Irish Scholars:Irish and Indian the Same People

[Guest guest]

SOURCE:THE CELTS By Gerhard Herm

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 administred 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 differant forms of

marriage, from arranged marriages, marriage by purchase and love-

matches to kidnapping. In both cultures there was a strict

distinctiopn 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 administred 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 parralels between India and

Gaul, sooner or later we sense that the Druids were also political

leaders, just as the Brahmins clealry stood above generals and

warriors.

The Druids, Ceaser says, taught that "souls do not disappear but

wander from one body to another'.Lucan in his Pharsalia-a verse epic

about the Roamn 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 anscestors 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 adventorous 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, wqas among the few great Hellinic philosophers who believed in

the possibilty 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.