What was Celtic, a view from the past by Sir Edward Anwyl (1866 – 1914)

What was Celtic ? 

What does the term really mean and why?

What was the Ancient Celtic Religion or Religions?

Tonight's Guest Lecturer may been unknown to most today. And passed into SummerLands some time ago, yet through his work, I have become quite fond of him, and while we never in this life have meet think of him as a dear friend. 

This is often how I dealt with Authors Ghost and treat their works as if they were personal letters written to me. 

This seems to enhance the learning experience greatly. 

Except for reformatting a bit I have left his words unchanged. 
And while the little book is over a hundred years old. For those unfamiliar with the subject you will find a fine kettle of terms to lookup and review or learn more about.
tdk


Our Reference: 

CELTIC RELIGION IN PRE-CHRISTIAN TIMES
By Sir EDWARD ANWYL, M.A. (1906)


Bio:
Sir Edwar Anwyl, M.A.  (5 August 1866 – 8 August 1914) 
LATE CLASSICAL SCHOLAR OF ORIEL COLLEGE, OXFORD
PROFESSOR OF WELSH AND COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY AT
THE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF WALES, ABERYSTWYTH
ACTING-CHAIRMAN OF THE CENTRAL WELSH BOARD
FOR INTERMEDIATE EDUCATION CHICAGO

Sir Edward Anwyl (5 August 1866 – 8 August 1914) was a Welsh academic, specializing in the Celtic languages.
Anwyl was born in Chester, England, and educated at the King's School, Chester. He went on to study at Oriel College, 

Oxford, and Mansfield College, Oxford. In 1892 he became Professor of Welsh at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and was later appointed Professor of Comparative Philology. He was knighted in July 1911.[1] In 1913, he became Principal of the newly founded. Monmouthshire Training College at Caerleon.


>>

In dealing with the subject of ' Celtic Religion
the first duty of the writer is to explain the
sense in which the term ' Celtic ' will be used in
this work. It will be used in reference to those
countries and districts which, in historic times,
have been at one time or other mainly of Celtic
speech. 

It does not follow that all the races
which spoke a form of the Celtic tongue, a tongue
of the Indo-European family, were all of the
same stock. Indeed, ethnological and archaeological
evidence tends to establish clearly that, in
Gaul and Britain, for example, man had lived for
ages before the introduction of any variety of
Aryan or Indo-European speech, and this Avas
probably the case throughout the whole of
Western and Southern Europe. 

Further, in the
light of comparative philology, it has now become
abundantly clear that the forms of Indo-European
speech which we call Celtic are most closely
related to those of the Italic family, of which
family Latin is the best known representative.
From this it follows that we are to look for the
centre of dissemination of Aryan Celtic speech in
some district of Europe that could have been the
natural centre of dissemination also for the Italic
languages. 

From this common centre, through
conquest and the commercial intercourse which
followed it, the tribes which spoke the various
forms of Celtic and Italic speech spread into the
districts occupied by them in historic times. The
common centre of radiation for Celtic and Italic
speech was probably in the districts of Noricum
and Pannonia, the modern Carniola, Carinthia,
etc., and the neighbouring parts of the Danube
valley. 

The conquering Aryan-speaking Celts
and Italians formed a military aristocracy, and
their success in extending the range of their
languages was largely due to their skiU in arms,
combined, in all probability, with a talent for
administration. This military aristocracy was of
kindred type to that which carried Aryan speech
into India and Persia, Armenia and Greece, not
to speak of the original speakers of the Teutonic
and Slavonic tongues. 

In view of the necessity of
discovering a centre, whence the Indo-European
or Aryan languages in general could have
radiated Eastwards, as well as AVestwards, the
tendency to-day is to regard these tongues as
having been spoken originally in some district
between the Carpathians and the Steppes, in the
form of kindred dialects of a common speech.
Some branches of the tribes which spoke these
dialects penetrated into Central Europe, doubtless
along the Danube, and, from the Danube
valley, extended their conquests together with
their various forms of Aryan speech into Southern
and Western Europe. 

The proportion of
conquerors to conquered was not uniform in all
the countries where they held sway, so that the
amount of Aryan blood in their resultant population
varied greatly. In most cases, the families
of the original conquerors, by their skill in the art
of war and a certain instinct of government, succeeded
in making their own tongues the dominant
media of communication in the lands where they
ruled, with the result that most of the languages
of Europe to-day are of the Aryan or Indo-
European type. 

It does not, however, follow
necessarily from this that the early religious
ideas or the artistic civilisation of countries now
Aryan in speecli came necessarily from the conquerors
rather than the conquered. In the last
century it was long held that in countries of
Aryan speech the essential features of their civilisation,
their religious ideas, their social institutions,
nay, more, their inhabitants themselves,
were of Aryan origin.

A more critical investigation has, however,
enabled us to distinguish clearly between the development
of various factors ofhuman life which in
their evolution can follow and often have followed
more or less independent lines. The physical
history of race, for instance, forms a problem by
itself and must be studied by anthropological and
ethnological methods. Language, again, has
often spread along lines other than those of race,
and its investigation appertains to the sphere of
the philologist. 

Material civilisation, too, has
not of necessity followed the lines either of
racial or of linguistic development, and the search
for its ancient trade-routes may be safely left to
the archteologist. Similarly the spread of ideas
in religion and thought is one which has advanced
on lines of its own, and its investigation must be
conducted by the methods and along the lines of
the comparative study of religions.
In the wide sense, then, in which the word


INTRODUCTORY: 
THE CELTS 'Celtic religion'
will be used in this work, it will
cover the modes of religious thought prevalent in
the countries and districts, which, in course of
time, were mainly characterised by their Celtic
speech. To the sum-total of these religious
ideas contributions have been made from many
sources. 

It would be rash to affirm that the
various streams of Aryan Celtic conquest made
no contributions to the conceptions of life and of
the world which the countries of their conquest
came to hold (and the evidence of language
points, indeed, to some such contributions), but
their quota appears to be small compared with
that of their predecessors ; nor is this surprising,
in view of the immense period during which the
lands of their conquest had been previously
occupied. Nothing is clearer than the marvellous
persistence of traditional and immemorial
modes of thought, even in the face of conquest
and subjugation, and, whatever ideas on religion
the Aryan conquerors of Celtic lands may have
brought with them, they whose conquests were
often only partial could not eradicate the inveterate
beliefs of their predecessors, and the result in
the end was doubtless some compromise, or else
the victory of the earlier faith.
But the Aryan conquerors of Gaul and Italy
themselves were not men who had advanced up the Danube
in one generation. 

Those men of Aryan speech who poured into the Italian
peninsula and into Gaul were doubtless in
blood not unmixed with the older inhabitants
of Central Europe, and had entered into the
body of ideas which formed the religious beliefs
of the men of the Danube valley. 

The common modifications of the Aryan tongue, by Italians
and Celts alike, as compared with^Greek, suggests
contact with men of different speech. Among
the names of Celtic gods, too, like those of other
countries, we find roots that are apparently irreducible
to any found in Indo-European speech,
and we know not what pre-Aryan tongues may
have contributed them. 

Scholars, to-day, are far
more alive than they ever were before to the
complexity of the contributory elements that
have entered into the tissue of the ancient
religions of mankind, and the more the relics
of Celtic religion are investigated, the more complex
do its contributory factors become. 

In the long ages before history there were unrecorded
conquests and migrations innumerable, and ideas
do not fail to spread because there is no historian
to record them. The more the scanty remnants of Celtic religion
are examined, the clearer it becomes that many of
its characteristic features had been evolved during
the vast period of the ages of stone. 

During these millennia, men had evolved, concomitantly with
their material civilisation, a kind of working
philosophy of life, traces of which are found in
every land where this form of civilisation has
prevailed. Man's religion can never be dissociated
from his social experience, and the painful stages
through which man reached the agricultural life,
for example, have left their indelible impress on
the mind of man in Western Europe, as they
have in every land. 

We are thus compelled, from the indications which we have of Celtic
religion, in the names of its deities, its rites, and
its survivals in folk-lore and legend, to come to
the conclusion, that its fundamental groundwork
is a body of ideas, similar to those of other lands,
which were the natural correlatives of the phases
of experience through which man passed in his
emergence into civilised life. To demonstrate
and to illustrate these relations will be the aim
of the following chapters.
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Moon Rising on us all.

TDK / The Druid King