Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/213

Rh they devoted themselves: the rest of the account is very curious, and states that the women used to pay visits to the men on the mainland, but that no man durst place his foot on the island. The god worshipped there had a temple which was roofed, but it was the custom of the priestesses to unroof it once a year; it must, however, be roofed again before sunset. So each of the women came to the work bringing on her shoulders a burden of the requisite materials, and in case any one allowed her burden to fall to the ground, she was instantly torn to pieces by her companions, who carried her mangled remains round the temple with jubilant exultation until the flame of their fury burnt itself out. It so happened, we are further told, that each succeeding year saw the horrid scene repeated.

Several things in these ancient accounts of the Armoric isles are deserving of special notice: take, for example, the one last mentioned: there we have a covered temple or sanctuary of some kind, which it was thought necessary to unroof once a year. This clearly implies that originally it had no roof but the sky, as in the case of Stonehenge and other stone circles. Further, in the case of the nine priestesses of the isle of Sein, we find that they were believed to possess the power of disturbing the sea and raising storms, a notion which postulates as its complement a belief, that the god to whose cult they devoted themselves had the control of the elements, especially the wind and the wave; and this exactly fits the Celtic Zeus, with his tendency in Brythonic mythology to become a sea-god. The same remark might be made as to the nine's gift of prophecy: in a word, the Gaulish oracle in the isle of Sein, spoken of by Mela, need not be