Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/64

 Elysium. Mr. M‘Culloch (The Religion of Anc. Celts, p. 370) is of the opinion that "the origin of the Celtic Elysium belief may be found in several myths of a golden age long ago in some distant Elysian region, where men had lived with the gods. Into that region brave mortals might still penetrate Possibly the Celtic myth of man's early intercourse with the gods in a lost region took two forms. In one it was a joyful subterranean region whither the Celt hoped to go after death. In the other it was not recoverable, nor was it a land of the dead. The Celtic Elysium belief is always of this second kind. We surmise, however, that the land of the dead was a joyous underworld ruled over by a god of fertility and of the dead, and from that region men had originally come forth. The later association of gods with the síd was a continuation of this belief, but now the síd are certainly not a land of the dead, but Elysium pure and simple. There must therefore have been at an early period a tendency to distinguish between the happy region of the dead and the distant Elysium, if the two were ever really connected."

This theory, however, does not account for all the tales which refer to the Other World, because there are stories where the inhabitants of the Other World are by no means friendly to the intruders into their domains. Again, it has to be proved whether the Irish síde do not owe their origin to ancestor-worship; and finally, the above-quoted theory presupposes that the old Celtic cultus was in olden times so developed and uniform that there was no room for contradictory ideas as regards the posthumous existence of man and more general conceptions of the universe.

Now, ancestor-worship has not been taken enough into account in the study of Celtic mythology, and yet we must take into consideration the fact that some of the fairy hills (síd) are really old burying places, e.g. the Brugh of Boyne is the abode of Oengus (Mac ind-Óc). According to Maelmuire Othna, the nobles of the Túatha Dé Danann