Alldaei
son of
Tath,
son of
Tabarn,
son of
Enna,
son of
Baath,
son of
Ebat,
son of
Betah,
son of
Iarbanel,
son of
NEMEDH (circa 1700 B.C.)
Nemedh, as I have said, forms one of the great epochs in the
mythological record. As will be seen, he and the earlier Partholan have
a common source:--
NEMEDH
son of
Sera,
son of
Pamp,
son of
Tath, PARTHOLAN (2000 B.C.)
son of son of
Sera,
son of
Sru,
son of
Esru,
son of
Pramant.
The connection between Keasair, the earliest of the Irish gods, and
the rest of the cycle, I have not discovered, but am confident of its
existence.
How this divine cycle can be expunged from the history of Ireland I am
at a loss to see. The account which a nation renders of itself must, and
always does, stand at the head of every history.
How different is this from the history and genealogy of the Greek gods
which runs thus:--
The Olympian gods,
Titans,
Physical entities, Nox, Chaos, &c.
The Greek gods, undoubtedly, had a long ancestry extending into the
depths of the past, but the sudden advent of civilisation broke up
the bardic system before the historians could become philosophical, or
philosophers interested in antiquities.
But the Irish history corrects our view with regard to other matters
connected with the gods of the Aryan nations of Europe also.
All the nations of Europe lived at one time under the bardic and druidic
system, and under that system imagined their gods and elaborated their
various theogonies, yet, in no country in Europe has a bardic literature
been preserved except in Ireland, for no thinking man can believe Homer
to have been a product of that rude type of civilisation of which he
sings. This being the case, modern philosophy, accounting for the origin
of the classical deities by guesses and _a priori_ reasonings, has
almost universally adopted that explanation which I have, elsewhere,
called Wordsworthian, and which derives them directly from the
imagination personifying the aspects of nature.
"In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched
On the soft grass through half a summer's day,
With music lulled his indolent repose,
And in some fit of weariness if he,
When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
A distant strain far sweeter than the sounds
Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched,
Even from the blazing chariot of the sun,
A beardless youth who touched a golden lute
And filled the illumined groves with ravishment--
***
"Sunbeams upon distant hills,
Gliding apace with shadows in their train,
Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
Into fleet oreads, sporting visibly."
This is pretty, but untrue. In all the ancient Irish literature we find
the connection of the gods, both those who survived into the historic
times, and those whom they had dethroned, with the raths and cairns
perpetually and almost universally insisted upon. The scene of the
destruction of the Firbolgs will be found to be a place of tombs, the
metropolis of the Fomorians a place of tombs, and a place of tombs the
sacred home of the Tuatha along the shores of the Boyne. Doubtless, they
are represented also as dwelling in the hills, lakes, and rivers, but
still the connection between the great raths and cairns and the gods
is never really forgotten. When the floruit of a god has expired, he
is assigned a tomb in one of the great tumuli. No one can peruse this
ancient literature without seeing clearly the genesis of the Irish gods,
_videlicet_ heroes, passing, through the imagination and through the
region of poetic representation, into the world of the supernatural.
When a king died, his people raised his ferta, set up his stone, and
engraved upon it, at least in later times, his name in ogham. They
celebrated his death with funeral lamentations and funeral games, and
listened to the bards chanting his prowess, his liberality, and his
beauty. In the case of great warriors, these games and lamentations
became periodical. It is distinctly recorded in many places, for
instance in connection with Taylti, who gave her name to Taylteen and
Garman, who gave her name to Loch Garman, now Wexford, and with Lu
Lamfada, whose annual worship gave its name to the Kalends of August.
Gradually, as his actual achievements became more remote, and the
imagination of the bards, proportionately, more unrestrained, he would
pass into the world of the supernatural. Even in the case of a hero
so surrounded with historic light as Cuculain we find a halo, as of
godhood, often settling around him. His gray warsteed had already passed
into the realm of mythical representation, as a second avatar of the
Liath Macha, the grey war-horse of the war-goddess Macha. This could be
believed, even in the days when the imagination was controlled by the
annalists and tribal heralds.
The gods of the Irish were their deified ancestors. They were not the
offspring of the poetic imagination, personifying the various aspects of
nature. Traces, indeed, we find of their influence over the operations
of nature, but they are, upon the whole, slight and unimportant.
From nature they extract her secrets by their necromantic and magical
labours, but nature is as yet too great to be governed and impelled by
them. The Irish Apollo had not yet entered into the sun.
Like every country upon which imperial Rome did not leave the impress
of her genius, Ireland, in these ethnic times, attained only a
partial unity. The chief king indeed presided at Tara, and enjoyed the
reputation and emoluments flowing to him on that account, but, upon the
whole, no Irish king exercised more than a local sovereignty; they were
all reguli, petty kings, and their direct authority was small. This
being the case, it would appear to me that in the more ancient times
the death of a king would not be an event which would disturb a very
extensive district, and that, though his tomb might be considerable, it
would not be gigantic.
Now on the banks of the Boyne, opposite Rosnaree, there stands a
tumulus, said to be the greatest in Europe. It covers acres of ground,
being of proportionate height. The earth is confined by a compact stone
wall about twelve feet high. The central chamber, made of huge irregular
pebbles, is about twenty feet from ground to roof, communicating with
the outer air by a flagged passage. Immense pebbles, drawn from the
County of Antrim, stand around it, each of which, even to move at
all, would require the labour of many men, assisted with mechanical
appliances. It is, of course, impossible to make an accurate estimate of
the expenditure of labour necessary for the construction of such a work,
but it would seem to me to require thousands of men working for years.
Can we imagine that a petty king of those times could, after his
death, when probably his successor had enough to do to sustain his new
authority, command such labour merely to provide for himself a tomb. If
this tomb were raised to the hero whose name it bears immediately after
his death, and in his mundane character, he must have been such a king
as never existed in Ireland, even in the late Christian times.
Even Brian of the Tributes himself, could not have commanded such a
sepulture, or anything like it, living though he did, probably, two
thousand years later than that Eocaidh Mac Elathan, whenever he did
live. There is a _nodus_ here needing a god to solve it.
Returning now to what would most likely take place after the interment
of a hero, we may well imagine that the size of his tomb would be in
proportion to the love which he inspired, where no accidental causes
would interfere with the gratification of that feeling. Of one of his
heroes, Ossian, sings--
"We made his cairn great and high
Like a king's."
After that there would be periodical meetings in his honour, the
celebration of games, solemn recitations by bards, singing his aristeia
[Transcriber's Note: Greek in the original]. Gradually the new wine
would burst the old bottles. The ever-active, eager-loving imagination
would behold the champion grown to heroic proportions, the favourite of
the gods, the performer of superhuman feats. The tomb, which was once
commensurate with the love and reverence which he inspired, would seem
so now no longer. The tribal bards, wandering or attending the great
fairs and assemblies, would disperse among strangers and neighbours a
knowledge of his renown. In the same cemetery or neighbourhood their
might be other tombs of heroes now forgotten, while he, whose fame was
in every bardic mouth in all that region, was honoured only with a tomb
no greater than theirs. The mere king or champion, grown into a topical
hero, would need a greater tomb.
Ere long again, owing to the bardic fraternity, who, though coming from
Innishowen or Cape Clear, formed a single community, the topical hero
would, in some cases, where his character was such as would excite
deeper reverence and greater fame, grow into a national hero, and a
still nobler tomb be required, in order that the visible memorial might
prove commensurate with the imaginative conception.
Now all this time the periodic celebrations, the games, and
lamentations, and songs would be assuming a more solemn character. Awe
would more and more mingle with the other feelings inspired by his name.
Certain rites and a certain ritual would attend those annual games
and lamentations, which would formerly not have been suitable, and
eventually, when the hero, slowly drawing nearer through generations,
if not centuries, at last reached Tir-na-n-Og, and was received into
the family of the gods, a religious feeling of a different nature would
mingle with the more secular celebration of his memory, and his rath or
cairn would assume in their eyes a new character.
To an ardent imaginative people the complete extinction by death of a
much-loved hero would even at first be hardly possible. That the tomb
which held his ashes should be looked upon as the house of the hero must
have been, even shortly after his interment, a prevailing sentiment,
whether expressed or not. Also, the feeling must have been present,
that the hero in whose honour they performed the annual games, and
periodically chanted the remembrance of whose achievements, saw and
heard those things that were done in his honour. But as the celebration
became greater and more solemn, this feeling would become more strong,
and as the tomb, from a small heap of stones or low mound, grew into an
enormous and imposing rath, the belief that this was the hero's house,
in which he invisibly dwelt, could not be avoided, even before they
ceased to regard him as a disembodied hero; and after the hero had
mingled with the divine clans, and was numbered amongst the gods, the
idea that the rath was a tomb could not logically be entertained. As
a god, was he not one of those who had eaten of the food provided by
Mananan, and therefore never died. The rath would then become his house
or temple. As matter of fact, the bardic writings teem with this idea.
From reason and probability, we would with some certainty conclude that
the great tumulus of New Grange was the temple of some Irish god; but
that it was so, we know as a fact. The father and king of the gods
is alluded to as dwelling there, going out from thence, and returning
again, and there holding his invisible court.
"Behold the _Sid_ before your eyes,
It is manifest to you that it is a king's mansion."
[Note: O'Curry's Manuscript Materials of Irish History, page 505.]
"Bove Derg went to visit the Dagda at the Brugh of Mac-An-Og."
[Note: "Dream of Angus," Revue Celtique, Vol. III., page 349.]
Here also dwelt Angus Og, the son of the Dagda. In this, his spiritual
court or temple, he is represented as having entertained Oscar and
the Ossianic heroes, and thither he conducted [Note: Publications of
Ossianic Society, Vol. III., page 201.] the spirit of Diarmid, that he
might have him for ever there.
In the etymology also we see the origin of the Irish gods. A grave in
Irish is Sid, the disembodied spirit is Sidhe, and this latter word
glosses Tuatha De Danan.
The fact that the grave of a hero developed slowly into the temple of
a god, explains certain obscurities in the annals and literature. As
a hero was exalted into a god, so in turn a god sank into a hero,
or rather into the race of the giants. The elder gods, conquered and
destroyed by the younger, could no longer be regarded as really divine,
for were they not proved to be mortal? The development of the temple
from the tomb was not forgotten, the whole country being filled with
such tombs and incipient temples, from the great Brugh on the Boyne to
the smallest mound in any of the cemeteries. Thus, when the elder gods
lost their spiritual sovereignty, and their destruction at the hands of
the younger took the form of great battles, then as the god was forced
to become a giant, so his temple was remembered to be a tomb. Doubtless,
in his own territory, divine honours were still paid him; but in the
national imagination and in the classical literature and received
history, he was a giant of the olden time, slain by the gods, and
interred in the rath which bore his name. Such was the great Mac Erc,
King of Fir-bolgs.
Again, when the mediaeval Christians ceased to regard the Tuatha De
Danan as devils, and proceeded to rationalise the divine record as the
ethnic bards had rationalised the history of the early gods; the Tuatha
De Danan, shorn of immortality, became ancient heroes who had lived
their day and died, and the greater raths, no longer the houses of the
gods, figure in that literature irrationally rational, as their tombs.
Thus we are gravely informed [Note: Annals of Four Masters.] that "the
Dagda Mor, after the second battle of Moy Tura, retired to the Brugh on
the Boyne, where he died from the venom of the wounds inflicted on him
by Kethlenn"--the Fomorian amazon--"and was there interred." Even in
this passage the writer seems to have been unable to dispossess his mind
quite of the traditional belief that the Brugh was the Dagda's house.
The peculiarity of this mound, in addition to its size, is the
spaciousness of the central chamber. This was that germ which, but for
the overthrow of the bardic religion, would have developed into a temple
in the classic sense of the word. A two-fold motive would have impelled
the growing civilisation in this direction. A desire to make the house
of the god as spacious within as it was great without, and a desire to
transfer his worship, or the more esoteric and solemn part of it, from
without to within. Either the absence of architectural knowledge, or
the force of conservatism, or the advent of the Christian missionaries,
checked any further development on these lines.
Elsewhere the tomb, instead of developing as a tumulus or barrow,
produced the effect of greatness by huge circumvallations of earth, and
massive walls of stone. Such is the temple of Ned the war-god, called
Aula Neid, the court or palace of Ned, near the Foyle in the North. Had
the ethnic civilisation of Ireland been suffered to develop according to
its own laws, it is probable that, as the roofed central chamber of the
cairn would have grown until it filled the space occupied by the mound,
so the open-walled temple would have developed into a covered building,
by the elevation of the walls, and their gradual inclination to the
centre.
The bee-hive houses of the monks, the early churches, and the round
towers are a development of that architecture which constructed the
central chambers of the raths. In this fact lies, too, the explanation
of the cyclopean style of building which characterizes our most ancient
buildings. The cromlech alone, formed in very ancient times the central
chamber of the cairn; it is found in the centre of the raths on Moy
Tura, belonging to the stone age and that of the Firbolgs. When the
cromlech fell into disuse, the arched chamber above the ashes of the
hero was constructed with enormous stones, as a substitute for the
majestic appearance presented by the massive slab and supporting pillars
of the more ancient cromlech, and the early stone buildings preserved
the same characteristic to a certain extent.
The same sentiment which caused the mediaeval Christians to disinter and
enshrine the bones of their saints, and subsequently to re-enshrine
them with greater art and more precious materials, caused the ethnic
worshippers of heroes to erect nobler tombs over the inurned relics
of those whom they revered, as the meanness of the tomb was seen to
misrepresent and humiliate the sublimity of the conception. But the
Christians could never have imagined their saints to have been anything
but men--a fact which caused the retention and preservation of the
relics. When the Gentiles exalted their hero into a god, the charred
bones were forgotten or ascribed to another. The hero then became
immortal in his own right; he had feasted with Mananan and eaten his
life-giving food, and would not know death.
When the mortal character of the hero was forgotten, his house or temple
might be erected anywhere. The great Raths of the Boyne--a place grown
sacred from causes which we may not now learn--represented, probably,
heroes and heroines, who died and were interred in many different parts
of the country.
To recapitulate, the Dagda Mor was a divine title given to a hero named
Eocaidh, who lived many centuries before the birth of Christ, and in the
depths of the pre-historic ages. He was the mortal scion or ward of
an elder god, Elathan, and was interred in some unknown grave--marked,
perhaps, by a plain pillar stone, or small insignificant cairn.
The great tumulus of New Grange was the temple of the divine or
supernatural period of his spiritual or imagined career after death, and
was a development by steps from that small unremembered grave where once
his warriors hid the inurned ashes of the hero.
What is true of one branch of the Aryan family is true of all.
Sentiments of such universality and depth must have been common to all.
If this be so, the Olympian Zeus himself was once some rude chieftain
dwelling in Thrace or Macedonia, and his sublime temple of Doric
architecture traceable to some insignificant cairn or flagged cist in
Greece, or some earlier home of the Hellenic race, and his name not
Zeus, but another; and Kronos, that god whom he, as a living wight,
adored, and under whose protection and favour he prospered.