Note 19 — Chapter XI · Folklore Philosophy

One seems to come upon traces of the same classification of a community into professionals and non-professionals, for that is what it comes to, in an obscure Welsh term, Teulu Oeth ac Anoeth, which may be conjectured to have meant ‘the Household of Oeth and Anoeth’ in the sense of Power and Not-power19. However that may be, the professional class of men who were treated as persons of power and gods seem to have attained to their position by virtue of the magic of which they claimed to be masters, and especially of their supposed faculty of shape-shifting at will. In other words, the druidic pantheism20 which Erigena was able to dress in the garb of a fairly respectable philosophy proves to have been, in point of genesis, but a few removes from a primitive kind of savage folklore.