The same great gods were, no doubt, adored by all the Celts, not only of Great Britain and Ireland, but of Continental Gaul as well. Sometimes they can be traced by name right across the ancient Celtic world. In other cases, what is obviously the same personified power of nature is found in various places with the same attributes, but with a different title. Besides these, there must have been a multitude of lesser gods, worshipped by certain tribes alone, to whom they stood as ancestors and guardians. “I swear by the gods of my people”, was the ordinary oath of a hero in the ancient Gaelic sagas. The aboriginal tribes must also have had their gods, whether it be true or not that their religion influenced the Celtic Druidism. Professor Rhys inclines to see in the _genii locorum_, the almost nameless spirits of well and river, mountain and wood—shadowy remnants of whose cults survive to-day,—members of a swarming Pantheon of the older Iberians.[54] These local beings would in no way conflict with the great Celtic nature-gods, and the two worships could exist side by side, both even claiming the same votary. It needs the stern faith of monotheism to deny the existence of the gods of others. Polytheistic nations have seldom or never risen to such a height. In their dealings with a conquered people, the conquerors naturally held their own gods to be the stronger. Still, it could not be denied that the gods of the conquered were upon their own ground; they knew, so to speak, the country, and might have unguessed powers of doing evil! What if, to avenge their worshippers and themselves, they were to make the land barren and useless to the conquerors? So that conquering pagan nations have usually been quite ready to stretch out the hand of welcome to the deities of their new subjects, to propitiate them by sacrifice, and even to admit them within the pale of their own Pantheon. This raises the question of the exact nationality of the gods whose stories we are about to tell. Were they all Aryan, or did any of the greater aboriginal deities climb up to take their place among the Gaelic tribe of the goddess Danu, or the British children of the goddess Dôn? Some of the Celtic gods have seemed to scholars to bear signs of a non-Aryan origin.[55] The point, however, is at present very obscure. Neither does it much concern us. Just as the diverse deities of the Greeks—some Aryan and Hellenic, some pre-Aryan and Pelasgian, some imported and Semitic—were all gathered into one great divine family, so we may consider as members of one national Olympus all these gods whose legends make up “The Mythology of the British Islands”. ----- Footnote 31: See Schrader: _Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples_, pp. 138, 272. Footnote 32: A description of the Druidical cult of the mistletoe is given by Pliny: _Natural History_, XVI, chap. XCV. Footnote 33: See Frazer: _The Golden Bough_, chap. IV. Footnote 34: