the form of great battles, then as the god was forced to become a
giant, so his temple was remembered to be a tomb. Doubtless, in his
own territory, divine honours were still paid him; but in the
national imagination and in the classical literature and received
history, he was a giant of the olden time, slain by the gods, and
interred in the rath which bore his name. Such was the great Mac
Erc, King of Fir-bolgs.

Again, when the mediaeval Christians ceased to regard the Tuatha De
Danan as devils, and proceeded to rationalise the divine record as
the ethnic bards had rationalised the history of the early gods;
the Tuatha De Danan, shorn of immortality, became ancient heroes
who had lived their day and died, and the greater raths, no longer
the houses of the gods, figure in that literature irrationally
rational, as their tombs. Thus we are gravely informed [Note:
Annals of Four Masters.] that "the Dagda Mor, after the second
battle of Moy Tura, retired to the Brugh on the Boyne, where he
died from the venom of the wounds inflicted on him by Kethlenn"--
the Fomorian amazon--"and was there interred." Even in this passage
the writer seems to have been unable to dispossess his mind quite
of the traditional belief that the Brugh was the Dagda's house.

The peculiarity of this mound, in addition to its size, is the
spaciousness of the central chamber. This was that germ which, but
for the overthrow of the bardic religion, would have developed into
a temple in the classic sense of the word. A two-fold motive would
have impelled the growing civilisation in this direction. A desire
to make the house of the god as spacious within as it was great
without, and a desire to transfer his worship, or the more esoteric
and solemn part of it, from without to within. Either the absence