fabrics of those ages are much indebted for their graceful adornments and their grand proportions. It may be a ground for marvel if that Society, the close depositor of empty mysteries, do not enrol the Cyclopes among their anomalous members. The Cyclopes, whether thus honoured or not, had been expelled from Greece before the time of the Trojan war, and had taken refuge in Sicily, where, as it appears from Homer, they constituted a formidable society that worshipped their deity named Polyphemus in a cave with rites evidently Celtic. The Circe and Calypso of the fable of the Odyssey, may, like Polyphemus, be supposed to have been deities of the Celtic pantheon. The former is distinguished by the epithet of Titanis, and both are named with disapprobation by the poet, who is evidently a zealous votary of the pantheon of Jupiter.

In the following passage from the Hymn of Callimachus in honour of the isle of Delos, the Celts and Titans are actually identified:

In future time shall come one common toil,
Though distant: lifting against the Greeks a sword
Barbarous and Celtic, when from farthest west
The late-born Titans on the land shall rush
Frequent as flakes of snow, numerous as stars
When most they occupy the fields of heaven.s

The invasion thus noticed is well known in history. The Gauls or Celts under Brennus did for a time overwhelm Greece as well as Rome. By the historians of that city they are called Gauls; the name of the country whence they came. By the Greeks they are called Galatæ, a word which being pronounced short becomes Celt. Nations are not uncommonly designated by the name of their god: for this reason, the Celts, worshippers of the Titans, were named Titans by the poet. It is more than probable that their

s Callimach. Hymn. in Delum, v. 171.

invasion of Greece may be in part attributed to the remembrance of former wrongs.

To this evidence, gathered from a Grecian source, the following, found in the archæological stores of Celtic Wales, may be added. The poems called Triads state that Hu Gadarn, a god of the highest rank in the Celtic pantheon, first brought the race of the Cymry into the island of Britain; that they came from the land of Hav, called Defrobani, and passed over Môr Tawch to the island of Britain.t The Welch commentators state in explanation, that Môr-Tawch is the German ocean, and that Defrobani is the country in the vicinity of Constantinople. It appears from this testimony that the Celtic ancestors of the modern Welch did migrate from the east, for the sea and the country are ascertained by ancient tradition.

It

These records speak in perfect accordance with the history of postdiluvian migration, and especially with the expulsion of the Celtic sect from India after the Bamun avatara. has been found too, that a nation of Celtic worship was settled at Troy. When that city and state was destroyed, the fugitives from the country sought their kindred tribes in Italy; and it has been said, with every appearance of probability, that some of them, under the guidance of a leader named Brute, found a home on the shores of Britain. Such is the testimony of the Triads and other authorities of Welch archæology. The credibility of those documents has been fully vindicated by the able author of the History of the Anglo-Saxons, who proves that the claims to remote antiquity asserted by the Welch records are such as nothing but unreasonable scepticism can refuse to allow.

The evidences adduced as above shew most clearly that the Titans, the fabled adversaries of the Grecian Jupiter, were a race of Celts, and that they were worshipped with such as are called Druidic rites, performed before idol

t Celtic Res. p. 154.

stones and in cave temples; and that such was at a certain period the religion prevalent in ancient Greece. This fact will illustrate the history of the progress of sacred structures, and help to trace the connexion between the patriarchal altar and the Christian church. The establishment of the religious worship of Jupiter led to the use of images, led also to the structure of the Grecian temple, which was an important step in the progress of sacred structures, accompanied by circumstances of much interest as to the present subject. How these changes were effected, the following authorities may serve to shew.

The Ascrean mystagogue in his Theogony recites the following fable, containing a figurative account of the birth, that is, of the first rise of the worship of Jupiter. This personage is called the Father of gods and men; that is, he was the God, the creator of the universe, claiming paternal reverence due to him from man by him created, and superiority above all the gods of the heathen pantheons, who are none other than personifications of the divine powers and agencies.

When near the birth of Jove, the mighty sire
Of gods and men, Rhea her parents sought,
Earth old, and Heaven studded thick with stars,
For counsel how in hiding she might bear
Her dearest son, and 'scape the father's fury,
Fierce toward his sons, whom he in craft devoured.
Their daughter dear with willing ears they heard,
And what the Fates decreed to her revealed,
Concerning Saturn and his bolder son.

To Lyctus her they sent and Cretans rich,
When now her last of sons came near to birth-
The mighty Jove. Him Earth Pelorian
Herself received to nurse and educate.

The Mother came, bearing through blackest night
Her charge to Lyctus. There her son she hid

In cave helibatal, holy retreat,

In mount Argæus massy clad in woods.u

u Hesiod. Theog. v. 468.

The birth of a god signified, in the language of fable, the commencement of the worship of the god said to be born. Thus Latona, after much persecution, gave birth to Diana and Apollo beneath the shade of a palm tree. From the fable cited as above, we learn, that the worship of the Grecian Jupiter was first practised in a cave in Crete, where his votaries escaped, in the privacy of the place, the persecution of the sect of Saturn. When they had become more numerous and powerful, they suppressed the worship of Saturn, and overthrew the powerful sect of Titans, and Jupiter became the sire of gods and men, the sovereign of a new pantheon, under which the worship in caves declined, and may be said in the time of Homer to have become extinct. But before it had become extinct, it had led to such changes, and occasioned such progress in the forms of sacred structures, as ultimately produced the several rooms or apartments which now constitute our chapels, churches, and cathedrals.

It might seem that the difference between a structure raised upon the surface of the earth, and a cavity beneath the surface, must be such as to constitute an irreconcileable difference in the character of each; but, in fact, the principles on which the sanctity of both were supposed to depend, were the same. The divine spirit was presumed to be really present both in temples and sacred places situate on the surface of the earth; the divine presence was believed to be obtained by rites of consecration; caves beneath the surface hardly seemed to have required consecration, because the divine spirit was supposed to permeate the whole mass of the earth, and consequently that caves were necessarily within the actual compass of the spirit. That caves were thus sacred, being, like the altar or barrow, symbols of the world, and therefore, properly temples, will be seen from the evidence afforded by the thirteenth Odyssey of Homer.

When the hero of that poem arrived, after an absence of twenty years, at his native Ithaca, he is said to have landed in a

harbour sacred to the marine god Phorcys, of which, among
other particulars, the poet gives the following description:
Far, at the harbour's utmost bound, there grows

An olive spreading broad. Near is a cave
Of pleasant gloom, all sacred to the nymphs
Well known to mortals by the name of Naiads.
Therein stand cups, and amphora of stone,
And swarms of bees there fly with ceaseless hum:
There, too, are webs of stone; for there the nymphs
Weave, wondrous sight! garments of purple bright.
Throughout flow ceaseless streams. Two doors there are:
That on the north admittance gives to man;

The southern heavenly is: for by it, way

Is not allowed, save to immortal souls.*

In another Odyssey, the poet describes the goddess Circe scated in her cave shaded by a thick grove of trees, and employed in the office of weaving with a golden shuttle, also chanting with sweet melody. Calypso, another divinity, is described weaving in like manner, and singing in tones of sweetest harmony.

The symbolical import of these caves is so profound, that, like the rest of the figurative Odyssey, it would have remained utterly unintelligible to modern ages, had not the moral been shewn by the philosopher Porphyry. He, living in an age when mythological fables were understood by the initiated, and being anxious also to vindicate the cause of the ancient idolatry in opposition to the Gospel, then beginning to prevail, gives the following account of the import of this mysterious cave. His statements afford a clear illustration of the principles on which holiness was ascribed to caves.

First, he observes, that a cave had long been taken as a symbol of the material world, in which men are confined as in a prison, illumined, though imperfectly, by the sun, for caves admit light only at the entrance. The bees of the cave are, according to his exposition, souls or spirits about to be born in bodies given to them by the agency called weaving, Porphyr. De Antro Nymph.

x Odyss. N. v. 102.