ans
were people of a comparatively high civilisation, who had discarded, if
they ever possessed, a savage "past." But old beliefs and customs still
survive through growing civilisation, and if the views of Professor
Sergi and others are correct, the Aryans were even less civilised than
the peoples whom they conquered.[1009] Shape-shifting, magic, human
sacrifice, priestly domination, were as much Aryan as non-Aryan, and if
the Celts had a comparatively pure religion, why did they so soon allow
it to be defiled by the puerile superstitions of the Druids?

M. Reinach, as we have seen, thinks that the Celts had no images,
because these were prohibited by their priests. This prohibition was
pre-Celtic in Gaul, since there are no Neolithic images, though there
are great megalithic structures, suggesting the existence of a great
religious aristocracy. This aristocracy imposed itself on the
Celts.[1010] We have seen that there is no reason for believing that the
Celts had no images, hence this argument is valueless. M. Reinach then
argues that the Celts accepted Druidism _en bloc_, as the Romans
accepted Oriental cults and the Greeks the native Pelasgic cults. But
neither Romans nor Greeks abandoned their own faith. Were the Celts a
people without priests and without religion? We know that they must have
accepted many local cults, but that they adopted the whole aboriginal
faith and its priests _en bloc_ is not credible. M. Reinach also holds
that when the Celts appear in history Druidism was in its decline; the
Celt, or at least the military caste among the Celts, was reasserting
itself. But the Druids do not appear as a declining body in the pages of
Caesar, and their power was still supreme, to judge by the hostility of
the Roman Government to them. If the military caste rebelled against
them, this does not prove that they were a foreign body. Such a strife
is seen wherever priest and soldier form separate castes, each desiring
to rule, as in Egypt.

Other writers argue that we do not find Druids existing in the Danube
region, in Cisalpine territory, nor in Transalpine Gaul, "outside the
limits of the region occupied by the Celtae."[1011] This could only have
weight if any of the classical writers had composed a formal treatise on
the Druids, showing exactly the regions where they existed. They merely
describe Druidism as a general Celtic institution, or as they knew it in
Gaul or Britain, and few of them have any personal