Macalistkr — Temair Breg : Remains and Traditions of Turn. .377 



orthodox Centaurs. 1 He is, in fact, just the sort of being that would develop 

 out of an ancient hippanthropic deity who had originally no connexion with 

 Centaurs, but who found himself among a people that had evolved the concep- 

 tion of the normal type of those disagreeable creatures. 2 We may suppose that 

 Phol was likewise a deity who had something to do with horses, otherwise his 

 appearance in the Merseburg charm would be inexplicable. Fal had certainly 

 a great deal to do with the inauguration of the divine horse-king at Temair. 

 There is no such traceable connexion of Pales with horses. Bui perhaps all 

 these scattered beings, taken together, enable us to get a little nearer to the 

 "Divine Horse-man," with whom we began our study in these devious 

 paths. 



At any rate, Fal belongs certainly to an older stratum of belief than the 

 divine beings among the Tuatha De Danann, who are, so to speak, the dii 

 consentes of Irish Celtic tradition. Except the one passage quoted from C6ir 

 Anmann, hinting at some sort of connexion between Nuadu and Fal, there is 

 no trace of any relation between Fal and the Tribe of Danu. 



But if Fal be borrowed from some non-Aryan, neolithic (?) pastoral 

 horse-divinity, the ceremonies at the stone of Fal which completed the induc- 

 tion of the king would become the more intelligible. Fal, the horse divinity, 

 standing somewhere near Duma na Bo, the mound of the sacred cow, accepted 

 the new king, if indeed he did not infuse his personality into him by his 

 mysterious scream. The bull-roarer does not appear to have been used in 

 the Parilia rites; but this might have been a local legacy from pre-Celtic 

 rites at Temair, and peculiar to that site. To some similar local contamina- 

 tion we may, perhaps, trace the different calendar days sacred to the god in 

 Italian, Celtic, and Teutonic centres. It is a difficulty in the way of the 

 complete identification of Pales, Phol, and Fal, that the first is celebrated on 

 21 April, the second on 2 May, while the chief festival of Temair seems to 

 have fallen in Samain, at a different lime of the \e.u altogether. The 

 transference of the festival to near May-day (as in the lihiueland) is perhaps 

 not difficult to understand; and if there were any evidence (which there 

 is not) that May-day was specially celebrated at Temair. our troubles would 

 be greatly diminished. For the Samain feast began a fortnight before 

 1 November; 3 and if the Hellene feast began equally early, it would 



' See Resetter's articles Keniauren and Pholos. 



■ The Master of Emmanuel writes to me: "*6\ot has no early authority in Qreek, Theo- 

 critus being apparently the first to mention him : though of course he may be very much 

 earlier. There is no obvious etymology for the name in Greek i it therefore might quite 

 well be non-Greek or prae-Greek. Hut when u comes to borrowing from an unknown 

 language there are no rules one can go by. 



3 Sdva Gadelica, vol. i, 3l!t : vol. ii, 360. 



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