IV

Here, however, we are close up to an important point of controversy. The mythologists claim tradition as theirs. It does not, they assert, give us the history but the mythology of our race. It tells us not of the men but of the gods. In explaining how this comes about, however, they have fallen into errors which it is not only necessary to correct but which are fundamental in their effects. We shall be better able later on to discuss the extremely important question of the position of the prehistoric tradition amidst historic life and surroundings, if we try to understand what the mythologists have done and not done in their attempts to claim exclusive property in the folk-tale. They have entirely denied or ignored all history contained in the folk-tale, and they have proceeded upon the assumption, the bald assumption not accompanied by any kind of proof, that the folk-tale contains nothing but the remnants of a once prevalent system of mythology. They ignore all the proofs brought forward by folklorists to the contrary, such proofs, for instance, as Mr. Knowles, Sir Richard Temple and others have produced concerning the Hindu folk-tale. What is not true of the Hindu folk-tale cannot be true of its Celtic or Teutonic or Scandinavian parallel, and yet in the most recent study of Celtic tradition, Mr. Squire takes its mythic origin for granted, and works through his ingenious statement without let or hindrance from other points of view. But even his thorough-going methods compel him to stop short at certain points, and to admit that he has come across historic fact. Thus he agrees that the Fir-Bolgs "were not really gods but the pre-Aryan race which the Gaels, when they landed in Ireland, found already in occupation," and yet when he treats of the fight of the Fir-Bolgs with the Tuatha dé Danann, and is confronted with Sir William Wilde's proofs that the monuments on the plain of Moytura are in agreement with the traditions concerning them, and point to the account of the battle being historical, all that Mr. Squire can admit is that "certainly the coincidences are curious." He disposes of them on the ground that the "people of the goddess Danu are too obviously mythical to make it worth while to seek any standing ground for them in the world of reality." That standing ground might be found connected with the Tuatha dé Danann in many places, but Mr. Squire will have it that it is impossible, because "it was about this period that the mythology of Ireland was being rewoven into spurious history." It is not, however, upon the mistakes of other inquirers that the mythologists may rest a good claim for their own view. The Historia Britonum of Geoffrey of Monmouth disposes of neither the myths nor the history of the Celts. It shows myth in its secondary position, in the handling of those who would make it all history, just as now there are scholars who would make it all myth. In front of the legends attaching to persons and places is the history of these persons and places. Behind these legends lies the domain of the unattached and primitive folk-tale, Mr. Campbell's Highland Tales, Kennedy's Fireside Stories of Ireland, and those English tales which have been rescued by Mr. Clodd and others. This makes it impossible to see in the hero-legends naught else than the intangible realm of Celtic gods and goddesses.

Equally impossible is it to create for them a home in a system of "state religion," and yet a state religion is a necessary part of the evidence for mythological origins. There was no Celtic state. Emphatically this was so. Everything we know about the Celts of Britain, both before and after the Roman conquest, both in Britain, where the Roman power was upheld for four centuries, and in Ireland, where the Roman power never penetrated, the Celts were possessed of a tribal, not a state polity; lived in tribal strongholds, not in Celtic cities; occupied tribal territories, not countries formed into states; elected tribal chiefs in primitive fashion, and not kings with state ceremonial; and when they come under the dominion of an incipient state policy after the conquest of the English and the Northmen, their laws are promulgated and codified, and show that both Welsh and Irish codes are tribal, not state law.

Not only do I fail to discover a state religion of the Celts, but I do not find it among the Teutons. There is greater evidence of discrepancies than of agreement in all the European religions, but these have not been dwelt upon by scholars. Professor York Powell, in one of his illuminating studies on Teutonic heathendom, is the only authority I know of who argues against the idea of a systematised religion. "It is important that we should at once throw aside the idea that there was any system, any organized pantheon in the religion of these peoples. Their tribes were small and isolated, and each had its own peculiar gods and observances, although the mould of each faith was somewhat similar. Hence there were varieties of religious customs among the Goths, Swedes, Saxons, and Angles."

Now if there was no state there could be no state religion. What existed of worship and religion was tribal. These are the historical facts, which have been neglected by students of myth and saga. I shall have to point out in greater detail presently what these tribal conditions mean to studies in folklore, but the word of warning and protest must come here, for it is unconsciously the conception of a Celtic state religion which gives even the semblance of possibility for Celtic mythology to be found in every hero-legend. It is, in short, the neglect of this among other historical facts which has led the folklorist into error of a somewhat magnificent kind. He attempts to create out of the myths of a people a mythology which provides gods to be worshipped, faiths to be organised, and beliefs to be the standards of life and conduct. Thus, as I have pointed out elsewhere, Sir John Rhys has, in his acute identification of the worship of the water-god Lud on the Thames and of Nod on the Severn, introduced the idea of a great Celtic worship established on these two great rivers as parts of a definite system of Celtic religion, whereas examination proves that the parallel faiths of two perfectly distinct Celtic tribes, the Silures on the Severn and the Trinovantes on the Thames, were welded into a common worship of the god of the waters by the masters of Celtic Britain, the Romans. There was no Celtic organisation which commanded both Severn and Thames until the Romans occupied the country, and occupying the country they adopted into their own religion the native gods and, fortunately for us, recorded their adoption in the pavements of their houses or their temples.

Mr. A. B. Cook goes much further than Sir John Rhys. He attempts to dig out the European sky-god from all sorts of queer places, all sorts of forgotten records, thereby producing a wealth of folklore parallels for which every student must be profoundly thankful. But he does not make it anywhere clear that this universal god was gloriously apparent to his worshippers. There is no established connection between the sky-god and those who worshipped the sky-god, and we seek in vain amidst all the brilliant researches, which have been held to produce evidence of the sky-god, for evidence that he was worshipped by the Aryan-speaking Celt and Teuton. In point of fact, we never get at the worshippers at all. There is the assumption of a state mythology without any evidence for the existence of the state.

In place of this obvious necessity we get an immense abstraction, worked out with all the subtle ingenuity and learning of the Cambridge professor. Mr. Cook has, in fact, used the materials he has collected with such amazing care to project therefrom just those mythological conceptions which Celt and Teuton would have worked out for themselves if they, like the Hindu and the Greek, had developed the state while they were still free to develop their own native beliefs. This they never did, and so their fire worship did not advance beyond its early stages. It was separated from nature worship to become the servant of the European tribes. It helped them to develop tribal and family institutions. It produced for them a tribal and family worship. It did not get beyond this, because Roman institutions and Christianity stood in the way and prevented tribal fire worship from becoming anthropomorphised into a mythology. This need not cause us to doubt that the analogies claimed by these scholars are true analogies. There were among the Celtic peoples, as among other branches of the race to which Celt, Greek, Teuton, Scandinavian, and Hindu belonged, the incipient elements which would go to make up a national or state mythology, when the nation or the state emerged, as it did emerge in the case of Greece and of Rome, from its tribal originals. But the Celtic state did not emerge from tribalism in Britain; the Celtic heroes were always tribal heroes. They were, as Hereward and Arthur were, real human flesh and blood, fighting and raiding and loving and feasting in their tribal fashion as the later heroes did in their national fashion; because of their success as tribal heroes they had attached to them the tribal myths; because they died as nobly as Cuchulain died they left imperishable records among those for whom they died. They were more than gods to the Celtic tribesman—they were kinsmen.

The false conception of a state religion before there was a state, appears in other studies not primarily based upon folklore research, and not having in view anthropological results. It is the basis of the remarkable researches of Sir Norman Lockyer as to the astrological and solar origin of Stonehenge and other circles, and in his chapter which deals with the question, "Where did the British worship originate?" he finds himself bound to the theory of a borrowed civilisation which established the solar system. This borrowed civilisation is Egyptian, but it is too much to ask mythology to supply not only a complete system of belief but a civilisation which belongs to it. What is needed is independent evidence of the civilisation. Without such independent evidence it is impossible to accept the deduction drawn only from one sphere of information.

The error of transferring to the domain of mythology events and occurrences which belong to history, is followed by an error of another sort, namely, the transferring to some general department of human belief the particular beliefs of a people, or of tribes of people. It is wrong to continue to label particular cults as nature myths, when they have already been transferred from that position to a more definite position among the beliefs of a people. Thus even so good a scholar as Mr. A. B. Cook, rightly interpreting Greek evidence of the hill-top fires and of the house fire, yet denies to the exactly corresponding Irish evidence the same interpretation, and argues that "the ritual of Samain, at which all the hearths in Ireland were supplied with fresh fire from a common centre at Tlachtga [is] almost certainly solar," and that "we shall not be far wrong if we suppose that the solar fires of Beltaine were the ritual of the sky god connected with the Ash of Uisnech." Mr. Frazer, too, has interpreted these bonfires as mainly sun charms, and he sees in the Balder myth, and in the peasant customs all over Europe, which he asserts illustrate this myth, an ancient ritual which originally marked the beginning of the new year, when the tree spirit, or spirit of vegetation, was burned, the special reasons why the deity of vegetation should die by fire being that as "light and heat are necessary to vegetable growth, on the principle of sympathetic magic, by subjecting the personal representative of vegetation to their influence you secure a supply of these necessaries for trees and crops." Mr. Frazer goes far afield for evidence. He does not see that the fire ceremonies which he collects from all Europe have a specialised significance, even in their last stages of existence as survivals, which is not found among the Incas, the African tribes, the hill tribes of India, and the Chinese, whom he cites as providing the required parallels. Parallel practices are not necessarily evidence of parallels in culture, and it is the failure to locate properly the several examples in relationship to each other which produces a loose and inadequate conception of the relics of fire worship in European countries, and the refusal to recognise its special place as the cult of a tribal people. Another example of this fundamental error takes us in the very opposite direction to that of Dr. Frazer. Thus Dr. Gummere, in a recent study dealing with Germanic origins, sees nothing in the fire cult of the Indo-European people but a branch, and apparently an undeveloped branch, of general nature worship, not specially Germanic or Indo-European, not specialised by the tribes and clans of these people into a cult far more closely connected with their doings and their life than mere participation in the general primitive nature worship could have afforded.

The danger of searching for a general system of belief and worship from the beliefs and rites of peoples not ethnically, geographically, or politically connected is very great, and I venture to think that even Mr. Frazer's remarkable researches into the agricultural rites of European peoples do not take count of one important consideration. I think his constructive hypothesis is too complex in process and too systematic in form to have been the actual living faith of the varied paganism of the European peoples. It would have meant as organised an institution as the Christian Church itself, and of this there is no evidence whatever. It would have meant an exclusive agricultural ceremony, and of this there is strong evidence to the contrary. It would have meant a deep system of philosophy, penetrating from the highest to the lowest of the people, and of this there is no evidence. The plain fact is that the historical conditions have been altogether left out of consideration in these matters, and we consequently do not get a complete study. We get the advocate's position. The case for the mythological interpretation of folklore has been put with full strength, but it is not the entire case.