to this that the soul is often thought of as a tiny animal, and we see how a point d’appui for the more materialistic belief was afforded.  The insect or worms of the rebirth stories may have been once forms of the soul.  It is easy also to see how, a theory of conception by swallowing various objects being already in existence, it might be thought possible that eating a salmon—­a transformed man—­would cause his rebirth from the eater.

The Celts may have had no consistent belief on this subject, the general idea of the future life being of a different kind.  Or perhaps the various beliefs in transformation, transmigration, rebirth, and conception by unusual means, are too inextricably mingled to be separated.  The nucleus of the tales seems to be the possibility of rebirth, and the belief that the soul was still clad in a bodily form after death and was itself a material thing.  But otherwise some of them are not distinctively Celtic, and have been influenced by old Maerchen formulae of successive changes adopted by or forced upon some person, who is finally reborn.  This formulae is already old in the fourteenth century B.C.  Egyptian story of the Two Brothers.

Such Celtic stories as these may have been known to classical authors, and have influenced their statements regarding eschatology.  Yet it can hardly be said that the tales themselves bear witness to a general transmigration doctrine current among the Celts, since the stories concern divine or heroic personages.  Still the belief may have had a certain currency among them, based on primitive theories of soul life.  Evidence that it existed side by side with the more general doctrines of the future life may be found in old or existing folk-belief.  In some cases the dead have an animal form, as in the Voyage of Maelduin, where birds on an island are said to be souls, or in the legend of S. Maelsuthain, whose pupils appear to him after death as birds.[1224] The bird form of the soul after death is still a current belief in the Hebrides.  Butterflies in Ireland, and moths in Cornwall, and in France bats or butterflies, are believed to be souls of the dead.[1225] King Arthur is thought by Cornishmen to have died and to have been changed into the form of a raven, and in mediaeval Wales souls of the wicked appear as ravens, in Brittany as black dogs, petrels, or hares, or serve their term of penitence as cows or bulls, or remain as crows till the day of judgment.[1226] Unbaptized infants become birds; drowned sailors appear as beasts or birds; and the souls of girls deceived by lovers haunt them as hares.[1227]