CHAPTER V

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

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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,1 "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, and the same idea is also expressed in their better-known name of "Fomors", derived from two Gaelic words meaning "under sea". 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.* 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", and who combined in himself the two classical rôles of the Cyclops and the Medusa. Though he had two eyes, one was always

1 Pronounced Tooǎha dae donnann.

Rhys: Hibbert Lectures, 1886. Lecture VI-"Gods, Demons, and Heroes". * De Jubainville: Le Cycle Mythologique Irlandais, chap. v.

3 Ibid.

5 De Jubainville: Cycle Mythologique Irlandais, chap. IX.

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 dark"A man of fairest form," it says, golden hair down to his shoulders.

ness.

"with

He wore a mantle of gold braid over a shirt interwoven with threads of gold. Five golden necklaces were round

(B 219)

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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." 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".2

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". She was the

1 From the fifteenth-century Harleian MS. in the British Museum, numbered 5280, and called the Second Battle of Moytura. 2 Harleian MS. 5280.

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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. Whitlev Stokes in Irische Texte.