Astronomical Myths - Camille Flammarion

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by fable.

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      The numerous stone monuments that are to be found scattered over this country, and over the neighbouring parts of Normandy, have given rise to many controversies as to their origin and use. By some they have been supposed to be mere sepulchral monuments erected in late times since the Roman occupation of Great Britain. Such an idea has little to rest upon, and we prefer to regard them, as they have always been regarded, as relics of the Druidical worship of the Celtic or Gaulish races that preceded us in this part of Europe.

      If we were to believe the accounts of ordinary historians, we might believe that the Druids were nothing more than a kind of savage race, hidden, like the fallow-deer in the recesses of their woods. Thought to be sanguinary, brutal, superstitious, we have learned nothing of them beyond their human sacrifices, their worship of the oak, their raised stones; without inquiring whether these characteristics which scandalize our tastes, are not simply the legacy of a primitive era, to which, by the side of the tattered religions of the old Paganism, Druidism remained faithful. Nevertheless the Druids were not without merit in the order of thought.

      For the Celts, as for all primitive people, astronomy and religion were intimately associated. They considered that the soul was eternal, and the stars were worlds successively inhabited by the spiritual emigrants. They considered that the stars were as much the abodes of human life as our own earth, and this image of the future life constituted their power and their grandeur. They repelled entirely the idea of the destruction of life, and preferred to see in the phenomena of death, a voyage to a region already peopled by friends.

      Under what form did Druidical science represent the universe? Their scientific contemplation of the heavens was at the same time a religious contemplation. It is therefore impossible to separate in our history their astronomical and theological heavens.

      In their theological astronomy, or astronomical theology, the Druids considered the totality of all living beings as divided into three circles. The first of these circles, the circle of immensity, Ceugant, corresponding to incommunicable, infinite attributes, belonged to God alone; it was properly the absolute, and none, save the ineffable being, had a right there. The second circle, that of blessedness, Gwyn-fyd, united in it the beings that have arrived at the superior degrees of existence; this was heaven. The third, the circle of voyages, Abred, comprised all the noviciate; it was there, at the bottom of the abysses, in the great oceans, as Taliesin says, that the first breath of man commenced. The object proposed to men's perseverance and courage was to attain to what the bards called the point of liberty, very probably the point at which, being suitably fortified against the assaults of the lower passions, they were not exposed to be troubled, against their wills, in their celestial aspirations; and when they arrived at such a point—so worthy of the ambition of every soul that would be its own master—they quitted the circle of Abred and entered that of Gwyn-fyd; the hour of their recompense had come.

      Demetrius, cited by Plutarch, relates that the Druids believed that these souls of the elect were so intimately connected with our circle that they could not emerge from it without disturbing its equilibrium. This writer states, that being in the suite of the Emperor Claudius, in some part of the British isles, he heard suddenly a terrible hurricane, and the priests, who alone inhabited these sacred islands, immediately explained the phenomenon, by telling him that a vacuum had been produced on the earth, by the departure of an important soul. "The great men," he said, "while they live are like torches whose light is always beneficent and never harms any one, but when they are extinguished their death generally occasions, as you have just seen, winds, storm, and derangements of the atmosphere."

      The palingenetic system of the Druids is complete in itself, and takes the being at his origin, and conducts him to the ultimate heaven. At the moment of his creation, as Henry Martyn says in his Commentary, the being has no conscience of the gifts that are latent in him. He is created in the lowest stage of life, in Annwfn, the shadowy abyss at the base of Abred. There, surrounded by nature, submitted to necessity, he rises obscurely through the successive degrees of inorganic matter, and then through the organic. His conscience at last awakes. He is man. "Three things are primarily contemporaneous—man, liberty, and light." Before man there was nothing in creation but fatal obedience to physical laws; with man commences the great battle between liberty and necessity, good and evil. The good and the evil present themselves to man in equilibrium, "and he can at his pleasure attach himself to one or the other of them."

      It might appear at first sight that it was carrying things too far to attribute to the Druids the knowledge, not indeed of the true system of the world, but the general idea on which it was constructed. But, on closer examination, this opinion seems to have some consistency. If it was from the Druids that Pythagoras derived the basis of his theology, why should it not be from them that he derived also that of his astronomy? Why, if there is no difficulty in seeing that the principle of the subordination of the earth might arise from the meditations of an isolated spirit, should there be any more difficulty in thinking that the principles of astronomy should take birth in the midst of a corporation of theologians embued with the same ideas as the philosophers on the circulation of life, and applied with continued diligence to the study of celestial phenomena. The Druid, not having to receive mythological errors, might be led by that circumstance to imagine in space other worlds similar to our own.

      Independently of its intrinsic value, this supposition rests also upon the testimony of historians. A singular statement made by Hecatæus with regard to the religious rites of Great Britain exhibits this in a striking manner. This historian relates that the moon, seen in this island, appears much larger than it does anywhere else, and that it is possible to distinguish mountains on its surface, such as there are on the earth. Now, how had the Druids made an observation of this kind? It is of not much consequence whether they had actually seen the lunar mountains or had only imagined them, the curious thing is that they were persuaded that that body was like the earth, and had mountains and other features similar to our own. Plutarch, in his treatise De facie in orbe Lunæ, tells us that, according to the Druids, and conformably to an idea which had long been held in science, the surface of the moon is furrowed with several Mediterraneans, which the Grecian philosophers compare to the Red and Caspian seas. It was also thought that immense abysses were seen, which were supposed to be in communication with the hemisphere that is turned away from the earth. Lastly, the dimensions of this sky-borne country were estimated; (ideas very different to those that were current in Greece): its size and its breadth, says the traveller depicted by the writer, are not at all such as the geometers say, but much larger.

      It is through the same author, who is in accordance in this respect with all the bards, that we know that this celestial earth was considered by the theologians of the West as the residence of happy souls. They rose and approached it in proportion as their preparation had been complete, but, in the agitation of the whirlwind, many reached the moon that it would not receive. "The moon repelled a great number, and rejected them by its fluctuations, at the moment they reached it; but those that had better success fixed themselves there for good; their soul is like the flame, which, raising itself in the ether of the moon, as fire raises itself on that of the earth receives force and solidity in the same way that red-hot iron does when plunged into the water."

      They thus traced an analogy between the moon and the earth, which they doubtless carried out to its full development, and made the moon an image of what they knew here, picturing there the lunar fields and brooks and breezes and perfumes. What a charm such a belief must have given to the heavens at night. The moon was the place and visible pledge of immortality. On this account it was placed in high position in their religion; the order of all the festivals was arranged after that which was dedicated to it; its presence was sought in all their ceremonies, and its rays were invoked. The Druids are always therefore represented

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