ABSTRACT

In early thought everything was a person, in the loose meaning then possessed by personality, and many such “persons” were worshipped—earth, sun, moon, sea, wind, etc. This led later to more complete personification, and the sun or earth divinity or spirit was more or less separated from the sun or earth themselves. Some Celtic divinities were thus evolved, but there still continued a veneration of the objects of nature in themselves, as well as a cult of nature spirits or secondary divinities who peopled every part of nature. “Nor will I call out upon the mountains, fountains, or hills, or upon the rivers, which are now subservient to the use of man, but once were an abomination and destruction to them, and to which the blind people paid divine honours,” cries Gildas. 1 This was the true cult of the folk, the “blind people,’ even when the greater gods were organised, and it has survived with modifications in out-of-the-way places, in spite of the coming of Christianity.