Isle of Magic

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Irish Celtic God of the Sea, Manannan, embodies Transformation and Change and is one of the most popular Gods of Irish Celtic mythology. He was lord of the sea, beyond or under which the Land of Youth or Islands of the Dead were supposed to lie; he therefore was the guide of man to this country.

He was master of tricks and illusions, and owned all kinds of magical possessions - the boat named Ocean-sweeper, which obeyed the thought of those who sailed in it and went without oar or sail, the steed Aonbarr, which could travel alike on sea or land, and the sword named Answerer, which no armour could resist. White-crested waves were called the Horses of Manannan and it was forbidden for the solar hero Cuchulain to perceive them, this indicated the daily death of the sun at his setting in the western waves.

Manannan wore a great cloak which was capable of taking on every kind of colour, like the widespread field of the sea as looked on from a height; and as the protector of the island of Erin it was said that when any hostile force invaded it they heard his thunderous tramp and the flapping of his mighty cloak as he marched angrily round and round their camp at night.

The Isle of Man, seen dimly from the Irish coast, was the throne of Manannan and took its name from this deity. In the midst of the Irish Sea, almost equidistant from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and concentrating in itself the psychical and magnetic influences from these three Celtic lands, lies the beautiful kingdom of the great Tuatha De Danann god, Manannan Mac Lir, or, as his loyal Manx subjects prefer to call him, Mannanan-Beg-Mac-y-Leir. In no other land of the Celt does Nature show so many moods and contrasts, such perfect repose at one time and at another time the mightiness of its unloosed powers, when the baffled sea throws itself angrily against a high rock-bound coast, as wild and almost as weatherworn as the western coasts of Ireland and the Hebrides.

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