have been traditionally raised above the human plane. Another being who was regarded as divine was the Mac Óc, who was said to have been the son of Dagda the Great and the goddess Boann.
In the lives of the early missionaries of Ireland there are some allusions to the heathenism of the country, and one of the best accounts of this heathenism is to be found in the Tripartite Life of St Patrick (trans. by the late Dr Whitley Stokes in Revue Celtique, I. p. 260). This version of St Patrick's life is attributed to St Eleranus of the seventh century. The passage reads as follows: "Thereafter went Patrick over the water to Mag Slecht, a place wherein was the chief idol of Ireland, to wit, Cenn Cruaich, covered with gold and silver, and twelve other idols about it, covered with brass. When Patrick saw the idol from the water whose name is Guth-ard (elevated its voice), and when he drew right unto the idol, he raised his hand to put Jesus' crozier upon it, and did not reach it, but it bowed westwards to turn on its right side, for its face was from the south, to wit, to Tara. And the trace of the crozier abides on its left side still, and yet the crozier moved not from Patrick's hand. And the earth swallowed the twelve other images as far as their heads, and they are thus in sign of the miracle, and he cursed the demon and banished him to hell." In the Book of Leinster (twelfth century) Mag Slecht is said to have been so called because the ancient Irish used to sacrifice there the first-born of their children and of their flocks, in order to secure power and peace in all their tribes, and to obtain milk and corn for the support of their families. A careful and discriminating study of Keltic legends would reveal no small sediment of pre-Christian thought, just as there are traces of the belief in a "Happy Other-world" and of the rebirth of heroes, in the Irish Voyage of Bran, and non-Christian pictures of another world in the Welsh Annwfn, which a medieval Welsh poem represents as being beneath the earth. Similarly, the Keltic folk-lore stories of water-bulls, water-horses, water-nymphs, fairies, sprites, and the like give a clue to the way in which Nature was regarded by the Kelts of Britain, as of other lands, before Christianity began its work in these islands.
The contribution of folk-lore research to the study of Keltic Heathendom in Britain is very valuable; for example, in the account which it gives of such practices as the periodical lighting of bonfires, the customs observed at Lent, May-day, and Harvest time, the vestiges of charms and sacrifices, the observation of omens and the like. By the use of the comparative method the study of folk-lore may be able to throw not a little light on the significance of the various practices in question. The evidence from all directions tends to shew that, in Britain and Ireland, as on the Continent, Keltic religion regarded substantially all natural objects as the abodes of divine beings, named and nameless, viewed sometimes collectively and sometimes individually, and it pictured the existence beneath this world of another world, whence many of the
