to come from the East on one of the motiveless wanderings so common in the legendary history of Ireland.[1]
Now the prophecies about the Wheel appear to have consisted partly of an ancient Irish belief in a mythic wheel and a mythic ship,[2] and partly of Christian tales about Simon Magus, such as the one about his flying in the air, or ascending like Elijah in a fiery chariot, in order to show his superiority over Peter and Paul;[3] but his brief aerial success contrasts most markedly with the ease with which Irish druids, and Mog Ruith in particular, are described soaring in the air by means of a simple pair of wings,[4] put on or off at pleasure like an ordinary article of dress. So here no room is left for the clumsy expedient of a wheel, and we have to look for that in another direction—the one, in fact, indicated by the name Roth Fáil, which may be rendered the Wheel of Light, and regarded as probably referring in the first instance to the disk of the sun: I said, 'in the first instance,' as one has only to glance at M. Gaidoz's account of the symbolism of the wheel to see how capable it was of modification, as, for example, when it took the form of a winged disk or even of a cross.[5] The importance attached to the place called Cnámchoill, 'Cleghile,' which translated would mean the Forest of
- ↑ Bk. of the Dun, p. 16b; Keating's Hist. of Ireland, pp. 90-7.
- ↑ Melusine, ij. 134, 159; Gaidoz, Études, pp. 99, 100.
- ↑ Arnobius, ij. 12 (in Migne's Patrologia, v. 827-9); St. Ambrose, Hexaem. iv. 8 (Migne, xiv. 205); Maximus Taurinensis, Homil. lxxii. ci. (Migne, lvii. 405-6, 488-90); and for more authorities, see Herzog's Real-Encyklopädie, s.v. Simon, Vol. xiv. 252.
- ↑ O'Curry's Manners, &c. ii. 214, 215.
- ↑ Études, pp. 49, 68, & passim.
