Macaustku — Temair Brer/: Remains and Traditions of Tarn. ;jl ;j 



tempting to treat 011-niueach as a variation of 011-gotliach, derived from a 

 misreading of a note written in Ogham. A* will be found by experiment, 



the scores by which these two words would be so denoted arc almost 

 identical. But the temptation must be suppressed. The names would not 

 be written in Ogham characters in their modern orthography, with lenition 

 expressed by means of //, except as ajeio d'esprit ; and this would not happen 

 till after they had both established a separate existence in literature. 

 The foregoing arguments give us the following equation : — ■ 



Geide Oll-gothach = Eochu Oll-athair = In Oagdae = Sen-gann 



— and this leads to the further conclusion that the appellation In Dagdae is a 

 euphemism, " the good god " instead of " the storm god." But why, it will 

 be asked, is this Celtic storm-god claimed as the head and founder of the 

 Pictish monarchy ? The answer to this question must be, that we have here a 

 variety of syncretism in which the new gods are not added to the old pantheon, 

 but are identified with them individually — just such a syncretism as we see 

 existing in literature between the gods of Greece and of Eome, where Iuppiter 

 and Zeus, Minerva and Athene, Diana and Artemis, are treated as identical 

 personalities. The incoming Celts have identified their storm-god with some 

 god or deified man, who was supposed to have founded the kingdom of the 

 aboriginal Picts. 



In that case, someone will object, the name of Geide ought to have come 

 first in the dynasty which we have isolated. Instead of this it occupies the 

 fourth place. This difficulty arises however we are to interpret the docu- 

 ments; but an explanation is not hard to find. It is this — Geide, or rather 

 the person whose place in the original tradition Geide holds, was the first 

 /in man king in the list. The three names which precede his are the names of 

 gods. If the hypothesis on which we are working is as correct as it seems 

 reasonable — that the dynastic lists before us are extracted from the several 

 versions of a folk-story, which was itself a popular paraphrase of an epic — it 

 follows that the epic narrated a history which began in ( Hympus, and half way 

 through descended to a newly-fashioned earth. It was, in other words, an 

 epic of cosmogony. 



Of this view the Fir Bolg list affords some confirmation. The name.- of 

 the two personages in joint rule, Gann and Genann, are clearly variants of one 

 another. In fact, they belong toa triplicityoi which the third member is their 

 successor Sen- Gann, " Old Gann." New, why due- nol "Old Gann"reign 

 before his presumably younger colleagues ? Doubtless because he is"old'' 

 from a different point of view. He is the " Old Gann " of the earth-dwellers; 

 probably he is conceived of as a sort of heaven-descended iimrlal creatoj 



