Tuatha de Dannan
The worshippers of the Tuatha do not deny the existence of the Old Gods, but claim that the Tuatha were human philosophers who discovered the secret to immortality and deital power sometime during the First Age of Man. The initial group of humans who discovered the secret, lead by a woman named Danu, then spanned the world trying to find a people they considered ready to learn the paths to enlightenment. After many adventures, during which they revealed the secret to some particularly impressive humans, they finally discovered the elves. Believing the elves long-lived enough to truly understand and undertake the paths of enlightenment as a culture, they passed on their secret, which lead to the rise of the Elven Apotheism. Somewhere during their travels, the Tuatha became associated with a sect of naturalists called the druids. Though the Tuatha de Dannan have no clerics, the druids have essentially become their spiritual leaders, while bards became the lore-keepers of the faith.
Worship of the Tuatha became almost universal after the fall of the First Age of Man, when the Old Gods withdrew their blessings from their priesthoods. At the dawn of the Second Age of Man, one of the original philosophers who discovered the Secret, Math Mathonwy, withdrew from the Tuatha with plans to share the secret with all of humanity. Certain that humanity could not handle the secrets of immortality and, more importantly, deital power, the rest of the Tuatha rose against Math and, after a war that lasted over four hundred years, finally defeated Math and his followers. The Tuatha withdrew to a location somewhere in the world still secret, an event which resulted in the conclusion of the Second Age of Man. The Tuatha eventually withdrew from the world altogether as the Old Gods reasserted their dominion over the world at the start of the Third Age of Man. The Tuatha were remembered only in remote, primitive regions in the world and generally discarded as ignorant legend by most scholars.
During the waning years of the Third Age of Man, the Tuatha again began to influence events in the mortal realm. It is believed by some that they directly influenced the events of the Mage War and worked to bring together the Dragonknights who were instrumental in defeating the forces of the Mage King. When the Old Gods again receded during the last Dark Age, the druids began to move from their remote enclaves to again give judgment in the traditions of the Tuatha and the Bards began to retell the old stories of the Tuatha. At the dawn of the Fourth Age of Man, however, the Old Gods returned and again granted power to their clerics.
It remains to be seen if the Tautha's druids and the Old Gods clerics can coexist. There has never been an Age where one or the other was not dominant.
