But what in reality is Angus and what is Dana, and how can they be made real to us? They will not be gained by much reading of the legendary tales, for they are already with us. A child sits on the grass and the sunlight falls about it. It is lulled by the soft colour. It grows dreamy, a dreaminess filled with a vague excitement. It feels a pleasure, a keen magnetic joy at the touch of earth; or it lays its head in silent tenderness nigh a mother or sister, its mood impelling it to grow nearer to something it loves. That tenderness in the big dreamy heart of childhood is Angus, and the mother-love it divines is Dana; and the form which these all-pervading divinities take in the heart of the child and the mother, on the one side desire, on the other a profound tenderness or pity, are nearest of all the moods of earth to the first Love and the Mighty Mother, and through them the divine may be vaguely understood. If the desire remains pure, through innocence, or by reason of wisdom, it becomes in the grown being a constant preoccupation with spiritual things, or in words I have quoted before where it is better said, "The inexpressible yearning of the inner man to go out into the infinite."
Of Dana, the Hibernian Mother of the gods, I have already said she is the first spiritual form of matter, and therefore Beauty. As every being emerges out of her womb clothed in form, she is the Mighty Mother, and as mother of all she is that divine compassion which exists beyond and is the final arbiter of the justice of the gods. Her heart will be in ours when ours forgive.
