As for the stage of civilisation at which totemism originated, there is much difference of opinion.  The stage of mind which it implies would suggest that it reflects a time when man’s mind was preoccupied with wild beasts, and when the alliances and friendships, which he would value in life, might be found in that sphere.  There is much plausibility in the view put forward by M. Salomon Reinach, that the domestication of animals itself implies a totemistic habit of thought, and the consequent protection of these animals by means of taboos from harm and death.  It may well be that, after all, the usefulness of domestic animals from a material point of view was only a secondary consideration for man, and a happy discovery after unsuccessful totemistic attentions to other animals.  We know not how many creatures early man tried to associate with himself but failed.

In all stages of man’s history the alternation of the seasons must have brought some rudiments of order and system into his thoughts, though for a long time he was too preoccupied to reflect upon the regularly recurring vicissitudes of his life.  In the pastoral stage, the sense of order came to be more marked than in that of hunting, and quickened the mind to fresh thought.  The earth came to be regarded as the Mother from whom all things came, and there are abundant indications that the earth as the Mother, the Queen, the Long-lived one, etc., found her natural place as a goddess among the Celts.  Her names and titles were probably not in all places or in all tribes the same.  But it is in the agricultural stage that she entered in Celtic lands, as she did in other countries, into her completest religious heritage, and this aspect of Celtic religion will be dealt with more fully in connection with the spirits of vegetation.  This phase of religion in Celtic countries is one which appears to underlie some of its most characteristic forms, and the one which has survived longest in Celtic folk-lore.  The Earth-mother with her progeny of spirits, of springs, rivers, mountains, forests, trees, and corn, appears to have supplied most of the grouped and individualised gods of the Celtic pantheon.  The Dis, of whom Caesar speaks as the ancient god of the Gauls, was probably regarded as her son, to whom the dead returned in death.  Whether he is the Gaulish god depicted with a hammer, or as a huge dog swallowing the dead, has not yet been established with any degree of certainty.

CHAPTER IV—­CELTIC RELIGION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIVIDUALISED DEITIES