s suffered from rationalism almost more than from
neglect and ignorance. The conjectures of the present century are
founded upon mediaeval attempts to reduce to verisimilitude and
historical probability what was by its nature quite incapable of such
treatment. The mythology of the Irish nation, being relieved of the
marvellous and sublime, was set down with circumstantial dates as a
portion of the country's history by the literary men of the middle ages.
Unable to excide from the national narrative those mythological beings
who filled so great a place in the imagination of the times, and unable,
as Christians, to describe them in their true character as gods, or, as
patriots, in the character which they believed them to possess, namely,
demons, they rationalized the whole of the mythological period with
names, dates, and ordered generations, putting men for gods, flesh and
blood for that invisible might, till the page bristled with names and
dates, thus formulating, as annals, what was really the theogony and
mythology of their country. The error of the mediaeval historians is
shared by the not wiser moderns. In the generations of the gods we seem
to see prehistoric racial divisions and large branches of the Aryan
family, an error which results from a neglect of the bardic literature,
and a consequently misdirected study of the annals.

As history, the pre-Milesian record contains but a limited supply of
objective truths; but as theogony, and the history of the Irish gods,
these much abused chronicles are as true as the roll of the kings of
England.

These divine nations, with their many successive generations and
dynasties, constitute a single family; they are all inter-connected and
spring from common sources, and where the literature permits us to see
more clearly, the earlier races exhibit a common character. Like a human
clan, the elements of this divine family grew and died, and shed forth
seedlings which, in time, over-grew and killed the parent stock. Great
names became obscure and passed away, and new ones grew and became
great. Gods, worshipped by the whole nation, declined and became
topical, and minor deities expanding, became national. Gods lost their
immortality, and were remembered as giants of the old time--mighty men,
which were of yore, men of renown.

"The gods which were of old time rest in their tombs,"

sang the Egyptians, consciously ascribing mortality even to gods.
Such was Mac Ere, Ki