Macaustkr — Temai?' Breg : Remains and Traditions oj Turn. 367 



the sun shine as long and as brightly as he conveniently could: and it may 

 perhaps be guessed that a certain talisman, called the Enlh C/n-ni, dosoiibod 

 as a golden brooch that was passed from king to king, 1 was an amulet for this 

 purpose. 2 But the main festival of Temair was not a solar festival. Il was 

 the feast of the beginning of winter, when the annual death of the spirit of 

 vegetation was solemnly celebrated. 



This being so, we might expect that the re-birth of the same being should 

 be celebrated at or near the vernal equinox. And by rare good fortune we 

 have evidence that this occasion also was a solemn festival at Temair. 



The evidence is afforded us by the well-known story of St. Patrick's 

 proceedings at Temair on the Easter after his arrival in the country as a 

 missionary. It is needless to do more than to remind the reader that he lit 

 the Paschal fire in full view of Temair, before the sacred fire was there kindled: 

 a sacrilege so serious that the penalty was death. But the question of the 

 authenticity of this story, which has been attacked by scholars of weight, 

 is one which it is important to consider before we proceed to deduce 

 anything from it. 



While the undignified display of magic, with which the saint is said to 

 have confounded the king's druids, is doubtless a legendary accretion, 3 1 see 

 no reason against accepting the story in its main lines. The druidie prophecy 

 of the coming of the "shave-pates" required no supernatural anticipation of 

 the future. Druidry had been suppressed in Gaul, and was eclipsed in Britain ; 

 but it still flourished in Ireland, and we may suppose that many persecuted 

 druids from overseas found there a sanctuary. From these refugees the druids 

 of King Loeguire would have heard of the strange religion whose ritual is so 

 naively described in the quatrain ascribed to them. It would only be a matter 

 of time before the "shave-pates" would make their way to Ireland; and the 

 druids sought to warn the king in time to suppress the new teaching, which 

 would inevitably threaten their own supremacy, so soon as it appeared. Their 

 recognition of the Paschal fire, also, needed no miraculous insight. The druids 

 doubtless knew that Patrick had already arrived in Ireland and was making 



1 Revue celtigue, xx, 138, 421. 



2 Oru means a fence, and it may perhaps be no mere coincidence that this object bore 

 a name with the same apparent meaning as Roth Fail. In any case it was a tiling; so 

 sacred that the bardic demand for its surrender was the IabI straw which broke the 

 patience of Aed mac Ainmirech, and determined that king to abolish t ho bardic order. 



3 One of the druids was said to have been caught up into the air and dashed to the 

 ground. This was the legendary fate of Simon Magus, who has an indirect connexion 

 with the Temair traditions through Mug Ruith : the tradition is probably teaponaible t'"t 

 the "flying-machine " conception of the Roth Hamach. We have already seen that the 

 names given to king Loeguire's druids tiro not historical. 



R.I.A. PROC, VOL. XXXIV, SECT. 0, [60] 



