Bryan Mcmahon, historian, scholar of folklore, teacher, a well known poet and much else besides, likes to test his favorite theories in
practice and to retail them with all the skill and timing of a seasoned performer. He told me: Whenever I meet an Indian I take him to one side and hum the first lines of an Irish folk-song. Then I ask him to continue the melody as he likes; and, believe it or not, almost every time he will sing it to the end as if he already knew the song. Isn't that astonishing?
For me it is an indication that Indians and Irishmen have a common past; that, as I put it in one of my plays, "We Celts came from the Mysterious East."
The late Myles Dillon, formerly Prof of Celtic at U of Dublin cites a whole series of further astonishing parallels between the culture of the Aryan Indians and the Irish Druids. (Druid from Dru=Oak Wid or Ved=Wisdom) His main contention is that in both cases there was a distinct class of scholars; the Brahmins in India, the highest reps in the Varna system; while in Ireland there were the 'wise men of the oak'. Dillon reckons that the Brahmins and the Druids should be equated because they carried out their profession-teaching and study, poetry and law-in a similar way.
There is evidence that this is so.
The principles by which justice was administered were similar, indeed identical with those in India. There a father with daughters but no sons could order one of them to take a man of his choice and produce a legal heir. beyond the Hindu Kush mountains, such a girl was called putrika (she who takes the son's place) and in old Ireland ban-chomarba (female-heir). But who if not the Continental Celts can have told the Irish what was going on in the far east? Dillon further notes similarities: in both cultures there were 8 different forms of marriage, from arranged marriages, marriage by purchase and love- matches to kidnapping. In both cultures there was a strict distinction between inherited and earned property and when contracts were drawn up there was an exact statement as to who was to provide what guarantees before obtaining what he wanted. In one case it was the Brahmins and in the other the Druids who administered these principles.
All this, Dillon says, suggests that the Celtic Druids indeed represented the same tradition as the Hindu Brahmins.... If we continue
to feel our way along the parallels between India and Gaul, sooner or later we sense that the Druids were also political leaders, just as the Brahmins clearly stood above generals and warriors.
The Druids, Caesar says, taught that "souls do not disappear but wander from one body to another'. Lucan in his Pharsalia-a verse epic about the Roman civil war-addressed them with the words: 'If we understand you aright, death is only a pause in a long life. 'Maybe he was right; if so, did the belief come from the Indo-European source that produced the Brahmins and the Druids? Or is it chance that lands as far apart as India and France produced a belief in metempsychosis? Does the fact that according to Scythian custom, crests depicted Eagles, wolves, bears as ancestors reflect the conviction of these people that the spirit of the dead goes through many life-forms, human and animal, as the Hindus believe? If so, do the Russian steppe people form a bridge between the cultures of the Far East and the Far West?...
...Ancient Author Diodorus's own most adventurous suggestion-'they still hold Pythgoras's belief in the immortality of the soul and
rebirth.'...But since Pythagoras, with his strong influences from the east, was among the few great Hellinic philosophers who believed in the possibility of life after death, they could only conclude that his belief was related to the blond barbarians, (The Celts) or that they had taken theirs from him.
practice and to retail them with all the skill and timing of a seasoned performer. He told me: Whenever I meet an Indian I take him to one side and hum the first lines of an Irish folk-song. Then I ask him to continue the melody as he likes; and, believe it or not, almost every time he will sing it to the end as if he already knew the song. Isn't that astonishing?
For me it is an indication that Indians and Irishmen have a common past; that, as I put it in one of my plays, "We Celts came from the Mysterious East."
The late Myles Dillon, formerly Prof of Celtic at U of Dublin cites a whole series of further astonishing parallels between the culture of the Aryan Indians and the Irish Druids. (Druid from Dru=Oak Wid or Ved=Wisdom) His main contention is that in both cases there was a distinct class of scholars; the Brahmins in India, the highest reps in the Varna system; while in Ireland there were the 'wise men of the oak'. Dillon reckons that the Brahmins and the Druids should be equated because they carried out their profession-teaching and study, poetry and law-in a similar way.
There is evidence that this is so.
The principles by which justice was administered were similar, indeed identical with those in India. There a father with daughters but no sons could order one of them to take a man of his choice and produce a legal heir. beyond the Hindu Kush mountains, such a girl was called putrika (she who takes the son's place) and in old Ireland ban-chomarba (female-heir). But who if not the Continental Celts can have told the Irish what was going on in the far east? Dillon further notes similarities: in both cultures there were 8 different forms of marriage, from arranged marriages, marriage by purchase and love- matches to kidnapping. In both cultures there was a strict distinction between inherited and earned property and when contracts were drawn up there was an exact statement as to who was to provide what guarantees before obtaining what he wanted. In one case it was the Brahmins and in the other the Druids who administered these principles.
All this, Dillon says, suggests that the Celtic Druids indeed represented the same tradition as the Hindu Brahmins.... If we continue
to feel our way along the parallels between India and Gaul, sooner or later we sense that the Druids were also political leaders, just as the Brahmins clearly stood above generals and warriors.
The Druids, Caesar says, taught that "souls do not disappear but wander from one body to another'. Lucan in his Pharsalia-a verse epic about the Roman civil war-addressed them with the words: 'If we understand you aright, death is only a pause in a long life. 'Maybe he was right; if so, did the belief come from the Indo-European source that produced the Brahmins and the Druids? Or is it chance that lands as far apart as India and France produced a belief in metempsychosis? Does the fact that according to Scythian custom, crests depicted Eagles, wolves, bears as ancestors reflect the conviction of these people that the spirit of the dead goes through many life-forms, human and animal, as the Hindus believe? If so, do the Russian steppe people form a bridge between the cultures of the Far East and the Far West?...
...Ancient Author Diodorus's own most adventurous suggestion-'they still hold Pythgoras's belief in the immortality of the soul and
rebirth.'...But since Pythagoras, with his strong influences from the east, was among the few great Hellinic philosophers who believed in the possibility of life after death, they could only conclude that his belief was related to the blond barbarians, (The Celts) or that they had taken theirs from him.
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