Many strands went to the weaving of the later conception of the gods, but there still hung around them an air of mystery, and the belief that they were a race of men was never consistent with itself.

Danu gave her name to the whole group of gods, and is called their mother, like the Egyptian Neith or the Semitic Ishtar.[218] In the annalists she is daughter of Dagda, and has three sons.  She may be akin to the goddess Anu, whom Cormac describes as “mater deorum hibernensium.  It was well she nursed the gods.”  From her name he derives ana, “plenty,” and two hills in Kerry are called “the Paps of Anu."[219] Thus as a goddess of plenty Danu or Anu may have been an early Earth-mother, and what may be a dim memory of Anu in Leicestershire confirms this view.  A cave on the Dane Hills is called “Black Annis’ Bower,” and she is said to have been a savage woman who devoured human victims.[220] Earth-goddesses usually have human victims, and Anu would be no exception.  In the cult of Earth divinities Earth and under-Earth are practically identical, while Earth-goddesses like Demeter and Persephone were associated with the underworld, the dead being Demeter’s folk.  The fruits of the earth with their roots below the surface are then gifts of the earth- or under-earth goddess.  This may have been the case with Danu, for in Celtic belief the gifts of civilisation came from the underworld or from the gods.  Professor Rh[^y]s finds the name Anu in the dat. Anoniredi, “chariot of Anu,” in an inscription from Vaucluse, and the identification is perhaps established by the fact that goddesses of fertility were drawn through the fields in a vehicle.[221] Cormac also mentions Buanann as mother and nurse of heroes, perhaps a goddess worshipped by heroes.[222]

Danu is also identified with Brigit, goddess of knowledge (dan), perhaps through a folk-etymology.  She was worshipped by poets, and had two sisters of the same name connected with leechcraft and smithwork.[223] They are duplicates or local forms of Brigit, a goddess of culture and of poetry, so much loved by the Celts.  She is thus the equivalent of the Gaulish goddess equated with Minerva by Caesar, and found on inscriptions as Minerva Belisama and Brigindo.  She is the Dea Brigantia of British inscriptions.[224] One of the seats of her worship was the land of the Brigantes, of whom she was the eponymous goddess, and her name (cf.  Ir. brig, “power” or “craft”; Welsh bri, “honour,” “renown”) suggests her high functions.  But her popularity is seen in the continuation of her personality and cult in those of S. Brigit, at whose shrine in Kildare a sacred fire, which must not be breathed on, or approached by a male, was watched daily by nineteen nuns in turn, and on the twentieth day by the saint herself.[225] Similar sacred fires were kept up in other monasteries,[226] and they point to the old cult of a goddess of fire, the nuns being successors of a virgin priesthood like