ODE FOR THE HIGH-KNOWERS.

Half of Mankind’s woe comes from the fact that, several thousand years ago, somewhere in the Middle East, peoples through their language conceived spirituality OR MYSTICISM….

-Not as a quest for meaning, hope or liberation with the concepts that go with it (distinction opposition or difference between matter and spirit, ethics, personal discipline, philanthropy, life after life, meditation, quest for the grail, practices...).

-But as a gigantic and protean law (DIN) that should govern the daily life of men with all that it implies.

Obligations or prohibitions that everyone must respect day and night.

Violations or contraventions of this multitude of prohibitions when they are not followed literally.

Judgments when one or more of these laws are violated.

Convictions for the guilty.

Dismissals or acquittals for the innocent. CALLED RIGHTEOUS PERSONS.

THIS CONFUSION BETWEEN THE NUMINOUS AND THE RELIGIOUS, THEN BETWEEN THE SACREDNESS AND THE SECULAR , MAKES OUR LIFE A MISERY FOR 4000 YEARS VIA ISRAEL AND ESPECIALLY THE NEW ISRAEL THAT CHRISTIANITY AND ISLAM WANT TO BE.

The principle of our Ollotouta was given us, long time ago already, by our master to all in the domain; the great Gaelic bard, founder of the modern Free-thought, who is usually evoked under the anglicized name of John Toland. There cannot be, by definition, things contrary to Reason in Holy Scriptures really emanating from the divine one.

If there are, then it is, either error, or lies!

Either there is no mystery, or then it is in any way a divine revelation!

There is no happy medium...

We do not admit other orthodoxy that only the one of Truth because, wherever it can be in the world, must also stand, we are completely convinced of it, God's Church, and not that one of such or such a human faction … We are consequently for showing no mercy to the error on any pretext that can be, each time we will have the possibility or occasion to expound it in its true colors.

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1696. Christianity not mysterious.

1702. Vindicius Liberus. Response of John Toland to the detractors of his "Christianity not mysterious."

1704. Letters to Serena containing the origin of idolatry and reasons of heathenism, the history of the soul's immortality doctrine among the heathens, etc. (Version Baron d’Holbach, a German philosopher).

1705. The true Socinianism * as an example of fair debate on matters of theology *.To which is prefixed Indifference in disputes, recommended by a pantheist to an orthodox friend.

1709. Adeisdaemon or the man without superstition. Jewish origins.

1712. Letter against popery, and particularly against admitting the authority of the Fathers or Councils in religious controversies, by Sophia Charlotte of Prussia.

1714. Defense of the Jews, victims of the anti-Semite prejudices, and a plea for their naturalization.

1718. The destiny of Rome, of the popes, and the famous prophecy of St Malachy, archbishop of Armagh, in the thirteenth century.

Nazarenus or the Jewish, gentile, and Mahometan Christianity (version Baron d’Holbach), containing:

I. The history of the ancient gospel of Barnabas, and the modern apocryphal gospel of the Mahometans, attributed to the same apostle.

II. The original plan of Christianity occasionally explained in the history of the Nazarenes, solving at the same time various controversies about this divine (but so highly perverted) institution.

III. The relation of an Irish manuscript of the four gospels as likewise a summary of the ancient Irish Christianity and what the realty of the keldees (an order half-lay, half-religious) was, against the last two bishops of Worcester.

1720. Pantheisticon, sive formula celebrandae sodalitatis socraticae.

Tetradymus.

I. Hodegus. The pillar of cloud and fire that guided the Israelites in the wilderness was not miraculous but, as faithfully related in Exodus, a practice equally known by other nations, and in those countries, not only useful, but even necessary.

Il. Clidophorus.

III. Hypatia or the history of the most beautiful, most virtuous, and most accomplished lady, who was stoned to death by the clergy of Alexandria, to gratify the pride, the emulation and even the cruelty, of Archbishop Cyril, commonly, but very undeservedly, styled Saint Cyril.

1726. Critical history of the Celtic religion, containing an account of the druids, or the priests and judges, of the vates, or the diviners and physicians, and finally of the bards, or the poets; of the ancient Britons, Irish or Scots. In plus with the story of Abaris the Hyperborean, priest of the sun.

A specimen of the Armorican language (Breton, Irish, Latin, dictionary).

1726. An account of Jordano Bruno's book, about the infinity of the universe and the innumerable worlds, translated from the Italian editing.

1751. The Pantheisticon or the form of celebrating the Socratic-society. London S. Paterson. Translation of the book published in 1720.

"Druidism" is an independent review (independent of any religious or political association) and which has only one purpose: theoretical or fundamental research about what is neo-paganism. The double question, to which this review of theoretical studies tries to answer, could be summarized as follows:

"What could be or what should be a current neo-druidism, modern and contemporary?”

"Druidism" is a neo-pagan review, strictly neo-pagan, and heir to all genuine (that is to say non-Christian) movements which have succeeded one another for 2000 years, the indirect heir, but the heir, nevertheless!

Regarding our reference tradition or our intellectual connection, let us underline that if the "poets" of Domnall mac Muirchertach Ua Néill still had imbas forosnai, teimn laegda and dichetal do chennaib, in their repertory (cf. the conclusion of the tale of the plunder of the castle of Maelmilscothach, of Urard Mac Coise, a poet who died in the 11th century), they may have been Christians for several generations. It is true that these practices (imbas forosnai, teimn ...) were formally forbidden by the Church, but who knows, there may have been accommodations similar to those of astrologers or alchemists in the Middle Ages.

Anyway our "Druidism" is also a will; the will to get closer, at the maximum, to ancient druidism, such as it was (scientifically speaking). The will also to modernize this druidism, a total return to ancient druidism being excluded (it would be anyway impossible).

Examples of modernization of this pagan druidism.

— Giving up to lay associations of the cultural side (medicine, poetry, mathematics, etc.). Principle of separation of Church and State.

— Specialization on the contrary, in Celtic, or pagan in general, spirituality history of religion, philosophy and metapsychics (known today as parapsychology).

— Use in some cases of the current vocabulary (Church, religion, baptism, and so on).

A golden mean, of course, is to be found between a total return to ancient druidism (fundamentalism) and a too revolutionary radical modernization (no longer sagum).

The Celtic PAA (pantheistic agnostic atheist) having agreed to sign jointly this small library *, of which he is only the collector, druid Hesunertus (Peter DeLaCrau), does not consider himself as the author of this collective work. But as the spokesperson for the team which composed it. For other sources of this essay on druidism, see the thanks in the bibliography.

* Socinians, since that's how they were named later, wished more than all to restore the true Christianity that teaches the Bible. They considered that the Reformation had made disappear only a part of corruption and formalism, present in the Churches, while leaving intact the bad substance: non-biblical teachings (that is very questionable in fact).

** This little camminus is nevertheless important for young people ... from 7 to 77 years old! Mantalon siron esi.

1) Do ratath tra do Mael Milscothach iartain cech ni dobrethaigsid suide sin etir ecnaide 7 fileda 7 brithemna la taeb ogaisic a crech 7 is amlaidsin ro ordaigset do tabairt a cach ollamain ina einech 7 ina sa[ru]gad acht cotissad de imus forosnad [di]chetal do chollaib cend 7 tenm laida .i. comenclainn fri rig Temrach do acht co ti de intreide sin FINIT.

LOOK OUT LOOKOUT ! PRELIMINARY CLARIFICATION!

THE LEBOR GABALA ERENN OR BOOK OF CONQUESTS OF IRELAND

IS IN NO CASE A “BIBLE” OF OUR DRUIDISM FOR THE REASONS WHICH FOLLOW.

NOTHING PREVENTS NEVERTHELESS TO STUDY IT FOR THE GEMS OF PURE PAGANISM IT CONTAINS.

Unlike what the great French specialist in the question who is Christian-J. Guyonvarc'h thinks, in what concerns us we will not include the Book of Conquests of Ireland or Lebor Gabala Erenn in the Celtic mythological great texts, for a simple reason: this book of Conquests of Ireland is only a forgery made of odds and ends collected haphazardly

by medieval bards fed of Christian underculture. There are inside only some lumps of pure druidic mythology, but drowned in a soup or a really insipid brew, well in the fashion of the time. Even if the first to have been interested in this forgery are Henry Lizeray like William O'Dwyer in 1884 (following the friar Mícheál Ó'Cléirigh ).

The Lebor Gabala Erenn which wants to be a literal and precise report of the history of Ireland can be analyzed actually as an attempt to endow Irishmen with a history comparable with that the Jews gave to themselves with the Old Testament. While resorting to pagan myths of Ireland at the same time Gaelic and pre-Gaelic but reinterpreted in light of the Judeo-Christian theology and of the historiography. This heterogeneous work shows us therefore an island subjected to various invasions, each one adding a new chapter to the history of the country. Biblical paradigms provided to these historians new kind narrative frameworks which only required to be adapted for them. We thus find ancestors of Gaels reduced to slavery in foreign lands like Hebrew in Egypt, or dispersed in a strange diaspora, or in search of their promised land.

Many fragments of a pseudo-history of Ireland circulated already in the seventh and eighth centuries, but longest and most documented are those appearing in the Historia Brittonum or History of Bretons by the Welsh monk Nennius (829-830). There Nennius provides us two different accounts which are supposed to speak about earliest Irish antiquity ( based on various materials, particularly French, which is not a reference in the circumstance).

The first of them, the Nennius known as Breton, evokes a series of successive settling coming from Iberia carried out by pre-Gaelic peoples: all are found in the book of invasions.

The second one, the Nennius written in Gaelic language, tells us about the origin of Gaels themselves and described how in turn they became the rulers of the country and consequently the ancestors of all true Irishmen.

These two basic accounts were enriched and worked over again by the Irish bards throughout the ninth century. In the 10th and 11th centuries, several long historical poems were written on the same subject then inserted in the general framework of the Book of invasions.

Four great Christian poets having contributed to the final development can therefore be identified by the way.

Eochaidh Ua Floinn (936-1004) of Armagh. Poems 30,41,53,65,98,109,111.

Flann Mainistrech mac Echthigrin (dead 1056), lector and historian of Monasterboice abbey. Poems 42, 56, 6, 82.

Tanaide (dead circa 1075). Poems 47,54,86.

Gilla Cómáin mac Gilla Samthainde (circa 1072). Poems 13,96,115.

Thereafter a few years later an anonymous scholar still Christian undoubtedly brought together all these poems as well as many others and fitted them within a prose framework, partly due to his hand partly drawn from older no longer extant sources, which developed or paraphrased these versified passages. The end result being therefore that the various states of the Gaelic language used to write this work fall within Middle Irish (period from 900 to 1200).

REMINDER.

“Drasidae (sic) memorant re vera fuisse populi partem indigenam, sed alios quoque ab insulis extimis confluxisse et tractibus transrenanis, crebritate bellorum et adluvione fervidi maris sedibus suis expulsos” (Timagenes, quoted by Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum Gestarum Libri or Res Gestae "Roman History,” book XV, chapter IX, 4).

“The druids [Latin drasidae] affirm that a portion of the people was really indigenous to the soil, but that other inhabitants poured in from very remote islands on the coast and from the districts across the Rhine, having been driven from their former abodes by frequent wars, and sometimes by a tidal wave” [literally: by the flood of a raging sea].

“The forest of the Tartessians, in which it is said that the Titans waged war against the gods, the Cynetes inhabited, whose most ancient king Gargorix, was the first to collect honey. This prince, having a grandson born to him, the offspring of an intrigue on the part of his daughter, tried various means, through shame for her non-chastity, to have the child put to death; But he, being preserved by some good fortune, through all calamities, came at last to the throne, from a compassionate feeling for the many perils that he had undergone. First of all, he ordered him to be exposed, that he might be starved, and, when he sent some days after to look for his body, he was found nursed by the milk of various wild beasts. When he was brought home, he caused him to be thrown down in a narrow road, along which herds of cattle used to pass; being so cruel that he would rather have his grandchild trampled to pieces, than dispatched by an easy death. As he was unhurt also in this case, and required no food, he threw him to hungry dogs, that had been exasperated by want of food for several days, and afterwards to swine, but as he was not only uninjured, but even fed with the teats of some of the swine, he ordered him at last to be cast into the sea. On this occasion, as if, by the manifest interposition of some deity, he had been carried, amidst the raging tide, and flux and reflux of the waters, not on the billows but in a vessel, he was put on shore by the subsiding ocean; and, not long after, a hind came up, and offered the child her teats. By constantly following this nurse, the boy acquired extraordinary swiftness of foot, and long ranged the mountains and woods among herds of deer, with fleetness not inferior to theirs. At last, being caught in a snare, he was presented to the king; and then, from the similitude of his features, and certain marks which had been burned on his body in his infancy, he was recognized as his grandson. Afterwards, from admiration at his escapes from so many misfortunes and perils, he was appointed by his grandfather to succeed him on the throne. The name given him was Habis; and, as soon as he became king, he gave such proofs of greatness that he seemed not to have been delivered in vain, through the power of the gods, from so many exposures to death. He united the barbarous people by laws; he was the first that taught them to break oxen for the plow and to raise wheat from tillage; and he obliged them, instead of food procured from the wilds, to adopt a better diet, perhaps through a dislike of what he had eaten in his childhood. ...By him the people were interdicted from servile duties, and the commonalty was divided among seven cities. After Habis was dead, the sovereignty was retained for many generations by his successors” (Justin, epitome or summary of the philippic and universal histories by Trogue Pompey or Pompeius Trogus, book XLIV chapter IV).

“The Celts who dwell along the ocean venerate the Dioscori above any of the gods, since they have a tradition handed down from ancient times that these gods appeared in their country coming from the ocean. The country which skirts the ocean does not bear a few names which are derived from the Argonauts and the Dioscori…” (Timaeus, Greek historian quoted by Diodorus Siculus. Historical Library. Book IV, chapter LVI).

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Some great French specialists as C. - J. Guyonvarc'h, deny any links between druidism and shamanism; but if we accept taking into account its shamanic origins, druidism is the oldest of the religions in the world. The word (druidism) to indicate the religion of Celts is, of course, of relatively recent origin. The Irish Middle Ages used the word druidecht we could more or less translate by “druidry.” The fact is that actually there was no narrower word and what we call druidism today, for example was indicated by periphrases, of which at least one is attested under the hand of Caesar. “They discuss and impart to the youth many elements respecting the stars and their motion, respecting the extent of the world and of our earth, respecting the nature of things, respecting the power and the majesty of the immortal gods” (Caesar B.G. Book VI, chapter XIV).

Last point. To speak about druidism in the singular (eternal druidism, etc.) is an intellectual swindle. There was never ONE druidism or a UNIFIED druidry, it was only druidism in the plural, variables according to places, times, even according to social classes or communities. There was therefore never ONE druidism, but SOME DRUIDIC SCHOOLS. Each time we speak about druidism in the singular, we will therefore indicate simply by that the broad outlines, or the main tendencies more or less common to all places and to all druidic times. And especially not a druidism claiming to be superior compared to other forms of piety, one of the theses common to all these Schools being precisely that of the various levels of truth, EACH ONE HAVING ITS NECESSITY OR ITS INTEREST.

The question of the sources now.

As soon as the domain of druidism is tackled, seekers are inevitably confronted with problems of reference.

Two types of sources deliver us general information. First of all, the contemporaries, among whom we can quote, for instances: Diodorus of Sicily (Historical Library), Strabo (Geography), Pomponius Mela (De Chorographia), Lucan (Pharsalia), Pliny the Elder (Natural History), and especially Julius Caesar, with his famous commentaries. These accounts often produce a negative image of the Celtic peoples but we can extract from them many very interesting elements.

The second source is much later since it is the writing down by the learned men of the Middle Ages, of the oral traditions, in Ireland. This literature, whose writing down ranges since the 8th century to the 16th century, opportunely comes to confirm or supplement the results of the studies of ancient sources.

It transcribes the myths as well as the epics of Celtic Ireland, transmitted orally from generation to generation. The collectors transcribers have decked all these myths out in a Christian veneer, under which the study can more or less discover the original Celtic substrate. All the work of researchers in druidism therefore consists in giving off the initial matter of Celtic mythology, while remaining in Indo-European context. These various texts of medieval Irish literature can be gathered in five main categories.

- The mythological cycle which also includes legends on the settlement of our island (the Legends on Etanna or Tochmarc Etaine, the death of the children of Tuireann, the battle of the standing stones plain, the Lebor Gabala Erenn, or the Book of the Taking of our beloved Ireland …

- The heroic cycle (also known as the red Branch cycle or Ulster cycle) whose principal hero is the invincible CúChulainn (Hound of the smith) . It is in this cycle that we must classify the rustling of the cows of Cooley as well as the moving legend of Deirdre…

- The Fenian cycle (also known as the Ossianic cycle or Leinster cycle), whose principal heroes are Finn Mac Cumaill, his son Ossian and his grandson Oscar.

- The historical cycle (or the cycle of kings).

- The various adventures sea voyages or aislingi (visions). Conle, Bran son of Febal, Cormac, St. Brendan, Tundale, the Purgatory of St. Patrick, the aisling or vision of Adamnan, the others imrama or echtra. But look at, only echtra remained of really pagan spirit, the imrama themselves, were more largely Christianized.

Cathbad drúi búi oc tabairt da daltaib fri hEmain anairtúaith. Cét fer n-déinmech dó oc foglaim druídechta úad. Is é lín doninchoisced Cathbad. Ocht n-dalta do aes in dána druidechta na farad (Tain Bo Cualnge).

Catubatuos the druid was teaching his pupils, in the North-East of Emain. Hundred thoughtless men were at his place, learning druidism. Such was the number of those Catubatuos taught. Eight of those [only] were capable of druidic science (Rustling of the cows of Cooley).

Question. Which is of the 72 languages which he had therefore studied that which was spread in first by Fenius Farsaid?

Answer. It is not difficult. The Irish language… because of all those which were brought back by its school, it was that which he preferred, that of which he heard about since his childhood in the country of Scythians…

Question. Why can we say about Gaelic it is a chosen language?

Answer. It is not difficult! Because it was chosen among all the languages, and because for any incomprehensible sound, existing in the other languages, a meaning was found in Gaelic, hence its limpidity as well as its clearness.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF IRISH LITERATURE.

Introduction. Irish literature in Gaelic language is commonly classified in 12 genres.

Togla (destructions) Forbaisi (sieges) Imrama (navigations) Tochmarca (wooings) Aitheid (elopements) Fessa (feasts) Uatha (caves) Tána (cattle-raids) Echtrada (adventures in the other world) Aideda ( tragic deaths) Catha (battles) and lastly Airgne (plunders).

Which are the three periods which give to the Irish literature its very particular charm?

The first written texts are related to Christianization of the Island: they are religious texts ranging from prayers to sermons by way of the life of a saint. The manuscripts which preserve them and which have reached us are the oldest written traces, if one agrees to eliminate the oghamic epigraphy, in itself not very literary. But they express (at the dawn of this literature) a first “unsuitability” : the hiberno-latin of hisperica famina.

They are written with a learned in books Latin language, which often reproduces the structures of Gaelic language, which copies turn of phrase gleaned here and there, and sometimes assembled in the form of glossaries as strange as unreasonable for a Latinist.

Since the beginning, because Ireland was never conquered by Rome, and owed its conversion to Christianity adopting writing, appears therefore this first gap of which we will emphasize features to release from it a paradox. It is in a foreign language, at the beginning badly mastered that a national literature is worked out, an Irish literature of which the goal is to be in conformity with continental European models, and to melt into this cultural identity.

The result was often far away from expected results and it was often surprising.

Indeed, it was not the first form of literature born in Ireland. There was an older one, an oral literature, learned by heart and recited, dating back to the times previous to Christianity. It would have completely disappeared if these same scholars, busy to express itself in Latin, had not taken the trouble to transcribe us the essential of it in the language of their country. Therefore leaving us an irreplaceable account, as well of a language as of a belief or a mentality. This effort to preserve texts former to the Christianization of minds, and that one could have wanted to do disappear forever was accompanied by the will to combine them, to integrate them, in the biblical or evangelical tradition. A little like a kind of an addition, but less by intellectual dishonesty that in order to unify different creations.

During too much for a long time, critics laughed at these juxtapositions and at these doubtful links, pruning within the Christian interpolations to find the original purity of the “pagan” text; some even feared some watering down, suppression, even destruction. In fact, instead of deploring this state of our texts, it is better to benefit from it, by precisely studying the passage of literature from a framework in another because at the end it resulted in a strengthening of the range of this same literature.

About these two periods, historically sometimes superimposed, we could call it bad luck and complain about the lot destiny so granted to Ireland. By using as an excuse that her identity was ridiculed, that she was despoiled with her soul, her spirit, after having been the victim of a conquest of minds in which she lost her language and her deep beliefs.

They are vain regrets, according to us, because most fertile interrogations emerge from certain tensions, and from this uncomfortable situation, the typically Irish mind drew more than one to prove its cleverness or its wakening. Capacity to integrate or make a synthesis is developed; the thirst for freedom, thanks to several references or books, is sharper there; the agility of the mind going up from a level to another can only be increased by it. In other areas of the world, it was the same thing. We will quote the case of the Persian epic of Firdausi. His Book of kings harmonizes the old Indo-Iranian background, the Zarathustra's reformation, the Mesopotamian worships, and the Muslim Shiism, and gives to each one a new respectability by merging these various contributions in a vast historical design, that of Iran.

The “cuts” are excellent insofar as they make patching and not exclusions, possible. To be disparate is the main risk, of course; but the advantage, in the event of success, amounts to establish new and original points of view.

If we continue to paint these pictures in a coarse way, it is for better explaining the intellectual surprise of the one who approaches for the first time the Irish literature, by pointing out a last period. With the difference of Latin which was never spoken as a living language, and which did not destroy Gaelic, English settled in a thorough way in Ireland, and became too an indigenous language, as a result of a durable colonization. To master this language guaranteed a better social status or simply an opportunity of freedom. Many Anglo-Norman settlers themselves nevertheless made common cause with the country in which they lived like the others, and reinforced incipient nationalism. And it is this passage from literature called “Anglo-Irish” in which the English contribution is dominating, to a “Hiberno-English” literature, representing after a new cultural identity, it is this passage which deserves the greatest attention. Most delicate for a colonized country, once its independence is got on the political level, is to get a cultural autonomy, especially if this new State remains modest, and does not reach the size of a great power.

What we say there is a simplification, because we would find many examples of Irish authors, either imitating their English fellows, or being opposed to them with the only aim of asserting or of imposing themselves, even nourishing a national awareness. But with the difference of the previous situation in which Latin was introduced in Ireland we will remark that English matched only political power. Behind Latin, before the conflict between Rome and the Church of Ireland in the 13th century, on the other hand, there was no political power, in view of the state of soft anarchy which prevailed in Europe between the sixth and seventh centuries. No political power but some new beliefs, carrying values to be communicated or to make bear fruit, which took support in this language. To therefore observe these two given situations, we will conclude without difficulty that one is the reverse of the other, that the first is not accompanied by political and economic oppression as the second. And that therefore the modern Irish literature came less from the will to delimit a national sense of identity than from a release of this same sense of identity. Stifled but also suddenly confronted with a vaster foreign space, a kind of extension, symbolized by the use of English. The incurred main risk is then that of dissolution, as well on the moral level as on the cultural level: it is necessary to withdraw himself from a model, to invent a personal one, to see it to crumble under his eyes and therefore to be freed in fact from every model. Once again, it is not obvious for a colonized country to reach independence, and to melt some invaluable “idiosyncrasies” in the universal flood of human culture. The Irish literature has this characteristic, again paradoxical, to create the cultural space which, on the other hand, will be missing for its political adversary, to supplement domination, and to convert them into liberation. A new gap, if you want, between a culture and a capacity, the first dissociated of the second and using the language of the adversary. Not to make a desire of independence pass, but for an improbable adequacy between a new culture and a capacity which, in order to be at the same height, was to be changed. These three periods also briefly outlined, of Irish literature, leave us a strange feeling.

a) The first literature is the result of the “mixture” of Latin (symbol of the Christian faith) and of Gaelic language. A compromise with original effects and a new use of the language and of the Irish thought.

b) The second form of literature matches the “passage” from an original Pagan culture to a Christian culture. Conciliation or new alliance with comparisons modifying prospects.

c) The third form is the protest “invention” of domination over the minds, matching that over human beings and material possessions. It escapes the oppressive political situation while benefiting from the cultural weakness of the English power; it changes a dying or stifled Gaelic national culture into a culture propelled by the very channel of the power which wanted to extinguish it forever. A necessary conversion giving rise to an original and attractive cultural mold.

And that brings back us to our initial interrogation: is there an extraordinary form of thought working in the Irish creativity, of which the bases would then be put in light, and of which the secret conceptualization would be sought?

Is there “an Irish miracle” as there was a “Greek miracle?” Can one speak about a “celtitude?” The question is not absurd. The word is perfectly legitimate if we keep to it its own and etymological meaning of object worthy of admiration. It implies even something in addition: “the unexpected one, the surprising one… Miracle implies contingencies. It is a set of favorable contingencies…” Here how we saw specialists annotate the word as for the Greek world. Whereas, of course, for his author, the French Renan, in 1883, it remained close to a religious reflection. Or at least very moral because it is on morals, this education of soul and mind by means of rational criticism, that he intended to reconstruct human unity.

Peter DeLaCrau’s notice for those of our readers who might be shocked by what is following. Renan is the author of a political notion that has become one of the pillars of today's left politicians or democrats, defining a nation (from Latin nascire birthright) through the will to live together or to have a common destiny, in order to continue to justify the belonging to France of Alsace and Lorraine after 1870.

In spite of the plurality of doctrines and religions. Renan, Breton faithful to his origins, is fascinated by Greece, is tormented by Judaea. We know from him his Life of Jesus which caused a scandal, but we generally forget his archeological work and those which deal about the Semitic languages. He also tried, in his Essays on Morals and critical essays (1859), particularly that which is entitled “the poetry of the Celtic races,” to release the characteristic of a Celtic literature. As if he sought again there what to determine a “miracle,” a moral propensity to link men (in spite of a national sense of identity), and an effort of surpassing which did not say its last word. Was not poetry previous to philosophy? (According to own words of Renan.) What therefore is important for us is to see that a thinker, at the exact origin of an expression (Greek miracle) which granted to a culture to reach eternity, put forward, before, with regard to Celtic literature, the same opinion. Made it public and professed it, by distinguishing even among this family the Irish branch, for its strong personality. Therefore his thesis is worthy to be expounded before considering other criticisms dealing with the same problems.

On which arguments is based Renan’s opinion consisting in recognizing in it a literature exceeding the framework of its origin and worthy to be proposed for attention to men? What strikes him first is that “this small people” (in which he integrates Irish, Welsh, Bretons or Armoricans) has a literature which developed during the Middle Ages a huge influence: changed European imagination, and imposed its poetic topics over almost all Christendom. It is therefore necessary to find the reasons for this fascination, and Renan sees them in the national characters of these "races,” according to a common prejudice at the time, though he moderates this idea by psychological considerations. If this race is "pure,” as a result of its remoteness, it is especially marked by its habits and its loneliness. It has all the faults and all the qualities of the solitary man: proud and timid, powerful as regards feeling and weak as regards the action.” In fact, for Renan, they are men who put themselves away from life or History. They preferred their inner life to the detriment of any political life, chose the way of dreams and neglected to succeed materially, indifferent to gold or empires. An idealized portrait of the Celts, strongly tinted by the specific tastes of Renan, attached to the idea of diffuse kindness, possible among men. Therefore he supports these judgments without insisting too much above them, as a consequence of the purity of blood but also of a too solitary life. “Deprived of expansion, alien to any idea of aggression and conquest, not very anxious to do prevail its thought outside, it (the race) knew only to move back…” “The infinite delicacy of feeling which characterizes Celtic race is closely related to its need for concentration”; “the essential component of the poetic life of Celt is the adventure, i.e., the pursuit of the unknown, the endless running behind the always fleeing object of our desires,” etc.

But, beyond these qualities inherent in a people, about which we feel confusedly that they would also suit others, it is necessary to notice in Renan another definition attempt, founded on some subconscious topics of these literatures. These last are as well Latin as Gaelic, British, and Welsh, and seem to be ended in the effort of the 19th century scholars to write them down. Renan therefore does not deal with the Anglo-Irish or Hiberno-English literature, but already covers for us at least two of the three evoked above periods:a, b and c. If Celtic imagination appears infinite to him (“Compared with classical imagination, Celtic imagination is really infinite compared with finite”); the characteristic of this literature is to have worked out a new ideal. In two parts we could say, a new image of the woman, and the belief in a saving hereafter. Though overcome, weak, turned on itself, a people, by his worship, encourage gentleness and hope. Renan maintains then: “Almost all the great calls for the supernatural are due to people hoping quite hopelessly…”

There again, let us stop on the reference to Israel, which at the time shared with Greece these qualities of universality we see ascribed to it as in reserve or in the state of non-exploited possibilities, by Renan, to Celtic literature. Of course, literary documents in the talk of Renan will be especially Welsh, as a result of the translations and of the spirit of the time more prepared for the romantic atmosphere of the Mabinogion, than for the virulence of the epic and mythological texts of Ireland.

Renan himself emphasizes the moral and literary features which would make these works more accessible to readers of his time, insisting on the gentleness, the benevolence which emanates from it, the sympathy for the weak beings, and the kindness towards animals. He notices these traits in the

church literature, illustrating that by the navigation of St. Brendan of which we know the Irish origin: this feeling (sympathy for the weak beings) is one of deepest among Celtic people. They even had pity of Judas. St. Brendan met him on a rock in the middle of the polar seas. He spends there a day per week to refresh himself away from “hell fire”; “the ecclesiastical literature itself presents similar traits: kindness for the animals appears in all the legends of saints in Brittany and Ireland.” From these visible or literary tendencies, which always refer to the situation of an overcome people, our author deduces an attitude concerning Nature, he considers as high as that of Greece or India. It opens an era as did Greece on this subject. Twice, he proclaims it; their mythology is only a transparent naturalism. Not the anthropomorphic naturalism of Greece and India, where the forces of the Universe, set up in living beings and endowed with awareness, tend more and more to be detached from physical phenomena, and to become moral beings. But a realistic naturalism in a way. The love of nature for itself, the sharp impression of its magic, accompanied by the movement of sadness Man fells, when face to face with it, he believes hearing it talking to him about his origin and his destiny.”

Later, Renan joins together Christianity, Hellenism, and Hibernism, around the word “miracle” which will be used by him further to designate Greece. “Among the Kymris (the Celts), the principle of wonder is in nature itself, in its hidden forces, in its inexhaustible fruitfulness… Nothing of the monotheistic design in which the supernatural is only a miracle, a departure from established laws. Nothing either of these personifications of the life of nature, which form the main thing of mythologies in Greece and India. Here, it is perfect naturalism, the indefinite faith in the possible, the belief in the existence of independent beings, and therefore bearing in themselves the principle of their force. Idea completely contrary to Christianity which, in similar cases, sees angels or demons only, necessarily.” Three concepts appear: the “naturalist supernatural” of Celts, the Judeo-Christian “miracle,” the Greco-Indian “anthropomorphism.” Nature either is there loved for itself, or transgressed, or humanized finally, and we can then suppose three forms of thought as original as each other. Even if Renan does not state it as we have just done, we guess the secret base of his reasoning. Do not astonish, he seems to tell his readers, if this literature could fascinate Europe and influence it, it is that it carries in itself qualities which connect it with noblest literature, and give it its aspect; as an example, see the legend of St. Brendan which “is indisputably the most singular product of this combination of Celtic naturalism with Christian spiritualism.”

Renan’s conclusion is then very simple : this literature foreshadows a philosophy to be born, if the Celtic race “dared to enter the world and if it submitted to the conditions of modern thought its rich and deep nature.” Further, he notices that its “poetic childhood” was complete and does not admit reflection is missing in it. Germany, which began with science and criticism, ended in poetry, why Celtic races, which began with poetry, would not end up with criticism? Poetic races are philosophical races, and philosophy is mainly only a manner of poetry as another one.” Obviously, Renan through such parallels, invites us to feel a fertile originality, within a literature which expresses besides better its characteristic features by means of Irish works. Moreover, he sees in it the promise of universality, though he ascribes it especially to the possibilities of the race and a little less to the literary creations themselves. The latter put on the track are a stage, a first effort which will find other molds to be achieved.

Ernest Renan is not the only critic having postulated the existence of a “Celtic miracle” if not of an Irish miracle, to consider the literature of these countries. His fellow countrywoman Clemence Ramnoux too will come, to release some insistent, even obsessive, topics, delimiting quite precise concepts: the sense of the time which goes by, the notion of invasion, the idea of curse, the theme of the "other” or of the “foreigner.”

Let us take the first concept. Many critics were sensitive to the strange courses of times designed or expounded in these texts. The diverting vision of a very thick temporality, full with encased lengths of time, passing at different rhythms (the human hero, going in the hereafter, thinks to remain one day, and learns on his return that in fact a century went by; as it was the case for Bran son of Febal, or Usheen, the famous hero of Yeats).

The second idea - that of invasion – is much stranger. In the rites (festivals of “Samon” or celebration of the royal crowning), in the myths and the epics, we observe the repetition of a narration which implies invasion of demons, pirates, natural elements, foreign peoples, in a cyclic way. But it is less the idea of cycles which prevails than the notion of necessary invasions, advantageous; though painful, therefore staging a cosmic drama in which landing and withdrawal, victory and disaster, battles and foundation, alternate. And Ramnoux to remark, rightly, that “history of Ireland was precisely viewed as a succession of conquests by new peoples.” What is in itself extremely original, since few national mythologies celebrate invasion and make it a positive element; in spite of the threats of the end and destruction, it supposes; able to structure reality. Irish mythological accounts show four principal invasions and it would be vain, as d’Arbois de Jubainville imagined it, to seek to which real peoples that corresponded. They are archetypes of which we discover the trace in many literary accounts. For example, in imaginary voyages or “imrama,” in which our heroes find again persons or friends passed in the Other World, pushed away in the periphery.

While the Sea Voyage of St. Brendan announces that a land awaits Christians of Ireland, over there, outside, when they will be persecuted by impious invaders. In the same way, the concept of invasion is carrying nostalgias, daydreams, obscure presences, promises and compensations; just as it indicates that in turn invaders will be subjected to the same fate, or will have, in order to survive, to win over overcome peoples. The invasion is a release for a land of Ireland overpowered by the weight of a people which therefore achieved its task and so must be erased. It is seen that the topic is boundlessly fertile and could nourish imaginations. A tension due to competition between the world of men and the Other World ready to invade earth and to retake it, does not have anything to envy as dramatic force with the conflicts of the human beings and the god-or-demons in Greek tragedies. So that Ramnoux remarks, to explain this tearing, “that the most popular way for that was to imagine a war for a woman.” A woman passing from the camp of the god-or-demons in that of men, and from the camp of men in that of the god-or-demons, unleashing a war worse than the Trojan War, a war between the human part and the divine part of the world.

On this level of analysis, we could consequently think that Renan and Ramnoux, as many others, want to judge everything in the light of Greece, and so denature the Irish originality. We don’t agree on this opinion, since their goal is the respect of these strange texts, of which they have the presentiment of a very astonishing validity with regard to the profundity, worthy of a heritage to be divided among all men. But as Ramnoux is astonished, here, no philosophy, no history, no tragedy, or rather all is at the stage of “pre-philosophy “ of “pre-history “ of “pre-tragedy “. Where Renan supposed progression in the intellectual development of the peoples, choosing to be initially poetic, then philosophical, or initially philosophical, then poetic, Ramnoux makes us traverse another stage. Another stage where we would describe these old literature as the lineaments of a possible, original, able to be conceptualized, thought. The Greek world is not the ultimate reference here, it is only a convenient reference point to emphasize and “to initiate” movement.

Moreover, it is possible to establish a type of hero recognizable in women, in exiled men, in the one who stirs up quarrels (often a born of adultery descendant). Each of them is “halfway” and leaves a society to enter another. As in the case of a wife whose children are often brought up in his clan by the “fosterage” system, a habit consisting in entrusting the child to the maternal uncle.

Or then as in the case of somebody leaving a group after being banished from it, but ready to betray his hosts to return to his place (case of the exiled one). Or then anxious to cause a quarrel in the purpose to have his share of a confiscated inheritance. As a result we have then a theology of the “to be between “whose all heideggerian expression points out to us the “mitsein “or the “dasein “of this philosopher, additional evidence for us of an effort of universality, in progress and in acts. These pushed back heroes, don’t know of which world they are a member. They “seek or precipitate the disasters in which themselves will find the occasion to experience again their torment,” and herewith highlight a design of evil due to the curse to be halfway; as unable to settle, accumulating misfortunes, and seeing it being repeated.

This concept “to be between” of the great eternally cursed heroes is not without pointing out some aspects of the philosophy of Empedocles (man and philosopher, devoted to the wandering, and to the destruction) at least for Ramnoux. So she concludes without hesitating her survey by the words “theology” and “pre-metaphysics,” certain of the value of these forgotten or badly read texts. “What is humanly interesting is that the model implanted in the life of tribes underwent a development able to make it an article of theology or pre-metaphysics. Here, the figure of an agent of fate, bad, there (in Greece), the prototype of the human and philosophical status.” It did not take much that a conceptual apparatus would then be developed upon.

What is certain and proclaimed is the assertion, expressed by Ramnoux, that the requirements for an awakening of the thought are met, and awaited only one flick to shine through.

We wish therefore in the same way that this modest and first essay, intended to make the Irish contribution conspicuous, be not only about the Gaelic literature (because of its antiquity, the strangest and most attractive one), but also ventures in the domain of the Latin Hibernic culture. Or in that of Hiberno-English creations, because their works can develop antiquated topics until then without transcendence, or because their development can make comprehensible some part of older Gaelic works.

The so much described originality old Gaelic background can indeed occult Irish artistic creations, and make us miss a by three times astonishing historical creation, which worked deeply Irish creativity.

The essay by Ramnoux, in addition to the stage that she makes us cross, is connected with other studies on this same Gaelic matter, of which we will give a short outline, before tackling Hibernic Latin. And here it is Guyonvarc'h, near to the Dumezilian method, about whom we think, so much he enables us to complete this course and to answer somewhat our earlier question about the significance of Irish works. What to do with these works, and what they tell us which is universal?

Dumezil, in his effort to reconstruct the trifunctional ideology of Indo-Europeans, used on several occasions as confirmation, some texts in old Irish, as well as Celtic background in a more general way. In order to find, through the changes the thought inflicted on the old Indo-European framework, elements showing a trifunctional structure.

We know that the Celtic branch considered, at the beginning, the world and the society, in the same way as the other Indo-European peoples. It designed the harmonization of the three functions necessary for the foundation and the balance of society. Specific god-or-demons were appropriate for each one of them, developing their power within the limits of the domain which was allocated to them.

Kings and soothsayers ruled the society, arbitrated the relationship between the men and the god-or-demons; warriors or heroes were there to defend it; farmers and craftsmen nourished it. For each one of these groups, there were specific values, quite precise faults and errors. We are far away from the definition of the “Greek miracle” according to Dumezil himself, which he sees as a beneficial treason with regard to Indo-European tradition, and as the urgent need to reason apart from established frameworks or from received conventions. Ireland is thus deprived of what had appeared to us previously to be her, i.e., an almost resemblance to the Greek world. However, there exists a case of analysis where an Irish legend - the well of Nechtan - opens a work of Dumezil, and is almost entrusted with the role of “guide” within other legends (Roman, Iranian) legends. Its topic is that of the “fire in water” ready to overflow from its spring and to submerge the man or the woman not qualified for this, or faulty, who wants to approach it. Either to seize the magic power that this fire grants, or to cleanse oneself from a particularly defamatory fault. Boand/Bovinda, eponym of the Boyne River, commits adultery; to undergo an ordeal or through curiosity, she approaches the magic well, which at once overflows and pursues her to the sea. And it is this short legend which makes it possible to understand an anthem of the Rig-Veda, the overflow of the Alban Lake of which some Latin historians speak, an episode of the Avesta, etc. In short see Dumezilians works.The conformity with the Indo-European model, the archaism of the topic therefore preserved, are then kept and used to clarify a vaster unit. But is it to help this old literature, of which we seek to see whether it would not have rather worked out concepts escaping too great cultural historicity, likely to be more universal? The Indo-European heritage built especially developments of this kind. Conflicts between functions (the two first ones against the third one) absorption of a function by others, invention of a fourth function (for instance the atectai or dhimmis in Ireland, the Shudra in India) , ambiguity of values inside a function, disqualifying faults according to the ethical code of a function, etc. We suppose a looking stronger originality regarding Ireland, whose ancient texts have as subjects the invasion of Island , replacing the

plague and the magic fault, too much Indo-European, or the thickness of time, for example. It is necessary therefore to better characterize the orientation which marks this literature.

The characteristic of this thought present in myths and epics, compared to the Indo-European world, appears to be a particular vision of the sovereignty, which preserves in Ireland an indisputable sacred force, a magic aura. A mythical and almost eternal woman (Banuta/Banba/Banva), appearing under a triple form (the trio of Macha) a stone (that of Fal) which shouts when a king can be elected, a systematic refusal of all central power other than religious. Here are as many elements which would characterize already a mythical thought. But the interest of the analysis by Guyonvarc'h amounts integrating the problem of the Christianization of these topics. For a long time, it was possible to draw “the pure” and pagan “core” from Christian interpretations, and to laugh at the awkwardness of these forced connections. But we will be able to define Irish originality, not only by a variation with respect to Indo-European tradition, but as conciliation and a deployment. In addition that the introduction of Christianity on the island made it possible to fix in writing down some accounts, which without that would have disappeared, and to preserve more than to destroy, that led to a redefinition of the topics inside other frameworks. Of course, it was necessary that the scholars at work loved these legends to authorize such infringements of the Christian belief. But if one wonders about their motivations, it is true that the judgment alternates then between the desire for showing them insincere, and the feeling of a higher comprehension. In any event, this manner of reasoning by analogy, i.e., for example to connect the Book of Conquests (where the successive races settling in Ireland are described) to the Bible, is worthy better than to be estimated skillful. It must hold the attention. It is one of the merits of the work of Guyonvarc'h to subject it to our reflection.

A melting is always fertilizing, and our goal not being the archeology of topics and structures, we will devote ourselves to that this intellectual operation of “displacement” can have as intrinsic and universal value. The study of origins is not negligible, but the creative activity “distorts,” and it is necessary to wonder whether these distortions are infinite, even anarchistic, or if certain rules preside over these changes. It is the latter point which brings our research.

Let us return to the myth of invasions such as Guyonvarc'h analyzes it and let us give there a short outline of it, to illustrate the previous remarks and to make us progress.

The mythological text tells the various invasions of Ireland; we feel this text is used as a base, and if it does not make possible all is developments from itself, it makes possible to think that it is the most common reference. Indeed, two other texts, the first and the second battle of the Plain of the standing stones or mounds (Cath Maige Tuired), are related to it and many others too. The text therefore opens by a comparison between the Garden of Eden of Adam and Ireland, two countries diametrically opposed by their situation, but similar in their nature…

Guyonvarc'h draws from this mythology astonishing remarks which help us to understand a form of colored, but original, thought. The first woman, Banuta, embodies eternal sovereignty. “She will reappear in the account as a queen of Toutai Deuas, a piece of evidence of the continuity of her presence and of her identification with the land of Ireland.” It is the immutable central axis around which some events will take place. Therefore, all the conquests have the same structure: “wanderings (generally on the sea) landing, fight against the previous occupier, installation and settlement, disappearance through disease or massacre in front of the following conqueror”; “the battle against Andernas renamed Fomoire is a constant of all invasions. But the Andernas/Fomoire escape the usual notion of winners and overcome people. It is an always again beginning task that to overcome and to subject them.” We will not insist on the importance of wandering on the sea for an island, such as it appears in our eyes, if we consider its power of formation and creation: but on the succession of the conquerors - whose conquest reproduces the aforesaid diagram - which gradually installs Mankind in Ireland. The land of Ireland enriched by all these contributions can then be allocated to mankind. The subsoil will belong to the god-or-demons, overcome and repelled into magic hillocks, or sidhe.

Guyonvarc'h underlines the double fight well which is obligatorily previous every invasion; a first one against the occupiers, a second against the Andernas/Fomoire. So the Irish mythical thought and we know the weight of myths over all the other thoughts which result from them is structured around a revolt against an unjust and unbalanced oppression. What makes possible after a return to the normal situation (return from exile, recovery of lost sovereignty); so that it is not an invasion, but a “taking” of sovereignty by legitimate processes. And that is possible in Ireland, we will add, only by means of the wandering on the sea, providing survivals or bright apophenias.

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 1.

Don’t forget nevertheless that Celts are not in the beginning islanders nor sea people but… continental peoples, of Central or Danubian Europe. And that a certain number of the invasions in question are only relatively recent confabulations, not going up beyond the fertile imagination of the Irish bards living in the Middle Ages, eager at the most point to flatter the self-esteem of their masters by endowing them with made-to-measure genealogies (Scotia daughter of Pharaoh, Adam, etc.). It is not because we reproduce here the brilliant study of our friend Vincent about this subject that we necessarily subscribe to all his considerations.

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Then the problem of the passage of this mythical model within the Judeo-Christian framework, and of seeing what that suggests as a process of intensification, remain. The first work of the monks and of the scholars was to link or find between the biblical chronology and that one of Ireland, landmarks. But the bringing together was not done anyhow, or at least, is not deprived of sense. Such is our point of view, when we look closely at the operation.

First, it was necessary to replace Irish traditions inside the known world, to reinstate them in total history of the time. For that, the various landowners of Ireland had to come from Greece, from Egypt, from Spain, from Scythia, and perhaps even from Judea or from India. That is not negligible and only artificial. The learned Irishman could therefore feel to be the heir to brilliant civilizations of which he perceived the importance by the means of the new texts he had to read. It was no longer needed to think himself completely alien to these intellectual productions, no longer needed to believe him lower or exiled, but on the contrary a formidable opening to remote origins.

It is good for a people that it founds its origin beyond itself and that it pushes back it unceasingly if it wants to reach a certain universality. To want to monopolize all the traditions, to regard oneself as the most faithful son, or the best zealot, in the naive manner like here of an improbable, but tried, genealogy, is in nothing bad or purely negative. Even if the archeologist of the beliefs or the historian of the religions must then untie this hank worthy of a chosen people, and give back each one his possession.

Because if we place ourselves on the level of the “real life,” the argument of historians becomes blurred when taking into consideration creations which emanate from these honorable ambitions, and the care which the Irishmen put to invent origin for themselves.

The Irish old texts are often regarded as a whole stable and unmemorable, that scoria, the interpretations, dirty.

We will support the idea that they were also developed in contact with monasteries, materially (by the writing), but especially intellectually (discovery in their tradition, of some most promising accounts, and strengthening of topics).

Let us see them, not as completed creations of which we should conceal pagan appearance, but as some “works in progress,” suddenly read thanks to another interpretation, erasing some useless alternatives, developing a topic to the detriment of another, etc.

A myth is far away from being motionless and “is fed" on models of reading which are affixed to him.

To confirm our thesis, which is more than an intuition or a hypothesis, it seems us remarkable to see the preference granted to the character of Noah. The biblical flood indeed occupies a large place in these texts; the reference to Noah will be implicit or explicit. Coincidence is strange to consider that, of all the biblical characters, that one of Noah won in the awareness or unconscious of the Irish scholars, at the point to draw from their traditions what evoked best his history.

This is why Irish mythological texts are an invaluable account, not only of ancient beliefs, but also of an intellectual operation. It is not so much Christianity which could distort these traditions, than their necessary transition from a cultural field to another, by appropriate disasters.

Let us conclude the development of our thought with the possible contribution of this Gaelic literature. Renan wished progress in which Celts would pass from poetry to philosophy; Ramnoux supposed the existence of a pre-metaphysics, of a pre-tragic mind, as if all the “ingredients” were there, ready for the forming of a thought; Guyonvarc'h suggested a total respect for texts to read without fanciful cut, in

order to find in them not only the Indo-European designs of the world, but also the subtle acting of Christianization. A spirit of tolerance, of astonishing flexibility, appeared.

That enabled us to establish that the transition from a culture to another directed the creations, and could have a general value when, for example, our thought works in other fields in this way.

That also explains our fascination for this mythological corpus of difficult access.

However, Ireland could not consist of this only literary contribution. There are others which, to cause fewer studies or glory, do not be less worthy of our attention. Therefore we will also deal, arrived at this point of our talk, with the literary production in Latin language in this country. Which therefore refers us to these centuries when the Irish monks ran Europe, and were the best teachers and intellectuals of the time.

PAGAN IRELAND. REMINDER. The first Irish literature was pagan, oral, and based on the use of a P- or Q-Celtic language. We will return to this later. Then there was Christianization and use of Latin.

LATIN IRELAND.

But of the whole production in Latin language what is to be kept? Because we think that through these texts, we will find the trace and the reason for the extraordinary wakening or intellectual ferment of the time. The Latin Irish humanities are worthy to be understood as such, without too seeing there a pure reflection of the pagan , or a pale imitation of the Christian writings: other reasons, independent of the possible background, are to be sought. Or course, the period is vast since it ranges from the fifth and sixth centuries to the ninth century, as creation time, but that it continues in the writing or the rewriting of manuscripts dating from the 12th - 15th century.

As previously, the precedence of a text over another is delicate to define. We could not be sure of the date, the place of composition, the author. Moreover, these Latin texts seem to be copied into manuscripts before the previous mythological epic texts, what grants them a “graphic” in the absence of being “conceptual,” primacy. Unless a most reasonable simultaneity was prudently chosen: the Indo-European tradition and the biblical tradition being both also worthy (one is former to the other only from the point of view of Irish history). What had restrained us about the Irish myths was their particular development (since a myth is subjected to many forces) due to a new intellectual framework, needing a transfer or a displacement. This transfer directed the creations, their topics, or their message.

In this case, the challenge for an Irishman is to express himself in another language, to settle in it to use it. They place no longer contents in other containers, reconciling what can be so; we witness the competition of two languages (or cultures) and their mutual influence. There will be exchanging, borrowing, reciprocal change, in which we noticed only adaptation. These texts are therefore used not only to reveal an old Celtic background or remains of initial Christendom (historicizing attitude), but to emphasize creativity mode due to conflicting circumstances. Let us point it out, however, that the Latin which was introduced in Ireland was accompanied by no oppressing political power, but used as a religion and a culture.

Let us detail this literary production; it is made of litanies and of prayers, of saint lives, of catecheses, of penitentials, and of monastic rules, of “navigations” or sea voyages, of glossaries and of texts of studies, of some philosophical or encyclopedic works. It is generally judged according to two criteria: it’s more or less large distance compared to a “post classic” Latin; its tie, more or less narrow compared to Celtic tradition. The comments alternate between the praise of a preserved ancient knowledge or that of an undeniable originality; or even they remark that, under the Latin religious “veneer “ true Celtic colors remain, somewhat faded or rubbed out, of course, etc. It is not in this light that we will estimate the aforementioned creation, because it seems obvious to us to admit that the meeting of two cultures caused infringements of an original purity difficult to define. The student of Gaelic origin wrote in a Latin language which sometimes indeed resembled his native tongue. Influences and borrowings were practiced. Folk traditions were preserved within Christian books. In fact, the important thing amounts to see if there were a sudden appearance of new forms, the clash of these two movements having created a common central surface, a place of division balanced between the two forces, in the worst case, a point halfway. All these texts will be then to classify according to their more or less great proximity compared to this central surface. They will contribute to it or will illustrate it.

However, by an almost general agreement, the Irish literature of Latin language brings two inventions to the universal literature: one of linguistic nature, i.e., the use, even the rise, of the rhyme in poetry; the second being the literary genre known by the name “sea voyage.”

These two new forms with success growing over centuries must be understood as the result of a conflict situation requiring less the disappearance of one of the antagonists than the opening of a third solution. By them, we perhaps approach what made so vigorous, intellectually speaking, the Irish thinkers and missionaries: they had two tools of effective design and spreading.

Irish Latin presents a double aspect: at the same time very preserving, erudite, and extremely barbaric. The first current most probably refers us to the teaching of this foreign language for the purpose of making priests and monks able to access to Christian literature. And not in the idea to train civil servants or rhetoricians for a disappeared empire.

This teaching carried out with zeal and rigor (the asceticism of Irish monasticism will be justly famous), kept in Ireland a school pronunciation often more correct than on the Continent where sounds were in full change. Therefore, “c” will be still pronounced “k,” which avoids the confusion between “ci” and “ti” of continental scribes. Keeping also of the difference in the final vowels (on the continent e, i, and u, often merged). Dag Norberg, from which we borrow these elements of analysis, emphasized how much this respectful attachment from Irishmen was also a cause of confusion and hesitation. It was unceasingly necessary to resort to glossaries in order to know, to which semantic field a word belonged. If it were of a poetic, technical, common, slang, register; or if it matched continental texts of Late Latin, whose forms were in competition or in disagreement with the forms in the Vulgate, or with more traditional texts. It was given to this unsuitable and extremely strange vocabulary the name “Hisperism,” from Latin “Hesper,” designating here Western lands, sunset. Whole texts, the Hisperica Famina, often defied any comprehension so much the choice of the words surprises.

“Hisperica Famina,” whose name was given to designate these forgeries of words, are perhaps behind rhyme. The thesis is worthy to be expounded because of the argumentation. The more running opinion concerning the invention of rhyme is based on the idea of decomposition of the Latin verse following the invasions of Germanics, and on that of its replacement by a structure close to prose. Indeed, the idea itself of this echo, for us an instrument of enchanting music, was at this point alien to Ancients that they avoided it as an imperfection; the authorization to use assonance existed only in prose, to punctuate some hard speech, or to complete an oratory periodic sentence in order to, so to speak, deal a fatal blow to the adversary. The thing therefore had nothing noble so much the effect seemed coarse, though effective. Following the invasions, the taste changed, and especially the knowledge of Latin, of which the exact pronunciation was no longer still heard. Therefore we find rhymed poems among the Visigothic Spaniards, in South Gaul, and in Ireland, but it is in this latter country that the use of rhyme became conscious. “Philologists and historians of literature generally come to an agreement to point out the first appearance of rhyme as a conscious element of poetic diction, in Ireland, in the sixth century.”

It remained to know how the invention which could be done in several places of Europe had become general and so formal in this country.

The eminent Bollandist who was Grosjean had then the idea to study the layout of sentences in the Hisperica Famina, of which obscure nature had caused many hypotheses. Was it some esoteric language, of what secrets in this case they were guardians?

Ireland is to be credited with another literary process less obvious than the invention of rhyme. It concerns prose, but its influence is far from being negligible. It appears in the “litanies” whose form and expression refer little to the Christian Latin culture. It is a stylistic invention we see appear there, in Ireland, because of the tension context which was already used for the rise of rhyme. The litany is in the beginning a prayer enumerating some qualities of God, even some faults of a man, using an extremely simplified syntax, in which the bringing together of words in the form of a list is done according to sonority. Of course, nowadays, only a negative idea is kept of the litany that of a tedious work, without somebody is too much concerned about its origin which is supposed by the majority of specialists as being Irish.

But we understand well that the critic would more like some longer and structured work, designed as such, and deeply literary. It remains to see then in the numerous and various, Saints' lives, which show several successive rewriting (a first period, archaic, is discernible in the seventh century, a second, medium, between the seventh and the ninth century, matching the maximum blossoming of Ireland; a third, from the 11th to the 13th century, has its productions resumed in the 14th and in the 15th century).

Let us recount by some examples the hagiographic work, while specifying that if the literature lover cannot get something out of the lives of Irish saints, historians, ethnologists, paleographer, or philologist, can glean in them useful information. Among the first texts, the lives of St. Patrick were written during the seventh century, one by Tirechan and the other by Muirchu. Two monks who had opted in the conflict on the date of Easter bringing the Celtic Church in conflict with Rome, for the latter. In the Life of St. Patrick, it is difficult to separate facts from legendary features. It is generally retained that he was born in Great Britain, that teenager he was taken along to Ireland by some pirates, that he guarded pigs, that, fugitive, he recovered freedom, traversed Gaul, and come back to his home. But there he received a call from God, inviting him to evangelize Irishmen. Legend adds many ordeals the saint went through thanks to the marvelous powers that God granted to him on these occasions.

[God… or Devil, according to the point of view , of course!]

But it does not matter for us! What is to be pointed out it is the “reading” of these events by the “biographers” of the saint. His life matches to the life of a biblical character who will be used as a model and as a “mold.” Of course, the choice is not neutral in our opinion; as in the case of Noah for mythological texts. It will reveal the intellectual operation in progress that which more or less consciously fills the minds, an operation which will need a “patronage” to find a solution to a tense and delicate intellectual situation. In the case of St. Patrick as in the case of Muhammad, it was Moses who was kept. And that teaches us that an “exit” is sought, that a new Promised Land for the Gaelic people is to be built. So, here he is morally and physically a prisoner of the high-knowers of the druidiaction (druidecht) and of a barbarian king, as Moses was a prisoner of priests and of Pharaoh; the voices that he hears resound in his head while taking care of the pigs in the wooded heights, remind the episode of the Burning Bush; his escape, his boarding, his crossing of the Gaul suddenly become desert (!), his miracles to feed the group of which he is a member, his fights against the temptation of Satan, are too close to Exodus to be credible. Only his mission in Ireland differs from that one of Moses who, himself, takes care well not to backtrack, but once Ireland converted to the new belief, it will be necessary to think of a Promised Land finally reached.

St Patrick will die, however, before it is so. This obvious similarity to the Bible will not have been used to look further into the life of the saint, it will only have made it more in keeping with. In spite of the “bis repetita non placent” Tirechan, as a good hagiographer, even concludes that Patrick was in four points similar to Moses.

1. He heard an angel in a bush.

2. He fasted 40 days and 40 nights.

3. He lived a hundred and twenty years.

4. Nobody knows where he is buried.

In all these adaptations, one would seek vainly some literary invention. A passage drawn from the Vita Tripartita Patricii, often quoted, nevertheless gives us food for thought. Patrick on the mount Crochan Aigli (become Croagh Patrick in Connaught) fasts and prays for 40 days. At the end of this period of time, the sky becomes covered with black birds, the saint casts against them his bell, and makes a hole in this darkness; he cries and some white birds appear: they are the soul/minds of sinners he saved from Hell, and others will follow thanks to his merit; an angel announces to him that Ireland will be covered by the sea seven years before the Last Judgment. This scene is attractive for what it visually expresses as opening of the horizon. For the final prophetic tone which seems to us to well suit the idea that Christianity is intellectually lived as an intrusion, whose only possible justification is in the birth of another world. But it is altogether inoperative and without effect on the course of his works. Lastly, as the French Oliver Loyour well explains it in his book entitled “Celtic Christendom,” Irish monasticism was not born from the efforts of Patrick who, in accordance with the continental model, wanted to organize Church in Ireland around the bishop, legal and religious person in charge, representing social order. One comes to celebrate St. Patrick and to write his life only at the time of the conflicts between Rome and Irish monasteries. Initially about the date of Easter, from seventh to eighth century, and about the submission of the churches to the Bishop see of Canterbury in Anglo-Saxon countries; then about the Clunisian reform linked in Ireland to the Norman expansion), for better calling back the too individualistic and in love with eremitism, Irishmen, to the oldest patrician tradition. The homage paid to St. Patrick, far from supporting an original and founded on Irish specificities work, was therefore already an invitation to be conformed to standards Hagiography is literarily disappointing in this first case.

But the conflict with Rome resulted in several lives in the same way, in progressive watering down and raising of the moral standard of the episodes: the work is done from the Carolingian “Restoration “(which owes so much to Irishmen) by the concern for a more classical Latin language; hibernisms are therefore corrected. This effort continues on the topics with a disappearance or obliteration of the too folk or “barbarian “facts. The hagiographer wants to give of his saint a certain “brand image “ which leads him to describe a birth announced by wonders, a fidgety childhood, a monastic or missionary life strewn with miracles, an edifying death.

This composition applies to all: it tends to identify the life of the saint to that of Christ, or more exactly to the apocryphal lives of Christ which satisfied the expectation of a fond of supernatural audience. Any detail escaping these rules is eliminated or appears only involuntarily, as a result of a lack of attention. Lastly, this hagiographic effort was accompanied by a transcription of manuscripts. In some case at least, where we are entitled to suppose that the rare veracious facts which could still come through imposed uniformity, were reduced last once and made more indistinct. The opinion of the critic is therefore the following one: these lives differ little from the European common tradition; at most they are a mine of information on Irish Christendom, to release from a monotonous gangue.

The only chance which remains for the critic is that this ultimate work of revision was not always quite accomplished and that negligence were numerous. He is reduced here to celebrate mistakes and lapses of memory.

We could therefore summarize Irish hagiography into the three following stages.

- To choose in the lives of saints those which are in conformity with the policy of Vatican.

- To change the facts lived by those which are agreed, particularly in the continental models; the choice being significant.

- To destroy any trace (mentalities, stylistics, etc.) of hibernism.

The report is severe at the literary level. In addition that fine sentiments never produced good literature, we remain amazed in front of this will of standardization. Even if this tendency does not succeed everywhere, fortunately, we must admit at least that the conditions of an original creation were not met.

We can review all these lives of saints to give an account of a hagiographic rewriting warping the original work they want to distribute but also to make in keeping. They will be used soon as “foil “for better understanding where the true Irish creativity is, that one in which a new literary genre, the sea voyage, is invented.

We maintain our idea that Irish literature could give some invention to universal literature. It cannot indeed have only repeated, transmitted, or imitated, even impoverished. That would not explain the intellectual blossoming of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries. Latin language was not used solely for quarrels or “slanted “works: it was made the vector of creative spirituality. The most convincing fact is the “sea voyage“ which success never flagged during the centuries, or even the influence. Similar to the question of the rhyme, the problem of the sea voyage tallies with a particular intellectual situation, which leads to the invention of a new form.

Several problems arose for criticism concerning the genre of the sea voyages of Irish literature. There exist “imrama “(plural of imram, a word whose sense amounts to mean “to row here and there, to wander “) which are written in Gaelic language (Middle Gaelic language), are of a mixed inspiration (non-religious and Christian), and narrate a sea voyage full of marvelous discoveries. The number of these texts is of three (the imram of Mael Duin, the longest and the most celebrated, that of the Hui Corra, that of Snedgus and MacRiagla). Though, in a catalog of the book of Leinster, five other titles of today lost voyages also appear: those of Murchertach mac Erca, Bri Leith, Brecan, Labraid, and Fothad. If it is spoken about a literary genre on their subject, it is because their structure is indifferent to the (incidental or absent) motif and goal and turned only on the incidents of the voyage.

As we said it at the very beginning of this work, the time “spent at the sea “is the essential criterion. But, onto, is inserted the existence of another genre, the echtra or voyage out of this world with “adventures” in the other one. IIt narrates us the departure of a hero invited to reach the other world, parallel to ours, which is generally designated by the name Hereafter or Afterlife, and to remain in it. There are three: the sea voyage of Bran (called wrongly “imram “ because the text obviously takes after “the echtra genre “), the adventures of Cormac, and those of Condla.

We should not lose sight of the fact that echtra are essentially pagan, whereas imrama were in a thoroughgoing way revised by Christianity.

Criticism therefore applied to the question of the anteriority of imram compared with echtra, or conversely, of the respective sources and of the religious or social origin of these two genres. To this first group of problems, were added those which concern the Navigatio Sancti Brandani, a Latin text existing almost in spite of the two Vitae Sancti Brendani, which come close to hagiography. Some manuscripts (the codex Dubliniensisfor instance) have a numbering of the chapters in the Navigatio independent of the Vita, which would prove that the two accounts have a different origin and were joined together tardily. We will therefore find about it the same questions as those in connection with the” imram “and the “echtra “.

Is the Vita previous to the Navigatio? Or is this the reverse? Etc. Then, we will do in the same way between Navigatio, Imram, Vita, Echtra, of which we will seek which is worthy of the anteriority or of the earlier originality prize.

The true question is about the development of this specific literary genre, of which characteristics lies in an outward journey then return, of the hero, from here in the other world. In the fact that the voyage is done at the seas and has some duration, in the belief in a quite sublunary hereafter. Unlike the aislingi (visions), the descents into Hell or the ascensions, the sea voyage in this case is a pilgrimage centered on the diversity of forms, and not on the sense of existence or on the divine mysteries. Preference is given to the “appearances “ and that is enough to satisfy expectation, just like to support admiration and praise. It is in that already we can approach this “genre “ and dissociate these texts of other (Greek, Roman, and Egyptian) voyages. By no means the plan to seek the unexpected one in order to change it into an admired object, and they feel fear in front of the “distortions “of reality. Aesthetically, the latter are insensitive to this criterion of a reality which would be beautiful because of its quirkiness or of its extravagance. The spectacle of a symmetrical stability would suit them better.

As pilgrimages, the Irish Sea voyages could draw their inspiration from certain practices in the country.

The Celtic law of brehons made the peregrinatio from a people or from a tribe to another mode of exile or punishment. One of the penalties provided by the Irish tradition was, in fact, a setting adrift on the sea sentencing a criminal to sail, deprived of oars and rudder, unto the wind would carry him. In both cases, the man was deprived of the help of his community and this was the greatest punishment that could occur to him. This forced pilgrim could thus count only on Divine Providence.

We have an excellent example of this in the Cain Adomnain of 697, the penalty replacing blood price for women (female offenders).

45. …A woman deserves death for the killing of a man or woman, or for giving poison whereof death ensues, or for burning, or for digging under a church….she is to be put in a boat of one paddle upon the ocean to go with the wind from the land. A vessel of meal and water to be given with her. Judgment on her as God deems it.

Let us remark in passing that we can wonder if a heavy weregild to pay as in the case of male offenders (the ancient Celtic society indeed did not know prison and rarely practiced death penalty but most often resorted to the principle of weregild if there was a man's death) would not have been a gentler punishment but God works in mysterious ways. Especially in Christianity (pagan gods were easier to understand because they were more logical).

In a completely different context, the supreme danger will therefore be tempted by certain monks who, feeling themselves culprits (or sinners), voluntarily break their ties and go into exile to do God's will.

It is obvious that this attitude was “revolutionist “for a society strongly centered on the integration of all individuals. Who existed only by the force of the social rules defining and protecting them. If this relationship is accepted, the sea voyage then describes violence done to quite a precise social law, as well as an inversion of values. The pilgrim is the equal one of the king, he faces prohibition and danger, has the destiny of a criminal, but the glory of a sovereign. That partly explains why his glance on the world favors the inaccessible and admirable one. No episode is conclusive, or completes a meaning. All leave a curious feeling of unexplainable things, since himself goes into exile far away from society, accepts for him the role of the outlaw, for a time. No human value can judge his act; and

what he sees cannot be explained for men. We passed from a way of dispensing justice, to a religious adventure where the convict become man of God or of the Demiurge, can serve as a hero.

Where the voluntary exile is the promise of an adventure going out of the network of relations peculiar to any society. Irish navigation enables us to state this concept which served us already so much, since it is based on the idea that thought can escape from its own reasonable or imaginary, inventions.

The imram draws its source in a double break (that one which is completely involuntary, of the banished criminal; that one which is voluntary, of the pilgrim denouncing the cruelty of the exile beyond the seas and agreeing to be despised, in the name of God or of the Demiurge; and looks at the “eccentric” in the strictest sense of the word since it is born outside the tradition of Irish humanities (Gaelic and Latin), reality.

After many discussions, criticism was stabilized on the opinion that the “imram “is a genre produced by the contribution of Christianity, that it is not an indigenous genre as can be the “ echtra. “ We will not discuss here the question of the relationship between these two genres; it is enough for us to know that some authors think that the imram has its origin in the echtra, while others prefer to give them a different and autonomous origin, one compared to the other. The important thing is to remark that the “echtra” is better attached to the epic or mythological literature of the old Irish language. Because of its way of communicating with the other world, parallel to ours, which we call hereafter (an invitation delivered by a woman and for the hero the impossibility of resisting it). And also because of the brevity of the passage from a world in the other.

On the other hand, imram would be attached better to texts of Christian inspiration, marked by the topic of the voyage and pilgrimage. So that we can conclude that imram is situated outside the principal current of the old Irish literature, unlike echtra.

Echtra indeed have topics connected with those of the mythological corpus, as we can see in the case of the adventures of Condla.

The son of a king of Ireland sees a fairy from hereafter approaching him and inviting him to follow her there; the king asks Coran, his druid, to recite an incantation against this woman that only Condla his son can see; the latter pines away by sadness, nourishing himself only by the means of a marvelous apple offered by the mysterious apparition; the fairy comes back, praises her country, in which misfortune is absent, and Condla boards with her, disappearing so forever. The outline of the story reveals a strong attraction that one of a marvelous land. “Come to me, O Condla the red one… if you agree, your youth, your beauty, will never be faded…” A first attempt to attract him that the king therefore denounces to his druid: “Since the time I ascended the throne, no enemy had therefore been able to challenge me. Today, an invisible being forces me and wants to take my son “.

In front of this situation, and following this call, Condla begins to waste away: “Sadness was breaking his heart and he wanted to see again this mysterious young woman “. The druid tries to break this disastrous charm, but the woman wins by putting forward that Condla, however, is devoted to die one day if he stays here on earth, a destiny which affects even the sons of a king.

The topic is therefore clearly expressed: the death awaits all human beings. As for the passage of Condla into the Other World, the text, in its very brevity, is transparent. “At once that the woman had given this answer, Condla left his father and his companions, and leaped into the crystal boat “.

We understand better why echtra does not include a “navigation “ the main thing is to perform the fastest possible leap. That matches perfectly with the intention and with the intellectual concern of that time, hence the choice of the most appropriate texts, and variants of these texts.

The woman prophesies another world and the disappearance of the old one; Condla prefigures the attitude to come where a leap will be necessary and was so.

This type of more literary evidence strengthen the idea that echtra is not a piece of the new genre that is the imram which has another series of images, as we will see later, and which is more influenced by Christianity. In the epic cycle of Cuchulainn, there exists an account which shows the same features that the echtra of Condla, which increases the relationship of the echtra and of the mythological or epic corpus.

In the serglige Conculainn indeed, we find the following story. A fairy, Wanda/Fand, left by her husband, the god-or-demon of the Other World, Belinos Barinthus Manannann, decides to marry our hero; she takes the appearance of a bird that Cuchulainn wants to capture, but in vain apparently; a magic sleep seizes him, then a state of lethargy which lasts one year. After that an unknown man promises cure to him if he comes in the Other World to marry Wanda/Fand; Cuchulainn sends first his charioteer twice in reconnaissance, before joining the fairy. His wedded wife Aemer feels a violent

jealousy and forces her husband, coming back with the fairy, to choose; for his part, Cuchulainn feels regrets, but, at the departure of Wanda/Fand, must drink an elixir to forget his Hereafter’s female lover.

The text describes a situation identical to that of Condla: an attractive beauty as well as power, of the Other World; dissatisfaction of our hero who does not support any longer the narrowness of our world, that results in a lethargy or in an absence of any movement (immobilization in a transitional time : “fairies overcame you, they captured you“); invitation to cross this threshold: “Wake up, hero of Ulaid (or Voluntii = Ulstermen), stand-up in good health and happy “ no indication of the voyage (the hero is immediately on the other side; without any time for the crossing).

The last account to be taken into consideration is indicated under the name Voyage of Bran, although it should be classed in the pagan genre which is the echtra, because of its structure.

A fairy invites Bran son of Febal to go towards the island of Eternal Youth, what it does. Along the way, the god-or-demon Belinos Barinthus Manannan describes him the country, and announces the arrival of one of his sons in Ireland; Bran reaches the Island of Joy where every man laughs unceasingly, then the island of Women where he remains centuries; one of his companions wants to come back to Ireland, but crumbles away by reaching the shore; Bran sets off again.

Therefore, compared to the other echtra, the only difference lies in the fact of taking somewhat account of the time necessary for the travel, but it is just a convention, because Bran does not wander on his way and goes directly where he is expected. The fascination exerted by the messenger of the Other World is expressed by a music which puts Bran to sleep, and by a branch full of flowers which slips out of the hands of our hero. Bran does not hesitate to take the leap in order to join the fairy, without any resistance, unlike Condla and Cuchulainn. We find the same idea of a vaster world which must replace the sublunary world, in the mention of a son (Jesus Christ?) of the god in question who must come in Ireland converted to more greatness. A wool ball stuck to the palm of Bran attracts him on the island of Women and keeps him over there, as to indicate his new settling; his new birth (a kind of restored umbilical cord in a way).

“Imram “and “Navigatio “are of another nature, because structured around images and spaces meaning crack or tear. There still, it would be suitable for knowing if the “imram” is or not previous to the “sea voyage.” But when we know that all in all, there is four works of this type (three imrama and the voyage of St. Brendan) it seems preferable, in order to call them a literary genre, to consider them together. A whole critical method inherited from the 19th century had as a point of honor to define some influences, sources, dates and places of writing, but that led so quickly to such an infinity of possible cases, that nothing conclusive appeared. The result of these efforts was not vain for as much; the date of the composition of these texts must be approximately identical (more or less a few tens of years): from seventh to eighth century. They are works designed by Irishmen, if not written in Ireland; the knowledge of the traditional texts and of the Gaelic texts is obvious; Christianity uses images coming from folklore.

The problem that we have, let us point it out, concerns the development of this literary genre. We are indeed at the conjunction of several influences, of which none is enough determining to be credited with the merit of the invention. The Celtic tradition about the other world parallel to ours, called hereafter, the Christian religion, the Greco-Latin works on the Fortunate isles, never led to a type of account. A “visit of the world “of which we would see only one part, and especially reaching the Universal Including (God, or the Truth) by the sea route. The happiness of this parallel universe called Hereafter is personal in the echtra; the Christian pilgrimage is more suffering than admiration of Creation; the Greco-Latin back world is cruel, and threatening, illusory and marked by the suffering.

Literally, the Gaelic design can generate lyricism that one of Christianity autobiography, that one of the Greco-Latin literature, drama. But their meeting gives rise to the genre of sea voyage, in which each one meets into this new form. Christian and Roman culture is inserted into the Gaelic field, it breaks the enchantment, imposes on it duration as well as difficulty, it moves away more and more the arrival point , distends the sea space preceding the ideal place. But along this division, it distributes the wonders condensed in only one place (the island of Youth), charges them with a classical human value, and questions them in a Christian way as signs of the future times. The sea voyage is no longer only a simple progression, a hard pilgrimage or destiny; it becomes time of praise, of metaphysical uncertainty, of astonishment, and of love for nature. The “Sea Voyage “was born, with in its center the “transfigured “elements of its development, directed towards another meaning.

This intellectual work is expressed in the frequency of certain images. It answers a requirement: the universe parallel to ours, called Hereafter according to Celts, is perfection, a place without conflict,

delicious. But as the hero named Usheen (Ossian) will say in the poem by Yeats, very late, it is also an extremely tedious place, given over to appearances. To this quickly monotonous vision which points out the difficulty of the theologians and Christian poets to describe Heaven (whereas it is so convenient to represent Hell); the new genre proposes on the contrary to visualize how Creation comes to be changed. As we showed in connection with the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, which describes in its way a “morphogenesis “. The saint gone away through a curiosity as well as a vocation comes back bearing a prophetic message, heralding a vast tear which will reach Ireland one day. Having witnessed the metamorphoses of Creation, he changed too; attached to an individual perfection, here he is now endowed with information concerning everybody.

Guyonvarc'h and Le Roux are right to write that the sea voyage made the women disappear and replaced the delights of the universe parallel with ours called Hereafter , by a mixture without separation of heavenly and infernal islands. “There is nothing so poorly Christian that this alternation or this succession, where angels and holy hermits are next to devils, demons, and monsters “.

We already dealt with the Navigatio Sancti Brendani, so that it is useless to repeat how the text favors the increased images, the preparatory stages, as well as a general structure drawing a cut in the plan of the voyage.

The text bears, in itself, the sign of what troubled the minds about it, it has a series of images and a composition which denounce an intellectual concern. From a medieval Celtic and Christian “matter “(with the meaning that the Middle Ages gave to this word), which meeting “tore” the one and “cut out” the other, the genre of sea voyage emerges. It was not a question of introducing a corpus of traditions into another framework, but of confronting two designs of Hereafter: the ones that echtra give us, on the one hand; that one which is discovered in the Vitae on the other hand.

We will conclude therefore. Irish “sea voyages “are readable on two levels.

The first level, internal to the work, described a “tear “which throws the hero from a point of view into another, and leads him to design the universe as being open (historical, existential, moral, announce, etc.).

The second level, external, reveals an ideological confrontation specific to these times, since the sea voyage moves away both from Gaelic literature and from Christian literature, such as they appear in other genres. The meeting of these two traditions does not produce a disparate “mixture “ but an original distortion due to an essential sublimation; indeed, a third factor applied, the belief in the Beauty of World. The two levels are superimposed, one conveying the other. As in the case of the rhyme, the invention happens indirectly, by chance, or by the meeting of favorable factors (two rich traditions and a religious leaven to cause puff up the paste). The Irish literature, fortified by these two inventions which it can spread to the others, is also such in a different way in our eyes: it describes us some laws of the working out of new forms. The passing from a culture into another is not necessarily disastrous, but directs a reading of one’s own tradition (and can strengthen it, vitalize it). The meeting of two equal cultural forces also causes the blossoming of new solutions 1).

What to do now with certain parts of this literature, especially if they are ancient and confused, impure and awkward, at first sight immoral or monotonous?

Guy VINCENT. Caracara Online Editions. The Caracara Online Editions of the utqueant. org website publish research tasks devoted to various literary works based on new methods.

1) An aspect that we neglected of a third solution lies in the invention of “Purgatory “: this place between Heaven and Hell, invention of Irishmen (of Croagh Patrick or Station island), although there is no unquestionable evidence of that. Cf. J. Le Goff, the birth of Purgatory.

THE VARIOUS (FORMER) BOOKS ON THE SETTLEMENTS IN IRELAND

AND THE LEBOR GABALA ERENN.

In Ireland they call Book of the taking a set of handwritten texts being essentially in (manuscripts) collections entitled :

Book of Leinster (1150). Lebor Laignech in Gaelic language.

Book of Fermoy (1373). Also known as the Book of Roche.

Great Book of Lecan (1418). Leabhar Mór Leacain in Gaelic language.

Book of Ballymote (1391). Leabhar Bhaile an Mhóta in Gaelic language.

The work of Mícheál Ó'Cléirigh/Michael O'Clery (1631).

A first try of translation was carried out in 1884 in Paris by William O'Dwyer and Henry Lizeray with the title Leabar Gabala.

O'Clery in what concerned him having refused to take up the Gaelic text of the Lebor gabala Erenn dealing with events which would have taken place before the story of Cessair, preferring to leave this part of the non-bible of druidism to theologists. To the Judeo-Islamic-Christian theologists more precisely, we should say.

In order to prove to our readers, at which point indeed this part of our manuscripts is absolutely absurd or aberrant, and completely lacking in relevance with regard to the history and philosophy, of our (biological or spiritual) distant ancestors we will say nevertheless a few words of them, from the reading of other authors, in order to leave our readers alone judges on the matter.

This Leabar Gabala or Lebor Gabala Erenn is a set of very disparate texts we can gather in ten different sections or books.

The first part consists of a summary of the history of the world creation according to the Bible, in other words, some Sumerian myths re-examined and adapted to their case, by Hebrews (Adam, Lucifer, etc.).

It begins as follows:

In principio fecit Deus celum & terram (what is Latin) and continues as follows: i. Doringne Dia nem & talmain ar tús & ni fil tossa ch na forcend fairseom féin (what is Gaelic).

The penultimate part is a list of the kings of Ireland before the advent of Christianity.

The last part is a list of the kings of Ireland having been baptized.

Only parts 2 to 8 deal with the way in which the peoples speaking a Celtic language peopled the island. We will see in this study that there is a lot to say about that, the connection with historical reality being sometimes, even often, very uncertain, particularly in poems.

To notice: the majority of the poems inserted in this work are primarily due to the following four Christian authors.

Eochaidh Ua Floinn (936-1004) of Armagh (poems 30,41,53,65,98,109,11).

Flann Mainistrech mac Echthigrin (died in 1056), of the abbey of Mainistir Bhuithe/Monasterboice (poems 42,56,67,82?)

Tanaide (died about 1075) (poems 47,54,86).

Gilla Cómáin mac Gilla Samthainde (about 1072) (poems 13,96,115).

This work claims to be a literal and accurate account of the history of Irish people, but it is in fact only an attempt to endow Irishmen with a written history comparable to that the Jews ascribed to themselves by the means of the part Old Testament in the Bible.

The whole by using the pagan myths of both Gaelic and pre-Gaelic Celtic Ireland, but reinterpreted in the light of Judeo-Christian ideology or mythology. It describes how the island was, according to the authors of this miscellaneous compilation, theoretically subjected to a succession of invasions, each one making up a new chapter of the country’s history. Biblical paradigms provided the authors of this endless saga with the ready-made stories which could be adapted to their design. Since the beginning, this new myth proved to be a very popular and enormously influential (including over many researchers in druidism of today, alas!) new orthodoxy, quickly endowed with an almost canonical status. Older texts were changed to make their narratives agree with this new version of History, and numerous new poems (136) were written to be inserted into it. Only within a century there existed a plethora of copies.

As we already have had the opportunity to say it, the Lebor Gabála Erenn is therefore one of the most important Irish texts of the medieval time and the first translation made in one of the vernacular languages of the Old Europe at the time was carried out by O'Dwyer and Lizeray in 1884 under the French title Book of Invasions of Ireland (255 pages).

The (Gaelic or Latin) text was published between 1938 and 1956 by R.A.S. Macalister, on behalf of the Irish Text Society. In his notes Macalister explains that there were five versions different of this myth, distributed in various manuscripts (Book of Ballymote, Book of Leinster, etc.) written between the 12th and 18th centuries.

The First Redaction, R1, is contained in the manuscripts L and F. the Second, R2, is contained in the manuscripts A, D, E, P, R and V. The Third, R3, is contained in the manuscripts B, b, b 1, b 2, H and M. It is a compilation of elements from R 1, R 2 as well as from other sources. The Redaction called Min (contraction of Míniugud) is present at the sides of elements from R2 in D, R and V. The Redaction K (also called 23K32) is a late version (1631) due to Micheál Ó'Cléirigh, the main compiler of the Annals of the Four Masters. R 3 and K are artificially arranged accounts. K is based on R2 (D), even if it has links with M, and R3.

Specialists count today in all 18 manuscripts concerning the Lebor Gabala. But we can reduce this number to 11. The manuscripts V are only parts of the same document, just like the manuscripts F. the manuscript A is a copy of the manuscript D, the manuscripts b are derivations from the B).

HISTORY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THIS WORK.

First of all, was written the Liber Occupationis Hiberniae. This work, in Latin language, evoked one invasion of Ireland. The Lebor Gabala, which will succeed, will keep besides in its title the idea of a single invasion (see the variant Min or Miniugud).

Then, or parallelly, a British or Welsh monk named Nennius, in the eighth century, writes a work incidentally dealing with the history of the three peoples which were previous to Gaels, by basing himself on various Latin texts and on oral information. He does not stage antediluvian peoples.

Nennius was a Welsh man of letters, able apparently to change the gaps of History into a coherent or at the very least suitable set for an immediate interpretation by his contemporaries. To say that he was a forger would be anachronistic. He is satisfied to fill the holes. For the contemporaries, it was not legends; it was the genealogies of their peoples and of their sovereigns.

Historia Britonum is therefore a composite work which is in fact only a gathering of several texts joined together over the centuries.

Late compiler, Nennius consequently tried to homogenize various contradictory elements. For some authors, this work of harmonization put under his name in fact would be only the product of a Welsh literary School working with French or Irish scriptoria.

In the Middle Ages, undeniable events miss cruelly. Historians as well as chroniclers therefore need much more imagination than today intellectuals, it is enough for them they are probable.

But what is probable is today quite different from what it was at the time, as regards the form, but perhaps not on the content… the ones and the others speak in praise of their readers. See the current discourse on the (obligatory or advised) crossbreeding by the French intellectuals. There is no objective history.

It is always a question of embroidering an account on a selected collection of undeniable events. The historian is not a novelist; he has to make the most of what he has, and the least without.

N.B. As for statistics which would make, so it seems, History enters the category of exact sciences, there is nothing more perverse. It is enough to see what politickers or journalists currently in power in France do with them. They use them, if needed by manipulating them or by shortening them, without shame, to tell stories.

Extracts of the cable 07 Paris 306, from the American Embassy.

“The private sector media in France – print and broadcast - continues to be dominated by a small number of conglomerates, and all French media are more regulated and subjected to political and commercial pressures than are their American counterpart…

… These journalists do not necessarily regard their primary role as to check the power of government. Rather many see themselves more as intellectuals, preferring to analyze events and influence readers more than to report events.”

In other words…

Except for some exceptions (according to personalities, individualities, or rather probably according to circumstances) which we greet; the lack of intelligence and the lack of intellectual honesty, even quite simply of courage, of the media class as a whole; worsened by the sheep-like behavior due to its lemming herd instinct crossed with a lot of hubris and contempt of the average citizen; makes always much time and invaluable time as well as psychic or mental energy be lost by our modern oligarchic societies. Because there is, of course, much more true democracy within a lost tribe of Amazonia coordinated by an old chief concerned “to involve” many people as possible in the making most important decisions (peace or war with the neighbors, the tribe leaves to settle elsewhere or remains still a year on the spot?)

But let us return to our muttons precisely, as it is said in this neck of the woods!

The history of antediluvian peoples was written after, in Gaelic or in Latin language, and inserted in this framework.

The following stage was the translation, in Gaelic language of all these essays concerning the settlement in Ireland.

The manuscript called Min for that matter precisely draws its name from this period (“Míniugud “means “Explanation “and the Min begins as follows: “Explanation of the Liber Occupationis Hiberniae “).Not without changes in passing, in the case of the Nennius in Gaelic language.

The poems only should not have been translated in that they were surely always written in Gaelic language.

And finally, it is probably at the end of the 11th century that an anonymous compiler gathered various poems that he inserted in this prose set. By incorporating in it comments, glosses, or paraphrases of his own invention, sometimes stopping therefore the course of the original account.

Among the Irish poets so used by this anonymous compiler, we can first name Eochaid Ua Flainn (936 - 1004), then Flann Mainistreach mac Echthigrin (dead in 1056), Tanaide (dead circa 1075) and finally Gilla Coemáin mac Gilla Shamthainne (1072).

This compilation turns towards two different directions: one followed by the Min manuscript and the R1, on the one hand, and that which is previous to R2 manuscript, on the other hand.

The Min was surely the first translation, and then there were manuscripts R1 and R2.

Today History is a social science which requires exactitude (as far as possible) and rigor. In the 12th century, and even in the 17th, the approach is different, History is especially subordinated to policy (see the dedication when there is one, for example the one of Roderick O’Flaherty addressed to King James II, in his book about his Ogygia to him).

The main objective of the compilers, authors of the Book of Conquests, in addition to that of justifying biblically their tradition, was to show the continuity of the settlement in Ireland, Promised Land of Gaels as Palestine was the promised land of Israel. Their scientific, ethnographic or etymological methods were, of course, not those which are ours. But it is useless to apply modern methods of investigation to their results, if we did not understand the postulate which was used by them as a basis.

If the French d’Arbois de Jubainville and some of his successors had seen in the Book of Conquests other things that historical reminiscences; they would have perhaps prevented druidomaniacs, ignorant and not very concerned about exactitude charlatans, to change certain parts of the Celtic tradition into a stupid , earthly or alien, science fiction.

If Irishmen had well-fixed ideas on their origins, the practical localization of their exiles or of their theoretical origins interested them not much. The result of that is sometimes variability, even geography, of which childishness bewilders us. But it is necessary to take everything into account. All that has no other importance than the one of the medieval vogue - that contemporary scholars are not forced to follow – of the eastern origin of human beings, of Fir Bolg Gauls or of Gaels. This childish dominant ideology like many dominant ideologies, it is enough to think thirty seconds on many remarks of the intellectuals and of the journalists of today (they are clearly located out of the field of any rationality because much too simplistic), made the Irishmen the equal ones or the distant cousins of the Hebrews, and justified all that their ancestors - including the god-or-demons of “heathenry” - had been well able to do between the time of the flood and the arrival of St. Patrick. How not to absolve them and tell without remorse their “devilries?” These various aberrations, as regards geography, find their explanation in the time of the transcription of oral traditions by Christian monks.

- From the seventh to the ninth century: relative tranquility. The scholars seek to link everything to the Bible and the Greco-Roman world, from where Christianity came. It is the dominant ideology of the time. Today the vogue is well to glorify obligatory interbreeding in the name of diversity, which is, however, contradictory when we think of it a little because the only law in this field should be that of love and chance. However, apology for interbreeding is not punished by the law but its contrary yes!

- From the 9th to the 11th century: ceaseless forays of Vikings. More advanced allusions to Scandinavia, to the extent that they make wyverns and gigantic anguipedics (fomorians in Gaelic language, andernas on the Continent) come from it.

But the fact that we find the same topics everywhere, in Giraldus Cambrensis, Keating, or in the Annals of the Four Masters, means something well,nevertheless: the permanence, in addition to that of some details, of some ways of thinking from the original pan-Celtic myth.

Below therefore ten parts or sections of the Lebor Gabala Erenn.

The creation of the world and the scattering of languages or nations. This first part deals with the Creation of the world as in the Bible (obvious Christian interpolation, the first words are besides in Latin).

In principio fecit Deus Caelum et Terram, i.e., God made Heaven and Earth at the first, [and He Himself has no beginning nor ending] etc.,etc.

The History of Gaels and of their arrival in Ireland in a biblical vein. Fenius Farsaid, tower of Babel, Egypt, the daughter of Pharaoh, Spain, etc.

The settlement of Cessair.

The settlement of Partholan.

The settlement of Nemed.

The settlement of the Fir Bolg Gauls.

The settlement of the god-or-demons of the goddess-or-demoness, or fairy, called Danu (bia): the Toutai Deuas. In Gaelic language the Tuatha de Danann.

The invasion of the Milesians, ancestors of the Gaels. Resumption of the history of Fenius Farsaid etc. Etc.

The list or the book of the kings of Ireland before the establishment of Christianity in the island.

The list or the book of the kings of Ireland after the Christianization.

These last two sections contain various royal genealogies, which obviously was to what the authors of this compilation wanted to come. It is indeed in connection with the Milesians ancestors of the Gaels that are evoked indeed, for the first time, some rolls of royal genealogies insisting heavily on the good king who fills his subjects with benefits. But each one of these kings dies nevertheless by the hand of his successor.

These various genealogies were, of course, completely false (some forgeries) since going back all as far as Eve and Adam. Because in fact, according to specialists, the first high king of Ireland really

historical was Niall of the nine hostages (Niall Noigiallach), a monarch who lived at the time of St. Patrick i.e., in the fifth century.

CONCLUSION.

After having been transmitted exclusively in an oral way until the end of the eighth century, what was going to become the incredible myth, founding all medieval Ireland, was after that copied, developed then rewritten by the scholars. To be more in tune with the teaching of the Catholic Church and the culture of the time.

The first written version of the Lebor Gabala Erenn, almost an outline (the Historia Britonum by Nennius), dates back to the eighth century or to the beginning of the ninth century.

The writing by Nennius (Historia Britonum ninth century) is therefore the oldest accounts relating to this Liber Occupationis Hiberniae or Lebor Gabala Erenn.

“Primus autem venit Partholomus cum mille hominibus de viris et mulieribus et creverunt usque ad quattuor milia hominum et venit mortalitas super eos et in una septimana omnes perierunt et non remansit ex illis etiam unus.

Secundus venit ad Hiberniam Nimeth filius quidam Agnominis, qui fertur navigasse super mare annum et dimidium et postea tenuit portum in Hibernia fractis navibus eius et mansit ibidem per multos annos et iterum navigavit cum suis et ad Hispaniam reversus est.

Et postea venerunt tres filii militis Hispaniae cum triginta ciulis apud illos et cum triginta coniugibus in unaquaque ciula et manserunt ibi per spatium unius anni. Et postea conspiciunt turrim vitream in medio mari et homines conspiciebant super turrim et quaerebant loqui ad illos et numquam respondebant et ipsi uno anno ad oppugnationem turris properaverunt cum omnibus ciulis suis et cum omnibus mulieribus excepta una ciula, quae confracta est naufragio, in qua erant viri triginta totidemque mulieres. Et aliae naves navigaverunt ad expugnandam turrim, et dum omnes descenderant in litore, quod erat circa turrim, operuit illos mare et demersi sunt et non evasit unus ex illis. Et de familia illius ciulae, quae relicta est propter fractionem, tota Hibernia impleta est usque in hodiernum diem. Et postea venerunt paulatim a partibus Hispaniae et tenuerunt regiones plurimas.

Novissime venit Damhoctor et ibi habitavit cum omni genere suo usque hodie in Brittannia. Istoreth Istorini filius tenuit Dalrieta cum suis ; Builc autem cum suis tenuit Euboniam insulam et alias circiter ; filii autem Liethan obtinuerunt in regione Demetorum et in aliis regionibus, id est Guir Cetgueli, donec expulsi sunt a Cuneda et a filiis eius ab omnibus Brittannicis regionibus.

Si quis autem scire voluerit, quando vel quo tempore fuit inhabitabilis et deserta Hibernia, sic mihi peritissimi Scottorum nuntiaverunt.

Quando venerunt per mare rubrum filii Israël, Aegyptii venerunt et secuti sunt et demersi, ut in lege legitur.

Erat vir nobilis de Scythia cum magna familia apud Aegyptios et expulsus est a regno suo et ibi erat, quando Aegyptii mersi sunt, et non perrexit ad persequendum populum dei.

Illi autem, qui superfuerant, inierunt consilium, ut expellerent illum, ne regnum illorum obsideret et occuparet, quia fortes illorum demersi erant in rubrum mare, et expulsus est.

At ille per quadraginta et duos annos ambulavit per Africam, et venerunt ad aras Filistinorum per lacum Salinarum et venerunt inter Rusicadam et montes Azariae et venerunt per flumen Malvam et transierunt per Maritaniam ad columnas Herculis et navigaverunt Tyrrenum mare et pervenerunt ad Hispaniam usque et ibi habitaverunt per multos annos et creverunt et multiplicati sunt nimis et gens illorum multiplicata est nimis.

Et postea venerunt ad Hiberniam post mille et duos annos, postquam mersi sunt Aegyptii in rubrum mare.”

“The first that came was Partholomus, with a thousand men and women; these increased to four thousand; but a mortality coming suddenly upon them, they all perished in one week. The second was Nimech, the son of Agnoman, who, according to reports, after having been at sea a year and a half, and having his ships shattered, arrived at a port in Ireland, and continuing there several years, returned at length with his followers to Spain. After these came three sons of a Spanish soldier with thirty ships, each of which contained thirty women; and having remained there during the space of a year, there appeared to them, in the middle of the sea, a tower of glass, the summit of which seemed covered with men, to whom they often spoke, but received no answer. At length they determined to besiege the tower; and after a year’s preparation, advanced towards it, with the whole number of their ships, and all the women, one ship only excepted, which had been wrecked, and in which were thirty men, and as many women; but when all had disembarked on the shore which surrounded the tower,

the sea opened and swallowed them up. Ireland, however, was peopled, to the present period, from the family remaining in the vessel which was wrecked.

Afterwards, others came from Spain, and possessed themselves of various parts of Britain. Last of all came Dam Hoctor, who continued there, and whose descendants remain there to this day. Istoreth, the son of Istorinus, with his followers, held Dalmeta, Builc, the island Eubonia, and other adjacent places. The sons Liethali obtained the country of the Dimetæ, and the provinces Guoher and Cetgueli, which they held till they were expelled from every part of Britain, by Cuneda and his sons.

According to the most learned among the Scots, Ireland was a desert, and uninhabited, at the time when the children of Israel crossed the Red Sea, in which, as we read in the Book of the Law, the Egyptians were drowned. At that period, there lived among this people, with a numerous family, a Scythian of noble birth, who had been banished from his country, and had never persecuted the people of God. The Egyptians who were left, seeing the destruction of the great men of their nation, and fearing lest he should possess himself of their territory, took counsel together, and expelled him. Thus reduced, he wandered forty-two years in Africa, and arrived, with his family, at the altars of the Philistines, by the salt lake. Then passing between Rusicada and the hilly country of Syria, they traveled by the river Malva through Mauritania as far as the Pillars of Hercules; and navigating the Sea, landed in Spain, where they continued many years, having greatly increased and multiplied. Thence, a thousand and two years after the Egyptians were lost in the Red Sea, they passed into Ireland .”

This [great] British Nennius writing, of course, in Latin, therefore evokes three sons of a soldier from Spain (tres filii militis Hispaniae) without mentioning neither that he is a Gael nor they are Milesians. Moreover he speaks neither about the Children of the goddess-or-demoness, or fairy if this word is preferred, Danu (bia), nor about Fir Bolg Gauls. The adventures of the people of these three sons of the soldier of Spain resemble a little that ones of the Nemedians in the Lebor gabala (the tower of Conann) of the later Irish legends. It is there also question of an attack against a tower located in the sea and ending by a disaster, etc.

The legends concerning Cessair and the men of the goddess-or-demoness, or fairy, Danu (bia) were therefore incorporated in the account only later, Nennius was unaware of them (not sufficiently known?) or drew them aside (stories of bards not very serious to his taste?) deliberately.

The first to come was Partholan, who had with him 1000 companions, as well men as women. Their number, increasing unceasingly, reached 4000 men. But an epidemic fell down suddenly on them and they died in one week, so that no one of them remained.

The second who came to Ireland was Nimeth, son of a certain Agnomen. It is said he sailed on the sea, for one year and half. Having been shipwrecked, he landed in a harbor of the country (of Ireland). He remained here many years then came back to Spain with his people.

Then came the three sons of a Spanish soldier with 30 vessels carrying each one 30 men and as many women. They remained in Ireland one year. They then saw on the sea a tower of glass and they saw upon it in something which resembled some men. They talked to these people without ever getting an answer. After being themselves prepared for one year in order to attack the tower, they went with all their ships and all their women. There remained in Ireland only one ship (having sunk immediately in the harbor with its crew). When the expedition landed on the shore surrounding the tower, the sea rose above them, and they all perished swallowed by the rising tide. From 30 men and 30 women whose ship had sunk before even attacking the tower, comes all the population which lives in Ireland today…

What is remarkable, it is that Nennius mentions another people after that one of the probable Milesians or of the possible Gaels.

“Novissime venit Damhoctor et ibi habitavit cum omni genere suo usque hodie in Brittannia “.

Nobody up to now was able to understand which invasion this mysterious Dom Hoctor refers. Some even think that it was not a proper noun.

The descendants of this Dom Hoctor resemble much the Gaulish Fir Bolg of the later Irish legends, particularly as regards their last refuges.

On the other hand, Nennius then seems to return to the invasion of Milesians while speaking about a noble Scythian of whom he does not give the name and about his numerous offspring.

In short, a beautiful mishmash! But the worst is to be come! It seems well that the whimsical genealogical indications provided by the collection of Nennius, result in fact from continental legends about the same subject. The Breton ones that he mentions are perhaps indeed, not those of Great Britain, but quite simply those of Armorica in France (cf. the Viri Armorum of his Irish version?)

Nennius mentions indeed a little farther, some Franks, some Romans… And some Alamans? Or some Scots? … Certain authors therefore think that the pseudo-genealogies of Nennius were in fact concocted... in France. That takes the cakes !

Here is an extract. In Latin. Aliud experimentum inveni de isto Bruto ex veteribus libris veterum nostrorum. Tres filii Noe diviserunt orbem in tres partes post diluvium. Sem in Asia, Cham in Africa, Iafeth in Europa dilataverunt terminos suos. Primus homo venit ad Europam de genere Iafeth Alanus cum tribus filiis suis, quorum nomina sunt Hessitio, Armenon, Negue. Hessitio autem habuit filios quattuor: hi sunt Francus, Romanus, Britto, Albanus. Armenon autem habuit quinque filios: Gothus, Valagothus, Gebidus, Burgundus, Longobardus. Negue autem habuit tres filios: Vandalus, Sax, Boguarus. Ab Hisitione autem ortae sunt quattuor gentes Franci, Latini, Albani et Britti. Ab Armenone autem quinque: Gothi, Valagothi, Gebidi, Burgundi, Longobardi. A Neguio vero quattuor Boguarii, Vandali, Saxones et Turingi. Istae autem gentes subdivisae sunt per totam Europam. Alanus autem, ut aiunt, filius fuit Fetebir, filii Ougomun, filii Thoi, filii Boib, filii Simeon, filii Mair, filii Ethach, filii Aurthach, filii Echthet, filii Oth, filii Abir, filii Ra, filii Ezra, filii Izrau, filii Baath, filii Iobaath, filii Iovan, filii Iafeth, filii Noe, filii Lamech, filii Matusalae, filii Enoch, filii Iareth, filii Malalehel, filii Cainan, filii Enos, filii Seth, filii Adam, filii dei vivi. Hanc peritiam inveni ex traditione veterum.

Qui incolae in primo fuerunt Brittanniae Brittones a Bruto. Brutus filius Hisitionis, Hisition Alanei, Alaneus filius Reae Silviae, Rea Silvia filia Numa Pampilii, filii Ascanii; Ascanius filius Aeneae, filii Anchisae, filii Troi, filii Dardani, filii Flise, filii Iuvani, filii Iafeth. Iafeth vero habuit septem filios. Primus Gomer, a quo Galli; secundus Magog, a quo Scythas et Gothos; tertius Madai, a quo Medos; quartus Iuvan, a quo Graeci; quintus Tubal, a quo Hiberei et Hispani et Itali; sextus Mosoch, has quo Cappadoces; septimus Tiras, a quo Traces. Hi sunt filii Iafeth filii Noe filii Lamech.

I have learned another account of this Brutus from the ancient books of our ancestors. After the deluge, the three sons of Noah severally occupied three different parts of the earth: Shem into Asia, Hem into Africa, and Japhet into Europe.

The first man that dwelt in Europe was Alanus, with his three sons, Hisicion, Armenon, and Neugio. Hisicion had four sons, Francus, Romanus, Alamanus, and Brutus. Armenon had five sons, Gothus, Valagothus, Cibidus, Burgundus, and Longobardus. Neugio had three sons, Vandalus, Saxo, and Boganus. From Hisicion arose four nations — the Franks, the Latins, the Albani, and Britains: from Armenon, the Gothi, Valagothi, Cibidi, Burgundi, and Longobardi; from Neugio, the Bogari, Vandali, Saxones, and Tarincgi. The whole of Europe was subdivided into these tribes.

Alanus is said to have been the son of Fethuir; Fethuir, the son of Ogomuin, who was the son of Thoi: Thoi was the son of Boibus; Boibus of Semion; Semion of Mair; Mair of Ecthactus; Ecthactus of Aurthack; Aurthack of Ethec; Ethec of Ooth; Ooth of Aber; Aber of Ra; Ra of Esraa; Esraa, of Hisrau; Hisrau of Bath; Bath of Jobath; Jobath of Joham; Joham of Jafet; Jafet of Noah; Noah of Lamech; Lamech of Mathusalem; Mathusalem of Enoch; Enoch of Jared; Jared of Malalehel; Malalehel of Cainan; Cainan of Enos; Enos of Seth; Seth of Adam and Adam was formed by the living God.

From ancient tradition, we have obtained this information respecting the original inhabitants of Britain. The Britains were thus called from Brutus; Brutus was the son of Hisicion; Hisicion was the son of Alanus; Alanus was the son of Rhea Silvia; Rhea Silvia was the daughter of Numa Pompilius; Numa was the son of Ascanius; Ascanius of Eneas; Eneas of Anchises; Anchises of Troius; Troius of Dardanus; Dardanus of Flisa; Flisa of Juuin; Juuin of Jafeth; but Jafeth had seven sons; from the first, named Gomer, descended the Galli; from the second, Magog, the Scythi and Gothi; from the third, Madian, the Medi; from the fourth, Juuan, the Greeks; from the fifth, Tubal, arose the Hebrei, Hispani, and Itali; from the sixth, Mosoch; sprung the Cappadoces; and from the seventh, named Tiras, descended the Traces: these are the sons of Jafeth, the son of Noah, the son of Lamech.

In short a typically French-centric celtomania or druidomania that the Italian Annio da Viterbo will bring even to its extreme in 1498 by putting such a Judeo-Christian frenzy in the mouth of a Babylonian priest named Berosus (Antiquitatum variarum).

FIRST TRIES OF CLASSIFICATION

OF THE VARIOUS SETTLEMENTS IN IRELAND.

ACCORDING TO THE [GREAT] BRITISH VERSION OF NENNIUS.

Partholan (Primus autem venit Partholomus).

Nemet (Secundus venit ad Hiberniam Nimeth).

Three sons of a soldier of Spain (et postea venerunt tres filii milites Hispaniae).

Dom Hoctor (Novissime venit Damhoctor).

ACCORDING TO THE VERSION KNOWN AS IRISH, OF NENNIUS.

The Irish version of the Historia Britonum, the Lebor Bretnach or Leabhar Breatnach, appears in three manuscripts.

The Book of Lecan. The Book of Ballymote. The manuscript H. 3. 17 (work gathering the writings of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries).

It was undoubtedly written in Scotland, more precisely in the monastery of Abernethy, then head office of a flourishing Gaelic literature.

DE GABAIL ERENN AMAIL INDISIS NEMNUS.

Ceid fhear do gab Eirind .i. Parrtalon cum mile hominibus .i. mile itir firr & mna, & ro fosbrithear a 'n-Eiri na n-il mileadaib, coras marb a n-aen t-sheachtmain do tam, a n-digail na fingaili do roindi for a pathair agus for a mathair.

Nemead iardain ros gab sen in Eirind. Mac saidein araile Agnomain; ro athtreab a sil re ré cian in Eirind, co n-deachadar co h-Easbain, for teithead in cissa na Muiride .i. na Fomorach.

Uiri Bullorum .i. Firbolg iardain & Uiri Armorum .i. Fir Gaileoin, & Uiri Dominiorum.i. Fri Domnann, sil Nemid annsin.

Ro gab in n-Eirind iardain Plebes Deorum .i. Tuata de Danann is dib ro badar na prim eladhnaig. Edon Luchtenus Artifex. Credenus Figalus. Dianus Meidicus. Eadan dna filia eius .i. muimi na filid. Goibnen Faber. Lug mac Eithnega rabadar na h-uil-dana. Dagda mor (mac Ealadan mic Dealbaith) in rig. Ogma brathair in rig, as e a ranig litri na Sgot.

Is iad na fir seo ro briseat cath mor for na muireadaib .i. for na Fomorcaib, & cor thaethsadar rompa ina tor .i. dun ro daingean for muir. Co n-deachadar fir Erenn ina n-dagaid co muir, coro cathaigseat friu co ros forro do glaeseat in muir uile acht lucht aen luinge, gor gabadar in n-inis iardain. No comad iad clann Neimid im Feargus leidh-dearg mac Neimid do togailseat in tor, &c.

Tainig iardain dám ochtair, cona ocht longaib, is co ro aittreabsath a n-Eirinn, & co ro gab rand mor de.

Fir Bolg imorro ro gabsat Manaind & araile innsi archeana, Ara & Ili & Rachra.

Clanda Gaileoin, imorro, mic Earcail ro gabsat Indsi Orc .i.

Istoreth mac Istoirine mic Aigine mic Agathirir ro sgailseat aril, a h-Indsib Orcc .i. do cuaid Cruithne mac Ingu mic Luithe mic Pairte mic Istoreth mic Agnamain mic Buain mic Mair mic Faitheacht mic Iauad mic Iafeth; conad ro gab tuasceart innsi Breatan……

DE IMTECHTAIB GAEDEAL ANNSO SIS.

Is amlaid seo imorro atfiadait na h-eolaid na n-gaedeal imteachta a n-arsaide toiseach. Ro bai araile fear soceanolach for loingeas i n-Eigipt, iar na h-indarba a rigi Sgeithia, in n-inbaid tangadar meic Israthel tre Muir Ruaid, & ro baidead Forand cona sluag. In sluag terna as gan badad, ro h-innarbsat a h-Eigipt in loingsech soicenelach ud, ar ba cliamain sium do Forand do baidead ann .i. Forann Cíncris.

Roascnadar iarum in Sgeitheagdai co na clann is a n-Affraig, co h-altoraibh na Feilisdinach co cuithib Salmara, & eitir na Ruiseagdaib & sliab Iasdaire, & tar sruth m-bailb tres in Set Muiride co Colamnaib Ercail tar muncinn Gaididoin co h-Easpain; & ro aittreabaid in Espain iardain, co tangadar meic Milead Easpaine co h-Eirind co trichait cuile, co tricha lanamain cach cul, a cind da bliadan ar mile iar m-badad Foraind im Muir Ruaid.

Rex hautem eorum mersus est .i. ro baidead in rig .i. Donn ag Tig Duind. Tri bandé in n-inbaid sin a flaithius Erenn, Folla, & Banba, & Eire, coro moideadar tri catha forro re macaib Mileadh. Coro gabadar meic Milead rigi iardain.

“The first man that took Ireland was Partholan, with a thousand men, i.e., a thousand between men and women; and they multiplied in the country, until many thousands, until they died of a plague in one week; in judgment for the murder that he committed on his father and on his mother.

Nemet afterwards inhabited Ireland. He was the son of one Aconomanos. His race dwelt long in the country, until they went into Spain, flying from the tribute imposed on them by the Muiridi [in other words the Andernas called Fomore in Ireland].

The Viri Bullorum [in other words the Fir Bolg] afterwards and the Viri Armorum [in other words the Fir Gaileoin] and the Viri Dominiorum [in other words the Fir Domnann] these were the race of Nemet.

Afterwards the people of the god-or-demons, in other words, the children of the goddess-or-demoness, or fairy if you prefer, Danu (bia), took Ireland…

It was these men of the goddess-or-demoness , or fairy, Danu (bia) that defeated in a great battle the mariners [in other words the Andernas/Fomore] so that they fled from them into their tower, a very strong fortress on the sea….

One day the men of Ireland went against them to the sea so that they fought with them valiantly but in vain; until the sea closed upon them all, except the crew of one ship; and thus they the Irish took the island afterwards.

But according to others, it was the descendants of Nemet with Fergus “the red sided “ his son, that destroyed the tower.

Afterwards came a company of eight, with eight ships, and dwelt in Ireland and took possession of a great portion of the island.

But the Fir Bolg seized upon Mann, and certain islands in like manner, Ara, Ili, and Rachra.

The children of Galeoin also, the son of Hercules, seized the Orkneys Islands; i.e., Istoreth, son of Istorine, son of Aigin, son of Agathirir, but were dispersed again from these islands. Then came Cruithne, son of Agnaman, son of Buan, son of Mar, son of Fatheacht, son of Javad, son of Japhet, so that he seized the Northern part of Great Britain.

.........

OF THE ADVENTURES OF THE GAELS AS FOLLOWS.

The learned of the Gaels give the following account of the adventures of their ancient chiefs.

There was a certain noble man in exile in Egypt after he had been banished out of the kingdom of Scythia; at the time when the children of Israel passed through the Red Sea, but Pharaoh with his host was drowned. The army that escaped without being drowned, banished out of Egypt that aforesaid noble exile, because he was the son-in-law of the Pharaoh that was drowned… Afterwards the Scythians went with their children into Africa… and they dwelt in Spain afterwards ; until the sons of Mil of Spain came to Ireland with thirty boats, with thirty couples in each boat, at the end of a thousand and two years after Pharaoh was drowned in the Red Sea. The king, viz., Donn, was drowned at Tech Duinn.Three goddess-or-demonesses at that time held the sovereignty of Ireland, namely Folla and

Banba and Eire until three battles were gained over them by the sons of Mil, so that the sons of Mil afterwards took the kingdom.

This Irish version of Nennius therefore gives us, on the other hand, or at least evokes, in the order.

Partholan.

Nemet.

The Fir Bolg (Viri Bullorum, Viri Armorum, Viri Dominiorum).

The Toutai Deuas (Plebs Deorum).

A company of eight men.

…

And lastly the Milesians (the sons of Mil/Milesius of Spain).

In other words, there are already additions, legend evolves and is enriched progressively.

Another very old version of the legend or of the myth, in the bad sense of the word, of the Gaelic-Milesian invasion of Ireland, appears in the life of St. Cadroe of Metz. Or more exactly in the foreword to the life of saint Cadroe (circa 900 – 97, abbot bishop of Waulsort near Dinant, Belgium, then of St. Clement’s monastery in Metz). The author of this foreword states indeed what follows.

The Scots were Greeks from the town of Chorischon in Choria, gone to Thrace on board powerful vessels. There they were joined by subjects of the king Pergamus and by Lacedemonians. Driven by the north wind they would have then wandered into the Mediterranean Sea then would have crossed the Pillars of Hercules, and sailed across the Atlantic to remote Tyle, before lastly landing at Cruachan Feli in Ireland. There they would have discovered that the country was already inhabited, by Picts. The Chorischii (as they called themselves) defeated the Picts and took Artmacha as well as the whole country between Ethioch and Loch Erne. It was then the turn of Kildare, Cork and Bangor. Many years later, the Chorischii would have landed on the island of Iona then in Scotland, in the area of Rossia, by the river Rosis, and would have taken the towns of Regmonath and Bellethor. These newcomers would have initially called Chorischia their new kingdom, but the Chorischii having little by little lost their language, the Egyptian name Scotia would then be given to their new homeland.

But yet what the true ancient texts say in this connection?

Strabo. Book XIV. Chapter I. Ionia.

Section 1.

It remains for me to speak of the Ionians and the Carians and the seaboard outside the Taurus, which last is occupied by Lycians, Pamphylians, and Cilicians; for in this way, I can finish my entire description of the peninsula, the isthmus of which, as I was saying, is the road which leads over from the Pontic Sea to the Issic Sea…

Section 3.

…Miletus was founded by Neleus, a Pylian by birth. The Messenians and the Pylians pretend a kind of kinship with one another, according to which the more recent poets call Nestor a Messenian; and they say that many of the Pylians accompanied Melanthus, father of Codrus, and his followers to Athens, and that, accordingly, all this people sent forth the colonizing expedition in common with the Ionians. There is an altar, erected by Neleus, to be seen on the Poseidium. Myus was founded by Cydrelus, bastard son of Codrus; Lebedus by Andropompus, who seized a place called Artis; Colophon by Andraemon a Pylian, according to Mimnermus in his Nanno; Priene by Aepytus the son of Neleus, and then later by Philotas, who brought a colony from Thebes...

Strabo. Book XIII. Chapter I. Section 54. The Trojade.

From Scepsis came the Socratic philosophers Erastus and Coriscus and Neleus his son; this last a man who not only was a pupil of Aristotle and Theophrastus, but also inherited the library of

Theophrastus, which included that of Aristotle. At any rate, Aristotle bequeathed his own library to Theophrastus, to whom he also left his school; and he is the first man, so far as I know, to have collected books and to have taught the kings in Egypt how to arrange a library. Theophrastus bequeathed it to Neleus; and Neleus took it to Scepsis and bequeathed it to his heirs, ordinary people, who kept the books, locked up and not even carefully stored. But when they heard how zealously the Attalic kings to whom the city was subject were searching for books to build up the library in Pergamum, they hid their books underground in a kind of trench. But much later, when the books had been damaged by moisture and moths, their descendants sold them to Apellicon of Teos for a large sum of money, both the books of Aristotle and those of Theophrastus.

From these some extracts of Strabo, we can deduce the following things.

Chorischon is probably a distortion of the name Coriscus.

Choria is undoubtedly a mistake for Caria, a country of Asia Minor (main town Miletus precisely).

Neleus…

Greek literature knows two men bearing this name.

Neleus, the founder of Miletus in Caria.

Neleus, son of Coriscus.

The Gaelic bards having invented the Milesian legend to flatter the self-esteem of their kings or of their princes therefore drew, of course, from these sources.

Pergamus. Pergamon is another name for the town of Troy and therefore it refers us to Virgil’s Aeneid (book VIII, verse 374). The legend of Miletus, ancestor of the Gaels, is quite simply a plagiarism of the work of our beloved Virgil.

What to think of all that?

THE CHRONOLOGY KEPT BY O'DWYER AND LIZERAY IN THEIR BOOK IS, OF COURSE, ABERRANT, LET IT BE JUDGED!

The Leabar Gabala or Book of Invasions, written in 1631, under the direction of Mícheál Ó'Cléirigh recounts the history of the six colonies the civilizations of the Continent threw successively, like as much alluvium, on the land of Ireland. It was:

1° the colony led by Cessair in 2957 before Jesus Christ, and formed of three men and fifty women.

2° That of Partholan come in 1679 before Jesus Christ lasted 300 years. It defended itself against the Fomorian pirates who had one eye and one foot, i.e., used only one foot and one eye, according to the explanation given by the chronicler and applicable to Cyclops.

3° the colony of Nemed, from 2349 until 2173 before Jesus Christ, fought these same Fomorians who had subdued Ireland and had built towers to control the country.

4° That of Fir-Bolgs Gauls, from 1973 until 1876 before Jesus Christ, establishes monarchy, laws and legislative assemblies.

5° That of Tuatha De Danan, i.e., the People of the goddess Danu, inspirer of arts and sciences. All the poetic mysteries, scientific enchantments and medical knowledge were established by Tuatha De Danan, and in spite of the advent of the Christian religion, their poems were not destroyed because of their merits. They ruled from 1876 to 1684.

6° In 1684 before Jesus Christ Gaedils (Gaels) or Scots arrive coming from Scythia. Current Irishmen come from Gaedils, of whom they preserved the name as an ethnonym. During twenty-eight centuries, kingship is disputed in turn by the two rival families of Emer and Eremon, sons of Mile. They play, so to speak, the dethroned king, what is in conformity with the manners of a warlike time and of valiant people. Then Irishmen make the mistake of utilizing foreigner in their internal quarrels. The Danes, called by an Irish party, conquered the island in 1156 after Jesus Christ, time to which the narration of Leabar Gabala ends….Leabar Gabala, which is almost on a par as regards interest with the history by Herodotus, is not contradicted by the accounts recorded in this ancient document. The Greek author says to us, indeed, that the Scythians named themselves Scolots of the name of one of their kings and this name approaches well that of Scots (or Gaels), who according to the version of the

Leabar Gabala, lived in Scythia before coming to Ireland. Herodotus also says to us that the habit of the Scythians and Thracians was to build a kind of earth mountain over the corpse of their dead princes; in the same way that among Scots of Ireland, we find the vogue of the cairn, etc., etc.

IN SHORT, AND WHILE MEANING NO OFFENSE AS REGARDS THE SYMPATHETIC DRUIDOMANIACS WHO ARE O'DWYER AND LIZERAY, LET US ADMIT THIS LEABAR GABALA ERENN COULD IN NO CASE FORM A VALID BIBLE OF DRUIDISM, HALF OF ITS TEXT AT LEAST BEING ABERRANT OR ABSURD. EXCEPT FOR SOME EPISODES HERE AND THERE, OF COURSE, IT IS NOT ESPECIALLY THEREFORE A BIBLE OF DRUIDISM. ULSTER’S CYCLE IS MUCH MORE INTERESTING (SEE THE EPIC OF SETANTA CUCHULAINN).

Few people now, apart from some simplistic scientists, still dare to maintain that Cuchulainn and Finn are historical characters having really existed. But it does not go in the same way for Milesian invasions. Many people are persuaded that the broad outlines of this story at least are true.

There exists even a tower of Breogan, built in the 17th century near La Coruna in Galicia (Spain), to commemorate the day when the person by the name Ith would have seen Ireland, Though located at some 900 km more up north.

Until the 19th century indeed, it was accepted that this text was on the whole exact and historical. The first historian to think that they could not take this account literally was a certain Eoin MacNeill. He was indeed the first to provide the foundations of a true history of ancient Ireland. The majority of other authors continued nevertheless to base themselves above. And particularly John O'Hart (Irish Pedigrees), which persevered in this way by making the origins of certain great Irish families date back to the famous Milesian warriors from Spain, and consequently to Eve and Adam!

Macalister, of course, in what concerns him, in his time, has approached this book with the same state of mind as MacNeill. In his introduction to this work, he explains why the sections 3,4,5,6, and 7 form as many interpolations or additions to a former text.

Ith was known as to have observed Ireland from the tower of Breogan in Spain, in the same way which Moses had foreseen the Promised land, and there were other parallels or similarities. Moreover, this history of Gaels was initially handed over only by oral tradition and written down a very long time after, by various authors, furthermore.

Thomas F. O'Rahilly goes even further than MacNeill and Macalister. For him too, the Lebor Gabala or Book of Conquests, is essentially a work of fiction, initiated in the eighth century by scholars (Nennius? ?) seeking to reconstruct the history of Ireland before the beginnings of Christianity, then gradually developed well with various additions. In the oldest versions, Mile from Spain for example has only two sons; Eber and Eremon. A third brother was added to them later, Ir, and so on until they are 8.

What these various authors wanted to do was to unify the various clans dividing the country, by giving them a common origin.

Secondly, to fight against paganism by making its god-or-demons like Lug, and the others, simple mortals (reverse euhemerism).

Thirdly, to give prestigious genealogies or famous ancestors, to the great families having ruled over the country in the Middle Ages.

In the case of characters like Columcille or Brian Boru, we have already great difficulty to separate History from Legend, then… O'Rahilly will conclude from it that it is strictly impossible to disentangle truth from fiction in such a work.

This savage will of the Irish men of letters (to want at any cost to be attached to the Greeks or to other peoples of this kind) for that matter had famous antecedents since we find already something similar in ancient accounts.

Timagenes quoted by Ammianus Marcellinus. Rerum Libri Gestarum or Res Gestae (Roman history).

Book XV, chapter IX, paragraphs 3-6.

“Some persons affirm that the first inhabitants ever seen in these regions were called Celts, after the name of their king, who was very popular among them, and sometimes also Galatae, after the name of his mother. For Galatae is the Greek translation of the Roman word Galli. Others affirm that they are Dorians, who, following a more ancient Hercules, selected for their home the districts bordering on the ocean.

The druids [Latin drasidae] affirm that a portion of the people was really indigenous to the soil, but that other inhabitants poured in from very remote islands on the coast and from the districts across the Rhine, having been driven from their former abodes by frequent wars, and sometimes by inroads of the tempestuous sea.

Some again maintain that after the destruction of Troy, a few Trojans fleeing from the Greeks, who were then scattered over the whole world, occupied these districts, which at that time had no inhabitants at all.

But the natives of these countries affirm this more positively than any other fact (and, indeed, we ourselves have read it engraved on their monuments), that Hercules, the son of Amphitryon, hastening to the destruction of those cruel tyrants, Geryones and Tauriscus, one of whom was oppressing the continental Celtica, and the other Spain; after he had conquered both of them, took to wife some women of noble birth in those countries, became the father of many children; and that his sons called the districts of which they became the kings after their own names.”

Justin. Epitome or summary of the philippic and universal histories by Trogue Pompey. Book XLIV, chapter III.

“As for the Galicians, they claim for themselves a Hellenic origin; for they say that Teucer, after the end of the Trojan war, having incurred the hatred of his father Telamon on account of the death of his brother Ajax, and not being admitted into his kingdom, retired to Cyprus, where he built a city called Salamis, from the name of his native land; that, sometime after, on hearing a report of his father's death, he returned to his country, but, being hindered from landing by Eurysaces the son of Ajax, he sailed to the coast of Spain, and took possession of those parts where Cartagena now stands, and, passing from thence to Galicia[ Latin Gallaecia] , and fixing his abode there, gave name to the nation. A part of the Gallaecians are called Amphilochi….”

Parthenius of Nicaea. Love stories (Nr XXX). The story of Celtine.

“Hercules, it is told, after he had taken the cattle of Geryones from Erythea, was wandering through the country of the Celts and came to the house of Bretannus, who had a daughter called Celtine. Celtine fell in love with Hercules and hid away the cattle, refusing to give them back to him unless he would first content her. Hercules was indeed very anxious to bring the heifers safe home, but he was far more struck by the girl’s exceeding beauty, and consented to her wishes; and then, when the time had come round, a son called Celtus was born to them, from whom the Celtic race derived their name.”

Diodorus Siculus. The Library of History. Book V. Chapter XXIV.

“Since we have set forth the facts concerning the islands which lie in the western regions, we consider that it will not be foreign to our purpose to discuss briefly the tribes of Europe which lie near them and which we failed to mention in our former books. Now Celtica was ruled in ancient times, so we are told, by a renowned man who had a daughter who was of unusual stature and far excelled in beauty all the other maidens. But she, because of her strength of body and marvelous comeliness, was so haughty that she kept refusing every man who wooed her in marriage, since she believed that no one of her wooers was worthy of her. Now in the course of his campaign against the Geryones, Heracles visited Celtica and founded there the city of Alesia; the maiden, on seeing Heracles, wondered at his prowess and his bodily superiority and accepted his embraces with all eagerness, her parents having given their consent. From this union she bore to Heracles a son named Galates, who far surpassed all the youths of the tribe in quality of spirit and strength of body. And when he had attained to man's estate and had succeeded to the throne of his fathers, he subdued a large part of the neighboring territory and accomplished great feats in war. Becoming renowned for his bravery, he called his subjects Galatians after himself, and these in turn gave their name to all of Galatia.”

Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Roman Antiquities. Book XIV. Chapter I.

“The whole country is called by the Hellenes by the common name Celtica (Keltikê), according to some, from a giant Celtus who ruled there; others, however, have a legend that to Hercules and Asteropê, the daughter of Atlas, were born two sons, Iberus and Celtus, who gave their own names to the lands which they ruled.”

Eustathius. Commentary on Dionysius Periegetes.

Line of verse 74. It is also said that this name [Galatians] comes from a certain Galates, son of Apollo...

Line 288. Celtus and Iberus are sons of Heracles and of a barbarian woman; and it is from them that come these people, the Celts and the Iberians.

!----- ----------------------- --------------- !

The history of the sons of Mile from Spain and of their conquests was used during centuries and centuries in order to legitimate or support the claims of the ones and others. In 1571, Campion used this myth to establish the rights of British monarchy to reign over the country; at the end of the 16th century (1591?) Edmund Spenser used or rejected various parts of it in order to denigrate Irishmen of his time, and therefore to justify English colonization.

Greatest manipulations of the text undoubtedly happened at the beginning of the 17th, at the time of the long contention of bards called Iomarbhágh Na bhFileadh (from 1616 to 1624). Each poet in the country endeavored to prove at any cost the superiority of his community or of his master over others.

Seathrún Céitinn, known as Geoffrey Keating in English, used Milesian legend (Foras Feasa ar Eirinn, 1634) to promote the legitimacy of Stewarts (thanks to the symbol of the stone of Fal or of Scone). And therefore to show that the genealogy of Charles I could date back to Eve and Adam through Brian Boru, Eber, Galam and Noah.

Our poor Roderick O'Flaherty, alas! Went in the same way for James II. O'Flaherty was, of course, right to understand that Ogygia was an island of Far West but he was completely misled by adopting the same kind of genealogy. His love for our very beloved Ireland undoubtedly explains this blindness and only for that he is forgiven. Sinn Féin!

For O'Rahilly on the contrary, this genealogy making the sovereigns of Ireland go back to the famous king Mile of Spain, is an invented coarse forgery intended to give them a greater legitimacy.

There exists indeed only one document stating such chronologies: the Lebor gabala Erenn or Book of invasions of Ireland.

In fact, no one does know precisely when nor how Gaelic tongue became the archetypal language of Ireland. We are unaware of when speakers of a Q-Celtic language could reach Ireland nor how they could become the dominant culture in this island. Or if the Q-Celtic language did not develop there quite simply from a language having been previous to this one. Some think that in Ireland Gaelic language has, in fact, supplanted a P-Celtic tongue of the same family as the Brittonic one established before. But we do not know with certainty if it was in this case a population change, or a group of invaders becoming a new leading caste. Or quite simply the extension of a new language spreading itself little by little in the country for various reasons.

Below what O'Rahilly found, by reasoning on only linguistic criteria.

Cruithne or Priteni/Britanni circa - 700 - 500.

Fir Bolg, Iberni or Erainn circa - 500.

Laginians, Domnonians and Gailioin (Gauls) circa - 300.

What is not without arousing some problems. Fir Bolg being in fact undoubtedly to be combined with Gailioin, Laginians, and Domnonians, not with Iberni or Ivernians called Erainn by O'Rahilly.

As Henry Lizeray said it very well by translating this work, Gaileoin, Fir Bolg, and Fir Domnann are only the various branches of the same people for which the general name Fir Bolg is used.

In Ireland, Iron Age matches the presence of a Celtic population. According to T.F. O'Rahilly, this population was therefore distinguished from its predecessors by the use of iron, and shared a certain number of common cultural features with the other Celtic peoples in the center and in the west of Europe.

But the relative importance of the invasions or of the slow cultural spreading, in the appearance of these similarities, is still a subject of debates.

It was thought traditionally up to that point that they are Celtic invaders who brought in Ireland Celtic language. Recent genetic and archeological studies suggest now that the adoption of the language and of the Celtic culture was in fact a much more progressive process. Run by cultural exchanges with Celtic groups of inland and of the South-west of continental Europe.

A major linguistic fact dominates all the prehistory of Celts: the division of the Celtic world in two groups of which the languages were different. A first branch which preserved Indo-European KW and transformed it into K or Q, and a second one which changed it into P.

The word horse was pronounced for example ekwos or epos according to the linguistic family.

The only reliable thing therefore is the linguistic situation. The Celtic languages spoken in the British Isles are divided into two distinct families. The P-Celtic, on the one hand, and the Q-Celtic, on the other hand.

At the time when the first written documents appear in the fifth century, we find (Q-Celtic) Gaelic language in Ireland and the (P-Celtic) Brittonic in (Great) Britain. Current Irish, called Gaelic (first official language of the Irish Republic, before English), is derived from a Q-Celtic dialect. The Celts of Great Britain spoke a P-Celtic dialect, ancestor of the Breton language.

But the book of conquests of Ireland (Lebor Gabala Erenn) admits itself the existence of three non-Gaelic tribes in Ireland: The Gabraide of the Suc River, in Connaught, and the Ui Tairsig as well as the Gaileoin, in Leinster.

What is certain also it is that there existed during historical times in Ireland, at least four tribes incontestably speaking a P-Celtic language.

Firstly, the Ivernians. Hiberni or Erainn (according to O'Rahilly). See the name of the goddess or demoness, or fairy if you prefer, Eriu, formerly Iveriu, in Ireland. A very important people of the extreme South-west of Ireland (Munster). They are quoted by Ptolemy in the form “Iouernoi “. Their main town was Ivernis (Greek Iouernis). It is, moreover, extremely probable that it is the first Celtic people arrived in Ireland, and which therefore gave its name to the country (Hivernia/Hibernia for the Romans, see Iveriu/Eriu). They seem to have been the dominating people of the time. But their link with Belgians is very disputed.

Secondly the Briganti (Counties Waterford and Wexford). Doubtless, a part of the Brigantes of Great Britain (Wales), having fled their territory of origin occupied by the Romans.

Thirdly the Menapians (County Wicklow). People of the east of Ireland, most probably a fraction of the Menapians of Belgium, having migrated in this country.

Fourthly, the Corionototae (North of the County Wexford). We know only a few things about these people, it is quoted by Ptolemy. It would be perhaps a portion of the Corionototae which would have migrated from Great Britain into Ireland. Initially settled in Leinster, it is probable that it is at the origin of the “Coraind” we find later in County Sligo.

Only one possible explanation consequently. There was not a Gaelic or Milesian invasion, but a slow increase of the original people, completing, as a result, to become Celtized, which by the way conferred on them a Q-Celtic language: the Gaels. A little as the ancestors of the Germanic people are non-Aryan people little by little Indo-Europeanized, hence the place, a little separate, of the Germanic languages in the Indo-European linguistic family. The Gaels of Ireland are therefore in this case, autochthonous peoples having evolved there, then having ended in taking again power.

For O’Rahilly, the first of the Goidelic sovereign, king of the kings of Ireland (Ard Ri) ancestor of the famous dynasty of Ui Neill through his grandson Conn of the hundred battles, would have been a person by the name Teutovalos (Tuathal) known as Techtmar, nickname of which meaning is dubious, and who would have lived during the first century of our era.

O'Rahilly thinks that, like in many accounts considered tantamount to “returns of exile,” it is in fact purely and simply a foreign invasion, the medieval bards depending on this dynasty having invented many stories to give it more legitimacy. They mixed particularly all the genealogies at their disposal as well as the myths concerning their duties in an incredible history dating back more than a thousand years earlier to a mythical Mil of Spain. According to O'Rahilly therefore it is this foreign invasion which would have inserted in Ireland within the indigenous tribes speaking P-Celtic languages, the Q-Celtic language which was going to become the Irish language. Tradition affirms that this Teutovalos or Tuathal known as Techtmar was the first to levy the specific tax called boroma or borama.

What is sure it is the written documents known today in Ireland do not date back beyond 431. The Gaelic king of Tara, known as Niall Noigiallach or “Niall of the nine hostages “ is the oldest historical figure, whose existence is not disputed by historians, and about whom we have some information.

According to the existing records, his father, Eochaid Mugmedon, was one of the kings of Tara, and he ruled over the kingdom of Mide. Niall therefore probably succeeded his father circa + 400, and he would have ruled during twenty-seven years. His reign saw Tara win recognition as a dominant power. At the origin of this rise, there was the conquest of what remained of Ulster by his men, the result of centuries of conflict between the Gaels of Tara and the Ulaids of Emain Macha. This conflict is for that matter evoked in the known mythical cycle as Ulster Cycle, which includes the Táin Bó Cúailnge or the rustling of the cattle of Cooley.

In Ulster, the tribes were grouped in three kingdoms: Airgialla, Ulaid, Ailech, each one independent.

The Gaelic conquest of Ulster was undertaken mainly by three of the sons of Niall, Eógan, Enda and Conall Gulban.

Airgialla, sometimes anglicized in Oriel, in the center of Ulster, covered most of the counties Armagh, Coleraine, Fermanagh, Louth, Monaghan and Tyrone. This kingdom was in fact a confederation of nine sub-kingdoms, each one of them ruled by an indigenous dynasty. The Ulaids or the Dal Fiatach, who had formed the dominant power in Ulster during centuries, were overcome, their royal seat in Emain Macha (Navan Fort) destroyed, and they were pushed back towards the east in County Down. The conquest of Niall reduced other princes to the status of simple vassals. In order to make sure of their loyalty, Niall obliged them, all, to send to him in Tara eminent members of their families as hostages. Hence the name Airgialla, which means “givers of hostages “ and perhaps also the epithet of Niall, Noígiallach, which means “of the nine hostages “.

North and East of Ulster covered the greatest part of the modern counties Antrim and Down. It was ruled over by the Dal nAraidi, an Ernean or Cruithnian indigenous dynasty, which claimed to come from the famous Gaulish Fir Bolg King Rudraige, but which also became, itself, reduced to being vassals of the kings of Tara. This Gaelic conquest had an impact on the history of Scotland. As a result of this defeat indeed, some of the Dal nAraidi crossed the sea and colonized Argyll. Over time, this colony became the dominant power in the North of Great Britain, and the kingdom of Scotland was formed in the ninth century by the union of the Dal nAraidi and of the indigenous kingdom of Picts.

According to the Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland called Annals of the Four Masters, Henry Lizeray’s version, Emain Macha, the seat of the Ulaid kings (Fort Navan) was attacked and destroyed in 331 by the three Collas, some Gaels come from Connacht. They defeated the king Fergus Foga in the battle of Achadh Leithdheirg in the county Monaghan and seized all his territories located in the west the Newry River or of the Lough Neagh. T.F. O'Rahilly (1946) compares him to the king Fergus mac Roich of the epic known as the rustling of the cows of Cooley.

The Ulaid or the Dál Fiatach, who had been the dominant power in Ulster during centuries, therefore were overcome and repelled towards the east in the county of Down. As we have already signaled it, this conflict is evoked in the mythical cycle known as Ulster Cycle, which includes the Táin Bó Cúailnge (or rustling of the cattle of Cooley). From there, the Ulaid were slowly weakened until being hardly the kings of their lands of origin, in the east of the Bann River, where the heart of their territory was located.

The kingdom of Ailech, in the west, occupied the same extent as the current county Donegal.

The taking of the fortress of Ailech, the royal seat, which had given its name to the kingdom, and which was going to become the capital of the Uí Néill of the North, about 425, marked the end of the Gaelic conquest of Ulster.

The three sons of Niall, Eógan, Conall Gulban, as well as Enda carved out there a subkingdom for each one: Tír Eógain, Tír Chonaill and Tír Enda. But Tír Enda was conquered by the descendants of Conall and was incorporated into Tír Chonaill. The two remaining kingdoms therefore increased in size and importance. Their names were preserved to us in the Gaelic designation of the two modern counties of Ulster: Donegal and Tyrone. Ailech was ruled during more than eight centuries by the descendants of Conall and Eógan, known collectively under the name of O'Neill, who gave several high kings to the country.

After the death of Niall, his son, Lóegaire succeeded him as king of Tara. It is during his reign that Christianity was introduced into the country, officially by St. Patrick who was probably the private tutor of his daughters (the glamour of the Roman culture) although since the fourth century there have been Christians from Bordeaux (Bordgal) in the south of Ireland (Leinster and Cork's area).

PRESENTATION OF THESE TEXTS BY HENRY LIZERAY IN 1884.

Peoples are never indifferent to accounts of their traditions: the evidence of this, it is the immortal glory which Homer and Virgil got to have reported origins of their country. The particular interest which is attached to the history of peoples comes from the fact that each one of them matches a level of human development and civilization: how much strange therefore history dealing with our ancestors will be seeming when it is known that, in the struggle fought against their enemies, Western civilization was involved.

But, alas, during the adventures of this astonishing, amazing, drama, which forms our history, among the reversals of our fortune we lost power, territory, traditions, everything, up to our name, keeping ourselves only this other whole that is soul.

Our name (Celts) who understands it today? Our annals, so wide since they belonged to the druidic teaching which lasted twenty years, our annals perished when the head of the last druid fell under the persecutions of Claudius. Druids, indeed, did not write and entrusted to memories their original and universal doctrines. From their immense knowledge, only what was reported by Greek and Latin authors, has reached us until this day.

But behold, in this distress, a sister nation had piety to preserve a considerable number of Celtic traditions. Ireland, well worthy to have taken the harp as her emblem, collected in the libraries of Trinity College and of the National Irish Academy a thousand manuscripts, priceless treasures which will use to clear the night fallen on our beginnings.

However before being authorized to borrow from Irishmen their traditions, in order to reconstruct by way of analogy those which are missing for us, it is advisable to say two words of the book of conquests or Leabar Gabala

It is amazing this work, whose importance exceeds that of the Annals of Ireland did not already tempt a translator. The cause is a not very reassuring expression which misled O'Donovan himself when he read it in the Foreword of Mícheál Ó'Cléirigh . This author says, indeed, that he corrected, bowdlerized and rewrote.

But the cuts, far from harming the work, are advantageous for it, because they were practiced on the repetitions and mainly on the biblical interpolations. Mícheál Ó Cléirigh indicates the nature of these preteritions to us when, at the end of his foreword, he says that he will overlook what relates to creation and other biblical inventions.

“We forbear from the discussion of the six days' work, which was usual in the beginning of every other old Book of Conquests, because they are related better in the Holy Scripture, and because it is more right for theologians to treat of them and not for other men ; who may have enough to treat of and to write without it. However, it appertains to us to speak of the ages of the world, from the creation of Adam ” (Mícheál Ó'Cléirigh).

“ May this work attract attention to the Celtic studies, neglected too a long time for Latin humanities. It seems indeed that the ideal of our professors is to make their pupils Romans of the Augustan age, and, in fact, the moral ideas of our young people do not rise above the level of Horatius or Catullus. But banality and inconsistency of a people which emulates its former conquerors become, moreover, a danger.

And since the Romans, at the time of their splendor, were struck by powerlessness against the Germanic people, they are not their imitators, eighteen centuries later, who will be better able to fight against the same reappearing danger.

The Latin tradition, for a long time exhausted, is useless in sciences, because all the discoveries are made outside its data; it is ineffective in policy, with its theory of Latin races, because it was ages ago that that the last Roman passed to the state of historical memory, in morals, Roman materialism chokes all the high qualities of the soul of Celt, such as a vocation, inspiration, spontaneousness, impetus, sensitivity. In the name of our salvation, let us be therefore Celts, and as education consists of the knowledge of the origins, let us study the history, not of Romans, but of Celts.

A word now about the circumstances of this translation. One of the authors, transiting in Dublin, was struck by what was said of the Leabar Gabala and decided to translate the work.

The one who writes these lines owes a word of memory to his unhappy collaborator and friend. The special aptitudes of William O'Dwyer, for Celtic grammar and philology, his at the same time subtle and sagacious scholarship make his death regrettable for his country, that he served with devotion.

The writer of this foreword personally thanks the Celticiist scientist, Mr. Hennessy, for having helped him out more once when he was dealing with the difficulties of the Irish text. Mr. Hennessy thanks to his subtle scholarship, profound, without pedantry and of a good mood, is the exact type of the Celtic well-read man, and the salvation of the embarrassed translators.

By fathoming the meaning of the Leabar Gabala, we note the harmony of this work with other cosmogonies and mythologies.

Ceasair symbolizes the time of polygamy, usual in the beginning of nations. The father of Ceasair, Biot or the Living one also has a significant name.

Partolan, and his wife Dealgnat, the Unjust one, symbolize the time of first laws. Dealgnat's adultery is somewhat analogous to Eve's sin.

The Nernedians i.e., the Celestial ones match the Olympian gods who are also called Uranians, i.e., celestial ones. The first fight the Fomorians, like the second fight the Titans.

Fir-Bolgs and Tuata de Danan symbolize the time of heroes and demigods.

The detail of the Leabar Gabala changes us from classics. It is a merit. If you want to deny it, it should be pointed out that the classical accounts, so much in their narration than in their chronology, are very contestable and cannot be used as a measure of the truth.

Paris, April 1884.

Editor’s note. Let us remark nevertheless that the great-grandfather of Virgil was a druid , and Catullus of Celtic origin too (he was a native of Verona).

IN SEARCH OF THE LOST ORIGINAL PAN-CELTIC MYTH.

The Leabar Gabala or Book of Invasions, written in 1631, under the direction of Mícheál Ó'Cléirigh recounts the history of the six settlements that the civilizations of the continent threw successively, like as much alluvium, on the land of Green Erin. It was:

1° The settlers brought by Ceasair in 2957 before Jesus Christ, and composed of three men and fifty women.

2° That of Partholan come into 1679 before Jesus Christ, remained 300 years. They defended themselves against the Fomorian pirates who had a single eye and a single foot, i.e., used only one foot and one eye, according to the explanation given by the chronicler and applicable to Cyclops.

3° The settlement of Nemid, from 2349 up to 2173 before Jesus Christ, fought against these same Fomorians who had subjected Ireland and had built towers to supervise the country.

4° That of Fir-Bolgs, from 1973 to 1876 before Jesus Christ, established kingship, laws and legislative assemblies.

5° That of the Tuata De Danan, i.e., the People of the Goddess Danu , she-inspirer of arts and sciences. (“All the poetic mysteries, scientific enchantments and medical knowledge were established by the Tuata Dé Danan, and in spite of the settlement of the Christian religion, their poems were not destroyed because of their merits ”). They prevailed from 1876 to 1684.

6° In 1684 before Jesus Christ Gaedils (Gaels) or Scots arrive, from Scythia. The current Irishmen are descendants of the Gaedils, of whom they preserved the name as an ethnic name. During twenty-eight centuries, the kingship is contended in turn by the two rival families of Emear and Ereamon, sons of Milead. They play, so to speak, the dethroned king, what is in conformity with the manners of a warlike time and of valiant people [….]

But that we have already said it.

The Leabar Gabala was the object of criticism to which we must reply [.....] Several questions are indeed aroused by the reading of Leabar Gabala [….] They also announced as a reason for suspicion regarding the contents, the difference in the dates adopted by Irish authors. The ones, indeed, conformed to Hebraic chronology, and the others followed that of the Septuagint, which gives 1466 years more to the world. To fill this gap, the partisans of the second system imagined very long intercalary periods during which Ireland remained deserted. We ignore voluntarily times piously added for the harmony with the Septuagint, and we admit only as genuine the periods filled by facts, about which unanimity of historians is established. In this way , the number and the length of the reigns with a slight difference the same in all the authors, fill long centuries which escape the dispute of critics.

Geographical mistakes do not sully either the sincerity of the narrators. They indicate only the precarious state of knowledge during the Middle Ages and at the remote time of the first draftings [….].

Generally Irish “mythological “texts are only adaptations to the geography and history of this island, of the original pan-Celtic mythology, resulting from the Continent; and appeared somewhere in Central Europe north of the Alps, in the second thousand years before the common era. In a geographical area which the Celts of the time will change into an allegory known as Letavia.

There is no doubt since the demonstrations of R. Macallister, that the so piously preserved works, were brought from the Continent; sometimes by immigrants, sometimes as a result of the circulation of ideas in the Celtic area; and that they have been subject to adaptations to land and history of the country. To notice it removes nothing of their merit, or of the merit that had Irishmen to keep them, even to embellish them. They have believed for a long time too and very sincerely, that it was their own history they sang. There are still a few tens of years, very serious authors sought to date the various waves of colonization described by the Book of conquests. A hopeless work because this theomachy is ageless.

Adaptations went very far: each place name, each old ruin, was endowed with a history, the human royal dynasties were attached to mythical dynasties, pan-Celtic gods or demons became as many legendary heroes. However, truth has always shown its face, all you had to do was to open a book to collect the evidence of it by the dozens. The three “races “which are used as support to myths, the Tuatha (and their doubles), the Ulaid

(or Voluntii) the Laigin, are for example all three of foreign origin, recently landed in Ireland, the authors themselves say it and rightly.

In short, the adaptation to the Irish conditions of the original pan-Celtic mythology went very far (upheavals in the hierarchy, demonization of some supernatural or preternatural entities, and so on) and to that an omnipresent Christian contribution (many interpolations) was added.

In spite of its great interest, we will not follow here therefore the entirety of the text established in 1884 by O’Dwyer and Henry Lizeray a, we will take over only certain principles like this one: Gaileoin, Fir Bolg, and Fir Domnann are only the various branches of the same people for which the general name Fir Bolg will be used. But on many other points we will correct the manifest misjudgment of Henry Lizeray.

The text which will follow IS NOT EITHER EXACTLY THAT OF THE IRISH LEBOR GABALA ERENN of Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister, nor even a reasoned compilation of the various Irish legends on this subject.

The text which follows is only a first essay, necessarily incomplete, of reconstruction of the original pan-Celtic myth, of which Irish monks of the Middle Ages have collected echoes, already considerably distorted by time! Distortion accentuated by their efforts of Christianization or of linking to, either biblical, or Greco-Roman, references.

Precise geographical location, although being a Celtic practice, play no role in the action. It is only a consequence or a parallel fact, of the more or less relative historicization mythical topics.

It is therefore here a completely new and consequently non-historic, non-scientific, version, resulting from a preliminary draft of de-Christianization and of de-Irishization of this legend (a hardly outlined draft because we have not been able to complete it alas).

Risen from a first attempt of reasoned synthesis (by elimination of contradictions, of inconsistencies, by comparison with the really historical or continental data, by comparison with the myths of other religions or with the myths of later times), etc., etc.

This effort of dechristianization especially consisted in eliminating the biblical references inserted obviously by medieval transcribers. But nevertheless we have often left these Christian additions at the end of texts when they are obvious and therefore not very likely to be taken for other things they are, some lies.

This solution indeed has the advantage of respecting the original configuration of texts, of respecting style, and of continuing to make the complexity of them feel.

We have also eliminated references to the Julian calendar and the day names, because they concern a system imported by Christianity. We substituted for them some dates according to druidic calendar, and more precisely in accordance with Coligny calendar.

The effort of de-Irishization especially consisted in substituting for Irish names their Goidelic etymological form (Q-Celtic language).

For certain names it is possible to identify them with continental names (in P-Celtic language), we carried out the substitution, while also reminding, between brackets, the Irish name appearing in the text. We also used various words relating to folklore or archeology (anguipedic, etc.) to widen the base of the account, and to get it out of its strictly Irish framework, where there was a possibility of a more widespread, even pan-Celtic, legend.

Let us not see there a proto-history, reconstructed by scientific research, but only the elements of an allegorical metahistory.

We rely on the perspicacity of our she readers and of our he readers thus warned as soon as our preliminary explanations, to filter the quintessence of it to rack from this profusion (of symbols).

The enormous mass of this mythical literature justifies this presentation, because, for lack of better sources “it was necessary to deal with “.

What follows is therefore not a faithful and successfully completed reconstruction of the original pan-Celtic mythology. It is only a first step in the long way to go in this direction. It is a first collection of materials which can be used for almost paleontological reconstruction of the original pan-Celtic myth. The skeleton of a dinosaur still badly released from the gangue with which Irish bards and

underculture of Christian copyist monks have covered it. The question is: “In your opinion, what could resemble this damned dinosaur? “It is up to our readers now to tackle this task. Some of our authors admit another occupation of the country before Partholan, wrote Seathrun Ceitinn. Very well! Therefore let us begin here. But let us not forget also to point out here as a preliminary this careful remark from this Christian historian (Seathrun Ceitinn) suddenly become doubtful.

”Know, O reader that it is not as genuine history... I set down this occupation only because I have found it written in old books. And, moreover, I do not understand how the antiquaries obtained tidings of the people whom they assert to have come here before the deluge, except it be the female aerial demons gave them to them, who were their fairy lovers during the time of their being pagans; or unless it be on flags of stones, they found them graven after the subsiding of the deluge, if the story be true; for it is not to be said that it is that Vindosenos/Fionntain who was before the deluge who would live after it! Because the Scripture is against it, where it says that there did not escape of the human race, without drowning, but the eight persons of the ark alone, and it is clear Vindosenos/Fionntain was not of those. .. However, think not, O reader, that this is the opinion of the people who are most authoritative in history....

The argument is unsound which some antiquaries have concerning vindosenos/Fionntain to have lived during the deluge, where they said that there lived four in the four quarters of the world, namely, Vindosenos/Fionntain, Fearon, Fors, and Andoid..... One of our authors sets this thing before me in a poem.

Here the names of four, the question was not difficult

Whom God left safe throughout the deluge.

Fionntain, Fearon, Fors, just, gentle,

And Andoid, son of Eathor.

Fors in the eastern land, east, was allowed;

Fearón for coldness was in need of clothing;

Fionntain for the west limit fairly

And Andóid for the southern part.

Though antiquaries record that,

The just canon of the true faith does not record

But Noe who was in the ark, and his children,

And their wives, who obtained protection of their lives” (Seathrun Ceitinn).

REMIND FOR THE READER.

Your attention, please! The texts which follow are not a complete or exhaustive synthesis of all the Irish or Welsh legends on the subject. For the simple reason that such a synthesis would be impossible, considering the countless variants or contradictions it is possible to discover in them. Only a synthesis of the broad outlines of these accounts can be considered.

The texts which follow are therefore only partial rewriting, and in short or in summary, of the main Irish legends in question, the whole being restructured or reconstructed after the demolition, on new bases, and following a different plan, here and there interrupted by analyses.

They have only one goal, to give our readers enough preliminary notions or outlines on the subject to want to know more.

The texts which follow do not exempt therefore from referring ultimately to original texts themselves.

CICOLLUIS THE STUNTED OF THE BRAIN WITH HIS WITHERED FEET AND HIS PEOPLE.

THE FIRST TRUE SETTLEMENT IN THE COUNTRY: THE GIGANTIC ANGUIPEDIC WYVERNS

KNOWN AS ANDERNAS ON THE CONTINENT, AS FOMORIANS IN GAELIC LANGUAGE.

The book of conquests of Ireland, or Lebor Gabala Erenn, states that the people of Partholan was the first to come to settle in this island after the flood. But Seathrun Ceitinn (Geoffrey Keating) in his Foras feasa ar Eirinn (History of Ireland) as we have just seen above (“Some of our authors reckon another occupation of the country before Partholan”), evokes a tradition according to which Andernas or Fomore, led by Cicolluis of the withered feet , had arrived two hundred years earlier. They would live here on fowl and fish until Partholan introduces oxen and plow in the island.

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 2.

Possible allusion in fact to peoples of hunter-gatherers having lived before invention of agriculture in the Neolithic era. Keating ascribed to them as descendants of Cham an African origin. He makes them “navigators of the race of Cham who left Africa. They came fleeing to the islands of the West of Europe, and fleeing the race of Sem, by fear...” etc. No need to be anti-Semite to realize the nonsense of such an assertion, emanating, however, from an eminent , Christian it is true, intellectual, of the 17th century…

OF THE CONQUEST OF CESAIR HERE FOLLOWS.

Now Cesair, daughter of Bith son of Noe, was the first who found Ireland after the beginning of the world, forty days before the flood, in the year of the age of the world, 2242. Three men and fifty maidens were with her. For this reason they came thither, a-fleeing from the flood ; for God said to Noe, son of Lamech, that he should make an ark for himself, for his sons ( i.e.Sem, Cam, and Japhet) and for their wives (Cova, Olla, Oliva, and Olivana), in hope of saving themselves from the wave roar of the flood which He should pour on the earth, to destroy and to annihilate its inhabitants at large, on account of the many sins of the children of Adam ; except Noe and his children, for these eight persons were free from sin. God commanded Noe to bring a pair of each sort of unlawful animal into the ark, for the sake of propagation from them after the flood ; and three pairs of lawful animals, for the sake of propagation from them likewise. He taught him the shape of the ark with the furniture which was necessary for it, and what he should bring therein of everything that would be required for the persons and animals besides.

When Bith, Fintan, and Ladhra ( the three men who accompanied Cesair in coming to Ireland later), heard that it was destined that a flood should come on the world, and that all the various races of the world should be drowned, save the people of the ark, they were terrified on that account. Each of them questioned Noe in turn as to whether he would let him go with him into the ark till the flood should be spent. Noe said that he had no power to let anyone into it but such as God Himself had ordained, for it was not a private ship , and they had no right on it.

Then the three men and Cesair take counsel to know what device they should contrive to save themselves from the flood. Give submission to me, said Lady Cesair, and I shall give you counsel." —It shall be your, said they. —"Take a portable god to you, said Cesair , worship him, and forsake the God of Noe.

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 3.

Portable God. We translate so the Gaelic word lamdia which designates a statuette like the teraphim worshipped by first Hebrews.

In Genesis 31-34, Rachel takes the Teraph of Laban and hides it in a saddle bag ; in the book of Samuel. Michal misleads the men of Saul and makes them believe that David in her bed is in fact a teraph. In the same account, we learn that a place was reserved for a teraph in each home.

In Hosea 3-4, the Teraph is described like as essential as the ephod in Israelite culture.

The fact that Micah, who venerated Yahweh, uses a Teraph as an idol (see Judges 17) and that Laban regards it as representing “his gods” seems to indicate that they could be images of God.

According to the Bible, the Teraph was prohibited by the reform of Josiah , but it is in reality possible that their use remained in the popular culture until the Hellenic era and perhaps later still.

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They agreed to that. They take a portable God to themselves, they worship him, and they forsake the Lord on the advice of Cesair. This is the instruction she gave them thereafter, to make a ship, and that they should go on the sea to Ireland. They do so ; but neither they nor their hand-held god knew when the flood should come.

Three men and fifty maidens went on that ship with Cesair. On Tuesday, so far as regards the day of the week, they went therein. Then they rowed from Meroe Island, a-fleeing from the flood, to the Tyrrhene Sea. Eighteen days they were on the Caspian Sea. Twenty days thence till they reached the Cimmerian Sea. One day till they reached Asia Minor, between Syria and the Tyrrhene Sea. Twenty days they had thence to the Alps. Eighteen days from the Alps to Spain. Nine days from Spain to Ireland. A Saturday they reached Ireland, on the fifteenth day of the moon ; and the place where they took harbor was at Dun na mBarc in Corco Duibhne. They were joyful then at reaching Ireland, for they hoped that whatsoever place where did not come evil nor sin, and that was free from reptiles and

monsters till then, would be safe from the flood ; for prophets had shown them before they came from the East that Ireland was in that wise.

Then, from there, they arrived at Miledach, which is called Bun Suainmhe today ; that is the Confluence of the Siuire, the Eoire, and the Barbha. Another name for it is Valley of the three waters (Comar na tTri nUisce), from the meeting or coming together of the three rivers. The three men divide the fifty maidens there. Fionntain took seventeen wives, with Cesair. He gave Bith seventeen, with Bairinn ; and gave Ladhra the sixteen others, and he complained about them. It was of the division of the women and of their names that this was said :

A fair division we divided between us, I and Bith and Ladhra bold : our peace, sensibly was it contrived, about the fifty splendid maidens. Seventeen I took, with Cesair ; Lot, and Luam, and Mael, and Marr, Fuirechair, Femmarr, Faible, Forall, Cipir, Tarriam, Tamall, Tam, Abla, Alla, Raigne, Sille, that is the tale that we were there.

Seventeen Bith took, with Bairind, Sealla, Della, Daoibh, Addeoss, Foda, Trage, Nena, Buanna, Tamall, Tuama, Natar, Leos, Fodarc, Rodarc, Dos, Clos (be it heard) ; those were our people further. Sixteen thereafter with Ladhra,

Labra, Bonna, Abloir, Ail, Gothiam, Grimoc, Aice, Inge, Roorc, Rinde, Iuchar, Ain, Urrand, Esba, Sinne, Somall,

Those were our fair company.

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 4.

The Gaelic sentence “daoibh addeoss” means literally, “I will say them to you.” But Henry Lizeray was wrong not to count them as proper names.

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Ladhra went with his women to the hill of Ladhra, so that he died of an excess of women, and he is the first dead of Ireland. His women went after his death to Cesair to know what they should do. A messenger was sent from Cesair to Bith about the division of the women. Bith comes to Fintan, to know his advice about the same matter. This is the conclusion they reached, to divide the women belonging to Ladhra in two, between them, so that each of them had twenty-five women thereafter. Bith went with his women then to the north of Ireland, so that he died in the mountain of Bith, and the women bury him there in the stone heap of the mountain of Bith, so that from him it is named. The women come back again to the place where they had left Cesair and Fintan.

Fintan escapes after that, a-fleeing before the women, over Bun Suainmhe, over the mountain of Cua, to the peak of Febrat son of Sin, left-handwise from Shannon, eastward, to Tul Tuinde over the lake of Derigdeirc.

Cesair goes to the valley of Cesair in Connaught, and her women with her ; and there her heart burst in the lady for the absence of her husband and the death of her father. The women bury her body there, so that from her are named valley of Céasair and Carn of Céasair.

Then the first age of the world's ages was finished, that is from Adam to the flood, save seven days only. The flood overtook the women then, so that they were drowned.

So that of the tales of Cesair and her people this song was made….

.........Editor’s note: we go directly to the following settlement this poem teaching us nothing more .......

OF THE CONQUEST OF PARTHOLAN SON OF SEAR HERE FOLLOWS.

From Adam till Partholan took Ireland, 2520

From the Flood till Partholan took Ireland, 278

Now Ireland was deserted for a space of two hundred three score and eighteen years after the flood till Partholan, son of Sear, son of Sru, son of Easru, son of Brament, son of Athecht, son of Magog, son of Japheth, son of Noe, came to it out of Greece.

For this cause he came from his native land, that is, from Sicily of the Greeks, a-fleeing from the kin murder that he had worked ; namely, killing his father and his mother, seeking the kingdom for himself and his brother. A sailing of a month had he from Sicily to Aladacia ; three days from Aladacia to Gothia ; a journey of a month from Gothia to Spain ; nine days from Spain to Ireland. A Tuesday he took Ireland, in the harbor of Scene, on the seventeenth of the moon. These are the chiefs of this conquest.

Partholan himself ; Slangha, Laighlinne, and Rudhraighe his three sons; Delgnat, Nerba, Cichva, and Cerbnat their four wives ; Aidhne, Aife, Aine, Fochain, Muchus, Melepart, Glas, Grennach, Abhlach, and Gribennach, the ten daughters of Partholan. These are their husbands : Brea, Boan, Ban, Cairtenn, Eccnach, Athcosan, Luchradh, Lugair, Liger, and Griber.

Of the names of the troop who were outstanding of the people of Partholan, besides those. Accasbel his steward, who was the first who made a guesthouse in Ireland. Brea son of Senub, the first who made a house, a cauldron, and single combat. Malaliach cet cor et cet cirpsire 7 cetna hesib lion ratha ind erind et as é do rigni fiafaigidh, eirneadh 7 adrah inti ??? Malaliach, the first surety, and the first brewer, and the first man who drank ale of fern in Ireland ; and it is he who made questioning, knowledge and adoration within it.

Tath, Fios, and Fochmarc, his three druids ; Miolchu, Meran, Muinechan, his three champions. Bachorbladhra, his man of learning (ollamos) ; he was the first master teacher of Ireland. Biobal and Babal were his merchants ; Biobal, the first who brought gold to Ireland, and Babal, the first who brought cattle. Tothacht, Tarba, Iomhus, Aithechbel, Cuil, Dorcha, and Damh, his seven chief farmers ; Lee, Lecmagh, Iomaire, and Eterche, the names of the oxen they had. Topa was the attendant of Partholan. In the time of Partholan was made the first building, the first mill, the first weir, and the first churning in Ireland.

Now Partholan chose a fertile place wherein to use the flowers, fruit, and sea produce ; because he found no husbandman before him, after his arrival there. The spot where he chose that place was in the vicinity of the Waterfall of the Two Fools ; that is, an island which is over against the waterfall on the bay. That was the place most fruitful, in his opinion, which he found before him in Ireland. The reason why it is called the Waterfall of the Two Fools was from the folly and madness that the wife of Partholan and his attendant, Topa, worked, as is related below.

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 5.

Knowledge. Henry Lizeray translates the Gaelic word eirneadh by knowledge. It means explanation in Gaelic language. The sentence in question ending in the notion of worship, we wonder if the evoked questioning is not that of oracles.

Weir. We translate so the Gaelic term linn which can also mean drink.

Husbandman. Henry Lizeray conveys by the notion of husbandry the Gaelic term trebhaire, the stem treb meaning housing, village.

ADULTERY OF PARTHOLAN’S WIFE.

A day when Partholan went on the shore of the sea (as was his wont) to fish, he leaves his wife and his attendant together in the island. She sues intercourse of lechery of the attendant, and he made her no answer the first time. Such was her immodesty that she did not suffer that he should not lie with her, she being stripped ; so that he did her pleasure. A burning of intense thirst seizes them after that. Partholan had a vessel of excellent drink in the dwelling, from which nothing could be drunk save through the cup of red gold that he himself had. She takes it to herself then, so that they drank their fill of it. After Partholan returned from the chase on which he was, he asks for drink. It was brought to him. After tasting it, he found the taste of their mouths on the cup , and gave heed to the evil deed that they had done ; for the diabolic spirit that used to accompany him revealed it to him.

Then he said, "Though no long time I am away from you there is a thing arisen through you that I find hard, and a compensation is my due fort that." So he said this :

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 6.

The diabolic spirit. Spiorat deamhnacda. If it is a Christian influence, it would be in this case a little the opposite of a guardian angel . A guardian demon ?

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" Great the story you have scattered abroad, O Delgnat, you have caused us trouble ; many children in doubt, on the face of kings blushing, in the heart of champions swelling, peace will not give them sound hearts ; the evil deed you have plotted little will not pay for great jealousy of a slave.

She answered Partholan and said, "I think that it is I who deserve compensation for the injustice you have worked ; for you it is who have caused the deed which I have done. For it is not right to neglect the guarding of desire of things for one another, for fear of destroying any of them. Just like honey to a woman, milk to a boy, flesh to a cat, food to the good fellow, a tool to a worker, so is a woman with a man ; it is not right not to interfere between them ; when desire of coition comes, it cannot easily be resisted."

This verdict of Delgnat is the first verdict of Ireland; so that thence people have a proverb from that onward, " The right of his wife against Partholan." So Delgnat said this :

Editors note. A poem in Gaelic that Henry Lizeray had visibly much difficulty to translate follows.

" O my fair lord Partholan, see your cattle speckle-hued,do they not ask to be united ? See your sheep of fair robe, do they not wait (?) their pairing master ? Now if you consider your lofty cattle, not a special bull they approach ; they approach bulls (?) from necessity. If you consider your pleasant sheep, when the heat comes they are very submissive

(to) whatsoever ram is first in pens. Calves have a tie (?) that they do not follow their milch kine ; paddocks are closed (?) on the noble lambs that the lambkins do not suck. Foaming milk from horned cattle trust not to a kitten ; do not trust your very sharp axe with a lumberjack, for safety.”

Partholan answered and said :

" Great is the injury you have done, Delgnat ? Great are your deliberate crimes, your joint sin incurs penalties ; we ever guarding you, you doing us treason. Enough to cause evil habits to all, seemly to all will appear your sinfulness. The sin of Eve you have found, second to it is what you have done

O Delgnat, or yet more.

While they were thus mutually disputing, the lapdog of Delgnat comes to Partholan to play with him ; Samer was its name. He strikes a blow of his palm on it, so that he killed it ; so that from it is named the island, namely, Samer's Island. That is the first jealousy of Ireland. Moreover, its first adultery was the lying of his serving attendant with Delgnat. Topa rises to flee from Partholan. He followed him, so that he destroyed him in punishment for his misdeed.

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 7.

We are busy speculating about the significance of the “sacrifice” of this dog. Jews invented the notion of a scapegoat, did the druids invent the notion of a scapedog ? The poor animal was, of course, innocent! But did Partolan perhaps consider that the dog had failed in his role which was that to stand guard while preventing any unknown man from approaching?? We can also think that Partolan quite simply got rid of the dog by making him flee with stones (a beginning of stoning for adultery?).

To notice, however, unlike Islam, only one of the two culprits of adultery crime is punished with capital punishment, the man. The woman (Delgnat) is apparently saved. What locates Celtic druidism halfway between Christianity and Islam on the matter. It is true that Topa as it happens had committed more than a simple adultery, he had betrayed the confidence of his lord what another crime quite as serious, was.

Let us repeat nevertheless that all this it is former druidism, that the new one does not forget the plea of Delgnat for a free love, liberating and liberated (cathartic), but that it also applies it to males, and therefore recommends getting rid of any middle-class feeling as regards marriage. Marriage is only a contract signed between a man and a woman, and society must especially be concerned with the destiny of the children who can be born from such a union of bodies hearts souls and situations.

ON PARTHOLAN’S WORK.

At the end of ten years after Partholan's coming to Ireland, he won a battle on the slopes of the plain of Ith, in the mountain of Emhoir against Ciogul Grigenchosach, son of Goll, son of Garbh, son of Tuathadh, son of Umhor, with his people, and against his mother, Lot the active and moving one ?

Two hundred years were they without enjoying food, save only fish and bird meat, so that therefore they came to land against Partholan in the estuary of Domnu. So the aforesaid battle was fought between them, and Ciogul fell there with his mother and his people. Eight hundred was their tale, namely, two hundred men and six hundred women. With a single foot, a single hand, and a single eye the Fomorians fought that battle against Partholan. A week were they fighting it. This is the first battle of Ireland. So that of the aforesaid things this was said :

Editor’s note.The same thing as what has just been said, follows as usual, but in lines of verses.

OF THE PLAINS THAT WERE CLEARED AT THE TIME OF PARTHOLAN.

OF THE LAKES, OF THE RIVERS THAT HE FOUND BEFORE HIM,

AND OF THE LAKE BURSTS THAT TOOK PLACE IN HIS TIME IN IRELAND.

OF THE DEATHS OF HIS CHILDREN AND OF HIS PEOPLE,

OF HIS OWN DEATH, AND OF THE TIME HE SPENT IN IRELAND, IS HERE RELATED.

Four plains were cleared by Partholan ; namely, the plain of Etirche in Connaught, the plain of Iotha in the Leinster, the plain of Lii in the descendants of the son of Uais of Bregha, between Bior and Camus, the plain of Latharna in Dal Araidhe.

At the end of seven years after Partholan occupied Ireland, the first man of his people died, namely, Fea, son of Tortu, son of Sru, his father's brother. From him is called the plain of Fea, for it is there he was buried, in Oilre of Magh Fea ; and of him is the first hurt, that is the first wounding in Leinster ; for there was he slain, in the top of the hill.

Partholan found not more than three lakes and nine rivers before him. These are the lakes ; lake of Fordreman, on which is Traighli on the mountain of Mis in Munster, the lake of Luimhnigh and the white lake near Domhnu. These are the rivers ; the river of Lifé between the territory of the Ui Neill and Leinster, Lai in Munster, Muaidh in the territory of the Ui Fiachrach, Sligech, Samair, on which is the red waterfall , Buas between the clan nAraidhe and the clan Riada, Fionn between the kin of Conall and the kin of Cenel Eoghan, Modhorn in the country of Eoghan, and Banna between Lee and Elle.

These are the lakes that burst at the time of Partholan. Lake Con and Lake Techet in Connaught, in the twelfth year after his coming. The burst of Lake Mescca the year after, the year when died Slanga, son of Partholan, and in the Carn of Slangha's Mountain he was buried. At the end of two years after that, the burst of Loch Laighlinne in the district of the son of Uas ; while the grave of Laighlinne, son of Partholan, was being dug, it is there it broke forth, so that from him it is named. The burst of Lake Echtra, between the mountain of Modharn and the mountain of Fuad. The burst of Lake Rudraidhe in Ulster at the end of ten years after that, so that what drowned him [i.e., Rudhraighe] was the burst of the lake over him. In the year after that, the sea flood of Brena over the land, that is, the Shore of Brena, so that it is the seventh lake.

At the end of four years after that, the death of Partholan on the Old Plain of the flight of Edar. For this reason it is called the "Old Plain," because never did root nor twig of forest grow through it. Thirty years was he in Ireland till then.

Two hundred three score and ten years from the death of Partholan to the plaguing of his people. A plague came to them on the calends of May precisely, the Monday of Beltain, so that nine thousand of them died from that Monday to the next ; that is, five thousand men and four thousand women, on the Old Plain of the Flight. Three hundred years the length of their stay over Ireland.

So that of them spoke Eochaid ua Floinn :

Editor’s note. A poem follows which does not learn much more and of which we leave the study to the expert scientists, what we are not.

OF THE CONQUEST OF NEIMHEDH AS FOLLOWS

From Adam till Neimhedh took Ireland, 2850.

From the Flood till Neimhedh took Ireland, 608.

Now Ireland was waste thirty years after the plague burial of Partholan's people, till Neimhedh, son of Agnoman, son of Pamp, son of Tat, son of Ser, son of Sru, son of Eassru, son of Brament, son of Aithecht, son of Magog, etc., of the Greeks of Scythia, reached it.

Now this is the account of Neimhedh. He came from Scythia westward, a-rowing the Caspian Sea, till he reached in his wandering the great Northern Ocean. Thirty-four ships were his tale, and thirty in each ship. While they were thus wandering, there appeared to them a golden tower on the sea close by them. Thus it was ; when the sea was in ebb the tower appeared above it, and when it flowed it rose over the tower. Neimhedh went with his people towards it, for greed of gold. From the greatness of their covetousness for it, they did not perceive the sea filling around them, so that the eddy took their ships from them all but a few, and their crews were drowned, except those of them whom Neimhedh and his children rescued. A year and a half were they after that wandering on the sea till they reached Ireland. They remain in it.

Now as for Neimhedh, he had four chiefs with him, Starn, Iarbanel the Prophet, Ferghus Redside, and Ainninn. They were four sons of Neimhedh. Macha was the name of his wife. Medv, Machu, Yba, and Cera were the names of the wives of the chieftains he had.

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 8.

Red side. We translate so the Gaelic word leithdercc but it can also mean half red-haired if you speak about hair. It is up to specialists to consider the question.

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The twelfth day after they reached Ireland, the wife of Neimhedh died and she was the first dead in Ireland from among them.

Four lake bursts over land at the time of Neimhedh ; the lake Cal in the district of Niallan, Lake Muinreamhar near the mountain of Guaire, Lake Dairbrech, and Lake Ainninn in Midhe. At the end of nine years after their coming to Ireland, these last two lakes burst forth.

Two royal forts were dug by Neimhedh in Ireland ; the fortress of Cinn Eich in the district of Niallan, and the fortress of Ciombaeith in Seimne. The four sons of Madan Fat-neck of the Fomoire dug the castle of Cinn Eich in one day: Boc, Roboc, Ruibne and Rodan were their names. For they were kept in servitude (?) by Neimhedh, with their father Madan.

After they completed the fort, twelve plains were cleared by Neimhedh similarly ; namely, the plain of Cera and the plain of Eba in the Connaught, the plain of Tochar in the territory of Eoghan, Leccmagh in Munster, Bernsa in Leinster, the plain of the forest of the hill in Connaught, the plain of Lughadh in the district of Tuirtre, the plain of Sered in Tethba, the plain of Seimni in the territory of the kin Araidhe, the plain of Luirg in Connaught, the plain of Magh Muirtheimne in Conaille, and the plain of Macha in Airghialla.

Neimhedh won three battles over the Fomhoire ; namely, the battle of Murbolg, in Dal Riada, where fell Starn, son of Neimhedh, at the hands of Conainn, son of Faebhar, in Leithet of Lachtmagh : the battle of the promontory of Fraochan in Connaught, which is also called the battle of Badgna ; there fell two kings of the Fomhoire, namely, Gann and Senghann : and the battle of the promontory of bones in Leinster, where fell a slaughter of the men of Ireland, with Beoan son of Starn son of Neimhedh, by the same Conainn. Moreover, by Neimhedh were these three battles won, although his people suffered great hurt in them.

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 9.

Forts. Henry Lizeray signals in a notice that raths were fortification formed by one or more circular ditches, whose diameter ranged from 40 to 360 meters. Houses were built in the space circumscribed by the ditches.

Dal' riada. Henry Lizeray remarks in a notice that the dal is the territory inhabited by a kin.

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Neimhedh died afterwards of plague, in the high island of Neimhidh in the territory of Liathan in Munster ; and three thousand with him.

Now there was a great oppression on the children of Neimhedh after that, since their champions and their chieftains were destroyed in the aforesaid battles, and since Neimhedh died with the number we have mentioned. Those at whose hands they suffered that oppression were Conainn son of Faebar of the Fomoire, and More son of Dele the other chief. The fortress house of Conainn at that time was in the land of Conann, which is called Tower Island , to the North-West of Ireland.

A sheep land (tir aireach) was made of Ireland by them, so that not a venture was made to let smoke be seen by day from a house that was in it, except with the consent of the Fomhoire.

Two thirds of their wheat, their milk, and their children, with other intolerable burdens, as they used to demand, this is what was given to them. The men of Ireland had to deliver every item to them always on Samhain eve at Magh Cetne.

For this reason is it called Magh Cetne, for the frequency they had to pay the heavy tax there to the Fomhoire ; and the men of Ireland had a byword at that time, asking one another, "Is it to the same plain the tax will be brought on this occasion ? " So that thence was the plain named.

Now wrath and rage seized the Children of Neimhedh for the heaviness of their distress and the injuriousness of their tax ; so that the three chieftains whom they had plotted to cause their people throughout Ireland to collect and assemble, so that they should arrive at one place. They act accordingly ; and having reached one spot, they resolve on one counsel, to proceed to Conainn's Tower to demand alleviation of their oppression from the Fomhoire, or to fight with them.

These were their chieftains ; Ferghus Red side son of Neimhedh, Semeon son of Iarbonel son of Neimhedh, and Erglan son of Beoan son of Starn son of Neimhedh. There were other princes and nobles in that assembly besides, with Artur the Great, son of Neimhedh, and Alma Onetooth, etc. Thirty thousand on sea, and the same number on land, was the tale of the Children of Neimhedh who went to that destruction, besides echtair-cenela,drubhar-sluaigh, 7 daescar daoine, foreigners, wastrels, and a rabble, which they brought to increase their muster against the oppression of the Fomhoire.

After they reached the shore of Toirinis they make booths and huts about the borders of the bay. Then they resolve on the counsel to send Alma One-Tooth to Conainn, to ask a respite in the matter of the tax to the end of three years. When he heard his speech, Conainn was enraged with the martial prince. He returns to his people and tells them the words of Conan. Downcast were they at hearing them, and they induce Alma to go back again, to ask respite of one year of Conainn, to show him their poverty and need, to bear witness to their inability to produce there the heavy tax of that year, and that it should come to him in its fulness at the end of that time. He said to him further, unless he should obtain the remission he was asking, to proclaim battle against Conainn ; for they well-nigh preferred to fall together in one place, men, women, boys, and girls, than to be under the great distress in which they were any longer. Alma went forward to Conainn and told him the words of the Children of Neimhedh in his presence.

"They will get the grace," said Conainn, "on condition that they separate or scatter from one another till the end of that year, until that I and the Fomhoire get them in one place, for their destruction, unless they pay the tax in its fulness at the end of the grace." ?????????????

Alma returned to his brethren and told them his news. They then accept that, in hopes that they should send messengers to their brethren and their original stock to Greece, to ask the help of an army from them against the Fomhoire. For Relbeo, daughter of the king of Greece, was the mother of two of those children of Neimhedh, Ferghus Red side and Alma Onetooth. Smol, son of Esmol, was king of Greece at that time.

When the messengers from his brethren reached him, he caused the nobles of Greece to come and assemble in common, so that he brought together an immense host of the choice warriors, of druids and druidesses ? of wolves and venomous animals throughout the land.

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 10.

Druidesses. We translate in this way the Gaelic word ban-druadaibh. It is advisable nevertheless to remind that in former druidism there did not exist druidesses. There existed only exclusively female pagan Celtic religious colleges, particularly in the islands, thus including all the possible ranks, or some priestesses of subordinate rank in mixed groups. But that, it was former druidism.

War dogs. We thus convey the Gaelic word onchonaibh which means “wolves” according to Henry Lizeray.

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He sends them before to the Children of Neimhedh, and himself joins them afterwards with the full muster of the Greeks. The progress of that warrior voyage is not related till they took harbor at Conainn's land.

Welcoming were the Children of Neimhedh to them ; and this was agreed by them after their arrival, to declare war on Conainn unless he yielded them their freedom.

They send messengers to him about this. Conainn was enraged with them after hearing their speech, so that he agreed to give battle. The messengers went back to their people. Conainn sent for Morc, son of Dele, the other prince of the Fomhoire, to him. Notwithstanding, he thought it inglorious to delay answering the battle at once, for he felt sure that the Children of Neimhedh were not ready to undertake battle with him, on account of the multitude and valor of his host ?????

Then the men of Ireland sent a spy to the castle of Conainn, namely, Relbeo, daughter of the king of Greece, who came in the host of her people. A druidess was she, and she went in the form of the concubine of Conainn to the castle, so that she was in a lover's wise with him for a while, through the confusion of his mind. A hard battle was joined first between their druids, and another between their druidesses, so that it went against the Fomhoire.

But in short, every battle which they set for a while after that, against the Fomhoire, the Fomhoire won, so that their people were destroyed to a great extent.

A wall strong and hard to pull down was made by the Children of Neimhedh near the castle after that, on the advice of their spy ; and they put in it the hurtful animals the Greeks had brought to their assistance to the tower after that, so that they breached together every quarter and every side of it before them. The attacking party went on their trail through the ways they had made, forward to the castle. The mighty warriors of the castle endured not to remain within it, because of the strength and venom of the hurtful strange animals mingled with them on that occasion.

Conainn with his war squadrons fled at once, and he thought it ignoble not to attack the hosts face to face.

For he considered it easier to give them battle, than to wait in the castle for the wild venomous beasts who came through the walls after they had disintegrated them. The attacking host after that yoke them, both hounds and venomous swine, after its warriors had left the castle. They leave a guard over it afterwards, and proceed to the combat. Each of them takes his battle duties upon him on this side and that.

After they had been thus fighting together for a while, this was in short what happened ; Conainn fell by the hand of Ferghus Red side, son of Neimhedh, in fair fight. The Fomhoire had two valiant knightly warriors after that, Giolcas, son of Faebhar, and Orcifanat ; and the Fomhoire close around them after losing their leader. They take to raising high their warlike efforts and their deeds of valor, till the Children of Neimhidh remembered their hostility and their cruelty to them up till then. So Semeon, son of Starn, and Giolcas, son of Faebhar, were mated, as well as Iarbanel and Orcifanat. This was the end of it, that the Fomhoire were beheaded by the hands of those warriors, who happened to be matched against them.

The battle at last goes against the tribe of the Fomhoire, and they took to encircling and surrounding them, so that not a fugitive escaped from them. The hosts proceed to the castle after that, so that they took out of it its treasures, its gold, its silver, and all its valuables in general. They put fires at every quarter of it after that, so that not higher was its smoke than its flame. Its women and females, its boys and girls were burned, so that not a fugitive escaped from it.

The Children of Neimhedh share the booty of the castle among the nobles and great men of the Greeks before parting from them, and they were grateful one towards the other. Now the Children of Neimhedh stay in the place of the conflict, after the departure of the Greeks from among them, burying those of their nobles who were slain.

Not long were they thus till they saw a full great fleet approaching them ; threescore ships was its tale, teeming with a choice of warriors, led by Morc, son of Dele, the other chief of the Fomhoire, coming to help Conainn ; so they landed in their presence.

The children of Neimhedh go against them to contend the harbor against them, although they were worn out; for this was their resolve, not to suffer the Fomhoire any longer to frequent Ireland.

Howbeit, although great was the respite and hatred of Morc, son of Dele, against the Children of Neimhedh before that, it was far the greatest on that occasion ; and he took to inciting the people against them, to revenge this great spite upon them.

A hot desperate battle was fought between them on every side. Such was the intensity of the fighting, and the greatness of the mutual hostility, that they did not perceive the gigantic wave of springtide filling up on every side around them, for there was not any heed in their minds but for their battle feats alone ; so that the majority were drowned and annihilated, except the people of one ship of the Fomhoire and one group of thirty men of the Children of Neimhedh. The crew of that ship arrived back and they tell their news to the people, and they were downcast at hearing it.

As for the thirty warriors who escaped of the Children of Neimhedh from that destruction, their three chieftains that were over them divided Ireland into three parts between them after that.

These are the chieftains : Beothach son of Iarbanel son of Neimhedh ; Semeon son of Erglan son of Beoan son of Starn son of Neimhedh, and Briotan son of Fergus Red side son of Neimhedh. The third of Beothach first, from Toirinis to the Boyne ; the third of Semeon from the Boyne to the way of Conglas ; the third of Briotan from the way of Conglas to Toirinis.

However they did not long abide by that division, without separating and scattering into other countries over the sea ; for they stood in fear of the Fomhoire lest what remained of them should wreak their resentment upon them after the battles that were fought between them.

Another cause ; that themselves were not friendly or heart loving one to the other ; and then in addition, they were terrified of the plagues by which troops of their chieftains and of their men had died, before the storming of the Tower. So that for these causes they separated one from the other.

These are the lands whither they went : Semeon with his nine to the lands of Greece ; Iobath son of Beothach with his people to the northern islands of Greece, he had gone after the death of his father in Ireland ; Briotan and his father Ferghus Red side to the land of Conan in Britain.

The names of the thirty champions who escaped from the destruction of the Tower of Conainn : Erglan, Matach, Iartach, Beoan, Bethach, Briotan, Baad, Ibad, Bethach, Bronal, Pal, Gortigern, German, Glasan, Ceran, Gobran, Gotiam, Gam, Dam, Ding, Dial, Semeon, Forthach, Goscen, Griman, Guillec, Taman, Turruc, Glas, Feb, and Feran.

So that of the destruction of Conainn's Tower this was said.

Eochaid ua Floind : The storming of Conainn's Tower with valor against Conainn the Great, son of Faebhar....

Editor’s note. A long poem follows which does not teach us many things more than the prose which is previous.

Of the adventures of Semeon son of Erglan, son of Beoan, son of Starn, son of Neimhedh, and of his children, from when they left Ireland after the destruction of Conainn's Tower, to their return again as the Fir Bolg ; of the length of years, they were in Ireland afterwards ; of the number of their kings, and of their deaths (with other matters that concern their conquest ) is related below.

THE CONQUEST OF THE FIR BOLG.

From Adam till the Fir Bolg took Ireland, 3266.

From the Flood till the Fir Bolg came into Ireland, 1024.

Now Ireland was deserted for the space of two hundred years after the departure of the three decades of men we have mentioned, till the coming of the descendants of the chief decade into it, as the "Fir Bolg."

Of the children of Neimhedh by descent were they, for Semeon, son of Erglan, son of Beoan, son of Starn, son of Neimhedh, was chief of one of the three nonads of the children of Neimhedh who went from Ireland after the destruction of Conainn's Tower, and who landed in Greece. They were there till many and divers were their children and their sept. After they increased thus, the Greeks did not allow them to be with their own young men but they imposed servitude on them. This was its amount, to make clovery plains of the stony rough-headed hills with the clay from elsewhere, after bringing it to the places in which they were ordered and commanded to put it.

Tired, weary, and despondent were they from this ; so that this is the counsel they discussed among themselves, to escape from the intolerable bondage in which they were. They agreed thereto at length. Then they make canoes and fair vessels of the skins and rope bags for carrying the earth till they were sound and seaworthy. They went in them thereafter, in quest of the fatherland from which their ancestors had gone. Their adventures on the sea are not related, save only that they reached Ireland in one week.

Different were their tribe names at that time as they came, namely, Gaileoin, Fir Bolg, and Fir Domnann ; nevertheless, though various and dissimilar were their names, their mutual friendship was very close ; for they were of one people and one origin.

Five chiefs were in authority over them : Slainghe, Rudraighe, Gann, Genann, and Sengann, the five sons of Dela, son of Loch, son of Oirtheacht, son of Triobuad, son of Oturp, son of Goisten, son of Uirtheacht, son of Semeon, son of Erglan, son of Beoan, son of Starn, son of Neimhedh, son of Agnamon, etc.

Now Gaileoin was the name of Slainghe and his people ; Gaileoin truly is gail-fhian, that is, the third who used to surpass the other two thirds in valor and in equipment ; so that from the valor (gal) they took the name. Fir Bolg, again, is the name of Gann and Senghann with their people ; to them the name Fir Bolg properly belongs, for it is they who were carrying the earth in the bags (bolg). Fir Domhnann, from "digging the earth" was it said ; that is Fir Doman-fhuinn, that is the men who used to deepen the earth. To Rudhraighe and to Genann with their people was the name applied (and it was in the estuary of Domhnann they took harbor). However, it is correct to call them all Fir Bolg in general, for it is in the bags for carrying the earth they came over the sea to Ireland, and they are one immigration and one race and one kingdom, though they came on different days, and landed in different creeks.

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 11.

Fir Domhnann. Undoubtedly a name similar to that of the Breton tribes of Domnonea (of Devon).

Fir Bolg = men-bags is a whimsical etymology. The stem Bolg undoubtedly refers to the name of Belgium and designates a wave of Celtic immigrants come from this part of the Continent.

Gail-fhian is quite obviously an explanation also whimsical of Gaileoin. The true etymology of Gaileoin can only refer also to the continental Celts of which some thought to be of Greek origin indeed.

Justin. Book XLIV. Chapter III.

In Portugal [Latin Lusitania], near the river Tagus, many authors have said that the mares conceive from the effect of the wind; but such stories have had their origin in the fecundity of the mares, and the vast number of herds of horses, which are so numerous, and of such swiftness, in Galicia [Latin Gallaecia] and in Portugal [Latin Lusitania], that they may be thought, not without reason, to have been the offspring of the wind. As for the Galicians, they claim for themselves a Hellenic origin; for they say that Teucer, after the end of the Trojan war, having incurred the hatred of his father Telamon on account of the death of his brother Ajax, and not being admitted into his kingdom, retired to Cyprus, where he built a city called Salamis, from the name of his native land; that, sometime after, on hearing a report of his father's death, he returned again to his country, but, being hindered from landing by Eurysaces the son of Ajax, he sailed to the coast of Spain, and took possession of those parts where Cartagena now stands, and, passing from thence to Galicia[ Latin Gallaecia] , and fixing his abode there, gave name to the nation. A part of the Gallaecians are called Amphilochi….

Diodorus of Sicily. Book V. Chapter XXIV.

Since we have set forth the facts concerning the islands which lie in the western regions, we consider that it will not be foreign to our purpose to discuss briefly the tribes of Europe which lie near them and which we failed to mention in our former books. Now Celtica was ruled in ancient times, so we are told, by a renowned man who had a daughter who was of unusual stature and far excelled in beauty all the other maidens. But she, because of her strength of body and marvelous comeliness, was so haughty that she kept refusing every man who wooed her in marriage, since she believed that no one of her wooers was worthy of her. Now in the course of his campaign against the Geryones, Heracles visited Celtica and founded there the city of Alesia; the maiden, on seeing Heracles, wondered at his prowess and his bodily superiority and accepted his embraces with all eagerness, her parents having given their consent. From this union she bore to Heracles a son named Galates, who far surpassed all the youths of the tribe in quality of spirit and strength of body. And when he had attained to man's estate and had succeeded to the throne of his fathers, he subdued a large part of the neighboring territory and accomplished great feats in war. Becoming renowned for his bravery, he called his subjects Galatians after himself, and these in turn gave their name to all of Galatia.

Plutarch. Volume XII. 63. 63. On the face which appears in the orb of the Moon [in Greek Peri tou emphaenomenou prosôpou tôi cyclôi tês selênês].

An island, Ogygia, lies far out at sea! A run of five days off from [Great] Britain as you sail westward there is also an island. And three other islands equally distant from it and from one another lie out from it in the direction of the summer sunset. In one of these, according to the tale told by the barbarians of the country, Cronos has been confined by Zeus, but that he, having a son [Briareus?] for the jailer, is left sovereign lord of those islands and of the sea, which they call the Gulf of Cronos. They add that the great mainland, by which the great ocean is encircled, while not so far from the other islands, is about five thousand stadia from Ogygia, the voyage being made by oars, for the sea is slow to traverse and muddy as a result of the multitude of streams. The streams are discharged by the great landmass and produce alluvial deposits, thus giving density and earthiness to the sea, which has been thought actually to be congealed. On the coast of the mainland Greeks dwell about a gulf which is not smaller than the Palus Maeotis and the mouth of the Caspian Sea. These people consider and call themselves Continentals and the inhabitants of this land islanders, because the sea flows around it on all sides; and they believe that with the peoples of Cronos there mingled at a later time those who arrived in the train of Heracles and were left behind by him that these latter so to speak rekindled again to a strong, high flame the Hellenic spark there which was already being quenched and overcome by the tongue, the laws, and the manners of the barbarians. Therefore Heracles has the highest honors and Cronos the second.

Strabo. Book IV, chapter IV, 6.

.....Ephorus, in his account, makes Celtica so excessive in its size that he assigns to the regions of Celtic most of the regions, as far as Cadiz, of what we now call Iberia; further, he declares that the people are fond of the Hellenes, and specifies many things about them that do not fit the facts of today. The following, also, is a thing peculiar to them: they endeavor not to grow fat or pot-bellied, and any young man who exceeds the standard measure of a certain girdle, is punished. So much for Transalpine Celtica.

Periegesis or Orbis descriptio .

Europe.

The Celts have Hellenic uses and manners; they owe them with their usual relations with Hellada.

And with the hospitality which they often give foreigners coming from this country.

They hold their assemblies with music, asking for this art the means of softening manners.

At the end of their country is the column said boreal, very high and projecting its point in a surging sea.

The places close to this column are inhabited by the Celts, who have here their last population branches.

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These are the creeks. Slainghe, their chief prince and elder, reached the land in the harbor of Slainghe. Saturday on the calends of August, so far as regards the day of the week ; so that from him the creek took its name, a thousand men his tale. Senghann and Gann in the estuary o Dubhghlas ; a Tuesday they landed, two thousand their tale. Rudhraighe and Genann landed in the estuary of Domhnann as we have said, the following Friday ; two thousand, moreover, was their tale.

They came together thereafter in Uisnech of Midhe, and they divide Ireland there in five parts. The share of Slainghe first, from the estuary of Colptha to the Meeting of the Three Waters ; of Gann next, from the Meeting to the way of Conglas ; Senghann from the way of Conglas to Luimnech ; Genann from Luimnech to the Drobhais ; Rudhraidhe from the Drobhais to the Boyne.

Of the aforesaid matters was this spoken…

Editor’s note. A long poem by Tanaidhe Ua Maoil-Chonaire, follows…..

…………………………….

These are the names of the wives. Fuad wife of Slainghe, Eudar wife of Gann, Anast wife of Senghann, Cnucha wife of Genann, and Liber wife of Rudraighe. To commemorate them this was said :

Fuad wife of Slainghe, it is no deceit in your opinion ;

Eudar was the wife of Gann with valor ;

Anast wife of Senghann ???

Cnucha was the wife of fair Genann,

Liber wife of Rudraighe after anger,

Muinter cumraidhe ni cuacc ????

Rudraighe, king of feats,

I prefer to think that Fuad was his wife.

OF THE KINGS OF THE FIR BOLG. OF THE TIME THEY SPENT IN THE KINGSHIP, AND OF THEIR DEATHS, THE FOLLOWING IS RELATED

Now no one called "king" took the kingship of the chief rule over Ireland till the Fir Bolg came into it. These gave the kingship to their elder brother, that is, to Slainghe, so that he was the first king

appointed over Ireland. One year had he in the kingship till he died in his castle and he is the first dead of Ireland of the nobles of the Fir Bolg. Year 3267 of the creation.

Rudhraighe his brother, two years in the kingship, till he died in the Brugh on the Boyne. [Year] 3269.

Gann and Genann , four years had they in the kingship till they died of plague in Fremhann of Midhe [Year] 3273.

Senghann five years, till he fell by the hand of Fiacha of the White-Head, son of Starn, son of Dela, son of Loch. [Year] 3278.

Fiacha of the White-Head five other years, till he fell by the hand of Rionnal son of Genann. White-headed were the kine of Ireland in the time of King Fiacha. [Year] 3283.

Rionnal , son of Gennan, son of Dela, six years, till he fell by the hand of Foidbgenidh, son of Senghann, in battle near the river Cairbre. It was in the time of that Rionnal that iron heads were put on spear shafts, for they used only to be headless shafts that were in their hands before then. [Year] 3289.

Foidbgeinidh four years had he in the kingship, till he fell at the hand of Eochaidh son of Erc, son of Rionnal, son of Genann, in the plain of Muirtheimne. In the time of this Foidbgheinidh knots and knobs came into existence on the trees, for smooth and straight were the woods of Ireland till then. [Year] 3293.

Eochaid , son of Erc, ten years in the kingship, till he fell at the hands of the three sons of Neimhedh, son of Badrai, of the people of the goddess Danu ; Cesarb, Luamh, and Luachra were their names, as is related below. Now good was that king Eochaid son of Erc ; there was no rain in his time but only dew. There was not a year without fruit. Falsehood used to be expelled from Ireland in his time. By him were first made right judgment, that is, just law, there.

Of the length of the reign and the deaths of these kings, it was said ; under the hand of Tanaidhe Ua Maoil-Chonaire :

The Fir Bolg were here a while,

In the great island of the sons of Mil ;

Five chieftains they brought from yonder ;

I have their names.

A year to Slainghe, this is true,

Till he died in his fine duma ????

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 12.

Henry Lizeray obviously has trouble in translating this Gaelic word. It is, of course, to designate an artificial or arranged hill. Cf. the Latin name of dumiatis to speak of the Mercury on the Puy de Dome.

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There is no record that forts were dug, or plains cleared, or lakes burst, at the time of the Fir Bolg. The books say that of the remnant of Fir Bolg are the Gabraidhe of Suck in the Connaught, the Ui Tairsigh of Leinster in Ui Failghe, and the Gaileoin of Leinster, etc.

THE CONQUEST OF THE CHILDREN OF THE GODDESS DANU.

OF THE ADVENTURES OF IOBATH, SON OF BEOTHACH. SON OF IARBANEL, SON OF NEIMHEDH AND OF HIS SEED,FROM THE TIME WHEN THEY LEFT IRELAND AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF CONAINN'S TOWER,TILL THEY RETURNED AS CLANS OF THE GODDESS DANU, AGAINST THE FIR BOLG.OF THE NUMBER OF THEIR KINGS, OF THE LENGTH OF THEIR REIGNS, AND OF THEIR DEATHS, IS RELATED FURTHER, WITH THE GENEALOGY OF SOME OF THEM

From Adam till the Children of the goddess Danu took Ireland : 3303.

From the Flood till the clans of the goddess Danu came : 1061.

As for Iobath son of Beothach, son of Iarbanel, son of Neimhedh, after his leaving Ireland with his people after the destruction of the tower before described, they settled in the northern islands of Greece. They were there till numerous were their children and their kindred. They learned druidry and many various similar arts in the islands where they were, fiothnaisecht, amaitecht, coinhliocht, sorcery, magic, enchantments, and every sort of gentilism in general ???? till they were knowing, learned, and very clever in the branches thereof. They were called « people of gods » (Tuatha dé) ; that is, they considered their men of learning to be gods, and their husbandmen non-gods, so much was their power in every art and every druidic occultism besides. Thence came the name, which is people of the gods, to them.

FOR THE CONTINUATION, SEE OUR SERIES " THE GREAT BATTLES OF THE METAHISTORY".

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 13.

People of gods….People of gods ..... It is in fact more exactly the people ...... OF THE GODDESS.

Of the goddess Danu. Perhaps the elemental of the blue Danube. For ancient druids it was a goddess fertilized by the god of lightning (metaphor of the fire in water): Taranis, Tuireann in Ireland.

The remark proves, moreover, that this “deity” was not obvious in the eyes of Irishmen of the Middle Ages who tended a little to regard Tuatha de Danann as simple superheroes so to speak. Some magicians or some wizards, but not some gods. Fortunately besides, if not they either would have been completely bowdlerized or systematically demonized, what is only partially or punctually the case in the medieval Irish literature.

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OF THE GENEALOGY OF SOME OF THE TUATHA DE HERE BELOW.

The children of Elathan, son of Dealbaoth, son of Néd, son of Iondae, son of Alldae, son of Tai, son of Tabam, son of Enna, son of Baath, son of Iobath, son of Beothach, son of Iarbanel the Prophet, son of Neimhedh, son of Agnoman, were Bres, Elloith, Daghda, Dealbaeth, and Oghma.

Ere, Fodla, and Banba, the three daughters of Fiachna, son of Dealbaeth, son of Oghma, son of Ealathan, son of Dealbaeth.

Fea and Neman, the two daughters of Elcmar of the Brugh [upon the Boinne], son of Dealbaeth, son of Oghma, son of Elathan ; wives of Néd, son of Iondae, from whom Ailech Néid is named.

Badb, Macha, and Moir-Rigan , the three daughters of Dealbaeth, son of Néd, son of Ionda. Ernbas, daughter of Eatarlamh, son of Ordan, son of Iondae, son of Alldae, was the mother of all those women. Mor-Riogan (the great queen) had another name, Ana ; from her are named the Tits of Anu in East Luachair.

Donu, daughter of Dealbaeth, son of Oghma, son of Ealathan, was the mother of Brian, Iucharba, and Iuchar, and they are called the three gods of Donu ; from them are the people of the goddess Danu

called (tuatha de Danann) ; uair tuatha de ba ainm doibh go ruccsat-som orra, 7 tuatha dé donann an ainm iaromh ?

For people of the goddess was their name till those arrived among them, and people of the goddess Danu was their name afterwards.

Goibniu the smith, Luichne the carpenter, Creidhne the worker, Diancecht the leech, were sons of Easarg the Speckled, son of Néd, son of Iondae.

Oenghus, that is "the young son," son of the Daghda, son of Ealathan, son of Dealbaeth, son of Néd. Lugh, son of Cian, son of Diancecht ; Cridhenbel Bruidhne and Casmael, the three satirists. Bechaille and Dinann, the two she-lords. Eadan the learned woman (bainecces) , daughter of Diancecht, son of Easarg, the Speckled son of Néd. Cairpre, the poet, son of Tuar, son of Tuirell, son of Cat Conaitchenn, son of Ordan, son of Iondae, son of Alldae.

Eden, the learned woman, was the mother of that Cairbre. The three sons of Cermad honey-mouthed son of Daghda, son of Ealathan, son of Dealbaeth : Dermitt, Ermit, and Aedh were their names.

Of them spoke Eochaid Ua Floind…..[a poem].

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 14.

People of the gods, people of the goddess Danu.

All that is not very clear and we wonder whether there were not confusion between gods and goddesses. What seems clear in any case it is that Brian Iuchar and Iucharba, Brennos Ivocaros and Ivocarbos in old Celtic, are well active and high-ranking members of the druidic Panth-eon even if there seems to have been in Ireland and compared with Great Britain or the Continent, a kind of palace revolution having dethroned Taran/Toran/Tuireann in aid of Noadatus/Nuada and Lug.

Bainecces. The ekes was a rank of the druidic fraternity. Bain means “woman” in Gaelic language. There were therefore at least women of this rank in former druidism.

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OF THE KINGS OF THE TUATHA DE DANANN, OF THEIR HISTORY, OF THE LENGTH OF THEIR REIGNS AND OF THEIR DEATHS, THIS IS RELATED.

Bres, son of Ealathan, son of Ned, son of Ciolcach, son of Plosg, son of Liparn, son of Golam, son of Largadh, son of Mercell, son of Salt Clarach, son of Starn of the Teeth, son of Sipurn, son of Sadal, son of Ucatt, son of Effec, son of Pelest, son of Fedel, son of Cush, son of Cham, son of Noe ; seven years was he in the kingdom of Ireland till the arm of Nuadha was healed, after it was cut from him in the first battle of the plain of the standing stones as we have related.

And in right of his mother Ere, daughter of Dealbaoth, the Tuath De Danann yielded the kingdom to Bres, so long as the arm of Nuadha was a-healing. Then Bres died in the Carn of the grandson of Neid when he had drunk the red water ( ruadhroda ?) in the form of a great draft ; and he was buried in the Carn, so that from him it was named.

It is, however, an opinion of other historians, as is clear in the Dindsenchas of the same Carn, that the father of Bres was of the Tuatha De Danann themselves [since they wrote] : Bres, son of Elathan, son of Dealbaeth, son of Néd, son of Iondae, son of Tait, son of Tabarn, son of Enna, son of Baath, son of Ibath, son of Beothach, son of Iarbanel the Prophet, son of Neimhedh, son of Agnamon, etc. [Year] 3310.

Nuadha silver-arm, son of Eachtach, son of Eatarlamh, son of Ordan, son of Iondae, son of Alldae, son of Taitt, son of Tabarn, son of Enna, son of Baath, son of Ibath, son of Beothach, son of Iarbanel the Prophet, son of Neimhedh ; twenty years was he in the kingdom, till he fell at the hand of Balor of the Mighty Blows, in the battle of the plain of the standing stones of the Fomhoire. [Year] 3330.

Lugh long-armed , son of Cian, son of Diancecht, son of Easarg, the speckled, son of Néd, son of Iondae, son of Alldae ; forty years till he fell at the hands of Mac Cuill in Caen-Druim. [Year] 3370.

Eochaid the great patriarch (Ollathair) , whose name was the Daghda, son of Ealathan, son of Dealbaeth, son of Néd, son of Iondae ; fourscore years till he died in his castle of the Brugh of the deadly darts of the cast that Cethlenn shot at him in the first battle of the plain of the standing stones [Year] 3450.

Dealbaeth son of Oghma Sun-face, son of Ealathan, son of Dealbaeth, son of Néd, son of Iondae ; ten years till he fell by the hand of his own son, namely, Fiacha, son of Dealbaeth. [Year] 3460.

Fiacha , son of Dealbaeth, son of Oghma ; ten years till he fell by the hand of Eoghan of Inbher. [Year] 3470.

Ermit, that is the son of the hazel tree, Dermit, that is the son of the plow, Aedh, that is the son of the sun, the three sons of Cermatt honey-mouthed, son of the Daghda, son of Elathan ; thirty years till they fell in the battle of Tailltiu at the hands of the sons of Mil, as is related below. Ethor, Tethor, and Cetheor were three other names of the children of Cermatt. Now Mac Cuill, the hazel was his god, Ethor his name, Banba his wife ; Mac Greine, the sun his god, Cethor his name, Eriu his wife ; Mac Cecht, the plowshare his god, Tethor his name, Fodla his wife. [Year] 3500.

Manannan, son of Elloth, son of Elathan, son of Dealbaoth, son of Néd ; Gaer and Oirbsiu are two other names of the same Manannan, and from him is named Loch Oirbsen ; and when his grave was dug it is there the lake burst out, so that from him it is named.

[Passage appearing in the manuscript of Trinity College. The six sons of Dealbaeth , son of Oghma, son of Ealathan, son of Dealbaoth, son of Néd, were Fiachna, Ollamh, Ionda, Brian, Iucharba and Iuchar. Three of them were the sons of a woman of the same name (called Dealbaoth), mother of the last three. It is from them the Tuatha De Danan has their name, because before their birth their people were called Tuate De (people of the gods) and Tuatha Danan then. These three there are called the three De Danan, and the mountain of the Three De (Gods) is named after them].

Of those it was said : [poem].

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 15.

He fell. Let us repeat it once again. It goes without saying gods could not die. If they die in our legends, it is only because of a literary convention increased by Christianization which encouraged the peoples to see in them only men, of course, standing out of the ordinary, but only some men nevertheless. Moreover we often see them reappearing at once in other legends. Gods by definition cannot die, except perhaps with this cycle. But they will reappear then with other names in the following cycle, because it is primarily forces of nature or of human soul.

The hazel was his god, etc. Obvious nonsense due to Christianization. Let us say more prudently this god was linked with the hazel tree that the hazel tree was his symbol, his means of intervention. Same reasoning for the plow and the sun. Christianization made the internal logic of all these (mythical) accounts literally flying into pieces .

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THE GENEALOGY OF SOME OF THE TUATHA DE DANANN FURTHER.

Miodhar of Bri Leith, son of Ionda, son of Echtach, son of Eatarlamh, son of Ordan, son of Iondae, son of Alldae. Caicher and Nechtan, the two sons of Namha, son of Eochaid the Rough, son of Dui the Dark, son of Breas, son of Ealathan, son of Dealbaoth, son of Ned, son of Iondae, son of Alldae, son of Tait son of Tabharn.

Bodb of the Sid east of Feimhen, son of Eochaid the Rough, son of Dui the Dark, son of Breas, son of Ealathan, son of Dealbaeth.

Siughmall, son of Cairbre the Crooked, son of Ealcmar, son of Dealbaoth, son of Oghma, son of Ealathan, son of Dealbaoith, son of Ned.

Aoi, son of Ollamh, son of Oghma, son of Ealathan, son of Dealbaeth, son of Ned.

The six sons of Dealbaeth, son of Oghma, son of Ealathan, son of Dealbaoth, were Fiachna, Ollamh, Ionda, Brian, Iucharba, and Iuchar. The last three are the three gods of Danu, as we have said. Dealbaeth, whose descendants those are, was called Tuireall.

Oenghus, that is, the Young Son, and Aedh the Beautiful, and Cermat honey-mouthed , the three sons of the Daghda, son of Elathan.

The children of Diancecht, son of Easarg the Speckled, are Cu, Cethen, Cen, Miach, Ciach ; Eatan the priestess, mother of Coirbre ; Armed the she-leech ; they are the two daughters of Diancecht. Brigit the poetess, daughter of the Daghda ; hers were Fe and Men, two royal oxen, whence is Femhen ; for that was the place of the pasture where they used to be pastured.

Uillenn Red-edge, son of Caicher, son of Namha, son of Eochaid the Rough, son of Dui the Dark, by him fell Manannan in the battle of Cuilliu.

Boind the daughter of Dealbaeth, son of Oghma, son of Ealathan. Abhcan, son of Biccfealmhas, son of Cu, son of Diancecht, poet of Lugh, son of Ethliu. En, son of Biccen, son of Starn, son of Edleo, son of Alldae, son of Tait, son of Tabarn, etc.

Every secret of art, every subtlety of knowledge, and every diligence of healing that exists, from the Tuatha De Danann had their origin. And although the Faith came, these arts were not driven out, for they are good.

Of the kings of the Tuatha De Danann was this said ; Tanaidhe O Maoil-Chonaire composed the following poem :

..........

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 16.

Priestess. Henry Lizeray translates in this way the Gaelic word bainfhile which means velede strictly speaking.

Poetess. Henry Lizeray translates in this way the Gaelic word bainfile which means velede strictly speaking.

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EDITOR’S NOTE.

ALL THAT IS RELATING TO THIS CLAIMED MILESIAN INVASION BEING MORE THAN DOUBTFUL WE WILL SAVE THIS CHORE TO OUR READERS AND. WE WILL COME DIRECTLY TO…

VARIOUS REFLECTION ON THE ORIGIN AND THE ORGANIZATION OF THE TOUTAI DEVAS OR TUATHA DE AS IT IS SAID IN IRELAND.

Most varied hypotheses were put forward on this subject.

As we saw, the most widespread assumption in Ireland is that which credits them with a Hyperborean origin in the broad sense of the word: islands north of the world.

But there is also another one which shows on the surface, here or there in some of our apocryphal texts and which is even more fantastic. Toutai Devas or Tuatha De would be in fact aliens arrived by the airs on board of gigantic flying machines of roth ramach or “rowing wheel” type (the druid Mog Ruith would have had plans of them).

Ciatberat araile comtis demna Tuatha De, ar tiachtain cen airiudugh, [asrubartsat fein iar loscadh a long is a nellaib dorchaib tancatar] 7 ar duilghe a fessa 7 tairthiudha, ar doidhnge a ngeneailg dobrith for culu… 7 ni fir on emh, ar atait an genilaighi for culu iar coir et coetera.

Though some authors said that the Tuatha De Danann were demons, seeing that they came unperceived [they said that it was in dark clouds that they came, after burning their ships] and that we don’t know many things of their science as well as of their adventures, and also because of the uncertainty of their genealogy as carried backwards so far as possible: but that is not true, for their genealogies carried backwards are perfectly sound, etc.

The third hypothesis, simplest if it is not most attractive, is that which ascribe them exactly the same origin that which is admitted to the triad of good fairies or goddesses called Banuta, Iveriu and Votala (Banba, Eriu and Fodla). As well as for the first king of the gigantic anguipedic wyverns mentioned by our legends, Cicolluis, in Irish Cichol or Cíocal.

In other words, our good old Earth. Which is worth all the spaceships in the world!

We can besides embroider on this last hypothesis if it is found too simple and imagine the Toutai Devas or the tribe of the great goddess Danu (bia) living in remote areas, or at the same time near and distant islands. Is not the famous kingdom of Gorre of the Arthurian legends bridged over to the dry land by two magic bridges, a bridge under water and a sword bridge?

The gods or Tuatha De Danann are localized in turn depending on the circumstances by our Irish brothers and sisters, according to the traditions...

- In the islands north of the world.

- On earth like each and everyone, like you and me (after having invaded Ireland for example).

- Underground in the sidhe.

- But also in the islands west of the world called “islands of the blessed.” That made much!

Simplest is therefore perhaps to apply the same basic theological reasoning to them as that which often the specialists in the question about the Irish Fomoire or Fomorians take again: in fact they are as old as the hills (of the sidhes precisely), they are from everywhere and nowhere, and to present them each time as invaders coming from a long distance is only a literary device, quite convenient to give an impulse, and what an impulse, to all these accounts.

Finally, it is up to each one to see, but it is quite necessary that gods and goddesses, or demons and demonesses, or fairies if it is preferred, also keep a part of mystery.

Below what the French J. - M. Ricolfis thinks on this subject.

Arrival of the Toutai Devas (of the children of goddess-or-demoness Danu-bia), finally, because they are again the Celtic Panth-eon, but this time that of the educational and radiant god-or-demons, that of the high-knowers of the druidiaction (druidecht). “This divine race has all the sympathies of the storytellers who like these beautiful beings, good and benevolent, although their Church, are they astonished, wants at all costs to make them some demons.”

On this point therefore J. - M. Ricolfis has an opinion differing from that of Christian-Joseph Guyonvarc'h.

The Toutai Devas, tribe of the goddess-or-demoness, or fairy if this word is preferred, Danu (bia), are the final result of Nemetians having taken refuge in the islands north of the world. They lived there in four tribes, in four cities. They went out from there under the leadership of their king Noadatus/Nuada/Nodons/Lludd, guided through a magic fog, the old Indo-European “cloud” which is risen from the contact of the burning sun with the sea of the dawn. They are very beautiful, eternally young, have hair color of the sun, and splendid clothes. Like the Egyptian Osiris, they rule through the mind and the arts more than through strength, they practice magic, arts and techniques. They are organized in an initiatory society of difficult access and have with them the sacred objects we will find again with the Round Table: the cauldron, the lance, the sword, the roaring stone” (Lia Fail or Stone of Scone… we will not choose between our Irish cousins and our Scottish brothers of the Auld alliance, another beloved country dear to our heart, so beautiful, and which is well worthy to be independent, would be only to preserve its language and therefore its soul ..... in both cases it is a stone of destiny).

We can also, by plunging into the extravagances of druidomaniacs, attribute to the Toutai Deuas the use of laser or flying saucers. But that does not change an iota in the meaning of the connections between CMT I, CMT II, versions, and the matching passages of the Book of Conquests or of the book by Keating.

The first point that the introductory paragraphs of the Lebor Gabala Erenn about the second battle of Mag Tured underline in any case is the nature superhuman, non-human, extra-human, supernatural or preternatural (divine therefore) of the Toutai Deuas. They are not subjected to a human destiny. The French Dottin, who translates toutai by “tribes” (what is normal), is mistaken when he supposes that the magic meaning of tuath “left” could apply to the name of these people of “wizards.”

If magic is to be taken badly, it is on the side of the gigantic wyverns and anguipedics (Fomore in Gaelic language, Andernas on the Continent). All the Irish interventions go in the direction of a clear distinction between the Toutai Deuas and the gigantic anguipedic wyverns (Fomore in Gaelic). Even and especially when medieval science, justifying its eastern past by the Old Testament, ascribes to the latter a biblical origin: Cham, the first man to be cursed after the flood. So that he was the co-heir of Cain and that it was from him that were born the Corroi (dwarves), the gigantic anguipedics and the Goat Heads ** as all the distorted beings which are among men.

** In Q Celtic language: Gabroqendoi, hence the Gaelic name Goborchind. In P Celtic: Gabropennoi (finally at least theoretically). Editor’s note.

The account of Keating is a kind of compromise between CMT I and CMT II versions. Whereas in CMT I the Toutai result from the descendants of the Nemet/Hornunnos having fled in Scandinavia, for Keating, while going out Greece, THEY MAKE A DETOUR VIA SCANDINAVIA. The principle of the northern origins is preserved. Ireland accustomed us since a long time to this kind of no subtle cheating: the transcribers never put malevolence in it.

By contrary symmetry, the wyverns and the gigantic anguipedics (Fomore in Gaelic language, Andernas on the Continent) will be, in the CMT III version, originating in Africa! The poor Africans, however, have nothing to do there!

Let us also mention what Keating is the only one to define: three social classes of god-or-demons of the Goddess-or-demoness, or fairy, in question.

The tuatha or noble.

The dee (“deuoi = gods”) or druids.

The ceard (“cerdastoi”) or dana (craftsmen).

Keating found again there, without respecting its hierarchical order, the principle of the Indo-European tripartite division.

The divinity of the Toutai Deuas is obvious in their origins and in the talismans or divine weapons with which they are provided, and all that is “diabolic” only by reference to Christianity, because it is not

Christian. But as all that is very Irish, in fact, is good and could not be bad, this offsets that. Keating himself, who does not take the Toutai Deuas for some saints, gives himself the time of a long description of their main talisman, the Stone of Fal or of Scone (Lia Fail). And it is still him who, in spite of the erroneous translation of “saxum fatale,” gives the most obvious explanation of it: sovereignty where is the stone (stone of sovereignty). By comparison the other treasures of the Toutai Deuas are described more summarily. But the description is traditional and matches those of the CMT II version and of the Book of Conquests. The second, not in the order of enumeration, but of importance, is the cauldron. At the same time cauldron of abundance and resurrection, or of sacrificial death (in the rite of the “triple death” for the monarch at the end of his reign).

As regards the lance of Lug, it is non-utilized in CMT III version (it is used only for the killing of Balor) and the sword of Noadatus/Nuada/Nodons/Lludd spares in any way his owner suffering a disqualifying mutilation.

There it would be without any doubt to say many things about the distribution of these talismans or about the functions held by their respective owners, but this work will be the subject of a later study.

The Irish miracle, because it is one, is that we have there gems of pure mythology, under a light euhemerization’s veneer, or some surface Christian expressions. At the time of the transcription of the Book of Conquests, heathenry had died for a rather long time so that its substance or its skeleton was no longer causes or subject of scandal. Each one knew, from the top to the bottom of the hierarchy of filid and in all scriptoria of annalist monks, that the children of the goddess-or-demoness, or fairy if this word is preferred, Danu (bia), were not demons, that their sciences and their arts did not have something demonic. So a writer more zealous than the others adds: “Ar cia thanic cretim, ni ro dichuirthe na dana sin ar it maithe, 7 ni demai demun maith etir. Is follus dana assa febaib 7 asa n-aigedhaib nach do demnaib na, sidhaighe do Tuathaib De Danann.” “Though the faith came, those arts were not put away, for they are good, and no demon ever did good. It is clear therefore from their dignity and their deaths that the men of the goddess, or fairy, called Danu (bia) were not of the demons.”

The naivety of the writer borders on the bad faith, because in theory in the eyes of every good Christian, the children of goddess-or-demoness, or fairy, Danu (bia) could only be regarded as demons. What many of them did apparently.

Let us say that the Irish paradox saved them from a complete and unanimous demonization. But the euhemerization of the myth by the first Christian monks had some very curious results. The great Cosmic Mother Goddess-or-demoness is, known as Danu (bia), the mother of the three primordial god-or-demons called Brennos, Ivocaros and Ivocarbos. And Lug is the adopted son of Talantio/Tailtiu, queen of the Fir Bolg Gauls (Rosemartha among continental Celts) while having for grandfather Balaros, a king anguipedic wyvern (Fomore in Gaelic language). The Toutai Deuas also come from the race of the Nemet/Hornunnos, with the same common ancestor as Partholan.

But let us point out once again and, of course, that as regards genealogies, they do not have more value than those ascribed to Muhammad in the hadiths or to the man Jesus in the Gospels; and that with regard to the gods or demons of paganism they are only the remainders of an attempt of explanation, in human terms, of the connections between these various forces of nature. And also of their euhemerization with wrong way. The same thing applies to their social organization. Men indeed always imagined the gods (or the demons) in their own image, living therefore in company, with specializations, relationship of subordination between them, family ties (father, mother, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, etc.)

ORIGIN OF THE TOUTAI DEVAS.

Biuotacos, son of Iariponalis the prophet...

It is from him that come the Toutai Deuas (the Tuatha Dé) whose exact origin is unknown or dubious. Some wonder even if they were men or demons, but it is probable that they came from the sky, because of their intelligence and of the effectiveness of their sciences. According to Tuan son of Cairell, in his Scel Tuain maic Cairill Do Fhinnen maige Bile inso sis.

The Toutai deuas (Tuatha Dé) are a race resulting from the third son of the Nemet/Hornunnos set off in search of adventure after the destruction the Tower of Cunanos: Iariponalis the prophet son of Biuotacos.

For others, here how the things occurred.

It happened at the time a great fleet came from the country of Syria to wage war to the people of the Athenian country. Those of the Athenians who were slain could nevertheless on the morrow be fighting again with these warriors from Syria. That magic was done through the necromancy of the Toutai Deuas who put demons in their bodies for raising them from the dead. When the people of Syria became aware of that, they asked their own shamans what it was necessary to do. The shamans said to them to set a watch on the place of the battle field, and to thrust a spit of rowan through the chest of every dead person who would be rising up against them. If it were demons that caused their bodies to revive, then they would be from that immediately turned into worms. The warriors of Syria come to join battle on the morrow and they were victorious. They thrust some spits of rowan (?) through the chest of the dead, as the shamans had told them, and the bodies changed into worms immediately. When they realized that the troops of Syria prevailed over the Greeks from now on, the Toutai Deuas preferred to flee in the direction of the Vindon Loccolandon (Gaelic Fionn Lochlann = white Scandinavia, i.e., in Norway). Where they were well received because of their sciences and of their arts.

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 17.

Syria, Syria, what is doing here Middle Eastern Assyria? Keating (History of Ireland, section X) is generally better inspired. It is perhaps rather the initial Syria about which spoke Homer, and whose name has a root which is the same one as that of the Sanskrit name for the sun, Surya, a central or polar island. Medieval transcribers of these accounts deciphered by Keating having obviously no longer understood something, duplicated the god-or-demons as Syrians, on the one hand, and Toutai Deuas on the other hand, by making them two distinct and hostile armies. We wonder well why. Toutai Deuas are not personally involved in this conflict which concerns especially the “Athenians” (sic), and their flight towards north (in Scandinavia or even in Norway more precisely, our text adds) will make everything return to normal. They therefore become again, like the inhabitants of this mysterious island of Syria, some Hyperboreans.

Necromancy… distant reminiscence of some shamanic practices of initiatory death or of healing by the intervention of the souls/minds perhaps… There was indeed something comparable with the shamanism in the Celtic world. See the carnival processions with masks, costumes, and so on, in Switzerland, in the Loetschental Valley (tschäggätä) like in Austria (the krampüse), some feats of Cuchulainn and of Saint Fursey or Fursa and so on (Forseus, Furseus). Saint Fursy or Fursa was a monk originating in Ireland who lived in England circa 630, remained famous for his aislingi (visions) of the Other World, and his ecstatic trances (cf. Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, III, 9).

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Their monarch at the time was Noadatus/Nuada/Nodons/Lludd son of Ectacos, son of Aterolamios (Etarlam), of the race of the Nemet/Hornunnos.

They get four cities to train their young people there.

Some say that they were also called Toutai Deuas Danunas, men of the clan of the goddess-or-demoness, or fairy, Danu (bia), because of the three groups which they formed.

The first group, called Toutai (Tuatha), constituted the nobility and the chiefs of these clans. These lines of verse say it explicitly to us.

“Benacosli and the deva Danu (bia)

Their two most famous princesses

Then were killed.

The end of their art

Came with the pale demons of the night “.

The second group is that which is called deuoi (the “de “), and for that matter such is the reason why the three persons mentioned below are called: the three god-or-demons of the Goddess-or-demoness, or fairy.

They were called “Deuoi” (De), because their powers were amazing.

The third group, called Dana in Gaelic language, was that of craftsmen and technicians (Danoi).

Here what it is most suitable to believe.

Others say, however, that Tuatha De were named Danann (in Gaeli languagec) because of the three sons of the Deva Danu (bia), daughter of Taran/Toran/Tuireann Beccoreo Delbato, i.e., Brennos, Ivocaros, and Ivocarbos.

It is because the three great lords named above were strongest in the arts of heathenry that these tribes wished that they will also be called like this.

Here a quotation which proves that these three here are well the three god-or-demons of the deva Danu (bia) in question, the poem whose beginning is the following.

“Listen, O men of letters, etc. “ and which ends as follows:

“The Three of the Toutai Devas

Brennos, Ivocaros and Ivocarbos,

Died victims of the revenge

Of Lug, son of Ethniu.”

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 18.

About what will follow, the genealogy of the leading Toutai deuas (Tùatha Dé) according to certain authors.

Of course and in accordance with what we saw earlier in the text (euhemerization, and so on) these genealogies are riddled with mistakes or contradictions. A little like the various genealogies of the high Rabbi Youhoshua Bar Yosef in the Bible (in the New Testament) or those of Muhammad in the hadiths.

The contradictions or the inconsistencies of these complicated genealogies come primarily from the euhemerization excessively practiced by Irish annalists to conform to the dominant ideology of their time, hence these sometimes ridiculous results, as often happens in the case of a really dominant ideology. See the intellectual or media coverage of the war in Georgia in 2008. An 8-year-old kid of the fifties speaking about the heroes against the villains would not have done better! So you should not especially count on journalists to be quite informed (to be informed in an intelligent and complete way). See the WikiLeaks cable 07 Paris 306 which was well right on their subject.

But what could be hoped as regards the care of the bodies of a surgeon who would detest blood and would have knowledge comparable to those of an eight-year-old child as regards anatomy or physiology? Human anatomy or physiology!

As regards the care of the souls, however, the frightening innocence of the children is replaced by a clear conscience, terrifying by its hypocrisy and its cynicism (it is said today “without complexes“). Mankind will never change! See the war in Iraq by George Bush (2003), and the war in Libya by Nicolas Sarkozy (2011). The humanitarian bombardments from the great Arab democracies as Qatar had definitively discredited and NATO and the resolutions of UN in the mind of many of the inhabitants of this planet. What a beautiful result! We are not close having peace on earth with mass media people of this moral fiber as regards propaganda, because, as Vauvenargues saw it very well, alas, “The ordinary pretext of those who make the misfortune of others is that they want their good.” But let us return to our sheep.

The learned Irish men therefore wanted at all costs to make these god-or-demons historical persons having really lived in their country, and therefore they linked to them more or less arbitrarily some lines of descent of later historical kings.

Hence then the irresistible temptation to have genealogies going back further possible, why not including Eve and Adam.

The only problem is that the Christian annalists having euhemerized them like this to conform to the dominant ideology of the time had almost always neglected to do it according to coherent lineages or chronologies of generations. In spite of easily discernible convergent lines, there is always what to lose several times one’s horse sense in the complex tangle of lineages and consanguinity. Such genealogies therefore remain in a state of indecipherable imbroglio.

But the god-or-demons of the texts which will follow, let us not forget it, are born, live and die, only that insofar as they were arbitrarily subjected to a historical perspective.

Concerning the Irish name Ogma. The theonym betrays a non-Gaelic phonetics and must be explained as a borrowing from the continental Celt “Ogmios “. It is certain that continental druids came to settle in Ireland after the loss of the independence of their countries. But it is better to think about the intrinsic unity of the Celtic mythology and of the Panth-eon or pleroma which order it.

Note: Tuireann Biccreo Delbaeth is perhaps the island equivalent of the continental Taranis or of Toran (in Welsh language).

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Genealogy of the leading Toutioi Deuas to the use of those who are interested in the lists of kings or ancestors.

Eochu Ollathir was the Dagda of this people, because he was a god-or-demon good for everything. Dagda, Ogma, Alloth, Bres, were the four sons of Elatha, son of Tuireann Biccreo Delbaeth, son of Net.

Son of Iondaoi, son of Allaoi, son of Tat, son of Tabharn, son of Enna, son of Bethach, son of Ibath, son of Beothach, son of larbonel the prophet, son of Nemet, son of Agnoman.

The wife of Net was called Nemain (hence the name Ailech Neit).

Manannan was son of Allod, son of Elatha, son of Tuireann Biccreo Delbaeth.

Fiachaid, Ollam, Iondaoi, Brian, Iuchar and Iucharba, were sons of Tuireann Biccreo Delbaeth.

Brian’s mother was the Dea Danu. This is why one also called these three here “the three gods of the De Danann” (hence also the name of the famous and legendary mountain known as mountain of the three gods).

Diancecht had five sons (Cu, Cian, Ceitheann, Octriui, and Miach) and two daughters (Airmed, who was a medicine woman, Etain which was a poetess; Etain had for husband Tuireann Biccreo Delbaeth, who was the grandfather of Cairpre the poet).

Lug was son of Cian, son of Dian Cecht, son of Easarg, son of Net. Son of Iondaoi, son of Allaoi, son of Tat, son of Tabharn, son of Enna, son of Bethach, son of Ibath, son of Beothach, son of Iarbonel the prophet, son of Nemet, son of Agnoman.

Goibniu the smith, Credne the craftsman, Diancecht the medicine man, Luchtaine the carpenter, Cairbre the poet, were sons of Tara son of Tuireann Biccreo Delbaeth.

Caicher and Neachtain were sons of Namha, son of Eochaid Garbh, son of Duach Dall.

Siodhmall was son of Cairbre Crom, son of Elcmar, son of Tuireann Biccreo Delbaeth.

Dagda had a daughter, the belisama Brigit (the most brilliant Brigit) which was a poetess. She was the wife of Bres (of whom she had Ruan).

The above-mentioned Dagda also had three grandsons: Sethor (Mac Cuil): the man of the hazel tree. Tethor (Mac Cecht): the man of the plow; Cethor (Mac Greine): the man of the sun. The wife of Sethor was called Banba, this one of Tethor, Fodla; this one of Cethor, Eriu.

Fiachna, son of Tuireann Biccreo Delbaeth, was their father. Ernmas, daughter of Etarcam, son of Nuada, their mother.

Ernmas also had three other daughters, Bodb, Macha, and Morrigu (i.e., Anna).

Bodb, Macha and Morrigu, were their three great magicians.

Credne too was their craftsman and Flidais was famous for her cattle.

The four daughters of Flidais were Airgoen, the wife of Cuile (Bé Chuille), Dinann, and the wife of Téith (Bé Téite).

Dinann and the wife of Cuile (Bé Chuille) were their two princesses. They had two oxen with an immaculate coat, the two oxen of Dil, called Fea and Femen. They gave their name to the first plains cleared thanks to them (the plain of Fea and the plain of Femen).

It was to them also that belonged Triath-ri-thorc, the king of the boars (hence the name Mag Treitherne).

And Cirb the king of the wethers (hence the name Mag Cirb).

Mathgen son of Umor was their shaman.

Cridenbel, Bruinne as well as Casmaol, were their satirists. It is they who let out the first three magic cries of revenge, because it is among the Toutai Deuas that was heard for the first time the voice of the harm. I.e. the cries of fright due to the war and slavery, the tears and groans due to misfortune, and the lamentations caused by nastiness or plundering.

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 19.

It is without any doubt here a Christian interpolation. Note. A gloss or a comment on this account, “the Morrigu (i.e., Anna)”, appearing in the very body of the text, and this since a rather earlier date undoubtedly, makes Morrigu a synonym of Anna. Since Ana/Anu is an undeniable variant of Dana/Danu (bia); casually such a gloss therefore provides us the important following equation: Morrigu (called Fata Morgana in the Middle Ages) = Ana = Dana.

All that indicates confusion in the minds of the Christian monks at the time as soon as it was a question of speaking about ancient Celtic heathenry.

Let us not forget, moreover, that this list is far, very far, to be exhaustive. The gods or demons in question are the highest, most famous, most known. But there were still others, who were comparable to them or very nearly, as regards honor, strength, beauty, wealth, power, fame, glory. And whose names are known and venerated by all, throughout the continent and the islands. Because from the race of the first god-or-demons came innumerable generations who peopled earth and sky, seas and mountains.

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ORGANIZATIONS AND POWERS.

The god-or-demons of the Goddess-or-demoness were in the islands around the north of the world, learning paganism and magic, warlike plays as well as handling of weapons. They had strong and bold fighters and specialists in all the fields of art or knowledge. They exceeded in that all the other learned in paganism.

Atbert tra araile beittid demna so, arro fetattatair (sic) curpu daenna impu, o lodin as firu; ar mairchetar a oigenelacha for culu, & do. raebattar la tiachtain creitmi. Conad dia n-aidedaib ro chan Flann Mainistreach in duan-sa sis ga foirgeall.

Rabb & Brott & Robb a tri druith.

Fiss & Fochmare & Eolas a tri adiuid (sic),

& Dub & Dobur & Doirchi a tri deogbaire.

Feic & Ruse & Radarc a tri derccaire.

Tailec & Tren & Tres a tri ngille.

Attach & Gaeth & Sidhe a tri ngabra,

Aig & Taig & Tairchell a tri coin.

Ceol & Binn & Tetbinn a tri cruitteire.

Gle & Glan & Gleo a tri tipratte,

Buaid & Ordan & Togad a tri n-aithe.

Sid & Saimi & Suba a tri muimme.

Cumma & Set & Samail a tri cuaich.

Meall & Tete & Rochain a tri muige cluiche.

Aine & Indmas & Brugas a tri nduinne.

Cain & Alaig & Rochain a tri ndúine.

Others say that they were demons, for they knew that human bodies were around them, which is more correct; and for their genealogies are reckoned back: they were living at the time of the coming of Faith. So that of their fates Flann Mainistreach composed the following song.

Rabb, Brott, Robb, their three jesters,

Fiss, Fochmarc, Eolas, their three druids,

Dub, Dobur, Doirche, their three cupbearers,

Feic, Rusc, Radarc, their three watchers,

Talc, Tren, Tres, their three servants,

Attach, Gaeth, Sidhe, their three horses,

Aig, Taig, Tairchell, their three dogs,

Ceol, Taig, Tetbinn, their three harpers,

Gle, Glan, Gleo, their three sources,

Buaid, Ordan, Togad, their three adoptive fathers,

Sid, Saime, Suba, their three adoptive mothers,

Cumma, Set, Samail, their three cups with drinking,

Meall, Tete , Rochain, their three playing fields,

Aine, lndmas, Brugna, their three edges,

Cain, Alaig, Rochain, their three fortresses.

The names of the four cities in which they learned science wisdom and arts were Thule, Abalum, Gorre (island bridged over to the continent by two magic bridges, one under the water and another one known as sword bridge) and Ogygia the green island (cf. Roderick O’Flaherty). In the legends passed on by the ancient Greek authors, Falias, Findias, Gorias and Murias in the Gaelic versions. Editor’s note.

On this subject, one of our best poets has written what follows.

The Toutai Deuas

Get on to higher sciences

To the druidry and the devilry.

From which did they learn their education?

The Toutai Deuas were the descendants

Of the third prince come from

The race of the Nemed/Hornunnos

Son of Acnomanos, King Iariponalis,

After the defeat of the Tower of Cunanos.

Iariponalis the prophet

Had for son indeed Biuotacos the fast

And for grandson Ivatos.

He was a famous warrior.

Here what some bards sang about him.

Biuotacos son of Iariponalis the prophet

Son of the Nemet/Hornunnos

Remained on the spot

With ten men and their wives

But the others

Led by Ivatos

Went out

To the islands north of Scandinavia.

The children of Ivatos

Arrived there only after a long voyage.

In the four cities

They had conquered there

They led a struggle which was fierce

To learn higher sciences.

They were called:

The first Thule (old Irish Falias).

The second Ogygia (old Irish Murias.).

The third Gorre (old Irish Gorias)

The glass island with thousand ships.

And the fourth Abalum (old Irish Findias).

Such are the names of the four magic cities in question.

Marovesos (old Irish Morfhessa),

Esdrios (old Irish Esras),

Uiscios (old Irish Uiscias),

And Semios (old Irish Semias),

Were the names of the four Masters of these islands.

To remember of that is equivalent to a blessing.

Vesos was the Master of Thule (old Irish Falias).

Semios was this one of Ogygia (old Irish Murias).

Esdrios was this one of Gorre (old Irish Gorias).

And Uiscios was this one of Abalum (old Irish Findias).

King of the Sky and king of the Earth,

In whom the abundance of the Holy Spirit reigns

Bless me. DD Finit. Amen!

It is from the city of Gorre (Gorias) the glass town with thousand ships that the poisoned lance which belonged to Lug was brought. No battle could be won against who had it in hand.

It is from the city of Abalum (Findias) that the sword of Noadatus/Nuada/Nodons/Lludd was brought. Nobody could escape it or resist it when it was drawn from the sleeve of the Bodua (of the Bodb), and who had been reddened of blood by it, would be only with one drop, could flee no longer after that.

It is from the city of Ogygia that the cauldron of the god-or-demon good for everything (the Suqellus Dagda Gurgunt) was brought. You left it only satisfied or with your belly full.

It is from the city of Thule (Falias) that the stone (stone of Falias or of Scone) was brought. They are the Toutai Deuas who brought this stone of knowledge and sovereignty; our country received from it its third designation, namely Valimagosia: the Plain of Fal.

The one under whom the stone roared when he sat down above it was the king, until Man’s best friend, the great and faithful Cuchulainn, strikes it. Because it let out no roaring under him nor under his adoptive son, Lugidos, son of the three Vindas of Emania - of the three Find of Emain -, when they had sat down on it. Since it remained dumb for that matter.

It is, however, not the Fate which is the cause of all that, but the appearance of the Christ (who broke the power of idols).

Others say that what remained of the stone was transported to Northern Ireland then to Scotland, in Scone, and finally in England. Others still say that the stone of Fal is still in Tara.

Below the lines of verse that a bard composed about it.

“The island of Fal was called so

Because of the stone which is under our feet.

Stone of Fal is its first name

But its other name is stone of Destiny” [saxum fatale in Latin].

It goes without saying this sacred stone can very well be the Stone of Scone as our brothers and our sisters of the Highlands of the auld alliance point it out for us, we are much too fond of the bewitching music of their bagpipes, since it came initially from the kingdom of Dal Riada (the last king of Scotland who used this magic ancestral ritual was John Balliol in 1292). Editor’s note.

The Toutai Deuas concluded a pact (a caratrad) with the gigantic wyverns and anguipedics (Fomore in Gaelic language, Andernas on the Continent), and Balaros, grandson of Nanto, gave his daughter Ethniu in marriage to Ceno, son of Deino Cuecto (Diancecht in Gaelic language).

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 20.

A) In the Irish legend of the Colloquy of Ancients (Acallam Na senorach), the lingam which is the stone of Fal or of Scone, is mentioned as follows.

“What had remarkable therefore this stone of Fal? Asked Diarmait the son of Cerball.

If somebody were accused of something, answered Ossian, and that one made him sit down on this stone, if he had said the truth, he became white and red, but if he had lied, a black and quite visible spot appeared on him.

When the true king of Tara sat down on it, the stone roared under his feet and the three waves of Ireland responded it as in echo: the wave of Cliodhna, the wave of Tuaide and the wave of Rudraige.

Whatever the enemy provincial king who sat down above, on the other hand, the stone howled or thundered under his feet.

Whatever the sterile woman who sat down above, she was covered with a fine mist of black blood; but when it was a fertile woman, she was covered with mist of all the colors “.

B) No ambiguity as for the nature of the alliance: the used word, caratrad, carantia in old Celtic, means “friendship “. The result of this alliance will be therefore the birth of Lug, the higher god-or-demon, the

cherished child of the victories, who is therefore wyvern or anguipedic (of the people of the Andernas or of the Fomore in Gaelic language) through his mother, and Toutios Deuas through his father. He will gain so in having power and authority at the same time over the Toutai Deuas and over the gigantic anguipedics. He is also the antithesis of Bregsos who, Toutios Deuas through his mother and Wyvern (Fomore in Gaelic language) through his father, will only gain so in being a temporary king somewhat usurper.

The names of the mothers, Ethniu and Iveriu, are, each time, some personifications of the land (it is undoubtedly here a late and apocryphal localization of the original pan-Celtic myth). But there is a difference in their unions: that of Ethniu and Ceno is a marriage in due form that of Iveriu and of Elatio resembles a temporary cohabitation very much. It will be noticed lastly that, in the chronology of the story, which is very logical, the alliance with the gigantic anguipedic wyverns (Andernas on the Continent, fomorinas in Gaelic language) is previous to the second battle of the Plain of standing stones or of mounds, even to the first.

OF THE KINGS OF THE TOUTAI DEVAS AND OF THE LENGTH OF THEIR REIGNS.

According to Geoffrey Keating (Foras Feasa Ar Eirinn: History of Ireland).

To clear up all that the poem below was composed by one of our bards.

Noadatus/Nuada/Nodons/Lludd silver-armed, son of Ectacos, son of Atervolamos, son of Ordo, son of Allaoi, son of Tatos, son of Tabharn, son of Enna, son of Ivato, son of Biuotacos, son of Iariponalis the prophet, son of the Nemed/Hornunnos; was king of the kings of the country for 30 years.

Bregsos, son of Elatio, son of Nanto, son of Andaios, son of Allaoi, son of Tatos, ruled for 7 years.

Noadatus/Nuada/Nodons/Lludd having perished in this second battle of the Plain of the standing stones or of the hillocks and Bregsos having been banished; Lug long-armed, son of Ceno, son of Diancecht, son of Isarcos Bricios, son of Nanto, son of Andaios, son of Allaoi, was then recognized as king of the kings in the country by the Toutai Devas.

His reign lasted 40 years until his death in Canondrotsmen their capital. It is this Lug who established the annual meeting in the honor of Talantio/Rosemartha, daughter of Magmor, as we saw. She had become the wife of Garbos Epax, son of Doveccos Dallos, prince of the Toutai Devas after the death of his first husband. It is by this woman indeed that Lug long-armed was fed and even brought up, until he is able to bear arms (he was in fosterage in her house ). Lug therefore instituted a whole series of games and trials in her honor.

A little like the Olympic games. Fifteen nights before and fifteen nights after the anniversary of her death, which occurred at the time of the full moon on the first day of Elembivi (beginning of August, during the night)? It is this commemoration which is called Lugnasade i.e., nasade (“festival”) of Lug (today the feast of Saint Peter in chains). Lug fell one day into the trap set by the three sons of Coimos Cermatos, in Canondrotsmen, and it was Coslognatos (Mac Cuill) who killed him. The great Suqellus Dagda Gurgunt, son of Elatio, son of Taran/Toran/Tuireann Beccoreo Deluato, son of Nanto, succeeded him and was the king of the kings in the country for 70 years. It is to be used as a palace by him that was built the large mound on the banks of the Boyne River. For him and his three sons, Mabon/Maponos/Oengus, Aedos, and Coimos Cermatos.

He died as a result of the wound which Catullina had inflicted on him at the time of the second battle of the Plain with the standing stones or with the hillocks: the spear head was indeed poisoned.

He had two nicknames: Ivocatuos and Ollater.

Visuciatis, son of Taran/Toran/Tuireann Beccoreo Deluato, son of Elatio, was king of the kings of the country for ten years, until his death because of the blows of Esociion Imberos Maros, in Ard Breac, with the six sons of Ollamos.

The three sons of Cermatos Melibetlos, son of the Suqellus Dagda Gurgunt, i.e., Coslognatos (Mac Cuill), Cextiognatos (Mac Cecht) and Grannognatos (Mac Greine), were kings during thirty years.

Some say that they were kings of the kings at the same time all the three, and that the country was then divided into three equal shares.

“They divided the land into three,

The great lords with the glorious exploits,

Son of the hazel tree, son of the plow, and son of the sun

Coslognatos, Cextiognatos, Grannognatos.”

In fact, it is not a division of the country into three which took place, but an alternation of sovereignty. They were king of the kings during one year, each one in turn. They fell all the three at the time of the

battle for the Talantio (Irish Tailtiu. The third battle of the Plain of the standing stones or of the tumuli in a way. Editor’s note).

Here the reason why these three kings are called so.

The true name of Coslognatos (Mac Cuill) was Setros, but he worshipped the tree named Coslo (the hazel tree or filbert). Banuta was his wife.

The true name of Cextiognatos (Mac Cecht) was Tetturo, but he was particularly fond of the plow called Cexta. Votala was his wife.

The true name of Grannognatos (Mac Greine) was Cetturo, but he adored the sun god-or-demon called Grannos. His wife was Iveriu.

Coslos, Cextis, and Grannos, were therefore for them like their god-or-demons. At least according to the following lines of verse:

“Setros the great one

Was king first.

The man was hard

And the tree called Coslos was his god

Banuta was his wife.

Tetturo the proud one was the second

His blows were violent

His fighting without mercy.

He achieved great exploits

And he had a plow called Cexta.

Votala was his wife.

Cetturo the beautiful one

Was a colorful warrior

His god was called Grannos.

Iveriu was his wife.

She was a great princess “.

The three grandsons of the Suqellus Dagda Gurgunt ruled therefore for 29 years, but they did not have successors and here how the reign of the god-or-demons ended on earth.

(According to the Psalter found at Cashel, the total length of the reign of the Toutai Deuas was 200 years, with a margin of error of 3 years. “Seven years, ninety and hundred, such was the precise duration of the reign of the Toutai Deuas on Earth “).

As for Belinos Barinthus Lerognatos (Manannan son of Lir), his true name was Orbiosenos (Oirbsean). He died only after more than one hundred battles.

ACCORDING TO GEOFFREY KEATING (FORAS FEASA AR EIRINN: HISTORY OF IRELAND).

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Counter-lay (neo-druidic commentary) No. 21.

What Geoffrey Keating did not understand, it is that the god-or-demons cannot die, since they are immortal by definition. The god-or-demons are born, live and die, in these accounts, only insofar as they were arbitrarily subjected to a historical perspective by the decadent bards of the last times of paganism, or by the Christian copyist monks having “historicized” them. It is evidenced by the fact that the monks having euhemerized them were mistaken more once in the chronologies or genealogies concerning them, and these countless aberrations were also taken over by the History of Ireland (Foras Feasa Ar Eirinn) by Keating, of course.

SECOND PART.

Since all what relates to these various settlements of Ireland is more than extremely suspect, we therefore judge more useful to insert into this place various general information on prehistory.

Hence this Second part of our opuscule on the subject.

REMINDER.

Look out, look out please! The following texts are not a complete nor exhaustive synthesis of all the Irish or Welsh legends on the subject. For the simple reason that such a synthesis would be impossible, seeing that the countless variants or contradictions which can be discovered in them. Only a synthesis of the broad outlines of these accounts can be envisaged.

The following texts are therefore only some partial rewriting, and in short or in summary, of the main Irish legends in question, the whole being restructured or reconstructed after its demolition on new bases and according to a different plan, here and there intersected with analyzes.

They have one goal, to give our readers enough preliminary notions or glimpses on the subject to want to know more.

The following texts therefore do not exempt to refer ultimately to original texts themselves.

TRUE GENERAL INFORMATION ABOUT PREHISTORY.

For more details to see the excellent web site entitled STRATIS.ORG. (N.B. I hope to have well understood everything, I am only a post-office employee, grandson of a mailman, and my mother was also only the daughter of the cooker in the castle.” And so I master, of course, much less than them, the language of Shakespeare, which is somewhat awkward for somebody who wants to interfere himself in such important things… for our planet... but...)

The Neolithic era is an epoch already too far away in the ages so that we would not be reduced, too often, to express suppositions: those which seem most probable, but which does remain only suppositions.

To summarize the essence of the Neolithic revolution amounts underlining the replacement of “a foraging economics “ that the first men had practiced since several million years, by the appearance of two new ways of life; moreover almost radically different one from the other.

- That of the settler farmer, for whom animals, according to species, are engines making easier agricultural works or a supplement for the food. But a supplement only: the examination under the microscope of the teeth of these first farmers shows; let us remind it, that their food was especially and basically vegetable/ cereals, broad beans, lenses, etc.

- That of the wandering shepherd that his constant peregrinations lead to preserve an important activity of hunting, an activity which trains him better to fight because he often uses his weapons. This military technical superiority will generate a “noble” way of life: a practice of the expedition which cheaply gets the goods and the slaves. This shepherd warrior, scorning the townsman farmer, will exist almost until the contemporary period (Huns, Mongols, etc. until Tuareg finally).

We have just evoked the opinion of experts, who think practically certain that the phenomenon war - violent action, collective, premeditated, organized - began only with the industrial-cultural facies” of Neolithic; which begins there is nearly one hundred centuries in the Near or Middle East, and there are 40 to 50 centuries only as regards Western Europe.

This assertion arouses several questions.

- Was violence between human beings unknown before this period?

- Why this conviction, almost unanimous?

- Why Neolithic era, and not previous periods - Upper Paleolithic, Mesolithic era - or later like the Chalcolithic, the Bronze Age?

Our ancestors, of course, were not the “noble savages” beloved by the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his today followers (media class or gentle and gentle people) . The murder, consequence of competitions for domination over the small clan and the female, surely existed thousands of centuries before Neolithic phase. This, for that matter, radically differentiates an aspect of the human behavior of that of the higher mammals also living in society; for example, the wolves, higher primates, where the “duel “ between the dominating and the candidate to supremacy end - except accidental, because “non-wanted“ fatal wound- by the submission of the overcome. But the human brain sees further than the immediate future: it knows that the rival, not accepting the defeat, will wait for a favorable occasion. The winner must therefore kill him if he does not want to live in the apprehension of his assassination by surprise.

For this very long period of origins, and for the relationship of the time between small groups of Hominidae, we have imagined until about the end of the year 1960 the behavior of our predecessors in a form very close to that which was popularized by novels or studies marked by the dominant ideology of their time (hence various anachronisms, which can be easily enough spotted). The fight until death, fought as by reflex, at the time of the meeting of these small clans; fight which will decide on the survival of one of the groups of wandering hunters, and whose only young women will be saved, to be taken over by the victorious clan.

Very recent progress of paleoanthropology evidenced these dramatic wrong pictures were inappropriate.

This disruption resulted from works of specialists (often known as paleo-pathologists) on the diseases of prehistoric men. Naturally, this research could be based on the only documents available: skeletons or fragments of skeletons revealed by excavations. They could recognize arthritic crookedness, coxalgias, osteosarcomas - at a time without pollution - and also existence of fractures, including of the cranium, which, if they are mended, show the survival of the casualty. The dental cavities are extremely rare until the Neolithic era. But the important thing, in our perspective, lies in the fact that, until this Neolithic era, wounds are only the result of accidents, murder being absolutely exceptional, and collective massacre unknown. It is, of course, more than probable that murder has a very deep past. But to notice it visually is exceptional, what explains the interest of paleontologists for it, for example, the murdered man found during the excavations in the small island of Teviec in France, or Otzi in Italy. The acknowledgement of murder is always exceptional.

It is since the beginning of the end of the Neolithic era that evidences of violent and collective deaths appear, for example, arrowheads still driven into such or such part of a skeleton; craniums crashed to pieces but not “opened” for an unknown rite or for a trepanning; discovery of mass graves containing, higgledy-piggledy, bodies of men, women and children, massacred simultaneously, obviously.

In France, for example, the hypogeum of Roaix – in the third thousand years, therefore still during the Neolithic era - irresistibly evokes the “Socialist-Communist” massacre of Katyn, the Hitlerian National-Socialist death camps (other things being equal), or of the communist Kampuchea.

All indicates that it is indeed a collective massacre. Since they buried fifty persons at the same time the ones on the others, of whom many had still arrowheads planted in the body, and some still driven in their bones.

In addition - and whereas the least sign of defensive organization was never found at the entrance of the caves of the Paleolithic - if the inhabitants of the first Jericho believed necessary to fortify their city, in the eighth thousand years; and if those of Çatalhöyük, ten centuries later, built their city so as to make it impregnable; we can think that these societies had good reasons to impose themselves; one, the exhausting realization of considerable defensive ramparts; the other, a way of circulation in the city particularly painful.

What did occur therefore in the Neolithic era?

Archeological excavations provide many and concordant indications of which the whole forms a more and more reliable picture since each discovery takes place there without much difficulty. Summarizing coarsely, we can say that, when the human being invented - gradually - agriculture and breeding, therefore producing his food instead of taking it by hunting and gathering; he radically upset his economy, his way of life, and his demography. Because these discoveries resulted in an extraordinary increase of food possibilities compared to surfaces.

This considerable reduction of vital surface, naturally, is especially true for farmerS. Wandering shepherd needs a vast surface of wandering for his herd. We will never know if, like the current farmer of the poor mountainous areas, this shepherd practiced the “slash-and-burn” of the zones with bushes, brooms, etc. to get an extension of the pasture zones in the following year. In addition, the “traditional” nomad does not make provisions of fodder for winter - or a very dry season - because it would be constrained to settle… The approach of the bad season therefore had to result in transhumance in the areas where herd could subsist. This research of pasture did not fail to cause conflicts in order to get the best zones. The nomad therefore did not limit himself only to plunder the cities of farmers. The battle for the possession of the best areas was one of the constants of History. For example, we know that before the establishment of the absolute domination of Genghis Khan, Mongolian tribes were in a state of almost permanent conflict, in order to have the pastures necessary to their “Urdu “.

It is estimated indeed that in no mountainous temperate zone “foraging economy “required about fifty square kilometers per individual to carry out the survival. A density which seems to have been that of most of the territory of the United States and in the south of Canada just before the arrival of the French then of the English: that is to say approximately 800.000 Indians in the United States (in l890, approximately 180.000; currently more 2.000.000 by counting those who are completely integrated in the modern way of life).

Below some dates of construction of European forts in the area. Fort Bourbon on Hudson Bay (taken in 1684). Pentagouet 1613. Duquesne 1754. Toulouse 1751 (trading post for Creeks until 1763). Maurepas 1699 (the Old Biloxi). Jonquière 1751. As a matter of interest, it is before Fort Duquesne that the young George Washington distinguished himself for the first time in 1755 (it is him who saved the English expedition of the absolute disaster because they had very imprudently attacked

enemy forces amounting to 72 European soldiers, 146 Canadian settlers and 637 over armed American Indians).

The small “standard “clan of a score of adults and 10 to 15 children was to therefore explore unceasingly a surface of about 1.500 square kilometers. What implies for that matter a permanent or semi-permanent “base “- cave, huts - for women having children still very young, at least, as well as for stiffened old men... those of more than forty years. We reach therefore a population with the density of 0, 02 per square kilometer.

With a farmer, the surface necessary for the survival of an individual crashes, at least in a favorable zone (temperature, rains, nature of the soil). It is measured in hectares - a hundredth of square kilometers – even in fractions of a hectare in the best conditions. Moreover, farmers of the Neolithic era have already little herds living on leftovers (pigs) or of pasture on the pieces of land unsuitable farming (sheep and goats). Then, and in spite of considerable infant mortality, a demographic boom occurs, beside which that with which neo-Malthusians threaten us - less and less besides- all things considered, is only a light inflection. But all the human beings do not have a vocation to be settler farmers. Or do not have the possibility to be so in certain climatic conditions. Others therefore limit themselves the techniques of breeding, which includes the protection of herds against the predators. They will be the wandering shepherds, who practically persisted until our days.

The problems were, for the ones, to find new cultivable lands when the soil is emptied; for the others, to have pasture zones.

And then the phenomenon war appears, coincidence which cannot be fortuitous and that we should try to explain.

The most probable hypothesis is the following one: the hunter gatherers were in such a low number that the meetings between small groups could only be very rare. During these meetings, the use of violence was not applicable, since in a foraging economics food stocks are nothing and each group has already its “tools” (a word taken in the broadest sense).

The “foreigners“ to a zone, in psychological state of insecurity since being then in unknown territory, could therefore very well go and seek their fortune elsewhere, on an apparently unlimited land.

However, certain favorable circumstances (plethoric game? Imbalance of genders? Lack of women) necessarily gave rise to fraternization, even with merging, if the total of individuals did not exceed a certain “critical mass “. Indeed, without these peaceful meetings and at least somewhat lasting, we could hardly explain the spreading of new methods: cut flints; casting by using a spear thrower; much later, bow and arrows; easy production of fire by shock of pyrite against a hard stone, etc. In addition, the associations of clans or the exchanges of young people made it possible to avoid a consanguinity which, if it had been essential to the appearance of a new species, had been harmful in the long run.

Let us return to the Neolithic era. A new concept appears, unknown hitherto: that of the attachment of the farmer to the ground he works, become an invaluable good, especially where it does not become emptied.

At the same time, the farmer becomes attached to his dwelling, much more comfortable and solid that the huts of his predecessors, and also to his small herd. In the same way, the shepherd is concerned with his livestock, which he therefore learned how to manage with wisdom, and also with the pasture areas essential to his animals.

Also appears, then, an extraordinary innovation: from now on the periods of food shortage must normally disappear!

But the explosive population growth brings problems quickly: for the farmer, one year too dry, too wet, too cold, results no longer either in food shortage, but in starvation, or almost; for shepherds same causes can make the grazing grounds very insufficient, and, worse still, epizootic diseases are calamities.

The survival of the village of farmers, or of the clan of nomadic shepherds being then threatened, an external moral code - i.e., concerning those who are not members of the group - emerge. It is not a crime, but a duty to attack “foreigner” in order to get what will carry out the survival of the community. Is good what is necessary to the community; is good what cannot, not be; is bad what is prejudicial to this community. Code of external morals which was never better summarized than by the famous British formula: “Right or wrong, it is my country! “

In other words, only the result is important! Still unconscious pragmatism, but which will persist until our days with the ethics of responsibility by Max Weber, after the political theoreticians of the Renaissance, Francesco Guicciardini, Machiavelli… had given “respectability“ to it. By affirming that the act should not be judged according to its moral contents, but according to its success or its failure. The appropriation of goods by force will extend quickly to that of men, slaves or populations subjected to a foreign despotism, considered as a kind of stock of muscular energy.

The practice of periodic tributes, to provide in food, in metal or/and in invaluable objects; even in men: slaves, military auxiliaries, also appears.

Once again, what is previous, is only of hypothetical value: that which rises from the old Roman proverb “His fecit cui prodest”. But, exact hypothesis or not, the fact remains; the prehistoric archeology shows that if murder is as old as Man - at least modern Man - collective violence, with its massacres, appeared only with the Neolithic era. i.e., approximately 10.000 years ago in certain areas, and much more recently in others, whereas this modern Man existed for tens of thousands of years.

THE STATE OF TECHNIQUES.

We saw that, a very long time after the dog, companion of man since 20.000 or 25.000 years, Neolithic era practiced the taming of pigs, sheep and goats, then of draft or/and pack animals, cattle, asses, onagers, camels.

That of the horse, so long a time only a game, appears to begin in Central Asia in the middle of the sixth thousand years, but still as a slaughter animal. It will be used as a mount only about the end of the third millennium, still in Central Asia (where, for the nomadic people, it becomes the archetypal noble animal). In China and Europe, this use as a mount can date back to the beginnings of the second thousand years (cave engravings in North Germany and Scandinavia). But in China for wars it draws light chariots until three or four centuries before our era, whereas in Europe and in the Middle East war chariots have almost entirely disappeared, except f in the Celtic world. Let us point it out that if the camel and the horse formerly quite existed in America, they then had been radically destroyed by Man, in his progression towards the south, from the Bering Strait. The survival of the buffalo, of the caribou, and of other big games of this type, received multiple explanations, unfortunately no tallying with. The fact remains that, very as much as the current human being, the man of the Paleolithic era upset already ecological balance. And it is at the beginning of our Neolithic era that the European of the West, made the forest of tall trees which stretched to the Mediterranean disappear (forever).

The horse will be tamed at the end of this Neolithic era, but it will not become the true draft energy source, our great-grandfathers still knew, only in the Middle Ages, with the shoulder collar for animal pulling. It is necessary to see well, however, that for tools in general and weapons in particular, the Neolithic era is only the result of a very old evolution. Since the hunting machine for the big game, of the Upper Paleolithic and of the Mesolithic era, could also be used as a war weapon.

Farming as well as breeding are the characteristics of the Neolithic cultural facies. But many innovations came to be added to these inventions. Like weaving, pottery (preservation of grains, cooking), improvement of the “woodwork “(manufacture of wooden objects for housework) thanks to stone tools increasingly improved, then metal tools, etc. Later the domestication of cattle, draft animals, and of asses, draft and pack animals, will come to be added, what will form the first energy revolution; and also for the agricultural output the - with a swing plow- tilling deeper and faster than the wooden hoe.

Special mention must be made with regard to the navigational machines; for which we notice that to a shift in the space of 15/20 000 kilometers corresponds, it seems, an interval in the time of about 25.000 years. What supposes a “technological transfer “ so slow, especially for a mobile object by definition, that there is here a not yet solved enigma

1). In Europe, precisely, and in its Eastern accesses, the oldest nautical remains date back only to the ninth thousand years : monoxylous pirogues (cut in a single log) paddles, more especially found in Northern Europe, in peat bogs which protected them. In this Nordic zone, the Neolithic era was then still to come, of some 5.000 years. We also know some Mesolithic sites in continental Greece containing obsidian pieces identified as not being able to come from the island of Samos, what implies the knowledge of navigation art. But the small dugouts of Europe hardly authorized the coastal navigation, or from islands to close islands, in fine weather, and without never losing sight land. It is not before the middle, approximately, of the second thousand years, that sailors will dare to embark on the open sea; for example, from Crete towards Egypt. And this audacity will be very slow to spread: the coastal navigation will remain practically the rule until the end of the 15th century of our era. In any event, in fact, the small dugouts of our Neolithic era could have been usable. Therefore it will be

necessary to wait for the composite boats - leather, then boards on ribs – of Antiquity, so that their size authorizes a “range” worthy to be taken into account.

1) In Europe and in the Near or Middle East, we find no sign of coastal navigation or of a voyage in the open sea before the 10th thousand years. On the other hand, the 35th thousand years before our era approximately, witnessed a vast sea-born migration to be carried out. From Southeast Asia into which Homo Erectus could pass without getting one's feet wet, towards the Sahul “platform” (a continent made of New Guinea, Tasmania and Australia); a land remained separated from Southeast Asia by a strait whose width, at the time of the lowest water, never descended under 90 kilometers. Similar massive crossings of emigrants, with families, tools, dogs, could succeed only by the use of boats much more important than the small “monoxylon” dugouts found in the West, and newer of some 25.000 years. We can suppose that they were large catamarans able to transport several tens of individuals and an important mass of supplies or equipment.

This conquest of the islands having formed the Sahul Platform (New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania) arouses many problems.

- Why, firstly, to have had the idea of embarking on an apparently endless sea?

- Why, then, to have waited some 30.000 years to reach Micronesia?

- Why, and how, these men of the Paleolithic era thought about making, with very primitive tools, boats able to face the open sea?

- Why this invention was not spread, gradually, towards the west?

- Why did the descendants of men who had dared but also be able to achieve such a feat, have stopped their intellectual and technical effort, at the point to be become (become again) when they were discovered by our civilization, one of the most primitive populations of the sphere?

- Lastly, what could be the event which, about simultaneously, caused the migrations of modern Man towards Australasia, towards America by the Bering Strait - passage then possible without getting one's feet wet - and towards Europe, where he will oust our Neanderthal ancestors (we have kept only 30% of their genes placed end to end)? What Europeans do not boast about!

WARLIKE FUNCTION IN THE NEOLITHIC ERA.

I am only a post-office employee grandson of the mailman of the village in which I was baptized in 1952 and of the cooker of “the castle” (on the maternal side), of farmers (on the paternal side), but my opinion is that the wars of the future will depend less on material or technological superiority that on the frame of mind of the involved forces, in short of their morale. Wars of the future will be battles of ideas, hence the need to be rearmed morally before and if it is necessary for that matter, and therefore to be ready to suffer or die so that his civilization values, those in which we believe, prevail over, at home even around ourselves. What implies already, of course, to know them and to defend them. The purpose of modern wars is more liberation, or change, or control, of minds, than of territories. We saw it in Algeria in 1962 and we see it still today in Afghanistan. It is useless to control the field militarily if populations remain hostile and do not support the values you defend.

So we will limit ourselves in this domain in enumerating the weapons warriors used in the Neolithic era: direct inheritance of what their predecessors used, for hunting big game or in order to defend themselves against carnivores, powerful enough to dare to attack man.

It is necessary to note that this function is that about which we have many certainties. Because we discovered weapons or fragments characteristic enough to reconstruct weapon in question, and also because representations of fighting were found (cave engravings).

A. One-handed or two-handed weapons, pole arms.

- The spear. It is the oldest found weapon, but in its hunting use. It is a spear driven in the skeleton of a mammoth killed circa - 30.000 and whose wood was preserved by mineralization. This pole arm will evolve in various shapes such as lance, pike… until its last transformation, the bayonet, still used with the majority of assault rifles.

- The club. Representations of composite clubs very similar to traditional Zulu “knobkerries" were found” on cave engravings very previous to local Neolithic era. For example, in Sahara just before its change into a desert. On a scale of represented hunters, it is a wood handle, 1 m long approximately, at which a spherical stone of 10 cm is fixed: the knobkerrie. It is obvious that these clubs, already worked out, were preceded in time by simpler devices: some clubs cut in a branch. Besides, a chimpanzee knows very well threaten a predator of young people (generally panthers) by holding up a

branch of a sufficiently deterrent diameter, what an amazing musculature (for the weight of this primate) enables it to do. But it is necessary to be wary of too easy a comparison: it is not there a tool in the human sense of the word; when the danger is passed, the animal gives up its club: it cannot imagine that there can be an advantage to choose, to keep then to carry, the weapon which was useful to it. The club still exists, in the shape of the billy club of the forces of law and order.

- The dagger. That which is made with bone was found since the level of the Aurignacian (- 30 to - 25.000), but it is probable that it existed already for a long time: the former remains were undoubtedly eliminated by time. This dagger made of bone lacks weight - it would be rather an ancestor of the stiletto - but also solidity, to deal the most fatal blows. In the Neolithic era, very elaborate knapping techniques made possible the making of very elegant obsidian and flint daggers. We can, however, wonder whether they were not in this case parade weapons more than true fight weapons, because the thinness of the stone blade would have badly resisted a real use. The first bronze daggers will often copy these stone weapons. It is useless to dwell on the survival of the dagger until our days.

- The axe. The “bifacial chopper” goes back to the Middle Pleistocene (Homo Erectus there are several hundreds of thousands of years). But specialists, as a whole, do not believe any longer that, held with the hand; it was used to deal the fatal blow to an animal trapped in a pit. The spear was more practical, especially if it was an animal with dangerous reactions, because it would then have been necessary to go down into the pit to strike it with the bifacial chopper.

More probably (confirmation by the microscope), it was the tool being used to skin animals from their invaluable hide - which was used to make clothing, tents, straps; primitive sandals - and to cut them into pieces or in lumps of meat: a knife all in all. But modern men knew how to fix the hatchet, split in the form of heavy bifacial chopper, at the end of a handle, to increase the striking speed, therefore the kinetic energy of the blow, and it is well then a weapon. The battle axe, and the stemmed weapons - war hammer, and so on- will remain, but in metal form, including the handle sometimes, until the 15th century of our era.

B. Missile weapons.

- The javelin. It is a light spear, cast. Hand throwing gives a useful and wounding range of about 30 meters (perhaps a little more for robust Neanderthals). First improvement (about - 30.000?) consisted in providing it with a head, hard and piercing or sharp: flint, obsidian or bone: the assegai. Then, circa - 25.000, man makes a surprising discovery: that of the spear thrower which, by lengthening of the lever arm, increases appreciably initial speed, therefore range. The javelin will remain as a weapon during thousands of years. The rigid spear-thrower will be replaced by a leather strap which, moreover, makes it possible to give to the projectile a rotation contributing to keeping its axis tangent with the trajectory, therefore to preserve the tip ahead and to be slow down at least by the air. (It will be, in this form, the amentum of the Roman auxiliary light troops, for example.) In the experiments made by General Reffyou for the Emperor Napoleon III, a javelin that could be thrown at only 20 meters by hand could be thrown up to 80 meters with the amentum by using such type of spear thrower.

- The sling. The oldest known sling was discovered in Egypt (dated back to - 2.000). The materials of which the weapon is made, fiber and/or leather, are badly preserved, even in zones of dry climate; even more so under wetter climates. The sling and its stemmed weapon - the staff sling or fustibalus o the Romans- persisted until the Middle Ages, because very effective in distributed shooting, but only in the hands of very trained specialists, otherwise it is more dangerous for the neighbors than for the enemy.

- The bow. The invention of this weapon - the first machine designed by man - formed an exceptional intellectual discovery: an anthropologist did not hesitate to write that its inventor was situated on the same plan as Archimedes. For the first time, indeed, man designed an indirect mechanical device, able to store energy, then to brutally restore it in a projectile; giving it therefore a speed, therefore a range, much higher than all that can be gotten directly by muscular springiness. We could say that, all things considered, bows and arrows were the prehistoric equivalent of the missile with a nuclear warhead. Exaggeration put aside, it is certain that, until now, the bow killed much more to

than atomic weapons, and at a time when the Earth itself was much less peopled.

We are certain that bow dates back at least to the Spanish Solutrean (- 20 to - 15.000, notched arrowheads), in the Capsian and in the Aterian, of North Africa (and perhaps in the Gravettian - 20/25 000 years). We indeed found what can be only heads of arrows, made in flint - piercing, but also, and often, cutting - in the sites of these cultural facies. But it is possible to think that, quite before to have thought of fixing heads, man began by shooting arrows made of hard wood feathered.

Since American Indians and Melanesians knew bows, it is one thing or the other. Either the invention occurred then was definitely spread before - 30/35 000, or chance had that, by a few thousands of years, this invention occurred simultaneously in the Old continent, but also in America; and in the islands of the Sahul platform (New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania). Whereas modern man existed for tens of thousands of years, except in Europe. Not very probable coincidence. Many figurations of bow hunting, quite former to local Neolithic era, were found. On the other hand, those,rarer, for use of bows in a fight - Sahara, etc. - don’t appear before the eighth thousand years.

The oldest specimen of bows currently known was dated back to - 6.000 (peat bogs of Holmegaard, in Denmark). Cut in a wood of yew, it is a “simple recurve” machine “- we will have to reconsider this question - very similar to what will be the Welsh longbow seven thousand years later, but less powerful. Its preservation state made the manufacturing of a replica possible. With the tests (but with optimal arrows, we don't know if they match those of the original, and with a modern cord), that gives a maximum range of 225 meters, and marksmanship at 75 meters.

- Another point but undetermined: the time when the feathering of arrows was invented, in order to stabilize the shaft on its trajectory. We can think that this improvement was immediate, or almost, because to send a very light stick twirling in space has no great interest. In spite of the devising of plastic fletching, more resistant to rain, shocks and handling, majority of current champions remain faithful to turkey or goose feathers (waterproofed).

Let us also notice that the archeologists found, in sites of the eighth thousand years and later hard stone “ arrow straightener,” and bone “shaft wrench” absolutely similar to those whom American Indians used hardly more than three centuries ago .

Man had understood, experimentally, that the accuracy of the shooting requires the use of shafts with constant length, diameter, weight, and flexibility.

The bow will remain, as a war weapon in Western Europe and Russia until the beginning of the 19th century. Archers of the English raid against the Isle of Rhe in 1627, Bashkir archers in the Army of the Tsar against Napoleon, in 1807, and 1812-1814.

Notice.

The arrowheads (and javelins) at the end of the Upper Paleolithic are among the first examples of the use of microliths (of course: a heavy head would have given a ridiculous range). It seems legitimate to wonder whether it is not by the means of these weapons, then of hunting primarily, that Man understood the interest of the three following things. Instead of wasting the major part of invaluable flint to be used as a handle to the edge, the scraper or the graver; it was preferable to assemble small flakes, microliths, on supports (handles) of hard wood, bone, reindeer antlers, Etc. By sticking them in grooves, pinching or/and binding. Other advantages: from now on the tool was reusable “indefinitely “ for example by being satisfied to replace blunted, or broken, microliths, by others. Lastly, to replace the stone surface for holding the tool, by that of a matter more adaptable to awaited work, formed a decisive progress.

It is certain that, without microliths, it had been quite difficult - to quote only one example of the Neolithic era - to harvest without the curved wooden sickle, with multiples small edges, or the straight harvest knife.

But we fall down here on the perpetual quarrel about the contribution, or the non-contribution, of armament, to the civil field.

PROTECTION.

Collective protection, i.e., fortification, appears at the beginnings of the Neolithic era, therefore at very different dates according to areas. The single case of Çatalhöyük put aside, the principles of fortificationS are practically identical everywhere in the world. Although it is not very probable that this

invention was spread like a slow wildfire because of the diversity of materials being able to be implemented. Indeed, the idea to use a height, natural as much as possible; to dig one or more concentric ditches; to use the soil extracted to increase the height of the scarp and, finally, to crown this scarp by a rampart covering the defender up to their chest, proceeds of the most elementary logic. In detail, however, if the “section” ditch + scarp is practically similar everywhere – from the first wall of Jericho to the “British camp “of Herefordshire -, the parapet itself, is made up of the means available on the spot. Rocks in Jericho, wooden palisades in soft ground, raw bricks elsewhere. But, very quickly, the elementary fortification will appear insufficient: where the material available makes it possible, as well as the population (enough many), the low height palisade is replaced by a rock rampart which foreshadows Mycenaean achievements.

This strengthening of fortification during the Neolithic era is especially marked for the zone stretching from the Eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea to Mesopotamia. Western Europe remains primarily on the stage of the rampart made of wooden stakes; what makes often difficult the distinction, in the actual position, between light fortification in plain and cattle pens. However, we find remainders of unambiguous achievements, combining low height ramparts with palisades, but also watchtowers and defense towers. In at least undulating, limestone and volcanic zones, giving cliffs, man used the heights which are connected to the main plateau only by a narrow strip of ground, therefore easy to defend; the rest being protected by the configuration of the ground itself. These “ends of earth” were very often favored places for the establishment and the persisting of cities, but with this disadvantage that the city, or the part of city defended by nature, can have only a limited surface. The inhabitants of the “low city “must therefore take refuge in the “high city “in the event of danger.

Let us also signal, at the end of the local Neolithic the strange “brochs” in Scotland: kinds of hollow donjons, or cylinders, with walls of such a thickness that cells or various compartments – rough and ready - and rooms for supplies storage, could be made in them. The establishment of these brochs on a rock ground - necessary to support a considerable weight without foundation - defied possible sap digging.

N.B. Some people view in them only British equivalents of the bories or boiries in France.

To conclude this paragraph on collective defense, let us point it out as soon as this first chapter the characteristics of the defense works, at least to the cannon (then with the engine combined with tracks and bombers).

- They make a restricted number of combatants able to resist an enemy force much more important. This gives time to join together relief troops in the backcountry - if there is one - or to await the arrival of allies; or to make the enemy give up his enterprise by discouraging it.

- They also make the not much trained individuals able to contribute to the fight with a better trained adversary. For example, from the top of a high wall, women and children can have a significant action by throwing heavy objects on the enemy making an assault.

Naturally, stocks of supplies and of projectiles, and a solid morale, are the essential supplement of all good fortification.

MOBILITY.

A. Land mobility.

Since the time of Australopithecus and until approximately the second half of the Neolithic era - once again, variable date according to areas - hominians could rely only on their legs to move, their arms or their shoulders to carry loads.

We already evoked the taming of draft animals, of pack animal, and of riding animals or mounts. We can notice that the oldest representations found in the Middle East show oxen harnessed to four wheeled carriages.

The invention of the wheel arouses problems. The general opinion is that in this first shape, primitive and heavy (boards connected by pegged crosspieces) it derives from that of the potter. A brilliant unknown would have had the idea to place the disc vertically, and to combine it with a second at each end of an axle. The wheel, single, of a wheelbarrow, is reproduced on the oldest Chinese representations of farm equipment. But pre-Colombian America was unaware of the wheel… The llama or the vicuna is too weak to be used as draft animals, but the non-existence of wheelbarrows shows that men who crossed the Strait of Bering, quite before the Neolithic era it is true, really did not know wheels. Almost incredible fact, there still existed in Europe of the beginnings of the 20th century populations which had never yet seen one wheel. It is what some allied units discovered in 1917, or in

1918, in very mountainous zones, close to the lake Okrida, towards the border between Greece and Montenegro. However, the paths of this area had given way to the carts carrying machine guns and ammunition, pulled by the mules, of these same units.

Let us return to what seems well to have been the first form of animal pulling that which uses cattle. It will be remarked that during a very long time, the yoke was only a kind of beam piece, fixed on the shaft of the wagon or of the swing-plow, tied by straps to the horns of the animal. The pulling effort consequently was only supported by these horns, therefore very limited; the strap passing under the neck of the animal was used only for better keeping the position of the aforesaid yoke (a kind of yoking that you find still in certain not very advanced areas). We do not know where nor when - in the Middle Ages, but between the fifth and eighth century - was invented the modern yoke, made to measure which, by encasing the forehead of an ox, uses it as a pushing surface; horns being useful only for its keeping in position.

From a military point of view, the cattle, too slow, has no great interest for the battle. On the other hand, the carriage can form the logistic means of transportation of the attackers of a city (supplies, scales, stock of projectiles). In the event of success, it makes it possible to bring back the casualties as well as a volume/weight of spoils much more important than what could have been transported on the back of men. We saw higher than the use of horses does not seem to have begun before the end of the Neolithic era. On the other hand, it is more than probable that the ass, undoubtedly domesticated before cattle, was used as a pack animal, even as a mount since, in spite of the legend, it is much more docile than the horse and easy to train. We do not know, unfortunately, when the mule “came on stage” in History: the oldest bas-reliefs hardly make it possible to distinguish between donkey and mule. However, more robust than the donkey, more frugal, docile and intelligent that the horse, we can suppose that its use was early.

In any event, the speed of the fighter of the Neolithic era was to be therefore that which his own capacities limit.

- 4 to 5 kilometers per hour between the pauses, for the long-distance stages and only three or four kilometers per hour if he must drive a team of cattle.

- 8 to 10 kilometers per hour on the distances of a few tens of kilometers, while scurrying along and while running after, to recover but this capacity is only accessible to robust and trained men.

- 20 to 25 kilometers per hour on a few hundred meters (i.e., 100 meters “dash “ in 14 to 18 seconds, but nature is not a stadium track and the combatant carries an armament).

B. Mobility on water.

There are no remains of boats of the Neolithic era in the Near and Middle East, perhaps because of the absence of peat bogs. Perhaps also because the first boats were made of material most easily available, bundles of rushes, of reeds, even of papyrus reeds in Egypt. This navigation means over rivers is still currently existing on the Tiger, the Euphrates, the Nile, as on the Lake Titicaca in the Andes Mountains, thousands of kilometers away, but it is precisely a material of very bad conservation. It would be surprising that at the time when pre-Neolithic Europe knew already monoxylous dugout, some zones culturally much more advanced, were very unaware of navigation, at least on rivers.

The technical skill of these men who, provided only with stone tools - axes, adzes, scrapers -, managed to dig these dugouts in a large tree log, is amazing. The examination of those whose remains were discovered (Holland - 8.000 years; France - 6.000 years, etc.) in peat bogs, showed that the digging out precisely was carried out according to a method still used by Indians and White “trappers “in the United States or in Canada in the first half of the 19th century. But with steel tools: planes, chisels and gouges, twibills and broad axes, instead of the old axes or adzes out of stone. Very summarily, after a cutting of the external shapes, the work was initially to light fireplaces of very small dimensions on the log; then the superficially carbonized wood was extracted with an adz. At the time of the stone tools, the operation was to be started again hundreds and hundreds times tirelessly before getting a bottom thickness of about 5 cm, and for the hull planking of about 1 centimeter only.

In the Eastern Mediterranean, more particularly in the Aegean Sea with multiple islands and small islands, the 4th thousand years sees narrow and long small boats, with a wooden frame, and edging made up of sewn skins, appear.

They will make colonization of islands possible and, already, trade exchanges between Western and Eastern shores of this sea, then, gradually, with Egypt which knows the commercial sailors of Crete, “Keftiu,” since before the year - 3.000. But, on the warlike level, the river navigation is probably more interesting for this time than that at sea, although it is necessary, in this field, to resort to the most probable hypothesis. What a river boat can bring to war? It could make some enterprises easier which, without it, would have imposed very long walks (while carrying supplies) to go up the river until finding a ford… Even very primitive, with only one or two men for paddles, it could be used for “heavy logistic transport “ in the outward journey if the river runs towards the city to attack; or for the transport of booty which does not move itself for the return, i.e., cereals, or various objects. Prisoners and conquered cattle, move by their own means, though well monitored, it goes without saying.

We can think that combats on water were undoubtedly exceptional, boats being used only as a means of moving. If there were, they were to be done with the throwing weapon until the boarding, then with a hand-to-hand fight. The ram, naval weapon by definition of the Antiquity, will be invented only at the first thousand years; moreover it can be set up only on very robust ships, with strong ribs and planking of boards, large enough to have many oarsmen.

SUPPORT.

The “health “support was to be nearly nothing for attackers; more exactly, reduced to the good will of their comrades if they had time. The townsmen, defenders, as for them, could be treated by women advised by “specialists “of the city: the wizard priests.

We say well: some women, and not, all the women of the city, because it seems quite constant, in the case of the peoples known as primitive, that women, if they do not take part in attacks contribute always vigorously to defense. During the contemporary time for example, in the Hmong tribes of Indochinese high plateaus (before their extermination by chemical weapons at the end of the years 1970), in front of the Vietminh, then Vietcong, enemy, the attack - some ambushes primarily - was the business of men. But for the defense of Hmong villages attacked by democrats * (the BoDoi of the Vietnamese democracy *), the adult women fought with the same eagerness as men, even with ferocity for those who had children.

This idea (that the young woman, the young mother especially, can be involved in the fury of fights) is, of course, in total opposition to our current concepts resulting from the Judeo-Greco-Roman tradition and is become the universal “standard “or almost.

It is there yet a very common reflex in the higher animal species: the mother defends her young with an inflexible tenacity; and that we want it or not, the evolution of mammals to men represents only a very small part of the lifespan on Earth.

The discovery, in the Neolithic ruins of villages, of skeletons of individuals, obviously, having been wounded in combat - for example, some fragments of arrowheads remained in a bone - but nevertheless having survived their wound - osseous scarring over -; show that this treatment was not always useless. However, mortality by infection of wounds was to be considerable.

* Official names, besides accepted a certain time by most of the international community. These official names call for the following detailed precision on our behalf.

The Athenian democracy, if we exclude women children slaves and foreigners (what makes many people nevertheless), was to apply only to approximately 4% of the population. Demetrius of Phalera gives an account of 21.000 citizens, 10.000 metics and 400.000 slaves. And for a citizen, there is a wife with children, that is to say if we consider three children per woman for example, 80.000 not citizens belonging to a family whose household head is a citizen. On the other hand, in order to fight against the professionalization of policy and against the devastation smoothy politickers can make in a democracy, Athenians resorted to the drawing lot for their magistrates and their legislative representatives, in the 500 members of the “boule.” What is efficient on. But we could arrive today at the same result while resorting to the e-voting at home 1).

In short,it is up to each one to consider suitable or not such a name : "democracy.”

Our opinion is that there was much more true democracy within a lost tribe of Amazonia coordinated by an old chief concerned “to involve” many people as possible in the making most important decisions (peace or war with the neighbors, the tribe leaves to settle elsewhere or remains still a year here?) or among the Celts of the Belgian Ambiorix (his power was of that nature, that the people had as much authority over him as he over the people. Caesar. B.G. Book V. Chapter XXVII); than in our modern democracies of Athenian type.

The conservatives, who are a minority, indeed occupy in it a dominating and favorable position. Even if the nature of the goods to be defended, real estate, movable and financial properties, makes them enter in competition, they profit from a great advantage: an unquestionable, present and tangible goal mobilizes them and links them, the protection of their goods and their increase. You are conservative only because you have goods to preserve by all means. But if the poor "vote for the right-wing,” it is unfortunately because they find their interest there, it is said: the search for favors by means of vote-catching appears more effective to them than the respect of the Legitimate Right to get what they would not be entitled to have through their only merits! Paul Villach. Agora Vox, February 11, 2011).

In other words, the democracies which are not “ of the left-wing” “hold out” because they are based on the natural selfishness of the human beings, and this selfishness although it varies according to individuals, of course, makes that the democracies of the right (in fact some oligarchies or plutocracies), without being eternal, appear without any doubt among the most stable government systems [strongly] helped in that by the establishments of dominant ideology which includes mainly, in addition to the media, legal system, religion and often also, alas, school.

N.B. “Strongly” is from us, because it seems to us that the author has a little tendency to underestimate their weight regarding the media, and he shrugs off a little quickly the concept of alienation, that I would have a tendency, personally, to rename “human stupidity.” It is enough to see the forums or the reactions of readers in certain fields (racism, Islam, role of State, etc.) many of the aforesaid reactions being explained only by the explosive mixture of unknowing and lack of intelligence, or by the lack of general knowledge and of thoroughgoing critical reflection , if you prefer. The prize in the matter without any doubt being held by the subject it is agreed to designate or stigmatize by the words “racism” or “antiracism” 2).

But let us return to our sheep, as it is said in this neck of the woods: democracy. The majority of our current societies are in fact not true democracies but oligarchies, plutocracies, when they are not quite simply “aristocracies.”

As for the true democracies, there are especially two great types of them, parliamentary or indirect democracies and direct democracies (as in the Swiss canton of Glaris or in the Iroquois tribes) renamed populism by the experts (intellectual professional sportsmen journalists and other elites of this type) in democracy 3).

However, it goes without saying we are neither for neither against democrats, neither for neither against republicans, neither for neither against monarchy, neither for neither against royalists, loyalists, right-wing, left wing, etc.,etc. That concerns each one only as a citizen or a subject (of his/her Majesty).

1) The e-voting at home making it possible to preserve the anonymity and secrecy of the vote supposes sufficient idea debates as a preliminary to inform opinions on the issues, therefore

- of quality,

- having much culture and general knowledge,

- showing hindsight and reflection,

- critical thinking,

- but also modesty even humility (I know, to think that a little more modesty and humility would not do harm in our world it is already Communism-Nazism or Hitlerism-Stalinism,

- intellectually honest,

- materially uninterested,

- showing a minimum of altruism

2) Definition of a racist. It is very simple: racists, they are others!

Non-racism or more precisely non-racialism, i.e., the fact of not being obsessed with racial questions and with the existence (or the non-existence) of races, but of being especially concerned with justice and freedom, is perfectly rational.

The antiracism itself, as any religion, has nothing to do with intelligence nor with knowledge, it is not a rational movement but a conditioned reflex, a little like in the case of the famous dog of Pavlov,

consisting in wanting or supporting simultaneously two things even three, completely contradictory, what is properly incoherent; i.e., diversity but also interbreeding, while refusing to recognize a mulatto or mixed race ( mixed blood) where he is precisely; for example, by systematically calling “Black” a mulatto or a quadroon, even an octoroon, by denying so or by disavowing so his also white roots, under the words of the idiotic rule of “one drop is enough” .

But diversity as well as interbreeding are as rigorously contradictory as freedom and equality, because it goes without saying universal interbreeding will be able only to put an end to diversity, by definition, if it comes to its end. One should therefore only be moderate or measured on this subject. Perhaps best consists in taking note without encouraging it nor rejecting it, by not morally or legally lobbying to promote it, but by being satisfied in this respect, only with the play or laws of pure love and chance, because it is true that it can sometimes (not always) contribute to forming a beautiful and rich personality, from the bodily as well as moral, point of view, moreover, let us say more than the average; and as regards the remainder let us support ethnic differentialism or development of differences.

3) Definition of populists. There too, it is very simple: the populists they are the others!

MESOLITHIC ERA IN SCOTLAND.

In the Palaeolithic (-20,000 years) all Northern Europe, from Ireland to Russia via (Northern) Germany, was covered with ice. Human life is therefore only possible from the south of the British Isles to the Ukraine through central Europe, or around the Mediterranean, even in the Near East.

Neanderthal man has disappeared to give way to modern man or homo sapiens known as Cro-Magnon man (first wave -45000 years, second wave -30000 years).

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)It is only after ice had disappeared that Scotland became livable, around 9.600 years Common Era. The hunter gatherers of the Mesolithic era then extend their zone of habitat as far as Scotland. A dwelling fireplace dated back to 8.500 before Common Era approximately was found in Cramond close to Edinburgh. Pits and traces of holes made by piles suggest the existence of a camp, and some of the stone tools found on the site are previous to those of the same style found in England. The many burned off hazel nut shells found, indicate that the way of cooking in this place was similar to that of the other known sites of the Mesolithic era, of which those of Star, and of Howick House in Northumberland.

Other sites on the east coast and along the lochs and rivers, as well as the many troglodyte shelters and the heaps of empty shells which were found, evoke very mobile people. Occupying some sites in a seasonal way, and using boats at the same time for fishing or transport of tools. Discoveries of flint tools on Ben Lawers and at Glen Dee (a mountain in the Cairngorms), draw up us the picture of people able to cross Scotland through its hills.

Shelters and remains of shells at Sand, opposite the Isle of Skye in Scotland, made it possible to show that about 7.500 years before Common Era; these hunter gatherers had made tools of bones, stone, and antlers. They lived on shells, fish, and deer, and used stones as pots. Shells were also used to make necklaces or to provide crimson dye.

The arrival of agriculture in the Neolithic era contributed to the extension of the permanent dwellings. At Balbrindie, in the area of Aberdeen, pits and holes found in the ground reveal the presence of a large building made with timbers, dating back to 3.600 before the Common Era.

The villages of pile dwellings or lake dwellings type. Quite a particular type of lake dwellings appreciably different from the Continent existed in Scotland: the crannog (but also crannog or crannoge). Crannog is the name given in Scotland like in Ireland to a natural or artificial island used as dwellings. The name is also used for wooden platforms built on not very deep water in the lochs, mainly during the Neolithic era. However, few remains of these buildings reached us. Fish abundance, and sense of security, seem to have been the reasons for the occupation of these crannog. The building of a crannog begins on a small island or in shallow water located on a loch, or in a marshy zone. At this place oak timber piles are then driven in forming a circle approximately 60 meters in diameter. The piles are joined by hundreds of hazel stems woven together. The interior of this unit is then filled, initially with tree trunks, then branches, stones, clay, peat and other materials resulting from the soil. In the center, a large flat stone hearth is built, and a wood dwelling built around. Several dwellings were sometimes built on a single crannog. This prehistoric fortification was occupied by a family or a tribe, and the access was often done using a dugout. However, much of these crannogs were connected to the dry land by means of stone or wooden roadways, sometimes built just under the water level, therefore allowing a greater safety against possible intruders. Bones of cattle, Elaph stag and pig were found during the excavations.

On the small island of Eilean Domhnuill, on the island of North Uist, shards of pottery suggest a date ranging between 3.200 and 3.800 years before the common era, which would make it oldest known crannog.

At Knap of Howar, on the island of Papa Westray in the Orkney Archipelago, a farmstead dated back to the Neolithic era and in an exceptional state of preservation is perhaps the oldest stone dwelling in

the North of Europe. The carbon-14 dating showing that it was occupied from the 35th to the 31st century before Common Era, that is to say approximately five hundred years earlier than the similar houses in Skara Brae.

The farmstead includes two buildings with high walls of approximately 1, 60 m, of rectangular forms but rounded, with each one an entrance very low and facing the sea. Largest and oldest of the two ones is contiguous with the other one, which is generally regarded as a workshop or a second house. There is no window, but the presence of a hole in the ceiling makes us think of ventilation in order to let the smoke pass.

The stone pieces of furniture remained intact. The hearths, the upright slabs, the stone benches and the pits, were preserved; the presence of holes indicates that there was a roof.

According to the clues found in the thrash of the time, the occupants bred cattle, sheep or also pigs; farmed barley and wheat, ate fish as well as shells, including species for which fishing at sea was necessary.

At Skara Brae, in the Orkneys, the found houses are very similar, but this time gathered in a village and connected between them by low and very narrow passages.

The houses, of an average surface of 40 square meters, had a broad square room containing a large hearth, which was to be used for making the cooking and being warmed. As there were few trees on the island, the inhabitants of Skara Brae used driftwood rejected by the ocean, whalebones and some thatch to cover their houses.

The lodgings contain a certain number of stone built pieces of furniture like cupboards, dressers, seats and closed beds (by broad stones) or storage boxes. The village profited even from a sophisticated system of drainage which perhaps included a primitive shape of toilets in each dwelling.

This site was occupied from 3000 to 2500 before Common Era. As for the found pottery, they are pottery of Grooved ware type, a style which is found in Great Britain, to Wessex.

MESOLITHIC ERA IN IRELAND.

The hunter gatherers of the Mesolithic era ate fish and shells, birds, wild boar even hazel nut. They hunted with spears, arrows and harpoons equipped with thin flint heads named microliths. They supplemented their food diet by gathering nuts, fruits, and berries.

The arrival of the first men in Ireland does not date back beyond the Mesolithic era. It is around 8.000 before Common Era that human small groups, undoubtedly from Scotland, settled in the North-East of the island; on the banks of Lough Neagh and of the Bann River, where some cut flints were found.

It is generally admitted that these first inhabitants colonized initially the North-East of the island coming from Scotland.

Living on hunting and gathering, they were spread towards the West and the South of the country. They lived in seasonal shelters which they built with skins of animals stretched on a simple wooden frame. The hearth for the cooking was located outside the hut.

Even if the sea level were at the time, much lower than it is it at the present time, Ireland was probably already an island when the first human ones came by boat. That is hardly surprising since the first sites inhabited in the Mesolithic era are located along the coasts.

Obviously, these first inhabitants were therefore sailors, or at least people who depended largely on the sea for their subsistence. This irrefutable fact was partly due to the natural elements: they had to wait for centuries so the stripped permafrost gives way to fertile and timbered soils.

The Mesolithic era (8 000 before Common Era - 4.500 before Common Era) therefore represents in Ireland the oldest period of human settlement. Establishments of hunter gatherers were found in a half-dozen sites. Mount Sandel close to Coleraine in Northern Ireland, Woodpark in County Sligo, the Shannon Estuary, at Lough Boora in County Offaly, at Curran in the county Antrim. And on some smaller sites in Munster. The population then should not have exceeded a few thousands of individuals.

NEOLITHIC ERA IN IRELAND.

The transitional period between Mesolithic and Neolithic era in Ireland is marked by the first traces of breeding. They were found on the archeological site of Ferriter's Cove on the Dingle Peninsula.

These Neolithic populations therefore became breeders but also farmers as the excavations of the accesses of Lough Gur in the County Limerick show it.

Agriculture began around the fifth thousand years before Common Era. Sheep, goats, cattle, and cereals, were imported from the South-west of continental Europe. The population of the island increased significantly. New waves of newcomers, circa 4.000 before Common Era, mixed up with the first occupants.

In addition to agriculture, the Neolithic era also experimented the bringing in Ireland of pottery, as well as the use of more elaborate stone tools. It was thought for a long time that these innovations were due to the arrival of a new wave of settlers, but there is no obvious evidence of such a large-scale invasion at this period of Irish history. It seems rather than the revolution of the Neolithic era comes from long and slow evolution, resulting from trade and cultural exchanges with agricultural communities in Great Britain or on the Continent.

The most outstanding characteristic of the Neolithic era in Ireland, in addition to the lake villages or lake houses of the crannog type, is the sudden appearance of megalithic monuments, and their spectacular growth. Most important of these monuments were obviously important sanctuaries for Neolithic population. In the majority of those which were excavated, human remains, generally cremated were found, but not systematically. Funerary offerings, pottery, arrowheads, pearls,

pendants, axes, etc., were also unearthed. These megalithic monuments, more than 1.200 are now listed, are divided into four distinct groups.

Burial mounds type cairns. The hillock is entirely made of stones. They are characterized by the presence of a short passage grave (a kind of stone cist, relatively long, for a cist). We almost exclusively find them in the North of the island, and they belong to the oldest monuments.

Burial mounds type tumuli. The hillock is made of stones but also of earth. They form the smallest group as regards their number, but are most impressive by their size and their importance. They are located mainly in North and East of the island. Largest and best known having been discovered in the four large Neolithic “cemeteries” of the Bru Na Boinne, Loughcrew (both in County Meath) Carrowkeel and Carrowmore, in the County Sligo.

According to some authors, Carrowkeel and Carrowmore would be the two megalithic sites which would have given to the Celtic Fir Bolg bards of the fifth century before Common Era, the idea to fix there the place of the famous battle of their still pan-Celtic myths, having taken place between gods and demons, or men and god-or-demons (first or second battle of Mag Tuired).

But best known of all today is the tumulus of the Bru Na Boinne (Newgrange), World heritage listed. It is one of the aligned on the stars monument, which is oldest in the world. It was built circa 3.200 years before the Common Era. In December's solstice, the first sunbeams enter by an opening made above the entrance of the tomb, and illuminate the death chamber which is in the center of the burial mound. The tumulus of Knowth contains several engraved flagstones perhaps in connection with the moon. One of the flagstones surrounding the base of the mound comprises over all its length an outline in which recent work recognizes a month of the lunar calendar made up of 29 elements; 22 crescents which form the base and sides of a large ellipse topped by seven circles forming a kind of celestial vault in the upper part. Under 17 crescents forming the flatten out base and the sides of a large ellipse, a spiral with five turns, the top of which covers the bottom of the three median crescents, would represent the three days of the new moon. Inside this ellipse, a sine curve with 15 periods running from one end to another could represent the alternation of the night and of the day during each fortnight. We therefore recognize there already several of the characters specific to the calendar which will be that of Celts; the situation of the two major phases of the moon, the new moon and full moon, in the middle of the flagstone - one at the bottom, the other at the top - three days of the new moon, alternation 29/30 days of lunation, the two fortnights…At least according to Martin Brennan’s study of the kerb stone 52 of Knowth in "the stones of time"

Dolmens of the type Portal tombs. The majority are gathered in two units, one in the South-east of the island (the dolmens of Knockeen and of Gaulstown in the County Waterford are exceptional examples of them), and the other in the North of the island.

Dolmens type wedge-shaped gallery graves. It is an Irish shape of dolmens, named therefore by reference to the shape of the death chamber, which ends in a wedge (marked by a contracting of the west towards the east of the width and of the height). It is the largest and most widespread of the four groups. These monuments are particularly present in the West and the South-west of Ireland. The County of Clare has many of them. It is the most recent unit of the four types of megalithic monuments that we have just mentioned; it dates back to the Neolithic era.

The theory, according to which these four groups of monuments would be associated with four different waves of the settlement, always has its supporters, but no archeological trace makes it possible to confirm it. They could be very well some local expressions of world practice. The growth of the population necessary for their construction cannot be caused by the arrival of new migrants. It was perhaps only the simple consequence of the introduction of agriculture.

When the Neolithic era was peaking, the population of Ireland probably exceeded 100.000 individuals, until perhaps reaching the bar of 200.000.

It is considered for example that at that time the island of Achill was peopled with approximately 500 to 1.000 persons. A paddle dating back to this period was found in a crannog close to Dookinelly. The island was covered with forests until its first inhabitants begin to farm the ground.

THE CHÉIDE FIELDS.

(Or fields of the low hill in Gaelic: Achaidh Chéide, discovered in 1930.)

One of the oldest types of cultural landscape or of a village’s territory due to the man (8 km North-West of Ballycastle, County Mayo).

At Achaidh Chéide, in County Mayo, a vast system of fields of the Neolithic era, undoubtedly one of oldest in the world, was found, preserved under a thick layer of peat.

The peat bog which covers the hill today did not always exist. The peat is today 1, 5 meter thick. 4.000 years ago, at the time of the pyramids in Egypt, the layer of peat had a thickness from hardly 0, 30 meter. And 5.000 years ago, at the time of the Neolithic era, there was absolutely no peat, but a fertile soil. What did happen therefore? Ni Ansa!

As we have had the opportunity to see it, men of the Neolithic era arrived in Ireland, on board boats, approximately 6.000 years ago. They are breeders and farmers. They bring cattle, sheep, and these animals existing not there in a wild state.

On their arrival, they found a vigorous forest of pines, hazel trees, oaks, and birches, which they cut down with their stone axes, or cleared by fire, to get fields and meadows necessary for breeding.

The climate hotter than today made pasture possible all the year. Breeding produced meat, milk, skin and wool.

These Men of the Neolithic era were also farmers. They sowed wheat and barley, already well known in continental Europe. They used a plow to work the soil (a stone plowshare traced the furrow).

They handled more than 250.000 tons of stone to build the kilometers of walls surrounding their meadows or their fields (the achaidh constitute a unit of small fields separate each from other by dry stone low walls).

The “Achaidh Chéide” were therefore farmed during many centuries between 3.500 and 3.000 before our era. These men lived in long and rectangular houses having a large central room with a hearth to make fire.

With clay, they made pottery which they cooked in a very simple kiln (the pottery resemble those of many areas of Europe). Because the pottery appeared about the same time as agriculture. Crockery similar to that which was found in the north of England was unearthed in Ulster (Lyle’s Hill) and in Limerick. The typical pieces of this pottery are bowls with broad mouth and round bottom.

RETURN ON THE LAST HUNTERS-GATHERERS.

We actually know very little thing of the first occupants of Ireland either it is of Mesolithic communities in Ulster, of Neolithic tribes to whom the megaliths of the Boyne River refer, or of the populations of the Bronze Age of whom we locate traces in the Wicklow mountains. Fenians of Ireland, descendants of the great hunters of stags of prehistory, are described in the old Irish manuscripts as a military fraternity, moving in the margin of tribal communities and subjected to the orders of a supreme king, of whose most famous was the hero named Vindos Camulogenos or Finn MacCumhaill in Gaelic language.

These last hunter gatherers halting in the initial silva (the hercynian forest) undoubtedly used to spend their nights near a water point and gathered at the foot of one tree with protective foliage. In addition Ialon means clearing, but also village in old Celtic.

The poem ascribed to the anatiomaros or great initiate called Vindosenos/Fintan, in the account in Gaelic language entitled “Suidigud tellaig temra,” is very clear in this regard.

“One day I passed through a wood in West Munster, I took away with me a red yew berry and I planted it in the garden of my court, and it grew up there until it was as big as a man. Then I removed it from the garden and planted it on the lawn of my court even, and it grew up in the center of that lawn so that I could fit with a hundred men under its foliage. The yew protected me from wind, from rain, from cold and from heat. I remained and so did my yew flourishing together until it shed its foliage from decay. Then I went and cut it from its stock, and made from it seven vats, seven ians, and seven drolmachs, seven churns, seven pitchers, seven milans, and seven methars with hoops for all of them. So I remained then and my yew vessels with me until their hoops fell off through decay and age. “

Later at the time during the perpetuation of these makeshift camps and their change into villages made up of some houses coalman’s hut deep in the woods, the primordial tree was obviously preserved. The territory of the clan widening over the years, the primordial tree ended up being found in the center of a vast cleared zone forming the very territory of the tribe.

Because of its sexual symbolism; this gigantic tree in the middle of the original clearing was also probably more or less consciously compared to the celestial phallus of a deity, fertilizing therefore permanently the mother earth (hierogamy). And the spring running at its foot became as the semen of the god-or-demon in question.

Text showing this ancient Celtic belief in a cosmic Bilios: the notice of the Felire Oenguso céli dé or martyrology of Oengus the culdee. It reports in connection with the date of April 20th:

The feast of the saints of Europe: there was a great tree in Rome; and the heathen worshipped it till the Christian saints fasted that it might fall, et statim cecidit.

Féil… noéb Eorapa.i.crann mor boi ir-Roim co n-adradais na geintlige hé, co ro troiscet na cristaide far nemaib na hEorpa co taethsad in crann, et statim cecidit.

In the initial design that the texts describe, the roots of the cosmic tree reach the deepest earth, while its summit reaches the sky. The cosmic tree is of no particular species, and has no particular fruit (apple, nut or acorn). It is a symbol of the life and it is sometimes a bearer of fruits which give or prolong the life, even which gives knowledge. This idea (of a sacred tree in the middle of the village or of the borough) left traces in toponymy.

As goes along the deployment of the first human community in the area, by clearing of new spaces; this first glade around the primordial tree (the country) obviously ended, too, in having the appearance of an original clearing at the origin of everything. And the bilios a symbol that enemies hastened to cut down as soon as they could, of course.

There was a pine tree in the middle of the city, of a most pleasing delightfulness. On its branches Germanus used to hang the heads of the beasts caught by him, to win applause for his great hunting.

Amator, the distinguished bishop of the same city, often used to urge him with the following utterances: "I beg you, most illustrious gentleman, stop pursuing this foolishness, which is odious to Christians and worthy of imitation by pagans. This is an act of idolatrous worship, not of dignified Christian tradition." And although the worthy man of God continued unceasingly, nevertheless Germanus was by no means willing to agree or to obey his advice. The man of the Lord again and again exhorted him not only to stop this evil custom which he had taken up, but also to destroy the tree itself, lest it be an object of resentment to Christians. But Germanus was to no degree willing to lend a kindly ear to Amator's advice.

Around the time of this attempt at persuasion, one day the aforementioned Germanus departed from the city to his own estates. Then the blessed Amator, waiting for the opportunity, cut down the accursed tree with its roots. Lest it serve as a reminder to the unbelievers, he at once ordered the tree to be burned with fire. What hung down and served as a reminder of his deeds or of a trophy of his hunt, as it were, he ordered thrown far from the city walls (life of Saint Amator bishop of Auxerre by Stephen the African. Chapter IV).

The oak of Brécc in Ireland (Dairbre Brécce) undoubtedly was the target of the same hatred from Christian authorities: the king of Connaught was no longer entitled to hang his spoils in it.

Trees and forests or groves appear in many Irish legends. There is in Ireland, as many cosmic trees as provinces.

This tree is generally an oak, but that can also be an apple tree (in the case of islands in the other world) a yew a pine a hazel tree, etc. The Bilios which was standing up in the middle of the Teres Biuotion or Land of the Living, Tir Na mBéo in Gaelic language, was to be also a tree of this kind. A spring spouts then generally at its foot, a spring in which there are salmons living on its fruits (case of the yew of Mugna).

The legends concerning the origin of the place names mention five sacred trees as well as a grove of hazel trees beside the source of the river Boyne.

The Suidigud tellaig Temra notes that a mysterious giant called Trefuilngid Tre Eochair one day brought a branch bearing hazel nuts apples and acorns. The person by the name Vindosenos/Fintan put these fruits in the soil and they gave the old tree of Tortu (Tortan bile) the yew of Ross (Eo Ruis), the yew of Mugna (Eo Mugna), the branchy tree of Dathe as well as the sacred tree of Uisnech (Uisneg bile). Apparently oldest in the country.

The Tree of Ross, the Tree of Mugna, the Ancient Tree of Dathe, the Branching Tree of Uisnech and the

Ancient Tree of Tortu, those are the five trees. The Tree of Ross is a yew. North-east as far as Druim

Bairr it fell, as [the book named] Druim Suithe ("Ridge of Science") sang:

Tree of Ross...

Noblest of trees

Glory of Laginians *,

Dearest of bushes.

Now the Branchy Tree of Belach is an ash, and it is it that killed the poet Dathen, and it fell upwards as far as Carn Uachtair Bile, and it is from it the Fir Bile are named.

Now the Tree of Mugna is an oak, and it fell due southward, over Mag n-Ailbe, as far as the Pillar of the Living Tree. Nine hundred bushels was its crop of acorns, and three crops it bore every year, to wit, marvelous apples, nuts round, blood red, and acorns brown, ridgy.

The Tree of Tortu was an ash, and it fell due southeastwards as far as Cell Ichtair Thire.

Due northward fell the Ash of Usnech, as far as Granard in Cairbre, at the time of the sons of Aed Slane (Rennes Dindsenchas. Extracts from the book of Leinster. Whitley Stokes).

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Three of these trees were therefore ashes, the bile of Tortu, the branchy tree of Dathe and the bile of Uisnech. Two were yews: the éo of Ruis and the éo of Mugna, but some variants of these legends also make the latter... an oak. Not simple! The tree of Tortu was called therefore; because it was supposed to have one day sheltered all the men of Tortu. St Patrick would have built a chapel there, but the tree would have been cut down in the year 600.

The word “bile” indicating a remarkable and particular tree, produced the following place names: Billy (County of Antrim), Movilla, close to Newtownards (plain of the sacred tree), Crevilly close to Ballymena (Craig an Bhile = rock of the sacred tree). For instance, also,the town of Billom in France, which had to be one of these old primordial clearings in which a sacred tree took center stage, like many other places in the same case.

During the clearing of a glade intended to make the group able to practice its worship open-air (nemeton), its religious rites, people undoubtedly proceeded in the same way that during the establishment of first villages in the initial silva. They took a particularly commanding tree, an oak for example, and they released the ground around it.

During the construction or building of a place of worship, no longer in the middle of a forest, but in open country, they also placed squared tree trunks (some logs) or wooden poles representing this primordial tree. Bilios therefore means in the beginning tree trunk, but also, by a shift of sense (metonymy), pole or axis mundi.

* Celts of the linguistic family of Gailioin.

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REFLECTION ON THE CHÉIDE OF MAYO COUNTY

(reflection on the distant ancestors without whom we would not be there).

Preliminary remarks about the notion of work. Work. What human being does to provide, directly, or indirectly (what differentiates man from animal) for his individual survival (to eat to drink to warm himself to get dressed to house himself to defend himself to treat himself) or collective (same things but for the children) even more (burials of dead, recreation, leisure and so on). A wolf which tracks its prey is therefore at work. The prehistoric hunter-gatherers who collected wild bays or fruits to feed or nourish their children were therefore also already at work. Work therefore was before even money, salaries, employers and rich men, or women, appear. Unless, of course, to consider as an employer the chief of the tribe or the elders of the village who coordinate a little the activities of their group. What is definitely inappropriate from the point of view of semantics. Work as such is consubstantial with mankind since even apes work in the strictest sense of the word (activity in order to survive). Work as such was before salaried work. Those who in their reasoning, voluntarily or not, conflate work in general and SALARIED work, are promoted berks *, some big bastards if it is voluntarily (even if they wrote hundreds books, made hundreds movies, won hundreds contests) who, in addition to their deep stupidity, also have selfishness (their own or that of some others: their readership, their spectators, their sponsors, etc.) rooted deep inside. O damned human stupidity!

* As one of our more famous Irish proverbs says (but it could just as easily be French considering the intellectual and moral mediocrity - see the extent of their knowledge and the profundity of their reflection, their connection with money, fame, power – of the intellectuals or elites: journalists politickers, sportsmen, authors, writers, Gods men, in this country today even if it has been a great nation, the eighth world power): cuir síoda ar ghabhar agus is gabhar i gconaí é! (Even dressed in silk a goat remains a goat!)

Sustainable or convivial degrowth. In a finite world like ours, economic development cannot be infinite. The consumption and production rate cannot be indefinitely increased nor even kept, insofar as the creation of wealth measured by economic indicators as the GDP corresponds to destruction of the natural capital as well as of the life’s quality (fresh air, serenity, human relationship). It is therefore necessary to come to a controlled, rational but also fair decrease (i.e., beginning with the rich persons) of mass consumption and of economic activity; by returning little by little to a voluntarily simpler way of life, a little in the way of the pastoral romance of Honore d'Urfe (but in a more realistic way of course), or in the manner of Henry David Thoreau (and this starting with that of the richest men or women so that their example is an incentive to do the same thing).

Preliminary remarks about the word “terroir” which will be used on several occasions in the continuation of this chapter. From Latin terratorium “territory,” coming from terra = land. Farms of the same small geographical area therefore having jointly soil, and weather conditions, interaction of both contributes to giving their products unique qualities. This notion of terroir is often used as regards wine of coffee or tea, in order to speak about the particular characteristics that the geography, the geology and the climate of certain places therefore, give to their crops, and particularly wine coffee tea like some other comparable products (honey, milk, and so on…). In France the word rather often has also in the mouth of city people (or urban people), with regard to the inhabitants of the aforesaid terroirs, a rather negative or pejorative connotation which is also found in the stereotypes concerning the country bumpkins who never left their clod of earth and the music of the same name (known as traditional even folk music).

!--------------- ------------------------ ------------------------!

We conceal, under the easy term of Prehistory, the ignorance in which we are of the times when our western rural civilization was worked out. This ignorance is maintained by the lack of epigraphic and written documents or accounts but it is much more the consequence of the calm of these rural societies devoted to the peaceful farming of the soil. And yet, it is not necessary to go far to

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contemplate in our countryside witnesses of foundation!… At every step, in front of you, around you, before your feet, from a movement which rises it hardly from the ground, the authentic witness of such an enterprise emerges. It has nothing pathetic, and yet it is absolute. With each one of our steps, we bump into the ruins of an initial countryside. Many current things always upright, always active, are the persistent continuation of the initial elements of countryside. Our villages remain faithful to the initial site. Under the substructure of our newest and most taken roads thousands-year-old traces buried in their foundations often persist. The human habits did not change very much. The things are in their former place. Relief, always the same, brings, to the same places where the sources burst, the same confluence of waters, the same meeting of the roads, and the same gathering of homes or humans… the layouts persevere; the fields are the same ones; the pastures are ancient; and the edge of the forests is still that whose foliage trembled before the first human plowing…

Under our tragic history these deep layers rest in peace. There - happy and without account remains- sleep centuries which have nothing to tell but the humble life of each day, of generations without violence, without history, without another memory than the experiment, without other conquests that of daily bread! … Nothing speaks us about them! … Nothing. If it is not their work! …

If we apply to them the rule we release from historical experience, and if we measure their prosperity as its length with the expansion of the assarting or of the clearings they did or of the fields they created; this rule, applied even with hesitation, enables us to foresee the ageless antiquity and the peaceful greatness of this rural civilization. For that matter its extraordinary duration is deduced as much from spiritual signs than from the extent of its material work. It is in this succession of calm thousands of years that the collection of memories and of traditions, which are still, for current men, behind the foundations of their moral being, was formed.

This rural civilization which fills Neolithic ages, and was completely developed at the Bronze Age, stopped when iron, fatal weapons, and war, appeared.

A nature that the man fashioned for his service, which he made through his works, and filled up with his tasks… here is what defines the farmed countryside. This rustic creation is the great work of men. Everywhere else, in the cities, on the ground, on the sea, in the very sky, the human effort is always intermittent, even accidental. Man disperses and details his work over Space and Time; he breaks and disseminates his activity. He draws it always according to a mood which varies with the liking of the intimate and disordered genius he bears in him. And even the mind works are not the least witness of this disorder or of these spasms of human toil.

But the creation of countryside is the human work done in the continuity of all the.. generations; it is the human work which, developed on the natural theme of seasons, carry out the conquest of the land, and the adaptation of the ground to needs and wills of man. Tilling and pasture; the oldest and most lasting tasks… Daily tasks like bread and food… Regular tasks like the beating of hours and days between the Sun and the Earth… It is the old work which never ceased since original times when Man received communication of his hard destiny and it is the work which will last as much as the human being on earth. All that comes from mankind has a precarious and deciduous life. Only the countryside he created remains the work which lasts forever.

Rupnel (1871-1945). But for what is following it is better to stick to what current historical science says to us about the hunter-gatherers and the emergence of agriculture in Western or Northern Europe (Danubian linear ceramics or Mediterranean cardium pottery, both from the Near East); Rupnel is especially a poet.

“Organized” countryside, with grouped villages, with "lengthened but also combined “fields, is characteristic of Western Germany, Netherlands, North-East of France and England. The village gathers in it all rural population; and the agrarian territory, which stretches around each one of these built-up areas is divided in many, long, thin and parallel, plots, grouped in massive blocks. This layout of plots was always and sometimes remains still, combined with the use of the communally owned pasture (Editor's Note: as crofts in Scotland since 1886) and of the three-field-crop rotation. This countryside with stripped appearance therefore is that of the “old terroirs.” It is primarily the true “countryside.” It dates back to a time much older than historians could or dared to suspect. It corresponds to an era of civilization defined by precise characteristics. It depends on a systematic

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organization of agricultural work within the framework of a regime which was originally communal, and whose remains build the manorial regime of the Middle Ages.

In most parts of Western Europe, the material features are indeed in all places the same ones. Everywhere land bears witness of this unity of work; everywhere on it the design identity and the analogy of results express themselves. As we will see it in all our development, and without it be possible for us to escape from the obviousness of the numerous records, it is quite an agricultural civilization; stretching over an immense area, totally created, with a put in order or rational arrangement, and carried out since the earliest antiquity, released from preparatory outlines and from preliminary experiments! …

This modest essay aims to restore in its rights this ancient agricultural civilization. The ground of which preserves the features but also bears the ruins, from which man received his social determination. And which contained in this way the genesis of our institutions, as it was already the raw material of our spiritual lives, and as it remains the substance of our deepest and of our most seductive memories.

All that we will try to write will have no other intention than only to show this unity, this power and this persistence of the initial work, of this ancient and rural koine. Whose ruins remain active, whose forms have still a soul, whose destinies continue.

The creation of the countryside is the work characteristic of our West. It is the nature and the spirit of its civilization. It is as particular for him as the development of the “polis «was for Mediterranean societies. Plowing, wheat sowing, grazing grounds, paths in the fields, are a work as filled up of ethnic sense and of achieved destinies, as the acropolises in Greece.

Here the man is the son of the earth which engraved and colored the features of his face and of his soul or of his mind. There it is unceasingly and everywhere that the earth “became man “. We are the oldest people of farmers in History: this is our race… [Terminology by Rupnel].

But the work was so great that to find for it first the conditions and the domain of its realization, it is necessary not only to give to it the past ad the extent of Neolithic times; but also to level this vastness, to remove in it the uneven piece of ground and the incident, to get these former centuries straight, in a word to make peace prevail over these thousands of years without history, which had a name only through their graves.

The foundation of countryside was a long-term work , which could be worked out only in the vast quietude of time without violence and of a resting environment. The work required a systematic effort; of which continuity as well as regularity imply a regime of peace.

This peace regime was that of the Western societies during the Neolithic era and until the end of the Bronze Age.

It is generally refused to admit that ancient mankind could enjoy a rest and a peace that our time doesn't experiment. For many historians, Neolithic and even Eneolithic periods, because of the changes which would appear in them, seem times of disorders and of violent invasions. They see in these barbarian ages only tragic conflicts, fights of peoples, and competitions of clans, continuous and violent disorder. “… What wars were waged then! What massacres perpetrated! Slavery was the fate of the vanquished, who died out gradually“ (Morgan, Prehistoric Man, a general outline of prehistory, but it sounds like Schure The great initiates).

This barbarian fury, this bellicose irritation, our older historical texts nevertheless contradict it. Pytheas visited seas and coasts of Western Europe up to the north of Norway. “He landed more than one hundred times, and each time he was treated as a friend, people showing him the country and providing him also some guides. “ Celtiberians of the rough Iberia celebrated the traveler. The Germans of Elba recognized divine guests in the Romans of Tiberius. The anecdote relating to the foundation of Marseilles is not less significant. And all the accounts of the people of Antiquity agree therefore to recognize to North people a deserved reputation for benevolence and equity.

Of course, they are there only partial accounts, collected already at the threshold of History. But quite before these writings, the facts themselves also speak.

Neolithic times appear to us in this marvelous continuity which betrays ages without disorder. Human industries evolve there in their types in such a regular manner that we are quite forced to recognize there a development that no disturbance comes to stop or trouble the course.

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Not once, in these thousands of years, a sudden appearance in the tools or in the funerary furniture comes to reveal a violent arrival, to reveal the brutal gesture of History. These slow changes these gradual improvements are not the consequence of abrupt irruptions and no victorious invader came to impose his frightening beneficence.

At the beginning of the Neolithic era, it is in the very West, and on the spot, that the elements of a new technique born from the places were worked out, and which drew its origins from the traditions of old ages or from indigenous memories. And all the following times, until the first Iron Age, show us that the majority of tools progresses was the only effects of industrial activity. Until the end of the second thousand years, we are in calm ages. Even when external influences acted, they arrived without violence. The spreading of discoveries was done with slowness synchronized with the peaceful movements of mercantile activity. They arrived by the slow spread which was exerted thanks to active commercial relationship. The introduction in particular of first metals is linked with no ethnic disruption. It was the result of an ingenious peddling. And this civilizing expansion, which gains ground gradually, is well the account of the peaceful influences which regulate the European world of the time. The inventions of the time were developed while taking their time and while lingering at the favorable stages. Industrial models, metallurgical processes, metals, words, myths, rites, symbols… even men… were of these peaceful journeys.

If there were no tragic jolts, that do not mean however ethnic stabilization, sterile immobility of an environment without renewal, taken away from the excitatory influences of outside. If there were no sudden invaders, there was, on the other hand, constant arrival of initiators.

But what there is essential in this extension, it is less its extent than its pace. It took all the duration of Neolithic times and Bronze Ages so that the new race achieved its settling. Its progression in Germany is even slower. It arrives there since the Neolithic times, linked with elements of the Mediterranean dolichocephalic type. But at the time of the first row graves (Reihengräber), the brachycephalic ones are only a minority in Bavaria (15%), and especially in Wurttemberg (2%). And it is only with the Bronze Age that the type will prevail about it.

Slowness in the spreading of the ethnic type was such that this one was often like lost on the road. It deteriorates as it spreads. It progresses rather slowly so that assimilation with the environment is made. On these calm routes, mixing therefore have time to be done. Mixing takes place. And at the end, it is a type of interbreeding which wins.

The nature of this progress excludes the hypothesis of invasion, of mass displacements. The settling of the race with a broad cranium (brachycephalic) was undoubtedly not very different of ethnic substitutions to which we could witness today. But their calm slowness generally conceals them from our observation, and makes us ignore them. To be honest, it would be as vain to view, in these ethnic changes, the effects of tragic adventures, than to regard as bellicose invaders the poor wretched immigrants who for two centuries went and sought in the United States a refuge and a new home. And it is quite indeed under the guises of a slow and peaceful individual emigration, that we should imagine the installation in Western Europe of the ancestors in the broad cranium of whom all the genius of white race meditated already.

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Editor’s note. Peter DeLaCrau being since always a non-racialist, i.e., all the opposite of a racist or of an anti-racist obsessed with racial questions; he reminds, as he already had the opportunity to write it in various studies published by the Real Brittany-Keltia Editions; particularly in 1985, and 1991 (truth about races, right to origins, towards a humanistic nationalism…); that there is not more pure Jewish race than pure American or Canadian race, nor pure French race. Let's not forget that Europeans have neanderthal blood in their veins (30 % of their genes placed end to end, a thing about which they do not boast). What matters is the individual value, the culture - then this, the culture, on the other hand, this is really determining -; and not the size of the nose, the shape of the ears (like cauliflower?) or the color of the skin (tricolor like Lugaid Riab nDerg, zebra striped , blue with green peas or whatever else again ).

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What these former immigrants have carried out finally, it is not the massive settlement, in a conquered country, of a victorious group, but a composite formation where foreigners as well as natives have slowly combined then merged their races. In which bloods were mixed, and in which reconciled memories as well as joined together aptitudes, built new souls and hopes. It is that we call a people,

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when the unity of ethnos group, that blood imposes, was erased, to let thrive only the community maintained by the same works of life and the same memories. Old nations in the West, you are made of a matter melted in the crucible of the first bronze. The initial alloy mixed in you the old indigenous blood of the reindeer hunters and the soul brought by the immigrant. You have in you the secret intimacy of the places where you plunge more than ten thousand years of human roots! …And you have in you the former traveler, with his nostalgic memories come from the end of the world! …

But was ever this initiating race a race? These brachycephalic ones with a broad cranium are about impossible for us to isolate. We do find them nowhere in the state of a pure element. From their more distant occurrence, they appear already in composition, settled in countries of which they have accepted mankind as well as nature, have adopted the environment, have been under their influences.

When we met them in the beginning, they seemed to us a dense mass settled in the northern valleys of the Alps. Because of that, specialists sometimes named their type: Homo Alpinus. But the Alps are probably not their initial habitat. Through Styrian and Carinthian valleys, through Bosnian plateaus, their tracks are noted, and we find their blood in them. And through Illyrian areas, we see them go on as far as the East, to be diluted there in confused and ample ethnic formations, to end there in innumerable and moving masses; that vast steppes of Asia could never fix.

The extension area appears to us therefore as having a continental stretch. From Mongolia to the boundaries of the Armorican Massif, it is the same flood which spreads out over the plateaus of Central Asia, which narrows in the European valleys, which breaks up in the Alpine massifs; to finally take its density like its late immobility in Western Europe. Or rather, it is less here a succession of similar crowd, than a kind of constant interior migration. Developed in the arena of the continental plains, ruled by its very movement, kept in a mobility or in a peace managed by the calm abundance of this flat vastness.

What matters if all this crowd still forms a unit of ethnos group and if the physical type kept or lost its homogeneity in it!...Man with broad cranium underwent without resistance these imperious environments, and his adaptation made him various lives and souls… so different that we hardly dare to recognize him from a region to another one. … Is he still, was he never; a race… this human flood which is colored by all the lands it covers? …. But in the absence of the individuality of ethnos group - that it is bolder to deny than it is easy to prove - the man with broad round head received from his habitat area the general aptitude that it could convey to him.

While in the Mediterranean South, sea called upon man, while in the Northern forests the regime of the hunting clans persevered, in the Center, in the gigantic clearing of the old continent, developed the mankind of herds and fields developed. It is there that man released his aptitude for living on the ground, for himself and for his herds.

But according to the environments, the general aptitude particularized its effects. From east to west, the old race with round heads made for itself a life and a soul or a mind in the image of the places. From east to west, the complete experiment develops and the three essential topics of the harmony between man and soil follow one another. From here Mongolian hordes come… oxen and wagons of Scythians… fields and homes of our farmers…

Over there, far towards the east, it is Asia! … The broad poor grass track where the nomad folds and unfolds unceasingly his tent! … The unstable hordes lived here on the ceaseless movement of their quick herds. And any limit floats eternally on the flat arena filled up with gallops, impatience and constant shudders: huge places which never could immobilize nor calm the men! …

But in the center of the area, they are the areas of “Black soil”… The fertile steppe imposed the value and the resources of its deep terroir. These plains without games were the country of early plowing and of first farming. It is there that the man with the broad cranium got the soil experience, and concluded with it the first pact. But the unbounded steppe lets nevertheless the herds of cattle slowly wander; however, the man, slowed down, is not yet completely stopped.

It is more in the west that his complete settling down will be done.

There, in our countries, no longer flat dreary expanse. The ground ceases fleeing and carrying away the clans. All is small compartments, small valleys, nestled plots intimate environment. Each place

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beneath its hill, beneath its forests, has its spring, has its fairy, and expects its fields. There, man cannot almost take a step without being taken and stopped forever.

Then, look at the immigrant! …. Lo here he is who arrives, tired force which goes for centuries, drifting history, society which floats on the motionless expanse of steppes! ….

For centuries, for thousands of years perhaps, linking his walk with the motion of the sun; he slips with slowness from the east towards the west, he drives his generations and their herds. Come from the soft expanses, he moves forward in increasingly rugged countries. Gradually, in front of him, the ground rises; little by little the relief grows; and slowly mounts appear before his eyes. As the continental image was blurred, he slowed down his walk, and a little longer each time he immobilized his passing herds and his temporary fields... Come from the places which always push back, finally arrived here at the places which hold back! … Here is made the drop-off and is put down the luggage of the wandering soul! …There, the experience worked out during the long routes will apply, in these places where the bare ground is devoted to the grass family, yearns for grains!

There the fixing of the acquired aptitudes will be made! There, will be made the settlement: the home of the men, the shed of the cattle, the fields which do not move anymore! … There, will develop but also will flourish, in the sudden maturity of a resting society, the science of herds and of farming! …

On this land which stops unceasingly, behold, emigrant stops too! … Here he is devoted to this land! …… …he builds his houses. He builds his ways. Village after village the old country is composed. Field after field, the countryside is done. Countryside after countryside the broad outlines as well as the lands are drawn.

Everywhere woods are demarcated, and everywhere the ground is striped, the horizon lights up and the ground has already everywhere its clear smile; are missing only its bell towers, its joy and knell voices, its voices in the heavens.

The house of the living is built. One after one, the hearths light their inspired embers. The god-or-demons are no longer animals of clans; but mankind starts to erect on the ground, to raise skyward, a picture of it that it will always magnify. New times came! …… The initiator is at work! … But even before his arrival, was not the work already started? … However, before farming became in our terroirs, under the influence of the race come from the East, a generalized system, it appeared already spontaneously among the old races of the West.

In the ancient Liguria, agriculture seems at home as if it was born there … See indeed the ingeniousness as well as the accuracy with which the agricultural territory carved its frameworks by showing the relief, and molded its clear expanses only on soft terrestrial forms! … See what this taking possession of the land was which was not only an admirable surface exploration of the ground, but which the deep matter and the intimate nature of it everywhere! …

Seeing all that, we can affirm it, first farmers did nothing but continue in the neck of the woods an activity maintained for a long time, and the agricultural life was the normal result, the necessary expression, and the spontaneous effectuation, of a since always moving experience. Agriculture in the neck of the woods a boost from indigenous saps, risen as the fruit of this land.

The fact which prevails over all these origins of agriculture, it is indeed the settled characteristic of the tribes which peopled our country at Neolithic times. Perhaps even, mankind never experimented here the forms of the wandering way of life. Since the Paleolithic ages, the settling of a human group was perhaps already a reality on each unit of territory. And these hunters of reindeers of Magdalenian times who, on the walls of Pyrenean caves, engraved the sacred processions of animals, were perhaps already for a long time immobilized around of their hollow hideaways, by some dead and god-or-demons.

In any case, since the beginnings of Neolithic times, the tribe and the clan are attached to permanent places. The cause of this early settlement, which fixed the man, which tied him to the land, it is not a decision or a preference that he drew from his own genius. The settling power sits in each plot of this country. It is the authoritarian grace of this nature. Each place is a complete territory where the man finds, with regard to his means, all the necessary universe, all the shape of the relief, varied subsoil, and the aptitudes which are complementary. Everywhere, they are the same soft movements of the ground intersected with short breaks. Everywhere, the soil is commensurate and suitable to our needs and our tastes, and not less adapted to the disturbing calculations of our interests than to the softness and torments of our dreams.

We have some difficulty to imagine these appearances and these distant times. We like to believe that places received their agreeableness only from civilization. We do not imagine that all was already

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smiling, during the old days, on the new terraces of our valleys, that the austere human morning was a daybreak like ours, with the same clear and briskness for what concerns air!...This ground, still wet of its fresh glacial silts, was already what we see and what we feel it is. And everywhere, the man was already settled on each terroir by eternal bonds.

But what tied him, it was not only the emotion of the hereditary memory in which was what human contemplation received from the country was gathered. The settled life was imposed by the very conditions of the primitive life, by the professional needs of the hunters and of the fishermen.

Life of hunting and fishing, and tribal organization, are indeed by no means incompatible with the settled life. Quite to the contrary. It is true that in the large homogeneous areas - Sudanese savannas, Asian steppes - wandering life remains possible; a tribe can move without its displacements remove from it its experience of nature and of places which are repeated unceasingly. But in our countries everything varies; from one rural district to another, relief changes; and, at each step, forest renews its appearances, changes its nature, its undergrowth, its fauna type, the secret life of its guests, the thousand and one habits of its game.

Each wood is a small world, a mysteriously closed and governed animal city, completely pierced by tiny avenues, livened up by tiny alleyways, traversed by anxious and skinny paths. Each species has there its traditional refuges and its hereditary routes, its particular exits, its reserved entrances. Since the oldest times, to hunt was to know his wood, to have sought all the thickets of it, to have noted in it step by step the tracks and the ways, to have explored the gorges through which prey escapes, blind places. Hunting was to know all the inner life of his forest, the arrivals as well as the departures of the big game, the ways and the movements of the small people of animals; to hunt, it was to be the old regular of places, and to have received from them, like the other beings, the traditional initiation. It is in the same manner, complete and subtle, that the initial fisherman acted in what concerns rivers and ponds. That he installed his keepnets in waters… that he explored the full of fish zones… of which he knew the populous submerged refuges. As well as all the secret movement which adjust to the hour and the season, the adventure of the life in each little place beneath the willow or the rushes.

This particular knowledge of forest or river, this penetration in the secrecy of animal life, this vigilant and attentive meditation on each place and each remains, the man of old times had it. It was for him a question of life or death to have the intimate experience of places. It was therefore necessary for him to apply to it all his life and to devote to it his line of descent.

But this practice of places, which has just given to the man his homeland, will give him also his long destinies. Because the fidelity of man towards land had been proved this one opened its bosom to him and delivered to him its fecundity.

At the origins of husbandry, there is not only the excitation of the eternal human research or the concern of satisfying food needs; it is from the land, since a long time questioned by man that the effects which tied mankind to it, went out.

In this many thousand-year-old visit that the clan of hunters always kept up with the same places was worked out the particular experience which prepared the cultivation of the ground and imposed it.

These many centuries of familiarity between mankind and land carried out the communion of human senses with the soil, and invested the human being with the animal instinct of things and of places.

It is not in vain that man had his thousand-year-old meditations always applied to the same plot of the world, closed by the same narrow horizon. Bush after bush, man learned how to decipher the book of nature, and to interpret vegetation in value of the soil. He knew how to learn from plants the secret of the terroir. He knew why the forest here lacked breath and why elsewhere it was in the inebriation of its saps, cast its timbers, or launched towards the sky green rockets of life. To unceasingly find the track in the imperceptible shiver of grass blades, the man learned how to know the vegetable, and to hear, under these surface revelations, the underground rumors, the murmur of a buried water, the muted resistance of the rock strata. The subsoil became clear and visible for him like an exposed surface. He knew of them values, infertility, aptitudes, hidden veins, secret humors. Attentive to all the interior voices left at each step from each plot of ground or from the shivers of foliage, he guessed everywhere the fortune of each soil; he suspected the obscure resistance of it, or the obvious joy and he got from them the promises.

Agriculture was born from this long primordial experiment, and the practical part of its science was, until the beginning of modern time, the cultivation of the legacy inherited from the early men. The ancient experiment thrived for a long time, sufficiently fed on its original force to no longer need to be

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renewed. But at the end everything becomes exhausted, even the richest spiritual resources. And the tradition - that the long fervor of ages inspired, but which had too much received the confirmation of times to know how be trained or kept - yielded little by little to the weariness of mind. It blurred its memory, darkened its remembrances, and ended up becoming numb into a routine.

This ancient and intimate familiarity that the man kept with the earth was not only a vain science of soils, but taught him also all the resources of the natural production. It gave him the revelation of a nature ready to cure his diseases, or able to satisfy his hunger. It is in the long centuries of preliminary training that mankind therefore ended up knowing the properties of medicinal herbs, and looking for food roots.

For a long time besides, forest delivered to him its seed and fruit resources. But since very old times, he already knew perhaps, how to support, by primitive processes of soil preparation, the growth of certain plants, too not very abundant in their natural state to be suitable for practical use.

The first plants farmed by man were indeed those it is necessary to treat in large quantities to benefit from them. To the era of gathering or search, therefore succeeds the era of plantations and harvests.

One of the first crop plants was therefore flax, of which narrow-leaved species (linum angustifolium), grows still spontaneously in our southern areas. Before having his grains and his harvests, the man of Neolithic times had perhaps his roots gardens and his plantations of flax. Later, he will learn the food properties of certain grass families, and then he will begin to sow his fields, to collect barley and millet.

These first fields are still a short thinning out in the forest, because almost everywhere, the ground without sun remains still buried under its cover of tall trees, loaded with the heavy shade of ancient silva. Originally indeed, in the clans which continued their traditional life of hunters, husbandry was only a further activity; and, similarly, the products of the ground were only a supplement to the venison of hunters.

The first clearings were, very as much as yards of rustic toil, blind and hunting places. It is on these bare spaces, where domestic herds grazed, and where millet and flax were farmed that the hunter came to await or to take by surprise preys attracted by the new and temptress vegetation, succulent roots, barley which comes up, grass families in flowers, ripe grains.

This association of the two ways of life, life of hunting and husbandry, could perhaps have persisted for a long time. The fields would then have appeared according to the chance of needs. The countryside would have been worked out slowly, like an always partial and ever-changing enterprise, subjected to the irregular determinism of places and circumstances.

But the miracle was done. Behold: there were yet only scattered thinnings out, and lo everywhere the increased clearing is open in the joy of a new and complete countryside! Here the earth in massive formations began to serve mankind! And here the new life takes entirely man, fills up his life with passionate tasks but also with the hard land works! …

In our countries, the origins of husbandry are therefore linked with the development and progress of the tribes of hunters. Breeding and farming were at the beginning only supplementary activities; and, the first cultivated expanses were to be close to, or to develop all along, these tracks of hunters, which were the ways of the first human traffic.

These places, where man developed the attempts of his appearing agriculture, had been perhaps prepared by Nature. The first centers of the agricultural experiment were perhaps these natural thinnings out, in which the infertility of the soil had kept the herbaceous formations.

The forest, we saw it, indeed prevailed on our land only at the end of the Paleolithic period. But on our limestone plateaus, where initial farming seems to have developed; many parts of flat rocks could preserve grassy vegetation, which was an unquestionable attraction for the animals in the forest. These natural clearings, located on dry and dominating spot, were therefore close to initial habitats; and the tribe of hunters used them, not only to slaughter their game, but also to make these food plants that game sought as much as man, thrive in them.

But without insisting on all these hypotheses , and without seeing there another thing that a field of possible speculations, let us come now to these constructions of the agrarian territories, which show a premeditated intention, a systematic and logical layout.

What was exactly the construction of this farming clearing, the intention which underlay it, the method which carried it out, the record of current things will not inform us about it, of course? It is necessary for us to reason by analogy. To discover prehistoric Celtica, it is necessary for us to be helped by the written information which was given us about Germanic history.

The development of countryside - that we try to discover - Caesar and Tacitus present it to us in barbarian Germania, and describe it to us in being carried out there.

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Four texts are significant. The first two belong to the De Bello Gallico. The two others are extracted from the Germania by Tacitus. All and sundry were the subject of many comments and the occasion of subtle debates.

The two texts of Caesar show us the Germanic people still primarily living on their herds and on their hunting. Agriculture in their part of the world is yet only a supplementary resource and a secondary activity. The agrarian territory changes every year; and each tribe farms it collectively.

Nevertheless, into the meantime which separates Caesar's time from the time when Tacitus wrote, a noteworthy change was introduced into the life of the Germanic peoples. A certain appropriation of the soil began. These Germanic peoples of the first century appear as settlers, fixed in small villages built according to the suitability of places, close to springs, forests, fertile soils. The houses, largely separated, are surrounded by enclosures ready for family tasks.

But these Germanic people still show for agricultural work, the same inaptitude as their ancestors of the previous centuries. They know yout only the farming of grains. Valleys don't have their meadows yout. Houses dolon't have yet their garden and their orchard.

The passage of book VI of the commentaries by Caesar seems of a general application: “They do not pay much attention to agriculture, and a large portion of their food consists in milk, cheese, and flesh; nor has anyone a fixed quantity of land or his own individual limits; but the magistrates and the leading men each year apportion to the clans and families, who have united together, as much land as, and in the place in which, they think proper, but the year after compel them to remove elsewhere.” (VI, 22).

Let us notice that this Barbarian Germania is - in the west at least - more a ruin than a new land. She owes her wild appearances to the Germanic invader, who destroyed the vestiges of the old rural civilization everywhere. Each tribe prides itself to keep this devastation. “It is the greatest glory to the several tribes-states to have as wide deserts as possible around them, their frontiers having been laid waste. “ (VI, 23).

However, near the village, the agricultural territory stretches, which periodically moves around the built area. It belongs jointly to the tribe; but each year the expanse to be farmed, will be fixed according to the number of farmers and will be distributed between them according to a determined order.

The regime which takes shape therefore is the regime characteristic of agriculture which is still in the era of clearings, and which has the vast spaces of a new territory (facilitatem partiendi camporum spatia prœstant).

This regime, we find it more specified in old Scandinavia. The process of culture which was practiced in this area of the world was the swidden farming.

Of the vast territory of woods or moors which belonged jointly to each “by “or “vicus”- let us say to each village - a certain expanse, calculated according to the needs of the population, was periodically cleared by fire. This bare soil, fertilized by ashes, was then farmed. Harvests having been made, they gave it up to natural vegetation, and forest took again possession of it gradually. The following year, it was the close forest district which was subjected to the swidden clearing and to the cultivation, to be given back, also, after, to moor and to forest. The agrarian territory was therefore like a sector of still new soil, which traversed the terroir located around the village. After a period of a score of years, the round of the terroir was completed. People then started again a new rotation, which gave back to the cultivation, successively and in their immutable order, all the old given up sectors, whose forest therefore had time to take again possession and to reconstitute fertile humus.

These precise details enable us to clear the uncertainties of the text by Tacitus. When he says to us, for example, that “agri pro numero cultorum ab universis in vices occupantur “, the expression in vices gives an account of this ceaseless moving of cultivated territory. We understand in addition that the extent of this territory is proportioned with the number of workers. Lastly, and especially, it clearly appears to us that the expression ab universis refers to a community regime of property or of toil, the only one which can adapt to this ceaseless and overburdening clearing enterprise.

Then let us foresee all the evolution of this regime which was, as a whole, of a general application.

In the beginning, before the tribe is fixed on the land or is settled in a village, the farming clearing was at each displacement a new place and a new creation. So to speak it followed man in his routes, immobilized him one moment at each stage, and stopped for a few seasons his wandering life. Then, when the tribe was gone away, the forest ,everywhere present, erased the traces of the human

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passage and toil. These intermittent and temporary clearings therefore did not change the general appearance of the country, which remained covered with a forest cover, hardly cut into with fleeting scars.

To this initial regime of not fixed agriculture, succeeds the regime which we have just described, and which is that of “semi-fixing “. The village is founded. The life is stabilized; but the task is not yet so. The farmed territory, which occupies only a sector of the village terroir, moves each year, by describing around the village this periodic rotation which leads it to occupy again successively all the situations it experimented.

In such a system, man and his home have their fixed place; the field does not have its place yet, but it has its area. This area is the circular expanse whose village is the center (the terroir), and in which, year after year, the sector of cultivation moves as the brush of light that a lighthouse walks on the dark horizon. This area, which the alternate cycle of human tasks and renunciations goes through, it will be one day our farming clearing; and its slow thousand-year-old development was made by the regular alternation of the long triumphs of forest but also of the short conquests of assarting or of plowing. To cut short these long triumphs, to prolong these short enterprises, it will be the easy method which will carry out all rural work.

But to give us an account of the development, let us go into the slowness of former gestures, and let us dwell on to consider the annual construction of the cultivated terroir. We call it “a sector “… The expression has only a schematic meaning. Let us understand it in a sense without rigor: the village, which is a constant center, forms an angular starting point for this annual territory, whose dimensions increase when going to the horizon circumference. It is, if you prefer, a kind of triangle, whose vertex is at the village, and whose base leans on the edges of the forest. Two sideways diverge from the village and limit this territory filled up with tasks and plowing.

Each year, this territory is not only a new place and soil but it varies in its extent and in its configuration. It is put on grounds with different relief and unequal fertility. It adapts its shape and its dimensions to soil irregularities and resources. Everywhere it is modeled and molded on the surface features of the terrestrial face.

This configuration and this general look that nature imposes, there are here like learned characteristics; and the sector will keep them or will restore them at the time of each restoration the man will bring to it, approximately every twenty years.

It is besides for this periodic reconstruction that paths are arranged. They are intended to resist the twenty years of human deficiency. These are not simple stone layouts that it would periodically be necessary to restore. True masonry built with cinder blocks and stones, they are let neither overrun by the forest, nor stuck in the mud by water. They are in no way linked with the ruins of fields, the interior decline of the sector; but keep to these lands stripped of any husbandry, a rigid shell, and make up on them an indestructible shape.

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RETURN TO THE CHEIDE FIELDS

(editorial subhead).

What betrays the former human built area; it is the convergence point of the old paths. The village is primarily a center. It is even only that. We could define it as the built part of the paths at their meeting point.

These ways, which come, not only to meet in the village, but to give it a shape and a nature, have necessarily the same destinies as the village. It is it what livens up them. And reciprocally, the village lives only to join them together. The same gesture which erases from the ground rural roads, removes their arrival as their meeting… therefore removes the village.

The old roads last therefore exactly insofar as the initial village keeps its life and its activity. Assart or farming clearing, we have said, appears as a whole systematically built, logically made up or put in order. It is good to be able to restore its framework as we have just learned how to do it. But it is more fundamental still to know how to restore the frame of it.

This frame, in fact, it is the ways which form it. Ways, as we will see, played a great part in the old rural civilization. From now, let us be already informed that the initial way was not simply a traffic lane or a transportation lane, an artery for communications. It was like the organ of the allotment of lands, i.e., the base of the parceling out in plots, an essential element in the land settlement of terroir.

The majority of our rural access paths belong to this old system. They are the survival of the early initial ways. The solidity of these constructions carried out to them a duration which often could triumph over the carelessness and destitution of historical time.

These country paths are the work of a population much more numerous than the sparse mankind which poorly livens up the current countryside. Mankind was necessary to set up them, devoted to local works, and to the tasks of its places, and which built this countryside, not only field after field, but also on rigid and imperishable main elements, all made with stone. And the work partly resisted. The modern Man found the ways of his fields already all fashioned. But he manages without clear-sightedness this legacy of an ignored past.

He never realized the antiquity of these faithful ways which lead him and bring back him daily from the homes in which he rests, towards the tasks where he toils. It seems to him that they are here layouts put next to the very ground, and he would think almost that his only daily passage was enough to tread the loam and to clear for him his daily path.

Admittedly, there are recent access lanes. But let us know it very well: in this countryside that they seem to travel all over with perishable lines and to liven with flimsy strokes, the majority of our ways in the fields are the irrefutable witnesses of the foundation (of the village).

The different characteristics of the historical path and of the initial path are numerous.

If the historical path appears to us therefore, with characteristics which make us recognize them easily, the initial paths have their own characteristics, and prove their origin with the help of other signs that negative evidence. But of course, of all the different characteristics which enable us to distinguish the old paths from the historical paths, most important refers to the part that the initial path played in the allotment of terroir.

Each one of our terroirs is essentially an assart or a farming clearing, and its borders are the edges of wood or forests. The first problem which arises is besides to find again the layout of this ancient border, which amounts distinguishing an initial edge from more recent wooded contours.

The initial way was not only a traffic lane; it was especially the base of the agrarian parceling out. The old countryside, indeed, was already much lacerated in these thousand narrow pieces of land, in these thousand thin strips which cut out it yet now. These pieces of land, it was the path which lay out them.

It is on it that they inserted their origin and their ending. However, we will see it, the plot lengths generally remained what they were formerly. The fields therefore continue to press their short bases on the old paths.

The pieces of land continue therefore, on the current countryside, to redraw, with their invariable ends, the strokes of the original drawing. And our eyes can contemplate, in this field panorama, some clear and almost eternal lines.

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But it is still stranger than we can recognize these initial paths with the only examination of a well-detailed map. These paths are indeed often used as a limit for the territories of villages. These between villages limits always correspond to the fixed features of the work which gave up the soil to human farming. We will see with which fidelity each rural grouping remained compelled to the framework that it formed for itself originally.

The habits which assigned to each village its site and its roads, also determined the borders of its daily activity. And the land framework of the current village continues to be, as in the initial time, leant against essential lines; which are the first ways of long routes just as well as the large features of the relief, the edges of the old forests, the rivers.

The old path is therefore like the final feature, the wrinkle dug by the great age on this laborious face of our countryside. This wrinkle, we can say that nothing erases it, and that it leaves indelible marks. We recognize the old path even when it is nothing anymore but fallen into decay way, a devastated path, a dubious vestige which is erased under the loam. Therefore let us strive to find these old paths that the village made radiate all around it and which were the liveners of countryside. The task is not difficult! Look on the ground: the old paths are still there, in the form of traces everywhere visible through our fields. For eyes which can look at, thousand small things indeed show its existence, and help to revive its disappeared layout of it. Generally, it is of humble status. It is the local path, the road of fields, the short and tired way which links the task places with the rest places, the fields with the village, the plowing with the home. It is the familiar way which appears before our threshold like a child, and which ends as the grandfather who dies in harness, by leaving our fields.

These rural access paths are, we said it, the essential features, and the main elements of the construction of assarts or farming clearing. The first ways of long-distance communication were only, at the beginning, these put end to end local paths: coarse making which was, however, neither hasty nor confused. But before going further, these humble pedestrians, soil handful after soil handful, plot after plot, distributed to us all the ground of the farming clearing.

This clearing, this elementary world, this fundamental construction which remains the terrestrial and tangible topic on which is developed all the association system of men with the land… we will recognize it when we have restored all its architecture. When we have fixed it within a framework, fixed on a center. We find it especially; when we have pegged it beams after beams, spread it fields by fields, on all its frame of paths.

In the old times, on the arrival of the main path, near the fresh spring in the shade, the site was a place of rest and reception, a place of worship and veneration. The ancient gods sat there. Gods of vigilance and hospitality, they protected or received all those their journey led there, supported some of the faithful, cured illnesses or wounds, inspired legends, prayers and hopes.

Of all this, memories hardly remain. A chapel which collapses, some ruined places, and this kind of physical disorder that the unfaithfulness of the man introduces in the places which he gives up. This kind of disorder through which he deteriorates forever the calm physiognomy of the soil he loved and repudiated.

But if mankind disappeared from the places, the call that Nature sent from over there to the traveler of former times preserves its entire accent. The spring continues to support the vigorous forest of tall trees and the oaks do not cease growing and overshadowing!

But what we have just recognized at the entrances of this wood’s edge, what we have just taken by surprise and which is sensational in the welcome the forest reserves for the old path, it is a testimony. … The evidence that this ancient trail of men had the rank and the status of a large way come from far away, maintained by the peoples, watched by the Gods! …

Now let us reexamine the appearance of this circular territory! …It is marked already everywhere by mankind. However, hardly a twentieth is plowed. But the whole expanse shows periodic farming, followed by twenty years of change in waste land. Depending on whether this setting in waste land is more or less recent, more or less old, the signs of human toil prevail still in it, or aspects of the forest appear already in it. The sectors the plowing has just left are prosperous grazing grounds. The others, older, are already invaded by bushes. Lastly, the undergrowth and the thickets are returned in the

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territories the assarts or clearing enterprise threat again. With a movement which is never tired, farming zones, grazing grounds, waste lands which become covered with bushes, recent woods and new coppices, turn therefore unceasingly around the village. But at each cycle, each one of these circular routes engraves a little more its track. The forest, which unceasingly returns in these precarious clearings, comes back in them with unceasingly decreased rights. Increasingly bushy, incomplete, unfinished, certain soils reject it, some places repudiate it. Everywhere the places remain increasingly more marked by the passage of human work, more ready to retain it, to fix it.

But it is not only contours which take shape, appearances which get ready: the frame is drawn up for final construction. All the paths are in place. They radiate towards the village periphery. They cross everywhere waste land and forest, dispel the obstacle of it, bore the wild veil of it. Everywhere they make contact with space, entries for light, life, and the spirit which circulates in the World.

To work out the elements of the assarting or farming clearing, to build the fields, the initial villager therefore exploited, we have said, the ancient experience that clans had taken of the places which had retained and fixed them. The old clearer, applying the empirical knowledge, the intuitive sense that the generations before him had bequeathed, knew how to choose his soils, distinguish the values and the aptitudes of them with as much perspicacity most erudite of current agronomy could do.

The taking possession of the land was therefore a work whose reliability defies even astonishes our science. Everywhere, it is necessary to recognize and admire the success of this countryside, the intelligent composition, the ingenious construction of these assarts or farming clearing, a work so much completed or fruit of such a subtle research, that it would be impossible to touch anything in it without deteriorating it. It would be as prejudicial to cut off from it some fields as it would be imprudent to add it some ones.

This countryside took on the forest some soils with all the possible aptitudes, and therefore formed for it an estate as varied as it is complete. This variety of soils remains the essential characteristic of the farmed countryside. If it is sometimes uneasy to justify all the conquests that fields carried out over forests, it is less difficult to comment that they left to them. We explain forest better than we explain fields. The reasons to keep a soil in a wooded territory are clearly obvious, it is not always the case of the origins and of the causes of extensions carried out by the complex agrarian territory.

Generally, the farmed countryside conquered all the territory it could occupy. It left only what rejected or disappointed its toil. If we tried to express in one formula the characteristic of the two respective domains, the forest territory as well as the agrarian territory, we would be tempted to say that the sharing was made according to the rules dictated by the relief. All that was accentuated relief or too shown features, remained left to the forest. What was on the contrary moderate relief or soft area of soil was given to plowing.

Mankind therefore left to the wild nature, gave up therefore to the forest, the too stiff slopes, the steep sided small valleys, the uneasy valleys, the slopes, the ravines, the narrow places. And, in the same way, flat alluvial surfaces, plains and valleys with horizontal bottom, where water did not have flowed, the soils naturally badly drained, generally continued to belong to the forest, to the marshes, to the peat bogs. It is only very late, and in historical times, that these low grounds were conquered for farming.

Beside these soils, that the insufficiency or the excess of their slope condemns to remain apart from the sphere of action of the human toil, the forest continued to occupy the territories whose infertility rejected cultivation: schistose soils, acid humus, plateaus with flat rocks. Same thing for the badly oriented slopes, as well as all places subjected to unfavorable airstreams or influences. Of which precise nature escapes us, but of which the effects would appear to us more than obvious if we knew, like the first men, read all the pages of the Great book of Nature.

The domain of agriculture, it is all the rest. It is all the grounds of moderate relief; it is every ground which seems to be raised slowly, as if the curve of the earth bent it with softness. This countryside, everywhere combined with soft undulations of the ground, it is all the fertile and loose soil which receives the light, and retains the heat.

This distributed everywhere grace composes the harmony of our countryside. The whole of the fields yet now offers to us the contemplation of a chosen land, the softness of peaceful places, that made in their remote image horizon surrounds. In the forest on the contrary, without knowing it, we still feel the ground which fights back since always, and the ground which refuses.

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This countryside, seemingly almost everywhere the same one, however, has a constructive diversity which it is advisable to relate to two or three well-characterized types.

We know already what this rural community was. We know hence it comes historically. But it is the primitive mentality which determined its mind. The agricultural village succeeded the totemic clan. The fixing power which settled forever the human group on a clod of soil was of divine nature. These gods were this land, these waters, and these trees. The man remained fixed by this impassive immobility of things. These dumb masters… took formerly during a short stay of the tribe, a handful of mankind in a way, and never dropped it! …Each village is still under this hand muscled with rocks which holds it since the Stone Age.

Fixed by gods, the human group stayed, kept by the tradition of the origins, and as if it was entirely one being. The totemic clan was, indeed, this original homogeneous composition, in which individuals seemed the non-differentiated parts of a collective being. The agricultural village inherited this initial cohesion. It was a stable society. And, through all History, its homes or its families, its lives and its soul/minds, remained settled on a structure old like human times, and which still holds.

This village community persisted through History course. It triumphed over the various political, social and moral, influences, which developed to restrict it or ruin it. Until the end of modern history, the village remained therefore a society which had a kind of administrative autonomy, which had general meetings and elected chiefs. And it is in the traditional practice of these public affairs and in the debate of these common interests that this spirit of good relationship was worked out. This social aptitude which is the trait of the race, and this sense of solidarity which remains basic force.

It the whole life of the village which supported in the individual a long-lived society spirit. The village is a complete small world, a tiny mankind, squeezed or tight on a clod of earth, as if it felt alone in the world. Isolated by the loneliness of his countryside, prisoner in his work, the villager therefore lived as if his village were the universe.

Because this small world is mankind on its own, dense and stable through being vigorously grouped. The strong discipline of the old clans was the bond which compressed it. The houses are adjoining and tighten often the ones against the others. The roofs join; the walls are party walls; the yards are common. One lives homes next to homes, households next to households and doors next to doors, you are neighboring almost with excess. The gossip circulates in the middle of the street, and each doorstep seems to have its free and merry chit-chat… But this mischievous look out from the public opinion is only the happy vigilance about which who has anything quite serious to be reproached is not alarmed.

Because the village is a healthy and complete being whose laughter is happier than it is malicious. Its cheerfulness is less a talkative mockery than the jovial agreement of the heart with the mind, a strapping health of the soul or of the mind. From there consequently popular jubilation, merry tables, meals with products made from pork, seasoned of jokes, larded as much as spiced.

This action of the village on man, these relationships of the group with the individual, the village itself fixed their nature, and it is so to speak according to its plan that it works out proportions of them.

According to whether it is more or less vigorously grouped, or that it slackens the bond and separates its houses; human association is sometimes the pressing force which determines the individual, sometimes the modest influence which leaves to each heart its intimate rights and to each soul/mind its secrets.

These cottages in which the flavor of the hearth and of the hot bread flutter, these soul/minds who smell of the outdoors and the wheat, compose the only mankind which is important in the great book of the worlds! Each one, here, carried his cross. Generations have been these toils without respite and these countless efforts. They were these fathers and these children, these powerful lives and these beloved years that Death had always led to God.

Because these farmers never ceased to work nor to suffer! … Fed with black bread, their misfortune was calm and without alarm! …Their history is only that of their long misery! …! And it is from them that we come! …

We can distinguish two types of original villages: valley village, and height village, to which two different types of countryside correspond necessarily.

Villages settled on the bank of running waters, at the foot of hills, in these places where human life could be fed on the double activity of hunting and fishing; created the countryside of which the shape matched irregular sites where they were settled.

Almost always these rivers villages are located at the crossroads of valleys. Their agrarian territory adapts then to the breadth which is offered to it. Sometimes, it is the main valley largely cleared out by

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water, which is enough to contain it. It is particularly the case when there are alluvial terraces, which are the archetypal place favorable to the settlement of housings and farming. Sometimes this main valley was inserted between narrow banks; and it is then in the tributary valley, with less abundant water and with a less steep relief, that man extended the domain of his husbandry. Sometimes finally, the junction of the two valleys generated the vast amphitheater of slopes and terraces in which a rich and complete countryside spreads out. But, in any event, these assarts or farming clearings in valleys are almost always surrounded by wooded slopes or bushy crests which determine their contours; while in the bottom of the small valleys, the farmed territory goes on with sinuous appendices increasingly narrowed. This irregular star-shaped clearing is like the very type of the countryside combined with the valley as well as the watercourse.

Completely different is the countryside of plateaus. It is centered on a village often older than it, and which overlooked it. This village, perched on its hummock or its peak, was very formerly surrounded by clear spaces, of deforested zones, which perhaps formed a kind of defensive glacis. It is around this center of deforestation that would therefore have been worked out, sector after sector, district after district, this farming clearing which was undoubtedly, in the beginning, an essentially pastoral territory. The feature which strikes us, it is its vastness. Our villages of plateaus are surrounded by excessive countryside, increasingly disproportionate compared to their population, and which exceed their resources and their needs.

These so vast countrysides are often stuck the ones with the others.

However let us finish to witness the total construction. Between the clearings of valleys or the clearings of plateaus, are inserted tormented borders, disturbed reliefs. All the play of the small valleys which penetrate in the plateaus, come out into the valleys, like as many sinuous points of attachment linking to the heart the highlands with the watercourses. On all this system of valleys or slopes, the forest remains set up according to the rules mentioned above.It is almost therefore, then, that all the landscape appears in our eyes, with its ancient and its eternal determination. Valleys as plateaus become covered with countryside or forests, according to what their calm or tormented look decides on their vocation. Between the two systems, the forest takes for it all the slack of the joints linking them. …

But this generalization of agricultural life, this sudden extension of the field, this invasion of clear spaces, this rush to the sun of the freed soil, this abrupt decision of new destinies, all that is not only the work of time; it is the work created by a race already in possession of a farming vocation and of an experience of husbandry. It is the work of the brachycephalic race (sic).

This complete experiment, collected on the continental long road, was a ceaseless adaptation of the agricultural and pastoral life to various places and varied climates. Born from the half-wandering life on the great grassy expanses, this aptitude for living on the soil, at each step of the migration towards the West, strengthened by all the obstacles and all the resistance over which it triumphed. Come from the plains and from the steppes, the race adapted to the valleys as well as a forest nature; and the fields, that the tribe formerly casually threw each year on new virgin expanses, it opened them and fixed them, with an axe in one's hand, in the forest. As the man with a round head, moving towards the West, penetrated between increasingly vigorous reliefs, its agricultural territory, formerly scattered or shapeless, was grouped within a more precise framework. Became firmer there, in the harshness of a contour engraved to be never erased, was completed there, in the authority or in the harmony of a system most exactly calculated but also tested for universal expansion.

The foundation of countryside is the systematic enterprise risen from the meeting and from the mixing of these hard indigenous populations with the people of newcomers from the east. Our agricultural system was born from the association of these two complementary forces.

The brachycephalic people, infiltrated little by little on the territory, brought a general science, the ingeniousness of an activity suited to all places, their liking for order and general improvement, their sense of society.

The native himself put in the common stock of the association his profound knowledge of a particular soil, an animal instinct of things and country, the harsh attachment to a terroir.

Of these two so dissimilar men, one had the roughness of a ground which defends itself; the other carried in its memory the pictures and the memories of the World. Both races collaborated each one with its singular experience of the land and of the soil. One had this broad but lucid experience of it, collected in the clear part of the continent. The other had of it the savage experience fixed since always on the same terroir, blindly gone in it and in a very thoroughgoing way.

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The two temperaments assert themselves in all the forms of activity. With the immigrants a richer and more general life, the sense of a larger community, a mind fed of remote visions, penetrated. And they form in the current man the share of our soul or of our mind which always dreams and goes on towards the distance.

The native, himself, is, in this country, the rough energy of places. He is the stock of steadfastness, the spirit of saving and resistance. He is what never moves, the savage loyalty towards the land. He is in our soul or in our mind the moral foundation securely fixed in stone…

These two races: one, breaths and clearness come from a distance! … The other, rock in places! …

We have in our history, and each one of us still carries in him, both races and double legacy. The alternative reign of these two dissimilar geniuses regulates the social upwards mobility and rhythms the passing of generations. According to whether one is more or less released from the land, one or the other of these two original influences is erased or asserted. In the city man the team spirit, the sense of the community as well as a certain social joy prevail . The farmer, himself, remains the silent force and the solitary soul or mind.

Generally, the two geniuses, that uprooting can sometimes dissociate, remain indissolubly combined in their alloy. Because the alloy has the invaluable quality of these compositions which nature works out slowly! Both races penetrated themselves through a peaceful merging in which each element with all its properties appeared.

In this ethnic composition, the native and the invader were each one increased with all that each one supplemented in the other. The whole is not only the sum of the parts, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and the composite multiplied the values which it added.

This is why it is not very easy to distinguish, in the great rural work carried out by this complex people, the respective shares of the two elements combined in it.

However, we can recognize in it, increased by the assistance they mutually gave each other, the two influences which met there and reconciled. The work bore the double print of its two origins. In its overall lines, it conveyed the foreign influence, in detail it was marked by the harsh sign of natives.

The brachycephalic race did not invent agriculture. It did not bring it either. It found it already set there.

But the agricultural activity which it found while arriving was not whereas a supplementary activity. The fields were yet only partial assarts or clearings in the large silva. To generalize this activity, to universalize this clearing and to compose the countryside of it: here what the work of men with a round head was! … They did not bring a new way of life: but they gave to it the expansion it preserved.

From the race of the east therefore come especially the vast assartings or clearings, in which the immigrant restored these bare spaces of which the breadth was familiar to its old contemplation, and which surrounds this remote horizon whose image prevailed in its memories.

The village is surrounded by these clear stretches. The houses and the buildings are grouped in the narrowest proximity. They are clustered villages (haufendorfer).

We are so much familiarized with this appearance of grouped village that we see here readily a natural practice for man. However, at the time history, as the farmer moves away from some original influence, he comes back more to his natural instincts. And what is shown then, it is the tendency, not to the gathering of habitats, but to their scattering. Even in the case of the village grouping, man agrees to introduce his dwelling into the clustering only if it remains combined with his estate and contiguous with his fields.

The clustered village in fact is the sign of the ethnic influences which presided over the development of our countryside. The founding race joined together and fixed its homes, joined together or settled its herds, in the same manner that it pitched formerly its tents, gathered at the center of the dreary horizon, and surrounded by hostile expanse. Our village, fixed forever in the center of its bare ground, remains even still now the delayed picture of these grouped tents that the nomad folds and unfolds each evening and each morning. Pitched up in the middle of the stretch, without our knowing it bears for us, in its attitude and its isolation, the confused significance to be still the camp on the plain; the halt of the evening, the timorous gathering of the one-night abodes on the eternal steppe, the man overpowered by the vastness or the loneliness! …

But in the stretch of fields themselves, we will find more marked still tradition particular to pastoral life. The group of dwellings has around it the group of fields. The village is surrounded by assarts or farming clearing.

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This assart or farming clearing is the sign of the way in which the man knew how to treat the ground. The breadth of this initial clearing overwhelms us. Its expanse often overflowed the strength of historical man. And since this decisive original conquest made over the forest, the plowman more often yielded ground than he did conquer any.

As a whole, however, this farming clearing remains the same one as in original times. And since thousands of years, the same wooded edges surround it and the same ways traverse it.

In a certain manner, we could say that the same fields compose it.

The original countryside, just like ours, was cut out in many plots and was lacerated everywhere in these numerous parallel strips. Each one of these fields could vary or to have its particular fortune, the appearance of the whole remained nevertheless the same one. Only the regime of farming differs. While in fact, nowadays, each plot is an individual private property and has its independence of cultivation, at the origin, the whole of the fields was subjected to a regime of collective ownership and common farming. The village association founded for the assarting or the clearing and the development of the clearing had been continued in an association of cultivation.

It is in the setting of this system of joint work, of this regime which excludes the individual initiative, that we recognize the influence of the strong tribal organization; carried on, in the race which had behind it the long traditions of the wandering and pastoral life. And as we will see, it is from this discipline of land that will go out one day the territorial organizations of feudalism, from which our States, our societies as well as our nations, will be a product. And in the same way, it is in the dissolution of this initial regime, it is in the substitution of private property to collective ownership that we recognize the influence of this native which had behind him his savage tradition of individual life. He did not cease encouraging the initial regime to give to each one his land ground and his particular task. Because the soul or the spirit also, in him, was limited like the material expanse. The farmer was from time immemorial the man of a clod of soil; and the boundary stones of his field will become one day for him geniuses with a dearer and more unquestionable help than the unlimited gods of the Sky.

In this luminous clearing in the dark forest of the first ages, we find already fixed in it the germs of the double evolution, which will organize in the top general destinies, and which will also establish the basic individual. Over the village territory elementary forms which will grow and contain States and homelands were already hanged. But the field, it is the individual with the independence of his clod of land and the loneliness of his heart.

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From the prehistory to the history.

At the time when the countryside completes being worked out, assarts or farming clearing appear to us as a more or less circular vast stretch which surrounds the village, and of which only a small part, variable each year, will be dedicated to plowing. They are the collective work of all the village population. Each one is already undoubtedly daily compelled to common tasks. From this daily toil a visible unit, the determination of a kind of plot, proceeds, which is not yet the private property, but which draws its domain.

This rural civilization, these associated fields around a clustered village, this countryside with such a characterized type, these plowmen organized in an agrarian community, this so general and so precise system; were the work of this people whose complex origins revealed themselves to us. This rural civilization indeed has its expansion area which is superimposed on the territory where this new people was slowly created.

The area of the clustered villages with associated fields - let us say rather, “with fields joined together in society" matches exactly the territory on which the ethnic mixture whose properties created a new West, took place.

At the end of Neolithic times, this territory stretches over Belgium, Rhineland’s areas, western and southern Germany, and Switzerland. Not forgetting northern France, less Armorica, however. At the beginning of the time of the Bronze Age, the system carries out its maximum expansion by entering and occupying England.

This agricultural zone, we have said, it is that on which interbreeding made up the people of organized agriculture.

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Towards the east, the boundary reached by the agricultural zone and this complex rural nation, seems to be the Elbe River.

And there, on the bank of the large river, as in the west on the severe edge of the Armorican massif, the remains of the old villages disappear with the broad cranium men.

If the extension boundaries tally, the speed of the propagation is the same one for the ethnic type and the agricultural system.

Just as the initiating race came from the east, it is from the east the principle of the agrarian regime came.

The oldest site which gave up to us brachycephalic craniums is on the plateau of the Swabian Jura, at Ofnet, close to Nördlingen, in Bavaria. There, in layers of the Azilian era superimposed on layers of the Reindeer Age, eight craniums of an extreme brachycephaly were found.

However these poor limestone plateaus of the Swabian Alps, at Neolithic times were covered with only herbaceous vegetation. It is on these naturally deforested territories, where the big game had become scarce and where Nature set the example of vegetation of the grass families that the Neolithic men installed their first geographically stable agricultural settlements...

In the remotest beginnings, therefore, the agreements between the ethnic type and a regime already characterized of cultivation of the soil, appear.

These steppes of the Swabian Alps, in which the first villages would have appeared, were surrounded by accentuated reliefs where more abundant atmospheric rainfall maintained the vegetable formations of forest. Agriculture circled them without penetrating in them. But it settled on the dry terraces of the Bavarian plateau and in the Swiss valleys. It is from there this conquest of the land so exactly combined with the slow walk and the route traversed by the immigrant with a round head, went towards the west.

Botanical inquiry and anthropological inquiry bring some information still too partial and too flimsy so that we can point out everywhere the agreement between the spreading of the human type and the propagation of the agrarian regime.

The areas of the east are not only the starting places of ethnic growth and of the large agricultural activity. From there also useful and ceaseless renewal arrives. Through these Eastern areas the material improvements, the progress of the tools, the religious rites, are inserted. It is from the east that is originating, in the Neolithic era, the type of building of crannogs which, from Upper Austria and Carniola, is spread gradually; to reach Western Switzerland and France during the Bronze Age. It is from the east that metals are propagated. When they are not brought by sea traffic, it is through the Danubian way they enter the West. It is from the East that men and instruments, god-or-demons and language, arrive.

The agricultural spreading therefore stopped, we saw, on the borders of the Armorican Massif. Just as the climatic conditions acted, by supporting the steppe, to determine the first centers of agricultural life, in the same way they intervened to fix the last stages of it and to stop its development.

The oceanic wet areas remained outside the agricultural expansion zone, as they remained outside the area where the agricultural race was created.

In the West, indeed, under this sky wet with spray, on these drowsy lands, on these acid humus, the forest remained the main plant cover of the soil. The man with a round head, who had found, on the limestone plateaus of the East, drained terraces with warm soil, favorable to his cereals, felt in the West countries a nature which refused welcome to him by rejecting his toil. In the final analysis, it is the climatic conditions which, by stopping the field, stopped the walk of the agricultural laborer.

The geographical area of the organized countryside stops therefore in the West with the too wet areas, as it ends towards the East with the areas already too dry of the Danubian corridor.

Armorica therefore remained the rough schistose land striped with dark rocks where, under a sky with clouds, the forest thrives, where old races persist who are not yet entered nor revived by Celtic blood. It is a country filled up with woods, with men according to the old type, with clans and with tribes, with woodsy myths old like beings. It is the megalithic area, where the fields become moors, where dead are ashes, and whose works are tombs.

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Editor’s note. G. Rupnel outlines here a little too quickly in our opinion an ethnography which is the opposite of the current views on the subject: the Armorican Bretons are not true Celts, etc. Was this quite useful?

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And it is indeed the Ocean which gave all this area the influence which reinvigorated it, as well as the feature which marked it. It is by the sea route, which went round the Iberian Peninsula and followed the oceanic shores, that the foreign elements of Neolithic civilization were inserted into the countries of the West. It is through this way that the types of megalithic building arrived. It is on the side of the Ocean that this Neolithic funerary divinity walked whose face, reduced to an outline of eyes and wrinkles, was so curiously similar to the severe Aegean idol guardian of burials. Through this same way later metals arrived. It is from Iberia that Western Continental Celtica and British Isles received the secrets of copper melting. Over all these oceanic regions, by the sea were propagated common tools, flat axes and dagger axes , which are not less known in Spain than in Armorica nor in Ireland.

Since Neolithic times, Western Europe therefore presents a kind of seaboard. From Tharsis to the British Isles, through Lusitania, Armorica, Cornwall and Ireland, a kind of unit independent of continental Europe asserts itself. The Ocean itself kept, in these regions along which its water went, the types and the unity of a distinct civilization, it fed or renewed unceasingly.

This seaboard of our countries of the West therefore set itself up as a particular world, where the life continued to develop, on a remained barbarian land. And in the first Bronze Ages, while our Eastern countries were the hard-working countryside, in which everywhere the soil breathed between the clear horizons with its harvests and its fields; at the same time, in the countries of the oceanic West, the powerful tribes continued to cover their land with imposing and rough burials, and to dedicate their life and their land to the worship of the dead.

The agriculture territory stopped therefore before the Alpine valleys, the pastoral areas of the Massif Central and the Eastern edge of the Armorican Massif. Within these boundaries, to the English and Germanic plain, and over the Upper Danube valley, agricultural civilization area stretched. These plains, these easy reliefs, this continental area softly undulating where rural communities and village mankind thrived, this hollow arena where man threw his sowing… it was therefore and that remained so, the garden of the World.

This ethnic formation that we saw being carried out in the West, it is time that we sanction its social homogeneity, by admitting for it this moral and spiritual unity which is expressed by the community of the same language. Are we to suggest it is necessary to associate to the last migrations of brachycephalic race the expansion towards west of an Indo-European language?

Admittedly, it would be without interest but also without logic to try identification between what we call the brachycephalic race and what it is agreed to name the Indo-European peoples. The realities to which these two names could apply do not have correspondence between them. To speak of “brachycephalic race,” it is to speak about a theoretical entity, and to place oneself in the Neolithic era. As for the Indo-European, it is less one race or a people than an ensemble of linguistic formations of proto-historic time.

And yet, there exists between the brachycephalic ones of the Neolithic time and the Indo-European vocabularies of the proto-historic time, a link. If one of the two expressions refers to old ethnic origins, and the other to late linguistic results, between the antiquated origins and the recent results, as between the cause and the effect; all the reality of the long story which leads to the unity of an agricultural nation; of a rural civilization, and of an agriculture language, in Europe of the North-West, unfolds.

If you want, all happens as if the immigration come from the east had, in its late journeys, conveyed with it some new dialects.

But reality as is always more complicated. The new language was spread because it met a need, and it entered the spot only because it was called. Western Europe, only devoted to agricultural life, opened up to the growth of a language which was able to interpret these ways and these conditions of life. In Europe of North-West, in the same way an agricultural nation and civilization had developed there, subsequently a language of rural civilization, a language of agriculture, was formed there. And this agricultural language necessarily derived from the same sources from which the ethnic origin as well as the initiation to the life of fields have been drawn therefore.

But it was not only a language of agriculture the rural Mankind of the West needed. Insofar as its agricultural civilization had become standard, an idiom able to express general ideas was also needed.

This new language was therefore not only that of fields. The antiquated idiom of which it was a result had its origins in this race of the steppes about which we spoke; it was prepared but also carried by the movement of this vast interior circulation... And it transmitted to the derived languages these qualities of flexible universality, which carried out its success.

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Everywhere therefore, the new idiom supplanted the local dialects, the language confined in the narrow life of the clan. Because it was the language which circulated on the new main roads in a world which opened up to remote influences. It was the instrument of trade relations and of general relationship, the idiom of an organized mankind, of a society which is based on the family prosperity, and whose gods are the increased picture of men. It began to give an expression of the moral life to the new soul/mind which opened under the heavens.

At the end of the Bronze Age, this agricultural civilization is therefore peaking. It rules on most of Western Europe. From Bohemia to Armorica, from Scotland to the Massif Central, it imposes everywhere the same landscape appearance, the same agrarian regime, the same society, the same language, the same soul, the same mind. Under the individual varieties which interpret the rich multiplicity of origins, everywhere this harmony of material and moral life, in which we recognize the unity of a people, the collective being, a nation, asserts itself.

This collective being which existed, this nation which thrived, these people builder of our countryside, and which made us the eternal legacy of our fields and of our paths, of our ways and of our destinies; this famous ignored man to whom we have no history to attribute…do we will give him a name?

From the age of the first metals, we see, in Western Germany, two whole of archers or hunters tribes, framing the peaceful villagers populations. Retained by the forests, fixed therefore on the heights, these tribes could live beside the farmers without disturbing peace of them. The regularity of the archeological deposits shows us indeed a time without violent conflicts. A particular funerary ceramic belongs to these hunter peoples; the narrowness of their cemeteries lets us believe that they were constantly moving. It is they who in the first part of the Bronze Age would have invaded British Isles. Thereafter, new waves of emigrants went out from these crowds which did not find their place on a soil allocated everywhere to diligent toil. Known as Goidels, Picts, Britons, and Belgians, they maintained therefore during more than a thousand years, the floods of invaders of Western Europe. While integrating already perhaps, at the end, some of these Nordic elements which will be different later, known as Germanic.

These invaders were never numerous enough to supplant the old farming populations. They even never succeeded in changing their type, their way of life and their society regime. Therefore it is explained that the organized countryside of western Germany and northern France could keep the material frameworks of their structuring.

These preserved countryside even practiced a kind of filtration of these Celtic invasions. At the beginning, they let their weak formations pass, which, perhaps combined with indigenous elements that the disorder released, went to undertake the agricultural colonization of the West, remained a free ground. Such Goidels crossing without settling in it the Great Britain, and finally going to carry out their settlement as far as Ireland! ……

Agriculture, we have said, was not, in our countries, the revelation brought by clever victors. It is gradually that this new activity developed within societies which were naturally prepared to receive it. The foundation of our countryside was the work in which, under the excitatory influence from outside, the experiment that the places and the centuries of the past had supported, came to be achieved.

Was the farming sector, essential element of the initial countryside, a construction site open to individual toils at the beginning, and in which initiatives without regulations were developed? We will see that it is not so about this subject. The regime of the original agrarian farming is of a collective nature.

Admittedly, it is quite difficult for us to describe with precision this initial regime. But we will have on many times the opportunity to detect its signs and its vestiges. It is in England that the antiquated traditions were best kept; it is there, indeed, that the original regime of land was most belatedly brought. Some survivals persisted for a long time and it is in the furtive gleam of evidence that the mystery of the original rural institutions is a little enlightened for us.

Let us insulate and specify from now one of these accounts.

We see that in the time of the Domesday Book, the normal team was of eight oxen. These eight oxen, of course, few farmers had them. Work of tilling therefore implied necessarily, a regime of association, a service system to which the villagers were subjected according to the cattle they had.

Let us not seek to know if all the farming operations were made by a team of several men, or if some, like the sowing for example, had the character of individual tasks. The main thing is to see well that the imposed service in any case took the form of a “day's work “.

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This original field, this field-type, the conditions of the initial farming do not determine only the length and the breadth of it, but also the form and the situation.

At the origin, indeed, because it corresponds to a plowing task, it corresponds to a certain number of furrows more than to an agrarian surface. It is still here a very old tradition. It was kept in the countries where Neolithic civilization carried out its later expansions, and in which its memories were in a way delayed. In Ireland, until the Middle Ages, the agrarian unit was a certain number of furrows, and not a surface.

It was the same thing in England. The capacity of the “acre” is indeed originally the area of land a farmer could plow with an ox in a day. And this standard surface area, the use still keeps it for the privileged plots that an ancient status immobilized in their old shapes and dimensions. In certain villages indeed, the circumstances supported the persistence of a very old regime of the land. In that of Hitchin (Hertfordshire), for example, which is a royal manor owned by the Crown since Edward the Confessor, the territory is divided into plots of equal dimensions. And the surface of this standard plot is proved identical to the agrarian unit of measurement, the “acre “.

In England, the original field is no longer only the persistence on the ground of a physical reality but it is this initial field which gives its measurement to area and space. From this “acre “ from this standard field, the measures of length emerged therefore. The furlong is not another thing. The word says its origin. This “furrow long “is the length of the furrow from the place where the plow starts it up to the point where it finishes it, that is to say 201 meters.

In England, the correlation between agrarian measurements and human tasks are still in a more significant precision. The capacity of the original plot is not only identical to the unit of agrarian surface,the acre, but the very shape of this plot also imposed itself to the measurement unit. A law of the thirty-third year of the reign of Edward the Confessor regulates indeed the expanse of an acre, not according to a surface, but according to dimensions. It is the rectangular expanse which is a “furlong “long, and four poles or “rods “ wide, i.e., 201,164 meters.

We see asserted therefore that the acre was in the beginning the field itself. Either only in its surface expanse, but such as its shape and its dimensions defined it, i.e., such as the human toil built it.

That will take all its significance if we bring the word acre closer to German acker, Latin ager, and Greek agros.

In the ancient times of the Bronze Age, when in England, with the uses of agricultural civilization, the use of the Indo-European idiom spreads, the first fields were designated by the word which defined them; as much in their shape everywhere similar, that in their expanse everywhere similar.

In this rural age of the old West, the field had in all places the same dimensions and a similar structure, which determined the same fundamental common measure, the same human toil, the task of the day.

We have just seen the field being determined in tilling works, to fix its expanse on the task of one day, to adjust its length to the route of the plows, and to regulate its width on the noble gesture of the sower.

We do not imagine indeed that the powerful team of plowmen - let us say of the initial clearer - could work therefore farmers after farmers, and prepare the soils while scattering its furrows according to people, instead of putting them together according to places. To believe it would be to suppose that a preliminary regime of land appropriation had already been done, that the rights to the land was previous to the tasks, and that work was distributed before to be done.

In the beginning, group work was a necessity that particularly painful conditions of initial tilling imposed.

The latter consisted indeed in restoring of a territory that the waste land or the coppice had overrun. It was each year like a new assarting or clearing, which required its strong ox teams and its robust workmen. It is on a vast field that each plow and each group worked therefore. Each one of these clearing yards of a powerful plowing therefore corresponded to a kind of rural district which had its structural unity. Furrows had the same direction and the same length there. The ensemble formed a massive part, a great square or a thick rectangle. These areas of plowing stand still now. It is the stripped blocks which give to our countryside its significant appearance, its checked structure. They

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put together, in strips parallel and with equal length, some plots which were originally the former individual shares.

This full assarting or clearing yard of a common plowing was divided between all the suppliers of service; each one received the field of his particular task in the work the farmer assumes separately. The individual share, the plot, the field, would have been born therefore under the gesture of the sower. However, he who throws the seed, necessarily collects its harvest. And the old man of these times was already this farmer for whom harvest is less the product of the soil than the result of his effort; less the fruit of his land than the testimony which affirms his value, justifies and glorifies his effort.

This character of a rural farming, individual in its initiatives, collective in its means, isn’t that which appears still today, at the time of certain farming operations which put in action an expensive mechanization?

For a long time, as we saw indeed, farming did not cease each year moving its territory around the village. However will these fields, which are assigned to a villager during the farming year, disappear when ceases the farming of the sector? When the territory is returned to the grazing ground, is it returned to the joint possession? …Or quite to the contrary, with each periodic restoration of the cultivation, are they restored in their initial shape, situation, and allocation? To discuss this, it is to determine if the dividing up in plots was annual or if it was final.

But first, did these fields really disappear? The return to grazing ground of a cultivated territory was only a transient erasing of the fleeting vestiges of cultivation. In fact, under the grass of pastures, the field of each individual task remains in the state of a cadastral unit. On the ground, a land form, an ideal layout of land, goes on to await the periodic return of the toil which will restore its active reality.

The same cadastral processes the fellahs of ancient Egypt used to find again after the flood their fields submerged under the silts, undoubtedly made possible for Western farmers locating their field erased under grass. Just as in ancient Egypt, the causeways emerging from the water, were the preserved features of the cadastral location, the paths were the indestructible frame on which our original countryside was built; they were the allotment lines of the individual tasks. It is on them that the working sites of plowing came to end up; it is on them that all the furrows were beginning, and that all the plows aligned the departures as well as the returns of their peaceful journeys. All the fields of a rural county having the same number of furrows, it was easy therefore, to restore along these stable lines, the faithful succession of the tasks which started from them. Therefore to return each year to each one the old field of his plowing.

Not only was this returning possible, but it was necessary. To give back the plowman to his old field, it is indeed to return him to an old attachment. It is to return him to the work where he put his effort and to what he has given of himself. To each periodic restoration of the cultivated sector, they returned to each one the land he had fashioned that many times already he had opened to the sowing and given over to a new wheat.

It is on this condition that and got from man all what he could give it. This land, in the beginning, it is not the one day working site, the task of one year, the courage and the sweat of one season. But it is the work of a whole life and it went forever into the succession of generations. A tradition dating back to immemorial time kept to the man of the first plowing the right to always start again at the same places he had worked, the stopped task. These elders therefore had already all “their land “. But this land belonged to them only because they could give themselves to it. It was the first and touching form of an attachment which will become one day the chains of serfdom. These plowmen - who begin so much to love a soil that they will become later the slaves, the serfs, of it - do not have other privileges yet, on this ground which is reserved for them, that of living and doing effort at its service. The privilege that they draw is less our modern property right that the right to accept tiredness and work of it… this right to work hard because of it, this right to suffer because of it, which is already as good as a right to love. This final allocation of the land was not an appropriation.

During centuries, during thousands of years, the rural property will preserve traces of its origin. The encumbrances which will mar it will be less an obligation established by some rulers, less a constraint imposed from the top, than vestiges of origin. What matters if these fees payable in natural produces, and in money, were confiscated by an individual, or a feudal chief! Until modern times, services, rents, and banalities (dues owed to the lord for the – obligatory – use of his mill of his oven and of his wine press) will remain the signs of an original collective property and of the old rights of everyone on the share of each one.

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The attachment of man to land was not the only cause which made permanent the allocations of the soil. The distribution was too difficult an operation so that they could often do it again. And it became increasingly impracticable as the cultivated territory increased.

The regime of the plots dividing was, of course, not the short and precise work or the stroke which is fixed without hesitating, without wavering. These hesitations, we suspect them; these wavering, we foresee them. We spoke as if all had been a conscious project or a premeditated order. However, which was set out, in this case, it is less a logical system than a makeshift regime, which was each time the improvisation of unruly human moods. It is without knowing it that the initial plowmen ended up taking these toil practices, which save research, save the effort, and prevent the disorder. At each restoration of the agrarian territory, they were perhaps less in a similar placing that in the same sequence of tasks. During this time of the preliminary organization, each man had less to worry in order to find again “his field “than to take again “his rightful position “… This rightful position on the farming site, perhaps was it already, perhaps became it, a social rank. The barbarian farmers that Tacitus watched in Germania were still in this original dividing of the land secundum dignationem.

The right to always cultivate the same field was at the beginning only a practice of men to distribute tasks among themselves until this place fixed the ground and regulated the land. Here still, the right was only a habit having gained acceptance through time, and as regards property of the land, jus and mos have the same value, the same meaning.

System evolution.

This revolution, we will find it in England; but, developed over a shorter duration, it took from this tightening in time a higher level of accuracy in features.

Brought in England only at the beginning of the Bronze Age, the regime of countryside with associated fields did not know there the indecision of slow developments; but at once took there the rigor of a tested system. Also it is in England that we saw the most characteristic agrarian uses of the initial rural economy persist. But, from the social point of view, the preservation of this original regime was not less obviousness. And until the Middle Ages, the English village community maintained its old lines in the manorial system.

At the time of the Norman Conquest, the English village community still appears to us, indeed, the most marked reality of rural society. This community, we not only see it enjoying unoccupied lands, regulating agrarian uses, carrying out the periodic dividing of scarce meadows, but still appearing as a person. It is collectively responsible before the lord of the discharge of the charges and services. It even happens as regards it, in the purpose to protect itself against the exactions of a bailiff, to take care of these charges and to manage them itself. In many situations, we see the village therefore intervening as a legal person, concluding agreements, exchanging rights. The village has an elected local bailiff who represents it at the assembly of the county which gathers various villages).

In the system of rights and personal relationship that the Norman Conquest had put in general use, the old principles of communal action and responsibility therefore remain still very much alive. The community, recognized under its name, is so well accepted in its effects that sometimes even, it remains free from any dependence; and therefore we still find in the Domesday Book, some communities which do not fall within the authority of a lord. What corresponds in Shetland and Orkney Islands to the land concerned with Udal law and on the continent to allodial lands [as that of Boisbelle-Henrichemont, that the compiler of this series of works has personally known very well].

It even happens that we can still take by surprise this village community in the gestures of its initial activity. We see it proceeding to allotments of properties remained undivided; some time, it carries out a new distribution of the farms and closed spaces which surround them 1). It settles new ways of farming for the benefit of the poor. It speaks for giving its consent to the building of the lord’s mill. And it therefore appears to us to be not yet completely stripped to the advantage of the lord, from the right of control on public utility works. This village community, the feudal system and manorial system did not succeed in stifling it. It remained in England, until the heart of the Middle Ages, a discernible form and an active force. Whereas in France and Germany, seigniory and gesellschaft dealt it a blow and a deterioration, which hardly let us recognize its nature or suspect its spirit.

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It is besides all the manorial system which derives, in its essential elements, from these remote origins which explain everything. And the evolution mechanism here is much more precise than in France. This English lord is obviously at the beginning only a chief without territorial fiefdom. G. Rupnel (the history of the countryside 1932).

But let us leave there this new Astrea due to the hand of Rupnel and let us return to our sheep like it is said in this neck of the woods (what, for a pastoral romance…), i.e., in fact to the Lebor Gabala Erenn. All the historians agree to recognize indeed that the serious things (positive ratio original pan-Celtic myth/true history) begin with the settlement of the Nemet-Hornunnos, in other words, the one which follows the first settlement, the one of Cicolluis the stunted one of the twisted legs having only positive links….with the myth!

1) See the Scottish system of crofting.

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APPENDIX Nr. 1.

NOTICE BY HENRY LIZERAY ABOUT THE WORSHIP OF CROM CRUACH.

Crom Cruach, Crom the bloody , Cromdubh, Crom the Black, Cenn Cruach, Bloody head, such were the names of the main idol worshipped in Ireland.

The worship of the god of terror was celebrated on the Plain of worship (Mag Slecht) located in this county of Cavan, barony of Tullyhow. The god was represented by a statue of gold or silver , surrounded by twelve bronze idols. This monument seems to have been the prototype of Cromleacs (stones of Crom) composed of a broad flagstone

(dolmen) always tilted in the east, and placed in the middle of twelve stones laid out in a circle. The main festival in

honor of Crom took place the day of Samain, corresponding to November first. Samain means end of spring. The Sunday which is previous to All Saints' day is still called by the Irishmen Sunday of Crom the Black.

The second festival took place on May first, day still named Bealtaine: Fires of Bel. On the night of May first, all fires on each land were extinguished , and interdiction was made by the king, under the penalty of death, to light any fire in Ireland, before that of Tara.

Round towers named Tuir aghas, Tuir Ain, i.e. Fire towers were used to see new fire lit in Tara, to pass its news by means of the fire which gave the signal of rejoicings.

The solar fruitfulness, formerly expressed by phallic emblems, provided us the explanation of the form given to fire towers. We still find similar monuments in the Indies and in Persia. They are always attached to buildings devoted to worship. Their narrowness and the absence of any trace of fight do not make it possible to regard them as fortresses.

Crom is the same god as Saturn, Cronos in Greek. Caesar calls him Dis. The word Crom means curve and designates the circular revolution of stars. Solemnities of May and November are primitive institutions. In spring, sacrifices were offered to the god, i.e., to his priests, the early products and the first-born of animals, according to the Dinnsenchus, quoted in the tripartite Life of saint Patrick. During November, first of the dark months, when the productions of soil were lacking, compensation for that was made by the culling of the cattle or by the hunting opened after the falling of the leaves in forests.

However these explanations do not justify the nickname of God of terror. The theocracies do not go without human sacrifices, and it was not always easy to have a good live at the old times, among man-eaters. At least, this reproach is expressed to Bretons and to Irishmen by the Greek and Latin historians.

Crom is Cronos, i.e., the Time. As the religions are only symbols, victims were sacrificed to Crom by analogy with the Time which consumes everything, edax rerum. The same tendencies were recognized to Bel, the sun of spring, because the word bel means mouth. The sun, indeed, is the wide-open mouth towards which , after more or less duration, all lively beings to be renovated and remade in a purer form, dash. Rabelais, in his book which must be regarded as the bible of the Celtic nations, preserved us an echo of these traditions, by celebrating the allegorical character Gargantua (Henry Lizeray).

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APPENDIX Nr. 2

NOTICE BY HENRY LIZERAY ON THE IRISH MISFORTUNES IN THE 19th CENTURY.

There will be an idea of endemic misery in Ireland when it is known that in the census of 1841 were counted 8,175,125 inhabitants, while there remained only 5,764,543 of them in 1861, that is to say 2,400,000 people less for one ten-year period. In 1867, population had dropped to 5,557,000 inhabitants, in major part made crippled by the deprivations and the hunger. Peopled in the same proportion as Belgium, Ireland would have 8,200,000 inhabitants.

Irish natives starve to death on an exceptionally rich land, of which vegetable layer is one meter and fifty centimeters deep . With his taste for agriculture Irish farmers , using their arms to live, could merrily bring up their children if he were allowed to work. But it was in the interest of the eight or ten Lords owners of Ireland the poor do not multiply (Malthusianism).

Ensured of superfluities the owners wait until the waste land covers with simple grass blade necessary to the food of the herds: this way of working the soil, far from being remunerative, was in use only among ancient peoples or among savages. Does the farmer want to cultivate his farm usually leased year to year? At once his rent is increased so that it is advantageous for him to do nothing. It is in the same way for fishing: this natural resource of an island with full of fish coasts was made impossible by the withdrawal of the subsidies and the hardness of the imposed conditions.

We recognize the Englishman is practical in life, he has a sociable, enduring, independent, nature, without meanness nor obsequiousness, moreover, personal, aristocrat, not sympathizing with the Celts neither with the brutal Germans.

But, with regard to Ireland, Englishmen showed themselves of refined cruelty and hypocrisy. Since the establishment of English domination, the history of Ireland mentions in each page massive spoliation, some confiscations of goods in each province, some thefts of title deeds then allocated to foreigners, the systematic ruin of national industry burdened with taxes and obstacles in order to satisfy jealousy of English manufacturers. We find in this same history some disorders stirred up by the police force in order to provide pretexts to suppression, deportations, denunciations, treason, hunting for patriots tracked up to the forests and excluded from all employment, complicity of the judges in all the crimes, wrongfully shed blood, massacre of war prisoners capped beforehand with a pitch coated bonnet which was fired and which was torn off with adhering flesh (Wexford 1798 ? Drogheda 1649 ?), hatred developed up to Gaelic manuscripts sought by a committee in charge of destroying them, the extermination of an entire people wanted by his despoilers. We still find there the violation of the treaty of Limerick and the factitious famine of 1847: Irishmen starved to death , then, in hundreds of thousands, while wheat gave a good harvest and everyday cattle were exported from Dublin to England in sufficient quantity to feed four or five times the number of the famished people. By a consequence of the absenteeism, all the cash had passed to England and Irishmen did not have money to buy meat, eggs, butter and other products of their country. Today still it is at most if they can get a potato meal, and when this scanty mean is suddenly missing, it is, like in 1847, the starvation to death for most of the population.

However to cure the pauperism of a whole people despoiled from its rights, its goods, its employment and deprived of work and resources, the English government promulgated its famous Poor Law which enacted that every robust beggar would be whipped for the first time, and punished with death penalty, for the second time, as felon and enemy of the public good. The call for charity became a crime in Christian country.

English men, moreover, lower than Irish, Scottish , Welsh Celts in all the intellectual expressions , such as policy, literature, sciences, war, sailing (they are it is true excellent stablemen) the Englishmen, in favor of "At home,” should realize they are not on their premises in Ireland, in Scotland, nor in the whole Great Britain; they should also remember that the barbarian application of the principle of the struggle for life always involves as a consequence the retaliation law; they should

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never finally lose sight of the fact that their maritime power is most prone to sink, since to get this result overnight a simple torpedo boat would be enough.

During one half-century , from 1691 to 1745, four hundred and fifty thousand Irish soldiers shed their blood in the service of France. The famous Irish brigade, moreover, gave its blood alongside with us over all the battle fields, until its dismissal in 1792. It is what a French cannot remember without wishing the recovery of this valiant nation.

AFTERWORD IN THE WAY OF JOHN TOLAND.

Pseudo-druids with fabulous initiatory derivation (the famous and indescribable or hilarious perennial tradition) having multiplied since some time; it appeared us necessary to put at the disposal of each and everyone, these few notes, hastily written, one evening of November, in order to give our readers the desire to know more about true druidism.

This work claims to be honest but in no way neutral. It was given itself for an aim to defend or clear the cluto (fame) of this admirable ancient religion.

Nothing replaces personal meditation, including about obscure or incomprehensible lays strewing these books, and which have been inserted intentionally, in order to force you to reflect, to find your own way. These books are not dogmas to be followed blindly and literally. As you know, we must beware as it was the plague, of the letter. The letter kills, only spirit vivifies.

Nothing replaces either personal experience, and it’s by following the way that we find the way. Therefore rely only on your own strength in this Search for the Grail. What matters is the attitude to be adopted in life and not the details of the dogma. Druidism is less important than druidiaction (John-P. MARTIN).

These few leaves scribbled in a hurry are nevertheless in no way THE BOOKS TO READ ON THIS MATTER, they are only a faint gleam of them.

The only druidic library worthy of the name is not in fact composed of only 12 (or 27) books, but of several hundred books.

The few booklets forming this mini-library are not themselves an increase of knowledge on the subject, and are only some handbooks intended for the schoolchildren of druidism.

These simplified summaries intended for the elementary courses of druidism will be replaced by courses of a somewhat higher level, for those who really want to study it in a more relevant way.

This small library is consequently a first attempt to adapt (intended for young adults) the various reflections about the druidic knowledge and truth, to which the last results of the new secularism, positive and open-minded, worldwide, being established, have led.

Unlike Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which swarm, concerning the higher Being, with childish anthropomorphism taken literally (fundamentalism known as integrism in the Catholic world); our druidism too, on the other hand, will use only very little of them, and will stick in this field, to the absolute minimum.

But in order to talk about God or the Devil we shall be quite also obliged to use a basic language, and therefore a more or less important amount of this anthropomorphism. Or then it would be necessary to completely give up discussing it.

This first shelf of our future library consecrated to the subject, aims to show precisely the harmonious authenticity of the neo-druidic will and knowledge. To show at which point its current major theses have deep roots because the reflection about Mythologies, it’s our Bible to us. The adaptations of this brief talk required by the differences of culture, age, spiritual maturity, social status, etc. will be to do with the concerned druids (veledae and others?)

Note, however. Important! What these few notes, hastily thrown on paper during a too short life, are not (higgledy-piggledy).

A divine revelation. A (still also divine) law. A (non-religious or secular) law. A (scientific) law. A dogma. An order.

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What I search most to share is a state of mind, nothing more. As our old master had very well said one day : "OUR CIVILIZATION HAS NO CHOICE: IT WILL BE CELTISM OR IT WILL BE DEATH” (Peter Lance).

What these few notes, hastily thrown on paper during a too short life, are.

Some dream. An adventure. A journey. An escape. A revolt cry against the moral and physical ugliness of this society. An attempt to reach the universal by starting from the individual. A challenge. An obstacle fecund to overcome . An incentive to think. A guide for action. A map. A plan. A compass. A pole star or morning star up there in the mountain. A fire overnight in a glade?

What the man who had collected the core of this library, Peter DeLaCrau, is not.

- A god.

- A half god.

- A quarter of God.

- A saint.

- A philosopher (recognized, official, and authorized or licensed, as those who talk a lot in television. Except, of course, by taking the word in its original meaning, which is that of amateur searching wisdom and knowledge.

What he is: a man, and nothing of what is human therefore is unknown to him. Peter DeLaCrau has no superhuman or exceptional power. Nothing of what he said wrote or did could have timeless value. At the best he hopes that his extreme clearness about our society and its dominant ideology (see its official philosophers, its journalists, its mass media and the politically correct of its right-thinking people, at least about what is considered to be the main thing); as well his non-conformism, and his outspokenness, combined with a solid contrariness (which also earned to him for that matter a lot of troubles or affronts); can be useful.

The present small library for beginners “contains the dose of humanity required by the current state of civilization” (Henry Lizeray). However it’s only a gathering of materials waiting for the ad hoc architect or mason.

A whole series of booklets increasing our knowledge of these basic elements will be published soon. This different presentation of the druidic knowledge will preserve nevertheless the unity as well as the harmony which can exist between these various statements of the same philosophical and well-considered paganism : spirituality worthy of our day, spirituality for our days.

Case of translations into foreign languages (Spanish, German, Italian, Polish, etc.)

The misspellings, the grammatical mistakes, the inadequacies of style, as well as in the writing of the proper nouns perhaps and, of course, the Gallicisms due to forty years of life in France, may be corrected. Any other improvement of the text may also be brought if necessary (by adding, deleting, or changing, details); Peter DeLaCrau having always regretted not being able to reach perfection in this field.

But on condition that neither alteration nor betrayal, in a way or another, is brought to the thought of the author of this reasoned compilation. Every illustration without a caption can be changed. New illustrations can be brought.

But illustrations having a caption must be only improved (by the substitution of a good photograph to a bad sketch, for example?)

It goes without saying that the coordinator of this rapid and summary reasoned compilation , Peter DeLaCrau, does not maintain to have invented (or discovered) himself, all what is previous; that he does not claim in any way that it is the result of his personal researches (on the ground or in libraries).

What s previous is indeed essentially resulting from the excellent works or websites referenced in bibliography and whose direct consultation is strongly recommended.

We will never insist enough on our will not be the men of one book (the Book), but from at least twelve, like Ireland’s Fenians, for obvious reasons of open-mindedness, truth being our only religion.

Once again, let us repeat; the coordinator of the writing down of these few notes hastily thrown on paper, by no means claims to have spent his life in the dust of libraries; or in the field, in the mud of the rescue archaeology excavations; in order to unearth unpublished pieces of evidence about the past of Ireland (or of Wales or of East Indies or of China).

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THEREFORE PETER DELACRAU DOES NOT WANT TO BE CONSIDERED, IN ANY WAY, AS THE AUTHOR OF THE FOREGOING TEXTS.

HE TRIES BY NO MEANS TO ASCRIBE HIMSELF THE CREDIT OF THEM. He is only the editor or the compiler of them. They are, for the most part, documents broadcast on the web, with a few exceptions.

ON THE OTHER HAND, HE DEMANDS ALL THEIR FAULTS AND ALL THEIR INSUFFICIENCIES.

Peter DeLaCrau claims only one thing, the mistakes, errors, or various imperfections, of this book. He alone is to be blamed in this case. But he trusts his contemporaries (human nature being what it is) for vigorously pointing out to him.

Note found by the heirs to Peter DeLaCrau and inserted by them into this place.

I immediately confess in order to make the work of my judges easier that men like me were Christian in Rome under Nero, pagan in Jerusalem, sorcerers in Salem, English heretics, Irish Catholics, and today racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, person, while waiting to be tomorrow kufar or again Christian the beastliest antichrist of all the apocalypses, etc. In short as you will have understood it, I am for nothingness death disease suffering ……

By respect for Mankind , in order to save time, and not to make it waste time, I will make easier the work of those who make absolutely a point of being on the right side of the fence while fighting (heroically of course) in order to save the world of my claws (my ideas or my inclinations, my tendencies).

To these courageous and implacable detractors, of whom the profundity of reflection worthy of that of a marquis of Vauvenargues equals only the extent of the general knowledge, worthy of Pico della Mirandola I say…

Now take a sheet of paper, a word processing if you prefer, put by order of importance 20 characteristics which seem to you most serious, most odious, most hateful, in the history of Mankind, since the prehistoric men and Nebuchadnezzar, according to you….AND CONSIDER THAT I AM THE COMPLETE OPPOSITE OF YOU BECAUSE I HAVE THEM ALL!

Scapegoats are always needed! A heretic in the Middle Ages, a witch in Salem in the 17th century, a racist in the 20th century, an alien lizard in the 21st century, I am the man you will like to hate in order to feel a better person (a smart and nice person).

I am, as you will and in the order of importance you want: an atheist, a satanist, a stupid person, with Down’s syndrome, brutish, homosexual, deviant, homophobic, communist, Nazi, sexist, a philatelist, a pathological liar, robber, smug, psychopath, a falsely modest monster of hubris, and what do I still know, it is up to you to see according to the current fashion.

Here, I cannot better do (in helping you to save the world).

[Unlike my despisers who are all good persons, the salt of the earth, i.e., young or modern and dynamic, courageous, positive, kind, intelligent, educated, or at least who know; showing much hindsight in their thoroughgoing meditation on the trends of History; and on the moral or ethical level: generous, altruistic, but poor of course (it is their only vice) because giving all to others; moreover deeply respectful of the will of God and of the Constitution …

As for me I am a stiff old reactionary, sheepish, disconnected from his time, paranoid, schizophrenic, incoherent, capricious, never satisfied, a villain, stupid, having never studied or at least being unaware of everything about the subject in question; accustomed to rash judgments based on prejudices without any reflection; selfish and wealthy; a fiend of the Devil, inherently Nazi-Bolshevist or Stalinist-Hitlerian. Hitlerian Trotskyist they said when I was young. In short a psychopathic murderer as soon as the breakfast… what enables me therefore to think what I want, my critics also besides, and to try to make everybody know it even no-one in particular].

Signed: the coordinator of the works, Peter DeLaCrau known as Hesunertus, a researcher in druidism.

A man to whom nothing human was foreign. An unemployed worker, post office worker, divorcee, homeless person, vagrant, taxpayer, citizen, and a cuckolded elector... In short one of the 9 billion human beings having been in transit aboard this spaceship therefore. Born on planet Earth, January 13, 1952.

130

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE BROAD OUTLINES

As regards the bibliography of details see appendix of the last lesson because, as Henry Lizeray says it so well, traditions that must be interpreted. It is there the whole difference which exists between

former druidism and neo-druidism.

-Lebar Gabala or The Book of Invasions. Paris 1884 (William O'Dwyer)

-Base of the druidic Church. The restored druidism. Henry Lizeray, Paris, 1885.

-National traditions rediscovered. Paris 1892.

-Aesus or the secret doctrines of the druids. Paris 1902.

-Ogmius or Orpheus. Paris 1903.

CONTENTS.

First part.

Preliminary clarification. Page 005

Reminder Page 006

General characteristics of Irish literature Page 009

The various (former) books on the settlements in Ireland Page 025

First tries of classification of the various settlements in Ireland Page 032

Presentation of these texts by Henry Lizeray Page 042

In search of the lost original pan-Celtic myth Page 044

Cicolluis the stunted of the brain with withered feet Page 048

Cesair Page 049

Partolan Page 051

The adultery of Partolan’s wife Page 052

Partolan’s work Page 054

Neimhed Page 055

Fir-Bolg Page 060

Children of the goddess Danu (gods). Page 064

Various reflections on the origin and the organization of the Irish Pantheon Page 068

Second part.

True general information about Prehistory Page 081

Mesolithic era in Scotland Page 093

Mesolithic era in Ireland Page 095

The Cheide fields Page 097

Return on the last hunters-gatherers Page 098

Considerations about the Cheide fields in Mayo County Page 101

Return to the Cheide fields Page 111

APPENDICES.

Appendix No. 1 Notices by Henry Lizeray on the worship of Crom Cruach Page 125

Appendix No. 2 Notices by H. Lizeray on misfortunes of Ireland in the 19th century Page 126

Afterword in the manner of John Toland Page 127

Bibliography of the broad outlines Page 130

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BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

1 Quotations from the ancient authors speaking about Celts or druids.

2. Various preliminary general information about Celts.

3. History of the pact with gods volume 1.

4. Druidism Bible: history of the pact with gods volume 2.

5. History of the peace with gods volume 3.

6. History of the peace with gods volume 4.

7. History of the peace with gods volume 5.

8. From Fenians to Culdees or “The Great Science which enlightens” volume 1.

9. Irish apocryphal texts.

10. From Fenians to Culdees or “The Great Science which enlightens” volume 2.

11. From Fenians to Culdees or “The Great Science which enlightens” volume 3.

12. The hundred paths of paganism. Science and philosophy volume 1 (druidic mythology).

13. The hundred paths of paganism. Science and philosophy volume 2 (druidic mythology).

14. The hundred ways of paganism. Science and philosophy volume 3 (druidic mythology).

15. The Greater Camminus: elements of druidic theology: volume 1.

16. The Greater Camminus: elements of druidic theology: volume 2.

17. The druidic pleroma: angels jinns or demons volume 1.

18. The druidic pleroma angels jinns or demons volume 2

19. Mystagogy or sacred theater of ancients Celts.

20. Celtic poems.

21. The genius of the Celtic paganism volume 1.

22. The Roland’s complex .

23. At the base of the lantern of the dead.

24. The secrets of the old druid of the Menapian forest.

25. The genius of Celtic paganism volume 2 (liberty reciprocity simplicity).

26. Rhetoric : the treason of intellectuals.

27. Small dictionary of druidic theology volume 1.

28. From the ancient philosophers to the Irish druid.

29. Judaism Christianity and Islam: first part.

30. Judaism Christianity and Islam : second part volume 1.

31. Judaism Christianity and Islam : second part volume 2.

32. Judaism Christianity and Islam : second part volume 3.

33. Third part volume 1: what is Islam? Short historical review of the set QUR.HAD.SIR. and SHAR.FIQ.MAD.

34. Third part volume 2: What is Islam? First approaches to the set QUR.HAD.SIR. and SHAR.FIQ.MAD.

35. Third part volume 3: What is Islam? The true 5 pillars of the set QUR.HAD.SIR. and SHAR.FIQ.MAD.

36. Third part volume 4: What is Islam? Sounding the set QUR.HAD.SIR. and SHAR.FIQ.MAD.

37. Couiro anmenion or small dictionary of druidic theology volume 2.

132

Peter DeLaCrau. Born on January 13, 1952, in St. Louis (Missouri) from a family of woodsmen or Canadian trappers who had left Prairie du Rocher (or Fort de Chartres in Illinois) in 1765. Peter DeLaCrau is therefore born the same year as the Howard Hawks movie entitled “the Big Sky.” Consequently father of French origin, mother of Irish origin: half-Irish, half- French. Married to Mary-Helen ROBERTS on March 12, 1988, in Paris-Aubervilliers (French department of Seine-Saint-Denis). Hence three children. John Wolf born May 11, 1989. Alex born April 10, 1990. Millicent born August 31, 1993. Deceased on September 28, 2012, in La Rochelle (France).

Peter DELACRAU is not a philosopher by profession, except taking this term in its original meaning of amateur searching wisdom and knowledge. And he is neither a god neither a demigod nor the messenger of any god or demigod (and certainly not a messiah).

But he has become in a few years one of the most lucid and of the most critical observers of the French neo-druidic or neo-pagan world.

He was also some time assistant treasurer of a rather traditionalist French druidic group of which he could get archives and texts or publications.

But his constant criticism both domestic and foreign French policy, and his political positions (at the end of his life he had become an admirer of Howard Zinn Paul Krugman Bernie Sanders and Michael Moore); had earned him, moreover, some vexations on behalf of the French authorities which did everything, including in his professional or private life, in the last years of his life, to silence him.

Peter DeLaCrau has apparently completely missed the return to the home land of his distant ancestors.

It is true unfortunately that France today is no longer the France of Versailles or of Lafayette or even of Napoleon (who has really been a great nation in those days).

Peter DeLaCrau having spent most of his life (the last one) in France, of which he became one of the best specialists, even one of the rare thoroughgoing observers of the contemporary French society quite simply; his three children, John-Wolf, Alex and Millicent (of Cuers: French Riviera) pray his readers to excuse the countless misspellings or grammatical errors that pepper his writings. At the end of his life, Peter DeLaCrau mixed a little both languages (English but also French).

Those were therefore the notes found on the hard disk of the computer of our father, or in his papers.

Our father has certainly left us a considerable work, nobody will say otherwise, but some of the words frequently coming from his pen, now and then are not always very clear. After many consultations between us, at any rate, above what we have been able to understand from them.

Signed: the three children of Peter DeLaCrau: John-Wolf, Alex and Millicent. Of Cuers.