Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 3 (Celtic and Slavic).djvu/91

Whether the earliest story told of Dagda's or of Elcmar's dispossession, Oengus is a god who tricks his father or his fosterfather, and perhaps the latter was the sufferer in the primitive form. Rhŷs makes Dagda an equivalent of Kronos and Oengus of Zeus; but apart from the disinheriting incident, which is not exactly parallel in the respective Greek and Celtic stories,¹⁰ Dagda and Oengus have no clear traits in common with Kronos and Zeus, nor is there the slightest evidence that Dagda, like Kronos, ruled over the dead, either before or after his expulsion. The possible basis of the story, as the present writer has suggested elsewhere, is a myth explaining why the cult of one god came to supersede that of another.¹¹