Macalistek — Temair Breg : Remains and Traditions of Tar a. 317 



descent From Dis Pater 1 ; it would also bring the Tea story yel Further into 

 line with the model of the myth of Kore. 

 Book III: The Story of the Heroes. 



v, vi, vii. Three heroes, or groups of heroes, who teach the several arts of 

 life and religion to the people. They are variously named, except Fiachu, who 

 appears in all the lists. We may very fairly note the curious coincidence 

 that the Tuatha list ends with three culture heroes, as does the ancient 

 Hebrew tradition, which after the story of Creation gives us a genealogy, 

 culminating in three culture-heroes, Jubal, Jabal, and Tubal. 



Book IV : The Story of the Final Catastrophe. 



Possibly a flood-legend : the tale of Cesair is certainly a native flood- 

 legend, synchronized by the historians with the flood of Noah. A reminiscence 

 of a flood-story may have become incorporated with a wholly different saga, 

 that of the fight between the sons of Kerned and the Fomoraig, when the 

 combatants were drowned by the rising tide which, in the heat of battle, 

 they did not perceive. It is also suggested by the frequent legends of lake- 

 bursts. But on the whole it is more probable that the Final Catastrophe 

 took the form of an annihilating war, as in Volo-spa. Indeed, that glorious 

 poem is not unlike the epic which we are reconstructing, and may even be 

 based upon it. The Druidic name or equivalent for the Teutonic Kagna-rok, 

 the Doom of the Gods, appears to have been Erdathe, 2 a mysterious word 

 still awaiting explanation. 



It is evident that such a symmetrical arrangement as this— three gods, a 

 demigod, and then three heroes — must be due to conscious literary manipu- 

 lation on the part of some individual author. Moreover, such an author 

 must have had a mind stored with ideas of religion above the common folk- 

 lore; no ordinary man would have begun his scheme of creation with the 

 abstract conception of Divine Wisdom, even though he impersonated it in the 

 crude form of a horse-god. This might be taken as an objection to the theory 

 here set forward; but it need not necessarily be so. We are only beginning 

 to realize how much movement there was between peoples and tribes even so 

 far back as the European Bronze Age. I see no extravagance in imagining a 

 medicine-man of Central Europe tired with a longing for wisdom, and seeking 

 it even so far away as the Vedic schools of India. Such a man, returning to 

 his own people, and trying to systematize their crude beliefs on the basis of 



1 Be Bello Galileo, vi, xviii. 1. If those »re correct who would see the Gaulish 1>i- 



Pater in Cernunnos, the preseuco of Cemunnos shrines on the hill of Ten wonhl l>ei ie 



yet more suggestive. 



-Tirechan, in Fit. Trip. Pat., vol. ii, p. 308. 



