CHAPTER XI

FOLKLORE PHILOSOPHY

To look for consistency in barbaric philosophy is to disqualify ourselves for understanding it, and the theories of it which aim at symmetry are their own condemnation. Yet that philosophy, within its own irregular confines, works not illogically.--Edward Clodd.

It will be remembered that in the last chapter a story was given, p. 602, which represented the soul as a little fellow somewhat resembling a monkey; and it will probably have struck the reader how near this approaches the idea prevalent in medieval theology and Christian art, which pictured the soul as a pigmy or diminutive human being. I revert to this in order to point out that the Christian fancy may possibly have given rise to the form of the soul as represented in the Welsh story which I heard in Cardiganshire and Professor Sayce in Monmouthshire; but this could hardly be regarded as touching the other Cardiganshire story, in which the soul is likened to a madfall or lizard. Moreover I would point out that a belief incompatible with both kinds of story is suggested by one of the uses of the Welsh word for soul, namely, enaid. I heard my father, a native of the neighbourhood of Eglwys Fach, near the estuary of the Dyfi, use the word of some portion of the inside of a goose, but I have forgotten what part it was exactly. Professor Anwyl of Aberystwyth, however, has sent me the following communication on the subject:--'I am quite familiar with the expression yr enaid, "the soul," as applied to the soft flesh sticking to the ribs inside a goose. The flesh in question has somewhat the same appearance and structure as the liver. I have no recollection of ever hearing the term yr enaid used in the case of any bird other than a goose; but this may be a mere accident, inasmuch as no one ever uses the term now except to mention it as an interesting curiosity.' This application of the word enaid recalls the use of the English word 'soul' in the same way, and points to a very crude idea of the soul as material and only forming an internal portion of the body: it is on the low level of the notion of an English pagan of the seventeenth century who thought his soul was 'a great bone in his body [203].' It is, however, not quite so foolish, perhaps, as it looks at first sight; and it reminds one of the Mohammedan belief that the os coccygis is the first formed in the human body, and that it will remain uncorrupted till the last day as a seed from which the whole is to be renewed in the resurrection [204].

On either savage theory, that the soul is a material organism inside a bulkier organism, or the still lower one that it is an internal portion of the larger organism itself, the idea of death would be naturally much the same, namely, that it was what occurred when the body and the soul became permanently severed. I call attention to this because we have traces in Welsh literature of a very different notion of death, which must now be briefly explained. The Mabinogi of Math ab Mathonwy relates how Math and Gwydion made out of various flowers a most beautiful woman whom they named Blodeuwed [205], that is to say anthôdês, or flowerlike, and gave to wife to Llew Llawgyffes; how she, as it were to prove what consummate artists they had been, behaved forthwith like a woman of the ordinary origin, in that she fell in love with another man named Gronw Pebyr of Penllyn; and how she plotted with Gronw as to the easiest way to put her husband to death. Pretending to be greatly concerned about the welfare of Llew and very anxious to take measures against his death (angheu), she succeeded in finding from him in what manner one could kill (llad) him. His reply was, 'Unless God kill me ... it is not easy to kill me'; and he went on to describe the strange attitude in which he might be killed, namely, in a certain position when dressing after a bath: then, he said, if one cast a spear at him it would effect his death (angheu), but that spear must have been a whole year in the making, during the hour only when the sacrifice was proceeding on Sunday. Blodeuwed thanked heaven, she said, to find that all this was easy to avoid. But still her curiosity was not satisfied; so one day she induced Llew to go into the bath and show exactly what he meant. Of course she had Gronw with his enchanted spear in readiness, and at the proper moment, when Llew was dressing after the bath, the paramour cast his spear at him. He hit him in the side, so that the head of the spear remained in Llew, whilst the shaft fell off: Llew flew away in the form of an eagle, uttering an unearthly cry. He was no more seen until Gwydion, searching for him far and wide in Powys and Gwyned, came to Arfon, where one day he followed the lead of a mysterious sow, until the beast stopped under an oak at Nantlle. There Gwydion found the sow devouring rotten flesh and maggots, which fell from an eagle whenever the bird shook himself at the top of the tree. He suspected this was Llew, and on singing three englyns to him the eagle came lower and lower, till at last he descended on Gwydion's lap. Then Gwydion struck him with his wand, so that he assumed his own shape of Llew Llawgyffes, and nobody ever saw a more wretched looking man, we are told: he was nothing but skin and bones. But the best medical aid that could be found in Gwyned was procured, and before the end of the year he was quite well again.

Here it will be noticed, that though the fatal wounding of Llew, at any rate visibly, means his being changed into the form of an eagle, it is treated as his death. When the Mabinogion were edited in their present form in a later atmosphere, this sort of phraseology was not natural to the editor, and he shows it when he comes to relate how Gwydion punished Blodeuwed, as follows:--Gwydion, having overtaken her in her flight, is made to say, 'I shall not kill thee (Ny ladaf i di): I shall do what is worse for thee, and that is to let thee go in the form of a bird.' He let her go in fact in the form of an owl. According to the analogy of the other part of the story this meant his having killed her: it was her death, and the words 'I shall not kill thee' are presumably not to be regarded as belonging to the original story. To come back to the eagle, later Welsh literature, re-echoing probably an ancient notion, speaks of a nephew of Arthur, called Eliwlod, appearing to Arthur as an eagle seated likewise among the branches of an oak. He claims acquaintance and kinship with Arthur, but he has to explain to him that he has died: they have a dialogue [206] in the course of which the eagle gives Arthur some serious Christian advice. But we have in this sort of idea doubtless the kind of origin to which one might expect to trace the prophesying eagle, such as Geoffrey mentions more than once: see his Historia, ii. 9 and xii. 18 [207]. Add to these instances of transformation the belief prevalent in Cornwall almost to our own day, that Arthur himself, instead of dying, was merely changed by magic into a raven, a form in which he still goes about; so that a Cornishman will not wittingly fire at a raven [208]. This sort of transformation is not to be severed from instances supplied by Irish literature, such as the story of Tuan mac Cairill, related in the Book of the Dun Cow, fo. 15a-16b. Tuan relates to St. Finnen of Magbile, in the sixth century, the early history of Ireland from the time of Partholan down, which he was enabled to do because he had lived through it all, passing from one form to another without losing his memory. First of all he was a man, and when old age had come upon him he was transformed into a stag of the forest. For a while he was youthful and vigorous; but again old age overtook him, and he next became a wild boar. When old age and decrepitude overcame him next he was renewed in the form of a powerful bird, called in the original seig. The next renewal was in the form of a salmon: here the manuscript fails us. The form of a salmon was also the one taken by the woman Liban when she was overwhelmed by the flood, which became the body of water known as Lough Neagh: her handmaid at the same time became an otter (fo. 40b). There was an ancient belief that the soul leaves the body like a bird flying out of the mouth of the man or woman dying, and this maybe said to approach the favourite Celtic notion illustrated by the transformations here instanced, to which may be added the case of the Children of Lir, pp. 93, 549, changed by the stroke of their wicked stepmother's wand into swans, on Lough Erne. The story has, in the course of ages, modified itself into a belief that the swans haunting that beautiful water at all seasons of the year, are the souls of holy women who fell victims to the repeated visitations of the pagan Norsemen, when Ireland was at their cruel mercy [209]. The Christian form which the Irish peasant has given the legend does not touch its relevancy here. Perhaps one might venture to generalize, that in these islands great men and women were believed to continue their existence in the form of eagles, hawks or ravens, swans or owls. But what became of the souls of the obscurer majority of the people? For an answer to this perhaps we can only fall back on the Psyche butterfly, which may here be illustrated by the fact that Cornish tradition applies the term 'pisky' both to the fairies and to moths, believed in Cornwall by many to be departed souls [210]. So in Ireland: a certain reverend gentleman named Joseph Ferguson, writing in 1810 a statistical account of the parish of Ballymoyer, in the county of Armagh, states that one day a girl chasing a butterfly was chid by her companions, who said to her: 'That may be the soul of your grandmother [211].' This idea, to survive, has modified itself into a belief less objectionably pagan, that a butterfly hovering near a corpse is a sign of its everlasting happiness.

The shape-shifting is sometimes complicated by taking place on the lines of rebirth: as cases in point may be mentioned Lug, reborn as Cúchulainn [212], and the repeated births of Étáin. This was rendered possible in the case of Cúchulainn, for instance, by Lug taking the form of an insect which was unwittingly swallowed by Dechtere, who thereby became Cúchulainn's mother; and so in the case of Étáin [213] and her last recorded mother, the queen of Etar king of Eochraidhe. On Welsh ground we have a combination of transformations and rebirth in the history of Gwion Bach in the story of Taliessin. Gwion was in the service of the witch Ceridwen; but having learned too much of her arts, he became the object of her lasting hatred; and the incident is translated as follows in Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion, iii. 358-9:--'And she went forth after him, running. And he saw her, and changed himself into a hare and fled. But she changed herself into a greyhound and turned him. And he ran towards a river, and became a fish. And she in the form of an otter-bitch chased him under the water, until he was fain to turn himself into a bird of the air. Then she, as a hawk, followed him and gave him no rest in the sky. And just as she was about to swoop upon him, and he was in fear of death, he espied a heap of winnowed wheat on the floor of a barn, and he dropped amongst the wheat, and turned himself into one of the grains. Then she transformed herself into a high-crested black hen, and went to the wheat and scratched it with her feet, and found him out and swallowed him. And, as the story says, she bore him nine months, and when she was delivered of him, she could not find it in her heart to kill him, by reason of his beauty. So she wrapped him in a leathern bag, and cast him into the sea to the mercy of God on the twenty-ninth day of April. And at that time the weir of Gwydno was on the strand between Dyvi and Aberystwyth, near to his own castle, and the value of an hundred pounds was taken in that weir every May eve.' The story goes on to relate how Gwydno's son, Elphin, found in the weir the leathern bag containing the baby, who grew up to be the bard Taliessin. But the fourteenth century manuscript called after the name of Taliessin teems with such transformations as the above, except that they are by no means confined to the range of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. I heard an amusing suggestion of metempsychosis the other day: it is related of a learned German, who was sitting at table, let us say, in an Oxford hotel, with most of his dinner in front of him. Being, however, a man of immediate foresight, and anxious to accustom himself to fine English, he was not to be restrained by scruples as to any possible discrepancy between words like bekommen and become. So to the astonishment of everybody he gravely called out to the waiter, 'Hereafter I vish to become a Velsh rabbit.' This would have done admirably for the author of certain poems in the Book of Taliessin, where the bard's changes are dwelt upon. From them it appears that the transformation might be into anything that the mind of man could in any way individualize. Thus Taliessin claims to have been, some time or other, not only a stag or a salmon, but also an axe, a sword, and even a book in a priest's hand, or a word in writing. On the whole, however, his history as a grain of corn has most interest here, as it differs from that which has just been given: the passage [214] is sadly obscure, but I understand it to say that the grain was duly sown on a hill, that it was reaped and finally brought on the hearth, where the ears of corn were emptied of their grains by the ancient method of dexterously applying a flame to them [215]. But while the light was being applied the grain which was Taliessin, falling from the operator's hand, was quickly received and swallowed by a hostile hen, in whose interior it remained nine nights; but though this seemingly makes Taliessin's mother a bird, he speaks of himself, without mentioning any intervening transformation, as a gwas or young man. Such an origin was perhaps never meant to be other than incomprehensible. Lastly as to rebirth, I may say that it has often struck me that the Welsh habit, especially common in Carnarvonshire and Anglesey, of one child in a family being named, partially or wholly, after a grandparent, is to be regarded as a trace of the survival from early times of a belief in such atavism as has been suggested above [216].

The belief in transformations or transmigrations, such as have been mentioned, must have lent itself to various developments, and two at least of them are deserving of some notice here. First may be mentioned one which connects itself intimately with the druid or magician: he is master of his own transformations, as in the case of Ceridwen and Gwion, for he had acquired his magic by tasting of the contents of Ceridwen's Cauldron of Sciences, and he retained his memory continuously through his shape-shiftings, as is best illustrated, perhaps, by the case of Tuan mac Cairill. The next step was for him to realize his changes, not as matters of the past but as present and possible; in fact, to lay claim to being anybody or anything he likes at any moment. Of this we have a remarkable instance in the case of Amairgen, seer and judge of the Milesians or Sons of Míl, in the story of their conquest of Ireland, as told in the Book of Leinster, fo. 12b. As he first sets his right foot on the land of Erin he sings a lay in which he says, that he is a boar, a bull, and a salmon, together with other things also, such as the sea-breeze, the rolling wave, the roar of the billows, and a lake on the plain. Nor does he forget to pretend to wisdom and science beyond other men, and to hint that he is the divinity that gives them knowledge and sense. The similarity between this passage and others in the Book of Taliessin has attracted the attention of scholars: see M. d'Arbois de Jubainville's Cycle mythologique irlandais, pp. 242 et seq. On the whole, Taliessin revels most in the side of the picture devoted to his knowledge and science: he has passed through so many scenes and changes that he has been an eye-witness to all kinds of events in Celtic story. Thus he was with Brân on his expedition to Ireland, and saw when Mordwyt Tyllion was slain in the great slaughter of the Meal-bag Pavilion. This, however, was not all; he represents himself as also a sywedyd [217], 'vates or prophet, astrologer and astronomer,' a sage who boasts his knowledge of the physical world and propounds questions which he challenges his rivals to answer concerning earth and sea, day and night, sun and moon. He is not only Taliessin, but also Gwion, and hence one infers his magical powers to have been derived. If he regards anybody as his equal or superior, that seems to have been Talhaiarn, to whom he ascribes the greatest science. Talhaiarn is usually thought of only as a great bard by Welsh writers, but it is his science and wisdom that Taliessin admires [218], whereby one is to understand, doubtless, that Talhaiarn, like Taliessin, was a great magician. To this day Welsh bards and bardism have not been quite dissociated from magic, in so far as the witch Ceridwen is regarded as their patroness.

The boasts of Amairgen are characterized by M. d'Arbois de Jubainville as a sort of pantheism, and he detects traces of the same doctrine, among other places, in the teaching of the Irishman, known as Scotus Erigena, at the court of Charles the Bald in the ninth century: see the Cycle mythologique, p. 248. In any case, one is prepared by such utterances as those of Amairgen to understand the charge recorded in the Senchus Mór, i. 23, as made against the Irish druids or magicians of his time by a certain Connla Cainbhrethach, one of the remarkable judges of Erin, conjectured by O'Curry--on what grounds I do not know--to have lived in the first century of our era. The statement there made is to the following effect:--'After her came Connla Cainbhrethach, chief doctor of Connaught; he excelled the men of Erin in wisdom, for he was filled with the grace of the Holy Ghost; he used to contend with the druids, who said that it was they that made heaven and earth, and the sea, &c., and the sun and moon, &c.' This view of the pretensions of the druids is corroborated by the fact that magic, especially the power of shape-shifting at will, was regarded as power par excellence [219], and by the old formula of wishing one well, which ran thus: Bendacht dee ocus andee fort, 'the blessing of gods and not-gods upon thee!' The term 'gods' in this context is explained to have meant persons of power [220], and the term 'not-gods' farmers or those connected with the land, probably all those whose lives were directly dependent on farming and the cultivation of the soil, as distinguished from professional men such as druids and smiths. This may be further illustrated by a passage from the account of the second battle of Moytura, published by Stokes with a translation, in the Revue Celtique, xii. 52-130. See more especially pp. 74-6, where we find Lug offering his services to the king, Nuada of the Silver Hand. Among other qualifications which Lug possessed, he named that of being a sorcerer, to which the porter at once replied: 'We need thee not; we have sorcerers already. Many are our wizards and our folk of might'--that is, those of our people who possess power--ar lucht cumachtai. Wizards (druith) and lucht cumachtai came, it is observed, alike under the more general designation of sorcerers (corrguinigh).

One seems to come upon traces of the same classification of a community into professionals and non-professionals, for that is what it comes to, in an obscure Welsh term, Teulu Oeth ac Anoeth, which may be conjectured to have meant 'the Household of Oeth and Anoeth' in the sense of Power and Not-power [221]. However that may be, the professional class of men who were treated as persons of power and gods seem to have attained to their position by virtue of the magic of which they claimed to be masters, and especially of their supposed faculty of shape-shifting at will. In other words, the druidic pantheism [222] which Erigena was able to dress in the garb of a fairly respectable philosophy proves to have been, in point of genesis, but a few removes from a primitive kind of savage folklore.

None of these stories of shape-shifting, and of being born again, make any allusion to a soul. To revert, for instance, to Llew Llawgyffes, it is evident that the eagle cannot be regarded as his soul. The decayed state of the eagle's body seems to imply that it was somehow the same body as that of Llew at the time when he was wounded by Gronw's poisoned spear: the festering of the eagle's flesh looks as if considered a continuation of the wound. It is above all things, however, to be noted that none of the stories in point, whether Irish or Welsh, contain any suggestion of the hero's life coming to an end, or in any way perishing; Llew lives on to be transformed, under the stroke of Gwydion's wand, from being an eagle to be a man again; and Tuan mac Cairill persists in various forms till he meets St. Finnen in the sixth century. Then in the case of Étáin, we are told in the Book of the Dun Cow, fo. 129a, that her first-mentioned birth and the next one were separated by more than a thousand years. So practically we may say that these stories implied that men and women were imperishable, that they had no end necessarily to their existence. This sort of notion may be detected in Llew's words when he says, 'Unless God kill me ... it is not easy to kill me.' The reference to the Almighty may probably be regarded as a comparatively late interpolation due to Christian teaching. A similar instance seems to occur in a poem in the Black Book of Carmarthen, fos. 47b-8b, where Arthur loudly sings the praises of his friend Cai. The couplet in point runs thus:--

Ny bei duv ae digonhei. Oet diheit aghev kei.

Unless it were God that wrought it, Hard to effect were the death of Cai.

I am not sure, however, of the meaning; for, among other things, diheit, which I am inclined to interpret as 'hard to reach' or 'not easy to effect,' has been rendered otherwise by others [223]. In any case, the other instance seems to imply that at one time the heroes of Llew's world were not necessarily expected to die at all; and when they happened to do so, it was probably regarded, as among savages at the present day, as a result brought about by magic. Any reader who may feel astonished at such a crudeness of belief, will find something to contrast and compare in the familiar doctrine, that but for the fall of Adam and Eve we should have never heard of death, whether of man or of beast. But if he proceeds to ask questions about the economy of our world in case nobody died, he must be satisfied to be told that to ask any such question is here not only useless but also irrelevant.

Now, suppose that in a society permeated by the crude kind of notions of which one finds traces in the Mabinogion and other old Welsh literature, a man arose who had a turn for philosophizing and trying to think things out: how would he reason? It seems probable that he would argue, that underneath all the change there must be some substratum which is permanent. If Tuan, he would say, changed from one form to another and remembered all that he had gone through, there must have been something which lasted, otherwise Tuan would have come to an end early in the story, and the later individual would not be Tuan at all. Probably one thing which, according to our folklore philosopher's way of thinking, lasted through the transformations, was the material of Tuan's body, just as one is induced to suppose that Llew's body, and that of the eagle into which he was transformed, were considered to be one and the same body labouring under the mortifying influence of the wound inflicted on Llew by Gronw's enchanted spear. Further, we have already found reasons to regard the existence of the soul as forming a part of the creed of some at any rate of the early inhabitants of this country, though we have no means of gathering what precise attributes our philosopher might ascribe to it besides the single one, perhaps, of continuing to exist. In that case he might otherwise describe Tuan's shape-shifting as the entrance of Tuan's soul into a series of different bodies. Now the philosopher here sketched agrees pretty closely with the little that is known of the Gaulish druid, such as he is described by ancient authors [224]. The latter seem to have been agreed in regarding him as believing in the immortality of the soul, and several of them appear to have thought his views similar to those of Pythagoras and his school. So we may perhaps venture to suppose that the druids, like Pythagoras, believed in the transmigration of souls, including that from the human to an animal form and the reverse. If, in the absence of an explicit statement, one may ascribe this latter form of that belief to the druids, the identity of their creed becomes almost complete with that of our conjectured folklore philosopher. At one time I was inclined to fancy that the druids of Gaul had received no unimportant part of their teaching from Greek philosophy by way of Massilia, but I am now more disposed to believe their doctrines to have been gradually developed, in the way above suggested, from the unfailing resources of that folklore which revelled in scenes of shape-shifting and rebirth. Possibly the doctrines of Pythagoras may have themselves had a like origin and a somewhat parallel development, or let us say rather that the Orphic notions had, which preceded Pythagoreanism.

But as to Gaul generally, it is not to be assumed that the Gaulish druids and all the other Gauls held the same opinion on these questions: we have some evidence that they did not. Thus the Gauls in the neighbourhood of Massilia [225], who would accept a creditor's promise to pay up in the next world, can hardly have contemplated the possibility of any such creditor being then a bird or a moth. Should it be objected that the transformations, instanced above as Brythonic and Goidelic, were assumed only in the case of magicians and other professional or privileged persons, and that we are not told what was held to happen in the case of the rank and file of humanity, it is enough to answer that neither do we know what the druids of Gaul held to be the fate of the common people of their communities. No lever can be applied in that direction to disturb the lines of the parallel.

In previous chapters, pp. 45, 54, 61, 88, 97, 229, instances from Welsh sources have been given of the fairies concealing their names. But Wales is not the only Celtic land where we find traces of this treatment of one's name: it is to be detected also on Irish ground. Thus, when a herald from an enemy's camp comes to parley with Cúchulainn and his charioteer, the latter, being first approached, describes himself as the 'man of the man down there,' meaning Cúchulainn, to whom he pointed; and when the herald comes to Cúchulainn himself, he asks him whose man he is: Cúchulainn describes himself as the 'man of Conchobar mac Nessa.' The herald then inquires if he has no more definite designation, and Cúchulainn replies that what he has given will suffice [226]: neither of the men gives his name. Thus Celts of both groups, Brythons and Goidels, are at one in yielding evidence to the same sort of cryptic treatment of personal names, at some stage or other in their past history.

The student of man tells us, as already pointed out, that the reason for the reluctance to disclose one's name was of the same nature as that which makes savages, and some men belonging to nations above the savage state feel anxious that an enemy should not get possession of anything identified with their persons, such as a lock of one's hair, a drop of one's blood, or anything closely connected with one's person, lest it should give the enemy power over one's person as a whole, especially if such enemy is suspected of possessing any skill in handling the terrors of magic. In other words, the anthropologist would say that the name was regarded as identified with the person; and, having said this, he has mostly felt satisfied that he has definitively disposed of the matter. Therein, however, he is possibly wrong; for when he says that the name was probably treated as a part of the man, that only leads one to ask the question, What part of the man? At any rate, I can see nothing very unreasonable in such a question, though I am quite willing to word it differently, and to ask: Is there any evidence to show with what part of a man his name was associated?

As regards the Aryan nations, we seem to have a clue to an answer in the interesting group of Aryan words in point, from which I select the following:--Irish ainm, 'a name,' plural anmann; Old Welsh anu, now enw, also 'a name'; Old Bulgarian imen (for *ienmen, *anman); Old Prussian emnes, emmens, accusative emnan; and Armenian anwan (for a stem *anman)--all meaning a name. To these some scholars [227] would add, and it may be rightly, the English word name itself, the Latin nomen, the Sanskrit naman, and the Greek ynoma; but, as some others find a difficulty in thus grouping these words, I abstain from laying any stress on them. In fact, I have every reason to be satisfied with the wide extent of the Aryan world covered by the other instances enumerated as Celtic, Prussian, Bulgarian, and Armenian.

Now, such is the similarity between Welsh enw, 'name,' and enaid, 'soul,' that I cannot help referring the two words to one and the same origin, especially when I see the same or rather greater similarity illustrated by the Irish words, ainm, 'name,' and anim, 'soul.' This similarity between the Irish words so pervades the declension of them, that a beginner frequently falls into the error of confounding them in medieval texts. Take, for instance, the genitive singular, anma, which may mean either animæ or nominis; the nominative plural, anmand, which may be either animæ or nomina; and the gen. anmand, either animarum or nominum, as the dative anmannaib may likewise be either animabus or nominibus. In fact, one is at first sight almost tempted to suppose that the partial differentiation of the Irish forms was only brought about under the influence of Latin, with its distinct forms of anima and nomen. That would be pressing the point too far; but the direct teaching of the Celtic vocables is that they are all to be referred to the same origin in the Aryan word for 'breath or breathing,' which is represented by such words as Latin anima, Welsh anadl, 'breath,' and a Gothic anan, 'blow or breathe,' whence the compound preterite uz-on, twice used by Ulfilas in the fifteenth chapter of St. Mark's Gospel to render exepneuse, 'gave up the ghost.'

Now the lessons which the words here grouped together contain for the student of man is, that the Celts, and certain other widely separated Aryans, unless we should rather say the whole of the Aryan family, were once in the habit of closely associating both the soul and one's name with the breath of life. The evidence is satisfactory so far as it goes; but let us go a little more into detail, and see as exactly as we can to what it commits us. Commencing at the beginning, we may set out with the axiom that breathing is a physical action, and that in the temperate zone one's breath is not unfrequently visible. Then one may say that the men who made the words--Welsh, enaid (for an earlier anatio-s), 'soul'; Irish, anim (from an earlier stem, animon); Latin, anima, also animus, 'feeling, mind, soul'; and Greek, anemos, 'air, wind'--must have in some way likened the soul to one's breath, which perhaps first suggested the idea. At all events they showed not only that they did not contemplate the soul as a bone, or any solid portion of a man's frame, or even as a manikin residing inside it: in fact they had made a great advance in the direction of the abstract notion of a spirit, in which some of them may have been helped by another association of ideas, namely, that indicated by speaking of the dead as shades or shadows, umbræ, skiai. Similarly, the words in point for 'name' seem to prove that some of the ancient Aryans must have, in some way, associated one's name with the breath of life. On the other hand, we find nothing to show that the name and the soul were directly compared or associated with one another, while the association of the name with the breath represents, probably, a process as much earlier as it is cruder, than likening the soul to the breath and naming it accordingly. This is countenanced to some extent by the general physiognomy, so to say, of words like enaid, anima, as contrasted with enw, ainm, nomen, name. Speaking relatively, the former might be of almost any date in point of comparative lateness, while the latter could not, belonging as they do to a small declension which was not wont to receive accessions to its numbers.

In what way, then, or in what respect did early folklore identify the name with the breath? Before one could expect to answer this question in anything like a convincing fashion, one would have to examine the collector of the folklore of savages, or rather to induce him to cross-examine them on the point. For instance, among the Singhalese [228], when in the ceremony of name-giving the father utters the baby's name in a low whisper in the baby's ear, is that called breathing the name? and is the name so whispered called a breath or a breathing? In the case of the savages who name their children at their birth, is the reason ever advanced that a name must be given to the child in order to make it breathe, or, at least, in order to facilitate its breathing? Some such a notion of reinforcing the child's vitality and safety would harmonize well enough with the fact that, as Mr. Clodd [229] puts it, 'Barbaric, Pagan, and Christian folklore is full of examples of the importance of naming and other birth-ceremonies, in the belief that the child's life is at the mercy of evil spirits watching the chance of casting spells upon it, of demons covetous to possess it, and of fairies eager to steal it and leave a "changeling" in its place.' Provisionally, one must perhaps rest content to suppose the association of the name to have taken place with the breath regarded as an accompaniment of life. Looked at in that sense, the name becomes associated with one's life, and, speaking roughly, with one's person; and it is interesting to notice that one seems to detect traces in Welsh literature of some confusion of the kind. Thus, when the hero of the story of Kulhwch and Olwen was christened he was named Kulhwch, which is expressed in Welsh as 'forcing or driving Kulhwch on him' (gyrru kulh6ch arna6 [230]); Kulh6ch, be it noticed, not the name Kulhwch. Similarly when Brân, on the eve of his expedition to Ireland, left seven princes, or knights as they are also called, to take charge of his dominions, we have an instance of the kind. The stead or town was named after the seven knights, and it is a place which is now known as Bryn y Saith Marchog, 'the Hill of the Seven Knights,' near Gwydelwern, in Merionethshire. But the wording of the Mabinogi of Branwen is o acha6s hynny y dodet seith marcha6c ar y dref [231], meaning 'for that reason the stead was called Seven Knights,' literally 'for that reason one put Seven Knights on the stead.' In Guest's Mabinogion, iii. 116, this will be found rendered wrongly, though not wholly without excuse--'for this reason were the seven knights placed in the town.' It is probable that the redactor of the stories from which the two foregoing instances come--and more might be cited--was not so much courting ambiguities as adhering to an old form of expression which neglected from the first to distinguish, in any formal way, between names and the persons or things which they would, in modern phraseology, be said to represent [232].

An instance has been already mentioned of a man's name being put or set on him, or rather forced on him: at any rate, his name is on him both in Welsh and Irish, and the latter language also speaks of it as cleaving or adhering to him. Neither language contemplates the name, however closely identified with him, as having become an inseparable part of him, or else as something he has secured for himself. In the neo-Celtic tongues, both Welsh and Irish, all things which a man owns, and all things for which he takes credit, are with him or by him; but all things which he cannot help having, whether creditable or discreditable, if they are regarded as coming from without are on him, not with him. Thus, if he is wealthy there is money with him; but if he is in debt and owes money, the money is on him. Similarly, if he rejoices there is joy with him; whereas if he is ashamed or afraid, shame or fear is on him. This is a far-reaching distinction, of capital importance in Celtic phraseology, and judged by this criterion the name is something from without the man, something which he cannot take credit to himself for having acquired by his own direct willing or doing. This is to be borne in mind when one speaks of the name as identified or closely bound up with one's life and personality. But this qualified identification of the name with the man is also what one may infer from savage folklore; for many, perhaps most, of the nations who name their children at their birth, have those names changed when the children grow up. That is done when a boy has to be initiated into the mysteries of his tribe or of a guild, or it may be when he has achieved some distinction in war. In most instances, it involves a serious ceremony and the intervention of the wise man, whether the medicine-man of a savage system, or the priest of a higher religion [233]. In the ancient Wales of the Mabinogion, and in pagan Ireland, the name-giving was done, subject to certain conditions, at the will and on the initiative of the druid, who was at the same time tutor and teacher of the youth to be renamed [234]. Here I may be allowed to direct attention to the two following facts: the druid, recalling as he does the magician of the Egypt of the Pentateuch and the shaman of the Mongolian world of our own time, represented a profession probably not of Celtic origin. In the next place, his method of selecting names from incidents was palpably incompatible with what is known to have been the Aryan system of nomenclature, by means of compounds, as evinced by the annals of most nations of the Aryan family of speech: such compounds, I mean, as Welsh Pen-wyn, 'white-headed,' Gaulish Penno-ouindos, or Greek Hipparchos, Archippos, and the like. Briefly, one may say that the association of the name with the breath of life was probably Aryan, but without, perhaps, being unfamiliar to the aborigines of the British Isles before their conquest by the Celts. On the other hand, in the druid and his method of naming we seem to touch the non-Aryan substratum, and to detect something which was not Celtic, not Aryan [235].

Perhaps the reader will not regard it as wholly irrelevant if here I change the subject for a while from one's name to other words and locutions in so far as they may be regarded as illustrative of the mental surroundings in which the last paragraph leaves the name. I allude especially to the exaggerated influence associated with a form of words, more particularly among the Irish Celts. O'Curry gives a tragic instance: the poet Néde mac Adnai, in order to obtain possession of the throne of Connaught, asked an impossible request of the king, who was his own father's brother and named Caier. When the king declared his inability to accede to his demand the poet made the refusal his excuse for composing on the king what was called in Irish an áir or áer, written later aor, 'satire,' which ran approximately thus:--

Evil, death, short life to Caier! May spears of battle wound Caier! Caier quenched, Caier forced, Caier underground! Under ramparts, under stones with Caier!

O'Curry goes on to relate how Caier, washing his face at the fountain next morning, discovered that it had three blisters on it, which the satire had raised, to wit, disgrace, blemish, and defect, in colours of crimson, green, and white. So Caier fleeing, that his plight might not be seen of his friends, came to Dun Cearmna (now the Old Head of Kinsale, in county Cork), the residence of Caichear, chief of that district. There Caier was well received as a stranger of unknown quality, while Néde assumed the sovereignty of Connaught. In time, Néde came to know of Caier being there, and rode there in Caier's chariot. But as Néde approached Caier escaped through his host's house and hid himself in the cleft of a rock, whither Néde followed Caier's greyhound; and when Caier saw Néde, the former dropped dead of shame [236]. This abstract of the story as told by O'Curry, will serve to show how the words of the satirist were dreaded by high and low among the ancient Irish, and how their demands had to be at once obeyed. It is a commonplace of Irish literature that the satirist's words unfailingly raised blisters on the face of him at whom they were aimed. A portion at least of the potency of the poet's words seems to have been regarded as due to their being given a certain metrical form. That, however, does not show how the poet had acquired his influence, and one cannot shut one's eyes to the fact that the means he might adopt to make his influence felt and his wishes instantly attended to, implied that the race with which he had to deal was a highly sensitive one: I may perhaps apply to it the adjective thin-skinned, in the literal sense of that word. For the blisters on the face are only an exaggeration of a natural phenomenon. On this point my attention has been called by a friend to the following passages in a review of a work on the pathology of the emotions [237]:--

'To both the hurtful and curative effects of the emotions M. Féré devotes much attention, and on these points makes some interesting remarks. That the emotions act on the body, more by their effects on the circulation than by anything else, is no new thesis, but M. Féré is developing some new branches of it. That the heart may be stopped for a few seconds, and that there may be localised flush and pallor of the skin, owing to almost any strong emotion, whether it be joy, anger, fear, or pain, is a matter of common observation; and that there may be many changes of nutrition due to vaso-motor disturbance is a point easy to establish. The skin is particularly easily affected; passion and pain may produce a sweat that is truly hemorrhagic (Parrot); and the scientific world is obliged to admit that in the stigmata of Louise Lateau the blood vessels were really broken, and not broken by anything else than an emotional state as cause. In a shipwreck Follain tells us that the pilot was covered in an hour with pustules from his fear; and the doctor sees many dermato-neuroses, such as nettle-rash, herpes, pemphigus, vitiligo, &c, from the choc moral.'

I can illustrate this from my own observation: when I was an undergraduate there was with me at college a Welsh undergraduate, who, when teased or annoyed by his friends, was well known to be subject to a sort of rash or minute pustules on his face: it would come on in the course of an hour or so. There is a well-known Welsh line on this subject of the face which is to the point:--

Ni chel grud gystud càlon.

The cheek hides not the heart's affliction.

So a man who was insulted, or whose honour was assailed, might be said to be thereby put to the blush or to be otherwise injured in his face; and the Irish word enech, 'face,' is found commonly used as a synonym for one's honour or good name. The same appears to have been the case with the Welsh equivalent, wyneb, 'face,' and dyn di-wyneb, literally 'a faceless man,' appears to be now used in Carnarvonshire and Glamorgan in the sense of one who is without a sense of honour, an unprincipled fellow. So when Welsh law dealt with insults and attacks on one's honour the payment to be made to the injured person was called gwynebwerth, 'the price of one's face,' or gwynebwarth, 'the payment for disgracing one's face.' Irish law arranged for similar damages, and called them by analogous names, such as enech-gris, 'a fine for injuring or raising a blush on the face,' and enech-lóg or enech-lann, 'honour price'; compare also enech-ruice, 'a face-reddening or blushing caused by some act or scandal which brought shame on a family.' Possibly one has to do with traces of somewhat the same type of 'face,' though it has faded away to the verge of vanishing, when one speaks in English of keeping another in countenance.

It has been suggested that if a magician got a man's name he could injure him by means of his arts: now the converse seems to have been the case with the Irish áer or satire, for to be effective it had, as in the instance of Caier, to mention the victim's name; and a curious instance occurs in the Book of Leinster, fo. 117, where the poet Atherne failed to curse a person whose name he could not manipulate according to the rules of his satire. This man Atherne is described as inhospitable, stingy, and greedy to the last degree. So it is related how he sallied forth one day, taking with him a cooked pig and a pot of mead, to a place where he intended to gorge himself without being observed. But no sooner had he settled down to his meal than he saw a man approaching, who remarked to him on his operating on the food all alone, and unceremoniously picked up the porker and the pot of mead. As he was coolly walking away with them, Atherne cried out after him, 'What is thy name?' The stranger replied that it was nothing very grand, and gave it as follows:--

Sethor . ethor . othor . sele . dele . dreng gerce Mec gerlusce . ger ger . dír dír issed moainmse.

Sethor-Ethor-Othor-Sele-Dele-Dreng gerce Son of Gerlusce ger-ger-dír-dír, that is my name.

The story goes on to say that Atherne neither saw his meal any more nor succeeded in making a satire on the name of the stranger, who accordingly got away unscathed. It was surmised, we are told, that he was an angel come from God to teach the poet better manners. This comic story brings us back to the importance of the name, as it implies that the cursing poet, had he been able to seize it and duly work it into his satire, could not have failed to bring about the intruder's discomfiture. The magician and folklore philosopher, far from asking with Juliet, 'What's in a name?' would have rather put it the other way, 'What's not in a name?' At any rate the ancients believed that there was a great deal in a name, and traces of the importance which they gave it are to be found in modern speech: witness the article on name or its equivalent in a big dictionary of any language possessed of a great literature.

It has been seen that it is from the point of view of magic that the full importance of one's name was most keenly realized by our ancient Celts; that is, of magic more especially in that stage of its history when it claimed as its own a certain degree of skill in the art of verse-making. Perhaps, indeed, it would be more accurate to suppose that verse-making appertained from the outset to magic, and that it was magicians, medicine-men, or seers, who, for their own use, first invented the aids of rhythm and metre. The subject, however, of magic and its accessories is far too vast to be treated here: it has been touched upon here and there in some of the previous chapters, and I may add that wizardry and magic form the machinery, so to say, of the stories called in Welsh the 'Four Branches of the Mabinogi' namely those of Pwyll, Branwen, Manawydan, and Math. Now these four, together with the adventure of Llûd and Llevelys, and, in a somewhat qualified sense, the story of Kulhwch and Olwen, represent in a Brythonicized form the otherwise lost legends of the Welsh Goidels; and, like those of the Irish Goidels, they are remarkable for their wizardry. Nor is that all, for in the former the kings are mostly the greatest magicians of their time: or shall I rather put it the other way, and say that in them the greatest magicians function as kings? Witness Math son of Mathonwy king of Gwyned, and his sister's son, Gwydion ab Dôn, to whom as his successor he duly taught his magic; then come the arch-enchanter Arawn, king of Annwn, and Caswallon ab Beli, represented as winning his kingdom by the sheer force of magic. To these might be added other members of the kingly families whose story shows them playing the rôle of magicians, such as Rhiannon, who by her magic arts foiled her powerful suitor, Gwawl ab Clûd, and secured as her consort the man of her choice, Pwyll prince of Dyfed. Here also, perhaps, one might mention Manawydan ab Llyr, who, as Manannán mac Lir, figures in the stories of the Goidels of Erin and Man as a consummate wizard and first king of the Manx people: see p. 314 above. In the Mabinogi, however, no act of magic is ascribed to Manawydan, though he is represented successfully checkmating the most formidable wizard arrayed against him and his friends, to wit, Llwyd ab Kilcoed. Not only does one get the impression that the ruling class in these stories of the Welsh Goidels had their magic handed down from generation to generation according to a fixed rule of maternal succession (pp. 326, 503, 505), but it supplies the complete answer to and full explanation of questions as to the meaning of the terms already mentioned, Tuatha Dé ocus Andé, and Lucht Cumachtai, together with its antithesis. Within the magic-wielding class exercising dominion over the shepherds and tillers of the soil of the country, it is but natural to suppose that the first king was the first magician or greatest medicine-man, as in the case of Manannán in the Isle of Man. This must of course be understood to apply to the early history of the Goidelic race, or, perhaps more correctly speaking, to one of the races which had contributed to its composition: to the aborigines, let us say, by whatsoever name or names you may choose to call them, whether Picts or Ivernians. It is significant, among other things, that our traditions should connect the potency of ancient wizardry with descent in the female line of succession, and, in any case, one cannot be wrong in assuming magic to have begun very low down in the scale of social progress, probably lower than religion, with which it is essentially in antagonism. As the crude and infantile pack of notions, collectively termed sympathetic magic--beginning with the belief that any effect may be produced by imitating the action of the cause of it, or even doing anything that would recall it [238]--grew into the panoply of the magician, he came to regard himself, and to be regarded by others, as able for his own benefit and that of his friends to coerce all possible opponents, whether men or demons, heroes or gods. This left no room for the attitude of prayer and worship: religion in that sense could only come later.