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"Willing, O king!" answered Congal. "It is well," said the king. "We shall all meet again to-night in our banquet-hall." And the king, with the Princess Mave on his arm, attended by his bards and Druids, entered the palace, and the chiefs and nobles went their several ways.
However, I spied a curious thing enough in the hedge. It was an old crab-tree, out of which grew a great bunch of something green, quite different from the tree itself. Here is a branch of it. Mr. A. Ah! this is mistletoe, a plant of great fame for the use made of it by the Druids of old in their religious rites and incantations.
The Beltane fires appear to have been kindled also in Ireland, for Cormac, "or somebody in his name, says that belltaine, May-day, was so called from the 'lucky fire, or the 'two fires, which the druids of Erin used to make on that day with great incantations; and cattle, he adds, used to be brought to those fires, or to be driven between them, as a safeguard against the diseases of the year."
It was as a whole not so old as the agents had represented it, by some centuries, but it adapted itself as little to his preconceived notions of domesticity as if it had been built by Druids. The task of seeming to be at home in it had as many sides to it as there were minutes in the day and oddly enough, Thorpe found in their study and observance a congenial occupation.
He says that Diarmid was killed by the druids, who put a burning shirt on him, a fragment of mythology that may connect Diarmid with the legend of Hercules, if it is not due to the 'learning' in some hedge-school master's ballad. Then we talked about Inishmaan.
Lastly, I may refer to the preservation of this rite among the Druids, whose "mystical dance" around the cairn, or sacred stones, was nothing more nor less than the rite of circumambulation. On these occasions the priest always made three circuits, from east to west, by the right hand, around the altar or cairn, accompanied by all the worshippers.
Andrew, from Rome to Britain, to convert the natives to Christianity; but, while the Anglo-Saxons embraced the new faith, the Britons rejected it, and, being persecuted by the Christians, retired to the fastnesses of the country known as Wales, where, for a long period, they maintained the observance of the Druidical form of worship; and although that country has long since become Christianized, the society of the Ancient Order of Druids has existed with an uninterrupted succession at Pout-y-prid, where the Arch-Druid resides, and from, whence emanated the charter of the Grand Lodge of the order in this country.
Many of the Greek and Roman writers who have dealt with this subject agree in ascribing to the Druids a high degree of scientific knowledge and mechanical skill.
In Western Europe, as shown in the ceremonies of the Druids, we find among the Celts a propensity for suicide and an indifference to self-torture. The Gauls were similarly minded, believing in the dogma of immortality and eternal repose. They thought little of bodily cares and ills. In Greece and Rome there was always an apology for suicide and death in the books of the philosophers.
They sat before Mogue's tent, and the King's Son told Flann the whole of the story he had searched for how a King traveling through the mist had come to where Druids and the Maid of the Green Mantle lived, how the King was enchanted, and how the maiden Sheen released him from the enchantment. He told him, too, how the Enchanter was changed into a wolf, and how the wolf carried away Sheen's child.
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