The hero then became immortal in his own right; he had
feasted with Mananan and eaten his life-giving food, and would not
know death.
When the mortal character of the hero was forgotten, his house or
temple might be erected anywhere. The great Raths of the Boyne--a
place grown sacred from causes which we may not now learn--
represented, probably, heroes and heroines, who died and were
interred in many different parts of the country.
To recapitulate, the Dagda Mor was a divine title given to a hero
named Eocaidh, who lived many centuries before the birth of Christ,
and in the depths of the pre-historic ages. He was the mortal scion
or ward of an elder god, Elathan, and was interred in some unknown
grave--marked, perhaps, by a plain pillar stone, or small
insignificant cairn.
The great tumulus of New Grange was the temple of the divine or
supernatural period of his spiritual or imagined career after
death, and was a development by steps from that small unremembered
grave where once his warriors hid the inurned ashes of the hero.
What is true of one branch of the Aryan family is true of all.
Sentiments of such universality and depth must have been common to
all. If this be so, the Olympian Zeus himself was once some rude
chieftain dwelling in Thrace or Macedonia, and his sublime temple
of Doric architecture traceable to some insignificant cairn or
flagged cist in Greece, or some earlier home of the Hellenic race,
and his name not Zeus, but another; and Kronos, that god whom he,
as a living wight, adored, and under whose protection and favour he
prospered.
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