countries, into her completest religious heritage, and this aspect of
Celtic religion will be dealt with more fully in connection with the
spirits of vegetation. This phase of religion in Celtic countries is one
which appears to underlie some of its most characteristic forms, and the
one which has survived longest in Celtic folk-lore. The Earth-mother
with her progeny of spirits, of springs, rivers, mountains, forests,
trees, and corn, appears to have supplied most of the grouped and
individualised gods of the Celtic pantheon. The Dis, of whom Caesar
speaks as the ancient god of the Gauls, was probably regarded as her son,
to whom the dead returned in death. Whether he is the Gaulish god
depicted with a hammer, or as a huge dog swallowing the dead, has not yet
been established with any degree of certainty.




CHAPTER IV--CELTIC RELIGION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIVIDUALISED DEITIES


Like other religions, those of the Celtic lands of Europe supplemented
the earlier animism by a belief in spirits, who belonged to trees,
animals, rocks, mountains, springs, rivers, and other natural phenomena,
and in folk-lore there still survives abundant evidence that the Celt
regarded spirits as taking upon themselves a variety of forms, animal and
human. It was this idea of spirits in animal form that helped to
preserve the memory of the older totemism into historic times. It is
thus that we have names of the type of Brannogenos (son of the raven),
Artogenos (son of the bear), and the like, not to speak of simpler names
like Bran (raven), March (horse), surviving into historic times. Bronze
images, too, have been found at Neuvy-en-Sullias, of a horse and a stag