Montmorency’s third objection against the antiquity of the Round Towers—founded on the statements of those Greek and Latin writers above named, respecting the “barbarous” condition of the then Irish,—I thus dissipate into thin air.
The inhabitants of Ireland, at the time in which those authors flourished, had nothing to do with the erection of the Round Towers. Those edifices were hoary with antiquity at that moment. They belonged to an era and to a dynasty, not only of a more ancient but of a more exalted character in every sense of the word, and whose religious ceremonials, for the celebration of which the Round Towers were constructed, the then inhabitants did not only abhor, but did all in their power to efface and obliterate. Nor was it the religion alone of this inoffensive and sacred tribe that this new and devastating race of militants laboured to extirpate; but, what was far more to be deplored, they, for a season, extinguished their literature also; until at length, fired by the moral ether which the lessons of their now slaves had inspired, their souls got attuned to the sublimity of such studies, and they sat themselves down accordingly to emulate their instructors.
As to the puny detractions, therefore, of either Greece or Rome, they might well have been spared, as they knew less than nothing of our real history. When they were lowly and obscure, and immersed in the darkness of circumambient benightment, our high careering name, synonymous with civilisation, was wafted by the four winds of heaven to all the quarters of the world which that heaven irradiates. The commerce of the whole East pressed tumultuously to our shores—the courts of the polished universe (not including Greece or Rome amongst the number) sent us embassies of congratulation; while the indomitable ardour and public-spirited zeal of the “islanders” themselves launched them abroad over the bosom of the wide watery circumference; exploring in every region the gradations of civil institutes, as well as the master productions of Nature herself; civilising life with the results of their discoveries, and garnishing their houses, like so many museums, with the fruits of their research, for the benefit, at once, and entertainment of their less favoured, though not less ambitious brethren at home.
Think you that the testimony of Festus Avienus, who wrote before the Christian light, and who avowedly only compiled his treatise from other more ancient authorities—think you, I say, that his designation of this island as “sacred”—and which he says was the appropriate denomination by which the still greater ancients used to call it—was an idle sobriquet or an arbitrary adjective? Amongst the many discoveries which will develop themselves in succession, before I shall have done with this little book, I pledge myself to the public incontrovertibly to prove that the word “Hibernian”—so grossly abused and so malignantly vilified, and which Avienus has recorded as the name of the islanders at the period in which he wrote, as it is still to this day—signifies, in its component essence, and according to the nicest scrutiny of etymological analysis, independently altogether of historical corroboration, an inhabitant of the sacred isle; and has nothing on earth to do with Heber or Heremon; or hiar, the west; or iberin, extremes; or any other such outlandish nonsense!
Now comes the Colonel’s fifth and last objection; viz. that because there existed at Baal Heremon, in India, a temple sacred to Baal, the capacity of which was sufficient to accommodate four thousand persons, therefore the Round Towers, which are “internally too confined to admit into them, at once, a dozen bulky persons, could not be denominated a temple.”
Does not the Colonel know that there existed a plurality of those Baals? that, in fact, they were as innumerable as the stars in the firmament, resolving themselves—according to the character of every distinct country, and of every minor subdivision and canton in that country—into the specific and gentile classifications of Baal Shamaim, Baal Pheor or Phearagh, Baal Meon, Baal Zephon, Baal Hemon, etc.; while under the veil of all, the learned ever understood to have been solely personated the sun and moon. “Howbeit every nation made gods of their own, and the men of Babylon made Succoth-Benoth.”[53]
In accordance with the different views under which each people considered the bounties of those luminaries, so did their temples assume a corresponding shape; and it shall be my lot, in the progress of this litigated research, to show why the followers of one of those Baals, namely, Baal Phearagh, gave their temples this erect, narrow, and elevated roundness.
I have thus annihilated those visionary ramparts which my opponent had flattered himself he had raised against the intrusion of long-suppressed truth; and by the help of which, as a military bastion, he had fondly hoped he might link together the Church and the sword in one cemented bond of anachronism. Let us see, however, how he would bring about the match, with the articles of intermarriage, and so forth.
His assumption is, that “the founders of those Towers were primitive Cœnobites and Bishops, munificently supported in the undertaking by the newly-converted kings and toparchs; the builders and architects being those monks and pilgrims who, from Greece and Rome, either preceded or accompanied our early missionaries in the fifth and sixth centuries”; which he pretends to substantiate in the following manner.
Having discovered, by a most miraculous effort of penetration, that one hundred and fifty Greek and Roman religionists had accompanied St. Abhan on his return from imperial Rome,—whither he had gone to complete his theological studies, towards the end of the fifth century,—and not knowing how to occupy those strangers in this then pagan land, the Colonel, with his industrious habits, well aware that “idleness is the mother of mischief,” sets them, at once, about building the Towers.