There has always been some doubt as to the Second Battle of Moytura. Because of a certain air with which it is invested, scholars think now, for the most part, that it was a later invention. But I do not think so: I think that air comes from the extra layer of symbolism that is laid over it; from the second coating of camouflage; from the fact that the few years between the two battles represent several million years,—about which the mythological history is silent, running them all together, like street-lights you see a long way off. What happened was this:
In the first battle Nuada, king of the Danaans, lost his hand; and, because a king must be blemishless, lost his kinghood too. It went to Bres son of Elatha; whose mother was Danaan, but whose unknown father was of the Fomoroh. Note the change: the first battle was with the Firbolgs, the mindless humanity of the early third Race; now we are to deal with Fomorians, who have come to symbolize the Black Magicians of Atlantis: the second half of the Lemurian, and nearly the whole of the Atlantean period, have elapse.—In person, Bres was handsome like the Danaans; in character he was Fomorian altogether. This is the sum of the history of later Lemuria and of Atlantis; Moytura, and Nuada's loss of his hand and kinghood there, symbolize the incarnation of the Manasaputra,—descent of Spirit into matter,— and therewith, in time, their forgetting their own divinity. I should say that it is Bres himself, rather than the Fomorians as a whole, who stands symbol just now for the Atlantean sorcerers. There is a subtle connexion between the Firbolgs and Fomoroh: the former are the men, the latter the Gods, of the same race; the Firbolgs stood originally for the mindless men of the early third, men evolving up out of the lower kingdoms towards the point of becoming human and mind-endowed; the Fomorians were the Gods or so to say Spiritual Powers of those lower worlds; the forces in opposition to upward evolution. So we see Bres of that dual lineage: with magic from his Danaan mother, and blackness from his Fomorian father: the Atlanteans, inheriting mind from the Manasaputra, but turning their divine inheritance to the uses of chaos and night.
As his reign represents the whole Atlantean period, we might expect it to have begun well enough, and worsened as it went. This was so; had he shown his colors from the first, it is not to be thought that the Danaans would have tolerated him at all. But it came to be, as time went on, that he oppressed Ireland abominably; and at last they rose and drove him out. Nuada, whose missing hand had been replaced with one of silver, was restored in the kingship; henceforth he is called Nuada of the Silver Hand. Here we have the return or redescent of the Divine Dynasties who came to lead the men of the early Fifth Race against the Atlantean giants. I shall beg leave now to tell you the story of the Second Battle of Moytura.
Perhaps it was in Ireland that the White Adepts of the Fifth made their first stand against the Atlanteans? Perhaps thence it first got its epithet, Sacred Ierne?—Bres, driven out by the Gods, took refuge with his father the Fomorian king beyond the western sea; who gave him an army with which to reconquer his lost dominions. Now we come to the figure who represents the Fifth Race. There are in Europe perhaps a dozen cities named after Lugh Lamfada, the Irish (indeed Celtic) Sun-god: Lyons, the most important of them, was Lug-dunum, the dun or fortress of Lugh. Lugh was a kind of counterpart to Bres; he was the son of Cian, a Danaan, and a daughter of the Fomorian champion Balor of the Mighty Blows, or of the Evil Eye. The story of his birth is like that of Perseus, son of Zeus and Danae. Danae's son, you remember, was fated to kill his grandfather Acrisius; so Acrisius shut Danae in an inaccessable tower, that no son might be born to her. The antiquity of the whole legend is suggested by this nearness of the Greek and Irish versions;—even to the similarity of the names of Dana and Danae: though Dana was not the mother of Lugh, but of the whole race of the Gods: Tuatha De Danaan means, the 'Race of the Gods the Children of Dana.' So you see it comes from the beginnings of the Fifth Race, a million years ago; but how much better the history of that time is preserved in the Irish than in the Greek version! As if the Irish took it direct from history and symbolism, and the Greeks from the Irish. And why not? since in the nature of things Ireland must have been so much nearer the scene of action.
Lugh grew up among his mother's people, but remembered his divine descent on his father's side; and when it came to the War of the Fomoroh against Ireland, was for fighting for his father's people. So he set out for Tara, where Nuada and the Gods were preparing to meet the invasion; and whoever beheld him as he came, it seemed to them as if they had seen the sun rising on a bright day in summer.—"Open thou the portal!" said he; but the knife was in the meat and the mead in the horn, and no man might enter but a craftsman bearing his craft. "Oh then, I am a craftsman," said Lugh; "I am a good carpenter." There was an excellent carpenter in Tara already, and none other needed.-"It is a smith I am," said Lugh. But they had a smith there who was professor of the three new designs in smithcraft, and none else would be desired. Then he was a champion; but they had Ogma son of Ethlenn for champion, and would not ask a better. Then he was a harper; and a poet; and an antiquary; and a necromancer; and an artificer; and a cup-bearer. But they were well supplied with men of all those crafts, and there was no place for him.— "Then go and ask the king," said Lugh, "if he will not be needing a man who is excellent in all those crafts at once"; and that way he got admission.
After that he was drawing up the smiths and carpenters, and inquiring into their abilities, and giving them their tasks in preparation for the battle. There was Goibniu, the smith of the Danaans.—"Though the men of Ireland should be fighting for seven years," said Goibniu, "for every spear that falls off its handle, and for every sword that breaks, I will put a new weapon in its place; and no erring or missing cast shall be thrown with a spear of my making; and no flesh it may enter shall ever taste the sweets of life after;—and this is more than Dub the smith of the Fomorians can do." And there was Creidne the Brazier: he would not do less well than Goibniu the Smith would; and there was Luchtine the Carpenter: evil on his beard if he did less than Creidne;—and so with the long list of them.
It was on the first day of November the battle began; and when the sun went to his setting, the weapons of the Fomorians were all bent and notched, but those of the Gods were like new. And new they were: new and new after every blow struck or cast thrown. For with three strokes of his hammer Goibniu would be fashioning a spear-head, and after the third stroke there could be no bettering it. With three chippings of his knife, Luchtine had cut a handle for it; and at the third chipping there would be no fault to find with the handle either by Gods or men. And as quickly as they made the spear-heads and the shafts, Creidne the Brazier had the rivets made to rivet them; and if there were bettering those rivets, it would not be by any known workmanship. When Goibniu had made a spear-head, he took it in his tongs, and hurled it at the lintel of the door so that it stuck fast there, the socket outward. When Luchtine had made a spear-haft, he hurled it out at the spear-head in the lintel; and it was good hurling, not to be complained of: the end of the haft stuck in the socket, and stuck firm. And as fast as those two men did those two things, Creidne had his rivets ready, and threw them at the spear-head; and so excellent his throwing, and the nicety of his aim, no rivet would do less than enter the holes in the socket, and drive on into the wood of the shaft;—and that way there was no cast of a spear by the Gods at the hellions, but there was a new spear in the smithy ready to replace it. Then the Fomoroh sent a spy into the camp of the Gods, who achieved killing Goibniu with one of the latter's own spears; and by reason of that it was going ill with the Gods the next day in the battle. And it was going worse with them because of Balor of the Mighty Blows, and he taking the field at last for the Fomorians,—
"Balor as old as a forest, his mighty head helpless sunk,
And an army of men holding open his weary and death-dealing eye,"
—for wherever his glances fell, there death came. They fell on Nuada of the Silver Hand, and he died,—albeit it is well known that he was alive, and worshiped in Britain in Roman times, for a temple to him has been found near the River Severn.—Then came Lugh to avenge Nuada, and a bolt from his sling tore like the dawn ray, like the meteor of heaven, over Moytura plain, and took the evil eye of Balor in the midst, and drove it into his head; and then the Fomorians were routed. And this, in truth, like Camlan and Kurukshetra, is the battle that is forever being fought: Balor comes death-dealing still; and still the sling of Lugh Lamfada is driving its meteor shafts through heaven and defeating him.
As for the defeat of the Gods by the Milesians, and their retirement into the mountains,—that too is actual history told under a thinnish veil of symbolism: the Fifth Race having been started, the Sons of Wisdom, its first Gods and Adept Kings, who had sown the seeds of all bright things that were to be in its future civilizations, withdrew into the Unseen.