ba--"when I was a deer ... a salmon ... a seal ... a roving wolf
... a man."[1223] Perhaps the complete story was that of a fabulous hero
in human form, who assumed different shapes, and was finally reborn. But
the transformation of an old man, or an old animal, into new youthful
and vigorous forms might be regarded as a kind of transmigration--an
extension of the transformation idea, but involving no metempsychosis,
no passing of the soul into another body by rebirth. Actual
transmigration or rebirth occurs only at the end of the series, and, as
in the case of Etain, Lug, etc., the pre-existent person is born of a
woman after being swallowed by her. Possibly the transformation belief
has reacted on the other, and obscured a belief in actual metempsychosis
as a result of the soul of an ancestor passing into a woman and being
reborn as her next child. Add to this that the soul is often thought of
as a tiny animal, and we see how a _point d'appui_ for the more
materialistic belief was afforded. The insect or worms of the rebirth
stories may have been once forms of the soul. It is easy also to see
how, a theory of conception by swallowing various objects being already
in existence, it might be thought possible that eating a salmon--a
transformed man--would cause his rebirth from the eater.

The Celts may have had no consistent belief on this subject, the general
idea of the future life being of a different kind. Or perhaps the
various beliefs in transformation, transmigration, rebirth, and
conception by unusual means, are too inextricably mingled to be
separated. The nucleus of the tales seems to be the possibility of
rebirth, and the belief that the soul was still clad in a bodily form
after death and was itself a material thing. But otherwise some of them
are not distinctively Celtic, and have been influenced by old _Maerchen_
formulae of successive changes adopted by or forced upon some person, who
is finally reborn. This formulae is already old in the fourteenth century
B.C. Egyptian story of the _Two Brothers_.

Such Celtic stories as these may have been known to classical authors,
and have influenced their statements regarding eschatology. Yet it can
hardly be said that the tales themselves bear witness to a general
transmigration doctrine current among the Celts, since the stories
concern divine or heroic personages. Still the belief may have had a
certain currency among them, based on primitive theories of soul lif