they were the priests of the oak-ritual, whence their name was derived.  In view of the variety of grades of civilisation then co-existing in Gaul and Britain, it is not improbable that the development of the non-military professional class varied very considerably in different districts, and that all the aspects of Druidism which the ancient writers specify found their appropriate places in the social system of the Celts.  In Gaul and Britain, as elsewhere, the office of the primitive tribal medicine-man was capable of indefinite development, and all the forms of its evolution could not have proceeded pari passu where the sociological conditions found such scope for variation.  It may well be that the oak and mistletoe ceremonies, for example, lingered in remote agricultural districts long after they had ceased to interest men along the main routes of Celtic civilisation.  The bucolic mind does not readily abandon the practices of millennia.

In addition to the term Druid, we find in Aulus Hirtius’ continuation of Caesar’s Gallic War (Bk. viii., c. xxxviii., 2), as well as on two inscriptions, one at Le-Puy-en-Velay (Dep.  Haute-Loire), and the other at Macon (Dep.  Saone-et-Loire), another priestly title, ‘gutuater.’  At Macon the office is that of a ‘gutuater Martis,’ but of its special features nothing is known.

CHAPTER VII—­THE CELTIC OTHER-WORLD

In the preceding chapter we have seen that the belief was widely prevalent among Greek and Roman writers that the Druids taught the immortality of the soul.  Some of these writers, too, point out the undoubted fact, attested by Archaeology, that objects which would be serviceable to the living were buried with the dead, and this was regarded as a confirmation of the view that the immortality of souls was to the Celts an object of belief.  The study of Archaeology on the one hand, and of Comparative Religion on the other, certainly leads to the conclusion that in the Bronze and the Early Iron Age, and in all probability in the Stone Age, the idea prevailed that death was not the end of man.  The holed cromlechs of the later Stone Age were probably designed for the egress and ingress of souls.  The food and the weapons that were buried with the dead were thought to be objects of genuine need.  Roman religion, too, in some of its rites provided means for the periodical expulsion of hungry and hostile spirits of the dead, and for their pacification by the offer of food.  A tomb and its adjuncts were meant not merely for the honour of the dead, but also for the protection of the living.  A clear line of distinction was drawn between satisfied and beneficent ghosts like the Manes, and the unsatisfied and hostile ghosts like the Lemures and Larvae.  To the Celtic mind, when its analytical powers had come to birth, and man was sufficiently self-conscious to reflect upon himself, the problem of his own nature