Irish Druids and Old Irish Religions

i2 2 Old Irish Religions.
and the first-born of their children." This record of
their heathen fathers must have been, doubtless, a libel
in the excess of zeal. The priests of Crom were the
Cruim-thearigh.
Instead of gold, one story declares the image was ornamented
with bronze, and that it faced the South, or Sun.
It was set up in the open air on the Mag Slechta, says
Colgan, the Field of Adoration. They who are not Irish
or Welsh scholars have to submit to a great variety of
readings and meanings in translators.
The mythology has been thus put into verse by T. D.
McGee :—
" Their ocean god was Menanan Mac Lir,
Whose angry Hps
In their white foam full often would inter
Whole fleets of ships.
Crom was their Day god, and their Thunderer,
Made morning and eclipse ;
Bride was their queen of song, and unto her
They prayed with fire-touched lips."
Professor Rhys has an explanation of Cromm Cruaich
as the Crooked or Bent one of the Mound saying—
; " The
pagan sanctuary had been so long falling
into decay, that
of the lesser idols only their heads were to be seen above
ground, and that the idol of Cenn Cruaich, which meant
the Head or
Chief oi the Mound, was slowly hastening to
its fall, whence the story of its having had an invisible
blow dealt it by St. Patrick."
The Mother of the Irish gods,—the Bona Dea of Romans
—appears to have been the Morriga?i, to whom the whitehorned
bull was sacred. She was the Great Queen. Some
old poet had sung, " Anu is her name ; and it is from her
is called the two paps above Luachair." From her paps
she was believed to feed the other deities, and hence
became Mother of the gods. According to another, she