Celtic Mythology and Religion

man in dreams.
THE "DRUID CIRCLES. 227,
Hence it is that the savage dislikes
the photographer. Animals and material objects,
of course, have souls,
on the same grounds, for the
dead hero appears in dreams with ghost of hatchet,
sword, and spear. " The Zulu will say that at death
a man's shadow departs and becomes an ancestral
ghost, and the widow will relate how her husband
has come to her in her sleep, and threatened to kill
her for not taking care of his children ;
or the son
will describe how his father's ghost stood before
him in a dream, and the souls of the two, the living
and the dead, went off together to visit some far-off
kraal of their people." The funeral sacrifices of
historic nations, of early Greeks, Romans, and Celts,
show how barbaric religion includes the souls of
men, animals, and material objects ; for what was
useful to the dead when alive was burnt or buried
along with them—chariots, arms, horses, dogs,
and even wives and slaves were sacrificed in one
mighty holocaust. The religious creed in which
" animism " embodies itself is, of course, the worship
of the dead, especially the worship of ancestors.
Worship and reverence, here, have a different sense
from our ideas of them. The dead are worshipped
for protection, and repaid with reverence, not merely
in feeling, but also in practical gifts and sacrifices
at their tombs. It may quite as often happen
that their wrath is deprecated. From the mere
family ancestor, the worship may rise to that of great
chiefs and kings that are departed, and fmm that it