•j'i.'ilffUiJ 
 
 
 f vf T i vm^inrfnTfctTfT ^ i -i--- ^ 7- ■—■■[■■«■■■ ■ .»-■ m ■'■ 1 *^, 
 
 M^1^!Wi»f li» W H i Ji» ^ W W *»M* «l > l " > l »■! »'"* ■' "' 
 
 ^m 
 
 ^ 
 
 H 
 
 3 ^ 
 9 ^ 
 
 4 S 
 
 ^ 
 3 S 
 2 ^ 
 
 ITT! AND M^asniP, 
 iPSES ^r ANcrfeNT laisn ire. 
 
 » p»»j» i i»a»jjij«« ■■ ■■'■ ■ *» » 
 
 »i^ i I »' i|i ■ »"i awr-fff^ 
 
 *# 
 
 u.f^n.rPKE
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 WILLIAM A. NITZE
 
 ^'~- 
 
 .*«>'' 
 
 PREHISTORIC FAITH AND WORSHIP
 
 .PREHISTORIC 
 FAITH AND WORSHIP 
 
 4* 
 
 GLtKlPSES OF ANCIENT IRISH LIFE 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. CANON J. F. M. FFRENCH, M.R.I.A., F.R.S.A.I. 
 
 TREASURER OF THE CHAPTER OF FERNS, RECTOR OF CLONEGAL, 1868-1907, 
 VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ANTIQUARIES, IRELAND, 1897 
 
 LONDON 
 
 DAVID NUTT 
 
 17 GRAPE STREET, NEW OXFORD STREET, W.C. 
 
 1912
 
 D^ 
 
 H3p 
 
 f 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 This little book is presented to the public 
 without any controversial intention, and 
 merely for the purpose of putting before its 
 readers antiquarian views in the light that 
 they appear to the writer. Subsequent to its 
 publication in various journals, an able mono- 
 graph was published by Mr. George Coffey, i 
 M.R.I. A., in which he put forward very 
 similar views to those of the writer, and 
 nothing (that seems to be) contrary to his 
 statements. The only part of the book that 
 can be called controversial is where the writer 
 treats the Tuatha De Danann as a real people. 
 He knows that the younger school of anti- 
 quaries prefer to treat them as mythical ; but 
 
 1 The book referred to by Mr. Coffey is New Grange 
 [BfOugh-na-Boinne) and other Inscribed Tumuli in Ireland. 
 
 877559
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 they are so interwoven with the prehistoric 
 history of our race that without them it 
 would be only a shadowy skeleton. The 
 writer must leave it to further discoveries to 
 solve the difficulties that now seem to exist. 
 Professor MacNeill says these prehistoric 
 races have no chronology, and we therefore 
 have nothing to rest on in that way. Their 
 so-called history seems very much like a 
 bundle of undated detached notes, but we 
 must remember that difficulties which seemed 
 in the past to be insoluble, such as Bel- 
 shazzar's place among the Persian kings, 
 have subsequently been clearly explained, 
 and writing, which at one time was said not 
 to have existed before the time of Moses, 
 was subsequently found to exist in abundant 
 measure. Sir Robert Ball, the astronomer, 
 is stated to have said that, however difficult 
 the astronomers found their dates, they were 
 in a better position than antiquaries, who 
 seemed never sure whether a given event 
 was B.C. or a.d. The article on 'Tribal 
 Badges' was commented on in the Ulster 
 Journal of ArchcBology by the Count de 
 Tyrone, the principal officer in the King of
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 Portugal's household — a nobleman who claims 
 to represent that ancient Irish title. 
 
 The writer has to express his grateful 
 thanks for much encouragement to the 
 Rigllfe' Rev. Dr. D'Arcy, Lord Bishop of 
 Down, Connor, and Dromore, without which 
 this little book would probably never have 
 been written. Bishop D'Arcy writes in his 
 letter of March 12, 1910 : ' To open up a 
 new line of investigation is indeed delightful.' 
 The President of the Royal Society of Anti- 
 quaries of Ireland (Robert Cochrane, Esq., 
 LL.D., F.S.A., M.R.I. A., I.S.O.) writes : ' I 
 was delighted to see in the Gazette your very 
 valuable paper on " Bullans." ' Thanks are 
 also due to the many kind friends whose 
 comments have been most encouraging, 
 and to journals such as the Witness, a 
 widely circulated and very influential Belfast 
 
 newspaper. 
 
 J. F. M. FFRENCH, 
 
 Canon, M.R.I.A. 
 
 ROSTELLAN, GrEYSTONES.
 
 NOTE TO PREFACE 
 
 The writer of this book disclaims any responsibility for 
 the spelling of proper names. When he makes a quotation, he 
 gives an exact copy, without any corrections of any kind, 
 believing, as the spelling of proper names was very variable, 
 that the author had some good reason for spelling the name 
 as he did. He has not even corrected the incorrect spelling 
 of his own name, which occurs in a letter from a high 
 authority in Scotland, although the writer had Canon ffrench's 
 letter with his name correctly spelled before him when he 
 wrote, and the spelling of names beginning with the letter ' F ' 
 with two small letters is not at all unusual. The writer at 
 one time had a set of title deeds sent to him to purchase by 
 a Dublin dealer. When he read them he saw that they were 
 the title deeds of an estate in the County Galway, now 
 owned by a French Count who generally resides in Parist 
 and who represents a branch of the family of ffrench. In 
 these ancient legal documents he found his own name spelled 
 in four different ways. He was very glad to be the means 
 of restoring these deeds to their rightful owner.
 
 ^ 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Inscribed Stones and Cup Markings . i 
 II. Pillar Stones and Holed Stones . . 13 
 
 III. Holed Stones 24 
 
 IV. The Symbolism of the Cross before 
 
 Christ 37 
 
 V. The Symbolism of the Cross before 
 
 Christ {continued) 49 
 
 VI. The Use of Sun and Fire Symbols in 
 
 Prehistoric Times 63 
 
 VII. Prehistoric Architecture .... 92 
 
 VIII. Clonegal: its Valley and its Battle . 127 
 
 IX. A Visit to Clonmacnoise .... 144 
 
 X. On a Manner of Lighting Houses in 
 Old Times, illustrated by Rush-light 
 Candlesticks 153 
 
 XI. Historic and Prehistoric Irish Tribal 
 Badges — The Arms of Ireland and 
 Celtic Tribal Heraldry. . . . 164 
 
 XII. Sketchofthe HistoryofFernsCathedral 198
 
 *^' 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 FULL PAGE PLATES 
 
 Doorways at Missoloxghi and Mycen^, also 
 Celtic Doorway ... to face page 122 
 
 Silver Brooch (Tara Type) . . ,, ,,123 
 
 Bronze Fibula . . . . . ,, ,, 124 
 
 Huntington Castle, Clonegal . • ,, ,, 128 
 
 The Nuns' Church at Clonmacnoise . ,, ,, 145 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT 
 
 The Busherstown Bullan Stone, co. Carlow . 
 
 Sketch of a Cup Marked and Totem and Ring 
 Marked Stone at Seskin Green, Ballygawley, 
 CO. Tyrone ...... 
 
 Sketch of a Typical Pillar Stone . 
 
 Holed Stone, near Ardristan, co. Carlow 
 
 Kilmakedar Secondary Holed Stone 
 
 Rude Stone Cross at the Old Church of Bally 
 castle ....... 
 
 SWASTICA (usual) ..... 
 
 Terra-cotta Object from Fourth City of Troy 
 ABOUT Two 'J'housand Years b.c. . 
 
 Kilnasaggart Pillar Stone with Swastica 
 Crosses, Latin Cross, and Ogham Inscription 
 
 PAGE 
 
 3 
 
 5 
 15 
 25 
 32 
 
 35 
 43 
 
 44 
 46
 
 xii ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 swastica from australia .... 
 
 Egyptian Cross, or Crux Ansata 
 
 Cross on Old Church at Inismurray 
 
 Chinese Cross, often found in Ireland . 
 
 Cross — Irish Mevagh Inscribed, co. Donegal 
 
 Cross from Tumuli at Dowth . 
 
 Cross on the Church of St. Fechan, at Fore 
 Westmeath. Assyrian Type . 
 
 Reask Cross, near Ventry, co. Kerry. Assyrian 
 Type ....... 
 
 Reask Cross, near Ventry, co. Kerry 
 
 Assyrian Winged Cross .... 
 
 Cross from Killaghter Churchyard, co. Donegal 66 
 
 New Grange Sun-marked Stone 
 Chimu Sun Symbol, Peru . 
 Rush-light Candlesticks . 
 Ferns Castle . . . . 
 
 Ferns Monastery 
 
 PAGE 
 48 
 
 50 
 50 
 
 54 
 54 
 57 
 
 57 
 
 57 
 64 
 
 65 
 
 85 
 88 
 
 160 
 
 200 
 
 203
 
 ^' PREHISTORIC 
 FAITH AND. WORSHIP 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 INSCRIBED STONES AND CUP MARKINGS ^ 
 
 Ireland abounds in the relics of prehistoric 
 times. The student of prehistoric archae- 
 ology will find them everywhere, and it seems 
 likely that they will be more the objects of 
 the study of the antiquary in the future than 
 they have been in the past. In fact, we may 
 say that many able men are devoting great 
 care and attention to them at present. The 
 most remarkable and the most usual of these 
 antiquarian objects are undoubtedly and 
 naturally of stone, for stone is not so perish- 
 able as other materials. Of these objects of 
 
 1 Paper read at a Literary Meeting at Greystones on 
 March 17, 1910, by the Rev. Canon ffrench, M.R.I. A., 
 Treasurer of Ferns Cathedral.
 
 2 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 stone we would ask particular attention to 
 be given to Bullans or Rock Basins, which 
 are found all through Ireland. Of these 
 there are various types ; sometimes they are 
 to be found cut into the undisturbed rock, or 
 sunk in boulders or in the sides or shelving 
 portions of natural caves. In size and sec- 
 tion they vary, yet all are (as the name implies) 
 basins ; some measure four feet or so, while 
 others are not larger than an ordinary break- 
 fast saucer ; the average diameter is about 
 fourteen inches. 
 
 There are three different varieties of 
 Bullans — an inverted cone, which is the most 
 usual ; a bowl-shaped basin ; and also a shal- 
 low depression with vertical sides. Examples 
 have been found on the perpendicular face 
 of rocks and on the sides of boulders. 
 
 Wakeman tells us that there can be no 
 doubt that they were in some way or other 
 associated with Pagan sepulchral rites, and 
 their constant presence near our very ancient 
 Church sites seems to give much strength to 
 this conclusion. For the early missionaries 
 would naturally select for their sacred build- 
 ings, sites which were already held in much
 
 INSCRIBED STONES 
 
 o 
 
 < 
 
 6 
 o 
 
 w" 
 z 
 o 
 
 H 
 </l 
 
 < 
 iJ 
 
 m 
 o 
 
 H 
 
 w 
 
 M 
 en 
 
 K 
 H 
 
 B 2
 
 4 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 esteem, in order that they might consecrate 
 those sites to the worship of the true God, 
 and the more effectually wean the worshippers 
 from Pagan superstition. The difficulty now 
 meets us, what were the Pagan rites with 
 which Bullan stones were associated ? We 
 cannot fall back on records, for the times 
 of which we treat are prehistoric ; but we 
 may fall back on the usages and beliefs of 
 tribes who still hold the shadows and 
 vestiges of the faith to which, before the 
 dawn of history, the worship of the Creator 
 had been degraded. The steps from the 
 worship of the Creator down to idolatry 
 seem plain enough. This primitive faith we 
 now call ' Totemism ' for want of a better 
 name. Astley, in his lectures on ' Prehistoric 
 Archaeology,' tells us, writing of the Neolithic 
 age: 
 
 Another phase of Neolithic art is seen in the cup 
 and ring markings on rocks and also on stones, 
 pebbles, and shells, together with circular or spiral 
 drawings, which are characteristic of the age all the 
 world over, and are found among the natives of 
 Australia to-day. 
 
 Judging by what we know of their present-
 
 INSCRIBED STONES 5 
 
 day significance, these seem to point to the 
 arrangement of society on a Totemistic 
 basis,-- and can be described, as I have 
 
 SKETCH OF A CUP MARKED AND TOTEM AND RIN'G 
 MARKED STONE AT SESKIN GREEN, BALLYGAWLEY, 
 CO. TYRONE. 
 By Mrs. Ross, of 66 ritzwilliam Square, and Dunmoyle, Co. Tyrone. 
 
 ventured to do elsewhere, as ' the heraldry 
 of primitive man.' 
 
 The Totem is an animal, plant, or insect 
 representing the original ancestor of the 
 human being, and this descent is derived, in 
 the first instance, through the mother, and
 
 6 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 only as a later development through the 
 father. Spencer and Gillen tell us : 
 
 The Arunta believe in re-incarnation from an 
 ancestor who lived in ' Alcheringa ' times — i.e. 
 beyond which no tradition goes. Each, ere he 
 or she died, deposited in the locality where death 
 was expected to take place a 'Churinga.' The 
 Churinga is a stone, or, more generally, a piece 
 of wood ornamented with various designs in 
 dots and rings, similar to the cup and ring mark- 
 ings found on rock surfaces all over the world, 
 which marked the Totem to which the deceased 
 belonged.^ 
 
 Now I would place Bullan stones before cup 
 and ring markings, before those family 
 badges which differentiate between different 
 families existing previous to the dawn of 
 history. 
 
 Certainly one of the oldest records we 
 have of sacrifices of any kind are the sacrifices 
 of Cain and Abel : the sacrifice of the 
 poured-out blood of the lamb made by Abel, 
 and the sacrifice of the fruits of the ground 
 made by Cain. These in some shape or form 
 remain to the present hour, for as Christians 
 
 ' Spencer and Gillen, The Nafive Tribes of Central Australia.
 
 INSCRIBED STONES 7 
 
 we hoM the Holy Communion to be the 
 Hving shadow and representation of the sacri- 
 fice of the body and blood of Christ ; and 
 Professor Sayce tells us in the November 
 number of the Expository Times, p. 88 : 
 
 The history of the Temple Hill thus offers a 
 curious parallel to that of a rock shrine I once 
 discovered near Dirr in Nubia. This was originally 
 dedicated to the Ka of an Eg^^ptian of the eighteenth 
 dynasty (which flourished from 1500 to 1300 B.C.), 
 to whom offerings were accordingly made. With 
 the introduction of Christianity the Egyptian Ka 
 became Isu or Jesus, to whom the old offerings 
 continued to be presented, and after the triumph of 
 Mohammedanism Isu passed into the Moslem Sheik 
 Isu. The offerings and cult remained unchanged, 
 and to this day the cup of water or beer, and the 
 bowl filled with corn are duly laid on the ancient 
 altar for the Mohammedan saint. 
 
 (The Mohammedan religion will not allow 
 the use of wine.) 
 
 There we have the offering of the fruits 
 of the ground at the present day ; and might 
 it not be held that our blessed Lord in His 
 all-wisdom, when doing away with bloody 
 sacrifices, which in themselves were but a 
 shadow, combined both the old shadows in
 
 8 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 one inclusive whole in the Holy Communion, 
 which contained within itself in the bread 
 and wine the shadow and Sacrament, not 
 only of the poured-out blood, but also the 
 shadow of His own body and of the fruits of 
 the ground? But to return to our Bullan 
 stones. It can hardly be questioned that 
 these rock basins were used, in the first in- 
 stance, for the purpose of having libations 
 poured into them, and probably (like Abel's 
 offering) a libation to the one and only true 
 God. Boni, the celebrated Italian anti- 
 quary, in his account of the excavations of 
 the Roman Forum, which dates back to the 
 earliest times, and to a period when hut- 
 shaped cinerary urns were in use, tells us: 
 
 I was fully aware of the care necessary in analys- 
 ing each stratum of the Forum, especially in the 
 comitium, because here almost up to the fall of the 
 Republic innumerable religious rites were performed, 
 either beginning or ending with a libation or else 
 with an offering of milk or wine. These rites were 
 celebrated in cavities of every sort and size, dug out 
 in effosa terra, or in the most ancient form cut in 
 the tuffa itself. 
 
 The tuffa itself being the virgin rock. There 
 then you have the Bullan or rock basin in full
 
 INSCRIBED STONES o 
 
 work, used for the reception of libations, and 
 you have the reason for having various 
 cavities in the same place. The libations 
 that were poured out were of various kinds, 
 milk^^nd wine, or oil and wine, which were 
 merely symbolical representations of blood 
 and fat. ' The blood which is the life thereof,' 
 and' the fat surrounding the vital parts (or 
 semen). The cavities may, therefore, have 
 contained blood, oil, wine, milk, or water, and 
 the worship may not have been Pagan worship. 
 It may have been the worship of the Creator, 
 a worship similar to the worship of Cain and 
 Abel. How soon the downward tendency in 
 human nature began to develop itself we 
 cannot say, but it is plainly evident that the 
 next stage was ancestor worship. The family, 
 instead of worshipping the common ancestor, 
 creator and founder of the race, adopted as 
 the object of worship the founder of their 
 own particular family ; and then necessity 
 called in the family badge or Totem, by which 
 it was possible to distinguish one family from 
 another. It was a necessity of the same 
 kind that called into existence the tribal 
 badges in Ireland and Scotland in the early
 
 10 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 ages, and it was a like necessity that called 
 into being the crests and coats-of-arms at 
 the time of the Crusades. We have here, 
 then, at once a system of religion much the 
 same as that of the Chinese, who fortunately 
 did not adopt the Totem badges. 
 
 The next step downward was a very 
 simple one. Instead of worshipping the thing 
 symbolised, they worshipped the symbol 
 itself, and became pure idolaters. Doubtless, 
 the worship at the Bullan stone developed 
 itself in various directions, and, once it 
 ceased to be the worship of the Creator, 
 became more or less a system of idolatry. 
 It would readily become a worship of the 
 stone itself. Nothing can be at greater 
 variance than our idea of a stone and that 
 held by the ancients. Smyth Palmer tells 
 us, in his essay on ' Comparative Religion,' 
 that the cult of stones goes back to the most 
 primitive times, and is found in all parts of 
 the world from China to Peru. It is not so 
 long ago since a black stone was an object 
 of veneration, in one of the islands off the 
 western coast, where it was carefully supplied 
 \vith warm blankets, and the Roman Catholic
 
 INSCRIBED STONES ii 
 
 clergyn^an of the district found no small 
 trouble in getting rid of it. 
 
 The examples of stone veneration are 
 much too numerous to be quoted ; here we 
 can only refer the reader to Smyth Palmer's 
 book. He says that menhirs, or standing 
 stones, were often conical and employed as 
 emblems of the god presiding over fertility. 
 The cup hollows were intended to contain 
 the libations or unctions which were once 
 poured upon them by the early worshippers. 
 I think that we may, without straining a 
 point, conclude that the object of the prayers 
 of the worshippers who poured libations on 
 these ancient stones was fertility. They 
 prayed for fertility for members of their 
 tribe, for their flocks and herds, and for the 
 kindly fruits of the earth ; and when we 
 find small cup markings which could not 
 have been intended to contain libations, 
 owing to the position they occupy, combined 
 with Totemistic rock scribings, I think we 
 may conclude that they are to be under- 
 stood as implying, or seeking, prayers for 
 the families who are represented by the 
 Totemistic scribings. In this article I have
 
 12 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 made no reference to other religious cults 
 which existed at the same time, such as the 
 veneration of spirits that dwelt in trees, in 
 wells, and in standing stones, and the 
 particular worship that gathered around 
 holed stones, and the worship of the host of 
 heaven, all of which are worthy of notice. ^ 
 Astley tells us that 
 
 the Totemistic Tribes attribute a living soul to 
 every object, making it to be what it is, and the 
 trend of modern thought is to attribute life to 
 every object, both to those which we describe as 
 inanimate, as well as to those which we describe 
 as animate. 
 
 1 Since writing the foregoing the following note has 
 been sent me by a friend : ' T. W. Y. E. Wentz, in his 
 book on the Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, published 
 at Reimes, mentions on p. 218, writing of Ireland, " the 
 ancient cult was one of ancestor worship," and on p. 228 
 he says, " Samain, as we already know, was the great 
 Celtic feast for the dead, when offerings or sacrifice of 
 various kinds were made to ancestral spirits and the 
 Tuatha-de-Danaine and the spirit hosts under their 
 control." '
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 PILLAR STONES AND HOLED STONES 
 
 We have now brought our prehistoric wor- 
 shipper down to his first acts of worship, 
 the presentation of votive sacrifices to God 
 in testimony and acknowledgment of His 
 gifts and seeking for further blessings for 
 the family, the flock, and the herd, and the 
 crops. Men then, just as we do now, re- 
 quired something symbolic to remind them 
 of the great truths they were already in 
 possession of, a point around which their 
 religious beliefs could gather ; something to 
 remind them of God. Our requirements are 
 exactly the same. If religion is to flourish 
 among us we require a House of God to 
 be set in every parish, a place where God's 
 honour dwelleth, and where we expect in an 
 especial manner to meet Him. On this House 
 
 of God we erect a spire pointing to heaven. 
 
 13
 
 14 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 The prehistoric worshipper had to meet his 
 want in a simple way, suitable to the state of 
 culture in which he lived. Mr. A. C. Haddon, 
 in his preface to Major A. G. Leonard's work 
 on the Lower Niger, tells us : 
 
 We now know that our brethren most backward 
 in material culture are imbued with ethical and 
 religious ideas which do not materially differ from 
 those inculcated by the teachers of the religions of 
 civilised peoples. 
 
 This being the case, we may, I think, assume 
 that the primary religious ethics and religious 
 ideas of mankind were always the same, and 
 are to be found now, as they were at the 
 beginning, among races that remain still in 
 their childhood. The simple way in which 
 they met the difficulty was by erecting pillar 
 stones, and calling them, as Jacob did. Bethels 
 — Houses of God. These pillar stones are to 
 be found all over Ireland ; the ordnance 
 map is studded with them. There is one in 
 the townland of Ardristan, in the County 
 Carlow, and another on the side of Newry 
 Hill, in the townland of the same name, in 
 the County Wicklow ; there are numbers of 
 them in the County Mayo ; there is one near
 
 PILLAR AND HOLED STONES 15 
 
 Moyne Abbey, and there is a range of them 
 extending over the country for some miles 
 in th'at county. There is a set of three in 
 
 SKETCH OF A TYPICAL PILLAR STONE. 
 By Miss M. J. Langhorn. 
 
 the North Arran Island, County Galway, at 
 a considerable distance apart. The Gallauns 
 in the County Kerry (as the standing or pillar 
 stones are there named) are very numerous.
 
 i6 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 The tallest pillar stone in Ireland is to be 
 found in the County Mayo, and is illustrated 
 in vol. XV. pp. 754-5 of the Journal of the 
 Royal Society of Antiquaries for the years 
 1879-82. This pillar stone was inscribed 
 with a cross at its base in Christian times. 
 There is a grand specimen standing amid a 
 group of megalithic structures in the sand- 
 hills of Finner, a wild district extending be- 
 tween Ballyshannon and Bundoran. They 
 were used for the purpose of calling God to 
 witness the making of covenants, and the 
 marking out of boundaries, and the hallow- 
 ing of burial sites, down to the time of the 
 introduction of Christianity. Of this there 
 can be no doubt, for we can date one of 
 them. 
 
 MacFirbis tells us : 
 
 The body of Dathi was brought to Cruachan and 
 was interred at Relig-na-Riogh, where most of the 
 kings of the race of Heremon were buried, and 
 where to this date the red stone pillar remains on a 
 stone monument over his grave near Rath Cruachan 
 to this time (1666). 
 
 Dathi was the last Pagan monarch of Ireland. 
 He died in the beginning of the fifth century
 
 PILLAR AND HOLED STONES 17 
 
 from tfie effects of lightning, somewhere in 
 the neighbourhood of the Alps, while leading 
 his army on a continental raid. We have 
 nothing in Ireland that can be compared 
 withjCarnac in Brittany, which might be 
 described as a vast prehistoric cathedral, but 
 we have abundance for educational and 
 illustrative purposes. Now, may I ask, why 
 should the religion of these people be called 
 heathen ? Hard names are not hard argu- 
 ments. I was present some years ago in the 
 courthouse in Rathmines when this subject 
 was very plainly illustrated. I was registering 
 my vote for the County Dublin, and at the 
 same time that nice little Indian gentleman, 
 the Professor of Arabic and Persian in Trinity 
 College, Dublin, came forward for the same 
 purpose. The County Court Judge ordered 
 him to be sworn, and he declined to be sworn 
 on the New Testament ; lie said he was not 
 a Christian. 'Oh,' said the Judge, ' you are a 
 heathen, I suppose.' ' No, your Worship,' said 
 the little gentleman, ' I am not a heathen ; I 
 worship the very same God that you do.' 
 His Worship looked very puzzled, and said, 
 ' I reallv do not know what to do with this
 
 i8 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 man. I think there is a precedent in the law 
 books for swearing a person hke this on a 
 cracked saucer ' ; but our Indian friend 
 indignantly refused to be sworn on a cracked 
 saucer, and a compromise was made by 
 allowing him to hold up his hand and affirm. 
 We are told that during the Crimean War the 
 Mohammedan officers told our officers that 
 they could see no reason why they should not 
 join with them in saying the Lord's Prayer. 
 It is true that in the course of the centuries 
 the worship at pillar stones became debased 
 and degraded, and a form of idolatry became 
 attached to it ; but is that falling away un- 
 known in the history of the Christian Church ? 
 A well-known writer tells us that ' the menhir 
 is to be met with over the whole surface of 
 the ancient world/ ' What is it but the 
 monument of primitive humanity, a living 
 witness of its faith in heaven ? ' In course 
 of time, the libations that were at the first 
 poured out before the pillar stone of testimony 
 came to be poured on the stone itself and 
 in that way it was consecrated to be a shrine 
 in which there was believed to be a special 
 indweUing of the Spirit of God. Jacob,
 
 PILLAR AND HOLED STONES iq 
 
 following the custom of his forefathers, 
 anointed his pillar stone with oil in honour 
 of the special disclosure of the Divine will 
 that Iiad been made to him. All our ritual 
 ordinances were probably founded on practices 
 already existing and widely dispersed among 
 the nations of antiquity, and anointing with 
 oil is still used by a large number of Christian 
 people. E. B. Taylor, in his ' Primitive 
 Culture,' tells us that the thoughts and 
 principles of modern Christianity are attached 
 to intellectual clues which run back far 
 through pre-Christian ages to the very origin 
 of human thought and human civilisation. 
 The primitive law of sacrifice was that certain 
 important parts of the animal were not con- 
 sumed, but were set apart for God. The 
 blood, which was the life, was poured out as 
 an oblation, and the fat surrounding the 
 vital organs was etherealised in the fire and 
 ascended in fragrant smoke as an offering to 
 God. This fat, which was accounted as 
 equally propitiatory with blood, was used 
 with blood as an offering to God. We con- 
 secrate our churches, they consecrated their 
 pillar stones, to be shrines of God with oil 
 
 C 2
 
 20 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 and blood. At a very early period men 
 learned to idealise the blood and fat, and 
 used in their room oil and wine. The least 
 cultured races have degraded the symbolic 
 offering down to the use of red paint, with 
 which they even now daub their pillar stones. 
 Probably at a very early date the worship 
 attached to pillar stones began the process 
 of deterioration, and the evil effects of 
 localising the presence of God commenced 
 to develop itself. The pillar stone which 
 was at first the shrine of the Spirit of God 
 became the shrine of a spirit, and as soon as 
 ancestor worship came to the front it be- 
 came the shrine of the spirit of an ancestor, 
 a departed chief or mighty man, whose 
 memory was venerated there, and sometimes 
 several spirits were supposed to dwell in the 
 one stone. We have been in the habit of 
 looking on the worshippers who lived at a 
 time when stone objects held the most 
 prominent places in their ritual as gross 
 materialists ; but that seems to be the very 
 opposite of what is the case, judging from 
 what we learn from the races which are still 
 in their childhood. In India, the belief of
 
 PILLAR AND HOLED STONES 21 
 
 these "simple people was to the fullest extent 
 ours. As the poet says : 
 
 There is no death, what seems so is transition. 
 
 Or, ^-s another of our poets tells us : 
 
 A simple child that lightly draws its breath 
 And feels its life in every limb, 
 What can it know of death ? 
 
 They believed that what seems death is only 
 a transference of life to another sphere, where 
 the influence of the seeming dead is more 
 powerful and more capable of being favour- 
 ably invoked than ever it was in life. Is it 
 not this faith that nerves the arm of the 
 Japanese soldier at the present day and 
 makes him rise altogether above the fear of 
 death ? But, as time passed on, the idea 
 seemed to have taken root that these stones 
 might also be possessed by evil spirits whom 
 it was necessary to propitiate, and then 
 they became idols of an evil type. The 
 most notable of these was Crom Cruach, 
 which is situated in the plain of Mag Slecht, 
 near Granard, and was destroyed by St. 
 Patrick. It is described as ornamented with 
 gold and silver, and having twelve other
 
 22 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 idols ornamented with brass around it. My 
 valued friend, the late Rev. Thomas Olden, 
 LL.D., quotes a poem in his 'History,' which 
 seems to say that children were offered to this 
 idol at certain periods. 
 
 Once the worship of stone pillars or the 
 spirits they were supposed to enshrine ob- 
 tained a solid footing it lasted with great 
 pertinacity, and we may be sure that St. 
 Patrick's strong measures were not enough 
 to dislodge it ; the people clung to it with 
 remarkable tenacity. Smyth Palmer tells 
 us an old thirteenth-century Norse Church 
 Balk ordains, ' that none shall to idols sac- 
 rifice and none shall on groves or stones 
 believe.' In the same century Archbishop 
 Theodore had to denounce the practice of 
 stone worship in England, and even so late 
 as 1656 the Presbytery of Dingwall (Ross) 
 forbade the adoring of stones and wells. 
 The hold that stone worship obtained on the 
 human mind may be illustrated by a story 
 told us by Sir A. Lyall in his * Asiatic Studies,' 
 who says that he knew 
 
 a Hindu officer of great shrewdness and very 
 fair education, who devoted several hours daily to
 
 PU.LAR AND HOLED STONES 23 
 
 the elaborate worship of five round pebbles which 
 he had appointed to be his symbol of omnipotence. 
 Although his general belief was in one all-pervading 
 Divinity, he must have something symbolical to 
 handle,-and address. 
 
 Perhaps in this story we may find an ex- 
 planation of the use of those curious little 
 oval' pebbles with a track across them, known 
 as tracked stones, which have been for such a 
 lengthened period a puzzle to Irish antiquaries, 
 and which are known among the peasantry as 
 little idols. May they not have been house- 
 hold or pocket reminders or shrines of the 
 god they were supposed to represent ? and 
 in this case these stones may be representa- 
 tions of the female principle, a cult which 
 had a powerful following in Ireland.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 HOLED STONES 
 
 The portion of the subject which I now 
 take up is holed stones, a very fine specimen 
 of which is to be found in the parish of 
 Aghade, on the townland of Ardristan, 
 in the County Carlow. It is called ' Cloch- 
 a-Phoill.' It lies in a semi-recumbent 
 position against the fence of the field, and 
 is plainly visible from the public road. It 
 rises 7 feet 6 inches above the ground, and 
 is 5 feet 8 inches in width and i foot 
 6 inches in its thickest part, and it is 
 pierced at a point nearly equahy distant from 
 its sides and top with a round hole 11 J inches 
 in diameter. 
 
 There is an historical legend in the Book 
 of BaUymote about this stone, which gives 
 the name of the parish in which it is at 
 present situated as Athfada, now Aghada or 
 
 24
 
 HOLED STONES 
 
 25 
 
 Aghade (Long-ford). In this legend we are 
 told that Eochaidh, the son of Enna Cenn- 
 sealagh (King of Leinster), burned the house 
 and l^^led the only son of the poet of Niall 
 of th# Nine Hostages because he was refused 
 entertainment in the poet's house. 
 
 In consequence of this King Niall made 
 
 HOLED STONE, NEAR ARDRISTAN, CO. CARLOW. 
 By Miss M. J. Langhonie. 
 
 an expedition against Leinster, and obliged 
 the Leinster men to give up Eochaidh as 
 a hostage, and he carried him to Athfadat, 
 in Fothartaibh, on the banks of the Slaine 
 (now Slaney), where he left him chained 
 to a rock and sent nine men to kill him ; 
 but, by a sudden jerk, the prisoner broke the 
 chain, and taking in his hand the iron bar
 
 26 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 that passed through the cham at the other 
 side of the stone, he turned on them and 
 slew them all. Tradition tells us that marks 
 on the stone still show the friction of the 
 chain. There are at present marks that 
 may have been caused by a chain ; but this, 
 although interesting as a matter of history, 
 and as a proof of the great antiquity of the 
 stone, has no relation to its use for religious 
 purposes. May I mention that it is only the 
 amount of veneration that is paid to these 
 ancient objects that has preserved this stone 
 to the present time ? for it has been several 
 times proposed to split it up into gate-posts. 
 We find that portion of the ritual use of this 
 stone which has lasted down to our own 
 days in Ryan's 'History of Carlow,' which is 
 a very reliable book. The late Professor 
 George Stokes once said to the writer of this 
 article, ' If you want to take your history 
 neat, read Ryan's " Carlow." ' He tells us, on 
 p. 338, that ' Cloch-a-Phoill ' was used in 
 his day to pass ill-thriven infants through the 
 hole, in order to improve their health, and 
 that his informant was a woman who had 
 herself passed one of her infants through the
 
 HOLED STONES 27 
 
 ..V 
 
 aperture, and that great numbers were for- 
 merly in the habit of doing so. A similar 
 tradition is found attached to a holed stone 
 near S.t^Madrous' Well, in Cornwall. There 
 a block -of granite, pierced in the centre by 
 a hole, is called the 'Creeping Stone,' because 
 sickly children were passed through it to 
 effect a cure. This stone is called in Corn- 
 ish, * Maced,' or ' Men-an-Toll,' and, if a 
 man crawls through it, he is believed to be 
 for ever afterwards free from rheumatism. 
 Children with the king's evil are passed 
 naked through the hole three times, and 
 then drawn three times along the grass 
 against the sun ; the same rites are practised 
 for spine disease. Similar healing virtues 
 are ascribed to a holed stone at Minchin- 
 hampton, in Gloucestershire, which is called 
 the ' Long Stone.' At its lower end there 
 is a perforation through which children were 
 passed to be cured or to guard against ail- 
 ments. At the parish of Fyvie, in Aber- 
 deenshire, close to St. Paul's Well, there 
 was a large stone supported by two others, 
 leaving a space, between it and the ground, 
 through which children were passed for
 
 28 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 healing ; and the Cloch-nave, Deglane, or 
 St. Declane's stone, on which he is supposed 
 to have sailed about on the ocean, has an 
 aperture beneath it which is used in the 
 same way. I have to thank a lady friend 
 for a sketch, with measurements, of a holed 
 stone which is to be found at St. Mona- 
 chan's Oratory, near Ventry (not in situ). 
 This stone is 33 inches in height, 26 inches in 
 width at the top, and 15 inches at the base. 
 In thickness it is about four inches. The 
 hole is nine inches by four inches. There is 
 a shallow channel at each side of the hole. 
 This seems to be a newly discovered feature, 
 and may be a more defined symbolism ; 
 perhaps the beginning or dawn of the runnels 
 which pass through ring markings. It is 
 quite unusual for a holed stone to be narrower 
 at the bottom than at the top. 
 
 These holed stones are very numerous in 
 Ireland, and although doubtless numbers of 
 the minor ones have been destroyed, and 
 numbers have not yet been recorded, num- 
 bers still remain, and we may take it that 
 the symbolism is in all places the same. 
 India supplies us with the best field of
 
 HOLED STONES 29 
 
 research for interpreting this symbohsm. Mr. 
 Milford, in his work on 'Asiatic Researches,' 
 in vol. vi. p. 502, tells us that in India 
 devout -people pass through these apertures, 
 when -the opening will admit, in order to be 
 regenerated. If the hole be small the}^ put 
 the hand or the foot through it and, with a 
 sufficient degree of faith, it answers nearly 
 the same purpose. The necessity for re- 
 generation seems to have been deeply im- 
 pressed on the human race, and when our 
 Lord said, ' Marvel not that I said unto 
 you, ye must be born again,' He stated no 
 unknown truth, even if His hearers were 
 slow to believe it, and when the children 
 or grown-up people were passed through the 
 circle, they were supposed to be symbolic- 
 ally re-born, freed from the imperfections of 
 the flesh with which they had been born or 
 had acquired, and (as Professor Stephen has 
 said, writing on ' Nature Worship ') these 
 circles may represent life transmitted from 
 generation to generation, ' life out of death, 
 life everlasting,' and by this symbolic action 
 men were believed to be brought into power- 
 ful contact with the Spirit of God which
 
 30 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 dwelt within the stone. In fact the act 
 became a kind of sacrament. 
 
 There is another use attached to these 
 stones which should also be mentioned, and 
 that is the use which was made of them for 
 the purpose of sanctifying an oath. Once 
 granted that there was a Spirit of God 
 dwelling within the stone, nothing could be 
 more reasonable than that they should be 
 used for sanctifying an oath, and particu- 
 larly that most important of all oaths, the 
 marriage covenant ; and from these circles 
 we probably derive the marriage ring. We 
 make those who testify in our courts ' kiss 
 the book,' which amounts to calling God to 
 witness. They made them join hands through 
 or around the sanctified stone, just for the 
 same purpose. The holed stone in Castle- 
 dermot Churchyard is called the ' Swearing 
 Stone.' There is another of the same type 
 in the County Kerry. Fergusson tells us 
 of the celebrated holed stone of Stennus, 
 near Kirkwall, in Orkney : 
 
 It is quite certain that the oath of Woden or 
 Odin was sworn by persons joining their hands 
 through the hole in this stone, and that an oath so
 
 HOLED STONES 31 
 
 taken, although by Christians, was deemed sacred 
 and binding. 
 
 Wakeman tells us that : 
 
 This ceremony was held to be so very sacred 
 that anyone breaking it was accounted infamous 
 and a person to be shunned. 
 
 This brings us down to the degradation of 
 the worship offered at holed stones ; for, when 
 the spirit supposed to be residing in the ' holed 
 stone ' had ceased to be accounted to be the 
 Spirit of God and had come to be accounted 
 the spirits of other gods, the character 
 of the worship was entirely changed. 
 
 We now come to the latest form of holed 
 stones, when they came to be considered 
 merely as the abode of spirits. These stones 
 have been well described by Wakeman, who 
 tells us that they have but small perforated 
 holes. Their symbolic use had evidently 
 ceased to exist. Wakeman considers the 
 larger perforations to be prehistoric and the 
 small perforations to date from anti-Christian 
 times, but afterwards to have been conse- 
 crated to the religious services of a people 
 recently won to Christianity, but who still
 
 32 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 possessed some lingering reverence for the 
 ' idols ' of their forefathers. I quote Mr. 
 Wakeman's words, but I do not consider 
 these symbolic stones to have been idols. 
 Two of the most important of these holed 
 
 KILMAKEDAR SECONDARY HOLED STONE. 
 From photo by Miss E. Warren. 
 
 stones are to be found in the Island of 
 Innishmurray, and here the traditional use 
 has descended from prayers for regeneration 
 to prayers for the fruitfulness of women. 
 One of these stones stands on the south 
 side of 'The Church of the Men.' It 
 measures 4 feet in height, ii| inches in
 
 HOLED STONES 33 
 
 breadth, i foot i inch at base, and is about 
 7 inches in thickness. A graceful cross has 
 been incised on the western front. This 
 face exhibits two holes of a size just large 
 enough to admit the human thumb. These 
 orifices extend through the adjoining angles of 
 the stone, and open out at the sides into a 
 space sufficient to receive the fingers of a hand. 
 But, as I said before, these stones are not 
 esteemed to be prehistoric, and as the wor- 
 ship attached to them had become degener- 
 ate, I must not dwell upon them beyond 
 noting that the Australian natives consider 
 these stones to be charged with spirit-children 
 who look out through these holes for mothers, 
 in whom to become incarnate. May I re- 
 mark that it seems strange how the ancients, 
 and the classes of humbler culture at the 
 present day, seem to think it necessary that 
 a door for exit and entrance should be pro- 
 vided for spirits ? They seem to think the 
 size of the aperture is of no consequence, but 
 the passage out and in ought to be there. 
 This is curiously illustrated by a letter which 
 Colonel W. B. Digby received from one of 
 his tenants in 1898 :
 
 34 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 MORANTOWN, 
 
 MOYVORE, 
 
 Westmeath. 
 
 Sir, — I hear that you are going to open the 
 Forthe {i.e. Rath) and let out the Leprechauns to 
 murther our cattle. I request that you will not 
 do that ; we won't allow it. 
 
 Your obedient servant, 
 
 Catherine Moorhead. 
 
 In conclusion, may I call attention to a 
 rough cross at the eastern end of Ballycastle 
 Church which has all the appearance of a 
 holed stone roughly hewn into the shape of 
 a cross, and may 1 suggest that it was from 
 an adaptation of the holed stones that the 
 Celtic Church derived the cross and circle 
 with which we are so familiar ? There has 
 been always a difficulty in accounting for 
 this cross, and the not impossible suggestion 
 has been made that it may have had its 
 origin in the Egyptian cross, which is a 
 cross beneath a circle. There certainly is 
 every reason to believe that at a very early 
 period there was communication between 
 Ireland and Egypt, but it is a long way to 
 go for an explanation of this Irish cross. 
 Would it not be more reasonable to suppose
 
 HOLED STONES 
 
 35 
 
 that it found its origin at home in an adap- 
 tation of the holed stones which were at first 
 roughly hewed into crosses, like the cross 
 outside the east end of Ballycastle Church ? 
 
 /^2L-^ 
 
 RUDE STONE CROSS AT THE OLD CHURCH OF BALLYCASTLE, 
 Taken from painting of J. S. Fleming, by Miss M. J. Langhorne. 
 
 In the Swearing Stone at Castledermot we 
 have a holed stone on which was sculptured 
 a Celtic cross, which takes the hole in the 
 stone as its centre. But this stone must be 
 very much later than the Ballycastle cross. ^ 
 
 1 Since I wrote my article on Prehistoric Faith and 
 Worship as illustrated by BuUans or Rock Basins, 
 another curious type of Libation Stones has come under my 
 notice. Antiquaries have been engaged in excavating 
 prehistoric Sardinia, which has long been famous for its 
 
 D 2
 
 36 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 nurages, which rise thirty or forty feet above the ground. 
 At St. Vittoria, near Servi, they have unearthed the ruins 
 of a prehistoric temple, the first sign of the find being the 
 discovery of a circular well, the bottom of which was reached 
 by means of a staircase. In front of the well is a forecourt 
 paved with white limestone slabs, and containing at the 
 head of the staircase an altar and a slab with a hole for 
 holding or receiving libations. Here also was found a 
 bronze statue of possibly a priest, attired in a short tunic 
 and cloak, holding a staff in one hand, while the other is 
 held up, apparently in the act of blessing, and around his 
 neck there is hung a bag or pouch, from which projects 
 one of these B.C. crosses, which are known to antiquaries.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS BEFORE 
 
 CHRIST 
 
 The Symbolism of the Cross before Christ 
 can be studied both from an antiquarian 
 and from a Christian point of view. Our 
 God is holy and just and good, consequently 
 our religion must have been, at its root, the 
 same at all times. 
 
 Justin Martyr expresses the belief that 
 what was true in ancient times was, all of 
 it, of the Logos (of the Eternal Word). The 
 Word of God was disseminated in the world 
 like seed until the Lord Jesus was born, 
 and then in Him we received no longer parts 
 or fragments but the whole Word of God. 
 If this is the case, can it be wondered at that 
 the great central symbol of our holy religion 
 should be found before Christ as well as after 
 the coming of our blessed Redeemer ? If 
 
 37
 
 38 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 the great and wondrous sacrifice was fore- 
 ordained in the eternal purposes of God 
 before the foundation of the world, surely it 
 is not surprising that it should be symbolised 
 from the earliest times. 
 
 That there was a holy deposit of truth in 
 the world, a deposit of a just and true religion, 
 before the revelation that we have the great 
 blessing and privilege to possess, can hardly 
 be questioned, and that that religion was 
 impressed by symbolic teaching, I think 
 I may say we know. The only question is 
 how far that symbolic teaching extended. 
 Let us go back to the Garden of Eden. 
 When Almighty God created human beings 
 in His own image, when He gave them a 
 dwelling-place on earth. He made intelli- 
 gent creatures who were capable of under- 
 standing His laws and obeying them. Here, 
 then, at once a revelation becomes necessary, 
 for no man, or no race of men, could evolve 
 the law of God out of their own inner con- 
 sciousness. If there was no revealed law 
 to sin against, my argument is that Adam 
 and Eve could not have committed sin, for 
 ' sin is the transgression of the law.' Now let
 
 SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 39 
 
 us look around and see what evidence we 
 have that the rehgion that was taught to 
 Adam and Eve was impressed by symbohc 
 teaching. At once the sacrifices offered 
 by tJieir sons present themselves to our 
 view. Both sacrifices showed a large amount 
 of religious teaching, previously received. 
 Whence did they derive that knowledge ? 
 Not certainly from any revelation that we 
 possess. Then it must have been from a 
 previous revelation. To suppose that there 
 was no previous revelation is to suppose that 
 when our God held communion with our first 
 parents in the Garden of Eden it was a profit- 
 less communion, and that Enoch was able to 
 walk perfectly with God without any Divine 
 teaching or instruction, and that Melchisedek 
 was able to occupy the high spiritual position 
 in which we find him without any teaching 
 from Almighty God. Why then a new revela- 
 tion ? My theory is that while the spring 
 and source of religious teaching was pure at 
 the fountain head, yet, during the centuries, 
 so many impurities were poured into it that 
 a great Reformation became necessary, a Re- 
 formation so thorough that a fresh and new
 
 40 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 means was provided to convey the Divine 
 Will to the knowledge of man. 
 
 Ancient truths had to be re-edified and 
 built up again, the common things of life 
 had to be re-consecrated to the service of 
 God. The necessity for an atoning sacrifice 
 as a doctrinal teaching seems never to have 
 lost its hold on mankind, and the sacrificial 
 types and shadows of it are all but 
 universal. There was also a widespread con- 
 viction that a Virgin should conceive and 
 bear a son. 
 
 The great historical truths that we have 
 preserved for us in the Word of God, such as 
 the stories of The Creation, The Fall, The 
 Deluge, The Confusion of Tongues, are found 
 in a more or less corrupted form among 
 people that never could have learned them 
 from our Holy Scripture. The idea that the 
 Old Testament contains the oldest written 
 records must be relegated to regions of 
 exploded myths ; for in the British Museum 
 there are letters deposited, which were written 
 on tablets of baked clay long before the time 
 of Abraham. It would be supposing a great 
 deal to imagine that sacrificial rites were the
 
 SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 41 
 
 only remnant of the symbolical teaching of 
 the older religion that survived to our own 
 time. Would it be too much to suppose that 
 a symifolism which pointed to the death of 
 the gfeat sacrificial victim on the Cross may 
 also have come down to us from that early 
 period r That the shadow of the Cross may 
 have been cast back over the ages, as well as 
 forward to the days in which we live ? ' May 
 it not be more than a coincidence,' as a well- 
 known writer says, ' that Osiris by the cross 
 should give life eternal to the spirits of the 
 just ? That, with the cross, Thor should 
 smite the head of the great serpent and 
 bring to life those that were slain ? ' That, 
 with that symbol to protect them, the ancient 
 peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America 
 laid them down in the dust and saw through it 
 the life that is to come ? ' The world abounds 
 in symbolic crosses that have existed and 
 come down to us as religious symbols from 
 ages long before the proclamation of Christian 
 truth. Ireland abounds in these crosses, but 
 in this respect Ireland is in nowise singular. 
 Whether the worshippers were cave-men 
 wending their way through the primeval
 
 42 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 forests that covered the continent of Europe 
 in the early days of the human race ; or wild 
 hunters who built their refuges from beasts 
 and men on piles in Swiss lakes, or Assyrians 
 or Egyptians or Chinese, or Japanese or 
 Hindoos or Scandinavian rovers, or Greeks 
 or Britons or Gallic Celts, or Mexicans or 
 Ancient Romans — the cross as a symbol was 
 common to them all. It is the one and only 
 inter-racial religious symbol, and we know 
 of no form of cross, whether it be that of 
 St. Andrew, or St. George, Maltese, Greek, 
 or Latin, that has not existed from the remot- 
 est antiquity, and that cannot be actually 
 looked on, in painted or sculptured form, as 
 it has come down to us from times both 
 before Christ and since the days of our Lord. 
 The passing of the ages has made no changes 
 worth mentioning in the forms of the symboli- 
 cal crosses ; and that which the ancient 
 Eygptian painted on the coffin or mummy- 
 cloth of his sacred dead a thousand years 
 before the birth of our Saviour is fashioned 
 by the modern stonecutter to grace the 
 gables of our Irish churches, and by the 
 jewellers in Grafton Street to adorn our
 
 SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 43 
 
 ladies' garments. The symbol which the 
 rude hunters scraped on the bones that were 
 cast aside from their feasts is found rudely 
 impresSteS on the bottoms of cinerary urns, 
 where 'the ashes of the cremated dead were 
 deposited long before the dawn of history. 
 In the Far East this baptismal symbol was 
 fashioned by the Hindu mother in rice around 
 the baby in the form of the 
 Swastica, and it is the sym- 
 bol that the Buddhist priest 
 impressed on the forehead of 
 the neophyte 600 years be- 
 fore the birth of Christ, and swastica (usual). 
 that the Scandinavian rover 
 placed in the hand of his god, which is 
 now found on the bells of our churches 
 in England and on the dinner napkins on 
 our tables, while the Havasupai Indians in 
 Western Arizona beat the same sign out in 
 virgin silver. This cross is found on a frag- 
 ment of an ancient Scandinavian sword 
 from Northern Sweden. It is called by a 
 variety of names by antiquaries, such as the 
 Croix Grammee, Swastica or Fylfot (many- 
 footed), Hannner of Thor, &c. It is said by
 
 44 
 
 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 trustworthy travellers and writers to be 
 found cut on rocks in the remote parts of 
 India, and it is found on the mitre of Thomas 
 a Becket, and on a coin of Granada, which 
 is held to be the oldest Indian coin. It is 
 to be seen on Indo-Bactrian coins, and on 
 coins preserved in the museum of Copen- 
 hagen supposed to be 
 of Byzantine origin. 
 It was also found on 
 spindle whorls and on 
 fragments of pottery 
 discovered at great 
 depths below the sur- 
 face of Hissarlik and 
 at Mycenae, by Dr. 
 Schliemann, and it ap- 
 pears on coins of Pales- 
 tine, Greece, and Sicily. Dr. Ferdhiand 
 Keller, in his ' Lake Dwellings of Switzerland 
 and other Parts of Europe,' gives illustrations 
 of this symbol from the Lake of Bourget, 
 where it was found on an object of clay said 
 to have been portion of a hut covering. In 
 the same work (on p. 339) is an illustration 
 of a seal or stamp which was evidently used 
 
 TERRA-COTTA OBJECT FROM 
 FOURTH CITY OF TROY 
 ABOUT TWO THOUSAND 
 YEARS B.C. 
 
 By Miss E. Warren.
 
 SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 45 
 
 for making the impression. This cross also 
 appears on Roman altars found in Britain, 
 and on the elaborate tesselated pavement of a 
 Romarn villa which was discovered in the 
 Isle (Ji Wight. It was found engraved on a 
 counter or roundlet, either of bone or horn, 
 in one uf the low mounds at St. Louis, United 
 States of America, and it was also found in 
 more southern districts of that continent. 
 In Ireland it has been found on monumental 
 stones, accompanied by ogham inscriptions, 
 and also it forms part of the decorative 
 design impressed upon other crosses (such as 
 the Pillar Stone at Kilnasaggart). 
 
 Among the Bantu negroes, several mis- 
 sionaries who are authorities attest that 
 before Christianity was introduced the cross 
 was used as a mystic symbol by the priests 
 who directed the worship of the spirits. We 
 also find that, in the practice of the sacred 
 ceremonies among the aboriginal Australians, 
 a Swastica somewhat in the form of a St. 
 Andrew's Cross was used ; and may not much 
 be said in favour of the St. Andrew's Cross 
 being the true cross, and the Australian type 
 being the original form of the Swastica ?
 
 46 
 
 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 ..,.^v^ 
 
 KILNASAGGAFT PILLAR STONE WITH SWASTICA CROSSES, LATIN 
 CROSS, AND OGHAM INSCRIPTION. ON THE OTHER SIDE IS 
 A PLAINER SWASTICA OR FYLFOT AND LATIN CROSS, AND 
 AN IRISH INSCRIPTION.
 
 SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 47 
 
 A recent writer on this subject (Mr. Albert 
 Churchward) says : 
 
 Its constant presence on altars, tombstones, 
 sepulcliral urns, and priestly vestments, and the 
 nature' of the symbols with which it is found asso- 
 ciated, afford more than sufficient proof that it 
 partook everywhere of the nature of the amulet, 
 the talisman, and the phylactery. 
 
 And, strange to say, just at the present time, 
 a strong effort is being made to revive its 
 use as a charm. The same writer, treating 
 of the figure of the Swastica within a triangle, 
 which we gather from him is found in West 
 Africa, says : 
 
 The figure of the Swastica in the centre of the 
 Sacred Triangle may be said to represent the highest 
 and greatest of the Christian doctrines of the present 
 day. That the spirit must be born again and will 
 be everlasting, and that we can only attain this by 
 believing in the Cross and in Christ and the Holy 
 Trinity. The Swastica here represents the regen- 
 eration of the life to come, as evinced by its position 
 in the centre of the Sacred Triangle, which is here 
 the representation of the first Holy Trinity. It 
 shows that the beliefs and the original doctrines of 
 these ancient people were identically the same as 
 what we now use, time and evolution having altered 
 them very httle.
 
 48 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 May we not hope that our readers will 
 
 see in the Swastica not only the sign of 
 
 blessings obtained, but also, in its first use, 
 
 the symbol of a predicted benefit ? The 
 
 word Swastica is the Sanskrit name for this 
 
 cross, and may be comparatively modern 
 
 and tinged with Buddhist ideas. My friend, 
 
 ^ Mr. E. Stanley Robertson, 
 
 I I late of the Indian Civil 
 
 l^l Service, tells me that in 
 
 ^^^^V India it is believed to be a 
 
 I ' monogram taken from two 
 
 J Devanagri letters which mean 
 
 SWASTICA FROM 5^^ (' wcll ') and asi ('is'), 
 
 AUSTRALIA. 
 
 and that it appears probable 
 that it is taken from the letters of some older 
 and simpler Sanskrit alphabet. The Dev- 
 anagri letters are extremely complex, while 
 the symbol itself is very simple. The sn is 
 of course cognate with the Greek eu, and 
 asti with esti. The final ka is a formative 
 termination implying that the word is a 
 noun. May I say in conclusion that the ' Fire 
 Stick ' suggestion with regard to the Swastica 
 does not seem to rest on anv evidence ?
 
 CHAPTER V . 
 
 THE SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS BEFORE 
 
 CHRIST — continued 
 
 After the Swastica, the next m importance 
 among the B.C. crosses is the Egyptian 
 Cross (Ansata, or Cross and Circle), which 
 may have been the prototype of our Celtic 
 Christian cross. The late Professor Stokes 
 and others have conclusively shown the in- 
 fluence exercised by the Christian Church in 
 Egypt on early Christianity in Ireland, and 
 what more natural than that the sacred pre- 
 Christian cross of the Egyptians should be 
 adopted by the early converts to the Chris- 
 tian faith, and that with other customs of 
 the Egyptian Church it should find its way 
 into Ireland ? 
 
 The A.D. cross numbered I. may be con- 
 sidered the transition stage to the Celtic 
 cross of our own times. The cross with a 
 
 49 E
 
 50 
 
 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 handle, or, more properly speaking, the 
 cross and circle, is a common symbol upon 
 the monuments of Eg^^pt. 
 
 A prominent English canon, rector of an 
 important parish, who has lately returned 
 
 EGYPTIAN CROSS, OR 
 CRUX ANSATA. 
 
 II. 
 
 CROSS ON OLD CHURCH 
 AT INISMURRAY. 
 
 from a tour in Egypt, writes, in a letter 
 which I have now before me : 
 
 The commonest of all sculptured symbols, 
 generally held in the hand of the god or king, was 
 what they called ' The Key of Life,' which is a 
 cross with a loop on top wherewith to hold it. 
 
 It was the key of life to the ancients, and it 
 is the key of life to Christian people now. 
 I have suggested elsewhere that the cross
 
 SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 51 
 
 and circle may very possibly have found an 
 origin in holed stones rudely hewn into a 
 cross, as illustrated by the Ballycastle cross 
 in my article on ' Holed Stones.' 
 
 The meaning of the Egyptian Cross has 
 for ages supplied food for the exercise of the 
 ingenuity of scholars. The ancient Egyptians 
 described it as a divine mystery. It is 
 constantly seen in the hands of Isis, Osiris, 
 and other Egyptian divinities. You will find 
 it figured in such popular and easily to 
 be procured books as ' Stones Crying Out,' 
 where there is a picture of an Egyptian 
 winged figure or cherubim, worshipping 
 before an Egyptian deity and offering up 
 to him the cross and circle. The same 
 emblem is seen on a staff fixed in the ground 
 before the deity, and yet again it seems to 
 be represented over the worshipper's head. 
 On p. 192 of * Echoes of Bible History ' there 
 is a representation of Thoth, the Egyptian 
 ' god of wisdom ' — an Ibis-headed deity, with 
 the sun and moon upon its head, and the cross 
 and circle in its hand. Socrates Scholasticus 
 explained the symbol, and declared (on the 
 authority of converts to Christianity) that it 
 
 E 2
 
 52 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 signified the ' life to come.' Rufinus said the 
 same thing. The figure varies somewhat in 
 different locahties. It was borne as an 
 ensign by the Egyptians ; and just as the 
 first Christian Emperor led his soldiers to 
 victory under the banner of the Cross, so did 
 the ancient kings of Egypt. With the lower 
 limb extended it served as a support for the 
 crest or device of their various cities, as a 
 lion for Leonopolis, as a goat for Panopolis. 
 
 It was figured on the gigantic emerald or 
 glass statue of Serapis, which was trans- 
 ported, B.C. 293, by order of Ptolemy Soter, 
 from Sinope, on the shores of the Black Sea, 
 and re-erected within the labyrinth on the 
 banks of Lake Maris ; and which was destroyed 
 by the victorious army of Theodosius, in 
 A.D. 389, despite the earnest entreaties of 
 the Egyptian priesthood to spare it because 
 it was the emblem of their god and of the 
 ' life to come.' 
 
 I would now say a word or two about the 
 circle. With us it signifies eternity, but I 
 think I may say that, outside the Christian 
 Church, it always signified a new birth. This 
 subject I have referred to under the heading
 
 SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 53 
 
 of ' Holed Stones.' The circle as an emblem 
 of regeneration is found everywhere ; and so 
 lately as October, 1892, the Graphic illus- 
 trated "paper had a picture of a Moorish 
 woman passing her hand into a circular hole 
 to obtain cleansing or forgiveness of sins, 
 i.e. ---a new birth.' The circle also came to 
 represent the transmission of life from 
 generation to generation through the female 
 power, which was such a prevailing cult in 
 Ireland when religion became degraded and 
 before the veneration of the male power 
 came into prominence. The Cross Ansata, 
 or Cross and Circle, was certainly a sacred 
 symbol among the Babylonians. Among 
 their many representations of it is a stand- 
 ing figure between two stars, beneath which 
 are ' handled crosses,' and above the head 
 of the deity is the Triangle, or symbol of the 
 Trinity. 
 
 We now take up cross No. III., the 
 ordinary Chinese Cross, which from time im- 
 memorial has been used by them to sym- 
 bolise the universe (the ' Four Points,' as it is 
 called). It answers in form exactly to the 
 crosses called Greek Crosses, so frequently
 
 54 
 
 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 found in Ireland. Cross No. IV. is of the 
 type that we call a Latin Cross, and is copied 
 from a rock that is decorated with cup 
 markings and circles, at Mevagh, Rossquile, 
 Co. Donegal. Cup markings are, undoubtedly, 
 a pre-Christian type of decoration. A modern 
 
 CUP MARKING. 
 
 CHINESE CROSS, OFTEN FOUND 
 IN IRELAND. 
 
 IV. 
 
 CROSS IRISH MEVAGH 
 
 INSCRIBED, CO. DONEGAL. 
 
 writer tells us that, long before the Romans 
 and the Etruscans, there lived, in the plains of 
 Northern Italy, a people to whom the cross 
 was a religious symbol — the sign beneath 
 which they laid their dead to rest. A people 
 of whom history tells us nothing, knowing 
 not their name, but of whom antiquarian re- 
 search has learned that they lived in ignor- 
 ance of the arts of civihsation, that they 
 dwelt in villages built on platforms over
 
 SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 55 
 
 lakes (which we in Ireland call crannogs), 
 and that they trusted in the cross to guard 
 (and maybe to revive) their loved ones whom 
 they 'Committed to the dust. Through 
 Emili^ are found the dust-heaps of these 
 people, which form quarries, whence manure 
 is taken by the peasants of the present day. 
 These quarries go by the name of terramaris. 
 They are vast accumulations of cinders, 
 bones, fragments of pottery, and other re- 
 mains of human industry, similar to those 
 which have been discovered in Denmark 
 and in Switzerland. The pottery found is 
 mostly fragments, and sometimes the bottoms 
 of the vessels are rudely engraved with 
 crosses. 
 
 In the County of Donegal, at a place 
 called Barnesbeg, near Kilmacrenan, there 
 is a dallan or standing stone deeply cup 
 marked, and on it there is a Latin cross, 
 three of the arms of which end in cup mark- 
 ings ; nor are these by any means the only 
 pre-Christian crosses of the Latin type found 
 in Ireland. At a place called Clanfinlough, 
 in the King's County, there is a stone, known 
 as the 'Fairy Stone,' which is covered with
 
 56 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 Latin crosses and representations of the 
 ancient Irish ring brooch ; also, at a place 
 called Cranna, in County Galway, there is a 
 stone called the ' Stone of the Fruitful Fairy/ 
 on which there are inscribed a number of 
 Latin crosses and two well-marked repre- 
 sentations of daggers. Cross No. V. is copied 
 from the scribblings within the great mound 
 at Dowth, in County Louth. 
 
 The great tumuli of New Grange and 
 Dowth are believed to have been erected by 
 the De Dananns, a race who are said to have 
 lived in Ireland before the Milesians and 
 the conversion of the inhabitants of this 
 country to the Christian faith, but who by 
 many are now believed to be a mythical 
 people. You will observe the resemblance 
 that it bears to the cross copied from the 
 Church of St. Fechan, at Fore, in County 
 Westmeath, and the resemblance that both 
 these crosses bear to the wheel cross of the 
 Assyrians, a cross that was always present 
 whenever they pictured their great god 
 Asshur, in whose name they carried on all 
 their wars and won all their victories. This 
 wheel cross of the Assyrians bears a
 
 -SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 57 
 
 CROSS FROM TUMULI 
 AT DOWTH. 
 
 VI. 
 CROSS ON THE CHURCH OF 
 ST. FECHAN, AT FORE, 
 WESTMEATH. ASSYRIAN 
 TYPE. 
 
 VII. 
 
 REASK CROSS NEAR VENTRY, CO. KERRY. ASSYRIAN 
 
 TYPE. 
 
 Fiom Miss E. WajTcn,
 
 58 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 resemblance to the cross that we find on 
 Anglo-Norman corns in Ireland. 
 
 The most ancient coins of the Gauls were circular 
 with a cross in the middle (little wheels, as it were). 
 That they were not designed to represent wheels is 
 apparent from there being only four spokes placed 
 at right angles. When coins of the Greek type 
 took their place, the cross was continued as the orna- 
 mentation of the coin. Some Gaulish coins bear 
 the cross on both obverse and reverse ; in the year 
 1835 about tw;o hundred of this description were 
 found near Quimper, in a brown earth urn, with 
 ashes and charcoal which had been placed in a 
 rude kistvaen of stone blocks. Thus proving that 
 the cross was introduced into England with the 
 Anglo-Norman kings. 
 
 We have an almost exact reproduction of 
 the Assyrian cross in Killaghter churchyard, 
 in County Donegal, and at Reask, near Ventry, 
 in County Kerry. This Reask cross is of 
 very early type, and seems to mark the 
 transition stage when the most cultured 
 emblem of pre-Christian symbolism (the Sun) 
 was giving way before Him whom we know 
 as the brightness of the Father's glory and 
 the express image of His person — the Sun of 
 Righteousness. 
 
 Now let us turn from the East to the
 
 •SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 59 
 
 West, and we meet with the fact that when 
 the Spaniards invaded America they were 
 overwhelmed with surprise to find the sign of 
 the cFbss in common use by men whom they 
 considered to be in every respect heathen ; 
 and by pointing to that sacred symbol, 
 emblazoned on their standards, they received 
 a more cordial reception from the natives 
 than they had any reason to expect. 
 
 So great was the respect paid by these 
 natives to the sign of the cross that they 
 treated it with Divine honours. We are 
 told by travellers that it is exceedingly diffi- 
 cult to distinguish between the ancient crosses 
 of America and those set up by the invaders. 
 Mr. Stephens, in his work on Central America, 
 bears witness to this, and gives a representa- 
 tion of one of the finest of these crosses that 
 he met with. He found it carved on the wall 
 of the ruined temple at Palenque, and it was 
 about nine or ten feet high. One of the 
 most remarkable of the American pre-Christian 
 crosses was one that was made at the festivals 
 by the Mexican priests, of corn flour consisting 
 of maize and the blood of the victims offered 
 in sacrifice. After this cross was worshipped
 
 6o PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 it was broken up and distributed to the people, 
 who ate it as a bond of union and brother- 
 hood. What a strange resemblance this 
 bears to the sacramental bread and wine ! 
 Surely the idea of safety through the blood 
 of the Cross could not have been far distant 
 from these people. 
 
 Now let me point to Ezekiel ix. 6, which, 
 while recounting the awful judgments to be 
 poured forth, says, ' Come not near any 
 man upon whom is the mark,' or, according 
 to the Vulgate of St. Jerome (which in the 
 opinion of Bishop Lowth is correct), upon 
 whom is the Tau Cross. This would seem 
 to be a foreshadowing of our custom in 
 Holy Baptism in which, as Wheatley says, 
 our Church has ordained ' that all her children 
 should be signed with the cross on their 
 foreheads, signifying thereby their consign- 
 ment up to Christ, whence it is often called 
 by the Fathers, " The Lord's Signet," and 
 ".Christ's Seal." ' 
 
 We have now, we trust not unsuccess- 
 fully, striven to show that prehistoric sym- 
 bolism was the same all over the world, and 
 consequently that those symbols may be
 
 -SYMBOLISM OF THE CROSS 6i 
 
 presumed to teach the same truths (however 
 subsequently degraded) as those in which 
 we beheve. The gold in the sovereign of 
 to-day may have first circulated in ' the 
 new^coined Stater of Croesus ' ; and if this 
 is the case, does it not present to us a wider 
 and more extended sense of the grace and 
 mercy of God overshadowing the earth from 
 the beginning, and does it not seem that the 
 great miracle of the atoning sacrifice through 
 the death of the Lord Jesus was impressed 
 on the earth by sign and symbol from the 
 birth of our race? We may differ about 
 minor details and statements conveyed to us 
 through languages that have long since passed 
 away, and by signs that must remain of doubt- 
 ful signification, yet may we not thank God 
 for every new proof that we obtain of the 
 eternal value of the great atonement, and of 
 salvation through the blood of the Cross? 
 * He that steals my purse steals trash,- but 
 he that weakens my faith in salvation through 
 the blood of the Cross 'enriches not himself, 
 but makes me poor indeed.' 
 
 In conclusion, may I say that the origin 
 of symbolic or sign writing, and the reasons
 
 62 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 that called it into existence, would naturally 
 present themselves for consideration ? I am 
 well aware of many theories which seem to me 
 like pyramids resting on their apex. I would 
 suggest the very commonplace reason of neces- 
 sity — the need for finding some easy way of 
 signalling when no writing was in existence. 
 
 A line perpendicular or horizontal would 
 tell of a deposit ol food placed in the spot, 
 or that a party had passed that way, and 
 some of our rock scribings, which are a 
 mere combination of two straight lines, may 
 have thus arisen ; but to suppose that at 
 an early period, when the struggle for exist- 
 ence was severe, those who lived then spent 
 their time decorating rocks or inscribing 
 them with a combination of more or less 
 elaborate figures for ornament only, seems 
 to me scarcely reasonable. I know of no 
 motive but a religious one that would have 
 sufficient power to cause men to do so, and 
 when we find that a symbol such as the 
 cross has had all the world over a religious 
 association attached to it, I think it not un- 
 reasonable to infer that a religious motive 
 was its primary cause.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE USE OF SUN AND FIRE SYMBOLS 
 IN PREHISTORIC TIMES 
 
 Although the cross was a symbol, it was 
 not in prehistoric times the symbol of an 
 object. It was the representation or sign 
 of an accepted belief, and not the sign of an 
 object around which worship could centre. 
 But human nature always craved for more 
 than that, it craved for something on which 
 faith could lean, and which would represent 
 the great invisible one ; and the swastica was 
 made to lend itself to satisfying that purpose. i 
 
 1 A recent writer tells us ' that among the symbols 
 accompanying the gamnadion there is none so frequent 
 as the solar disk. The two signs are in a manner counter- 
 parts not only among the Greeks, the Romans, and the 
 Celts, but also with the Hindus, the Japanese, and the 
 Chinese.' — The Count Goblet D'Alviella, The Migration 
 of Symbols, 1894, p. 56. This shows us how completely 
 the swastica had degenerated into a mere sun symbol. — 
 Ibid. p. 67. 
 
 63
 
 64 
 
 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 A revolving swastica could be made to 
 represent either the circular disk of the 
 sun or a sun cross. Numbers of these 
 sun crosses are to be found in Ireland, such 
 as the cross at Inismurray, the cross at 
 
 REASK CROSS, NEAR VENTRY, CO. KERRY. 
 
 Dowth, the cross at St. Fechan's of Fore, 
 and the cross at Reask, near Ventry. This 
 Reask cross we reproduce, as it is such an 
 excellent illustration of the sun cross of a 
 very early type. We give also illustrations 
 of the Assyrian cross and the cross on 
 the standing stone at Killaghter and the
 
 'SUN AND FIRE SYMBOLS 
 
 65 
 
 sun-marked stone at New Grange ; also the 
 Chincana symbol. The Assyrian winged 
 cross usually accompanied the presence of 
 Assur,' their chief god, and it may be con- 
 sidered as marking out the figure represented 
 as that of their god. That this cross is not 
 
 ASSYRIAN WINGED CROSS. 
 
 a wheel is easily seen from the fact that 
 it had only four arms radiating from the one 
 centre, and no one ever tried to construct 
 a wheel with four spokes. That the trend 
 of human nature is to accept the host of 
 heaven as the symbol required is plainly to 
 be gathered from the Old Testament Scripture, 
 and this seems to be the degradation of
 
 66 
 
 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 worship that some of the oldest written 
 documents in the world tell us had first of all 
 to be guarded against ; for the Bible, although 
 not the oldest written record, is one of the 
 oldest. The first ' Thou shalt not ' in the 
 Bible is found in the twentieth chapter of 
 
 FROM KILLAGHTER CHURCHYARD, CO. DONEGAL. 
 
 Exodus : ' Thou shalt not make unto thee a 
 graven image, nor the likeness of any form 
 that is in heaven above. . . . Thou shalt 
 not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve 
 them ' ; and in Deuteronomy xvii. 3 the 
 wicked who have served other gods and 
 worshipped them are described as those who 
 have worshipped either ' the sun, or the moon,
 
 ^SVN AND FIRE SYMBOLS 67 
 
 or any of the host of heaven.' We have it 
 there plainly stated that one of the earliest 
 forms of idolatry was the worship of the sun, 
 which I. would say became a form of idolatry 
 when, as invariably happened, the thing 
 symbolised was forgotten, and the symbol 
 itseli was allowed to take its place. Con- 
 sequently, the necessity for the command 
 against symbolic worship arose. In Deuter- 
 onomy iv. ig we have the warning, ' Lest 
 thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when 
 thou seest the sun and the moon and the 
 stars, even all the host of heaven, thou be 
 drawn away and worship them and serve 
 them.' Certainl3^ if any definite object was 
 allowed to be taken as a symbol of God, none 
 could be more suitable than the sun. It is 
 God's agency for supplying the world with 
 light and heat, and much of the very comfort 
 of existence depends on the sun. Where 
 there is no sunlight there is practically no 
 life, or life of only the most feeble and un- 
 healthy kind. We have an excellent example 
 of how readily the untaught man turns to 
 the heavenly host as the representative of 
 God in the case of a deaf-mute who had never 
 
 F 2
 
 68 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 been instructed, and yet who was often seen 
 engaged in prayer. After he was instructed 
 he was asked to whom did he pray, and he 
 rephed ' to the heavenly host ' (the stars) . 
 The worship of the sun symbol had 
 undoubtedly a great hold on the world, and 
 it remains in existence still among the 
 descendants of the ancient Persians. It was 
 the only cult that was able to make a stand 
 against Christianity when it became the 
 religion of the Roman Empire. The cultured 
 gentlemen of Greece and Rome were not the 
 stupid idolaters that ill-instructed people 
 seem to think. A well-known writer regarded 
 their religion as of such a high and cultured 
 type that if Christianity had developed any 
 mortal weakness, the religion of cultivated 
 Rome would have been the religion of the 
 Western world. It was practically a return 
 to Patriarchal Religion. 
 
 The human spirit instinctively turned with 
 reverence to the Father of all spirits, and in its 
 helplessness sought utterance for its yearnings in 
 symbolism of word or act.^ 
 
 1 S. Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the 
 Western Empire (London, 1910), p. 9.
 
 -'SUN AND FIRE SYMBOLS 69 
 
 The cultured men of those early days 
 sought an image of the infinite God in the 
 sun. Other worshippers sought it under 
 other' names, and thus attempted to realise 
 faint" shadows of the Infinite. One of their 
 philosophers, Longinianus, a correspondent 
 of St. Augustine, while he believed that the 
 ancient sacred rites had a real value, also 
 believed that the one ' great ineffable Creator ' 
 was to be approached only by the way of 
 piety and truth in word and deed. Professor 
 Samuel Dill tells us that in the fourth century 
 
 the ancient God of Light had become in public 
 opinion the Supreme Power who is all-seeing and 
 all-pervading, who is Lord and giver of life, the 
 cleanser from sin, the protector of the miserable, 
 the conqueror of evil demons and death, who 
 assures to his faithful worshippers the hope of 
 immortality. 1 
 
 Even in its ritual there was a strong 
 resemblance to the Christian faith : 
 
 Its expiation for sins by bloody baptism ; its 
 ascetic preparation for the Holy Mysteries ; its 
 oblation of the consecrated bread ; its symbolic 
 teaching of the resurrection — all so strongly resemble 
 
 1 Dill, p. 81.
 
 70 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 Christianity that it was not surprising that Christians 
 should consider it a cunning device of the evil one.i 
 
 May we not see in it the remains of the 
 original teaching from which all knowledge 
 of true religion comes ? * The mystery of 
 the death of a Divine being, His descent 
 to the mider world, and His joyful restor- 
 ation, which was the central idea of many 
 of the cults which most influenced the 
 reUgious feeling of Antiquity,' - may well 
 seem to us the remains of the original deposit 
 of truth which man received from his Maker. 
 Even barbarous religious symbols have often 
 sloughed off their baser elements with the 
 development of a purer morality. Be this 
 as it may, Christianity had no mean foe 
 to contend with before it could plant the 
 Cross on the ruins of pre-existing faiths, 
 backed up as these old behefs were by 
 memories of the past and by patriotism and 
 love of country, which always make the 
 votaries of any faith formidable. We know 
 little of the faith of the Druids, but there is 
 every reason to think that it was largely 
 
 1 Dill, p. 84. 2 Ibid. p. 85.
 
 -^SUN AND FIRE SYMBOLS 71 
 
 leavened with sun and fire worship ; for the 
 two forms of worship seem so mingled together 
 that practically they were the same thing, 
 and the remnants of that worship are 
 abundantly to be found among us from that 
 time to the present. In St. Patrick's Hymn, 
 as translated by the Rev. Thomas Olden, 
 he not only binds to himself Christian doc- 
 trines, but he also claims the very elements 
 worshipped by his opponents. He says : 
 
 I bind myself to the virtue of heaven ; 
 In Hght of the sun ; 
 In brightness of snow ; 
 In splendour of fire ; 
 In speed of hghtning ; 
 . In swiftness of wind ; 
 In depth of sea ; 
 In stability of earth. 
 
 These separate symbols might be worshipped 
 as separate gods, but far more likely as 
 symbols of the attributes of the one God. 
 Astley tells us : 
 
 The great temples which they erected at Stone- 
 henge, Avebury, and Carnac, in Brittany, which 
 are the primeval models of the Egyptian Karnac, 
 of the Mycenean Baitlyon, of the Parthenon, of 
 Baalbec, and of the medieval cathedral in all its
 
 72 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 glory, were for the worship of the mighty sun, the 
 Lord and hfe-giver to all things. i 
 
 The Rev. Dr. Olden, in his ' History of the 
 Church of Ireland,' tells us : 
 
 The worship of the sun is referred to by Saint 
 Patrick as practised in his time,^ 
 
 and one of the customs connected with it 
 and still retained in Ireland was the lighting 
 of bonfires (once common throughout Europe). 
 The first day of May was known in the Irish 
 language as the Day of Bealltaine (either the 
 fire of Baal or the fire of the Lord) ; these 
 fires are now transferred to the 23rd of June 
 (the Eve of St. John the Baptist's Day), and 
 this seems to indicate a connexion with 
 the summer solstice. On the Continent the 
 practice survived the Roman occupation and 
 the Teutonic conquest, which survival attests 
 the extraordinary vitality of Celtic tradition. 
 In the Bavarian highlands they are known 
 as sonnen-wend-feuer (solstice fires), and a 
 capitular of Charlemagne condemns them as 
 a remnant of paganism. 
 
 1 H. J. D. Astley, The Historic Archcsology and the 
 Old Testament, 1908, p. 151. 
 
 2 P. 6.
 
 ;^SUN AND FIRE SYMBOLS 73 
 
 We have before noticed the Assyrian sun 
 symbol, and Bunsen notes that the Sun God 
 of Hehopohs in S^Tia (Baalbec), came from 
 Assyria, and quotes from Macrobius (' Saturn,' 
 i. 23) : ' The Assyrians celebrate with great 
 ceremony in the city of Heliopolis the worship 
 of the sun under the name of Jove.' Lanigan, 
 in his ' Ecclesiastical History,' tells us : 
 
 That fire was in pagan times an object of worship, 
 or at least great veneration in Ireland, and par- 
 ticularly the sun, which was the greatest of all fires, 
 is an indubitable fact.i 
 
 The so-called sun worshippers and the 
 so-called fire worshippers were one and the 
 same, and in both cases they themselves said 
 they did not worship either the sun or the fire, 
 but God in the fire. Lanigan says that : 
 
 Zoroaster, the reformer of fire worship among 
 the Persians, directed that wherever altars on 
 which their sacred fire was kept were erected on 
 the tops of hills and high places in the open air, 
 temples should be built over them to prevent the 
 sacred fire being extinguished and the holy offices 
 of their religion being interrupted and disturbed, 
 for all parts of their public worship were performed 
 before these public sacred fires, as all their private 
 
 1 J. Lanigan, Ecclesiastical History (Dublin, 1822), p. 407.
 
 74 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 devotions were before private fires in their own 
 houses, not that they worshipped the fire, for this 
 they always disowned, but God in the fire, 
 
 or, as we would put it, God as symbolised 
 by lire. He adds in a footnote : 
 
 There seem to have been in Ireland, as there 
 were in Persia, two sects of fire worshippers — one 
 that lighted their fires in the open air, and performed 
 their religious ceremonies on hills and high places ; 
 and a second who kept the sacred fire in the sacred 
 temples. 1 
 
 This last statement of our writer I think 
 we can only receive in a very modified 
 degree. After the introduction of Christianity, 
 the sacred fire of St. Brigid was probably 
 called into existence to turn a pre-existing 
 fire worship to Christian uses. Nor was the 
 instance of Kildare the only instance of 
 perpetual sacred fires kept burning, for there 
 was one at Inismurray and another at Cloyne. 
 There is also an instance where a newly- 
 converted chief erected an altar at one end 
 of his place of worship to the glory of God, 
 and an altar at the other end to the object 
 of his pre-Christian worship. Keating, in his 
 
 1 J. Lanigan, Ecclesiastical History (Dublin, 1822), p. 409.
 
 '^SUN AND FIRE SYMBOLS 75 
 
 ' History of Ireland,' explains the change of 
 name-of three of the chiefs of the Tuatha De 
 Danann by telling us that they changed their 
 names to the name of the god that they 
 worshipped. Thus one of them changed his 
 name to MacGreine, because he worshipped 
 Grian, the sun. 
 
 The alarm of the so-called Druids when 
 they saw St. Patrick's fire at his first Easter 
 celebrations, shows that Druidism was in 
 Ireland probably a form of sun and fire 
 worship ; and so great was their fear that they 
 fled to the head king at Tara, requesting him 
 to have it extinguished, lest it would get the 
 mastery of their fire and bring the down- 
 fall of the kingdom. There is every reason 
 to believe that, whatever Druidism was in 
 Ireland, it was free from the cruel and bloody 
 rites that were associated with it elsewhere, 
 and was of the mild and gentle type that sun 
 worship might be expected to be. That sun 
 worship was a prevailing cult in Ireland 
 cannot be disputed ; for St. Patrick in his 
 ' Confessions,' alluding to it, says : 
 
 For that sun which we behold, by the command
 
 76 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 of God, rises daily for our sakes ; but it will never 
 reign, nor will its splendour endure ; but all those 
 who worship it shall go in misery to sore punishment. 
 We, on the other hand, believe in and worship 
 the true sun, Christ, who will never perish, nor 
 will anyone who doeth His will ; but he will abide 
 for ever, as Christ will abide for ever, who reigneth 
 with God the Father Almighty and with the Holy 
 Spirit, before the worlds, and now, and for ever 
 and ever. Amen.i 
 
 The strong conservative instinct of the Celt 
 is nowhere more clearly exhibited than in the 
 fact that after the passing of the centuries 
 the sun cult has left its impress on our 
 customs. 
 
 I have already mentioned that the first 
 day of May was known in the Irish language 
 as the Day of Bealltaine, but that these fires 
 were transferred to the 23rd of June. In old 
 times mysterious virtues were supposed to 
 be possessed by dew gathered on May 
 Morning : 
 
 The fair maid who the first of May 
 
 Goes to the field at break of day, 
 
 And washes in dew from the hawthorn tree, 
 
 Will ever after handsome be. 2 
 
 1 Conf. 60, White's translation. 
 
 2 Wood -Martin, Traces of the Elder Faiths of Ireland, 
 igo2, p. 176.
 
 ^.SUN AND FIRE SYMBOLS 77 
 
 A peasant always approaches a holy place 
 from -the north side, and he must move from 
 east to west in imitation of the supposed 
 motion, of the sun. In the sa.me way a corpse 
 must be carried to its last resting-place, a 
 bride should approach her husband, an infant 
 should be carried to the baptismal font, and 
 the glass should be circulated at the festive 
 board. Even now it is believed that every 
 movement of persons or things should be 
 with the course of the sun. To move against 
 the sun was productive of evil consequences, 
 and was called ' withershins.' Witches in 
 their dances always went withershins. Mr. 
 Simpson, in his work, ' Meeting the Sun,' 1 
 says : 
 
 The Lama monk whirls his praying cylinder 
 in the way of the sun, and fears lest a stranger 
 should get at it and turn it contrary, which would 
 take from it all the virtue it had acquired. They 
 build piles of stone, and always pass them on one 
 side and return on the other, so as to make a 
 circuit with the sun. 
 
 Mohammedans make the circuit of the Caaba 
 in the same way. To move ' with the sun ' 
 
 1 Quoted by Wood-Martin, op. cit. p. 57.
 
 78 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 is desiul, a Gaelic word akin to dextra. 
 Withershins ('contrary ways') is German — 
 Wilder Sinn. The adoption of a foreign 
 form for the ill-omened words is curiously 
 significant. 
 
 The ancient dagobas of India and Ceylon 
 were also walked around in the same way. 
 The old Irish and Scotch custom is to make 
 all movements desiul or sun-wise. To go 
 withershins and to read prayers or the creed 
 backwards were great evils, and pointed to 
 connexion with the devil. i 
 
 Pennant refers to these and similar 
 practices in Scotland, such as kindling a fire 
 
 1 ' An ancient rite occurring in different branches 
 of the Indo-European family consisted in making the 
 circuit of the object intended to be honoured or sanctified, 
 keeping meanwhile the right side turned towards it, that 
 is to say, following the apparent direction of the sun, 
 known in India by the name of pradakshina, and still 
 practised by the Buddhists of Tibet round their sacred 
 stones. This custom has survived to our own times in 
 different parts of Europe. Dr. MacLeod relates that 
 the Highlanders of Scotland, when they came to wish his 
 father a Happy New Year, made in this manner the circuit 
 of the house in order to ensure its prosperity during the 
 year. At St. Fillans, by Comrie in Perthshire, this 
 circumambulation, called deasil (deisul), was performed 
 round a miraculous well, to which people came in search 
 of health. A similar custom seems to have existed in 
 the Jura Mountains.'
 
 _]SUN AND FIRE SYMBOLS 79 
 
 and the people joining hands and dancing 
 three- times around it southways, according 
 to the course of the sun ; indeed, he tells us 
 all public matters were done according to 
 certain fixed ideas in relation to the sun, 
 ' all pointing to a lingering ray of sun worship.' 
 As I said before, the Bealltaine festival seems 
 to have moved about from May Day to the 
 Eve of St. John the Baptist's Day, the time 
 when the sun is visible for the longest period. 
 The Bealltaine (the Lord's festival fires) 
 were kindled on the hills or at cross-roads 
 and other convenient places. The writer 
 remembers seeing the bonfires lighting all 
 along the sides of the hills on St. John's Eve, 
 and the young people dancing around them, 
 always following the course of the sun. 
 The writer has also seen brands taken from 
 the fire and carried around the houses three 
 times to keep away evil spirits. In some 
 places the young people are feasted on cakes 
 made with milk and eggs, and the cakes are 
 called Bealltaine cakes, and in many places 
 it is beheved that on this night many who 
 rest in their graves arise and may be met 
 with at the church. Children and cattle are
 
 8o PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 also passed through the bonfires. A gentle- 
 man who was standing by these fires in the 
 County Cork told the writer that on the 
 night of celebration he saw little children 
 and cattle passed through the fires. The 
 little children, very sparsely clothed, were 
 made to draw up their legs under them, and 
 two young men would each catch the child 
 by an arm, and whisk it so briskly through 
 the flames that the fire would not rest upon it 
 or the child be in any way injured. The 
 young people of both sexes also jumped 
 through the fire. But the cattle were not so 
 tenderly treated, for although they were 
 sometimes driven between two fires, they 
 were often driven through the fires, and 
 consequently often scorched, and their feet 
 burned by the glowing embers. We have 
 here apparently an exact repetition of the 
 worship described in the Old Testament and 
 an explanation of it ; for there the idolatrous 
 Israelites are described as passing their sons 
 and their daughters through the fire. This 
 the writer always thought was some fearfully 
 cruel observance, but it seems that it could 
 be done without in any way hurting the
 
 .,SUN AND FIRE SYMBOLS 8i 
 
 children. There are many other still re- 
 maining traces of fire worship, such as the 
 treating of cattle by the ' need fire ' when they 
 were^sJ€k. This method of healing survived 
 to very nearl}^ our own time. In case of 
 sickness every fire on the townland was put 
 out, and no fire was allowed to be kindled 
 until it had been produced by two men 
 rubbing sticks together ; and a fire was lit 
 in that way, the smoke of which the cattle 
 were compelled to inhale. This was plainly 
 a following of the old pre-Christian custom 
 that, under given circumstances, all fire 
 should be put out, and only lighted again by 
 brands from a sacred fire. Once the sun, the 
 great producer of light and heat, was accepted 
 as the symbol or image of God, bearing 
 within it a presence of God, then it necessarily 
 followed that all flames were regarded in a 
 like way, and nothing can exceed the respect 
 with which present-day sun worshippers treat 
 the flame and light of the fire. So much is 
 this the case that the Parsees for a long time 
 looked on lucifer matches with great doubt 
 as an unlawful method of producing fire, and 
 it was only necessity that at last compelled
 
 82 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 them to use them. Prideaux, quoted by 
 Lanigan, tells us that, when they came before 
 these holy fires to worship, they always 
 approached them on the left side, so that, 
 having their faces towards them and also 
 towards the rising sun, they might direct 
 their worship towards both. 
 
 It would seem that the highest worship 
 was reserved for the rising sun. There is 
 a well-known stone at Clogher which, before 
 the writer visited that place, had been brought 
 to the Church or Cathedral and laid up against 
 the outside of the north wall. This stone 
 was said to be none other than the Clogh-or, 
 or ' stone of gold,' from which the whole place 
 derived its name ; and the stone was called 
 the stone of gold because a panel of burnished 
 gold was said to be inserted in it, and the 
 stone itself was said to be placed in such a 
 way that the beams of the morning sun, 
 when it first arose above the horizon, would 
 light upon it, and cause it to shine with great 
 brilliancy and splendour. There is plainly 
 visible on this stone a depression which seems 
 to have been made to hold this panel of gold. 
 It can scarcelv be doubted that this stone was
 
 ..SUN AND FIRE SYMBOLS 83 
 
 a remnant of sun worship. The celebrated 
 stone' known as Crom Cruach, which stood 
 near .the river Gathard, in the plain of Magh 
 Sleacht, in the Barony of Tullyhaw and 
 County of Cavan, seems to have been of a like 
 character ; for we are told it was ornamented 
 with gold and silver, and in the ' Tripartite 
 Life of St. Patrick,' published by Colgan, 
 part ii. chap. xxxi. it is called the chief idol 
 of all the Irish. 
 
 Doubtless, in St. Patrick's time, the thing 
 symbolised had been entirely lost sight of, 
 and the symbol was worshipped in its stead. 
 Even to our own days the shadow of the sun 
 cult remains with us in our everyday life. 
 We still call the first day of the week Sunday, 
 and Lady Wilde was of opinion that in the 
 May Day processions the sun was figured by 
 a hoop wreathed with rowan berries and 
 marsh marigolds. 
 
 The late Rev. Doctor George Stokes 
 mentions an incident in the life of St. Ciaran 
 of Saiger (who, according to tradition, was 
 a Bishop before St. Patrick) which goes to 
 prove that it was believed that fire was 
 originally divinely kindled, and could only 
 
 G 2
 
 84 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 be renewed in the same way. A sacred fire 
 was allowed to go out by the carelessness of 
 the person in charge, and there was con- 
 sternation in the monastery, for it was from 
 this fire all the other fires were kindled. 
 Still more, the weather was cold, and there 
 were visitors in the guest-house. In this 
 emergency St. Ciaran went forth, spread 
 abroad his hands, and prayed, whereupon 
 a thunderbolt fell, which he wrapped up in 
 his robe and took home, and was thus enabled 
 to rekindle the fire. The most recent pre- 
 historic sun symbol that has been discovered 
 has been illustrated in the last issue of the 
 Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries 
 of Ireland. Mr. George Coffey, in his 
 * Memoir of New Grange and Dowth,' mentions 
 as exceptional a stone which is to be found 
 on the east side of the mound. i Only the 
 upper surface of this stone, which is covered 
 with a leaf-like figure, was visible at the time 
 the memoir was written. Mr. Coffey teUs 
 us that when this stone was modelled for the 
 Museum in July 1901, the lower portion, 
 with incised crest-markings on it, was brought 
 
 1 Trans., R.I. A. xxx. 6i.
 
 .SUN AND FIRE SYMBOLS 
 
 8= 
 
 to light. These markings, which are of much 
 interest and importance, evidently represent 
 
 o 
 
 H 
 en 
 
 Q 
 U 
 « 
 
 PS 
 
 < 
 
 I 
 
 z 
 & 
 
 tn 
 
 H 
 O 
 
 z 
 
 o 
 
 Z 
 
 three suns, two of which have their outer 
 rays enclosed in a circle ; there is a fourth 
 rougher figure above these, which also appears
 
 86 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 to be a sun. Since writing this article, I have 
 read a most interesting paper on ' Mithraism,' 
 which was pubHshed in a former number of 
 the Irish Church Quarterly ^ by Mr. E. H. Alton. 
 I was very glad to find that it was written on 
 the same lines, and came to very much the 
 same conclusion that I did. In some un- 
 accountable way I had missed seeing it. The 
 sun symbols which we have may easily have 
 sprung from a misuse of the swastica, and 
 thus may symbolise a religion which is not 
 in many ways wholly unworthy of the great 
 Patriarchal Religions that existed before 
 Christ. For I think we must take sun worship, 
 or the worship of the sun symbol, as reformed 
 in the last century of the Western Roman 
 Empire, as a fair representative of the sun 
 cult as it originally existed. The following 
 extract, made from one of our daily papers,- 
 illustrates how the sun cult, like the swastica, 
 was a symbol which is found all over the world : 
 
 Mr. Clement Wragge paid a visit last week to 
 what are known as the tattooed rocks on the coast 
 near Raglan, New Zealand ; and as a result he 
 
 1 I. C. Q., vol. Iv. 
 
 2 Duhlin Daily Express, February ii, igio.
 
 " SUN AND FIRE SYMBOLS 87 
 
 is distinctly of opinion that they are the work of 
 neither Tamil nor Maori, but are the inscriptions 
 of a very ancient race of sun-worshipping people, 
 antedating the advent of the Maori by untold 
 centuries. The spiral circles, ovals, crosses, and 
 squares, he says, are most significant, and confirm 
 his opinion that New Zealand has been inhabited 
 by early man. He considers the inscriptions are 
 probably connected with those at Easter Island and 
 Central and South America, and are ' Atlantican ' 
 or Lemurian in origin. Further, the Maori copied 
 the spiral from the relics of those ancient people, 
 and did not initiate it. 
 
 Everywhere we turn we find the shadow of 
 the sun cult. Professor Ridgeway, in his 
 ' Origin of Tragedy,' ^ tells us the people of 
 Cleonae, like the Athenians, had suffered 
 from the pestilence, and in obedience to an 
 * oracle from Delphi, sacrificed a he-goat to 
 the rising sun.' While even Dante refers to it ; 
 for in Canto vii. of the ' Purgatorio ' he makes 
 Sordello say : * Not for doing, but for not 
 doing, have I lost the vision of the high sun.' 
 As in the Old World, so also in the New World. 
 Among the wonderful discoveries made by 
 Mr. T. Hewitt Myring in the Chincana Valley 
 of Peru, which are believed to date from 
 
 1 p. 80.
 
 88 
 
 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 many thousand years B.C., we find very 
 remarkable traces of tlie worsliip of the sun 
 symbol. When the grave of an ancient 
 chieftain was opened, the body was found 
 stretched at full length, with the head raised 
 
 CHIMU SUN SYMBOL, PERU. 
 
 SO that the sightless eye-balls might catch 
 the first gleam of the rising sun, and we have 
 also a representation of the sun symbol 
 itself, with a widely-extended nimbus around 
 it, which we engrave. i 
 
 It is well worthy of remark how deeply 
 impressed on primitive religion was the 
 teaching that without shedding of blood there 
 was no remission of sin. The most impressive 
 
 ' Illustrated London News, December 4, 1909.
 
 ^SUN AND FIRE SYMBOLS b\ 
 
 rite in the worship of the sun symbol was the 
 baptism of blood called the Taurobolium. 
 The ceremonial has been described in a well- 
 knowii passage of Prudentius, in which we 
 are told that a cist was made in the earth, 
 in which the penitent was laid, which was 
 covered with planks, having apertures between 
 them. A bull was led on the platform, and, 
 with due ceremonial conducted by the priests, 
 was slaughtered, so that the blood streaming 
 from his throat might bathe the votary below. 
 It was esteemed a matter of great importance 
 that not a drop should be wasted, and the 
 subject of the rite used all his efforts to enjoy 
 the full benefits of the sacred blood. The 
 ceremony was a long and costly one, attended 
 by great crowds, with the magistrate at their 
 head, and the man who had enjoyed such a 
 blessing left the record of it on stone, often 
 concluding with the striking phrase, ' In 
 aeternum renatus.' ^ This supposed new birth 
 to eternal life through the cleansing rites of 
 the Taurobolium seems to have been the 
 acting motive of those who offered oblations 
 of blood at the burying-places of the dead. 
 
 1 Dill, p. Sz f.
 
 8^0 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 A singular mode of cist burial was in existence 
 both in Ireland and Scotland to within com- 
 paratively modern times. In many places 
 there was a parish coffin, which was used for 
 all those who were to be buried, and in which 
 the corpse was borne to its last resting-place. 
 When it arrived there the body was taken out 
 of the coffin, and interred in a cist prepared 
 in the manner I have described as in use for 
 those who received blood baptism in the 
 days of the sun symbol. Could this have 
 been a ray of sun worship from those far-off 
 days ? Blood baptism seems to have been 
 in use not only for the living, but for 
 the dead. Professor Ridgeway gives us a 
 graphic description of it. He says : 
 
 The old chief within his grave now thinks of 
 his family and his people, and if they in their 
 turn think of him, and nourish his spirit with 
 offerings, and keep his vital element strengthened 
 with libations of freshly shed blood, then will he 
 keep them in the hour of peril, and he will use his 
 influence with the earth beneath to make her yield 
 her increase and to make fruitful the herds and 
 flocks and women of his tribe. ^ 
 
 In offerings at the grave of a notable, no fire 
 was employed, for the blood (or pelanos) was 
 
 1 W. Ridgeway, Origin of Tragedy, 1910, p. 30.
 
 2 SUN AND FIRE SYMBOLS g. 
 
 poured into a bothros or hole beside the 
 grave, or even, as at Tronis, through an 
 aperture reaching right down to the dead 
 in side. 1 We gather from the same source 
 that the offerings in kind presented at this 
 time were of barley meal, honey, and oil — 
 an offering, as we would describe it, of the 
 first-fruits. But eventually all offerings to 
 God were burned that the essence might 
 ascend to heaven. This offering of barley 
 meal and oil, usually made into cakes, will 
 help us to understand the offerings that were 
 made to God in rock basins before hero and 
 ancestor worship had superseded the worship 
 of God, and also the shew-bread in the 
 temple. Several pierced stones having the 
 bothros (hole), which may at one time have 
 been placed over pre-Christian graves, have 
 been sketched and measured. When con- 
 sidering this subject we must not forget the 
 orientation of churches and prehistoric erec- 
 tions, which may be considered as inspired 
 by reverence for the rising sun as a living 
 symbol of Him who enlightens our darkness, 
 the Sun of Righteousness. 
 
 1 Ridgeway, p. 38.
 
 8^ 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 
 
 When colonists from foreign countries first 
 landed on our coasts and sought to make a 
 home for themselves in this island, the first 
 of their wants that had to be supplied was 
 food, and when that was supplied a scarcely 
 less pressing want was shelter from the ele- 
 ments. Ireland is essentially a country where 
 shelter from the elements is needed, and wet 
 as it is now, the climate was probably even 
 more humid then ; for the face of the country 
 was covered by vast forests, the presence of 
 which would increase the rainfall. 
 
 The new colonists would first of all seek 
 out the shelters which nature has provided, 
 natural caves from which they were in the 
 first instance obliged to expel the wild beasts 
 who would assert their prior right of possession. 
 
 These inhabited caves have supplied us with 
 
 92
 
 PKJEHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 93 
 
 some most interesting specimens of the im- 
 plements then in use, rude and primitive 
 as they were, and of the first dawn of the 
 artistip idea, in the rough and yet truthful 
 sketches of then existing animals. The caves 
 which come most prominently before my mind 
 are those of Ballinamintra and others in that 
 neighbourhood in the County Waterford. 
 From these caves were procured objects of 
 stone, bronze and jet, flint scrapers, rings 
 of slate, stone beads, whetstones, fragments 
 of jet, amulets, objects of stone, worked 
 articles of bone and horn, such as piercers, 
 scoops, beads, whorls, a bronze pin and a 
 gilt-bronze clasp, very numerous objects of 
 iron, such as a small curved knife, blades 
 thick at the back, pins, buckles, spear heads, 
 and a saw, the boss of a shield, a plough- 
 share, a stone hatchet, and many other 
 articles, all showing that these caves had been 
 inhabited for centuries. As a matter of fact, 
 there are caves used as dwelling-places in 
 Europe and Asia up to the present hour. The 
 late Theodore Bent, the well-known traveller, 
 in his very interesting account of his and 
 Mrs. Bent's exploration of the frankincense
 
 94 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 country, Southern Arabia, published in the 
 Geographical Journal for August 1895, gives 
 on p. 14 a description of these earth-dweUings 
 belonging to the Gara tribe. He says : 
 
 We constantly come across their homesteads, 
 which consisted of deep caves in the hillside in 
 which the families and flocks lived together in happy 
 union. The calves and kids were penned in holes 
 in the rocks, the milk is churned in a skin attached 
 to a tripod and all their instruments are of the rudest 
 kind. 
 
 And in a note he tells us : 
 
 It is interesting to read in ' Periplus ' a descrip- 
 tion of this coast and of the high mountains behind 
 * where men dwell in holes.' 
 
 I would here wish to remark that the rudeness 
 of the construction of implements cannot be 
 taken as a proof of the antiquity of the 
 people who used them. That a people should 
 use stone implements does not seem to me to 
 prove anything except that they had not metal 
 within their reach. If a colony of people of 
 our time were cast on a desert island where 
 they had flint and had no metal, they would 
 think themselves fortunate if they were able 
 to construct implements out of the flint. I
 
 PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 95 
 
 know of an instance where a gentleman saw 
 a stone axe in actual use in an island off our 
 own coast. We generally associate caves with 
 the s^gashore, where they have been formed 
 by the washing of the waves; but there are 
 numerous caves to be found inland, par- 
 ticularly in limestone districts, and these Co. 
 Waterford caves are in the limestone rock 
 many miles from the sea, and entered from 
 limestone knolls which crop up from the sur- 
 face. The oldest of the objects found are 
 undoubtedly those of bone. I was present 
 when the gentleman who excavated these 
 caves was exhibiting his finds, and among 
 them he exhibited two chicken bones which 
 had been formed into delicately constructed 
 little scoops, such as we sometimes see in 
 silver. These bone scoops may have been for 
 the purpose of extracting the marrow from 
 bones, and at all events must have been of 
 fabulous antiquity, and were of great interest 
 to me. 
 
 As illustrating the varied points of view 
 from which different people see the same thing, 
 I may mention that a very cultivated lady 
 who was also present turned to me and said :
 
 96 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 ' Really, Mr. ffrench, I do take an interest in 
 these things, but I have not been educated 
 up to chicken bones yet.' 
 
 Next in order to the natural caves as 
 dwellings, I think we may place the artificial 
 caves, which are even yet very numerous in 
 Ireland. These earth-houses are of two 
 classes, one of which we may call regular 
 residences and occasional hiding-places, and 
 the other class seem to have been used both 
 as hidden storehouses for corn and valuables 
 and as occasional places of refuge for their 
 owners. The Irish name for these stores in 
 the earth is the 'hole of plenty'; and that, I 
 think, affords us a graphic description of the 
 uses to which they were often applied. Some 
 of these earth-houses could have been held 
 by a few determined men against an army, 
 so skilfully were they fortified. The way in 
 which these places were made seems to have 
 been this. A deep trench or passage was dug, 
 widening out at one end into a chamber. 
 These sides were lined with walls of unhewn 
 and unmortared stone ; and the roof was formed 
 by gradually approaching the upper tiers of 
 the walls together until they almost met,
 
 PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 97 
 
 when large slabs, placed above them, com- 
 pleted the whole. In some cases there was 
 only a narrow passage, the walls rose up 
 perpendicularly, and the roof was made by 
 placing broad slabs horizontally across. At 
 other times a row of tall upright stones was 
 placed on either side of the passage, and these 
 inclined together at the top, so as to render 
 any superimposed flagstones almost or alto- 
 gether unnecessary. But where the gallery 
 widened into the chamber, which was always 
 circular, such methods as the two last indi- 
 cated could not be followed, and the onlv 
 available plan left to those primitive builders 
 was to bring the opposite sides gradually 
 together, so as to form a beehive-shaped 
 room covered b}^ a kind of irregular arch 
 called the ' Cyclopean Arch.' 
 
 The appearance of these earth-houses 
 overground, when they could be discerned 
 at all, was that of slight green eminences ; 
 and so well hidden were they that it was 
 necessary to have a secret sign by which the}^ 
 might be discovered by the initiated. One 
 of these signs we learn from a tenth-century 
 Saga was a withered sapling, which, when 
 
 H
 
 98 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 pulled up by the roots, disclosed the entrance 
 to the hidden dwelling-place ; of course 
 there were skilfully devised and carefully 
 hidden arrangements for ventilation. Nor 
 were these earth-houses peculiar to Ireland. 
 Tacitus, in his description of the manners of 
 the Germans,! tells us : 
 
 Subterraneous caves, also, they are in the habit 
 of digging, which they cover over with dung, forming 
 in winter the double purpose of a retreat and a 
 granary for corn. By this process also a regular 
 temperature is preserved, and if on an invasion the 
 country shall be laid waste, they retreat into this 
 hidden fosse and escape through the ignorance or 
 the want of search of the invader. 
 
 In Ireland the inhabitants of the earth- 
 houses were not able to escape from the 
 so-called Danes, who had discovered the 
 symbols which told of the hidden dwelling- 
 places. These they plundered. We are also 
 told in the ' Annals ' : 
 
 Never was there a dun or diongna but it was 
 taken by that howling, furious, loathsome crew, and 
 plundered ; neither was there concealment under- 
 ground in Erin, for they slaughtered those who had 
 taken refuge in them ruthlessly. 
 
 ^ Germania, chap. xvi.
 
 PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 99 
 
 O'Curry tells us that in old Irish MSS. there 
 are a whole class of tales devoted to recounting 
 the adventures of those who lived in earth- 
 housgs or artificial caves. One of them is a 
 story relating to Cuglas, a Prince of Leinster, 
 in the first century, who one day, while hunt- 
 ing, disappeared into a cave called ever since 
 after him, Belach Conglais (now Baltinglass), 
 and was never heard of afterwards. One of 
 these earth-houses was explored during a 
 visit of the Royal Society of Antiquaries to 
 Killala Cathedral, having been discovered 
 when digging a grave. It so happened that 
 the entrance was made into the circular 
 chamber of the earth-house, which is six feet 
 in diameter, with a roof of the usual beehive 
 form. To this circular chamber large additions 
 were subsequently made, and the passage to 
 the earth-house became a whole series of 
 underground chambers rectangular in plan. 
 
 The most remarkable earth-house in Ire- 
 land, which was probably both a palace and 
 a tomb, is New Grange. It was not at all 
 unusual for a departed chieftain to be buried 
 in the house that he had lived in. This house 
 is described by Mr. George Coffey in the 
 
 H 2
 
 100 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 monograph that he has written on the 
 subject which was pubhshed by the Royal 
 Irish Academy. He tells us the mound or 
 tumulus itself consists of an enormous cairn 
 of loose stones heaped within a curb of great 
 stones 8 to lo feet long, laid on edge and 
 touching end to end, over which a thin cover- 
 ing of grass has grown. In plan the tumulus 
 is circular, and covers an area of about one 
 acre, or taking the circle of the standing stones 
 nearly two acres. The greatest diameter of 
 the mound measures 280 feet. Its present 
 height is 44 feet. The somewhat flattened 
 top, also found at Knowth, is not an unusual 
 feature in such structures. A retaining wall 
 or revetment of dry rubble some 5 or 6 feet 
 high is built immediately on the base stones 
 and is deserving of notice. It is, again, 
 
 hard to say whether this is an original feature. It 
 is difficult to believe that anyone should have taken 
 the trouble to build this wall at a later time. It is 
 not necessary for stabiUty, any more than at Dowth 
 and Knowth, and must have involved considerable 
 labour, and though an exceptional feature it may 
 be urged that the tumulus is exceptional in other 
 respects. On the other hand, this wall partakes of 
 the character of masonry ; it is microHthic as 
 distinguished from the general megalithic or rude
 
 PRpHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE loi 
 
 stone construction of the tumulus, and presumably 
 later. .- The absence of masonry in the construction 
 of the interior of the monument also tells against 
 the age^of the wall ; but against this we have the 
 fact ttwrt dry masonr}^ is found at the back of the 
 chambers of one of the cairns on the Loughcrew 
 Hills, in other respects of rude stone construction. 
 Moreover, in estimating the period to which sepul- 
 chral monuments of this class are to be ascribed, 
 we must not leave out of account the effects of 
 tradition and conservative feeling. It is not im- 
 probable that rude stone construction was felt to 
 be appropriate to, and emplo3'ed in the erection of, 
 tumuH, even after dry masonry was understood. 
 I find it hard to believe that the builders of New 
 Grange, who, as we shall see, were not devoid of 
 structural enterprise, and not without some skill in 
 the working of stone, as shown in the carefully wrought 
 stone basin in the centre of the chamber, were still 
 wholly within the Stone age. On the whole, taking into 
 consideration the architectural and other features 
 of the tumulus, on which I shall dwell later, which 
 tend to place it towards the close of the series of 
 that class of monuments in Ireland, it is possible, 
 although first impressions are against the wall, that 
 it is part of the original structure. 
 
 The entrance, it will be noticed, is clearly marked 
 by the curving inwards of the curb-stones. The 
 same feature is strongly marked in the larger cairns 
 on the Loughcrew Hills. We usually think of the 
 entrance of a tumulus as concealed when the chamber 
 was covered in. This is evident, from the manner
 
 102 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 in which it is marked by the curving inwards of the 
 curb-stones. 
 
 In the Christian Examiner of December 
 1853, p. 282, the following account of earth- 
 dwellers in the island of Omey, off the west 
 coast of Ireland, will be found : 
 
 This island — the name of which in Irish signifies 
 forlorn or desolate — is situated off the coast of 
 Sellema, in the County of Galway, about seven 
 miles from Clifden. It contains an area of three 
 hundred acres, with a population of two hundred, 
 whose sole subsistence consists in shellfish, sea- 
 weed, and potatoes. The waves of the broad 
 Atlantic dash against its rocky shore, and the roar 
 of the ocean billow reverberates along its beach ; 
 although, when the tide is out, it is easy of access, 
 not being more than a hundred yards from the 
 mainland. Nothing can be more wretched than the 
 temporal condition of its inhabitants. Their hats 
 are merely excavations in the sand, covered over 
 with sods and seaweed, and might, indeed, easily 
 escape the notice of a casual observer. I went into 
 one of them, which could not certainly have been 
 more than six feet in diameter, and five or six feet 
 in height. A small portion of dried grass for a bed, 
 a pot for boiling seaweed collected on the shore, and 
 a few potatoes, was all that appeared in this miser- 
 able hovel, the entrance to which answered the 
 purpose of a window, a chimney, and a door. 
 
 A Co. Mayo Resident Magistrate recently
 
 PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 103 
 
 told a relative of mine that cave-dwellers 
 frequently come before his Court. They seem 
 to be a strange wild people, and do not speak 
 one word of English ; consequently, they 
 always bring an interpreter with them. The 
 disputes they bring before him are nearly 
 always about the ownership of cattle. 
 
 History tells us that this country of ours 
 received three successive great colonies, or 
 was under the dominion of three successive 
 tribes who all seem to have spoken the same 
 language, and were all probably Celts. These, 
 each in their turn, ruled over the land. First 
 came the Firbolgs, a small swarthy dark race ; 
 then the Dananns, a large, fair, light-haired 
 people ; and lastly, the Milesians. 
 
 The Firbolgs formed as it were the founda- 
 tion stones on which the Irish nation is 
 built. They were the people who used the 
 stone implements which are to be found all 
 over the land, and the use of which has sur- 
 vived in some rare instances even to the 
 present time ; but they were not allowed an 
 undisputed predominance. For a superior 
 nation of the same race, and speaking the 
 same language, arrived to dispute with them
 
 104 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 their pre-eminence. Tradition, which in this 
 country never dies, has at all times connected 
 the land we live in with Greece, one of 
 the most cultured, learned, and bravest of 
 ancient nations ; and it was probably through 
 Greece the next great Celtic wave came before 
 it broke upon our rocky shores. The Tuatha 
 DeDanann ('people of the god of skill') were 
 a very remarkable race, and bore with them 
 to us a higher civilisation than had yet 
 reached us. They were warlike, energetic, 
 progressive, skilled in metal work, musical, 
 poetical, acquainted with the healing art, 
 skilled in Druidism, and believed by their 
 ignorant neighbours to be adepts in necro- 
 mancy and magic. 
 
 It is against the general and universally re- 
 ceived creed of the human race to confess ignor- 
 ance. If anyone knows anything that those 
 about him do not know, the way to account for 
 it is to say that they are not right, they have 
 dealings with the evil one. As for the 
 Tuatha De Danann, their reputation as nec- 
 romancers never left them. When they had 
 landed, they burned their boats, marched 
 into the country hidden by a favouring mist,
 
 PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 105 
 
 and took the Firboigs by surprise (this mist 
 the Firboigs thought to be a magic fog) ; but 
 it was. not the right thing in those days to 
 take^an enemy by surprise — you should give 
 him notice, and not come on until he was 
 ready. Now the Firboigs were not ready, so 
 the Danann had to wait until they were ready, 
 and during the interval the two armies 
 agreed on a game of skill and manly prowess ; 
 twenty-seven youths from each army engaged 
 in a game of hurling, now called hockey, on a 
 plain which is called to this day ' The Plain 
 of the Hurlers.' The game ended in the 
 defeat and death of the twenty-seven Danann, 
 over whom a great cairn or monument of heaped 
 stones was erected, called, in the MS. 'Account 
 of the Battle of Moytura,' The Monument of 
 the Game. This mound exists to the present 
 day. On June 11, in the Year of the World 
 3303, the battle of Moytura is said to have 
 commenced ; 100,000 men were said to have 
 been engaged in it. It lasted four days, and 
 ended in the defeat of the Firboigs, over whom 
 the Danann obtained the mastery. It was 
 a regular hand-to-hand fight. There is one 
 incident worth recording. Before the second
 
 io6 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 day's fight, Eochy, King of the Firbolgs, went 
 in the morning to perform his ablutions down 
 to a well in a chasm in the limestone rock 
 deep under the surface. While there, he was 
 surprised by a party of Danann, and only 
 saved from death by the bravery and courage 
 of his companion, who slew the invaders, and 
 lost his life in saving the life of the King. 
 
 That well can easity be found, for it is the 
 only well in the valley, and close to it is ' the 
 cairn of the one man,' where the hero was 
 buried. This cairn was opened some years 
 ago and a beautiful little urn containing his 
 ashes taken from it. This urn is now in the 
 Museum of the Royal Irish Academy. There 
 can be little doubt that it was the Tuatha 
 De Danann who practised burial by cremation, 
 which custom they brought with them to 
 Ireland from the shores of the Mediterranean, 
 so that when you meet with one of the little 
 urns of red earth carefully closed up in a little 
 chamber built of dry stones, which are so 
 often met with all through Ireland, you need 
 have little doubt that they contain the ashes 
 of one of that weird old romantic race that 
 once held dominion over the land. Portions of
 
 PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 107 
 
 two of these urns which were found at Adams- 
 towri, in the County Wexford, are now in 
 my CQllection, and a beautiful specimen which 
 was^^iound at Captain Walker's of Tykillen 
 is now in the Museum of the Royal Irish 
 Academy in Dublin. One is also, I believe, 
 in the Museum of the College in Wexford. 
 Some years ago I stood on the grand old battle- 
 field of Moytura, and everywhere around me, 
 as far as the eye could see, there were the 
 monuments of the mighty dead who had 
 fallen in that great prehistoric battle. The 
 cromlechs, the pillar stones, the sepulchral 
 mounds were all around in rich profusion. 
 I would advise anyone who wishes to study 
 the methods and forms of prehistoric 
 burial, and particularly cromlech burial, to 
 visit the battlefields of Upper and Lower 
 Moytura. But the Tuatha De Danann had, 
 in their turn, to submit to less civilised and, 
 at the same time, stronger-handed foes ; 
 men who were better soldiers and worse 
 scholars, the brave and chivalrous Milesians. 
 This Celtic wave is said to have reached us 
 from the coast of Spain, and from them some 
 of the best families in Ireland, particularly
 
 io8 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 those whose names begin with an ' O ' or a 
 
 ' Mac,' are said to derive. True to the old 
 
 chivahous spirit, when they heard that the 
 
 Tuatha De Dananns were not ready to fight, 
 
 they returned to their ships to give them time, 
 
 and by doing so encountered a storm which 
 
 nearly put an end to that invasion of Ireland ; 
 
 but eventually they deposed the last of the 
 
 Danann Kings, and ruled over the land. 
 
 MacFirbis thus described them : 
 
 Everyone who is white of skin, brown of hair, 
 bold, honourable, daring, prosperous, bountiful in 
 the bestowal of property, and who is not afraid 
 of battle or combat, they are the descendants 
 of the Sons of Milesius in Erin. 
 
 But the Tuatha De Danann, although 
 conquered, would not submit, nor mingle with 
 their conquerors. These tall, flaxen-haired 
 men, with melancholy blue eyes, were con- 
 quered, but they would not submit to a tribe, 
 who, although stronger of arm and mightier 
 in valour, were inferior in culture at that 
 period of history. They withdrew into the 
 depths of the forests, that, at the time in 
 which they lived, covered so large a portion 
 of the country. They went down beneath 
 the surface and lived in their skilfully
 
 PgEHlSTORIC ARCHITECTURE 109 
 
 constructed earth-houses from which they 
 probably seldom issued, except at night. 
 
 The Milesians looked on them first as 
 gods,, and then as fairies. The prevalent 
 idea was that they lived in splendid palaces 
 in the interior of the Green Hills. These 
 hills were called ' Sidh,' pronounced Shee, 
 and the Danann were called ' Daoine Sidhe,' 
 pronounced Deena Shee, ' the people of the 
 fairy hills.' And doubtless it was no mere 
 fancy, it was absolute fact, that often, during 
 their residence in earth-houses, music might 
 have been heard issuing from the 'green hills/ 
 and men and women might have been seen 
 dancing around them in the moonlight. 
 Here, then, you have the actual facts on which 
 the fairy-tales of Ireland were founded as 
 well as much of the borrowed legendary lore 
 of England. 
 
 In course of time the Danann became 
 absolutely extinct. At the present day many 
 ancient Celtic families claim to be descended 
 from the Firbolgs, but. not one family in the 
 country claims to be descended from the 
 Danann. Yet this romantic race did not 
 pass away without leaving an impress on the
 
 no PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 country. Sir William Wilde held that from 
 them was derived all that superior skill in 
 the smelting of metals and the manufacture 
 of tools and implements that is so much to 
 be admired in those relics which have come 
 down to us to the present day. Among them 
 are to be found swords as perfect in their 
 Grecian outline as if they had just left the 
 hands of the heroes of ancient Greece. Sir 
 William Wilde tells us that some of them are 
 of pure Grecian type. From them also came 
 the dawning of the architectural idea in 
 Ireland ; they were our first builders, and the 
 Pelasgic and Etruscan tumuli were repeated 
 by them with but slight Variation in the 
 mounds at New Grange and Dowth. It has 
 been suggested that those two notable monu- 
 ments of the building skill of the Danann 
 were first used as earth-houses, and afterwards 
 as the tombs of their royal owners. To them 
 Wilde ascribes the construction of the duns, 
 cashels, and caves all through Ireland, and 
 so great was the impression that their power 
 of construction made on the inhabitants of 
 this country that popular parlance has made 
 them the builders of all the ancient forts in
 
 PI^EHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE iii 
 
 the land. Every rath is called a Danish fort 
 which is a Danann fort, just in the same way 
 as every piece of demolished stonework and 
 every ruined church and tower and hall is said 
 to be the work of Oliver Cromwell. There is 
 no such word as ' Dane ' in the Irish language. 
 The Scandinavian rovers that we call 
 Danes were called by the ancient Irish either 
 ' black strangers ' or ' white strangers/ and 
 strange to say, at the battle of Clontarf, they 
 are called ' green strangers,' but never Danes. 
 It is the Danann forts that we have corrupted 
 into ' Danes' Forts.' We may take New Grange 
 as a specimen of Danann building for one 
 reason if there was no other, and that reason 
 is that there is hardly any doubt that it is 
 the workmanship of the Danann. The usual 
 earth-houses were intended to be hidden, yet 
 were more or less built in the same way, and 
 down in these underground houses the ancient 
 earth-dwellers lived and worked at their 
 trades as manufacturers of the metals. And 
 we learn much about them from the Northern 
 Sagas that tell of their being plundered by 
 the old sea rovers. Among them we read of 
 the sword which Thorgils wore ever after he
 
 112 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 had obtained it as part of the booty he got 
 in an Irish earth-house. Another story tells 
 us of a knight who entered an earth-house and 
 found a party of smiths at work inside. Some 
 time or other we will probably know much more 
 of this underground life, for there still remains 
 (O' Curry tells us) untranslated a whole section 
 of Irish tales relating to adventures in caves. 
 
 But let us return to the surface. When 
 we went underground, we left our first builders 
 living in natural caves and building artificial 
 ones, but we did not speak of their houses in 
 the open, which must have been quickly 
 constructed, and which were usually, for 
 purposes of defence, erected on natural 
 islands, or perhaps, still oftener, on artificial 
 islands which could be easily isolated from 
 the mainland. These we call crannogs. A 
 description of these crannogs does not come 
 within the scope of this chapter, but a descrip- 
 tion of the wattled houses does, which were 
 undoubtedly the first residences overground. 
 
 The ancient Irish houses were of two forms, 
 one a long quadrilateral ^ building, built of 
 
 1 See the banqueting hall at Tara, the outhne of 
 which is quadrilateral.
 
 PB£HISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 113 
 
 felled trees and covered with thatch. The 
 other,' circular houses made of wicker-work, 
 and having cup-shaped roofs and circular- 
 head)^ doorways. The vast majority of the 
 early Irish houses were circular and made of 
 wattle-work, plastered and then whitewashed, 
 and as long as they lasted they were very 
 comfortable. Wattle-work walls were to be 
 found in Ireland all through the centuries, 
 and came down from the dawn of history, and 
 the earliest settlements of our race, to a period 
 well within my own recollection. In my 
 young days plastered wattle-work was often 
 to be seen in the partition walls of farm build- 
 ings, and I feel quite sure that some of the 
 old hooded chimneys are to be found, even 
 now, where wattle-work is still used. I know 
 that they existed in several of my workmen's 
 cottages. A respectable residence in those 
 old days consisted of a group of these circular 
 chambers separated one from the other, 
 devoted to different objects, and treated 
 as we treat the different rooms in the same 
 house now. The bedrooms were recesses 
 separated by pillars and curtains from 
 the sitting-room ; each couch had its head
 
 114 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 to the wall and the foot directed to the 
 fire, which was always in the centre of 
 the room ; beneath the foot of each bed there 
 was a long footstool extending the whole 
 width of the bed, called the foot-bank, on 
 which people sitting on the foot of the couch 
 rested their feet. In addition to the hving 
 house there was the back-house or kitchen — 
 the women's house— the weaving-house, the 
 barn, the granary, the sheds, and the cellars, 
 all wicker-work. Now wattle-work is very 
 perishable ; yet, strange to say, the ruins of a 
 wattle-work city of those old, old days remain 
 down to our own times ; but to find it we must 
 go across the Channel and seek for the remains 
 of the ancient Britons, who, hke the Irish, 
 were Celts, and whose civilisation and culture 
 were almost identical with ours. There we 
 seek out Glastonbury, and not far from the 
 Glastonbury of to-day we find the Glaston- 
 bury of the past, where the first Christians 
 erected a church of wattle-work, a church 
 which survived the violent changes that swept 
 over the land when heathen Angles and Saxons 
 conquered it with fire and sword, and drove 
 the Christian Britons to take refuge in the
 
 PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 115 
 
 fastnesses of tlie Welsli mountains : a church 
 which survived when the Enghsh (hke the 
 Irishj^were conquered by the Normans, until 
 at last it was burned by an accident. Mr. 
 Freeman is willing to accept it as a fact that 
 Glastonbury was the one place outside the 
 fastnesses of the Britons where Christian 
 worship was never interrupted. In the low 
 ground now occupying the place of the im- 
 penetrable marshes which gave the name of 
 the Isle of Acalan to the higher ground, the 
 eye of a local antiquary had long noticed a 
 mass of dome-shaped hillocks clustered to- 
 gether, about seventy in number. Not so 
 long ago excavations were made, and these 
 hillocks proved to be the remains of the houses 
 of the old British Celts, who were so closely 
 connected with Ireland that Cormac in his 
 'Glossary' calls it 'Glastonbury of the Irish.' 
 It was a true Irish city, built on crannogs, or 
 ground made solid in the midst of the water, 
 with causeways for approach from the land. 
 The faces of the island and the sides of the 
 causeways were found to be riveted with 
 wattle-work, strong and well made, which was 
 preserved by the peat that had gathered 
 
 I 2
 
 ii6 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 around it ; and the wattles, when first un- 
 covered, were as good to all appearance as the 
 day they were made. The houses were all oval 
 or circular ; one of them covers 450 square feet, 
 and a larger one still remains to be opened. 
 All had a circular area of white stones in the 
 middle for a hearth, and all had been destroyed 
 by fire ; but the fire that burned the wattle- 
 work had baked the clay mortar with which 
 they were covered so that every line of the 
 wattle-work could be distinguished in it; just 
 as you can see, in the old crypt in Waterford 
 Cathedral, the impress of the wattle-work 
 which the old Danish builders used as scaffold- 
 ing on which to erect the crypt, and the wattle- 
 work impressed in the mortar used as centring 
 by the old Norman builders who erected 
 Kilkenny Castle. Let us bear in mind that 
 they did not use wattles because they were 
 unacquainted with the use of timber ; for in 
 other parts of this old Celtic fortress carpenter- 
 work of extreme neatness of fit and finish 
 is found in use. In the MS. Register of 
 Lanercost Priory mention is made of a 
 chapel of wattle-work at Triermain, in which 
 Divine Service was celebrated by consent of
 
 PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 117 
 
 Egelw-in, the last Anglo-Saxon Bishop of 
 Durham. 
 
 When King Henry II spent a Christmas 
 in Dublin, he could not find a hall there 
 large enough to entertain the Irish lords 
 and princes, so he had a great hall made of 
 wattle-work, after the fashion of the country, 
 in which to entertain them, which Hovenden 
 calls a ' royal palace, constructed for the occa- 
 sion, with wonderful skill, of peeled osiers.' 
 These wattle-houses were, when in the posses- 
 sion of princes and wealthy owners, most 
 richly adorned, bronze and gold and silver 
 being freely used. The fronts of the recesses 
 in which the couches were placed were orna- 
 mented with carved yew ; they had cano- 
 pies, and pillars of silver and bronze in use. 
 The walls at the back of the recesses were 
 fully wainscoted, but sometimes they were 
 only covered with hangings or curtains made 
 of matting or woollen stuff. In fact the 
 fitting up of the inside of the dwelling-room 
 depended on the wealth of the owners. Such, 
 then, were the earliest houses ; and the 
 clochauns, or beehive-shaped stone houses, 
 which exist in considerable numbers in the
 
 ii8 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 West of Ireland, seem to me to be simply the 
 wattle-house, as it were, turned into stone ; or 
 I might call them a stone version of wattle- 
 houses made where wood was scarce, which 
 is eminently the case in the West. Stone forts 
 of uncemented masonry, some of them most 
 beautifully constructed, are principally to be 
 found in Kerry, Clare, Galway, and Sligo ; 
 but they are also found elsewhere. There 
 is one of ruder workmanship not far from my 
 old residence in the County Carlow. Twenty- 
 four of these buildings were examined by Lord 
 Dunraven on the west coast of Ireland, built 
 without mortar of any kind ; they are raised 
 in such compact and close-fitting masses 
 that they have been enabled to endure the 
 wind and rain of many centuries. Their 
 walls (usually of twenty feet in height and 
 eighteen feet in thickness) are really three 
 walls compacted together and faced in dry 
 walling. The doorways of these forts are 
 all formed with inclining sides and horizontal 
 lintels, such as we invariably see in the very 
 early Christian churches. In some of them 
 we find provision made for furnishing them 
 with double doors, which were secured with
 
 PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 119 
 
 bars "of wood shot into the stonework. Plat- 
 forms and offsets ran along the inner sides of 
 the 'walls, access to which was obtained by 
 flights of stone steps, from four to ten of 
 which were sometimes found in the same 
 bdilding. Passages and dome-roofed cham- 
 bers occur in the thickness of the walls ; and 
 in the inner area little round huts with conical 
 roofs, or long huts like upturned boats, are 
 found constructed in clusters. These domes 
 are formed by the projection of one stone 
 above the other until the aperture is so nar- 
 rowed that it can be closed by one flag at the 
 top. The oldest church in this island is 
 shaped just like an upturned boat, and is 
 known as the Oratory of Gallarus. Many 
 of these structures are attributed to the 
 Firbolgs race. We find a reference to these 
 boat-shaped buildings in Sallust, who, in his 
 ' History of the War of Jugurtha,' tells us : 
 
 The Persians were nearest to the sea, and they 
 used their boats turned upside down as dwellings ; 
 because they found no timber growing in the 
 country and could procure none from the Spaniards. 
 By degrees they, by intermarriages, mixed with the 
 Getulians ; and because they were often shifting 
 about from place to place, to try the goodness of
 
 120 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 the soil, they called themselves Numidians. To 
 this day the cottages of the Numidians, which they 
 call naupalia, are of an oblong form, with the 
 sides bending out like the hulls of ships. ^ 
 
 In the overlapping or cyclopean arch, 
 and in the doorways with inclining sides, we 
 pick up again a link that unites our old colon- 
 ists with their old home on the shores of the 
 Mediterranean. Just as our metal work points 
 to Greece, so in like manner, if we desire to 
 find the prototypes of our early masonry, we 
 must go back to the ancient races who in- 
 habited Greece and Italy before Hellenic and 
 Latin nations existed. Just as the Pelasgic 
 and Etruscan sepulchral tumuli are repeated 
 with but slight variation in our own tumuli at 
 New Grange and Dowth, so do we find, in 
 the architectural remains of the Pelasgic and 
 Etruscan peoples, doorways shaped exactly 
 like those in our prehistoric forts. I now 
 quote from a paper that I wrote on this 
 subject in the New Ireland Review.^ 
 
 The language of the Pelasgi has perished ; 
 the remnants or fragments of their history are 
 few and unsatisfactory. But the testimony of 
 
 1 Jtigurihine War, ch?.p. xviii. 
 
 3 New Ireland Review, vol. iii. No. 2, March 1895, p. 14.
 
 PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 121 
 
 their- architecture is clear and distinct, and 
 from that, I think, we can learn the secret of 
 the iiiclining jamb. Nowadays we would con- 
 sider a doorway that was narrower at the top 
 than at the bottom a most unsatisfactory 
 arrangement, and we should not like to have 
 to fit a door in it. We must remember, 
 however, what the force of custom is, and if 
 our forefathers always constructed doorways 
 in this manner we v/ould find it difficult 
 to persuade ourselves that it should be 
 done otherwise. I have in my collection 
 of architectural sketches two doorways 
 which were probably erected 800 or 1,000 
 years before the birth of Christ, and from 
 them we learn how the inclining jamb origi- 
 nated. The idea which seems to have been 
 in the mind of the first builder was to copy 
 the door of a tent. Is it not just the kind of 
 design that we might expect would suggest 
 itself to a migratory people when first begin- 
 ning to settle down, and to find out that 
 substantial dwelling-places were necessary ? 
 The next stage in the construction of a door- 
 way shows us that those ancient builders 
 inserted a lintel at a certain height and made
 
 122 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 the jambs more perpendicular below and 
 more sloping above ; the second sketch (which 
 has been copied from the * Gate of Lions ' at 
 Mycenae) shows further progress. But even 
 there, although the jambs are single stones, 
 they incline, and an effort has been made to 
 preserve the old shape above the lintel, so that 
 its ancient tent-like character may be kept. 
 Our third engraving shows the fully developed 
 and inclined Celtic jamb. 
 
 The traditional connexion of our country 
 with Greece has lasted through the centuries, 
 and was referred to by the celebrated Florence 
 McCarthy in a letter which he wrote in the 
 time of Queen Elizabeth, and in which he says : 
 
 For all our ancient books and writers do conclude 
 that these three kingdoms were first peopled by 
 the colony that was brought out of Greece about 
 300 years after the universal flood. 
 
 In referring the origin of our architecture 
 back to the shores of the Mediterranean, I feel 
 supported by an expression of opinion given by 
 that eminent authority Fergusson, who says : 
 
 We must not look for the origin of her archi- 
 tectural styles, either in England or in France, but to 
 some more remote locality, whose antiquities have
 
 -^
 
 DOORWAY AT MISSOLONGHI. 
 From Fergusson's ' Handbook of Architecture.' 
 
 THE GATE OF LIONS, MYCEN^. 
 From Fergusson's ' Handbook of Architecture.' 
 
 TO ILLUSTRATE THK DEVELOPMENT
 
 
 k , 
 
 -t.^ 
 
 **!»•. 
 
 **:. 
 
 
 
 DOORWAY OF AN EARLY CELTIC CHURCH, SHOWING THE 
 INCLINED JAMBS. 
 
 From a photograph, taken by Lord Walter FitzGcrald in 1897, of the west doorway 
 of the Clonamcry Church ruins, Co. Kilkenny. 
 
 THE INCLINED JAMB.
 
 **'
 
 SILVER BROOCH ( TARA TYPE) 
 From Xorth Africa.
 
 PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 123 
 
 not yet been so investigated as to enable us to point 
 it out as the source whence they were derived. 
 
 For general purposes of convenience we 
 may divide the peopling, of Ireland into 
 three periods, for which we adopt the names 
 established by tradition— the Firbolgs, the 
 Tuatha De Danann, and the Milesians. We 
 would suggest that the Danann reached our 
 shores from the Eastern birthplace of the 
 Celts (wherever that may be) through Greece ; 
 and this can be proved by their sepulchral 
 mounds, their architecture, and their weapons 
 of warfare ; we would further suggest that the 
 third wave of Celts came from the same 
 source along the north coast of Africa and up 
 through Spain, and possibly reached Brittany 
 in their wanderings on their way to Ireland. 
 We trace them on their journey by finding, 
 on their route along the north coast of Africa, 
 cromlechs of the same type as those so abund- 
 antly found in Ireland ; silver brooches of the 
 Tara Brooch type — one of which I have in 
 my collection, which was purchased for me off 
 the person of an Arab chief in Tunis by a 
 lady who is the wife of the British Consul
 
 124 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 there ; also bronze fibulae, of the same type as 
 the gold ones so well known in Ireland, which 
 a missionary told me are so well known in 
 some places that silver specimens are often 
 used as napkin rings by the whites. The 
 same missionary told me that bronze celts are 
 very well known in China, where they are 
 called 'thunderbolts,' and perhaps this may 
 help to point back to the Turanian origin of 
 the Firbolgs. The existence of the Tuatha 
 De Danann tribe has been called in question 
 on chronological grounds ; but have we any 
 data which will enable us to fix a chronological 
 plan or scheme for this period ? must it not 
 be pure guess-work ? As Professor MacNeill 
 says, the writer ' had in his mind the tradi- 
 tional or legendary epochs of Prehistoric 
 Ireland. These latter had no chronology, 
 no trace of a native Irish chronology has any- 
 where been found ' ; or, as Mr. Thomas Johnson 
 Westropp tells us, in his monograph on ' The 
 Types of the Ring-forts remaining in Eastern 
 Clare: Killaloe, its Royal Forts and their 
 History,' published by the Royal Irish 
 Academy, it is probable (as Professor Mac- 
 Neill has noted, and as I long ventured to
 
 ^ 
 
 ^ 
 
 BRONZE FIBULA ^ull SlZe) 
 From Xorth Africa.
 
 PREHISTORIC ARCHITECTURE 125 
 
 assert), that 'we have httle original matter 
 relating to the history of Co. Clare earlier 
 than the ninth century. Our detailed know- 
 ledge ''possibly begins with the collections 
 of the poet, Flann MacLonain, in the latter 
 half 01 that period.' 
 
 I venture to suggest that when the Irish 
 learned classes endeavoured to recover what 
 was left after the fearful ravages of the Norse 
 and Danes, they found probably lists of kings, 
 fragmentary genealogies, and certain old 
 accounts of heroes of outstanding import- 
 ance, which Sagas (early forerunners of the 
 * Wars of the Gaedhill ' and the ' Triumphs of 
 the Torlough ') gave only patches of light 
 in the gloom of the earlier centuries. The 
 tribal genealogists endeavoured to connect 
 the pedigrees of the chiefs with these, partly 
 by genuine descents ; partly by, wrongly or 
 rightly, embodying early lists ; partly, it may 
 be, by unfounded guess-work. Tribes recog- 
 nised as of equal standing and rights, or con- 
 scious of ancestral ties, gave a further clue, 
 and their rulers were traced to common 
 ancestors. Therefore, while believing that 
 some (perhaps much) truth lies in what has
 
 126 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 come down to us, I do not commit myself or 
 my readers to any belief in the full correctness 
 of the alleged pedigrees. If this be true of 
 Clare, there is no reason to suppose that it is 
 not equally true of all Ireland, and I think we 
 had better leave conjectural history out of 
 account as far as dates are concerned, and 
 satisfy ourselves as far as we are able with 
 those glimpses of truth that come to us 
 through the clouds and mists of ages, and 
 avail ourselves of the visible remains of 
 the architecture and art of those remote 
 and distant periods that rest on the horizon 
 of history. 
 
 Note. — Mr. E. S. Robertson, late B.C.S., tells me that he 
 considers that Tuatha De Danann means ' People of the 
 God of Skill,' but once the name is given in full he thinks 
 that ' Danann the skilful one ' may be used for shortness. 
 See page 104.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 clonegal: its valley and its battle 
 
 Clonegal is not only the name of a valley 
 and a parish/ but it is also the name of a 
 considerable village, that once was a fair- and 
 market-town, boasting its distillery, brewery, 
 tan-yards, and a notable market for the sale 
 of woollen stuffs. This village is built near 
 the head of the valley, and almost under the 
 shadow of Mount Leinster, which lifts up its 
 giant head through the blue haze in the back- 
 ground. Its broad street of comfortable 
 slated houses and neat shops, adorned with 
 a double row of forest trees that cast their 
 shadows over its pathways, extends down 
 the side of the hill until it meets the River 
 Derry, which is spanned by an ancient bridge, 
 and then it runs for a short distance up the 
 hill on the opposite side of the river. At 
 the head of the village, the towers of the 
 
 1 The parish is also known by the name of Moyaeomb. 
 
 127
 
 128 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 Protestant and Roman Catholic places of wor- 
 ship are visible through their surrounding 
 trees ; and at a short distance, the old grey 
 ivy-covered castle of the Esmonds (now the 
 residence of H. Robertson, Esq., M.P.) — a 
 most picturesque old castle with immensely 
 thick walls built of small stones. It has a 
 well in the vaults to provide against a siege, 
 and a strong iron gate between the double 
 doors of the entrance still remaining, all 
 reminding us of the time when massive walls 
 and battlemented towers and strong arms 
 within them were needed for the protection 
 of those of whom it has been said : 
 
 the good old rule 
 
 Sufficeth them : the simple plan 
 That they should take who have the power, 
 And they should keep who can. 
 
 Some hundreds of years ago there were two 
 other buildings, which must have added 
 greatly to the beauty of the scene. Not far 
 from the village at one side were the ruins 
 of the Augustinian Abbey, and at the opposite 
 side of the village there then existed the 
 Castle of Clonogan. Of the Augustinian 
 Abbey of Doune, or Abbey Down, but few
 
 ^1 
 
 
 
 ^^^nflp -*1 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 ^^^^H^^^^^* 
 
 
 J 
 
 Ih'~ 
 
 
 o 
 u 
 
 H 
 < 
 
 u 
 
 z 
 o 
 
 H 
 O 
 
 z 
 
 H 
 
 w
 
 CLONEGAL 129 
 
 vestiges are now to be met with. It is said 
 to have been founded by the Danes, who 
 perhaps at one time extended their dominion 
 inl-aiid from the coast as far as Clonegal, 
 and possibly it may be from them that the 
 valley derives its name of ' The Meadow of 
 the Gaul, or Stranger.' 
 
 In the older editions of ' Ware,' this ecclesi- 
 astical foundation was called Dun Abbey, 
 or the Abbey by the Dun ; and the outline 
 of the dun, or fort, under whose protecting 
 shadow the abbey was erected, is still plainly 
 visible. The few remaining cut stones have 
 been placed for preservation in the Rector's 
 lawn. One of them seems part of the groining 
 of an arch, and another was evidently the 
 centre stone, from which sprung the two 
 Romanesque openings of the east window of 
 the abbey. The other ecclesiastical remains 
 in the valley are but few. Two or three cut 
 stones are the only vestiges of the oratory of 
 Ard Britain (the height of the Britain), on 
 the townland of Orchard, where at one time 
 some ancient ecclesiastic from Wales devoted 
 himself to prayer. The church of Clonegal 
 is modern, but the site is most interesting. 
 
 K
 
 130 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 It was appropriated to sacred purposes so long 
 ago as the time of St. Patrick, and the original 
 church was built on a dun, or mound, which 
 formed the base of a small fortress, and was 
 surrounded by a deep moat enclosed by a 
 rath, evidently the gift of some ancient 
 chieftain, who had devoted his residence to 
 God. 
 
 This churchyard contains the stone socket 
 of an ancient Irish stone cross ; and in igo2, at 
 a depth of about ten feet below the present 
 surface, an ancient quern or hand corn-mill 
 (now in the vestry of the church) was found 
 on digging a grave. Possibly the very quern 
 used by St. Fiacc, the first Rector of the 
 Parish, who was set apart by St. Patrick to 
 be one of the first Bishops of the Irish Church. 
 The prehistoric and pre-Christian remains 
 in the valley are not numerous. On the side 
 of Newry Hill there is a pillar-stone, under 
 which probably the native Irish judge at one 
 time sat to hear cases, as a little beneath it 
 there is the remains of an ancient Irish 
 residence, still called Rath-na-Doran, and we 
 know that the Dorans were the Brehons, the 
 hereditary judges of Leinster.
 
 ■^ CLONEGAL 131 
 
 On the townland of Militia there is a 
 grave known as loh in a sigh, ' the stone of 
 the"fairy,' where doubtless one of that weird 
 rac^ who pass like a shadow across the pages 
 of Irish history was laid to rest — the Tuatha 
 De Dananns, who retreated before the more 
 muscular Milesians into the depths of the 
 forest, or into earth-houses, and who are 
 handed down to us as fairies living in the 
 ' green hills.' I once tried to excavate this 
 grave, and at considerable expense employed 
 two men to undertake the work. They worked 
 away under my supervision until the shades 
 of night compelled them to desist. I re- 
 turned the next morning to find the place all 
 filled in again. In the night two of the 
 neighbours who knew their fears howled at the 
 back of the house where they were sleeping, 
 until they frightened them to such a degree 
 that they were seen rushing from their house 
 in their night garments with shovels in their 
 hands, with which they quickly undid all 
 that I had got them to do the day before. 
 In the grounds of Huntington Castle there 
 is an interesting bullan, or rock-basin, 
 with which we must conclude our list of 
 
 K 2
 
 132 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 prehistoric remains. Now let us return to 
 Clonogan Castle. 
 
 Clonogan Castle, of which nothing now 
 remains but the site, was once a place of 
 considerable importance, and must have domi- 
 nated over the valley No doubt it was 
 originally a Kavanagh castle ; for, in a lease 
 of the Abbey of Doune, granted in 1567 to 
 that strange adventurer, Thomas Stuckley 
 (then Seneschal of the County Wexford), the 
 lands are styled the ' Lands of the Abbey of 
 Doune, in the O'Morrow's Country.' Con- 
 sequently, Clonogan Castle must have been 
 in the O'Morrow's country also, as it was not 
 far distant from the Abbey of Doune ; and 
 situated as it was in the midst of the Kavanagh 
 strongholds, it would have been impossible 
 for any sept but the Clan Kavanagh to have 
 held it. Yet the valley was not originally 
 theirs— it was the patrimony of the O' Neils of 
 Leinster. In ' a Deveyse for the reformatyon 
 of Laynster,' presented to the king in 1540, 
 this castle is called ' The Castell of Clonogan, 
 the Kinge's Castell,' so that it seems probable 
 that the Crown obliged the Kavanaghs to 
 give it up when taking from them the Castles
 
 ^ CLONEGAL 133 
 
 of Qohamon and ClonmuUen, which were 
 made royal castles, although the latter castle 
 — that of ClonmuUen — remained practically 
 in **the Kavanaghs' hands, as they were 
 appointed its hereditary constables. 
 
 -' Quiet and peaceful-looking as the valley 
 is now, it was not always so ; for at one time 
 the northern pass into Wexford was through 
 it. Poulmounty at one end of the Leinster 
 range, and the valley of Clonegal at the other, 
 formed the two passes from the north into the 
 County Wexford ; and consequently, in the 
 convulsions that followed the Insurrection 
 of 1641, it was the theatre of much military 
 activity ; and when Lord Ormond left 
 Dublin, in 1642, at the head of an army of 
 2,500 foot and 800 horse, with ' two brasse 
 culverines and four brasse field pieces,' for 
 the purpose of opposing the Confederates, he 
 rested his troops at Clonegal, and doubtless 
 felt more sure of a friendly reception there than 
 he would elsewhere, as it was situated on the 
 estate of Lord Esmond, the founder of Hunt- 
 ington Castle, an old and trusted military 
 commander, who was as strong a supporter 
 of the unfortunate King Charles I as he was
 
 134 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 himself, and who was at that very time 
 commanding the royal troops at Duncannon 
 Fort. This confidence seems to have led to 
 a certain amomit of carelessness on the part 
 of his following, who forgot that, whoever 
 might be the owner of Clonegal, they were in 
 the immediate neighbourhood of a strong 
 Confederate leader. Sir Morgan Kavanagh, 
 of Clonmullen (also known as Sir Murragh 
 MacMurragh), eighteenth in descent from 
 Dermott MacMurrough, King of Leinster, 
 and doubtless his scouts were in all the neigh- 
 bouring woods ; and when the head of Lord 
 Ormond's medical staff, ' Chiefe Chirurgeon 
 Mr. Coddell,' lagged behind, they pounced 
 on him, and carried him off, carriage and 
 horses, drugs, and all. Knowing, as we do 
 now, the ideas then in existence as to medical 
 treatment, we must say that they conferred an 
 unintentional benefit on the Royalist troops, 
 and, perhaps, materially aided in bringing 
 about the defeat of the Confederates ; for 
 certain it is, whether owing to the unwonted 
 supply of drugs, or from some other cause, 
 they were defeated, and Sir Morgan Kavanagh 
 lost his life at the battle of Ballinvegga shortly
 
 CLONEGAL 135 
 
 afterwards. But a very different visit from 
 the friendly one of Lord Ormond and his 
 arm^;was paid eight years after — in 1650 — 
 to the village of Clonegal. The military 
 usurper, Cromwell, who, in order to reform 
 the monarchy, cut off the king's head and 
 established a military despotism that recog- 
 nised no authority but his own ; who, in order 
 to reform the churches, turned out all the 
 Protestant clergy ; and who, as an old writer 
 quaintly says, beheaded the churches and 
 ' stripped them clean bare,' was about to 
 make himself felt there as he did to the re- 
 motest corners of the country. His troops, 
 under Colonels Reynolds and Hewson, having 
 taken Tullow Castle, which was then com- 
 manded by Colonel Butler, a detachment of 
 them marched from that to Clonegal, into the 
 very heart of the country held by the hill 
 tribes ; and there, tradition tells us, these 
 tribes made a last and desperate stand, a 
 brave but fruitless effort to withstand the 
 invader. Nothing seems to the writer of this 
 sketch more remarkable than the feebleness 
 of the opposition that was, as a general 
 rule, offered to Cromwell. It can only be
 
 136 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 compared to that offered to King Henry II 
 when engaged in a similar enterprise ; and, in 
 both instances, the ease with which the con- 
 querors took possession of the country may 
 be attributed to the same cause. 
 
 The inhabitants of Ireland were so deeply 
 engaged in their never-ending quarrels with 
 one another that they had no energies left to 
 devote to repelling an invader, and numbers 
 were longing for any strong hand which would 
 have power enough to give peace to the land. 
 Doubtless, also, many thought that Cromwell, 
 like others, would have been satisfied with an 
 empty conquest, and would have returned to 
 England, leaving things to go on much as 
 they did before. But, however the dwellers 
 in the valleys may have failed to realise the 
 situation, the Kavanaghs, the O'Byrnes, and 
 the O'Tooles of the hills seem to have fore- 
 seen what was coming, and determined to 
 make, at all events, a stand before the Crom- 
 wellian roller passed over them. For that 
 purpose they mustered in force in Clonegal. 
 Tradition does not tell us who commanded 
 them ; but, in all probability, it was Colonel 
 Daniel, or Donnell, Kavanagh, the last of
 
 CLONEGAL 137 
 
 the , chieftains of Clonmullen, who was called 
 after his grandfather, the well-known Donnell 
 SpatiTeach, and who himself, after the defeat, 
 escaped to Spain, and died unmarried there. 
 The traditional account of this forlorn hope 
 of the hill tribes, which is still green in the 
 memories of the older inhabitants, tells us 
 that the Cromwellian troops marched from 
 Tullow along the old road through Orchard (a 
 place where one of the last of the Bards, 
 ' Fleming,' once gathered his pupils around 
 him, and the site of whose residence is still 
 known as the ' Schoolhouse Field '), and, 
 passing from that over the hill of Monaugh- 
 rim, found the village of Clonegal lying at 
 their feet. The mountain men lay in am- 
 buscade behind the houses at either side of 
 the street, hoping to take the Cromwellians 
 by surprise, and to throw them into disorder ; 
 as soon as the advancing troops had passed 
 into the street, they rushed upon them. The 
 Cromwellians received them with perfect 
 coolness, and instantly formed so as to present 
 an unbroken front to the enemy as they 
 poured in at either side of the street, and then 
 opened on them, at close quarters, a deadly
 
 138 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 fire of musketry. The carnage was dreadful ; 
 and when the mountain men found that the 
 surprise was a failure, they fled ; discipline 
 prevailed against courage, as it has often 
 done before and since. The remains of one 
 division attempted to cross the Derry, but the 
 Cromwellian vanguard, which had previously 
 passed over the bridge, lined the banks, and 
 the Derry was soon ' red with blood and 
 choked with dead.' The remains of another 
 division fled to Kilcarry, which was then a 
 little village adjoining Clonegal. It was im- 
 mediately surrounded, and it is believed that 
 not one escaped ; and, doubtless, it was the 
 feeling of bitterness caused by this attempted 
 surprise that led the Cromwellians to treat 
 with such severity the Clonmullen sept, and 
 to so strongly garrison all the surrounding 
 castles. 
 
 They placed a garrison at Clonegal, doubt- 
 less in the Castle of Clonogan ; for we find, 
 three years after the battle of Clonegal, in 
 1653, Dudley Colclough, Esq., petitioned the 
 government for payment for the goods and 
 provisions made use of by the garrison at 
 Clonegal. They had also garrisons at Carnew
 
 ^ CLONEGAL 139 
 
 and,'-Clohamon, and ' other places in the 
 counties of Wicklow and Wexford.' There 
 can*'^e httle doubt that, if the hnes of the 
 Croniwelhans had been broken, the mountain 
 men would have exterminated them ; but the 
 long street of Clonegal was not a suitable 
 place, even for an attempted surprise. We 
 must suppose that the width of the street 
 was always much the same as it is at present, 
 and it was too wide to make the attempt to 
 throw the Croniwelhans into confusion likely 
 to be successful. There is room enough out- 
 side the houses for two pathways, two rows 
 of trees, and for troops to form, so that (unless 
 they were panic-stricken) the attempt was 
 likely to be a failure. Mr. Charles Topham 
 Bowden, an English officer, who visited 
 Clonegal one hundred years ago, has pre- 
 served in his ' Tour ' a mention of this local 
 tradition, which is substantially the same as 
 that already given, and he has also placed 
 on record a stanza of an old Irish song de- 
 scriptive of the battle, which was translated 
 into English for him by the Rev. Mr. M'Daniel, 
 who was at that time the Roman Catholic 
 curate of the parish :
 
 140 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 The sun of thy glory for ever is set, 
 
 Ill-fated Hibernia, in darkness profound ; 
 With the blood of thy heroes Kilcarry is wet, 
 
 Desolation and death roam at large all around. 
 The streams of old Derry which silver were called, 
 
 By the sweet bards of Orchard in happier days, 
 Are tainted with murders, and crimson'd with gore. 
 
 Choked up with carnage, and stopt in their ways. 
 
 You will observe that a hundred years ago 
 it was necessary to translate into English a 
 local song, as Irish was the language spoken ; 
 but in latter years not one word of Irish was 
 understood in the valley. I will illustrate 
 this by a story. My old coachman, who has 
 been thirty years in my service, was born and 
 reared in Clonegal. When the last census 
 was taken I asked Pat had he filled the paper. 
 ' Yes, sir,' he said. ' What language did you 
 say you spoke ? ' I asked. * Irish,' he said. 
 ' Why, man,' said I, ' you never heard a word of 
 Irish spoken. What do you think they speak 
 in England ? ' 'If, sir,' he said, ' they speak 
 like me, they speak Irish.' This was said with 
 such determination that I was obliged at 
 once to give in, and let it pass as a fact that 
 the whole English nation spoke Irish. 
 
 ' Desolation ' was indeed a very fitting 
 description to give to the patrimony of the
 
 CLONEGAL 141 
 
 Clonrnullen sept, for Cromwell seems to have 
 determined to take every precaution that 
 the^f^hould give him no further trouble, and 
 he tl'ansplanted the whole tribe, so that from 
 Newtonbarry to the Nine Stones, high up on 
 the side of Mount Leinster, not one farmer of 
 the name of Kavanagh remains to tell where 
 once that warlike sept was located ; the plough 
 passes over the green field where once the 
 strong castle of Clonmullen stood ; and 
 although the beautiful mountain valleys that 
 are to be found between Newtonbarry and 
 the Nine Stones are now inhabited by hardy, 
 thrifty, industrious farmers, the population 
 is of comparatively modern growth, and the 
 old men will tell you that their fathers and 
 grandfathers told them that, when they 
 settled there, the land had lain so long 
 desolate, that the furze bushes had grown 
 into forest trees, in which the magpies built 
 their nests. When the military despotism of 
 Cromwell had passed over, and the king got 
 his own again, there was not one of the Clon- 
 mullen Kavanaghs who could claim the 
 beautiful patrimony of their ancestors ; for, 
 as I have already mentioned, the last of the
 
 142 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 chieftains of Clonmullen died childless in a 
 foreign land, and the estates of the family 
 were granted to Arthur, Earl of Anglesey. 
 I have called those estates a beautiful patri- 
 mony, because it would be difficult to find a 
 much more picturesque and charming moun- 
 tain scene than that which can be enjoyed by 
 those who drive from the well-built, thriving, 
 and beautifully situated little town of New- 
 townbarry to the Nine Stones. The contrast 
 between the highly cultivated valleys and the 
 purple heath-covered mountains, on which 
 the lights and shadows are ever playing, 
 forms a lovely picture ; and when visitors 
 have arrived at the highest point to which 
 they can drive, the whole County Carlow, 
 and miles beyond, lies spread out in one vast 
 panorama before them. Mr. Bowden, of a 
 hundred years ago, was as much impressed 
 with the beauty of his surroundings and the 
 courtesy of the inhabitants as visitors are at 
 the present day ; and he seems, during his 
 very short visit, to have thoroughly enjoyed 
 himself. He stopped at the hotel of Leonard 
 Brown, a large house in the village, which 
 has been purchased within the last few years
 
 CLONEGAL 143 
 
 for a. clergyman's residence. Mr. Bowden 
 admired everything that his very short sojourn 
 enabled him to see, particularly the residences, 
 close to the village, of Mr. Durden of Hunt- 
 ington Castle, and Lieutenant Rowan of 
 Lower Kilcarry. He also admired the pretty 
 thatched cottage called Upper Kilcarry, 
 where, subsequently, Mr. Tighe (of the Wood- 
 stock family) and his wife, the gifted poetess 
 and author of ' Psyche,' lived. 1 
 
 1 Authorities quoted : — The State Papers ; ' Loca 
 Patriciana,' by the Rev. J. F. Shearman {Journal, Royal 
 Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 1874-1875) ; Bowden's 
 Tour ; Historical Collections, DubHn, 1758, &c.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 A VISIT TO CLONMACNOISE ^ 
 
 During a recent visit to Athlone, I found 
 myself in the neighbourhood of Clonmac- 
 noise, and, having taken a car from the 
 excellent Prince of Wales's Hotel, I speedily 
 was on my way to that most interesting pile 
 of ecclesiastical ruins. This celebrated group 
 of churches is situated on the banks of the 
 Shannon, and, like many of the old founda- 
 tions, it is placed in a secluded position, 
 having the broad waters of the Shannon on 
 one side, and a wide expanse of wild bog 
 between it and Athlone. Even in these days 
 of railways and telegraphs, its isolated posi- 
 tion seems to tell upon the peasantry, who 
 appear to be still in a very primitive state. 
 I saw many of them barefooted, and bearing 
 heavy loads of turf upon their backs, in baskets 
 
 1 From the Irish Builder, October i, 1890. 
 
 144
 
 jvii^vi 
 
 W 
 (/) 
 
 n 
 
 o 
 2: 
 
 u 
 <J 
 
 iz; 
 o 
 
 ^A 
 U 
 
 H 
 
 X 
 u 
 
 D 
 
 u 
 
 D 
 
 z 
 
 w 
 
 w 
 
 H
 
 -A VISIT TO CLONMACNOISE 145 
 
 made to be strapped between the shoulders. 
 My driver told me that it was not unusual 
 for the small land-holders, who did not 
 wisb^to employ a horse, to put the manure 
 on their fields in the same way, and that 
 they -were able to put out a very large 
 quantity in the day. This I could quite 
 credit, from the short, strong, square-built 
 type of men I saw — evidently the remains 
 of some primitive tribe, who had lingered on 
 in this retired spot — perhaps a remnant of 
 the old Firbolgs that had not been driven 
 away by the succession of conquering tribes 
 who swept over Ireland. A description of 
 the ecclesiastical ruins of Clonmacnoise 
 would be quite outside the scope of this 
 sketch. It will be sufficient to say that any 
 archaeologist who has not already visited this 
 place will find in its seven churches (contain- 
 ing so many beautiful Hiberno-Romanesque 
 architectural features), in its two round 
 towers, and in its numerous crosses, a rich 
 treat that can hardly be equalled elsewhere. 
 I cannot refrain from mentioning the beauti- 
 ful chancel arch of the Nuns' Church, which 
 lies at some distance eastward of the
 
 146 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 cemetery, and which alone repays a visit. This 
 church was erected, in 1167, by Dervorgille, 
 whose elopement with Dermot MacMurrough 
 led to the Norman invasion. It is curious 
 to see the flagged causeway which connected 
 this little church with the cemetery, in many 
 places still in a fair state of preservation ; 
 and the interested will also observe, worked 
 in among the carved work of the chancel 
 arch, one of those weird and hideous little 
 figures called sheela-na-gigs, which tell how 
 the conservative Celt still clung to old pagan 
 customs long after their meaning was for- 
 gotten. Another remnant of these old cus- 
 toms I observed within the cemetery itself. 
 On particularly sacred places, where the 
 worshippers still pray, I saw little groups of 
 pins and small objects. I asked the intelli- 
 gent caretaker what brought them there, and 
 he told me that they were left there by the 
 worshippers when they prayed. How strange 
 to see remnants of this old forgotten religion 
 lingering on late in the nineteenth century, 
 just as rags are still hung on thorns at holy 
 wells, and pins are dropped into the cavities 
 of cup-marked and holed stones — ^all telling
 
 A VISIT TO CLONMACNOISE 147 
 
 of theTong-forgotten worship of a far-distant 
 past ! In the cemetery itself we are indeed 
 walking on wliat from the earhest times was 
 esteemed holy ground. Clonmacnoise was 
 considered one of the most holy of the holy 
 places of Ireland — in fact, it ' occupied a 
 position only second to Armagh in popular 
 reverence.' Ware tells us that Clonmacnoise 
 was founded by St. Kiaran, who died and was 
 buried here in a.d. 549, ' in the flower of his 
 age, having lived only thirty- three years.' 
 He also tells us that St. Kevin attended his 
 funeral, and that St. Columba composed a 
 hymn in his praise. From that da}^ onwards 
 countless kings, nobles, and bishops have 
 been interred within the two Irish acres of 
 burial-ground that surround the Churches of 
 Clonmacnoise, and its monumental inscrip- 
 tions in the Irish language form the richest 
 and most varied collection of examples of 
 that kind to be met with in Ireland. Sir 
 James Ware, writing more than one hundred 
 and eighty years ago, tells us the cemetery 
 was ' famous for the sepulchres of the 
 nobility and bishops, and some monuments 
 
 and inscriptions, part in Irish and part in 
 
 L 2
 
 148 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 Hebrew.' Dr. Petrie valued these inscrip- 
 tions so highly that he copied upwards of 
 ' one hundred and seventy examples ' at 
 Clonmacnoise and in its neighbourhood ; and 
 these inscriptions were subsequently arranged 
 more or less in sequence, so as to form a 
 complete series ranging from the seventh down 
 to the twelfth century, showing the gradual 
 development and progress of sculpture and 
 style of lettering in Ireland, which may serve 
 as a key to the approximate date of such 
 works in other parts of the country, as well 
 as elsewhere in the British Islands. But, 
 sad to say, no cemetery in Ireland has 
 suffered more from the ruthless hand of the 
 destroyer than Clonmacnoise. Unfortunately 
 it was situated on that very highway of the 
 Danish invaders, the Shannon, and within 
 easy reach of their ships. It is needless to 
 say that they plundered and devastated 
 it ; but, more than that, they converted it 
 into a heathen sanctuary, and there ' Ota, 
 wife of Turgesius the Dane, was a Pythoness,' 
 and from the altar of the great Church of 
 Clonmacnoise, 
 amid foul and bloody pagan rites, amid the shrieks
 
 ■ -^ VISIT TO CLONMACNOISE 149 
 
 of butchered victims and the smoke of human 
 sacrifices, the wild pagan priestess dehvered her 
 oraculax responses.^ 
 
 Arid yet we have most interesting and in- 
 valuable monumental memorials of the dead, 
 whicli, while they passed comparatively un- 
 harmed through that fearful ordeal, were from 
 pure thoughtlessness in danger of being 
 destroyed in this Christian and civilised 
 nineteenth century. In fact, so fast were the 
 monumental memorials of the dead disappear- 
 ing from the cemetery of Clonmacnoise, that 
 the caretakers of the churchyard felt that 
 there was no course open to them, in order to 
 preserve these monuments, except to take 
 them all up and place them under lock and 
 key in one of the ecclesiastical buildings. 
 Let it not be supposed that our fellow- 
 countrymen have an enmity to the monu- 
 ments of the dead. This is, indeed, far from 
 being the case. There are no people who 
 guard more carefully and regard with deeper 
 feelings of reverence and respect the tombs 
 of their own relatives than our fellow-country- 
 men. And this trait of their character, 
 
 1 See Professor Stokes's Ireland and the Celtic Church.
 
 150 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 accompanied as it is by deep religious feeling, 
 makes us confident that the spirit which 
 would cause them to treat with respect the 
 monumental memorials of others, lies latent 
 in their breasts, and only requires to be 
 awakened. I had an excellent opportunity 
 afforded me of judging how easily this spirit 
 is awakened, during my visit to Clonmac- 
 noise. In accordance with my usual custom, 
 I sought for antiquarian objects to purchase, 
 and in a short time I was able to purchase a 
 gold-bronze pin of a usual type, a local token, 
 and an old Irish shoe that had been found at 
 the bottom of a deep cutting of turf — one of 
 the kind that was made in ancient times, 
 before the shoemakers had learned to use 
 hemp, and was sewn altogether with narrow 
 thongs of leather. The supply seemed to be 
 exhausted, until a man came forward and 
 asked me would I buy a stone with Irish 
 letters on it. ' Where is it ? ' said I. * It is 
 in the bottom of the field ditch, sir,' said he. 
 * I will buy nothing until I see it first,' was my 
 reply ; and at his request we then went to his 
 potato field, and he commenced to pull down 
 a portion of the rough stone ditch that
 
 "A VISIT TO CLONMACNOISE 151 
 
 surrounded it. When he had reached the 
 foundation, there lay the inscribed flag, 
 fortuiiately face downwards, so that the in- 
 scription was not injured. When he placed 
 it before me, I saw at once that it was one of 
 the monuments from the cemetery, bearing 
 an inscription in the Irish language and 
 character, and inscribed with a beautiful in- 
 cised cross of a very early design. ' This, 
 my friend,' said I, ' is a tombstone from the 
 churchyard ; I cannot purchase it, for it 
 should never have been removed from where 
 it stood.' ' Sir,' said the man, ' I did not 
 take it out of the churchyard ; I dug it up in 
 the field we are standing in, years ago, and if 
 it is a tombstone, it must belong to the old 
 people who are dead and gone long ago.' 
 
 * But those old people,' said I, ' thought as 
 much about their father and mother's tomb 
 as you think about your father and mother's 
 tomb ; and would you like your family tomb- 
 stone to be under a ditch in a potato field ? ' 
 
 * It is true for you, sir,' said he, ' and I will 
 hand it over to Mr. Molloy, and let it go 
 back to the churchyard.' Just at this 
 moment Mr. Kieran Molloy, the intelligent
 
 152 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 and active caretaker of Clonmacnoise, came 
 in sight, and then and there we handed over 
 the old tombstone to him, to be placed among 
 the others in the locked-up building. Un- 
 fortunately I had not the materials with me 
 wherewith to take a rubbing of the stone, 
 nor had I time to study the inscription, as I 
 had to hasten back to Athlone to catch a 
 train ; but in Mr. Kieran Mohoy's hands the 
 monument is in safety, and can be studied at 
 any time ; and I was happy to see these 
 most interesting ruins looked after by a man 
 who esteems his work a labour of love in 
 which he takes the most lively interest.
 
 ^ 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 ON A MANNER OF LIGHTING HOUSES IN OLD 
 TIMES, ILLUSTRATED BY RUSH - LIGHT 
 CANDLESTICKS 1 
 
 As long as houses in Ireland were round, and 
 had no lofts or partitions, they were probably 
 illuminated in summer by the light that came 
 through the door, and in winter by the fire 
 that was kindled in the centre of the floor ; 
 but as soon as houses were constructed of an 
 oblong shape, and when fires were removed 
 to one end or side of the house, and a separate 
 exit or flue provided for smoke, and lofts and 
 partitions were introduced, then the necessity 
 for a household illuminant must have been 
 quickly felt ; and, as we might have expected, 
 we find very early mention of such lights. It is 
 stated by Dr. Sulhvan, in his introduction to 
 the ' Manners and Customs,' that ' one of the 
 
 ' Read before the Royal Irish Academy, January 12, 1911.
 
 154 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 essential articles of furniture in the house of 
 a B6-Aire was a candle upon a candlestick,' 
 it being the custom that in such abodes a 
 light should be kept burning through the 
 night. Sullivan also tells us that an oblong 
 house was divided roughly, in the direction 
 of its length, into three parts by two rows of 
 pillars, which supported the roof, the candela- 
 brum being placed between the fire and the 
 door, and generally towards the middle of the 
 house. Although references to candles and 
 candlesticks are plentiful enough, yet detailed 
 information as to the manner in which the 
 candlesticks were constructed or the material 
 of which the candles were made is, as far as 
 I know, very rare. No doubt the wax of the 
 large quantity of honey that was paid ' as 
 rents and tributes to the Kings and other 
 Flaths ' was utilised by them for lighting 
 purposes ; and in a legend recorded in one of 
 the early Journals of the Kilkenny Archaeo- 
 logical Society, mention is made of a square 
 wax candle, which if square must have been 
 run in a mould. 
 
 Doubtless also bog-wood was used as a 
 torch for lighting purposes ; for, down to our
 
 LIGHTING HOUSES 155 
 
 own time, long strips of bog- wood were dried, 
 and made use of by the poorer classes instead 
 of eSndles, and were placed by them in 
 candlesticks. But the method of household 
 illumination which I would seek to bring 
 undci the notice of the Academy is neither 
 that of the very rich nor of the very poor, 
 but the ordinary common manner of lighting 
 houses, which, I believe, has come down to 
 us from times that are prehistoric, and, like 
 the quern or hand-mill, may be found in a few 
 isolated instances still in use. The conserva- 
 tive Celt did not readily give up the use of 
 his quern hand-mill, and even yet makes use 
 of the rush-light. The candles that were used 
 for ordinary lighting purposes seem to have 
 been of three kinds : the dipped candle, which 
 was made by taking a wick of flax, and dipping 
 it again and again into melted grease until it 
 had attained the necessary thickness ; rushes 
 may also have been used for wicks in this 
 kind of candle ; secondly, the rush-light 
 candle, or rush taper, which was the light in 
 everyday use ; and, thirdly, the resin candle, 
 called a snob, which was made by rolling 
 resin in a soft state around a wick of linen rag.
 
 156 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 Just as the arrangements of Irish houses 
 were in most respects similar to those of the 
 Anglo-Saxons, so I believe were the methods 
 of household illumination common to both. 
 My attention was first called to Irish rush- 
 light candlesticks by an engraving of an 
 English candlestick that was exhibited in the 
 collection of an English antiquarian, which 
 I saw in one of the illustrated journals, I 
 subsequently purchased one exactly similar 
 to that engraving at a farm-house in my 
 neighbourhood. Afterwards I saw a second 
 illustration of another type of these candle- 
 sticks in that journal ; and I also found one 
 similar to it in another farm-house. I may 
 mention that the English writer altogether 
 misunderstood his candlestick, as he believed 
 the pincers arrangement to hold the rush- 
 light taper to be a kind of snuffers to snuff the 
 candle, which was placed in the candle-holder. 
 The earliest mention I have been able to 
 find of the preparation of rushes for lighting 
 purposes is in a pretty story in the life of 
 Cormac Mac Art, King of Ireland, about the 
 year a.d. 200 or 227. This story, as related 
 by Keating and others, tells us that Cormac,
 
 ^- LIGHTING HOUSES 157 
 
 riding: through a wood, came suddenly and 
 unobserved upon a fair damsel, who was 
 engaged in her household avocations of 
 milking and drawing water, and cutting 
 rushes with a sharp hook ; and as she cut the 
 rushcb she separated those that were long and 
 green from such as were short and withered, 
 and laid them in different heaps (the long 
 green ones being, as we know, suitable for 
 lighting purposes, and the others, in accord- 
 ance with the custom of the times, for strew- 
 ing the floor). One version of the story tells 
 us that, when he revealed himself to her, and 
 questioned her about cutting the rushes, she 
 told him that it was the work of the women to 
 cut and peel the rushes, as women are the light 
 of the house. The story further goes on to 
 tell how, captivated by her beauty and her 
 aptitude for housekeeping, he made her his 
 Queen. Our story very plainly describes the 
 first process in the manufacture of rush-lights : 
 the cutting of long green rushes, and peeling 
 them until nothing remained of the outside 
 rind except a narrow strip of green just 
 sufficient to bind together the pith. The 
 rushes when thus prepared and dried were
 
 158 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 dipped into a vessel called a grisset, con- 
 taining melted grease, and then dried. The 
 grisset, of which I exhibit a miniature 
 specimen, was a boat-shaped vessel of metal or 
 iron, standing on three legs, and having a long 
 handle projecting from the centre of the side. 
 There were also long, narrow baskets, made 
 for holding the prepared rushes, which were 
 much prized, and considered suitable for 
 wedding presents. The preparing and peel- 
 ing of rushes was part of the work of every 
 farmer's wife, almost to our own time ; and 
 the preparing and selling of bundles of rushes 
 to old bachelors and other unfortunates who 
 had no women in their families to do the work 
 was a regular industry among the poor. 
 
 Now, with regard to the candlesticks or 
 stands which held these rush-lights, they 
 were very diverse in pattern ; yet I think 
 we can trace, not only distinct types, but also 
 a steady progress in type in their manufac- 
 ture. At first, I have no doubt, they were 
 made of wood, and displayed but little 
 refinement of art, although they showed a 
 ready wit in the manner of their construction. 
 I have had descriptions given me, or sent to
 
 ^ LIGHTING HOUSES 159 
 
 me from different parts of Ireland, of these 
 early and rude candlesticks. One such de- 
 scription was given me by a County Carlow 
 marr'bver eighty years of age, of a candlestick 
 which was of a type that was old when he was 
 young, and may well be a survival of the 
 primitive pattern. He described this candle- 
 holder as a round or square oak stick of the 
 size of an ordinary spade-handle, or some- 
 what thicker, inserted in a block of wood, 
 its height depending on whether it was to 
 stand on the floor or on a table. If it was 
 to stand on the floor, it would be about three 
 feet long ; if to stand on a table, it would be 
 about ten or eleven inches in height. This 
 upright post was bored in the centre to con- 
 tain a candle, and had inserted in it, at right 
 angles, a small piece of wood with a notch cut 
 in it to hold a rush-light. The rush-hght 
 when inserted in the notch was kept in position 
 by a wooden spring attached to the upright 
 shaft, which sprang back against the notched 
 hollow in the projecting shaft, and thus pre- 
 vented the rush from dropping out. I had a 
 model made of this type of candlestick under 
 his guidance and direction, which I exhibit
 
 i6o 
 
 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 (fig. I), and which he says is exactly similar 
 to the candlesticks that he remembers in use. 
 I have obtained from the County Meath a 
 similar description of a candlestick, except 
 that instead of the rush being held in the notch 
 
 II.— Iron. 
 
 I.— Wood. 
 RUSH-LIGHT CANDLESTICKS. 
 
 in.— Iron. 
 
 by a spring, a wooden pincers was attached 
 by a wooden dowel to the upright shaft. 
 There is also a record of a rush-light candle- 
 stick seen in the County Sligo in the year 1760. 
 It is described as two feet six inches high.
 
 ^- LIGHTING HOUSES i6i 
 
 with a stand of three legs and a catch to hold 
 the rash-light. It must have been a candle- 
 stick^'^uch as one of these, which the Hon. 
 Emil^^ Lawless describes as having been found 
 under sixteen feet of peat in a Kerry bog, the 
 material of which it was composed being all 
 wood. I now pass on to the iron forms of the 
 rush-light candlestick, which plainly show the 
 influence of the wooden forms which preceded 
 them. 
 
 The next candlestick which I exhibit 
 has a twisted iron stem, standing on three 
 bowed and twisted iron supports, which are 
 combined by an iron ring. It is fourteen 
 and a half inches in gross height ; and the 
 ring on which it stands is nearly five inches 
 in width. It has a pincers arrangement at 
 right angles with the shaft, the idea of which 
 is plainly derived from the old wooden form ; 
 and it has also attached to it a place on which 
 to stick a candle, which is what may be 
 properly called a candlestick, not a candle- 
 holder such as that to which we give that 
 name. 
 
 I also show a sketch of a rush-light 
 candlestick in which an upright pincers has 
 
 M
 
 i62 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 taken the place of the pincers at right angles 
 with the shaft ; but still the old wooden 
 influence is shown in the spring which is 
 adapted to keep the pincers closed. It is 
 ten and a quarter inches in height and four 
 inches wide at base. 
 
 Next a pincers candlestick standing in 
 a wooden block fourteen inches high and 
 between four and five inches wide at base. 
 This candlestick has no spring. Then a 
 candlestick with a very nicely finished shaft 
 of twisted iron, attached to an oak block or 
 stand, with both a candle-holder and a rush- 
 light holder. It stands fourteen and a half 
 inches high, and is four and a half inches 
 wide at base. 
 
 Next I put forward a very well-finished 
 rush-light and ordinary candle-holder com- 
 bined, with twisted stem, standing on four 
 bowed and twisted legs united by an iron ring. 
 It is twelve inches high and five inches 
 wide at base. Then a much simpler candle- 
 stick of the same pattern, but not twisted, 
 nine and a half inches in height and four 
 inches wide at base ; also a rush-light candle- 
 stick of iron, for standing on the floor, which
 
 LIGHTING HOUSES 163 
 
 I have removed from the block in which it 
 was inserted in order to enable me to carry it 
 more ^easily. At present it is two feet seven 
 and a half inches in height, with a twisted stem. 
 When inserted in its block it stood three 
 feet high. In conclusion, may I say that in 
 these days of progress, when the electric light 
 may be seen under the shadow of Mount 
 Leinster, and when even a pair of snuffers is 
 an unknown implement, to which no name 
 could be attached by many of our young 
 people, it may not be undesirable to preserve 
 some record of a method of household illumi- 
 nation that is now very much a thing of the 
 past. 
 
 Note. — These candlesticks were exhibited at a meeting of 
 the Royal Irish Academy in their rooms in Dawson Street. 
 
 M 2
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 HISTORIC AND PREHISTORIC IRISH TRIBAL 
 BADGES — THE ARMS OF IRELAND AND 
 CELTIC TRIBAL HERALDRY 
 
 The Armorial Bearings that I am about to 
 treat of in this chapter are the allegorical 
 designs, or badges, emblazoned on the stand- 
 ards of Ireland and its princes in times past. 
 Heraldry has been described as ' the art of 
 arranging and explaining in proper terms all 
 that relates or appertains to the bearing of 
 arms, crests, badges, quarterings, and other 
 hereditary marks of honour ' ; but this 
 definition would apply more properly to 
 Norman than to Celtic heraldry, which was 
 of a much simpler type. I believe I can safely 
 assert that so far as heraldry consists in the 
 bearing by different nations, cities, and tribes 
 of distinguishing standards, emblems, and 
 
 devices, it can be traced back to the very 
 
 164
 
 -• IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 165 
 
 earliest records that we possess of the oldest 
 civilisation. In this, as in many other cases, 
 I can quote an old and homely proverb, 
 ' Necessity is the mother of invention ' ; and 
 necessity required that different nations, cities, 
 and tribes should have some well-known and 
 easily discerned sign or badge, by which 
 they could be distinguished the one from the 
 other. When seeking for the first traces of 
 any particular use, we naturally turn to 
 Egypt, the birthplace of architecture, and, 
 to some extent, of art design ; and there, 
 I think, we find the earliest traces of the use of 
 heraldic symbols or badges. 
 
 The learned Egyptologist, Professor Flin- 
 ders Petrie, in a lecture delivered before the 
 British Association, in which he took as his 
 subject ' Man before Writing,' tells us that 
 the city of Heliopolis, probably the most 
 ancient city whose origin we can guess at 
 (far older than the Egyptian monarchy), 
 had as its sign a sixteen-sided fluted column, 
 with a tapering shaft, just as in after years 
 a lion became the sign of Leonopolis, and a 
 goat of the city of Pantopolis. Here, says 
 Petrie, still speaking of the Heliopolis sign,
 
 i66 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 we have a form (symbol or badge) which 
 is carried back into the unlettered ages, and 
 which we cannot hope to touch with any 
 continuous record. It was doubtless his 
 residence in Egypt, and the impression made 
 on his mind by what he learned there, that 
 caused the patriarch Jacob to give distin- 
 guishing heraldic badges, or devices, to his 
 sons, by which their various tribes should be 
 hereafter known. Thus, Reuben is supposed 
 to have had as his badge water (or wavy) ; 
 Judah, a lion's whelp ; Issachar, an ass ; 
 Dan, a serpent ; Naphtali, a hind ; Joseph, 
 a fruitful bough, &c. ; and in the Book of 
 Numbers we find the direction — ' Every man 
 of the children of Israel shall pitch by his 
 own standard with the ensign of his father's 
 house.' In its earliest conception the idea 
 of a standard was not a flag, but a figure, or 
 device, elevated on a pole, like the eagle of 
 the Roman soldiers and the raven of the 
 Scandinavian Rovers (popularly called Danes). 
 Here I may remark that, although in the 
 course of time the Scandinavian Rovers 
 adopted as a banner a representation of a 
 raven, there is reason to believe that in the
 
 ^ IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 167 
 
 first .instance their standard was a tamed 
 specimen of the bird itself ; and, if this is the 
 case/lt is not to be wondered at that it was 
 considered a bird of ill omen. 
 
 In Ireland banners bearing various colours 
 seem to have been associated with the 
 badges or devices of the various tribes at 
 an early period. The Rev. Geoffrey Keating, 
 D.D., in his ' General History of Ireland,' 
 tells us that in the reign of Ollamh Fodhla, 
 in a great triennial assembly at Tara, it was 
 ordained by a law that every nobleman and 
 great officer should, by the learned heralds, 
 have a particular coat-of-arms assigned to 
 him according to his merit and his quality, 
 whereby he should be distinguished from 
 others of the same rank, and be known where- 
 ever he appeared. In an historical tale called 
 'The Battle of Magh Rath,' edited and tran- 
 scribed by John O'Donovan from the ' Book 
 of Leinster,' which was compiled from ancient 
 manuscripts in the first half of the twelfth 
 century by Finn MacGorman, Bishop of 
 Kildare, who died in the year 1160, we have 
 a whole list of the banners used by the com- 
 batants in that contest, by which they were
 
 i68 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 distinguished from one another. From this 
 account, which was pubhshed in 1842 by the 
 Irish Archaeological Society, I quote (p. 227 ; 
 see also p. 347) : 
 
 Mightily advance the battalions of Congal 
 
 To us over the ford of Ornamh ; 
 
 When they came to the contest of the men 
 
 They require not to be harangued. 
 
 The token of the great warrior of Macha — 
 
 Variegated satin on warlike poles ; 
 
 The banner of each bright king with prosperity 
 
 Over his own head conspicuously displayed. 
 
 The banner of Scannlan — an ornament witla prosperity. 
 
 And of Fiachna Mor, the son of Baedan, 
 
 Great symbol of plunder floating from its staff 
 
 Is over the head of Congal advancing towards us 
 
 A yellow Lion on green satin, 
 
 The insignia of the Craebh Ruadh, 
 
 Such as the noble Conchobar bore, 
 
 Is now held up by Congal. 
 
 The standards of the sons of Eochaidh 
 
 In front of the embattled hosts. 
 
 Are dun-coloured standards hke fire. 
 
 Over the well-shaped spear handles of Crumthann. 
 
 The standard of the vigorous king of Britain, 
 
 Conan Rod, the royal soldier. 
 
 Streaked satin, blue and white, 
 
 In folds displayed. 
 
 The standard of the great king of Saxonland of hosts 
 
 Is a wide, very great standard. 
 
 Yellow and red, richly displayed. 
 
 Over the head of Dairbhre, son of Dornmor. 
 
 The standard of the majestic king of Feabhail 
 
 (I have not seen such another) 
 
 Is over his head (no treachery does he carry with him). 
 
 Black and red, certainly. 
 
 J
 
 IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 169 
 
 The. standard of Suibhne — a yellow banner, 
 
 The renowned king of Dal Araidhe ; 
 
 Yellow satin, over that mild man of hosts — 
 
 The white-fingered stripling himself in the middle of them. 
 
 The^standard of Ferdoman of banquets, 
 
 The red-weaponed king of the Ards of Ulster ; 
 
 White satin, to the sun and wind displayed. 
 
 Over -that mighty man without blemish. 
 
 Here we have many standards, but only 
 one symbol or sign — the yellow lion. Dr. 
 Keating says that favourite signs, borne by 
 the ancient Irish, were ' a dead serpent, and 
 the rod of Moses.' Badges, symbols, or 
 heraldic signs seem to have been 'common 
 enough among the Irish tribes, such as the 
 red hand, which has been for som.e centuries 
 the badge of the O'Neills, but which, Owen 
 O' Donnelly contended, was derived from the 
 heroes of the Red Branch, and belonged, of 
 right, to Magennis, the senior representative 
 of Conall Cernach, the most distinguished of 
 those heroes. 
 
 The story of the red hand is a well-known 
 one : two tribes contended for the same 
 portion of land, and the future owner was to 
 be decided by the result of a boat-race ; 
 whoever touched the land first was to be lord 
 of the soil. It was a close race, what we call
 
 170 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 a neck-to-neck race ; but as the land drew 
 near, it became evident to the ancestor of 
 the Magennis that his adversary would touch 
 land before him, so he cut the matter short 
 by standing up in the bow of his boat, 
 cutting off one of his hands with a hatchet, 
 and casting it with the other hand on the shore. 
 His descendants ever after bore the bloody 
 hand as their heraldic cognisance. King 
 James adopted it as the symbol of Ulster, 
 with which the new order of baronet was 
 identified. We may also mention the cat and 
 salmon of O'Cathain or O'Kane. 
 
 John O'Donovan gives the following 
 heraldic bearings, which he translated from 
 an ancient Irish MS. quoted in his edition of 
 ' The Battle of Magh Rath,' p. 349 : 
 
 Bearings of O'Doherty 
 Mightily advance the battahons of Conn 
 With O'Doherty to engage in battle ; 
 His battle-sword with golden cross 
 Over the standard of this great chief ; 
 A lion and bloody eagle — 
 Hard it is to repress his plunder — 
 On a white sheet of silken satin. 
 
 Bearings of O'Sullivan in the Battle of Caisglinn 
 I see mightily advancing in the plain 
 The banner of the race of noble Finghin, 
 His spear with venornous adder [entwined].
 
 ^ IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 171 
 
 Bearings of O'Donovan 
 
 A hand holds an ancient Irish sword entwined with a 
 serpent. 
 
 **' Bearings of O'Loughlin Burren 
 
 In O'Loughhn's camp was visible a fair satin sheet 
 To be at the head of each battle, to defend in battle- 
 field ; 
 An ancient fruit-bearing oak, defended by a chieftain justly. 
 And an anchor blue, with folds of a golden cable. 
 
 That the Celtic tribes were distinguished 
 by particular colours, we have ocular demon- 
 stration of to the present day, in the tartans 
 of the Scotch Highland tribes ; and so 
 particular were the ancient Irish about dis- 
 tinguishing colours, that the number of colours 
 each class of society were to wear in their 
 clothes was specially regulated by law. 
 One colour in the clothes of servants, two 
 colours in the clothes of rent-paying farmers, 
 three colours in the clothes of officers, five 
 colours in the clothes of chiefs, six colours 
 in the clothes of ollamhs and poets, seven 
 colours in the clothes of kings and queens. 
 
 In the account of the Battle of Clontarf, 
 which took place in 1014, and which Dr. 
 Joyce quotes as rehable history, the old king, 
 Brian Boru, who was too feeble to engage
 
 172 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 in the fight himself, is described as remaining 
 in his tent, and engaged in prayer, while his 
 attendant stood at the door to watch the 
 battle. In response to an anxious inquiry 
 from the king, the attendant said : ' Many 
 have fallen, but Murrogh's banner still stands 
 moving through the battalions.' ' That is 
 well,' said the king; ' as long as the men of 
 Erin see that standard they will fight with 
 courage and valour.' Now, if we take this 
 even as a free version, it shows that standards 
 were used then as now to rally the troops 
 around them ; and surely no one will contend 
 that they were like a blank sheet of paper, 
 without any particular colour or device by 
 which they could be distinguished the one from 
 the other. The old Irish prophecy about 
 the * Flag of Battles ' shows how familiar 
 they were with its use, and ' we find references 
 in the lives of the primitive Irish saints to 
 several consecrated banners called by the 
 name of Cathach.' These banners may have 
 been borne, not on poles, but on the breast 
 of the standard-bearer. 
 
 I think that I have now fairly established 
 my proposition that the ancient Irish had a
 
 " IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 173 
 
 • 
 
 heraldry of their own ; also tribal badges 
 and colours, by which their various tribes 
 and 'kingdoms were distinguished the one 
 froni the other. But when we seek for any 
 coat-of-arms for the whole land, or any crest 
 that might be considered the badge of the 
 whole kingdom, we are at once face to face 
 with a difficulty ; a badge or crest such as 
 the eagle of the Romans, the white horse of 
 the Saxons, the raven of the Danes, the lion 
 of the Normans, we cannot find. I am 
 disposed to think that the heraldic colour of 
 Ireland for the time being was that of the 
 tribe that supplied Ireland with its Ard Righ, 
 or chief king, and that the badge or symbol 
 was that of his family. For instance, when 
 the great Munster sept of Dal Cais supplied 
 Ireland with an Ard Righ in the person of 
 Brian Borumha, there can be little doubt 
 that the colours of Ireland for the time being 
 were the colours borne by that tribe, which 
 Mr. O'Looney told me were brown, purple, 
 green, and gold. In our days blue and green 
 have often contended for precedence, but in 
 those old Celtic days there was a strong pre- 
 ference for a ' blay brown.' This is shown
 
 174 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 in the English version of an old Irish song, 
 for which I am indebted to the late Mr. 
 O'Looney : 
 
 Brown was the banner of the fierce and mighty Gaul, 
 
 Brown was the banner of the great Fiana Fail, 
 
 When the fierce ' Dalraids ' of Alba on the Roman wall 
 
 were seen, 
 They planted there the standard of the brown, and 
 
 blue, and green. 
 
 Here we have the great Fenian forces 
 marching to battle under colours of brown, 
 and blue, and green. As every one of the 
 minor kings of Ireland had ' as the ground of 
 his chief colour the principal colour of the 
 head king ' in the days of Brian Boru, brown 
 must have been, to a great extent, the national 
 colour. 1 But great a man and great a king 
 
 1 It has been asserted on the supposed authority of 
 Dr. Geoffrey Keating that the ground of the shield or 
 principal colour of the O'Briens was red. I have failed to 
 find this statement in his history. The idea probably 
 arose from the fancy picture of an Irish king to be found in 
 the folio edition of Dermod O'Connor's translation. In it 
 King Brian is represented resting on a shield gules bearing 
 three lions ; but it, like the twelve sheets of coats-of-arms 
 attached to the book, is Dermod O'Connor's work, for 
 which Dr. Keating is not in any way accountable. These 
 coats-of-arms cannot be considered as specimens of Celtic 
 heraldry (although they may contain Celtic tribal badges). 
 They are plainly arms that had been granted to the various 
 families by Norman heralds.
 
 ^ IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 175 
 
 as he was, Brian was to a certain extent a 
 usurper ; for Meath was the Imperial Pro- 
 vince;''5nd the arms of Meath might be taken 
 as the'arms of Ireland. 
 
 O'Halloran tells us that he read in some 
 old .manuscripts, and found in O'Flaherty's 
 writings, that the arms of the Irish monarchs 
 were a king enthroned in majesty, with a lily 
 in his hand, in a field ' saturn.' This, he 
 concluded, must be the arms of Meath, about 
 which he could obtain no information at the 
 Herald's office. We are told that this coat- 
 of-arms is now recorded in Ulster's office 
 as an ancient coat-of-arms of the Kingdom 
 of Ireland, and is thus entered : (sa) a king 
 sitting on his throne cross-legged, in his right 
 hand a golden lily ; crest, a tower triple- 
 towered (or) from the portal a hart springing 
 (ar) attired and hoofed (or). There is much 
 to be said in favour of this last coat-of-arms. 
 It is quite unlike the coats-of-arms adopted 
 by the Norman Conquerors, and yet has 
 held its own as a coat-of-arms of the Kingdom 
 of Ireland to the present day (although not 
 in use) ; and for this reason I am disposed 
 to think that it was the old arms of the country
 
 176 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 which passed out of use when the Normans 
 adopted the three crowns ; and if this be the 
 case, the principal colour was saturn or sable, 
 otherwise black, which in heraldry is believed 
 to imply vengeance, and the deathful prowess 
 of the bearer. 1 We now come to the period 
 of the Norman Invasion, when we find the 
 old, simple badges of the various tribes 
 superseded by the complicated system of 
 family heraldry, which at that time was called 
 
 1 I am indebted to our well-known Fellow, David 
 MacRitchie, Esq., of Edinburgh, for the following informa- 
 tion, obtained by him from Mr. G. Grant, Rothesay 
 Herald : 
 
 Court of the Lord Lvon, 
 
 Edinburgh, -^rd March 1903. 
 
 Dear Mr. MacRitchie,- — I have received your letter 
 of yesterday enclosing ' Mr. French's.' I find in an old 
 Heraldic MS. compiled in 1567, commonly called ' Work- 
 man's MSS.,' because it belonged to James Workman, 
 Marchmont Herald, a painting of the arms of the Kingdom 
 of Ireland, and a written blazon : azure, a king enthroned 
 (or sitting in his chair), holding in his right hand a sceptre, 
 and an antique crown with points on his head, or. No 
 crest is given. The arms described by ' Mr. French ' are, 
 I beheve, recorded in Ulster's office. The ancient arms 
 of Ireland are said to be azui"e, three ancient crowns or. 
 These are now the arms of Munster. The arms of Ireland 
 would never be officially recorded in this office. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Francis P. Grant.
 
 ^ IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 177 
 
 into existence. The necessities of the Crusades 
 may be said to have created heraldry in the 
 modern sense of the term. Knights from all 
 parfs of Europe, and from twenty different 
 nations, assembled together to recover the 
 Holy Land and the holy places from the 
 followers of Mahomet ; and it was necessary 
 to have some means of distinguishing between 
 them, and to have heralds who were skilled 
 in the art of blazoning, assigning, and mar- 
 shalling coat armour, in order to marshal the 
 knights under the banners of their various 
 leaders, and so that in a tournament, when a 
 knight rode into the lists with his visor down, 
 someone should be able to explain the shield 
 or coat of armour that he bore, and to tell 
 who he was. 
 
 The late Sir Bernard Burke, writing on 
 the subject of heraldry, says : 
 
 For my own part I consider that the registry 
 of its birth may be found among the archives of the 
 Holy Wars ; that its cradle was rocked by the 
 soldiers of the Cross, and that its maturity was 
 attained in the chivalrous age of Feudalism. 
 
 The old Irish chieftains, satisfied with their 
 old, simple tribal heraldry, were slow in 
 
 N
 
 178 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 adopting the complicated system of the 
 Normans; and John O'Donovan tells us^ 
 that he had ' examined more tombstones in 
 Irish churchyards than any person then living, 
 with an anxious wish to discover Irish in- 
 scriptions and armorial bearings ; but among 
 the many tombs he had seen he had not 
 observed any escutcheon of a Milesian Irish 
 family older than the reign of Queen Eliza- 
 beth,' — the coats-of-arms before that time 
 being the armorial bearings of tribes and 
 territories, not of families. The earliest 
 known private coat-of-arms is that upon the 
 monumental effigy of a Count of Wasserburgh 
 in the Church of St. Emeran at Ratisbon, 
 the ensigns being ' Per fess az. and sa., a 
 lion rampant, countercharged,' and the date 
 loio. The earliest heraldic document that 
 has come down to us is a roll of arms between 
 the years 1240 and 1245, containing the names 
 and arms of the barons and knights of the 
 reign of Henry III. 
 
 But to return to Ireland ; it is interesting 
 to observe the difference in the arms of Ulster, 
 given by Mr. O'Halloran about eighty years 
 
 1 Battle of Magh Rath, p. 348.
 
 ^ IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 179 
 
 ago, .from the arms now in use. He tells 
 us : 
 
 I ..some years ago applied to Sir William 
 Hawkins and to Mr. Withens at the Herald's office, 
 where I learned that the provincial arms were for 
 Munster on a field azure, three eastern diadems 
 proper ; for Leinster on a field vert, a harp or, 
 string argent ; for Ulster on a field (or) a lion 
 rampant, double-queued gules ; and for Connaught, 
 party per pale, argent, and sable ; on the argent 
 side, a demi-eagle spread sable ; on the field sable, 
 a hand and arm holding a sword erect. I have 
 been told that the crest of Ireland as used by our 
 own princes in tilts and tournaments on the con- 
 tinent, and after them by some of the Henrys and 
 Edwards, was a bleeding hind wounded by an 
 arrow, under the arch of an old castle. 
 
 You will observe that the arms which for 
 many hundred years after the Conquest were 
 borne by the whole of Ireland are now borne 
 by the province of Munster alone. 
 
 In the time of Edward IV a Commission 
 was held to inquire into the arms of Ireland, 
 which Commission returned, ' y' ye three 
 crowns were ye arms.' This bearing is 
 found on the reverse of early Irish coins 
 subsequent to the Conquest. 
 
 The meaning to be attached to the three 
 
 N 2
 
 i8o PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 crowns has been a subject of controversy. 
 In Harris's ' Ware,' ii. 215, the idea is put 
 forward that the three crowns represented 
 the three kingdoms of England, France, and 
 Ireland. Fynes Moryson imagined that they 
 represented the Pope's triple crown. 
 
 Dr. Aquilla Smith, in his learned essay on 
 the * Irish Coins of Edward IV,' published 
 among the Transactions of the Royal Irish 
 Academy, tells us neither of these opinions 
 is correct ; and it is a remarkable circum- 
 stance that this device, the meaning of which 
 the learned research of Sir James Ware 
 failed to discover, has proved to be the arms 
 of Ireland. 
 
 The Rev. Richard Butler, of Trim, after- 
 wards Dean of Clonmacnoise, puts forward 
 the following summary of the evidence that 
 he has collected on the subject : 
 
 1. Richard II granted to Robert de Vere 
 permission to bear arms, so long as he should 
 be Lord of Ireland, three crowns within a 
 bordure. 
 
 2. At Henry V's funeral, on the first car 
 were emblazoned the ancient arms of England ; 
 on the second, those of France and England,
 
 ^- IRISH TRIBAL BADGES i8i 
 
 quarterly ; on the third, those of France ; 
 and on the fourth three crowns on a field 
 azur€; doubtless for Ireland. 
 
 5^ The crown first appears on the first 
 distmct and separate coinage for Ireland, 
 issued according to an Act of Parliament 
 in 1460, declaring the independence of Ire- 
 land, and enacting that it should have a 
 proper coin, separate from the coin of England. 
 
 4. The three crowns appear on the Irish 
 coins of Edward IV, Richard III, and Henry 
 VII. They are unknown on the English 
 coinage ; and when Henry VIII assumed 
 the harp as the arms of Ireland, they appear 
 no more. 
 
 5. On the only silver coins on which the 
 three crowns occur, they appear, as the harp 
 does afterwards, on the reverse — the obverse 
 bearing the arms of England ; and when 
 the legend ' Dominus Hibernie ' is on the coin, 
 it is on the same side with the three crowns, as 
 it is afterwards on the same side with the harp. 
 
 6. That these crowns are borne, not in a 
 shield, but ' upon a cross,' is no objection to 
 their being armorial bearings, as the harp 
 was never borne on a shield, except on the
 
 i82 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 coins of Queen Elizabeth, who, instead of 
 one harp, bore three on her coinage of 1561, 
 as Edward IV bore sometimes one, and 
 sometimes three, crowns. But that the three 
 crowns were sometimes enclosed within a 
 shield is a fact which is incontestably proved 
 by a small copper coin, two specimens of 
 which were found at Trim, and another of 
 which had previously been found near Dublin. 
 7. In 1483 Thomas Galmole, gentleman, 
 and worker of the money of silver, and keeper 
 of the Exchanges in the Cities of Devylyn 
 (Dublin) and Waterford, was bound by 
 indenture to make two sorts of rnoneys, one 
 called a penny, with the king's arms on one 
 side upon a cross, trefoiled at every end, and 
 with the inscription, ' Rex Anglie et France,' 
 and on the other side the arms of Ireland, 
 upon a cross, with this scripture, ' Dns 
 Hibernie.' Sir Bernard Burke thought it 
 probable that the crowns, or, upon an az. 
 ground, were introduced by the Normans 
 from the coat of St. Edmund. He says : 
 
 This was the coat of St. Edmund, and it is 
 possible that the Anglo-Norman invaders, who 
 were arrayed under the banners of St. George and
 
 ^ IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 183 
 
 St. Edmund, introduced the bearings of the latter 
 saint as the ensigns of the new Conquest. 
 
 The three crowns appear to have been 
 reUnquished by Henry VIII as the arms of 
 Ireland about the time that he obtained an 
 Ac't of Parliament constituting him King of 
 Ireland ; and probably because they were 
 mistaken for the Papal arms. Since that 
 time the heraldic arms of this country have 
 been : az. a harp or, stringed argent, other- 
 wise a golden harp with silver strings on a 
 blue ground. Truly a rich and beautiful 
 device. 
 
 O'Curry devotes much care and attention 
 to the consideration of the origin of a harp 
 device. He thinks that the idea was prob- 
 ably derived from the harp, popularly known 
 as Brian Boru's harp, and that this instrument 
 may possibly be the harp of Donnchadh 
 Cairbreach O'Brien, son of the last King of 
 Munster, who had a small, sweet harp which 
 passed from this country into Scotland, and 
 which he made great efforts to recover, and 
 failed to do so. 
 
 He further suggests that this harp may 
 have been carried into England by Edward I,
 
 i84 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 when he took away from the Palace of 
 Scone, in Scotland, the ancient inaugural 
 chair, or stone, and other regalia of the old 
 Scottish monarchs, to Westminster Abbey, 
 and that it there remained, with the name of 
 its original owner traditionally attached to it, 
 till the time of Henry VIII, who, it is said, 
 presented a celebrated harp to the Earl of 
 Clanrickard, as the harp of Donogh O'Brien. 
 He goes on to say : 
 
 Would it be two much to believe that it was 
 the celebrity of this ancient instrument that sug- 
 gested to their execrable monarch the first idea of 
 placing the harp in the arms of Ireland in the fashion 
 of the heraldry of the time, and impressing it upon 
 the coinage of this country ? 
 
 I should say that Ware claims a far older 
 association of the harp with the arms of 
 Ireland than that which is now generally 
 accepted. He says (p. 208, Harris's ' Ware '), 
 when treating of the coinage of King John : 
 
 The triangle on the Irish coins of this monarch, 
 as well as of those of his two next successors, repre- 
 sents a harp which was anciently of that shape, for 
 all pennies that have a head in a triangle were 
 Irish coins.
 
 IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 185 
 
 There is a note quoted by Brewer from 
 Chalmers's ' Caledonia,' i. 463, which has 
 an irnportant bearing on the subject. He 
 says : 
 
 There remains in the College of Arms a curious 
 roll containing the badges of the Earls of Warwick 
 from Brutus the founder, which was composed by 
 the celebrated John Rous, the Warwick antiquary, 
 who died in 1491. He included Richard HI as an 
 Earl of Warwick. This antiquary, in painting the 
 several crests of Richard, surmounted his crest as 
 Lord of Ireland with the harp, and in order to 
 prevent mistakes wrote under each crest — England, 
 France, Acquitane, and Ireland. 
 
 When Henry VIII placed a harp instead of 
 three crowns on the Irish shield, he may have 
 only called into requisition a well-known Irish 
 badge, which would, on that account, be more 
 readily accepted. Whether this is the case or 
 not I will not venture to determine ; but this I 
 can safely say, that the adoption of the harp 
 as the badge of Ireland was a decided success, 
 and has proved equally acceptable to all 
 parties in the state. 
 
 One subject relating to the arms of Ire- 
 land still remains to be considered. How 
 did green obtain its present position as the
 
 i86 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 colour that, above all others, is symbolical 
 of the Emerald Isle ? Various reasons have 
 been suggested. One is that it originated 
 with the Ulster United Irishmen, who made 
 a blend of orange and blue, and thus pro- 
 duced green, which was to be symbolical of 
 the union of two different parties in the coun- 
 try, but this seems a mere guess. It was in 
 use long before that time, and it would be a 
 far more likely thing if we were to say that it 
 was brought into favour by the Catholic 
 Confederation. In the ' National MSS. 
 Series,' vol. i. date 1582-3, there is the picture 
 of an Irish soldier bearing an Irish coat-of- 
 arms. The shield is blue, bearing a gold 
 harp, with a crown of gold over the shield. 
 Very shortly after this we find green in use. 
 The following extract from a letter of Father 
 Matthew O'Hartigan, dated from Paris, 
 October 17, 1642, shows that green was then 
 borne as an Irish standard : 
 
 Colonel Owne Ro his frigot is back to Dunkert 
 full of butter, tallow, and hides. This frigot bears 
 the Irish harp in a green held in a flagg in the 
 main-top. 
 
 Cardinal Moran, in his ' Spicilegium Ossori-
 
 IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 187 
 
 ensQ,' gives the following extract from the 
 description of the standards of the Irish 
 Confederate army, a.d. 1643, which is found 
 in fne Wadding papers at Rome : 
 
 Nota quod in parte dextra sit crux Hiberniffi 
 in <:ircuitu color rubir in campo viridi, sub Cruce, 
 ' Vivat Rex Carolus,' et super, has literas, C. R. et 
 corona Imperialis. 
 
 If the Irish Confederate Catholics flew a 
 standard which bore an Irish cross on a green 
 field or ground, surely that in itself would give 
 great prominence to green as a colour, and 
 even to a certain extent as a national colour. 
 
 Now we come to a.d. 1737, and we find 
 that in a book published in The Hague in 
 that year the arms of Ireland are given as 
 ' II est vert, charge d'une harpe d'or.' 
 
 Next, let us take up the great Volunteer 
 Movement of 1782, which was just as much a 
 Protestant movement as the Catholic Con- 
 federation had been a Roman Catholic move- 
 ment. One of the principal leaders of the 
 Volunteers was the then Protestant Bishop of 
 Derry. Let us see what prominence was 
 given to green by them. The Attorneys' 
 Regiment of Volunteers wore, as their uniform.
 
 i88 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 scarlet and Pomona green. There were iifty- 
 two regiments and companies of momited 
 and foot Volunteers scattered all over Ireland, 
 who wore uniforms faced with green, or al- 
 together green ; and it is to be remarked that 
 green was not worn as a party colour, but 
 as a national colour, for these regiments and 
 companies were nearly all Protestants, and 
 were officered by the resident gentry in their 
 respective districts. The arms of Leinster 
 given by Sir William Hawkins and Mr. 
 Withens, of the Herald's Office, to Mr. 
 O'Halloran some eighty years ago, were a 
 golden harp with silver strings on a green 
 ground ; and the arms of Leinster still re- 
 main — ' Vert an Irish harp or, stringed 
 argent.' So completely has this passed away 
 from remembrance that when a well-known 
 Dublin antiquary was applied to by a gentle- 
 man to tell him what were the correct arms 
 of Leinster, he sent him the foregoing, and 
 immediately received the reply : ' Come now, 
 don't be poking fun at me. I know the popu- 
 lar arms well enough, but I want the correct 
 arms.' In this case the popular arms and 
 the correct arms are identical.
 
 IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 189 
 
 An amusing story is told of something 
 
 like a hoax which was played off on the poet 
 
 Moore. He gives a facsimile of a so-called 
 
 *»' .... 
 
 ancient Irish inscription in the folio edition 
 
 of the ' Irish Melodies,' p. 84, the translation 
 
 of which is : 
 
 A yellow lion upon green satin, 
 
 The standard of the heroes of the Red Branch, 
 
 Which Connor carried in battle 
 
 During his frequent wars for the expulsion of foreigners. 
 
 To which Moore adds the following note : 
 
 The inscription upon Connor's tomb (for the 
 facsimile of which I am indebted to Mr. Murphy, 
 the chaplain to Lady Moira) has not, I believe, been 
 noticed bv any antiquarian or traveller. 
 
 This inscription is to be found on an 
 eighteenth-century tombstone in the Abbey 
 Church of Multifarnham, which was founded 
 by William Delamar in the year 1236, con- 
 sequently it would not be a likely place to 
 find the tomb of Connor or Conchobar mac 
 Nessa, who died in the beginning of the first 
 century. But Mr. Moore evidently never 
 saw the first part of the inscription on 
 this tombstone, which immediately precedes
 
 igo PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 the Irish inscription, and which runs as 
 follows : 
 
 Pray for the soul of James Gaynor of Leney, who 
 died January the 15th 1764, aged 66 years. Also 
 for his ancestors and posterity. 
 
 James Gaynor's posterity evidently wished 
 to make history. 
 
 At present green is the field of the shield 
 of the Province of Leinster, blue is the field 
 of the shield of Munster, and black and gold 
 of Connaught. Strange to say, Ware as- 
 serts that arms almost identical with those 
 borne by the Province of Connaught were at 
 one time borne as the arms of all Ireland. 
 He says (p. 184) : 
 
 If Ulysses Aldrovandus may be credited, the more 
 ancient arms of Ireland were in one part of the 
 scutcheon, or, an arm armed with a sword ; in the 
 other part a demi-eagle in a field argent. 1 
 
 So that it would seem that with very 
 little difference the arms now borne by the 
 provinces of Leinster, Munster, and Con- 
 naught, were borne by the whole country 
 
 1 'OrnithoL' lib. i, quoted in Harris's Ware, vol. ii. 
 Antiqq. 184.
 
 ^ IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 191 
 
 at different periods. The arms of the 
 provinces, as given by the late Sir Bernard 
 Burke.» are : 
 
 Ulster. — Az. a cross gules, on an inescutcheon 
 a dexter hand couped also gules. 
 
 -Lei'nster. — Vert, an Irish harp or, stringed 
 argent. 
 
 Munster. — Azure, three antique crowns or. 
 
 Connaught. — Per pale argent and azure. On 
 the dexter a dimidiated eagle, displayed sable ; and 
 on the sinister conjoined therewith at the shoulder a 
 sinister arm embow^ed proper ; sleeved of the first 
 holding a sword erect, also proper. 1 
 
 The writer wishes to acknowledge his in- 
 debtedness to the writings of John O'Donovan, 
 and particularly to his translation of ' The 
 Battle of Magh Rath ' ; also to O'Curry's 
 ' Manners and Customs of the Ancient 
 Irish ' ; and to a Paper on ' The Irish 
 Coins of Edward the Fourth,' by Aquilla 
 Smith, Esq., M.D., M.R.I.A., published 
 in the Transactions of the Royal Irish 
 Academy, vol. xix. ; to Mac Nevin's ' History 
 of the Volunteers of 1782 ' ; also to a Paper 
 on ' The Ancient Arms of Ireland,' published 
 by Sylvester O'Halloran, Esq., M.R.I. A. 
 
 1 See Journal, U.S.A. I., igo^, p, 416.
 
 192 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 The writer has still further to thank the President, 
 J. R. Garstin, Esq., D.L.,&c., for the following Notes : 
 
 It wiU be well to remember that Sir J. Bernard 
 Burke, Ulster, besides his account of the arms of Ire- 
 land, &c., in his ' General Armoury,' 1878, pubhshed 
 a fuller discussion of them in the remodelled 
 two-volume edition of his ' Vicissitudes of Families,' 
 i. 124-6, in a note on the race of Niall the 
 Great, whose posterity, he says, had ' exclusively 
 occupied the throne of Ireland for upwards of six 
 hundred years, and whose banner — if any banner 
 can claim the distinction — might be regarded as the 
 national standard of Ireland antecedent to the 
 Anglo-Norman Invasion.' As this book has long 
 been out of print, and Sir Bernard was the highest 
 authority, his note here follows in full : 
 
 ' It is very difficult to ascertain whether Ireland 
 had any national colour before the advent of the 
 EngHsh. I have failed in tracing any such, and I 
 am inclined to think there was not a recognised 
 national standard. 
 
 ' The various septs were ranged under the 
 banners of their respective chiefs, and when one 
 of these chiefs was elected king, his colour may be 
 considered for the time the national ensign. The 
 field " gules " of the O'Brien coat-of-arms would 
 indicate that Brian Boru's banner at Clontarf was 
 " red." Most assuredly, the popular colours in those
 
 ^- IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 193 
 
 days , were "crimson," "saffron," and "blue"; 
 "green " was not much iif*favour; O'Neill did not use 
 it, noE^-O'Meleaghlin, nor O'Donnell, nor MacCarthy, 
 nor ^VRorke, nor MacMorrough-Kavanagh, nor 
 O'Brien ; and these were among the chief Celtic 
 princes, from among whom the kings were chosen. 
 I am not so sure as to the colours of Roderick 
 O'Connor. 
 
 ' Certain it is, that from the date of the advent 
 of the Strongbowians, the field of the national arms, 
 and consequently the national colour, has been 
 blue. From the fact that " azure three crowns or " 
 was the coat of augmentation granted by King 
 Richard II (Rot. Pat. 9 Ric. II, m. i. in Latin, 
 which is quoted) to his favourite, Robert de Vere, 
 Earl of Oxford, and Marquess of Dublin, when he 
 created him Duke of Ireland, with the lordship and 
 domain thereof ; and from the occurrence of the 
 " three crowns " on the old Irish coinage, it may 
 fairly be inferred that that coat-of-arms was the 
 national bearing of Ireland during the Plantagenet 
 era. 
 
 / This coat " az. three crowns or " was that of 
 St. Edmund ; and it is just possible that the Anglo- 
 Normans, arrayed as they are known to have been 
 under the banner of St. George and St. Edmund, 
 may have introduced the bearings of St. Edmund 
 as the ensigns of the newly acquired country of 
 Ireland. St. Edmund's arms had, indeed, been long 
 employed as part of the Royal insignia. They were 
 borne with those of St. George in the army of King 
 Edward I, and, in conjunrtion with the Royal
 
 194 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 banner, were placed on the turrets of Carlaverock 
 Castle after its capture. \Sn H. Nichols.) 
 
 ' The three crowns were relinquished for the harp 
 as the arms of Ireland by Henry VIII from an 
 apprehension, it is said, lest they might be taken for 
 the Papal tiara ; and the gold harp on a blue field 
 has been, since the time of James I, quartered for 
 Ireland in the Royal achievement. 
 
 ' There is a very interesting MS., in the hand- 
 writing of Sir William Le Neve, still preserved in the 
 Heralds' College, London, on the subject of the 
 adoption of the harp. In it are given the words of 
 dissent of the Earl Marshal, the Earl of Northamp- 
 ton, which are worth quoting : 
 
 Sir W"" Seagar tould me y' when the comm''^ for ye 
 first claymes of King James had determined the harpe to 
 be quartered w"^ France, Ingland & Scotland, for the armes 
 of Ireland, the Earl of Northampton (Lord H. Howard), 
 in shewing no affection in approving the same, sayd the best 
 reason that I can observe for the bearing thereof is it 
 resembles y' country in being such an instrument y' it 
 requires more cost to keep it in tune than it is worth. Note : 
 y^ 3 crownes are y^ antient armes of Ireland ( — the Harp 
 but an antient badge or device of that country — ) from 
 whence it came y' Vere, Duke of Ireland, had three crownes 
 w"* a border given him in augmentation. In the tyme of 
 Edw. ye 4th a commission being to enquire the arms of 
 Ireland it was returned y' y*^ 3 crownes were the armes, 
 and these arms I have scene uppon the reverse of old Irish 
 coynes. 
 
 ' It is thus shown that azure, and azure only, has 
 been the colour of Ireland since the Enghsh Con- 
 quest, and it is equally clear that antecedently green
 
 IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 195 
 
 was not much in vogue with the great Celtic houses 
 from which the kings of 'ireland were chosen. 
 
 ' ^ the creation of the Order of St. Patrick, an 
 order, instituted as a compUment to the nationahty 
 of Ireland, just after 1782 and the Vohmteers, when 
 it was the object of the King to gratify the national 
 sensibihty of Ireland, the colour selected for the 
 knights was blue ; the Royal Irish Regiments have 
 their facings generally blue, and never green, and the 
 uniform of the Irish Brigade in the service of France 
 was red. About seventy years ago, when the peerage 
 of Bantry was created, one of the supporters granted 
 was a female figure representing ' Ireland,' viz. a 
 lady robed in blue, wearing an ancient crown, and 
 standing in front of a harp. 
 
 ' From all these circumstances, it would appear 
 that, prior to the Anglo-Norman Invasion, there 
 was not any one colour or banner adopted for Ireland 
 at large. None such is traceable in the old Celtic 
 records or authorities ; none handed do\\ai by 
 tradition, and none found mentioned in history ; 
 and since the introduction of EngHsh rule, the 
 national colour, estabhshed by and derived from the 
 national arms, has been invariably blue.' 
 
 With reference to the use of the colour ' green,' 
 Mr. Garstin also mentions that notices of it 
 will be found in Notes and Queries, 9th series, 
 iii. 37 ; vi. 274, &c. The Knights of St. John 
 of Jerusalem used a green flag. Josephus, in 
 his ' Antiquities ' (ed. of 1864, pp. 398, 424), 
 menti<jns a mysterious organisation in the time 
 
 o 2
 
 196 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 of Augustus, known as ' Thtj Green Band Faction.' 
 See also Gibbon and Hodj^'kin's ' Invaders of Italy,' 
 V. 434. The use of green can be traced to 
 Delphos. At Nisme, in 1816-8, the Bourbon party 
 wore their cockades embroidered with green. 
 
 Dr. Joyce, in his ' Social History of Ancient 
 Ireland ' (ii. 190-3), has an interesting section 
 on Colours. He says that though green is at 
 the present day regarded as the national colour, 
 this is a modern innovation, and he adds : 
 
 It is well known that at the Battle of the Boyne, in 1690, 
 the Irish wore little strips of white paper in their caps, 
 while the Williamites wore sprigs of green. 
 
 In the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries, 
 ii- 378-380, there is an Irish poem on the origin 
 of armorial bearings ; and in the same journal, 1902, 
 xxxii. 415-417, will be found communications from 
 Bishop Howley, Mr. Burtchaell, and Mr. Vinycomb, 
 giving many memoranda bearing on the subject. 
 The origin of the arms of Connaught has, however, 
 yet to be explained. (See p. 190, supra, extract 
 from Harris's ' Ware,' n. 184.) 
 
 The red saltire cross of St. Patrick, which was 
 associated with those of St. George and St. Andrew, 
 to form the flag of the United Kingdom, as recorded 
 in a volume in Ulster's Office, was older than Mr. 
 Vinycomb and other writers supposed, though in 
 Cromwell's time the harp was used to correspond 
 with the two other crosses on the coinage, &c. The 
 old seal of Trinity College, Dubhn, found among the 
 archives in Kilkenny Castle, and depicted in ' The
 
 " IRISH TRIBAL BADGES 197 
 
 Book of Trinity College/ bears the date 'April, 
 1593/ and includes, on the two flags surmounting 
 the .* towers, two 'crosses — the saltire in question, 
 and.^that of St. George. The cross of St. Patrick 
 (a saltire gules) was probably derived from the arms 
 of the noble house of FitzGerald, which also 
 suggested the arms of the Bishopric of Kildare. 
 
 A very full account of the formation of the Union 
 Flag will be found in the Times newspaper of Sep- 
 tember 30 and October i (three columns), 1903. 
 
 The arms now assigned to the four provinces 
 (which figure prominently in the O'Connell Monu- 
 ment, and in the badge of our Society) are compara- 
 tively modern, having been settled by Sir B. Burke 
 for a grant to the Royal University in 1881 ; 
 but in Betty's maps and elsewhere earlier varia- 
 tions may be found, though, unlike the arms of 
 Meath, they were not registered in the Irish Office of 
 Arms. 
 
 In the Book of Arms, drawn up by Sir David 
 Lindsay, ' of the Mount,' Lion King-of-Arms of 
 Scotland in 1630, which were officially approved 
 by the Privy Council of Scotland, there are coloured 
 representations of the arms of the kings of Christen- 
 dom, and these include those of ' The Kyng of 
 Yrland,' which show a king seated on a throne, both 
 apparently gold, on a blue shield. The blazon is 
 given as : ' Az. A king seated on throne, or.' 
 These were the arms of the ancient kingdom 
 registered in Ulster's Of^ce.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF FERNS 
 CATHEDRAL 
 
 However prosaic and commonplace the 
 little town of Ferns may be, the ruins of 
 its cathedral, its castle, its parish church, 
 and its monastery are sufficient to remind us 
 of its former importance. Ferns of the saints 
 and Ferns of the kings was a provincial seat 
 of government, and the residence of an arch- 
 bishop before Dublin had well-nigh attained 
 to the dignity of a bishop's see ; and much of 
 the history of our country centres around its 
 site. 
 
 The old semi-circular graveyard points 
 us back to a time previous to the foundation 
 of the see of Canterbury, when our founding 
 archbishop, known as St. Moedoc, St. 7Eda.n, 
 
 and St. Mogue (all of which names may be 
 
 198
 
 - FERNS CATHEDRAL 199 
 
 rendered in English as St. Hugh), the friend 
 and pupil of the great St. David of Wales, 
 sailed across the channel, and collecting to- 
 gether the scattered Christians and the con- 
 verts gathered out of the surrounding heathen, 
 formed them into a united church ; and when, 
 after a short sojourn at Clonmore, County 
 Wexford, and other places, he threw up his 
 ecclesiastic rath, or fort, at Ferns, for the pro- 
 tection of himself and his followers on the 
 site now occupied by the present graveyard, 
 this location being a portion of land which 
 had been granted to him by our Irish ' Black 
 Prince,' 'Bran Duhh,' as a thank-offering for 
 the services rendered to him by suggesting a 
 stratagem, or military ruse, which enabled 
 him to successfully resist his enemy, Aedh, 
 son of Ainmire, King of all Ireland. Within 
 this rampart he built his little oratory, pro- 
 bably of wood or wattle-work, to be succeeded 
 in after years by a group of little Celtic 
 churches like those which remain to our own 
 day at Glendalough. 
 
 One of these (hke Glendalough), larger and 
 more imposing than the others, would be the 
 predecessor of our cathedral ; for we read in
 
 200 
 
 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 the records both of the ' oratory ' of Ferns 
 and of the ' oratories ' of Ferns. Within 
 these walls lived not only St. Moedoc, Arch- 
 bishop of all Leinster, but also his successor, 
 
 FERNS CASTLE 
 
 an equally celebrated Irish saint and bishop, 
 or archbishop, St. Moiling of Ferns, patron of 
 the Clan Kavanagh. A holy well, dedicated 
 to St. Mogue (some say to St. Moiling), is 
 situated not far from the cathedral enclosure, 
 and over it a modern stonework dome has
 
 ^ FERNS CATHEDRAL 201 
 
 been erected, adorned with heads abstracted 
 from the ancient Celtic church of Clone. 
 
 0t this great Archbishop of Ferns we 
 have an interesting monument preserved for 
 us in the Book of Mulling, on which Professor 
 Jackson Lawlor has published such a learned 
 essay, and in which he has discovered ' the 
 only sample of a daily office of the ancient 
 Irish or Scottish church known to exist/ At 
 a time long subsequent, but still well within 
 the Celtic period, was written the celebrated 
 ' Book of Leinster,' which was compiled in the 
 first half of the 12th century by Bishop Finn 
 MacGorman, in accordance with the direction 
 of the tutor of Dermot MacMurrough, the 
 well-known last King of Leinster [in Celtic 
 times] who resided at Ferns, and which, like 
 the Book of Mulling, is now one of the literary 
 treasures preserved in Trinity College, Dublin. 
 In fact, the principal remains of Celtic Ferns, 
 with the exception of the Celtic crosses (one 
 of which is supposed to mark the grave of 
 King Dermot), are literary ; for although we 
 would desire to speak of the tomb of St. 
 Moedoc with all respect, we must place it 
 well within the Norman period.
 
 202 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 The tomb itself is a very fine one, and lias 
 resting upon it a nicely carved full-length 
 figure of a well-set-up Norman Bishop. 
 That eminent antiquary, the late Herbert 
 Hore, believed it to be the tomb of Richard 
 of Northampton, who had been secretary to 
 the Prime Minister of England, and was 
 interred in the Cathedral of Ferns a.d. 1303. 
 Yet it is quite possible that in the course of 
 the many convulsions through which Ferns 
 passed, the tomb of this Norman bishop may 
 have been removed from its own resting-place 
 and placed over the grave of the founding 
 bishop of the diocese, whose remains may 
 have been buried at some period in the crypt 
 underneath. 
 
 The little parish church, which is in the 
 rector}^ lawn, is a late Celtic or Romanesque 
 building. Within the cathedral enclosure 
 the Normans found nothing but ruins ; for 
 in 1 166 King Dermot MacMurrough burned 
 down the whole place as a precaution lest 
 the Connaught men might burn it. 
 
 The monastery of King Dermot's own 
 foundation was without the cathedral en- 
 closure. These Normans were mighty builders
 
 FERNS CATHEDRAL 
 
 203 
 
 and introduced into Ireland the Gothic 
 or Early Pointed style of architecture. In 
 it •'(making use, doubtless, of the materials 
 of**the old oratories, not a vestige of which 
 
 *^>.u<^^ 
 
 FERNS MONASTERY 
 
 now exists) they constructed a fine Gothic 
 church, and the ruins of some of its graceful 
 Gothic windows still remain to show that at 
 one time a building stood there that was 
 worthy of the ancient reputation that attaches 
 to an honoured site ; but before that church
 
 204 PKE HISTORIC FAITH 
 
 was built the most gorgeous pageant that 
 ever took place in Ferns must have been 
 witnessed within that cathedral enclosure, 
 when the conquering Earl Strongbow and 
 the Princess Eva came there, with all their 
 retinue, to wed the earl's daughter to Robert 
 de Quency. And here, in the presence of 
 Norman knights clad in glistening coats of mail 
 and Irish nobles in their bright tunics adorned 
 with that wealth of colour that was esteemed 
 suitable to princely rank, wearing fringed 
 cloaks fastened on the right breast with 
 brooches of gold, the wedding took place ; 
 when the ceremony was over, Strongbow 
 endowed the bridegroom with the lands 
 called 'The Duffry,' and conferred on him the 
 office and dignity of Constable of Leinster. 
 The old record tells us that he handed him 
 the standard and banner of his office in the 
 presence of all the baronage. Here from time 
 to time knelt in prayer not only Irish kings 
 and princes, but all that was great and noble 
 among the Norman knights, such as the Lord 
 de Prendergast (grandson of the chivalrous 
 Sir Maurice de Prendergast), who married the 
 heiress of the Constable of Leinster. Here
 
 FERNS CAT HEDRAL 205 
 
 were- seen the noble Earls-Marshal of England, 
 Eords of Pembroke, well known if it was only 
 fof'Fhe tenacity with which they held on to 
 the church lands claimed by the bishops 
 until the last of the race passed away and the 
 family became extinct. Here also scions of 
 the noble house of Fitzgerald kept watch and 
 ward in that fine old Norman castle which 
 dominates the \'alley in which the cathedral 
 stands, and which doubtless was erected on the 
 site of the Celtic dun or fort where Dermot 
 and the Princess Dervorgilla, wife of O'Rourke, 
 Prince of Briefne, kept their court ; but 
 shortly after the Norman invasion the palmy 
 days of Ferns may be said to have passed 
 away ; for although in the olden time it had 
 been subject to periodical raids made by the 
 Danes, that may be said to have been as 
 nothing compared with the unrest of the 
 Norman period of occupation. 
 
 The Normans could conquer, but they 
 proved unable to hold. There was no steadi- 
 ness or continuity in the government they 
 set up. To-day, Bishop Charnells was heading 
 his retainers against the Irish clans and routing 
 them with great slaughter. To-morrow, the
 
 2o6 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 war cries of the clans of the Kavanaghs, the 
 O'Byrnes, and O'Tooles rang through the 
 streets, and the townsmen and ecclesiastics 
 withdrew to a more peaceful neighbourhood. 
 Neglect and decay followed. The district 
 was held for lengthened periods by the 
 chieftains of the Kavanaghs, nominally as 
 constables for the king, but really as inde- 
 pendent princes — so very independent that 
 the king found it necessary to pay them 
 blackmail, which was called ' MacMurrough's 
 black penny,' to keep them quiet. 
 
 In the reign of Queen Elizabeth the 
 O'Byrnes burnt the cathedral down, and in 
 1577 an Order in Council was passed com- 
 manding them to rebuild it. This they seem 
 to have partly attempted to do, as Bishop 
 Ram tells us that there was an ' ile ' of the 
 Cathedral Church ' builded,' * wherein Divine 
 Service is duely celebrated. ' This aisle was sub- 
 sequently partly rebuilt and restored in 1816, 
 and an effort to rescue it from the degrada- 
 tion of ' carpenter's Gothic ' and the barbar- 
 ous square pews of the Georgian period was 
 afterwards made. It is also hoped that the 
 mother church of the diocese may now be
 
 ^ FERNS CATHEDRAL 207 
 
 considered in some respects an object-lesson of 
 ecclesiastical order to its daughter churches. 
 ThS jjresent status of the building is defined 
 by** an Act of Parliament passed in the year 
 1781, giving permission for the cathedral 
 to be used for parish or parochial purposes, 
 as the parish church had become a ruin, and 
 at the same time ' saving to the Lord Bishop 
 of Ferns and his successors, and to the Dean 
 and Chapter of said Cathedral and their 
 successors, their several and respective and 
 distinct rights, and privileges, and immunities, 
 in said Cathedral, an3^thing in this Act con- 
 tained to the contrary thereof in anywise 
 notwithstanding.' So interesting do strangers 
 consider this relic of the past and the anti- 
 quarian remains contained in and around it, 
 that one of the first subscribers to the restora- 
 tion fund was the editor of the Ulster 
 Journal of Archaeology, who, although his 
 fellow-townsmen were straining every effort 
 to build a cathedral for Belfast, felt that 
 he could not allow such an excellent 
 object of church improvement to pass by 
 unaided. 
 
 Of the history of the Chapter of Ferns but
 
 2o8 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 little worthy of record remains to be told. 
 From the Vatican registers we learn that 
 Reginald, Archdeacon of Ferns, obtained a 
 licence from Honorius III (a.d. 1223) ad- 
 mitting the validity of certain ecclesiastical 
 acts done by him. This same Reginald was 
 witness to a grant of lands made by John St. 
 John, the first Norman Bishop of Ferns, to 
 the Abbey of Douske, or Vale St. Saviours ; 
 as was also Geffry St. John, Official of Ferns, 
 who became the next Bishop of Ferns. In 
 A.D. 1252 we find a mandate to the Bishop 
 and Chapter of Ferns to give a canonry to 
 Richard, called Chancellor of their diocese. 
 This, doubtless, was to be held along with his 
 dignity of Chancellor. In a.d. 1325 there 
 was an ' Indult ' issued to Master Geoffrey, 
 Precentor of Ferns, to enjoy the dispensation, 
 hitherto without effect, granted to him by 
 the Archbishop of Dublin, to hold an addi- 
 tional benefice provided he reside thereon. 
 In 1286 an Indult was issued to Master John 
 de Stanford, ' Dean of Dublin,' who obtained 
 first the Treasurership of Ferns, and then 
 the parish church of Cavendish, in the diocese 
 of Norwich. These documents provide us
 
 FERNS CATHEDRAL 209 
 
 with names of the earhest holders of these 
 offices known to us, and show that the 
 dio,ccse of Ferns had a properly constituted 
 Chapter at an early date. 
 
 Note. — Authorities quoted in this chapter : ' The 
 Annals of the Four Masters ' ; Lanigan's ' Ecclesiastical 
 History of Ireland ' ; ' The Song of Derinot and the Earl,' 
 translated b}- Goddart Orpen, &c., &c
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 TO CHAPTERS I, II, III, AND VII 
 
 Prehistoric Religion. — In the Proceedings of the 
 Royal Irish Academy, vol. xxx. sec. c. no. 2, 
 p. 57, Major R. G. Berry, A.S.C., tells us on the 
 authority of Dr. O'Gorman, the Roman Catholic 
 Bishop of Sierra Leone (writing of the cannibals of 
 that region) : ' All the Mendi-speaking people have 
 individualised the Creator. It is he who has made 
 the world, themselves and everything in it. They 
 consider him good and beneficent and give to him 
 an attribute of aloofness. He does not now trouble 
 much with the earth and its inhabitants, but he is 
 all-powerful. He does not act direct, he tells some 
 spirit or devil to do it ' : so that their practical 
 worship is the worship of devils, whom they greatly 
 fear. 
 
 Ancestor Worship. — On page 59 the same writer 
 tells us : ' Ancestor worship prevails as much in 
 Africa as in China.' 
 
 Totemism. — There are relics- of totemism among 
 the Mcndi, some of the people claiming to belong 
 to the bird family, others to the fish and leopard 
 families, and others again to vegetable families ; and 
 
 p 2
 
 212 PREHISTORIC FAITH 
 
 none will eat objects which are of or represent these 
 families in the animal or vegetable world. 
 
 Earth Houses. — On page 26 we are told that 
 during the troubles in the Soudan the troops were 
 subject to constant annoyance from a mysterious 
 enemy who appeared from nowhere and as 
 mysteriously disappeared. On being pursued by 
 some British officers, it was found that they disap- 
 peared down holes, the ground being honeycombed 
 with them like a rabbit-warren. On being entered 
 it was found that the holes led into passages and 
 these into galleries and chambers until quite a city 
 was revealed. 
 
 {Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 
 published May 4th, 1912.) 
 
 THE END 
 
 PRINTED BY 
 
 SPOTTISWOODE AND CO. LTD., COLCHESTER 
 
 LONDON AND ETON
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE, FOLK LORE 
 
 ETC. 
 
 PRIMITIVE PATERNITY. The Myth of Supernatural Birth 
 in Relation to the History of the Family. By E. S. Hartland, 
 .JP.'S.A. 2 vols. iSs. net. 
 
 " J^he book is certainly a most interesting contribution to the study 
 botfi*of primitive culture and folk-lore." — Scotsman. 
 
 CELTIC LITERATURE. By Matthew Arnold. With 
 Preface and Notes by Mr. Alfred Nutt. 3;-. 6d. net. 
 
 Mr. Nutt, who admires the essay enormously, has done it the great 
 service of stating fully the circumstances in which it was written, and of 
 correcting in footnotes those errors either of fact or impression which the 
 great improvement of Celtic scholarship has laid open to detection. 
 
 THREE MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCES. By Laura 
 HiBBARD. Uniform with the Arthurian Romance Series. 
 2s. net. 
 
 MONUMENTA HISTORICA CELTICA. By W. Dinan. 
 
 A Collection of references to the Celts in classical authors. 2 vols. 
 Demy 8vo. Vol. L 15^. net. 
 
 POPULAR STUDIES No. 3.— OSSIAN AND OSSI- 
 ANIC LITERATURE. By Alfred Nutt. New Edition. 
 6d. net. 
 
 CULTS, MYTHS AND RELIGIONS. By S. Reinach. 
 Translated by Miss Elizabeth Frost. [/« Preparation. 
 
 FOLK-TALES AND LEGENDS OF THE SANTAL 
 PARGANAS. Collected by the Rev. D. BODDING, and trans- 
 lated by C. H. BoMPAS, Indian Civil Service. Demy 8vo. 
 Cloth. Upwards of 400 pp. lo^. dd. net. 
 "The stories make delightful reading, and there is much instruction 
 
 mingled with the delight." — Expository Times. 
 
 EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL. By the Rev. E. S. Buchanan. 
 
 \_I71 Prepa?-ation. 
 
 THOUGHTS ON ULTIMATE PROBLEMS. By F. W. 
 
 Frankland. Fifth and revised edition. Crown 8vo. Price 
 is. 6d. net. A series of short studies on theological and meta- 
 physical subjects. 
 
 THE BOOK OF RUTH. By the Rev. R. II. J. Steuart, S.J. 
 Crown 8vo. Bound. 3^. 6d. net. A literal translation from 
 the Hebrew. 
 
 THE SCIENCE OF THE SCIENCES, constituting a new 
 system of the universe, which solves great ultimate problems. 
 By H. Jamyn Brooks. Probable price, 3^. 6d. to ^s. 
 
 [/« Preparation. 
 
 THE EUCHARIST. A study by Amy Brooks. Demy 8vo. 
 Price 6d. net. 
 
 DAVID NUTT, 17 Grape Street, New Oxford Street.
 
 IRISH TEXTS SOCIETY. 
 
 INEDITED IRISH TEXTS WITH ACCOMPANYING ENGLISH 
 VERSION, NOTES AND INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Demy 8vo. cloth. 
 
 Vol. I.— the ADVENTURES OF THE LAD OF THE 
 FERULE. The Adventures of the Children of the King of 
 Norway. Two Irish Romantic Tales of the i6th and 17th 
 Centuries, edited and translated for the first time by Douglas 
 Hydk, LL.D., with Introduction, Notes and Glossary. 1899. 
 xvi-176 pp. [OiU of rrint. 
 
 Vol. II.— fled BRICREND; THE FEAST OF 
 BRICRIU. An early Gaelic Saga, edited, with Translation, 
 Introduction and Notes by George Henderson, M.A., Ph.D. 
 1899. lxvii-209 pp. \0 lit of Print. 
 
 Vol. III.— the POETICAL WORKS OF EOGAN 
 O'RAHILLY. For the first time edited, with accompanying 
 English version, Introduction, Notes and Glossary by the Rev. 
 Father DiNEEN, S.J. 190Q. lxiii-304 pp. [Out of Print. 
 
 Vol. IV.-HISTORYOF IRELAND. By Geoffrey Keat- 
 ing. Edited by David Comyn. Vol. I. 1901. io.f. Gd. net. 
 
 Vol. v.— the MARTIAL CAREER OF CONGHAL 
 CLAIRINGHNEACH. Edited for the first time, with Trans- 
 lation, Introduction, Notes, and Glossary, by P. MacSweeney, 
 M.A. 1902, lxviii-233 pp. 105. 6d. net. 
 
 Vol. VI.— the IRISH AENEID. Printed for the first time 
 from fourteenth century MSS., and Translated by the Rev. J. 
 Calder. With Introduction, Notes, Glossary. 1903. io.y. 6a'. net. 
 
 Vol. VII.— DUANAIRE FINN. The Book of the Lays of 
 
 Fionn. Irish Text with Translation into English, by John 
 
 MacNeill. Part I. Demy 8vo. lxv-208 pp. 105. 6d. net. 
 
 Mr. MacNeill's Introduction is a most valuable contribution to the 
 
 elucidation of the " origines " of the Ossianic cycle and to the criticism of 
 
 Irish romantic history of the third century A. D. 
 
 Vols. VIII. and IX.— KEATING'S HISTORY OF IRE- 
 
 LAND. Vols. II. and III. los. 6d. each net. 
 
 Vol. X.— the STORY OF THE CROP-EARED DOG. 
 THE STORY OF EAGLE BOY. Two Irish Arthurian 
 Romances. Edited and Translated by R. A. Stewart 
 Macalistes. ix-204 pp. los. 6d. net. 
 
 Vol. XL— the POEMS OF DAVID O'BRUADAIR. 
 
 Part I. Containing poems down to the year 1666. Edited with 
 Introduction, Translation and Notes by the Rev. John L. C. 
 MacErlean, S.J. 206 pp. 10s. 6d. net. 
 
 Vol. XII.— Reprint of Vol. III. Revised and Enlarged. ios.6d.nti. 
 
 Catalogue on application. 
 
 DAVID NUTT, 17 Grape Street, New Oxford Street,
 
 UNIVERSITY OF. CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 FEB 4 
 
 AUG ?-19^_^ 
 * FEB S«r 
 
 ^ OCT 1 : 1376 
 
 .,D URL ^* ^^ 
 
 ' ■ ■ ^ 
 
 KECD LO-URQ 
 . APR 6 WBb 
 
 978 
 
 Form L9-40m-7,'56(C790s4)444 
 
 z^,__ ''i'H-^ Unu AHt 
 
 msmrnrrr of California
 
 3 1158 01015 9928 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY 
 
 FACILITY 
 
 AA 000 394 032 7
 
 m