f symbolism that is laid over it; from the
second coating of camouflage; from the fact that the few years
between the two battles represent several million years,--about
which the mythological history is silent, running them all
together, like street-lights you see a long way off. What
happened was this:

In the first battle Nuada, king of the Danaans, lost his hand;
and, because a king must be blemishless, lost his kinghood too.
It went to Bres son of Elatha; whose mother was Danaan, but
whose unknown father was of the Fomoroh. Note the change: the
first battle was with the Firbolgs, the mindless humanity of the
early third Race; now we are to deal with Fomorians, who have
come to symbolize the Black Magicians of Atlantis: the second
half of the Lemurian, and nearly the whole of the Atlantean
period, have elapse.--In person, Bres was handsome like the
Danaans; in character he was Fomorian altogether. This is the
sum of the history of later Lemuria and of Atlantis; Moytura,
and Nuada's loss of his hand and kinghood there, symbolize the
incarnation of the Manasaputra,--descent of Spirit into matter,--
and therewith, in time, their forgetting their own divinity. I
should say that it is Bres himself, rather than the Fomorians as
a whole, who stands symbol just now for the Atlantean sorcerers.
There is a subtle connexion between the Firbolgs and Fomoroh:
the former are the men, the latter the Gods, of the same race;
the Firbolgs stood originally for the mindless men of the early
third, men evolving up out of the lower kingdoms towards the
point of becoming human and mind-endowed; the Fomorians were the
Gods or so to say Spiritual Powers of those lower worlds; the
forces in opposition to upward evolution. So we see Bres of that
dual lineage: with magic from his Danaan mother, and blackness
from his Fomorian father: the Atlanteans, inheriting mind from
the Manasaputra, but turning their divine inheritance to the uses
of chaos and night.

As his reign represents the whole Atlantean period, we might
expect it to have begun well enough, and worsened as it went.
This was so; had he shown his colors from the first, it is not
to be thought that the Danaans would have tolerated him at all.
But it came to be, as time went on, that he oppressed Ireland
abominably; and at last they rose and drove him out. Nuada,
whose missing hand had been replaced with one of silver, was
restored in the kingship; henceforth he is called