s husband, are called _side_, and Manannan is Fand's
consort.[209] Labraid's island, like the _sid_ of Mider and the land to
which women of the _side_ invite Connla, differs but little from the
usual divine Elysium, while Mider, one of the _side_, is associated with
the Tuatha De Danann.[210] The _side_ are once said to be female, and
are frequently supernatural women who run away or marry mortals.[211]
Thus they may be a reminiscence of old Earth goddesses. But they are not
exclusively female, since there are kings of the _side_, and as the name
_Fir side_, "men of the _side_," shows, while S. Patrick and his friends
were taken for _sid_-folk.

The formation of the legend was also aided by the old cult of the gods
on heights, some of them sepulchral mounds, and now occasionally sites
of Christian churches.[212] The Irish god Cenn Cruaich and his Welsh
equivalent Penn Cruc, whose name survives in _Pennocrucium_, have names
meaning "chief _or_ head of the mound."[213] Other mounds or hills had
also a sacred character. Hence gods worshipped at mounds, dwelling or
revealing themselves there, still lingered in the haunted spots; they
became fairies, or were associated with the dead buried in the mounds,
as fairies also have been, or were themselves thought to have died and
been buried there. The haunting of the mounds by the old gods is seen in
a prayer of S. Columba's, who begs God to dispel "this host (i.e. the
old gods) around the cairns that reigneth."[214] An early MS also tells
how the Milesians allotted the underground part of Erin to the Tuatha
Dea who now retired within the hills; in other words, they were gods of
the hills worshipped by the Milesians on hills.[215] But, as we shall
see, the gods dwelt elsewhere than in hills.[216]

Tumuli may already in pagan times have been pointed out as tombs of gods
who died in myth or ritual, like the tombs of Zeus in Crete and of
Osiris in Egypt. Again, fairies, in some aspects, are ghosts of the
dead, and haunt tumuli; hence, when gods became fairies they would do
the same. And once they were thought of as dead kings, any notable
tumuli would be pointed out as theirs, since it is a law in folk-belief
to associate tumuli or other structures not with the dead or with their
builders, but with supernatural or mythical or even historical
personages. If _side_ ever meant "ghosts," it would be easy to call the
dead gods by this name, and to connect them with the places of the
dea