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VI. GODS, DEMONS AND HEROES.

attributes removed. Be that as it may, Beli and Bile wore doubtless forms of the Dis of the ancient Celts; but when, for instance, the time of Beli is referred to in Welsh literature as the golden age of Brythonic independence, one is induced to think that very possibly a Celtic counterpart of Cronus or Saturn has been confounded and identified with Beli: the analogy of the cognate myths would lead us to expect to find them closely associated but scarcely amalgamated. A more complete representative, however, of Cronus on Celtic ground is to be detected in the Irish Dagda, whose name seems to mean the 'good god' (p. 154). He is an Ollathair or Great Father, like Cronus, and, like him, his character readily lent itself to comic treatment, as, for instance, in a description of his making a heavy meal of porridge, of which he was over-fond; like Cronus also, he was deprived of his house and home by his Mac Óc or Young Son, for that, and not Nuada, is the name in this connection of the counterpart of young Zeus; but the triumph of his son is made the result of a trick (p. 147), and not of a battle as in the case of Cronus. In the next place, he, duly conciliated, is said both himself to abstain, and to cause the other gods to abstain, from blighting the crops and spoiling the milk of the Milesian Irish. So here again he may be compared to Cronus, and regarded as the god to be propitiated by the farmer and the shepherd. This would naturally imply that he had power to a certain extent over the atmosphere near the earth, which is borne out by his promising that at the final battle of Moytura he would himself work as many atmospheric wonders as all the druids of the Tuatha Dé Danann put together. Thus it would seem that he was one of