Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/188

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The Idea of Hades in Celtic Literature.

usually gone into, but this does not appear to have been essential.[1]

We need not linger over these tales. All that is essential to us is to recognise that over them hangs no depressing rule of "Dark Divinities," no gloom of spirit-haunted shades, no thought of death or pain. They are painted with all the powers of brilliant word-painting of which the Irish Gael was such a master, as worlds of joy and of youth, of vital and unending life. They are, in fact, the Paradise of the Gods of Life. It is earth that is in them represented always as "the dark unquiet land," the place where "amid the assemblies of short-lived mortals" man is fated to await his death.

This is the essential distinction of the Pagan dreams. But when we pass to the visions influenced by Christian thought, we are conscious at once of a change of tone. Gradually the joyousness that has been the dominant note of Pagan belief is tuned down into a minor key, the old stories receive into themselves new features, counterbalancing what had hitherto been wholly bright and hopeful, by suggestions of gloom, of suffering, and of despair. At first these suggestions are fitted awkwardly into the old framework, they are rare, and, as it were, out of place; but gradually, as larger portions of the new belief find their way into the old romances, many of the older features become modified, and we finally emerge into an atmosphere wholly controlled by mediaeval beliefs introduced through Christian influence. The meeting-point of Pagan and Christian thought is always of deep interest; but I know of no place in custom or literature where there can be traced, step by step, the

  1. It is to be remarked that the most permanent characteristics of the unseen world are those which formed part of the ordinary surroundings of every Irish dwelling of any rank. The pot or cauldron, the apple-tree in which birds sing, the vat of mead or ale, the hearth or fire, the harp giving music, were essentials without which the earthly home would have been imperfect. The transference of these things into his Elysium was natural and inevitable.