this subject, but his researches into some portions of the field
especially have suggested to him the possibility of giving a new
presentation to certain facts and groups of facts, which the existing
evidence disclosed. It is to be hoped that a new interest in the
religion of the Celts may thereby be aroused.

E. ANWYL.

ABERYSTWYTH,
_February_ 15, 1906.




CHAPTER I--INTRODUCTORY: THE CELTS


In dealing with the subject of 'Celtic Religion' the first duty of the
writer is to explain the sense in which the term 'Celtic' will be used in
this work. It will be used in reference to those countries and districts
which, in historic times, have been at one time or other mainly of Celtic
speech. It does not follow that all the races which spoke a form of the
Celtic tongue, a tongue of the Indo-European family, were all of the same
stock. Indeed, ethnological and archaeological evidence tends to
establish clearly that, in Gaul and Britain, for example, man had lived
for ages before the introduction of any variety of Aryan or Indo-European
speech, and this was probably the case throughout the whole of Western
and Southern Europe. Further, in the light of comparative philology, it
has now become abundantly clear that the forms of Indo-European speech
which we call Celtic are most closely related to those of the Italic