The second race of invaders, the Nemedians, were also given a war with the Fomorians,—­in the story of the seige of Conan’s Tower.  But this story is told by Nennius as applying to the Milesians, the Fifth Race Irish, and not to the Second Race Nemedians; and probably relates to events in comparatively historical tiems,—­ say a million years ago, or between that and the submersion of Poseidonis about nine thousand B.C.  One would imagine that Ireland, from its position, must have been a main battle-ground between the men of the Fifth and the Atlanteans, between the White and the Black Magicians.  Mr. Judge’s Bryan Kinnavan stories indicate that it was a grand stronghold of the former.

The Nemedians were akin to the Partholanians:  the Second Race to the First,—­both mindless:  they came after their predecessors had all died out; and in their turn died or departed to the last man.  So we find in The Secret Doctrine that the first two humanities passed utterly and left no trace.  If I go into all this a little fully, it is because it illustrates so well the system of blinds under which the Inner Teaching was hidden, and at the same time revealed, by the Initiate of every land.  These Celtic things seem never to have come under the eye of Mme. Blavatsky at all; or how she might have drawn on them!  I think that nowhere else in the mythologies are the Five Root-Races, the four past and the one existent, mentioned so clearly as here in Ireland.  For historic reasons at which we have glanced,—­the Roman occupation, which was hardly over before the Saxon invasions began,—­Wales has preserved infinitely less of the records of ancient Celtic civilization than Ireland has; and yet Professor Kund Meyer told me,—­and surely no living man is better qualified to make suct a statement,—­that the whole of the forgotten Celtic mythology might yet be recovered from old MSS. hidden away in Welsh private libraries that have never been examined.  How much more then may be hoped for from Ireland!

The third invasion was by a threefold people:  the Fir Domnan, or Men of the Goddess Domna; the Fir Bolg, or Men of the Sacks; and the Galioin.  From these races there were still people in Connacht in the seventeenth century who claimed their decent.  Generally all three are called by the one name of Firbolgs.  They were “avaricious, mean, uncouth, musicless, and inhospitable.”  Then came the Tuatha De Danaan, “Gods and false gods,” as Tuan MacCarell told St. Finnen, “from whom everyone knows the Irish men of learning are descended.  It is likely they came into Ireland from heaven, hence their knowledge and the excellence of their teaching.”  Thus Tuan, who has just been made to allude to them as “Gods and false gods.” This Tuan, I should mention, originally came into Ireland with Partholan; and, that history might be preserved, kept on reincarnating there, and remembering all his past lives.  These Danaans conquered, and then ruled over, the Firbolgs:  it is a glyph of the Third or Lemurian Race, of which the first three (and a half) sub-races were mindless—­the Fir Domnan, Fir Bolg and Galioin; then the Lords of Mind incarnated and reigned over them, the Tuatha De Danaan, wafted down from heaven in a druid cloud.  So far we have a pretty exact symbolic rendering of the Theosophic teaching.