elves sceptical of a future life or believing
in a traditional gloomy Hades, they were bound to be struck with the
vigour of the Celtic doctrine and its effects upon conduct. The only
thing like it of which they knew was the Pythagorean doctrine. Looked at
in this light, Caesar's words need not convey the idea of transmigration,
and it is possible that he mistranslated some Greek original. Had these
writers meant that the Druids taught transmigration, they could hardly
have added the passages regarding debts being paid in the other world,
or letters conveyed there by the dead, or human sacrifices to benefit
the dead there. These also preclude the idea of a mere immortality of
the soul. The dead Celt continued to be the person he had been, and it
may have been that not a new body, but the old body glorified, was
tenanted by his soul beyond the grave. This bodily immortality in a
region where life went on as on this earth, but under happier
conditions, would then be like the Vedic teaching that the soul, after
the burning of the body, went to the heaven of Yama, and there received
its body complete and glorified. The two conceptions, Hindu and Celtic,
may have sprung from early "Aryan" belief.

This Celtic doctrine appears more clearly from what Lucan says of the
Druidic teaching. "From you we learn that the bourne of man's existence
is not the silent halls of Erebus, in another world (or region, _in orbe
alio_) the spirit animates the members. Death, if your lore be true, is
but the centre of a long life." For this reason, he adds, the Celtic
warrior had no fear of death.[1158] Thus Lucan conceived the Druidic
doctrine to be one of bodily immortality in another region. That region
was not a gloomy state; rather it resembled the Egyptian Aalu with its
rich and varied existence. Classical writers, of course, may have known
of what appears to have been a sporadic Celtic idea, derived from old
beliefs, that the soul might take the form of an animal, but this was
not the Druidic teaching. Again, if the Gauls, like the Irish, had myths
telling of the rebirth of gods or semi-divine beings, these may have
been misinterpreted by those writers and regarded as eschatological. But
such myths do not concern mortals. Other writers, Timagenes, Strabo, and
Mela,[1159] speak only of the immortality of the soul, but their
testimony is probably not at variance with that of Lucan, since Mela
appears to copy Caesar, and speaks of accounts and