and deivos, “god,” though Dr. Stokes considers Dagda as connected with dagh, whence daghda, “cunning."[267] Dagda is also called Cera, a word perhaps derived from kar and connected with Lat. cerus, “creator” and other names of his are Ruad-rofhessa, “lord of great knowledge,” and Eochaid Ollathair, “great father,” “for a great father to the Tuatha De Danann was he."[268] He is also called “a beautiful god,” and “the principal god of the pagans."[269] After the battle he divides the brugs or sid among the gods, but his son Oengus, having been omitted, by a stratagem succeeded in ousting his father from his sid, over which he now himself reigned[270]—­possibly the survival of an old myth telling of a superseding of Dagda’s cult by that of Oengus, a common enough occurrence in all religions.  In another version, Dagda being dead, Bodb Dearg divides the sid, and Manannan makes the Tuatha Dea invisible and immortal.  He also helps Oengus to drive out his foster-father Elemar from his brug, where Oengus now lives as a god.[271] The underground brugs are the gods’ land, in all respects resembling the oversea Elysium, and at once burial-places of the euhemerised gods and local forms of the divine land.  Professor Rh[^y]s regards Dagda as an atmospheric god; Dr. MacBain sees in him a sky-god.  More probably he is an early Earth-god and a god of agriculture.  He has power over corn and milk, and agrees to prevent the other gods from destroying these after their defeat by the Milesians—­former beneficent gods being regarded as hurtful, a not uncommon result of the triumph of a new faith.[272] Dagda is called “the god of the earth” “because of the greatness of his power."[273] Mythical objects associated with him suggest plenty and fertility—­his cauldron which satisfied all comers, his unfailing swine, one always living, the other ready for cooking, a vessel of ale, and three trees always laden with fruit.  These were in his sid, where none ever tasted death;[274] hence his sid was a local Elysium, not a gloomy land of death, but the underworld in its primitive aspect as the place of gods of fertility.  In some myths he appears with a huge club or fork, and M. D’Arbois suggests that he may thus be an equivalent of the Gaulish god with the mallet.[275] This is probable, since the Gaulish god may have been a form of Dispater, an Earth or under-Earth god of fertility.

If Dagda was a god of fertility, he may have been an equivalent of a god whose image was called Cenn or Cromm Cruaich, “Head or Crooked One of the Mound,” or “Bloody Head or Crescent."[276] Vallancey, citing a text now lost, says that Crom-eocha was a name of Dagda, and that a motto at the sacrificial place at Tara read, “Let the altar ever blaze to Dagda."[277] These statements may support this identification.  The cult of Cromm is preserved in some verses: