Читать книгу Myths of the Rhine - M. Xavier - Страница 30

The Celts used various and strange means for the purpose of disposing of the remains of their deceased friends. In some countries they were burnt, and their own tree furnished the fuel for the funeral pile; in other countries the Todtenbaum (Tree of the Dead), hollowed out with an axe, became the owner’s coffin. This coffin was interred, unless it was intrusted to the current of the river, to be carried God knows where! Finally, in certain localities there existed a custom—a horrible custom!—of exposing the body to the voracity of birds of prey, and the place of exposure was the top of the very tree which had been planted at the birth of the deceased, and which in this case, quite exceptionally, was not cut down.

Now, observe, that in these four distinct methods by which human remains were restored to the four elements of air and water, earth and fire, we meet again the four favorite ways of burial still practiced in India, as of old, by the followers of Brahma, Buddha, and Zoroaster. The fire-worshippers of Bombay are as familiar with them as the dervishes who drown children in the Ganges. Thus we have here four proofs, instead of one, of the Indian origin of our Celts. For my part at least, I confess I am convinced by this quadruple evidence.

It is to be presumed that the use of Dead Men’s Trees and of posthumous drownings continued for centuries in ancient Gaul as well as in ancient Germany. About 1560 some Dutch laborers found, in examining a part of the Zuyder Zee, at a great depth, several trunks of trees which were marvelously well preserved and nearly petrified. Each one of these trunks had been occupied by a man, and contained some half-petrified fragments. It was evident that they had been carried down, trunk and man, by the Rhine, the Ganges of Germany.