Druids, the Milesians generally adored Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Apollo, the sun, moon, and wind; they had also their mountain, forest, and river gods. These divinities were common to them and to other nations of the world.... According to the Annals of Ulster, cited by Ware, the antiquarian, the usual oath of Laegore (Leary) II, King of Ireland, in the time of St. Patrick, was by the sun and wind.” McGee, writing of the same subject, on pages 5 and 9 of his “Popular History of Ireland,” says: “The chief officers about the kings, in the first ages, were all filled by the Druids or pagan priests; the Brehons, or judges, were usually Druids, as were also the Bards, the historians of their patrons. Then came the Physicians, the Chiefs who paid tribute to or received annual gifts from the sovereign, the royal Stewards, and the military leaders, or Champions.... Their religion in pagan times was what the moderns call Druidism, but what they called it themselves we now know not. It was probably the same religion anciently professed by Tyre and Sidon, by Carthage and her colonies in Spain; the same religion which the Romans have described as existing in great part of Gaul, and, by their accounts, we learn the awful fact that it sanctioned, nay, demanded, human sacrifices. From the few traces of its doctrines which Christian zeal has permitted to survive in the old Irish language, we see that Belus or Crom, the god of fire, typified by the sun, was its chief divinity—that two great festivals were held in his honor on days answering to the first of May and last of October. There were also particular gods of poets, champions, artificers, and mariners, just as among the Romans and Greeks. Sacred groves were dedicated to these gods; priests and priestesses devoted their lives to their service; the arms of the champion and the person of the king were charmed by them; neither peace nor war was made without their sanction; their own persons and their pupils were held sacred; the high place at the king’s right hand and the best fruits of the earth and the water were theirs. Old age revered them, women worshiped them, warriors paid court to them, youth trembled before them, princes and chiefs regarded them as elder brethren. So numerous were they in Erin, and so celebrated, that the altars of Britain and Western Gaul, left desolate by the Roman legions, were often served by hierophants from Ireland, which, even in those pagan days, was known to all the Druidic countries as the Sacred Island.”