own, one distinguishes three main cycles: the _Mythological,_
the _Red Branch,_ and the _Fenian._ The first deals with the
Five Races that invaded or colonized Ireland: Partholanians,
Nemedians, Firbolgs, Gods, and Irish;--in all of it I suspect the
faint memories and _membra disjecta_ of old, old manvantaras:
indeed, the summing up of the history of created man. You will
have noted that the number of the races, as in Theosophic
teaching, is five. M. de Jubainville points out that the
creation of the world, or its gradual assumption of its present
form, goes on _pari passu_ with the evolution of its humanities,
and under their eyes; thus, when Partholan, the first invader,
arrived, there were but three lakes in Ireland, and nine rivers,
and one plain. This, too, is an echo of the secret doctrine;
and incidentally indicates how tremendously far back that first
invasion was thought to have been.
The Partholanians came into Ireland from the Great Plain, the
"Land of the Living," as the Irish called it, which is also the
Land of the Dead:--in other words, they came _into_ this world,
and not from another part of it. Their peculiarity was that they
were "no wiser the one than the other "; an allusion to the
mindlessness of the early humanities before the Manasaputra
incarnated in the mid-Third Root Race. Again, before their
coming, there was a people in Ireland called the Fomorians: they
came up from the sea, were gigantic and deformed; some of them
with but one foot or one arm, some with the heads of horses or
goats. That will remind you of the "water-men, terrible and bad"
in the Stanzas of Dzyan: the first attempts of the Earth or
unaided Nature to create men. But when the Partholanians fought
with and defeated these Fomoroh, they were said to have "freed
Ireland from a foreign foe"; this though the Fomorians were
there first, and though the Partholanians were "invaders," and
utterly ceased to be after a time, so that no drop of their blood
runs in Irish veins. Why, then, does Ireland identify itself
with the one race, and discard the other as "foreign foes"?--
Because the Partholanians represent the first human race, but the
Fomoroh or 'Water-men' were unhuman, and a kind of _lusus
naturae._ 'Fomoroh,' by the way, may very well be translated
'Water-men'; _fo_ I take to be the Greek _upo,_ 'under,' and
'mor' is the 'sea.' Now the Battle of Mag Itha, between
Partholan and the Fomorians, is a very late in
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