Irish mythology

“ Whatever may be the traces of a higher and more advanced mythology among the Irish, we can see from the questions of the king’s daughter that the objects of the popular belief were rather the personified powers of nature. Mysterious beings, who were supposed to dwell in the heavens or the earth, the sea, the river, the mountain, or the valley, were to be dreaded and conciliated. These they worshipped and invoked, as well as the natural objects themselves in which they were supposed to dwell; and this conception of them runs through the early history of Ireland during the pagan period. ”

“ For this loss of the Grecian mythology, and this substitution of Nox and Chaos for the remote ancestors of the Olympians, we have to thank the early Greek philosophers, and the general diffusion of a rude scientific knowledge, imparting a physical complexion to the mythological memory of the Greeks.
In the theogony of the ancient inhabitants of this country, we have an example of a slowly-growing, slowly-changing mythology, such as no other nation in the world can supply. The ancestry of the Irish gods is not bounded by a single generation or by twenty. ”

“ There is a whole department of research concerned with the growth of myths, stage by stage, from a little nebulous blotch into a peopled world of illusion. The strange evolution there set forth finds an exact parallel in the development of English opinion on Ireland. And, indeed, the more you study "the Irish Question," as it is envisaged by the ruling mind of Great Britain, the more conscious are you of moving in the realm not of reason but of mythology. ”

“ A race of beings, who must originally have fallen from the Celtic Olympus, continue to appear, with characteristics that remain the same in essence, and under a designation that may be heard in Ireland today, through ten centuries of Irish tradition and literature. [76]
These people are called in Irish mythology the Tuatha Dé Danann, described from at latest 1100 A.D. as aes sidhe, "the folk of the [fairy-] hillock;" the name for fairies in Ireland now is "the Sidhe." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He strives to infuse into his stories the sadder and more mystic aspects of the Gaelic spirit, as he conceives it. “I have not striven to depict the blither Irish Celt.” But many of his stories are simply Irish legends, e.g., The Harping of Cravetheen. The Author thus describes his work: “In certain sections are tales of the old Gaelic and Celtic Scandinavian life and mythology; in others there is a blending of paganism and Christianity; in others again are tales of the dreaming imagination having their base in old mythology, or in a kindred mythopæic source.... ”

“ That school of interpreters who decry all ancient Irish history as a mixture of mythology and fiction, and who can see in Cormac mac Art only a sun-god, would probably ascribe the expulsion of the Dési and other records of a similar nature to the creative imagination of the later Irish, who, they hold, invented their genealogies as they did their history. ”

“ Others make wicker-work images of vast size, the limbs of which they fill with living men and set on fire.” [43]
We find evidence of similarly awful customs in pagan Ireland. Among the oldest Gaelic records are tracts called Dinnsenchus, in which famous places are enumerated, together with the legends relating to them. Such topographies are found in several of the great Irish mediæval manuscripts, and therefore, of course, received their final transcription at the hands of Christian monks. ”

“ Divine help is often referred to in Irish myths, and a parallel instance occurs in Justin's allusion to the guidance of the Segovesi by birds to the Danubian regions which they conquered.21 Such myths are depicted on coins, on which a horse appears led by a bird, which sometimes whispers in its ear. Heroes were also inspired by birds to found towns. Birds were objects of worship and divination with the Celts, and divinities transformed themselves into the shape of birds, or birds formed their symbols.
The birth of heroes from a god and a human mother occurs in Irish myth. ”

“ Critical studies on the subject in handy form are as yet few. We may mention De Jubainville's Le Cyce Mythologique Irlandais et la Mythologie Celtique, Paris, 1884 (vol. ií, of the 'Cours') , translated by Mr. R. L. Best as The Irish Mythological Cycle and Celtic Mythology, Dublin, 1903; Professor J. Rhŷs's Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (The Hibbert Lectures for 1886) , London, 3rd edit., 1898, with their sequel, Studies in the Arthurian Legend, Oxford, 1891; and Mr. Alfred Nutt's The Voyage of Bran, son of Febal, 2 vols., London, 1895–97. ”

“ Myth and history acted and reacted upon each other, and produced heroic saga which may be defined as myth tinged and distorted by history. The largest element is as a rule suggested by myth, so that the varying heroic sagas of the various portions of a race, have always a great deal in common. These heroic sagas, together with the official or semi-official mythologies of the pre-Christian Irish are the subject-matter of the Annals. ”

“ A kind of digest of the chief published translations of ancient Irish and Welsh saga and romance, preceded by four short essays on the interest of Celtic mythology, and the sources of our knowledge of it, the origin of the Britons and their religion (44 pp. in all) . Pp. 47-248 are a summary of Gaelic myth, &c., and pp. 250-395 of British ditto. Then there is an essay on survivals of Celtic paganisms, and an Append. giving brief bibliogr. Index. The myths and romances are not related as a tale is told ”

“ But outside these, great numbers have been lost: destroyed during the Danish and Anglo-Norman wars.
Most of the Irish tales fall under four main cycles or periods of history and legend, which, in all the Irish poetical and romantic literature, were kept quite distinct.
First:—The Mythological Period, the stories of which are concerned with the mythical colonies preceding the Milesians, especially the Dedannans. The heroes of the tales belonging to this cycle, who are assigned to periods long before the Christian era, are gods, namely, the gods of the pagan Irish. ”

“ It is only the mythological element in the belief in metempsychosis which has come down to us, and from which we ascertain that the pagan Irish believed that supernatural beings could become clothed in flesh and blood, could enter into women and be born again, could take different shapes and pass through different stages of existence, as fowls, animals, or men. ”

“ Of course the supernatural element often takes as grim a form in early Irish as in early Norse or German; the Goddess with red eyebrows who on stricken fields wooed the Erse heroes from life did not differ essentially from the Valkyrie; and there were land and water demons in Ireland as terrible as those against which Beowulf warred. But, in addition, there is in the Irish tales an unearthliness free from all that is monstrous and horrible ”

“ There are several mythologies in Irish legend the figures of which are made contemporary with each other by the later poets, and while it might be of interest to scholars to disentangle these and relate each deity to its proper cycle, only the vision of the universe which underlay them all is of real importance.
That spiritual Overworld our Gaelic ancestors beheld was in essentials the same as the Overworld revealed in the sacred books ”

“ In these legends, prodical of enchantment, where Gods, heroes and bright supernatural beings mingle, are at league or war together, I have found not misty but clear traces of that old wisdom-religion once universal. There are indeed no ancient Irish Scriptures I am aware of, but they were not needed. To those who read in the Book of Life, philosophy and scripture are but as blinds over the spiritual vision. But we today— lost children of the stars—but painfully and indirectly catch glimpses of the bright spheres once our habitations, where we freely came and went. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A collection of fairy stories, legends, descriptions of superstitious practices, medicals cures and charms, robber stories, notes on holy wells, &c., taken down from the peasantry, some in Gaelic, some in English. The legends, &c., are preceded by a learned essay on the origin and history of legend, and the book concludes with chapters on Irish art and ethnology and a lecture by Sir W. Wilde on the ancient races of Ireland. Contains a vast amount of matter useful to the folk-lorist, to the general reader, and even to the historian. The stories are rather pathetic and tender than humorous. ”

“ When we find so much of the brief and scanty information given us by the classics, not only borne out, but amply illustrated by old Irish literature, when we find the dry bones of Posidonius and Cæsar rise up again before us with a ruddy covering of flesh and blood, it is not too much to surmise that in other matters also the various Celtic races bore to each other a close resemblance. ”

“ Magic, and the doing of it, runs through the whole of Irish story-telling, and not only into pagan but also into Christian legend; for it was easy to change the old gods into devils, to keep the demonic creatures as demons, to replace the wise Druids by the priests and saints, and the wizards by the heretics who gave themselves to sorcery. Thus the ancient supernaturalism of the Irish has continued, with modern modifications, to the present day. The body of thought is much the same as it was in the days of Conor and Finn ”

“ Patrick's driving the snakes and other reptiles out of Ireland has often been made the subject of, let us say, good-natured jest. But, besides, among others than Irishmen the legend has been laid to the score of the excessive credulity of Irishmen. I myself have heard German Catholics instance this story as an evidence of the excesses into which the Celtic mind is apt to run. And yet, investigation shows that the Irish are not alone in their pious belief. Father Chas. Cahier, a Jesuit, has compiled a work entitled "Caractéristiques des Saints dans l'Art Populaire." ”

“ Whatever themes sprang from the pagan age, probably nothing was written down before the Christian time, when Christian matter might be foisted into the pagan story. The Sagas belonging to the so-called Ulster Cycle afford the best illustration of early Irish traits. [150] They reflect a society [Pg 129] apparently at the “Homeric” stage of development, though the Irish heroes suffer in comparison with the Greek by reason of the immeasurable inferiority of these Gaelic Sagas to the Iliad and Odyssey. ”

“ Throughout Ireland there are many ancient, often prehistoric, earthworks or tumuli, which are popularly called forts, raths, or dúns, and in folk-belief these are considered fairy hills or the abodes of various orders of fairies. In this belief we see at work a definite anthropomorphism which attributes dwellings here on earth to an invisible spirit-race, as though this race were actually the spirits of the ancient Irish who built the forts. ”

“ A flower, like a flag, might be little more than a ghost; but a fruit has that sacramental solidity which in all mythologies belongs not to a ghost but to a god. This sight of things sustaining, and a beauty that nourishes and does not merely charm, is the premonition of practicality in the miracle of modern Ireland. It is a miracle more marvellous than the resurrection of the dead. ”

“ In our Ancient books there are stories of five different races of people who made their way to Ireland in old times, with very exact accounts of their wanderings before their arrival, and of the battles they fought after landing. But these narratives cannot be depended on, for they are not real History but Legends, that is stories either wholly or partly fabulous. Of the five early races, the two last, who were called Dedannans and Milesians, were the most remarkable; and they are mixed up with most of the old Irish tales. ”

“ For as the religion of the ancient Irish was intermingled with their history, and as the wide diffusion of their celebrity arose from the eminence of their religious creed, the flames of that conflagration have inflicted a loss upon the antiquarian which fifteen centuries of study have not been able to repair! ”