vention; not
devised, I think, until the eleventh century. And of course
there was no war or contact between the First Race and the
Water-men, who had been destroyed long before. This is a good
example of what came down in Pagan Ireland, and how the Christian
redactors treated it. They had heard of the existence of the
Fomoroh before the coming of Partholan, and thought it wise to
provide the latter with a war against them. Later, as we shall
see, the Fomoroh stood for the over-sea people westward,--the
Atlantean giant-sorcerers.

The second race of invaders, the Nemedians, were also given a war
with the Fomorians,--in the story of the seige of Conan's Tower.
But this story is told by Nennius as applying to the Milesians,
the Fifth Race Irish, and not to the Second Race Nemedians; and
probably relates to events in comparatively historical tiems,--
say a million years ago, or between that and the submersion of
Poseidonis about nine thousand B.C. One would imagine that
Ireland, from its position, must have been a main battle-ground
between the men of the Fifth and the Atlanteans, between the
White and the Black Magicians. Mr. Judge's _Bryan Kinnavan_
stories indicate that it was a grand stronghold of the former.

The Nemedians were akin to the Partholanians: the Second Race to
the First,--both mindless: they came after their predecessors
had all died out; and in their turn died or departed to the last
man. So we find in _The Secret Doctrine_ that the first two
humanities passed utterly and left no trace. If I go into all
this a little fully, it is because it illustrates so well the
system of _blinds_ under which the Inner Teaching was hidden, and
at the same time revealed, by the Initiate of every land. These
Celtic things seem never to have come under the eye of Mme.
Blavatsky at all; or how she might have drawn on them! I think
that nowhere else in the mythologies are the Five Root-Races, the
four past and the one existent, mentioned so clearly as here in
Ireland. For historic reasons at which we have glanced,--the
Roman occupation, which was hardly over before the Saxon
invasions began,--Wales has preserved infinitely less of the
records of ancient Celtic civilization than Ireland has; and yet
Professor Kund Meyer told me,--and surely no living man is better
qualified to make suct a statement,--that the whole of the
forgotten Celtic mythology might yet be recovered from old MSS.
hidden away in Welsh p