who thereupon cursed her. In vain did she send after the mendicant to entreat her to remove the curse, and promised to reward her if she would; this was refused. "All the rest of the day I remained sitting on the stool speechless, thinking of the prayer which the woman had said, and wishing I had given her everything I had in the world, rather than she should have said it." Thenceforth all went ill with her, the family, the farm. She became as one possessed, and in chapel "I would shout and hoorah, and go tumbling and toppling along the floor before the Holy Body." Her sons took to drink, one was convicted and sent to prison, she lost everything and became a homeless pauper. 21

In Wales, till not so long ago the Holy Well of S. Elian was employed for invoking a curse on offenders. In Brittany, those who have been wronged appeal to S. Yves to this day to punish the wrongdoer.

We must not be too shocked at this cursing as practised by the Celtic saints. It was a legal right accorded to them, hedged about with certain restrictions. It was a means provided by law and custom to enable the weak, who could not redress their wrongs by force of arms, to protect themselves against the mighty, and to recover valuables taken from them by violence. A man who considered himself aggrieved, and could not forcibly recover the fine, went to a Druid in Pagan times, to a saint in Christian days, and asked him to "illwish" the wrong-doer, just as now he goes to a lawyer and solicits a

summons.

We will now pass to a feature in the lives of several of the Celtic saints that needs explanation. This is the practice of "fasting against" an offender. There was a legal process whereby a creditor might recover from the debtor, or the wronged might exact an eric or fine from the wrong-doer; and this was by levying a distress.

In Wales, as in Ireland, there was no executive. The law could be ascertained, and the amount of the fine decreed, but the creditor or aggrieved was left to his own devices to obtain the redress adjudicated. The court did nothing to enforce its judgments. Consequently, a man who could not enforce the penalty vi et armis was left to choose between two courses: either he might get a saint to curse the debtor or wrong-doer, or else he might take the matter into his own hands by "fasting against " the offender.

The process was this. He made formal demand for what was due to him. If this were refused, and he were unable otherwise to enforce

VOL. I.

21 Borrow, Wild Wales, Lond. 1901, pp. 691-702.

payment or restitution, he seated himself at the door of the debtor and abstained from food and drink.

In India the British Government has been compelled to interfere, and put down this process of dharna. The fact of the levy of a fast against a man at once doubled the eric or fine due for the offence. In India it was the etiquette for the debtor to fast also; but in Ireland the only means that one man had of meeting a fast against him without yielding was to fast also. The fast seemed to have extended to the whole family; for when S. Patrick fasted against King Laoghaire, the king's son ate some mutton, to the great scandal of his mother. "It is not proper for you to eat food," said the Queen. Do you not know that Patrick is fasting against us?" "It is not against me he is fasting," replied the boy, "but against my father." 22 Hardly ever did any chief or noble dare to allow the fasting to proceed to the last extremities, because of the serious blood feud it would entail, as also because of the loss of prestige in the clan that would be his.

S. Patrick boldly had recourse to the same method to obtain his demands from King Laoghaire. Again, he found that Trian, an Ulster chief, maltreated his serfs. Trian had set them to cut down timber with blunt axes, and without providing them with whetstones. The poor fellows had their palms raw and bleeding. Patrick remonstrated with their master, but when he would not listen, he brought him to a proper sense of humanity by fasting against him, 23

We find the same thing in Wales. S. Cadoc was offended with Maelgwn Gwynedd. Some of the king's men had carried off a very beautiful girl from his land, the daughter of the steward of the establishment. The men of Cadoc's ecclesiastical tribe went in pursuit, and in revenge massacred three hundred of Maelgwn's attendants. The king, "in raging and furious anger," marched against Cadoc's tribe to wreak vengeance. Cadoc could not resist by force of arms, so he and all his men instituted a fast against the king, who at once gave way, 24

An odd story is that of the men of Leinster, who sent a deputation to the great S. Columba to obtain of him the promise that they should never be defeated by any foreign king. Columba demurred to giving them this assurance, whereupon they undertook a fast against him, and he gave way. 25

S. Caimin of Iniskeltra, being engaged by the King of Ulster to

22 Tripartite Life, p. 557.

24 Cambro-British Saints, p. 94.

23 Ibid., p. 219.

25 Book of Leinster, quoted in Anecdota Oxon. The Book of Lismore, p. 308.

obtain the destruction of the army of the King of Connaught, fasted against Connaught for three whole days and nights.

King Diarmid and Tara were cursed by S. Ruadhan, assisted by eleven saints of Ireland. In the narrative there is a point of interest connected with this practice of fasting. The twelve saints instituted their fast against the King, fasting alternate days. Thereupon he, in retaliation, fasted against them, and so long as one kept even with the other, neither could get the mastery, so the saints bribed the king's steward, with a promise of heaven, to tell his master a lie, and to assure him that he had seen the twelve eating on their fast day. When Diarmid heard this, he broke his fast, whereupon the saints got ahead of him and triumphed. 26

nan.

Another remarkable story is that of Adamnan, the biographer of S. Columba. Irghalach son of Conaing had killed Adamnan's kinsman Niall. The saint thereupon fasted upon Irghalach to obtain a violent death for him. The chief, aware of this, fasted against AdamThe saint not only fasted, but stood all night in a river up to his neck. The chief did the same. At last the saint outwitted the chief by dressing his servant in his clothes and letting Irghalach see him eat and drink. The chief thereupon intermitted his fasting, and so Adamnan got the better of him, and obtained his death. When the Queen heard how he had been over-reached, she was in terror lest the saint should curse her unborn child. So she "grovelled at his feet," imploring mercy for the child. Adamnan consented only so far to curse it, that it should be born with one eye. 27

We have spoken particularly of this levy of a distress by fasting, for it gives us the clue to the extravagant asceticism, not of the early Celtic saints only, but of the yogis and fakirs of India.

The Celtic saints were perfectly familiar with the law just described; they put its process into operation against the chiefs with excellent effect. By no great effort of mind they carried their legal conceptions into their ideas of their relation with the Almighty. When they desired to obtain something from a chief, they fasted against him, and God was to them the greatest of all chieftains, so they supposed that to obtain a favour from God they must proceed against Him by levying a distress.

This lies at the root of all fakir self-torture in India. The ascetic dares the Almighty to let him die of starvation. He is perfectly assured that He will not do it, lest He should fall into disrepute among

the people, assured also that He will be brought to submit, however reluctant He may be, in the end, just as would a human chieftain.

This, indeed, is frankly admitted in the Tripartite Life of S. Patrick. Patrick was ambitious of obtaining peculiar privileges from God, notably that of sitting in judgment over the Irish people at the Day of Doom. To obtain this he instituted a fast. When in a condition of nervous exaltation he fancied that an angel appeared to him and intimated that such a petition was offensive to God, and he offered him some other favour in place of it. Patrick stubbornly rejected all compromise, and continued his fast, as the writer says, "in a very bad temper, without drink, without food." After some time he fancied that the angel approached him again, offering further concessions. "I will not go from this place till I am dead," replied Patrick, "unless all the things I have asked for are granted to me." In the end he fell into such a condition of exhaustion of body, that he became a prey to hallucinations, thought the sky was full of black birds, and deluded himself into the belief that the Almighty had given way at all points. 28

A like story is told of S. Maidoc of Ferns, who desired to obtain some outrageous privileges—that no successor of his should go to hell, that no member of his community or tribe should be lost eternally, and that till the Day of Judgment he might be able daily to deliver a soul from hell. He fasted against God, to wring from Him these privileges, and continued his fast for fifty days, and deluded himself into the belief that he had forced the Almighty to grant everything. 29

There is a story of three scholars in the Book of Lismore that also illustrates how completely this legal notion of transacting business with the Almighty affected the minds of the early Celtic Christians. Three scholars resolved on reciting daily the Psalter, each taking a third; and they agreed among themselves that in the event of one dying, the others should take his Psalms on them in addition to their own. First one died, then the other two readily divided his fifty Psalms between them. But presently a second died, and the third found himself saddled with the daily recitation of the entire Psalter. He was highly incensed against heaven for letting the other two off so easily, and overloading him with obligations. Then, in his resentment, regarding God as having treated him unjustly, we are informed that he fasted against Him.

In India the fakirs possess power over the people who flock to them

28 Tripartite Life, p. 115. Tirechan, the most trustworthy of the biographers of S. Patrick, speaks of this fast.

29 Cambro-British Saints, p. 243.

to entreat the gods to obtain for them abundant harvests, or the burning of an enemy's house, the recovery of a sick child, or the wholesale destruction of an enemy's family. A man who sits on spikes, has voluntarily distorted himself, or who lives half buried in the earth, is supposed to be all powerful with the gods. Why so? Because through his self-tortures he has wrung a legal power over the gods to grant what he shall ask. The very same race which underlies the Hindu population of India underlay the Goidel in Ireland and the Brython in Britain. That race which to this day sets up menhirs and dolmens there, strewed Ireland and Cornwall with them at a remotely early period. That same race has scattered these remains. over Moab. We find the same legal and religious ideas in India and in Ireland; as also in Moab, which is likewise strewn with dolmens. Balaam comports himself just as would a Christian saint many centuries later in Erin, because these ideas belong to the non-Aryan Ivernian race everywhere. Monachism among the Celts, doubtless, received an impulse from such books as the Historia Lausiaca of Palladius, and the Life of S. Martin by Sulpicius Severus; but it did not originate from the perusal of these books. It had existed as a system, from a remote antiquity, among the pagan forefathers of the saints.

Everything conduced to engage the Christian missionaries in a contest of ascetic emulation with the medicine men of Paganism. They strove to outstrip them, for if they fell short of the self-torture practised by the latter, they could not hope to gain the ear of the princes and impress the imaginations of the vulgar. In the instance of S. Findchua we have a man emerging from Paganism, practising frightful austerities, and eagerly invoked to occupy the place hitherto assigned to the Druid. Surely he simply trod the same path as that pursued by the necromancers before him. Of S. Kevin it is said that he remained for seven years without sleep, and that he held up one arm till it became rigid, and a blackbird laid and hatched her eggs in his palm.30 S. Erc is said to have spent the day immersed in a river. S. Ita to have had only earth for her bed.

This immoderate and astounding self-torture enabled the saints in Celtic lands, with all confidence, to appropriate to themselves the keys of heaven and hell, and to give assurance of celestial felicity to whom they would, and denounce to endless woe whoever offended them. S. Patrick is said to have promised heaven to a story-teller, who had amused him with old bardic tales, and to a harper for having 30 Irish Liber Hymnorum, ii, 192; Giraldus Camb., Top. Hibern., ii, 48 ; Book of Lismore, p. 334.