Celtic religion in pre-Christian times / by Edward Anwyl.

  • Edward Anwyl
Date:
1906
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Celtic religion in pre-Christian times / by Edward Anwyl. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The mind of man at certain levels is quite capable of evolving new myths and fresh folk-lore along the lines of its own psychology and its own logic. The forms which the soul could take doubtless varied greatly in men’s opinions in different dis¬ tricts and in different mental perspectives, but folk-lore tends to confirm the view that early man, in the Celtic world as elsewhere, tended to emphasise his conception of the subtlety and mobility of the soul as contrasted with the body. Sooner or later the primitive philosopher was bound to consider whither the soul went in dreams or in death. He may not at first have thought of any other sphere than that of his own normal life, but other questions, such as the home of the spirits of vegetation in or under the earth, would suggest, even if this thought had not occurred to him before, that the spirits of men, too, had entrance to the world below. Whether this world was further pictured in imagination depended largely on the poetic genius of any given people. The folk-lore of the Celtic races bears abundant testimony to their belief that beneath this world there was another. The ‘annwfn’ of the Welsh was distinctly conceived in the folk-lore embodied in mediaeval poetry as being ‘ is elfydd ’ (beneath the world). In mediaeval Welsh legend, again,