death.[1158] Thus Lucan conceived the Druidic doctrine to be one of bodily immortality in another region.  That region was not a gloomy state; rather it resembled the Egyptian Aalu with its rich and varied existence.  Classical writers, of course, may have known of what appears to have been a sporadic Celtic idea, derived from old beliefs, that the soul might take the form of an animal, but this was not the Druidic teaching.  Again, if the Gauls, like the Irish, had myths telling of the rebirth of gods or semi-divine beings, these may have been misinterpreted by those writers and regarded as eschatological.  But such myths do not concern mortals.  Other writers, Timagenes, Strabo, and Mela,[1159] speak only of the immortality of the soul, but their testimony is probably not at variance with that of Lucan, since Mela appears to copy Caesar, and speaks of accounts and debts being passed on to the next world.

This theory of a bodily immortality is supported by the Irish sagas, in which ghosts, in our sense of the word, do not exist.  The dead who return are not spectres, but are fully clothed upon with a body.  Thus, when Cuchulainn returns at the command of S. Patrick, he is described exactly as if he were still in the flesh.  “His hair was thick and black ... in his head his eye gleamed swift and grey....  Blacker than the side of a cooking spit each of his two brows, redder than ruby his lips.”  His clothes and weapons are fully described, while his chariot and horses are equally corporeal.[1160] Similar descriptions of the dead who return are not infrequent, e.g. that of Caoilte in the story of Mongan, whom every one believes to be a living warrior, and that of Fergus mac Roich, who reappeared in a beautiful form, adorned with brown hair and clad in his former splendour, and recited the lost story of the Tain.[1161] Thus the Irish Celts believed that in another world the spirit animated the members.  This bodily existence is also suggested in Celtic versions of the “Dead Debtor” folk-tale cycle.  Generally an animal in whose shape a dead man helps his benefactor is found in other European versions, but in the Celtic stories not an animal but the dead man himself appears as a living person in corporeal form.[1162] Equally substantial and corporeal, eating, drinking, lovemaking, and fighting are the divine folk of the sid or of Elysium, or the gods as they are represented in the texts.  To the Celts, gods, side, and the dead, all alike had a bodily form, which, however, might become invisible, and in other ways differed from the earthly body.