1525 B.C. Age of the FIRBOLGS and third cycle of the Fomorians, once
gods, but expulsed from their sovereignty by the Tuatha De Danan, after
which they loom through the heroic literature as giants of the elder
time, overthrown by the gods. From the FIRBOLGS were descended, or
claimed to have descended, the Connaught warriors who fought with Queen
Meave against Cuculain, also the Clan Humor, appearing in the Second
Volume, also the heroes of Ossian, the Fianna Eireen. Even in the time
of Keating, Irish families traced thither their pedigrees. The great
chiefs of the FIR-BOLGIC dynasty were the five sons of Dela, Gann,
Genann, Sengann, Rury, and Slaney, with their wives Fuad, Edain, Anust,
Cnucha, and Libra; also their last and most potent king, EOCAIDH MAC
ERC, son of Ragnal, son of Genann, whose tomb or temple may be seen
to-day at Ballysadare, Co. Sligo, on the edge of the sea.
The Fomorians of this age were ruled over by Baler Beimenna and his wife
Kethlenn. Their grandson was Lu Lamada, one of the noblest of the Irish
gods.
The last of the mythological cycles is that of the Tuatha De Danan,
whose character, attributes, and history will, I hope, be rendered
interesting and intelligible in my account of Cuculain and the Red
Branch of Ulster.
Irish history has suffered from rationalism almost more than from
neglect and ignorance. The conjectures of the present century are
founded upon mediaeval attempts to reduce to verisimilitude and
historical probability what was by its nature quite incapable of such
treatment. The mythology of the Irish nation, being relieved of the
marvellous and sublime, was set down with circumstantial dates as a
portion of the country's history by the literary men of the middle ages.
Unable to excide from the national narrative those mythological beings
who filled so great a place in the imagination of the times, and unable,
as Christians, to describe them in their true character as gods, or, as
patriots, in the character which they believed them to possess, namely,
demons, they rationalized the whole of the mythological period with
names, dates, and ordered generations, putting men for gods, flesh and
blood for that invisible might, till the page bristled with names and
dates, thus formulating, as annals, what was really the theogony and
mythology of their country. The error of the mediaeval historians is
shared by the not wiser moderns. In the generations of the gods we seem
to see prehistoric racial divisions and large branches of the Aryan
family, an error which results from a neglect of the bardic literature,
and a consequently misdirected study of the annals.
As history, the pre-Milesian record contains but a limited supply of
objective truths; but as theogony, and the history of the Irish gods,
these much abused chronicles are as true as the roll of the kings of
England.
These divine nations, with their many successive generations and
dynasties, constitute a single family; they are all inter-connected and
spring from common sources, and where the literature permits us to see
more clearly, the earlier races exhibit a common character. Like a human
clan, the elements of this divine family grew and died, and shed forth
seedlings which, in time, over-grew and killed the parent stock. Great
names became obscure and passed away, and new ones grew and became
great. Gods, worshipped by the whole nation, declined and became
topical, and minor deities expanding, became national. Gods lost their
immortality, and were remembered as giants of the old time--mighty men,
which were of yore, men of renown.
"The gods which were of old time rest in their tombs,"
sang the Egyptians, consciously ascribing mortality even to gods.
Such was Mac Ere, King of Fir-bolgs. His temple [Note: Strand near
Ballysadare, Co. Sligo], beside the sea at Iorrus Domnan [Note:
Keating--evidently quoting a bardic historian], became his tomb. Daily
the salt tide embraces the feet of the great tumulus, regal amongst its
smaller comrades, where the last king of Fir-bolgs was worshipped by
his people. "Good [Note: Temple--vide post.] were the years of the
sovereignty of Mac Ere. There was no wet or tempestuous weather
in Ireland, nor was there any unfruitful year." Such were all the
predecessors of the children of Dana--gods which were of old times,
that rest in their tombs; and the days, too, of the Tuatha De Danan were
numbered. They, too, smitten by a more celestial light, vanished from
their hills, like Ossian lamenting over his own heroes; those others
still mightier, might say:--
"Once every step which we took might be heard throughout the
firmament. Now, all have gone, they have melted into the air."
But that divine tree, though it had its branches in fairy-land, had
its roots in the soil of Erin. An unceasing translation of heroes
into Tir-na-n-og went on through time, the fairy-world of the bards,
receiving every century new inhabitants, whose humbler human origin
being forgotten, were supplied there with both wives and children. The
apotheosis of great men went forward, tirelessly; the hero of one epoch
becoming the god of the next, until the formation of the Tuatha De
Danan, who represent the gods of the historic ages. Had the advent of
exact genealogy been delayed, and the creative imagination of the bards
suffered to work on for a couple of centuries longer, unchecked by the
historical conscience, Cuculain's human origin would, perhaps, have been
forgotten, and he would have been numbered amongst the Tuatha De Danan,
probably, as the son of Lu Lamfada and the Moreega, his patron deities.
It was, indeed, a favourite fancy of the bards that not Sualtam, but
Lu Lamfada himself, was his father; this, however, in a spiritual or
supernatural sense, for his age was far removed from that of the Tuatha
De Danan, and falling well within the scope of the historic period.
Even as late as the time of Alexander, the Greeks could believe a great
contemporary warrior to be of divine origin, and the son of Zeus.
When the Irish bards began to elaborate a general history of their
country, they naturally commenced with the enumeration of the elder
gods. I at one time suspected that the long pedigrees running between
those several divisions of the mythological period were the invention of
mediaeval historians, anxious to spin out the national record, that it
might reach to Shinar and the dispersion. Not only, however, was such
fabrication completely foreign to the genius of the literature, but in
the fragments of those early divine cycles, we see that each of these
personages was at one time the centre of a literature, and holds a
definite place as regards those who went before and came after.
These pedigrees, as I said before, have no historical meaning, being
pre-Milesian, and therefore absolutely prehistoric; but as the genealogy
of the gods, and as representing the successive generations of that
invisible family, whose history not one or ten bards, but the whole
bardic and druidic organisation of the island, delighted to record,
collate, and verify--those pedigrees are as reliable as that of any of
the regal clans. They represent accurately the mythological panorama, as
it unrolled itself slowly through the centuries before the
imagination and spirit of our ancestors accurately that divine
drama, millennium--lasting, with its exits and entrances of gods.
Millennium-lasting, and more so, for it is plain that one divine
generation represents on the average a much greater space of time than
a generation of mortal men. The former probably represents the period
which would elapse before a hero would become so divine, that is, so
consecrated in the imagination of the country, as to be received into
the family of the gods. Cuculain died in the era of the Incarnation,
three hundred years, if not more, before the country even began to be
Christianised, yet he is never spoken of as anything but a great hero,
from which one of two things would follow, either that the apotheosis of
heroes needed the lapse of centuries, or that, during the first,
second, third, and fourth centuries, the historical conscience was so
enlightened, and a positive definite knowledge of the past so universal,
that the translation of heroes into the divine clans could no longer
take place. The latter is indeed the more correct view; but the
reader will, I think, agree with me that the divine generations, taken
generally, represent more than the average space of man's life. To what
remote unimagined distances of time those earlier cycles extend has been
shown by an examination of the tombs of the lower Moy Tura. The ancient
heroes there interred were those who, as Fir-bolgs, preceded the reign
of the Tuath De Danan, coming long after the Clanna Nemedh in the divine
cycle, who were themselves preceded by the children of Partholan, who
were subsequent to the Queen Keasair. Such then being the position in
the divine cycle of the Fir-bolgs, an examination of the Firbolgic
raths on Moy Tura has revealed only implements of stone, proving
demonstratively that the early divine cycles originated before the
bronze age in Ireland, whenever that commenced. Those heroes who, as
Fir-bolgs, received divine honours, lived in the age of stone. So far is
it from being the case, that the mythological record has been extended
and unduly stretched, to enable the monkish historians to connect the
Irish pedigrees with those of the Mosaic record, that it has, I believe,
been contracted for this purpose.
The reader will be now prepared to peruse with some interest and
understanding one or two of the mythological pedigrees. To these I have
at times appended the dates, as given in the chronicles, to show how the
early historians rationalised the pre-historic record.
Angus Og, the Beautiful, represents the Greek Eros. He was surnamed
Og, or young; Mac-an-Og, or the son of youth; Mac-an-Dagda, son of the
Dagda. He was represented with a harp, and attended by bright birds,
his own transformed kisses, at whose singing love arose in the hearts
of youths and maidens. To him and to his father the great tumulus of New
Grange, upon the Boyne, was sacred.
"I visited the Royal Brugh that stands
By the dark-rolling waters of the Boyne,
Where Angus Og magnificently dwells."
He was the patron god of Diarmid, the Paris of Ossian's Fianna, and
removed him into Tir-na-n-Og, when he died, having been ripped by the
tusks of the wild boar on the peaks of Slieve Gulban.
Lu Lamfada was the patron god of Cuculain. He was surnamed Ioldana, as
the source of the sciences, and represented the Greek Apollo. The latter
was argurgurotoxos [Transcriber's Note: Greek in the original], but Lu
was a sling bearing god. Of Fomorian descent on the mother's side,
he joined his father's people, the Tuatha De Danan, in the great war
against the Fomoroh. He is principally celebrated for his oppression of
the sons of Turann, in vengeance for the murder of his father.
ANGUS OG, (circa 1500 B.C.) LU LAMFADA, (circa 1500 B.C.)
son of son of
THE DAGDA, (Zeus) Cian,
son of son of
Elathan, Diancect, (god the healer)
son of son of
Dela, Esric,
son of son of
Ned, Dela,
son of son of
Indaei, Ned,
son of son of
Indaei,
son of ALLDAEI.
Amongst other Irish gods was Bove Derg, who dwelt invisible in the
Galtee mountains, and in the hills above Lough Derg. The transformed
children alluded to in Vol. I. were his grand-children. It was his
goldsmith Len, who gave its ancient name to the Lakes of Killarney,
Locha Lein. Here by the lake he worked, surrounded by rainbows and
showers of fiery dew.
Mananan was the god of the sea, of winds and storms, and most skilled
in magic lore. He was friendly to Cuculain, and was invoked by seafaring
men. He was called the Far Shee of the promontories.
BOVE DERG (circa 1500 B.C.) MANANAN (circa 1500 B.C.)
son of son of
Eocaidh Garf, Alloid,
son of son of
Duach Temen, Elathan,
son of son of
Bras, Dela,
son of son of
Dela, Ned,
son of son of
Ned, Indaei,
son of son of
Indaei,
son of ALLDAEI.
The Tuatha De Danan maybe counted literally by the hundred, each with a
distinct history, and all descended from Alldaei.