IRISH MYTHOLOGY DEEP DIVE The Mythological Cycle 6+ HOURS

https://bit.ly/brehonacademy_courses This video is a marathon deep dive into the first of the four cycles of Irish mythology; called ‘The Mythological Cycle’. We will learn about the tales from the Lebor Gabala Érenn and get to know some of the earliest mythical inhabitants. We’ll take long detours to learn about the Fir Bolgs, Tuatha De Danann, and Fomorians, before the coming of Milesians. We wrap up the video with a story from the Mythological Cycle, and another from the Fenian Cycle but is included here because of the descriptions of the Otherworld.

#irishmythology

00:00 Intro
01:13 The Four Cycles of Irish Mythology
05:30 The Mythological Cycle
08:50 Early Mythological People According to the Lebor Gabála Érenn
28:50 Who Were The Firbolgs?
01:24:42 Who Were the Tuatha De Danann?
01:46:15 The Arrival of the Tuatha De Danann and First Battle of Moytura
02:51:00 Psychology of Gaelic Gods and Goddesses
04:45:22 Who Were the Fomorians?
05:22:38 The Milesians
05:29:32 The Taking of the Fairy Mound
05:31:51 Osín in the Land of the Young

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hey folks welcome to the brahim academy this video is going to be a deep dive into one of the four cycles of irish mythology it’s called the meteorological cycle and it’s actually considered to be the oldest of the mythological cycles so to start we’ll just take a little bit to say what the other four mythological cycles are before going deeper into the first of the four cycles you’re going to learn who the early people are you’re going to learn about them the stories as attributed to them we’re going to do a bit of a detour then into the fear bollocks into the tour of the danon and into the femorians as well before learning one of the old stories that’s ocean in the land of the young which will be at the end of the video so stick around for that okay that’s enough of that let’s jump into the video the deep dive into the irish mythological cycle [Music] four cycles of irish mythology irish mythology is grouped into four distinct cycles they are the ulster cycle the fenian cycle the mythological cycle and a historical cycle number one the ulster cycle the ulster cycle recounts the first century bc tales of king conover kukholin and the mighty men and women of the northern province of ulud which is today known as ulster while there are many loose stories often depicting a single tale one unifying saga stands out among the best of all irish epics and it is known as the tan bow [ __ ] or the cattle raid of [ __ ] the fenian cycle tells the stories of funeral and his band of noble poet warriors known as defina from the irish word fien meaning a warrior who protected ireland and fought with honor as a virtue the stories are set around the 3rd century a.d and historically we know such bands of warriors existed in ireland from at least the 6th century while christian elements can be found throughout the text the stories point to an earlier pre-christian mindset where the hero is placed high in the altar of the mind as something to respond to and someone to learn from it’s told somewhat as a dialogue between saint patrick and oshie fion’s son in a story titled a gull of nada shannarak or the colloquy of the old men it is in these accounts that we learn of ocean’s visit to taren and oak the land of the ever young the powerful love between dermod and guanya and the salmon of knowledge number three the mythological cycle the mythological cycle is the most elusive and imaginative cycle of irish mythology since the tales are of the greatest antiquity and describe the most outlandish beings and events it is in this cycle that we learn about the gods and titans of irish myth the illustrious to ahead of dannon and the monstrous femorians this cycle is rife with magic and mystical characters who make appearances throughout the other cycles it is from here that we find the origins of ireland’s famous fairy people and material from this cycle is also drawn from a manuscript called the metrical denshenkus which gives the myths about the origins and lore of irish place names number four the historical cycle the historical cycle reflects a remarkably irish trait which is their keen interest in preserving genealogies and historical accounts in writing in addition to our mythological stories and legal manuscripts there are also a body of manuscripts referred to as annals these sought to preserve a somewhat accurate account of historical events such important matters were protected by a class of individuals known in ireland as philly mature poet historians however in the historical cycle we see obvious mixing of factual accounts with fictitious embellishments which places this literature in the realm of mythology this cycle can be further grouped into smaller cycles within it under the names of the kings who make appearances the earliest being a third century king of lannster name lavree longshi would also includes a count about the legendary kings cormac mccarth and khan of the hundred battles this classification into mythological cycles is a relatively recent literary invention but luckily for us approaching the topic today it is a classification that makes sense and provides us with a good starting point or a skeleton to begin our understanding of irish mythology in the earlier traditions these stories were grouped together by type not by character or era so we have details of invasions details of the destructions the voyages the tales of the courtships and cave stories the tragedies the banquets the elopements the plunderings the sieges the cattle raids and the adventures the mythological cycle stories from this cycle of irish mythology are the oldest the surviving literature is scarce and much of what remains has not been preserved well the motifs and themes are characteristically pre-christian full of magic spirits and monsters it is the strangest and most imaginative of the four cycles it is here that we learn about ancient people and strange beings who once lived in ireland and who fought one another to secure a rule over the bountiful island we are introduced to the elusive and illustrious too ahead of dannon great god-like people who brought civil order arts written language and higher culture to the island and how they fought with honor during the first battle of moitura against the fear bulge to secure the island for themselves we also learn about their mighty foes the femorians who came from across the sea to plague the land dwelling people and had their base at thor moore on tory island ultimately these two factions meet in a great clash during the second battle of muytorah where the femorians are finally defeated when their leader balor of the evil eye is slain by his grandson the young lu law father samuel donnak lou the long iron master of all arts who led the two had it done in battle the tour had it done and as subsequently defeated by a wave of new migrations called the malaysians and retreated the hills and mounds of ireland as their home these strange beings became the she the hill folk or fairy people so popular in irish folklore tradition aside from the lower gawala aaron or the book of the takens of ireland which speaks of the waves of migrations of the earliest people to ireland we also have important and useful manuscripts called the dinshenkas which means the law of place names and the core anamon meaning the fitness of names both of which speak of the lore of certain irish place names and features some of the mystical characters from the tour head of dannon and other cycles finally there are a number of single episodes mentioned in the book of leinster however only eight complete tales have been preserved the koh moi tora kunga the battle of moitura at kang or the first battle of moitora kathmaithorad the second battle of muytorah ashling ingus the dream of angus tokumak attained the willing of attain the gowl in cheetah the taking of the fairy mound all trump t madar the nourishment of the house of the two cups eoclanaturan the fate of the children of turin and eoclanaleer the fate of the children of lear other titles include the four jewels of the two ahead of danum the adventures of nera the adventures of lahin how did dagda got his magic staff the story of tune mccarroll the invasion of the med the progress of the sons of mill from spain to ireland finton and the hawk of ackel and the cauldron of posey [Music] you can’t just accept the legendary accounts like i can’t believe you know that there was monsters living on the island and all of these things because i haven’t witnessed it with my own eyes and what’s interesting about this book the one from 1726 nearly 300 years ago he considers these legendary stories and he i wouldn’t say debunks them but he he critically analyzes them and gives in my opinion some much better accounts for for explaining these things so you have to basic periods in irish history of the of the of the in the waves of migration you have the people who came before the great flood and then you have the people who arrived after the great flood now for for christian writers like jeffrey keating who wrote this book the general history of ireland because he was writing at a very christianized time he had to check the facts according to scripture so in the bible it says that you know the flood happened and everybody was wiped out except for the people and noah’s ark jeffrey keating is of the opinion that like nobody nobody survived the flood in ireland so therefore there couldn’t have been anybody around to tell the tale of these people but nonetheless we have an account of this group of people that were called the caesareans you know this is really just really interesting was was the granddaughter of noah so it goes straight back to the bloodline of noah and cesaro’s father wasn’t able to get onto the ark noah wouldn’t let them onto the act so they had to come up with it with an alternative and what cesare decided to do was to construct a religious idol and they’d call upon it for guidance and they got this i guess you could call it a spark of the divine inspiration and they’ve decided to build a boat best way to survive a flood is to build a boat and what they got a group of 50 women and three men and the men were called bith finton and ladra and they sailed on the sea for seven years and when they arrived in ireland it was just 40 days before the great flood began this was around the time of uh 2361 bc and they landed at a place called doom the mark in bantry bay down in cork which adds a lot of validity to the claims of local cork people that the true and rightful capital of ireland is actually the defined county of cork but each of the men who went on this excursion with the 50 women uh agreed to adjust the vision of a quote magnificent of the magnificent maidens and that’s a quote from the from the old texts they divided out these magnificent maidens amongst themselves so they had no less than 16 wives each and cesar the protagonist the female protagonist here was the wife of finton macbooker there’s a really famous uh book of irish history called the lara gabala heron and this is where a lot of the information i’m going to be talking about comes from the lower gabala heron means the book of invasions of ireland and in the book there’s a there’s a passage of section 26 that says i am finton the white son of boca i shall not conceal it after the flood here i am a noble great sage and this is where it gets interesting this is where the history mixes with the legend because he’s saying after the flood here i am a noble great sage yet we’re supposed to believe that nobody survived this flood but the legend goes that after the uh the other two men who we came over with died for different reasons ladra and uh and and bith both died within a short time of arriving here in the island and one of the accounts says finton now finding himself with 50 women decided to flee it’s probably just too much trouble on his hands so flinton fled and without giving an explanation for this it just says that he turned into a fish he turned into a salmon and in this form as being as a salmon he was able to survive in what what the text says was an unbroken sleep at a place called the hill of the wave and then he later changed into a hawk and then finally became a man who would be known as fint in the wise the white ancient one the noble great sage who would be an adviser to the people who was yes to come so fint in the wise is a very interesting character in irish mythology very ancient character i guess you could say he’s the the the the oldest like um character in irish mythology and he was believed to be a storehouse of knowledge and wisdom of error and it said that he lived long enough to witness the adventures of the hero of fion mccull [Music] and even the advent of christianity in ireland which was in the 5th century so that’s if you want to believe these claims uh he lived for three thousand years because christianity came about three thousand years after the first people arrived in ireland the caesareans so aside from finton there wasn’t any survivors of the caesarean people but i guess vinton was the guy who survived and lived to tell the story [Music] the next group of people to arrive in ireland we’re after the flood and this is when the historical accounts start to become a lot more valid the earliest people after the flood were known as the barthelonians and they always tucked out a really a really greek or roman sound and name to it and that’s because the barcelonians came from greece it was around the time anno mundi which means the year of the world 2520 and he came here with his wife and several children it was under patalone’s real rule that ireland would first be divided into several provinces which he which he gave to his children he divided out among his uh his children but it said that he reason why he left greece is because he had committed a horrible crime he had committed the crime of parasite killing your parents and it talks about how he tried to get away from this curse of parasite how he tried to get away from his sin i guess of what he’d done to his parents and that’s why he he made his way to ireland and he settled the patalonian people settled around ben ader which is hope on the um east coast of dublin there but according to the legendary and the historical accounts the the curse caught up with him and his whole people were wiped out by a a great plague and they were buried in a place called tala which means the plague grave so i’m going to go into a little bit more detail about the pathologians now and um just illustrate what they were like maybe a couple of uh stories and again like it was this finton character who was sort of chrono being keeping the chronology of what was happening here what’s interesting when you come across all of these groups of people is how they always seem to have a connection back to some biblical character and to noah cezaire the previous group of people she was a granddaughter of noah and part alone he’s a descendant of the biblical character named magog and magog was one of the seven sons of jeffett who was a son of noah which is i i i haven’t really taught him much about this yet but i just find it really interesting how how the all these bloodlines seem to trace back to this biblical character of noah and it was um the year that the patalonians landed in ireland was the 60 the 60th year of the age of abraham so the the character known as abraham the man known as abraham was only 60 years of age when part along took ireland according to the lower gabala in section 30. he came over with about 1000 people and they you know quickly multiplied four-fold and would you be surprised uh they arrived at such a bountiful uh fruitful land and it’s no surprise that they multiply so rapidly the first battle in ireland also took place under the reign of parthelon when his people encountered these ones who they say they came from the sea but there’s actually mixed accounts about the origins and descriptions of these people they were known as the femorians and some of them like a guy called brez and his father king elitha are described as handsome and golden haired and others are described as dark and then there’s even more that are described as grotesque creatures and made up of the limbs of different animals whose pores seep this venomous poison that’s fatal to anything it touched they’re but portrayed as this race of demonic demigods who terrorized ireland’s ancient people and some people have compared them to the pantheon of greek gods you know we’ve got the greek gods and they were fighting against the uh the titans the evil ones whatever the case may be about this this group of people they survived on ireland for a very long time and some people even refer to them as the aboriginals of ireland that even when the caesareans were here that the femorians were floating about as well off the coast and on the islands and some people also say that they came from africa and for more the femorians it’s also pronounced formulaic and people think that might be morocco but we don’t know it’s speculation and then i want to point that out that it is speculation a lot of this we have all this information all we can do is put it together and use our rational thought critical analysis and try and come up with the most you know trying to make the most sense of it in the most rational explanation for these things so the patalonians were the first group of people who would actually feel the force of the femorians they had long years of pitched battle against them and uh finally part alone defeated the femorian king it was called kyoko and he was beaten at the battle of magitha and it seemed everything seemed to be going well for the patalonians if it were not for the fact that having only been on the island for 270 years they would be struck with this plague i mentioned previously and they would all be wiped out and it’s just like a flashback to that earlier tragedy which happened to the caesareans the entire population would be wiped out and it was wiped out in just one week that’s how deadly this plague was and just like finton before that partelonians would be survived by just one man and like fenton he could shape-shift as well he’d shape-shift into a stag and he eats um he he was he he witnessed the coming of christianity as well he was like another immortal kind of guy and and he witnessed the arrival of the fair bollocks and the two of the don and then finally the sons of male the milesians and his last animal incarnation is like vincent’s first he he he was in the form of a salmon he was caught and he was served to the wife of carol who was the ch it was the chieftain so that’s the patalonians um they’re an important group of people but they weren’t here for that long so their history is short [Music] the next group of people to arrive were called the the names [Music] and that was thirty years after the parthelonians had died then the medians arrived in ireland and these people were greeks as well and they were from sydia they were the sons of agno maine they set out from greece with 33 ships and the meds is the only one to actually reach irish shores he appoints his four sons as his chieftains and they were called starn aaron bonnell anand and fergus red sheed like pardon the med led his people in battles against the femorians and became the next in a long line to attempt to take in of ireland now i think the name edians are probably one of the people often talk about the two of the donen the malaysians the fair bulks mostly the two are they done but the names are crucially important and we’ll get to just why they’re so important now in a while so named overcame the from orients he actually defeat them in a lot of battles but it’s strange like he was the nominees were also well named himself was killed in this in this unexplained plague again i’m thinking chemical warfare something here but in his absence he did the people didn’t have a good leader so they suffered really badly under the harshness of the femorians they were required to hand over two-thirds of their wheat milk and their children to these cruel overlords and this happened every halloween so on and some of you might be hearing what i’m saying here and thinking sacrifice and and halloween was the time that they had to pay this tax of two-thirds of their produce so the unforgivable conditions that were imposed on the median people pushed them to a breaking point and it actually caused a rebellion against the femorians but they weren’t successful eventually the descendants of had to flee ireland and they did so in several groups and they had tried to fight the femorians one last time but um they were defeated and they set sail from ireland in search of of new lands and once again the taking of ireland had been unsuccessful by this group of people [Music] do [Music] now the next group of people to come with are the fear bollocks and they’re very closely connected to the two heads that they’ve done in and when you read the legendary account it talks about how when the two had done and arrived the fear balls were already established on the island and when they met each other for the very first time they could speak the same language and that really baffled me at first i was thinking what what’s the explanation for this why would these people be speaking the same language if the two are they done and some people say they come from atlantis and things like that so where would they have the same language and in this book by jeffrey keating it gives a very rational explanation for that see once the the descendants of the med fled ireland they settled in different parts of greece the two ahead of dannon settled in in north greece in sydney and the freobolgs settled in near athens unfortunately for them they didn’t have a good time in in in greece they were they’re basically slaves as soon as they arrived they were put into slavery again when we talk about the fair bogs there’s actually three groups of people involved here but we just used fear bulks to refer to all of them there were the fear dom none and the galleon as well so the third domino where the people translate it to mean the men of earth and the fear of bollocks is translated as the men of the bags and the galleon are trans is translated to mean the men of the javelins or the spears and just to explain what all this means why it seems significant the fear down none were called the men at the earth because they were the ones who dug soiled they were basically digging up in the mountains to get topsoil to to bring back down to greece to have fertile land so this was a slavery that they were doing they were the ones who were digging the fear bugs were the ones who were carrying the soil in the sacks back down to greece back down to the low land and the gate the galleon were the ones who protected them with their spears so in this state of slavery they they eventually just couldn’t take it anymore and they decided to go back to i guess what they felt was their home and they wanted to go back to ireland so they um set off in these three groups the fear bugs the fair downlands and the galeons and they arrived in ireland um a tree in the space of a week they all arrived in ireland under this group of people they ruled ireland for a period of 37 years and they’re considered to be the first group of people to have actually successfully taken ireland as their own for the fact that they ruled it for so long and and they’d established the proper government there under the fear boggs there were a total of nine kings and each of them was a descendant of someone called dala and a very important king of this time was called yucca son of irk and he would be the first irish high king to die from a death wound inflicted in battle and he’d also be the last of the high kings of the fairbox as i said they they only ruled for for a short period of time and then they were defeated and overthrown by the two ahead of donald [Music] hey everybody kevin flanagan here with the brand academy what i wanted to do tonight is just a short addendum or follow-up to the video that i uploaded last week a story of an irish sept chapter one dealing with the origins of a famous irish sept the dalkasians this was written by nottage charles mcnamara and there were some points that came up in the comments that i felt it was worth going into in a little bit more detail so this is the book here if anybody is interested in reading it you can download it from the brethon academy.org website the story of an irish sept their character and struggle to maintain their lands in claire written by a member of the sept i want to just point out again i know i mentioned it in the previous video but i think it’s important to remember that this book was published in 1896. so the information that um notice had to come to his conclusions was quite limited there was no internet genealogical research was nowhere near advanced as it is now what this book or the story of an irish set covers is really the the history of ireland but focusing on a single clan and that’s why i find it incredibly interesting this book could be written about any irish clan pretty much and their struggle to maintain their lands but we’re dealing with the mcnamara clan who are descended from the dalkasians of which the o’briens are also a a clan or a member of that sept so we’re looking at this territory here which is in the west of ireland in county clare also known as tomment which means the kingdom of north monster to guide us on this i’d like to refer back to a couple of the comments that were left on the video because that should give us some insight of where i’d like to go with this addendum so matt potter thanks for your comment matt um just in the middle paragraph there matt says that he’s not watched the channel for a while but he wonders what the latest genetic studies have to bring over the basques and the irish from county clare and especially the aran irelands is this link confirmed i might have to rewatch some videos around this after to reacquaint myself with this topic because as far as i can remember there wasn’t much evidence at that time which is not to say there won’t be any in the future in a later comment matt also added that as for the dna linked to the basque country i think i saw that somewhere not too long ago i had referred to him um an rte documentary covering this some years ago but i wasn’t able to find it again and i’m not sure if that was positive negative or just raised more questions i think it may have been the latter but i’m not sure and then ossary overseas left a really interesting comment as well and he commented on how nazi charles mcnamara seemed to be very fixated on what was considered science of the era and in which it was published 1896 phrenology and the late 19th century comparisons of races and nations especially within europe you can see mcnamara reacting to what other english and german authors were saying as he uses such methods to defend the honor and history of his own people while now all such thinking is long discredited as you said at the start this has value as a relic of its own day and i’ll probably repeat that throughout this whole series we must really treat the work in the context of the time that it was written it’s an amazing thing to see the irish grapple with a history which is both heroic juxtaposed with military and political subjugation this combination of a society broken but still clinging on and he has it cleverly marked out and of a distant glorious past but keenly remembered is i think why those in ireland and the virus descent wrestle with such a love of history and this is an interesting point that i’d like to go into and i will go into shortly particularly around the idea of phrenology but what this conversation really raises for us is the question of who were the fear bullocks the fear bollocks are mentioned by mcnamara throughout the text and this is who he believes he has descended from but who were the fear bullocks it’s an interesting question i took a little snippet from wikipedia there i know wikipedia is not a fountain of knowledge when it comes especially to things of ancient ireland but it does give a good um sort of mainstream view uh the fear bollocks in medieval irish myth uh were the fourth group of people to settle in ireland the fourth group they are descended from the moon named or the numedian people that means an earlier group who abandoned ireland and went to different parts of europe those who went to greece became the free bullock and eventually returned to ireland after it had been uninhabited for many years after ruling it for some time and dividing the island into provinces they are overthrown by the invading two headed allen so what we’re talking about here are the early migrations of people to ireland when you look at irish mythology particularly the book of invasions it’s called the book of invasions but also called the book of the taking of ireland um and what this book basically contains is the stories of the migrations of different people into ireland so it’s not a question in the mind of the irish psyche that there are migrants who came to ireland different migrations who settled here at different times who had different characteristics who eventually ward with one another for ownership and dominance on the island i’d like to go a little bit deeper into this though um some of the source material that i’m talking about here comes from jeffrey keating’s history of ireland but other sources as well particularly the book of invasions as i mentioned when you look into these genealogies one of the interesting stories let me go this way one of the interesting stories about the fear furbolgs was that they were inhabiting ireland they were ruling ireland um the only other kind of significant group of people who were there at the time were called the from warrians and these are even less are known of the fomorians and in many respects they could be described as the the true native inhabitants of ireland but they’re always depicted as being kind of like they’re like the titans like the bad gods if you want the monstrous ones who come from the sea they live on the island of um initiatory torah and tormor this is where the the clan or the the group of people from whom balor of the evil eye descends and they’re always at the backdrop of irish mythology these femorian type with the furbolgs they inhabited ireland and they later had to face another migration that came after them which were the two heads of dana and this picture that you can see on the left here is of two members of these two groups of people the two heterotanon and the fear bollocks they’re ambassadors for each of these groups they’re called srang who was of the fear bollock and bress who was of the tour to dannon i remember reading about this story many many years ago when i was younger and uh one of the things that really struck me in the story how it says they approached each other quite guarded you know these two ambassadors were sent to meet and they could speak the same language and when they met and discovered they could speak the same language one of the first things that they inquired of each other is of their race and people from whom did they descend what stock were they from what is their race essentially and this was always a mystery for me for a while like how could they speak the same language to do it the dannon and the fearbots that just makes no sense but it made sense when i did some more deeper research when i was a little bit older and realized that the story goes that they are themselves two groups that are descended from an original group called the nemedians the mutual number as it’s mentioned there on the wikipedia page and this goes some way to explaining why and how they were able to speak the same language the other picture there is the first battle of moytora which i will get to in just a second but what i wanted to do is just go a little bit deeper onto the fear books because there are different sources for these stories and the different sources tell different accounts and have different explanations for these things um as i mentioned there are the the book of invasions and which talks about this but uh rahuli theo he talks about it as well he he um seems to think that they are the the fear bollocks are like a pre celtic p uh a p celtic group that came to ireland before the celts and a lot of the early writers tend to talk of them as being real although accepting that um there’s a lot of mythology tied into this and it’s really difficult to know what is the point where mythology ends and history begins so in the laura gawala era in the book of the takens of ireland it talks about ireland being settled by six different groups of people uh the first three people are the people of cassere or saser who allegedly is the granddaughter of noah then you have the people of parthelon and then the people of named who i’ve just mentioned um the people of the med were wiped out by some sort of a plague or they had battles with the femorians and they had to flee the island and when they fled the island some of them went um well the groups of people went to different parts of europe the fear bollocks are said to have been the ones who went to greece and while they were in greece they were not treated very well this is how one of the stories goes um within the fair bullock there’s actually three groups you could say there’s three subgroups that are called free of bullocks um there’s also the free download and the fair galleon okay but they’re all supposed to be connected as the same kind of wider kin group what we call them the fear of looks collectively um and there’s a reason why some people well jeffrey keaton gives a reason why they’re called this and i’ll get to that in a second but even the word fear bullock is something that there’s even contention over that some people say that it’s like uh the men of the belly bullock being your belly and fear being the irish for for men so fear bullock the men of the belly but other people suggest that it’s the men of the bag the bag men and this is supported by keating um in his analysis of these words so the idea was that basically the fear bullocks ended up being sort of slaves while they were in greece and these groups they were broken into three groups there were the men in the bag the men of the earth the downline and the men of this spear spear uh the goleon and the idea was that the deferred downland were the ones who were digging the soil this fertile soil up in the mountains the fear bullocks were the ones who were collecting that soil in the bags and bringing it down into the city to be used and the fair galleon were the ones who had spears who were protecting them while they were doing this but who knows who knows really um we just cannot divorce our understanding of early irish psyche and identity without taking account of these pseudo-historical semi-mythological um uh stories so come on back to kasaya why is that interesting well to say that she is a descendant of an author of noah the book of invasions the lara gavilan aaron is generally considered to be like not historical and it’s kind of criticized as an attempt by early irish monks to write the irish degale into the story of man in a biblical context so putting the irishman the gael into certain uh situations that were now being accepted across the christianized europe as being like the true history of the world and therefore cassaire is described as being a daughter of of noah now what happens with noah there is the great flood right so um casser and her followers are i think gosh there must have been like 60 people or 90 people something like that three men and the rest were all women they get in a boat and they sail to ireland and they are eventually wiped out by the flood all of them except for finton who takes the form of a fish and survives the flood and he’s the one who lives to tell the story so we have this really kind of mishmash here of like biblical references um um the great flood for example and um the early idea of like the celtic i don’t like even to say celtic and because of this sort of research it’s hard to say celtic but the early gaelic early irish psyche and mythology the idea of shape-shifting the salmon the salmon of knowledge these kind of early motifs start to take and start to show up here so cassar was the first group of people there’s also parthalon who i won’t go into now and actually if you want to learn more about this i have a video on youtube the the mythic origins of the irish people i think that’s what it’s called um if you type in mythic origins you’ll find it on my channel and this that video is quite long i think it’s about it’s over an hour long and it goes into each of these groups of people and tells their story so you can definitely go into more information over there but the med is an interesting one to focus on for a second here because named is a word that continued all through um the the irish era did age the gaelic age which i count up to being around the 1600s um named was a word that was used for the nobility then the med and therefore we have this um tract of brethren law called the brahma med which are the judgements of the nobles so named was seen to be uh some sort of mythological progenitor of groups of people who at one point fled ireland some of them went to greece i’m trying to recall where did the tour had the dannon go i think it might have been like scandinavian countries i’ll have to maybe it will come back to me but then the med went to greece i’m sorry did the fear bollocks the people who would become the fear bullocks went to greece and after being treated there so badly for so long they they decided to leave and return back to their land of ireland from where in their mind their ancestors had come from their ancestors came from ireland in their mind even though the med himself was one of these migrations so it’s not easy it’s not an easy topic there’s a lot of like moving parts here it’s um it’s naughty it’s complicated we don’t have a lot of like very strong sources but there’s definitely references to this all throughout our our mythological cycle of our manuscripts um so yeah those who went to greece became the fear bollocks they were enslaved by the greeks as i said and they returned back back to ireland so and this brings us up to what i was speaking about a few moments ago they’ve settled in ireland i believe that the free bullocks had uh nine kings of ireland and the last uh of the of the uh fear bullock high kings was uh yoki makarik yuki makirk and he was um he was the the high king at the time when the uh two headed down and came and even though they recognized that they had this like lineage um they’re kind of like distant cousins somehow they could speak the same language they both descended from the med um it was kind of certain that they were going to have a battle and i believe the legend tells that the two of the diamond asked for some like compromise from yukit uh like half of the island or something and he said like no we will not give them half because if we give them half they will surely take the rest of it too so this led to the first battle of muy torah it’s called them uh that might not be the best pronunciation in the irish but um the battle of my torah the first battle and this is what we see depicted in the artwork here of jim fitzpatrick jim fitzpatrick i think is one of the best artists for producing like materials about early irish mythology they’re just quite beautiful and amazing to look at and have this very like flavor of uh this very gaelic irish flavor to them so what happened was the battle began and um each day they sent nine groups of nine hurlers each i should say before the battle like in this picture what’s happening is they’re inspecting each other’s weapons so they were allowed each side was allowed to inspect each other’s weapons to i guess make sure that they had weapons that were of sufficient like quality and the technology was the same and they sent the same amount of people to battle each day in this battle of moitora and that’s why on the image there on the right you see that they have hurls and that’s literally what the legend says that they sent nine groups of nine hurlers each day to battle so they battle with hurls and it’s a fantastic story and if you’re interested in irish mythology i would really recommend to go back and uh have a look at that because it’s just it’s a great story and um how it ended was that the two other dannon won but the the battle itself is full of magic it has druids it has um amazing story to it where even uh it tells how nuada the king of the two of the don and lost his arm in battle and would later become new arden arrogant love the newada of the silver hand so yeah this cannot be divorced from our history our idea of irish psyche and his and um uh um mentality our sense of ourselves and it should be said that like there have been more kind of um let’s say evidence-based research away from the mythology that tries to understand what is going on with all of this with all of these stories and again uh tf or raheli in his early irish history and mythology that was published in 1946 he attempts to make a connection with the belgae uh tribe who were tribes living in northern gaul um so some people i guess like uh o’reilly is in is in this camp as well um well some people suggest that they’re named from a fictional race and some people suggest that they’re a real group of people and could be connected to the belgae of northern gaul and there’s actually a lot of places in ireland that have names that relate to these groups of people the fair bulldog deferred donald and the fergalian um that lead some archaeologists i guess to believe that they must have been real groups of people but to what extent and what influence they had on the people it’s it’s really hard it’s really hard to say um so that’s just a little bit of the background on the fear bollocks um what i’d like to do next is just keeping in mind what we covered in the previous um in the previous uh video where we read the first chapter i’d like to read this it’s another extract from of the ancient races of ireland by lady francesca wilde and just see if you can draw any parallels here from what has already been covered and this is probably the sort of material that notice charles mcnamara had access to when he was writing so she says the earliest historic race of ireland was a pastoral people called the fair bullocks said to be of greek or eastern origin probably a branch of that great celtic race which having passed through europe and rounded shores found the resting place at last in ireland of the femorians nomedians and other minor invaders we need not speak as they have left nothing by which to track their footsteps the old analysts bring them direct from the ark and in straight line from japhet the coming of pharaoh’s daughter from egypt with her ships may be also considered apocryphal here they’re talking about scota which i mentioned in the previous video as well but the fair balls begin our authentic history they had laws and social institutions and established a monarchical government at the far famed hill of tara about which our early centers of civilization sprung and where we have now most of those great pasture lands those planes of me that can beat the world for their fattening qualities and which supply neighboring countries with their most admired meats i cannot say that the fear bulge was a cultivated man but i think he was a shepherd and an agriculturalist i doubt if he knew anything certainly not much of metallurgy but it does not follow that he was a mere savage no more than the maoris of new zealand where when we first came into contact with them this kind of relates to what um mcnamara is talking about in relation to the early graves that were found and how very few metal artifacts were being found in these graves which is how why and how he makes a distinction between this group of people whoever they were and the later invasions who we call celts but we’re going to see shortly that that might not be their accurate either the fear bugs were a small straight-haired swarthy race who have left a portion of their descendants with us to this very day a genealogist their own countryman resident in galway about 200 years ago described them as dark hail haired dark-haired talkative guiltful strolling unsteady quote disturbers of every council and assembly end quote and described and described formed the bulk of our so-called celtic population ah sorry i’m promoters of discord sorry so they were disturbers of every council and assembly and promoters of discord i believe they together with the next two races about to be described form the bulk of our so-called celtic population combative nomadic and opportunity enduring litigious but feudal and faithful to their chiefs hard-working for a spurt as in their annual english immigration not thrifty but when their immediate wants are supplied lazy especially during the winter to these physical and mental characters described by mcvirvis let me add those of the unusual combination of blue or blue gray eyes and dark eyelashes with a swarthy complexion this peculiarity i have only remarked elsewhere in greece in greece the melt and upper gum is not good but the nose is usually straight in many of this and the next following race there whereas there was a peculiarity that has not been alluded to by writers the larynx or as it used to be called the pomo adami was remarkably prominent and became more apparent from the uncovered state of the neck the sediment of this early people still exists in ireland along with the fair complexion danands and forms the bulk of the farm laborers called in popular phrasal phraseology spalpins spalpins that yearly emigrate to england in connuct they now chiefly occupy a circle which includes the junctions of the counties mayo galway was common and sligo and i’m surprised she doesn’t include claire here but however they with their fair-faced brothers at present the most numerous are also to be found in kerry and donegal and they nearly all speak by statistics procured from our great midland western railway alone i learned that on average thirty thousand of these people chiefly the descendants of the dark frill bulge and the fair denons emigrate annually to england to harvest for harvest work to the great advantage of the english farmer and the irish landlord the acreage of arable land for these people runs from two to six acres connecting this race with the remains of the past i am of the opinion that they were the first wrath or earthen mound and enclosure makers that they mostly buried their dead without cremation and in cases of distinguished distinguished personages beneath the cromlec or the tumulus their heads were oval or long in the antero antero posterior diameter and rather flattened at the sides examples of these i have given and the discounted upon when i first published my etynological researches ethnological researches which have been fully confirmed by the late andreas retzios it is however unnecessary even if space or advisability permitted for me to allude to such matters as that great work the crania britannica has lithographed typical specimens of this long-headed race apologies for the few slips of the tongue there um but i wanted to share this with you just to show you that what we’re reading about from mcnamara is not in isolation it seems that especially writers of that era within like the past hundred years or so um seem to generally hold on to this idea that the the fear bollocks were a distinct group of people in ireland and they were characterized by the darkness of their hair the shorter build blue eyes and other characteristics and particularly regarding their character and personality which we’ll talk about shortly just as a little aside here to emphasize um this point uh i once uh once dated a girl from uh kerry who looked like this who had these features and so much so that her father was nicknamed the spaniard um so there are certainly a a kind of a genetic group of people in ireland who have these sort of features that we would consider um more iberian or closer to the basque i would say that there are generally speaking three like core groups of typical irish looking people we do have blonde haired blue-eyed uh irish people um often green-eyed as well which come from um the danish invasions we also have these like dark-haired blue eyes darker skins uh fair darker complexion which perhaps come from the um the basques and the iberian peninsula and then we have the more kind of generic idea of the irish person who has the red hair and the freckles so there are certainly different distinctive groups within ireland that have different genetic makeup and these writers are trying with the limited resources they have available to them to try and make sense of that the next thing i wanted to talk about very briefly here was the topic of phrenology i don’t want to dwell on this too much but just as it was mentioned in the comments i don’t believe that the writers are talking about phrenology when they talk about the shapes of the skulls phrenology is a is a completely outdated uh scientific idea if you can even call it scientific um that believed that you could tell the character of a person and their their characteristics and traits by the different bumps on their head um to me this looks a lot like palmistry and palm reading um it’s being pretty much completely discredited it is completely discredited what am i saying pretty much it is completely discredited but that’s not the same as saying that it’s possible it’s not even controversial within forensic science to suggest that it’s possible to identify different groups of people races of people through the shapes of their school uh here i just pulled up one scientific paper that discusses this and i have a picture there showing the the different types of skulls from different core kind of racial groups in in the world and this has got nothing to do with racial superiority or anything like that and there was some comments in the chat room last time that were just kind of way off the mark in my opinion and it has nothing to do with racial superiority it’s just acknowledging the fact that different races look different from each other and it’s as simple as that um whether you can say within like we can see the caucasian school there on the on the right the european school whether those people in 1896 had enough knowledge and understanding of this science of the shape of crania to say that european schools could be distinguished one from another like a german skull can be distinguished from that of an irishman i don’t know i’m not a scientist i can’t say anything on that but i don’t think it’s um too far-fetched based on the information that they had to or maybe far-fetched isn’t the right word i don’t i think it’s with the information that they had available to them it’s reasonable to to to see why they would look to this sort of research um for indicators of of um their kind of genetic lineage but today we have much much more advanced dna research genetic science that allows us to not only look at different sort of physical characteristic traits that are different but also we can track it in the uh in the chromosomes in the y chromosome and the uh microndrial dna we can see where from where we descend and what’s interesting just quickly on this point when if anybody has done these like 21 and me um tests where you can take a swab and send it off and they show you where you come from a lot of people find out that they’re actually a little bit of everything a little bit of distance a little bit of that so what that shows us is that our ancestors got around didn’t they and that was surely the case in in early ireland so to what extent you can talk about um a pure race of fear bollocks or celts and so on is very questionable and i don’t even know how how valuable it is but i really want to emphasize here that i believe mcnamara is not using this as this like fundamental basis for his claim his claim being that the people of west rest of ireland and cork sorry county clare and the aran islands um descend or have genetic connection to the people of the basque of spain he uses the skulls as just one example here but he also uses other examples for example for example he says um he uses a linguistic example so professor boyd dawkins observes that aaron ireland the land of erna ivernian ibernian and i would add hibernia is merely a variant of iberia and that the name of the great island of the western ocean ireland and the southwestern peninsula of europe which is the basque country is due to their having been occupied by the same race a race so clearly marked off from all the others has to be known by the same name and he doesn’t just focus on the skulls he also talks about the general characteristics physical characteristics of these people um tradition refers to this race as having been rather under the average height short with brown or gray eyes and curly dark hair a type to be found in considerable numbers among the people of clare at the present day he also says that the ancient inhabitants of ireland from the earliest times were recognized as iberians and as we learned from the life of saint shannon were known in central clare as the baskin tribe the baskin tribe maybe it’s connected to the people of the basque region bath country uh i also seen in the comments and we will talk about this uh in a moment actually i can show you the slide now and i’m gonna read this article uh in more detail later on uh galicia galicia is quite similar in santa like gaelic right the gaelic people the galician people the people of west uh of clare being called baskin tribe basque region i’m not going to read this now but it did feature in the previous video i’m going to read this for you at the end of this short presentation that i have mcnamara also includes the observations of the third earl of carnavan who spent time with the basques and his reason for including this is to not talk about the physical characteristics here but to talk about the personality traits what type of people were these basques and in what way are they likened to the people of ireland particularly those of claire mcnamara’s tribe uh so some of the observations of the third era of carnival have included here every man had a right to state his own case before constituted authorities when accused or as defendant and that this was a far more precious this right was far more precious than even the habeas corpus what we’re hinting at here is the importance of law even in an ancient time the earl of carnival also talked about how um the basques were incredibly protective of their ancient furors was the word which are their ancient rights they inhabited a free land and were men deserving freedom the whole bearing of the men spoke of liberty long enjoyed well understood and therefore not abused they were trained habits of self-reliance by centuries of self-government fine men in spirit not in name alone drinking in with their mother’s milk a love of justice and a reverence for law so can you see here in well in my opinion this is mcnamara’s effort to make this more fundamental connection between the very nature of the irish and the basques in thoughts over yet independent and holy without fear except the honest fear of doing wrong models of ancient manners and not on frequently of manly beauty faithful friends and generous hosts they adhere with tenacity to the soil of their birth no prospect of advantage or promotion can induce him to abandon his home and as we see as we go throughout this text the story of an irish sept the story of ireland becomes very uh gets brought very clearly into focus and you realize just how sad it is he writing in 1896 is aware of the fact that this was very much the nature of the early irish their love of justice their connection to their land the soil of their birth and their own willingness to give it up under any costs so just to kind of recap the last section here we’re not only talking about the shapes of the skulls although perhaps there is some merit to that line of inquiry we’re not talking about phrenology of not at all which is the bumps on your head meaning something like your character or something like that we’re not talking about that and we are um i think we can give an allowance to mcnamara here in the context of the time that it was written why he would look to evidence like the shapes of schools however as we’ll see shortly there is now abundant genetic evidence to support these claims as well but more importantly and probably the most important part for me is why is he drawing this connection to the basket what does he spend so much time on it is because he’s trying to show the character of the people in this early time what what was their nature who were they by their nature they were lovers of justice lovers of the law they adhered to their land they were strong people who [Music] the only fear that they had was the fear of doing wrong now i just want to take a little tangent here and talk about who were the celts this is not going to be long i just want to recommend this docu this um seminar by professor barry cunliff um you can see it’s relatively new it was on st patrick’s day 2008. and professor barry kunliff is probably one of the most the foremost archaeologists um of our time and this this presentation is incredibly interesting because it challenges this idea of what are the cells and who are they and this kind of um east to west migration um there’s a lot in this presentation that suggests there is a some elements of west to east migration but to call this group of people the celts is kind of um not helpful or even accurate uh and genetic research is backing up this as well because when you say something like oh the celts you you create in the mind of the listener yeah an idea of a homogenous group of people who had the same culture the same beliefs who were essentially the same family the same triad right but um what we are finding out through more modern archaeological research and genealogical research is that that’s not very helpful phrase and it’s not quite entirely accurate how i like to describe this to people comparatively is to say well if you talk about the europeans okay if you were to say oh well the europeans do x or they behave why it’s not helpful because europeans sure is a word that we can use to describe the whole group of people who live on the continent of europe but within that continent there are many subgroups you know and they’re not directly connected to each other apart from this kind of overarching idea of being european as such they speak different language in germany as they do in france very different they speak i know that we have indo european languages but the culture and the history and the nature of the people differs in each of these places so it’s not always helpful or accurate to refer to just one group of people as being the celts so this is a great document seminar that i would really recommend i’ll put a link in the description of this video so you can watch this after but it’s very eye-opening and just gives us more information and more of a deeper understanding of how to think about this early time in our history to groups of people that were there on how they migrated and how they interacted with each other so what i’d like to do now is um i’m going to read three articles for you the first article i’m going to read is the one from the irish times that i just shared a screenshot with you there a few moments ago a second article is going to be from irish central which is teasing out this idea of uh who were the celts and what is ireland’s like genetic heritage and the third article then will be from a basque website which is also talking about this connection between the basques and the irish the first article i’d like to share with you is from the irish times published february 16 2009 and written by dick alstrom genetic studies show how our closest relatives are found in galicia and the basque region ancestral links what do pygmy shrews badgers mountain hares pine martins and irish people have in common all probably originally came to ireland on boats from northern spain our closest relatives are found in various parts of galicia and the basque country according to genetic studies led by professor dan bradley of trinity college dublin smurfette institute of genetics he presented his research over the weekend at the american association for the advancement of science annual meeting in chicago he was joined by queen’s university belfast archaeologist and linguist professor james mallory who talked about efforts to link these dna studies with the transmission of languages across western europe the chair of the session was the government’s chief scientific advisor professor patrick cunningham professor bradley and colleagues have done extensive genetic analysis into where the irish came from and how they got to ireland he studies genes associated with the y chromosome a genetic inheritance that comes via the father by tracking the presence of certain y chromosome markers he can travel back in time to map our relatedness to others across europe he explained how he had also done this with the two main species of cattle the familiar flat-backed cattle and the humpback cattle seen in india and africa the human data it definitely showed that our strongest relatedness was with the northern iberian peninsula with this genetic signal strongest for the irish living today in the west of ireland these in turn were likely the closest relatives of the migrants who originally settled in ireland genetic studies of irish fauna also showed this distinctive signal he said the irish badgers are spanish but the british badgers are not the fauna of ireland seems to be divergent how does one explain this he asked the most likely explanation was that the island was settled by migrants from northern spain as the glaciers that covered ireland from the last ice age melted away it seems to me that most animals in ireland came by boat there seems to have been some communication with southern europe the book of invasions from the 8th century talked about an invasion by the spanish king maligious he said his group also looked for genetic linkages between people sharing a common surname something passed along from the male lineage like the y chromosome they found linkages that traced back to the famous o’neill kindred from whom neil neglig nile of the nine hostages was descended professor mallory described attempts to match up the transmission of languages with the dispersal of dna as people migrated across europe it was extremely difficult however due to confounding influences including language transmission via elite dominance settled areas with a unique language later taken over by invaders would see language displacement with the newcomers imposing their own language however the local gene pool would remain and would dilute the genetic influence of the newcomers this was possibly the reason why when one looked for genetic evidence of the celts in ireland these celtic genes could not be found studies of this dynamic has occurred in what is now hungary showed a mismatch between the dominant language and the dominant genetic influence modern dna is no predictor of the modern hungarian language professor mallory said the next article is from irish central some myths of the celt exposed by the science of dna written by michael o lachlan september 25th 2020 we have been taught for a few generations that the irish descended from the celts the king of one wave of celts was milesias maelysius is the most famous celtin legend i think some call him the founder of the irish people but it looks like it is mostly a fanciful story dna studies are now telling us that ireland was settled centuries earlier than thought it was not first settled by the celts of legend it was actually those who survived the last ice age about 10 000 years ago holding out in north west spain as things warmed up they found their way to ireland in fact the closest dna match with the irish in all europe is with the basque take a look at the film blood of the irish and you’ll become a believer the current theory is that they came by boat to ireland which was settled much later than britain which was connected by land to the continent they did not come from scotland but from basque country so at least they came from around spain like some of the malaysian legends speak of we still have to double check all the findings but it seems pretty convincing the irish and the basque are brothers so to speak as far as we can see our earliest ancestors were the basque people so there is the point to start your genealogy in ireland if you want to see some of the legends that came from the story of the celts and malesias there is a book it is entitled a genealogical history of the malaysian families of ireland that i published several years ago if you want to see a real classic take a look at the book of invasions one of our oldest written stories about who settled ireland this book gives that the irish originally came from spain this is the ancient book that o’donnell took to the court of spain trying to strengthen the ties between the two countries looks like there was some truth there and the third article is from a website about basque country.eu for the irish the closest dna match is with the basques the us-based online publication irish central dedicated to the irish all over the world has brought back an article on the basque roots of the irish which we ourselves mentioned back in the day the article written by irish genealogy expert michaela lachlan is based on the dna studies he’s carried out we’ve already brought you some of these articles among the topics we’ve covered on basque genetics curiously the irish the basques and the sards make up an unusual triangle of genetic relationships because there are also important genetic connections between the islanders of sardinia and the original basque settlers perhaps the only thing that might need to be explained to the author of the article an expert in irish genealogy is that being of basque descent is not the same as descending from the inhabitants of northern spain for starters when this happened spain did not exist while the basques did but even if rather than spain he’d meant the iberian peninsula making a geographical rather than political reference that isn’t quite right either this is because of the fact that the basques back then as today live on both sides of the pyrenees meaning some around the iberian peninsula and others on the continental mainland in any case it’s always a pleasure to find out that the people as pleasant and beloved by the basques as the irish have strong connections with our basque ancestors who colonized europe after the last ice age so that brings us to the end of this addendum to chapter one of a story of an irish sept i don’t think i’m gonna need to do an addendum or follow up for most of the other chapters that are going to be covered just this one felt like you needed a little bit more investigation and discussion around it just to clarify and add a little bit of depth to some of the things that uh the ideas that are brought up by uh not each charles mcnamara in this first chapter um as we begin this journey of understanding this family this mcnamara clan and their struggle to maintain their lands in county clare um so i really hope you enjoyed this content this um addition to chapter one i’d love to hear your comments in the comment section below if you liked the video please click that little finger button there um if you want to see more of this and get notified when i’m going to be uploading new content please hit the subscribe button also inviting anybody watching this to please go and sign up at thebrahenacademy.org it’s completely free to join you can get access to the library there’s a lot of materials there blog posts and a bunch of videos uh content that’s not always available on youtube stuff that i haven’t put into video format yet um so if that’s your thing i think you’re gonna like the website big huge thank you to those of you who bought some stuff from the store in the last uh last week those of you who bought mugs and t-shirts i really hope you enjoy them i think they’re going to be on the way out to you very soon once they just get printed and shipped and a huge thank you to those of you who helped me out by by becoming a paid member i really appreciate it it’s such a confidence boost and it really fuels the work that i’m doing it pushes me on to produce more and more content like this and it just it’s really satisfying to know that um people are getting a value out of this and um they appreciate it so thank you so much for your support uh to all of you um i it really really means a lot um i’m almost finished uh chapter two which is going to be focusing on uh their brain law uh more widely speaking say like the um law and society of early ireland so we’re going to be talking about the brahing laws who wrote the bretton laws who put them into the manuscripts let’s say uh the shankas more status on society we even have a little short section on the b judgments which i know people really like uh to to hear about i have a video on youtube about uh beast bees trees and bren law so you might like to check that out as well if you can’t wait till i think it’s going to be out next week in the next few days i hope and if you like this content and you feel like you’re getting something from it i would really encourage you to to have a look at the courses on brethren academy.org um that is probably my best work in this on this brahen academy project there’s a lot of information there in each one of the courses i think the minimum i have to count but i think the minimum amount of time is four hours but they’re arranged between four to five hours of content early irish culture and society covers like pretty much everything you’d need to know about um early irish culture and society uh we have a section there uh of course should i say on irish mythology as well so any of you who are interested in that side of things are storytellers and just having a deeper understanding of irish mythology you’re going to get a lot out of that course and also check out my video here on youtube the psychology of the irish gods and goddesses gaelic gods and goddesses um just to give you a taste of the sort of content that i cover in that course but i think the jewel in the crown of all of this is the brahim the brethren laws of early ireland course i don’t think there’s anything else like this available online at least i have never found it and my goal behind these courses was really to make resources that i wished existed when i started researching the bretton law more than 10 years ago so that was really the ambition behind these courses was to build the resources that i think um others would really benefit from to take this wisdom of early ireland and to put it into a modern medium to put it into easily digestible videos with nice images and images and graphics to help fuel the imagination and the learning experience so yeah if you want to go deeper into the sort of content that i’m covering here i would recommend obviously i recommend uh to check out the online courses on brahimacademy.org thank you so much for your time thank you for being here on this journey with me i really appreciate it until next time it’s longer fall [Music] i think this group of people in particular are the ones who stand out the most for people when they look back at ancient irish history to who is it translated by some to be to mean the people of the goddess danu or the people of of the god danang and you often hear things written about them like the truth was not known beneath the sky of stars whether they were of heaven or of earth they’re always spoken about in this sort of mystical way and then what if you’re reading the historical accounts of the legendary accounts it always says that they had perfected magic necromancy they were very powerful individuals the legendary accounts say that they came to ireland riding on a dark cloud on the first day of bialtona the festival of the fires which was mayday their leader was a man who was known as nuada and they settled in the mountains of and when they first arrived here in ireland there was a thick layer of mist and smoke covering them protecting them so the fear bugs didn’t know that they had arrived these are the people who we know today as the fairy people the invisible ones who live in the hills the gods of ireland the men of day the she as in the banshee they are said to have brought with them not just to leah fall the stone of destiny but but three other treasures as well one from each of the lands that they came from the first meeting between the two of the donen and the free bogs came between uh from an encounter between two champions at a place called my reign so once the furballs had become aware that the territory down and were there they sent out a champion of theirs to go and meet them and the two of the dyna did the same they sent the two of the donna sent a guy called breasts and the fear box and commanders rang and they approached each other with their spears firmly gripped and their shields held tight to their chests very slowly they walked towards each other ready for battle and brez was the first to speak and when srang heard him speak he realized it was irish and he was speaking his own tongue so he was less you know on guard they walked a bit closer to each other and they started to ask questions about each other’s race and each other’s family it sounds pretty profound but the truth is the reason why they could speak the same language is because they were both descendants from the meds where the fear boggs went to to south of greece near athens the two headed down and went to north of greece city as i said earlier and while they were there they learned the magical practices of the greeks but they became much better at them at these practices than the greeks themselves and there was a war going on between the the scythians and and the greeks and the two ahead of dannon were helping the greeks fighting this war and how they were helping them was at the end of every battle they would go to the fallen soldiers on the greek side and they would chant spells and incantations over them and they would bring these soldiers back from the dead and the scythians you know they were going to be destroyed because they couldn’t stop they couldn’t you know their soldiers were dying every day as well and you know they go back to the battlefield the next day and the same people that they killed yesterday are back fighting them again so they went and they consulted a druid and the druid said to them and bear in mind the book that i’m getting this information was 300 years old a lot older than the writing of bram stoker’s dracula but he said to them that the only way to defeat them is if you drive a wooden stake through their heart and if they don’t rise up from the dead then they are of the devil and you will defeat them but if they do rise from the dead then they’re of god and there’s nothing you can do to stop them that’s out of jeffrey keating’s book so that’s how they basically they started driving stakes of wood into their into the bodies of the of the dead men after they killed them and that’s how they began to stop the two ahead of dannon’s powers their their spells and now because of what they had done the two had it done and feared that they were going to be you know killed and tortured and really badly treated by this by the scythians for what they’d done so this is when they decided to leave greece the fear boggs left because they were in slavery and they’re getting mistreated the two headed down and left because they’re afraid that they’re going to be killed uh for for using magic against the sithians and the two headed down and headed to scandinavia and when they met the scandinavian people and the people of those lands witnessed the sort of power that the two had done and had i had the power that they had to speak to spirits and the power that they had over nature they marveled at what they could do and they they asked them if they would stay and teach their children how to do what they could do to so they gave them four cities or centers of learning one of them was called marius one of them called fades one of them is called glorious and the other one was called i can’t remember it’s gone out of my head it’ll come back to me we’re basically these four cities were centers of learning that were given by the scandinavians two to two at the donna to teach their children as time went on they detoured it down and then left the scandinavian countries they left their four cities and they took from each of these four cities and an object a sacred object and before they arrived in ireland they actually went to scotland first and they lived in scotland for seven years and then they finally arrived in ireland and when they got to the coast of ireland they set their ships on fire and this setting the ships on fire some people say well that’s probably what the magical mist was who knows so this is what i’m saying it’s very difficult to look at these this point in history with any certainty because it there’s so much fantasy mixed with real historical data that it’s um you know we really need to be careful and precise about the information and be very critical about about it and then yeah if you’re very critical and rational about this information so the two ahead of dannon and the fear bugs um had had this meeting and the two of the down and said well look if you give us half of the island you can have the rest of it in peace and if you don’t give us half the island well we’re going to take it by battle so srang went back to their fair bollocks and he said it to his king who was king yuckad and having consulted his council on his learned elders what will we do how will we deal with these these new invaders who want half the island they came back with the conclusion we will not give up half this country to these strangers for if we do they will soon take the whole thing so battle was inevitable at this point and the preparations began both sides agreed to delay the battle so that they could make spears and armor that was like that of the others so basically they had different weapons they had different types of armor different types of spears and instead of just going to battle the next day they allowed time for each of the sides to manufacture weapons and armor that was like that of the enemy could you imagine that happening today could you imagine like you know who’s going to war america syria and they go okay we’re going to go to war here but we’re going to let you have all the time you need to get the same amount of nukes we have and the same of the tanks we have and why would you do that why would you do that if you’re going to battle it doesn’t seem right to us today and i think the reason why it doesn’t feel like it’s because we’ve drifted so far far away from what is fair that’s why they were doing it it’s tactically unwise to let your enemy know what your capabilities are yet in ancient ireland we see both sides willing to share their weaponry so that the battle might be more evenly matched we see this really strange glimmer of fairness flickering through the darkness of a battle and the idea holds that if one of one of those is going to be victorious it’s going to be because they were the best warriors and they fought with the most passion and the most fury and they rightly defeated the lesser opponent and not because one soil had bigger spears or tougher armor now even though there was this element of fairness it didn’t stop the two headed down and mixing their magic with espionage and they secretly sent three of their queens bob macca and the marugu into terror which was the seat of government for the fearbox and for many kingdoms thereafter and by the power of their enchantments they brought mists and clouds of darkness over the whole place and they sent showers of fire and of blood over the people the way they could not see or speak with one another through the length of three days so they basically went in and did magic to confound and confuse their enemy the fear box it was mid-summer’s morning when the armies were ready and they assembled at magdhora county sligo each side sent nine times nine hurdlers into battle so they sent 81 herders each hurlers into battle agreeing that this would be the set number to fight each day and then we see that glimmer of fairness flickering again not only will they have similar armor and similar weapon both sides would be evenly matched at the beginning of every new day there was really no contest here against the superior skill of the two headed down and the fear boggs were defeated and during the battle king yuckas of the fair box with fear bugs was overcome by this race terrible thirst from the enchantments and the spells that the two of the dannon had been placing on him and he couldn’t find anywhere to to to quench his turrets to find water and while he was looking for this warrior he was he was basically pursued and he was he was slain by um by the enemy and in this battle king nuada of the two had it done and there wasn’t just a you know the fear boggs did give a good fight and they managed to sever the arm of nuada and there was this custom ancient ireland that a king could not have a blemish if you had a spot or a mark or a bruise or if you were missing an eye or a hand or an arm you could not be king because the king had to be the closest embodiment of perfection that you could have so he didn’t die but according to these ancient laws he could not be the king of the two of the don and he was disqualified and instead detoured it down and appointed the champion known as brez who i mentioned earlier as their new leader what’s interesting about brez was that he is the son of one of the members of the territory and also the femorian king eletha so he’s half from orion and half to it it done once the battle was finished and the fear bogs were defeated the two are they down and they were they were moved by the feral bulg’s spirit and their nobility and their their valiance in battle that they allowed the fieldbox to have one quarter of the island and they chose conoct well all this was going on you still had this other group of of these strange characters and they weren’t pleased with the new change of government i’m talking about the femorians and what they’ve done was because brez who was now king of the two of the done and he was he was like related to them they start to manipulate them and use them for their own benefit he was weak and he he folded under the pressure of these femorians who was basically like their political puppet and they used him to impose the harsh tax on the two of the dawn and again it’s like the tax that they placed under the medians before they had to give two-thirds of all their crops all their cattle and all their children to the femorians so brez was a very bad ruler he was he he he made his champions do work that they shouldn’t have done like carry fire ward or build a wrath and he didn’t stand up to the performance he didn’t that he didn’t defend the two of the downing at all after the battle nuada began the recovery process and with the help of his physicians he eventually got his arm restored fixed and it was made of silver and again i’m trying to put this into a modern context it’s just like biotechnology it’s just like you know you lose a leg and they they give you a new leg like a robotic leg that you can you can you can walk around it’s just like an ancient idea of of some sort of biotech i have to ask the question where does the history and the legend where do they separate not exist was he a real man that existed if he existed did he actually lose his iron in battle if he lost his iron bottle did he actually have it restored through magic and science to have a silver arm well it took seven years for him to heal anyway and now that he was unblemished he reassumed his position as leader of the king of the two of the dawn and he regarded for a further 20 years until he would finally be beheaded in a battle by the femorian king balor of the evil eye notorious for his strength and described as a giant this balor of the evil lawyer of the mighty blows uh is described to us as having one eye on the back of his head that caused destruction to all that came within its glare he is said to who have lived on tory island which is off the northwest coast of tonight and to this day the island’s highest point is associated with balor it is called tor moor or the high tower and it’s believed to be the location of the legendary crystal terror in which balor imprisoned his daughter ethylene upon hearing a prophecy that she he would be killed by a grandson should point out at this stage that jr talking got a lot of his inspiration from these sort of legends the norse and celtic and gaelic legends and balor of the evil eye who lives in the high terror is um a lot like the symbolism and a lot like the uh the themes that you see in lord of the rings so because this project was this prophecy that balor’s daughter would have a child who would end up killing and killing him so he decided to lock her up in this tower and there’s still evidence of wreck still referred to on tory island today as thor moore but what happened was um one of the members of the territory done and called keane using magic he assumes the form of a woman and he successfully enters ethelene’s chamber an encounter that would leave her pregnant with triplets no less and once balor heard about this he just threw the infants into the sea from the tower but one of them is saved by this druid s and this baby has become a very important character in irish history this baby would be known as liu law father which means lieu of the long arm as an infant he would be fostered by the freobolic queen tail to and the magical mananan mcclear as a man he would approach the two of the donovan seated at terror and he would claim to be the master of the arts or the ill dialogue having been sort of kicked off the trail and dispossessed of his title perez sort of fecked off to the femori inside and he started to get assistance from them and started to raise an army or to attack the two of the don they were still under that harsh tax but when lou this strange ill donald just this brilliant man arrived at terror he had this energy with him he had this fire in his belly and he spurred them on to fight back and they secretly began preparing for battle they were determined to put an end to the tyranny of the femorians so the men of ireland assembled just in time for halloween just before that dreaded tax was due could you imagine having to give up a third two thirds of all your produce your crops your cattle and most importantly your children two-thirds so there was a mighty clash and a din as the battle began just on the eve of halloween and the the figures say that there was a hundred and eighty thousand men led by lou lular father in the two of the don and they they got a victory at the place called muay thai but sadly although they had a victory against the femorians their beloved leader nuada is slain by balor but once sam nuada is slain lou steps up and fulfills the prophecy it’s very much the story i’m about to tell you now is very reminiscent of the story in the old testament of king david king david who fought against goliath the giant well balor is it is described as a giant and in this account the irish account lula father uses a slingshot to slay his grandfather just like in the bible with david except this story is a little bit different because he hits batter so hard with this stone that it knocks his evil eye out of the back of his head and it lands facing the direction of the fomorians and as i said earlier anything that this eye looks like anything that falls upon its gaze is destroyed immediately so the femorians were just there was just havoc in the femorian ranks they were decimated by their own leader balor because of this brilliant shock of lu love father the ill donald the master of the arts have been defeated in this way the femorians start to flee ireland lou is having none of it he gets another couple of characters called ogma and the dagda and they go after this femorians who had stolen this this magical herb the two of the downing are said to have ruled ireland until around 1500 bc there’s no reason to think that these are not absolutely a real bunch of of people historically verifiable people there’s no reason to doubt that all of our evidence all of our text says that they were real people but whether they had magical powers you can’t you can’t believe those things in the modern world you can’t say oh yeah they were magical in the in this modern world like but that’s what the accounts say about them after lulu our father there would be six more kings as liu was declared their king having one such a glorious battle there would be six more kings and three of them were brothers who shared title by rotating [Music] so there were these three brothers and these would be the last of the high kings of the two of the donovan they they shared their reign so they they were all king hiking at the same time but they just took one year on two years off they were called mccool mcgrane and mckecht and it was these three men who each took wives whose whose names would be given to ireland so mccool mcgrane and mckech you had fawler bamba and eru and they successfully ruled ireland in this way for for several years until the descendants of a man called mill arrived [Music] are said to have arrived in ireland in a magical mist that obscured them from the inhabitants thousands of years later a magical miss still remains over the character of the two ahead of daniel in this video i’d like to try and clear up some of that mist and get a little bit more clarity about who the two of the daniel were by focusing on their arrival in ireland so this video we’re going to talk about the earliest people of ireland up until the first battle of my torah before we get into the video i just want to tell you about a really cool project concept called the heroes of terror so heroes of tara is a role-playing game it’s an expansion to the dungeons and dragons role-playing game but it’s set in the mythical age of ireland with the characters such as the hg the fairy people and the fear bugs and people and characters and themes and settings that we’d be very familiar with here on the brain academy you can tell a lot of work has gone into this the writer there jacob wallet dirksen has clearly done a lot of research um to set the scene and you can learn a lot about mythical ireland and ancient ireland just by reading um the outline to the game that’s already been created so as i said you can play as the ac the fairy people you can place the few bollocks or you can play as the gaels these are the three kind of primary classes or tribes of people but within that there’s different subdivisions so you can be a brethren or you can be a druid or a chieftain a warrior poet like our friends in the athena you can even be a fairy rover and clearly a lot of popularity and a lot of interest in this project they reached their kickstarter goal in 24 hours the campaign is still open it’s still running so if this is just sort of project that you want to get involved in the sort of project that you’d like to support you can still do that i’m going to put a link to the description uh in the description to the campaign so if you want to go over and and contribute to that it’ll be a really amazing fun game and i hope to speak to the creator of this one day in the future and this is going to tie in very nicely to tonight’s topic which is the arrival of the tour head of darling [Music] what is the value in considering mythology what is the the merit for people to have a mythology and to want to understand and to know their mythology if myth is fake well i don’t really halt to that view for me obviously there is a divergence between mythology and history that’s why we have different words for them but myth is real and has a value in society on more subtle intrinsic factors than the more kind of overt understanding that we can get from history to say that myths are not real is to my mind the same as saying that dreams are not real well yeah they’re not real but they exist myth exists in the same way that dream exists and so it has been written and said that myth are public dreams and dreams our private myth the only reason i’m saying this is that it would be a great loss to our understanding uh to discount something simply because it is known as a myth yet we can still approach mythology and we can still approach um ancient manuscripts that talk of fantastic things that simply to our mind could not be with the understanding that it is myth we’re approaching and we use maybe a different set of let a different lens and a different set of analytical tools because we’re approaching it with the understanding that it is myth but perhaps all myth is seeded in truth i have to see the truth within it the main irish manuscript that deals with the the topic of the two-headed dannon would be the book of invasions it’s called or lauer gowalla aaron it’s also called the book of the takings of ireland or the book of the migrations of ireland and basically it tells the story of the migrations of many different groups of people different races or tribes to ireland over a period of time in the mythic or prehistorical uh the prehistorical age you can find uh the book of invasions for example in um the book of lismore but they’re also referenced in the annals of ireland which we’ll mention a bit more in this video um i guess just to give you a bit of a background on what are the animals the animals served as a sort of a historical record of the knowledge of the people and what’s interesting about the irish animals is that they are clearly historical documents with dates that have been verified and aligned with what is written in the manuscript but when you go very very far back into the origins of the the very people this is when they start to get a bit fantastical so in the irish context there is a clear mixture of mythology of history of religious spiritual influence fused with folk memory and and under the pressure of many external forces um well then sure it only makes sense that irish books of history and animals would be mixed with flavors of mythology and a sort of a a a sort of a dreamlike consciousness that that ties the the irish sense of itself to itself so this is the thing with mythology and this is the thing with identity um they they mythology stands the test of time because the messages and motifs in the myth are relevant throughout the test of time beyond the story and the characters when you get into the psychological and messaging and the archetypes and the motifs they’re relevant but when we think about how these stories of the mythologies have come down to us in ireland over the many many centuries millennia even the further we go back into the midst of time the harder it is to have concrete understanding of what was going on back then and as new writers as generations came and the society the context changed maybe the language that they use to tell the same mythology begins to evolve and change maybe they add embellishments or they impute messages and meanings that’s relevant to the current age but may not have been relevant to the age that came just before them because it’s important in the irish context to remember always that the manuscript writing began after the christian era so therefore all of the manuscripts that would be tinged naturally with a christian bias that just makes sense the lara gavala is an interesting one because it has been sort of described as a pseudo-history written by let’s say like ambitious irish monks who wished to write the story of their own people of the gale into the emerging judeo-christian world narrative that was you know the prevailing understanding of society and reality at the time and the irish people are reading these stories in the bible and um they want to be part of it so some people suggest that the christianization of the lower govala aaron was as an effort to legitimize in a way the existence of the gael and that they were somehow connected to biblical uh biblical lines uh before that however there is uh there are accounts like the stories that appeared in lara gavala aaron do appear in other manuscripts older than the 11th century and they you can see a clear uh distinction between the descriptions on how the myth are treated so the christian era definitely brought with it writing and um manuscripts beautiful ornate manuscripts monastic settlements and so on but previous to that the memory uh decided knowledge of myth was memorized and preserved in an oral tradition that spanned at least at least centuries before saint patrick’s arrival we have to say centuries because we’re getting into that pre-historic pre-written record era where it’s just gets a bit messy and historians tend not to like to go to that part of the historical record because there ain’t one there um so what i wanted to do is just kind of try to dis and disambiguate a little bit who are the two ahead of dan and in relation to their arrival in ireland up until the first battle of moytora so like most of my videos this is going to be a kind of a a collage of pictures and quotes mostly quotes i’m going to be using in this and i’m going to send include a list of the books that i’m using in the description below so if any of you guys want to um get access to those books and read more you can certainly do that and i’m pretty sure all of these are available already in the brehn academy.org resource library so please do go and sign up there it’s completely free to become a member you can access the library there’s over 100 resources there resources just like the ones that i used to put together the material for this video now that being said as i was talking a moment ago the texts relating to the two ahead of dannon can be classed generally speaking into two groups okay roughly those before the 11th century and those after the 11th century so during the 11th century a theme emerged in the monastic schools that sort of invented the histories of ireland in a manner that would relate the irish people back to the biblical descendants of adam and in these accounts all of the races of ireland can trace their lineage back to the descent of adam via jaffet this is important and it will become clear why in a few moments you have to put it into the mindset of today the christian mindset of the day why this would have made sense to them so in this post-11 century in the later kind of versions uh we find that the two ahead of dannon and the fear bollocks are actually related to each other and they descend from the nemedians and the med is descended from the biblical families of who we were speaking about a moment ago so this is interesting because this extended kinship between the three bullocks and the toa hat of dannon gives an explanation why they could understand each other’s language when they first met which is covered in my previous video uh about the fear bollocks and in other videos elsewhere and it might i think come up again uh later in this video as well um but that explained how they could understand each other because they were allegedly descended from the same parent group who were called the nemedians but according to our word ruben ville this is not the primitive tradition this is not the earlier tradition of what the earlier irish believed the earlier accounts described the two had the danon as beings that came down from heaven as many other native and you know sort of uh tribal cultures that still exist with us describe their origin myth as coming down from the stars as uh the anunnaki and so on is a very common theme across many cultures so the earlier myth believed that they came down from the heavens and uh the judeville says that the legendary tune mccarroll who was mentioned in the previous video and stories of an irish sept he still held to belief even after his conversion to christianity by saint finnen but that i think my friends is probably a story for another day can just go any direction with this there’s so much just so much in it uh but to quote the de joubienville in his book the irish mythological cycle and celtic mythology from 1903 he said after adopting the 11th century idea that the two ahead of dannon had a descendants of jaffet by urbanelle and named the book of invasions further on adopts the older tradition and describes them as demons the name by which the christians used to designate the pagan gods he finishes by saying contradictions of this kind are not uncommon in the book of invasions so on the one hand the animals treat uh the two-headed dannon as being a group of human beings great human beings highly cultured human beings perhaps even skilled in magic and necromancy but still human nonetheless and that’s important because they have to be human because they have to descend from noah of the bible through the line of jaffet on the other hand the animals are speaking of the two heterodyne in a very supernatural way the jubinville is using the words demons here and it’s very clear that that was an intentional use of the world there is a supernatural aspect to how the early irish viewed uh the two headed dannon so the annals as much of the literature does in early ireland has a tendency to mix together sources and there’s a lot of the time in irish mythology where something doesn’t make sense and you just have to go with the flow it’s very dreamy in that sense um and the animals is is not um an exception to the fact that there’s often a lot of mixing and blending together of motifs and sources and um um i guess like words that are used and descriptions and so on so viewed in the context of the times in this christian christendom mindset and the prevailing belief at that time that the bible was a historical fact okay we can then look at this 11th century sort of reformulation or reimagining of the stories as an attempt by the irish monks to i guess make sense of their own history to make sense of their own identity the folk history of their people and their origins and get that to somehow fit into what was then the wider emerging historical and biblical narratives that were prevailing across europe so that leads to a problem then if everyone was wiped out during the flood as the bible tells us it was except for noah his family and two of every animal then the irish like all people in the world must descend from noah because everybody else was wiped out so they had to contend with this biblical idea and then explain well how did people like kisser come into existence the caesarians and the pathelonians caser was was a group of people who allegedly came to ireland when at the time the great fluid happened well if she was in ireland and everybody else in the world who wasn’t on the ark was wiped out how does anybody live to tell that story they were trying to tackle these kind of inc what they perceived to be inconsistencies and then find a way to fit the story of ireland and the irish identity into the wider emerging narrative of um i guess biblical global historical identity but the irish origin myths told a different story and in a different way because they were not trying to fit into this mold of judeo-christian identity so the way they were told originally would have been obviously more authentically irish more primal in a sense more honest more naked uh in depicting the true will the fear the desires aspirations of those people without trying to conform it to some emerging world view that was prevailing at the time but to me this sort of retelling of the irish epoch seems like an effort on the part of the monks to sort of weave the tails of their own people into the story of the world i don’t think there’s anything like uh essentially like insidious about that and we have to remember if it wasn’t for these monks we probably wouldn’t be even sitting and being able to talk about these legends at all earlier to the 11th century kind of reformulation the two ahead of dundin would be closer to what we could call the pagan gods of the irish however when you read the mythology they’re not really taught of earth or people don’t behave towards them like we expect people to behave towards gods and goddesses such as in the greek and in the roman belief systems and other pagan systems they were considered the xi or the dini maha they called them the good people and part of the reason they called them the good people was not really because they thought they were good people it was in case they were listening the invisible ones were listening and you didn’t want to say something bad about them because the fairy people the dini maha they had power and in a sense we might be closer thinking of demons here or of jin in the uh islamic tradition so these are the fairies the banshee the very er famous fairies and and she people of ireland we don’t find temples to them in the same way that we do to say athena or jupiter and so on hermes and the stories and that we do have about them don’t seem to contain much about sacrificing to the she or calling on them for divine aid they do appear in the stories and to some of the later heroes and offer divine assistance but it doesn’t seem like there’s anything humans can do to to kind of appeal to that assistance and to to call out to them they don’t seem to be worshipped as a in the typical way that we expect gods to be worshipped so after the 11th century they reformulated texts and this is where we start to hear of two battles of moitora and this is the really where we’re starting to get into the substance of this video the battle of moitora commonly today it is generally accepted if you go and buy a book about irish mythology um generally you’re going to read about two battles of my torah okay the first battle of my torah which is called southern moy torah taking place between the fear bollocks and the two ahead of daniel that’s what we’re going to talk about today the second battle of moytora called northern more torah allegedly took place between the two heads of danan and the famorians okay but this wasn’t always the case um and just don’t know on the femorians because everybody knows and talks about the two headed down and as he’s like very mystical and interesting and mysterious gods of early ireland but the fomorians are even more mysterious than the two headed on it they are the longest established of the early races who we hear of in ireland several races had come in the time after the flood so after cassair you had the patalonians and the medians and the fear bullocks and each time they came they found the femorians that were already there so in a sense according to the mythology the fomorians are the oldest of the post-flood races they seem to have inhabited ireland uh the longest especially along the north and the west coasts and meanwhile you have these migrations of barcelonians and nemedians and eventually to head to dannon and so um these are the group that the two are headed down and allegedly fighting the second battle of my torah the fomorians who are described as as monsters or pirates or in some texts even just merchants and in the mythology they signify the bad gods the monstrous ones the the what we would call the titans uh in greek mythology they symbolized the chaotic and dark side of nature the the unruly forces of the storm they are the opposing forces to tattoo ahead of dannon who symbolize light reason art poetry high culture and so on um the jubilee anvil goes on to explain that the most ancient traditions in the most ancient traditions the ones prior to the 11th century they only speak of one battle and in this battle the two headed and yes they are the main ones fighting but they fight against both the fear bullocks and the femorians at the same time now i wanted to share this with you because not a lot of people are aware of that that there was a according to the journey villain and others there was originally only one battle of muytora which was the three of bollocks and the femorians against the two ahead of the dunan and in that story the femorians are described as the gods of the fear bullocks the gods of the fear bullets ready for mauryans now i’m just sharing the information and it’s uh as i said earlier there doesn’t have to be always consistency in irish mythology it’s a little bit dreamy you just kind of have to go with the flow a little bit and just accept that that’s the way things are a quote from the jupiter here about this battle he said that in this battle the tour had done and overthrew the triple race of men who were at the time masters of ireland namely the fear bullock the freedom and the galleon in the same battle they also overcame the gods who were associated with this antique race and who were known as the famorians or they donna now if you know much about irish or even a little bit you’d know that they signifies god or something godly so to a hate de danu to ahad uh has been translated to mean that the people of the goddess daniel to what i find here interesting is um the the the the group who existed in ireland before the two headed down and arrived who we calling the fear bullock here are described as the triple race of men because you know if you watched my other videos within the fear bullock there was actually three groups the fear bollock they feared downing and the guardian why is this interesting why am i making a fuss about this well fear down on if you’ve watched the previous video here with a fear box you would know that this has been translated to being like the men of the earth because they were apparently like digging the soil and collecting soil and if this is true my my logic is is serving me well here then to call the fomorians the day down on it’s almost like saying the gods of the earth the gods of the soil like and it might be connected to it might have a very like nature uh primal pagan sort of connection there to refer to them as the day down um but before the 11th century just to clarify this so we can move on um we only read of one battle of moytora which was where the two ahead of dannon fought the triple race of men called the fear bollocks aka fear bullock uh fear down and guardian and their gods the framorians who were called the day donut after the 11th century we had a retelling and a reformulation by the monks by a new version that became popular that there are now two battles of muytora and the two are headed and fight two separate battles against both of these groups the three bullocks and in the first one and the second one the formorians and this is the version that we’re going to be doing a bit more of a deep dive on here it’s one that we’re going to be talking about but i’ll make references wherever relevance to the more magical descriptions of the two headed down along the way so um just to put this in the context of timing i’m using a list here that’s called the age of the world ano mundi chronology from eleanor hull’s epochs of history volume 2 early christian ireland which was published in 1905 and it’s available on the brent academy.org members library the timeline that eleanor hull has created here is based on the annals of the farm master as we spoke about earlier on and but why i wanted to just take a moment to pause on this is because um it’s written in what’s called ano mundai so you know we have bc before christ a d and o domini well this is given as anno monday and on monday is the latin that means the year of the world and it’s actually calculated from the jewish uh chronology of the world which is counted from the time of creation so that’s why it’s different than ours which is bc and ad obviously uh jewish people don’t use these dates in their chronology because they don’t didn’t have crisis of messiah and then changed their times um so in the jewish chronology it’s j i think this is kind of funny but it’s generally accepted that um creation began around 3762 up to 3758 bc we know for sure that it was on a sunday according to jewish belief and they calculated by looking at genealogies by looking at historical events in the torah they’re able to calculate and say we think it’s around this the the creation began about this many years ago so the year and on monday 5781 began at sunset on the 18th of september 2020. so we’re currently in on the gregorian calendar what we would call uh 18th of uh from the 18th of september 2020 we entered into the ano mundai 5781 which leads to the the belief under that is that that’s how all the world is um this year why am i saying this because i want to create an anchor for us so that when we look at these dates of on monday you have some sort of reference to understand how long ago these things were so the annals and the timeline begins in ano monday 2242 which is the time that casser came to ireland okay and they say that that was in the year of the great flood okay so kissare came to ireland in 2242 and on one day the current and on monday is 5781 so when we’re talking about the the coming of the first group of people into ireland the kasarians we’re looking at according to these records about 3500 about 3539 years ago eleanor hull also notes that okay the dates of the four masters are sometimes in arrears of a year or two and sometimes they’re very different from other records so for the most important events she’s taking other dates that aren’t in the four masters the ones that are the most accepted and most likely dates and she acknowledges that obviously some of the dates are mythical and you can never really validate them and as i said you can download this from the bretton academy resource library if you want to go and have a look at her full timeline we’re only going to go from the beginning of the world up until the battle of moytora we’re going to leave out a few details on the way we’re talking about a time span here of about 1060 years from 3539 years ago up until 2478 years ago we’ll quickly go through the first a couple of thousand years of existence and then we’ll take a little bit more time to to focus in on a particular year which is 3303 because that was the year that the tour had done and came to ireland and that was the year that the two had to done and met with the fear bullock in battle so zero god created everything on a sunday then we have the book of genesis the story of noah the great flood there the details i’m gonna gloss over uh which brings us up to ano monday 2242 this is the date given by the four masters as the coming of caserta ireland and that was allegedly 40 days before the great flood caster came to ireland with 50 women and three men she fled they fled together on a boat to ireland in order to try and escape the flood it didn’t work uh casey’s husband was vinton mcbojour he is said to be the survivor he is said to be the reason why we knew about the story hundreds of years later because he survived the flood by taking different incarnations as as different animals starting with a fish so 2000 and on monday 2520 given as the date in which parthelong came to ireland then 10 years later the formorians are defeated by parthelon at in the battle of magus in county donegal in 2820 parthenon’s people die of the plague um it’s interesting because some of the myths that i’ve read that they attribute where they died to a place called tala which is in dublin tala which literally translates as a plague pit or burial place um and the story says how five thousand men and four thousand women of the parthenonians died of this plague in a single week so that was the end of the parthelonians 30 years later in 2850 nemeth came to ireland fast forward in and on monday 3066 the femorian tower of conan on tory island is destroyed by the race of named only 30 of the race of the med escape they escape they escape and they flee the country and the people of the med are not going to return in ireland for another 200 years the medians broke away into different groups and they scattered themselves across europe group one where the triple race of men who we’ve talked about earlier the free bullock and the second group group was the tribe of danu or titua in anna monday 3266 we have the arrival of the fear bullock in eru this you could call the first return of the nominees to ireland why do i say that because they are the descendants of the people who fled after only 30 of them remain from a battle of the femorians whenever i mentioned the fear bullet you must always keep in mind the fear down and the fear gallian in jeffrey keating’s history of ireland he says quote it is to these chiefs with their companies that are called fair bullock verdan and fair guardian fear bullock indeed from the bags of leather they used to have in greece carrying her to put it on bare flags so that they might make of them flowery plains in bloom fair downing from the pits they used to dig in the soil by carrying it to the fair bullock guardian indeed were named from the darts because it is these which used to be their arms defending everybody when they would be that is doing their work and from the darts or the spears which were their arms they were named if you want to learn more about this go back and watch my previous video who were the fear bollocks eleanor hull also speaks about this idea of them being like the men of the bag she says quotes they were called fear bologna men of the bags or leather wallets this name was given to them because the greeks compelled them to carry bags of rich soil from the valleys up to the stony heights in order to turn them into gardens at last they could endure their slavery no longer and it is said that the order made boats of the leather bags with which they had toiled or stole some greek ships and escaped they turned towards the distant island from which their ancestor had come and 217 years after he left ireland they set foot on its shores the fear bullets ruled ireland for 37 years before the coming of the torah de dunan and they had nine kings during this time their five leaders partitioned the kingdom into five provinces their last hiking was yucky mcgurk and if you want to hear more on this check out the uh the basque connection video or the mythic origins of the irish people video that i have here on youtube so that brings us up to very quickly uh i told you it would be quick the faithful year of three thousand three hundred and three and on monday the two headed down and invade ireland and we have the first battle of muy torah in kong county mayo the annals entry for ana monday 3303 says the tenth year of the reign of yuki’s son of irk and this was the last year of his reign for the two head of dannon’s came to invade ireland against the fair bullocks and they gave battle to each other at muay thara in konmar khul tala in konak so that the king yooki sonavurk was killed by the three sons of nimit son of vadhri of the two hudadanans kesarup luev and lucra their names the fear bulls were vanquished and slaughtered in this battle moreover the hand of son of yoki son of erdel ederlov the king who was over the two headed daniels was cut off in the same battle the afore said yuki was the last king of the fair bullocks nine of them had assumed the kingship and 37 years was the length of their sway over ireland patrick western joyce in his social history of ancient ireland volume 1 says that the name to ahead of danan signifies the two aha or people of the goddess danu or danan who was the mother of the gods according to arabic chroniclers the didanans were the fourth of the prehistoric prehistoric colonies that arrived in ireland many centuries before the christian era they were great magicians and were highly skilled in science and metalworking after inhabiting ireland for about 200 years they were conquered by the people of the fifth and last colony the malaysians jeffrey keating in section 10 of his history of ireland on the invasion of the two heterdanon says that others say that it is why they are called to ahadidanan because it is in their three orders they were of those who had come into ireland on this expedition the first order of them which is called tua used to be in the rank of nobility and headship of tribe tua indeed and hirna being equivalent as tua and hereness are equal that is the more fit to believe in as much as is given as an epitaph for buchul and for danan whom they had for female rulers so this verse gives us to understand beukel and danon beloved the two female chiefs were slain the extinction of their magic at last by pale demons of air the second order to which used to be called day such are their druids whence it is the above three used to be called the three gods of danan wherefore they were called gods is from the wonderfulness of their deeds of magic the third order which was called danan namely the order which was given to don our crafts for dan and card are equal so what he’s saying here there’s two different accounts one of them is they’re called tu ahada danan because it means tuaha the people they danan the of the goddess but jeffrey keating is saying well there’s actually another theory here that they’re called tua because of the society and the the the rank of nobility aristocracy that was of the tour they’re called they because of the religious aspect their beliefs of the druids and the practices of the druids today the god people and then dan don is the irish for poem and craft uh well it’s for poem and he’s saying don and card are equal so what this could be is that they were named after being the people who had like society religion and arts and poetry and this is one way that they were characterized a little bit of a longer quote here from the juvenile in the irish mythological cycle and celtic mythology he says the two ahead of dannon are the most exalted representatives of one of the two principles that divide the world the more ancient of these is negative death night ignorance evil the second which proceeds from the first is positive namely day life knowledge goodness in the tour headed we find the most brilliant expression of the latter principle and from them emanate the lore of the druids and the science of the philly irish texts relating to the two heterodanine may be divided into two separate groups some of them have come under the influence of the late 11th century school which sought to create a history of ireland based upon the genealogies of the bible in this systematically conceived doctrine all the mythic and historical races of ireland are descended from the same stock which can be traced back from jaffet to adam the father of mankind the two headed anon include named among the number of their ancestors one of his sons by name yarbonnel was possessed with the gift of prophecy urbanelle’s posterity escaped from the massacre of conan’s tower and departing out of ireland passed into the northern regions of the world to learn druidical lore the art of obtaining visions and foretelling the future and the practice of incantations when they had acquired these magical arts the descendants of urbanelle came back to ireland and they are lighted in the midst of dark clouds so that the sun was hidden from the space for three days and for three nights also says the book of invasions but this is not the primitive tradition the ancient pagan belief was that the two ahadidanan came down from heaven too and mccarroll after his conversion by finnin still held this belief after adopting the 11th century idea that the tyra de danen are the descendants of jaffet by arbanel and named the book of invasion further on adopts the older tradition and describes them as demons this is what we talked about earlier uh back to jeffrey keating again talking of the invasion of the two-headed daniel he says that they are of the posterity of the third chief of the race of the med who had gone on adventures from ireland after the destruction of the tower of khannan namely yobat son of bjork and according to some antiquaries the place which was inhibited by them was bowetia in the north of europe some others say that it is in the athenian territory they dwelt where the city of athens is based understand our reader that mauitia and the city of athens according to pomponius mella are in the district of greece which is called achaea and that it is there they learn their magic and their arts until they became skilled in every trick of sorcery it happened about that time that a great fleet came from the county country of syria to make war on the people of the athenian country so that there was daily warfare between them and those of the athenians who would be slain it is they who would be on the morrow fighting with the people of syria the necromancy used to be done through the art of magic of the two ahead of dannon for they would put demons in the same bodies to restore them and when the people of syria became aware of this they go to take council with their own druid the druid says to them to set a watch on the site around the place of the battlefield and to thrust a stake of quicken tree through the trunk of every dead person he would be rising up against him and if it were demons it would cause their bodies to revive that they would be from that immediately turned into worms while if it were really their revival that had been brought about the bodies would not suffer change of corruption the people of syria come to join battle on the morrow and it is won by them and they thrust the stakes of ash through the dead as the druid had told them and presently worms were made of them and the people of syria fell on the others after that slaughtering them as regards to two hadidan and when they saw the people of syria prevailing over the people of the country they in one band depart from that territory for fear of them and they made no stay till they came to the country of lachlan the people of norway where they got welcome from the people of the country for the extent of their science and of their varied arts it was a long quote that one what’s interesting and why i like to share it is it it’s starting to emphasize this common idea about tattoo ahead of dannon which is that they’re involved in necromancy and magic and when i read this and bear in mind this book was written gosh must be 1700s or something um it reminded me very much of like vampires like drive a piece of wood through the the body of the dead to stop them reviving stop them coming back to life mf cusack in the patriots history of ireland writing in 1869 says quote the two ahead of dennis where are brave high-spirited race and famous for their skill in what was then termed magic but it is probable that all the magic of which they were guilty was being able to exercise many mechanical arts of which those who had previously invaded ireland were then ignorant sort of suggesting that maybe they weren’t magic after all they just had a higher understanding of science and so on so let’s talk about their actual arrival in the land in lao and ahuja the book of the dune cow the story of tune with carol which is a manuscript written around the 12th century it says quote whose origin of the two headed and the learned do not know but that it seems likely to them that they came from heaven on account of their intelligence and for the excellence of their knowledge they had no vessels no one really knows whether it was over the heavens or out of the heavens or out of the earth that they came were the demons of the devil or they men that’s from the book of leinster around right around 1160 and you can find that in the irish mythological cycle and celtic mythology by armoire de joubeinville t.w rowliston in myths and legends of the celtic race they were wafted into the land in a magic cloud making their first appearance in western connect when the cloud cleared away the fear bullocks discovered them in a camp which they had already fortified at moyrane jeffrey keating again said concerning the two headed down in day having spent seven years in the north of scotland came to ireland and on their coming to land on a monday on bialtena in the north of ireland they burned their ships so to certify that this ran was composed each warrior of them burned his ship when he reached noble era it was a grave decision in his state the vapor of the ships being burned after that they put off mist of drew after that they put a mist of druidism around them for the space of three days so that they were not manifest to any one of the fear bulk till they reached sleeve on iren eleanor hull says that these wise and clever people seem also to have come from greece and they landed on the northwest coast of ireland in a thick mist which lasted for three days and which they are said to have raised to hide their advance from the freer bulk they marched on scene to schlieven erin by the iron mountain in county literal eleanor hull also says in pagan ireland elsewhere that um the dominion of the fear bog was not long in ireland for when 36 years were ended a fresh enemy appeared to dispute the kingdom with them this was the mysterious race called the two hudderdanon who were supposed to possess all sorts of magical power and who were afterwards looked upon as great gods the deities of the pagan irish the people who came after them believed that they could invoke magic mists mists to bewilder the enemy that they could raise the dead to life and do all sorts of miraculous things what really seems to have been true is that they were more learned and clever in all sorts of arts and in the knowledge of natural things than the races with whom they mingled so that these more ignorant people thought that they possess supernatural powers they brought with them to ireland the knowledge of medicine building of making cups and weapons of brass and other metals besides the skill and hard playing for which the irish afterwards became so famous lady gregory and gods and fighting men says it was in a mist the two headed the people of the gods of dana or some called them the men of day came through the air and the high air to ireland it was on the first day of the alternate that is now called mayday the two headed down and came and it was to the northwest of connect they landed but the fear bullocks the men in the bag that were in ireland before them and they had come from the south saw nothing but a mist ended lying on the hills it was from the north they came and in the place they came from they had four cities where they fought their battle for learning great failures and shining glorious and phineas and rich murias that lay to this out and in those cities they had four wise men to teach their young men skill and knowledge and perfect wisdom chenius and murious and arius the fair-headed poet in phineas and aerious of the noble nature ingorius and maurius in failus itself and they brought from those four cities their four treasures a stone of virtue from failus that was called the leophyle the stone of destiny and from glorious they brought a sword and from phineas a spear of victory and for murias the fourth treasure the cauldron that no company ever went away from unsatisfied end quote the joubeinville again says that the word demon was borrowed by the irish from the latin theologians but they had an expression of their own to designate the wonderful human-like bodies by which by means of which they believe that god sometimes made themselves visible to men this was shibra which might fittingly be rendered as phantom this brings us up now to the first battle of southern motora the plane of the towers earliest texts in which we find mention of the battle of motora are the glossary of cormac who died at the beginning of the 10th century uh and also a poem by kennedu artakhan who died in 975 and can be found in lower nahuja eleanor hall in pagan ireland says that the fear bulk chose to fight for their rights and the two armies marched to a place called southern muytorah or mother in county mail near kong along the shore of lok mask here a furious battle was fought during four days in which the free bullet were utterly beaten and an immense number were slain even at the present day the district over which this great battle is said to have been fought is covered with memorials of it t.w rowleston and myths and legends of celtic race says that the fear bulgs now sent out one of their warriors named swang to interview the mysterious newcomers and the people of dana on their side sent the warrior name bress to represent them the two ambassadors examined each other’s weapons with great interest the spears of the that of the danands we are told were light and share pointed those of the fear bullocks were heavy and blunt to contrast the power of science with that of brute force is here the evident intention of the legend and we are reminded of the greek myth of the struggle of the olympian deities with the titans perez proposed to the furbolg that the two rays not impressed with the available of the danans and decided to refuse their offer the battle was joined on the plane of my torah the south of county mayo in a spot now called kong the fear bollocks were led by their king mcgurk and the danons by nuda of the silver hand who got his name from an incident in this battle his hand it is said was cut off in the fight and one of the skillful artificers who had who abounded in the ranks of the danans made him a new one of silver now we’re going to go a little bit deeper into the details of the battle itself from lady gregory’s gods and fighting men it was on a mid-summer day they began the battle three times nine hurdlers of the two ahead of daniel went out against three times nine hurlers of the fear bullocks and they were beaten and every one of them was killed and then king yohi sent a messenger to ask what they have to battle every day or every second day and it is what nuada answered that they would have it every day but that there should be just the same number of men fighting on each side yuki agreed to that but he was not well pleased for there were more men of the fear bullock than of the men of day so the battle went on for four days and there were great feats done on each side and a great many champions came to do that to their death and for those that were alive at evening the physicians on each side used to make a bath of healing with every sort of healing plant or herb in it the way they would be strong and sound for the next day’s fight and on the fourth day the men of day got the upper hand and the fear bullets were driven back and a great thirst came on yuki their king in the battle and he went off the field looking for a drink and three fifties of his men protecting him but three fifties of the two headed down and followed after them till they came to the strand that is called tree johal and they had a fierce fight there and at last king yohi fell and they buried him there and they raised a great heap of stones over his grave and when they were about 300 men left of the 11 battalions of the free bullocks and strang at the head of them nuada offered them peace and their choice among the five provinces of ireland and srang said they would take connuct and he and his people lived there and their children after them it is of them ferdia came afterwards that made such a good fight against cu cullen and eric son of carvery that gave him his debt and that battle that was the first fought in ireland by the men of day was called by some the first battle of muy toro and the two headed down and took possession of terror there was something called drum kind the beautiful ridge and leodrome the grey ridge and romney descent the ridge of the outlook all those names were given to tower and from that time it was above all other places for its king was the high king over all ireland the king’s wrath lay to the north and the hill of the hostages to the northeast of the high seat and the green of terror to the west of the hill of the hostages and to the northeast in the hill of the she was a well called nemnak and out of it there flowed a stream called nith and on that stream the first mill was built in ireland and to the north of the hill of the hostages was the stone the leophile and it used to roar under the feet of every king that would take possession in ireland and the wall of the three whispers was near the house of the women that had seven doors to the east and seven doors to the west and it is in that house the feasts of shower used to be held and there was the great house of a thousand soldiers and near it to the south the little hill of the woman’s soldiers t.w rolliston and myths and legends of the celtic race says by their magical and healing arts that that the dalans gained the victory and the fear bowler king was slain but a reasonable agreement followed the fear bullocks were allotted the province of connaught for their territory while the danans took the rest of ireland so late as the 17th century the analyst mcflurry was discovered that many of the inhabitants of connects traced their descent to these same fear bullocks probably they were a veritable historic race and the conflict between them and the people of dana may be a piece of actual history invested with some of the features of a myth mf kuzak in the patriot history says the fear bullocks were defeated for they were no fair match for the famous two ahead of dannon’s eleanor hull in pagan ireland said king yuki was killed on the last day of the fight it was mid-summer day hot and dusty and after the defeat of his army the king with a guard of 100 faithful men left the battlefield to go in search of water to allay their burning thirst they reached the shore nearby zadar and zlago and here made a last stand against a large body of the enemy who had followed them the king was killed after a fierce conflict in which the three leaders of the enemy also fell the king of the two headed dennis lost his hand in the battle and seven years afterwards his people made for him a silver hand so that he was known as nuada of the silver hand after the battle the fair bullock who escaped fled to the western oil of iron wrathlin and the hebrides and here they are said to have built immense force on the borders of the ocean in which they defended themselves some of the forts ascribed to them remain to the present day and are the most remarkable and stupendous relics we have of the pagan times afterwards some of them returned to ireland and the king of leinster gave them lands other others settled in connect they remained quite distinct from the other inhabitants and were remarkable for their activity and bravery it is certain that there are still on the west coast of ireland mixed with the ordinary population a small black-haired people which corresponds exactly with the description given after fair bullet by the old writers so that brings us to the end of this video i’m curious to know what you think who are the two ahead of tannen are they a real group of people where they some purely mythological inventions i’d love to know what you think i think this is a really fascinating interesting topic of discussion uh in the matters of irish history and heritage uh before i go just remind you to check out the link in the description to the kickstarter campaign for heroes of tara be sure to check that out i have a few more videos in the pipeline uh trying to get these out a little bit quicker than i have been doing but it takes quite a long time to produce them uh but until next time thank you for your time this evening and slang fall [Music] hey you’ve got dana august faulty good day to understand hello everybody and you’re very welcome to turn this here landed the free tonight so i’m going to read an extract tonight from a book called beyond the mist by peter o’connor who’s a psychologist and he shows us how ancient irish mythology can be used to understand the universal themes and conflicts that have affected humankind throughout the course of time in chapters four and six of his book peter o’connor describes the gods and goddesses of the gaelic pantheon and he shows that through their characteristics and activities they metaphorically represent these aspects of the human psyche symbolic concepts within ourselves which must be conquered to understand he makes an interesting point when people say things like myths are false it’s similar to saying dreams are false they’re not false they do have a sense of reality in their own sense albeit a subjective sense of reality and an objective a subjective existence but if dreams are the symbolic language of an individual’s unconscious mind then myths are the language of the collective’s unconscious mind so sit back get comfortable and we’re going to take an exploration into the gaelic gods and goddesses and what they mean in a psychological context this is beyond the midst of time by peter o’connor chapter four the gods the masculine archetypes the gods have deteriorated down and are not dominant or all powerful figures indeed it is the goddesses who emerge as the most powerful divinities in irish mythology there seems to be within irish mythology a permanent supremacy of divine women and the male divinities must acknowledge this supremacy it is as if the ego which is identified with rationality and logos must accept and concede that it is not master in its own house and that more exists in that which is known visible and tangible there is this permanent presence of what we have come to term the unconscious which is often symbolized in myths and dreams by natural phenomena such as the sea forests the moon and the earth and is therefore symbolically linked to the goddess and the feminine this pervasive utter world of the unconscious governs much of our waking life and rules our sleeping life the unconscious not unlike the goddesses of ireland is the source of growth and fertility the spring of renewal that gives energy to the conscious life and yet just like nature can destroy consciousness itself the hero our heroine must simultaneously yield to and struggle to emerge from the unconscious if if successful in this struggle he creates some order in the form of discrimination and consciousness we need to work at consciously knowing these forces that move invisibly within us and determine much of our everyday behavior although the goddesses are more powerful we must firstly turn to the major male divinities in irish mythology the dagdah the dagda is the chief god of the celtic pantheon and one might consider him as similar to zeus jupiter or odin he is a multi-faceted god with various titles such as father of all which is yucca ala hair and lord of perfect knowledge ruid rofessa the knowledge being referred to here is not factual knowledge but rather esoteric or arcane knowledge druidic knowledge nora chadwick points out that the irish gods are neither worshiped nor sacrificed to they are supernatural beings with magical powers the doctor certainly falls within this category and we also know that he is described as the good god not because he is good in a moral sense but because he is good at everything which includes his magical knowledge and powers in some stories he is seen as the literal father of the goddess bridget and the god angus in addition to his role as father of all he is said to have possessed a magical club a cauldron and harp the club was so massive that it required eight men to carry it and one end could kill nine men in one stroke whereas the order could immediately restore them to life this possession highlights his supernatural powers over life and death his magical cauldron left no one unfed since the supply was inexhaustible this symbolizes a somewhat more feminine role of the dagde as nurturer of his tribe it is interesting to note that the cauldron in many mythologies is associated with female deities and with the process of regeneration and rebirth in babylon for example the cauldron was under the control of the faith goddess cirrus mother of the stars whereas in welsh mythology it is the goddess branwyn who is the possessor of a magical cauldron of regeneration in nearly all mythologies there exists some form of miraculous vessel connected with birth and transformation christian mythology includes the chalice of christ which is linked to the holy grail legend the new testament tells of christ feeding the multitudes from what may be a magical vessel since from two fish and five loaves five thousand were fed and twelve baskets of leftovers were gathered up the chalice associated with the catholic mass is another example of a magical vessel since it is connected with the magical renewal of the body and blood of christ the dagger is also referred to as a crude ugly pot-bellied coarse figure who was inclined to uncount behavior however he also had a very refined side that is reflected in his third possession his magical harp this he could summon by merely calling it and it would fly to him through the air he played on it to mark the changing seasons which links him to nature and symbolizes his additional role as guardian of the earth and his fertility the dagda like various of the goddesses incorporates both the masculine and feminine principles achieved in god preoccupied with territorial claims kingship and aggression is at the same time a nurturing figure guardian of fertility and restorer of life this aspect of the irish gods and goddesses finds its parallel in young’s notion of the archetype and in particular his concept of the archetypal anime and animus the feminine and masculine energies in the collective psyche in the first half of life says young we tend to develop only one of these consciously often in line with both gender and social expectations leaving the opposite aspect in an undeveloped state often identifiable with adolescence the midlife crisis the transition which occurs between 35 and 45 years of age is related to a need from within to attend to the imbalance and to develop the opposite qualities to those that are already present in one’s conscious life many people around this age begin to experience a loss of meaning and purpose culminating in feelings of aimlessness and hopelessness what is the point of it all is the question that many a person in the midlife period has found themselves asking for men this is often a time for developing and understanding their feelings and moving away from an exclusive reliance on logic for understanding women if they have pursued a formal career in the first half of life experience much the same feeling as men a deep and abiding sense of futility along with a growing sense that there must be more to life than power and success in the workplace some of these women experience the emergence of the feminine side in the form of pondering whether they will have a child or not order women who may have forgotten or curtailed their careers in the interest of raising children find themselves occupied with thoughts of returning to the workplace or undertaking further study for these women it is the masculine principle that needs development in this sense the dike that provides an archetypal model for men albeit a somewhat primitive one of the integration of these opposite qualities he would appear to be an advance on the singularly masculine gods of the ancient greeks which have played such a powerful role in shaping the psyche of western man lou this god is the son of a femorian woman and two ahead of donor man whoever evidence exists to suggest that he was well in existence prior to his appearance in the irish pantheon his name is associated with such places as luke dunham which is modern day leon in france and logo valium which is carlyle this is the god whom caesar equated with the roman mercurius and described as the most worshipped god of the continental celts sanctuaries with dedications to this figure have been discovered throughout gaulish territories thus lou probably represents an older continental god who has been incorporated into the irish pantheon one of the meaning of lou is shining one which means that he is sometimes considered a solar god the welsh god leo is equated with lou and leo is taken to mean light some scholars for example dahia hogan point out that lou is cognate with the latin word looks which also means light the story of the battle of my torah which tells how brez son of balor arose one morning and said i wonder why the sun is rising in the west today and in the east every other day would it were so said to druid why what else but the sun is it said brez it is the radiance of the face of lou replied the druid his face was as bright as the sun and no one could look upon it as he approached from the west he was riding on the sea god manon’s horse which was as swift as the wind and the rider who was on his back could never be killed he was also wearing mananan’s breastplate which protected whoever was wearing it from being wounded and he carried mananan’s sword a magical sword called the answerer anyone wounded by this sword was instantly killed thus equipped he came across the framorian tax collectors and killed all but nine of them these he spared only so they could return to their kinsmen and warned them that the two head of dannon were ready for war the word lugos which is presumed to relate to lou means raven and this was the sacred bird of the greek sun god apollo indeed it was the raven that warned apollo of the infidelity of his mortal lover coronas the mother as of asclepios the god of healing interestingly keane lou’s father is in turn the son of the irish god of healing the insect the healing here could be taken to meant not only medical healing but also the healing power of the sun following the blight of winter thus lou’s prophesied slaying of his femorian grandfather balor may well be the triumphing of a solar deity over the darkness of winter the solar deity also suggests within the modern psychological framework the rising of consciousness the illuminating light of knowledge acting as a renewal to overcome the dark blight of meaninglessness that winter season of the soul when life is without meaning and a feeling of depression is present lou’s feast is called lunasa a harvest festival held on first of august thereby associating him with fecundity apollo also fulfilled the fertility role as he was seen to make the fruits of the earth ripen and that delos and delphi the first crops were consecrated to him he also protected the crops by destroying mice and driving off locusts apollo’s deadly arrows were equated with the rays of the sun which killed from afar one of lou’s other names isla father which means lieu of the long arm since like apollo he shot his weapons from a long distance finally neither of these gods is confined to a single role apollo in addition to being a sun god was also god of medicine music archery and prophecy lou would appear to be even more complex than apollo since one of his titles is samuel zamel donut master of many skills or arts thus he is god of craft magic and warfare and the druid who sings incantations prior to battle and then becomes the heroic warrior who slays the fearsome giant whilst in many respects lou is the irish apollo he is in addition hermes and aries he and the dagda are both the masters of all arts but the dagda has all the hallmarks of an earlier agricultural god with his rough and crude appearance on his link to the seasons via his harp lou by comparison seems a more refined and later god it is liu not dagda who appears in the later heroic tales where he becomes the father of the great irish mythological hero kukholin his role as father of kukulen may well symbolize his rebirth emerging from the utter world following the darkness of winter his death comes about at the hands of the triple kings of ireland who some say took over the kingship after nuada in revenge for him having slain their father khmed although lou is the shining one and although he may be a symbol of consciousness we learned that consciousness is a transitory state and that other often darker forces such as envy and jealousy also reside in the realm of the invisible world we have come to term the unconscious these can cause a death or dismembering of the solar qualities of elimination and meaning only for them to be renewed as we remember it and re-emerge from the sea of unconsciousness freud once described the goal the goal of psychoanalysis as equivalent to the draining of the zeus essentially an act of reclamation of an element of consciousness a sense of i from the vast sea of unconsciousness this is tantamount to saying that we do not have consciousness but rather we experience moments or times when we are conscious the critical mythic pattern to grasp is the continuing interplay in the deepest recesses of the collective unconscious of those opposite forces of darkness and light life and death meaning in chaos light and dark are in an eternal dance with each other and sometimes we find ourselves being with one partner a little longer than with the other angus angus is the god of love born of the union between the dagda and the river goddess ballen he was at the time the wife of king elsmer whose residence was at bruno boyne the dog that enchanted elsmere and sent him on a journey so that nine months passed as it would wear a single day the spell prevented ellesmere perceiving the darkness of night nor could he experience hunger or thirst during this time the doctor slept with bowen and she conceived and gave birth to a son whose name was angus like his father he possessed a heart made of gold and his music was so sweet that anyone hearing it was compelled to follow in this respect he would appear to be very similar to the greek figure orpheus the latter also played a lawyer that made all those heard and follow and was the means by which he managed to descend into hades in his attempt to rescue his beloved eurodice angus is sometimes known as the irish eros and is the protector of lovers both in the mythological cycle and the athenian cycle where he protects the archetype of lovers damage and grana it is also said of angus that his kisses turned into birds which hovered invisibly over the younger maidens of ireland this would appear to be an irish version of aeros’s arrows he also had his fairy palace at bruno boeing which he acquired from king king elsmere by trickery angus appears as the major figure in three important stories the ruling of attain damage and rania and the dream of angus all these stories involve lovers but in the latter it is the god himself who is smitten by love not unlike the mythic story of eros and psyche briefly the story is that angus falls in love with a girl he sees in his dream and after a long search he finds her in the form of a swan and takes her back to his palace at bruno boyne angus’s death comes about through a woman named katelyn who threw a stone at angus during a battle and struck him a fatal blow on the head being a god of youth love and renewal does not protect one from submission to the inevitability of debt as part of the cycle of birth debt and renewal the remaining gods all appear somewhat lesser figures although of course we have no way of knowing whether this is simply because they were gradually written out of the stories by christian monks or whether the manuscripts relating to them have been lost mid-air madeira is usually seen as the dagger’s son although in some versions he is the dagger’s brother he is also angus’s foster father and counsel angus on how to require the fairy palace that bruno boyne madeira himself is lord of the underworld dwelling at brie lee near present-day ardah and it is to this she or fairy mound that he brings his lover attain some see him as the irish equivalent of hades or pluto god of the underworld however this would appear to be a little simplistic since the only characteristics he has in common with hades are that he is the lord of the underworld and that he takes a woman to this world as his lover as hades did with persephone all the two headed down in chiefs were lords of an under or otherworld realm not just madeir his most prominent role in the mythology is in the story of the wearing of attain whom he takes as his lover thus incurring the rat of his wife firmnach whom he uh who transformed detain into a butterfly and with a strong wind blows from the far ends of the earth there is a tale in which madeira possesses three hostile cranes who guard the entrance to his fairy palace cranes are well represented in large mythology and are particularly associated with shape-changing or metamorphosis in females usually ill-natured women sometimes they are also connected with birds of omen and there is some suggestion that there may have existed a taboo against eating crane flesh because to do so would have resulted in some negative faith the sea god mananan had a crane skinned bag that contained many treasures madeira’s tree cranes provide a link with hades since was the three-headed dog cerebrus that guarded this entrance are we to assume from this that it is a trail of ill-natured women transformed into cranes that guard the entrance to the underworld we have come to know in our contemporary mythology as the unconscious world certainly within jungian circles it is a commonly held position that moodiness can be a manifestation of an undeveloped feeling life or anima jung saw this figure as the mediator between the conscious and unconscious worlds the figure that stands at the entrance of the other world or unconscious thus the tree cranes like moods not only guard access to the unconscious feelings in us but also locate the entrance to this world this interpretation gains some added credence when one considers that it is to this place that madeir takes the feminine in the form of detain that is like hades he abducts the feminine into the unconscious modern men also seem to have an abducted feminine side that can only be found when they reflect upon their various moods and their ill-natured feminine side the irony is that whilst most moodiness points to the existence of deeper underworld feelings it can also inhibit and prevent one from entering that world this happens particularly when moods are are simply projected onto others whom we then blame for aerials and not reflected upon and owned as part of ourselves moodiness invariably points to the presence of some undifferentiated or unclear feelings which we need to struggle to bring into conscious awareness by journeying into the unconscious or other world lear there is a god of the sea one of the two ahead of dannon best known as the father of the sea deity mananan mcclear both are clearly the same figures as the wealthy gods leir and manawidan one view is that layer is a much earlier god than his son and could be seen as representing the irish sea itself again comparison is sometimes made with the greek pantheon where he is seen as the equivalent of poseidon what we know of lear is almost entirely derived from the story entitled the fate of the children of leir this story is one of the three great tragedies of ireland after the two headed down and retreated on the ground their respective she they elected a new king bogdyarg and lear was offended that they did not choose him as an act of reconciliation bob offered lear one of his daughters in marriage her name is eve and she bought lyre two sets of twins but she died and given birth to the second set lear was distraught and bob in a further gesture of good will gave him his second daughter ifa to marry however she turned out to be the classic wicked stepmother and became insanely jealous of the children she put a curse on them that changed him into swans for eternity the eldest of the children finula pleaded for mercy and whilst recognizing that the curse was too powerful to be undone she asked that the enchantment be modified so that they may not be condemned to live with swans forever etha relented and modified the spells that the children would have to live as swans for 900 years during this time they could never live on land indeed they had to live for 300 years on loch deravara where they were where they were when the spell was cast upon them followed by 300 years on the sea of male and the last 300 on the atlantic ocean ever then declared that when a king from the north marry the queen from the south they would hear a bell and they would know that their exile was over the curse meant that although they were swans they would be able to speak with their own voices use their own minds feel with their own hearts and be able to sing beautifully when eva’s father discovered what she had done he was so furious he used his puritic powers and turned her into a demon in which form she was doomed to wander through the air forever lear whilst grief stricken by the events was able for the first three hundred years to stay in contact with his children and to talk to them at lochderavara where some say a large settlement grew up to listen to the children’s singing and storytelling when the children moved onto the sea of moyle they experienced great hardships as they did for the final 300 years by the atlantic ocean 900 years elapsed and the old chieftain gods of ireland had all gone underground and a new religion was in place christianity brought by saint patrick the children were rescued by a hermit monk who rang a bell every night until the children heard it and provided them with food and shelter and linked them together with the silver chains that they would never be parted but it was not until a king from the north king were going married a queen from the south that the curse could finally be undone after this marriage took place the queen who had heard about the beautiful music that the swan sang insisted that they be brought to her legwin knowing that this was wrong and also knowing that the saintly hermit would not agree nevertheless went ahead and took the swans by force whereby they instantly turned into very old and frail human beings there gwen fled in horror at what he had done and the children of lair knowing that their life was coming to an end were baptized and buried by the hermit monk manon mclaren this son of the sea is far better known than his divine father and appears in many of the irish myths as a divine chieftain he is usually seen as lord of the underworld which is located under the sea around some magical island the sea is clearly of great significance to an island race and it may be for this reason that he appears so frequently in the stories if we draw a parallel between the sea and the unconscious then we can appreciate further why this god like the unconscious is so ubiquitous the world of spirits and gods was commonly said to lie over the water there were three well-known such lands mag which is the plane of the lights tear turned gary the land of promise and here in oak the land of perpetual youth in the celtic other world there was an inexhaustible supply of food there was no death or decay and the inhabitants were invisible when they chose to be frequently in the stories one finds the hero summoned by a woman of the other world with the promise of perpetual sensual delights many a modern man at midlife will admit to experiencing this summons and pursuing it narcissistic and idealized longings for paradise exist in all human beings and in men often take the form of the fantasy of the perfect woman meeting their every need at the midlife period it is not uncommon for a man to leave his wife children and even job to pursue what he perceives as the relationship of his life he has been summoned by his own anime or otherworld woman and has projected these qualities onto some mortal woman with whom he falls in love the passage of time often reveals to him that the woman he fell in love with and the woman he is in a relationship with are not the same person at this moment he often looks back at a trail of pain and destruction that he has left behind him not having the self-awareness to understand the inner summoning of the otherworld woman he took it to be literal rather than a symbolic expression of part of himself these lands of perpetual sensual delight are a stark contrast to the christian of the world but since the gods of the incoming religion usually make devils of the gods of the preceding religion christianity has demonized both body and bodily pleasures and the christian other world hell has become a place of punishment for the very same pleasures that the ancient irish delighted in mandolin was also a mass revolution a shape-changer and the possessor of several magical items one was his core called wave sweeper or ocean sweeper which obeyed the thoughts of those who commanded it and had no sails or oars the order of mananan’s magical possessions are the magical sword and breastplate loaned to liu he also possessed a magical horse called enver literally water foam he was swifter than wind and can run over both land and water sometimes white-crested waves were called the horses of manalan like madeir he possessed a bag made of crane skin in which the treasures of the two ahead of dynamic were kept he also wore a great cloak that was capable of taking on every color just like the sea itself in one story mananan is visited by the ancient irish king cormac mccarth manon is described as being finely clad and carrying on his shoulder a branch bearing three golden apples which when rubbed together made delightful music this he gave to king hormuck who treasured it all his life and gave it back to the gods at the point of his death the giving of gifts seems to be another characteristic of the son of the sea and may well symbolize the fecundity of the sea as a provider of food much as the goddesses represent the fertility of the land in some stories following the defeat of the territory by the malaysians seen as coming across the sea and giving the gods of tattoo three gifts the first of these was a magical cloak which which the gods could make themselves invisible the second was to provide a magic feast the feast of age which warded off age the third gift was his pigs which had the magical quality of being eaten one day and replenishing themselves to live fully the next manager does not only appear in the mythological cycle but also in the ulster and fenian cycles which points to his enduring qualities as a god and perhaps to the enduring meaning of the sea for the ancient irish in the ulster cycle the great mythic hero cullen falls in love with manoland’s wife fand but after a while she returns to mananan who shakes a cloak between his wife and cochon so that they are invisible to each other forever the image in the fenian cycle is said to have been the pupil of manolan in the other world and as we have just seen comic macarthur was also a visitor there is still present in the christian era in one version king faithner is fighting the scots and in great danger of his life when a stranger appears to his wife who promises to save him if she will abandon herself to him she reluctantly agrees and from this union the 7th century king mongan is said to have been conceived the stranger was none other than mammal mcclaire madame is also involved in another of the prominent stories that we will discuss later the voyage of bran king brown was enchanted by a fairy woman and set out on a journey to the other world during which he came across manolan and this moment is said to be the source of some of the most beautiful lyrical poetry of the irish mythological tradition it is also a piece of poetry as projects mccanna points out that expresses vividly the inversion of reality which characterizes the other world vision of things manganon addresses bran in these words it seems to brand a wondrous beauty in his core on a clear sea well to me in my chariot of fire it is a flowery plane on which i ride what is a clear sea for the proud craft of which bran is is a plane of the lights with a profusion of flowers for me in my two-wheel chariot bran sees a host of waves breaking across the clear sea i myself see in magman red tips flowers without blemish sea horses glisten in summer as far as bran’s eye can stretch flowers pour forth a stream of honey in the land of mana man mcclaire bulbjerk bob jerick succeeded to tag that as ruler of the two-headed dannon some sources actually have him as attacked his son whilst others regard him as bowen’s brother bob was king of the shield monster called sheer feminine the modern sleeve and element in county temporary like mananan he had magical pigs that renewed themselves after having been eaten and the pig is strongly associated with feasting which perhaps gives it added significance within the mythology since we also know from the accounts of the continental celts that feasting was of considerable importance to them bob jerick’s main role in the mythological stories is in the dream of angus where he searches for and finds the woman of angus’s dream bob jarg has two daughters who appear in the later fenian cycle one of these scythe metamorphosed into her fawn and then backed into a human and became the mother of ushayne the great poet and leader of the feina bob jarrod remains a relatively less regard in the pantheon and does not appear to have the status or ubiquity of such figures as man augment is depicted as a two ahead champion and one of the figures who challenges liu before he is admitted to tara he is also known as kermit meaning honey tongued since he is the god of eloquence and a champion orator as patron of literature he is seen as the inventor of om the ancient irish writing usually seen on standing stones it is also sometimes described as a form of occult writing augment is first described by the roman poet lucian in the 2nd century id he refers to him as ogmeos lucian regards him as the celtic equivalent of the greek god hercules presumably because of his abilities as a champion warrior there is also a suggestion that like the greek hermes ogma may well have been a psychopump who leads souls from one world to the other and travels freely between them however it is quite possible that lucian is simply projecting his greek divinities upon this celtic figure in some versions of the second battle of maitore ogma is married to the daughter of the physician dean keck and among their offspring was turin whose sons later murdered liu’s father another son is said to be cabre the poet who satirized the femorian king brez thereby precipitating the battle itself these three craft gods are respectively the blacksmith the carpenter and the metal worker it is difficult to find any references to these figures having anything to do with mortals and their activities seem to be confined to the supernatural realm they may well be early gods since their triplicate form links them to the triple goddess figures and their alternative title tree didanan the three gods of danu also points to this possibility the one aspect of gribnu that differentiates him a little from the other two is that he supplies the magic ale that is served at other world feasts the partaking of this ale bestowed invulnerability upon the gods and here there would appear to be a parallel to the greek blacksmith her face those who also serve drinks to the gods whilst gribner does not appear in later stories his importance can be seen in the fact that his character survives in folklore where he was referred to as guevlon and is reputed to run a magical cow whose yields is inexhaustible nawada argetlov nevada of the silvaram the most significant thing about this god is perhaps the story concerning the loss of his arm and his replacement first with a silver one and finally with his own he has his she in a place called almu which was later arrested from him by the warrior hero fion a central figure in the later fenian cycle the incact this is the divine god of healing the god of medicine the leech he is one might suppose the irish escalators although he would appear to derive his healing powers from druidic knowledge whereas the sclepios derived his from dreams several important points emerge from these descriptions marie louise joe set raises the first point the difference between them and the goddesses she claims that the gods are national and tribal in character whereas the goddesses are local the gods govern social events or arrangements such as political power and territorial matters whereas the goddesses govern the natural events so from the mytho-historical accounts we learn more about the gods than we do about the goddesses the goddess is the personification of nature the physical land of ireland is her body the goddesses are the very forces that the male figures struggle to overcome in order to have nature serve them however nature is only temporarily overcome since she can provide or destroy at will likewise the logical rational mind that weapon of modern man which the with which the ego is identified is perilous against the forces of the unconscious psyche which jung once described as a natural phenomenon in either mythology ancient irish or modern jungian we see the struggle to arrive at a workable arrangement with the forces of nature so that we neither ruthlessly try to triumph over her nor naively succumbed to her the first strategy leads to a sense of inflation and emotional sterility the second to madness the second theme is the link between the gods and what jung has termed the archetypes jung himself warns not for a moment there we succumb to the illusion that an archetype can be fully explained and disposed of even the best attempts at explanation are only more or less successful translations into another metaphorical language myths are one such metaphorical language that we speak of what we know and yet do not know myths are the plots that move behind and form the substrata upon which our individual lives are built the divine figures of myths are the characters of these plots the plots themselves are imaginative accounts of ancient patterns of comprehension that lie within us the realm of the psyche that contains these inborn patterns of comprehension has been termed the collective unconscious by young as previously mentioned one could consider archetypal patterns to be the equivalent of migrative patterns of birds or the highly elaborate and ritualistic mating patterns of many animal species no one teaches these animals such patterns they are simply built into the species the difference in our human species is that we can represent these patterns through consciousness via images and it is these images that jung has termed archetypal images mythology is the story of these images and the forces that they symbolize so the image of the great murder or earth mother can symbolize instinctual comprehension of patterns of birth fertility and nurturance the figure of the great father can be seen to symbolize such matters as knowledge and wisdom modern human figures such as gandhi or mother teresa can come via projection to represent these innate patterns less mature human beings than those mentioned are vulnerable to such projections and begin to believe that they are actually our wise old men etc rather than merely carriers of the projection this sense of ego inflation is dangerous and usually leads to the downfall of the person sometimes into psychosis as the weak ego identifies completely with the archetypal force the art is to know that these patterns are within us to build a conscious awareness and relationship to them and to draw on the knowledge and wisdom these inbuilt patterns of understanding natural elements such as volcanoes and storms can symbolize destructive forces or the dark side of the great mother the sun on the other hand symbolizes the force of life renewal and the overcoming of darkness myths which existed long before science expressed these archetypal patterns in a manner that provides us with a sense of relief the relief that comes with the sense of recognition of something that was known but had not been rendered conscious brings us to the team of the irish gods multifaceted nature so unlike the single-issue greek gods jung’s archetypes are also intertwined and interconnected and as one of his major proponents marie louise von franz says in the unconscious all archetypes are contaminated with another she attributes this quality to the relative timelessness and spaciousness of the unconscious the qualities that are used to describe the irish utter world the doctor is one example of an irish god who depicts this overlapping quality of the archetypes he symbolizes a masculine fertility pattern of energy and a source of great nourishment with his miraculous cauldron of plenty archetypally he could be seen as symbolizing the fruitfulness of knowledge since he is after all the lord of perfect knowledge as an image he could possibly represent a pattern that might emerge from the unconscious mind at those times when our knowledge is too intellectual and need of earthing we know that is also an earthy god who can call in the seasons and bring us back to the natural rhythm of things thereby reducing the possibility of inflation of the eagle lou is a complex god who clearly personifies the overlapping quality of the archetypal forces however the essential quality of lieu is light that instinctual urge to illuminate the darkness he symbolizes the archetypal pattern that calls us to rail against darkness and to bring the light of consciousness to bear on some issue or aspect of ourselves that has been outside our conscious perception so perhaps when we feel dark and despondent or are simply feeling lost and aimless the archetypal pattern of the figure of lou will emerge to compensate our conscious position this we could experience in the form of some insight that would throw light upon our darkness balor the femorian giant on the other hand symbolizes the opposite forces of darkness and destructiveness that plummet us into periods of sterility and meaninglessness balor is the archetypal expression of not only the disintegrative tendencies in the human psyche but also and more importantly of the dark and unacceptable side of our personality yet these qualities need to be confronted and illuminated brought into our conscious awareness and ultimately integrated as part of ourselves this process young has termed individuation and lou as a solidarity could be seen as a symbol of the archetypal urge towards individuation angus is best seen as the archetypal symbol of eros the instinctual desire to connect whether physically mentally or spiritually it is the likes of angus for example that might emerge in our psyches in the form of erotic fantasies characterized by a longing and yearning union at those times when we are feeling desperately disconnected yet regrettably individuals are susceptible to taking the fantasies literally and concretizing them by projecting them onto someone else thus they are lived out rather than in not reflected upon for the possible meaning that may lie within the fantasies the latter approach demands stopping and asking questions such as what image lies within this fantasy what need or feeling is being depicted by this image or what is my desire and what am i seeking in this fantasy archetypal images like dreams are more often than not compensatory thus they arise at times when the consciously held view is in need of correction or a renewed sense of meaning the great value of mythological stories is that they remind us of certain patterns of truth that otherwise escape attention in a profoundly materialistic and outwardly oriented culture such as ours dean ink asclepios symbolizes an archetypal pattern or instinctive knowledge that we have to confront and heal the divisions that lie within our psyche these divisions often arise from a too drastic severance between our elder and inner lives mythological stories evoke images that bridge this gap returning us to a sense of balance and connection and providing a broader landscape within which we can locate our immediate personal difficulties guide new depicts another yet not of course unrelated archetypal pattern this is derived from his role as a blacksmith god who like the medieval alchemists knows how to transmute raw material into its higher form he symbolizes an aspect of the archetypal realm that knows of the need to render base matter or base feelings into a higher more conscious form which enables us to make choices in our lives rather than simply acting out blindly then declaring that fate is so unkind he is part of the instinctual comprehension that works with or overlaps with lou the figure of light together these images symbolize the interconnected energy patterns upon which consciousness itself is formed and desired when young said the archetypes are the great decisive forces they bring about the real events and not our personal reasoning and intellect the the archetypal images decide the fate of man he meant that they are present in us from the beginning will not go away and indeed can cannot go away mythology is a vital map for helping us to know of their existence and thereby enhance the possibility of making some connection to these archetypal and universal patterns within us this connection serves to relativise the ego and provide a sense of meaning this is a necessary antidote to the feelings of ruthlessness that are so symptomatic of our modern society an awareness of the existence of archetypal patterns also connects us to a realm beyond the ego and draws our attention to something beyond the mundane material and obvious life now on that note we’re going to take a quick music break and when we come back we’re going to continue with chapter five the section on goddesses [Music] we’re going to skip chapter 5 which is a section on the battle of my torah where the author peter o’connor describes how this battle is symbolic of the inner battles that we go through in our day-to-day lives and we’re gonna skip that chapter and go to chapter six the goddesses the feminine archetypes but i would encourage anybody who’s interested in what we’ve covered so far to get the book by peter o’connor it’s called beyond the mist what irish mythology can teach us about ourselves and as i said peter is a psychologist so chapter six the goddesses the feminine archetypes why is mythology has an essentially feminine quality and female deities featuring so many stories of the land and the islands that lie off the coast it has been suggested that a matriarchal culture preceded the patriarchal one while this may be true the more likely explanation is that the feminine is a personification of the fertility of the land this personification is often in the figure of the sovereign queen with whom the mortal aspirant for kingship must have union if he is to rule the celtic notion of sacral kingship would seem to find its equivalent in the medieval alchemical idea of the heroes gamos or the climacal wedding which led to the creation of the philosopher’s stone whilst the gods heroic attributes give them a certain measure of power and independence there always seems to be another power which ensures that they are not completely masters of their own destiny the greek father god zeus is seen as obeying some higher power variously named as fatim or moira the word fatim is the origin of our english word fate in turn derived from the verb fair to speak and is translated to mean that which has been spoken in this sense it is a form of divine decree within the greek mythological tradition the fates or moire were three old women the daughters of nix the knight cloth though span the thread of life latches assigned to each person his or her destiny and atropos carried the shares that cut the tread at death it is said that they arrived shortly after the birth of a child to decide upon the course of the child’s life they were also invoked at marriage to ensure that the union was a healthy one and finally when the end of life approached they had to be summoned to cut the thread indeed the whole of life was shattered by the fates and it takes little thought to perceive the parallel of the face to the theme of life death and renewal that so characterizes irish mythology it seems plausible therefore that the other power behind the gods is the inevitability of this cycle to which all are subjective gods included irish goddesses are usually depicted as triple goddesses emphasizing their link to the three fates the triple goddess personifies a state of wholeness she is the symbol of the eternal state and the goal itself which is the acceptance and integration of the three processes of birth life and death the figure of the triple goddess of ireland could be seen as personifying the fourth state that emerges out of her embodiment of the tree often we become preoccupied with renewal or beginnings in a pattern that jung has determined the pure child archetype this pattern can most readily be seen in connection with relationships where some people more often men can only ever begin relationships usually in a highly sexualized manner yet within a short period of time the relationship ends since the addiction is to the excitement of beginnings not to relating and the possibility of growth others may become obsessed by the fear of death and lose all sight of life and beginnings as they plummet into depression here the relationship pattern is one of not getting involved because of the belief that it will not last yet others hang on to life refusing to concede that the only permanent thing is change itself thereby denying themselves the possibility of renewal relationships caught in this pattern simply become stagnant and often moribund since change is perceived as a threat to order and fixity in these relationships libido is often sacrificed on the altar of security the goal of individuation as a spouse by jung may well be wholeness but this in turn constitutes your willingness to accept the inevitability of the never-ending cycle of life death and renewal the task of consciousness then would be to come to grips with the realization that we are permanently in flux we must be prepared at times to let go of our attachment to certain possessions and views in order to let thanatos death do its work allowing them to die as a necessary prelude to the renewal process if the ego and the persona dominate our being then we cannot yield to the inevitable since we would be preoccupied with control and the end result is that we get stuck in the illusion that what we see is all there is danu dana or anu it is generally accepted that anu danu or dana are one in the same deity and that she is the mother of the gods but just as the dagger is seen as the father of the tribe daniel was not literally their mother rather anu or dana is a fertility goddess associated with the plenty and prosperity of the land she is described as the one who nurtures well the gods the province of monster in the southwest of ireland is said to owe its fertility to anu and two mountains in kerry are known as the paps of anu the mythical tribe of duty are of course the people of the goddess another much less written about female figure who is also a mother goddess but possibly much earlier than dana is the kiala gyara the old hag of the biara peninsula in west cork she is a complex figure and would appear to be a predecessor to the celts themselves she is also a corn goddess and associated with the protection of fertility indeed in one story she put to debt a succession of male reapers who failed to match her prowess with the sickle the story reflects a frequent mythological theme of a local hero and the female deity opposing each other in a reaping contest in which the female deity symbolizing fertility inevitably triumphs her order manifestations include a role as shaper of the land itself it is said that she dropped cairns on the hill of mead out of her apron and that she was responsible for creating many of the rocks and islands around the southwest coast of ireland deep ravines and valleys are the result of her having run her nails across the landscape in another role she is seen as symbolizing the wild forces of nature especially storms at sea this role is strongly associated with the chialak by the people of the biera peninsula she is also a symbol of longevity and is said to have passed through seven periods of youth and all day so that her children grandchildren and great child grandchildren are the people and tribes of ireland thus she represents three aspects of the feminine young maiden mother and old crown the khalakh is also the sovereign queen under the name bree she appears as the wife of lou the divine prototype of kingship these roles all illustrate the murder goddess function and the associations with nature and fertility which may suggest that she is a very early goddess whom perhaps the continental celts incorporated into their pantheon to symbolize the land of ireland itself she’s believed to be embodied today in a special stone that stands overlooking the sea near iries in cork where she awaits the return of her husband mananan lord of the sea bridget of rigid another composite early figure is bridget who later became the christian saint bridget sometimes she is seen as interchangeable with daniel and she is also described as the daughter of the dagda however she is mostly seen in her own right as the goddess adored by poets blacksmiths and physicians she is also associated with childbirth fertility and the hearth and in these capacities she could readily be seen as the irish equivalent of some composite hestia artemis figure from greek mythology the latter being associated with childbirth and the farmer with the hearth her festival on the 1st of august is called imbolc which is one of the four great irish seasonal festivals inbolg is a pagan spring festival and is associated with the lactation of ewes linking bridget to fertility and the abundance of animals she was appropriated by christianity and became saint bridget but has nevertheless preserved much of her original character since saint bridget is associated with childbirth and folklore has it that she was the midwife of the virgin mary in her christian capacity she is also considered to bring abundance to the country hearth that she visits and as an irish saint she takes second place only to saint patrick she and the kylock indicate the persistent presence of these fertility goddesses right up to the present time the land of ireland is still the goddesses no matter what name she goes by is one of a group of irish goddesses who are concerned with war fertility and prosperity of land she is sometimes perceived as one goddess and sometimes as tree but either way she represents the sovereignty and fertility of ireland and covers an enormous period of time from the mythological prehistory period through to the beginning of the christian era she gave her name to remain the seat of the ancient kings of ulster macca is connected to the festival of lunasa the harvest festival on the 1st of august an interesting aspect of these later goddesses is the explicit appearance of warlike capacities in the earlier figures warlike or destructive aspects are embedded in the goddess’s associations with nature such as the kylok’s personification as a goddess of the wildness of nature in the later goddesses it is clearly developed role perhaps symbolizing the heroic male’s increasing consciousness of the power of nature to control his fate the first of the three marcus the wife of nemed takes us back to the book of invasions and the arrival of the numidians the third group of invaders to settle in ireland following cesare and parthalone she prophesies the destruction that would be wrought when conox fought ulster over the great brown bowl of cooley and the birding of this foresight caused her to die of a broken heart the account of this battle is known simply as the tan it constitutes the greatest heroic tale of ireland with the central role being played by the hero kuhlen maha died on one of the 12 planes cleared by her husband named and the plane is named after her this figure of maha is clearly an agrarian deity associated with the clearing and cultivation of the land and hence predominantly a fertility goddess the second makha maka the red was the daughter of one of the three ancient kings of ireland who ruled alternately each for seven years mythic history places them around the sixth to fourth century bc when michael’s father died she was elected to rule but the other two kings refused to give her the throne because she was a woman in the war that followed the victorious maca banished one of her rivals to connect marrying the other and making him chief of chief of her army the five sons of the banished king then sought to contest the tround but she visited them in disguise as a leper she enticed them one by one to lie with her and in turn bound each of them to slavery the red is clearly the warrior goddess dominating the third of the matas the wife of kunchu conforms to the familiar mythological fairy tale theme of the supernatural bride who lives happily with a mortal husband until he violates a taboo with the result that she dies one day a beautiful woman walked into the house of a peasant widow named crunchy without speaking the words she said about doing the housework and at night she made the ritualistic right-handed journey around the room anti-clockwise being an almond of bad fortune and entered cruncher’s bed she became pregnant by him and through this union he prospered greatly at this point in the story macca embodies the sovereign queen as union with the archetypal feminine is a source of fertility kunchu was required to attend an assembly of all ulster men at tara and before he set off maka warned him not to mention her name nor speak of her at the assembly at the assembly much was made of the ability of the king’s horses with the poets singing their praises and exalting their thriftness cruelty forgot macca’s warning and declared that his wife could run faster than any of the king’s horses the king took up the challenge and ordered crunchy to bring his wife to race against his horses in vain maca protested and asked for a delay as she was close to giving birth but the king insisted that she race or he would put crunchy to death reluctantly she raced and beat the king’s horses but as she finished she cried out in pain and gave birth to two twins the exertion proved fatal for macca and she died in giving birth but with her last breath she cursed the men of ulster for nine times nine generations at times of great peril the men of ulster would suffer the sickness of childbirth and therefore would be too tired and weak to fight in battle some scholars have interpreted this curse which is called the novena of the ulster men as a form of the practice amongst primitive peoples called whereby the husband of a woman in childbirth has opposed upon him the same seclusion and precautions as upon the mother the aim of this appears to be that the husband will take on the pain of the woman thereby assisting in the birth process process a second interpretation of discourse is that it serves to underline the power of other world women and the superiority of their power to that of the male warrior a third explanation is that the curse being activated at a time of war is a symbolic mime in honor of the mother goddess in this sense it is an act of propitiation aimed at giving the warriors protection in the forthcoming battle in this third marker we see we can see the dominance of the functions of childbirth nurturance and fertility thus the three maccas present maternal reproductive power nurturance fertility and warlike are sexual attributes of the three one can be seen to fulfill dumasell’s sorcerer function with her prophecy of a future period of destruction maca the red fulfills the function of force with her warrior-like behavior and the third maka represents fertility the use of threes is a dominant feature of irish mythology and may well have symbolized some sense of totality itself for example in the realm of time it might represent past present and future and in relation to space the qualities of a head behind and hear it could also be seen as representing the dimensions of earth sky and sea and christianity uses triplication in the notion of the holy trinity in egyptian mentality it is represented in the figures of osiris isis and horus within the alchemical tradition it exists in the three stages of negrido albedo and rubido philosophy has its own version of it in hegel’s thesis antithesis and synthesis consistent throughout these various examples is the assumption that tree equals one and that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts irish mythology then is not unique in this incorporation of trees but the extent to which they are used is striking the marigna there is one group of three female deities that can lay special claim to the title of goddess of war and that is the group known as the marigna the persons of this trio are not always always the same but usually comprise the bab the crow the morrigan the queen of phantoms and either the main which is panic or maca these war goddesses do not normally engage in iron combat as their weapons belong to the magical world of sorcery and inspire dread and terror the main for example creates panic amongst fighting men and in a battle against hugh holland a hundred warriors fell dead when they heard her cry even when the goddess of war is enticed to take part in battle she will do so by magic often appearing in animal form so the morrigan attacks kuhlin in the shape of an eel which winds itself around his legs at other times he appears as a wolf and drives a frightening herd of cattle at him hugh collins has burned her overtures of love and graciously declared that he had no need of a woman’s help bob appears as a crow and in this form she lands on kuholen’s shoulder as a portent of his imminent debt signaling that it is safe to approach and behead him is essentially a prophetess of death and finds her direct equivalent in atrophos the faith who cuts the tread of life bab also finds her contemporary expression in the banshee the irish fairy who is crying is important of death she also appears in the role of water at the ford washing the arms and clothes of a warrior who is to die shortly the morrigan can play a similar role as the harbinger of death both the morrigan and bath also have powerful sexual roles and bald has been described as a femme fatale who prevents the hero and then leads him to his death when the dagger mates with the morrigan she symbolizes the sovereign queen ensuring the fertility of the land these three figures that constitute the marigna are interchangeable but as a single or triple figure they are personifications of nature in both her life-giving and life-destroying capacities man in the form of a hero sets out to conquer nature in order to have it serve him this of course finds its psychological parallel in the heroic role that the ego must play in facilitating a measure of consciousness of the life-giving or heroes qualities and the life destroying are tana those qualities of the unconscious mind but just as the marigna is not a figure that can be easily overcome neither can the unconscious be conquered in any complete sense this realm like the marigna is the source of both being and non-being we met we may well need our own version of a sacral marriage with the sovereign queen if our lives are to remain fertile dreams and the paying of attention to them are of course a simple means of enacting this ritual ignoring or rejecting the marigna as kuholen does can only bring about our death psychologically speaking the death of consciousness the crow of depression sitting on our shoulders or the eel of anxiety winding around us can be signs of this death which we must struggle to understand if we are not to succumb to the meaninglessness a specific form of debt in itself queen maeve queen wave of connect is described as being sexually promiscuous it is said of her that never was she without one man in the shadow of another she mated with at least nine mortal kings and refused to allow any king to rule in tara who had not first mated with her this marks her out as a mythological sovereign queen with her promiscuity symbolizing the fertility of the land itself the most important story concerning queen maeve is the cattle raid of coulee which belongs to the ulster cycle maeve is jealous of her husband king elil who possesses a magnificent white ball maeve hears of a fabulous brown ball and sends her army to invade ulster to acquire it during the battle that follow she appears as a warrior inciting her army to fight and several times she pits her wits against the ulster hero kucholen so she is associated with war death and fertility some may ask why there is no irish equivalent of venus or aphrodite mccanna suggests that the mythological personification of sexual love is bound up in the role of the irish goddess as sovereign queen and a personification of the fertility of the land as joe stead points out points out to wonder that we do not find a goddess presenting this character to the exclusion of all others is to judge celtic mythology by foreign standards and so to condemn oneself to a misconstruction of its intimate system etane or aiding although etan is not usually presented as a deity she can nevertheless be considered to be a goddess since she is thrice born and her lives cover an enormous expanse of time in addition she plays a role as a sovereign queen in relating the famous story of the wearing of ethane i have relied on three major sources one is a very comprehensive version of the stories by geoffrey gantz the second is from the irish scholar miles dillon and the third a recent imaginative version by marie heaney the story commences with the birth of angus who was conceived from the union between the dagda and bowen and was then fostered out to midir midair who was also known as madeira proud because he wore such magnificent clothes lived with his wife phil nach who truly in truly splendid surroundings in the she at brie lee furunlock was both knowledgeable and clever and was very well versed in magic and sorcery since she had been reared by the druid brussel madeira was very attached to angus and was missing him since angus had moved into his own sheet at barina boyne madeira decided to visit him and when he arrived he found ingus sitting anger sitting on a mound watching a group of boys playing suddenly a fight broke out between the boys and madeira decided to intervene to break it up it was not easy to part them and as he struggled to do so a spring up holly was hurled at him putting out one of his eyes he gathered up his eye from the ground and returned to angus complaining that now that he was blemished he would not be able to see and rule over the land he had come from madeira blamed angus cursing that he had ever come to see him but angus told him that they would go and find the physician being kicked the latter was summoned and it was not long before he had returned madeira’s eye to his socket and the healing process had begun however madeira demanded compensation for the injury and angus ever ready to police his foster fighter agreed to meet his request as part of his compensation madeira wanted the fairest maiden in ireland orders say that the following that following the healing of his eye madeir wanted to leave bruno boyne but angus pleaded with him to stay madeira agreed on the condition that angus gave him a chariot worth seven kamals female slaves and clothing appropriate to my rank and the fairest woman in ariel angus agreed to the conditions and set off to require the fairest woman in ireland whom he knew to be attained the daughter of king aelil of ulster when angus arrived at king aelial’s palace he announced that he had come to seek his daughter the king agreed provided some conditions her first met the first of these was that twelve planes be cleared so that cattle could graze on them angus felt overwhelmed by the size of the task and sought the help of his natural father the dagda who met his son’s request and in one night cleared to twelve planes but king aelil now wanted twelve rivers to be diverted from the land to the sea again angus felt overwhelmed by the request and sought the help of his father who diverted the rivers overnight aliel now asked for attained weight in gold since he claimed the other compensations had been for the benefit of the people not for him personally thus he was given he changed white and gold and angus left would detain for bruno boyne he stayed with madeir for a whole year of bruno boyne but then he decided to return to his own she when he arrived back at brie lee he was welcomed by his wife fernak who also made detained feel very welcome but appearances were deceptive and feral knock was plotting her rival’s demise on the pretext of showing it into her room firmlock struck her with a wand that instantly turned her into her pool of water she then fled to her foster father bressel’s house fearing madeira’s anger a fire near the pool of water heated it up and out of the water emerged a worm which before very long turned into a beautiful crimson fly with jeweled eyes and enameled wings when it moved its wings it created wonderful music and whenever it went wherever it went it left a beautiful fragrance in the air though she now had the shape of a fly etan retained the feelings of a woman and she went off in search of medea she found him asleep in a room as she flew around creating the beautiful music and fragrance madeira awoke and realized immediately that it was it hanged from then on she accompanied madeira everywhere lulling him to sleep with her music and also warning him of any approaching enemies madeira knew that so long as ethane was with him he could never love another woman when firmlock heard of this enduring love she was overcome by a jealous rage and once again began to plot detain’s demise she decided to return to brie lee but when she arrived madeira attacked her angrily for what she had done to retain unmoved by madeira’s anger she began to chant a spell that suspended his love for retain and rendered all his magic perilous she then called up a great wind that blew all true breely taking detained helplessly before it and blowing her out to sea for seven years etane was continually buffeted by the wind and could find no resting place other than odd rocks in the ocean and on the waves at last she was miraculously blown over briana boyne utterly exhausted and barely able to lift her wings she fell on to angus cloak and he immediately recognized her he welcomed her into his house tended to her needs and then set about building her a glass room to live in ethane felt safe and secure in this space and her spirit was uplifted by the strange fragrant herbs that angus had placed in the bower a great love grew between angus and ethan who brought joy and happiness into angus life just as she had from a dare however yet again through not heard of this love and happiness and again plotted to destroy utaine she knew that she would not be able to get direct access to retain at bruno boyne so she was forced to conjure up a more devious scheme madeira and angus had naturally fallen out of retain so furumlock offered to arrange a reconciliation meeting on a hill outside bruno boyne the men waited for furmlock to join them there but such a long time passed that they became uneasy and decided to return to the palace angus went to the glass bearer and to his horror discovered that detain was gone immediately he knew that the jealous furious had been at work some say that he was so angry that when he found film like hiding in the palace he cut off her head when angus had initially left to meet with madeira firmlock had circled around bruno bryan from the opposite direction found detained in her classroom and once again conjured up a powerful wind that sent her back out to sea for another seven years she was constantly blown over the land and seas of ireland and could find no resting place at last she was blown inlands towards the great hall of a castle and there she alighted on a beam high above the floor where a festival was in progress this was the castle of attire a great ulster champion and much drinking and feasting was going on finally ethane exhausted from her lung a deal could cling no longer to the beam and fell straight into the golden globe of itar’s wife just as she was raising it to her mouth she swallowed the wine and detained in one mouthful was unaware of what happened but in nine months later she gave birth to a beautiful girl whom they called it thus ends the first story or rather the first part of the story the second story commences when ethan is about 20 years of age however as is the way with myths a thousand years had elapsed and joked around was now king of ireland in the first year of his reign he called together an assembly of all the chieftains and their people to be held at tara at sawan however word came back that the chieftains would not attend because the king did not have a wife and no man could attend his festival without his wife you could immediately dispatch his messengers to travel throughout the land to find the fairest woman to become his queen he insisted that in addition to the woman also be a nobleman’s daughter and a virgin and it was detained daughter of guitar and the messenger ascent trained as being ideal in all respects the king himself set out to meet her and acquire her hand and marriage as he and his retinue approached attire’s house they came across a beautiful woman washing herself beside a well yucca was mesmerized by the woman and instantly fell in love with her when he asked her name she replied i am etain daughter of guitar a chieftain and noble man of ulster yogurt was so overjoyed to discover that this beautiful woman woman was to be his bride and they married immediately and returned to tara it was said that all are lovely till compared with detain all are fair till compared with detained and it was this beauty that caused yucca’s brother aylil to fall in love with her he would gaze upon her endlessly and his will not to do so was perilous against his desire for her but he could not reveal these wishes to anyone since it was a transgression to lust after his brother’s wife as the obsession grew stronger and stronger he became weaker and started to waste away no one knew what mysterious illness had overtaken the king’s brother a whole year passed with aliel continuing to waste the way until yucat insisted that his own physician fuchna see his brother the physician put his hand on alien’s chest and at that instant ayla let out a huge sigh facma turn to alien and said you have one of two pangs that no doctor can cure the pang of love and the pang of jealousy a little knew this to be true but he could not reveal his secret and continue to deteriorate and move towards death king yukid had to travel throughout his kingdom but before he left he gave hitaine instructions for the care and burial of his dying brother he undertook all these tasks willingly but as she tended daily she notices that contrary to all expectations he started to get better finally out of frustration and desperation adil confessed to retain that he was in love with her and the only thing that could cure him was if they would become lovers itaine could not bear the thought of ariel dying because of his unmet love for her yet nor could she bear the thought of portraying her husband in his own house after an agonizing period of confusing she arranged to meet a lil on a hill at daybreak ali lay awake all night excited by the thoughts of a possible union would detain but as he appointed error he fell into a deep sleep and did not awake until the third hour of the next day betaine in the meantime went to the hills arranged and the man she saw waiting for her looked exactly like alia but as she got closer she realized it was not him and the figure she saw did not speak but really moved on and went away when alien finally woke up he was devastated to realize he had missed the rendezvous detain and she out of concern for him agreed to meet under the same arrangements the next day but again the strange sleepover took ayla at the precise time of the meeting with detain and again the stranger appeared to her in his place for the third time a meeting was arranged between detained and alien and the same events occurred however this time etayne asked the stranger who he was he replied that he had come to meet her but detained protested that she had come to meet aelil brother of king yokud not the person who stood before her the stranger replied it would be more fitting for you to come to me for when you were retained daughter of king aelil i was your husband etan was titled by this statement and anxiously asked the stranger who he was since she had no memory of the past that stranger spoke of he replied i am the dear of bree lee and it was the evil sorcerer film like departed us and it was i who put the love into the heart of yucca’s brother elil so that we might meet he turned to retain and pleaded for her to come to bree lee with him where she belonged itain was utterly bewildered by all of this but somewhere within her there was a haunting sense of familiarity with this figure who called himself madeir after a while she hesitatingly agreed that she would go with him so long as her husband agreed she felt she was on safe ground her since she did not believe that yooka would agree to such a thing madeira smiled and quickly agreed to the terms that ethan had set out and with that he magically disappeared shortly after the king returned from his royal circuit and was delighted to find his brother not only alive but well he thank detained for her exemplary care of him but he then kept her silence on both the cause and the cure my dear who had originally created the desire in elil and who had protected detains honor by putting him to sleep at the critical time had released aliel from his illness by quelling his desire thus then it’s the second story the third story commences when king juked standing on the terrace of his palace admiring the beauty of the surrounding landscape on the distant horizon he observed a figure who as he got closer appeared to be a warrior who wore a deep purple cloak had golden shoulder-length hair and carried a shield in one hand and a square in the other yucca was perplexed for he knew that the gates of the fort had not yet been opened and thus the warrior could not belong to the company that had arrived the previous night by now the stranger is facing yogurt who asked him who are you i don’t recognize you the stranger replied not a famous one madeira breely is my name from what has brought you here ask your kid to which medea replied that he had come to play chess with the king yorkie was taken aback by all this and tried to stall madeira by saying his chess set was in the queen’s quarters and he could not disturb her to the king’s astonishment madeira promptly produced the chess set and the game was all ready to commence when juche said he would not play unless there was a stake madeira obligingly invited yucca to name his stake and the king nominated 50 of the finest horses midir lost and next morning the king looked out on the grass around the planet’s palace and observed 50 magnificent horses grazing contently yorkin was delighted with his prize and enthusiastically challenged madeira to another game the state this time involved clearing the land and rendering it fertile mandir agreed on con condition that if he lost yucchi had to guarantee that he would prevent anyone in his kingdom from witnessing the clearing of the land mid-air played the second game and did lose thus being required to clear the land yucca could not resist the temptation to know what was happening and sent out sent one of his jurors to secretly observe the work medea was furious and demanded that you could pay retribution for the betrayal madeira said they must play another game and that whoever won that game would name his prize yooka had no choice but to accept madeira’s terms since he had violated the trust this time madeira won jucked was terrified that medea would name some enormous stake and perhaps take back what he had already won and more besides to his astonishment madhir stated that he wanted to take the queen attain in his arms and kiss her completely thrown by this request you could hesitatingly agreed but asked that madeira come back in a month to claim his stake sensing some sort of danger in the mysterious stranger’s request yogurt spent the entire month assembling the warriors of ireland to protect his palace and prevent madeira from entering however at the jew moment madeira suddenly appeared in their midst while the king was banqueting media declared what his promise is now jew he then embraced detained and as he did so they rose up into the air and were transformed into two beautiful swans who flew out of the palace through an opening in the roof from there they flew to brie lee where ethane was rejoined her kinfolk the two headed on you’re good full of grief and anger at the loss of retain was also furious that madeira had tricked him and made up his mind to retrieve his wife he traversed all of ireland digging up every fairy mail he could find for he now knew that she had be taken by one of the folk of the other world to his dismay however every time he dug up a mound by the next morning mourning all of the dirt had been replaced exactly as it has originally been juked was undeterred and some say that he continued to dig a fairy mounds for nine years finally in desperation he sought the advice of a druid he revealed that madeira and attain were at brie lee just as joker was making his assault on brie lee madeira called the truce and offered to return attained to him the next day with madir using his magical gifts tricked yucca and at the appointed third hour of the following day 50 women all looking exactly like itain appeared imperiously madeira declared that you could could have attained back if you could identify the tree retained you could remember how beautifully attained had borne wine so he requested that each of the women performed the task each woman in turn poured until there were only two left and as the second last woman took to joe and started the poor joker spontaneously declared that she was detained claimed her and returned with her to tower much later when ethan was pregnant joker discovered again through the aegis of madeira that the woman he had chosen was naughty tang but his own daughter since his wife was pregnant with her when she flew away with madeira reeling in horror from this incestuous union he declared to the gods never will i look upon the daughter of my daughter and he arranged that when the child was born two members of his household would take the child and throw it into a pit of wild beasts the two servants could not bring themselves to throw the tiny infant into the pit but left her in an isolated herdsman’s hut with a [ __ ] and her pups when the herdsmen and his wife returned they were astonished to find the infant but accepted her unhesitatingly and reared her as if she was their own child she in accordance with her divine heritage prospered and displayed exceptional beauty and skill in due course she was discovered by a prince of whom it had been prophesied that he would marry a woman of unknown origin and that she would bury him a child this newly happened and that child became the legendary conair moore the central character in a later ulster story entitled the destruction of the darger’s hostile the wearing of ethane is a mysterious and haunting tale that captures the essence of the irish mythological world it has a sense of timelessness as it moves between two worlds the natural and the supernatural the mortal and the divine ethane is undoubtedly a symbol of life debt and renewal some scholars notably mcculloch and gantz have suggested that the ancient irish held ideas of reincarnation which are symbolized in the mythic theme of rebirth certainly the archaeological evidence points to the ancient celts burying their dead with the clear intention of providing for a journey indicating a firm belief in the other world and perhaps rebirth many of the irish divinities do not appear to die per se but live for generations of generation as seen in the figaro betaine the fact that detain was transformed into a beautiful crimson fly is also of some significance in the mythological context for example the ancient greeks believed that the soul could travel from one life to another in insect form the idea of incarnation would presumably have been anathema to the christian scribes and it is possible that many more direct references to these beliefs have been edited out hence we are left with stories that mainly point towards these beliefs rather than stating them however belief in rebirth is entirely consistent with the pattern of life debt and renewal that salt provides irish mythology in this context we can also see ethane as a seasonal goddess symbolizing the death and rebirth of the crops which links her to demeter and persephone of greek mythology etain is also of course the sovereign queen figure when king yukit summons his people to tara and they refuse to come because he is without a wife he is reminded that in order to be a rightful king of the gland he has first to be accepted as a legitimate spouse of the goddess who personifies the land itself without this union the land could not prosper and would remain infertile finally within the jungian mythological framework etain is an archetypal feminine or more precisely the archetypal anima her archetypal status is confirmed by the company she keeps the gods madeir and angus the gods of mythology are the archetypes of young and their territory so to speak is what young has termed a collective unconscious the collective psyche is not something we acquire as a result of our personal history but rather as a consequence of the history of the species in this sense it is permanent and continuous and like the divine figures cannot die but merely passes from one generation to the next yucca as a mortal figure has to compete with a supernatural rival for a relationship with the feminine in the figure i betaine this represents the task of building a personal relationship with the anime or feminine aspects of our being the task of developing a conscious awareness of our feelings and an enhanced capacity both to connect and to communicate them if the feminine remains at the archetypal level then feelings remain impersonal stereotyped and invariably projected out rather than seen as part of ourselves so a man for example will project a fantasy image of the ideal woman onto a real woman and she will have the unnerving feeling that the intense relationship she is experiencing is really not much to do with her but with some fantasy about her the sound pattern is manifested by women when they project the archetypal animals onto mortal men the relationship will have a peculiar and personal quality about it being on the receiving end of such projections is often described by the phrase he or she is full on relationships starting out with this intensity usually finish as quickly as they started and very often have a distinctly obsessional and possessive quality to be in the grip of archetypal images and energy is to be impersonal and not really present to the self or others this can take the form of idealization where there’s absolutely no perception of negatives or intense denigration and rage where there exists no positives from this latter position murder and mayhem are easy since the constraint of the awareness of the other as such does not exist this we normally call madness the figure of yukid is the hero of this story and within contemporary psychology mythology he’s associated with the ego the role of the ego like that of the hero and the ancient stories is to journey the unknown lands your unconscious and dare to confront unknown and frightening figures that symbolize aspects of our own being these are figures for which jung would use such terms as the shadow or anima and animus if the hero or heroine successfully completes the journey then the ego is altered by the experience this is usually manifested in the maturing of the personality which in turn is reflected in in an increase in tolerance of ambiguity however the heroic figure is often reluctant to undertake the journey preferring instead to adhere to fixed views about him or herself and the world in jungian psychology the figure of the king usually represents the ruling principle of the psyche are those values and attitudes with which the ego was identified and which govern everyday behavior thus we could see king yuki’s relationship with the etan as the interaction of the ego with the archetypal feminine a necessary first step in ensuring the fertility of one’s own growth and maturation as an individual madeira is a complex figure but perhaps could be seen as the negative animus the negative animus is considered to represent archetypal negative masculine qualities such as fixed opinions and is essentially antagonistic to feminine values such as relationships receptiveness ambiguity and feelings the desire of the negative animus is to disconnect and we have already seen disconnection is at times a vital factor in enabling the process of change to occur and is an essential part of the cycle of eternal change however if the negative animus is a dominating force within a woman’s psyche it can result in a sad history of unfulfilling relationships with men and finds this parallel in madeira’s actions with regards to retain medea keeps detained to himself and prevents her having a relationship with yukit this is another way of saying that the archetypal negative animus resists any emergence of the feminine attribute of feeling the conscious development of this more eros-based quality would create a sense of connection and this is the very phenomenon that the negative animus works against like his greek equivalent hades madeira abducts the feminine into the other world below the surface of consciousness from the outset we see his disdain of the feminine as he simply demands the most beautiful woman in ireland and then returns with her to his wife whilst firmlock may well be a negative anime figure her rage is understandable other people’s positions or needs seem irrelevant to madeira the proud in some women the negative animus can lead to a certain immaturity with anyone holding a different view seen as unequivocally wrong the extreme wings of the women’s movement with their rigid adherence to ideological purity reflect the presence of the negative animus in men this presence is seen in a rigid patriarchal position that does not allow feminine attributes any legitimacy madeira’s hope is that detain will simply stay in the other world of really with him forever and not have a life in the everyday world madeira the proud may also symbolize a narcissistic structure within the personality that yearns for possession not relationship for power over orders rather than a relationship with others this is a typical masculine pattern and men as part of their maturation have to work against a narcissistic position that regards those who are different as inferior this applies particularly to their possession perception of women and feminine values ukr’s behavior throughout the story depicts the psychological task of forming a personal relationship with the feminine attributes within himself and not leaving them entirely in the original archetypal form his first contact with attain is essentially archetypal insofar as he falls in love and projects unto her his fantasy of the ideal woman he instantly knows that she is the one the figure of aelil yucket’s brother is interesting in a stereotypical male way he perceives that the solution to his despair and depression lies in being able to have sex with detain within young’s theoretical framework the broader figure is sometimes seen as the shadow a figure that symbolizes attributes that are unacceptable to the conscious view we hold of ourselves or other people a nail symbolizes yuck’s shadow obsessive desire for retain and further depicts the absence of an actual personal relationship with the feminine etane seen through the eyes of the shadow no matter how benevolent and caring look it may appear is simply an object of sexual desire not a person sex for many men is often a substitute for intimacy not an expression of it particularly when there is a poorly developed relationship with his feelings when the ego figure of yucca is absent busy with the demands of his job as many modern men find themselves the shadow really comes to the fore it is aided and embedded by the archetypal figure of medea who uses aliel to seduce etane thus in a psychological sense the archetype of masculine power aids the perception of women as sexual objects to be conquered not people to be connected with in a meaningful relationship look at fails to develop a personal relationship with etan and thus the feeling side of his personality is regressed and is symbolized in the shadow of his brother if a man’s conscious view of himself centers around power as yorkers can be seen to do then the inevitable shadow that this cast is a dark often obsessive and impersonal sexuality that denigrates women the outcome for yogurt is a complete loss of contact with the feminine not only at the personal but also at the archetypal level the feminine finally regresses to the other world in the arms of the archetypal negative masculine and disappears from consciousness whilst this spurs yokota into action what he is driven by is the loss of an idealized fantasy and when he discovers that he has chosen his own daughter he rejects her vehemently sending his child or grandchild to her debt this outcome in the story requires further thought jung’s position on incestuous figures is informative and valuable incest symbolizes union with one’s own being it means individuation of or becoming self incest is simply the union of like with like and is the next stage in the development of the primitive idea of self-fertilization he is of course referring to the symbol of incest in dreams and not the acting out of this image so yucca rejects the possibility of a union with his own personal feeling life symbolizing the figure of his incestuously begotten daughter instead he continues to yearn for the idealized buzzer woman after all his pursuing of attain throughout the other world and all the digging up of the unconscious yucca remains unchanged he still rejects the development of personal feeling that he has banished and condemned to death this reminds me of a certain individual who relentlessly pursued therapy in a variety of forms and settings but after all the digging up they remain as uninsightful as when they started the failure to accept aspects of ourselves whether masculine or feminine is a pervasive team in human beings in relationships this can be experienced as a constant pressure that one partner exerts on the other to be who they want them to be the desire to change one’s partner is very often refusable to accept them and a violation of their individuality it is also not infrequently a means by which people avoid looking at themselves and asking what aspects of their own being they might need to change the final part of this story may represent an alternative strategy to one of rejection that joker chose the herdsman and his wife are repair and as such symbolized the integration of the masculine and feminine at the human not the archetypal level the presence of royal figures in myths and dreams symbolizes the archetypal or impersonal level this disintegration of opposites that enables the acceptance and maturation of the feminine in the figure of etane star the cup will also represent opposite qualities to the king for yukid para and status dominate whereas the herdsmen and his wife are characterized by acceptance and humility from this symbolic position within the psyche the rejected feminine can be nurtured and renewal found with the birth of a new king in the figure of kaner moore we can see the transformation of the ego or ruling principle that occurs as the result of the development of feminine attributes humility and acceptance provide the essential conditions for change since they facilitate the emergence of unconscious images and thoughts without the interference of a defense of a judging ego when the sense of who we are is derived from an over identification with the ego or the persona the image we project to the world we are often very dismissive of thoughts and images emerging from the unconscious such phrases as that stupid or that’s illogical often point to the presence of the old king ruling the psyche and refusing to disconnect or die the irish goddesses tend to conform to what jungian mythology has termed a great mother or earth water archetype because they are so closely connected to nature and natural events mythologies offer many variations of this figure for example demeter sybil and gaia beloved of the new age movement other symbols of this archetype are a ploughed field a garden forest or sea or animal symbols such as the crow the cell and the mare the great mother is a symbol of both the creative forces and the destructive ones like all archetypes he has both a positive and a negative side alongside the goddess’s nurturing qualities is the feminine wisdom that transcends logic and asserts the inevitability of the eternal cycle of birth life and death the maccas the danube are unequivocal unequivocal examples of this the kealak vyara is a fine example of the archetypal hag the holder of wisdom and knowledge of spiritual matters when women are able to establish a conscious awareness of the relationship to these archetypal figures within themselves they are able to stand back in any situation and know the inevitability of change this is not passivity or compliance but rather an action of acceptance taken in the light of knowledge it is a yielding and not a given in to many men such acceptance is misconstrued as weakness however men of course are so poorly connected to this feminine archetype and so preoccupied with taking action that they cannot discriminate between acceptance and giving in however if a woman is disconnected in this way which is often true of very intellectual women then they are often prone to inertia and despair when faced with some life situation that just demands the acceptance of change this could be the birth of a child marital separation or the death of a loved one once caught in the grip of such inertia it is very difficult to have any sense of the dynamic process of change and the emergence of fertility that comes from the acceptance and the writing this requires the presence in a woman’s conscious life of the chaotic borough or the wisdom of the crown in our masculine dominated action-oriented rational world this figure has experienced enormous denigration and derision rationality wants to try and fall for life not participating in acknowledging the inevitability of the cycle of change young captures the full complexity of this archetypal figure of the great murder when he describes her as the loving and the terrible mother hindu goddess kali is a good example of this and just as mother nature has a destructive side earthquakes bushfires droughts and floods so also does the great mother the negative side of the archetype includes such attributes as a desire to dissolve all boundaries and the view that everything is connected to everything else and that discrimination and separateness are of no value in this way the negative face of the great mother works against the emergence of consciousness and the development of boundaries yet this return to chaos and the obliteration of boundaries is of course often the beginning of a period of creativity but such a return as you will see in the stories of the heroic quest requires discrimination of conscious awareness and not a submissive compliant giving in for some women it is easier to identify and indeed in some situations to over identify with the positive nurturing qualities of this figure to such an extent that the archetype dominates their psyche the end result is that they become nothing more than a mother with no sense of their own individual identity change in this fixed role can therefore bring about major identity crisis the children of such women can experience their mothers as extremely possessive sometimes resulting in the child escaping into sickness madness or even death the mother whose entire identity revolves around being a murderer needs to possess the child as a means of keeping her own identity intact as the child emerges into young adulthood he is imprisoned in the mother psyche and the engulfing face of the great murder comes into operation preventing the forward movement of growth and development other women react so strongly against the nurturing aspects of this archetype that they appear to place a curse upon themselves that they will never be like their own mother over identification with the destructive aspects of the archetype meanwhile may mean that nurturance is perceived as a weakness and that such women are not only unable to nurture others but also unable to nurture themselves the masochistic martyr is one manifestation of this pattern as also is it seeming opposite the driven corporate woman who is unable to stop and take stock of the direction of her life the power and wisdom of the triple goddess lies in the incorporation of all three attributes of fertility nurturance and aggression perhaps it is because the goddesses are so close to nature that these three qualities have not been split or intellectualized into separate and discrete entities again and again the myths reveal the existence of this wisdom and the desirability of holding and containing opposites and there you have it guys i’m afraid that’s all we have time for tonight that concludes the chapters on the gods the male archetypes and the goddesses the female archetypes and peter o’connor’s beyond the mists i highly recommend that book for anybody interested in these subjects hey folks welcome back to the brand academy i’m kevin flanagan in this video i’m going to do a bit of a deep dive into the femorians one of the mythical races of beings from the irish sagas uh you heard about these beings the formorians in the book the lava cavalla aaron and they’re quite interesting as we’re about to find out i would say even more interesting in some ways than the two i had done in themselves before i jump into that of course please i invite you to check out the website brahanacademy.org if you become a member you can access the library there right and most of the if not all of the resources that i’m using in this video are all available in the library for free download if you become a member i also have a free course that i’ve just launched a crash course on gaelic ireland so if you sign up you can also get access to that too now with that being said let’s just jump straight into the video [Music] in this video we’re going to explore a group that’s even older and more elusive and mysterious than the two of the dunnon and that is the from warrians when we read in the early irish mythology in the lao gavala the book of the takings of ireland we hear about these different migrations of people who travel to ireland to settle here the first we hear about it the caesareans then we hear about the numedians the barthelonians and so on and all the while there’s another group in the background lingering ever-present watching that is the fomorians fomorians are a difficult group to research and it takes you down some very strange and unusual paths with a lot of conjecture you tend to end up in places like atlantis and so on my aim with this video is to shine some light on what’s really a shadowy and mysterious race of beings and my typical format i like to kind of do a kaleidoscope of different images different quotes that i’ve researched different ideas and pieced them together in a kind of a tapestry to try and help give you a clearer understanding and deeper appreciation of this mythology so we’re going to do a little bit of a deep dive into the femorians and that’s going to involve us also meeting a few other groups along the way we’re going to meet the fear bulge we’re going to meet the two-headed dunnon and we’re going to meet some interesting characters two characters in particular who kind of bring a big question mark over the relationship between these types of people these groups of peoples and that is brez who was half from warian and half to a hadith and while he had for maureen relatives he ended up ruling the two hadith while noah was wounded and then you have lou a sort of semi-divine or fully divine god-king a leader of the two had done in battle against the fomorians who was prophesized to defeat his grandfather balor of the mighty blows or balor of the evil eye who was the leader of the fomorians and like perez lou was also half to edit on it and half for marion this video is going to be a great compliment to my other videos who were the fear bulks and the arrival of the two of the danon in those videos we learned about the pre-history of ireland up to the first battle of moitora the tour had a tannen had defeated the phil bulks but still there was another earlier group of inhabitants on the island who they would have to contend with and this is the femorians so who were the femorians were they giants were they were they gods were they monsters uh were they pirates edmund curtis in his history of ireland from the earliest times to 1922 said the femorians were gloomy giants of the sea in the north of ireland on the shore of county antrim we find the famous giants causeway it’s a channel of approximately forty thousand hexagonal hexagonal vaseled columns that was once said to be an ancient pathway for giants to cross between the northern coast of ireland and the western coast of scotland in irish this place is called clock on the fawaroch which means literally the stepping stones of the femorians the femori as they’re also called are closely associated with the sea and its islands and the name some people suggest could mean under the sea and they’re often described as coming from under the sea in irish fui mara would be under the sea so you have free mara as a kind of a closely related form linguistically to form orion or from war so some people speculate that it could have something to do with that in a late account of the mythological story the second battle of moytora it names 33 leaders of the framorian 32 of them plus their high hiking in her book celtic ireland sophie bryant describes the femorians as sea rovers and she speculates that they might be a tribe of ugrian i think it’s pronounced eugreen extraction coming around the north of scotland from denmark or scandinavia and she says if this urian race settled however sparsely in scotland and the two headed down and came to ireland from that country it is easy to imagine one way in which the modification of gale by ugly and might have come to pass on them so you can see that even though they’re shrouded in this mystery that they might be from the sea or somehow monstrous that there has been speculation historical and anthropological research into migrations of people on these islands that lead people to think that there might be some truth in this in the patriot history of ireland cusack says that the femorians are a race of pirates of whom little is known and according to the annals of clonmac noise they were a sept descended from ham or cham the son of noah and lived by piracy and spoil of other nations and where in those days very troublesome to the whole world end quote patrick western joyce one of my favorite writers on early irish history speaking on the femorian says quote the fomorians were a race of sea robbers who according to some came originally from africa their two chiefs mork and conning lived in a wonderful fortress called tor cunning on torrey island off the coast of dhonigal and after the death of named they tyrannized over his people and made them pay an intolerable yearly tribute of corn butter cattle and children so the numedians unable to bear their miserable state any longer rose up in a fury in an on monday 3060 they destroyed tor cunning and slew conning himself and all his family but more attacked them soon after and a dreadful battle was fought on the sea beach in which nearly all the combatants fell and those who were not killed in battle were drowned for the combatants fought so furiously that they gave no he to the advancing tidal wave which rose and overwhelmed them after the medians only the crew of one bark escaped and moore and his femorians remained masters of tory seven years after the battle a part of the nemedians fled from ireland under three chiefs simon brick iba and britain mail simon brick and his people went to the north of greece and from them were the descendants the fear bulks iba and his followers who were the ancestors of the de danons made their way to that part of greece in which the city of athens is situated and those who went with britain mail settled in the north of alban or scotland the few named that remained behind dwelt in ireland for more than 200 years under the bitter tyranny of the femorians end quote from p.w joyce’s a short history of ireland from the earliest times to 1608 as an aside here i also want to mention the mirror connection we talk of the femurians and there are writings that talk about the darkness of their skin and while i haven’t been able to verify this in an academic sense i have come across pieces of information and it seems to be something that’s present in the folk memory of a connection between the irish and north africa for example there is a short irish film and if i remember it correctly there’s like a pilot who crashes in the desert and he’s not able to communicate as it did a a nomadic man finds him and he has trouble communicating when he tries to communicate in english but when they switch to irish all of a sudden they’re able to communicate now this is just a funny little movie but i do have friends from from libya and algeria and i do one of my friends from libya is from the barbara culture and he plays the traditional barbara music like i say it’s this irish music that you’re playing because the music is very similar so we’re talking about a period of time that’s so far back in the midst of time that is very difficult to speak with any certainty but it doesn’t seem to be a huge stretch to think that perhaps the framorians were from north africa i read it somewhere and i think i think even jeffrey keating mentions this the former raek could mean from the west or something like that somebody who traveled from the west uh from the east excuse me from the east uh so there’s like some speculation about a connection between the femorians um the north africa the barbers and early irish culture that being said let’s just take a couple of minutes to recap the timeline that we’re talking about here so we don’t use bc and ad we use the phrase am which means anno monde it’s the chronology of the world and in the past they believed that they could calculate when the world actually began that that was created by god and how old it actually was so when we say ano monday we’re talking about the age of the world from when it was created by god himself so that’s what an omni means i’m going to pull this information from an eleanor holds epochs of history volume 2 on this section on early christian ireland okay she has a page here a section here called age of the world so the the dates given here are those that are also appearing in the annals of the form master so just to put that into context for you if i calculated this right the year and on monday 5782 began at sunset on the 18th of september 2021. so if the calculations are correct um that’s how old the world is so that should give us just a little bit of context for understanding the following dates that i’m going to use you can use that as a reference point that the current year and on one day would be 5782 if i’m calculating that correct based on the information that i have now the animals of ireland begin in anamonday 2242 and with the coming of kisser to ireland or cesar depending on your pronunciation in the year on monday 2242 and so this was the year of the great flood this is the date that’s given by the four masters as that of the covenant of cacere to ireland and this was apparently 40 days before the great flood began and on one day 2520 is given as the date when parthelon came to ireland and for 200 years before the coming of parthelon it’s written that the fomorian had subsisted by felling and fishing alwyn reeves and brinley reese and celtic heritage an ancient tradition in ireland and wales said that quote the femori had already made their presence known in the time of parthelon the lower gawala aaron describes them in that context as beings with single arms and single legs they were led by kikl grikenkos son of gaul the one-eyed son of garub woof each of their four ships companies comprise 50 men and thrice 50 women and their predominantly female character is further emphasized by the description of kickle’s monstrous mother lot her bloated lips were in her breast she had four eyes on her back and she equaled all her troop and strength according to some versions the fomori were destroyed in their battle with parthelon according to others though the battle was fought for a week not a man was slain there for it was a magic battle that’s the end of the quote in anamonday 2530 different mauryans in one account were defeated by parthelon at maggieth county donegal and these events are recorded in the annals of ireland in another monday 2820 parthelon’s people die of the plague in 2850 named came to ireland in 3066 the femorian tower of conon on tory island is destroyed by the race of nemed but numedians are defeated and only 30 of their race survive and escape ireland again reece says ultimately named people assaulted the tower of conant but after they had secured his downfall moore appeared with three score ships and only one ship or 30 warriors of named people escaped from the slaughter that ensued end quote in john o’donovan’s translation of the annals of the kingdom of ireland volume 1 at the year on monday 3066 he writes the demolition of the tower of kanan in this year by the race of the med against conan son of favor and the femorians in general in revenge for all the oppression they had inflicted upon them the race of the med as is evident from the chronicle which is called lara gavala and they nearly all fell by each other thirty persons alone of the race of the named escaped to different quarters of the world and they came to ireland sometime afterwards as fear bullocks 216 years numed and his race remained in ireland after this ireland was a wilderness for a period of 200 years end quote and on monday 3266 the arrival of the fear bulk so just to recap there was a group of people who came to ireland called them the medians they had been oppressed and tyrannized by the femorians they rose up against the fomorians and managed to destroy the tower of conon which sat on tory island however the framorians got reinforcements and almost completely eradicated the race of the named however 30 people managed to escape on ships for 200 years they had been away from ireland if you want to know more about that story you have to watch the video who are the fear bulks but that brings us up to the year 3266 as the furbolgs the descendants of the med the enemies the rivals the those who had fought against the femorians hundreds of years before returned to ireland and they had the kingdom of ireland for the most part until the annum one died 3303 when the two ahead of dannon arrived in ireland this brings us up to the first battle of my torah which if you want to hear that story you need to watch the video on the arrival of the two ahead of dannon see i told you how all these videos are going to complement each other and together to provide a very intricate tapestry of the different groups of people and their actions and their dynamics from the mythological accounts of ireland so we find a sort of an alliance between the two ahead of and the femorians after the first battle of my torah and it’s an interesting one because it really sheds light on this subject which is complicated enough already it’s vague and it’s difficult to find good information on but when you do start to dive deeper into it what do you find well politics in the first battle of my torah the arm of nuada who was king and leader of the two of the dunan was severed in the battle and under the bretton laws under the oldest laws of the land a king could not be king if he was blemished so therefore noah had to give up the position of king of the two hadith and who should it go to well for some reason or another the wives said that it should go to their adopted son prez or yohibrez who was son of allah perez’s father allaha son of dalbeth was a king of the fomorians but his mother was eru daughter of delba and belonged to the two ahadidanan so brez was of a mixed race here his father was from maury and his mother to a hadith but he had been adopted and raised and was part of the tua hadidana tribe at first sight the proposal which was accepted by the tuwaha seems strange in view of what has been said of the femorians as monstrous enemies who challenged partelon and as the oppressors who caused the remnant of nemez people to abandon the country however in later stories the formorian are giants and in ecclesiastical texts their class were elves and other mishaping creatures the accursed sons of noah before coming to ireland the two ahead of dannon had made an alliance with the femorian it seems because you have intermarriage between the two head of dannon and the femorians at a very early stage in the story of when they arrived to ireland how was breast a grown man more from alwyn and brinley rhys in celtic heritage and ancient tradition in ireland and wales speaking on the birth of prez it is said that the second battle of moitura that iru the daughter of delba a woman of the two had a daniel was looking out to sea one morning and she saw a silver ship which brought a fair-haired youth wearing a gold adorned mantle you greeted her with is this the time that our lying with thee will be easy they lay down together and the youth then told her he was elaha son of delba king of the femori he gave her a ring which she should give only to one whose finger it fitted and he prophesied the birth of a beautiful boy who should be called yogi brez the boy was duly born and grew twice as rapidly as other boys end quote and on monday 3304 the reign of brez begins kingdom was bestowed upon prayers and conditioned that he would surrender to sovereignty if his misdeeds should give cause anyway he proceeded to go ahead and strip tatua had to donate of the nobility of their jewels of their tribute their cattle and their food they reduced he reduced their status he forced them to engage in manual labor every house in the country fell under tribute via breasts to the femorian kings the dagda who is the god of druidism labored at building a fort for pres and every day he surrendered the best part of his food to a monstrous satirist who tyrannized him agma the mighty champion of the tua had likewise suffering from lack of food had to supply the host every day with firewood from nearby islands and the sea would sweep away two-thirds of his bundle because of his weakness the story goes on to explain how under press’s rulership under his leadership as a king the two had a denon suffer their nobility diminished this could be said to reach a crescendo in the story called the satire of carvery in this story the warrior press who was ruling during novada’s incapacity but he was not popular and he certainly wasn’t hospitable when a famous bird named carbury the son of the poetess eaton came to visit the royal court he was sent to a dark chamber without a fire or a bed or food just some measly small cakes of bread is all he was given to understand how offensive this truly was you need to appreciate the high regard for hospitality given in early ireland it was offensive what breast was doing and the next morning fuming the poet left the court but just before he did he pronounced a scathing satire on the king and according to our mythologies the first satire that had ever been pronounced in ireland and this had the effect you see there was always a belief that the words of a poet were more than just mere words that they carried power and force and effect and to be satired by a poet by a bird by a druid it could mean the ruin of your life aside from the physical blotches that might appear on your face the ridicule that you would face in society the laughter that people would have when they see you that would be enough to destroy you and perez was called to resign and he did so as you can imagine with no grace or dignity whatsoever his father was a femorian sea king also called a pirate and he retired to his court but his reception there was not really what he had expected so he went instead to balor of the evil eye a femorian chief and together the two warriors collected a vast army and navy and formed a bridge of ships and boats all the way from the hebrides to the northwest coast of ireland upon landing their forces they marched to a plane in the byrony of terrerrell county sloigo where they awaited an attack or surrender of the two hadid army but the magical skill or more correctly the superior abilities of this people prove them more than equal to the occasion that’s from an illustrated history of ireland from the earliest period by mf cusack the story then continues into the birth of lou and the coming of lou and the arrival of him into the two ahead of daniel but we’re not going to speak about that here just for the sake of time but it’s enough to say that lou was also born half to at the dine and in half for maureen however in reverse if i remember correctly his father was two of the dunnon and his mother uh from orion um but it’s enough to know that he was prophesized to slay balor who is his grandfather balor of the evil eye and so when he arrived in tara he proved himself to the tour hadad and they accepted him as the new leader in price in place of brass but before liu arrives on the scene in anamonday 3310 nuada had gone through a bit of a miraculous healing when his physician the magical dean kecked he created a silver arm to replace the wada’s lost arm and so he ruled as nuada aragon love which means nuada of the silver arm today in county calder there is a place called minute which in irish is called my nuada which means the plane of nuada the king of the two ahead of dannon returning to wres again in celtic heritage and ancient tradition in ireland and wales the main nuada had long since been provided with a silver arm or an arrogant love by dean kecked but later dean kek’s son mirk healed his arm of flesh and he was reinstated as king of two ahead of dannon so this explains why nuada is now again king of the two hadith and wen lu who had not been raised with the two head of daniel now a young man arrives at the door of tara asking to be admitted so impressed with the tua hadidan and with this liu law father samuel donogh the long-armed master of all arts that they chose him to be their leader in the second battle of my torah which occurred in ano mundo 3330 and it’s in this battle that lou lives up to the prophecy and slays his grandfather balor the giant of the mighty blows and the evil eye with a well-placed shot of his sling does this sound familiar the plane on which this battle was fought retains the name of my torah meaning the plane of the towers or the pillars and separate monuments may still be seen on the ancient field to this day sadly nuada was also slain in the battle by the femorians so in alan 1.331 the reign of lu lu father the long-handed begins and he establishes the fair of telltu in telltown county mead in anamonday 3470 the joint reign of the last three kings of the two had the danun mccool machete and magrana begins and finally twenty-nine years later in alan monday 3500 we have the arrival of the malaysians and then the battles of sleeve mish and talcia are fought and the three kings of the two hadadanan are killed now onto the femorians what i found interesting in my research of them is this kind of like blurred distinction that we have between the femorians and the two had the dunnon and especially the kind of characters of bress and lou all almost being counterparts of each other where both of them are half from orion and have two ahead of tannen but on opposite sides so for one of them the father is of two ahadidan and the mother is of femorians and the other it’s it’s vice versa it’s the other way around we also see these kind of supernatural qualities associated to both the two hadith and the femorians but not so much the fear bulks okay they might have druids and so on but the two of the donors are always spoken of as being like adept at magic and the magical arts and the supernaturals what’s also interesting is the femorians never appear to be as settlers in ireland in the same ways as the other groups of people they remain kind of in the background throughout like a boogeyman like this monster that’s always lurking in the shadows they seem to always be associated with the sea and from a kind of jungian perspective this is the idea of the subconscious and the unknown and in this sense the femorians could represent the aspect of the self and of nature that is untamed and therefore we are subject to it and at the whim of uh as compared to say the what the two headed dannon symbolized which is more of a kind of an order a and a society um artistry uh devotion worship like in the spiritual like having a kind of a higher culture so perhaps what we’re we’re looking at here is more of a symbolic of the dark uh monstrous part of our own psyche the untamed part of our own psyche the primordial part of our own minds we can also draw some parallels here from these stories with the myths and accounts from around the world like the biblical account of david and goliath just sounds exactly like um lou and balor to down to the fact that balor is a giant and lou is just like a young man and he kills him with a slingshot but but there’s obviously obvious differences here is that balor is a supernatural giant with it with one eye that whatever it looks on it gets destroyed i don’t think goliath had that um however the ending of the irish one is like way cooler because he knocks the eye so hard it fires out the back of his head at the back of his skull and because this eye is a magical eye that causes anything it looks like to be destroyed well it starts to completely eradicate the femorian enemy when it falls at the back of his skull and starts looking at them it’s very cool ending so that’s an obvious parallel there but there’s other parallels that we can draw here with say de vedas or scandinavian mythology or greek and roman mythology particularly the idea of having like two groups of gods who are fighting against each other you know you have the titans in the greek mythology in in hinduism you have the idea of the devas and the asuras and you have this constant theme of a kind of a battle that’s raging on throughout time throughout history and the general mythology of these two groups of divine semi-divine i say semi-divine because there’s also subject to very like human qualities as well um and it’s it’s replete in all of our mythology throughout the world if i had more time and maybe this is for another video i’d love to explore this topic in more detail with you and explain how from a archetypal sense from a you know psychoanalytical sense looking at the the themes that come out of these myths um and how they apply to our psychology and how they represent different parts of our mind and our psychology would be a really interesting uh deep dive and if anybody is interested in doing a bit more deep dive on that checkout my videos are here on youtube called the psychology of the gaelic gods and goddesses um the book beyond the mist by peter o’connor also and anything by the writer joseph campbell um who was a comparative mythologist so he looked at the mythologies of the whole world and he he drew analysis from that that suggests that all of the mythology of the world is really about psychology and that’s why it’s still relevant today so i hope this has shed some light on the dark mysterious shady group of sea monster pirates called the femorians i’m not too sure if it has that’s the thing with the femorians that’s the thing with this sort of research it tends to leave more things unanswered more questions unanswered than actually solved but i do hope that i’ve given you a little bit more context for which to kind of think about and contemplate these these ideas who are the femorians who are the two had done and what did they mean do they represent something about ourselves that’s all for me for this time thanks for sticking around i’ll just remember just wanted to invite you to check out the website brandonacademy.org check out my online courses over there i have a course on early irish culture and society one on mythology one of the brethren law and i now have a free course on gayle garden so be sure to check that out that’s all for now so government august long fall [Music] me the malaysians as i said were descendants of a man named mill who was obsidian and he had settled in spain he became he was known as king of spain and this i think this is fascinating this this particular part of our irish history mill was married to a woman called scotia and this is one of the names that was given to ireland and scotia was the daughter of the egyptian pharaoh nick donnabus he was the king of egypt so again you have this indication of a connection between ancient ireland and ancient india uh ancient egypt and the story goes male had five sons and he himself actually never set foot in ireland ireland he died before he before he could set foot in ireland but one of the sons called ear ir was sent off on a sort of a scouting mission to see what he could find and he came across the country and he he he he went on shore and he he found the two at a dominant they sort of parted on good company but once he had left the the three kings sort of had second thoughts and they thought jesus he’s gonna come back if we let him go he’s gonna come back with with loads of people we need to do something about this so they did something very wrong and they killed him and once news of this had spread to his relatives in spain his brothers they they pledged to avenge his death so these spanish egyptian descendants sent over armies of men to ireland it was like a full-scale invasion by his support his sons they first tried to land at a place called inverse lane which i believe is is slain castle i believe it’s that area and this was foiled by the two of the don and who once they seen it they were arriving they started to use their spells and do these storms and you know push them further out to sea so they didn’t get to land first first of all they were led the malaysians were led by a morgan who was one of the uh the sons of male one of the older brothers and the morgan came onto the island and he came across the three kings mccool mackeck the magurina and he finds them having a fight they’re quarreling over a division of their father’s treasure and he’s shocked and he’s a little bit bemused i guess at this petty behavior from kings on were kings of such a bountiful and abundant land to be petty to be squabbling over some petty jewellery and petty treasure he he felt that they were unworthy of the title of kingship and boldly said i’m your king now [Music] what transpired next is referred to as the first judgment but as i said earlier the one with them report along is a much earlier account but some people still refer to this as the first judgment because there’s actually a judge in this story there’s actually a brethren uh or a druid who’s giving his opinion and therefore it’s a judgment you don’t get that in the patalonian story but the two they’ve done and they weren’t prepared for this battle they weren’t expecting you know they were sort of caught by surprise by the malaysians and they asked for more time to and prepare for battle and they turned to a morgan who was who was a druid and he said they said to them okay you have to use your good judgment and knowledge we’re going to put you to the test we’re going to put your judgment to the test we want you to make us a fair offer and if he didn’t make them a fair offer they promised to strike him down on the spot using their enchantments and kill him so he turned around and he said that because the two of the donor were caught off guard that it wouldn’t be fair to fight now so what they would do is they would go back to their ships and they would sail out nine leagues nine waves out into the ocean and then they would try to take ireland again and if they were successful they would take it and if not um they would leave and he tells us who they’ve done and that they can use their magic and if they can keep the ships from coming back on the shore then that will be it and they will remain the rulers of ireland and they see what they’ve done in her disjudgement and it was they seen it as pleasing to them and it was a just judgment and it was fair and because they were confident and probably a little bit cocky of their magical abilities they were in their own minds certain of success they started using their enchantments they called on these great storms and this roaring sea this stormy windy weather in an effort to destroy the ships of the malaysians that were sitting in the bay but the accounts the story says that this storm this wind this roaring sea was soothed back to calmness when american began to speak his poetry landing on the shores finally they go on to overthrow the two ahead of daniel at talton which is now today known as telltale in the region of tara in the county of mead defeated the two de danon move into the hills of ireland under the guidance of manalan and the kingship of their new leader bob dyarg malaysians had conquered ireland and would set about building hill farts round forts rats cairns and we can see lots of remnants of these things around the country today but the malaysians would be as i said the spanish the sons of melissa mill the king of spain and this is where the irish people get some of the irish people have dark hair darker skin darker eyes it comes from that genetic that genetic line going back to spain and it’s also why i i would suspect speculate why the irish people are so closely rene related genetically to the people of the basque region of spain [Music] the book of leinster contains a short and quaint tale called the gowell and cheetah the taking of the fairy meld which centers on the characters of angus magog angus the young tsun and his father the dagda or good god who is also affectionately referred to as dagan in the story both of whom are prominent members of the two ahead of dannon the girl in cedar the taking of the fairy meld there was a wonderful king over the two headed down in ireland his name was dagon or the dagda he had a great power even though the land belonged to the descendants of meal the tour had it done and used to destroy the crops and milk produced by the descendants of meal until they formed a pact with the dagda after that he protected their crops and milk at first he had great power as king he was the one who assigned the she mounds to the two ahead of dannon luke mahetnan was assigned to she rodriban ogma was assigned to she acquired the dagger himself although it’s said that he had the shi in braga which is newgrange from the beginning the mac og the young song angus was the foster son of madeira breeley and of nindid the seer after everyone else was assigned a place the mack ogue went to the dagda to get land i have nothing for you said the doctor all land is being assigned give me just a day and a night in your own dwelling said the macogue and that was given to him after that the doctor said to him off you go to your people your time is up it is a fact the mac oak said that all existence is made up of day and night and that is what you offered me so dagon left and the mac og is still in the she to this day and the wonderful world is in it there are three trees that bear fruit eternally an immortal pig standing on its feet a roasted pig and a vessel containing a staggering drink and they can never be depleted [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh noble ocean o son of the king it was best indeed of valor in battle relate to us now without grief how thou has lived after all the other phoenians i will tell thee that o newcombe patrick though sad to me to speak of it aloud it was after the hard-fought field of gather where alas was slain the valiant oscar one day as weed athenians were all assembled the generous fein and all that survived of us though sad and sorrowful are converse after our heroes have been laid low at a hunt on a misty morning on the circling shores of lochlean where there were trees most fragrant of bloom and music at all times sweetly sung by birds they was roused by us the hornless doe that was best in bounding running and all activity our hounds and dogs were all close after her in full chase it was not long till we saw a swift rider coming towards us from the west a youthful maiden who was most beautiful of countenance on a graceful white steed most fleet in movement we all halted from the chase at the sight of the countenance of the royal lady wonder seized finn and athenians had never before seen a woman so beautiful there was a royal crown upon her head and she had a dark brown mantle of costly silk stamped with stars of red gold covering her shoes down to the grass a ringlet of gold was hanging down from each yellow dress of her golden hair her blue eyes were clear and cloudless as a dew drop on a blade of grass her cheek was redder than the rose her complexion fairer than the hue of the swan upon the wave sweeter yet was the taste of her little mouth than honey that is taken mixed with red wine a cloth wide long and smooth was covering the white steed there was a saddle adorned with red gold and she held a gold-bitted bridle in her right hand four shapely shoes were under him of yellow gold of the finest quality a wreath of silver he had in the back of his head not in the world was there a better steed she came into the presence of finn and spoke in a tone gentle and earnest and said o king of the fiends long and from afar has been my journey who art thou thyself o young queen a woman best in figure beauty and countenance relate to us now thy story from the beginning and tell us thy name and thy land nev of the head of gold is my own name almost valiant finn of the great hosts beyond all the women of the world i have gained fame and i am the fair daughter of the king of youth tell us so gentle queen the cause of thy coming over the sea from afar is it thy husband who has gone from thee or what is the trouble that is on thee it is not that husband has gone from me never yet have i been pledged to any man orphini and king of the highest fame but affection and love i have given to thy son to which of my sons o blooming maid hast thou given love and liking do not hide from us now the whole cause but tell us thy trouble o woman i myself will tell thee that o finn it is thy lovable handsome son of the hard weapons high-minded ushing of the strong arms he is the hero that i now speak of what is the cause for which thou hast given love a beautiful maid of the glossy hair to my own fair ushing beyond all others seeing that there are so many high princes under the sun not without cause o king of the fenians have i come from afar for him but i received an account of him of his excellence of body and mind it is many a king’s son and high prince have offered me love and lasting affection i never consented to accept any man till i gave love to the valiant or sheen by that hand on theo patrick and not shameful for me to tell it there was not a part of me but was in love with the beautiful maid of the glossy hair i took her hand in mind and said my rover with sweet toned voice the kindest welcome i give thee to this land a lovely youthful queen thou art the brightest and fairest of bloom it is thou i should prefer for wife thou art my choice above the women of the world i’ll kindly stare of the brightest look commands that no true heroes do not regard i impose on thee now o generous ocean to come with me on my horse and thus go away to turn the nog it is the most delightful land to be found in the world the land of most renown now beneath the sun the trees bending with fruit and blossom and foliage growing to the tips of the branches abundant in it had a honey in wine and everything good that i had seen decay shall not come upon thee with time thou shalt not see failure or death thou shalt get feasting clay and drinking thou shalt get music most sweet on harpstring thou shalt get silver and gold and thou shall get also abundance of jewels thou shalt have a hundred swords and no deceit and a hundred mantles of saturn of costly quality thou shalt have a hundred steeds most swift in battle thou shalt have with them a hundred keen hounds thou shalt have a hundred suits of armor and shirts of satin a hundred cows and also a hundred calves thou shalt have a hundred sheep with fleeces of gold thou shalt have a hundred gems that are not to be found in this world of thine thou shalt have a hundred handmaids young and mirthful and bright and glorious as the sun of the best features figure and complexion whose voices are sweeter than the song of birds thou shalt have a hundred warriors most brave in battle most accomplished too in feats of activity armed and equipped before thee if thou comest with me to the land of youth thou shalt have a protecting well-fitting corset and a gold-hilted sword of most cunning stroke worth a hundred swords in the hand of a true hero it’s like your land has never seen thou shalt get the royal diadem of the king of youth that never yet was given to anyone under the sun bright brilliant with precious stones whose worth cannot be put into words thou shalt have everything that i have said to thee and utter delight without sorrow without weeping thou shalt have beauty strength and power and myself you shall have for a wife refusal at all i will not give o pleasant queen of the dresses of gold thou art my choice beyond the women of the world and i will go with the light to the land of the young on the steed’s back we went away together before me sat the maiden who said o ushing let us go softly at the first till we reached the opening into the great sea then arose that steed with strength and when we reached the edge of the strand he shook himself then for the journey and led forth three nays allowed when finn and defenian saw the steed swiftly going in his course and turning his face to the strong sea they uttered three cries of grief oh o’sheen said finn weak and faint my grief is that thou art going away leaving me without a hope to see thee come back again to me all triumphant his features and beauty changed and he let fall showers of tears which drowned his bright face and bosom and he said my woe of washing thy going from me oh patrick a melancholy event was our parting from each other then the parting of the father from his own son sad and weak am i through having to tell it i kissed my father tenderly lovingly and the same mark of affection i received from him i paid farewell also to the fenians whilst the tears poured down my cheek many a delightful day i and finn and the fenians with us in full glory were playing chess and carousing and listening to music a gallant company or hunting in the pleasant cleanse our sweet voiced hounds being with us another time we were in the rough battle slaughtering warriors full vigorously our vain or shin quietly leave treating of thy valiant deeds amongst the fiends how did style go to the land of the young continue now for us thy story without a lie we turned our back to the land and our face directly to the west the smeared sea ebbed before us and filled in swelling waves in our rear we saw wonders on our way cities courts and castles bright palaces and fortresses splendid sunny mansions and loyal dwellings we saw also by our side a hornless doe bounding swiftly and a red-eared vigorous white hound hunting it boldly in the chase we saw also tis no invention a young maid on a brown steed with an apple of gold in her right hand riding over the top of the waves we saw a short distance behind her a young horseman on a steed most white dressed in cloth of purple and red satin with a gold hilted sword in his right hand who are those two i see on the road gentle queen let me know that woman of the beautiful countenance and that graceful horseman on steed most white take no notice of what thou shalt see o gentle ocean nor mind what thou hast yet seen they are all as nothing till we reach in earnest the land of the young we saw next away far off a bright sunny place smooth fronted more fear of shape and look than all else to be found in the whole world what kingly most bright fortress most beautiful of all eye has seen are we approaching now and who is the high prince over that fortress it is the daughter of the king of the land of the living who is queen now in yonder fortress whom father of the blows of jerome lucach took away with him by the great strength of his arms and by might bonds she imposed on that robber never to make her his wife till she should find a knight of true hero who would give him battle hand to hand bear sway and blessing o gold haired neve i have never heard any music that was better than the most sweet word from thy honeyed mouth though great grief it is to us to hear of a woman of her rank being so treated let us go now to visit her in that fortress and it may be for me it is fated to slay that mighty warrior by feats of strength as was my custom we went down to the fortress and there came out to us the young princess whose splendor was equal to the sons and she gave us a hundred welcomes there was a robe of yellow silk on this queen of the lovely complexion her skin was fair as the swan upon the wave her cheeks the colour of the rose of the colour of gold was her hair and her blue eyes clear without a mist her little melt of honey was of the berry’s hue each slender brow was clear cut into shape we then sat down each of us in a chair of gold much food was placed before us with drinking horns filled with burr when we had eaten enough of food and tasted many sweet wines the gentle young queen spoke and said listen to me quietly she told us her whole story fully and fairly and the tears fell on her cheek and she could never return to her own country whilst there was a mighty giant still alive this be silent the young queen cease from thy grief and weave not and i swear by my hand to thee that by me shall fall that murderous giant there is no hero at all to be found now however great has reproved for valor throughout the world who would give battle hand to hand to this fierce giant alas for me i tell thee o fair queen that not terrible to me is his coming against me and if he fall not by the strength of my arms then i will fall in thy defense not long till we saw coming the mighty giant most hateful of luck clothed in skins of deer with a club of iron in his hand he saluted us not nor belle to us but glared into the face of the young maid his captive declared battle and stern conflict against me and i went forth to encounter him for the space of three nights and three days we were engaged in that tough struggle but though stealth was the great giant at last i cut his head off him when the two young maids saw the great giant lying perilous on the ground they uttered three cries of delight with great exaltation and rejoicing we then went into the castle i was bruised weak and faint my blood flowing full freshly and coming swift and hot from my wounds the daughter of the king of the living came quickly to my relief poured healing balm into my wounds and immediately i was well and strong we buried the big man in a grave earth deep wide and clear i raised his headstone over his grave and wrote his name upon it in the alm of branches we took our meal joyfully and mary where we then after it and in the castle warmly covered beds of the feathers of birds were prepared for us on the tomorrow at break of day we awoke from our slumber it is fitting for me said the king’s daughter to set out without further rest to my own land we dressed without delay and took our leave of the maiden grieved and mournful were we after her and nonetheless was the sunni male after us it is not known to me or gentle patrick what happened that young queen afterwards from the day we parted from her or even if she ever returned to the land of the living we turned our back to the castle with our steed under us in full course swifter to our mind that white steed than our march wind over a mountain’s ridge it was not long till the sky darkened and the wind rose and blew in every direction the great mad sea kindled terribly but there was no glimpse to be seen of the sun a while we were anxiously gazing at the dark clouds and on the stars that sometimes showed when suddenly the wind and storm were baited and brightly shone fiebles above our heads we saw then at our side a most lovely land all blooming beautiful smooth clear plains and a royal castle very splendid there was not a colour of all i had seen of bright blue of green and of white of purple of red and of yellow but was to be found in that royal palace that i am speaking of there were on the other side of this castle bright sun warmed dwellings and mansions all made of precious stones by the hands of cunning craftsmen and noble artists what bright lovely country is that yonder or gentlemaid of the tresses of gold a country of the fairest aspect i has ever looked upon or is that the land of the youth it is indeed a generous ocean no untruth have i told thee about it there is nothing of all that i have promised thee but may be seen by thee forever it was not long till we saw coming towards us from the castle to meet us thrice 50 warriors the strongest and handsomest and of the highest fame and of character there came to us after that a hundred young maids of the greatest beauty in silken garments adorned with gold welcoming us to their own land we saw next coming fort a band of the very choicest troops and an illustrious powerful mighty king best in figure features and complexion a yellow shirt of the smoothest silk was on him and over it a bright cloak adorned with gold and on his head a glittering crown of gold shining and brilliant we saw coming next the young queen of the highest fame and 50 maiden sweet voiced modest and the fairest form in her train when they had all come into one place thus kindly spoke the king of youth and said here is ushing the son of finn the chosen spouse of goldhair neve he sees me then by the hand and said loud enough for the whole host o valiant oshin o son of the king a hundred thousand welcomes to thee this land in which thou hast arrived its virtues i will not hide from thee truly long and lasting shall thy life be and thou shalt be young forever there is no delight of all the heart has ever imagined that is not in this country for thee thou mayest o’shin truly believe me for i am king of the land of youth here is our fair queen and here our daughter neve the golden-haired who crossed the smooth sea for thee to have thee for her husband forever i gave thanks to the king and bowed low to the virtuous queen we did not delay longer but there entered the palace of the king of youth then came the nobles of that first city both men and women to greet us there was feasting and festivity there continuously for the space of ten nights and ten days i was married then to gold-haired neve or patrick from rome of white crow’s ears thus was it i went to the land of youth though sad and sorrowful for me to treat of it continued our story further washing of the golden words a wishing of the warlike arms how did style leave the land of youth i feel it long till thou revealest the reason tell me too with great kindness hatstar any children by niv or what’s that long in the land of the young tell us the story now without grieving i had by goldhair neve children of the fairest complexion and greatest beauty best featured best shaped brightest hued two young sons and one fair daughter oh pleasant o’sheen continue my story and tell me where thy children are tell me their names without delay and the country they are now living in neve held for them the land of youth the land of the living and the land of virtues a rod of lordship and a crown of kingly gold and a wealth of gems i do not mention gold-haired neve gave to my two boys the names of my father and my well-beloved son finn the illustrious and victorious and head of the hosts and golden oscar of the deadly weapons i myself gave to my fair daughter with the consent of most lovable neve in virtue of her beauty and great sweetness the true name flower of women i spent there a long lasting period 300 years apparently and more till at length i thought within myself i should like to see once more finn and athenians alive one day i asked leave of the king and of my gentle wife gold herd and eve to go back to aaron again to see my father finn and his great host thou shalt get leave said the lovely woman though woeful the subject thou has broached for i fear thou will never come back again during thy lifetime to my own land my ocean of victory what cause for fear have we o sunni queen when the white’s deed shall be at my will he will easily show me the way and i shall return to thee safe remember o using what i am saying if thou layest foot to smooth ground there is no return for thee ever again to this lovely land where i am i tell thee again without falsehood if thou art lightest from the white’s deed thou shalt never come again to the land of youth o golden-haired ocean of the victorious arms for the third time i say to thee should thou come off thy horse that thou wilt be a blind withered old man without strength or spirit unable to run or bound i think it willful dear ocean that thou should ever go to green aaron again she is not now as she was of old and thou never shall see finn of the hosts thou wilt not find in aaron eastward any but fathers of orders and troops of saints then beloved ushing here is my kiss to thee to the land of youth whoa whoa i fear thou will never return i looked with sorrow into her face and a shower of tears fell from my eyes of stern patrick even thou woods have pitied her to see her tearing the tresses of her soft golden hair but she put me under strict bonds to go and come without touching ground and told me that such was their power if i should break them i should not return safe i promised her everything faithfully that i would do all she told me i mounted the back of the white steed and bad farewell to the people of the castle i kissed my gentle wife and melancholy were we at the parting i kissed also my two sons and young daughter who were in grief shedding tears i then prepared myself for the journey and turned my back to the land of youth swiftly the horse rushed away with me as he had done before with me and gold-haired neve o patrick of the orders and of the saints of falsehood i have never yet told thee there is now for thee the substance of my story and how i left the land of youth if i could get abundance of bread as i used to get at all times from finn i would pray to the king of graces that thou might be saved forever on account of it thou shalt have food and drink and unstint it now for me sweet to me the words of thy lips continue those stories still for me our tale is not told minutely about everything that happened to me till i come back again the green airing of the many gems on my coming then to land i gazed minutely in every direction and then i began to fear really that no tidings could be found off in not long and no great while was i standing till i saw coming towards me from the west a great cavalcade of men and women and they came up to me they greeted me kindly and sweetly and wonder seized each one of them and seeing the size of my body my figure my luck and my countenance i inquired then of them if they had heard that finn was alive or if anyone else of defenian still lived or what calamity had happened to them we have heard men treat a finn for strength activity and valor that there never was his equal and personal mind and fame many a book is there to be found amongst the sweet melodious birds of the gale of which we could not easily tell thee that speaks of the deeds of finn and athenians we have heard that finn had a son of distinguished beauty and form that a young maid came hither for him and that he went away with her to the land of youth when i heard that speech that neither finn nor one of the fenians now lived a faintness and great grief sees me and full gloomy was i after them i did not stop them in my course but forthwith i went away swiftly rapidly and turned my face straight direct to renowned alvin of broadlandster great was my amazement then that i could not see the court of finn of the hosts there was nothing in its place truly but weeds chickweed and nettles the lasso patrick and the last my whoa an empty useless visit was it for me with no tidings whatever to be gut of finn or of the fenians tis that has left me in sorrow for the rest of my days i will follow up the story for theo patrick after i had left alvin of leinster there was no dwelling place in which defenian had ever lived that i did not visit eagerly and anxiously in passing through glenna’s mole i saw a great gathering there 300 men and more were before me and that glenn one of the herd then spoke to me and said with loud voice come to our assistance o kingly hero and release us from this dire difficulty i then came up to the spot and there the crowd were laboring under a great flag of marble the weight of the flag was bearing down upon them and to cast it away from them they had no power some of them who were down under the flag were bearing miserably crushed with the distressing weight of the great load many of them lost their senses then one of the stewards spoke and said oh youthful kingly champion relieve at once our men or a man of them at all shall not live it is a shameful word now to say seeing the number of men that are here that they could not with the entire strength of the crowd lift that stone full stoutly if oscar sonavushin lived he would seize that stone in his right hand he would send it with a cast over the heads of this crowd no falsehood am i accustomed to speak i leaned to my right side and seized the flag in one hand with the strength and vigor of my arms i casted seven perches from the spot with the exertion of hurling that very great flag the golden girth of the white’s deed broke full swiftly i came to the ground on the soles of my two feet now sooner had i come down then fear seized the whites deed he ran off then away and i in grief left weak and helpless i lost the sight of my eyes my figure my fur countenance and my bloom and i was a poor blind old man powerless worthless and unhonored oh patrick there is for day my story as everything happened to me without any falsehood my going away my adventures in full and my return from the land of the young [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you