make us believe that the souls of men are immortal.  I would be tempted to call these breeches-wearing folk fools, if their doctrine were not the same as that of the mantle-clad Pythagoras.”  He also speaks of money lent which would be repaid in the next world, because men’s souls are immortal.[1157] These passages are generally taken to mean that the Celts believed simply in transmigration of the Pythagorean type.  Possibly all these writers cite one common original, but Caesar makes no reference to Pythagoras.  A comparison with the Pythagorean doctrine shows that the Celtic belief differed materially from it.  According to the former, men’s souls entered new bodies, even those of animals, in this world, and as an expiation.  There is nothing of this in the Celtic doctrine.  The new body is not a prison-house of the soul in which it must expiate its former sins, and the soul receives it not in this world but in another.  The real point of connection was the insistence of both upon immortality, the Druids teaching that it was bodily immortality.  Their doctrine no more taught transmigration than does the Christian doctrine of the resurrection.  Roman writers, aware that Pythagoras taught immortality via a series of transmigrations, and that the Druids taught a doctrine of bodily immortality, may have thought that the receiving of a new body meant transmigration.  Themselves sceptical of a future life or believing in a traditional gloomy Hades, they were bound to be struck with the vigour of the Celtic doctrine and its effects upon conduct.  The only thing like it of which they knew was the Pythagorean doctrine.  Looked at in this light, Caesar’s words need not convey the idea of transmigration, and it is possible that he mistranslated some Greek original.  Had these writers meant that the Druids taught transmigration, they could hardly have added the passages regarding debts being paid in the other world, or letters conveyed there by the dead, or human sacrifices to benefit the dead there.  These also preclude the idea of a mere immortality of the soul.  The dead Celt continued to be the person he had been, and it may have been that not a new body, but the old body glorified, was tenanted by his soul beyond the grave.  This bodily immortality in a region where life went on as on this earth, but under happier conditions, would then be like the Vedic teaching that the soul, after the burning of the body, went to the heaven of Yama, and there received its body complete and glorified.  The two conceptions, Hindu and Celtic, may have sprung from early “Aryan” belief.

This Celtic doctrine appears more clearly from what Lucan says of the Druidic teaching.  “From you we learn that the bourne of man’s existence is not the silent halls of Erebus, in another world (or region, in orbe alio) the spirit animates the members.  Death, if your lore be true, is but the centre of a long life.”  For this reason, he adds, the Celtic warrior had no fear of