[150] Florus, ii. 4.

[151] See the table of identifications, p. 125, _infra_.

[152] We need not assume with Jullian, 18, that there was one supreme
god, now a war-god, now a god of peace. Any prominent god may have
become a war-god on occasion.

CHAPTER IV.

THE IRISH MYTHOLOGICAL CYCLE.

Three divine and heroic cycles of myths are known in Ireland, one
telling of the Tuatha De Danann, the others of Cuchulainn and of the
Fians. They are distinct in character and contents, but the gods of the
first cycle often help the heroes of the other groups, as the gods of
Greece and India assisted the heroes of the epics. We shall see that
some of the personages of these cycles may have been known in Gaul; they
are remembered in Wales, but, in the Highlands, where stories of
Cuchulainn and Fionn are still told, the Tuatha De Danann are less known
now than in 1567, when Bishop Carsewell lamented the love of the
Highlanders for "idle, turbulent, lying, worldly stories concerning the
Tuatha Dedanans."[153]

As the new Achaean religion in Greece and the Vedic sacred books of India
regarded the aboriginal gods and heroes as demons and goblins, so did
Christianity in Ireland sometimes speak of the older gods there. On the
other hand, it was mainly Christian scribes who changed the old
mythology into history, and made the gods and heroes kings. Doubtless
myths already existed, telling of the descent of rulers and people from
divinities, just as the Gauls spoke of their descent from Dispater, or
as the Incas of Peru, the Mikados of Japan, and the kings of Uganda
considered themselves offspring of the gods. This is a universal
practice, and made it the more easy for Christian chroniclers to
transmute myth into history. In Ireland, as elsewhere, myth doubtless
told of monstrous races inhabiting the land in earlier days, of the
strife of the aborigines and incomers, and of their gods, though the
aboriginal gods may in some cases have been identified with Celtic gods,
or worshipped in their own persons. Many mythical elements may therefore
be looked for in the euhemerised chronicles of ancient Ireland. But the
chroniclers themselves were but the continuers of a process which must
have been at work as soon as the influence of Christianity began to be
felt.[154] Their passion, however, was to show the descent of the Irish
and the older peoples from the old Biblical personages, a process dear
to the modern Anglo-Israelite, som