Irish Druids And Old Irish Religions

Immortality was adjudged to be a Druidic creed.

The Inverness Gaelic Society's Journal has this affirmation: "They looked for an immortality more substantial than the rewards of fame, in a heroic state in the far-off spirit land, to which the bards, it would appear, issued the passport --There lay the realms of mystery." Beyond that, however, was "the roofless house of lasting doom," to which illustrious spirits eventually passed. As a Skye tale implies, there was a happier region in the Beyond, from which there was no return. The ghosts, that appeared, came, as they are said by Spiritualists of our day still to come, from a sort of pleasant Purgatory, where they enjoyed awhile a free and easy condition of existence.

Ammianus Marcellinus recorded: "The Druids, who united in a Society, occupied themselves with profound and sublime questions, raised themselves above human affairs, and sustained the immortality of the soul." On the other hand, Archbishop Whately, and many more, maintained that there was no proof of immortality independent of revelation.

This idea of life had, however, a peculiar connection with pre-existence and transmigration. Thus, George Eliot refers to their finding "new bodies, animating them in a quaint and ghastly way with antique souls." So Wordsworth--

     "Our life's star
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
     And cometh from far."

The soul descended into the womb of nature to be re-born

p. 65