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In Egypt at the time of Moses, Scota,
daughter of the Pharaoh, and Neil, son of Fenius the inventor
of the Irish language, had a son named Gaedhael. Gaedhael was
the progenitor of the group of Celts who became the Irish. When
he was a young boy, he was bitten by a snake. Moses cured his
snakebite and said, “God commands and I command that this boy’s
descendants will live in a land free from snakes.” Depending on
how you look at it, that is why there are no snakes in Ireland,
or why Gaedhael’s people eventually settled in Ireland, where
there were no snakes.
But first they stopped off in Spain
for a few hundred years. Gaedhael’s people came from Scythia,
lived in Egypt for a time, were evicted from there, and then dominated
the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe.
The lighthouse in La Coruña in Galicia,
on the northwest coast of Spain, is called the Tower of Hercules,
because it was built by Hercules over the bones of the giant Gerión
after he killed him in combat. But long before that, in the fifth
century before Christ, Breogán, one of Gaedhael’s descendants,
built a tower on the same site.
At that time, the king of Spain was Mil. One day, Breogán’s
son Ith, nephew of Mil, was standing on top of the Tower of Breogán,
and he looked directly to the north and saw land on the horizon.
Even now, some people swear that if you stand on the highest mountains
in Galicia – over a mile high – you can see this small green island
900 kilometres north of La Coruña.
Ith’s brother Breg said what many people
say today: “No, it’s not land that you see. It’s only a bank of
clouds.” But Ith and his family got into a boat and set off to
investigate this strange island. When they arrived at what was
then called Inis Ealga – the Noble Island – but is now known as
Ireland, they met the inhabitants, the Tuatha Dé Danaan, who possessed
magic arts.
Ith made a serious mistake. First he
admired the beauty and fertility of the country, and then he gave
the Tuatha Dé Danaan advice on how to run it. This made the Tuatha
Dé Danaan think that Ith wanted to take over Ireland for his own
people – and perhaps that was true – so they killed him. When
Ith’s family went back to Spain and told the other Celts what
had happened, a large group – the Sons of Mil or the Milesians
– returned to invade Ireland.
The druids of the Tuatha Dé Danaan
covered the country with a cloud, so the Milesians couldn’t see
the land. The Milesians circled the island three times to break
the spell, and when they landed they met the three queens of the
Tuatha Dé Danaan – Banba, Fodhla and Éire. Each of them asked
the Milesians to name the country after her, if they were victorious
in the coming battle.
They promised that they would, and
even though the Tuatha Dé Danaan had magic powers, they were Bronze
Age people, with bronze weapons, and the Iron Age Milesians, with
their superior iron weapons, defeated them. So now Ireland’s official
name in Irish is Éire, but Fodhla and Banba are still used as
poetic names.
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