'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
the soul could take doubtless varied greatly in men's opinions in
different districts and in different mental perspectives, but folk-lore
tends to confirm the view that early man, in the Celtic world as
elsewhere, tended to emphasise his conception of the subtlety and
mobility of the soul as contrasted with the body. Sooner or later the
primitive philosopher was bound to consider whither the soul went in
dreams or in death. He may not at first have thought of any other sphere
than that of his own normal life, but other questions, such as the home
of the spirits of vegetation in or under the earth, would suggest, even
if this thought had not occurred to him before, that the spirits of men,
too, had entrance to the world below. Whether this world was further
pictured in imagination depended largely on the poetic genius of any