Saturday

saturn's day's child

Alexander Cornelius Polyhistor referred to the Druids as philosophers and called their doctrine of the immortality of the soul and reincarnation or metempsychosis "Pythagorean":

"The Pythagorean doctrine prevails among the Gauls' teaching that the souls of men are immortal, and that after a fixed number of years they will enter into another body."

"The principal point of their doctrine", says Caesar, "is that the soul does not die and that after death it passes from one body into another" (see metempsychosis). Caesar wrote:

"With regard to their actual course of studies, the main object of all education is, in their opinion, to imbue their scholars with a firm belief in the indestructibility of the human soul, which, according to their belief, merely passes at death from one tenement to another; for by such doctrine alone, they say, which robs death of all its terrors, can the highest form of human courage be developed. Subsidiary to the teachings of this main principle, they hold various lectures and discussions on astronomy, on the extent and geographical distribution of the globe, on the different branches of natural philosophy, and on many problems connected with religion".
Julius Cesar, "De Bello Gallico", VI, 13

This led Diodorus Siculus and others to the unlikely conclusion that the druids may have been influenced by the teachings of Pythagoras,[18] One modern scholar has speculated that Buddhist missionaries had been sent by the Indian king Ashoka.[19] Others have invoked common Indo-European parallels.[20]


[[[ Irish has no indefinite article, so "a day and a night" is the same as "day and night"]]]