Early Bardic Literature, Ireland Part 4

Again, when the mediaeval Christians ceased to regard the Tuatha De Danan as devils, and proceeded to rationalise the divine record as the ethnic bards had rationalised the history of the early G.o.ds; the Tuatha De Danan, shorn of immortality, became ancient heroes who had lived their day and died, and the greater raths, no longer the houses of the G.o.ds, figure in that literature irrationally rational, as their tombs.

Thus we are gravely informed [Note: Annals of Four Masters.] that "the Dagda Mor, after the second battle of Moy Tura, retired to the Brugh on the Boyne, where he died from the venom of the wounds inflicted on him by Kethlenn"--the Fomorian amazon--"and was there interred." Even in this pa.s.sage the writer seems to have been unable to dispossess his mind quite of the traditional belief that the Brugh was the Dagda's house.

The peculiarity of this mound, in addition to its size, is the s.p.a.ciousness of the central chamber. This was that germ which, but for the overthrow of the bardic religion, would have developed into a temple in the cla.s.sic sense of the word. A two-fold motive would have impelled the growing civilisation in this direction. A desire to make the house of the G.o.d as s.p.a.cious within as it was great without, and a desire to transfer his worship, or the more esoteric and solemn part of it, from without to within. Either the absence of architectural knowledge, or the force of conservatism, or the advent of the Christian missionaries, checked any further development on these lines.

Elsewhere the tomb, instead of developing as a tumulus or barrow, produced the effect of greatness by huge circ.u.mvallations of earth, and ma.s.sive walls of stone. Such is the temple of Ned the war-G.o.d, called Aula Neid, the court or palace of Ned, near the Foyle in the North. Had the ethnic civilisation of Ireland been suffered to develop according to its own laws, it is probable that, as the roofed central chamber of the cairn would have grown until it filled the s.p.a.ce occupied by the mound, so the open-walled temple would have developed into a covered building, by the elevation of the walls, and their gradual inclination to the centre.

The bee-hive houses of the monks, the early churches, and the round towers are a development of that architecture which constructed the central chambers of the raths. In this fact lies, too, the explanation of the cyclopean style of building which characterizes our most ancient buildings. The cromlech alone, formed in very ancient times the central chamber of the cairn; it is found in the centre of the raths on Moy Tura, belonging to the stone age and that of the Firbolgs. When the cromlech fell into disuse, the arched chamber above the ashes of the hero was constructed with enormous stones, as a subst.i.tute for the majestic appearance presented by the ma.s.sive slab and supporting pillars of the more ancient cromlech, and the early stone buildings preserved the same characteristic to a certain extent.

The same sentiment which caused the mediaeval Christians to disinter and enshrine the bones of their saints, and subsequently to re-enshrine them with greater art and more precious materials, caused the ethnic worshippers of heroes to erect n.o.bler tombs over the inurned relics of those whom they revered, as the meanness of the tomb was seen to misrepresent and humiliate the sublimity of the conception. But the Christians could never have imagined their saints to have been anything but men--a fact which caused the retention and preservation of the relics. When the Gentiles exalted their hero into a G.o.d, the charred bones were forgotten or ascribed to another. The hero then became immortal in his own right; he had feasted with Mananan and eaten his life-giving food, and would not know death.

When the mortal character of the hero was forgotten, his house or temple might be erected anywhere. The great Raths of the Boyne--a place grown sacred from causes which we may not now learn--represented, probably, heroes and heroines, who died and were interred in many different parts of the country.

To recapitulate, the Dagda Mor was a divine t.i.tle given to a hero named Eocaidh, who lived many centuries before the birth of Christ, and in the depths of the pre-historic ages. He was the mortal scion or ward of an elder G.o.d, Elathan, and was interred in some unknown grave--marked, perhaps, by a plain pillar stone, or small insignificant cairn.

The great tumulus of New Grange was the temple of the divine or supernatural period of his spiritual or imagined career after death, and was a development by steps from that small unremembered grave where once his warriors hid the inurned ashes of the hero.

What is true of one branch of the Aryan family is true of all.

Sentiments of such universality and depth must have been common to all.

If this be so, the Olympian Zeus himself was once some rude chieftain dwelling in Thrace or Macedonia, and his sublime temple of Doric architecture traceable to some insignificant cairn or flagged cist in Greece, or some earlier home of the h.e.l.lenic race, and his name not Zeus, but another; and Kronos, that G.o.d whom he, as a living wight, adored, and under whose protection and favour he prospered.