Macalistkk — Temair Brey : Remains ami Trmlitiom of Tuva. 383 



(9) The purpose of this king- being to secure fertility in its various mani- 

 festations, it was essential that he should be married, so as to produce the 

 result aimed at by sympathetic magic. 



(10) As it was important that the king should be the strongest man 

 available in the community, anyone who could slay the holder of tin; ■ » II i < ■ < ■ 

 was entitled to succeed. 



(11) If the king died in office of an apparently natural death, it was 

 regarded as an interposition of the gods, and the succession had bo be repaired 

 by an elaborate ritual, in which the sacred animals (both bull and horse), 

 Fal, and other deities or deified men took part. 



(12) The annual celebrations took the form of assemblies connected with 

 the crises of the solar year. 



(13) A perpetual fire was kept burning, made to blaze into full life on the 

 occasions when the sun seemed to need quickening. 



(14) Cormac mac Airt, a man of enlightenment and alert mind, influenced 

 by what he had learned of the Eoman organization of Britain, set himself to 

 develop the political rather than the religious side of the life of Temair ; for 

 which he seems to have incurred Druidic maledictions. He was partly, but 

 not wholly, successful. If it fell within our present scope to follow out the 

 later history of the ridge, it would appear that the religious interest was 

 dominant throughout, and that when Christianity conquered the earlier faiths 

 the importance of the site dwindled almost to vanishing point ; although it is 

 not correct, to say that it ever was wholly abandoned clown to the end of the 

 independence of Ireland. 



7. The Place of Temair in European Culture. 



Till now we have been considering Temair as the scene of the local 

 corroborees of the pre-Celtic and the Celtic tribes which successively occupied 

 the region in which it stands. We have now to set 1 that it is the cm ire of a 

 much wider interest. 



Our researches have led us to the conclusion thai bhere is an intimate 

 connexion between Temair and the tumulus now called New Crange. which 

 is the chief monument of the ancient cemetery called Brug na Boinne. When 

 we turn our attention to this structure, we find bhere a greal earthen mound, 

 containing a stone-built passage leading to a central tomb-chamber. The 

 plan is extraordinarily like that of the dromos-tholos tombs of the Late 

 Minoan cultures, of which the so-called Treasury of Atreus is the best-known 

 example. Three burial-chambers radiate from the tholos at New Grau 



R.I. A. PROC, VOL. XXXIV, SECT. C. [52] 



