The Fall of the Fomorians

The Fomorians are described as sometimes having various features of animals, but also sometimes of
being very beautiful and completely human in appearance.

I am hardly an expert on Irish Mythology, these are just my observations from my hardly-expert readings on the subject.

The Fomorians are the bad guys of the Irish Mythological Cycle, which is the story of how the semi-divine Tuatha de Danann came to Ireland and were eventually supplanted by the Milesians, the ancestors of today's Irish. I am not going to suggest in this post that the Irish Mythological Cycle describes actual history: clearly it does not. What it does describe, in sometimes clouded and metaphorical terms, is a history that occurred in many places over long periods of time, and in a sense continues to this day. It describes in rough terms the outlines of the Neolithic Conquest.

I. The Neolithic Conquest

The usual term is "Neolithic Revolution" or "the Agricultural Revolution," the change that occurred when people starting raising crops and domestic animals more or less full time, in sedentary non-transient settlements. However, to call it a revolution suggests several things that probably aren't true. First is the suggestion that mesolithic peoples were unfamiliar with agriculture: this is almost certainly not the case. It's not rocket science to figure out that the place you spat watermelon seeds last summer is the place that is growing watermelon plants this spring. Mesolithic people had agriculture, but they used it as an adjunct to a primarily hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

The word "revolution" also implies that as soon as people were exposed to agriculture and village living, they had this "Aha!" experience and were immediately converted to the idea of working hard in the fields all day rather than goofing off enjoyably in the forest. More and more everyday the evidence is coming in that this was certainly not the case. Skeletons of people are compared before and after they undergo this revolution: the skeletons of sedentary agriculturalists show more signs of stress, spinal problems, disease, dental decay, and are overall shorter and show every sign of being less healthy than their own hunter-gatherer ancestors were a few hundred years previous. Agricultural work is hard, their diet less varied, and because of their closer quarters with other people they are more subject to disease. Also almost invariably with denser populations came more autocratic forms of government. A band of hunter-gatherers might have had some sort of informal boss-man, but he was probably pretty limited in the ways he could throw his weight around without encountering significant opposition. Compare this to the amount of labor that more hierarchical agricultural societies could compel from their people. The mounds and pyramids of the Americas and the pyramids of Egypt and many other ancient earthworks required immense labor, and that labor really wasn't done for the benefit of those who were doing the work. The labor was done to glorify the king. You get the "Neolithic Revolution" and soon you get chiefs and then kings and standing armies who can compel obedience on behalf of that king. None of this is an advance in human health or happiness compared with mesolithic hunters and gatherers.

Where the main advance does lie, is in physical security. Not food security so much, though of course there was always the possibility for hunters and gatherers that they might starve, and farmers can have granaries that can store food for years. No it was an advance in physical security, protection against attack. Obviously if you are in a neolithic village with a couple hundred people in it, and the other tribes around you are mesolithic hunter-gatherer bands of twenty-odd people, they would be a fool to attack you. You on the other hand are more able to attack them without putting your homes at that much risk. And this is what happened. The change to sedentary living dependent on agriculture wasn't an improvement to freedom, convenience or health, it adversely affected those things. What it was, was a stone-age arms race, and once a community converted to that way of life all those around them would likely either follow suit for their protection or eventually be annihilated as the agriculturalists required more and more land for their crops and flocks. Undoubtedly many hunter-gatherers looked at the early agriculturalists and said, "they live and work like slaves, their way of life makes them sickly, why would I want that?" Unfortunately, they would have eventually been destroyed or assimilated by these agriculturalists who if nothing else were able to have much higher and denser populations than their enemies. Even those who were not conquered or assimilated, the new villages and towns were disease factories, and although the hunter-gatherer's more dispersed groups would have given them some protection from these plagues, eventually they would have reached them too with disastrous results.

So we see that we cannot really call it a "Neolithic Revolution" or an "Agricultural Revolution," it was a conquest, an innovation in weaponry that gave those who had it power over those who didn't and who quite sensibly would have preferred to have nothing to do with a life of backbreaking labor under increasingly dictatorial chieftains. To quote Stalin on the topic of weaponry: quantity has a quality all its own. However strong or healthy or brave the hunter-gatherers would have been, the farmers just had way more numbers. It wasn't a revolution to a better way of life which hadn't existed before. Mesolithic peoples had agriculture and more freedom AND a healthier way of life. It was a change for military advantage. Hence, I call it the Neolithic Conquest. While we might be inclined to say that it all worked out for the best, now that we have televisions and Xboxes and jet planes and convenience stores (and computers and blogs), it is clear that up until the Nineteenth century perhaps (and even later), "civilization" was a bum deal for the vast majority of people who were subject to its effects. People were healthier and freer as hunter-gatherers than they would be for centuries to come, and probably much of that still holds true. They had no jobs, no bosses, better diets, and had to work for their sustenance maybe a third as much as people today do, and had no significant problems getting their needs met. You didn't have to wait for the weekend, or yearly vacation time, to knock off. If you had enough pemmican in your pocket, every day was a vacation day. No, they didn't have modern medicine, and many things that hospitals today can treat very handily might have proved fatal to them, but it remains to be seen what the long-term effects of medicine are going to be on the human race.

II. The Fomorians and the Tuatha de Danann

According to the mythology, when the Tuatha de Danann (the People of the goddess Danu) arrive on the shores of Ireland, they don't appear to have agriculture (although the matter seems slightly uncertain.) When they arrive, the Fomorians are already living in Ireland and they either have yet to develop a sedentary agricultural way of life or only recently developed it. It does clearly state that the Fomorians were known as hunter gatherers prior to this time. So as far as the Neolithic Conquest goes, they seem to be about at the same level. They both came to agriculture only lately, and they both have a moderate level of hierarchy (they both are referred to as having 'kings') If you read between the lines however, the Fomorians seem much more cut from the hunter-gatherer cloth and the Tuatha de Danann much more in an agricultural mode. Why do I say that?

First, the Tuatha de Danann: they are clearly referred to as civilizers. No hunter gatherers ever had reason or need to call themselves such, and the more hierarchical the society the more likely they are to call themselves such. Classical examples (literally) would be the Greeks and Romans. The Greeks clearly felt themselves to be culturally superior to all other societies, and the Romans not only considered themselves superior to the 'barbarians' but felt an obligation, a 'white man's burden' if you will, to bring civilization to them. This reaches its ultimate level in Victorian England and America, where it is considered not only right but a moral necessity to bring the benefits of Anglo-Saxon enlightenment to all the non-Western peoples of the world. What they were actually doing to the Africans and the Native Americans and other peoples all over the world, was enslaving them. The fact that they not only wouldn't admit this but honestly couldn't see it, couldn't see that what they were bringing was oppression, calls for levels of blindness to the faults of one's own society that are hard to imagine. I don't doubt the accounts of the time that they really believed they were civilizing the wild godless savages, doing them a good turn. They probably even expected to be thanked in some future time for bringing Anglo-Saxon superiority to their shores.

The Tuatha de Danann also possessed some magical objects, one of which was an inexhaustible cauldron of food that would never run out and from which no man would ever leave unsatisfied. One wonders why they would have needed agriculture if they had the magic endless bucket O chicken. One answer is that the magic cauldron wasn't a substitute for agriculture, it was the result of agriculture. Imagine a hunter-gatherer staring at a granary that contained enough grain to feed the whole village for two years. Would such a structure (roughly cauldron shaped perhaps?) not seem an inexhaustible supply of food and in fact magical? Certainly no one man would ever eat to the bottom of it. Granted, one might be tempted to write off the story of the cauldron, and the whole thing, as so much higgledy-piggledy nonsense, but that nonsense has been communicated down the generations for millennia. While the literal truth of the magic cauldron is of course nonsense, there are truths behind most legends. To a person who never sees any more food than one killed deer or whatever his next handful consists of, a large granary is very impressive and could very easily be mistaken for magic. The persistence of these magic cauldrons in Celtic myth certainly points to some powerful experience which has become obscured by the mists of time.

Secondly, the Formorians: they are clearly depicted as chaotic, primeval and atavistic. The opposite of the bright and shiny and civilized Tuatha. They have two related features that are most interesting for the purposes of this discussion: they are often depicted as partly animal, and they are depicted as having multiple forms. So for instance, some of the Formorians are clearly completely human in form, even beautiful, while some others are depicted as having goat heads on human bodies and other such things. And yet the Formorians are one people, not multiple, and they are the same species as the Tuatha (or very close) since they are able to marry them and have offspring. Again, you have to give some leeway for this being mythology, but maybe not completely. I think there is a kernel of truth behind these outlandish legends.

One tendency of hunter-gatherer societies that tends to diminish the more "civilized" the society becomes, is the tendency of priests and shamans to wear animal skins ritually or even take on the personality or become possessed by the spirits of animals. In hunter-gatherer societies it is basically a universal, and no better demonstrated visually than by the paleolithic rock painting of the shapeshifted "Sorcerer at Trois-Freres," made around 13,000 bce. Here the feet. legs and hands are human, and everything else is animal.

Images of antlered and semi-animal humans are very common in pre-agricultural and early post-agricultural societies and with a few exceptions tends to disappear in more hierarchical societies, as presumably does the wearing of animal parts by shamans and spirit possession of shamans by animals. One might be tempted to note ancient Egypt as an exception, with their plethora of animal-headed gods, but these are clearly gods not human beings. In ancient Greece and Rome, animal form disappears from both the figures of the gods and the regalia of the priests (with the exception of a few marginal cults perhaps.) Images of the gods become wholly human in appearance, denoting perhaps a disconnection from the animal world and a preoccupation with the human one. The fact that there are priests who officially handle a person's interaction with the gods signifies a distanced and abstracted relationship.

So a visitor from an "advanced" society who sees animal-human forms in a dark forest and who sees these creatures acting like animals not humans, might be excused for thinking that they aren't human. Moreover, shapeshifting is a common theme in most shamanic cultures, by which I mean that I don't think that they actually turn into animals but that they can put on the quite convincing appearance of being one. This shapeshifting is an attribute which is normally transferred to gods, not humans, in hierarchical cultures like the Greeks and Romans. Zeus might be able to turn into a swan, various divine beings change form with ease, but people cannot.

III. Semi-Divine Beings

Both the Tuatha de Danann and the Formorians were considered to be semi-divine beings by the Milesians who were considered the ancestors of the modern Irish people. The Christians who recorded these myths were careful to call them "semi-" divine, but they are often considered to be half-remembered relics of the archaic gods of Ireland. Of the two though, the Tuatha de Danann would clearly be agricultural and civilized gods, perhaps the very same gods as the gods of the ancient Celts, and the Formorians the wild ancient deities of the hunter-gatherers that preceded them. However the Tuatha de Danann and the Formorians can also be seen as the peoples that worshiped these gods. In other words, the Tuatha represent the first wave of the ancient Celtic invasion of Ireland and the Formorians represent the pre-Indo-European peoples that were there originally.

If so, then a rather sad picture emerges, one that was undoubtedly repeated around the world throughout the Neolithic Conquest. The Tuatha, the first wave of Celtic immigration, invade and eventually displace the Formorians by virtue of the high population concentrations that crops and flocks make possible. It is said that the Formorians are eventually "swept into the sea" by the Tuatha.

The Tuatha in turn are displaced by a new wave of Celtic immigration, the Milesians. According to legend, the Tuatha and the Milesians make a deal and divide Ireland, but the Milesians get all the land that is on or above the surface of the Earth and the Tuatha get all the territory below the surface. So the Tuatha retreat into the sidhe, the fairy mounds, the various ancient tombs and mounds dotting Ireland. They retreat to the underworld or otherworld, from which they supposedly occasionally make forays into the world of men as elves or other fey beings. The Tuatha have "become" ancestors, withdrawn into the world of the ancestors represented by the mounds, which is the same place as the underworld or otherworld. Which might just be a snarky way of saying "they're all dead," but certainly their influence on Celtic mythology was far from dead. They would continue to put in appearances even as far away as Britain, where the Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend and in fact Merlin himself were reputed to be at least partly "fey," supernatural descendents of the Tuatha de Danann.

The Formorians and their lore, unfortunately, was swept aside and forgotten, as one day the lore of the Celts in most of Europe would also be swept aside and forgotten, and their druids killed, when Rome invaded Western Europe. In other words, just as the Formorians were deprived of their culture by the 'civilized' Neolithic conquerors of their time, the Celts would one day be deprived of their culture by a more hierarchical and 'civilized' society with a more abstract and distanced religion, the Romans. It's a sad tale, both for the Formorians and eventually for the Tuatha. One becomes extinct, the other becomes a dim and misty legend. One that would probably have been lost to the sands of time had the Romans not stopped short of invading Ireland.

Modern shaman

Native American rock art

Perhaps the Celtic antlered god Cernunnos

Lion Man of the Hohlenstein Stadel, the oldest known zoomorphic (animal-human) sculpture and the oldest uncontested example of figurative art, period. 40,000 years old, twice as old as the cave art at Lascaux.

Native American rock art, a horned entity.