not
have become the divinity of the dead until the multitude of single
graves or barrows, in each of which the dead lived, had become a wide
subterranean region of the dead. This divinity was the source of life
and growth; hence he or she was regarded as the progenitor of mankind,
who had come forth from the underworld and would return there at death.
It is not impossible that the Breton conception of Ankou, death
personified, is a reminiscence of the Celtic Dispater. He watches over
all things beyond the grave, and carries off the dead to his kingdom.
But if so he has been altered for the worse by mediaeval ideas of "Death
the skeleton".[1187] He is a grisly god of death, whereas the Celtic Dis
was a beneficent god of the dead who enjoyed a happy immortality. They
were not cold phantasms, but alive and endowed with corporeal form and
able to enjoy the things of a better existence, and clad in the
beautiful raiment and gaudy ornaments which were loved so much on earth.
Hence Celtic warriors did not fear death, and suicide was extremely
common, while Spanish Celts sang hymns in praise of death, and others
celebrated the birth of men with mourning, but their deaths with
joy.[1188] Lucan's words are thus the truest expression of Celtic
eschatology--"In another region the spirit animates the members; death,
if your lore be true, is but the passage to enduring life."

There is no decisive evidence pointing to any theory of moral
retribution beyond the grave among the pagan Celts. Perhaps, since the
hope of immortality made warriors face death without a tremor, it may
have been held, as many other races have believed, that cowards would
miss the bliss of the future state. Again, in some of the Irish
Christian visions of the other-world and in existing folk-belief,
certain characteristics of hell may not be derived from Christian
eschatology, e.g. the sufferings of the dead from cold.[1189] This might
point to an old belief in a cold region whither some of the dead were
banished. In the _Adventures of S. Columba's Clerics_, hell is reached
by a bridge over a glen of fire,[1190] and a narrow bridge leading to
the other world is a common feature in most mythologies. But here it may
be borrowed from Scandinavian sources, or from such Christian writings
as the _Dialogues_ of S. Gregory the Great.[1191] It might be contended
that the Christian doctrine of hell has absorbed an earlier pagan theory
of retribution, but of this there