It is almost, if not quite, impossible to acquire a right perspective of the position which the Celts occupy in British history without examining the incidence of that position and some of its relationships by the light of the results of modern archÆological research.

In Cornwall, as elsewhere, the prehistoric races which inhabited the county before the Celts appeared have left abundant evidence of their presence. That evidence, however, will be hard to discover in the warp and bent of character and in the physical development which doubtless all Englishmen have in some measure inherited from them, and towards which these extremely remote ancestors have to some slight extent contributed. We shall probably never know enough about any of them so as to be in a position to say of any one living in the county as we might say, for example, of an Irishman “that splendid act of daring or that hairbrained escapade must be set down to his Irish breeding.” Yet, inasmuch as no one supposes that an incoming race commonly extirpates the race it supplants there is always the suspicion that the new race may have yielded to the moral influence or to the religious atmosphere of the old. History supplies us with instances of this triumph of spiritual over physical force, Christianity itself being the most striking instance of all.

For this reason it is necessary to go back to those ages which have been distinguished as palÆolithic, neolithic, and bronze, in other words to those periods during which unpolished stone, polished stone, and bronze implements were in use,^[11] in order to discover, if possible, whether as the tide of industrial progress flowed in, there are indubitable signs of an unbroken tradition of religious thought and practice which became articulate in the historic narrative of Julius CÆsar.

Mr. Clement Reid, F.R.S., has thought that he detected traces of the palÆolithic age in the raised beach at Prah Sands,^[12] and there is, a priori, no reason to suppose that his discovery will not be confirmed by further investigation. Quite the contrary; it is not unlikely that some of the implements which have been found in the county and which are now commonly regarded as belonging to the later stone age will be found to belong to the earlier. This consideration, however, has only a very indirect bearing upon the present enquiry, for it has not yet been shown that the men of the earlier period had any religious belief at all.

On the other hand, there is a very strong presumption that the races of the later period had, towards the end of it, religious beliefs more or less definite. In this connection there is no need to call attention to the different kinds of stone implements which have been found in Cornwall and which have been identified with this—the neolithic—period. It will be useful, however, to consider, very briefly, the more striking of its monuments, found chiefly in the west and, by reason of their size, styled megalithic. They are distinguished as dolmens sometimes but incorrectly termed cromlechs, cists (stone chests), circles, menhirs or long stones, and alignments of which there are comparatively very few in the county. All belong to the same period; all appear to have been erected by the same race. They are all found in greater numbers and of larger dimensions in Brittany. The general opinion of competent archÆologists is that, with the exception perhaps of the menhirs, they are all sepulchral in character and with the exception of some of the cists that they all belong to the neolithic or else to the earlier half of the Bronze Age. The dolmens, of which ChÛn Quoit and Lanyon Quoit are good examples, differ only in size and detail from the cists which are abundant in Cornwall, and which have been proved to be depositories for the dead by their contents. The circles probably performed the very useful function of marking and protecting either single graves, as many of the smaller ones are still found to do, or a more or less large collection of graves like a modern churchyard wall. The fact that some of the circles no longer surround human interments, or that some cists are found without circles to protect them, presents no difficulty to those who accept this explanation, but who at the same time admit a variety of use in the disposal of the dead and who have abundant proof of a bygone vandalism which is not unknown in Cornwall to-day. Stonehenge is not only larger and more elaborate, but of later date than most of the larger circles, being the only one in England which is constructed of hewn stone, all the rest being built of undressed stone. Even of this, for which, on that account, there might have been presumed a quasi-religious origin, Sir Arthur Evans, one of the most eminent of living archÆologists, can only assert that “it is one of the large series of primitive religious monuments that grew out of purely sepulchral architecture.”

Of alignments it is hardly possible to say more than this, that they are usually associated with circles and may have served as avenues to them. The menhirs, sometimes isolated and independent of other ancient remains and sometimes as, for example, at St. Buryan and Drycarn, sufficiently near to circles to suggest association with them, are even less easy to explain. Some of them are of enormous dimensions, like the Men-er-Hroeck at Locmariaquer in Brittany; some are so small as to be liable to be mistaken for the rubbing stones of cattle. The former must have required vast numbers of men to erect, and it is their weight and size which has invested both the smaller and the greater with an interest and importance which would otherwise have been lacking. It is probable that some of them served as boundary stones, some as guide posts, and others as stones of memorial, like those reared by Jacob at Bethel, Joshua at Jordan, and Samuel at Ebenezer. The isolated menhirs of the largest size, i.e. the true menhirs or great undressed stones, reared by human instrumentality, wherever no traces of burial can be found either underneath or near them, undoubtedly suggest a religious purpose. While there is nothing to connect them with nature worship,^[13] as commonly understood, or with solar worship, it is difficult to conceive how they came to be erected unless it was either to commemorate a departed chief^[14] or to serve as symbols or objects of religion. Reverence paid to the dead, at certain stages of human development, may and probably does imply a belief in life after death. These monuments are of the late neolithic age.

The transition from it to the Bronze Age took place in Europe, according to the best authorities, about 1800 years before Christ. Bronze gave place to iron about 900 years later. The use of bronze in Cornwall, judging from the comparatively small number of bronze implements which have been discovered in the county, and from the fact that for its manufacture both of its constituent metals are abundant, would seem to have been of shorter duration here than elsewhere. Bronze celts have been found in Lelant, St. Just-in-Penwith, St. Hilary, St. Mawgan-in-meneage, Gwinear and in a few other places, but the net result is somewhat disappointing.

It is, however, during this period that in Gaul we meet with two races, the Ligurian and Iberian, occupying lands east and west of the Rhone respectively. These races must not be identified too closely with the countries whose names they bear.

They appear to have followed different occupations, the Ligurians devoting themselves to agriculture and the Iberians to the keeping of sheep and cattle.^[15]

It is remarkable that little evidence should have been discovered respecting the character of the religion of either race. A bronze disc from Ireland and a horse mounted on (not harnessed to) a six-wheeled curricle to one of the axles of which is affixed a disc, from Denmark, have been supposed to be emblematic of the Bronze Age sun worship of those countries. Again, the swan-shaped prow of Scandinavian boats has been recognised as a solar emblem, but the freedom with which that ancient bird has been treated for decorative purposes, leaves one somewhat in doubt as to its religious signification. No evidence of the use of either symbol has apparently been found in Britain or in Armorica.

If the distinction between Ligurian and Iberian can be sustained is it not possible that the latter if not both emblems were confined to the Ligurians and were introduced by them along with their religious associations as traders engaged in the overland amber traffic between the Baltic and the Mediterranean?

The same dearth of evidence meets us when we come to consider the cult of the bull and the sacred horns and that of the axe. Had this cult been peculiar to a pastoral people like the Iberians an irreverent mind might have been pardoned for suggesting that they hit upon a very appropriate symbolism. Unfortunately the Bronze Age of Britain and Armorica, whether Iberian or otherwise, supplies us with very few if any illustrations of it. Two bronze bulls of small size found in Morbihan have been claimed to represent it in Armorica. The bronze bull found in the Vicarage garden at St. Just, undoubtedly fashioned for a religious purpose, seems to have an equal claim; but until more evidence is forthcoming it is allowable to doubt whether the Minoan beliefs, associated with the bronze period in the Ægean, ever gained a footing in Britain. M. DÉchelette has with great pains striven to show that the mythology and the metal were closely related, perhaps contemporaneous and coextensive^[16]—at least this seems to be the general drift of his exposition. While yielding to no one in gratitude for his great work—a challenge to English archÆologists—it seems to the present writer that, in dealing with the religious symbolism of the Bronze Age, so far as North-Western Europe is concerned, he has done little more than to show that the double axe (bipenne) of the Ægean has its analogue, perhaps archetype, in the single axe with handle (hache simple et emmanchÉe) which is found inscribed on some of the Armorican dolmens of an earlier age. Nor is it self-evident that either the sacred horns or the axe is a solar emblem, though both appear to have been received into the Minoan system.

When we leave the Bronze Age and come to the Iron, we enter upon what has been termed protohistoric archÆology. Within about 300 years of its commencement we find ourselves in the presence of a race which has survived and has in a measure retained its individuality up to the present time.

The Celts, it is true, were only one of several races which from the east and north pressed westward and southward over Europe for a period of over a thousand years; but no invasion has ever been more complete or the effects of an invasion more profound and permanent. The Celts became identified with our island to a greater extent than either of their successors, the Saxons and Normans. The second body of them imparted to it its name. In the fifth century before Christ they had reached the Atlantic and had begun to invade Britain although the main body were near the Danube. In 387 B.C., they sacked Rome, and in the succeeding century a section of them crossed the Hellespont, overran Asia Minor and eventually settled in what became known as Galatia.

The point of greatest importance at the present stage of our enquiry is that of the Celtic religion between the close of the Bronze Age and CÆsar’s invasion of Gaul and Britain. Was it one of the many forms of nature worship which found the central object of its adoration in the glorious orb who in the words of the Psalmist “cometh forth as a bridegroom out of his chamber and rejoiceth as a giant to run his course”? Did the worship of the sun form its most prominent distinguishing feature?

The much-quoted passage given by Diodorus the Sicilian, who lived in the first century before the Christian era and who reproduced it from the Description of the World written by HecatÆus in the fifth century, states that in the island of the Hyperboreans over against Celtica there is a magnificent circular temple which they have erected to Apollo.^[17] The passage presents more than one difficulty. The Hyperboreans were known to the ancient world as the possessors of the sources of amber, a substance which is not found in Britain but in the neighbourhood of the Baltic. Those who would identify the Hyperborean island with Britain and the temple with Stonehenge, have to face the greater difficulty of accounting for the fact that a sepulchral structure erected in pre-Celtic times was, in the fifth century before Christ, being used for sun worship by Hyperboreans who may or may not have been Celts, but who in the passage are described as having erected it for that purpose. It should be remembered that HecatÆus had been dead for over a century when Pytheas the daring Greek explorer made his famous voyage of discovery, and that if that voyage was, as M. DÉchelette contends,^[18] to the navigator of the fourth century before the Christian era what a polar expedition is to the navigator of to-day, it is hardly likely that HecatÆus could have had very reliable information concerning either Britain or its Celtic inhabitants.

It may, perhaps, be allowable to hazard an opinion which after all is only an opinion, viz. that the Ligurians who dwelt along the transcontinental amber route were sun worshippers, but that until the days of Julius CÆsar we know very little, if indeed anything for certain, of the religion of the Celts who inhabited western Gaul and Britain. Whether Stonehenge was the temple referred to is very doubtful; whether it was orientated with respect to the sun is a matter which, as Professor Oman justly observes, need not be taken seriously.^[19]

But what of the Phoenicians, and where do they come in? It is a cruel thing to say to a generation which can ill afford to part with any fragment of its diminished archÆological patrimony, but it must be said without reserve or qualification: the Phoenicians do not come in at all.

It would be comparatively easy, as some have already found, to provide Celtic Britain with all the elaborate machinery of sun worship if it could be shown that there were direct and close relations between Britain and Phoenicia either before or after the Celtic invasion. No one, of course, doubts or denies the glory of the Phoenician thalassocracy. The Bible is only one of many witnesses. Hiram King of Tyre supplied Solomon both with craftsmen for the brass work of the Temple at Jerusalem and with sailors for his trading expeditions to India. Gades (Cadiz) the port of Tartessus, or Tarshish, was founded by the Phoenicians before 1100 B.C. The ships of Tarshish are rooted in the memory like the bulls of Bashan and the cedars of Libanus. Ezekiel’s lamentation for Tyre^[20] is not only one of the most profoundly pathetic but also one of the most illuminating passages in the Old Testament.

Speaking of Tyre, he says, “Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kind of riches, with silver, iron, tin, and lead they traded in thy fairs:” “the ships of Tarshish did sing of thee in thy market: and thou wast replenished and made very glorious in the midst of the seas.”

Nevertheless, great, extensive and varied as was the commercial enterprise of the Phoenicians, scholars are now generally agreed that they never got beyond Gades in their Atlantic voyages.

Moreover, the Cassiterides or Tin Islands, mentioned by Diodorus, which a former generation strove to identify with the Scilly Isles, lay undoubtedly to the north of Spain.^[21] At the same time it must be noted that the same author Diodorus, who probably had his information from Poseidonius (born circa 135 B.C.), does expressly state in the same passage that tin was conveyed from Britain to Gaul and overland to Marseilles. By that time, however, the doom of Carthage, the daughter city of Tyre, situated on the Bay of Tunis, had also been sealed.

This absence of historical evidence respecting Phoenician intercourse with Britain, supposing such intercourse to have existed, might have been in some measure explained—and not as the Privy Council explained the Ornaments Rubric of the Church of England, by arguing that omission implies prohibition—by assuming that the source of the tin supply was kept secret, like that of amber, by the traders in that commodity. It is the fact that no vestige of these Semitic navigators has been found either in Gaul or in Britain, which decisively excludes the supposition that they ever visited those countries. Dr. Birch in giving his judgment upon the bronze bull found in the garden of St. Just Vicarage states it as his conviction that no object has yet been found in Britain which can be satisfactorily identified with the Phoenicians,^[22] and M. DÉchelette is equally emphatic respecting the absence of similar objects in Gaul.^[23] What M. Alexandre Bertrand says of Celtic civilisation, namely, that neither the Ligurians, nor the Phoenicians, nor the Greeks, nor the Iberians collaborated in that educational work, may with some reservations in favour of the two latter nations be accepted as true of the Celtic religion.

From Julius CÆsar some useful information is to be gained respecting the religion of the Celts of his own day. He states that they had many gods, the chief of whom, in Gaul at least, answered to the Roman Mercury, patron of arts and crafts. Mars, Apollo, Minerva and Dis Pater were represented in the Celtic system, but it is not easy to equate them satisfactorily. After the Roman conquest the Britons followed the custom of other subject races and identified their gods with those of Olympus. Some of their gods found no corresponding analogue, like Nodens, whose temple overlooked the Severn; others again were purely local and patronal.

During the three centuries while Britain remained a province of the Empire the Romanisation of the native religion had free scope, the spread of Christianity meanwhile striving with indifferent success to keep pace with it. “The larger half of the altars and shrines, discovered in Britain are simply set up to honour the ordinary gods of the Roman world.”^[24] Among these latter were many strange divinities, who in origin were neither Celtic nor Roman, but were those of alien races led to Britain by the hope of profitable traffic or by compulsory military service.

Mithras, for example, whose worship was introduced at Rome under the Emperors, found in this way a place in the British pantheon.

There is no evidence to show that either nature worship or sun worship was the dominant religion of the Celts either before, during or after the Roman occupation. It is, of course, possible to say of the Romans that they practised both, but it is an abuse of language to say that they were either sun worshippers like the Egyptians or nature worshippers like the Phoenicians. The same holds good of the Celts.

Under Roman influence the days of the week received Latin names derived from the planetary system, all of which except Sunday (Dies Solis which became Dies Dominica) continued to be used by our lawyers until English took the place of Latin in the courts of record. In Cornwall, notwithstanding the Saxon invasion, the Latin names were retained until Cornish ceased to be a spoken and written language. Thus Sunday, Dies Solis became DÊ Zil, Zil being the Cornish derivative of Sol and not a variant of the Cornish word Houl.^[25] Until the Roman occupation the Celts reckoned time by nights, not days. Thus the first night (of the week if they had weeks) was the sixth night after new moon, that is when the moon was on the point of becoming half-full. Their year, therefore, consisted of thirteen months. The Celtic mind appears to have revelled in the realm of mystery. The practice of magic; the prevalence of human sacrifice; the numerous local divinities, with strange names preserved to us only in the dedications of their shrines, whose attributes and powers remain unknown; the hidden virtues of the mistletoe and the selago; above all, the secrets of the Celtic priesthood—the Druids—suggest, but unfortunately only suggest, a religious differentiation which carries us back to a period more remote than that of any religious system with which we are familiar.

Professor Sir John Rhys has attempted to show that Druidism was a pre-Celtic survival, the religious system, in short, of some race which preceded the Celts in Britain, and his judgment would doubtless have been accepted had there not been good evidence to show that the system was not peculiar to Britain but to the Celts themselves. It prevailed among the continental Celts just as it prevailed among those of Britain and Ireland. On the other hand, its affinities with classical mythology are not sufficiently pronounced at the time when it is first encountered to indicate an Ægean origin. When the original home of the Celt has been determined it may be possible to discover the home of his religion.

The Druids^[26] were the interpreters of divine things to the Celtic conscience. They shared with the knights the administration of public affairs, expounded the ceremonial law and determined the times and modes of its application. CÆsar states, but not on good authority, that Druidism originated in Britain, and Tacitus, who lived towards the end of the first century of the Christian era, that Anglesey was its religious centre. An impressive picture is given of the scene (A.D. 60) which was presented to the army of Suetonius Paulinus preparing to attack that venerable sanctuary. “Along the shore was seen a dense line of armed warriors, while women were rushing about between the ranks garbed like the Furies, in black gowns, their hair flowing loose, and torches in their hands. The Druids were visible in the rear offering sacrifices to their gods, raising their hands to heaven, and calling down dire imprecations upon the head of the invader.”^[27]

Of Druidical worship in Cornwall there is no direct evidence.^[28] The kinship and intercourse and close relations, however, which subsisted between Cornwall, Wales and Ireland leave no room for doubt that Druidism was its religious system. It should be needless to observe that its megalithic remains, dolmens, circles, and the like, which were erected many centuries before the Celts appeared in Britain, had originally no connection with Druidism and that there is no evidence to show that they ever became identified with it.

Without stopping to compare Irish and Gaulish Druidism with that of Britain there is one point which claims attention and which, whether Druidical or essentially primitive and sporadic, bears witness to the existence of a cult which, occurring in Ireland, could not have been introduced by the Romans.

From the life of St. Patrick we learn that in Ireland idols of stone, sometimes adorned with gold, silver, or copper, and in particular one stone, that of Ceen Cruaich or Cronn Cruach, were worshipped by all the people of the land.^[29] Practices similar though not necessarily identical—in other words idol worship—characterised the Cornish paganism of the sixth century. Henoc the biographer of St. Sampson relates an incident of such absorbing interest that a translation of the Latin,^[30] however imperfect, will be welcomed. It was during the saint’s sojourn at Docco (St. Kew) that we read, “Now it came to pass, on a certain day as he journeyed through a certain district which they call Tricurius (the hundred of Trigg) he heard on his left hand (in sinistra parte de eo) to be exact, men worshipping (at) a certain shrine after the custom of the Bacchantes by means of a play in honour of an image. Thereupon he beckoned to his brothers that they should stand still and be silent while he himself, quietly descending from his chariot to the ground and standing upon his feet and observing those who worshipped the idol, saw in front of them, resting on the summit of a certain hill an abominable image. On this hill I myself have been and have adored and with my hand have traced the sign of the cross which Saint Sampson, with his own hand, carved by means of an iron instrument on a standing stone. When Saint Sampson saw it (the image), selecting two only of the brothers to be with him, he hastened quickly towards them, their chief Guedianus standing at their head, and gently admonished them that they ought not to forsake the one God who created all things and worship an idol. And when they pleaded as excuse that it was not wrong to keep the festival of their progenitors in a play, some being furious, some mocking but some of saner mind strongly urging him to go away, straightway the power of God was made clearly manifest. For a certain boy driving horses at full speed fell from a swift horse to the ground and twisting his head under him as he fell headlong, remained, just as he was flung, little else than a lifeless corpse.

“Then St. Sampson, speaking to the tribesmen as they wept around the body, said, ‘You see that your image is not able to give aid to the dead man. But if you will promise that you will utterly destroy this idol and no longer adore it I, with God’s assistance, will bring the dead man to life.’ And they consenting, he commanded them to withdraw a little further off and after praying earnestly over the lifeless man for two hours he delivered him, who had been dead, alive and sound before them all.

“Seeing this they all with one accord, along with the aforementioned chief, prostrated themselves at St. Sampson’s feet and utterly destroyed the idol.”

It will have been noticed that the writer does not state whether the idol was of stone or of wood; nor is it quite clear whether it was itself the object of worship or the representation or symbol of a god. Probably it was the latter.

Whatever its nature and character the saint decided upon its destruction and marked the sign of the cross not upon it but upon a stone standing in its vicinity. It does not seem likely that the word abominable (simulacrum abominabile) would have been employed to describe a wheel-headed stone. The idol was probably a fetich pure and simple or possibly a symbol of nature worship.

Whatever may have been the purposes for which menhirs were erected during the neolithic period and whatever adoration may have been paid them by succeeding races—we have no evidence that such adoration was paid—it appears certain that they had nothing to do with sun worship. The Minoan symbolism, as such, which included the cross or rather the wheel with four spokes (in this connection a better and more accurate description because it explains the most beautiful form which it assumed as the swastika), is entirely absent from the prehistoric monuments of Western Europe.^[31] The stone crosses of Cornwall are not of an earlier date than the sixth or seventh century of our era, and by that time not only was the county actively Christian but the Minoan symbolism was dead, buried and forgotten.

Stones may be, and in many ages and in many lands have been, venerated for their supposed powers and virtues. Such stones, especially in Brittany, have received Christianisation, that is, have been marked with or surmounted by a cross within comparatively modern times. There is no reason why some such course may not have suggested itself to the Cornish Christians of the seventh and succeeding centuries. But the golden age of Celtic Christianity was during the latter half of the seventh and first half of the eighth century, and at that time Cornwall was in constant communication with Ireland, the centre of Christian learning.^[32]

About 270 stone crosses are to be found in Cornwall. They are mostly of granite and have been fashioned by means of iron implements, in some instances with considerable taste and skill.

They are too well known to require description. To suppose them to have been erected by sun worshippers in the sixth and succeeding centuries is to suppose the prevalence of a religion in Cornwall which at that time prevailed nowhere else in Europe and concerning which history is silent. On the other hand, to suppose them to have been originally connected with nature worship of a peculiarly revolting character and to have been Christianised by signing them with the sign of the cross is highly improbable if, as the maintainers of this hypothesis assert, that sign was regarded as pagan.

A much simpler and more convincing explanation is that the stone crosses were erected in order to disaffect and sanctify places which from time immemorial had been devoted to old pagan superstitions.^[33] This at any rate has the merit of being in accordance with the facts disclosed by the Sampson episode. Moreover, it avoids the anachronism which connects them with sun worship, while at the same time it disallows the charge of incredible folly which must otherwise be imputed to the founders of Cornish Christianity if we suppose those earnest men to have retained a degrading symbol of nature worship with little or no modification of its structural features.