Danan.

The fact that the grave of a hero developed slowly into the temple of
a god, explains certain obscurities in the annals and literature. As
a hero was exalted into a god, so in turn a god sank into a hero,
or rather into the race of the giants. The elder gods, conquered and
destroyed by the younger, could no longer be regarded as really divine,
for were they not proved to be mortal? The development of the temple
from the tomb was not forgotten, the whole country being filled with
such tombs and incipient temples, from the great Brugh on the Boyne to
the smallest mound in any of the cemeteries. Thus, when the elder gods
lost their spiritual sovereignty, and their destruction at the hands of
the younger took the form of great battles, then as the god was forced
to become a giant, so his temple was remembered to be a tomb. Doubtless,
in his own territory, divine honours were still paid him; but in the
national imagination and in the classical literature and received
history, he was a giant of the olden time, slain by the gods, and
interred in the rath which bore his name. Such was the great Mac Erc,
King of Fir-bolgs.

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 gods; 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
gods, 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 passage 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
spaciousness 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 classic 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 god as spacious within as it was great without, and a desire to
transfer his worship, or the more esoteric and sole