Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 3 (Celtic and Slavic).djvu/44

20 crags, so the gods and their doings are half-recorded and halfhidden behind the mists of time and false history and romance. Clear glimpses through this Celtic mist are rare. This is not to be wondered at when we consider how much of the mythology has been long forgotten, and how many hands have worked upon the remainder. The stories are relics of a dead past, as defaced and inexplicable as the battered monuments of the old religion. Romancers, would-be historians, Christian opponents of paganism, biographers of saints, ignorant yet half-believing folk, have worked their will with them. Folk-tale incidents have been wrought into the fabric, perhaps were originally part of it. Gods figure as kings, heroes, saints, or fairies, and a new mythical past has been created out of the débris of an older mythology. There is little of the limpid clearness of the myths of Hellas, and yet enough to delight those who, in our turbulent modern life, turn a wistful eye upon the past.

To make matters worse, modern writers on Celtic tradition have displayed a twofold tendency. They have resolved every story into myths of sun, dawn, and darkness, every divinity or hero Into a sun-god or dawn-goddess or ruler of a dark world. Or those with a touch of mysticism see traces of an esoteric faith, of mysteries performed among the initiate. In mediaeval Wales the "Druidic legend"—the idea of an esoteric wisdom transmitted from old priests and philosophers—formed itself among half-crazy enthusiasts and has been revived in our own time by persons of a similar genus. Ireland and the West Highlands have always been remarkably free of this nonsense, though some Celts with a turn for agreeing with their interlocutor seem to have persuaded at least one mystic that he was on the track of esoteric beliefs and ritual there.40 He did not know his Celt! The truth is that the mediaeval and later Welsh Druidists were themselves in the mythopoeic stage—crude Blakes or Swedenborgs—and invented stories of the creed of the old Druids which had no place in It and are lacking in any document of genuine antiquity, Welsh or Irish. This is true