The most ancient Divinity of whom we have any knowledge is Danu herself, the Goddess for whom the whole hierarchy of Gods received its name of Tuatha De Danann.

She was also called Anu or Ana, and her name still clings to two well-known moutains near Killarney, which, though now called simply "The Paps", were known formerly as the "Paps of Ana".

She was the Universal Mother; "well she used to cherish the Gods", says the commentator of a ninth-century Irish glossary.

Her husband is never mentioned by name, but one may assume him, from British analogies, to have been Bile, known to Gaelic tradition as a God of Hades, a kind of Celtic Dis Pater who 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 Argetlam, 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.

Among the Gauls, Camulus, whose name meant "Heaven", was indentified by the Romans with Mars; and other such instances come to mind, he was possessed of an invincible sword, one of the four chief treasures of the Tuatha De 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 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 sacrafices, 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". 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 Morrigu, or "Great Queen".

This supreme War-Goddess of the Gaels, who resembles a fiercer Hera, 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 Ares and Poseidon 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 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 Morrigu".

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".

An acount 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 mens 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 the goblins and owls, and destroying demons of the air and firmament, and the demoniac phantom host; and they were inciting and sustainig 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. The Goddesses Badb and the Morrigu 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 contries for their avatar, the hoodie-crow.

After Nuada, the greatest of the Gods was the Dagda, whose name seems to have meant the "Good God".

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 proprtion 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 summe, 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, lownecked tunic which with only reached down to his hips, to his hips, and, over this a hooded cap 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.

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 Formors, 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.

Formerly there was only a well, shaded by nine magic hazel-trees.

These trees bore crimson nuts, and it was property of the nuts that whoever ate 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 priviledge-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 Boanne, with the proverbial women'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 disconsolatley through the dephts 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 decended.

This way of accounting for the excistance 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 Ler.

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, evil christianizers of Ireland adopted the Pagan Goddess into their roll of saintship, and, thus canonized, she obtained immense popularity as Saint Brigit, or Bride.

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 youthfull exponent of love and beuty.

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 Falgo-a name for what was otherwise, and still is, called the Isle of Man where he had a strong-hold 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 flippanty as personified ""gentle hints".

They stood beside his door, and when anyone approached to ask for hospitality, the the first one said:" Do not come! do not come!" and the second one added:"Get away! get away!" while the third one chimed in with:"Go past the house! go past the house!"

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 thier owner, who does not otherwise apear as a churlish and illiberal deity.

On the contrary, he is represented as the victim of others, who plundered him freely. The god Angus took away his wife Etain , 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 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, were compelled, as expiation, to pay the greatest fine ever heard of-nothing less than the chief treasures of the world.

Another son, Cairpre, became the professional bard of the Tuatha De Danann, while three others reigned for a short time over the divine race.

Charles Squire

The Late Cian Mac Grainne for original source code