Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/121

It has often been noticed that all these divinities, whether friendly or unfriendly to man, usually muster in threes; but they probably resembled the Genius Loci in being local and attached to particular spots, and it would therefore not be always easy to draw a clear line of demarcation between them and the other gods and goddesses associated with the salient features of a Celtic landscape. The number of these minor divinities was legion; and, without attempting to draw a hard and fast line between them and the greater divinities, who also lent themselves to localization, one may say that among the former must be included the spirits of particular forests, mountain tops, rocks, lakes, rivers, river sources, and all springs of water, which have in later times been treated as holywells, whether in France or the other lands inhabited by the Celts. It has been supposed, and not without reason, that these landscape divinities re-acted powerfully on the popular imagination in which they had their existence, by imparting to the physical surroundings of the Celt the charm of a weird and unformulated poetry. But what race was it that gave the Celtic landscape of antiquity its population of spirits? The Celtic invaders of Aryan stock brought their gods with them to the lands they conquered just as much as the ancestors of the English brought with them theirs to the Christian land of Roman Britain; and the former continued to be in the main the great figures of the Celtic pantheon until that rude edifice crumbled to dust under the attacks of Christianity; but as to the innumerable divinities attached, so to say, to the soil, the great majority of them were very possibly the creations of the peoples here before the Celts. In any case,