Chapter V

THE PRE-MILESIAN FABLE AND EARLY PANTHEON

In investigating the very early history of Ireland we are met with a mass of pseudo-historic narrative and myth, woven together into an apparently homogeneous whole, and all now posing as real history. This is backed up, and eked out, by a most elaborate system of genealogy closely interwoven with it, which, together with a good share of the topographical nomenclature of the island, is there to add its entire influence to that of historian and annalist in apparently attesting the truth of what these latter have recorded.

If in seeking for a path through this maze we grasp the skirt of the genealogist and follow his steps for a clue, we shall find ourselves, in tracing into the past the ancestry of any Milesian chief, invariably landed at the foot of some one of four persons, three of them, Ir, Eber, Eremon,[1] being sons of that Milesius who made the Milesian conquest, and the fourth being Lughaidh [Lewy], son of Ith, who was a nephew of the same. On one or other of these four does the genealogy of every chief and prince abut, so that all end ultimately in Milesius.

Milesius' own genealogy and the wanderings of his ancestors are also recounted for many generations before they land in Ireland, but during this pre-Milesian period there are no side-genealogies, the ancestors of Milesius himself alone are given, traced through twenty-two apparently Gaelic names and thirteen Hebrew ones, passing through Japhet and ending in Adam. It is only with the landing of the three sons and the nephew of Milesius that the ramifications of Irish genealogies begin, and they are backed up by the whole weight of the Irish topographical system which is shot through and through with places named after personages and events of the early Milesian period, and of the period of the Tuatha De Danann.

It will be well to give here a brief résumé of the accounts of the Milesians' wanderings before they arrived in Ireland. Briefly then the Gaels are traced back all the way to Fenius Farsa, a king of Scythia, who is then easily traced up to Adam. But beginning with this Fenius Farsa we find that he started a great school for learning languages. His son was Niul, who also taught languages, and his son again was Gaedhal, from whom the Gaels are so called. This Niul went into Egypt and married Scota, daughter of Pharaoh. This is a post-Christian invention, which is not satisfied without bringing Niul into contact with Aaron, whom he befriended, in return for which Moses healed his son Gaedhal from the bite of a serpent. Since then says an ancient verse—

"No serpent nor vile venomed thing Can live upon the Gaelic soil, No bard nor stranger since has found A cold repulse from a son of Gaedhal."

Gaedhal's son was Esru, whose son was Sru, and when the Egyptians oppressed them he and his people emigrated to Crete. His son was Eber Scot, from whom some say the Gaels were called Scots, but most of the Irish antiquarians maintain that they are called Scots because they once came from Scythia,[2] to which cradle of the race Eber Scot led the nation back again. Expelled from Scythia a couple of generations later the race plant themselves in the country of Gaethluighe, where they were ruled over by one called Eber of the White Knee. The eighth in descent from him emigrated with four ships to Spain. His son was Breogan, who built Brigantia. His grandson was Golamh, called Miledh Easpáin, i.e., Warrior of Spain,[3] whose name has been universally, but badly, Latinised Milesius, and it was his three sons and his nephew who landed in Ireland and who planted there the Milesian people. Milesius himself never put foot in Ireland, but he seems in his own person to have epitomised the wanderings of his race, for we find him returning to Scythia, making his way thence into Egypt, marrying Scota, a daughter of Pharaoh, and finally returning to Spain.

Much or all of this pre-Milesian account of the race must be unhesitatingly set down to the influence of Christianity, and to the invention of early Christian bards who felt a desire to trace their kings back to Japhet.[4] The native unchristianised genealogies all converge in the sons and nephew of Milesius. The legends of their exploits and those of their successors are the real race-heritage of the Gael, unmixed with the fanciful Christian allusions and Hebraic adulterations of the pre-Milesian story, which was the last to be invented.

The genuine and early combination of Irish myth and history centres not on foreign but on Irish soil, in the accounts of the Nemedians, the Firbolg, the Tuatha De Danann, and the early Milesians, accounts which have been handed down to us in short stories and more lengthy sagas, as well as in the bold brief chronicles of the annalists. No doubt the stories of the landing of his race on Irish soil, and the exploits of his first chieftains were familiar in the early days to every Gael. They became, as it were, part and parcel of his own life and being, and were preserved with something approaching a religious veneration. His belief in them entered into his whole political and social system, the holding of his tribe-lands was bound up with it, and a highly-paid and influential class of bardic historians was subsidised with the express purpose of propagating these traditions and maintaining them unaltered.

Everything around him recalled to the early Gael the traditional history of his own past. The two hills of Slieve Luachra in Kerry he called the paps of Dana,[5] and he knew that Dana was the mother of the gods Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba, the story of whose sufferings, at the hands of Lugh the Long-handed, has in later times so often drawn tears from its auditors. When he beheld the mighty barrows piled upon the banks of the Boyne,[6] he knew that it was over the Dagda—an Irish Jupiter—and over his three sons[7] that they were heaped; and one of these, Angus of the Boyne, was, down to the present century, reverenced as the presiding genius of the spot. The mighty monuments of Knock Áine in Limerick, and Knock Gréine, as well as those of Knowth, Dowth, and New Grange, were all connected with his legendary past. It was Lugh of the Tuatha De Danann, he knew, who had first established the great fair of Tailltin,[8] to which he and his friends went from year to year to meet each other, and contract alliances for their grown children. The great funeral mound, round which the games were held, was sacred to Talti, the foster-mother of Lugh, who had there been buried, and in whose honour the games in which he participated were held upon the day which he called—and still calls, though he has now forgotten why—Lughnasa or Lugh's gathering.[9] His own country he called—and still calls—by the various names of Eire, Fódhla [Fola], and Banba, and they, as he knew, were three queens[10] of the Tuatha De Danann. The Gael of Connacht knew that Moycullen, near Galway, was so named from Uillin, a grandson of the Tuatha De Danann king Nuada; and Loch Corrib from Orbsen, the other name of the sea-god Manannán, slain there by this Uillin, and each of the provinces was studded with such memorials.

The early Milesian invaders left their names just as closely imprinted upon our topography as did their predecessors the Tuatha De Danann. The great plain of Bregia in Meath was so called from Brega, son of that Breogan who built Brigantia. Slieve Cualann in Wicklow—now hideously and absurdly called the Great Sugar Loaf!—is named from Cuala, another son of Breogan; Slieve Bladhma, or Bloom, is called from another son of the same; and from yet another is named the Plain of Muirthemni, where was fought the great battle in which fell Cuchulain "fortissimus heros Scotorum." The south of Munster is called Corca Luighe from Lughaidh, son of Ith, nephew of Milesius. The harbour of Drogheda was called Inver Colpa, from Colpa of the sword, another son of Milesius, who was there drowned when trying to effect a landing. The Carlingford Mountains were called Slieve Cualgni, and a well-known mountain in Armagh Slieve Fuad, from two more sons of Breogan of Brigantia, slain after the second battle with the Tuatha De Danann, while they followed up the chase. The sandhills in the west of Munster, where Donn, the eldest son of Milesius, was shipwrecked and lost his life—as did his whole crew consisting as is said of twenty-four warriors, five chiefs, twelve women, four servants, eight rowers, and fifty youths-in-training—is called Donn's House. So vivid is this tradition even still, that we find a Munster poet as late as the last century addressing a poem to this Donn as the tutelary divinity of the place, and asking him to take him into his sidh [shee] or fairy mound and become his patron. This poem is remarkable, as showing that in popular opinion the early Milesians shared the character of sub-gods, fairies, or beings of supernatural power, in common with the Tuatha De Danann themselves, for the poet treats him as still living and reigning in state, as peer of Angus of the Boyne, and cousin of Cliona, queen of the Munster fairies.[11] Wherever he turned the Gael was thus confronted with scenes from his own past, or with customs—like the August games at Tailltin—deliberately established to perpetuate them.

In process of time, partly perhaps through the rationalising influences of a growing civilisation, but chiefly through the direct action of Christianity, with which he came into active contact in perhaps the fourth, or certainly in the fifth century, the remembrance of the old Gaelic theogony, and the old Gaelic deities and his religious belief in them became blunted, and although no small quantity of matter that is purely pagan, and an immense amount of matter, but slightly tinged with Christianity, has been handed down to us, yet gods, heroes, and men have been so far brought to a common level, that it is next to impossible at first sight to disentangle them or to say which is which.

Very probably there was, even before the introduction of Christianity, no sharply-defined line of demarcation drawn between gods and heroes, that, in the words of Pindar, ἓν ἀνδρῶν ἓν θεῶν γένος, "one was the race of gods and men," and when in after times the early mythical history of Ireland came to be committed to parchment, its historians saw in the Irish pantheon nothing but a collection of human beings. It is thus, no doubt, that we find the Fomorians and the Tuatha De Danann posing as real people, whilst in reality it is more than likely that they figured in the scheme of Gaelic mythology as races of beneficent gods and of evil deities, or at least as races of superhuman power.

The early Irish writers who redacted the mythical history of the country were no doubt imbued with the spirit of the so-called Greek "logographers," who, when collecting the Grecian myths from the poets, desired, while not eliminating the miraculous, yet to smooth away all startling discrepancies and present them in a readable and, as it were, a historical series.[12] Others no doubt wished to rationalise the early myths so far as they conveniently could, as even Herodotus shows an inclination to do with regard to the Greek marvels; and the later annalists and poets of the Irish went as far as ever went Euhemerus, reducing gods and heroes alike to the level of common men.

We find Keating, who composed in Irish his Forus Feasa or History, in the first half of the seventeenth century, and who only re-writes or abbreviates what he found before him in the ancient books of the Gaels now lost, distracted between his desire to euhemerise—in other words, to make mere men of the gods and heroes—and his unflinching fidelity to his ancient texts. Thus he professes to give the names of "the most famous and noble persons of the Tuatha De Danann," and amongst them he mentions "the six sons of Delbaeth, son of Ogma, namely, Fiacadh, Ollamh, Indaei, Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba,"[13] but in another place he quotes this verse from some of his ancient sources—

"Brian Iucharba and the great Iuchar, The three gods of the sacred race of Dana, Fell at Mana on the resistless sea By the hand of Lughaidh, son of Ethlenn."

These whom the ancient verse distinctly designates as gods, Keating makes merely "noble persons," but at the very same time in treating of the De Danann he interpolates amongst his list of their notable men and women this curious sentence:[14] "The following are the names of three of their goddesses, viz., Badhbh [Bive], Macha, and Morighan."[15]

There are many allusions to the old Irish pantheon in Cormac's Glossary, which is a compilation of the ninth or tenth century explanatory of expressions which had even at that early date become obscure or obsolete, and many of these are evidently of pagan origin. Cormac describes Ana as mater deorum hibernensium, the mother of the Irish gods, and he adds, "Well used she to nourish the gods, it is from her name is said 'anæ,' i.e., abundance, and from her name is called the two paps of Ana." Buanann, says Cormac, was the "nurse of heroes," as "Anu was mother of the gods, so Buanann was mother of the 'Fiann.'" Etán was nurse of the poets. Brigit, of which we have now made a kind of national Christian name, was in pagan times a female poet, daughter of the Dagda. Her divinity is evident from what Cormac says of her, namely, that "she was a goddess whom poets worshipped, for very great and very noble was her superintendence, therefore call they her goddess of poets by this name, whose sisters were Brigit, woman of smith-work, and Brigit, woman of healing, namely, goddesses—from whose names Brigit[16] was with all Irishmen called a goddess," i.e., the terms "Brigit" and "goddess" were synonymous (?) The name itself he derives fancifully from the words breo-shaighit, "fiery arrow," as though the inspirations of a poet pierced like fiery arrows. Diancécht Cormac calls "the sage of the leech-craft of Ireland," but in the next line we read that he was so called because he was "Dia na cécht," i.e., Deus salutis, or god of health. Zeuss quotes an incantation to this god from a manuscript which is, he says, at least a thousand years old. His daughter was Etán, an artificer, one of whose sayings is quoted by Cormac. Néith was the god of battle among the Irish pagans, Nemon was his wife. The euhemerising tendency comes out strongly in Cormac's account of Manannán, a kind of Irish Proteus and Neptune combined, who according to him was "a renowned trader who dwelt in the Isle of Man, he was the best pilot in the West of Europe; through acquaintance with the sky he knew the quarter in which would be fair weather and foul weather, and when each of these two seasons would change. Hence the Scots and Britons called him a god of the sea. Thence, too, they said he was the sea's son—Mac Lir, i.e., son of the sea."

Another ancient Irish gloss[17] alludes to the mysterious Mór-rígan or war-goddess, of whom we shall hear more later on; and to Machæ, another war-goddess, "of whom is said Machæ's mast-feeding," meaning thereby, "the heads of men that have been slaughtered."

From all that we have said it clearly appears that carefully as the Christianised Irish strove to euhemerise their pantheon, they were unable to succeed. If, as Keating acknowledges, Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba were gods, then à fortiori much more so must have been the more famous Lugh, who compassed their death, and the Dagda, and Angus Óg. Keating himself, in giving us a list of the famous Tuatha De Danann has probably given us also the names of a large number of primitive Celtic deities—not that these were at all confined to the De Danann tribes.

It is remarkable that there is no mention of temples nor of churches dedicated to these Irish gods, nor do we find any of those inscriptions to them which are so common in Gaul, Belgium, Switzerland, and even Britain, but they appear from passages in Cormac's Glossary[18] to have had altars and images dedicated to them.

We are forced, then, to come to the conclusion that the pagan Irish once possessed a large pantheon, probably as highly organised as that of the Scandinavians, but owing to their earlier and completer conversion to Christianity only traces of it now remain.