THE GODS OF THE GAELS
Of the two Celtic races that settled in our islands, it is the earlier,
the Gaels, that has best preserved its old mythology. It is true that we
have in few cases such detailed account of the Gaelic gods as we gain of
the Hellenic deities from the Greek poets, of the Indian Devas from the
Rig Veda, or of the Norse Æsir from the Eddas. Yet none the less may we
draw from the ancient Irish manuscripts quite enough information to
enable us to set forth their figures with some clearness. We find them,
as might have been anticipated, very much like the divine hierarchies of
other Aryan peoples.
We also find them separated into two opposing camps, a division common
to all the Aryan religions. Just as the Olympians struggled with the
Giants, the Æsir fought the Jötuns, and the Devas the Asuras, so there
is warfare in the Gaelic spiritual world between two superhuman hosts.
On one side are ranged the gods of day, light, life, fertility, wisdom,
and good; on the other, the demons of night, darkness, death,
barrenness, and evil. The first were the great spirits symbolizing the
beneficial aspects of nature and the arts and intelligence of man; the
second were the hostile powers thought to be behind such baneful
manifestations as storm and fog, drought and disease. The first are
ranged as a divine family round a goddess called Danu, from whom they
took their well-known name of _Tuatha Dé Danann_,[56] “Tribe” or “Folk
of the Goddess Danu”. The second owned allegiance to a female divinity
called Domnu; their king, Indech, is described as her son, and they are
all called “Domnu’s gods”. The word “Domnu” appears to have signified
the abyss or the deep sea,[57] and the same idea is also expressed in
their better-known name of “Fomors”, derived from two Gaelic words
meaning “under sea”.[58] The waste of water seems to have always
impressed the Celts with the sense of primeval ancientness; it was
connected in their minds with vastness, darkness, and monstrous
births—the very antithesis of all that was symbolized by the earth, the
sky, and the sun.
Therefore the Fomors were held to be more ancient than the gods, before
whom they were, however, destined to fall in the end. Offspring of
“Chaos and Old Night”, they were, for the most part, huge and deformed.
Some had but one arm and one leg apiece, while others had the heads of
goats, horses, or bulls.[59] The most famous, and perhaps the most
terrible of them all was Balor, whose father is said to have been one
Buarainech, that is, the “cow-faced”,[60] and who combined in himself
the two classical rôles of the Cyclops and the Medusa. Though he had two
eyes, one was always kept shut, for it was so venomous that it slew
anyone on whom its look fell. This malignant quality of Balor’s eye was
not natural to him, but was the result of an accident. Urged by
curiosity, he once looked in at the window of a house where his father’s
sorcerers were preparing a magic potion, and the poisonous smoke from
the cauldron reached his eye, infecting it with so much of its own
deadly nature as to make it disastrous to others. Neither god nor giant
seems to have been exempt from its dangers; so that Balor was only
allowed to live on condition that he kept his terrible eye shut. On days
of battle he was placed opposite to the enemy, the lid of the destroying
eye was lifted up with a hook, and its gaze withered all who stood
before it. The memory of Balor and his eye still lingers in Ireland: the
“eye of Balor” is the name for what the peasantry of other countries
call the “evil eye”; stories are still told of _Balar Beimann_, or
“Balor of the Mighty Blows”; and “Balor’s Castle” is the name of a
curious cliff on Tory Island. This island, off the coast of Donegal, was
the Fomorian outpost upon earth, their real abode being in the cold
depths of the sea.
This rule, however, as to the hideousness of the Fomors had its
exceptions. Elathan, one of their chiefs, is described in an old
manuscript as of magnificent presence—a Miltonic prince of darkness. “A
man of fairest form,” it says, “with golden hair down to his shoulders.
He wore a mantle of gold braid over a shirt interwoven with threads of
gold. Five golden necklaces were round his neck, and a brooch of gold
with a shining precious stone thereon was on his breast. He carried two
silver spears with rivets of bronze, and his sword was golden-hilted and
golden-studded.”[61] Nor was his son less handsome. His name was Bress,
which means “beautiful”, and we are told that every beautiful thing in
Ireland, “whether plain, or fortress, or ale, or torch, or woman, or
man”, was compared with him, so that men said of them, “that is a
Bress”.[62]
Balor, Bress, and Elathan are the three Fomorian personages whose
figures, seen through the mists of antiquity, show clearest to us. But
they are only a few out of many, nor are they the oldest. We can learn,
however, nothing but a few names of any ancestors of the Gaelic giants.
This is equally true of the Gaelic gods. Those we know are evidently not
without parentage, but the names of their fathers are no more than
shadows following into oblivion the figures they designated. The most
ancient divinity of whom we have any knowledge is Danu herself, the
goddess from whom the whole hierarchy of gods received its name of
Tuatha Dé Danann. She was also called Anu or Ana, and her name still
clings to two well-known mountains near Killarney, which, though now
called simply “The Paps”, were known formerly as the “Paps of Ana”.[63]
She was the universal mother; “well she used to cherish the gods”, says
the commentator of a ninth-century Irish glossary.[64] Her husband is
never mentioned by name, but one may assume him, from British analogies,
to have been Bilé, known to Gaelic tradition as a god of Hades, a kind
of Celtic Dis Pater from whom sprang the first men. Danu herself
probably represented the earth and its fruitfulness, and one might
compare her with the Greek Demeter. All the other gods are, at least by
title, her children. The greatest of these would seem to have been
Nuada, called _Argetlám_, or “He of the Silver Hand”. He was at once the
Gaelic Zeus, or Jupiter, and their war-god; for among primitive nations,
to whom success in war is all-important, the god of battles is the
supreme god.[65] Among the Gauls, Camulus, whose name meant
“Heaven”,[66] was identified by the Romans with Mars; and other such
instances come readily to the mind. He was possessed of an invincible
sword, one of the four chief treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann, over
whom he was twice king; and there is little doubt that he was one of the
most important gods of both the Gaels and the Britons, for his name is
spread over the whole of the British Isles, which we may surmise the
Celts conquered under his auspices. We may picture him as a more savage
Mars, delighting in battle and slaughter, and worshipped, like his
Gaulish affinities, Teutates and Hesus, of whom the Latin poet Lucan
tells us, with human sacrifices, shared in by his female consorts, who,
we may imagine, were not more merciful than himself, or than that
Gaulish Taranis whose cult was “no gentler than that of the Scythian
Diana”, and who completes Lucan’s triad as a fit companion to the
“pitiless Teutates” and the “horrible Hesus”.[67] Of these warlike
goddesses there were five—Fea, the “Hateful”, Nemon, the “Venomous”,
Badb, the “Fury”, Macha, a personification of “battle”, and, over all of
them, the Morrígú, or “Great Queen”. This supreme war-goddess of the
Gaels, who resembles a fiercer Herê, perhaps symbolized the moon, deemed
by early races to have preceded the sun, and worshipped with magical and
cruel rites. She is represented as going fully armed, and carrying two
spears in her hand. As with Arês[68] and Poseidon[69] in the “Iliad”,
her battle-cry was as loud as that of ten thousand men. Wherever there
was war, either among gods or men, she, the great queen, was present,
either in her own shape or in her favourite disguise, that of a “hoodie”
or carrion crow. An old poem shows her inciting a warrior:
“Over his head is shrieking
A lean hag, quickly hopping
Over the points of the weapons and shields;
She is the gray-haired Morrígú”.[70]
With her, Fea and Nemon, Badb and Macha also hovered over the fighters,
inspiring them with the madness of battle. All of these were sometimes
called by the name of “Badb”[71]. An account of the Battle of Clontarf,
fought by Brian Boru, in 1014, against the Norsemen, gives a gruesome
picture of what the Gaels believed to happen in the spiritual world when
battle lowered and men’s blood was aflame. “There arose a wild,
impetuous, precipitate, mad, inexorable, furious, dark, lacerating,
merciless, combative, contentious _badb_, which was shrieking and
fluttering over their heads. And there arose also the satyrs, and
sprites, and the maniacs of the valleys, and the witches and goblins and
owls, and destroying demons of the air and firmament, and the demoniac
phantom host; and they were inciting and sustaining valour and battle
with them.” When the fight was over, they revelled among the bodies of
the slain; the heads cut off as barbaric trophies were called “Macha’s
acorn crop”. These grim creations of the savage mind had immense
vitality. While Nuada, the supreme war-god, vanished early out of the
Pantheon—killed by the Fomors in the great battle fought between them
and the gods—Badb and the Morrígú lived on as late as any of the Gaelic
deities. Indeed, they may be said to still survive in the superstitious
dislike and suspicion shown in all Celtic-speaking countries for their
_avatar_, the hoodie-crow.[72]
After Nuada, the greatest of the gods was the Dagda, whose name seems to
have meant the “Good God”.[73] The old Irish tract called “The Choice of
Names” tells us that he was a god of the earth; he had a cauldron called
“The Undry”, in which everyone found food in proportion to his merits,
and from which none went away unsatisfied. He also had a living harp; as
he played upon it, the seasons came in their order—spring following
winter, and summer succeeding spring, autumn coming after summer, and,
in its turn, giving place to winter. He is represented as of venerable
aspect and of simple mind and tastes, very fond of porridge, and a
valiant consumer of it. In an ancient tale we have a description of his
dress. He wore a brown, low-necked tunic which only reached down to his
hips, and, over this, a hooded cape which barely covered his shoulders.
On his feet and legs were horse-hide boots, the hairy side outwards. He
carried, or, rather, drew after him on a wheel, an eight-pronged
war-club, so huge that eight men would have been needed to carry it; and
the wheel, as he towed the whole weapon along, made a track like a
territorial boundary.[74] Ancient and gray-headed as he was, and sturdy
porridge-eater, it will be seen from this that he was a formidable
fighter. He did great deeds in the battle between the gods and the
Fomors, and, on one occasion, is even said to have captured
single-handed a hundred-legged and four-headed monster called Mata,
dragged him to the “Stone of Benn”, near the Boyne, and killed him
there.
The Dagda’s wife was called Boann. She was connected in legend with the
River Boyne, to which she gave its name, and, indeed, its very
existence.[75] Formerly there was only a well[76], shaded by nine magic
hazel-trees. These trees bore crimson nuts, and it was the property of
the nuts that whoever ate of them immediately became possessed of the
knowledge of everything that was in the world. The story is, in fact, a
Gaelic version of the Hebrew myth of “the Tree of the Knowledge of Good
and Evil”. One class of creatures alone had this privilege—divine salmon
who lived in the well, and swallowed the nuts as they dropped from the
trees into the water, and thus knew all things, and appear in legend as
the “Salmons of Knowledge”. All others, even the highest gods, were
forbidden to approach the place. Only Boann, with the proverbial woman’s
curiosity, dared to disobey this fixed law. She came towards the sacred
well, but, as she did so, its waters rose up at her, and drove her away
before them in a mighty, rushing flood. She escaped; but the waters
never returned. They made the Boyne; and as for the all-knowing
inhabitants of the well, they wandered disconsolately through the depths
of the river, looking in vain for their lost nuts. One of these salmon
was afterwards eaten by the famous Finn mac Coul, upon whom all its
omniscience descended.[77] This way of accounting for the existence of a
river is a favourite one in Irish legend. It is told also of the
Shannon, which burst, like the Boyne, from an inviolable well, to pursue
another presumptuous nymph called Sinann, a granddaughter of the sea-god
Lêr.[78]
The Dagda had several children, the most important of whom are Brigit,
Angus, Mider, Ogma, and Bodb the Red. Of these, Brigit will be already
familiar to English readers who know nothing of Celtic myth. Originally
she was a goddess of fire and the hearth, as well as of poetry, which
the Gaels deemed an immaterial, supersensual form of flame. But the
early Christianizers of Ireland adopted the pagan goddess into their
roll of saintship, and, thus canonized, she obtained immense popularity
as Saint Bridget, or Bride.[79]
Angus was called _Mac Oc_, which means the “Son of the Young”, or,
perhaps, the “Young God”. This most charming of the creations of the
Celtic mythology is represented as a Gaelic Eros, an eternally youthful
exponent of love and beauty. Like his father, he had a harp, but it was
of gold, not oak, as the Dagda’s was, and so sweet was its music that no
one could hear and not follow it. His kisses became birds which hovered
invisibly over the young men and maidens of Erin, whispering thoughts of
love into their ears. He is chiefly connected with the banks of the
Boyne, where he had a “brugh”, or fairy palace; and many stories are
told of his exploits and adventures.
Mider, also the hero of legends, would seem to have been a god of the
underworld, a Gaelic Pluto. As such, he was connected with the Isle of
Falga—a name for what was otherwise, and still is, called the Isle of
Man—where he had a stronghold in which he kept three wonderful cows and
a magic cauldron. He was also the owner of the “Three Cranes of Denial
and Churlishness”, which might be described flippantly as personified
“gentle hints”. They stood beside his door, and when anyone approached
to ask for hospitality, the first one said: “Do not come! do not come!”
and the second added: “Get away! get away!” while the third chimed in
with: “Go past the house! go past the house!”[80] These three birds
were, however, stolen from Mider by Aitherne, an avaricious poet, to
whom they would seem to have been more appropriate than to their owner,
who does not otherwise appear as a churlish and illiberal deity.[81] On
the contrary, he is represented as the victim of others, who plundered
him freely. The god Angus took away his wife Etain,[82] while his cows,
his cauldron, and his beautiful daughter Blathnat were carried off as
spoil by the heroes or demi-gods who surrounded King Conchobar in the
golden age of Ulster.
Ogma, who appears to have been also called Cermait, that is, the
“honey-mouthed”, was the god of literature and eloquence. He married
Etan, the daughter of Diancecht, the god of medicine, and had several
children, who play parts more or less prominent in the mythology of the
Gaelic Celts. One of them was called Tuirenn, whose three sons murdered
the father of the sun-god, and were compelled, as expiation, to pay the
greatest fine ever heard of—nothing less than the chief treasures of the
world.[83] Another son, Cairpré, became the professional bard of the
Tuatha Dé Danann, while three others reigned for a short time over the
divine race. As patron of literature, Ogma was naturally credited with
having been the inventor of the famous _Ogam_ alphabet. This was an
indigenous script of Ireland, which spread afterwards to Great Britain,
inscriptions in ogmic characters having been found in Scotland, the Isle
of Man, South Wales, Devonshire, and at Silchester in Hampshire, the
Roman city of Calleva Attrebatum. It was originally intended for
inscriptions upon upright pillar-stones or upon wands, the equivalents
for letters being notches cut across, or strokes made upon one of the
faces of the angle, the alphabet running as follows:
[Illustration]
When afterwards written in manuscript, the strokes were placed over,
under, or through a horizontal line, in the manner above; and the vowels
were represented by short lines instead of notches, as:
[Illustration]
A good example of an ogmic inscription is given in Professor Rhys’s
_Hibbert Lectures_. It comes from a pillar on a small promontory near
Dunmore Head, in the west of Kerry, and, read horizontally, reads:
[Illustration: ERC, THE SON OF THE SON OF ERCA (DESCENDANT OF)
MODOVINIA.[84]]
The origin of this alphabet is obscure. Some authorities consider it of
great antiquity, while others believe it entirely post-Christian. It
seems, at any rate, to have been based upon, and consequently to
presuppose a knowledge of, the Roman alphabet.
Ogma, besides being the patron of literature, was the champion, or
professional strong man of the Tuatha Dé Danann. His epithet is
_Grianainech_, that is, the “Sunny-faced”, from his radiant and shining
countenance.
The last of the Dagda’s more important children is Bodb[85] the Red, who
plays a greater part in later than in earlier legend. He succeeded his
father as king of the gods. He is chiefly connected with the south of
Ireland, especially with the Galtee Mountains, and with Lough Dearg,
where he had a famous _sídh_, or underground palace.
The Poseidon of the Tuatha Dé Danann Pantheon was called Lêr, but we
hear little of him in comparison with his famous son, Manannán, the
greatest and most popular of his many children. Manannán mac Lir[86] was
the special patron of sailors, who invoked him as “God of Headlands”,
and of merchants, who claimed him as the first of their guild. His
favourite haunts were the Isle of Man, to which he gave his name, and
the Isle of Arran, in the Firth of Clyde, where he had a palace called
“Emhain of the Apple-Trees”. He had many famous weapons—two spears
called “Yellow Shaft” and “Red Javelin”, a sword called “The
Retaliator”, which never failed to slay, as well as two others known as
the “Great Fury” and the “Little Fury”. He had a boat called
“Wave-sweeper”, which propelled and guided itself wherever its owner
wished, and a horse called “Splendid Mane”, which was swifter than the
spring wind, and travelled equally fast on land or over the waves of the
sea. No weapon could hurt him through his magic mail and breast-plate,
and on his helmet there shone two magic jewels bright as the sun. He
endowed the gods with the mantle which made them invisible at will, and
he fed them from his pigs, which, like the boar Sæhrimnir, in the Norse
Valhalla, renewed themselves as soon as they had been eaten. Of these,
no doubt, he made his “Feast of Age”, the banquet at which those who ate
never grew old. Thus the people of the goddess Danu preserved their
immortal youth, while the ale of Goibniu the Smith-God bestowed
invulnerability upon them. It is fitting that Manannán himself should
have been blessed beyond all the other gods with inexhaustible life; up
to the latest days of Irish heroic literature his luminous figure shines
prominent, nor is it even yet wholly forgotten.
Goibniu, the Gaelic Hephaestus, who made the people of the goddess Danu
invulnerable with his magic drink, was also the forger of their weapons.
It was he who, helped by Luchtainé, the divine carpenter, and Credné,
the divine bronze-worker, made the armoury with which the Tuatha Dé
Danann conquered the Fomors. Equally useful to them was Diancecht, the
god of medicine.[87] It was he who once saved Ireland, and was
indirectly the cause of the name of the River Barrow. The Morrígú, the
heaven-god’s fierce wife, had borne a son of such terrible aspect that
the physician of the gods, foreseeing danger, counselled that he should
be destroyed in his infancy. This was done; and Diancecht opened the
infant’s heart, and found within it three serpents, capable, when they
grew to full size, of depopulating Ireland. He lost no time in
destroying these serpents also, and burning them into ashes, to avoid
the evil which even their dead bodies might do. More than this, he flung
the ashes into the nearest river, for he feared that there might be
danger even in them; and, indeed, so venomous were they that the river
boiled up and slew every living creature in it, and therefore has been
called “Barrow” (boiling) ever since.[88]
Diancecht had several children, of whom two followed their father’s
profession. These were Miach and his sister Airmid. There were also
another daughter, Etan, who married Cermait (or Ogma), and three other
sons called Cian, Cethé, and Cu. Cian married Ethniu, the daughter of
Balor the Fomor, and they had a son who was the crowning glory of the
Gaelic Pantheon—its Apollo, the Sun-God,—Lugh[89], called
_Lamhfada_[90], which means the “Long-handed”, or the “Far-shooter”. It
was not, however, with the bow, like the Apollo of the Greeks, but with
the rod-sling that Lugh performed his feats; his worshippers sometimes
saw the terrible weapon in the sky as a rainbow, and the Milky Way was
called “Lugh’s Chain”. He also had a magic spear, which, unlike the
rod-sling, he had no need to wield, himself; for it was alive, and
thirsted so for blood that only by steeping its head in a
sleeping-draught of pounded poppy leaves could it be kept at rest. When
battle was near, it was drawn out; then it roared, and struggled against
its thongs; fire flashed from it; and, once slipped from the leash, it
tore through and through the ranks of the enemy, never tired of slaying.
Another of his possessions was a magic hound which an ancient poem,[91]
attributed to the Fenian hero, Caoilte, calls—
“That hound of mightiest deeds,
Which was irresistible in hardness of combat,
Was better than wealth ever known,
A ball of fire every night.
“Other virtues had that beautiful hound
(Better this property than any other property),
Mead or wine would grow of it,
Should it bathe in spring water.”
This marvellous hound, as well as the marvellous spear, and the
indestructible pigs of Manannán were obtained for Lugh by the sons of
Tuirenn as part of the blood-fine he exacted from them for the murder of
his father Cian.[92] A hardly less curious story is that which tells how
Lugh got his name of the _Ioldanach_, or the “Master of All Arts”.[93]
These are, of course, only the greater deities of the Gaelic Pantheon,
their divinities which answered to such Hellenic figures as Demeter,
Zeus, Herê, Cronos, Athena, Eros, Hades, Hermes, Hephaestus,
Aesculapius, and Apollo. All of them had many descendants, some of whom
play prominent parts in the heroic cycles of the “Red Branch of Ulster”
and of the “Fenians”. In addition to these, there must have been a
multitude of lesser gods who stood in much the same relation to the
great gods as the rank and file of tribesmen did to their chiefs. Most
of these were probably local deities of the various clans—the gods their
heroes swore by. But it is also possible that some may have been
divinities of the aboriginal race. Professor Rhys thinks that he can
still trace a few of such Iberian gods by name, as Nêt, Ri or Roi, Corb,
and Beth.[94] But they play no recognizable part in the stories of the
Gaelic gods.
-----
Footnote 56:
Pronounced _Tooăha dae donnann_.
Footnote 57:
Rhys: _Hibbert Lectures_, 1886. Lecture VI—“Gods, Demons, and Heroes”.
Footnote 58:
_Ibid._
Footnote 59:
De Jubainville: _Le Cycle Mythologique Irlandais_, chap. V.
Footnote 60:
De Jubainville: _Cycle Mythologique Irlandais_, chap. IX.
Footnote 61:
From the fifteenth-century Harleian MS. in the British Museum,
numbered 5280, and called the _Second Battle of Moytura_.
Footnote 62:
Harleian MS. 5280.
Footnote 63:
“In Munster was worshipped the goddess of prosperity, whose name was
Ana, and from her are named the Two Paps of Ana over Luachair Degad.”
From _Coir Anmann_, the _Choice of Names_, a sixteenth-century tract,
published by Dr. Whitley Stokes in _Irische Texte_.
Footnote 64:
Attributed to Cormac, King-Bishop of Cashel.
Footnote 65:
Rhys: _Hibbert Lectures_, 1886—“The Zeus of the Insular Celts”.
Footnote 66:
Rhys: _Hibbert Lectures_, 1886—“The Gaulish Pantheon”.
Footnote 67:
_Pharsalia_, Book I, l. 444, &c.:
“Et quibus immitis placatur sanguine diro
Teutates, horrensque feris altaribus Hesus;
Et Taranis Scythicae non mitior ara Dianae”.
Footnote 68:
_Iliad_, Book V.
Footnote 69:
_Op. cit._, Book XIV.
Footnote 70:
It commemorates the battle of Magh Rath.
Footnote 71:
The word is approximately pronounced _Bive_ or _Bibe_.
Footnote 72:
For a full account of these beings see a paper by Mr. W. M. Hennessey
in Vol. I of the _Revue Celtique_, entitled “The Ancient Irish Goddess
of War”.
Footnote 73:
De Jubainville: _Le Cycle Mythologique_. Rhys: _Hibbert Lectures_, p.
154. The _Coir Anmann_, however, translates it “Fire of God”.
Footnote 74:
_The Second Battle of Moytura._ Harleian MS. 5280.
Footnote 75:
The story is told in the Book of Leinster.
Footnote 76:
Now called “Trinity Well”.
Footnote 77:
See chap. XIV—“Finn and the Fenians”.
Footnote 78:
Book of Leinster. A paraphrase of the story will be found in O’Curry’s
_Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish_, Vol. II, p. 143.
Footnote 79:
See chap. XV—“The Decline and Fall of the Gods”.
Footnote 80:
Rhys: _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 331.
Footnote 81:
Rhys: _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 331.
Footnote 82:
See chap. XI—“The Gods in Exile”.
Footnote 83:
See chap. VIII—“The Gaelic Argonauts”.
Footnote 84:
Rhys: _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 524.
Footnote 85:
Pronounced _Bove_.
Footnote 86:
Lêr—genitive Lir.
Footnote 87:
Pronounced _Dianket_. His name is explained, both in the _Choice of
Names_ and in Cormac’s _Glossary_, as meaning “God of Health”.
Footnote 88:
Standish O’Grady: _The Story of Ireland_, p. 17.
Footnote 89:
Pronounced _Luga_ or _Loo_.
Footnote 90:
Pronounced _Lavāda_.
Footnote 91:
Translated by O’Curry in _Atlantis_, Vol. III, from the Book of
Lismore.
Footnote 92:
Chap. VIII—“The Gaelic Argonauts”.
Footnote 93:
Chap. VII—“The Rise of the Sun-God”.
Footnote 94:
Rhys: _Celtic Britain_, chap. VII.
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