The Reason Why
Though the dates in Ireland were considerable later were not as often supposed, savages.
In Mental capacity they were our equal. If we take the Iron Age and then consider today, we realise that almost exactly in the middle of this span of years came the Greek and Roman Civilizations. If their culture is not the equal to our own, then you should read no further.
These Ancient Peoples of the Bronze and Iron Ages recently skilled in the use of metals, lived a day to day existence, dependent on climate, the sun, and vagaries of nature. If the weather was harsh, they starved, in the winter when there was little sun they sought what shelter there was from the elements, and it was natural for them to regard nature with awe, and personify the various phenomena. The Sun was benevolent, it ripened their crops and made life easier, and it was natural, not knowing what the sun was, to treat it as a god, a god with human attributes.
This was true of the moon, the stars, thunder and lightening, the rain which Ireland is so rich in, and the wind. All were given names and qualities, or sometimes they were regarded as different moods of the sun, which , in the manner of all gods from whatever part of the world, could change its appearance at will. It was often beleived tht the sun changed its attitude towards its minions because it had been offended in some way, and therefore it had to be propitiated by ceremonies. These could vary from place to place, ranging from the most modest of entreaties to human sacrifice. Sometimes these failed to work, and new methods were used. It was sometimes necessary to fabricate new gods who would take on the power of the sun or attempt to placate or trick it in some way or another. Or gods could be renamed and even well established gods with unique characteristics could, if circumstances dictated, turn out to be the same ones under an alias, which was often never disclosed to their susceptible subjects.
Consequently there arose people who had a special gift for dealing with these unknown forces, and throughout recorded time they were regarded with reverence and awe and credited with immense powers. Some of them are with us still in the guise of Witch Doctors in Africa.
Thoughout History we have these wise men; in Arthurian Legend we have the wizard Merlin, and amongst the Celts especially in Ireland, we have the professional scholars, the learned monks, and the druids, who have never been treated with the importance they merit.
We can therefore divide myths into the rational and the irrational, and these are not only the myths of the Celtic world, but those throughout the world, including Greece and Rome where reason by and large held sway. The rational myths are those which represent gods as beautiful and wise spirits, typical of these being the Greek Artemis of the Odeyssey, "taking her passtime in the chase of boars and the swift deer, while with her the wild wood nymphs disport them, and high over them all she rears her brow, and is easily to be known where all are fair". This is a chaming picture, all a god of nature should be. But there is another Artemis co-existing, who could be a she-bear or a star, just as the magestic Zeus could also be at the same time a rapist, a trickster, and a thoroghly unpleasant character.
One authority of the nineteenth century, the Anglo German academic Max Muller (1823 - 1900) was very dissaproving of what he termed " the silly, savage and senseless element" in myths, and tried to explain it away by theories that there had been some kind of pollution in the language, some major misunderstanding, that it was so complicated that only he and his colleagues could even begin to understand it. His ideas, innovative as they were, are little regarded today, but when they were first put out they were seriously considered, and it make mythology more of a puzzle, especially when the languages of Sanskrit, Egyptian and Babylonian had only recently been broken down and the mythologies of these countries was not only incomprehensible because of the communication barrier, but even when the language barrier was conquered difficult to understand anyway. The Greeks and Romans were themselves perplexed by their own more extravagant and monstrous myths, and tried to distance themselves from the more distasteful by pretending that they were allegorical and needed more analysis before they could be understood, which of course was ideal for wise men and prophetesses such as Cassandra. The manner in which gods changed their shapes with annoying regularity was explained by the Egyptians; in moments of danger, gods changed their shapes to fool antagonists.