may seem
a mass of error, and so they are when judged unhistorically, but when
viewed critically, and at the same time historically, they afford many
glimpses of prehistoric genius in a world where life was of necessity a
great experiment. The folk-lore of the world reveals for the same stages
of civilisation a wonderful uniformity and homogeneity, as Dr. J. G.
Frazer has abundantly shown in his _Golden Bough_. This uniformity is
not, however, due to necessary uniformity of origin, but to a great
extent to the fact that it represents the state of equilibrium arrived at
between minds at a certain level and their environment, along lines of
thought directed by the momentum given by the traditions of millennia,
and the survival in history of the men who carefully regarded them. The
apparently unreasoned prohibitions often known as 'taboos,' many of which
still persist even in modern civilised life, have their roots in ideas
and experiences which no speculation of ours can now completely fathom,
however much we may guess at their origin. Many of these ancient
prohibitions have vanished under new conditions, others have often
survived from a real or supposed harmony with new experiences, that have
arisen in the course of man's history. After passing through a stage
when he was too preoccupied with his material cares and wants to consider
whether he was haunted or not, early man in the Celtic world as
elsewhere, after long epochs of vague unrest, came to realise that he was
somehow haunted in the daytime as well as at night, and it was this sense
of being haunted that impelled his intellect and his imagination to seek
some explanation of his feelings. Primitive man came to seek a solution
not of the Universe as a whole (for of this he had no conception), but of
the local Universe, in which he played a part. In dealing with Celtic
folk-lore, it is very remarkable how it mirrors the characteristic local
colouring and scenery of the districts in which it has originated. In a
country like Wales, for example, it is the folk-lore of springs, caves,
mountains, lakes, islands, and the forms of its imagination, here as
elsewhere, reflect unmistakably the land of its origin. Where it depicts
an 'other world,' that 'other world' is either on an island or it is a
land beneath the sea, a lake, or a river, or it is approachable only
through some cave or opening in the earth. In the hunting-grounds of the
Celtic world the primitive