meaning of the existing monuments of Gaul. Ireland in particular appears to have been in an earlier pre-sacrificial stage at a time when numerous and bloody sacrifices were part of the religious ceremonial of Gaul and Britain. We do not hear of the Druids taking the position of religious functionaries or sacrificing priests in Ireland until nearer Christian times, that is, about the fourth century; they are represented as magicians and medicine-men, counsellors of chiefs, and wizards, but they seem only to take a distinctively religious aspect when they are brought into active contact with and hostility to Christianity. In Gaul and Britain it is evident that they exercised ceremonial functions from much earlier times.[1] These considerations should make us most cautious in our examination of any theory which is deduced from a variety of passages, or of suggestions drawn indiscriminately from Roman, Gallic, and native sources. What may be a perfectly true statement, for example, regarding a particular development of belief in Gaul may be utterly inapplicable to Ireland either at the same or at any other period. Thus the belief cited by M. D'Arbois de Jubainville from Plutarch and Procopius showing that the Gauls had a legend of the existence of a dismal Isle of Spirits off the western coasts, to which the dead were ferried across the water, may be perfectly true of Gaulish tradition, but absolutely inapplicable to Ireland, which had evolved for itself a different order of ideas about the invisible world.[2] To identify this dreary and mournful land of ghosts, whence arise sighs and grief, with the joyous Irish Magh Mell or "Honey Plain," is to absolutely change its whole signification; there is no similarity whatever between the two ideas.
- ↑ This is no doubt largely to be accounted for by the difference in the evidence; an heroic romance will consider the magician exclusively in his "wise-man" aspect, a historian or theologian from the point of view of the religious functionary, but this does not entirely explain matters.
- ↑ Cycle Myth. pp. 231, 232.
