Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race - Knowledge Rush

CHAPTER II: THE RELIGION OF THE CELTS 37We have said that the Irish among the Celtic peoples possessthe unique interest of having carried into the light of modernhistorical research many of the features of a native Celticcivilisation. There is, however, one thing which they did not carryacross the gulf which divides us from the ancient world—andthis was their religion.It was not merely that they changed it; they left it behind themso entirely that all record of it is lost. St. Patrick, himself a Celt,who apostolised Ireland during the fifth century, has left us anautobiographical narrative of his mission, a document of intenseinterest, and the earliest extant record of British Christianity; butin it he tells us nothing of the doctrines he came to supplant. Welearn far more of Celtic religious beliefs from Julius Cæsar, whoapproached them from quite another side. The copious legendaryliterature which took its present form in Ireland between theseventh and the twelfth centuries, though often manifestly goingback to pre-Christian sources, shows us, beyond a belief in magicand a devotion to certain ceremonial or chivalric observances,practically nothing resembling a religious or even an ethicalsystem. We know that certain chiefs and bards offered a longresistance to the new faith, and that this resistance came to thearbitrament of battle at Moyrath in the sixth century, but noecho of any intellectual controversy, no matching of one doctrineagainst another, such as we find, for instance, in the records ofthe controversy of Celsus with Origen, has reached us from thisperiod of change and strife. The literature of ancient Ireland, aswe shall see, embodied many ancient myths; and traces appear in [52]it of beings who must, at one time, have been gods or elementalpowers; but all has been emptied of religious significance andturned to romance and beauty. Yet not only was there, as Cæsartells us, a very well-developed religious system among the Gauls,but we learn on the same authority that the British Islands werethe authoritative centre of this system; they were, so to speak,the Rome of the Celtic religion.