Читать книгу CELTIC MYTHOLOGY (Illustrated Edition) - T. W. Rolleston - Страница 66

1. From Greek megas, great, and lithos, a stone.

2. See p. 78.

3. See Borlase's “Dolmens of Ireland,” pp. 605, 606, for a discussion of this question.

4. Professor Ridgeway (see Report of the Brit. Assoc. for 1908) has contended that the Megalithic People spoke an Aryan language; otherwise he thinks more traces of its influence must have survived in the Celtic which supplanted it. The weight of authority, as well as such direct evidence as we possess, seems to be against his view.

5. See Holder,“Altceltischer Sprachschatz.” sulb voce “Hyperboreoi.”

6. Thus the Greek pharmakon=medicine, poison, or charm; and I am informed that the Central African word for magic or charm is mankwala, which also means medicine.

7. If Pliny meant that it was here first codified and organised he may be right, but the conceptions on which magic rest are practically universal, and of immemorial antiquity.

8. Adopted 451 B.C. Livy entitles them “the fountain of all public and private right.” They stood in the Forum till the third century A.D., but have now perished, except for fragments preserved in various commentaries.

9. See “Revue Archeologique,” t. xii., 1865, “Fouilles de René Galles.”

10. Jade is not found in the native state in Europe, nor nearer than China.

11. Small stones, crystals, and gems were, however, also venerated. The celebrated Black Stone of Pergamos was the subject of an embassy from Rome to that city in the time of the Second Punic War, the Sibylline Books having predicted victory to its possessors. It was brought to Rome with great rejoicings in the year 205. It is stated to have been about the size of a man's fist, and was probably a meteorite. Compare the myth in Hesiod which relates how Kronos devoured a stone in the belief that it was his offspring, Zeus. It was then possible to mistake a stone for a god.

12. Replaced by a photograph in this edition.

13. See Sir J. Simpson's “Archaic Sculpturings” 1867.

14. The fact is recorded in the “Annals of the Four Masters” Under the date 861, and in the “Annals of Ulster” under 862.

15. See “Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy,” vol. xxx. pt. i., 1892, and “New Grange,” by G. Coffey, 1912.

16. It must be observed, however, that the decoration was, certainly, in some, and perhaps in all cases, carried out before the stones were placed in position. This is also the case at Gavr'inis.

17. He has modified this view in his latest work, “New Grange,” 1912.

18. “Proc. Royal Irish Acad.,” vol. viii. 1863, p. 400, and G. Coffey, op. cit. p. 30.

19. “Les Sculptures de Rochers de la Suède,” read at the Prehistoric Congress, Stockholm, 1874; and see G. Coffey, op. cit. p. 60.

20. “Dolmens of Ireland,” pp. 701-704.

21. “The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria.”

22. A good example from Amaravati (after Fergusson) is given by Bertrand, “Rel. des G.,” p. 389.

23. Sergi, “The Mediterranean Race,” p. 313.

24. At Lökeberget, Bohuslän; see Monteiius, op. cit.

25. See Lord Kingsborough's “Antiquities of Mexico,” passim, and the Humboldt fragment of Mexican painting (reproduced in Churchward's “Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man”).

26. See Sergi, op. cit. p. 290, for the Ankh on a French dolmen.

27. “Bulletin de la Soc. d'Anthropologie,” Paris, April 1893.

28. “The Welsh People,” pp. 616-664, where the subject is fully discussed in an appendix by Professor J. Morris Jones. “The pre-Aryan idioms which still live in Welsh and Irish were derived from a language allied to Egyptian and the Berber tongues.”

29. Flinders Petrie, “Egypt and Israel,” pp. 137, 899.

30. I quote from Mr. H.B. Cotterill's beautiful hexameter version.

31. Valerius Maximus (about A.D 30) and other classical writers mention this practice.

32. Book V.

33. De Jubainville, “Irish Mythological Cycle,” p.191 sqq.

34. The etymology of the word “Druid” is no longer an unsolved problem. It had been suggested that the latter part of the word might be connected with the Aryan root VID, which appears in “wisdom,” in the Latin videre, &c., Thurneysen has now shown that this root in combination with the intensive particle dru would yield the word dru-vids, represented in Gaelic by draoi, a Druid, just as another intensive, su, with vids yields the Gaelic saoi, a sage.

35. See Rice Holmes, “Cæsar's Conquest,” p. 15, and pp. 532-536. Rhys, it may be observed, believes that Druidism was the religion of the aboriginal inhabitants of Western Europe “from the Baltic to Gibraltar” (“Celtic Britain,” p. 73). But we only know of it where Celts and dolmen-builders combined. Cæsar remarks of the Germans that they had no Druids and cared little about sacrificial ceremonies.

36. “Rel. des Gaulois,” leçon xx.

37. Quoted by Bertrand, op. cit. p. 279.

38. “The Irish Mythological Cycle,” by d'Arbois de Jubainville, p. 6l. The “Dinnsenchus” in question is an early Christian document. No trace of a being like Crom Cruach has been found as yet in the pagan literature of Ireland, nor in the writings of St. Patrick, and I think it is quite probable that even in the time of St. Patrick human sacrifices had become only a memory.

39. A representation of human sacrifice has, however, lately been discovered in a Temple of the Sun in the ancient Ethiopian capital, Meroë.

40. “You (Celts) who by cruel blood outpoured think to appease the pitiless Teutates, the horrid Æsus with his barbarous altars, and Taranus whose worship is no gentler than that of the Scythian Diana”, to whom captive were offered up. (Lucan, “Pharsalia”, i. 444.) An altar dedicated to Æsus has been discovered in Paris.

41. Mont Mercure, Mercœur, Mercoirey, Montmartre (Mons Mercurii), &c.

42. To this day in many parts of France the peasantry use terms like annuit, o'né, anneue, &c., all meaning “to-night,” for aujourd'hui (Bertrand, “Rel. des G.,” p. 356).

43. The fili, or professional poets, it must be remembered, were a branch of the Druidic order.

44. For instance, Pelagius in the fifth century; Columba, Columbanus, and St. Gall in the sixth; Fridolin, named Viator, “the Traveller,” and Fursa in the seventh; Virgilius (Feargal) of Salzburg, who had to answer at Rome for teaching the sphericity of the earth, in the eighth; Dicuil, “the Geographer,” and Johannes Scotus Erigena—the master mind of his epoch—in the ninth.