clear line of distinction was drawn between satisfied
and beneficent ghosts like the Manes, and the unsatisfied and hostile
ghosts like the Lemures and Larvae. To the Celtic mind, when its
analytical powers had come to birth, and man was sufficiently
self-conscious to reflect upon himself, the problem of his own nature
pressed for some solution. In these solutions the breath, the blood, the
name, the head, and even the hair generally played a part, but these
would not in themselves explain the mysterious phenomena of sleep, of
dreams, of epilepsy, of madness, of disease, of man's shadow and his
reflection, and of man's death. By long familiarity with the scientific
or quasi-scientific explanations of these things, we find it difficult to
realise fully their constant fascination for early man, who had his
thinkers and philosophies like ourselves. One very widely accepted
solution of early man in the Celtic world was, that within him there was
another self which could live a life of its own apart from the body, and
which survived even death, burial, and burning. Sometimes this inner
self was associated with the breath, whence, for example, the Latin
'anima' and the Welsh 'enaid,' both meaning the soul, from the root _an_-,
to breathe. At other times the term employed for the second self had
reference to man's shadow: the Greek 'skia,' the Latin 'umbra,' the Welsh
'ysgawd,' the English 'shade.' There are abundant evidences, too, that
the life-principle was frequently regarded as being especially associated
with the blood. Another tendency, of which Principal Rhys has given
numerous examples in his Welsh folk-lore, was to regard the soul as
capable of taking a visible form, not necessarily human, preferably that
of some winged creature. In ancient writers there is no information as
to the views prevalent among the Celts regarding the forms or the abodes
of the spirits of the dead, beyond the statement that the Druids taught
the doctrine of their re-birth. We are thus compelled to look to the
evidence afforded by myth, legend, and folk-lore. These give fair
indications as to the types of earlier popular belief in these matters,
but it would be a mistake to assume that the ideas embodied in them had
remained entirely unchanged from remote times. The mind of man at
certain levels is quite capable of evolving new myths and fresh folk-lore
along the lines of its own psychology and its own logic. The forms which
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