world,[1] this is the impression left upon the mind by the constant use of the word "Hades," and the belief that it was a world of the dead, and ruled by Gods of Death, or "Dark Divinities." Professor Rhys eventually accepts the word in its full meaning as a place of the departed, a dark world of shades.
Now, I believe that this general impression is a wrong one, and that whatever may have been the tradition in Gaulish mythology (a tradition now entirely lost to us), in Welsh literature and in Irish literature, at all events, a different conception prevails. The conception that the Celts believed themselves to have originated in a country of the dead I hold to be largely, if not entirely, a fiction of the imagination, grown out of a possibly erroneous idea picked up in Gaul by that inquisitive but not very deeply-reflecting Roman soldier, Caesar, and adopted by him without much consideration as explaining a fact which puzzled him, namely, why the Gauls counted time by nights instead of days. The idea does not seem to gain any support from Irish and Welsh literature, and but a doubtful support from the remaining Gaulish monuments.
Secondly, the idea that this unseen world was one into which only the dead could go, and from which they could never return, is contradicted by a long series of stones in which persons specially invited might go in life, and did frequently return again.
Thirdly, the idea that this world was conceived of as a place of the dead at all is only faintly shadowed in a few isolated and obscure passages in that part of the literature which seems to retain most of the pagan flavour and spirit, and does not seem to have been a general belief until Christianity had revolutionised the original pagan doctrine.
- ↑ For example, by his reference on p. 17 to Hesiod's Opera et dies, verse 168-169.
