Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

They arrived, say the oldest Irish books, not by ship but by sky. On the first of May, in a darkness of their own making, the Tuatha Dé Danann —the People of the Goddess Danu—descended upon the mountains of the west of Ireland in a magic mist, having burned their boats behind them so that retreat would be unthinkable, and the smoke of the burning, some scribes admit, may have been the mist itself. The admission is precious. Even the medieval monks who wrote the legends down could not decide whether the shining race came as gods descending or as men committing themselves utterly; and that undecidability is not a flaw in the record but the very signature of the Tuatha Dé. They are the great amphibians of European myth—divine and defeated, radiant and buried—and their story, from the cloud on the mountain to the door in the hill, is the West's most complete parable of what happens to the sacred when a new world refuses it lodging. The Four Cities and the Four Treasures Before Irela...