Chapter 5

[1]SeeHaliday's "Keating," p. 215.

[2]See p. 15 of O'Curry's MS. Materials. There was some doubt in his mind about the words in brackets, but as the sheets of his book were passing through the press he took out the MS. for another look on a particularly bright day, the result of which left him no doubt that he had read the name correctly.

[3]For a typical citation of this book see p. 28 of O'Donovan's "Genealogy of the Corca Laidh," in the "Miscellany of the Celtic Society."

[4]See"Celtic Miscellany," p. 144, O'Donovan's tract on Corca Laidh.

[5]"Generositatem vero et generis nobilitatem præ rebus omnibus magis appetunt. Unde et generosa conjugia plus longe capiunt quam sumptuosa vel opima. Genealogiam quoque generis sui etiam de populo quilibet observat, et non solum, avos, atavos, sed usque ad sextam vel septimam et ultra procul generationem, memoriter et prompte genus enarrat in hunc modum Resus filius Griffini filii Resi filii Theodori, filii Aeneæ, filii Hoeli filii Cadelli filii Roderici magni et sic deinceps."Genus itaque super omnia diligunt, et damna sanguinis atque dedecoris ulciscuntur. Vindicis enim animi sunt et iræ cruentæ nec solum novas et recentes injurias verum etiam veteres et antiquas velut instanter vindicare parati" ("Cambriæ Descriptio," Cap. XVII.).

"Genus itaque super omnia diligunt, et damna sanguinis atque dedecoris ulciscuntur. Vindicis enim animi sunt et iræ cruentæ nec solum novas et recentes injurias verum etiam veteres et antiquas velut instanter vindicare parati" ("Cambriæ Descriptio," Cap. XVII.).

[6]O'Donovan says—I forget where—that he had tested in every part of Ireland how far the popular memory could carry back its ancestors, and found that it did not reach beyond the seventh generation.

[7]According to the "Four Masters"; in 213, according to Keating.

[8]But see O'Donovan's introduction to "The Book of Rights," where he adduces some reasons for believing that it may have been a septennial not a triennial convocation.

[9]SeeKeating's History under the reign of Tuathal Teachtmhar.

[10]In the seventeenth century. His book on genealogies would, O'Curry computed, fill 1,300 pages of the size of O'Donovan's "Four Masters."

[11]This was a very ancient law book, which is quoted at least a dozen times in Cormac's Glossary, made in the ninth or tenth century.

[12]Thus quaintly expressed in the original, for which see O'Curry's MS. Materials, p. 576: "muna ffaghuid dearbhtha iar ndeghleabhraibh é, a chuntabhairt fén do chur re a chois."

[13]Seepp. 102, 113 of Father Hogan's "Documenta de S. Patricio ex Libro Armachano," where he is called Endae. He persecuted Cuthbad's three sons, "fosocart endae cennsalach fubîthin creitme riacâch," but Patrick is said to have baptized his son, "Luid iarsuidiu cucrimthan maccnêndi ceinnselich et ipse creditit."

Of that part of every Irish pedigree which runs back from the first century to Milesius nothing can be laid down with certainty, nor indeed can there be anyabsolute certaintyin affirming that Irish pedigrees from the eleventh to the third century are reliable—we have only an amount of cumulative evidence from which we may draw such a deduction with considerable confidence. The mere fact that these pedigrees are traced back a thousand years further through Irish kings and heroes, and end in a son of Milesius, need not in the least affect—as in popular estimation it too often does—the credibility of the last seventeen hundred years, which stands upon its own merits.

On the contrary, such a continuation is just what we should expect. In the Irish genealogies the sons of Milesius occupy the place that in other early genealogies is held by the gods. And the sons of Milesius were possibly the tutelary gods of the Gael. We have seen how one of them was so, at least in folk belief, and was addressed in semi-seriousness as still living and reigning even in the last century.

All the Germanic races looked upon themselves as descended from gods. The Saxon, Anglian, Danish, Norwegian, andSwedish kings were traced back either to Woden or to some of his companions or sons.[1]It was the same with the Greeks, to whom the Celts bear so close a similitude. Their Herakleids, Asklepiads, Æakids, Neleids, and Daedalids, are a close counterpart to our Eremonians, Eberians, Ithians, and Irians, and in each case all the importance was attached to the primitive eponymous hero or god from whom they sprang. Without him the whole pedigree became uninteresting, unfinished, headless. These beliefs exercised full power even upon the ablest and most cultured Greeks. Aristotle and Hippocratês, for instance, considered themselves descended from Asklêpius, Thucidydes from Æakus, and Socrates from Daedalus; just as O'Neill and O'Donnell did from Eremon, O'Brien from Eber, and Magennis from Ir. It was to the divine or heroic fountain heads of the race, not so much as to the long and mostly barren list of names which led up to it, that the real importance was attached. It is not in Ireland alone that we see mythology condensing into a dated genealogy. The same thing has happened in Persian history, and the history of Denmark by Saxo Grammaticus affords many such instances. In Greece the Neleid family of Pylus traced their origin to Neptune, the Lacedæmonian kings traced theirs to Cadmus and Danaüs, and Hekatæus of Miletus was the fifteenth descendant of a god.

Again we meet with in Teutonic and Hellenic mythology the same difficulty that meets us in our own—that of distinguishing gods from heroes and heroes from men. The legends of the Dagda and of Angus of the Boyne and the Tuatha De Danann, of Tighearnmas and the Fomorians, of Lugh the Long-handed and the children of Tuireann—all evidently mythologic—were treated in the same manner, recited by the same tongues, and regarded with the same unwavering belief, as the history of Conor mac Nessa and Déirdre, of Cuchulainand Mève, or that of Conn of the Hundred Battles, Owen Mór, Finn mac Cool, and the Fenians. The early Greek, in the same way, treated the stories of Apollo and Artemis, of Arês and Aphroditê, just as he did those of Diomede and Helen, Meleager and Althæa, Achilles, or the voyage of theArgo. All were in a primitive and uncritical age received with the same unsuspicious credulity, and there was no hard-and-fast line drawn between gods and men. Just as the Mórrígan, the war-goddess, has her eye dashed out by Cuchulain, so do we find in Homer gods wounded by heroes. Thus, too, Apollo is condemned to serve Admetus, and Hercules is sold as a slave to Omphalê. Herodotus himself confesses that he is unable to determine whether a certain Thracian god Zalmoxis, was a god or a man,[2]and he finds the same difficulty regarding Dionysus and Pan; while Plutarch refuses to determine whether Janus was a god or a king;[3]and Herakleitus the philosopher, confronted by the same difficulty, made the admirablemotthat men were "mortal gods," gods were "immortal men."[4]

In our literature, although the fact does not always appear distinctly, the Dagda, Angus Óg, Lugh the Long-handed, Ogma, and their fellows are the equivalents of the immortal gods, while certainly Cuchulain and Conor and probably Curigh Mac Daire, Conall Cearnach, and the other famous Red Branch chiefs, whatever they may have been in reality, are the equivalent of the Homeric heroes, that is to say, believed to have been epigoni of the gods, and therefore greaterthan ordinary human beings; while just as in Greek story there are the cycles of the war round Thebes, the voyage of theArgothe fate of Œdipus, etc., so we have in Irish numerous smaller groups of epic stories—now unfortunately mostly lost or preserved in digests—which, leaving out the Cuchulain and Fenian cycles, centre round such minor characters as Macha, who founded Emania, Leary Lore, Labhraidh [Lowry] the Mariner, and others.

That the Irish gods die in both saga and annals like so many human beings, in no wise militates against the supposition of their godhead. Even the Greek did not always consider his gods as eternal. A study of comparative mythology teaches that gods are in their original essence magnified men, and subject to all men's changes and chances. They are begotten and born like men. They eat, sleep, feel sickness, sorrow, pain, like men. "Like men," says Grimm, "they speak a language, feel passions, transact affairs, are clothed and armed, possess dwellings and utensils." Being man-like in these things, they are also man-like in their deaths. They are only on a greater scale than we. "This appears to me," says Grimm,[5]"a fundamental feature in the faith of the heathen, that they allowed to their gods not an unlimited and unconditional duration, but only a term of life far exceeding that of man." As their shape is like the shape of man only vaster, so are their lives like the lives of men only indefinitely longer. "With our ancestors [the Teutons]," said Grimm, "the thought of the gods being immortal retires into the background. The Edda never calls them 'eylifir' or 'ôdauðligir,' and their death is spoken of without disguise." So is it with us also. The Dagda dies, slain in the battle of North Moytura; the three "gods of the De Danann" die at the instigation of Lugh; and the great Lugh himself, from whom Lugdunum, now Lyons, takes its name, and to whom early Celtic inscriptions are found, shares the same fate. Manannán isslain, so is Ogma, and so are many more. And yet though recorded as slain they do not wholly disappear. Manannán came back to Bran riding in his chariot across the Ocean,[6]and Lugh makes his frequent appearances amongst the living.

[1]These genealogies were in later times, like the Irish ones, extended to Noah.

[2]Herod, iv. 94-96.

[3]Numa, ch. xix.

[4]"θεοὶ θνητοὶ," "ἄνθρωποι ἀθάνατοι." It is most curious to find this so academic question dragged into the hard light of day and subjected to the scrutiny of so prosaic a person as the Roman tax-collector. Under the Roman Empire all lands in Greece belonging to the immortal gods were exempted from tribute, and the Roman tax-collector refused to recognise as immortal gods any deities who had once been men. The confusion arising from such questions offered an admirable target to Lucian for his keenest shafts of ridicule.

[5]"Deutsche Mythologie," article on the Condition of the Gods.

[6]"Voyage of Bran mac Febail," Nutt and Kuno Meyer, vol. i. p. 16.

Although Irish literature is full of allusions to the druids it is extremely difficult to know with any exactness what they were. They are mentioned from the earliest times. The pre-Milesian races, the Nemedians and Fomorians, had their druids, who worked mutual spells against each other. The Tuatha De Danann had innumerable druids amongst them, who used magic. The invading Milesians had three druids with them in their ships, Amergin the poet and two others. In fact, druids are mentioned in connection with all early Irish fiction and history, from the first colonising of Ireland down to the time of the saints. It seems very doubtful, however, whether there existed in Ireland as definitely established an order of druids as in Britain and on the Continent.[1]They are frequently mentioned in Irish literature as ambassadors, spokesmen, teachers, and tutors. Kings were sometimes druids, so were poets. It is a word which seems to me to have been, perhaps from the first, used with great laxity and great latitude. The druids, so far as we can ascertain, do not seem to be connected with any positive rites or worship; still less do they appear to have been a regular priesthood, and there is not a shadow of evidence to connect them with any special worship as that of the sun or of fire. In the oldest saga-cycle the druid appears as a man of the highest rank and related to kings. King Conor's father was according to some—probably the oldest—accounts a druid; so was Finn mac Cool's grandfather.

Before the coming of St. Patrick there certainly existed images, or, as they are called by the ancient authorities, "idols" in Ireland, at which or to which sacrifice used to be offered, probably with a view to propitiating the earth-gods, possibly the Tuatha De Danann, and securing good harvests and abundant kine. From sacrificial rites spring, almost of necessity, a sacrificial caste, and this caste—the druids—had arrived at a high state of organisation in Gaul and Britain when observed by Cæsar, and did not hesitate to sacrifice whole hecatombs of human beings. "They think," said Cæsar, "that unless a man's life is rendered up for a man's life, the will of the immortal God cannot be satisfied, and they have sacrifices of this kind as a national institution."

There appears nothing, however, that I am aware of, to connect the druids in Ireland with human sacrifice, although such sacrifice appears to have been offered. The druids, however, appear to have had private idols of their own. We find a very minute account in the tenth-century glossary of King Cormac as to how a poet performed incantations with hisidols. The word "poet" is here apparently equivalent to druid, as the word "druid" like the Latinvatesis frequently a synonym for "poet." Here is how the glossary explains the incantation calledImbas Forosnai:—

"This," says the ancient lexicographer, "describes to the poet whatsoever thing he wishes to discover,[2]and this is the manner in which it is performed. The poet chews a bit of the raw red flesh of a pig, a dog, or a cat, and then retires with it to his own bed behind the door,[3]where he pronounces an oration over it and offers it to hisidol gods. He theninvokes the idols, and if he has not received the illumination before the next day, he pronounces incantations upon his two palms and takes his idol gods unto him [into his bed] in order that he may not be interrupted in his sleep. He then places his two hands upon his two cheeks and falls asleep. He is then watched so that he be not stirred nor interrupted by any one until everything that he seeks be revealed to him at the end of anomad,[4]or two or three, or as long as he continues at his offering, and hence it is that this ceremony is called Imbas, that is, the two hands upon him crosswise, that is, a hand over and a hand hither upon his cheeks. And St. Patrick prohibited this ceremony, because it is a species of Teinm Laeghdha,[5]that is, he declared that any one who performed it should have no place in heaven or on earth."

These were apparently the private images of the druid himself which are spoken of, but there certainly existed public idols in pagan Ireland before the evangelisation of the island. St. Patrick himself, in his "Confession," asserts that before his coming the Irish worshipped idols—idola et immunda—and we have preserved to us more than one account of the great gold-covered image which was set up in Moy Slaught[6][i.e., thePlain of Adoration], believed to be in the present county of Cavan. It stood there surrounded by twelve lesser idols ornamented with brass, and may possibly have been regarded as a sun-god ruling over the twelve seasons. It was called the Crom Cruach or Cenn Cruach,[7]and certain Irish tribes considered it their special tutelary deity. The Dinnseanchas, or explanation of the name of Moy Slaught, calls it "the King Idol of Erin," "and around him were twelve idols made of stones, but he was of gold. Until Patrick's advent he was the god of every folk that colonised Ireland. To him they used to offer the firstlings of every issue and the chief scions of every clan;" and the ancient poem in the Book of Leinster declares that it was "a high idol with many fights, which was named the Cromm Cruaich."[8]

The poem tells us that "the brave Gaels used to worship it, and would never ask from it satisfaction as to their portion of the hard world without paying it tribute."

"He was their God,[9]The withered Cromm with many mists,The people whom he shook over every harbour,The everlasting kingdom they shall not have.To him without gloryWould they kill their piteous wailing offspring,With much wailing and perilTo pour their blood around Cromm Cruaich.Milk and cornThey would ask from him speedilyIn return for one-third of their healthy issue,Great was the horror and scare of him.To himNoble Gaels would prostrate themselves,From the worship of him, with many manslaughtersThe Plain is called Moy Sleacht.* * * * *In their ranks (stood)Four times three stone idolsTo bitterly beguile the hosts,The figure of Cromm was made of gold.Since the ruleOf Heremon,[10]the noble man of grace,There was worshipping of stonesUntil the coming of good Patrick of Macha [Ardmagh]."

There is not the slightest reason to distrust this evidence as far as the existence of Crom Cruach goes.

"This particular tradition," says Mr. Nutt, "like the majority of those contained in it [the Dinnseanchas] must be of pre-Christian origin. It would have been quite impossible for a Christian monk to have invented such a story, and we may accept it as a perfectly genuine bit of information respecting the ritual side of insular Celtic religion."[11]

St. Patrick overthrew this idol, according both to the poem in the Book of Leinster and the early lives of the saint. The life says that when St. Patrick cursed Crom the ground opened and swallowed up the twelve lesser idols as far as their heads, which, as Rhys acutely observes, shows that when the early Irish lives of the saint were written the pagan sanctuary had so fallen into decay, that only the heads of the lesser idols remained above ground, while he thinks that it was at this time from its bent attitude and decayed appearance the idol was called Crom, "the Stooper."[12]There is, however, noapparent or recorded connection between this idol and the druids, nor do the druids appear to have fulfilled the functions of a public priesthood in Ireland, and the Introduction to the Seanchas Mór, or ancient Book of the Brehon Laws, distinctly says that, "until Patrick came only three classes of persons were permitted to speak in public in Erin, a chronicler to relate events and to tell stories, a poet to eulogise and to satirise, and a Brehon to pass sentence from precedents and commentaries," thus noticeably omitting all mention of the druids as a public body.

The idol Crom with his twelve subordinates may very well have represented the sun, upon whom both season and crops and consequently the life both of man and beast depend. The gods to whom the early Irish seem to have sacrificed, were no doubt, as I think Mr. Nutt has shown, agricultural powers, the lords of life and growth, and with these the sun, who is at the root of all growth, was intimately connected, "the object of that worship was to promote increase, the theory of worship was—life for life."[13]That the Irish swore by the sun and the moon and the elements is certain; the oath is quoted in many places,[14]and St. Patrick appears to allude to sun-worship in that passage of his "Confession," where he says, "that sun which we see rising daily at His bidding for our sake, it will never reign, and its splendour will not last for ever, but those who adore it will perish miserably for all eternity:" this is also borne out by the passage in Cormac's Glossary of the images the pagans used to adore, "as, for instance, the form or figure of the sun on the altar."[15]

Another phase of the druidic character seems to have been that he was looked upon as an intermediary between man and the invisible powers. In the story which tells us how Midir the De Danann, carries off the king's wife, we are informed that the druid's counsel is sought as to how to recover her, which he at last is enabled to do "through his keys of science and Ogam," after a year's searching.

The druids are represented as carrying wands of yew, but there is nothing in Irish literature, so far as I am aware of, about their connection with the oak, from the Greek for which,δρῦς,[16]they are popularly supposed to derive their name. They used to be consulted as soothsayers upon the probable success of expeditions, as by Cormac mac Art, when he was thinking about extorting a double tribute from Munster,[17]and by Dáthi, the last pagan king of Ireland, whensetting out upon his expedition abroad; they took auguries by birds, they could cause magic showers and fires, they observed stars and clouds, they told lucky days,[18]they had ordeals of their own,[19]but, above all, they appear to have been tutors or teachers.

Another druidic practice which is mentioned in Cormac's Glossary is more fully treated of by Keating, in his account of the great pagan convention at Uisneach, a hill in Meath, "where the men of Ireland were wont to exchange their goods and their wares and other jewels." This convention was held in the month of May,

"And at it they were wont to make a sacrifice to the arch-god, whom they adored, whose name was Bél. It was likewise their usage to light two fires to Bél in every district in Ireland at this season, and to drive a pair of each herd of cattle that the district contained between these two fires, as a preservative, to guard them against all the diseases of that year. It is from that fire thus made that the day on which the noble feast of the apostles Peter and James is held has been called Bealtaine [in Scotch Beltane],i.e., Bél's fire."

Cormac, however, says nothing about a god named Bél—who, indeed, is only once mentioned elsewhere, so far as I know[20]—but explains the name as if it were Bil-tene, "goodly fire," from the fires which the druids made on that day through which to drive the cattle.[21]

Post-Christian accounts of the druids as a whole, and or individual druids differ widely. The notes on St. Patrick, in the Book of Armagh, present them in the worst possible light as wicked wizards and augurs and people of incantations,[22]and the Latin lives of the Saints nearly always call them "magi." Yet they are admitted to have been able to prophecy. King Laoghaire's [Leary's] druids prophesied to him three years before the arrival of Patrick that "adze-heads would come over a furious sea,"

"Their mantles hole-headed,Their staves crook-headed,Their tables in the east of their houses."[23]

In the lives of the early saints we find some of them on fair terms with the druids. Columcille's first teacher was a druid, whom his mother consulted about him. It is true that in the Lismore text he is called not a druid but afáidh, i.e., vatesor prophet, but this only confirms the close connection between druid, prophet, and teacher, for his proceedings are distinctly druidical, the account runs: "Now when the time for reading came to him the cleric went to a certain prophetwho abode in the land to ask him when the boy ought to begin. When the prophet had scanned the sky, he said 'Write an alphabet for him now.' The alphabet was written on a cake, and Columcille consumed the cake in this wise, half to the east of a water, and half to the west of a water. Said the prophet through grace of prophecy, 'So shall this child's territory be, half to the east of the sea, and half to the west of the sea.'"[24]Columcille himself is said to have composed a poem beginning, "My Druid is the son of God." Another druid prophesies of St. Brigit before she was born,[25]and other instances connecting the early saints with druids are to be found in their lives, which at least show that there existed a sufficient number of persons in early Christian Ireland who did not consider the druids wholly bad, but believed that they could prophecy, at least in the interests of the saints.

From what we have said, it is evident that there were always druids in Ireland, and that they were personages of great importance. But it is not clear that they were an organised body like the druids of Gaul,[26]or like the Bardic body in later times in Ireland, nor is it clear what their exact functions were, but they seem to have been teachers above everything else. It is clear, too, that the ancient Irish—at least in some cases—possessed and worshipped images. That they sacrificed to them, and even offered up human beings, is by no means so certain, the evidence for this resting upon the single passage in the Dinnseanchas, and the poem (in a modern style of metre) in the Book of Leinster, which we have just given, and which though it is evidence for the existence of the idol Crom Cruach, known to us already from other sources, may possibly have had the trait of human sacrifice added as a heightening touch by a Christian chronicler familiar with theaccounts of Moloch and Ashtarôth. The complete silence which, outside of these passages,[27]exists in all Irish literature as to a proceeding so terrifying to the popular imagination, seems to me a proof that if human sacrifice was ever resorted to at all, it had fallen into abeyance before the landing of the Christian missionaries.

[1]Cæsar's words are worth repeating. He says that there were two sorts of men in Gaul both numerous and honoured—the knights and the Druids, "equites et druides," because the people counted for nothing and took the initiative in nothing. As for the Druids, he says: "Rebus divinis intersunt, sacrificia publica et privata procurant, religiones interpretantur ... nam fere de omnibus controversiis publicis privatisque constituunt, et si quod est admissum facinus, si cœdes facta, si de hereditate, de finibus controversia est iidem decernunt præmia, pœnasque constituunt." All this seems very like the duties of the Irish Druids, but not what follows: "si qui, aut privatus aut populus eorum decreto non stetit, sacrificiis interdicunt. Hæc pœna apud eos est gravissima." Nor do the Irish appear to have had the over-Druid whom Cæsar talks of. (See"De Bello Gallico," book vi. chaps. 13, 14).

[2]"Cach raet bid maith lasin filid agus bud adla(i)c dó do fhaillsiugad."

[3]Thus O'Curry ("Miscellany of the Celtic Society," vol. ii. p. 208); but Stokes translates, "he puts it then on the flagstone behind the door." See the original in Cormac's Glossary under "Himbas." I have not O'Donovan's translation by me.

[4]O'Curry translates this by "day." It is at present curiously used, I suppose by a kind of confusion with the English "moment," in the sense of a minute or other short measure of time. At least I have often heard it so used.

[5]Another species of incantation mentioned in the glossary.

[6]In Irish Magh Sleacht.

[7]In O'Donovan's fragmentary manuscript catalogue of the Irish MSS., in Trinity College, Dublin, he writesaproposof the life of St. Maedhog or Mogue, contained in H. 2, 6: "I searched the two Brefneys for the situation of Moy Sleacht on which stood the chief pagan Irish idol Crom Cruach, but have failed, being misled by Lanigan, who had been misled by Seward, who had been blinded by the impostor Beauford, who placed this plain in the county of Leitrim. It can, however, be proved from this life of St. Mogue that Magh Sleacht was that level part of the Barony of Tullaghan (in the county of Cavan) in which the island of Inis Breaghwee (now Mogue's Island), the church of Templeport, and the little village of Ballymagauran are situated." I have been told that O'Donovan afterwards found reason to doubt the correctness of this identification.

[8]M. de Jubainville connects the name withcru(Latin,cruor), "blood," translating Cenn Cruach bytête sanglanteand Crom Cruach byCourbe sanglante, orCroissant ensanglanté; but Rhys connects it with Cruach, "a reek" or "mound," as in Croagh-Patrick, St. Patrick's Reek. Cenn Cruach is evidently the same name as the Roman station Penno-Crucium, in the present county of Stafford, the Irish "c" being as usual the equivalent of the British "p." This would make it appear that Cromm was no local idol. Rhys thinks it got its name Crom Cruach, "the stooped one of the mound," from its bent attitude in the days of its decadence.

[9]Observe the exquisite and complicated metre of this in the original, a proof, I think, that the lines are not very ancient. It has been edited from the Book of Leinster, Book of Ballymote, Book of Lecan, and Rennes MS., at vol. i. p. 301 of Mr. Nutt's "Voyage of Bran," by Dr. Kuno Meyer—"Ba hé anDiaIn Cromm Crín co n-immudciaIn lucht ro Craith ós eachCúanIn flaithiusBúannochosBia."

"Ba hé anDiaIn Cromm Crín co n-immudciaIn lucht ro Craith ós eachCúanIn flaithiusBúannochosBia."

[10]I.e., Eremon or Erimon, Son of Milesius, see above, p.59.

[11]The details of this idol, and, above all, the connection in which it stands to the mythic culture-king Tighearnmas, could not, as Mr. Nutt well remarks, have been invented by a Christian monk; but nothing is more likely, it appears to me, than that such a one, familiar with the idol rites of Judæa from the Old Testament, may have added the embellishing trait of the sacrifice of "the firstlings of every issue."

[12]Sir Samuel Ferguson's admirable poem upon the death of Cormac refers to thepriestsof the idol, but there is no recorded evidence of any such priesthood—"Crom Cruach and his sub-gods twelve,Saith Cormac, are but carven treene.The axe that made them haft or helve,Had worthier of your worship been.But he who made the tree to grow,And hid in earth the iron stone,And made the man with mind to knowThe axe's use is God alone.Anonto priests of Crom were brought—Where girded in their service dread,They ministeredin red Moy Slaught—Word of the words King Cormac said.They loosed their curse against the king,They cursed him in his flesh and bones,And daily in their mystic ringThey turned the maledictive stones."D'Arcy McGee also refers to Crom Cruach in terms almost equally poetic, but equally unauthorised:—"Their ocean-god was Manannán Mac Lir,Whose angry lipsIn their white foam full often would interWhole fleets of ships.Cromwas their day-god and their thunderer,Made morning and eclipse;Bride was their queen of song, and unto herThey prayed with fire-touched lips!"

[12]Sir Samuel Ferguson's admirable poem upon the death of Cormac refers to thepriestsof the idol, but there is no recorded evidence of any such priesthood—

"Crom Cruach and his sub-gods twelve,Saith Cormac, are but carven treene.The axe that made them haft or helve,Had worthier of your worship been.

But he who made the tree to grow,And hid in earth the iron stone,And made the man with mind to knowThe axe's use is God alone.

Anonto priests of Crom were brought—Where girded in their service dread,They ministeredin red Moy Slaught—Word of the words King Cormac said.

They loosed their curse against the king,They cursed him in his flesh and bones,And daily in their mystic ringThey turned the maledictive stones."

D'Arcy McGee also refers to Crom Cruach in terms almost equally poetic, but equally unauthorised:—

"Their ocean-god was Manannán Mac Lir,Whose angry lipsIn their white foam full often would interWhole fleets of ships.Cromwas their day-god and their thunderer,Made morning and eclipse;Bride was their queen of song, and unto herThey prayed with fire-touched lips!"

[13]Nutt's "Voyage of Bran," vol. ii. p. 250.

[14]The elements are recorded as having slain King Laoghaire because he broke the oath he had made by them. In the Lament for Patrick Sarsfield as late as the seventeenth century, the unknown poet cries:"Go mbeannaigh' an ghealach gheal's an ghrian duit,O thug tu an lá as láimh Righ 'Liam leat."I.e., May the white Moon and the Sun bless you, since thou hast taken the Day out of the hand of King William.And a little later we find the harper Carolan swearing "by the light of the sun.""Molann gach aon an té bhíos cráibhtheach cóir,Agus molann gach aon an té bhíos páirteach leó,Dar solas na gréinesé mo rádh go deóGo molfad gan spéis gan bhréig an t-áth mar geóbhad."

"Go mbeannaigh' an ghealach gheal's an ghrian duit,O thug tu an lá as láimh Righ 'Liam leat."

I.e., May the white Moon and the Sun bless you, since thou hast taken the Day out of the hand of King William.

And a little later we find the harper Carolan swearing "by the light of the sun."

"Molann gach aon an té bhíos cráibhtheach cóir,Agus molann gach aon an té bhíos páirteach leó,Dar solas na gréinesé mo rádh go deóGo molfad gan spéis gan bhréig an t-áth mar geóbhad."

[15]See above, ch. V, note18.

Back to Index Next