Irish Druids and Old Irish Religions

Irish Gods. i^terrestrial
god. The river Boync may have had its name
from the goddess Boaiin, wife of the Irish Neptune, Nodcns.
Adolphe Pictet was formerly regarded as the most
learned Celtic scholar in France. He is very precise in his
belief of Irish polytheism, though influenced
too strongly
by the Cabiric theory. "The double Cabiric Irish chain,"
says he, " is only the ascending development of the two
primitive
principles."
Ordinary people may fail to follow this philosopher in
his metaph}^sical views concerning the early Irish. Thc\-
may doubt his progression of six degrees in Irish masculine
and feminine divinities.
He held that Eire, Eo-anu, and Ceara were onl\' the
same being in three degrees of development ; that Porsaibhean,
daughter of Ceara, was the Greek Persephone,
the Roman Proserpine ;
that Cearas and Ceara were
Koros and his sister Kore ;
that Cearas was Dagh-dae,
god of fire, and that he was a sort of demiurgus that
;
Aesar and Eire or Aeire, as fundamental duality, give
birth to two chains of progressive parallels,— masculine
and feminine, fire and water, sun and moon that the
;
goddess Lute or Lufe is power and desire, but Luth is
force ;
that the Midr, children of Daghdae, were rays of
God
;
that Aesar was god of intelligible fire ;
that Pri-hit
was goddess of wisdom and poetry, like Nath, while Acdh
was goddess of vital fire.
Much of this might be esteemed by some readers as a
pleasing or romantic philosophy of Irish m\-thology.
It may be useful to look at the religion of the ^Manx, or
people of the Isle of Man, w^ho were, if not Irish, close
kinsmen of the same. We take the following from a
Manx poem, first printed in 1778, as dealing with the
divinities.