The Danaans conquered the Firbolgs, it is said, at the Battle of Moytura.  Now there were two Battles of Moytura, of which this was the first; it alludes to the incarnation of the Manasaputra, and with it the clear symbolic telling of human history comes to an end.  So much, being very remote, was allowed to come down without other disguise than that which the symbols afforded.  But at this point, which is the beginning of the mind-endowed humanity we know, a mere eighteen million years ago, further blinds became necessary.  History, an esoteric science, had still more to be camouflaged, lest memories should seize upon indications too readily, and find out too much.  Why this should be, it is not the time to argue; enough to say that the wisdom of antiquity decreed it.

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.