themselves to each other.[1218] Other Welsh bards besides Taliesin make similar boasts to his, and Dr. Skene thinks that their claims “may have been mere bombast."[1219] Still some current belief in shape-shifting, or even in rebirth, underlies some of these boastings and gives point to them.  Amairgen’s “I am” this or that, suggests the inherent power of transformation; Taliesin’s “I have been,” the actual transformations.  Such assertions do not involve “the powerful pantheistic doctrine which is at once the glory and error of Irish philosophy,” as M. D’Arbois claims,[1220] else are savage medicine-men, boastful of their shape-shifting powers, philosophic pantheists.  The poems are merely highly developed forms of primitive beliefs in shape-shifting, such as are found among all savages and barbaric folk, but expressed in the boastful language in which the Celt delighted.

How were the successive shape-shiftings effected?  To answer this we shall first look at the story of Tuan Mac Caraill, who survived from the days of Partholan to those of S. Finnen.  He was a decrepit man at the coming of Nemed, and one night, having lain down to sleep, he awoke as a stag, and lived in this form to old age.  In the same way he became a boar, a hawk, and a salmon, which was caught and eaten by Cairell’s wife, of whom he was born as Tuan, with a perfect recollection of his different forms.[1221]

This story, the invention of a ninth or tenth century Christian scribe to account for the current knowledge of the many invasions of Ireland,[1222] must have been based on pagan myths of a similar kind, involving successive transformations and a final rebirth.  Such a myth may have been told of Taliesin, recounting his transformations and his final rebirth, the former being replaced at a later time by the episode of the Transformation Combat, involving no great lapse of time.  Such a series of successive shapes—­of every beast, a dragon, a wolf, a stag, a salmon, a seal, a swan—­were ascribed to Mongan and foretold by Manannan, and Mongan refers to some of them in his colloquy with S. Columba—­“when I was a deer ... a salmon ... a seal ... a roving wolf ... a man."[1223] Perhaps the complete story was that of a fabulous hero in human form, who assumed different shapes, and was finally reborn.  But the transformation of an old man, or an old animal, into new youthful and vigorous forms might be regarded as a kind of transmigration—­an extension of the transformation idea, but involving no metempsychosis, no passing of the soul into another body by rebirth.  Actual transmigration or rebirth occurs only at the end of the series, and, as in the case of Etain, Lug, etc., the pre-existent person is born of a woman after being swallowed by her.  Possibly the transformation belief has reacted on the other, and obscured a belief in actual metempsychosis as a result of the soul of an ancestor passing into a woman and being reborn as her next child.  Add