calculated to intoxicate and exhilarate those who partook of it.
The Culture Hero and the Nine-night Week.
As allusion has more than once been made to an ancient reckoning of nine nights to a week, a word must now be said in explanation of that term. The Celts reckoned Dis the father of all, and regarded darkness and death as taking precedence over light and life; so in their computation of time they began with night and winter,[1] and not with daylight and summer. The Teutons reckoned similarly, and probably for the same mythological reason.[2] In ancient Italy we have a trace of the same idea in the Roman habit of considering the calends of every month sacred to Janus, one of the undoubted counterparts of the Celtic Dis; and especially was this the case with the winter month called after Janus, of which the calends and the ninth day, that is to say, the first day of the two first nine-night weeks of January, were sacred to that god. Further, we know that the Celts must have formerly reckoned not only the night with which the week or any period began, but also the night with which it ended. Witness such Celtic terms as the Welsh word wythnos, 'a week,' which literally means 'an eight-
- ↑ This is probably the key to reckoning years as winters, of which we have instances in Med. Welsh literature, as when Kulhwch's horse is described as 'four winters' old (R. B. Mab. p. 102). The habit appears to have been also English and Gothic, not to mention that it is Icelandic to this day.
- ↑ The words of Tacitus, in his Germania, chapter xi., are worth quoting: Nec dierum numerum, ut nos, sed noctium computant, sic constituunt, sic condicunt: nox ducere diem uidetur.
