Noah had no place for her on the Arc because he decided she was consorting with thieves, Instead of feeling sorry for herself, she took matters in to her own hands, built three Arks and set off to “start again”. In this remarkable Journey, she would have encountered the creation mythologies of what would have been all the (then) known cultures of the world.
Now this does, of course, make it a strongly Western Creation Story that obviously omits the Asian, Americas and Australias. With that qualification in mind this Irish Myth of Origins story is one that was an imagined ‘from everywhere’ and at that time would have been seen as all that there was! It was certainly unlike so many of the other Creation Stories of the great mythologies of the world. See the image for the Cesair Journey.
Next are the Nemedians and it is their role to build an infrastructure to ensure on-going prosperity. But such was the cruelty and unfair taxes imposed on them by the Formorians that they were forced to scatter to the four corners of the world. Some of their people went to Greece where they were subject to more hardship and cruelty before returning to Ireland as the Fir Bolg, the Bag People with their wonderful idea of the division of Ireland as “cuige”, the five that are four plus the mighty distributed idea of the Fifth Province.
Finally it was another of the dispersed peoples, the Tuatha De Danaan, The People of the Goddess Danu. They were to arrive from the North in a mist with their magic and their four great gifts. They were to burn their boats as an indication of an intention to stay. Having defeated the Formorians at the Second Battle of Moytura they were to prosper until the arrival of Amerghin and the Sons of Mil. These were the Celts. And they were to end up in a Battle with the Tuatha De Danaan at Tailtiu. For some this defeat was a absolute tragedy because it was a defeat for the Goddess People, the builders of the great neolithic monuments that populate the landscape.
The story goes that Fenius was determined to make something of the multiple languages and communication problems so he set of with Goidel and 72 scholars to study the confused languages of the world. By then all the scholars who had been at the Tower had dispersed after the fall. His scholars where dispatched to study all languages. Taking the best of each the task was to create a new language, Goidelic, the language of the poets. It was to be the basis of old and middle Irish and later modern Irish.
The old texts tell us that Fenius discovered four alphabets. They were Hebrew, Greek and Latin and the last was Ogham. This was the most perfect as it was the last to be discovered. The great scholar of early Irish History, Donnchadh Ó Corráin was to describe the Irish as the first Europeans. He could perhaps have gone a step futher and suggested the Irish as the first globalists!
Exile and immigration are core to the Irish Story. But so is the experience of the people and cultures and mythologies of the world.
