Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/231

Rh (the) Bones or Bone-wood, is not to be understood without ampler data than we have; but it looks as though the spot had been another Mag Slecht adorned with another and ruder figure of Cenn Cruaich, covered with gold and credited with glory exposed to no vulgar gaze but fenced around by the solitude of a sacred forest, like one which figures in the history of ancient Prussia.

Lastly, we have another proof of the existence in ancient Ireland of a wheel myth in the name Mog Ruith of the druid involved in the stories occupying our attention at present. It meant Servus Rotae, or the Slave of the Wheel, and most probably of no other wheel than the one here in question, the Roth Fáil or Wheel of Light. Personal names formed in this analytic fashion, so familiar to Semitic scholars in such instances as Abdiel, 'Servant of El,' Abdallah, 'Servant of Allah,' and the like, are not unusual in Irish; and they not unfrequently involve a god's name, as in the case of Mog Nuadat, ' Servus Nodentis,' and Mog Néit or Slave of Nét, this last being a name of the Goidelic god of war, as we are told in Cormac's Glossary. The habit of forming proper names of men in this way is probably of pre-Celtic origin in Ireland; but it was continued in Christian times with the aid of the words mael, 'bald, tonsured,' and gille, 'boy, servant-boy,' as in Maelpadraic, rendered into Latin as Calvus Patricii, or the Tonsured Slave of Patrick, still current as Mulpatrick; Maelmuiri, ' Marianas,' or the Tonsured Slave of Mary; and Gillecrist, 'Christ's Servant,' curtailed into Gilchrist; Gillecomded, ' Servus