Irish Druids And Old Irish Religions

writings of Irish Churchmen, so few references to the idolatrous practices of their countrymen. In the catalogues of the Dublin Museum of the Irish Academy one finds expression of the same wonder in these words: "The ecclesiastical chroniclers of the period, in their zeal for the establishment of Christianity, would appear to have altogether ignored the subject of pagan worship." It is this silence which has led so many persons to doubt the idolatrous customs of the early Irish, or to be very sceptical as to the nature of the gods they worshipped.

The Akkadian religion of Assyria throws some light upon Irish faiths. Major Conder, referring to the inscriptions of Tell Loh, thought they proved "the piety of those ancient Akkadian rulers, and showing that the deities adored represented the sun and moon, the dawn and sunset, with the spirits of the mountains, the sea, the earth, and of hell." Elsewhere he says, "As regards the deities adored, they evidently include heaven, hell, the ocean, the sun and moon, the dawn, and the sunset." This was in Ur of the Chaldees, but long before Abraham's time.

The Major was struck with another inscription--"I have made the Pyramid temple to the Lord of the heavenly region. To Tammuz, Lord of the Land of Darkness, I have built a Pyramid temple." He further adds--"The Akkadians and Babylonians believed in pairs of deities inhabiting the various kingdoms of the gods." Others have detected the same duality in the divinities of Ireland. The Druidical three rods, or rays of light, have been compared to a Phœnician Trinity--the three sons of Il, and called Elohim. Morien contends that Jehovah is represented in Druidism by the three letters, I A O.

It is curious to note the remains of a very ancient building on the Hebridean Harris Island, known locally as the temple. of Annait, and a similar one at Skye, afterwards

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becoming the Church of the Trianade, or Trinity. We are reminded of the Tanat or Tanath of the Phœnicians, the Anaietis of the Lydians, the Aphrodite Tanais of the Babylonians. How such mysteries got to the Hebrides need not surprise us. Two races left their descendants in those Islands--the Norwegian and the Irish; the latter spread over the islets and coastline of Western Scotland, and carried thither the popular creed of the migration era.

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