In Irish folklore, Sluagh were the spirits of dead sinners; sometimes the spirits of pagan ancestors; usually troublesome and destructive. They flew in groups like flocks of birds, coming from the west, and tried to enter a house where someone is dying to take the soul away with them. West-facing windows were sometimes kept closed to keep them out. Although many of the manuscripts containing texts relating to Irish mythology have failed to survive, and much more material was probably never committed to writing, there is enough remaining to enable the identification of four distinct, if overlapping, cycles: the Mythological Cycle, The Ulster Cycle, the Fenian Cycle and the... Within a European Christian context, paganism is a catch-all term which has come to connote a broad set of not necessarily compatible religious beliefs and practices (see Cult (religion)) of a natural religion (as opposed to a revealed religion of a text), which are usually, but not necessarily, characterized...