Will this be considered the vapouring of conceit? Is it the spouting of self-sufficient inanity? Let the heartless utilitarian, unable to appreciate the motives which first enlisted me in this inquiry, and which still fascinate my zeal, at an age when—did not my love for truth and the rectification of my country’s history rise superior to the mortification of alienated honour—I should have flung from me letters and literature in disgust, and betaken myself, an adventurer for distinction as a soldier,—let such, I say, conceal within himself his despicable worldly-mindedness, and leave me unmolested, if unrewarded, to posterity.
“Come thou, my friend, my genius, come along,
Thou master of the poet and the song,
And while the muse now stoops, or now ascends,
To man’s low passions, or his glorious ends,
Teach me, like thee, in various nature wise,
To fall with dignity—with temper rise;
Formed by thy converse happily to steer
From grave to gay, from lively to severe;
Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease;
Intent to reason, or polite to please.”
The origin of the term “Sacred Island,” being now for ever adjudicated, the reader will at once see that it belonged to an era long anterior to Christianity. In assigning to it this date,[154] I pretend not to be unique; and, as I should not wish to deprive any brow of the laurels which it has earned—more especially, where an undisputed enjoyment has amounted to prescription—I shall register, in express words, my predecessor’s own exposé, which is, that “the isle must have been so named because of its nurturing no venomous reptile”[155]!!! Who will not smile?
No, sir, the imposers of this name were too sensible of its value, and too jealous of its use, to expose it to ambiguity. It pourtrayed the sanctity of the occupying proprietors; and lest there should be any misconception as to the species of worship whence that “sanctity” had emanated, they gave this scene of its exercise three other names, viz. Fuodhla, Fudh Inis, and Inis-na-Bhfiodhbhadh[156]—which at once associate the “worship” with the profession of the worshippers: for f, or ph, being only the aspirate of b, and commutable with it, Fuodhla—which is compounded of Fuodh and ila, this latter signifying land—becomes Buodhla—that is, Budhland.[157] Fudh Inis, by the same rule, is reducible to Budh Inis, of which the latter means island, that is, Budh-island;[158] while Inis-na-Bhfiodhbhadh requires no transposition, being clear and obvious in itself, as the Island of Budhism.
Now, “to make assurance doubly sure,” go to Keating’s History of Ireland, p. 49, and you will there find “the female deities”—an incorrect expression for the deities worshipped by the females—of the Tuath-de-danaans, to have been Badhha, Macha, and Moriagan.[159] Of these the first needs no exposition; the second I shall reserve for another place, but the third I will here develop. He was the military deity of this “sacred” colony, and a personification of Budh, under the designation of Farragh,[160] i.e. Copulation; and, accordingly, the Scythians, who incorporated with them, after first dethroning them, adopted this term as their exhilarating war-shout, while under the veil of the epithet was really meant the sun, whose aid they invoked to give strength to their loins and vigour to their arms.[161]
And yet this is the name which Spenser would derive from that of Fergus, king of Scotland! Fifteen hundred years and more before Fergus was born, which, by the way, was not until the sixth century of the Christian era, the Irish basked in the sunshine of their resplendent war-god, who, under another and equivalent denomination, viz. Buodh, abbreviated into Boo,[162] and thus with the prefix a, implying to, or under the auspices of—assumed by the different septs as their distinctive watchwords, branched out into the national and spirit-stirring acclamations of O’Brien a-Boo![163] O’Neil a-Boo! etc. etc.; which the early English settlers, who would fain become Hibernis ipsis Hiberniores, afterwards imitated: such as Butler a-Boo; Shanet-a-Boo; Grasagh a-Boo; Crom a-Boo, etc.; the last having been that adopted by Fitzgerald, Duke of Leinster, and still retained as the motto of his armorial escutcheon.
It is worth while to listen to Spenser’s gratulation, while chuckling himself with the idea of his fancied discovery: “This observation of yours,” he says to himself, “is very good and delightful, far beyond the blind conceits of some, who upon the same word Farragh have made a very blunt conjecture.” Oh patria! Oh mores! how little is known of Ireland! But I am not surprised at foreigners, when the very natives, the descendants of the actors in those glorious scenes, are ignorant of its history!
Take up any document, purporting to give an account of this country, and you will find it to be composed, either of absurd and nauseous exaggerations on the one hand, or of gross and calumnious detractions on the other. But though the wildness of the former cannot fail to generate, in the intellectual amongst all readers, an unfavourable impression; and in those of a different nation, already prejudiced, or mayhap incapable of separating the gold from the baser metal, incredulity and contempt; yet the true Irish searcher, versed in the antiquities, not only of his own dear “father-land,” but of the kindred East, which maintained in the old world a religious and incessant communication with this “Sacred Isle,” will glean in the distortion of those maniac effusions, the glimmerings of that truth whence they originally emanated—while the injustice of the calumniator’s must, of itself bring dismay, with the whole train of confusion and dishonour, upon the mercenary instruments of those foul abuses, as well as upon the heartless abettors who could have enlisted their vassalage!
Truth, notwithstanding, obliges me to say that the blame should not altogether be laid upon the historians. They did as much as, under the circumstances, could be expected at their hands. Two successive invasions having passed over, and swept away, in the whirlwind of their desolating fury, all those monuments of learning to which the world had bowed just before—one from innate antipathy to the thing itself; the other from apprehension that the contents of those memorials, acting upon the sensibilities of a high-hearted and proud race, should stimulate their ardour to the recovery of their lost rights, and the consequent ejectment of the party who had usurped them[164]—the patriot had little more to guide him in supplying the deficiencies thus created, than the rude imagining of his own brain, or the oral traditions of the village schoolmaster and genealogist.
The rigour, however, of penal observances began, in time, gradually to relax; and the people ventured to confess that they had still in their possession such things as manuscripts, illustrative of their lineage and ancestral elevation. This was the signal to some liberal individuals to prosecute an inquiry for additional memorials; and the result was, that they rose from the pursuit, if not with a connected aggregate of demonstrational evidence, at least with a conviction on their minds, that those treasured visions of primeval lustre, hereditary and inborn within the breast of every Irishman, and impossible to be eradicated, were not yet, late as was the hour, without something like a basis to rest upon.