[410] It is interesting to compare with this episode the episodes of how the magic of St. Patrick prevailed over the magic of the Druids when the old and the new religions met in warfare on the Hill of Tara, in the presence of the high king of Ireland and his court.
[411] E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (London, 1904), p. 3.
[412] Prescott, Conquest of Mexico and Conquest of Peru.
[413] W. Crooke, The Legends of Krishna, in Folk-Lore, xi. 2-3 ff.
[414] Laws of Manu, vii. 8, trans, by G. Bühler.
[415] A. B. Cook, European Sky-God, in Folk-Lore, xv. 301-4.
[416] Cf. Lucian, Somn., 17, &c. See Tylor, Prim. Cult.,4 ii. 13; also Tertullian, De Anima, c. xxviii, where Pythagoras is described as having previously been Aethalides, and Euphorbus, and the fisherman Pyrrhus.
[417] Cf. Huc, Souvenirs d’un voyage dans la Tartarie et le Thibet, i. 279 ff.
[418] The doctrine of kingly rule by divine right was substituted after the conversion of the Roman Empire for the very ancient belief that the emperor was a god incarnate (not necessarily reincarnate); and the same christianized aspect of a pre-Christian doctrine stands behind the English kingship at the present day.
[419] A curious parallel to this Irish doctrine that through re-birth one suffers for the sins committed in a previous earth-life is found in the Christian scriptures, where in asking Jesus about a man born blind, ‘Rabbi, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?’ the disciple exhibits what must have been a popular Jewish belief in re-birth quite like the Celtic one. See St. John ix. 1-2. Though the Rabbis admitted the possibility of ante-natal sin in thought, this passage seems to point unmistakably to a Jewish re-birth doctrine.