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Rh god Ucuetis in Alesia.” Now Eríu was in some tales a daughter of Umor and Tailltiu was daughter of Mac Umoir. The solar god “Mac Greine,” too, had married a goddess (the same, or bearing the same name) Eríu, and was defeated (and “slain”) at Tailltiu by the Milesians. We seem to be hot on the scent of he lost tradition of the goddess who fostered the sun god at the Fir Bolgic sanctuary.

But Nuada, Lug’s predecessor in the “theocracy” (if not, as the Munster druids and genealogists thought, his child), also made a “marriage with Fál,” a well-known alias for “Eríu,” and, add the writher, “there was sporting and making love to the stone of Fál.” As we shall see, there were Fál stones not only at Tara (with its “phallic names,” ancient and modern, Ferp and Bod) but at Tailltiu and at Bruden Da Derg. The So-called “aphrodisiac rites,” symbolizing marriage to a holed pillar, a basin stone, a dolmen, or even, I am told, a high cross, are not unknown in Ireland in late times; some even survived to our time. Cormac’s Glossary tells us, “the marriages of Tailltiu, they were celebrated at the mound of the buying (Tulach an Coibche), where the bride price was paid.” Add the fact that the marriage fees of Tailltiu were paid to the king of Ulad, on whose territory the sanctuary was presumed to stand; the strange, irregular marriages kept up there, if tradition says truly, till 1770; and the coincidence of so many indicators, ancient and modern point