Much of Irish mythology is lost to us. The accumulations of myth and heroic tales were a closed book to the Romans, whom we rely on for much of our understanding of prehistoric Europe but who barely made it to Ireland. As a result much of the mythology, like that of the Picts, was dependent on oral traditions and died when these were no longer passed on.
Put more simply, there was nothing much tangible left behind to be uncovered. But thankfully there are two sources which have allowed, if not a comprehensive understanding of this wildest and weirdest of mythologies, at least a piecing together of those stories of gods and monsters.
The first is the wealth of Stone, Bronze and Iron Age archaeology which litters the island. These speak to the sophistication of Irish religion (and building techniques) and the impact it had on the environment even thousands of years later.
Among the most prominent of these is the great prehistoric monument to the winter solstice at Newgrange. This huge, circular Stone Age construction, older than Stonehenge and more a tumulus than a building, is magnificent and exacting in its orientation and in its fine stonework.
But the second source of information on Irish mythology is that, happily and only towards the end, some of the great mythic tales of Ireland and her people were recorded. This simple act of committing these stories to a more permanent record meant that, in time, Irish myths could be recovered even with the oral tradition long broken.
And it also means we know who, in Irish mythology at least, lived at Newgrange.
The Dagda
What’s in a name? Well, the use of the definite article is very interesting here. It suggests that the Dagda is not the name of this figure, but more a description. Som what is “the” Dagda, in this context?
This father of the Irish gods has many interesting parallels with other, contemporary religions. Like the Greeks and the later, plagiarizing Romans, the Irish family of gods fought their own antagonistic Titans, known as the Fomorians.
Like the Greek god Zeus, Dagda was married to an “envious wife”, known as The Morrigan. Like the Norse god Odin, or the Gaulish god Sucellos, the Dagda was seen as an old man, yet still tall, bearded and powerful. His staff was able to grant life or death, depending on which end he wielded, his harp could bewitch man and control their emotions, and his cauldron never ran out of food.
These are familiar characteristics for a god, it must be said. But it prompts an interesting question: are these characteristics examples of a sort of mythological convergence in evolution? Put another way, are gods seen in this fashion because these are characteristics which we naturally come to attribute to divine beings, in our attempts to rationalize the realities of the world around us?
The overwhelming number of close parallels and similarities between these disparate mythic figures argues otherwise. Is it too simplistic to say that the many “father of the gods” figures so similar because these are the natural emergent characteristics that we would ascribe to such characters?
Is the Dagda powerful, and both life giving and destructive, simply because he is an anthropomorphized rendering of how we understand our environment? Are environmental pressures so consistent that they would create similar gods as far apart as Ireland and Greece, unrelated to each other?
Is that all there is to it? Some, looking for a deeper understanding of these traditions, emphasize instead that these likely all flow from the same spring, that there is an underlying proto-religion that all these later myths draw on. Like shadows cast on a wall, we can see this ur-religion in the common characteristics of those that came after.
Where did the Dagda come from? Why does he share so much with his analogues from other religions, despite the isolation of one from another? It would seem, in identifying these common characteristics, that we can not only piece together the Dagda and his religion.
We can piece together how religion came to be.
Top Image: The Dagda is the ancient Irish god of the natural world. Source: Sean McGrath / CC BY 2.0.
