The Celts had been taught by their priests that the soul is immortal.
When the body died,
The spirit passed instantly into another existence in a country close at hand.
We remember that the underworld of the British Isles,
Peopled by the banished Tuatha and all superhuman beings,
Was either in caves in the earth,
As in Ireland,
Or in an island like the English Avalon.
By giving a mortal one of their magic apples to eat,
Fairies could entice him,
Whither they would,
And at last away,
Into their country.
In the Irish story of Nera,
The corpse of the criminal is the cause of Nera's being lured into the cave,
So the dead have the same power as fairies and live in the same place.
On May Eve and November Eve,
The dead and the fairies hold their revels together and make excursions together.
If a young person died,
He was said to be called away by the fairies.
The Tuatha may not have been a race of gods,
But merely the early Celts,
Who grew to God like poor portions,
As they just raised a mound of lore and legends for their pedestal,
So they might really be only the dead,
And not of superhuman nature.
In the fourth century AD,
The men of England were hard-pressed by the Picts and Scots from the northern border,
And were helped in their need by the Teutons.
When these tribes saw the fair country of the Britons,
They decided to hold it for themselves.
After they had driven out the northern tribes,
In the fifth century,
When King Arthur was reigning in Cornwall,
They drove out those whose cause they had fought.
So the Britons were scattered to the mountains of Wales,
To Cornwall,
And across the Channel to Amorica.
Amorica,
A part of France,
Which they named Brittany,
After their homeland.
In Lower Brittany,
Out of the zone of French influence,
A language something like Welsh or Old British is still spoken,
And many of the Celtic beliefs were retained,
More untouched than in Britain,
Not clear of paganism,
Till the seventeenth century.
Here especially did Christianity have to adapt the old belief to her own ends.
Gaul,
As we have seen from Caesar's account,
Had been one of the chief seeds of Druidical belief.
The religious centre was Carnutes,
Now Kheten.
The rites of sacrifice survived in the same form as in the British Isles.
In the fields of Douzerre,
Fires were built of stubble ferns,
Leaves,
And thorns,
And the people danced about them and burned nuts in them.
On St.
John's Day,
Animals were burned in the fires to secure the cattle from disease.
This was continued down into the seventeenth century.
The pagan belief that lasted the longest in Brittany,
And is by no means dead yet,
Was the cult of the dead.
Caesar said that the Celts,
And of Gaul,
Trace their ancestry from the guard of the dead,
Who he called the Spalter.
Now figures of Ancu,
A skeleton armed with a spear,
Can be seen in most villages of Brittany.
This mindfulness of dead was strengthened by the sight of the prehistoric cairns of stones on hilltops.
The ancient altars of the Druids and Dolmens,
Formed of one flat rock resting like a roof,
On two others set up on end with a space between them,
Ancient tombs,
And by the Bretons,
Being cut off from the rest of France by the nature of the country,
And shut in among the uplands,
Black and misty in November,
And blown over by chill Atlantic winds.
Under a seeming dull indifference and melancholy,
The Bretons conceal a lively imagination,
And no place has a greater wealth of legendary literature.
What fairies,
Dwarves,
Pixies,
And the like are to the Celts of other places,
The spirits of the dead are to the Celts of Brittany.
They possess the earth on Christmas,
St.
John's Day,
And All Saints.
In Finistère,
That western poet of France,
There is a saying that on the eve of All Souls there are more dead in every house than sands on the shore.
The dead have the power to charm mortals,
And take them away,
And foretell the future.
They must not be spoken of directly,
And more than the fairies of the Scottish border or met with for fear of evil results.
By the Bretons of the sixth century,
The nearby island of Britain,
Which they could just see on clear days,
Was called the Otherworld.
And historian Procopius tells how the people nearest Britain were exempted from paying tribute to the Franks,
Because they were subject to knightly summons to ferry the souls of the dead across in their boats,
And deliver them into the hands of the Keeper of the Souls.
Farther inland,
A black bog seemed to be the entrance to an Otherworld underground.
One location which combined the ideas of an island and a cave was a city buried in the sea.
The people imagined they could hear the bells of Curies ringing,
And joyous music sounding,
But though this was a city of the dead,
It resembled the fairy palaces of Ireland,
And was ruled by King Gralon and his fair daughter,
Dahut,
Who could lure mortals away by her beauty and enchantments.
The approach of winter is believed to thrive like the flocks,
The souls of the dead,
From their cold,
Cheerless graves to the food and warmth of home.
This is why November Eve,
The night before the first day of winter,
Was made sacred to them.
From the songs of Brittany,
When comes the harvest of the year,
Before the skite the wheat will fall.
The harvest-time reminded the Britons of their garnering by that reaper,
Dead.
On November Eve,
Milk is poured on graves,
Feasts and candles set out on the tables,
And fires lighted on the herds,
To welcome the spirits of departed kinsfolk and friends.
In France,
From the twelfth to the fourteenth century,
Stone buildings like lighthouses were erected in cemeteries.
They were twenty or thirty feet high,
With lanterns on top.
On Halloween they were kept burning to safeguard the people from the fear of night-wandering spirits and the dead,
So they were called lanterns de mort.
The cemetery is the social centre of the Briton village.
It is at one's meeting-place,
Playground,
Park and church.
The tombs that outline the hills make the place seem one vast cemetery.
On All Souls' Eve in the mid-nineteenth century,
Their procession of tombs was held.
All formed a line and walked about the cemetery,
Calling the names of those who were dead as they approached their resting-places.
Their accord was carefully remembered,
So that not one should seem to be forgotten.
We live without death,
Say the Britons.
First on the Eve of All Souls comes the religious service,
Black Vespers.
The blessedness of death is praised,
The sorrows and shortness of life dwelt upon.
After a common prayer,
All go out to the cemetery,
Pray separately,
Each by the grace of his kin,
Or to the place of bones,
Where the remains of those long dead are thrown altogether in one tomb.
They can be seen behind gratings by the people as they pass,
And rows of skulls at the sides of the entrance can be touched.
In these tombs are Latin inscriptions meaning,
Remember,
Two Must Die,
Today to Me and Tomorrow to Thee,
And others reminding the reader of his coming dead.
From the cemetery the people go to a house or an inn,
Which is the gathering-place for the night.
Singing or talking loudly on the road to warn the dead who are hastening home,
Lest they meet,
Lest they may meet,
Reunions of families take place on this night in the spirit of the Roman feast of the dead,
The Feralia,
Of which Ovid wrote,
After the visit to tombs and to the ancestors who are no longer with us,
It is pleasant to turn towards the living.
After the loss of so many,
It is pleasant to behold those who remain of our blood,
And to reckon generations of our descendants.
Toast is drunk to the memory of the departed.
The men sit about the fireplace,
Smoking or weaving baskets,
The women apart,
Knitting or spinning by the light of the fire and one candle.
The children play with their gifts of apples and nuts,
As the hour grows later and mysterious noises begin to be heard about the house,
And a curtain sways in a draft,
The thoughts of the company already centered upon the dead find expression in words,
And each has a tale to tell of an adventure with some friend or enemy who has died.
The dead are taught to take up existence where they left it,
Working at the same trades,
Remembering their old debts,
Likes and dislikes,
Even wearing the same clothes they wore in life.
Most of them stay not in some distant,
Definite other world,
But frequent the scenes of their former life.
They never trespass upon daylight,
And it is dangerous to meet them at night,
Because they are very ready to punish any slighter memory,
Such as selling their possessions or forgetting the hospitality due to them.
Lanku will come to get supply of shavings,
If the coffins are not lined with them,
To make a softer resting place for the dead bodies.
The lively Celtic imagination turns the merest coincidence into an encounter with the spirit and the poetic temperament of the narrator's clothes.
The stories with vividness and mystery,
They tell how the presence of a ghost made the midsummer air so cold that even wood did not burn,
And of groans and footsteps underground as long as the ghost is displeased with what his relatives are doing.
Just before the midnight,
A bellman goes about the streets to give warning of the hour when the spirits will arrive.
They will sit where we sat,
And will talk of us as we talked of them.
In the grey of the morning only will they go away.
The supper for the souls is then set out.
The poor who live in the mountains have only black corn,
Milk,
And smoked bacon to offer.
It is given freely,
Those who can afford it,
Spread on a white cloth dishes of clotted milk,
Hot pancakes,
And mugs of cider.
They all have retired to lie with both eyes shut tight,
Lest they see one of the guest's dead singers make their rounds,
Shandling under the windows.
You are comfortably lying in your bed,
But with the poor dead it is otherwise.
You are stretched softly in your bed,
While the poor souls are wandering abroad.
A white sheet and five planks,
A bundle of straw beneath the head,
Five feet of earthen bone,
Are all the worldly goods we own.
The tears of their deserted friends disturb the comfort of the dead,
And sometimes they appear,
Tell those in sorrow that their shrouds are always wet,
From the tears shed on their graves.
Waken by the dirge of the dead singers,
The people rise and pray for the souls of the departed.
Divination has a little part in the annals of the evening,
But one in a finished year is recorded.
Twenty-five new needles are laid in a dish,
Unnamed,
And water is poured upon them.
Those who cross are enemies.
In France is the whole typical continental celebration of all saints and all souls.
On October 31st,
The children go asking for flowers to decorate the graves and to adorn the church.
Night bells ring to usher in all saints.
On the day itself,
The churches are decorated gaily with flowers,
Candles,
And banners,
And special services is held.
On the second day of November,
The light and color give way to black drapings,
Funeral songs,
And prayers.
