CHAPTER VIII CONFUSION BETWEEN GODS AND MEN

Of that part of every Irish pedigree which runs back from the first century to Milesius nothing can be laid down with certainty, nor indeed can there be any absolute certainty in affirming that Irish pedigrees from the eleventh to the third century are reliable—we have only an amount of cumulative evidence from which we may draw such a deduction with considerable confidence. The mere fact that these pedigrees are traced back a thousand years further through Irish kings and heroes, and end in a son of Milesius, need not in the least affect—as in popular estimation it too often does—the credibility of the last seventeen hundred years, which stands upon its own merits.

On the contrary, such a continuation is just what we should expect. In the Irish genealogies the sons of Milesius occupy the place that in other early genealogies is held by the gods. And the sons of Milesius were possibly the tutelary gods of the Gael. We have seen how one of them was so, at least in folk belief, and was addressed in semi-seriousness as still living and reigning even in the last century.

All the Germanic races looked upon themselves as descended from gods. The Saxon, Anglian, Danish, Norwegian, and[Pg 78] Swedish kings were traced back either to Woden or to some of his companions or sons.[1] It was the same with the Greeks, to whom the Celts bear so close a similitude. Their Herakleids, Asklepiads, ?akids, Neleids, and Daedalids, are a close counterpart to our Eremonians, Eberians, Ithians, and Irians, and in each case all the importance was attached to the primitive eponymous hero or god from whom they sprang. Without him the whole pedigree became uninteresting, unfinished, headless. These beliefs exercised full power even upon the ablest and most cultured Greeks. Aristotle and Hippocratês, for instance, considered themselves descended from Asklêpius, Thucidydes from ?akus, and Socrates from Daedalus; just as O'Neill and O'Donnell did from Eremon, O'Brien from Eber, and Magennis from Ir. It was to the divine or heroic fountain heads of the race, not so much as to the long and mostly barren list of names which led up to it, that the real importance was attached. It is not in Ireland alone that we see mythology condensing into a dated genealogy. The same thing has happened in Persian history, and the history of Denmark by Saxo Grammaticus affords many such instances. In Greece the Neleid family of Pylus traced their origin to Neptune, the Laced?monian kings traced theirs to Cadmus and Danaüs, and Hekat?us of Miletus was the fifteenth descendant of a god.

Again we meet with in Teutonic and Hellenic mythology the same difficulty that meets us in our own—that of distinguishing gods from heroes and heroes from men. The legends of the Dagda and of Angus of the Boyne and the Tuatha De Danann, of Tighearnmas and the Fomorians, of Lugh the Long-handed and the children of Tuireann—all evidently mythologic—were treated in the same manner, recited by the same tongues, and regarded with the same unwavering belief, as the history of Conor mac Nessa and Déirdre, of Cuchulain[Pg 79] and Mève, or that of Conn of the Hundred Battles, Owen Mór, Finn mac Cool, and the Fenians. The early Greek, in the same way, treated the stories of Apollo and Artemis, of Arês and Aphroditê, just as he did those of Diomede and Helen, Meleager and Alth?a, Achilles, or the voyage of the Argo. All were in a primitive and uncritical age received with the same unsuspicious credulity, and there was no hard-and-fast line drawn between gods and men. Just as the Mórrígan, the war-goddess, has her eye dashed out by Cuchulain, so do we find in Homer gods wounded by heroes. Thus, too, Apollo is condemned to serve Admetus, and Hercules is sold as a slave to Omphalê. Herodotus himself confesses that he is unable to determine whether a certain Thracian god Zalmoxis, was a god or a man,[2] and he finds the same difficulty regarding Dionysus and Pan; while Plutarch refuses to determine whether Janus was a god or a king;[3] and Herakleitus the philosopher, confronted by the same difficulty, made the admirable mot that men were "mortal gods," gods were "immortal men."[4]

In our literature, although the fact does not always appear distinctly, the Dagda, Angus óg, Lugh the Long-handed, Ogma, and their fellows are the equivalents of the immortal gods, while certainly Cuchulain and Conor and probably Curigh Mac Daire, Conall Cearnach, and the other famous Red Branch chiefs, whatever they may have been in reality, are the equivalent of the Homeric heroes, that is to say, believed to have been epigoni of the gods, and therefore greater[Pg 80] than ordinary human beings; while just as in Greek story there are the cycles of the war round Thebes, the voyage of the Argo the fate of ?dipus, etc., so we have in Irish numerous smaller groups of epic stories—now unfortunately mostly lost or preserved in digests—which, leaving out the Cuchulain and Fenian cycles, centre round such minor characters as Macha, who founded Emania, Leary Lore, Labhraidh [Lowry] the Mariner, and others.

That the Irish gods die in both saga and annals like so many human beings, in no wise militates against the supposition of their godhead. Even the Greek did not always consider his gods as eternal. A study of comparative mythology teaches that gods are in their original essence magnified men, and subject to all men's changes and chances. They are begotten and born like men. They eat, sleep, feel sickness, sorrow, pain, like men. "Like men," says Grimm, "they speak a language, feel passions, transact affairs, are clothed and armed, possess dwellings and utensils." Being man-like in these things, they are also man-like in their deaths. They are only on a greater scale than we. "This appears to me," says Grimm,[5] "a fundamental feature in the faith of the heathen, that they allowed to their gods not an unlimited and unconditional duration, but only a term of life far exceeding that of man." As their shape is like the shape of man only vaster, so are their lives like the lives of men only indefinitely longer. "With our ancestors [the Teutons]," said Grimm, "the thought of the gods being immortal retires into the background. The Edda never calls them 'eylifir' or '?daueligir,' and their death is spoken of without disguise." So is it with us also. The Dagda dies, slain in the battle of North Moytura; the three "gods of the De Danann" die at the instigation of Lugh; and the great Lugh himself, from whom Lugdunum, now Lyons, takes its name, and to whom early Celtic inscriptions are found, shares the same fate. Manannán is[Pg 81] slain, so is Ogma, and so are many more. And yet though recorded as slain they do not wholly disappear. Manannán came back to Bran riding in his chariot across the Ocean,[6] and Lugh makes his frequent appearances amongst the living.
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[1] These genealogies were in later times, like the Irish ones, extended to Noah.

[2] Herod, iv. 94-96.

[3] Numa, ch. xix.

[4] "θεο? θνητο?," "?νθρωποι ?θ?νατοι." It is most curious to find this so academic question dragged into the hard light of day and subjected to the scrutiny of so prosaic a person as the Roman tax-collector. Under the Roman Empire all lands in Greece belonging to the immortal gods were exempted from tribute, and the Roman tax-collector refused to recognise as immortal gods any deities who had once been men. The confusion arising from such questions offered an admirable target to Lucian for his keenest shafts of ridicule.

[5] "Deutsche Mythologie," article on the Condition of the Gods.

[6] "Voyage of Bran mac Febail," Nutt and Kuno Meyer, vol. i. p. 16.