Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Every heroic literature has its supreme figure, and Ireland's is a boy who never saw his eighteenth year old age. Cú Chulainn , the Hound of Ulster—centerpiece of the Ulster Cycle and of its great epic, the Táin Bó Cúailnge , the Cattle Raid of Cooley—is the perfected form of the Indo-European champion: superhumanly gifted, catastrophically radiant, and priced from birth. Son of the god Lugh the many-skilled by a mortal mother, nephew of King Conchobar, he was small, dark, and beautiful—the texts insist on the beauty with un-warlike tenderness—and he carried within him a thing the tradition regarded with equal parts reverence and horror: the ríastrad , the warp-spasm, the battle-frenzy that unmade his lovely form into a monster when combat took him. His legend is built of vows, single combats at fords, a divine father, an offended goddess, and a death met standing up, lashed to a pillar-stone so that he might die on his feet—and running through all of it, like the one string of a...