Note 22 — Chapter XI · Folklore Philosophy

Now, suppose that in a society permeated by the crude kind of notions of which one finds traces in the Mabinogion and other old Welsh literature, a man arose who had a turn for philosophizing and trying to think things out: how would he reason? It seems probable that he would argue, that underneath all the change there must be some substratum which is permanent. If Tuan, he would say, changed from one form to another and remembered all that he had gone through, there must have been something which lasted, otherwise Tuan would have come to an end early in the story, and the later individual would not be Tuan at all. Probably one thing which, according to our folklore philosopher’s way of thinking, lasted through the transformations, was the material of Tuan’s body, just as one is induced to suppose that Ỻew’s body, and that of the eagle into which he was transformed, were considered to be one and the same body labouring under the mortifying influence of the wound inflicted on Ỻew by Gronw’s enchanted spear. Further, we have already found reasons to regard the existence of the soul as forming a part of the creed of some at any rate of the early inhabitants of this country, though we have no means of gathering what precise attributes our philosopher might ascribe to it besides the single one, perhaps, of continuing to exist. In that case he might otherwise describe Tuan’s shape-shifting as the entrance of Tuan’s soul into a series of different bodies. Now the philosopher here sketched agrees pretty closely with the little that is known of the Gaulish druid, such as he is described by ancient authors22. The latter seem to have been agreed in regarding him as believing in the immortality of the soul, and several of them appear to have thought his views similar to those of Pythagoras and his school. So we may perhaps venture to suppose that the druids, like Pythagoras, believed in the transmigration of souls, including that from the human to an animal form and the reverse. If, in the absence of an explicit statement, one may ascribe this latter form of that belief to the druids, the identity of their creed becomes almost complete with that of our conjectured folklore philosopher. At one time I was inclined to fancy that the druids of Gaul had received no unimportant part of their teaching from Greek philosophy by way of Massilia, but I am now more disposed to believe their doctrines to have been gradually developed, in the way above suggested, from the unfailing resources of that folklore which revelled in scenes of shape-shifting and rebirth. Possibly the doctrines of Pythagoras may have themselves had a like origin and a somewhat parallel development, or let us say rather that the Orphic notions had, which preceded Pythagoreanism.