Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth

IRELAND’S IMMORTALS

IRELAND’S IMMORTALS

A HISTORY OF THE GODS OF IRISH MYTH

MARK WILLIAMS

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Williams, M. A. (Mark Andrew), 1980– , author.

Title: Ireland’s immortals : a history of the gods of Irish myth / Mark Williams.

Description: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015045004 | ISBN 9780691157313 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: | LCSH: Mythology, Celtic—Ireland. | Ireland—Religion—History.

Classification: LCC BL980.I7 W54 2016 | DDC 299/.16113–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2015045004

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Linux Libertine and Albertus MT Std

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

FOR JUSTINE

siur 7 anmcharae

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

TABLE

ABBREVIATIONS

PREFACE

THIS BOOK IS the story of a nation’s fantasy, and of the crossing-places where imagination meets belief. Its purpose is to trace the evolution of the divinities of Irish mythology―most frequently known as the Túatha Dé Danann or ‘Peoples of the goddess Danu’―from the early Middle Ages through to the present.

But who are the Irish gods? Often people who love Greek or Norse myth have never heard of the indigenous divinities of Ireland. Such elusiveness is their calling card: they dissolve into the landscape, here one minute, gone the next. At times they resemble the Olympian divinities as a family of immortals ruled by a father-god, but at others we find them branching into a teeming race of supernatural nobility, an augmented humanity freed from ageing and artistic limit. Paradox is key, for these gods are also fairies; they are immortal, but—like the Norse gods—they can be killed. They are simultaneously a pantheon and a people.

Where to look for them? They lie hidden, literally latent. In some medieval stories they live in Ireland and rule, not from faraway Olympus or Asgard, but from the island’s symbolic seat of kingship at Tara. In many other tales they live under the surface of Ireland’s landscape, inside hills and prehistoric mounds. But they are not phantasms rising from the earth like a damp vapour: their dwellings open out into a mirroruniverse of uncanny splendour. Though their origins lie in Iron Age veneration of earth and water, the gods’ affinities are not with nature but with culture. Never depicted in early art and long cut off from pagan ritual, they float—worldly and refined—through the imaginative spaces of Irish literature.

A noteworthy difference between Irish and other mythologies is that sharply outlined personalities among the Irish gods are few, though we might point to the heroic Lug, a radiant and royal man between youth and maturity, or to the Morrígan, a gruesome war-goddess, shapeshifting between woman and crow, eel and wolf, or to Manannán the seagod, speeding his chariot over an ocean churned to the colour of blood. Opaque in motivation and unstable of outline, these beings do not lend themselves to a conventional history, especially as my own training is as a literary critic rather than a historian. Nonetheless, this book’s focus is overwhelmingly on stories, and concerns the development of a group of characters caught up in the flow of historical change. It follows the Irish gods through many interconnected sources, alighting on key works and summarizing plotlines. Texts in the Irish language are read together with Irish literature in English. It is not intended to be a complete history of the supernatural beings of Irish tradition: there are no leprachauns or pookas here. Nor is it intended as a contribution to comparative mythology or the history of religions, at least not directly; only very rarely do I suggest the shape which pre-Christian Irish belief might have taken. Further, among the peculiarities of the pantheon is the fact that new deities continued to appear centuries after pagan religion had come to an end in Ireland, just as a willow branch will continue to put forth green shoots long after being sawn from the body of the tree. Under such circumstances it would scarcely be possible for me to judge whether a particular deity is ‘authentic’: I follow the principle of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in regarding all iterations as valid and necessary for the meaning of a myth, or of a god, to be fully grasped.

‘Myth’ is a difficult term to define, but one used often in this book. Greek muthos, from which our word derives, originally simply meant ‘something said’. The most common interpretation of the word in English, however, is that of a falsehood or an ingrained untruth, and scholars of mythology have long struggled to uproot this meaning from their readers’ minds. They tend instead to emphasize the range of ways in which mythic narratives are able to embody responses to the human condition. The Sanskritist Wendy Doniger has mischievously played on this, summing up myth as ‘a story that a group of people believe for a long time, despite massive evidence that it is not actually true.’¹ Her definition resonates with the early material examined in this book, for the Túatha Dé Danann were believed by generations of Ireland’s medieval and early modern intellectuals to have been historical people, their deeds memorialized in a complex web of legendary history. According to this view, the gods were merely the second-to-last of a sequence of invaders who wrested control over the island in ancient times. For writers in Irish down to the eighteenth century, the myth of Ireland’s successive invasions and associated stories about the Túatha Dé Danann retained great imaginative hold.

A second useful definition of myth is that adopted by Heather O’Donoghue: it consists simply of ‘stories about the gods’.² But in Ireland it is the word gods that causes trouble. When the peoples of Europe became Christian, they had to decide how to think about the gods of their pagan forebears, often concluding that they had been demons who should be forgotten or only contemplated with a shudder. Not so the Irish, who continued to make a conspicuous imaginative investment in their island’s native gods; one of the enigmas this book addresses is why this habit of mind should have obtained in Ireland but not in (say) Anglo-Saxon England. A consequence of this continuing interest in the gods was that the divine characters of medieval Irish literature bear only a very uncertain relationship to the deities of Irish paganism. Likewise, a distinctively Irish habit was the assigning of exotic orders of being to former gods in an effort to shoehorn them into a Christian worldview. Some medieval writers asserted that these former gods had been either ‘half-fallen’ angels or a mysteriously sinless branch of the human race, although neither were fully orthodox positions. It is a fundamental oddity of Irish mythology that while its divine personnel may be strangely ‘other’—gifted with supernatural powers, great beauty, or immortal life—before the nineteenth century those beings were only occasionally acknowledged to be, or to have once been, pre-Christian gods. It is also worth noting at this point that any discussion of a monolithic group of Irish gods may in itself be misleading, and that some of the things that puzzle us about their representation may result from our own imperfect knowledge of medieval tradition. Though the literature we have is rich, references to lost manuscripts and tales make it clear that we only have a limited sample of what once existed and what we do have may not be representative. In particular, it is very likely that there were regional variations in traditions about the gods which are now hard to trace due to the limitiations of the surviving evidence.

With this caveat in mind, we come to the structure of the book. Ireland’s Immortals falls into two halves, with discrete styles and ways of approaching the material. Part One addresses the trajectory of the Irish divinities from the conversion period through to the end of the Middle Ages. It asks three interconnected questions. The first is who or what are the Irish gods; the second asks why they are so unusual, compared to the gods of other European paganisms; and the third considers the reasons why interest in them persisted in medieval Ireland. In looking squarely at medieval texts as repositories of the values of the people who actually wrote them, rather than trying to look through them in an attempt to glimpse a pre-Christian world, we can answer all three questions by examining the work which the native gods performed within Irish culture during the Middle Ages.

Each chapter addresses a different set of themes and focuses on a small number of key texts. Chapter 1 looks at the Iron Age religious background and what became of the gods as Ireland became Christian during the fifth and sixth centuries, in so far as that process can be traced at all. Chapter 2 compares the earliest saga narratives featuring native supernaturals, ‘The Adventure of Connlae’ and ‘The Voyage of Bran’, both of which are short; they date from around the turn of the eighth century. Chapter 3 analyses the society of the gods and weighs their importance as symbols of culture; it does so by looking at two magnificent ninth- or tenth-century sagas, ‘The Wooing of Étaín’ and ‘The Second Battle of Moytura’. Chapter 4 then goes on to examine ‘The Book of Invasions’, the great edifice of pseudohistory into which the Túatha Dé Danann were slotted during the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Chapter 5 considers the role of the divinities in relation to the hero Finn mac Cumaill—anglicized as Finn Mac Cool—who became the centre of gravity for a luxuriant body of story from the turn of the thirteenth century. The principal text examined here is ‘The Colloquy of the Elders’, written c.1220, though the chapter ends by comparing the depiction of the gods in a luminously beautiful saga called ‘The Fosterage of the House of Two Vessels’, perhaps composed in the fourteenth century. Chapter 6 ends Part One with a brief look at how the gods were imagined, and found wanting, towards the end of the Middle Ages. It examines ‘The Tragic Deaths of the Children of Lir’—famously the weepiest of all Irish mythological tales—and compares it with ‘The Tragic Deaths of the Children of Tuireann’, likewise a late tale, but one focused on bloodletting and vengeance. To close, I turn to ‘The Battle of Ventry’, a fifteenth-century tale in which the gods help to fight off invaders from Ireland’s shores. So rich is the medieval literature that a painful selectivity has been necessary: many sagas and a number of important divinities have been mentioned only in passing.

Part Two represents a fresh starting point, turning from Irish to English and from the largely anonymous writings of the Middle Ages to a range of literary personalities. Some of the men and women who appear in this section―W. B. Yeats, for example―are among the most hallowed of Irish writers. Others, such as the mystic, poet, and painter George Russell, were of the second rank in virtuosity, but of the greatest importance in the story of the Irish gods. After all, almost certainly more people have now heard of divinities such as Lug, the Morrígan, and Manannán than at any previous point in history, and the second half of the book sets out to determine how the multitudinous medieval Túatha Dé Danann slimmed down and came into focus as the pantheon of one of the world’s great mythologies. My concern is with the recasting in English of the divinities in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, focusing in particular on their importance in the Irish cultural and political risorgimento. This body of material, though large, is such that most significant figures can be discussed, though some important areas—such as book illustration and modern writing in Irish—have had to be passed over.

Chapter 7 takes a wide view of the early history of the gods in writing in English, and shows how the concept of a native pantheon only slowly became intellectually available during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Chapter 8 focuses on Yeats and Russell and the role of the Túatha Dé Danann in fin de siècle occult nationalism, when for the first time a passionate impetus was felt to recover a lost Irish paganism. It includes the first of two case studies in the book of a single deity, the love-god Óengus, the Mac Óc (‘Angus Og’). Chapter 9 focuses on Scotland, where from the 1890s a Celtic Revival parallel to that of Ireland took root. This redefined the pantheon not just as the gods of Ireland, but as the gods of the Gaels on both sides of the sea. The work of that movement’s most celebrated literary figure, ‘Fiona Macleod’, is read alongside that of its most successful visual artist, John Duncan. Chapter 10 considers three early twentieth-century attempts to systematize Ireland’s intractably complex mythology under the influence of eastern philosophy, with various degrees of coherence and literary success. Chapter 11 takes us to the present, concluding with a second case study of Óengus and an overview of the Irish gods in classical music, children’s literature, and contemporary culture. The book then ends with Chapter 12, which presents some final observations and thoughts about what the future may hold.

A work such as this has some obvious potential pitfalls. In particular it became clear as soon as I started that most Irish divinities could benefit from full-length studies combining the medieval and the modern. This has already been done by Charles MacQuarrie for the sea-god Manannán, but Lug, Óengus, the Morrígan, and especially the firegoddess Brigit would richly repay such examination as well. I hope other scholars will undertake this work in future and so add to and correct my findings here. Also, in covering so many texts over such a long time span it is inevitable that I shall have neglected items which some experts will feel should have been discussed. The first draft of the book was a third as long again as the published version and many things I would have liked to have included have been cut. In order to write it I had to familiarize myself with aspects of modern Irish literature of which I had only vague knowledge, and will certainly have failed to notice some relevant material. Worse, writing a long work of systematizing scholarship places the author in the alarming role of arch-ventriloquist, aiming to modulate sympathetically the voices of many writers—poets, annalists, antiquarians, monastics, and mystics—over fifteen hundred years. But it is precisely this long process of development and reclamation which makes the Irish gods so fascinating, and which is one reason for the book.

I have written with two audiences in mind. The first consists of colleagues whose expertise is concentrated in one of the two poles which it addresses: that is, medievalists who want to know more about the reception of Irish myth and scholars of modern Ireland with an interest in the Revival’s medieval roots. But I hope still more that the book will be accessible and entertaining to the general public, and this tempts me to add a personal note. As I completed the text I had a vivid dream in which I found myself following the war-goddess, the Morrígan, into a síd or ‘fairy hill’. The interior—dismally—was completely empty except for wall-to-wall beige carpeting. This book may seem similarly empty to that sector of my readership who feel a deep personal connection to the Irish gods: it will be said that an academic approach suffers from institutional unimaginativeness (that beige carpet). I can only rejoin that no one is more aware of this than I, and that there is a humble value in criticism which explores and explains. Such criticism in no way detracts from the worth of responses rooted in rapture and rich emotion; nor could it, for that is where literature begins.

A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS AND REFERENCING

Given the audiences at which this book is aimed it has been my policy (against my own inclination) to keep quotations in Irish to a minimum in the body of the text. For the same reason I have felt obliged to use English names for Irish and Latin texts, unless the effect was misleading or barbarous. The Irish original is given when a text is first mentioned. Often translations from Irish are my own, though if there is a recent scholarly rendering of a text I have sometimes used that, duly credited.

In the footnotes, full bibliographic data is given when an article or book is cited for the first time; subsequent references are abbreviated. An exception is the relatively small number of texts, journals, and critical studies cited very frequently: these are given using the acronyms listed under Abbreviations above. Where possible I have tried to cater to the needs of both the specialist and the general reader, directing the one to the original text and the other to a reliable translation.

1 W. Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Oxford, 2010), 23.

2 H. O’Donoghue, English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History (Oxford, 2014), 1.

GUIDE TO PRONUNCIATION

THERE ARE CONVENTIONAL English spellings and pronunciations for the names of the gods of Greece and Rome (we say Jupiter for Iuppiter), and for some members of the Norse pantheon; not so for the Irish divinities. This is a problem in as much as Irish and its sister language Scottish Gaelic can seem unpronounceable to those unfamiliar with the Gaelic spelling system, such as the hapless visitor to the Highlands or west of Ireland encountering Sgùrr a’ Ghreadaidh or Aonach Urmhumhan for the first time.

The coverage of this book means that many names might potentially be met with in their Old Irish, Middle Irish, Modern Irish, or (occasionally) Scottish Gaelic guises. All of these would be equally correct, but important shifts in pronunciation took place as Old Irish (roughly AD 600–900) morphed into Middle Irish (c.900–1200), which in turn developed into the Early Modern and Modern versions of the language. Scottish Gaelic also has idiosyncrasies of its own. Orthography too is a problem: for experts the difference between, say, Old Irish Bodb Derg—a fairy king of Connaught—and Early Modern Irish Bodhbh Dearg is superficial, but it may confuse other readers who do not expect names to develop supplementary vowels and h’s. To make matters worse, nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers in English often spelled medieval Irish names idiosyncratically: in the penultimate chapter of this book the sea-god Manannán (correctly so spelled) appears as Mananaan, Mannanan, and Manaunaun.

My own policy has been to choose a point in time—c.AD 875—and to keep names in the form which they had at that stage in the history of the language: later Old Irish. Some suggested pronunciations may therefore look odd to speakers of Modern Irish: in particular the pronunciation of d and g inside words has changed greatly with time, and Old Irish did not have the extra ‘epenthetic’ vowels heard in the modern pronunciation of words such as dearg (red), or gorm (blue). If no Old Irish form of a name is available, then the earliest attested form is given. This system has the advantage that a single Old Irish-based key to pronunciation can be provided, at least for most of the personal names. In a way, I would prefer to provide a fully accurate guide to all these names using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet, but doing so would undermine the goal here, which is to provide a crib useable by the general reader. This key is not aimed at Celtic specialists, but rather at non-specialist readers, who should be able to at least approximate the names in a manner that has some historical justification.¹ In a few cases (the names of some texts and manuscripts, for example), scholars use the modern rather than the medieval pronunciation, and I have followed this convention.

There are two difficult cases. The first is the youthful god Óengus, who is discussed extensively in this book. As he was a popular figure his name occurs in at least seven different forms in texts from which I quote: Middle Irish Aengus, Scottish Gaelic Aonghas, and anglicized Angus, Œngus, and Aongus—among others. The second is the term for the hollow mounds in which the gods were supposed to live: síd (plural síde) in Old Irish, along with later Irish forms such as sídhe/sidhe, Scottish Gaelic sìth, and anglicizations such as Shee or Shí. For clarity, I have sometimes used the tautology ‘síd-mounds’. In both cases the coverage of the book makes variation unavoidable, and I hope this will not cause marked discomfort; I have tried to signal it wherever possible.

As a final note for the general reader, I draw attention here to the convention that when an asterisk is placed before a word, it indicates that that word is a modern philological reconstruction of a lost form or root which is not actually attested in any surviving writing.

STRESS

In the following list, capital letters indicate where the stress falls in words of more than one syllable: almost always this is the first syllable. Monosyllablic names are always strongly stressed.

SOUNDS

During the Old Irish period there was a gradual change in how vowels were pronounced in unstressed, i.e. non-initial, syllables. Early on they all sounded distinctly different, but later they all (with the exception of ‘u’) became a nondescript ‘uh’ sound, like the ‘a’ at the end of English sofa, technically called a schwa and written as ə in phonetic notation. This was particularly obvious at the ends of words: by about 875 the names Lóegaire and Banba―note the different final vowels—ended when spoken with identical ‘uh’ sounds of this sort.

The key uses the following five symbols:

1 My policy is similar to that of Ann Dooley and Harry Roe in their translation Tales of the Elders of Ireland (Oxford, 1999), xxxiv–vii; their guide is easy to use and much more accurate for the medieval pronunciation than e.g. that in Marie Heaney’s (beautiful) Over Nine Waves: A Book of Irish Legends (London, 1994), 243–9, which is based, albeit inconsistently, on Modern Irish. The suggested pronunciations found in popular works on Celtic myth are usually wildly wrong. For Old Irish pronunciation rules using the IPA see T. Charles-Edwards, ECI, xvi-viii, plus Appendix 4 of Fergus Kelly’s A Guide to Early Irish Law (Dublin, 1988).

PART ONE

1

HIDDEN BEGINNINGS

FROM CULT TO CONVERSION

Every layer they strip

Seems camped on before.

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.

The wet centre is bottomless.

—SEAMUS HEANEY, ‘BOGLAND’

IN MANY MYTHOLOGIES the gods issue forth from primordial night; in Ireland, the divinities emerge not from the dark abyss of creation myth, but from an enigmatic and patchy archaeological record.

The earliest written evidence for native gods comes from early Christian Ireland, not from the pagan period; this is a pivotal fact which must be emphasized. Christianity did not entirely consign the pagan gods to the scrapheap, but the consequences of its arrival were dramatic and affected Irish society on every level. Pagan cult and ritual were discontinued, and a process was set in motion that eventually saw a small number of former deities reincarnated as literary characters. Christianity—intrinsically a religion of the book—enabled the widespread writing of texts in the Roman alphabet. Some of these have been transmitted to the present, with the paradoxical upshot that we owe our ability to say anything at all about the ‘personalities’ of Ireland’s pre-Christian gods to the island’s conversion.¹

This chapter focuses on the period from the fifth century down to the late seventh, but tighter historical brackets can be put around the conversion process itself. The Christian religion was present in Ireland from at least the early 400s, certainly among British slaves and their descendants, though there may well also have been communities of Irish converts in the areas of the island that had been most exposed to influence from Roman Britain.² It is notoriously difficult to pinpoint when a population group can be decisively said to have exchanged one religion for another, but during the 500s the church hierarchy was legally established as a privileged order, and monasticism, Latin education, and ecclesiastical learning thrived. By the year 600, therefore, we can speak of Irish society as already converted on the level of hierarchy and institution.³ The public worship of pagan gods by high-status individuals had probably come to an end in the mid to late 500s, but occasional, increasingly marginalized manifestations of non-Christian religion seem to have continued until the turn of the eighth century.⁴ It is not until that point that druids—the magico-religious specialists of Irish paganism—finally cease to appear in legal texts as a going concern and can be taken to have disappeared from Irish society.⁵ It is also worth remembering that all such markers are public and collective: the realm of personal conviction—how people behaved in their homes and felt in their hearts—is irrecoverably lost to us.

Around the year 700—roughly three hundred years after the conversion process began—pagan divinities began to appear in a vibrant literature written in Old Irish.⁶ Two questions immediately present themselves. Why should a Christian people be interested in pagan gods at all? And what was the relationship between the gods whom the pagan Irish had once venerated and the literary divinities who thronged the writings of their Christian descendants?⁷

ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANALOGY

It is traditional in handbooks of mythology to begin with a family portrait of the divinities, detailing their relationships, powers, and attributes.⁸ This cannot be done for the gods of Ireland. It could be argued—albeit rather austerely—that we should not speak of Irish pre-Christian deities at all, because everything we know about them comes down to us in writings composed after the island’s conversion and may therefore have been filtered through a Christian lens. All surviving mythological material from Ireland is the product of a pious and intellectually sophisticated Christian culture, and it is important to hold in mind that from their earliest appearances in the textual record the Irish gods are divorced from cult.

Can we retrieve any information from non-textual sources about the nature of the divinities worshipped by the pagan Irish?⁹ The attempt is possible only with caution and if we confine ourselves to general principles. Two tools come to hand: the first is archaeology, and the second is inference drawn from the related societies of Celtic Gaul and Britain.

FIG. 1.1. Late Bronze Age yew-wood figure, c.1000 BC, discovered in Ralaghan, Co. Cavan. Photo: Reproduced with the kind permission of the National Museum of Ireland.

By its nature, archaeological evidence is of limited value in reconstructing belief systems or mythological narratives, but it does seem that at least some Irish population groups set up anthropomorphic wooden or stone images that may be of gods. One found in the bog of Ralaghan, Co. Cavan, is roughly a metre long and made from a single round trunk of yew: it has a gouged hole in the genital area, which may once have held a carved phallus (Fig. 1.1). Though its sunken eye hollows anticipate the uncanny stare associated with the (characteristically Iron Age) La Tène decorative style, it actually dates to the late Bronze Age, at the beginning of the first millennium BC.¹⁰ Many scholars would place this before the arrival of any form of Celtic speech in Ireland, so there is no guarantee of cultural continuity with the religious practices of over a millennium later.¹¹ That said, similar sculptures have turned up sporadically in Britain in a more explicitly Iron Age context, suggesting that they may once have been widespread: we cannot tell.¹²

Similar problems of interpretation attend the stone sculpture known as the ‘Tandragee Idol’, also dated to c.1000 BC. Helmeted and grasping his left arm—in pain or in salute?—the figure could represent a human warrior or a native deity (Fig. 1.2). In an instance of the seductive temptation to read archaeological objects in the light of much later literature—and thus to find a politically soothing continuity in the Irish past—it has been suggested that the Tandragee sculpture depicts Núadu Argatlám (‘of the Silver Hand/Forearm’), a literary character who loses his arm in battle and has it temporarily replaced by one made of metal.¹³ Ellen Ettlinger, who suggested the identification in 1961, felt convinced that the sculptor had depicted the left arm as ‘clearly artificial’—but distinctions of this kind surely lie in the eye of the beholder.¹⁴ Additionally, as the story of Núadu’s silver prosthesis is first attested in a saga composed nearly two millennia after the Tandragee sculpture was created, any link must be considered at best only a possibility; the figure remains inscrutable.

There are also hints that rivers, bogs, and pools were important in the religious beliefs of the pagan Irish, though Iron Age deposits of artifacts are strikingly rarer in Ireland than in parts of Britain, for unknown reasons: an instance of the enigmatic quality of Irish Iron Age archaeology in general.¹⁵ Ireland can nonetheless boast one of the most spectacular of these, the Broighter Hoard, which was discovered in 1896 buried in heavy agricultural land near to Lough Foyle in County Derry. The original deposition was made close to the water’s eastern edge, but the shore of the lake has shifted over the millennia. It includes not only the most splendid torc ever uncovered in Ireland, but also a miniature golden boat, complete with tiny oars.¹⁶ The items seem to have been fashioned, and perhaps deposited as well, in the first century BC. Depositions such as this suggest a belief at the time they were made in supernatural beings associated with water, and it should be emphasized that this is all that can be extracted with confidence. In another instance of looking to later literature to explain archaeology, scholars have long speculated that the hoard was a ritual offering to the sea-god Manannán, because Old Irish texts associate Lough Foyle with stories of an inundation and an encounter between the god and a band of human mariners.¹⁷ All this is not to say that connections drawn between medieval written texts and pre-Christian archaeology are of necessity misguided, simply that they must be considered tentative and that it is dismayingly easy to build castles in the air.

FIG. 1.2. The Tandragee Idol, carved stone image, c.1000 BC. Photo: Reproduced by permission of the Dean and Chapter of St Patrick’s Cathedral (Church of Ireland), Armagh.

Because the archaeological evidence emerges as open to several interpretations we can use it to outline only the most important aspects of how the pre-Christian Irish regarded their divinities. Briefly, there were probably a great number of these, related to specific places, peoples, and to the natural world.¹⁸ They were considered worthy of reverence, and perhaps (as seen) of artistic depiction; some of them seem to have had associations with water—though whether they were supposed to dwell in, under, or through it is unclear. They could be propitiated, and must have been imagined as having uses for the gifts, including animal sacrifice, which human beings offered up to them. Some of this picture can be rounded out by comparison with Gaul and Britain, but one final caveat about the archaeological record should be considered before we move on: it points to the centuries immediately before the conversion began as a period of economic contraction, agricultural decline, and (very likely) some degree of political upheaval.¹⁹ Therefore it is possible that late–Iron Age religious values and beliefs reflected such turbulence, so that far from descending changelessly from an immemorial Celtic past, they may have been in considerable flux.

With the turn from Irish archaeology to Celtic Gaul and Britain, written data enters the picture, largely in the form of inscriptions, though there are also important Roman descriptions of Gaulish religious customs. Once again, useful parallels between the religious cultures of these societies and that of Ireland can only be drawn if we stick to broad outlines. Three features emerge as likely to have been shared. The first is that watercourses seem regularly to have been venerated as divinities—usually goddesses, though there are a few river-gods.²⁰ The second is a welter of local variety, with an enormously large number of named deities attested, though most of these clearly fell into a limited number of overlapping functional types: warrior, trader, hunter, and healer, for instance.²¹ Thirdly, neither Gaul nor Britain provide us with evidence for a native pantheon in the Graeco-Roman sense, and this is clearly related to the localism just mentioned. This last presents a puzzle, for it has to be acknowledged that Old Irish literature—as we shall see—does in fact provide a loose family of supernatural beings looking something like a pantheon. A deity named the Dagda, literally meaning the ‘Good God’, forms the centre of gravity within this structure, like the Roman Jupiter; like Jupiter, he has several children and is conspicuously highly sexed.²²

There are a number of ways to resolve this discrepancy. On the one hand, pre-Christian Ireland might have independently developed a pantheon while the Gauls and the Britons did not, though this seems unlikely. Ireland was, and remained after its conversion, a decentralized, rural, and politically fragmented society with a thinly spread population of limited mobility—a situation unlikely to foster the development of a national family of gods.

More persuasive is the second possibility that those members of society who could move about thought in terms of a core pantheon. This would mean those who maintained themselves via a professional skill (known as áes dána, the ‘people of art/talent’), and perhaps especially druids as the island’s religious elite. It may be that this is what we find reflected at some removes in the later literature, which does have a striking emphasis on figures associated with skill. People tied to the land would probably have focused more on local divinities of fertility.²³ It is possible that a similar situation obtained in Gaul, and this would explain the sharp contrast between Julius Caesar’s famous description of a micro-pantheon of five Gaulish gods—for whom he uses the Roman names Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Apollo, and Minerva—and the clear epigraphic evidence that Gaulish deities numbered in the hundreds.²⁴ We know that Caesar spoke with a druid, and that he had a pressing need to understand the attitudes of the powerful in Gaulish society: his account of the gods of the Gauls may reflect solely the beliefs of the learned, mobile elite.²⁵

A third possibility is that the whole concept of a family of gods under a father-god might have been adopted by the Irish as a result of contact with Roman culture, though this might have happened at two possible stages: pre-conversion and post-conversion. Pre-Christian Ireland was exposed to significant influence from Roman Britain, and the idea of a pantheon might have been adopted in imitation of the culture of the neighbouring island, as was the custom of commemorating the dead with inscriptions on stone.²⁶ Alternatively the concept of a pantheon might never have been part of Irish paganism at any stage. Rather, it could have been imported after the island became Christian, as the learned classes of Irish society developed familiarity with Latin literature—not least the poet Virgil’s baroquely mythological epic, the Aeneid. All these options are possible, but at the present state of our knowledge it is hard to gauge which is most likely.²⁷

‘UNCLEAN THINGS’

We know of one individual who encountered pagan Ireland first-hand: St Patrick. Exasperatingly, Patrick tells us next to nothing in his surviving writings about the non-Christian religious beliefs and practices to which he must have been exposed.²⁸

Much about Patrick’s life and mission has been clarified by two generations of brilliant historians, though many obscurities remain.²⁹ What he was famously not, however, was an Irishman. He tells us that he was a Briton, born into priestly family which belonged to the local nobility of a Romano-British civitas.³⁰ Abducted as a teenager and enslaved in the far west of Ireland, he managed after six years to escape. Later, having been ordained and then consecrated as a bishop, he felt impelled by a vision to return to evangelize the island where he had been in bondage and to succour its beleaguered Christians, though we know he was neither the island’s first missionary, nor even its first bishop. The scholarly consensus is that Patrick’s mission should be dated to the fifth century, and probably to its second half, though there is a range of opinions on almost every detail of where, when, how, and why.

Patrick is an indispensable source for the ‘changing times’ of the conversion period, which began with a pagan cult in full swing. British slaves, right at the bottom of society, probably made up the majority of Christians in Ireland—Patrick himself began as one such—though there may already have been settled communities of Irish converts in the ‘Greater Leinster’, the eastern and south-eastern region of Ireland, the area which had been most exposed to the culture of Roman Britain.³¹ Of Patrick’s two surviving writings, the more important for our purposes is the Confession, which amounts to a powerful—and powerfully difficult—spiritual autobiography, written in Latin.³² Ireland’s social topography, it reveals, consisted of a patchwork of different kingdoms of variably dense population. There were around a hundred of these túatha (singular túath).³³ Patrick notes the presence among the Irish of idola et inmunda, ‘idols and unclean things’.³⁴ Jacqueline Borsje has noted that while the basic meaning of idolum in Latin is ‘image’, extended definitions include ‘apparition’ and the like; because a category of supernatural entity appears in the later literature under the native label scál (‘phantom’, ‘spectre’), she has suggested that Patrick’s word idola refers to this class of being.³⁵ Ingenious as this is, his meaning may have been more prosaic. Inmunda in particular suggests objects, and it is tempting to imagine Patrick’s ‘idols and unclean things’ as carved figures of the Ralaghan type, together with the ritual trappings of their cult.³⁶

After Patrick, nothing in the textual record names or alludes to native deities until the end of the seventh century.³⁷ To bridge this gap in the evidence about the fate of the gods whom the Irish worshipped during the change of religions, we must again look at parallels with similar societies.³⁸ These parallels suggest that the customs of animal sacrifice and the makings of offerings to deities—universal among pre-Christian European peoples—were progressively given up or banned. The loss of these rituals would inevitably lead to once-important divinities being forgotten—perhaps more rapidly than we would expect, given the dismal life expectancies of the period.³⁹ Ritual sites would have been closed and abandoned. Edel Bhreathnach suggests that wells and springs formerly associated with pagan gods were widely used by missionaries as sites of baptism by affusion, in which water was poured over the convert’s head, thus consecrating the sites via the rites of the new religion.⁴⁰ On the social level the vigour of churches and monastic centres would have been reflected in the increased standing of churchmen, even as authority drained from pagan religious functionaries. In Ireland this probably meant the druidic class, and there is good evidence from the law-tracts and penitentials for this process of social demotion, including seventhcentury stipulations that druids were no longer to be accorded the privileges owed to members of high-status professions.⁴¹

If Anglo-Saxon England is anything to go by, after the rulers of a population group converted, the public worship of pagan gods probably took forty to fifty years to disappear, following a brief period in which Christianity and paganism coexisted.⁴² In Ireland, this scenario was probably repeated many times in different social groups. As Elva Johnston points out, the island’s political diversity meant that conversion must have been an untidy affair, and ‘not simply the process of convincing one important dynasty or ruler’.⁴³ She thus aptly describes Ireland’s conversion as ‘both fast and slow’—fast because once a people began to change their religion the process could take place relatively speedily, but slow because there were so many peoples to convert.

The Venerable Bede provides a (not unproblematic) narrative of the process of Christianization for Anglo-Saxon England, but there is no equivalent for Ireland. Indeed, Patrick’s writings make plain that he was not at all interested in giving a sequential account of the conversion process. We do not know, for example, which túatha were converted first, which lagged behind, nor how this process was bound up with the expansion of alphabetic literacy. If there was any backsliding, it is not mentioned. Nevertheless, the earliest Irish saints’ lives, which date from the seventh century, make plain that—as elsewhere in Europe—pagan deities were sometimes rebranded as evil spirits.⁴⁴ Surviving Anglo-Saxon baptismal formulae involve the rejection of pagan deities as demons, and as Irish missionaries played an important role in the conversion of some Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, it is tempting to believe that similar formulae also played a part in the conversion process in Ireland.

TWO DEITIES

With this background in mind, it is worth considering the trajectories in the conversion period of two specific deities, a god and a goddess.

The god Lug is a pivotal figure in a number of medieval sagas, and is one of the most charismatic of medieval Ireland’s literary supernaturals—a youthful warrior and ruler ‘equally gifted in all the arts’, as his sobriquet, samildánach, indicates. He was repackaged in the nineteenth century as the Irish god of the sun—a process examined later in this study—and though not a shred of evidence exists for this identification it is still recycled in popular works.⁴⁵ Lug’s prominence in the literature has led generations of scholars to see him as an after-image of an important pre-Christian deity intimately connected with kingship.⁴⁶ Old Irish Lug can only derive from earlier Lugus, and a divinity of that name is attested among a number of Celtic-speaking peoples on the continent, as well as more indirectly in Britain.⁴⁷ It has long been thought that Lugus was one of the few Celtic gods with an extensive cult, though Bernhard Maier has recently cast doubt upon his pan-Celtic spread.⁴⁸

In Ireland, it seems accepted that a pre-Christian deity provided the foundation for the medieval Lug. But how do we determine the ways in which this divinity was affected by change of religions—about how, on a more than merely linguistic level, Lugus morphed into Lug? If as before we refer only to what cautious comparison can tell us (supplemented by such securely pre-Christian evidence as there is), then all that can be blandly affirmed is that Lugus was important to at least some groups among the pagan Irish. This much is clear from tribal and personal names, as at least two populations named themselves after him. One was the Luigni, the ‘People of Lugus’, whose territory in historical times was located in Connaught; the other was the Luigni Temro (‘of Tara’), who were associated with Tara in Co. Meath, the symbolic centre of Irish over-kingship.⁴⁹ The two peoples may have been branches of a single kindred. Their name appears a number of times in an earlier form, LUGUNI, upon stones incised in ogam, the cumbersome alphabet of notches which was developed to write Irish in the fourth and fifth centuries.⁵⁰ This form crops up on ogam stones in a scattered fashion, suggesting that members of the Luigni were either widely dispersed or that the name was relatively common.⁵¹

By their nature, ogam stones commemorate high-status individuals. A significant number of stones point to a widespread fondness among Irish elites for personal names containing an allusion to the god. One example is LUGUDEC(C)AS—corresponding to Old Irish Lugdech, genitive case of the common male name Lugaid—which perhaps means ‘he who venerates Lugus’.⁵² Even more suggestive is LUGUQRIT- (Old Irish Luccreth), ‘he whose form is like that of Lugus’.⁵³ That these names continued to be popular in the Christian period in no way implies that the worship of Lugus was maintained, in the same way that those named Apollonius or Dionysius in late antiquity did not continue to worship the gods Apollo or Dionysus. Rather, these were simply names hallowed by tradition, inheritance, and elite usage.

While the above is relatively secure, it is not much to go on. However, as soon as we turn to early medieval depictions of the literary Lug for hints about the pagan Lugus, we are immediately confronted with a mass of aggravating ambiguities. It must be emphasized that although very little can be known for sure about pre-Christian Irish religion, it does not follow that all conjecture on the subject is retrograde and irresponsible. One may reasonably speculate, but it is important not to use the resulting suggestions to anchor larger arguments.⁵⁴

One plausible scenario is that there were multiple Luguses, or versions of him. Surviving texts make clear that the medieval Lug was strongly bound up with ideas and ideals of rulership, and in an island of many túatha his divine precursor might well have had any number of local manifestations—hardly an uncommon phenomenon in the pagan religions of ancient Europe.⁵⁵ As such, he might have been regarded as an ancestor-deity connected with the legitimization of political authority in many different population groups: the Luigni may have been far from unique.

If different groups in pre-Christian Ireland did indeed have distinctively local takes on Lugus, this may explain a