Archaic England

This book is an application of the jigsaw system to certain archæological problems which under the ordinary detached methods of the Specialist have proved insoluble. My fragments of evidence are drawn as occasion warrants from History, Fairy-tale, Philosophy, Legend, Folklore—in fact from any quarter whence the required piece unmistakably fulfils the missing space. It is thus a mental medley with all the defects, and some, I trust, of the attractions, of a mosaic.

Ten years ago I published a study on Mediæval Symbolism, and subsequent investigation of cognate subjects has since put me in possession of some curious and uncommon information, which lies off the mainroads of conventional Thought.

The consensus of opinion upon A New Light on the Renaissance,[1] was to the effect that my theories were decidedly ingenious and up to a point tenable, yet nevertheless at present they could only be regarded as non-proven. In 1912[2] I therefore endeavoured to substantiate my earlier propositions, pushing them much further to the point of suggesting an innate connection between Symbolism and certain words—such, for example, as psyche, which means a butterfly, and psyche the anima or soul which was symbolised or represented by a butterfly. Of course I knew only too well the tricky character of the ground I was exploring and how open many of my propositions would be to attack, yet it seemed preferable rather to risk the Finger of Scorn than by a superfluity of caution ignore clues, which under more competent hands might yield some very interesting and perhaps valuable discoveries.

In the present volume I piece together a mosaic of visible and tangible evidence which is supplementary to that already brought forward, and the results—at any rate in many instances—cannot by any possibility be written off as due merely to coincidence or chance. That they will be adequate to satisfy the exacting requirements of modern criticism is, however, not to be supposed. Referring to The Lost Language, one of my reviewers cheerfully but disconcertingly observed: “He must deal as others of his school have done with all the possible readings of the history of the races of men”.[3] To sweeping and magnanimous advice of this character one can only counter the untoward experiences of the hapless “Charles Templeton,” as recounted by Mr. Stephen McKenna: “At the age of three-and-twenty Charles Templeton, my old tutor at Oxford, set himself to write a history of the Third French Republic. When I made his acquaintance, some thirty years later, he had satisfactorily concluded his introductory chapter on the origin of Kingship. At his death, three months ago, I understand that his notes on the precursors of Charlemagne were almost as complete as he desired. ‘It is so difficult to know where to start, Mr. Oakleigh,’ he used to say, as I picked my steps through the litter of notebooks that cumbered his tables, chairs, and floor.”[4]

But Mr. Templeton’s embarrassments were trifling in comparison with mine. Templeton was obviously a man of some leisure, whereas my literary hobbies have necessarily to be indulged more or less furtively in restaurants, railway trains, and during such hours and half-hours of opportunity as I can snatch from more pressing obligations. Moreover, Mr. Templeton could concentrate on one subject—History—whereas the scope of my studies compels me to keep on as good terms as may be with the exacting Muses of History, Mythology, Archæology, Philosophy, Religion, Romance, Symbolism, Numismatics, Folklore, and Etymology. I mention this not to extenuate any muzziness of thought, or sloppiness of diction, but to disarm by confession the charge that my work has been done hurriedly and here and there superficially.

With the facilities at my disposal I have endeavoured to the best of my abilities to concentrate a dozen rays on to one subject, and to mould into an harmonious and coherent whole the pith of a thousand and one items culled during the past seven years from day to day and noted from hour to hour. Differing as I do in some respects from the accepted conclusions of the best authorities, it is a further handicap to find myself in the position of Nehemiah the son of Hachaliah, who was constrained by force of circumstance to build with a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other.

To the heretic and the wayfarer it is, however, a comfortable reflection that what Authority maintains to-day it generally contradicts to-morrow.[5] Less than a century ago contemporary scholarship knew the age of the earth with such exquisite precision that it pronounced it to a year, declaring an exact total of 6000 years, and a few odd days.

When the discoveries in Kent’s Cavern were laid before the scientific world, the authorities flatly denied their possibility, and the proofs that Man in Britain was contemporary with the mammoth, the lion, the bear, and the rhinoceros[6] were received with rudeness and inattention. Similarly the discovery of prehistoric implements in the gravel-beds at Abbeville was treated with inconsequence and insult, and it was upwards of twenty years before it was reluctantly conceded that: “While we have been straining our eyes to the East, and eagerly watching excavations in Egypt and Assyria, suddenly a new light has arisen in the midst of us; and the oldest relics of man yet discovered have occurred, not among the ruins of Nineveh or Heliopolis, not on the sandy plains of the Nile or the Euphrates, but in the pleasant valleys of England and France, along the banks of the Seine and the Somme, the Thames and the Waveney.”[7]

The fact is now generally accepted as proven by both anthropologists and archæologists, that the most ancient records of the human race exist not in Asia, but in Europe. The oldest documents are not the hieroglyphics of Egypt, but the hunting-scenes scratched on bone and ivory by the European cave-dwelling contemporaries of the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros. Human implements found on the chalk plateaus of Kent have been assigned to a period prior to the glacial epoch, which is surmised to have endured for 160,000 years, from, roughly speaking, 240,000 to 80,000 years ago.

It is now also an axiom that the races of Europe are not colonists from somewhere in Asia, but that, speaking generally, they have inhabited their present districts more or less continuously from the time when they crept back gradually in the wake of the retreating ice.

“Written history and popular tradition,” says Sir E. Ray Lankester, “tell us something in regard to the derivation and history of existing ‘peoples,’ but we soon come to a period—a few thousand years back—concerning which both written statement and tradition are dumb. And yet we know that this part of the world—Europe—was inhabited by an abundant population in those remote times. We know that for at least 500,000 years human populations occupied portions of this territory, and that various races with distinguishing peculiarities of feature and frame, and each possessed of arts and crafts distinct from those characteristic of others, came and went in succession in those incredibly remote days in Europe. We know this from the implements, carvings, and paintings left by these successive populations, and we know it also by the discovery of their bones.”

Anthropology, however, while admitting this unmeasurable antiquity for mankind, takes no count of the possibility of an amiable or cultured race in these islands prior to the coming of the Roman legions. It traces with equanimity the modern Briton evolving in unbroken sequence from the primitive cave-dweller, and it points with self-complacency to the fact that even as late as the Battle of Hastings some of Harold’s followers were armed with stone axes. There has, however, recently been unearthed near Maidstone the skull of a late palæolithic or early neolithic man, whose brain capacity was rather above the average of the modern Londoner. The forehead of this 15,000 year-old skull is well formed, there are no traces of a simian or overhanging brow, and the individual himself might well, in view of all physical evidence, have been a primeval sage rather than a primeval savage.

The high estimation in which the philosophy of prehistoric Briton was regarded abroad may be estimated from the testimony of Cæsar who states: “It is believed that this institution (Druidism) was founded in Britannia, and thence transplanted into Gaul. Even nowadays those who wish to become more intimately acquainted with the institution generally go to Britannia for instruction’s sake.”

It has been claimed for the Welsh that they possess the oldest literature in the oldest language in Europe. Giraldus Cambrensis, speaking of the Welsh Bards, mentions their possession of certain ancient and authentic books, but whether or not the traditionary poems which were first committed to writing in the twelfth century retain any traces of the prehistoric Faith is a matter of divided opinion. To those who are not experts in archaisms and are not enamoured of ink-spilling, the sanest position would appear to be that of Matthew Arnold, who observes in Celtic Literature: “There is evidently mixed here, with the newer legend, a detritus, as the geologists would say, of something far older; and the secret of Wales and its genius is not truly reached until this detritus, instead of being called recent because it is found in contact with what is recent, is disengaged, and is made to tell its own story.”[8]

The word “founded,” as used by Cæsar, implies an antiquity for British institutions which is materially confirmed by the existence of such monuments as Stonehenge, and the more ancient Avebury. Whether these supposed “appendages to Bronze age burials” were merely sepulchral monuments, or whether they ever possessed any intellectual significance, does not affect the fact that Great Britain, and notably England, is richer in this class of monument than any other part of the world.[9]

Circles being essentially and pre-eminently English it is disappointing to find the most modern handbook on Stonehenge stating: “In all matters of archæology it is constantly found that certain questions are better left in abeyance or bequeathed to a coming generation for solution”.[10] Every one sympathises with that weary feeling, but nevertheless the present generation now possesses quite sufficient data to enable it to shoulder its own responsibilities and to pass beyond the stereotyped and hackneyed formula “sepulchral monument”. I hold no brief on behalf of the Druids—indeed one must agree that the Celtic Druids were much more modern than the monuments associated with their name—nevertheless the theory that these far-famed philosophers were mere wise men or witch doctors, with perhaps a spice of the conjuror, is a modern misapprehension with which I am nowise in sympathy. Valerius Maximus (c. A.D. 20) was much better informed and therefore more cautious in his testimony: “I should be tempted to call these breeches-wearing gentry fools, were not their doctrine the same as that of the mantle-clad Pythagoras”.

Druids or no Druids there must at some period in our past have been interesting and enterprising people in these islands. At Avebury, near Marlborough, is Silbury Hill, an earth mound, which is admittedly the vastest artificial hill in Europe. Avebury itself is said to constitute the greatest megalithic monument in Europe, and nowhere in the world are tumuli more plentiful than in Great Britain. On the banks of the Boyne is a pyramid of stones which, had it been situated on the banks of the Nile, would probably have been pronounced the oldest and most venerable of the pyramids. In the Orkneys at Hoy is almost the counterpart to an Egyptian marvel which, according to Herodotus, was an edifice 21 cubits in length, 14 in breadth, and 8 in height, the whole consisting only of one single stone, brought thither by sea from a place about 20 days’ sailing from Sais. The Hoy relic is an obelisk 36 feet long by 18 feet broad, by 9 feet deep. “No other stones are near it. ’Tis all hollowed within or scooped by human art and industry, having a door at the east end 2 feet square with a stone of the same dimension lying about 2 feet from it, which was intended no doubt to close the entrance. Within, there is at the south end of it, cut out, the form of a bed and pillow capable to hold two persons.”[11]

Sir John Morris-Jones has noted remarkable identities between the syntax of Welsh and that of early Egyptian: Gerald Massey, in his Book of the Beginnings, gives a list of 3000 close similarities between English and Egyptian words; and the astronomical inquiries of Sir Norman Lockyer have driven him to conclude: “The people who honoured us with their presence here in Britain some 4000 years ago, had evidently, some way or other, had communicated to them a very complete Egyptian culture, and they determined their time of night just in the same way that the Egyptians did”.

It used to be customary to attribute all the mysterious edifices of these islands, including stones inscribed with lettering in an unknown script, to hypothetical wanderers from the East. Nothing could have been more peremptory than the manner in which this theory was enunciated by its supporters, among whom were included all or nearly all the great names of the period. To-day there is a complete volte face upon this subject, and the latest opinion is that “not a particle of evidence has been adduced in favour of any migration from the East”.[12] When one remembers that only a year or two ago practically the whole of the academic world gave an exuberant and unqualified adherence to the theory of Asiatic immigration it is difficult to conceive a more chastening commentary upon the value of ex cathedra teaching.

Happily it was an Englishman[13] who, seeing through the futility of the Asiatic theory, first pointed out the now generally accepted fact that the cradle of Aryan civilisation, if anywhere at all, was inferentially in Europe. The assumption of an Asiatic origin was, however, so firmly established and upheld by the dignity of such imposing names that the arguments of Dr. Latham were not thought worthy of reply, and for sixteen years his work lay unheeded before the world. Even twenty years after publication, when the new view was winning many adherents, it was alluded to by one of the most learned Germans as follows: “And so it came to pass that in England, the native land of fads, there chanced to enter into the head of an eccentric individual the notion of placing the cradle of the Aryan race in Europe”.

The whirligig of Time has now once again shifted the focus of archæological interest at the moment from Scandinavia to Crete, where recent excavations have revealed an Eldorado of prehistoric art. It is now considered that the civilisation of Hellas was a mere offshoot from that of Crete, and that Crete was veritably the fabulous Island of Atlantis, a culture-centre which leavened all the shores of the Mediterranean.

According to Sir Arthur Evans: “The high early culture, the equal rival of that of Egypt and Babylon, which began to take its rise in Crete in the fourth millennium before our era, flourished for some 2000 years, eventually dominating the Ægean and a large part of the Mediterranean basin. The many-storeyed palaces of the Minoan Priest-Kings in their great days, by their ingenious planning, their successful combination of the useful with the beautiful and stately, and last but not least, by their scientific sanitary arrangements, far outdid the similar works, on however vast a scale, of Egyptian or Babylonian builders.”

The sensational discoveries at Crete provide a wholly new standpoint whence to survey prehistoric civilisation, and they place the evolution of human art and appliances in the last Quaternary Period on a higher level than had ever previously been suspected.

Not only have the findings in Crete revolutionised all previously current ideas upon Art, but they have also condemned to the melting-pot the cardinal article of belief that the alphabet reached us from Phœnicia. Prof. Flinders Petrie has now clearly demonstrated that even in this respect, “Beside the great historic perspective of the long use of signs in Egypt, other discoveries in Europe have opened entirely new ground. These signs are largely found used for writing in Crete, as a geometrical signary; and the discovery of the Karian alphabet, and its striking relation to the Spanish alphabet, has likewise compelled an entire reconsideration of the subject. Thus on all sides—Egyptian, Greek, and Barbarian—material appears which is far older and far more widespread than the Græco-Phœnician world; a fresh study of the whole material is imperatively needed, now that the old conclusions are seen to be quite inadequate.”

The striking connection between the Karian and the Spanish alphabet may be connoted with the fact that Strabo, mentioning the Turdetani whom he describes as the most learned tribe of all Spain, says they had reduced their language to grammatical rules, and that for 6000 years they had possessed metrical poems and even laws. Commenting upon this piece of precious information, Lardner ironically observed that although the Spaniards eagerly seized it as a proof of their ancient civilisation, they are sadly puzzled how to reconcile these 6000 years with the Mosaic chronology. He adds that discarding fable, we find nothing in their habits and manners to distinguish them from other branches of that great race, except, perhaps, a superior number of Druidical remains.[14]

This “except” is noteworthy in view of the fact that the Celtiberian alphabet of Spain is extremely similar to the Bardic or Druidic alphabet of Britain, and also to the hitherto illegible alphabet of Ancient Crete.

Cæsar has recorded that the Druids thought it an unhallowed thing to commit their lore to writing, though in the other public and private affairs of life they frequently made use of the Greek alphabet. That the Celts of Gaul possessed the art of writing cannot be questioned, and that Britain also practised some method of communication seems a probability. There are still extant in Scotland inscriptions on stones which are in characters now totally unknown. In Ireland, letters were cut on the bark of trees prepared for that purpose and called poet’s tables. The letters of the most ancient Irish alphabet are named after individual trees, and there are numerous references in Welsh poetry to a certain secret of the twigs which lead to the strong inference that “written” communication was first accomplished by the transmission of tree-sprigs.

The alphabets illustrated on pages 14 and 15 have every appearance of being representations of sprigs, and it is a curious fact that not only in Ireland, but also in Arabia, alphabets of which every letter was named after trees[15] were once current.

BRITISH ALPHABET.

Fig. 1.—From Celtic Researches (Davies, E.).

CELTIBERIAN ALPHABET, SHEWING THE DESCRIPTION OF CHARACTERS FOUND ON THE COINS OF TARRACONENSIS AND BÆTICA.

Fig. 2.—From Ancient Coins (Akerman, J. Y.).

In The Myths of Crete and Pre-Hellenic Europe, Dr. Mackenzie inquires: “By whom were Egyptian beads carried to Britain, between 1500 B.C. and 1400 B.C.? Certainly not the Phœnicians. The sea traders of the Mediterranean were at the time the Cretans. Whether or not their merchants visited England we have no means of knowing.”[16]

The material which I shall produce establishes a probability that the Cretans systematically visited Britain, and further that the tradition of the peopling of this island by men of Trojan race are well founded.

According to the immemorial records of the Welsh Bards: “There were three names imposed on the Isle of Britain from the beginning. Before it was inhabited its denomination was Sea-Girt Green-space; after being inhabited it was called the Honey Island, and after it was formed into a Commonwealth by Prydain, the Son of Aedd Mawr, it was called the Isle of Prydain. And none have any title therein but the nation of the Kymry. For they first settled upon it, and before that time no men lived therein, but it was full of bears, wolves, beavers, and bisons.”[17]

In the course of these essays I shall discuss the Kymry, and venture a few suggestions as to their cradle and community of memories and hopes. But behind the Kymry, as likewise admittedly behind the Cretans, are the traces of an even more primitive and archaic race. The earliest folk which reached Crete are described as having come with a form of culture which had been developed elsewhere, and among these neolithic settlers have been found traces of a race 6 feet in height and with skulls massive and shapely. Moreover Cretan beliefs and the myths which are based upon them are admittedly older than even the civilisation of the Tigro-Euphrates valley: and they belong, it would appear, to a stock of common inheritance from an uncertain culture centre of immense antiquity.[18]

The problem of Crete is indissolubly connected with that of Etruria, which was flourishing in Art and civilisation at a period when Rome was but a coterie of shepherds’ huts. Here again are found Cyclopean walls and the traces of some most ancient people who had sway in Italy at a period even more remote than the national existence of Etruria.[19]

We are told that the first-comers in Crete ground their meal in stone mortars, and that one of the peculiarities of the island was the herring-bone design of their wall buildings. In West Cornwall the stone walls or Giants’ Hedges are Cyclopean; farther north, in the Boscastle district, herring-bone walls are common, and in the neighbourhood of St. Just there are numerous British villages wherein the stone mortars are still standing.

The formula of independent evolution, which has recently been much over-worked, is now waning into disfavour, and it is difficult to believe otherwise than that identity of names, customs, and characteristics imply either borrowing or descent from some common, unknown source.

That the builders of our European tumuli and cromlechs were maritime arrivals is a reasonable inference from the fact that dolmens and cromlechs were built almost invariably near the sea.[20] These peculiar and distinctive monuments are found chiefly along the Western coasts of Britain, the Northern coast of Africa, in the isles of the Mediterranean, in the isolated, storm-beaten Hebrides, and in the remote islands of Asia and Polynesia.

By whom was the Titanic art of cromlech-building brought alike to the British Isles and to the distant islands of the Pacific? By what guidance did frail barques compass such terrifying sea space? How were these adequately victualled for such voyages, and why were the mainlands ever quitted? How and why were the colossal stones of Stonehenge brought by ship from afar, floated down the broad waters of the prehistoric Avon, and dragged laboriously over the heights of Oare Hill? Who were the engineers who constructed artificial rocking stones and skilfully poised them where they stand to-day? “To suspend a stupendous mass of abnormous shape in such an equilibrium that it shall oscillate with the most trivial force and not fall without the greatest, is a problem unsolved so far as I know by modern engineers.”[21]

Who were the indefatigable people who, prior to all record, reclaimed the marshes of the Thames-mouth by an embankment which is intact to-day all round the river coast of Kent and Essex? Who were the horticulturists who evolved wheat and other cereals from unknown grasses and certain lilies from their unknown wild? And who were the philosophers who spun a delicate gossamer of fairy-tales over the world, and formulated the cosmic ideas which are in many extraordinary respects common alike to primitive and more advanced peoples? And why is the symbol generally entitled the Swastika cross found not only under the ruins of the most ancient Troy but also in the Thames at Battersea, and elsewhere from China to Zimbabwe? How is it that Ireland, that remote little outpost of Europe, possesses more Celtic MSS. than all the rest of Celtic Europe put together?

The most rational explanation of these and similar queries is seemingly a consideration of the almost world-wide tradition of a lost island, the home of a scientific world-wandering race. The legend of submerged Atlantis was related to Solon by an Egyptian priest as being historic fact, and the date of the final catastrophe was definitely set down by Plato from information given to Solon as having been about 9000 B.C. Solon was neither a fool himself nor the man to suffer fools gladly. It is admitted by geology that there actually existed a large island in the Atlantic during tertiary times, but this we are told is a pure coincidence and it is impossible to suppose any tradition existing of such an island or land.

Science has very generally denied the credibility of tradition, yet tradition has almost invariably proved truer than contemporary scholarship. Scholarship denied the possibility of finding Troy, notwithstanding the steady evidence of tradition to the mound at Hissarlik where it was eventually disclosed. Even when Schliemann had uncovered the lost city the scientists of every European capital ridiculed his pretensions, and it was only gradually that they ungraciously yielded to the irresistible evidence of their physical senses. Science similarly denied the possibility of buried cities at the foot of Vesuvius, yet popular tradition always asserted the existence of Pompeii and Herculaneum; indeed, contemporary science has so consistently scouted the possibility of every advance in discovery that mere airy dismissal is not now sufficient to discredit either the Atlantean, or any other theory. From China to Peru one finds the persistent tradition of a drowned land, a story which is in itself so preposterous as unlikely to arise without some solid grounds of reality. Thierry has observed that legend is living tradition, and three times out of four it is truer than what we call history. Sir John Morris Jones would seemingly endorse this proposition, for he has recently contended that tradition is itself a fact not always to be disposed of by the hasty assumption that all men are liars.[22]

The Irish have their own account of the Flood, according to which three ships sailed for Ireland, but two of them foundered on the way. The Welsh version runs that the first of the perilous mishaps which occurred in Britain was “The outburst of the ocean ‘Torriad lin lion,’ when a deluge spread over the face of all lands, so that all mankind were drowned with the exception of Duw-van and Duw-ach, the divine man and divine woman, who escaped in a decked ship without sails; and from this pair the island of Prydain was completely re-peopled”.

Correlated with this native version is a peculiar and, so far as my information goes, a unique tradition that previous disasters had taken place, causing the destruction of animals and vegetables then existing, of which whole races were irrevocably lost. This tradition, which is in complete harmony with the discoveries of modern geology, is thus embodied in the thirteenth Triad: “The second perilous mishap was the terror of the torrent-fire, when the earth was cloven down to the abyss, and the majority of living things were destroyed”.

It is a singular coincidence that evidence of a prehistoric torrent-fire exists certainly in Ireland, where bog-buried forests have been unearthed exhibiting all the signs of a flowing torrent of molten fire or lava. According to the author of Bogs and Ancient Forests, when the Bog of Allen in Kildare was cut through, oak, fir, yew, and other trees were found buried 20 or 30 feet below the surface, and these trees generally lie prostrated in a horizontal position, and have the appearance of being burned at the bottom of their trunks and roots, fire having been found far more powerful in prostrating those forests than cutting them down with an axe; and the great depth at which these trees are found in bogs, shows that they must have lain there for many ages.[23]

No ordinary or casual forest fire is capable of prostrating an oak or fir tree, and the implement which accomplished such terrific devastation must have been something volcanic and torrential in its character.

I am, however, not enamoured of the Atlantean or any other theory. My purpose is rather to collate facts, and as all theorising ends in an appeal to self-evidence, it is better to allow my material, for much of which I have physically descended into the deeps of the earth, to speak for itself:—we must believe the evidence of our senses rather than arguments, and believe arguments if they agree with the phenomena.[24]

Although my concordance of facts is based upon evidence largely visible to the naked eye, in a study of this character there must of necessity be a disquieting percentage of “probablys” and “possiblys”. This is deplorable, but if license be conceded in one direction it cannot be withheld in another. The extent to which guess-work is still rampant in etymology will be apparent in due course; the extent to which it is allowed license in anthropology may be judged from such reveries as the following: “Did any early members of the human family commit suicide? Probably they did; the feeble, the dying, the maimed, the weak-headed, the starving, the jealous, would be tired of life; these would throw themselves from heights or into rivers, or stab themselves or cut their throats with large and keen-edged knives of flint.”[25]

Although my own inquiries deal intimately with graves and names and epitaphs, it still seems to me a possibility that the brains which fashioned exquisitely barbed fish-hooks out of flint, and etched vivid works of art upon pebble, may also have been capable of poetic and even magnanimous ideas. It is quite certain that the artistic sense is superlatively ancient, and it is quite unproven that the lives of these early craftsmen were protracted nightmares.

Although not primarily written with that end, the present work will inter alia raise not a few doubts as to the accuracy of Green’s dictum: “What strikes us at once in the new England is that it was the one purely German nation that rose upon the wreck of Rome”. In the opinion of this popular historian the holiest spot in all these islands ought in the eyes of Englishmen to be Ebbsfleet, the site where in Kent the English visitors first landed, yet inconsequently he adds: “A century after their landing the English are still known to their British foes only as ‘barbarians,’ ‘wolves,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘whelps from the kennel of barbarism,’ ‘hateful to God and man’. Their victories seemed victories for the powers of evil, chastisement of a divine justice for natural sin.”[26]

It is an axiom among anthropologists that race characteristics do not change and that tides of immigration are more or less rapidly absorbed by the aboriginal and resident stock. Assuredly the characteristics of the German tribes have little changed, and it is extraordinary how from the time of Tacitus they have continued to display from age to age their time-honoured peculiarities. Invited and welcomed into this country as friends and allies, “in a short time swarms of the aforesaid nations came over into the island, and they began to increase so much that they became terrible to the natives themselves who had invited them”.[27]

According to Bede the first symptoms of the frightfulness which was to come were demands for larger rations, accompanied by the threat that unless more plentiful supplies were brought them they would break the confederacy and ravage all the island. Nor were they backward in putting their threats in execution. Just as the Germans ruined Louvain so the Angles razed Cambridge,[28] and in the words of Layamon “they passed to and fro the country carrying off all they found”. Already in the times of Tacitus famous for their frantic Hymns of Hate, so again we find Layamon recording “they breathed out threatenings and slaughter against the folk of the country”. Indeed Layamon uses far stronger expressions than any of those quoted by Green, and the British chronicler almost habitually refers to the alien intruders as “swine,” and “the loathest of all things”.

Instead, therefore, of being thrilled into ecstasy by the landing of the Germans at Ebbsfleet, one may more reasonably regard the episode as untoward and discreditable. It is more satisfactory to contemplate the return in the train of Duke William of Normandy of those numerous Britons who “with sorrowful hearts had fled beyond the seas,” and to appreciate that by the Battle of Hastings the temporary ascendancy of Germanic kultur was finally and irrevocably destroyed.

It is observed by Green that the coins which we dig up in our fields are no relics of our English fathers but of a Roman world which our fathers’ sword swept utterly away. This is sufficiently true as regards the Saxon sword, but as some of the native coins in question are now universally assigned to a period 200 to 100 years earlier than the first coming of the Romans, it is obvious that there must have been sufficient civilisation then in the country to require a coinage, and that the native Britons cannot have been the poor and backward barbarians of popular estimation.

A coin is an excessively hard fact, and should be of just as high interest to the historian as a well-formed skull or any other document. To Englishmen our prehistoric coinage—a national coinage “scarcely if at all inferior to that of contemporary Rome”—[29] ought to possess peculiar and special interest, for it is practically in England alone that early coins have been discovered, and neither Scotland, Wales, nor Ireland can boast of more than very few. It is, however, an Englishman’s peculiarity that possessing perhaps the most interesting history, and some of the most fascinating relics in the world, he is either too modest or too dull to take account of them. The plate of coins illustrated on page 364, represents certain sceattae which, according to Hawkins, may have been struck during the interval between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Saxons. One would at least have thought that such undated minor-monuments would have possessed per se sufficient interest to ensure their careful preservation. Yet, according to Hawkins, these rude and uncouth pieces are scarce, “because they are rejected from all cabinets and thrown away as soon as discovered”.[30]

It is the considered opinion of certain British numismatists that not only all English but also Gaulish coins are barbarous and degraded imitations of a famous Macedonian original which at one time circulated largely in Marseilles. This supposititious model is illustrated on page 394, and the reader can form his own opinion as to whether or not the immense range of subjects which figure on our native money could by any possibility have unconsciously evolved from carelessness. Sir John Evans, by whom this theory was, I believe, first put forward, is himself at times hard-driven to defend it; nevertheless he does not hesitate to maintain: “The degeneration of the head of Apollo into two boars and a wheel, impossible as it may at first appear, is in fact but a comparatively easy transition when once the head has been reduced into a form of regular pattern”.[31]

My irregularity carries me to the extent of contending that our native coins, crude and uncouth as some of them may be, are in no case imitations but are native work reflecting erstwhile national ideas. The weird designs and what-nots which figure on these tokens almost certainly were once animated by meanings of some sort: they thus constitute a prehistoric literature expressed in hieroglyphics for the correct reading of which one must, in the words of Carlyle, consider History with the beginnings of it stretching dimly into the remote time, emerging darkly out of the mysterious eternity, the true epic poem and universal divine scripture.

According to Tacitus the British, under Boudicca, brought into the field an incredible multitude; that Cæsar was impressed by the density of the inhabitants may be gathered from his words: “The population is immense; homesteads closely resembling those of the Gauls are met with at every turn, and cattle are very numerous”.[32] That the handful of Roman invaders eliminated the customs and traditions of a vast population is no more likely than the supposition that British occupation has eradicated or even greatly interfered with the native faiths of India.

It is generally admitted that the Romans were most tolerant of local sensibilities, and there is no reason to assume that existing British characteristics were either attacked or suppressed. To assume that some hundreds of years later the advent of a few boat-loads of Anglo-Saxon adventurers wiped out the Romano-British inhabitants and eradicated all customs, manners, and traditions is an obvious fallacy under which the evidence of folklore does not permit us to labour. The greater probability is that the established culture imposed itself more or less upon the new-comers, more particularly in those remote districts which it was only after hundreds of years that the Saxons, by their conventional policy of peaceful penetration, punctuated by flashes of frightfulness, succeeded in dominating.

Even after the Norman Conquest there are circumstances which point to the probability that the Celtic population was much larger and more powerful than is usually supposed. Of these the most important is the fact that the signatures to very early charters supply us with names of persons of Celtic race occupying positions of dignity at the courts of Anglo-Saxon kings.[33]

The force of custom and the apparently undying continuance of folk-memory are among the best attested phenomena of folklore. It was remarked by the elder Disraeli that tradition can neither be made nor destroyed, and if this be true in general it is peculiarly true of the stubborn and pig-headed British. Our churches stand to-day not only on the primeval inconvenient hill-sites, but frequently within the time-honoured earthwork, or beside the fairy-well. On Palm Sunday the villagers of Avebury still toil to the summit of Silbury Hill, there to consume fig cakes and drink sugared water; and on the same festival the people even to-day march in procession to the prehistoric earthwork on the top of Martinshell Hill. Our country fairs are generally held near or within a pagan earthwork, and instance after instance might be adduced all pointing to the immortality of custom and the persistent sanctity of pagan sites.

In the sixth century of our era the monk Gildas referred complacently but erroneously to the ancient British faith as being dead. “I shall not,” he says, “enumerate those diabolical idols of my country, which almost surpassed in number those of Egypt, and of which we still see some mouldering away within or without the deserted temples, with stiff and deformed features as was customary. Nor will I cry out upon the mountains, fountains, or hills, or upon the rivers, which now are subservient to the use of men, but once were an abomination and destruction to them, and to which the blind people paid divine honour.”

Notwithstanding the jeremiads of poor Gildas[34] the folk-faith survived; indeed, as Mr. Johnson says, the heathen belief has been present all the time, and need not greatly astonish us since the most advanced materialist is frequently a victim of trivial superstitions which are scouted by scientific men as baseless and absurd.

The Augustine of Canterbury, who is recorded to have baptised on one day 10,000 persons in the river Swale, recommended with pious ingenuity that the heathen temples should not be destroyed, but converted to the honour of Christ by washing their walls with holy water and substituting holy relics and symbols for the images of the heathen gods. This is an illuminating sidelight on the methods by which the images of the heathen idols were gradually transformed into the images of Christian saints, and there is little doubt that as the immemorial shrines fell into ruin and were rebuilt and again rebuilt, the sacred images were scrupulously relimned.

Even to-day, after 2000 years of Christian discipline, the clergy dare not in some districts interfere with the time-honoured tenets of their parishioners. In Normandy and Brittany the priests, against their inclination, are compelled to take part in pagan ceremonials,[35] and in Spain quite recently an archbishop has been nearly killed by his congregation for interdicting old customs.[36]

The earliest British shrines were merely stones, or caves, or holy wells, or sacred trees, or tumuli, preferably on a hill-top or in a wood. The next type is found in the monastery of St. Bride, which was simply a circular palisade encircling a sacred fire. This was in all probability similar to the earliest known form of the Egyptian temple, a wicker hut with tall poles forming the sides of the door; in front of this extended an enclosure which had two poles with flags on either side of the entrance. In the middle of the enclosure or court was a staff bearing the emblem of the God.

Later came stone circles and megalithic monuments in various forms, whence the connection is direct to cathedrals such as Chartres, which is said to be built largely from the remains of the prehistoric megaliths which originally stood there. There are chapels in Brittany and elsewhere built over pagan monoliths; indeed no new faith can ever do more than superimpose itself upon an older one, and statements about the wise and tender treatment of the old nature worship by the Church are euphemisms for the bald fact that Christianity, finding it impracticable to wean the heathen from their obdurate beliefs, made the best of the situation by decreeing its feasts to coincide with pre-existing festivals.

Fig. 3.—Section of the Dolmen Chapel of the Seven Sleepers near Plouaret.

It has long been generally appreciated that the lives of saints are not only for the most part mythical, but that even documentary evidence on that subject is equally suspect.[37] There is, indeed, no room to doubt that the majority of the ancient saint-stories are Christianised versions of such scraps and traditions of prehistoric mythology as had continued to linger among the folk. To the best of my belief I am the first folklorist who has endeavoured to treat The Golden Legend in a sympathetic spirit as almost pure mythology.

It is usually assumed that at any rate the Christian Church tactfully decanted the old wine of paganism into new bottles; but Christianity, as will be seen, more often did not trouble to provide even new bottles, and merely altered a stroke here and there on the labels, transforming San tan, the Holy Fire, into St. Anne, Sin clair, the Holy Light, into St. Clare, and so forth.

The first written record of Christianity in Britain is approximately A.D. 200, whence it is claimed that the Christian religion must have been introduced very near to, if not in, apostolic times. In 314 three British bishops, each accompanied by a priest and a deacon, were present at the Council at Arles, and it is commonly maintained by the Anglican Church that only a relatively small part of England owes its conversion to the Roman mission of the monk Augustine in 597.

We have it on the notable authority of St. Augustine that: “That very thing which is now designated the Christian religion was in existence among the ancients, nor was it absent even from the commencement of the human race up to the time when Christ entered into the flesh, after which true religion, which already existed, began to be called Christian”.

We should undoubtedly possess more specific evidences of the ancient faith but for the edicts of the Church that all writings adverse to the claims of the Christian religion, in the possession of whomsoever they should be found, should be committed to the fire. It is claimed for St. Patrick that he caused to be destroyed 180—some say 300—volumes relating to the Druidic system. These, said a complacent commentator, were stuffed with the fables and superstitions of heathen idolatry and unfit to be transmitted to posterity.

Mr. Westropp considers that much of value escaped destruction, for Christianity in Ireland was a tactful, warm-hearted mother, and learned the stories to tell to her children. This is true to some extent, but in Britain there are extant many bardic laments at the intolerance with which old ideas were eradicated, e.g., “Monks congregate like wolves wrangling with their instructors. They know not when the darkness and the dawn divide, nor what is the course of the wind, or the cause of its agitation; in what place it dies away or on what region it expands.” And implying that although one may be right it does not follow that all others must be wrong the same bard exclaims, “For one hour persecute me not!” and he pathetically asks: “Is there but one course to the wind, but one to the waters of the sea? Is there but one spark in the fire of boundless energy?”

In the same strain another bard, in terms not altogether inapplicable to-day, alludes to his opponents as “like little children disagreeing on the beach of the sea”.

Although bigotry and materialism have suppressed facts, stifled testimony, misrepresented witnesses, and destroyed or perverted documents, the prehistoric fairy faith was happily too deeply graven thus to be obliterated, and it is only a matter of time and study to reconstruct it. Most of the suggestions I venture to put forward are sufficiently documented by hard facts, but some are necessarily based upon “hints and equivocal survivals”.[38] At the threshold of an essay of the present character one can hardly do better than appropriate the words of Edmund Spenser:—I do gather a likelihood of truth not certainly affirming anything, but by conferring of times, language, monuments, and such like, I do hunt out a probability of things which I leave to your judgment to believe or refuse.

It is generally admitted that place-names are more or less impervious to time and conquests. Instances seemingly without limit might be adduced of towns which have been sacked, destroyed, rebuilt, and rechristened, yet the original names—and these only—have survived. Dr. Taylor has observed that the names of five of the oldest cities of the world—Damascus, Hebron, Gaza, Sidon, and Hamath—are still pronounced in exactly the same manner as was the case thirty, or perhaps forty centuries ago, defying oftentimes the persistent attempts of rulers to substitute some other name.[39]

As another instance of the permanency of place-names, the city of Palmyra is curiously notable. Though the Greek Palmyra is a title of 2000 years’ standing, yet to the native Arab it is new-fangled, and he knows the place not as Palmyra but as Tadmor, its original and infinitely older name. Five hundred years B.C. the very ancient city of Mykenæ was destroyed and never rose again to any importance: Mykenæ was fabulously assigned to Perseus, and even to-day the stream which runs at the site is known as the Perseia.[40]

If it be possible for local names thus to live handed down humbly from mouth to mouth for thousands of years, for aught one knows they may have endured for double or treble these periods; there is no seeming limit to their vitality, and they may be said to be as imperishable and as dateless as the stones of Avebury or Stonehenge.

History knows nothing of violent and spasmodic jumps; the ideas of one era are impalpably transmitted to the next, and the continuity of custom makes it difficult to believe that the builders of Cyclopean works such as Avebury and Stonehenge, have left no imprint on our place-names, and no memories in our language. Even to-day the superstitious veneration for cromlechs and holy stones is not defunct, and it is largely due to that ingrained sentiment that more of these prehistoric monuments have not been converted into horse-troughs and pigsties.

If, as now generally admitted, there has been an unbroken and continuous village-occupation, and if, as is also now granted, our sacred places mostly occupy aboriginal and time-honoured sites, it is difficult to conceive that place-names do not preserve some traces of their prehistoric meanings. In the case of villages dedicated to some saintly man or sweetest of sweet ladies, the connection is almost certainly intact; indeed, in instances the pagan barrows in the churchyard are often actually dedicated to some saint.[41]

That memories of the ancient mythology sometimes hang around our British cromlechs is proved by an instance in North Wales where there still stands a table stone known locally as Llety-y-filiast, or the stone of the greyhound bitch. “This name,” says Dr. Griffith, “was given in allusion to the British Ceres or Keridwen who was symbolised by the greyhound bitch”.[42] I shall have much to say about Keridwen—“the most generous and beauteous of ladies”—meanwhile it is sufficient here to note that her symbol, the greyhound bitch, is found unmistakably upon our earliest coinage.

British.
Fig. 4.—From Evans.              Fig. 5.—From Akerman.

All place-names of any real antiquity are generally composed of various languages, and like compound rocks contain fragments in juxtaposition which belong properly to different ages. The analysis of these is not difficult, as the final -hill, -ton, -ville, -ham, and so forth is usually the comparatively modern work of newcomers. Frequently the later generations forgot the original meanings of the ancient terms; and thus, for instance, at Brandon Hill in Suffolk there is the curious phenomenon of Hill Hill Hill—in three languages, i.e., bran, don, and hill. On this site the flint knappers are still at work, using practically the same rude tool as their primitive woad-painted ancestors. At Brandon not only has the art of flint-making survived, but anthropologists have noted the persistence of a swarthy and most ancient type—a persistence the more remarkable as Suffolk was supposed to be a district out of which the Britons had been wholly and irretrievably eradicated. Whether there is anything in the world to parallel the phenomenon of the Brandon flint knappers I do not know, and it may well be questioned. In the words of Dr. Rice Holmes:—The industry has been carried on since neolithic times, and even then it was ancient: for Brandon was an abode of flint makers in the Old Stone Age. Not only the pits but even the tools show little change: the picks which the modern workers use are made of iron, but here alone in Britain the old one-sided form is still retained, only the skill of the workers has degenerated: the exquisite evenness of chipping which distinguished the neolithic arrow heads is beyond the power of the most experienced knapper to reproduce.[43]

At Brandon is Broomhill; the words bran and broom will be subsequently shown to be radically the same, and I shall suggest reasons why this term, even possibly in Old Stone times, meant hill.

During recent years the study of place-names has been passing through a period of spade-work, and every available document from Doomsday Book to a Rent Roll has been scrupulously raked. The inquirer now therefore has available a remarkably interesting record of the various forms which our place-names have passed through, and he can eliminate the essential features from the non-essential. Although the subject has thus considerably been elucidated, the additional information obtained has, however, done nothing to solve the original riddle and in some cases has rendered it more complex.

The new system which is popularly supposed to have eliminated all guesswork has in reality done nothing of the kind. In place of the older method, which, in the words of Prof. Skeat, “exalted impudent assertions far above positive evidence,” it has boldly substituted a new form of guesswork which is just as reckless and in many respects is no less impudent than the old. The present fashion is to suppose that the river x or the town of y may have been the property of, or founded by, some purely hypothetical Anglo-Saxon. For example: the river Hagbourne of Berkshire is guessed to have been Hacca’s burn or brook, which possibly it was, but there is not a scintilla of real evidence one way or the other.

If one is going to postulate “Hacca’s” here and there, there is obviously a space waiting for a member of the family on the great main road entitled Akeman Street. As this ancient thoroughfare traverses Bath we are, however, told that it “received in Saxon times the significant name of Akeman Street from the condition of the gouty sufferers who travelled along it”.[44] One would prefer even a phantom Hacca to this aching man, nor does the alternatively suggested aqua, water, bring us any nearer a solution.

There sometimes appears to be no bottom to the vacuity of modern guesswork. It is seriously and not pour rire suggested that Horselydown was where horses could lie down; that Honeybrook was so designated because of its honey-sweet water, and that the name Isle of Dogs was “possibly because so many dogs were drowned in the Thames here”.[45] In what respect do these and kindred definitions, which I shall cite from standard authors of to-day, differ from the “egregious” speculations, the “wild guesses,” and the “impudent assertions” of earlier scholars?

There is in Bucks a small town now known as Kimball, anciently as Cunebal. Tradition associates this site with the British King Cymbeline or Cunobelin, and as the place further contains an eminence known as Belinsbury or Belinus Castle, the authorities can hardly avoid accepting the connection and the etymology. But for Kimbolton, which stands on a river named the Kym, the authorities—notwithstanding the river Kym—provide the purely supposititious etymology “Town of Cynebald”. There were, doubtless, thousands of Saxons whose name was Cynebald, but why Kimbolton should be assigned to any one of these hypothetical persons instead of to Cymbeline is not in any way apparent. The river name Kym is sufficient to discredit Cynebald, and the greater probability is that not only the Kym but also all our river and mountain names are pre-Saxon.

It will be seen hereafter that the name Cunobelin or Cymbeline, which the dictionaries define as meaning splendid sun, was probably adopted as a dynastic title of British chiefs, and that the effigies of Cymbeline on British coins have no more relation to any particular king than the mounted figure on our modern sovereign has to his Majesty King George V. The prefix Cym or Cuno will subsequently be seen to be the forerunner of the modern Konig or King. Hence like Kimball or Cunebal, Kimbolton on the Kym was probably a seat of a Cymbeline, and the imaginary Saxon Cynebald may be dismissed as a usurper.

Kimbolton used at one time to be known as Kinnebantum, whence it is evident that the essential part of the word is Kinne or Kim, and as another instance of the perplexing variations which are sometimes found in place-names the spot now known as Iffley may be cited. This name occurs at various periods as follows: Gifetelea, Sifetelea, Zyfteleye, Yestley, Iveclay and Iftel. This is a typical instance of the extraordinary variations which have perplexed the authorities, and is still causing them to cast vainly around for some formula or law of sound-change, which shall account satisfactorily for the problem. “We are at present,” says Prof. Wyld, “quite unable to formulate the laws of the interchange of stress in place-names, or of the effects of these in retaining, modifying, or eliminating syllables.... Until these laws are properly formulated, it cannot be said that we have a scientific account of the development of place-names. The whole thing is often little better than a conjuring trick.”[46]

No amount of brainwork has conjured any sense from Iffley, and the etymology has been placed on the shelf as “unknown”. I shall venture to suggest that the initial G, S, Z, or Y, of this name, and of many others being adjectival, the radical Ive or Iff, as being the essential, has alone survived. It will be seen that Iffley was in all probability a lea or meadow dedicated to “The Ivy Girl” or May Queen, and that quite likely it was one of the many sites where, in the language of an old poet—

I shall connote with Ivy and her maidens, not only Mother Eve, but also the clearly fabulous St. Ive. We shall see that the Lady Godiva of Coventry fame was known as Godgifu, just as Iffley was once Gifetelea, and we shall see that St. Ives in Cornwall appears in the registers alternatively as St. Yesses, just as Iffley was alternatively Yestley. Finally we shall trace the connection between Eve, the Mother of all living, and Avebury, the greatest of all megalithic monuments.

If it be objected that my method is too meticulous, and that it is impossible for mere farm- and field-names to possess any prehistoric significance, I may refer for support to the Sixth Report of the Royal Commission appointed to inventory the ancient monuments of Wales and Monmouthshire.[47] In the course of this document the Commissioners write as follows:—

“The Tithe Schedules, unsatisfactory and disappointing though many of them are, contain such a collection of place-names, principally those of fields, that the Commissioners at the outset of their inquiry determined upon a careful investigation of them. The undertaking involved in the first place the examination of hundreds of documents, many of them containing several thousands of place-names; secondly, in the case of those names which were noted for further inquiry, the necessity of discovering the position of the field or site upon the tithe map; and, thirdly, the location of the field or site on the modern six-inch ordnance sheet. This prolonged task called for much patience and care, as well as ingenuity in comparing the boundaries of eighty years ago with those of the present time.

“Of the value of this work there can be no doubt. We do not venture to express any opinion on the question whether, or to what extent, farm and field names are of service to the English archæologist; but with regard to their importance to the Welsh archæologist there can be no two opinions. The fact that the Welsh place-names are being rapidly replaced by English names, so that the local lore which is often enshrined in the former is in danger of being lost, was in itself a sufficient reason for the undertaking. The results have more than justified our decision. There is hardly a parish, certainly not one of the ancient parishes, of the principality, where the schedule of field names has not yielded some valuable results. Scores of small but in some cases important antiquities would have passed unrecorded, had it not been for the clue to their presence given by the place-name which was to be found only in the schedule to the Tithe Survey.”

In Cornwall almost every parish is named after some saintly apostle, and many of these saints are alleged to have travelled far and wide in the world founding towns and villages. It is almost a physical impossibility that this was literally true, and it becomes manifestly incredible on consideration of the miracles recorded in the lives of the travellers. As already suggested the greater probability is that the lives of the saints enshrine almost intact the traditions of pre-Christian divinities. Of the popular and most familiar St. Patrick, Borlase (W. C.), writes: “Of the reality of the existence of this Patrick, son of Calporn, we feel not the shadow of a doubt. But he was not the only Patrick, and as time went on traditions of one other Patrick at least came to be commingled with his own. We have before us the names of ten other contemporary Patricks, all ecclesiastics, and spread over Wales, Ireland, France, Spain, and Italy. The name appears to be that of a grade or order in the Church rather than a proper name in the usual sense. Thus Palladius is called also Patrick in the ‘Book of Armagh’ and the Patrick (whichever he may have been) is represented as styling Declan ‘the Patrick of the Desii,’ and Ailbhe ‘the Patrick of Munster’. When Patrick sojourned in a cave in an island in the Tyrrhene Sea he found three other Patricks there.” Precisely: and there is little doubt that our London Battersea or Patrixeye was originally an ea or island where the patricks or padres of St. Peter’s at Westminster once congregated.

The arguments applied to St. Patrick apply equally to, say, St. Columba, or the Holy Dove, and similarly to St. Colman, a name also meaning Dove. In Ireland alone there are 200 dedications to St. Colman, and evidence will be brought forward that the archetype of all the St. Colmans and all the St. Columbas and all the Patricks was Peter the Pater, who was symbolised by petra, the stone or rock.

The so-called Ossianic poems of Gaeldom, although of “a remarkably heathenish character,” preserve the manners of and opinions of what the authorities describe as “a semi-barbarous people who were endowed with strong imagination, high courage, childlike tenderness, and gentle chivalry for women,”[48] and that the ancients were tinctured through and through with mysticism and imagination, finding tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything, is a fact which can be denied. When our words were framed and our ancient places, hills, and rivers named, I am persuaded that the world was in its imaginative childhood, and hence that traces of that state of mind may reasonably be anticipated. It is remarkable that the skulls found in the first or oldest Troy exhibit the most intellectual characteristics,[49] and in many quarters seemingly the remoter the times the purer was the theology whether in Phrygia, Egypt, India, Persia, or Great Britain. Among the Cretans “religion entered at every turn” of their social system; in Egypt even the very games and dances had a religious significance, and the evidence of folklore testifies to the same effect in Britain. It was one among the many grievances of the pessimistic Gildas that the British were “slaves to the shadows of things to come,” and this usually overlooked aspect of their character must, I think, be recognised in relation to their place-names. To a large degree the mystical element still persists in Brittany, where even to-day, in the words of Baring-Gould:—At a Pardon one sees and marvels at the wondrous faces of this remarkable people: the pure, sweet, and modest countenances of the girls, and those not less striking of the old folk. “It is,” says Durtal, “the soul which is everything in these people, and their physiognomy is modelled by it. There are holy brightnesses in their eyes, on their lips, those doors to the borders of which the soul alone can come, from which it looks forth and all but shows itself. Goodness, kindness, as well as a cloistral spirituality, stream from their faces.”[50]

What is still true of Brittany was once equally true of Britain, and although the individuality of the Gael has now largely been submerged by prosaic Anglo-Saxondom, the poetic temperament of the chivalrous and dreamy Celt was essentially a frame of mind that cared only for the heroic, the romantic, and the beautiful.

The science of etymology as practised to-day is unfortunately blind to this poetic element which was, and to some extent still is, an innate characteristic of “uncivilised” and unsophisticated peoples. Archbishop Trench, one of the original planners and promoters of The New English Dictionary, was not overstating when he wrote: “Let us then acknowledge man a born poet.... Despite his utmost efforts, were he mad enough to employ them, he could not succeed in exhausting his language of the poetical element which is inherent in it, in stripping it of blossom, flower, and fruit, and leaving it nothing but a bare and naked stem. He may fancy for a moment that he has succeeded in doing this, but it will only need for him to become a little better philologer to go a little deeper into the study of the words which he is using, and he will discover that he is as remote from this consummation as ever.”

Nevertheless, current etymology has achieved this inanity, and has so completely dismissed the animate or poetic element from its considerations that one may seek vainly the columns of Skeat and Murray for any hint or suggestion that language and imagination ever had anything in common. According to modern teaching language is a mere cluster of barbaric yawps: “No mystic bond linked word and thought together; utility and convenience alone joined them”.[51]

Words, nevertheless, were originally born not from grammarians but amid the common people, and pace Mr. Clodd they enshrine in many instances the mysticism and the superstitions of the peasantry. How can one account, for instance, for the Greek word psyche, meaning butterfly, and also soul, except by the knowledge that butterflies were regarded by the ancients as creatures into which the soul was metamorphosised? According to Grimm, the German name for stork means literally child-, or soul-bringer; hence the belief that the advent of infants was presided over by this bird. But why “hence”? and why put the cart before the horse? If one may judge from innumerable parallels of word-equivocation the legends arose not from the accident of similar words, nor from “misprision of terms,” or from any other “disease of language,” but the creatures were named because of the attendant legend. It is common knowledge that in Egypt the animal sacred to a divinity was often designated by the name of that deity; similarly in Europe the bee, a symbol of the goddess Mylitta, was called a mylitta, and a bull, the symbol of the god Thor, was named a thor. We speak to-day of an Adonis, because Adonis was a fabulously lovely youth, and parallel examples may be found on almost every hand. Irish mythology tells of a certain golden-haired hero named Bress, which means beautiful, whence we are further told that every beautiful thing in Ireland whether plain, fortress, or ale, or torch, or woman, or man, was compared with him, so that men said of them “That is a Bress”. Elsewhere and herein I have endeavoured to prove that this principle was of worldwide application, and that it is an etymological key which will open the meaning of many words still in common use. It is a correlative fact that the names of specific deities such as Horus, Hathor, Nina, Bel, etc., developed in course of time into generic terms for any Lord or God.

Very much the same principles are at work with us to-day, whence a dreadnought from the prime “Dreadnought,” and the etymologer of the future, who tries by strictly scientific methods to unravel the meaning of such words as mackintosh, brougham, Sam Browne, gladstone, boycott, etc., will find it necessary to investigate the legends attendant on those names rather than practice a formal permutation of vowels and consonants.

By common consent the quintessence of the last fifty years’ philological progress is being distilled into Sir James Murray’s New English Dictionary, and in a conciser form the same data may be found in Prof. Skeat’s Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Both these indispensable works are high watermarks of English scholarship, and whatever absurdities they contain are shortcomings not of their compilers but of the Teutonic school of philology which they exemplify. If these two standard dictionaries were able to answer even the elementary questions that are put to them it would be both idle and presumptuous to cavil, but one has only to refer to their pages to realise the ignorance which prevails as to the origin and the meaning of the most simple and everyday words.

It is unfortunately true that “in philology as in all branches of knowledge it is the specialist who most strongly opposes any attempt to widen the field of his knowledge”.[52] Hence, as was only to be expected, one of the reviewers of my Lost Language of Symbolism deemed it quite insufferable that I should throw to the winds the laborious work on the science of phonetics built up by generations of careful research.

But in point of fact I discarded none of the sound work of my predecessors; I only tried to supplement it and fished deeper. My soundings do not begin until I am well beyond the limits of modern etymology, and they are no more affected by the cross-currents of historic languages than the activities of a deep-water fisherman are interrupted or affected by the tide eddies on the shore. The defect of official philology is that it offers no explanation for radicals. It does not, for example, attempt to explain why the word ap was the Sanscrit for water, why pri was the Sanscrit for love, or why pat was the Sanscrit for fly. It refers the word oak to the Anglo-Saxon ac, Dr. Murray merely describing it as “a consonantal stem, ulterior meaning obscure”. Etymology to-day is in fact very much in the situation of an insolvent bank which, unable to satisfy its creditors with cash on demand, blandly endeavours to satisfy them with corresponding cheques of equally uncashable face value. Words can never properly be interpreted merely by parallel words: originally they must have expressed ideas, and it is these underlying ideas that I am in search of. My previous work was a pioneer, and in many respects bungling attempt to pick up the threads where at present philology is content to lose them. Using the same keys as hitherto, I shall attempt to explore further the darkness which is at present the only achieved goal of the much trumpeted Science of Language.

In a moment of noteworthy frankness Prof. Skeat has admitted that “Scientific etymology is usually clumsy and frequently wrong”. Similarly, Prof. Sayce issues the warning: “Comparative philology has suffered as much from its friends as from its opponents; and now that it has at last won its way to general recognition and respect, there is a danger that its popularity may lead to the cessation of sound and honest work, and to an acquiescence in theories which, however plausible, are not yet placed upon a footing of scientific certainty. It is much easier for the ordinary man to fill in by patient elaboration what has already been sketched for him in outline, than to venture upon a new line of discovery, in which the sole clue must be the combinative powers of his own imagination and comprehensive learning. And yet, now as much as ever, comparative philology has need at once of bold and wide-reaching conceptions, of cautious verification, and of a mastery of facts. It is true the science is no longer struggling for mere life, and the time is gone by for proving the possibility of its existence. But it is still young, scarcely, indeed, out of its nursery; a small portion only of its province has hitherto been investigated, and much that is at present accepted without hesitation will have to be subjected to a searching inquiry, and possibly be found baseless after all.”[53]

The value of any system must be measured by its results, and the fruits of philology as formulated only a year or so ago were unquestionably false. Where now are the “successes” of the Max Müller school which were advertised in such shrill and penetrating tones? Sanscrit is deposed from its pride of place, it being now recognised that primitive sounds are preserved more faithfully in Europe than elsewhere. Who to-day admits there is any basis for the Disease of Language theory, or that all fairy-tales and myths are resolvable into the Sun chasing the Dawn?[54] What anthropologist accepts the theory of Aryan overland immigration from somewhere in Asia? The archæologists of the last generation were, in the light of modern findings, quite justified when, contrary to the then stereotyped idea, they maintained that skulls were harder things than consonants. In short, large sections of the card-castle of German philology have more or less crumbled, and in the cruel words of a modern authority on Crete: “Happily, archæology has emerged from the slough into which the philologists had led her”.

For the causes of this fiasco it is unnecessary to seek further than the fundamental fallacy upon which the “Science of Language” has been erected. According to Max Müller, “etymology is indeed a science in which identity, or even similarity, whether of sound or meaning, is of no importance whatever. Sound etymology has nothing to do with sound. We know words to be of the same origin which have not a single letter in common, and which differ in meaning as much as black and white.”

To maintain that “sound etymology has nothing to do with sound,” is tantamount to the contention that language is not sound, which is obviously absurd. In the saner view of Dr. Latham: “language begins with voice, language ends with voice”. The Germans, Poles, and Russians had no acquaintance with letters until the ninth century, and speech, which certainly existed for unnumbered centuries before either writing or spelling was evolved, must, primarily and essentially, have been a system of pure and simple phonetics, spreading, as a mother teaches her child, syllable by syllable, word upon word, and line upon line. To rule sound out of language, is, indeed, far more fatal than to purge Hamlet out of Hamlet. One may prove by super-ingenious logic and an elaborate code of cross references that black is white and white black, yet common sense knows all the time that it is not so. There are, I am aware, certain races who are unable to vocalise certain sounds and accordingly modify them. The obscure causes governing these phonetic changes must be taken into account, and as far as possible formulated into “laws,” but the pages of Skeat and Murray demonstrate beyond refutation two very simple but very certain fundamental, universal facts, to which hitherto wholly insufficient attention has been given. These elementary and seemingly never-varying facts are: (1) That originally vowel sounds were of no importance whatever, for in the same word they vary to the utmost limits, not only in different areas and in different eras, but contemporaneously in different grades of society; (2) that heavy and light consonants such as b and p, d and t, f and v, g and k, etc., are always interchangeable. Whether in place-names, words, or proper names, the changes are found always to occur, and they are precisely those variations which common sense would suggest must occur in every case where words travel viva voce and not via script or print. A man suffering from what Shakespeare would term “a whoreson rheum,” says, for instance, did vor dad instead of tit for tat, and there is, so far as I can discover, not a single word or a solitary place-name in which a similar variation of thin and thick consonants is not traceable.

The formidable Grimm’s Law, any violation of which involves summary and immediate condemnation, is merely a statement of certain phonetic facts which happen invariably—unless they are interfered with by other facts. The permutations of sound codified by Grimm are as follows:—

It is said that the causes which brought about the changes formulated in Grimm’s Law are “obscure” (they may have been due to nothing more obscure than a prevalence to colds in the head), and that they were probably due to the settlement of Low German conquerors in Central and Southern Germany. The changes above formulated all fall, however, within the wider theory I am now suggesting, with the exception of d and t becoming in High German z. This particular syllabic change was, I suggest, due to z at one time being synonymous with d or t, and not to any inability of certain tribes to vocalise the sound t.

Max Müller observes that “at first sight the English word fir does not look very like the Latin word quercus, yet it is the same word”. Fir certainly does not look like quercus, nor, of course, is it any more the “same word” than six is the same word as half a dozen. There are a thousand ways of proving six to be radically and identically the same as half a dozen, and the ingenious system of permutations by which philologists identify fir with quercus, and alphana with equus,[55] are parallel to some of the methods by which common sense, by cold gradation and well-balanced form, would quite correctly equate six with half a dozen.

The term “word” I understand not in the loose sense used by Max Müller, but as the dictionary defines it—“an oral or written sign expressing an idea or notion”. Thus I treat John as the same word as Jane or Jean, and it is radically the same word as giant, old English jeyantt, French geante, Cornish geon. Jean is also the same word as chien, a dog, Irish choin; Welsh chin or cyn, and all these terms by reason of their radical an are cognate with the Greek kuon, a dog, whence cynical. The Gaelic for John is Jain, the Gaelic for Jean or Jane is Sine, with which I equate shine, shone, and sheen, all of which have respect to the sun, as also had the Arabic jinn, genii, and “Gian Ben Gian,” a title of the fabulous world-ruler of the Golden Age. Among the Basques Jaun means Lord or Master, and the Basque term for God, Jainko, Jeinko, or Jinko, is believed to have meant “Lord or Master on High”. The Irish Church attributes its origin to disciples of St. John—Irish Shaun, and one may detect the pre-Christian Sinjohn in the British divinity Shony, and evolving from the primeval Shen at Shenstone near Litchfield. Here, a little distance from the church, was a well, now called St. John’s Well, after the saint in whose honour the parish church is dedicated. In all probability the present-day church of St. John was built on the actual site of the original Shen stone or rock; and that John stones were once plentiful in Scotland is probably implied by the common surname Johnstone. Near the Shannon in Ireland, and in close proximity to the church and village of Shanagolden, is “castle” Shenet or Shanid, attached to which is a rath or earthwork of which the ground-plan, from Mr. Westropp’s survey, is here reproduced. As it is a matter of common knowledge that the worldwide wheel cross was an emblem of the sun, I should therefore have no scruples in connoting Castle Shenet with the primeval jeyantt or the Golden Shine; and suggesting that it was a sanctuary originally constructed by the Ganganoi, a people mentioned by Ptolemy as dwelling in the neighbourhood of the Shannon. The eponymous hero of the Ganganoi was a certain Sengann,[56] who is probably the original St. Jean or Sinjohn to whom the fires of St. Jean and St. John have been diverted.

We shall see that Giant Christopher was symbolically represented as chien headed, that he was a personification of the Shine or Sheen of the Sun, and that he was worshipped as the solar dog at the holy city of Cynopolis or dog-town. We have already noted English “chien” or cyn coins inscribed cun, which is seemingly one of the innumerable puns which confront philology.

Fig. 6.—From Proc. of the Royal Irish Acad., xxxiii., C., No. 2.

Years ago Bryant maintained that “the fable of the horse certainly arose from a misprision of terms, though the mistake be as old as Homer”. There was nothing therefore new in the theories of the Max Müller school that all mythologies originated from a “disease of language”. Dr. Wilder, alluding to symbolism, speaks of the punning so common in those days, often making us uncertain whether the accident of similar name or sound led to adoption as a symbol or was merely a blunder. It was, I think, neither, and many instances will be adduced in favour of the supposition, that words originated from symbolic ideas, and not vice versa. That symbolism existed before writing is evident from the innumerable symbols unearthed at Mykenæ, Troy, and elsewhere, where few traces of script or inscriptions have been found. By symbolism, primitive man unquestionably communicated ideas, and, as has already been pointed out, the roots of language bear traces of the rudimentary symbolism by which our savage forefathers named the objects around them as well as the conceptions of their primitive religion.[57] Faced by the “curiosity” that the Greek and Latin words for archaic, arch, ark, arc, are all apparently connected in an intricate symbolism in which there is more than a suspicion that there is an etymological as well as a mystical interconnection, a writer in The Open Court concludes: “it would seem as though the roots of such words derived their meaning from the Mysteries rather than that their mystical meaning was the result of coincidence”.[58]

That the Mysteries—or in other words dramatised mythology—Symbolism, and Etymology, are all closely connected with each other is a certitude beyond question. The theory, so pertinaciously put forward by Max Müller, was that myths originated from a subsequent misunderstanding of words. Using the same data as Max Müller, I suggest that words originated from the mysteries and not myths from the words.

In The Holy Wells of Cornwall, Mr. T. Quiller Couch observes that Dr. Borlase, learned, diligent, and excellent antiquary as he was, to whom we are all indebted in an iconoclastic age for having copied for us fair things which time had blurred, seems to have had little sympathy with the faiths of the simple, silly, country folk (I use these adjectives in their older meaning), and to have passed them with something like contempt. At present the oral traditions of a people, their seeming follies even, have become of value as indicating kinship between nations shunted off by circumstances, to use the most modern term, in divergent ways.

Dr. Johnson would not admit fun into his Dictionary as he deemed it a “low word”: I turn up my nose at nothing, being convinced that it is to low origins that the great lexicographers will eventually have to stoop. In truth, the innate strength of the English language, which is becoming more and more the Master Tongue of the world, lies in its homely, trivial, and democratic origin.[59] This origin, as I have elsewhere endeavoured to show, is due largely to symbolism, which is merely another term for metaphor. We used to be taught that every language was a dictionary of faded metaphor, and such an origin is undoubtedly more true than the current theory of barbaric yawps. The essence of symbolism is its simplicity. Who, for instance, does not understand that the Lion is the symbol of High Courage, and the Bull-dog of Tenacity, or holding on? At the present day the badge of one of His Majesty’s warships is the picture of a butting goat, accompanied by the words “Butt in”. This, as the authorities rightly describe it, is “pure symbolism,” but to a symbolist the legend “Butt in” is superfluous, as the mere butting goat adequately carries the idea. As Prof. Petrie has well said: “To understand the position and movement of thought in a primitive age, it must be approached on a far simpler plane than that of our present familiarity with writing. To reach the working of the childhood of our races we should look to the minds of children. If the child passes through ancestral changes in its bodily formation, so certainly it passes through such stages in the growth and capacity of its brain.”[60] I shall push the childish and extremely simple theory of symbolism to its logical conclusions, and shall show, for instance, that the Boar, because it burrowed with its plough-like snout, was the emblem of the ploughman, and that thus, boar and boer are the same word. Or, to take another instance, I shall show that probably because the cat sits washing herself, and is a model of cleanliness in sanitary respects, the cat who figures on the head of the Magna Mater of Crete was elevated into a symbol of the Immaculate or Pure One, and that the word cat, German kater, is identical with the name Kate or Caterina which means purity. The Sanscrit word for cat means literally the cleanser, whence it is obvious that the cleanly habits of the cat strongly impressed the Aryan imagination.

Whether or not my theories are right, it is undeniable that the etymologies of Skeat and Murray are very often painfully wrong. The standard explanation, for instance, of the word haha, meaning a sunk fence, is that it is from the French ha-ha, “an interjection of laughter, hence a surprise in the form of an unexpected obstacle that laughs at one”. This may be so, but it is a far wilder guess than anything to be found in my pages, or that I should ever dare to venture. In 1913 I suggested in Notes and Queries that the word ha-ha or haw-haw was simply a re-duplication or superlative of the French haie, a fence or hedge, old English haw. In the new edition of Skeat I am glad to find this suggestion accepted, and that ha-ha! has been expunged. It still figures in Dr. Murray.

In his Canons of Etymology, Prof. Skeat observes:—“The history of a nation accounts for the constituent parts of its language. When an early English word is compared with Hebrew or Coptic, as used to be done in the old editions of Webster’s Dictionary, history is set at defiance; and it was a good deed to clear the later editions of all such rubbish”.

This is curiously parochial, yet it seems to have been seriously accepted by etymologers. But what would Science say nowadays to that geologist or anthropologist who committed the foul deed of discarding or suppressing a vast body of facts simply because they clashed with, or “set at defiance,” the “historic” assertions of the Pentateuch? It is true that the history of a nation, if it were fully known, must account for the constituent parts of its language, but how much British history do we pretend to know? To suggest that philology must limit its conclusions by the Roman invasion, or bound its findings by the pages of Mrs. Markham, is ludicrous, yet, nevertheless, these fictitious boundaries are the mediæval and pre-Darwinian limits within which the Science of Language is now coffined. Prof. Skeat was reluctantly compelled to recognise a Semitic trace in words such as bad and target, but was unable to accept the connection owing to the absence of any historic point of contact between Syria and this country prior to the Crusades! So, too, M. Sebhlani observed numerous close similarities between Arabic and English, but was “unable to press them for lack of a theory as to how they got into English!”

As history must be constructed from facts, and facts must not be peremptorily suppressed simply because at present they clash with the meagre record of historians, I shall have no scruples in noting a word from Timbuctoo if it means precisely what it does in English, and proves reasonably to be a missing piece. As Gerald Massey thirty or forty years ago very properly observed: “We have to dig and descend mine under mine beneath the surface scratched with such complacent twitterings over their findings by those who have taken absolute possession of this field, and proceeded to fence it in for themselves, and put up a warning against everybody else as trespassers. We get volume after volume on the ‘science of language’ which only make us wonder when the ‘science’ is going to begin. At present it is an opera that is all overture. The comparative philologists have not gone deep enough, as yet, to see that there is a stage where likeness may afford guidance, because there was a common origin for the primordial stock of words. They assume that Grimm’s Law goes all the way back. They cling to their limits, as the old Greek sailors hugged the shore, and continually insist upon imposing these on all other voyagers, by telling terrible tales of the unknown dangers beyond.”[61]

As soon as etymologists appreciate the value of the comparative method it is undeniable that a marked advance will be made in the “Science of Language,” but during the last few decades it must be confessed that that science—pace the bombastic language of some of its adherents—has retrogressed rather than moved forward.

Prof. Skeat was admittedly a high authority on early English, and his Dictionary of the English Language is thus almost inevitably conspicuous for its Anglo-Saxon colouring. Had, however, the influence of the Saxons been as marked and immediate as he assumes, the language of Anglo-Saxondom would have coincided exactly or very closely with the contemporary German. But, according to Dr. Wm. Smith, “There is no proof that Anglo-Saxon was ever spoken anywhere but on the soil of Great Britain; for the ‘Heliend,’ and other remains of old Saxon, are not Anglo-Saxon, and I think it must be regarded, not as a language which the colonists, or any of them, brought with them from the Continent, but as a new speech resulting from the fusion of many separate elements. It is, therefore indigenous, if not aboriginal, and as exclusively local and national in its character as English itself.”[62]

That modern English contains innumerable traces of pure Celtic words used to be a matter of common acceptance, and in the words of Davies, the stoutest assertor of a pure Anglo-Saxon or Norman descent is convicted by the language of his daily life, of belonging to a race that partakes largely of Celtic blood. If he calls for his coat (W. cota, Germ. rock), or tells of the basket of fish he has caught (W. basged, Germ. korb), or the cart he employs on his land (W. cart, from càr, a dray, or sledge, Germ. wagen), or of the pranks of his youth, or the prancing of his horse (W. prank, a trick, prancio, to frolic), or declares that he was happy when a gownsman at Oxford (W. hap, fortune, chance, Germ. glück, W. gwn), or that his servant is pert (W. pert, spruce, dapper, insolent); or if, descending to the language of the vulgar, he affirms that such assertions are balderdash, and the claim a sham (W. baldorddus, idle prating; siom, shom, a deceit, a sham), he is unconsciously maintaining the truth he would deny. Like the M. Jourdain of Molière, who had been talking prose all his life without knowing it, he has been speaking very good Celtic without any suspicion of the fact.[63]

It is noteworthy that in his determination to ignore the Celtic influence, Prof. Skeat concedes only one among the above-mentioned words to the British—(gwn). The Welsh hap “must,” he says, be borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon gehoep, and the remainder he ascribes to Middle English or to an “origin unknown”.

Tyndall has observed that imagination, bounded and conditioned by co-operant reason, is the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer. It is to imagination that words born in the fantastic and romantic childhood of the world were due, and it is only by a certain measure of imagination that philology can hope to unravel them. The extent to which mythology has impressed place-names may be estimated from the fact that to King Arthur alone at least 600 localities owe their titles. That Arthur himself has not been transmogrified into a Saxon settler[64] is due no doubt to the still existing “Bed,” “Seat,” “Stables,” etc., with which popular imagination connected the mystic king.

“Geographical names,” says Rice Holmes, “testify to the cult of various gods,” and he adds: “it is probable that every British town had its eponymous hero. The deities, however, from whom towns derived their names, were doubtless often worshipped near the site long before the first foundations were laid: the goddess Bibracte was originally the spirit of a spring reverenced by the peasants of the mountain upon which the famous Aeduan town was built”.[65]

I shall not lead the reader into the intricacies of British mythology deeper than is requisite for an understanding of the words and place-names under consideration, nor shall I enlarge more than is necessary upon the mystic elements in that vast and little known mythology.

It has been said that the mediæval story-teller is not unlike a peasant building his hut on the site of Ephesus or Halicarnassus with the stones of an older and more majestical architecture. That Celtic mythology exhibits all the indications of a vast ruin is the opinion not only of Matthew Arnold, but of every competent student of the subject, and it is a matter of discredit that educated Englishmen know so little about it.

Among the phenomena of Celtic mythology are numerous identities with tales related by Homer. Sir Walter Scott, alluding to one of these many instances, expresses his astonishment at a fact which, as he says, seems to argue some connection or communication between these remote highlands of Scotland, and the readers of Homer of former days which one cannot account for.[66] His explanation that “After all, perhaps, some Churchman, more learned than his brethren, may have transferred the legend from Sicily to Duncrune, from the shores of the Mediterranean to those of Loch Lomond,” is not in accord with any of the probabilities, and it is more likely that both Greek and Highlander drew independently from some common source. The astonishing antiquity of these tales may be glimpsed by the fact that the Homeric poems themselves speak of a store of older legends from an even more brilliant past.

Somebody once defined symbolism as “silent myth”. To what extent it elucidates primeval custom has yet to be seen, but there is unquestionably an intimate connection between symbolism and burial customs. Among some prehistoric graves disclosed at Dunstable was one containing the relics of a woman and of a child. The authorities suggest that the latter may have been buried alive with its mother, which is a proposition that one cannot absolutely deny. But there is just as great a possibility that neither the mother nor the child came to so sinister and miserable an end. Apart from the pathetic attitude of the two bodies, the skulls are as moral and intellectual as any modern ones, and in face of the simple facts it would be quite justifiable to assume that the mother and the child were not buried alive, nor committed suicide, but died in the odour of sanctity and were reverently interred. The objects surrounding the remains are fossil echinoderms, which are even now known popularly among the unlettered as fairy loaves, and as there is still a current legend that whoso keeps at home a specimen of the fairy loaf will never lack bread,[67] one is fairly entitled to assume that these “fairy loaves” were placed in the grave in question as symbols of the spiritual food upon which our animistic-minded ancestors supposed the dead would feed. It is well known that material food was frequently deposited in tombs for a similar purpose, but in the case of this Dunstable grave there must have been a spiritual or symbolic idea behind the offering, for not even the most hopeless savage could have imagined that the soul or fairy body would have relished fossils—still less so if the material bodies had been buried alive.

Fig. 7.—From Man the Primeval Savage (Smith, G. Worthington).

I venture to put forward the suggestion that primeval stone-worship, tree-worship, and the veneration paid to innumerable birds and beasts was largely based upon symbolism. In symbolism alone can one find any rational explanation for the intricacies of those ancient mysteries the debris of which has come down to us degraded into between symbolism and burial customs. Among some prehistoric graves disclosed at Dunstable was one containing the relics of a woman and of a child. The authorities superstitious “custom” and it is probable that in symbolism may also be found the origin of totemism.

Whatever symbolism may or may not be it has certainly not that close and exclusive connection with phallicism which some writers have been pleased to assign it. On the contrary, it more often flushes from unlikely quarters totally unexpected coveys of blue birds. Symbolism was undeniably a primitive mode of thinging thought or expressing abstract ideas by things. As Massey says of mythology: “There is nothing insane, nothing irrational in it, ... the insanity lies in mistaking it for human history or Divine Revelation. Mythology is the depository of man’s most ancient science, and what concerns us chiefly is this—when truly interpreted once more it is destined to be the death of those false theologies to which it has unwittingly given birth.”[69] That the ancients were adepts at constructing cunningly-devised fables is unquestionable: to account for the identities of these pagan fables with certain teachings of the New Testament it was the opinion of one of the Early Fathers—Tertullian, I believe—that “God was rehearsing Christianity”.

In the opinion of those best able to judge, Druidism originated in neolithic times. Just as the Druid sacrificed white bulls before he ascended the sacred oak, so did the Latin priest in the grove, which was the holy place of Jupiter. “But,” says Rice Holmes, “while every ancient people had its priests, the Druids alone were a veritable clergy”.[70] The clergy of to-day would find it profitable to study the symbolism which flourished so luxuriously among their predecessors, but, unfortunately, with the exception of a few time-honoured symbols such as the Dove, the Anchor, and the Lamb, symbolism in the ecclesiastical and philosophic world is now quite dead. It still, however, lingers to a limited extent in Art, and it will always be the many-coloured radiancy which colours Poetry. The ancient and the at-one-time generally accepted idea that mythology veiled Theology, has now been discarded owing to the disconcerting discovery that myths were seemingly not taught to the common people by the learned, but on the contrary spread upwards from the vulgar to the learned. This latter process has usually been the doom of Religion, and it is quite unthinkable that fairy-tales could survive its blighting effect. As a random instance of the modern attitude towards Imagination, one may cite the Rev. Prof. Skeat, who, commenting upon the Music of the Spheres, gravely informs the world that: “Modern astronomy has exploded the singular notion of revolving hollow concentric spheres”. “These spheres,” he adds, “have disappeared and their music with them except in poetry.”[71]

Whether or not our predecessors really heard the choiring of the young-eyed cherubim, or whether the music was merely in their souls is a point immaterial to the present inquiry, which simply concerns itself with the physical remains of that poetic once-upon-a-time temperament which at some period or other was prevalent,[72] and has left its world-wide imprints on river names, such as the Irish “Morning Star”.[73] One would have supposed it quite superfluous at this time of day to have to claim imagination for the anonymous ancients who mapped the whole expanse of heaven into constellations, and wove fairy-tales around the Pleiades and every other group of stars, and it is simply astonishing to find a Doctor of Divinity writing to-day in kultured complacency: “It is to the imagination of us moderns alone that the grandeur of the universe appeals,[74] and it was relatively late in the history of religion—so far as can be reconstructed from the scanty data in our possession that the higher nature cults were developed.”[75]

Is it wonderful that again and again the romantic soul of the Celtic peasantry has risen against the grey dogmas of official Theology, and has expressed itself in terms such as those taken down from the mouth of a Gaelic old woman in 1877: “We would dance there till we were seven times tired. The people of those times were full of music and dancing stories, and traditions. The clerics have extinguished these. May ill befall them! And what have the clerics put in their place? Beliefs about creeds and disputations about denominations and churches! May lateness be their lot! It is they who have put the cross round the heads and the entanglements round the feet of the people. The people of the Gaeldom of to-day are anear perishing for lack of the famous feats of their fathers. The black clerics have suppressed every noble custom among the people of the Gaeldom—precious customs that will never return, no, never again return.”[76]

There are features about the wisdom of the ancients which the theologian neither understands nor tries to understand,[77] and it is like a breath of fresh air to find the Bishop of Oxford maintaining, “We have got to get rid of everything that makes the sound of religion irrational, and which associates it with bygone habits of thought in regard to science and history”. Sir Gilbert Murray has recently expressed the opinion that “it is the scholar’s special duty to trim the written signs in our old poetry now enshrined back into living thought and feeling”; but at present far from forwarding this desideratum scholarship not only discountenances imagination, but even eliminates from consideration any spiritual idea of God. To quote from a modern authority: “Track any God right home and you will find him lurking in a ritual sheath from which he slowly emerges, first as a dæmon or spirit of the year, then as a full-blown divinity.... The May King, the leader of the choral dance, gave birth not only to the first actor of the drama, but also, as we have just seen, to the God, be he Dionysus or be he Apollo.”[78]

The theory here assumed grossly defies the elementary laws of logic, for every act of ritual must essentially have been preceded by a thought: Act is the outcome and offspring of Thought: Idea was never the idiot-child of Act. The assumption that the first idea of God evolved from the personation of the Sun God in a mystery play or harvest dance is not really or fundamentally a mental tracking of that God right home, but rather an inane confession that the idea of God cannot be traced further backward than the ritual of ancient festivals.

Speaking of that extremely remote epoch when the twilight and mists of morning shed dim-looming shapes and flickering half lights about the path of our scarcely awakened race, The Athenæum a year or two ago remarked: “No wonder that to such purblind eyes men appear as trees, and trees as men—Balder the Beautiful as the mystic oak, and the oak as Balder”. This passage forms part of a congratulation that the work of Sir James Frazer is now complete, and that The Golden Bough “has at length carried us forward into broad daylight”.

I have studied the works of Sir James Frazer in the hope of finding therein some insight as to the origin and why of custom, but I have failed to perceive the broad daylight of The Athenæum’s satisfaction.

One might lay down The Golden Bough without a suspicion that our purblind ancestors ever had a poetic thought or a high and beautiful ideal, and it is probable that scholarship will eventually arraign Sir James Frazer for this suggestio falsi. In the meanwhile it should hardly be necessary to enter a caveat against the popular idea that we are now “in broad daylight”. The value of The Golden Bough lies largely in the evidence therein adduced of what may be termed universal ritual. But all ritual must have originated from ideas, and these original ideas do not seem to have entered the horizon of Sir James Frazer’s speculations. What reason does he suppose lurked necessarily behind, say, the sacred fire being kindled from three nests in three trees, or by nine men from nine different kinds of wood? And why do the unpleasant Ainos scrupulously kill their sacred bear by nine men pressing its head against a pole?

It is now the vogue to resolve every ancient ceremony into a magic charm for producing fire, or food, or rain, or what not, and there is very little doubt that magic, or sacred ceremonies, verily sank, in many instances, to this melancholy level. But, knowing what history has to tell us of priestcraft, and judging the past from the present, is it not highly likely that the primitive divine who found his tithes and emoluments diminishing from a laxity of faith would spur the public conscience by the threat that unless sacred ceremonies were faithfully and punctually performed the corn would not flourish and the rain would either overflow or would not fall?[79]

It is now the mode to trace all ceremonial to self-interest, principally to the self-interest of fear or food. But on this arbitrary, stale, and ancient theory[80] how is it possible to account for the almost universal reverence for stone or rock? Rocks yield neither food, nor firing, nor clothing, nor do they ever inflict injuries: why, then, should the artless savage trouble to gratify or conciliate such innocuous and unprofitable objects? The same question may be raised in other directions, notably that of the oak tree. Here the accepted supposition is that the oak was revered because it was struck more frequently by lightning than any other tree, but if this untoward occurrence really proves the oak tree was the favourite of the Fire God surely it was an instance of affection very brilliantly dissembled.

Sir James Frazer has used his Golden Bough as he found it employed by Virgil—as a talisman which led to the gloomy and depressing underworld. In Celtic myth the Silver Bough played a less sinister part, and figures as a fairy talisman to music and delight.

Whether the appeal of Sir Gilbert Murray meets with any sympathy and response, and whether the written signs in our old poetry will ever be enshrined back into living thought and feeling remains to be seen. I think they will, and that the better sense of English intellectualism will sooner or later recoil from the present mud-and-dust theories of protoplasm for, as has been well said, “Materialism considered as a system of philosophy never attempts to explain the Why? of things”. Certainly protoplasm has unravelled nothing, nor possibly can. One of our standard archæologists lamented a few decades ago: “As the Germans have decreed this it is in vain to dispute it, and not worth while to attempt it”. But the German, an indefatigable plodder, is but a second-rate thinker, and the time must inevitably come when English scholars will deem it well worth while to unhitch their waggons from Germania. With characteristic assurance the Teutonic litterati are still prattling of The Fatherland as a “centre” of civilisation, and are pluming themselves upon the “spiritual values” given to mankind by Germany. Some of us are not conscious of these “spiritual values,” but that German scholarship has poison-gassed vast tracts of modern thought is evident enough. The theories of Mannhardt, elaborated by Sir James Frazer and transmuted by him into the pellucid English of The Golden Bough, have admittedly blighted the fair humanities of old religion into a dull catalogue of common things,[81] and no one more eloquently deplores the situation than Sir James Frazer himself. As he says: “It is indeed a melancholy and in some respects thankless task to strike at the foundations of beliefs in which as in a strong tower the hopes and aspirations of humanity through long ages have sought refuge from the storm and stress of life. Yet sooner or later it is inevitable that the battery of the Comparative Method should breach these venerable walls mantled over with ivy and mosses, and wild flowers of a thousand tender and sacred associations.”

When the Comparative Method is applied in a wider and more catholic spirit than hitherto it will then—but not till then—be seen whether the fair humanities are exploded superstitions or are sufficiently alive to blossom in the dust.

It is quite proper to designate The Golden Bough a puppet-play of corn-gods,[82] for the author himself, referring to Balder the Beautiful, writes: “He, too, for all the quaint garb he wears, and the gravity with which he stalks across the stage, is merely a puppet, and it is time to unmask him before laying him up in the box”.

But to me the divinities of antiquity are not mere dolls to be patted superciliously on the head and then remitted to the dustbin. Our own ideals of to-day are but the idols or dolls of to-morrow, and even a golliwog if it has comforted a child is entitled to sympathetic treatment. To the understanding of symbolism sympathy is a useful key.

The words doll, idol, ideal, and idyll, which are all one and the same, are probably due to the island of Idea which was one of the ancient names of Crete. Not only was Crete known as Idæa, but it was also entitled Doliche, which may be spelled to-day Idyllic. Crete, the Idyllic island, the island of Ideas, was also known as Aeria, and I think it probably was the centre whence was spun the gossamer of aerial and ethereal tales, which have made the Isles of Greece a land of immortal romance. We shall also see as we proceed that the mystic philosophy known to history as the Gnosis[83] was in all probability the philosophy taught in prehistoric times at Gnossus, the far-famed capital of Crete. From Gnossus, whence the Greeks drew all their laws and science, came probably the Greek word gnosis, meaning knowledge. But the mystic Gnosis connoted more than is covered by the word knowledge: it claimed to be the wisdom of the ancients, and to disclose the ideal value lying behind the letter of all mysteries, myths, and religious ordinances.

I am convinced that the Christian Gnostics, with whom the Tertullian type were in constant conflict, really did know much that they claimed, and that had they not been trampled out of the light of day Europe would never have sunk into the melancholy, well-designated Dark Ages. Gnostic emblems have been found abundantly in Ireland: the Pythagorean or Gnostic symbol known as the pentagon or Solomon’s seal occurs on British coins,[84] and the Bardic literature of Wales is deeply steeped with a Gnostic mysticism for which historians find it difficult to account. The facts which I shall adduce in the following pages are sufficiently curious to permit the hope that they may lead a few of us to become less self-complacent, and in the words of the author of Ancient Britain relative to aboriginal Britons, “to think more of those primitive ancestors. In some things we have sunk below their level.”[85]

It is a modern axiom that the ancient belief expressed in the above extract has no foundation in fact, and that the Phœnicians, however far-spread may have been their commercial enterprise, never extended their voyages beyond the Pillars of Hercules. It is conceded that it would be easy to demonstrate in Britain the elaborate machinery of sun-worship, if only it could be shown that there were at any time intimate and direct relations between Britain and Phœnicia. The historical evidence, such as it is, of this once-supposed connection, having been weighed and found wanting, the present teaching is thus expressed: “But what of the Phœnicians, and where do they come in? It is a cruel thing to say to a generation which can ill afford to part with any fragment of its diminished archæological patrimony; but it must be said without reserve or qualification: the Phœnicians do not come in at all.”[86]

But before bidding a final and irrevocable adieu to Tyre and Tarshish, one is entitled to inquire whence and how Phœnician or Hebrew words and place-names reached this country, particularly on the western coasts. The cold-shouldering of Oriental words has not extinguished their existence, and although these changelings may no longer find an honoured home in our Dictionaries, the terms themselves have survived the ignominy of their expulsion and are as virile to-day as hitherto.

The English language, based upon an older stratum of speech and perpetually assimilating new shades of sense, has descended in direct ancestry from the Welsh or Kymbric, and Kymbric, still spoken to-day, has come down to us in verbal continuity from immemorial ages prior to the Roman invasion. It was at one time supposed that of the Celtic sister-tongues the Irish or Gaelic was the more ancient, but according to the latest opinion, “In the vocabularies of the two languages where strict phonetic tests of origin can be applied it is found that the borrowing is mainly on the side of the Irish”.[87] The identities between Welsh and Hebrew are so close and pressing that from time to time claims have been put forward that the old Welsh actually was Hebrew. “It would be difficult,” said Margoliouth, “to adduce a single article or form of construction in the Hebrew Grammar, but the same is to be found in Welsh, and there are many whole sentences in both languages exactly the same in the very words”.[88] Entire sentences of archaic Hebraisms are similarly to be found in the now obsolete Cornish language, and there are “several thousand words of Hebrew origin” in the Erse or Gaelic. According to Vallencey, “the language of the early inhabitants of Ireland was a compound of Hebrew and Phœnician,”[89] and this statement would appear to be substantiated by the curious fact that in 1827 the Bible Societies presented Hebrew Bibles to the native Irish in preference to those printed in English, as it was found that the Irish peasants understood Hebrew more readily than English.[90]

Is it conceivable that these identities of tongue are due to chance, or that the terms in point permeated imperceptibly overland to the farthest outposts of the Hebrides?

It is a traditional belief that the district now known as Cornwall had at some period commercial relations with an overseas people, referred to indifferently as “Jews,” “Saracens,” or “Finicians”. That certain of the western tin mines were farmed by Jews within the historic period is a fact attested by Charters granted by English kings, notably by King John; yet there is a tradition among Cornish tinners that the “Saracens,” a term still broadly applied to any foreigner, were not allowed to advance farther than the coast lest they should discover the districts whence the tin was brought. The entire absence of any finds of Phœnician coins is an inference that this tradition is well founded, for it is hardly credible that had the “Finicians” penetrated far inland or settled to any extent in the country, some of their familiar coins would not have come to light.

The casual or even systematic visits of mere merchants will not account for integral deep-seated identities. The Greeks had a powerful settlement at Marseilles centuries before Cæsar’s time, yet the vicinity of these Greek traders, although it may have exercised some social influences upon arts and habits, did not effect any permanent impression on the language, religion, or character of the Gaulish nation.

One is thus impelled to the conclusion that the resemblances between British and Phœnician are deeper seated than hitherto has been supposed, and that it may have been due to both peoples having descended from, or borrowed from, some common source.

The Phœnicians, though so great and enterprising a people, have left no literature; and it is thus impossible to compare their legends and traditions with our own. With Crete the same difficulty exists, as at present her script is indecipherable, and no one knows positively the name of a single deity of her Pantheon.

There is no historic record of any intercourse between the British and the Greeks, but both Irish and British traditions specify the Ægean as the district whence their first settlers arrived. Tyndal, the earliest translator of the Greek Testament into English, asserts that “The Greek agreeth more with the English than the Latin, and the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin”. Happily Greece possesses a literature, and one may thus compare the legends of Greece with those of our own country.

An Hellenic author of the first century is thus rendered by Sir John Rhys:[91] “Demetrius further said that of the islands round Britain many lie scattered about uninhabited, of which some are named after deities and heroes. He told us also that being sent by the Emperor with the object of reconnoitring and inspecting, he went to the island which lay nearest to those uninhabited, and found it occupied by few inhabitants who were, however, sacrosanct and inviolable in the eyes of the Britons.... There is there, they said, an island in which Cronus is imprisoned with Briareus, keeping guard over him as he sleeps, for as they put it—sleep is the bond forged for Cronus. They add that around him are many deities, his henchmen and attendants.”[92]

It is remarkable that Greek mythology was thus familiar to the supposedly blue-painted savages of Britain. Nor is the instance solitary, for at Bradford a Septennial festival used to be held in honour of Jason and the Golden Fleece,[93] and at Achill in Ireland there is a custom which seemingly connects Achill and Achilles. Pausanias tells the tale of young Achilles attired in female garb and living among maidens, and to this day the peasantry of Achill Island on the north-west coast of Ireland dresses its boys as girls for the supposed purpose of deceiving a boy-seeking devil.[94] Are these and other coincidences which will be adduced due to chance, to independent working of the primitive mind, or to intercourse with a maritime people who were not restricted by the Pillars of Hercules?

The exit of the Phœnicians has created a dilemma which impels Mr. Donald A. Mackenzie to inquire: “By whom were Egyptian beads carried to Britain between 1500 B.C. and 1400 B.C.? Certainly not the Phœnicians. The sea-traders of the Mediterranean were at the time the Cretans. Whether or not their merchants visited England we have no means of knowing.”[95] There are, however, sure and certain sources of information if one looks into the indelible evidence of fairy-tales, monuments, language, traditions, and place-names.

Ammianus Marcellinus records that it was a traditional belief among the Gauls that “a few Trojans fleeing from the Greeks and dispersed occupied these places then uninhabited”.[96] The similar tradition pervading early British literature we shall consider in due course and detail. This legend runs broadly that Bru or Brutus, after sailing for thirty days and thirty nights, landed at Totnes, whence after slaying the giant Gogmagog and his followers he marched to Troynovant or New Troy now named London.

It was generally believed that this supposed fiction was a fabrication by Geoffrey of Monmouth, but it was subsequently discovered in the historical poems of Tyssilia, a Welsh Bard. According to a poem attributed to Taliesin, the semi-mythical “Chief of the Bards of the West,” whose reputation Sir J. Morris Jones has recently so brilliantly resuscitated,[97] “A numerous race, fierce, they are said to have been, were thy original colonists Britain first of Isles. Natives of a country in Asia, and the city of Gafiz. Said to have been a skilful people, but the district is unknown which was mother to these children, warlike adventurers on the sea. Clad in their long dress who could equal them? Their skill is celebrated, they were the dread of Europe.”

According to the Welsh Triads the first-comer to these islands was not Bru, but a mysterious and mighty Hu: “The first of the three chieftains who established the colony was Hu the Mighty, who came with the original settlers. They came over the hazy sea from the summer country, which is called Deffrobani; that is where Constantinople now stands.”[98]

Although, as will subsequently be seen, Hu and Bru were seemingly one and the same, it is not to be supposed that Britain can have been populated from one solitary shipload of adventurers; argosy after argosy must have reached these shores. The name Albion suggests Albania, and in due course I shall connect not only Giant Alban, but also the Lady Albion and the fairy Prince Albion with Albania, Albany, and “Saint” Alban.

The Albanian Greek is still characterised by hardihood, activity, bodily strength, and simplicity of living; and there is unquestionably some connection between the highlanders of Albania and the highlanders of Albany who, up to a few hundred years ago, used to rush into battle with the war-cry of “Albani! Albani!” By the present-day Turk the Albanians are termed Arnaouts.[99] Whether this name has any connection with argonauts is immaterial, as the historic existence of argonauts and argosies is a matter of fact, not fancy. A typical example of the primitive argosies is recorded in the British Chronicles where the arrival of Hengist and Horsa is described. Layamon’s Brut attributes to Hengist the following statement:—

“Our race is of a fertile stock, more quick and abounding than any other you may know, or whereof you have heard speak. Our folk are marvellously fruitful, and the tale of the children is beyond measure. Women and men are more in number than the sand, for the greater sorrow of those amongst us who are here. When our people are so many that the land may not sustain nor suffice them, then the princes who rule the realm assemble before them all the young men of the age of fifteen and upwards, for such is our use and custom. From out of these they choose the most valiant and the most strong, and, casting lots, send them forth from the country, so that they may travel into divers lands, seeking fiefs and houses of their own. Go out they must, since the earth cannot contain them; for the children come more thickly than the beasts which pasture in the fields. Because of the lot that fell upon us we have bidden farewell to our homes, and putting our trust in Mercury, the god has led us to your realm.”

In all probability this is a typical and true picture of the perennial argosies which periodically and persistently fared forth from Northern Europe and the Mediterranean into the Unknown.

The Saxons came here peaceably; they were amicably received, and it would be quite wrong to imagine the early immigrations as invasions involving any abrupt breach in place-names, customs, and traditions. Of the Greeks, Prof. Bury says: “They did not sweep down in a great invading host, but crept in, tribe by tribe, seeking not political conquest but new lands and homesteads”.

At the time of Cæsar the tribe occupying the neighbourhood of modern London were known as the Trinovantes,[100] and as these people can hardly be supposed to have adopted their title for the purpose of flattering a poetic fiction in far Wales, the name Trinovant lends some support to the Bardic tradition that London was once termed Troy Novant or New Troy. Argonauts of a later day christened their new-found land New York, and this unchangingly characteristic tendency of the emigrant no doubt accounts for the perplexing existence of several cities each named “Troy”. That many shiploads of young argonauts from one or another Troy reached the coasts of Cornwall is implied by the fact that in Cornwall tre’s were seemingly so numerous that tre became the generic term for home or homestead. It is proverbial that by tre, pol, and pen, one may know the Cornish men.

Fig. 8.—Welsh Shepherd’s “Troy Town.”
From Prehistoric London (Gordon, E. O.).

Fig. 9.—Cretan maze-coins and British mazes at Winchester, Alkborough, and Saffron Walden.
From Prehistoric London (Gordon, E. O.).

[To face p. 87

Borlase, in his glossary of Cornish words, gives both tre and dre as meaning dwelling; the Welsh for Troy is Droia, the Greek was Troie, and this invariable interchange of t and d is again apparent in derry, the Irish equivalent for the Cornish tre. The standard definition of true is firm or certain; whence it may appear that the primeval “Troys” were, so to speak, the permanent addresses of the wandering families and tribes. These Troys or trues were maybe caves—whence trou, the French for hole or cave; maybe the foot of a big tree, preferably the sacred oak-tree, which was alike sacred in Albion and Albania. Tree is the same word as true, and dru, the Sanscrit for tree, is the same word as dero or derry, the Irish for oak tree, as in Londonderry, Kildare, etc. The Druids have been generally supposed to have derived their title of Druid from the drus or oak tree under which they worshipped, but it is far more probable that the tree was named after the Druids, and that druid (the accusative and dative of drui, a magician or sorcerer), is radically the Persian duru, meaning a good holy man, the Arabic deri, meaning a wise man.[101]

But apart from the generic term tre or dre there are numerous “Troy Towns” and “Draytons” in Britain. Part of Rochester is called Troy Town, which may be equated with the Duro- of Durobrevis the ancient name of Rochester. There is a river Dray in Thanet and the ancient name for Canterbury was Durovern. Seemingly all over Britain the term Troy Town was applied to the turf-cut mazes of the downs and village greens, and the hopscotch of the London urchin is said to be the Troy game of the Welsh child.

In London, tempus Edward II., a military ride and tournament used to be performed by the young men of the royal household on every Sunday during Lent.[102] This also so-called Troy game had obviously some relation to the ancient Trojan custom thus described by Virgil:—

In Welsh tru means a twisting or turning, and this root is at the base of tourney and tournament. One might account for the courtly jousts of the English Court by the erudition and enterprise of scholars and courtiers, but when we find turf Troy Towns being dug by the illiterate Welsh shepherd and a Troy game being played by the uneducated peasant, the question naturally arises, “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?” In the Scilly Islands there is a Troy Town picked out in stones which the natives scrupulously restore and maintain: in the words of Miss Courtney, “All intricate places in Cornwall are so denominated, and I have even heard nurses say to children, when they were surrounded by a litter of toys, that they looked as if they were in Troy Town”.[104]

In the Æneid Virgil observes that “Tyrians and Trojans shall I treat as one”. Apart from Tyrians and Trojans the term Tyrrheni or Tyrseni was applied to the Etrurians—a people the mystery of whose origin is one of the unsolved riddles of archæology. It was Etruria that produced not only Dante, but also a galaxy of great men such as no other part of Europe has presented. In Etruria woman was honoured as nowhere else in Europe except, perhaps, in Crete and among the Kelts; and in Etruria—as in Crete—religion was veiled under an “impenetrable cloud of mysticism and symbolism”.

It is supposed that Etruria derived much from the prehistoric Greeks who dwelt in Albania and worshipped Father Zeus in the sacred derrys or oak-groves of Dodona. The Etrurians and Greeks were unquestionably of close kindred, and it would seem from their town of Albano and their river Albanus that the Etrurians similarly venerated St. Alban or Prince Albion. The capital of Etruria was Tarchon, so named after the Etruscan Zeus, there known as Tarchon. In the Introduction to The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, Dennis points out that for ages the Etruscans were lords of the sea, rivalling the Phœnicians in enterprise; founding colonies in the islands of the Tyrrhene Sea “even on the coast of Spain where Tarragona (in whose name we recognise that of Tarchon) appears to have been one of their settlements—a tradition confirmed by its ancient fortifications. Nay, the Etruscans would fain have colonised the far ‘islands of the blest’ in the Atlantic Ocean, probably Madeira or one of the Canaries, had not the Carthaginians opposed them.”

The title Madeira, which is radically deira, might imply an origin from either Tyre or Troy, and if place-names have any significance it seems probable the Etrurians reached even our remote Albion. One may recognise Targon as at Tarragona in Pentargon, the sonorous, resounding title of a mighty pen or headland near Tintagel, and it is not unlikely Tarchon or Tarquin survives in giant Tarquin who is popularly associated with Cumberland and the North of England. In Arthurian legend it is seemingly this same Tarquin that figures as Sir Tarquin, a false knight who was the enemy of the Round Table and a sworn foe to Lancelot: “They hurtled together like two wild bulls, rashing and lashing with their shields and swords, that sometimes they fell both over their noses. Thus they fought still two hours and more and never would have rest.”[105]

It will become increasingly evident as we proceed that tur or true served frequently as an adjective, meaning firm, constant, durable, and eternal, and that it is thus used in the name Tarchon, Trajan, or Trojan. One may thus modernise Tarchon into the Eternal John, Jean, or Giant, and it is seemingly this same giant that figured as the John, Joan, or Old Joan of Cornish festivals. In the civic functions at Salisbury and elsewhere, the elementary giant figures simply as “Giant”. Although the Cornish for giant was geon, the authorities—I think wrongly—translate Inisidgeon, an islet in the Scillies, as having meant inis or island of St. John.

Near Pentargon is the Castle of King Arthur, which, before being known as Tintagel, was named Dunechein or the dun of chein. At Durovern (now Canterbury) is a large tumulus known as the Dane John, and on the heights behind St. Just in Cornwall is Chun Castle.[106] This is a noble specimen of Cyclopean architecture, and appears to be parallel in style of building with the Cyclopean architecture of Etruria. Similarly, in the Dune Chein neighbourhood may be seen Cyclopean and “herring-bone” walls, which seemingly do not differ from those of Crete and Etruria.

At Winchelsea in Sussex are the foundations and the doorway of an ancient building known as “Trojans or Jews’ Hall,” but of the history of these ruins nothing whatever is known. There is, however, little if any doubt that Trojan or Tarchon was an alternative title of the Etrurian Jonn, Jupiter, or Jou, and that to the Cretan Jou the Greeks added their piter or father, making thereby Jupiter or Father Jou. Jou was the title of a kingly dynasty in Crete, but the custom of royal dynasties taking their title from the All Father likened to the Sun is so constant as almost to constitute a rule.

The word Jew, when pronounced yew, will be considered subsequently; it may here be pointed out that Jay, Gee, and Joy are common surnames, query, once tribal names in Britain. Near Penzance is Marazion or Market Jew, and it may be suggested that the traditional Cornish “Jews” were pre-Phœnician followers of the Cretan Jou. With Market-Jew one may connote Margate, which, as will be shown later, was probably in its origin—like Marazion or Mara San—a port of mer, or mère, the generic terms for sea and mother. It is a well-recognised fact that Brittany, Cornwall, and Wales spoke more or less the same tongue, and according to Cæsar in his time there was little or no difference between the languages of Gaul and Britain.

As will also be seen later it is probable that the words mer and mère, and the names Maria and Marie, are radically rhi, the Celtic for lady or princess; that Rhea, the Mother-Goddess of Crete, is simply rhia, the Gælic and the Welsh for queen, and that Maria meant primarily Mother Queen, or Mother Lady. The early forms of Marazion figure as Marhasyon, Marhasion, etc.

Among the Basques of Spain jaun meant lord or master; in British chun or cun meant mighty chief,[107] whence it is probable that the name Tarchon meant Eternal Chief or Eternal Lord, and this anonymity would accord with the custom which most anciently prevailed at Dodona. “In early times,” says Herodotus, “the Pelasgi, as I know by information which I got at Dodona, offered sacrifices of all kinds and prayed to the gods, but had no distinct names and appellations for them, since they had never heard of any. They called them gods (theoi) because they had disposed and arranged all things in such a beautiful order.”[108]

The eternal Chon or Jonn of Etruria may be recognised Latinised in Janus, the most ancient deity of Rome or Janicula, and we may perhaps find him not only in John of Cornwall but among the innumerable Jones of Wales. The Ionians or Greeks of Ionia worshipped Ione, the Holy Dove, whence they are said to have derived their title. In Greek, ione, in Hebrew, juneh, means a dove, and the Scotch island of Iona is indelibly permeated with stories and traditions of St. Columba or Columbkille, the Little Dove of the Church. The dove was the immemorial symbol of Rhea, and it is highly probable that it was originally connected with the place-name Reculver, of which the root is unknown, but “has been influenced by Old English culfre, culver, a culver dove or wood pigeon”.[109] In Cornwall there is a St. Columb Major and St. Columb Minor, where the dedication is to a virgin of this name, and on the coast of Thanet the shoal now called Columbine, considered in conjunction with the neighbouring place-names Roas Bank and Rayham, may be assumed to be connected with Rhea’s sacred Columbine or Little Dove. A neighbouring spit is marked Cheney Spit, and close at hand are Cheyney Rocks. There is thus some probability that Great Cheyne Court, Little Cheyne Court, Old Cheyne Court, New Cheyne Court, and the Kentish surname Joynson have all relation to the mysterious ruin “Trojans or Jews Hall”.

Fig. 10.—From Nineveh (Layard).

Fig. 11.—From The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (Dennis, G.).

Fig. 11 shows the Goddess of Etruria holding her symbolic columba, in Fig. 10, the same emblem worshipped in Assyria is being carried with pomp and circumstance, and Fig. 12 shows the columba, turtle, or tortora, being similarly honoured in Western Europe.

“Throughout the Ægean,” says Prof. Burrows, “we see traces of the Minoan Empire, in one of the most permanent of all traditions the survival of a place-name; the word Minoa, wherever it occurs, must mark a fortress or trading station of the Great King as surely as the Alexandrias, or Antiochs, or Cæsareas of later days.”[110]

Fig. 12.—From The Everyday Book (Hone, W.).

If a modern place-name be valid evidence in the Mediterranean, the place-name Minnis Bay between Margate and Reculver has presumably a similar weight, particularly as a few miles further round the coast is a so-called Minnis Rock. Here is an ancient hermitage consisting of a three-mouthed cave measuring precisely 9 feet deep. King Minos of Crete held his kingship on a tenure of nine years, and the number nine is peculiarly identified with the idea of Troy, true, or permanent. In Hebrew, truth and nine are represented by one and the same term, because nine is so extraordinarily true or constant to itself, that 9 × 9 = 81 = 9, 9 × 2 = 18 = 9, and so from nine times one to nine times nine.

In Crete there were no temples, but worship was conducted around small caves situated in the side of hills. This is precisely the position of Minnis Rock which is situated in a valley running up from Hastings to St. Helens. “It is,” says the local guide-book, “one of the few rock cells in the country, and though almost choked with earth and rubbish is still worth inspection. The three square-headed openings were the entrances to the separate chambers of the cave, which went back 9 feet into the rock. It is surmised that the Hermitage was used as a chapel or oratory, dedicated probably to St. Mary, or some other saint beloved of those who go down to the sea in ships. Many such chapels existed in olden times within sight and sound of the waves, and passing vessels lowered their topsails to them in reverence. Torquay, Broadstairs, Dover, Reculver, Whitby, and other places in England had similar oratories.”[111]

The Etruscans or Tyrrhenians believed in a Hierarchy of Nine Great Gods. Minos of Crete was not merely one of a line of mighty sea-kings, but Greek mythology asserts that Minos was the son of Zeus, i.e., Jonn or Tarchon. In a subsequent chapter we shall consider him at length, but meanwhile it may be noted that it is not unlikely that the whole of Eastern Kent was known as Minster, Minosterre, or Minos Terra. There are several Minsters in Sheppey, and another Minster together with a Mansion near Margate. The generic terms minster and monastery may be assigned to the ministers of Minos originally congregating in cells or trous or in groves under and around the oaks or other similarly sacred trees.

Troy, or as Homer terms it, “sacred Troy,” was pre-eminently a city of towers, tourelles, turrets, or tors, and in the West of England tor, as in Torquay, Torbay, etc., is ubiquitous. Tory Island, off the coast of Ireland, is said to have derived its title from the numerous torrs upon it. The same word is prevalent throughout Britain, but there are no torrs at Sindry Island in Essex nor at Treport in the English Channel. In the Semitic languages tzur, meaning rock, is generally supposed to be the root of Tyre, and in the Near East tor is a generic term for mountain chain.

Speaking of princely Tyre, Ezekiel says, “Tarshish was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kinds of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs”.[112] Tarshish is usually considered to have been the western coast of the Mediterranean afterwards called Gaul, in later times Spain and France, and undoubtedly the men of Tarshish, Tyre, Troy, or Etruria, toured, trekked, travelled, tramped, traded, and trafficked far and wide. Etrurian vases have been disinterred in Tartary and also, it is said, from tumuli in Norway, yet as Mrs. Hamilton Gray observes: “We believe that they were never made in those countries, and that the Tartars and Norwegians never worshipped, and possibly never even knew the names of the gods and heroes thereon represented”.[113] These vases more often than not depicted incidents of Trojan legend, and of that famous Troy whose exploits in the words of Virgil “fired the world”.

The Tyrians conceived their chief god Hercules or Harokel as a bagman or merchant, and in Phœnician the word harokel meant merchant. Our own term merchant[114] is etymologically akin to Mercury, the god of merchants, and as mere among other meanings meant pure or true, it is not unlikely that merchant was once the intellectual equivalent to Tarchon or True John. In the West of England the adjective “jonnock” still means true, straightforward, generous, unselfish, and companionable.[115] The adjective chein still used by Jews means very much the same as jonnock, with, however, the additional sense of the French chic. Jack is the diminutive endearing form of John, and the Etruscan Joun is said to have been the Hebrew Jack or Iou.[116] Joun or his consort Jana was in all probability the divinity of the Etruscan river Chiana, and Giant or Giantess Albion the divinity of the neighbouring river Albinia.

Close to Market Jew or Marazion is a village called Chyandour, where is a well named Gulfwell, meaning, we are told, the “Hebrew brook”. It is still a matter of dispute whether the Jews shipped their tin from Market Jew or overland from Thanet (? Margate[117]). From the word tariff, a Spanish and Arabian term connected with Tarifa, the southernmost town in Spain, it would seem that the dour and daring traders who carried on their traffic with Market Jew and Margate toured with a tarifa or price-list. Doubtless the tariff charges were commensurate with the risks involved, for only too frequently, as is stated in the Psalms, “the ships of Tarshish were broken with an east wind”. To try a boat means to-day to bring her head to the gale, and in Somersetshire small ships are still entitled trows, a word evidently akin to trough.

Fig. 13

The Etruscans or Tyrrhenians represented Hercules the Great Merchant in a kilt, and this seemingly was a tartan or French tiretaine. Speaking of certain figures unearthed at Tarchon, Dennis remarks: “The drapery of the couches is particularly worthy of notice, being marked with stripes of different colours crossing each other as in the Highland plaid; and those who are learned in tartanology might possibly pronounce which of the Macs has the strongest claim to an Etruscan origin”.[118]

Fig. 13 reproduced from Mrs. Murray Aynsley’s Symbolism of the East and West, is taken from a fragment of pottery found in what is believed to be a pre-Etruscan cemetery at Bologna in Italy. It might be a portrait of Hendry or Sander bonneted in his glengarry, armed with a target, and trekking off with two terriers. Terre, or terra firma, the earth, is the same as true, meaning firm or constant. According to Skeat the present form of the verb tarry is due to tarien, terien, “to irritate, provoke, worry, vex; hence to hinder, delay”. Having “tarried” an order there was, it may be, still further “tarrying” on presentation of the tariff, and it may be assumed that the author of The Odyssey had been personally “tarried” for he refers feelingly to—

The hero of The Odyssey was, self-confessedly, no tyro, but was himself “in artifice well framed and in imposture various”. Admittedly he “utter’d prompt not truth, but figments to truth opposite, for guile in him stood never at a pause”.[119] Obviously he was a sailor to the bone, and when he says, “I boast me sprung from ancestry renowned in spacious Crete,” with the additional statement that at one time he was an Admiral of Crete, it is possible we are in face of a fragment of genuine autobiography.

Doubtless, as our traditions state, the first adventurers on the sea who reached these shores were oft-times terrors and “the dread of Europe”. To the Tyrrhenes may probably be assigned the generic term tyrranos which, however, meant primarily not a tyrant as now understood, but an autocrat or lord. “Clad in their long dress who could equal them?” wondered a British Bard, and it may be that the long robes figured herewith are the very moulds of form which created such a powerful impression among our predecessors. The word attire points to the possibility that at one time Tyre set the fashions for the latest tire, and like modern Paris fired the contemporary world of dress. In connection with the word dress, which is radically dre, it is noticeable that the Britons were conspicuously dressy men; indeed, Sir John Rhys, discussing the term Briton, Breton, or Brython, seriously maintains that “the only Celtic words which can be of the same origin are the Welsh vocables brethyn, ‘cloth and its congeners,’ in which case the Britons may have styled themselves ‘cloth-clad,’ in contradistinction to the skin-wearing neolithic nation that preceded them”.

FIGURES ON ANCIENT BRONZES FOUND IN THE TYROL.
Fig. 14.—From The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (Dennis, G.).

We know from Homer that the Trojans had a pretty taste in tweeds, and that their waistcoats in particular were subjects of favourable remark:—

Time does not alter the radical characteristics of any race, and the outstanding qualities of the Britons—the traditional “remnant of Droia,” are still very much to-day what they were in the time of Diodorus the Sicilian. “They are,” said he, “of much sincerity and integrity far from the craft and knavery of men among us.”[120] So great was the Trojan reputation for law and order that the Greeks who owed their code of laws to Crete paid Minos the supreme compliment of making him the Lord Chief Justice of the World of Shades. It will probably prove that the droits, laws, rights, or dues of “Dieu et mon Droit” are traceable to those of Troy, as also perhaps the Triads or triple axioms of the Drui or Druids. To put a man on trial was originally perhaps to try or test him at the sacred tree: the triadic form of ancient maxims had doubtless some relation to the Persian Trinity of Good Thought, Good Deed, Good Word, and these three virtues were symbolised by the trefoil or shamrock. The Hebrew for law is tora or thorah, the Hill of Tara in Ireland (middle-Irish, Temair), is popularly associated with the trefoil symbol of the Trinity (Welsh, Drindod); that three, trois, or drei was associated by the game of Troy is obvious from Virgil’s reference to the “triple groups dividing,” and that the trefoil was venerated in Crete would appear from Mr. Mackenzie’s statement: “Of special interest, too, is a clover-leaf ornament—an anticipation of the Irish devotion to the shamrock”.[121]

The primitive trysts were probably at the old Trysting Trees; trust means reliability and credit and truce means peace. Among rude nations the men who carried with them Peace, Law, and Order must naturally have been deemed supermen or gods, hence perhaps why in Scandinavia Tyr meant god. Our Thursday is from Thor—a divinity who was sometimes assigned three eyes—and our Tuesday from Tyr, who was supposed to be the Scandinavian Joupiter. The plural form of Tyr meant “glorious ones,” and according to The Edda, not only were the Danes and Scandinavians wanderers from Troy or Tyrkland, but Asgard itself—the Scandinavian Paradise—preserved the old usages and customs brought from Troy.[122]

Homer by sidelights indicates that the Trojans were nice in their domestic arrangements, took fastidious care of their attire, and were confirmed lovers of fresh air. Thus Telemachus—

The word “Trojan” was used in Shakespeare’s time to mean a boon companion, a jonnock tyro, or a plucky fellow, and it is worthy of note that the trusty lads of Homer’s time passed, as does the Briton of to-day, their liquor scrupulously from left to right:—

One of the most remarkable marvels of Cretan archæology is the up-to-date drainage system, and that the Tyrrhenians were equally particular is recorded apparently for all time by the Titanic evidence of the still-standing Cloaca Maxima or great main drain of Rome.

The word Troy carries inevitable memories of Helen whose beauty was such utter perfection that “the Helen of one’s Troy” has become a phrase. The name Helen is philologically allied to Helios the Sun, and is generally interpreted to mean torch, shiner, or giver of light. The Greeks called themselves Hellenes, after Hellen their eponymous divine leader. Oriental nations termed the Hellenes, Iones, and there is little doubt that Helen and Ione were originally synonymous. In Etruria was the city of Hellana, and we shall meet St. Helen in Great Britain, from Helenium, the old name for Land’s End, to Great St. Helen’s and Little St. Helen’s in London. St. Helen, the lone daughter of Old King Cole, the merry old soul, figures in Wales and Cumberland as Elen the Leader of Hosts, whose memory is preserved not only in Elaine the Lily Maid, but also in connection with ancient roadways such as Elen’s Road, and Elen’s Causeway. These, suggests Squire, “seem to show that the paths on which armies marched were ascribed or dedicated to her”.[125] Helen’s name was seemingly bestowed not only on our rivers, such as the Elen, Alone, or Alne and Allan Water, but it likewise seems to have become the generic term lan meaning holy enclosure, entering into innumerable place-names—London[126] among others—which will be discussed in course. The character in which Helen was esteemed may be judged from the Welsh adjective alain, which means “exceeding fair, lovely, bright”. Not only in Wales but also in Ireland Allen seems to have been synonymous with beauty, whence the authorities translate the place-name Derryallen to mean oakwood beautiful. In Arthurian romance Elaine or Elen figures as the sister of Sir Tirre,[127] as the builder of the highest fortress in Arvon, and as sitting lone or alone in a sea-girt castle on a throne of ruddy gold. It is said that so transcendent was her beauty that it would be no more easy to look into her face than to gaze at the sun when his rays were most irresistible. It would thus seem that Howel, said to be Elen’s brother, may be equated with hoel, the Celtic for Sun, and that Elen herself, like Diana, was the glorious twin-sister of Helios or Apollo.

The principal relics of St. Helena are possessed by the city of Treves, and at Therapne in Greece there was a special sanctuary of Helena the divinely fair daughter of Zeus and a swan. “Troy weight,” so called, originated, it is supposed, from the droits or standards of a famous fair held at Troyes in France.

From time immemorial Crete seems to have been associated with the symbol of the cross. This pre-Christian Cross of Crete was the equi-limbed Cross of St. John (Irish Shane) which form is also the Red Cross of St. George. In earlier times this cross was termed the Jack—a familiar form of “the John”—and it was also entitled “the Christopher”. In India the cave temple of Madura, where Kristna[128]-worship is predominant, is cruciform, and the svastika or solar cross, a variant of John’s Cross, is in one of its Indian forms known as the Jaina cross and the talisman of the Jaina kings.

“It must never be forgotten,” said a prince of the Anglican Church preaching recently at St. Paul’s, “that the cross was primarily an instrument of torture.” Among a certain school, who in Apostolic phrase deem themselves of all men most miserable, this conception is firmly fixed and seemingly it ever has been. It was Calvinistic doctrine that all pain and suffering came from the All Father, and that all pleasure and joy originated from the Evil One. Thus to Christianity the Latin Cross has been the symbol of misery and the concrete conception of Christian Ideal is the agonised Face of the Old Masters. This dismal verity was exemplified afresh by the melancholy poster which was recently scattered broadcast over England by the National Mission engineered by the Bishop of London. Even the Mexican cross, consisting of four hearts vis a vis (Fig. D)—a form which occurs sometimes in Europe—has been daubed with imaginary gore, and with reference to this inoffensive emblem the author of The Cross: Heathen and Christian complacently writes: “The lady to whom I have just alluded considers (and I think with great propriety) that the circle of crosses formed by groups of four hearts represents hearts sacrificed to the gods; the dot on each signifying blood”.[2]

Fig. 15.—From The Cross: Heathen and Christian (Brock, M.).

But we shall meet with these same dots on prehistoric British cross-coins as also on the “spindle whorls” of the most ancient Troy, and it will be seen that, apart from the word svastika which intrinsically means it is well, the svastika or pre-Christian cross was an emblem not of Melancholia but Joy. The English word joy and the French word jeu have, I think, been derived from Jou, just as jovial is traceable from Jove, and jocund to Jock or Jack. Pagans were the children of Joy and worshipped with a joyful noise before the Lord, and with sacred jeux or games. The word cross is in all probability the same as charis which means charity, and akin to chrestos which means good. Cres, the son of Jou, after whom the Cretans were termed Eteocretes, is an elementary form of Christopher, and the burning cross with which the legends state Christopher was tortured by being branded on the brow was more probably the Christofer or Jack—the Fiery Cross, with which irresistible talisman the clansmen of Albany were summoned together. Similarly the solar wheel of Katherine or The Pure One was supposed by the mediæval monks—whose minds were permanently bent on melancholia and torture—to have been some frightful implement of knives and spikes by which Kate or Kitt, the Pure Maiden, was torn into pieces. It will be seen in due course that almost every single “torture” sign of the supposed martyrs was in reality the pre-Christian emblem of some pagan divinity whence the saintly legends were ignorantly and mistakenly evolved.

When the Saxon monks came into power, in the manner characteristic of their race, they “tarried” the old British monasteries and sacred mounds, bringing to light many curious and extraordinary things. At St. Albans they overthrew and filled up all the subterranean crypts of the ancient city as well as certain labyrinthine passages which extended even under the bed of the river. The most world-famous labyrinth was that at Gnossus which has not yet been uncovered, but every Etrurian place of any import had its accompanying catacombs, and in the chapter on “Dene holes” we shall direct attention to corresponding labyrinths which remain intact in England even to-day.

When pillaging at St. Albans the Saxons found not only anchors, oars, and parts of ships, imputing that St. Albans was once a port, but they also uncovered the foundations of “a vast palace”. “Here,” says Wright,[129] “they found a hollow in the wall like a cupboard in which were a number of books and rolls, which were written in ancient characters and language that could only be read by one learned monk named Unwona. He declared that they were written in the ancient British language, that they contained ‘the invocations and rites of the idolatrous citizens of Waertamceaster,’ with the exception of one which contained the authentic life of St. Albans.” And as the Abbot before mentioned “diligently turned up the earth” where the ruins of Verulamium appeared, he found many other interesting things—pots and amphoras elegantly formed of pottery turned on the lathe, glass vessels, ruins of temples, altars overturned, idols, and various kinds of coins.

Many of the jewels and idols then uncovered remained long in the possession of the Abbey, and are scheduled in the Ecclesiastical inventories together with a memorandum of the human weaknesses against which each object was supposed to possess a talismanic value. Thus Pegasus or Bellerophon is noted as food for warriors, giving them boldness and swiftness in flight; Andromeda as affording power of conciliating love between man and woman; Hercules slaying a lion, as a singular defence to combatants. The figure of Mercury on a gem rendered the possessor wise and persuasive; a dog and a lion on the same stone was a sovereign remedy against dropsy and the pestilence; and so on and so forth.

“I am convinced,” says Wright, “that a large portion of the reliques of saints shown in the Middle Ages, were taken from the barrows or graves of the early population of the countries in which they were shown. It was well understood that those mounds were of a sepulchral character, and there were probably few of them which had not a legend attached. When the earlier Christian missionaries and the later monks of Western Europe wished to consecrate a site their imagination easily converted the tenant of the lonely mound into a primitive saint—the tumulus was ransacked and the bones were found—and the monastery or even a cathedral was erected over the site which had been consecrated by the mystics rites of an earlier age.”[130] After purification by a special form of exorcism the pagan pictures were accepted into Christian service, the designs being construed into Christian doctrines far from the purpose of the things themselves.

Fig. 16.—“Kaadman.” From Essays on Archæological Subjects (Wright, T.).

Among the monkish loot at St. Albans was an ancient cameo herewith reproduced. This particular jewel was supposed to be of great efficacy and was entitled Kaadman; “perhaps,” suggests Wright, “another mode of spelling cadmeus or cameus”. But in view of the fact that Alban means all good, it was more probably the picture of a sacred figure which the natives recognised as the original Kaadman, i.e., Guidman or the Good Man.[131] The jewels found at St. Albans being unquestionably Gnostic it is quite within the bounds of probability that the Kaadman seal was an “idol” of what the Gnostics entitled Adam Caedmon or Adam Kadman. According to C. W. King the Adam Kadman or Primitive Man of Gnosticism, was the generative and conceptive principle of life and heat, Who manifested Himself in ten emanations or types of all creation.[132] In Irish cad means holy; good and cad are the same word, whence Kaadman and the surnames Cadman and Goodman were probably once one. The word Albon or Albion means as it stands all good, or all well, and the river Beane, like the river Boyne—over whom presided the beneficent goddess Boanna—means bien, good, or bene well. The Herefordshire Beane was alternatively known as the river Beneficia, a name which to the modern etymologer working on standard lines confessedly “yields a curious conundrum”.[133]

The Anglo-Saxon Abbot of St. Albans after having assured himself that the idolatrous books before-mentioned proved that the pagan British worshipped Phœbus, and Mercury consigned them to the flames with the same self-complacency as the Monk Patrick burnt 180—some say 300—MSS. relative to the Irish Druids. These being deemed “unfit to be transmitted to posterity,” posterity is proportionately the poorer.

Phœbus was the British Heol, Howel, or the Sun, and Mercury, was, as Cæsar said, the Hercules of Britain. The snake-encircled club of Kaadman is the equivalent to the caduceus or snake-twined rod of Mercury; the human image in the hand of Kaadman implies with some probability that “Kaadman” was the All Father or the Maker of Mankind. We shall see subsequently that the Maker of All was personified as Michael or Mickle, and that St. Mickle and All Angels or All Saints stood for the Great Muckle leading the Mickle—“many a mickel makes a muckle”. St. Michael is the patron saint of Gorhambury, a suburb of St. Albans, and in Christian Art St. Michæl is almost invariably represented with the scales and other attributes of Anubis, the Mercury of Egypt. Both Anubis of Egypt and Mercury of Rome were connected with the dog, and Anubis was generally represented with the head of a dog or jackal. In The Gnostics and their Remains, King illustrates on plate F a dog or jackal-headed man which is subscribed with the name MICHAH, and it is probable the word make is closely associated with Micah or Mike.

ANUBIS.
Fig. 17.

Eastern tradition states that St. Christopher, or St. Kit, was a Canaanitish giant, 12 feet in stature, having the head of a dog. The kilted figure represented in the Gnostic cameo here illustrated, is seemingly that same Kitman, or Kaadman, Bandog, or Good Dog, and chien, the French for dog, Irish chuyn, may be equated with geon, geant, or giant. The worship of the chien was carried in the Near East to such a pitch that a great city named Cynopolis or Dog-Town existed in its honour. The priests of Cynopolis, who maintained a golden image of their divine kuon or chien, termed themselves Kuons, and these kuons or dog-ministers were, according to some authorities, the original Cohen family. A beautiful relievo of Adonis and his dog has been unearthed at Albano in Etruria; Fig. 13 is accompanied by bandogs(?); Albania in Asia Minor is mentioned by Maundeville as abounding in fierce dogs, and in Albion, where we still retain memories of the Dog Days, it will be shown to be probable that sacred dogs were maintained near London at the mysteriously named Isle of Dogs. Until the past fifty years the traditions of this island at Barking were so uncanny that the site remained inviolate and unbuilt over. Whence, I think, it may originally have been a kennel or Cynopolis, where the kuons of the Cantians or Candians were religiously maintained.[134]

Fig. 18.—From An Essay on Ancient Coins, Medals, and Gems (Walsh, R.).

We shall deal more fully with the cult and symbolism of the dog in a future chapter entitled “The Hound of Heaven”. Not only in England, but also in Ireland, place-names having reference to the dog are so persistent that Sir J. Rhys surmised the dog was originally a totem in that country.

In connection with chuyn, the Irish for dog, it may be noted that one of the titles of St. Patrick—whence all Irishmen are known as Paddies—was Taljean or Talchon, and moreover that Crete was alternatively known to the ancients as Telchinea. In Cornish and in Welsh tal meant high; in old English it meant valiant, whence Shakespeare says, “Thou’rt a tall fellow”; in the Mediterranean the Maltese twil; Arabic twil meant tall and hence we may conclude that the present predominant meaning of our tall was once far spread, Talchon meaning either tall geon or tall chein, i.e., dog-headed giant Christopher.

The outer inscription around Fig. 18 is described as “altogether barbarous and obscure,” but as far as can be deciphered the remaining words—“a corruption of Hebrew and Greek—signify ‘the sun or star has shone’”.[135] I have already suggested a connection between John, geon, chien, shine, shone, sheen, and sun.

It is probable that not only the literature of the saints but also many of the national traditions of our own and other lands arose from the misinterpretation of the symbolic signs and figures which preceded writing. The “diabolical idols” of Britain, as Gildas admitted, far exceeded those in Egypt; similarly in Crete, the fantastic hieroglyphics not yet read or understood far out-Egypted Egypt. The Christian Fathers fell foul with Gnostic philosophers for the supposed insult of representing Christ on the Cross with the head of an ass; but it is quite likely that the Gnostic intention—the ass being the symbol of meekness—was to portray Christ’s meekness, and that no insult was intended. A notable instance of the way in which ignorant and facetious aliens misconstrued the meaning of national or tribal emblems has been preserved in the dialogue of a globe-trotting Greek who lived in the second century of the present era. The incident, as self-recorded by the chatty but unintelligent Greek, is Englished by Sir John Rhys as follows: “The Celts call Heracles in the language of their country Ogmios, and they make very strange representations of the god. With them he is an extremely old man, with a bald forehead and his few remaining hairs quite grey; his skin is wrinkled and embrowned by the sun to that degree of swarthiness which is characteristic of men who have grown old in a seafaring life: in fact, you would fancy him rather to be a Charon or Japetus, one of the dwellers in Tartarus, or anybody rather than Heracles. But although he is of this description he is, nevertheless, attired like Heracles, for he has on him the lion’s skin, and he has a club in his right hand; he is duly equipped with a quiver, and his left hand displays a bow stretched out: in these respects he is quite Heracles. It struck me, then, that the Celts took such liberties with the appearance of Heracles in order to insult the gods of the Greeks and avenge themselves on him in their painting, because he once made a raid on their territory, when in search of the herds of Geryon he harrassed most of the western peoples. I have not, however, mentioned the most whimsical part of the picture, for this old man Heracles draws after him a great number of men bound by their ears, and the bonds are slender cords wrought of gold and amber, like necklaces of the most beautiful make; and although they are dragged on by such weak ties, they never try to run away, though they could easily do it: nor do they at all resist or struggle against them, planting their feet in the ground and throwing their weight back in the direction contrary to that in which they are being led. Quite the reverse: they follow with joyful countenance in a merry mood, and praising him who leads them pressing on one and all, and slackening their chains in their eagerness to proceed: in fact, they look like men who would be grieved should they be set free. But that which seemed to me the most absurd thing of all I will not hesitate also to tell you: the painter, you see, had nowhere to fix the ends of the cords, since the right hand of the god held the club and his left the bow; so he pierced the tip of his tongue, and represented the people as drawn on from it, and the god turns a smiling countenance towards those whom he is leading. Now I stood a long time looking at these things, and wondered, perplexed and indignant. But a certain Celt standing by, who knew something about our ways, as he showed by speaking good Greek—a man who was quite a philosopher, I take it, in local matters—said to me, ‘Stranger, I will tell you the secret of the painting, for you seem very much troubled about it. We Celts do not consider the power of speech to be Hermes, as you Greeks do, but we represent it by means of Heracles, because he is much stronger than Hermes. Nor should you wonder at his being represented as an old man, for the power of words is wont to show its perfection in the aged; for your poets are no doubt right when they say that the thoughts of young men turn with every wind, and that age has something wiser to tell us than youth. And so it is that honey pours from the tongue of that Nestor of yours, and the Trojan orators speak with one voice of the delicacy of the lily, a voice well covered, so to say, with bloom; for the bloom of flowers, if my memory does not fail me, has the term lilies applied to it. So if this old man Heracles, by the power of speech, draws men after him, tied to his tongue by their ears, you have no reason to wonder, as you must be aware of the close connection between the ears and the tongue. Nor is there any injury done him by this latter being pierced; for I remember, said he, learning while among you some comic iambics, to the effect that all chattering fellows have the tongue bored at the tip. In a word, we Celts are of opinion that Heracles himself performed everything by the power of words, as he was a wise fellow, and that most of his compulsion was effected by persuasion. His weapons, I take it, are his utterances, which are sharp and well-aimed, swift to pierce the mind; and you too say that words have wings.’ Thus far the Celt.”[136]

The moral of this incident may be applied to the svastika cross, an ubiquitous symbol or trade-mark which Andrew Lang surmised might after all have merely been “a bit of natural ornament”. The sign of the cross will be more fully considered subsequently, but meanwhile one may regard the svastika as the trade-mark of Troy. The Cornish for cross was treus, and among the ancients the cross was the symbol of truce.[137] The Sanscrit name svastika is composed of su, meaning soft, gentle, pleasing, or propitious, and asti (Greek esto), meaning being. It was universally the symbol of the Good Being or St. Albion, or St. All Well; it retains its meaning in its name, and was the counterpart to the Dove which symbolisms Innocence, Peace, Simplicity, and Goodwill. There is no doubt that the two emblems were the insignia of the prehistoric Giants, Titans, or followers of the Good Sun or Shine, or Sunshine, men who trekked from one or several centres, to India, Tartary, China, and Japan. Moreover, these trekkers whom we shall trace in America and Polynesia, were seafaring and not overland folk, otherwise we should not find the Cyclopean buildings with their concomitant symbols in Africa, Mexico, Peru, and the islands of the Pacific.

The svastika in its simpler form is the cross of St. Andrew, Scotch Hender or Hendrie. In British the epithet hen meant old or ancient, so that the cross of Hen drie is verbally the cross of old or ancient Drew, Droia, or Troy. This is also historically true, for the svastika has been found under the ruins of the ten or dozen Troys which occupy the immemorial site near Smyrna.

Our legends state that Bru or Brut, after tarrying awhile at Alba in Etruria, travelled by sea into Gaul, where he founded the city of Tours. Thence after sundry bickers with the Gauls he passed onward into Britain which acquired its name from Brute, its first Duke or Leader. We shall connote Britannia, whose first official portraits are here given, with the Cretan Goddess Britomart, which meant in Greek “sweet maiden”. One of these Britannia figures has her finger to her lips, or head, in seemingly the same attitude as the consort of the Giant Dog, and the interpretation is probably identical with that placed by Dr. Walsh upon that gnostic jewel. “Among the Egyptians,” he says, “it was deemed impossible to worship the deity in a manner worthy by words, adopting the sentiments of Plato—that it was difficult to find the nature of the Maker and Father of the Universe, or to convey an idea of him to the people by a verbal description—and they imagined therefore the deity Harpocrates who presided over silence and was always represented as inculcating it by holding his finger on his lips”. We know from Cæsar that secrecy was a predominant feature of the Drui or Druidic system, and for this custom the reasons are thus given in a Bardic triad: “The Three necessary but reluctant duties of the bards of the Isle of Britain: Secrecy, for the sake of peace and the public good; invective lamentation demanded by justice; and the unsheathing of the sword against the lawless and the predatory”.

Britain is in Welsh Prydain, and, according to some Welsh scholars, the root of Prydain is discovered in the epithet pryd, which signifies precious, dear, fair, or beautiful. This, assumed Thomas, “was at a very early date accepted as a surname in the British royal family of the island”.[138] I think this Welsh scholar was right and that not only Britomart the “sweet maiden,” but also St. Bride, “the Mary of the Gael,” were the archetypes of Britannia; St. Bride is alternatively St. Brighit, whence, in all probability, the adjective bright. At Brightlingsea in Essex is a Sindry or Sin derry island(?); in the West of England many villages have a so-called ‘sentry field,’ and undoubtedly these were originally the saintuaries, centres, and sanctuaries of the districts. To take sentry meant originally to seek refuge, and the primary meaning of terrible was sacred. Thus we find even in mediæval times, Westminster alluded to by monkish writers as a locus terribilis or sacred place. The moots or courts at Brightlingsea were known as Brodhulls, whence it would appear that the Moothill or Toothill of elsewhere was known occasionally as a Brod or Brutus Hill.

Some of the Britannias on page 120 have the aspect of young men rather than maidens, and there is no doubt that Brut was regarded as androginous or indeterminately as youth or maiden. We shall trace him or her at Broadstairs, a corruption of Bridestow, at Bradwell, at Bradport, at Bridlington, and in very many more directions. From Pryd come probably the words pride, prude, and proud, and in the opinion of our neighbours these qualities are among our national defects. Claiming a proud descent we are admittedly a dour people, and our neighbours deem us triste, yet, nevertheless trustworthy, and inclined to truce.

On the shield of one of the first Britannias is a bull’s head, whence it may be assumed the bull was anciently as nowadays associated with John Bull. At British festivals our predecessors used to antic in the guise of a bull, and the bull-headed actor was entitled “The Broad”. The bull was intimately connected with Crete; Britomart was the Lady of All Creatures, and seemingly the brutes in general were named either after her or Brut. The British word for bull was tarw, the Spanish is toro; in Etruria we find the City of Turin or Torino using as its cognisance a rampant bull; and I have little doubt that the fabulous Minotaur was a physical brute actually maintained in the terrible recesses of some yet-to-be-discovered labyrinth. The subterranean mausoleums of the Sacred Bulls of Egypt are among the greatest of the great monuments of that country; the bull-fights of Spain were almost without doubt the direct descendants of sacred festivals, wherein the slaying of the Mithraic Bull was dramatically presented, but in Crete itself the bull-fights seem to have been amicable gymnastic games wherein the most marvellous feats of agility were displayed. Illustrations of these graceful and intrepid performances are still extant on Cretan frieze and vase, the colours being as fresh to-day as when laid on 3000 years ago.

Fig. 19.—From An Essay on Medals (Pinkerton, J.).

In Britain the national sport seems to have been bull-baiting, and the dogs associated with that pastime presumably were bull-dogs. Doggedness is one of the ingrained qualities of our race; of recent years the bull-dog has been promoted into symbolic evidence of our tenacity and doggedness. Our mariners are sea-dogs, and the modern bards vouch us to be in general boys of the bull-dog breed. The mascot bull-dogs in the shops at this moment serve the same end as the mascot emblems and mysterious hieroglyphics of the ancients, and the Egyptian who carried a scarabæus or an Eye of Horus, acted without doubt from the same simple, homely impulse as drives the modern Englishman to hang up the picture of a repulsive animal subscribed, “What we have we’ll hold”.

The prehistoric dog or jackal symbolised not tenacity or courage, but the maker of tracks, for the well-authenticated reason that dogs were considered the best guides to practicable courses in the wilderness. Bull-headed men and dog-headed men are represented constantly in Cretan Art, and these in all likelihood symbolised the primeval bull-dogs who trekked into so many of the wild and trackless places of the world.

The Welsh have a saying, “Tra Mor, Tra Brython,” which means, “as long as there is sea so long will there be Britons”. Centuries ago, Diodorus of Sicily mentioned the Kelts as “having an immemorial taste for foreign expeditions and adventurous wars, and he goes on to describe them as ‘irritable, prompt to fight, in other respects simple and guileless,’ thus, according with Strabo, who sums up the Celtic temperament as being simple and spontaneous, willingly taking in hand the cause of the oppressed”.[139]

Diodorus also mentions the Kelts as clothed sometimes “in tissues of variegated colours,” which calls to mind the tartans of the Alban McAlpines, Ians, Jocks, Sanders, Hendries, and others of that ilk.

The dictionaries define the name Andrew as meaning a man, whence androgynous and anthropology; in Cornish antrou meant lord or master, and these early McAndrews were doubtless masterly, tyrannical, dour, derring-doers, inconceivably daring in der-doing. To try means make an effort, and we speak proverbially of “working like a Trojan”. The corollary is that tired feeling which must have sorely tried the tyros or young recruits. After daring and trying and tiring, these dour men eventually turned adre, which is Cornish for homeward. Whether their hearts were turned Troy-ward in the Ægean or to some small unsung British tre or Troynovant, who can tell? “I am now in Jerusalem where Christ was born,” wrote a modern argonaut to his mother, but, he added, “I wish I were in Wigan where I was born.”

Our Chronicles state that when Brute and his companions reached these shores, “at that time the name of the island was Albion”. According to tradition Alba, Albion, or Alban, whence the place-name Albion, was a fairy giant, but this, in the eyes of current scholarship, is a fallacy, and alba is merely an adjective meaning white, whence wherever met with it is so translated. But because there happens to be a relatively small tract of white cliffs in the neighbourhood of Dover, it is a barren stretch of imagination to suppose that all Britain thence derived its prehistoric title, and in any case the question—why did alba mean white?—would remain unanswered. The Highlanders of Scotland still speak of their country as Albany or Alban; the national cry of Scotland was evidently at one time “Albani,” and even as late as 1138, “the army of the Scots with one voice vociferated their native distinction, and the shout of Albani! Albani! ascended even to the heavens”.[140]

Not only by the Romans but likewise by the Greeks, Britain was known as Albion, and one may therefore conjecture that the white-cliff theory is an unsound fancy.

Strabo alludes to a certain district generally supposed to be Land’s End, under the name “Kalbion,”[141] a word manifestly having some radical relation to “Albion”. By an application of the comparative method to place-names and proper-names, I arrived several years ago at the seemingly only logical conclusion that in many directions ak and its variants meant great or mighty. On every hand there is presumptive evidence of this fact, and I have since found that Bryant and also Faber, working by wholly independent methods, reached a very similar conclusion. My modus operandi, with many of its results, having been already published,[142] it is unnecessary here to restate them, and I shall confine myself to new and corroborative evidence.

In addition to great or mighty it is clear that the radical in question meant high. The German trisagion of hoch! hoch! hoch! is still equivalent to the English high! high! high! the Swedish for high is hog, the Dutch is oog, and in Welsh or British high is uch. It is presumably a trace of the gutteral ch that remains in our modern spelling of high with a gh now mute, but the primordial Welsh uch has also become the English ok, as in Devonshire where Okment Hill is said to be the Anglicised form of uch mynydd, the Welsh or British for high hill. I shall, thus, in this volume treat the syllable ’k or ’g as carrying the predominant and apparently more British meaning of high. That the sounds ’g and ’k were invariably commutable may be inferred from innumerable place-names such as Ogbourne St. Andrew, alternatively printed Okebourne, and that the same mutability applies to words in general might be instanced from any random page of Dr. Murray’s New English Dictionary. We may thus assume that “Kalbion,” meant Great Albion or High Albion, and it remains to analyse Alba or Albion.

B and P being interchangeable, the ba of Alba is the same word as pa, which, according to Max Müller, meant primarily feeder; papa is in Turkish baba, and in Mexico also ba meant the same as our infantile pa, i.e., feeder or father. In paab, the British for pope, one p has become b the other has remained constant.

The inevitable interchange of p and b is conspicuously evident in the place-name—Battersea, alternatively known as Patrickseye, and on that little ea, eye, or eyot in the Thames at one time, probably, clustered the padres or paters who ministered to the church of St. Peter—the architypal Pater—whose shrine is now Westminster Abbey.

It is a custom of children to express their superlatives by duplications, such as pretty pretty, and in the childhood[143] of the world this habit was seemingly universal. Thus pa, the Aryan root meaning primarily feeder, has been duplicated into papa, which is the same word as pope, defined as indicating the father of a church. In A.D. 600 the British Hierarchy protested against the claims of the “paab” of Rome to be considered “the Father of Fathers,”[144] and there is little doubt that Pope is literally pa-pa or Father Father. In Stow’s time there existed in London a so-called “Papey”—“a proper house,” wherein sometime was kept a fraternity of St. Charity and St. John. This was, as Stow says, known as the Papey;[145] “for in some language priests are called papes”.

In the Hebrides the place-names Papa Stour, Papa Westray, and so forth are officially recognised as the seats of prehistoric padres, patricks, or papas. Skeat imagines that the words pap meaning food, and pap meaning teat or breast, are alike “of infantine origin due to the repetition of pa pa in calling for food”. They may be so, but to understand the childhood of the world one must stoop to infantile levels.

In Celtic alp or ailpe meant high, and also rock. Among the ancients rock was a generally recognised symbol of the undecaying immutable High Father, and in seemingly every tongue will be found puns such as pierre and pere, Peter the pater, and Petra the Rock. The papacy of Peter is founded traditionally upon St. Petra, the Rock of Ages, “Upon this Rock will I found my Church,” and the St. Rock of this country, whose festival was celebrated upon Rock Monday, was assumedly a survival of pagan pre-Christian symbolism.

Fig. 20.—From Analysis of Ancient Mythology (Bryant, J.).

In the group of coins here illustrated it will be noticed that the Mater Deorum is conventionally throned upon a rock. “Unto Thee will I cry, O Lord my Rock,” wrote the Psalmist, and the inhabitants of Albion probably once harmonised in their ideas with the Kafirs of India, who still say of the stones they worship, “This stands for God, but we know not his shape.” In Cornwall, within living memory, the Druidic stones were believed in some mysterious way to be sacred to existence, and the materialistic theory which attributes all primitive worship to fear or self-interest, will find it hard to account satisfactorily for stone worship. Cold, impassive stone, neither feeds, nor warms, nor clothes, yet, as Toland says: “’Tis certain that all nations meant by these stones without statues the eternal stability and power of the Deity, and that He could not be represented by any similitude, nor under any figure whatsoever”.

Fig. 21.—Christ and His Apostles, under the form of Lambs or of Sheep. (Latin sculpture; first centuries of the Church.)
From Christian Iconography (Didron).

It is asserted by one of the classical authors that stones were considered superior in two respects, first in being not subject to death, and second in not being harmful. That Albion was harmless and beneficent is implied by the adjectives bien, bonny, benevolent, bounteous, and benignant. That St. Alban was similarly conceived is implied by the statement that this Lord’s son of the City of Verulam was “a well disposed and seemly young man,” who “always loved to do hospitality granting meat and drink wherever necessary”. That St. Alban was not only Alpa, the All Feeder, but that he was also Alpe, the High One and the Rock whence gushed a “living water,” is clear from the statement: “Then at the last they came to the hill where this holy Alban should finish and end his life, in which place lay a great multitude of people nigh dead for heat of the sun, and for thirst. And then anon the wind blew afresh, cool, and also at the feet of this holy man Alban sprang up a fair well whereof all the people marvelled to see the cold water spring up in the hot sandy ground, and so high on the top of an hill, which water flowed all about and in large streams running down the hill. And then the people ran to the water and drank so that they were well refreshed, and then by the merits of St. Alban their thirst was clean quenched. But yet for all the great goodness that was showed they thirsted strongly for the blood of this holy man.”[146]

From this and other miraculous incidents in the life of St. Alban it would appear that the original compilers had in front of them some cartoons, cameos, or symbolic pictures of “The Kaadman,” which had probably been recovered from the ruins of the ancient city. The authenticity of St. Alban’s “life” is further implied by the frequency with which allusions are made to the blazing heat of the sun, a sunshine so great, so conspicuous, that it burnt and scalded the feet of the sightseers. The Latin for yellow, which is the colour of the golden sun, is galbinus, a word which like Kalbion resolves into ’g albinus, the high or mighty Albanus. From galbinus the French authorities derive their word jaune, but jaune is simply Joan, Jeanne, shine, shone, or sheen.

In Hebrew Albanah or Lebanah properly signifies the moon, and albon means strength and power, but more radically these terms may be connoted with our English surname Alibone and understood as either holy good, wholly good, or all good.

Yellow is not only the colour of the golden sun, but it is similarly that of the moon, and at the festivals of the yellow Lights of Heaven our ancestors most assuredly halloe’d, yelled, yawled, and yowled. The Cornish for the sun is houl, the Breton is heol, the Welsh is hayl, and until recently in English churches the congregation used at Yule Tide to hail the day with shouts or yells of Yole, Yole, Yole! or Ule, Ule, Ule! The festival of Yule is a reunion, a coming together in amity of the All, and as in Welsh y meant the, the words whole, and Yule were perhaps originally ye all or the all. An alloy is a mixture or medley, anything allowed is according to law, and hallow is the same word as holy.

The word Alban is pronounced Olbun, and in Welsh Ol, meant not only all, but also the Supreme Being. The Dictionaries translate the Semitic El as having meant God or Power, and it is so rendered when found amid names such as Bethel, Uriel, Eleazar,[147] etc. But among the Semitic races the deity El was subdivided into a number of Baalim or secondary divinities emanating from El, and it would thus seem that although the Phœnicians may have forgotten the fact, El meant among them what All does amongst us. According to Anderson, El was primarily Israel’s God and only later did He come to be regarded as the God of the Universe—“Rising in dignity as the national idea was enlarged, El became more just and righteous, more and more superior to all the other gods, till at last He was defined to be the Supreme Ruler of Nature, the One and only Lord”.[148]

The motto of Cornwall is “One and All,” and among the Celtic races there is still current a monotheistic folk-song which is supposed to be the relic of a Druidic ritual or catechism. This opens with the question in chorus, “What is your one O”? to which the answer is returned:—

There figures in the Celtic memory a Saint Allen or St. Elwyn, and this “saint” may be modernised into St. “Alone” or St. “All one”: his third variant Elian is equivalent to Holy Ane or Holy One.[149]

The Greek philosophers entertained a maxim that Jove, Pluto, Phœbus, Bacchus, all were one and they accepted as a formula the phrase “All is one”. In India Brahma was entitled “The Eternal All” and in the Bhagavad Gita the Soul of the world is thus adored:—

Near Stonehenge there is a tumulus known nowadays as El barrow, and Salisbury Plain itself was once named Ellendune or Ellen Down. The Greeks or Hellenes claimed to be descendants of the Dodonian Ellan or Hellan, a personage whom they esteemed as the “Father of the First-born Woman”. Ellan or Hellan was alternatively entitled Hellas, and in Greek the word allos meant “the one”.

Tradition said that the Temple of Ellan at Dodona—a shrine which antedated the Greek race, and was erected by unknown predecessors—was founded by a Dove, one of two birds which flew from Thebes in Egypt. The super-sacred tree at Dodona, as in Persia and elsewhere, was the oak, and the rustling of the wind in the leaves of the oak was poetically regarded as the voice of the All-Father. The Hebrew for an oak tree is allon, elon, or allah, and Allah is the name under which many millions of our fellow-men worship The Alone. To this day the oak tree is sacred among the folk of Palestine,[150] particularly one ancient specimen on the site of old Beyrut or Berut—a place-name which, as we shall see, may be connoted with Brut.

Diana, the Moon, with a circular nimbus. (Roman sculpture.)

Mercury with a circular nimbus. (Roman sculpture.)

Apollo as the Sun, adorned with the nimbus, and crowned with seven rays. (Roman sculpture.)

Sun, with rays issuing from the face, and a wheel-like nimbus on the head. (Etruscan sculpture.)

Fig. 22.—From Christian Iconography. (Didron.)

Fig. 23.—The statue of Diana of the Ephesians worshipped at Massilia.
From Stonehenge (Barclay, E.).

B being invariably interchangeable with P, the Ban of Alban is the same as the Greek Pan.[151] From Pan comes the adjective pan meaning all, universal, so that Alban may perhaps be equated with Holy Pan. Hale also means healthy, and the circular halo symbolising the glorious sun was used by the pagans long before it was adopted by Christianity. By the Cabalists—who were indistinguishable from the Gnostics—Ell was understood to mean “the Most Luminous,” Il “the Omnipotent,” Elo “the Sovereign, the Excelsus,” and Eloi “the Illuminator, the Most Effulgent”. Among the Greeks ele meant refulgent, and Helios was a title of Apollo or the Sun.

The Peruvians named their Bona Dea Mama Allpa, whom they represented, like Ephesian Diana, as having numerous breasts, and they regarded Mama Allpa as the dispenser of all human nourishment. In Egypt pa meant ancestor, beginning, origin, and the Peruvian many-breasted Mama Allpa seemingly meant just as it does in English, i.e., mother, All pa or All-feeder.

It is important to note that the British Albion was not always considered as a male, but on occasions as the “Lady Albine”.[152]

The Sabeans worshipped the many-breasted Artemis under the name Almaquah, which is radically alma, and the Greeks used the word alma as an adjective meaning nourishing. The river Almo near Rome was seemingly named after the All Mother, for in this stream the Romans used ceremoniously to bathe and purify the statue of Ma, the World Mother, whose consort was known as Pappas. Pappas is the Greek equivalent to Papa, and Ma or Mama meaning mother is so used practically all the world over. Skeat is contemptuous towards mama, describing it as “a mere repetition of ma an infantile syllable; many other languages have something like it”. Not only all over Asia Minor but also in Burmah and Hindustan ma meant mother; in China mother is mi or mu, and in South America as in Chaldea and all over Europe mama meant mother; Mammal is of course traceable to the same root, and it is evident that even were ma merely an infantile syllable it obviously carried far more than a contemptible or negligible meaning.

MA.
Fig. 24.—The Egyptian Ma
or “Truth”.

In Europe, Alma and Ilma are proper names which are defined as having meant either Celtic all good, Latin kindly, or Jewish maiden. In Finnish mythology the Creatrix of the Universe, or Virgin Daughter of the Air is named Ilmatar, which is evidently the All Mater or All Mother. Alma was no doubt the almoner of aliment, and her symbol was the almond. In Scotland where there is a river Almond, ben means mountain or head, and ben varies almost invariably into pen, from the Apennines to the Pennine Range.

It is said that Pan was worshipped in South America, and that his name was commemorated in the place-name Mayapan. Among the Mandan Indians, pan meant head, and also pertaining to that which is above; in China, pan meant mountain or hill, and in Phœnician, pennah had the same meaning. As, however, I have dealt somewhat fully elsewhere with Pan the President of the Mountains, I shall for the sake of brevity translate his name into universal or good.

In England we have the curious surname Pennefather;[153] in Cornwall, Pender is very common, and it is proverbial that Pen is one of the three affixes by which one may know Cornishmen.

As Pan was pre-eminently the divinity of woods and forests, Panshanger or Pan’s Wood in Hertfordshire may perhaps be connected with him, and the river Beane of Hertfordshire may be equated with the kindred British river-names, Ben, Bann, Bane, Bain, Banon, Bana, Bandon, Banney, Banac, and Bannockburn.

Bannock or Panak the Great Pan is probably responsible for the English river name Penk, and the name Pankhurst necessarily implies a hurst or wood of Pank. Penkhull was seemingly once Penkhill, and it is evident that Pan or Pank, the God of the Universe, may be recognised in Panku, the benevolent Chinese World Father, for the account of this Deity is as follows: “Panku was the first, being placed upon the earth at a period when sea, land, and sky were all jumbled up together. Panku was a giant, and worked with a mallet and chisel for eighteen thousand years in an effort to make the earth more shapely. As he toiled and struggled so he grew in strength and stature, until he was able to push the heavens back and to put the sea into its proper place. Then he rounded the earth and made it more habitable, and then he died. But Panku was greater in death than he was in life, for his head became the surface of the earth; his sinews, the mountains; his voice, the thunder, his breath, the wind, the mist, and the clouds; one eye was converted into the sun; the other the moon; and the beads of perspiration on his forehead were crystallised into the scintillating stars.”

The name Panku is radically the same as Punch, and there is no doubt that Mr. Punch of to-day represented, according to immemorial wont, with a hunch, hill, or mountain on his back, has descended from the sacred farce or drama. Punch and Punchinello, or Pierre and Pierrot are the father and the son of the ancient holy-days or holidays.

At Bancroft, in the neighbourhood of St. Albans, the festivities of May-day included “first” a personage with “a large artificial hump on his back,”[154] and we may recognise the Kaadman of St. Albans in the Cadi of Welsh pageantry. In Wales all the arrangements of May-day were made by the so-called Cadi, who was always the most active person in the company and sustained the joint rôle of marshal, orator, buffoon, and money collector. The whole party being assembled they marched in pairs headed by the Cadi, who was gaudily bedecked with gauds and wore a bisexual, half-male, half-female costume. With gaud and gaudy, which are the same words as good and cadi, may be connoted gaudeo the Latin for I rejoice.

Punch is always represented with an ample paunch, and this conspicuous characteristic of bonhomie is similarly a feature of Chinese and Japanese bonifaces or Bounty Gods. The skirt worn by the androgynous British Cadi may be connoted with the kilt in which the Etrurians figured their Hercules, and that in Etruria the All Father was occasionally depicted like Punch, is clear from the following passage from The Sepulchres of Ancient Etruria: “Hercules and Minerva were the most generally honoured of the Etruscan divinities, the one representing the most valuable qualities of a man’s body and the other of his soul. They were the excellencies of flesh and spirit, and according to Etruscan mythology they were man and wife. Minerva has usually a very fine face with that straight line of feature which we call Grecian, but which, from the sepulchral paintings and the votive offerings, would appear also to have been native. Hercules has a prominent and peaky chin, and something altogether remarkably sharp in his features, which, from the evidence of vases and scarabæi together, would appear to have been the conventional form of depicting a warrior. It is probably given to signify vigilance and energy. A friend of mine used to call it, not inaptly, ‘the ratcatcher style’. Neptune bears the trident, Jove the thunderbolt or sceptre, and these attributes are sometimes appended to the most grotesque figures when the Etruscans have been representing either some Greek fable, or some native version of the same story. This may be seen on one vase where Jove is entering a window, accompanied by Mercury, to visit Alcmena. Jove has just taken his foot off the ladder, and in my ignorance I looked at the clumsy but extraordinary vase, thinking that the figures represented Punch; and though I give the learned and received version of the story, I am at this moment not convinced that I was wrong, for I do not believe the professor who pointed it out to me, notwithstanding all his learning, extensive and profound as it was, knew that Punch was an Etruscan amusement. Supposing it, however, to have been Punch, which I think was my own very just discovery, the piece acted was certainly Giove and Alcmena.”

It is very obvious that the term holy has changed considerably in its meaning. To the ancients “holidays” were joy-days, pandemoniums, and the pre-eminent emblem of joviality was the holly tree. The reason for the symbolic eminence of the holy tree was its evergreen horned leaves which caused it to be dedicated to Saturn the horned All Father, now degraded into Old Nick. But “Old Nick” is simply St. Nicholas, or Santa Claus, and the name Claus is Nicholas minus the adjective ’n or ancient. Janus, the Latinised form of Joun, was essentially the God of geniality and joviality, otherwise Father Christmas and he is the same as Saturn, whose golden era was commemorated by the Saturnalia. The Hebrew name for the planet Saturn was Chiun, and this Chiun or Joun (?) was seemingly the same as the Gian Ben Gian, or Divine Being, who according to Arabian tradition ruled over the whole world during the legendary Golden Age.

On the first of January, a month which takes its name from Janus as being the “God of the Beginning,” all quarrelling and disturbances were shunned, mutual good-wishes were exchanged, and people gave sweets to one another as an omen that the New Year might bring nothing but what was sweet and pleasant in its train.

This “execrable practice,” a “mere relique of paganism and idolatry,” was, like the decorative use of holly, sternly opposed by the mediæval Church. In 1632 Prynne wrote: “The whole Catholicke Church (as Alchuvinus and others write), appointed a solemn publike faste upon this our New Yeare’s Day (which fast it seems is now forgotten), to bewail these heathenish enterludes, sports, and lewd idolatrous practices which had been used on it: prohibiting all Christians, under pain of excommunication, from observing the Calends, or first of January (which we now call New Yeare’s Day) as holy, and from sending abroad New Yeare’s Gifts upon it (a custom now too frequent), it being a mere relique of paganisme and idolatry, derived from the heathen Romans’ feast of two-faced Janus, and a practice so execrable unto Christians that not only the whole Catholicke Church, but even four famous Councils” [and an enormous quantity of other authorities which it is useless to quote], “have positively prohibited the solemnisation of New Yeare’s Day, and the sending abroad of New Yeare’s Gifts, under an anathema and excommunication.”

There is little doubt that the “Saint” Concord—an alleged subdeacon in a desert—who figures in the Roman Martyrology on January 1st, was invented to account for the Holy Concord to which that day was dedicated. Janus of January 1st, who was ranked by the Latins even above Jupiter, was termed “The good Creator,” the “Oldest of the Gods,” the “Beginning of all Things,” and the “God of Gods”. From him sprang all rivers, wells, and streams, and his name is radically the same as Oceanus.

Before the earth was known to be a ball, Oceanus, the Father of all the river-gods and water-nymphs, was conceived to be a river flowing perpetually round the flat circle of the world, and out of, and into this river the sun and stars were thought to rise and set. Our word ocean is assumed to be from the Greek form okeanus, and the official surmise as to the origin of the word is—“perhaps from okis—swift”. But what “swiftness” there is about the unperturbable and mighty sea, I am at a loss to recognise. In the Highlands the islanders of St. Kilda used to pour out libations to a sea-god, known as Shony, and in this British Shony we have probably the truer origin of ocean.

Fig. 25.—Personification of River.
From Christian Iconography (Didron).

The ancients generally supposed the All Good as wandering abroad and peering unobserved into the thoughts and actions of his children. This proclivity was a conspicuous characteristic of Jupiter, and also of the Scandinavian All Father, one of whose titles was Gangrad, or “The Wanderer”. The verb to gad, and the expression “gadding about,” may have arisen from this wandering proclivity of the gods or gads, and the word jaunt, a synonym for “gadding” (of unknown etymology), points to the probability that the rambling tendencies of “Gangrad” and other gods were similarly assigned by the British to their Giant, “jeyantt,” or Good John. Jaunty or janty means full of fire or life, and the words gentle, genial, and generous are implications of the original good Giant’s attributes.

Fig. 26.—Figure of Time with Three Faces. From a French Miniature of the XIV. cent.
From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Fig. 27.—The Three Divine Faces with two eyes and one single body. From a French Miniature of the XVI. cent.
From Christian Iconography (Didron).

The coins of King Janus of Sicily bore on their obverse the figure of god Janus; on the reverse a dove, and it is evident that the dove was as much a symbol of Father Janus as it was of Mother Jane or Mother Juno. Christianity still recognises the dove or pigeon as the symbol of the Holy Ghost, and it is probable that the word pigeon may be attributed to the fact that the pigeon was invariably associated with pi, or pa geon.[155]

Fig. 28.—Brahma.—From A Dictionary of Non-classical Mythology
(Edwardes & Spence).

Janus, “the one by whom all things were introduced into life,” was figured as two-faced, or time past, and time to come, and Janus was the “I was,” the “I am,” and the “I shall be”.[156] As the “God of the Beginning,” Janus is clearly connected with the word genesis; Juno was the goddess who presided over childbirth, and to their names may be traced the words generate, genus, genital, and the like. Just as January is the first or opening month of the year, so June,[157] French Juin, was the first or opening month of the ancient calendar. It was fabled that Janus daily threw open the gate of day whence janua was the Latin for a gate, and janitor means a keeper of the gate.

All men were supposed to be under the safeguard of Janus, and all women under that of Juno, whence the guardian spirit of a man was termed his genius and that of a woman her juno. The words genius and genie are evidently cognate with the Arabian jinn, meaning a spirit. In Ireland the fairies or “good people” are known as the “gentry”; as the giver of all increase Juno may be responsible for the word generous, and Janus the Beginning or Leader is presumably allied to General. Occasionally the two faces of Janus were represented as respectively old and young, a symbol obviously of time past and present, time and change, the ancient of days and the junior or jeun. In Irish sen meant senile.

It is taught by the mothers of Europe that at Yule-Tide the Senile All Bounty wanders around bestowing gifts, and St. Nicholas, or Father Christmas, is in some respects the same as the Wandering Jew of mediæval tradition. The earliest mention of the Everlasting Jew occurs in the chronicles of the Abbey of St. Albans,[158] and is probably a faint memory of the original St. Alban or All Bounty. It was said that this mysterious Wanderer “had a little child on his arm,” and was an eye-witness of the crucifixion of Christ. Varied mythical appearances of the Everlasting Jew are recorded, and his name is variously stated as Joseph, and as Elijah. Joseph is radically Jo, Elijah is Holy Jah, whence it may follow, that “Jew” should be spelled “Jou,” and that the Wandering or Everlasting Jew may be equated with the Sunshine or the Heavenly Joy.

Fig. 29.—The Three Divine Heads within a single triangle. From an Italian Wood Engraving of the XV. cent.
From Christian Iconography (Didron).

In France the sudden roar of the wind at night is attributed to the passing of the Everlasting Jew. In Switzerland he is associated with the mighty Matterhorn, in Arabia he is represented as an aged man with a bald head, and I strongly suspect that the Elisha story of “Go up, thou bald head” arose from the misinterpretation of a picture of the Ancient of Days surrounded by a happy crowd of laughing youngsters. In this respect it would have accorded with the representation of the Divine bald-head of the Celts, leading a joyful chain of smiling captives. In England the Wandering Jew was reputed never to eat but merely to drink water which came from a rock. Some accounts specify his clothing sometimes as a “purple shag-gown,” with the added information, “his stockings were very white, but whether linen or jersey deponent knoweth not, his beard and head were white and he had a white stick in his hand. The day was rainy from morning to night, but he had not one spot of dirt upon his clothes”.[159] This tradition is evidently a conception of the white and immaculate Old Alban, in the usual contradistinction to the young or le jeun, and we still speak of an honest or jonnock person as “a white man”. By the Etrurians it was believed that the soul preserved after death the likeness of the body it had left and that this elfin or spritely body composed of shining elastic air was clothed in airy white.[160] There figures in The Golden Legend an Italian St. Albine, whose name, says Voragine, “is as much as to say primo; as he was white and thus this holy saint was all white by purity of clean living”. The tale goes on that this St. Albine had two wives, also two nurses which did nourish him. While lying in his cradle he was carried away by a she-wolf and borne into the fields where happily he was espied by a pair of passing maidens. One of these twain exclaimed “Would to God I had milk to foster thee withal,” and these words thus said her paps immediately rose and grew up filled with milk. Semblably said and prayed the second maid, and anon she had milk as her fellow had and so they two nourished the holy child Albine.

Figs. 30 to 38.—From Les Filigranes (Briquet, C. M.).

It has been suggested that the Wandering Jew is a personification “of that race which wanders Cain-like over the earth with the brand of a brother’s blood upon it”; by others the story is connected particularly with the gipsies. The Romany word for moon is choon, the Cornish for full moon is cann, and it is a curious thing that the Etrurian Dante entitles the Man in the Moon, Cain:—

Christian symbology frequently associates the Virgin Mary with the new moon, and in Fig. 39 a remarkable representation of the Trinity is situated there.

Fig. 39.—The Holy Ghost, as a child of eight or ten years old, in the arms of the Father. French Miniature of the XVI. cent.
From Christian Iconography (Didron).

In the illustrations overleaf of mediæval papermarks, some of which depict the Man in the Moon in his conventional low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat, there is a conspicuous portrayal of the two breasts, doubtless representative of the milk and honey flowing in the mystic Land of Canaan. This paradise was reconnoitred by Joshua accompanied by Caleb, whose name means dog, and it will be remembered that dog-headed St. Christopher was said to be a Canaanitish giant.

Irishmen assign the name Connaught to a beneficent King Conn, during whose fabulously happy reign all crops yielded ninefold, and the furrows of Ireland flowed with “the pure lacteal produce of the dairy”. Conn of Connaught is expressly defined as “good as well as great,”[162] and the Hibernian “pure lacteal produce of the dairy” may be connoted with the Canaanitish “milk”. We shall trace King Conn of Connaught at Caen or Kenwood, near St. John’s Wood, London, and also at Kilburn, a burn or stream alternatively known as the Cuneburn. This rivulet comes first within the ken of history in the time of Henry I., when a hermit named Godwyn—query Good One?—had his kil or cell upon its banks. King Conn of Connaught reigned in glory with “Good Queen Eda,” a Breaton princess who was equally beloved and esteemed. This Eda is seemingly the Lady of Mount Ida in Candia, and her name may perhaps be traced in Maida Vale and Maida Hill. Pa Eda or Father Ida is apparently memorised at the adjacent Paddington which the authorities derive from Paedaington, or the town of the children of Paeda. Cynthia, the Goddess of the Moon or cann, may be connoted with Cain the Man in the Moon, and we shall ultimately associate her with Candia the alternative title of Crete, and with Caindea, an Irish divinity, whose name in Gaelic means the gentle goddess.

Near Coniston in Cumberland is Yew Barrow, a rugged, cragged, pyramidal height which like the river Yeo, rising from Seven Sisters Springs, was probably associated with Jou or Yew. The culminating peak known as “The Old Man” of Coniston is suggestive of the Elfin tradition:—

The Egyptians figured Ra, the Ancient of Days, as at times so senile that he dribbled at the mouth.

The traditional attributes of Cain, the Man in the Moon, or Cann, the full moon, are a dog, a lanthorn, and a bush of thorn. The dog is the kuon or chien of St. Kit, the Kaadman or the Good Man, and the lanthorn is probably Jack-a-lantern or Will-o-the-wisp, known of old as Kit-with-a-canstick or Kitty-with-a-candlestick. The thorn bush was sacred to the Elves for reasons which will be discussed in a subsequent chapter. It is sufficient here to note that the equivalent of the sacred hawthorn of Britain is known in the East as the Alvah or Elluf.[163] The Irish title of the letter a or haw is alif, as also is the Arabian: the Greek alpha is either alpa or alfa.

The Welsh Archbard Taliesin makes the mystic statement:—

The same poet claims, “I was in the Ark with Noah and Alpha,” whence it would seem that Alpha was Mother Eve or the Mother of All Living. Alfa the Elf King and his followers the elves were deemed to be ever-living, and the words love, life, and alive are all one and the same. That Spenser appreciated this identity between Elfe and life is apparent in the passage:—

Quick as in “quick and dead” meant living, whence “Elfe, to wit Quick,” was clearly understood by Spenser as life. It meant further, all vie or all feu, for the ancients identified life and fire, and they further identified the fays or elves with feux or fires. The place-name Fife is, I suspect, connected with vif or vive, and it is noteworthy that in Fifeshire to this day a circular patch of white snow which habitually lingers in a certain hill cup is termed poetically “the Lady Alva’s web”. Whether this Lady Alva was supposed to haunt Glen Alva—a name now associated with a more material spirit—I do not know.

The dictionaries define “Alfred” as meaning “Elf in council,” and Allflatt or Elfleet as “elf purity”. The big Alfe was no doubt symbolised by the celebrated Alphian Rock in Yorkshire, and the little Alf was almost certainly worshipped in his coty or stone cradle at Alvescott near Witney. That this site was another Kit’s Coty or “Cradle of Tudno,” as at Llandudno, is implied by the earlier forms Elephescote (1216) and Alfays (1274). The Fays and the Elves are one and the same as the Jinns, the Genii, or “the Gentry”.

There used to be an “Alphey” within Cripplegate on the site of the present Church of St. Alphage in London. It was believed that the Elf King inhabited the linden tree, and the elder was similarly associated with him. Linden is the same word as London, and the name elder resolves into the dre or der or abode of El: in Scandinavia the elves were known as the Elles, whence probably Ellesmere—the Elves pool—and similar place-names.

We shall subsequently consider a humble Hallicondane or Ellie King dun still standing in Ramsgate. There was also a famous Elve dun or Elve-haunt at Elboton, a hill in Yorkshire, where according to local legend:—

In the neighbourhood of this ton or dun of Elbo there are persistent traditions of a spectral hound or bandog.

In the immediate neighbourhood of the London Aldermanbury—the barrow or court of Alderman—is a church dedicated to St. Alban, and in this same district stood the parish church of St. Alphage. There figures in the Church Calendar a “St. Alphage the Bald,” and also a St. Alphage or Elphege, known alternatively as Anlaf. The word Anlaf resolves into Ancient Alif, and it may be thus surmised that “Alphage the Bald” was the Alif, Aleph, or Alpha aged.

As has already been seen the Celts represented their Hercules as bald-headed. St. Alban’s, Holborn, is situated in Baldwin’s Gardens where also is a Baldwin’s Place. Probably it was the same Bald One—alias Father Time—that originated the Baldwin Street in the neighbourhood of St. Alphage and St. Alban, Aldermanbury.

St. Anlaf may be connoted with the St. Olave whose church neighbours those of St. Alphage, and St. Alban. By the Church of St. Alban used to run Love Lane, and Anlaf may thus perhaps be rendered Ancient Love, or Ancient Life, or Ancient Elf.

The Olive branch is a universally understood emblem of love, in which connection there is an apparition recorded of St. John the Almoner. “He saw on a time in a vision a much fair maid, which had on her head a crown of olive, and when he saw her he was greatly abashed and demanded her what she was.” She answered, “I am Mercy; which brought from Heaven the Son of God; if thou wilt wed me thou shalt fare the better”. Then he, understanding that the olive betokened Mercy, began that same day to be merciful.

A short distance from Aldermanbury is Bunhill Row, on the site of Bunhill fields where used to be kept the hounds or bandogs of the Corporation of London. The name Bunhill implies an ancient tumulus or barrow sacred to the same Bun or Ban as the neighbouring St. Albans.

The “Coleman” which pervades this district of London, as in Coleman Street, Colemanchurch, Colemanhawe, Colemannes, implies that a colony of St. Colmans or “Doves” settled there and founded the surrounding shrines. In Ireland, Kil as in Kilpatrick, Kilbride, meant cell or shrine, whence it may be deduced that the river Cuneburn or Kilburn was a sacred stream on the banks of which many Godwyns had their cells. In this neighbourhood the place-names Hollybush Vale, Hollybush Tavern, imply the existence of a very celebrated Holly Tree. The illustration herewith represents the Twelfth Night Holly Festival in Westmorland, which terminated gloriously at an inn:—

Fig. 40.—From The Everyday Book (Hone, W.).

At the Westmorland festival the holly tree was always carried by the biggest man, and in all probability this was a similar custom in the Cuneburn or Kilburn district, terminating at the Hollybush Tavern.

Scandinavian legend tells of a potent enchantress who had dwelt for 300 years on the Island of Kunnan (Canaan?) happy in the exquisite innocence of her youth. Mighty heroes sued for the love of this fairest of giant maidens, and the sea around Kunnan is said to be still cumbered with the fragments of rock which her Cyclopean admirers flung jealously at one another. Ere, however, she was married “the detestable Odin” came into the country and drove all from the island. Refuging elsewhere the Lady of Kunnan and her consort dwelt awhile undisturbed until such time as a gigantic Oluf “came from Britain”. This Oluf (they called him the Holy) making the sign of the cross with his hands drove ashore in a gigantic ship crying with a loud voice: “Stand there as a stone till the last day,” and in the same instant the unhappy husband became a mass of rock. The tale continues that on Yule Eve only could the Lord of Kunnan and other petrified giants receive back their life for the space of seven hours.[166]

Now Janus alias Saturn had on his coins the figure of a ship’s prow; he was sometimes delineated pointing to a rock whence issued a profusion of water; seven days were set apart for his rites in December; and the seven days of the week were no doubt connected with his title of Septimanus. In Britain the consort of the Magna Mater Keridwen ( = Perpetual Love) or Ked was entitled Tegid, and like Janus and St. Peter Tegid was entitled the Door-keeper. In Celtic te meant good, whence Tegid might reasonably be understood as either Good God or The Good. Tegid also meant, according to Davies, serene baldness, an interpretation which has been ridiculed, but one which nevertheless is in all probability correct for every ancient term bore many meanings, and because one is right it does not necessarily follow that every other one is wrong.

Tegid and Ked were the parents of an untoward child, whose name Avagddu is translated as having meant utter darkness, but as Davies observes “mythological genealogy is mere allegory, and the father and the son are frequently the same person under different points of view. Thus this character in his abject state may be referred to as the patriarch himself during his confinement in the internal gloom of the Ark, where he was surrounded with utter darkness; a circumstance which was commemorated in all the mysteries of the gentile world.... And as our complex Mythology identified the character of the patriarch with the sun, so Avagddu may also have been viewed as a type of that luminary in his veil of darkness and gloom. This gloom was afterwards changed into light and cheerfulness, and thus the son of Keridwen may be recognised in his illuminated state under the title of Elphin, and Rhuvawn Bevyr which implies bursting forth with radiance, and seems to be an epithet of the helio-arkite god.” Davies continues: “Avagddu thus considered as a type of the helio-arkite god in his afflicted and renovated state has a striking coincidence of character with Eros the blind god of the Greeks”.[167] The Cain or “Man in the Moon,” represented herewith, has the heart of love, or Eros, figured on his headgear, and he is carrying the pipes of Pan, or of the Elphin Bard of Fairyland.

It was common knowledge to our predecessors, that Titania—“Our radiant Queen”—hated sluts and sluttery and when Mrs. Page concocted her fairy plot against Falstaff she enjoined—

Fig. 41.—From Les Filigranes (Briquet, C. M.).

Fig. 42.—British. From A New Description of England and Wales (Anon., 1724).

The White May or Hawthorn which was so dear to the Elves was probably the symbol of that chastity and cleanliness which was proverbially an Elphin attribute. It is, for instance, said of Sir Thopas, when questing for the Fairy Queen, that—

On reaching the domain of Queen Elf, Sir Thopas is encountered by a “great giaunt” Sire Oliphaunt, who informs him—

Sire Oliphaunt may be connoted with the Elephant which occurs on our ancient coinage, and is also found carved on many prehistoric stones in Scotland, notably in the cave of St. Rule at St. Andrews. The Kate Kennedy still commemorated at St. Andrews we shall subsequently connote with Conneda and with Caindea.

The Elephant which sleeps while standing was regarded as the emblem of the benevolent sentinel, or watchman, and as the symbol of giant strength, meekness, and ingenuity. According to the poet Donne:—

Fig. 43.—From An Essay on Ancient Coins, Medals, and Gems (Walsh, R.).

The Elephant or Oliphant (Greek elephas, “origin unknown”) is the hugest and the first of beasts, and in India it symbolises the vanquisher of obstacles, the leader or the opener of the way. Ganesa, the elephant-headed Hindu god is invariably invoked at the beginning of any enterprise, and the name Ganesa is practically the same as genesis the origin or beginning. “Praise to Thee, O Ganesa,” wrote a prehistoric hymnist, “Thou art manifestly the Truth, Thou art undoubtedly the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer, the Supreme Brahma, the Eternal Spirit.”

One of the reasons for the symbolic eminence of the Elephant seems to have been the animal’s habit of spouting water. It is still said of the Man in the Moon that he is a giant who at the time of the flow stands in a stooping posture because he is then taking up water which he pours out on the earth and thereby causes high tide; but at the time of the ebb he stands erect and rests from his labour when the water can subside again.[168]

The moon goddess of the Muysca Indians of Bogota is named Chin (akin to Cain, cann, and Ganesa?), and in her insensate spleen Chin was supposed at one period to have flooded the entire world. In Mexico one of the best represented gods is Chac the rain-god, who is the possessor of an elongated nose not unlike the proboscis of a tapir, which, of course, is the spout whence comes the rain which he blows over the earth.[169] The Hebrew Jah, i.e., Jon or Joy or Jack, is hailed as the long-nosed, and Taylor in his Diegesis[170] gives the following as a correct rendering of the original Psalm: “Sing ye to the Gods! Chant ye his name! Exalt him who rideth in the heavens by his name Jack, and leap for Joy before his face! For the Lord hath a long nose and his mercy endureth for ever!” It is quite beyond the possibilities of independent evolution or of coincidence that the divinity with a long nose or trunk, should have been known as Chac alike in Mexico and Asia Minor.

The spouting characteristic of the whale rendered it a marine equivalent to the elephant. Whale is the same word as whole, and leviathan is radically the lev of elephant. According to British mythology, Keridwen or Ked was a leviathian or whale, whence, as from the Ark, emerged all life.

Not only is the Man in the Moon or the Wandering Jew peculiarly identified with St. Albans in Britain, but he reappears at the Arabian city of Elvan. This name is cognate with elephant in the same way as alpha is correlate to alpa or alba: Ayliffe and Alvey are common English surnames. In Kensington the memory of Kenna, a fairy princess who was beloved by Albion a fairy prince, lingered until recently, and this tradition is seemingly commemorated in the neighbourhood at Albion Gate, St. Alban’s Road, and elsewhere. In St. Alban’s Road, Kensington, one may still find the family name Oliff which, like Ayliffe and Iliffe, is the same as alif, aleph, or alpha, the letter “a” the first or the beginning.

Panku, the great giant of the universe, is entitled by the Chinese the first of Beings or the Beginning, and it is claimed by the Christian Church that St. Alban was the first of British martyrs. Eastward of Kensington Gardens is St. Alban’s Place and also Albany, generally, but incorrectly termed “The Albany”. The neighbouring Old Bond Street and New Bond Street owe their nomenclature to a ground landlord whose name Bond is radically connected with Albany. The original Bond family were in all probability followers of “Bond,” and the curiously named Newbons, followers of the Little Bond or New Sun. In the Isle of Wight there are, half a mile apart, the hamlets of Great Pann and Little Pann which, considered in conjunction with Bonchurch, were probably once sacred to Old Pan and Little Pan. According to Prof. Weekley the name Lovibond, Loveband, or Levibond, “seems to mean ‘the dear bond’”.[171] Who or what “the dear bond” was is not explained, but we may connote the kindred surnames Goodbon, Goodbun, and Goodband.

By 24th December, the shortest day in the year, the Old Sun had sunk seemingly to his death, and at Yuletide it was believed that the rejuvenate New Sun, the Baby Sun, the Welsh Mabon, or Baby Boy, was born anew either from the sea or from a cave or womb of the earth. The arms of the Isle of Man, anciently known as Eubonia, are the three-legged solar wheel of the Wandering Joy. Eu of Eubonia is seemingly the Greek eu, meaning soft, gentle, pleasing and propitious, and the rolling wheel of Eubonia was like the svastika, a symbol of the Gentle Bounty running his beneficent and never-ending course. St. Andrew, with his limbs extended to the four quarters, was, I think, once the same symbol,[172] and it is probable that the story of Ixion bound to a burning wheel and rolling everlastingly through space was a perversion of the same original. Ixion is phonetically Ik zion, i.e., the Mighty Sun or Mighty Sein or Bosom. It was frankly admitted by the Greeks that their language was largely derived from barbarians or foreigners, and the same admission was made in relation to their theology.[173]

The circle of the Sun or solar wheel, otherwise the wheel of Good law, is found frequently engraved on prehistoric stones and coins. In Gaul, statues of a divinity bearing a wheel upon his shoulder have been found, and solar wheels figure persistently in Celtic archæology. It has been supposed, says Dr. Holmes, that they are symbolical of Sun worship, and that the God with the wheel was the God of the Sun. It is further probable that the wheel on the shoulder corresponded to the child on the shoulder of St. Kit, and I am at a loss to understand how any thinker can have ever propounded such a proposition as to require Dr. Holmes’ comment, “the supposition that the wheels were money is no longer admitted by competent antiquaries”.[174] Sir James Frazer instances cases of how the so-called “Fire of Heaven” used sometimes to be made by igniting a cart wheel smeared with pitch, fastened on a pole 12 feet high, the top of the pole being inserted in the nave of the wheel. This fire was made on the summit of a mountain, and as the flame ascended the people uttered a set form of words with eyes and arms directed heavenwards. In Norway to this day men turn cart wheels round the bonfires of St. John, and doubtless at some time the London urchin—still a notorious adept at cart-wheeling—once exercised the same pious orgy.

On Midsummer Eve, when the bonfires were lighted on every hill in honour of St. John, the Elves were at their very liveliest. Eléve in French means up aloft, and eléve means frequently transported with excitement. Shakespeare refers to elves as ouphes, which is the same word as oaf and was formerly spelt aulf. Near Wye in Kent there is a sign-post pointing to Aluph, but this little village figures on the Ordnance map as Aulph. The ouphes of Shakespeare are equipped “with rounds of waxen tapers on their heads,” and with Jack o’ lanthorn may be connoted Hob-and-his-lanthorn. In Worcestershire Hob has his fuller title, and is alternatively known as Hobredy:[175] with the further form Hobany may be correlated Eubonia, and with Hobredy, St. Bride, the Bona dea of the Hebrides. It is probable that “Hobany” is responsible for the curious Kentish place name Ebony, and that the Wandering Dame Abonde, Habonde, or Abundia of French faërie, was Hobany’s consort. The worship of La Dame Abonde, the star-crowned Queen of Fées, is particularly associated with St. John’s Day, and there is little doubt that in certain aspects she was cann, or the full moon:—

The Bretons believe in the existence of certain elves termed Sand Yan y Tad (St. John and Father) who carry lights at their finger ends, which spin round and round like wheels, and, according to Arab tradition, the Jinn or Jan (Jinnee m., Jinniyeh, f. sing.) are formed of “smokeless fire”.[177] That the ancient British, like the Peruvians, deemed themselves children of the Fire or Sun is implied among other testimony from a Druidic folk-tale (collected by a writer in 1795), wherein a young prince, divested of his corporeal envelope, has his senses refined and is borne aloft into the air. “Towards the disc of the Sun the young prince approaches at first with awful dread, but presently with inconceivable rapture and delight. This glorious body (the Sun) consists of an assemblage of pure souls swimming in an ocean of bliss. It is the abode of the blessed—of the sages—of the friends of mankind. The happy souls when thrice purified in the sun ascend to a succession of still higher spheres from whence they can no more descend to traverse the circles of those globes and stars which float in a less pure atmosphere.”[178]

At New Grange in Ireland, and elsewhere on prehistoric rock tombs, there may be seen carvings of a ship or solar barque frequently in juxtaposition to a solar disc, and the similarity of these designs to the solar ship of Egypt has frequently been remarked. The Egyptian believed that after death his soul would be allowed to enter the land of the Sun, and that in the company of the Gods he would then sail into the source of immortal Light: hence he placed model boats in the tombs, sometimes in pairs which were entitled Truth and Righteousness, and prayed: “Come to the Earth, draw nigh, O boat of Ra, make the boat to travel, O Mariners of Heaven”.

It is no doubt this same Holy Pair of Virtues that suckled the Child Albine, and that are represented as two streams of nourishment in the emblem herewith.

Fig. 44.—From the title-page of a seventeenth-century publication of a Cambridge printer.

That the British were enthusiastic astronomers is testified by Cæsar, who states that the Druids held a great many discourses about the stars and their motion,[179] about the size of the world and various countries, about the nature of things, about the power and might of the immortal gods, and that they instructed the youths in these subjects. It is equally certain that the British reverenced Sun and Fire not merely materially but as emblems of the Something behind Matter. “Think not,” said a tenth-century Persian, “that our fathers were adorers of fire; for that element was only an exalted object on the lustre of which they fixed their eyes. They humbled themselves before God, and if thy understanding be ever so little exerted thou must acknowledge thy dependence on the Being supremely pure.” Among the sacred traditions of the Hindus which are assigned by competent scholars to 2400 B.C. occurs what is known as the holiest verse of the Vedas. This reads: “Let us adore the supremacy of that Divine Sun the Deity who illumines all, from whom all proceed, are renovated, and to whom all must return, whom we invoke to direct our intellects aright in our progress towards His holy Seat”. It is quite permissible to cite this Hindu evidence as Hindus and Celts were alike branches of the same Aryan family, and between Druids and Brahmins there has, apart from etymology,[180] been traced the same affinity as existed between the Druids and the Magi.

The primeval symbolism of Fire as Love and Light as Intellect is stamped indelibly on language, yet like most things which are ever seen it is now never seen. We say “I see” instead of “I understand”; we speak of throwing light on a subject or of warm affection, yet in entire forgetfulness of the old ideas underlying such phraseology. When Christianity came westward it was compelled to take over almost intact most of the customs of aboriginal paganry, notably the Cult of Fire. The sacred fire of St. Bridget was kept going at Kildare until the thirteenth century when it was suppressed by the Archbishop of Dublin. It was, however, relighted and maintained by the nineteen nuns of St. Bridget—the direct descendants of nineteen prehistoric nuns or Druidesses—until the time of the Reformation, when it was finally extinguished.

In old Irish MSS. Brigit—who was represented Madonna-like, with a child in her arms—is entitled “The Presiding Care”. The name of her father, Dagda Mor, is said by Celtic scholars to mean “The Great Good Fire”; the dandelion is called “St. Bride’s Forerunner,” and in Gaelic its name is “Little Flame of God”.

We have it on the authority of Shakespeare that “Fairies use flowers for their charactery,” whence probably the pink with its pinked or ray-like petals was a flower of Pan on High. Dianthus, the Greek for pink, means “divine” or “day flower,” and like the daisy or Day’s Eye the Pansy was in all probability deemed to be Pan’s eye. Among the list of Elphin names with which, complained Reginald Scott, “our mothers’ maids have so frayed us,”[181] he includes “Pans” and the “First Fairy” in Lyly’s The Maid’s Metamorphosis, introduces himself by the remark, “My name is Penny”. To this primary elf may perhaps be assigned the plant name Pennyroyal, and his haunts may be assumed at various Pennyfields, Pandowns, and Bunhills.

Some authorities maintain that Bonfire is a corruption of Bonefire, or fire of bones. But bones will not burn, and the “Blessing Fire,” Bonfire, Good Fire, or Beltane is still worshipped in Brittany under the Celtic name of Tan Tad or Fire Father. In Brittany there exists to this day a worship of the Druidic Fire Father, which in its elaborate ritual preserves seemingly the exact spirit and ceremony of prehistoric fire-worship. In Provence the grandfather sets the Christmas log alight, the youngest child pours wine over it, then amid shouts of joy the log is put upon the fire-dogs and its first flame is awaited with reverence. This instance is the more memorable by reason of the prayer which has survived in connection with the ceremony and has been thus quoted in Notes and Queries: “Mix the brightness of thy flames with that of our hearts, and maintain among us peace and good health. Warm with thy fire the feet of orphans and of sick old men. Guard the house of the poor, and do not destroy the hopes of the peasant or the seaman’s boat.”

The instances of Bonfire or Beltane customs collected by the author of The Golden Bough clearly evince their original sanctity. In Greece women jumped over the all-purifying flames crying, “I leave my sins behind me,” and notwithstanding the strenuous efforts of Christianity to persuade our forefathers that all who worship fire “shall go in misery to sore punishment,” the cult of Fire still continues in out-of-the-way parts even now. To this day children in Ireland are passed through the fire by being caught up and whisked over it, my authority for which statement observing: “We have here apparently an exact repetition of the worship described in the Old Testament and an explanation of it, for there the idolatrous Israelites are described as passing their sons and their daughters through the fire. This the writer always thought was some purifying cruel observance, but it seems that it could be done without in any way hurting the children.”[182]

Not only the ritual of fire, but also its ethics have largely survived, notably in Ireland, where it was customary to ask for fire from a priest’s house. But if the priest refused, as he usually did, in order to discountenance superstition, then the fire was asked from the happiest man, i.e., the best living person in the parish. When lighting a candle it was customary in England to say “May the Lord send us the Light of Heaven,” and when putting it out, “May the Lord renew for us the Light of Heaven”.

Originally the Persians worshipped the sacred fire only upon hill-tops, a custom for which Bryant acidly assigns the following reason: “The people who prosecuted this method of worship enjoyed a soothing infatuation which flattered the gloom of superstition. The eminences to which they retired were lonely and silent and seemed to be happily circumstanced for contemplation and prayer. They who frequented them were raised above the lower world and fancied that they were brought into the vicinity of the powers of the air and of the Deity, who resided in the higher regions.”

The Druids, like the Persians, worshipped upon hill-tops or the highest ground, doubtless because they regarded these as symbols of the Most High, and there is really nothing in the custom flattering either to gloom or superstition:—

If our ancestors were unable to find a convenient highland, they made an artificial mound, and such was the sacred centre or sanctuary of all tribal activities. The celebrated McAlpine laws of Scotland were promulgated from the Mote of Urr, which remarkable construction will be illustrated in a later chapter.

Not only in Homeric Greece, but universally, Kings and Chiefs were once treated and esteemed as Sun-gods. “Think not,” said a Maori chief to a missionary, “that I am a man, that my origin is of the earth. I come from the Heavens; my ancestors are all there; they are gods, and I shall return to them”.[183] The notion of Imperial divinity is not yet dead; it was flourishing in England to Stuart times, and though the spirit may now have fled, its traces still remain in our regal ceremonial. In the Indian Code known as the Laws of Manu, the superstition is thus enunciated: “Because a King has been formed of particles of those Lords of the gods, he therefore surpasses all created beings in lustre, and like the Sun he burns eyes and hearts; nor can anybody on earth even gaze at him. Through his power he is Fire and Wind, he the Sun and Moon, he the Lord of Justice, he Kubera, he Varuna, he Great Indra. Even an infant King must not be despised that he is mortal; for he is a great deity in human form.”[184]

It is obvious that the British carried this conception of the innate divinity of man much farther than merely to the personalities of kings. The word soul, Dutch ziel, is probably the French word ciel; to work with zeal is to throw one’s soul into it. That the Celts, like the Chinese or Celestials, equated the soul with the ciel or the Celestial, believing, as expressed by Taliesin, the famous British Bard, that “my original country is the region of the summer stars,” is unquestionable. Max Müller supposed that the word soul was derived from the Greek root seio, to shake. “It meant,” he says, “the storm-tossed waters in contradistinction to stagnant or running water. The soul being called saivala (Gothic), we see that it was originally conceived by the Teutonic nations as a sea within, heaving up and down with every breath and reflecting heaven and earth on the mirror of the deep.”

Whatever the Teutonic nations may have fancied about their souls is irrelevant to the Druidic teaching, which was something quite different. In a.d. 45, a Roman author stated that the Druids (who did not flourish in Germany) taught many things privately, but that one of their precepts had become public, to wit, that man should act bravely in war, that souls are immortal, and that there is another life after death. There is additional testimony to the effect that the Druids of the Isle of Man, or Eubonia, “raised their minds to the most sublime inquiries, and despising human and worldly affairs strongly pressed upon their disciples the immortality of the soul”. “Before all things,” confirmed Cæsar, “they (the Druids) are desirous to inspire a belief that men’s souls do not perish.” That they successfully inspired this cardinal doctrine is proved by the fact that among the Celts it was not uncommon to lend money on the understanding that it should be repaid in the next world. It is further recorded that the Britons had such an utter disregard of death that they sang cheerily when marching into battle, and in the words of an astonished Roman, Mortem pro joco habent—“They turn death into a joke”.

It was the belief of the Celt that immediately at death man assumed a spiritual replica of his earthly body and passed into what was termed the Land of the Living, the White Land, or the Great Strand, or The Great Land, and many other titles. An Elphin Land, where there was neither death nor old age, nor any breach of law, where he heard the noble and melodious music of the gods, travelled from realm to realm, drank from crystal cups, and entertained himself with his beloved. In this Fairyland of happy souls he supposed the virtuous and brave to roam among fields covered with sweet flowers, and amid groves laden with delicious fruits. Here some, as their taste inclined, wandered in happy groups, some reclined in pleasant bowers, while others exercised themselves with hunting, wrestling, running races, martial feats, and other manly exercises. No one grew old in this Abode, nor did the inhabitants feel tedious of enjoyment or know how the centuries passed away. In this spiritual Land of Immortal Youth “wherein is delight of every goodness,” and “where only truth is known,” there was believed to be “neither age, nor decay; nor gloom, nor sadness, nor envy, nor jealousy, nor hatred, nor haughtiness”; in short, the Fairyland or Paradise of the Britons coincided exactly with the celestial garden of the Persians wherein, it is said, there was “no impotent, no lunatic, no poverty, no lying, no meanness, no jealousy, no decayed tooth, no leprous to be confined,” nor any of the brands wherewith evil stamps the bodies of mortals.

To this day the unsophisticated Celts of Britain and Brittany believe in this doctrine of a heavenly hereafter, and the conception of an all-surrounding “Good People” and elemental spirits is still vividly alive. In England fairies were known as Mawmets, meaning “little mothers,” and in Wales as y mamau, which means “the mothers”. They were also known as “mothers’ blessings”.

To the early Christian preachers the “gentry” and the “good people” were the troops of Satan continually to be combated and exorcised, but it was a hard task to dispel the exquisite images of the fairy-paradise, substituting in lieu of it the monkish purgatory. There is a tale extant of how St. Patrick once upon a time tried to convince Oisin that the hero Fingal was roasting in hell. “If,” cried out the old Fenian, “the children of Morni and the many tribes of the clan Ovi were alive, we would force brave Fingal out of hell or the habitation should be our own.”

Not only did the British believe that their friends were in Elysium, but they likewise supposed themselves to be under the personal and immediate guardianship of the “gentry”. The Rev. S. Baring-Gould refers to the beautiful legends which centre around this belief as too often, alas, but apples of Sodom, fair cheeked, but containing the dust and ashes of heathenism. After lamenting the heresy—“too often current among the lower orders and dissenters”—that the souls of the departed become angels, he goes on to explain: “In Judaic and Christian doctrine the angel creation is distinct from that of human beings, and a Jew or a Catholic would as little dream of confusing the distinct conception of angel and soul as of believing in metempsychosis. But not so dissenting religion. According to Druidic dogma the souls of the dead were guardians of the living, a belief shared with the Ancient Indians, etc. Thus the hymn, ‘I want to be an Angel,’ so popular in dissenting schools, is founded on a venerable Aryan myth and therefore of exceeding interest, but Christian it is not.”[185]

Lucan, the Roman poet, alluding to the Druids observed—

Fig. 45.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).

The symbolism of the butterfly is crystallised in the word psyche, which in Greek meant not only butterfly but also soul, and to this day butterflies in some districts of Great Britain are considered to be souls, though this may have arisen not from an ethereal imagination, but from the ancient doctrine of metemphsychosis which the Druids seemingly held. It was certainly believed that souls, like serpents, shed their old coverings and assumed newer and more lovely forms, that all things changed, but that nothing perished. In Cornwall moths, regarded by some as souls, by others as fairies, are known as pisgies or piskies. The connection between the Cornish words pisgie or piskie and the Greek psyche has been commented upon as being “curious but surely casual”. Grimm has recorded that in old German, the caterpillar was named Alba, and that the Alp often takes the form of a butterfly.[186]

Referring to Ossian, Dr. Waddell states: “He recognised the Deity, if he could be said to recognise him at all, as an omnipresent vital essence everywhere diffused in the world, or centred for a lifetime in heroes. He himself, his kindred, his forefathers, and the human race at large were dependent solely on the atmosphere, their souls were identified with the air, heaven was their natural home, earth their temporary residence.”

But, though certainly upholders of what would nowadays be termed complacently “the Larger Hope,” it was certainly not supposed that evil was capable of admittance to the Land of Virtues: on the contrary, the Celts believed firmly in the existence of an underworld which their poets termed “the cruel prison of the earth,” “the abode of death,” “the loveless land,” etc.

According to the Bardic Triads there were “Three things that make a man equal to an angel; the love of every good; the love of exercising charity; and the love of pleasing God”. It was further inculcated that “In creation there is no evil which is not a greater good than an evil: the things called rewards or punishments are so secured by eternal ordinances, that they are not consequences, but properties of our acts and habits.”

It was not imagined as it is to-day that “the awful wrath of God” could be assuaged by the sacrifice of an innocent man, or that—

It is still the doctrine of the Christian Church that infants dying unbaptised are doomed to hell, but to the British this barbaric dogma evidently never appealed. In the fifth century the peace of the Church was vastly disturbed by the insidious heresy called Pelasgian, and it is a matter of some distinction to these islands that “Pelasgus,” whose correct name was Morgan, was British-born. Morgan or Pelasgus, seconded by Coelestius, an Irish Scot, wilfully but gracelessly maintained that Adam’s sin affected only himself, not his posterity; that children at their birth are as pure and innocent as Adam was at his creation, and that the Grace of God is not necessary to enable men to do their duty, to overcome temptations, or even to attain perfection, but that they may do all this by the freedom of their own wills. A Council of 214 Bishops, held at Carthage, formally condemned these pestilent and insidious doctrines which, according to a commentator, “strike at the root of genuine piety”.

There is no known etymology for the words God and good, and some years ago it was a matter of divided opinion whether or not they were radically the same. In Danish the two terms are identical, and there is very little doubt that the one is an adjective derived from the other. Max Müller, however, sums up the contrary opinion as follows: “God was most likely an old heathen name of the Deity and for such a name the supposed etymological meaning of good would be far too modern, too abstract, too Christian”.

One might ignore this marvellous complacency were it not for the fact that it still expresses the opinion of a considerable majority. To refute the presumption that Christianity alone is capable of abstract thought, or of conceiving God as good, one need only turn to any primitive philosophy. It is, however, needless to look further afield than pagan Albion. Strabo alludes to the Druidic teaching as “moral science,” and no phrase better defines the pith and dignity of certain British Triads. It was daringly maintained that God cannot be matter, therefore everything not matter was God: that:—

The Bards of Britain, who claimed to maintain the “sciences” of piety, wisdom, and courtesy, taught that—the three principal properties of the Hidden God were “Power, knowledge, and love”: that the three purposes of God in his works were “to consume the evil; to enliven the dead; and to cause joy from doing good”: that the three ways in which God worked were “experience, wisdom, and mercy”.

It will be observed that all these axioms are in three clauses, and it was claimed by the Welsh Bards of the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries that they possessed many similar Triads or threefold precepts which had been handed down by memory and tradition from immemorial times.[189] It is generally accepted by competent scholars that the Welsh Triads, particularly the poems attributed to “Taliesin,” undoubtedly contain a great deal of pagan and pre-Christian doctrine, but to what extent this material has been garbled and alloyed is, of course, a matter of uncertainty and dispute. In some instances external and internal evidence testify alike to their authenticity. For example, Diogenes Laertius, who died in A.D. 222, stated: “The Druids philosophise sententiously and obscurely—to worship the Gods, to do no evil, to exercise courage”. This precise and comprehensive summary of the whole duty of man is to be found among the Bardic Triads, where it has been translated to read: “The three First Principles of Wisdom: obedience to the laws of God, concern for the good of mankind, and bravery in sustaining all the accidents of life”.

In Celtic Heathendom Sir John Rhys prints the following noble and majestic prayer, of which four MSS. variants are in existence:—

Some have supposed that Druidism learned its secrets from the Persian Magi, others that the Magi learnt from Druidism. Pliny, speaking of the vanities of Magiism or Magic, recorded that “Britain celebrates them to-day with such ceremonies it might seem possible that she taught Magic to the Persians”. In Persian philosophy the trinity of Goodness was Good Thought, Good Deed, and Good Word, and in Britain these Three Graces were symbolised by the three Golden Berries of the Mistletoe or Golden Bough. They figure alternatively as Three Golden Balls or Apples growing on a crystal tree. The Mistletoe—sacred alike in Persia and in Britain—was worshipped as the All-Heal, and it was termed the Ethereal Plant, because alone among the vegetable creation it springs etherially in mid-air, and not from earth. Among the adventures of Prince Conneda of Connaught—the young and lovely son of Great and Good King Conn and Queen Eda—was a certain quest involving the most strenuous seeking. Aided by a Druid, the youthful Conneda carried with him a small bottle of extracted All-Heal, and was led forward by a magic ball, which rolled ever in advance. The story (or rather allegory, for it is obviously such) tells us that the Three Golden Apples were plucked from the Crystal Tree in the midst of the pleasure garden, and deposited by Conneda in his bosom. On returning home Conneda planted the Three Golden Apples in his garden, and instantly a great tree bearing similar fruit sprang up. This tree caused all the district to produce an exuberance of crops and fruits, so that the neighbourhood became as fertile and plentiful as the dominion of the Firbolgs, in consequence of the extraordinary powers possessed by the Golden Fruit.[190]

The trefoil or shamrock (figured constantly in Crete) was another symbol of the Three in One, and I have little doubt that at Tara there once existed a picture of St. Patrick holding this almost world-wide emblem. Tara is the same word as tri or three and in Faërie this number is similarly sacred. The Irish used to march in battle in threes, the Celtic mairae or fairy mothers were generally figured in groups of three, and the gown of the Fairy Queen is said to have been—

The word shamrock in Persian is shamrakh, and three to four thousand years ago a Persian poet hymned: “We worship the pure, the Lord of purity. We worship the universe of the true spirit, visible, invisible, and all that sustains the welfare of the good creation. We praise all good thoughts, all good words, all good deeds, which are and will be, and keep pure all that is good. Thou true and happy Being! we strive to think, to speak, to do only what, of all actions, may promote the two lives, the body and the mind. We beseech the spirit of earth, by means of these best works (agriculture) to grant us beautiful and fertile fields, for believer and unbeliever, for rich and poor. We worship the Wise One who formed and furthered the spirit of the earth. We worship Him with our bodies and souls. We worship Him as being united with the spirits of pure men and women. We worship the promotion of all good, all that is very beautiful, shining, immortal, bright, everything that is good.”

The alleged author of this invocation to the God of Goodness and Beauty lived certainly as early as 1200 B.C., some think 2000 B.C.: the hymn itself was collected into its present canon during the fourth century of this era, but, like the British Triads and all other Bardic lore, it is supposed to have been long orally preserved. It is perfectly legitimate to compare the literature of Ancient Persia with that of Britain, for the religious systems of the two countries were admittedly almost identical; and until recently Persia was the most generally accepted cradle of the Aryans.

It is impossible to suppose that the earliest compilers and transcribers of the British Triads had access to the MSS. of the hymn just quoted; yet while Persian tradition records, “We worship the promotion of all good, all that is very beautiful, shining, immortal, bright, everything that is good,” the British Bards seemingly worshipped the promotion of all good, in fact the Three Ultimate Objects of Bardism are on record as being “to reform morals and customs; to secure peace and praise everything that is good and excellent”.

British literature, British folklore, and British custom, all alike refute Max Müller’s preposterous supposition that the equation God = Good is “far too modern, too abstract, too Christian,” and there is manifestly some evidence in favour of the probability that Giant Albion was worshipped as the Holy Good and the All Good. There is no known tribe of savages that is destitute of some code of ethics, and it is seemingly a world-wide paradox that spiritual wisdom and low civilisation can, and often do, exist concurrently. Side by side with the childish notions of modern savages, one finds, not infrequently, what Andrew Lang termed, “astonishing metaphysical hymns about the first stirrings of light in darkness, of becoming, of being, which remind us of Hegel and Heraclitus”.[192] The sacred Books of Christendom emanated from one of the crudest and least cultivated of all the subject races of the Roman Empire. It is self-evident that the Hebrews were a predatory and semi-savage tribe who conceived their Divinity as vengeful, cursing, swearing, vomiting, his fury coming up into his face, and his nostrils smoking; nevertheless, as in the Psalms and elsewhere, are some of the noblest and most lofty conceptions of Holiness and Beauty.

As a remarkable instance of this seeming universal paradox, one may refer to Micah, a Hebrew, whose work first appeared in writing about 300 b.c. There is in Micah some of the best philosophy ever penned, yet the status of the tribe among whom he lived and to whom he addressed himself, was barbarous and brutal. Of this, an example is found in Chapter III, where the prophet writes: “And I said, Hear I pray you, O heads of Jacob and ye princes of the house of Israel; Is it not for you to know judgement? who hate the good, and love the evil; who pluck off their skin off them, and their flesh from off their bones; who also eat the flesh of my people, and flay their skin from off them, and they break their bones, and chop them in pieces, as for the pot, and as flesh within the caldron”.

As a parallel to this cannibalism it is thus quite conceivable that while some of the MacAlpines were lauding Albani, others were larding their weaker brethren for the laird’s table: but the whole trend of Alban custom and Alban literature renders the supposition unlikely. There is extant a British Triad inculcating the three maxims for good health as “cheerfulness, temperance, and early rising”. There is another enunciating the three cares that should occupy the mind of every man as: “To worship God, to avoid injuring any one, and to act justly towards every living thing”. The latter of these is curiously reminiscent of Micah’s Triadic utterance: “He hath showed thee O man what is good, and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy, and walk humbly with God”.

The British Chronicles relate that when Brute and his companions reached these shores the island was then uninhabited, save only for a few giants. Seemingly these natives did not oppose the Trojan landing, for the story runs that “Nought gave Corineus (Brute’s second-in-command) greater pleasure than to wrestle with the giants of whom there was a greater plenty in Cornwall than elsewhere”. On a certain day, however, the existing relations ceased, owing to an obnoxious native named Goemagog, who, accompanied by a score of companions, interrupted a sacred function which the Trojans were holding. From the recommendations of the pious Æneas, it would seem that the Trojans had suffered similarly in other directions:—

The graceless Goemagog and his ruffianly crew did passing cruel slaughter on the British, howbeit at the last the Britons, rallying from all quarters, prevailed against them and slew all save only Goemagog. Him, Brute had ordered to be kept alive as he was minded to see a wrestling bout betwixt him and Corineus, “who was beyond measure keen to match himself against such a monster”. Corineus, all agog and o’erjoyed at the sporting prospect, girded himself for the encounter, and flinging away his arms challenged Goemagog to a bout at wrestling. After “making the very air quake with their breathless gaspings,” the match ended by Goemagog being lifted bodily into the air, carried to the edge of the cliff, and heaved over.[194]

One cannot read Homer without realising that this alleged incident was in closest accord with the habits and probabilities of the time. Alike among the Greeks and the Trojans wrestling was as popular and soul-absorbing a pastime as it is to-day, or was until yesterday, among Cornishmen:—

The untoward Goemagog was probably one of an elementary big-boned tribe whose divinities were Gog and Magog, and there are distinct traces, at any rate, of Magog in Ireland. According to De Jubainville, “the various races that have successively inhabited Ireland trace themselves back to common ancestors descended from Magog or Gomer, son of Japhet, so that the Irish genealogy traditions are in perfect harmony with those of the Bible”.[196]

The figures of Gog and Magog used until recently to be cut into the slope of Plymouth Hoe: in Cambridgeshire, are the Gogmagog hills; at the extremity of Land’s End are two rocks known respectively as Gog and Magog, and there is an unfavourable allusion to the same twain in Revelation.[197] Gog and Magog are the “protectors” of London, and at civic festivals their images used with pomp and circumstance to be paraded through the City.

In some parts of Europe the civic giants were represented as being eight in number, and the Christian Clergy inherited with their office the incongruous duty of keeping them in good order. One of these ceremonials is described by an eye-witness writing in 1809, who tells us that in Valencia no procession of however little importance took place, without being preceded by eight statues of giants of a prodigious height. “Four of them represented the four quarters of the world, and the other four their husbands. Their heads were made of paste-board, and of an enormous size, frizzled and dressed in the fashion. Men, covered with drapery falling on the ground, carried them at the head of the procession, making them dance, jump, bow, turn, and twist about. The people paid more attention to these gesticulations than to the religious ceremony which followed them. The existence of the giants was deemed of sufficient importance to require attention as to the means of perpetuating them; consequently there was a considerable foundation in Valencia for their support. They had a house belonging to them where they were deposited. Two benefices were particularly founded in honour of them; and it was the duty of the Ecclesiastics who possessed these benefices to take care of them and of their ornaments, particular revenues being assigned for the expense of their toilettes.”[198]

Four pairs of elemental gods were similarly worshipped in Egypt, each pair male and female, and these eight primeval Beings were known as the Ogdoad or Octet. In Scotland, the Earth Goddess who is said to have existed “from the long eternity of the world,” is sometimes described as being the chief of eight “big old women,” at other times as “a great big old wife,” and with this untoward Hag we may equate the English “Awd Goggie” who was supposed to guard orchards.

The London figures of Gog and Magog—constructed of wicker work—had movable eyes which, to the great joy of the populace, were caused to roll or goggle as the images were perambulated. Skeat thinks the word gog is “of imitative origin,” but it is more likely that goggle was originally Gog oeuil or Gog Eye. The Irish and Gaelic for Goggle-eyed is gogshuileach, which the authorities refer to gog, “to move slightly” and suil, “an eye”.

At Gigglewick or Giggles-fort in Yorkshire (anciently Deira), there is a celebrated well of which the famed peculiarity is its eightfold flow, and it was of this Giggle Well that Drayton wrote in Polyolbion:—

In Cornwall at St. Isseys there used to be a sacred fountain known as St. Giggy’s Well, and as every stream and fount was the supposed home of jinns or genii it is possible that “Saint Giggy” may be equated with igigi, a word meaning in Babylonian mythology “the spirits of Heaven”. Jinn or Genie may also be connoted with a well near Launceston known as Joan’s Pitcher, the pitcher or vase whence the living waters were poured being a constantly recurring emblem of Mother Nature. It will be noticed in Fig. 25, p. 142, and in Fig. 256, p. 428.

The French have an expression a gogo (“origin unknown”) which means at one’s ease, or in clover; in old French gogue (“origin unknown”) meant pleasantry or fun, and goguenard a funmaker, or a jester. All these and kindred terms are probably correlate to the jovial Gogmagog carnivals and festivals. In London the house of Gog and Magog is the Guildhall in Aldermanbury: if born within the sound of the bells of the neighbouring St. Mary-le-Bow a Londoner is entitled to be termed a cockney; Cockayne is an old and romantic term for London, and it would therefore seem likely that among the cluster of detached duns which have now coalesced into London, the followers of Gog and Magog had a powerful and perhaps aboriginal footing. Around Londonderry in Ireland are the memories of a giant Gig na Gog, and at Launceston in Cornwall there used to be held a so-called Giglot Fair. At this a gogo festival every wench was at liberty to bestow the eye of favour, ogle, or look gougou, on any swain she fancied: whence obviously the whole village was agog, or full of eagerness, and much ogling, giggling, goggling, and gougounarderie.

In Cornwall googou means a cave, den, souterrain, or “giants holt,” and there are several reasons to suppose that the Gogmagogei or gougouites were troglodytes. “Son of Man,” said Ezekiel, “set thy face against Gog the Land of Magog,” and to judge from similar references, it would seem that the followers of Gogmagog were ill-favoured and unloved. Sir John Maundeville (1322) mentions in his Travels, that in the Land of Cathay towards Bucharia, and Upper India, the Jews of ten lineages “who are called Gog and Magog” were penned up in some mountains called Uber. This name Uber we shall show is probably the same as obr, whence the Generic term Hebrew, and it is said by Maundeville that between those mountains of Uber were enclosed twenty-two kings, with their people, that dwelt between the mountains of Scythia.[199] Josephus mentions that the Scythians were called Magogoei by the Greeks: by some authorities the Scythians are equated with the Scotti or Scots. There are still living in Cornwall the presumed descendants of what have been termed the “bedrock” race, and these people still exhibit in their physiognomies the traces of Oriental or Mongoloid blood. The early passage tombs of Japan are, according to Borlase, (W. C.), literally counterparts in plan and construction of those giant-graves or passage-tombs which are prevalent in Cornwall, and, speaking of the inhabitants of Cornwall and Wales, Dr. Beddoe says: “I think some reason can be shown for suspecting the existence of traces of some Mongoloid race in the modern population of Wales and the West of England. The most notable indication is the oblique or Chinese eye. I have noted thirty-four persons with oblique eyes. Their heads include a wide range of relative breadth. In other points the type stands out distinctly. The cheek bones are almost always broad: the brows oblique, in the same direction as the eyes; the chin as a rule narrow and angular; the nose often concave and flat, seldom arched; and the mouth rather inclined to be prominent.... The iris is usually hazel or brown, and the hair straight, dark-brown, black, or reddish.” “It is,” he adds, “especially in Cornwall that this type is common.”

Our British Giants, Gog, Magog, Termagol, and the rest of the terrible tribe, sprang, according to Scottish myth, from the thirty-three daughters of Diocletian, a King of Syria, or Tyria. These thirty-three primeval women drifted in a ship to Britain, then uninhabited, where they lived in solitude, until an order of demons becoming enamoured of them, took them to wife and begot a race of giants. Anthropology and tradition thus alike refer the Magogoei to Syria, or Phœnicia, and there would seem to be numerous indications that between these people and the ethereal, romantic, and artistic Cretans there existed a racial, integral, antipathy.

The Gogonians may be connoted with the troglodyte Ciconians, or Cyclops, to whom Homer so frequently and unfavourably alludes, and the one-eyed Polyphemus of Homer is obviously one and the same with Balor, the one-eyed giant of Tory Isle in Ireland. This Balor or Conann the Great, as he is sometimes termed, was cock-eyed, one terrible eye facing front, the other situated in the back of his head facing to the rear. To this day the fateful eye of Balor is the Evil Eye in Ireland, whence anyone is liable to be o’erwished. Ordinarily the dreadful optic was close shut, but at times his followers raised the eyelid with an iron hook, whereupon the glance of Baler’s eye blasted everything and everybody upon whom it fell. On one occasion the fateful eye of Balor is said to have overflowed with water, causing a disastrous flood; whence, perhaps, why a watery eye is termed a “Balory” or “Bleary eye”. That Balor was Gog may be inferred from Belerium or Bolerium, being the name applied by Ptolemy to the Land’s End district where still stand the rocks called Gog and Magog. That Balor was Polyphemus, the Cyclopean Ciconian, is probable from the fact that he was blinded by a spear driven into his ill-omened eyeball, precisely as Polyphemus was blinded by a blazing stake from Ulysses. Did the unlettered peasantry of Tory Isle derive this tale from Homer, or did Homer get the story from Ogygia, a supposedly ancient name for Erin? Not only is there an identity between the myth of Balor and Polyphemus, but, further—to quote D’arbois de Jubainville—“As fortune strangely has it the Irish name Balor has preserved its identity with Belleros, whom the poems of Homer and Hesiod and many other Greek writers have handed down to us in the compound Bellero-phontes, ‘slayer of Belleros’”.[200]

The author of The Odyssey describes the Ciconians as a race endued with superior powers, but as troubling their neighbours with frequent wrongs:—

Apparently some of these same lawless and predatory troglodytes were at one time dwelling in Wales, for a few miles further north of Aberystwith we find the place-name Goginan there applied to what is described as “a locality with extensive lead-mines”. The Welsh for cave is ogof, or gogof, and in Cornish not only gougou, but also ugo, or hugo meant the same: thus og and gog would seem to have been synonymous, a conclusion confirmed in many other directions, such as goggle and ogle. In Hebrew, og meant gigantic, mighty, or long-necked, which evidently is the same word as the British uch, German hoch, meaning high; whence, there is every probability that Og, or Gog, meant primarily High-High, or the Most High, and Magog, Mother Most High.

Okehampton, on the river Okement in Devonshire, held, like Launceston, a giglet fair, whence it is probable that Kigbear, the curious name of a hamlet in Okehampton, took its title from the same Kig as was responsible for giglet. There are numerous allusions in the classics to a Cyclopean rocking-stone known as the Gigonian Rock, but the site of this famous oracle is not known. Joshua refers to the coast of Og, King of Bashan, which was of the remnant of the giants, and that this obnoxious ruler was a troglodyte is manifest from his subterranean capital at Edrei, which is in existence to this day, and will be described later. That at one time Og was a god of the ocean may be deduced from the Rabbinic tradition that he walked by the side of the ark during the flood, and the waters came up only to his knees. From the measurements of Og’s famous bedstead it has been calculated that Og himself “was about nine feet high”.[201]

In Hebrew og is also understood to mean he who goes in a circle, which is suggestive of the Sun or Eye of Heaven. That the sun was the mighty, all-seeing ogler or goggler of the universe is a commonplace among the poets, whence Homer, alluding to the Artist of the World, observes: “His spy the Sun had told him all”. To the jocund Sun, which on Easter Day in particular was supposed to dance, may be referred the joyful gigues, or jigs of our ancestors. Gig also meant a boy’s top, and to the same source may be assigned whirligig. Shec is the Irish form of Jack, and gigans or gigantic are both radically Jack or Jock. In English, Jack means many things, from a big fresh-water fish to a jack pudding, and from Jack-in-Green to Jack-a-lanthorn: Skeat defines it, inter alia, as a saucy fellow, and in this sense it is the same as a young cock. Among the characteristics of Mercury—the Celtic Ogmius, or Hercules—were versatility, fascination, trickery, and cunning: sometimes he is described as “a mischievous young thief,” whence, perhaps, the old word cog, which meant cheating, or trickery.

The names Badcock, Adcock, Pocock, Bocock, Meacock, and Maycock, as also Cook and Cox, are all familiar ones in London or Cockayne. As Prof. Weekley observes, “many explanations have been given to the suffix cock, but I cannot say that any of them have convinced me. Both Cock and Cocking are found as early personal names.”[202] In London or Cockaigne, coachmen used to swear, “By Gog and Magog,”[203] and it may prove that “By Gosh” is like the surnames Goodge and Gooch, an inflection of Gog.

Cogs are the teeth or rays upon a wheel, and that cog meant sun or fire is implied by the word cook, i.e., baked or fried. Coch is Welsh for red, kakk was the Mayan for fire; in the same language kin meant sun and oc meant head, and among the Peruvians Mama Cocha was the title of the Mother of all Mankind. As coke is cooked coal, one might better refer that term to cook, than, as officially at present, to colk, the core of an apple. It is difficult to appreciate any marked resemblance between coke and the core of an apple.

The authorities connote Cockayne with cookery, and there is undoubtedly a connection, but the faerie Cockayne was more probably the Land of All Highest Ayne. The German for cock is hahn, and the cock with his jagged scarlet crest was pre-eminently the symbol of the good Shine. Chanticleer, the herald of the dawning sun, was the cognisance of Gaul, and East and West he symbolised the conqueror of darkness:—

The Cockayne of London, France, Spain and Portugal was a degraded equivalent to the Irish Tir nan Og, which means the Land of the Young, and the word Cockayne is probably cognate with Yokhanan, the Hebrew form of John, meaning literally, “God is gracious”. According to Wright, “the ancient Greeks had their Cockaigne. Athenæus has preserved some passages from lost poets of the best age of Grecian literature, where the burlesque on the golden age and earthly paradise of their mythology bears so striking a resemblance to our descriptions of Cockaigne, that we might almost think, did we not know it to be impossible, that in the one case whole lines had been translated from the other.”[204] The probability is, that the poems, like all ancient literature, were long orally preserved by the bards of the two peoples.

In Irish mythology, it is said of Anu, the Great Mother, that well she used to cherish the circle of the Gods; in England Ked or Kerid was “the Great Cherisher,” and her symbol as being perpetual love was, with great propriety, that ideal mother, the hen. The word hen, according to Skeat, is from the “Anglo-Saxon hana, a cock,” literally “a singer from his crowing”. But a crowing hen is notoriously a freak and an abomination.

In Lancashire there is a place called Ainsworth or Cockey: in Yorkshire there is a river Cock, and near Biggleswade is a place named Cockayne Hatley: the surname Cockayne is attributed to a village in Durham named Coken. In Northumberland is a river Cocket or Coquet, and in this district in the parish of St. John Lee is Cocklaw. Cockshott is an eminence in Cumberland and Cocks Tor—whereon are stone circles and stone rows—is a commanding height in Devon. In Worcestershire is Cokehill, and it is not improbable that Great and Little Coggeshall in Essex, as also the Oxfordshire place-name Coggo, Cogges, or Coggs, are all referable to Gog.

In Northamptonshire is a place known as Cogenhoe or Cooknoe, and in seemingly all directions Cook, Cock, and Gog will be found to be synonymous. The place-name Cocknage is officially interpreted as having meant “hatch, half-door, or wicket gate of the cock,” but this is not very convincing, for no cock is likely to have had sufficient prestige to name a place. The Cornish place-name Cogynos, is interpreted as “cuckoo in the moor,” but cuckoos are sylvan rather than moorland birds: the word cuckoo, nevertheless, may imply that this bird was connected with Gog, for the Welsh for cuckoo is cog, and in Scotland the cuckoo is known as a gauk or gowk. These terms, as also the Cornish guckaw, may be decayed forms of the Latin cuculus, Greek kokkuz, or there are equal chances that they are more primitive. In Cornwall, on 28th April, there used to be held a so-called Cuckoo Feast.[205]

There is an English river Cocker: a cocker was a prize fighter, and it is possible that the expression, “not according to cocker,” may contain an allusion older than popularly supposed. There are rivers named Ock, both in Berks and Devon, and at Derby there is an Ockbrook: there is an Ogwell in Devon, a river Ogmore in Glamorganshire, and a river Ogwen in Carnarvon. In Wiltshire is an Ogbourne or river Og, and on the Wiltshire Avon there is a prehistoric British camp called Ogbury. This edifice may be described as gigantic for it covers an area of 62 acres, is upwards of a mile in circuit, and has a rampart 30 to 33 feet high.[206] The number 33 occurred in connection with the original British giants, said to be 33 in number, and we shall meet with 30 or 33 frequently hereafter. Ogre (of unknown origin), meaning a giant, may be connoted with the Iberian ogro, and with haugr the Icelandic word for hill, with which etymologers connect the adjective huge: the old Gaulish for a hill was hoge or hogue,[207] and the probability would seem to be that Og and huge were originally the same term. There is a huge earthwork at Uig in Scotland, the walls of which, like those at Ogbury in Wiltshire, measure 30 feet in height.

The surname Hogg does not necessarily imply a swinish personality: more probably the original Hoggs were like the Haigs, followers of the Hagman, who was commemorated in Scotland during the Hogmanay festivities. In Turkey aga means lord or chief officer, and in Greece hagia means holy, whence the festival of Hogmanay has been assumed to be a corruption of the Greek words hagia mene, in holy month. If this were so it would be interesting to know how these Greek terms reached Scotland, but, as a matter of fact, Hogmanay does not last a month: at the outside it was a fête of three weeks, and more particularly three nights.

During Hogmanay it was customary for youths to go in procession from house to house singing chants of heroic origin:—

The King Henry here mentioned is probably not one of the Tudors, but the more primitive Nick or Old Harry, and the percipient divine who thundered against the popular festival: “Sirs, do you know what Hagmane signifies? It is the Devil be in the house! That’s the meaning of its Hebrew original,” had undoubtedly good grounds for his denunciation.

But the still more original meaning of Hagman was in all probability the uchman, or high man, or giant man. According to Hellenic mythology Hercules was the son of Jove and Alcmena: the name Alcmena is apparently the feminine form of All or Holy Acmen—whence indirectly the word acumen or “sharp mind”—the two forms mena and man seemingly figure in Scotch custom as Hogmanay, and as the Hagman of “Sing Hagman heigh!”[209]

One of the great Roman roads of Britain is known as Akeman Street, and as it happens that this prehistoric highway passes Bath it has been gravely suggested that it derived its title from the gouty, aching men who limped along to Bath to take the waters. But as man is the same word as main the word Akeman Street resolves more reasonably into High Main Street, which is precisely what it was.

In some parts of England fairy-rings are known as Hag-tracks, whence seemingly fairies were sometimes known as hags: at Lough Crew in Ireland, there is a cabalistically-decorated stone throne known as “the Hag’s Chair”.

In Mid-Wales ague is known as y wrach, which means the hag or the old hag; the notion being that ague (and all aches?) were smitings of the ugly old Hag, or “awd Goggie”. Various indications seem to point to the conclusion that the aboriginal “bedrock” Og or Gog was a Tyrian or Turanian Deity, and that in the eyes of the Hellenes and Trojans anything to do with Og was ugly, i.e., Ug-like and ugsome.

In the county of Fife the last night of the dying year used to be known as Singin-e’en, a designation which is connected with the carols sung on that occasion. But Singin may, and in all probability did, mean Sinjohn, for the Celtic Geon or giant was Ogmius the Mighty Muse, and chanting was attributed to this world-enchanter. As already seen he was pictured leading the children of men tongue-tied by his eloquence, and it is not improbable that Ogmius is equivalent to Mighty Muse, for muse in Greek is mousa. According to Assyrian mythology the God of wondrous and enchanting Wisdom rose daily from the sea and was named Oannes—obviously a Hellenised form of John or Yan. Among the Aryan nations an meant mind, and this term is clearly responsible for inane or without ane. The dictionaries attribute inane to a “root unknown,” but the same root is at the base of anima, the soul, whence animate or living. Oannes, who was evidently the Great Acumen or Almighty Mind is said to have emerged daily from the ocean in order to instruct mankind, and he may be connoted with the Hebridian sea-god Shony. In the image of the benevolent Oannes reproduced overleaf it will be noted he is crowned with the cross of Allbein or All Well.

In Brittany there are legends of a sea-maid of enchanting song, and wondrous acumen named Mary Morgan, and this incantatrice corresponds to Morgan le fay or Morgiana. The Welsh for Mary is Fair, and the fairies of Celtic countries were known as the Mairies,[210] whence “Mary Morgan” was no doubt “Fairy Morgan”. In Celtic mor or mawr also meant big, whence Morgan may be equated with big gan and Morgiana with either Big Jane or Fairy Giana. This fairy Big gyne or Big woman was known alternatively in the East as Merjan Banou and in Italy as Fata or Maga.

It is authoritatively assumed that the word cogitate is from co “together” and agere “to drive,” but “driving together” is not cogitation. The root cog which occurs in cogent, cogitate, cognisance, and cognition is more probably an implication that Gog like Oannes was deemed to be the Lord of the Deep wisdom: Gog, in fact, stands to Oannes or Yan in the same relation as Jack stands to John: the one is seemingly a synonym for the other.

Figs. 46 and 47.—From Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (Baring-Gould).

The word magic implies a connection with Maga or Magog: in Greek mega means great, and the combined idea of great and wise is extended into magus, magister, and magician. The Latin magnus and magna are respectively Mag Unus and Mag Una: Mogounus was one of the titles applied to St. Patrick, and it was also a sobriquet of the Celtic Sun God.[211]

One of the stories of the Wandering Jew represents him as benevolently assisting a weaver named Kokot to discover treasure, and in an Icelandic legend of the same Wanderer he is entitled Magus. On Magus being interrogated as to his name he replied that he was called “Vidforull,” which looks curiously like “Feed for all,” or “Food for all”. The story relates that Magus possessed the marvellous capability of periodically casting his skin, and of becoming on each occasion younger than before. The first time he accomplished this magic feat he was 330 years old—a significant age—and in face of an astonished audience he gave a repetition of the wonderful performance. Baring his head and stroking himself all over the body, he rolled together the skin he was in and lay down before a staff or post muttering to himself: “Away with age, that I may have my desire”. After lying awhile motionless he suddenly worked himself head foremost into the post, which thereupon closed over him and became again solid. Soon, however, the bemazed onlookers heard a great noise in the post, which began gradually to bulge at one end, and after a few convulsive movements the feet of Magus appeared, followed in due course by the rest of his body. After this bewildering feat Magus lay for awhile as though dead, but when the beholders were least expecting it he sprang suddenly up, rolled the skin from off his head, saluted the King, and behold “they saw that he was no other than a beardless youth and fair faced”.[212]

This magic change is not only suggestive of the two-faced Janus, but also of Aeon, one of the British titles for the Sun:—

Commenting on this passage Owen Morgan observes: “The expression ‘cast his skin’ alluded to the idea that the Sun of the old year had his body destroyed in the heavens at noon on each 20th December, by the Power of Darkness”.[213] The Gnostics considered there were thirty divine Powers or Rulers, corresponding obviously to the days of the month, and these Powers they termed Aeons: among the Greeks aeon meant an enormously vast tract of time; in Welsh Ion means Leader or Lord.

The story of Vidforull or Magus gains in interest in view of his mystic age of 330, or ten times 33, and the emerging-ex-post incident may have some connection with the nomenclature of the flame-flowered staff or post now termed a Hollyhock, or Holy Hock. One of the miracles attributed to St. Kit—a miracle which we are told was the means of converting eight thousand men to Christianity—was the budding of his staff. “Christopher set his staff in the earth, and when he arose on the morn he found his staff like a palmier bearing flowers, leaves, and dates.” Kit or Kate is the same word as “Kaad,” and there is a serpent represented on the post or staff at St. Alban’s Kaadman, figured on p. 110. The serpent was universally the symbol of subtlety and deep wisdom, and among the Celts it was, because it periodically sloughed its skin, regarded as the emblem of regeneration and rejuvenescence.[214]

The Hawk, which is the remaining symbol of the Kaadman (Fig. 16), was the uch or high-flying bird, which soared sun-wise and hovered overworld eyeing or ogling the below with penetrating and all-seeing vision. It is difficult to see any rational connection between hawk and heave—a connection which for some mysterious reason the authorities connote—but the hawk was unquestionably an emblem of the Most High. A hawker is a harokel, Hercules, or merchant, and with Maga may be connoted magazine, which means storehouse. In Celtic mako or maga means “I feed”; in Welsh magu means breed, and to nurse; in Welsh magad is brood. It is to this root that obviously may be assigned the Gaelic Mac or Mc, which means “breed of” or “children of”. In the Isle of Man, the inhabitants claimed to be descended from the fairies, whence perhaps the MacAuliffes of Albany originally claimed to be children of the Elf. Among the Berbers of Africa Mac has precisely the same meaning as among the Gaels, and among the Tudas of India mag also means children of. “Surely after this,” says a commentator, “the McPhersons and McGregors of our Highland glens need not hesitate to claim as Scotch cousins the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula.”[215]

There are many tales current in Cornwall of a famous witch known as “Maggie Figgie,” and a particular rock on one of the most impressive headlands of the Duchy is entitled “Maggy Figgie’s Chair”. Here, it is said, Maggie was wont to seat herself when calling to her aid the spirits of the storm, and upon this dizzy height she swung to and fro as the storms far below rolled in from the Atlantic. Just as Maggie is radically make, so is figgy related to fake. The many-seeded fica or fig was the symbol of the Mother of Millions, and the same root is responsible for fecund, and probably for phooka, which is the Irish for Fairy or Elf. Feckless means without resource, shiftless, incompetent, and incapable; vague means wandering, and the word vagabond is probably due to the beneficent phooka or Wanderer. That Pan was not only a hill and wood deity, but also a sea-vagabond is implied by the invocation:—

In Northumberland among the Fern Islands is a rock known as the Megstone, and in Westmorland is the famous megalithic monument, known as Long Meg and her Daughters. The daughters were here represented by seventy-two stones placed in a circle (there are now only sixty-seven), and Long Meg herself, who is said to have been the last of the Titans, is identified with an outstanding rock, which is recorded as measuring 18 feet in height, and 15 feet in circumference. The monument is situated on what is called The Maiden Way, and the measurement 15 is therefore significant, for the number 15 was peculiarly the Maiden’s number, and “when she was fifteen years of age” is almost a standard formula in the lives of the Saints. We shall meet with fifteen in connection with the Virgin Mary, who, we shall note, was reputed to have lived to the age of seventy-two. The circle of “the Merry Maidens” near St. Just is 72 feet in diameter, and the Nine Maidens near Penzance is also 72 feet in diameter.[217] Christ the Corner Stone is said to have had seventy-two disciples, and the seventy-two stones of Long Meg’s circle have probably some relation to the seventy-two dodecans into which the Chaldean and Egyptian Zodiac was divided. In connection with magu, the Welsh for nurse, it is worth noting that St. Margaret, or St. Meg, is said to have been delivered to a nurse to be kept, but on a certain day, when she was fifteen years of age and kept the sheep of her nurse, her circumstances took a sudden change for the worse.

Fig. 48.—Long Meg and her Daughters. From Our Ancient Monuments (Kains-Jackson).

The Parthenon, or Maiden’s House, at Athens was supported by fifteen pairs of columns; the number eighteen is twice nine, and in all probability stood for the divine twain, Meg and Mike, Michal and St. Michael. The duality of St. Michael which is portrayed in Fig. 200, page 363, was no doubt also symbolised by the two rocks, which, according to The Golden Legend, Michael removed and replaced by a single piece of stone of marble. A second apparition recorded of St. Michael states that the saint stood on a stone of marble, and anon, because the people had great penury and need of water, there flowed out so much water that unto this day they be sustained by the benefit thereof.[218] This is evidently the same miracle as that illustrated in Fig. 21, on page 130, and in this connection it is noticeable that in the neighbourhood of Mickleham (Surrey) are Margery Hall, Mogadur, and Mug’s well.

Meg is a primitive form of Margaret, and in Art St. Margaret is always represented as the counterpart of St. Michael with a vanquished dragon at her feet. To account for this emblem the hagiographers relate that St. Margaret was swallowed by a dragon, but that the cross which she happened to be holding caused the creature to burst, whereupon St. Margaret emerged from its stomach unscathed.

There is a counterpart to Maggie Figgie’s chair at St. Michael’s Mount, but in the latter case “Kader Migell” was a hallowed site. “Who knows not Mighell’s Mount and chair, the pilgrims Holy vaunt?” According to Carew this original “chair,” outside the castle, was a bad seat in a craggy place, somewhat dangerous of access.

St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall used to be known as Dinsul, which the authorities suggest was dun sol, or the Sun Hill. Very probably this was so, and there is an equal probability that it meant also din seul, i.e., the hill of Le Seul or La Seule, the Solitary or Alone.[219] In the Old Testament Michal figures as the daughter of King Saul, which is curious in view of St. Michael’s Mount being named Dinseul. St. Michael’s in Brittany and St. Michael’s elsewhere are dedicated ad duas tumbas, which means the two tumuli or tumps.[220] At St. Albans, the sacred processions started from two tumps or toot hills, and it may be suggested these symbolised the two teats of the primeval parent. In Ireland at Killarney are two mounts now termed The Paps, but originally known as The Paps of Anu, i.e., the Irish Magna Mater. Similar “Paps” are common in other parts of Britain, and there is little doubt that mam, the Welsh for a gently rising hill, has an intimate relation to mammal or teat. The Toothills were where tout or all congregated together in convocation, and in all probability every toot hill originally represented the teat of Tad, or Dad, the Celtic tata, or daddy. Toot hills are alternatively known as moot hills, and this latter term may be connoted with maeth, the Welsh for nourishment: near Sunderland are two round-topped rocks named Maiden Paps.

Mickleham in Surrey is situated at the base of Tot Hill: Tothill Street at Westminster marks the locality of an historic toot hill standing in Tothill Fields, and at Westminster the memory of St. Margaret has seemingly survived in dual form—as the ecclesiastical St. Margaret whose church nestles up against the Abbey of St. Peter, and as the popular giantess Long Meg. This celebrated heroine “did not only pass all the rest of her country in the length of her proportion, but every limbe was so fit to her talnesse that she seemed the picture and shape of some tall man cast in a woman mould”. In times gone by a “huge” stone in the cloisters of Westminster used to be pointed out to visitors as the very gravestone of Long Meg,[221] and this “long, large, and entire” piece of rock may be connoted with the Megstone of the Fern Islands and the Long Meg of Cumberland. In 1635 there was published The Life of Long Meg of Westminster, containing the mad merry pranks she played in her lifetime, not only in performing sundry quarrels with divers ruffians about London, but also how valiantly she behaved herself in the “Warres of Bolloinge”.

This allusion to Bolloinge suggests that the chivalrous and intrepid Long Meg was famous at Bulloigne, and that the name of that place is cognate with Bellona, the Goddess of War. That the valiant St. Margaret was as unconquerable as Micah was invictus, may be judged from the sacred legend that the devil once appeared before her in the likeness of a man, whereupon, after a short parley, “she caught him by the head and threw him to the ground, and set her right foot on his neck saying: ‘Lie still, thou fiend, under the feet of a woman’. The devil then cried: ‘O Blessed Margaret, I am overcome’”.

As St. Michael was the Leader of All Angels, so St. Margaret was the Mother of All Children, and the circle of Long Meg was evidently a mighty delineation of the Marguerite, Marigold, or Daisy. The Celts, with their exquisite imagination, figured the daisy or marguerite as the symbol of innocence and the newly-born. There is a Celtic legend to the effect that every unborn babe taken from earth becomes a spirit which scatters down upon the earth some new and lovely flower to cheer its parents. “We have seen,” runs an Irish tale, “the infant you regret reclining on a light mist; it approached us, and shed on our fields a harvest of new flowers. Look, oh, Malvina! among these flowers we distinguish one with a golden disc surrounded by silver leaves: a sweet tinge of crimson adorns its delicate rays; waved by a gentle wind we might call it a little infant playing in a green meadow, and the flower of thy bosom has given a new flower to the hills of Cromla. Since that day the daughters of Morven have consecrated the Daisy to infancy. It is called the flower of innocence; the flower of the new-born.”[222]

The Scotch form of Margaret is Maisie, and from the word muggy, meaning a warm, light mist, it would seem that Maisie or Maggy was the divinity of mists and moisture. It was widely supposed that the mists of Mother Earth, commingling with the beams of the Father Sun, were together the source of all juvenescence and life. According to Owen Morgan, “Ked’s influence from below was supposed to be exercised by exhalations, the breathings as it were of the Great Mother,”[223] and it is still a British belief that—

Maggie or Maisie being thus probably the Maid of the Mist, or Mistress of the Moisture, and there being no known etymology for fog, the unpopular Maggie Figgie who sat in her chair charming the spirits of the ocean, was perhaps the ill-omened Maggie Foggy.

It is a world-wide characteristic of the Earth Mother to appear anon as a baleful hag, anon as a lovely maid, and in all probability to “Maid Margaret that was so meeke and milde,” may be attributed the adjective meek. In London an ass, in Cockney parlance, is a moke; Christ was said to ride upon an ass as symbolic of his meekness, and as already noted Christ by the Gnostics was represented as ass-headed. The worship of the Golden Ass persisted in Europe until a comparatively late period; a jenny is a female moke, a jackass is the masculine of Jenny.

At St. Michael’s Mount in Cornwall is a Jack the Giant-Killer’s Well. The French name Michelet means “little Michael,” and that Great Michael was Cain the Wandering One is implied by the tradition that St. Kayne visited St. Michael’s Mount, and conferred certain powers upon the stone seat or Kader Mighel situated so dizzily amid the crags. The orthodoxy of this St. Kayne—who appears again at Keynsham—was evidently more than suspect, and according to Norden “this Kayne is said to be a woman-saynte, but it better resembleth kayne, the devil who had the shape of a man”. At Keynsham St. Kayne is popularly supposed to have turned serpents into stone, and there is no doubt that his or her name was intimately associated with the serpent. The Celtic names Kean and Kenny are translated to mean vast, but in Cornish ken meant pity, and ken, cunning, and canny all imply knowledge and deep wisdom. In Welsh, cain means sun and also fair; candere, to glow, is, of course, connected with candescent, candid, and candour.

The seat on St. Michael’s Tower is the counterpart to Maggie Figgie’s Chair, which is near the village of St. Levan, and in the previous chapter it was seen that Levan or Elvan was a synonym for elban or Alban. The family name at St. Michael’s Mount is St. Levan, and the usual abode of Maggie Figgie is assigned to the adjacent village of St. Levan. The chief fact recorded of St. Levan is his cell shown at Bodellen, near which is his seat—a rock split in two. He is also associated with a chad fish, entitled “chuck child,” to account for which a ridiculous story has been concocted to the effect that St. Levan once caught a chad, which choked a child. Like the cod the chad was perhaps so named because of its amazing fecundity, and the term chuck child was probably once Jack, the child Michael, or the giant-killing Jack, whose well stands on St. Michael’s Mount. It is not improbable that “chuck,” like Jack, is an inflexion of Gog, and that it is an almost pure survival of the British uch uch or high high. The great festival of Gog and Magog in Cockaigne was unquestionably on Lord Mayor’s Show Day, and this used originally to fall—or rather the Lord Mayor was usually chosen—on Michaelmas Day.[224]

In addition to associating St. Levan with the chad or “chuck child,” legend also connects St. Levan with a woman named Johanna. W. C. Borlase observes that Carew calls him St. Siluan, and that this form is still retained in the euphonious name of an estate Selena. Selena was a title under which the Mother of Night, the consort of Cain, the Man in the Moon, was worshipped by the Greeks. With regard to the Sel of Selena or Silenus it will be seen as we proceed that silly, Seeley, etc., did not imply idiocy, but that silly, as in Scotland where it meant holy, and as in the German selig, primarily meant innocent. We speak to-day of “silly sheep”; in the Middle Ages Christ was termed the silly Babe, and the county of Suffolk still vaunts itself as Silly Suffolk. Silene or Selina would thus imply the Innocent or Holy Una: her counterpart Silenus was usually represented as a jovial, genial, and merry patriarch. Selenus, like Janus, was apparently the Old Father Christmas, and Selena or Cynthia seemingly the maiden Cain, Kayne, St. Kenna, or Jana.

At Treleven, the tre or the Home of Leven, there is a Lady’s Well said to possess exceptional healing properties, and the power of conferring great vigour and might to the constitution. Levin in Old English meant the lightning flash, Levant was the uprising, the Orient, or the East, and levante is Italian for the wind. According to Etruscan mythology, there were eleven thunderbolts or levins wielded by Nine Great Gods,[225] and that the number eleven was associated with Long Meg of Westmorland, would appear from the fact that her circle measured “about 1100 feet in circumference”. With this measurement may be connoted the British camp on Herefordshire Beacon, “which takes the form of an irregular oval 1100 yards in length,”[226] and that 1100 implied some special sanctity may be gathered from the bardic lines—

The more usually assumed age of Jesus, i.e., thirty-three, may be connoted with the persistent thirty-threes elsewhere considered. The diameter of the circle of Long Meg and her Daughters is stated as 330 feet,[228] a measurement which seemingly has some relation to the 330 years of age assigned to Magus when he accomplished his magic change.

Christianity has retained the memory of a St. Ursula and 11,000 virgins, but it has been a puzzle to hagiographers to account for the “11” or 11,000 so persistently associated with her. In his essay on the legend, Baring-Gould refers to it as being “generated out of worse than nothing,” lamenting this and kindred stories. “Alas! too often they are but apples of Sodom, fair-cheeked, but containing the dust and ashes of heathenism”. But the story of St. Ursula is essentially beautiful; moreover, it is essentially British. The Golden Legend tells us that Ursula was a British princess, and Cornwall claims, with a probability of right, that she was Cornish. Her mother was named Daria, her cousin Adrian, and there is a clear memory of the Darian, Adrian, Droian, or Trojan games perpetrated in the incident which The Golden Legend thus records: “By the counsel of the Queen the Virgins were gathered together from diverse realms, and she was leader of them, and at the last she suffered martyrdom with them. And then the condition made, all things were made ready. Then the Queen shewed her counsel to the Knights of her Company, and made them all to swear this new chivalry, and then began they to make diverse plays and games of battle as to run here and there, and feigned many manners of plays. And for all that they left not their purpose, and sometimes they returned from this play at midday, and sometimes unnethe at evensong time. And the barons and great lords assembled them to see the fair games and disports, and all had joy and pleasure in beholding them, and also marvel.”[229]

From this account it would appear that twice a day the followers of St. Ursula joyed themselves and the onlookers by a sacred ballet, which no doubt symbolised in its convolutions the ethereal Harmony and the ordered movements of the Stars. Her consort’s name is given as Ethereus, whence Ursula herself must have been Etherea, the Ethereal maid, conceived in all likelihood at the idyllic island Doliche, Idea, Aeria, Candia, or Crete. The name Ursula means bear, and it was supposed that around the seven stars of Arcturus, the immovable Great Bear, all the lesser stars wheeled in an everlasting procession. Of this giant’s wheel or marguerite, Margaret, or Peggie, was seemingly deemed to be the axle, peg, or Golden Eye, and this idea apparently underlies Homer:—

Having quitted Britain, St. Ursula and her train of 11,000 maidens underwent various vicissitudes. Eventually circumstances took them to Cologne, whereupon, to quote The Golden Legend, “When the Huns saw them they began to run upon them with a great cry and araged like wolves on sheep, and slew all this great multitude”.[230] From time to time the monks of Cologne have unearthed large deposits of children’s bones which have piously been claimed to be authentic relics of the 11,000 martyrs.

In China and Japan the Great Mother is represented pouring forth the bubbling waters of creation from a vase, and in every bubble is depicted a small babe. This Goddess Kwanyon, known as the eleven faced and thousand handed, is represented at the temple of San-ju-San-gen-do by 33,333 images, and her name resolves, as will be seen, into Queen Yon. The name China, French Chine, is John, and Japon or Yapon, the land of the Rising Sun, whose cognisance is the Marguerite or Golden Daisy, whose priests are termed bonzes, and whose national cry is banzai, is radically the same as the British Eubonia or Hobany, La Dame Abonde, the Giver of Abundance.

Among the megalithic remains in Brittany there have been found ornaments of jade, a material which, until recently, was supposed not to exist except in China or Japan. At Carnac, near the town of Elven, is the world-famed megalithic ruin now consisting of eleven rows of rocks, said to number “somewhere between nine and ten thousand”. As for many years these relics have been habitually broken up and used for building and road-making purposes, it is not unlikely that originally there were 1000 rocks in each of the eleven rows, totalling in all to the mystic 11,000. We shall see in a later chapter that Elphin stones were frequently eleven feet high: our word eleven is elf in Dutch, ellifir in Icelandic, ainlif or einlif in Gothic; but why this number should thus have been associated with the elves I am unable to decide, nor can I surmise why the authorities connote the word eleven with lika, which means “remaining,” or with linguere, which means “to leave”. In modern Etruria it is believed by the descendants of the Etruscans that the old Etruscan deities of the woods and fields still live in the world as spirits, and among the ancient Etrurians it was held that in the spiritual world the rich man and the poor man, the master and the servant, were all upon one level or all even.[231] Our word heaven is radically even and ange, the French for angel is the same word as onze meaning eleven.

The Golden Legend associates St. Maur with the Church of St. Maurice, where a blind man named Lieven is said to have sat for eleven years.[232] This marked connection between Maurice and eleven renders it probable that St. Maurice was the same King Maurus of Britain as was reputed to be the father of St. Ursula. The precise site of the monarch’s domain is not mentioned, but as Cornwall claims him the probabilities are that his seat was St. Levan. St. Maurus of the Church Calendar is reputed to have walked on the waters, and he is represented in Art as holding the weights and measures with which he is said to have made the correct allotment of bread and wine to his monks. These supposed “measures” are tantamount to St. Michael’s scales, which were sometimes assigned by Christianity to God the Father.

Fig. 49.—The Trinity in One Single God, holding the Balances and the Compasses. From an Italian Miniature of the XIII. Cent.
From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Ursula, as the daughter of Maurus, would have been Maura, and in face of the walking-on-the-sea story she was, no doubt, the Mairymaid, Merrowmaid, or Mermaid. Of St. Margaret we read that after her body had been broiled with burning brands, the blessed Virgin, without any hurt, issued out of the water. That St. Michael was associated in Art with a similar incident is evident from his miraculous preservation of a woman “wrapped in the floods of the sea”. St. Michael “kept this wife all whole, and she was delivered and childed among the waves in the middle of the sea”.[233] The Latin word mergere, i.e., Margery, means to sink into the sea, and emerge means to rise out of the sea. In Cornwall Margery Daw is elevated into Saint Margery Daw, and we may assume that her celebrated see-saw was the eternal merging and emerging of the Sun and Moon.

The Cornish pinnacle associated with Maggie Figgy of St. Levan may be connoted with a monolith overlooking Loch Leven and entitled, “Carlin Maggie” or “Witch Maggie”. This precipitous rock is precisely the same granite formation as is Maggie Figgy’s Chair, and legend says that it originated from Maggie “flyting” the devil who turned her into stone.[234] The Scotch Loch Leven is known locally as Loch Eleven, “because it is eleven miles round, is surrounded by eleven hills, is fed or drained by eleven streams, has eleven islands, is tenanted by eleven kinds of fish”.[235] It was also said to have been surrounded by the estates of eleven lairds.

At Dunfermline is St. Margaret’s Stone, “probably the last remnant of a Druid circle or a cromlech”.[236]

The megalithic Long Meg in Westmorland, standing by what is termed the “Maiden Way,” is in close proximity to Hunsonby. The Dutch for sun is zon, the German is sonne, whence Hunsonby in all probability was once deemed a by or abode of Hunson the ancient sun or zone.

The circle of Long Meg is an enceinte, i.e., an incinctus, circuit or enclosure; that St. Margaret of Christendom was the patroness of all enceinte women is obvious from Brand’s reference to St. Margaret’s Day, as a time “when all come to church that are, or hope to be, with child that year”. Sein is the French for bosom, and that Ursula of the 11,000 virgins was a personification of the Good Mother of the Universe or Bosom of the World may be further implied by the fact that she corresponds, according to Baring-Gould, with the Teutonic Holda. Holda or Holle (the Holy), is a gentle Lady, ever accompanied by the souls of maidens and children who are under her care. Surrounded by these bright-eyed followers she sits in a mountain of crystal, and comes forth at times to scatter the winter snow, vivify the spring earth, or bless the fruits of autumn.

The kindly Mother Holle was sometimes entitled Gode,[237] whence we may connote Margot, Marghet, or Marget with Big Good, or Big God. In Cornwall the Holly tree is termed Aunt Mary’s tree, which, I think, is equal to Aunt Maura’s tree, St. Maur being tantamount to St. Fairy or St. Big.

According to Sir John Rhys, Elen the Fair of Britain figures like St. Ursula as the leader of the heavenly virgins; St. Levan’s cell is shown at Bodellen in St. Levan, and as in Cornwall bod—as in Bodmin—meant abode of, one may resolve Bodellen into the abode of Ellen, and equate Ellen or Helen with Long Meg or St. Michael.

We may recognise St. Kayne in the Kendale-Lonsdale district of North Britain, where also in the neighbourhood of the rivers Ken or Can, and Lone or Lune is a maiden way and an Elen’s Causeway.[238] On the river Can is a famous waterfall at Levens, and in the same neighbourhood a seat of the ancient Machel family. In 1724 there existed at Winander Mere “the carcass of an ancient city,”[239] and it is not improbable that the ander of Winander is related to the divine Thorgut, whose effigy from a coin is reproduced in a later chapter (Fig 422, p. 675). Kendal or Candale has always been famous for its British “cottons and coarse cloaths”.

In Etruria and elsewhere good genii were represented as winged elves—old plural elven—and the word mouche implies that not only butterflies and moths, but also all winged flies were deemed to be the children of Michael or Michelet. According to Payne Knight, “The common Fly, being in its first stage of existence a principal agent in dissolving and dissipating all putrescent bodies, was adopted as an emblem of the Deity”.[240] Thus it would seem that not only the mouches, but likewise the maggots were deemed to be among Maggie’s millions, fighting like the Hosts of Michael against filth, decay, and death.

The connection between flies or mouches, and the elves or elven, seems to have been appreciated in the past, for The Golden Legend likens the lost souls of Heaven, i.e., the elven of popular opinion, to flies: “By the divine dispensation they descend oft unto us in earth, as like it hath been shewn to some holy men. They fly about us as flies, they be innumerable, and like flies they fill the air without number.”[241] Even to-day it is supposed that the spirits of holy wells appear occasionally in the form of flies, and there is little doubt that Beelzebub, the “Lord of flies,” alias Lucifer, whose name literally means “Light Bringer,” was once innocuous and beautiful.

In Cornwall flies seem to have been known as “Mother Margarets” (a fact of which I was unaware when equating mouche with Michelet or Meg), for according to Miss Courtney, “Three hundred fathoms below the ground at Cook’s Kitchen Mine, near Cambourne, swarms of flies may be heard buzzing, called by the men for some unknown reason ‘Mother Margarets’”.[242] Whether these subterranean “Mother Margarets” are peculiar to Cook’s Kitchen Mine, and whether Cook has any relation to Gog and to the Cocinians who in deep caverns dwelt, I am unable to trace.

That St. Michael was Lord of the Muckle and the Mickle, is supported in the statement that “he was prince of the synagogue of the Jews”.[243] The word synagogue is understood to have meant—a bringing together, a congregation; but this was evidently a secondary sense, due, perhaps, to the fact that the earliest synagogues were not held beneath a roof, but were congregations in sacred plains or hill-sides. It may reasonably be assumed that synagogues were prayer meetings in honour primarily of San Agog, St. Michael, or the Leader and Bringer together of all souls.

By the Greeks the sobriquet Megale was applied to Juno the pomegranate—holding Mother of Millions, and the bird pre-eminently sacred to Juno was the Goose. The cackling of Juno’s or Megale’s sacred geese saved the Capitol, and the Goose of Michaelmas Day is seemingly that same sacred bird. In Scotland St. Michael’s Day was associated with the payment of so-called cane geese, the word cane or kain here being supposed to be the Gaelic cean, which meant head, and its original sense, a duty paid by a tenant to his landlord in kind. The word due is the same as dieu, and the association of St. Keyne with Michael renders it probable that the cane goose was primarily a dieu offering or an offering to the Head King Cun, or Chun. Etymology would suggest that the cane goose was preferably a gander.

Even in the time of the Romans, the Goose was sacred in Britain, and East and West it seems to have been an emblem of the Unseen Origin. In India, Brahma, the Breath of Life, was represented riding on a goose, and by the Egyptians the Sun was supposed to be a Golden Egg laid by the primeval Goose. The little yellow egg or gooseberry was seemingly—judged by its otherwise inexplicable name—likened to the Golden Egg laid by Old Mother Goose. Among the symbols elsewhere dealt with were some representative of a goose from whose mouth a curious flame-like emission was emerging. I am still of the opinion that this was intended to depict the Fire or Breath of Life, and that the hissing habits of the Swan and Goose caused those birds to be elevated into the eminence as symbols of the Breath. The word goose or geese is radically ghost, which literally means spirit or breath; it is also the same as cause with which may be connoted chaos. According to Irish mythology that which existed at the beginning was Chaos, the Father of Darkness or Night, subsequently came the Earth who produced the mountains, and the sea, and the sky.[244]

Fig. 50.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).

In this emblem here reproduced Chaos or Abyssus is figured as the youthful apex of a primeval peak; at the base are geese, and the creatures midway are evidently seals. The seal is the silliest of gentle creatures, and being amphibious was probably the symbol of Celi, the Concealed One, whose name occurs so frequently in British Mythology. To seal one’s eyelids means to close them, and the blind old man named Lieven, who sat in the porch of St. Maurice’s for eleven years, may be connoted with Homer the blind and wandering old Bard, who dwelt upon the rocky islet of Chios, query chaos? Among the Latins Amor or Love was the oldest of the gods, being the child of Nox or Chaos: Love—“this senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid”[245]—is proverbially blind, and the words Amor, Amour, are probably not only Homer, but likewise St. Omer. The British (Welsh) form of Homer is Omyr: the authorship of Homer has always been a matter of perplexity, and the personality of the blind old bard of Chios will doubtless remain an enigma until such time as the individuality of “Old Moore,” “Aunt Judy,” and other pseudonyms is unravelled. It has always been the custom of story-tellers to attribute their legends to a fabulous origin, and the most famous collection of fairy-tales ever produced was published in France under the title Contes de la Mere Oie—“The Tales of Mother Goose”. Goose is radically the same word as gas, a term which was coined by a Belgian chemist in 1644 from the Greek chaos: the Irish for swan is geis, and all the geese tribe are gassy birds which gasp.

In a subsequent chapter we shall analyse goose into ag’oos, the Mighty Ooze, whence the ancients scientifically supposed all life to have originated, and shall equate ooze with hoes, the Welsh word for life, and with Ouse or Oise, a generic British river name. In huss, the German for goose, we may recognise the oose without its adjectival ‘g’.

With the Blind Old Bard of Chios may be connoted the Cornish longstone known as “The Old Man,”[246] or “The Fiddler,” also a second longstone known as “The Blind Fiddler”.[247] In because or by cause we pronounce cause “koz,” and in Slav fairy-tales as elsewhere there is frequent mention of an Enchanter entitled Kostey, whose strength and vitality lay in a monstrous egg. The name Kostey may be connoted with Cystennyns,[248] an old Cornish and Welsh form of Constantine: at the village of Constantine in Cornwall there is what Borlase describes as a vast egg-like stone placed on the points of two natural rocks, and pointing due North and South. This Tolmen or Meantol—“an egg-shaped block of granite thirty-three feet long, and eighteen feet broad, supposed by some antiquaries to be Druidical, is here on a barren hill 690 feet high”.[249] The Greek for egg is oon, and our egg may be connoted not only with Echo—the supposed voice of Ech?—but also with egg, meaning to urge on, to instigate, to vitalise, or render agog.

The acorn is an egg within a cup, and the Danish form of oak is eeg or eg: the oak tree was pre-eminently the symbol of the Most High, and the German eiche may be connoted with uch the British for high. The Druids paid a reverential homage to the oak, worshipping under its form the god Teut or Teutates: this latter word is understood to have meant “the god of the people,”[250] and the term teut is apparently the French tout, meaning all or the total. The reason suggested by Sir James Frazer for oak-worship is the fact that the Monarch of the Forest was struck more frequently by lightning than any meaner tree, and that therefore it was deemed to be the favoured one of the Fire god. But to rive one’s best beloved with a thunderbolt is a more peculiar and even better dissembled token of affection than the celebrated kicking-down-stairs. According to the author of The Language and Sentiment of Flowers[251] the oak was consecrated to Jupiter because it had sheltered him at his birth on Mount Lycaeus; hence it was regarded as the emblem of hospitality, and to give an oak branch was equivalent to “You are welcome”. That the oak tree was originally a Food provider or Feed for all is implied by the words addressed to the Queen of Heaven by Apuleus in The Golden Ass: “Thou who didst banish the savage nutriment of the ancient acorn, and pointing out a better food, dost, etc.”

It has already been suggested that derry or dru, an oak or tree, was equivalent to tre, an abode or Troy, and there is perhaps a connection between this root and terebinth, the Tyrian term for an oak tree. That the oak was regarded as the symbol of hospitality is exceedingly probable, and one of the earliest references to the tree is the story of Abraham’s hospitable entertainment given underneath the Oak of Mamre. The same idea is recurrent in the legend of Philemon and Baucis, which relates that on the mountains of Phrygia there once dwelt an aged, poor, but loving couple. One night Jupiter and Mercury, garbed in the disguise of two mysterious strangers who had sought in vain for hospitality elsewhere, craved the shelter of this Darby and Joan.[252] With alacrity it was granted, and such was the awe inspired by the majestic Elder that Baucis desired to sacrifice a goose which they possessed. But the bird escaped, and fluttering to the feet of the disguised gods Jupiter protected it, and bade their aged hosts to spare it. On leaving, the Wanderer asked what boon he could confer, and what gift worthy of the gods they would demand. “Let us not be divided by death, O Jupiter,” was the reply: whereupon the Wandering One conjured their mean cottage into a noble palace wherein they dwelt happily for many years. The story concludes that Baucis merged gradually into a linden tree, and Philemon into an oak, which two trees henceforward intertwined their branches at the door of Jupiter’s Temple.

The name Philemon is seemingly philo, which means love of, and mon, man or men, and at the time this fairy-tale was concocted Love of Man, or hospitality, would appear to have been the motif of the allegorist.

We British pre-eminently boast our ships and our men as being Hearts of Oak: the Druids used to summon their assemblies by the sending of an oak-branch, and at the national games of Etruria the diadem called Etrusca Corona, a garland of oak leaves with jewelled acorns, was held over the head of the victor.[253] There is little doubt that Honor Oak, Gospel Oak, Sevenoaks, etc., derived their titles from oaks once sacred to the Uch or High, the Allon or Alone, who was alternatively the Seven Kings or the Three Kings. “It is strange,” says Squire, “to find Gael and Briton combining to voice almost in the same words this doctrine of the mystical Celts, who while still in a state of semi-barbarism saw with some of the greatest of ancient and modern philosophers the One in the Many, and a single Essence in all the manifold forms of life.”[254]

“Do you imagine that Robin Goodfellow—a mere name to you—conveys anything like the meaning to your mind that it did to those for whom the name represented a still living belief, and who had the stories about him at their fingers’ ends? Or let me ask you, Why did the fairies dance on moonlight nights? or, Have you ever thought why it is that in English literature, and in English literature alone, the fairy realm finds a place in the highest works of imagination?”—F. S. Hartland.

In British Faërie there figures prominently a certain “Man in the Oak”: according to Keightley, Puck, alias Robin Goodfellow, was known as this “Man in the Oak,” and he considers that the word pixy “is evidently Pucksy, the endearing diminutive sy being added to Puck like Betsy, Nancy, Dixie”.[255] It is probable that this adjectival si recurring in sweet, sooth, suave, swan, etc., may be equated with the Sanscrit su, which, as in swastika, is a synonym for the Greek eu, meaning soft, gentle, pleasing, and propitious. When used as an affix, this “endearing diminutive” yields spook, which was seemingly once “dear little Pook,” or “soft, gentle, pleasing, and propitious Puck”. In Wales the fairies were known as “Mothers’ Blessings,” and although spook now carries a sinister sense, there is no more reason to suppose that “dear little Pook” was primarily malignant than to suggest that the Holy Ghost was—in the modern sense—essentially ghastly. Skeat suggests that ghost (of uncertain origin) “is perhaps allied to Icelandic geisa, to rage like fire, and to Gothic us-gais-yan, to terrify”. Some may be aghast at this suggestion, others, who cannot conceive the Supreme Sprite except as a raging and consuming fury, will commend it. In the preceding chapter I suggested that the elementary derivation of ghost was ’goes, the Great Life or Essence, and as te in Celtic meant good, it may be permissible to modernise ghoste, also Kostey of the egg, into great life good.

That there was a good and a bad Puck is to be inferred from the West of England belief in Bucca Gwidden, the white or good spirit, and Bucca Dhu, the black, malevolent one.[256] Puck, like Dan Cupid, figures in popular estimation as a pawky little pickle; in Brittany the dolmens are known as poukelays or Puck stones, and the particular haunts of Puck were heaths and desert places. The place-name Picktree suggests one of Puck’s sacred oaks; Pickthorne was presumably one of Puck’s hawthorns, and the various Pickwells, Pickhills, Pickmeres, etc., were once, in all probability, spook-haunted. The highest point at Peckham, near London, is Honor Oak or One Tree Hill, and Peckhams or Puckhomes are plentiful in the South of England. One of them was inferentially near Ockham, at Great and Little Bookham, where the common or forest consists practically solely of the three pre-eminently fairy-trees—oak, hawthorne, and holly. The summit of the Buckland Hills, above Mickleham, is the celebrated, box-planted Boxhill, and at its foot runs Pixham or Pixholme Lane. On the height, nearly opposite Pixham Lane, the Ordnance Map marks Pigdon, but the roadway from Bookham to Boxhill is known, not as Pigdon Hill, but Bagden Hill. In all probability the terms Pigdon and Bagden are the original British forms of the more modern Pixham and Bok’s Hill.

In the North of England Puck seems more generally Peg, whence the fairy of the river Ribble was known as Peg O’Nell, and the nymph of the Tees, as Peg Powler.[257] Peg—a synonym for Margaret—is generally interpreted as having meant pearl.

The word puck or peg, which varies in different parts of the country into pug, pouke, pwcca, poake, pucke, puckle, and phooka, becomes elsewhere bucca, bug, bogie, bogle, boggart, buggaboo, and bugbear.

According to all accounts the Pucks, like the Buccas, were divided into two classes, “good and bad,” and it was only the clergy who maintained that “one and the same malignant fiend meddled in both”. As Scott rightly observes: “Before leaving the subject of fairy superstition in England we may remark that it was of a more playful and gentle, less wild and necromantic character, than that received among the sister people. The amusements of the southern fairies were light and sportive; their resentments were satisfied with pinching or scratching the objects of their displeasure; their peculiar sense of cleanliness rewarded the housewives with the silver token in the shoe; their nicety was extreme concerning any coarseness or negligence which could offend their delicacy; and I cannot discern, except, perhaps, from the insinuations of some scrupulous divines, that they were vassals to or in close alliance with the infernals, as there is too much reason to believe was the case with their North British sisterhood.”[258]

The elemental Bog is the Slavonic term for God,[259] and when the early translators of the Bible rendered “terror by night” as “bugs by night” they probably had spooks or bogies in their mind. In Etruria as in Egypt the bug or maybug was revered as the symbol of the Creator Bog, because the Egyptian beetle has a curious habit of creating small pellets or balls of mud. In Welsh bogel means the navel, also centre of a wheel, and hence Margaret or Peggy may be equated with the nave or peg of the white-rayed Marguerite or Day’s Eye.[260]

It must constantly be borne in mind that the ancients never stereotyped their Ideal, hence there was invariably a vagueness about the form and features of prehistoric Joy, and Shakespeare’s reference to Dan Cupid as a “senior-junior, giant-dwarf,” may be equally applied to every Elf and Pixy. It is unquestionable that in England as in Scandinavia and Germany “giants and dwarfs were originally identical phenomenon”.[261]

In the words of an Orphic Hymn “Jove is both male and an immortal maid”: Venus was sometimes represented with a beard, and as the Supreme Parent was indiscriminately regarded as either male or female, or as both combined, an occasional contradiction of form is not to be unexpected. The authorities attribute the contrariety of sex which is sometimes assigned to the Cornish saints as being due to carelessness on the part of transcribers, but in this case the monks may be exonerated, as the greater probability is that they faithfully transmitted the pagan legends. The Moon, which, speaking generally, was essentially a symbol of the Mother, was among some races, e.g., the Teutons and the Egyptians, regarded as masculine. In Italy at certain festivals the men dressed in women’s garments, worshipped the Moon as Lunus, and the women dressed like men, as Luna. In Wales the Cadi, as we have seen, was dressed partially as a woman, partially as a man, and in all probability the cassock of the modern priest is a survival of the ambiguous duality of Kate or Good. In Irish the adjective mo—derived seemingly from Mo or Ma, the Great Mother—meant greatest, and was thus used irrespective of sex.

The French word lune, like moon and choon, is radically une, the initial consonants being merely adjectival, and is just as sexless as our one, Scotch ane. In Germany hunne means giant, and the term “Hun,” meant radically anyone formidable or gigantic.

The Cornish for full moon is cann, which is a slightly decayed form of ak ann or great one, and this word can, or khan, meaning prince, ruler, king or great one, is traceable in numerous parts of the world. Can or chan was Egyptian for lord or prince; can was a title of the kings of ancient Mexico; khan is still used to-day by the kings of Tartary and Burmah and by the governors of provinces in Persia, Afghanistan, and other countries of Central Asia. In China kong means king, and in modern England king is a slightly decayed form of the Teutonic konig or kinig. The ancient British word for mighty chief was chun or cun, and we meet with this infinitely older word than king as a participle of royal titles such as Cunobelinus, Cunoval, Cunomor and the like. The same affix was used in a similar sense by the Greeks, whence Apollo was styled Cunades and also Cunnins. The Cornish for prince was kyn, and this term, as also the Irish cun, meaning chief, is evidently far more primitive than the modern king, which seems to have returned to us through Saxon channels. Prof. Skeat expresses his opinion that the term king meant “literally a man of good birth,” and he identifies it with the old High German chunig. Other authorities equate it with the Sanscrit janaka, meaning father, whence it is maintained that the original meaning of the word was “father of a tribe”. Similarly the word queen is derived by our dictionaries from the Greek gyne, a woman, or the Sanscrit jani, “all from root gan, to produce, from which are genus, kin, king, etc.”

The word chen in Cornish meant cause, and there is no doubt a connection between this term and kyn, the Cornish for prince; the connection, however, is principally in the second syllable, and I see no reason to doubt my previous conclusions formulated elsewhere, that kyn or king originally meant great one, or high one, whereas chun, jani, gyne, etc., meant aged one.

One of the first kings of the Isle of Man was Hacon or Hakon, a name which the dictionaries define as having meant high kin. In this etymology ha is evidently equated with high and con or kon with kin, but it is equally likely that Hakon or Haakon meant originally uch on the high one. In Cornish the adjective ughan or aughan meant supreme: the Icelandic for queen is kona, and there is no more radical distinction between king and the disyllabic kween, than there is between the Christian names Ion, Ian, and the monosyllabic Han.

Janaka, the Sanscrit for father, is seemingly allied to the English adjective jannock or jonnack, which may be equated more or less with canny. Uncanny means something unwholesome, unpleasant, disagreeable; in Cornish cun meant sweet or affable, and we still speak of sweets as candies.

Fig. 51.—From The Sepulchres of Etruria (Gray, Mrs. Hamilton).

In Gaelic cenn or ken meant head, the highest peak in the Himalayas is Mount Kun; one of the supreme summits of Africa is Mount Kenia, and in Genesis (14-19) the Hebrew word Konah is translated into English as “the Most High God”. Of this Supreme Sprite the cone or pyramid was a symbol, and the reverence in which this form was held at Albano in Etruria may be estimated from the monument here depicted.[262] In times gone by khans, cuns, or kings were not only deemed to be moral and intellectual gods, but in some localities bigness of person was cultivated. The Maoris of New Zealand, whose tattooings are identical in certain respects with the complicated spirals found on megaliths in Brittany and Ireland, and who in all their wide wanderings have carried with them a totemic dove, used to believe bigness to be a royal essence. “Every means were used to acquire this dignity; a large person was thought to be of the highest importance; to acquire this extra size, the child of a chief was generally provided with many nurses, each contributing to his support by robbing their own offspring of their natural sustenance; thus, whilst they were half-starved, miserable-looking little creatures, the chief’s child was the contrary, and early became remarkable by its good appearance.”[263]

The British adjective big is of unknown origin and has no Anglo-Saxon equivalent. In Norway bugge means a strong man, but in Germany bigge denoted a little child—as also a pig. The site of Troy—the famous Troy—is marked on modern maps Bigha, the Basque for eye is beguia; bega is Celtic for life. A fabulous St. Bega is the patron-saint of Cumberland; there is a Baggy Point near Barnstaple, and a Bigbury near Totnes—the alleged landing place of the Trojans. Close to Canterbury are some highlands also known as Bigbury, and it is probable that all these sites were named after beguia, the Big Eye, or Buggaboo, the Big Father.

At Canterbury paleolithic implements have been found which supply proof of human occupation at a time when the British Islands formed part of the Continent, and, according to a scholarly but anonymous chronology exhibited in a Canterbury Hotel, “Neolithic, bronze, and iron ages show continuous occupation during the whole prehistoric period. The configuration of the city boundaries and the still existing traces of the ancient road in connection with the stronghold at Bigbury indicate that a populous community was settled on the site of the present Canterbury at least as early as the Iron Age.”

The branching antlers of the buck were regarded as the rays of the uprising sun or Big Eye, and a sacred procession, headed by the antlers of a buck raised upon a pole, was continued by the clergy of St. Paul’s Cathedral as late as the seventeenth century.[264] A scandalised observer of this ceremony in 1726 describes “the whole company blowing hunters’ horns in a sort of hideous manner, and with this rude pomp they go up to the High Altar and offer it there. You would think them all the mad votaries of Diana!” On this occasion, evidently in accordance with immemorial wont, the Dean and Chapter wore special vestments, the one embroidered with bucks, the other with does. The buck was seemingly associated with Puck, for it was popularly supposed that a spectre appeared periodically in Herne’s Oak at Windsor headed with the horns of a buck. So too was Father Christmas or St. Nicholas represented as riding Diana-like in a chariot drawn by bucks.

The Greek for buck or stag is elaphos, which is radically elaf, and it is a singular coincidence that among the Cretan paleolithic folk in the Fourth Glacial Period “Certain signs carved on a fragment of reindeer horn are specially interesting from the primitive anticipation that they present of the Phœnician letter alef”.[265]

Peg or Peggy is the same word as pig, and it is generally supposed that the pig was regarded as an incarnation of the “Man in the Oak,” i.e., Puck or Buck, because the bacco or bacon lived on acorns. There is little doubt that the Saint Baccho of the Church Calendar is connected with the worship of the earlier Bacchus, for the date of St. Baccho’s festival coincides with the vintage festival of Bacchus. The symbolism of the pig or bacco will be discussed in a subsequent chapter, meanwhile one may here note that hog is the same as oak, and swine is identical with swan. So also Meg is connected with muc or moch which were the Celtic terms for hog. Among the appellations of ancient Ireland was Muc Inis,[266] or Hog Island and Moccus, or the pig, was one of the Celtic sobriquets for Mercury. The Druids termed themselves “Swine of Mon,”[267] the Phœnician priests were also self-styled Swine, and there is a Welsh poem in which the bard’s opening advice to his disciples is—“Give ear little pigs”.

The pig figures so frequently upon Gaulish coins that M. de la Saussaye supposed it with great reason to have been a national symbol. That the hog was also a venerated British emblem is evident from the coins here illustrated, and that CUNO was the Spook King is obvious from Figs. 52 and 57, where the features face fore and aft like those of Janus. The word Cunobeline, Cunbelin, or Cymbeline, described by the dictionaries as a Cornish name meaning “lord of the Sun,” is composed seemingly of King Belin. Belin, a title of the Sun God, is found also in Gaul, notably on the coinage of the Belindi: Belin is featured as in Fig. 58, and that the sacred Horse of Belin was associated with the ded pillar is evident from Fig. 59.

Figs. 52 to 57.—British. From Ancient Coins (Akerman, J. Y.).

Figs. 58 to 59.—Gaulish. From ibid.

Commenting upon Fig. 52 a numismatist has observed: “This seems made for two young women’s faces,” but whether Cunobelin’s wives, sisters, or children, he knows not. In Britain doubtless there were many kings who assumed the title of Cunobelin, just as in Egypt there were many Pharoahs; but it is no more rational to suppose that the designs on ancient coins are the portraits of historic kings, their wives, their sisters, their cousins, or their aunts, than it would be for an archæologist to imagine that the dragon incident on our modern sovereigns was an episode in the career of his present Majesty King George.

We shall subsequently connect George, whose name means ploughman, with the Blue or Celestial Boar, which, because it ploughed with its snout along the earth, was termed boar, i.e., boer or farmer. With bacco or bacon may be connoted boukolos, the Greek for cowherd, whence bucolic. The cattle of Apollo, or the Sun, are a familiar feature of Greek mythology.

Fig. 60.—Gaulish. From Akerman.

The female bacon, which inter alia was the symbol of fecundity, was credited with a mystic thirty teats. The sow figures prominently in British mythology as an emblem of Ked, and was seemingly venerated as a symbol of the Universal Feeder. The little pig in Fig. 60, a coin of the Santones, whose capital is marked by the modern town of Saintes, is associated with a fleur-de-lis, the emblem of purity. The word lily is all holy; the porker was associated with the notoriously pure St. Antony as well as with Ked or Kate, the immaculate Magna Mater, and although beyond these indications I have no evidence for the suggestion, I strongly suspect that the scavenging habits of the moch caused it, like the fly or mouche, to be reverenced as a symbol of Ked, Cadi, Katy, or Katerina, whose name means the Pure one or the All Pure. The connection between hog and cock is apparent in the French coche or cochon (origin unknown). Cochon is allied to cigne, the French for swan, Latin, cygnus, Greek, kuknos; the voice of the goose or swan is said to be its cackle, and the Egyptians gave to their All Father Goose a sobriquet which the authorities translate into “The Great Cackler”.

Fig. 61.—Swan with Two Necks. (Bank’s Collection, 1785).
From The History of Signboards (Larwood & Hotten).

Among the meanings assigned to the Hebrew og is “long necked,” and it is not improbable that the mysterious Inn sign of the “Swan with two necks” was originally an emblem of Mother and Father Goose. In Fig. 61 the geis or swan is facing fore and aft, like Cuno, which is radically the same Great Uno as Juno or Megale, to whom the goose was sacred. Geyser, a gush or spring, is the same word as geeser, and there was a famous swan with two necks at Goswell Road, where the word Goswell implies an erstwhile well of Gos, Goose, or the Gush.[268] A Wayzgoose is a jovial holiday or festival, gust or gusto means enjoyment, and the Greengoose Fair, which used to be held at Stratford, may be connoted with the “Goose-Intentos,” a festival which was customarily held on the sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Pentecost, the time when the Holy Ghost descended in the form of “cloven tongues,” resolves into Universal Good Ghost.

The Santones, whose emblem was the Pig and Fleur-de-lis, were neighbours of the Pictones. Our British Picts, the first British tribe known by name to history, are generally supposed to have derived their title because they depicted pictures on their bodies. In West Cornwall there are rude stone huts known locally as Picts’ Houses, but whether these are attributed to the Picts or the Pixies it is difficult to say. In Scotland the “Pechs” were obviously elves, for they are supposed to have been short, wee men with long arms, and such huge feet that on rainy days they stood upside down and used their feet as umbrellas. That the Picts’ Houses of Cornwall were attributed to the Pechs is probable from the Scottish belief, “Oh, ay, they were great builders the Pechs; they built a’ the auld castles in the country. They stood a’ in a row from the quarry to the building stance, and elka ane handed forward the stanes to his neighbour till the hale was bigget.”

That the pig and the bogie were intimately associated is evidenced by a Welsh saying quoted by Sir John Rhys:—

In Ireland Pooka was essentially a November spirit, and elsewhere November was pre-eminently the time of All Hallows or All Angels. Hallow is the same word as elle the Scandinavian for elf or fairy, and at Michaelmas or Hallowe’en, pixies, spooks, and bogies were notoriously all-abroad:—

The time of All Hallows, or Michaelmas used to be known as Hoketide, a festival which in England was more particularly held upon St. Blaze’s Day; and at that cheerless period the people used to light bonfires or make blazes for the purpose of “lighting souls out of Purgatory”. In Wales a huge fire was lighted by each household and into the ashes of this bonfire, this alban or elphin fire,[269] every member of the family threw a white or “Alban,” or an elphin stone, kneeling in prayer around the dying fire.[270] In the Isle of Man Hallowtide was known as Hollantide,[271] which again permits the equation of St. Hellen or Elen and her train with Long Meg and her daughters. On the occasion of the Hallow or Ellie-time saffron or yellow cakes, said to be emblematical of the fires of purgatory, used to be eaten. To run amok in the East means a fiery fury—the words are the same; and that bake (or beeak as in Yorkshire dialect) meant fire is obvious from the synonymous cook. Coch is Welsh for red, and the flaming red poppy or corncockle, French—coquelicot, was no doubt the symbol of the solar poppy, pope, or pap. The Irish for pap or breast is cich, and in Welsh cycho means a hive, or anything of concave or hivelike shape. Possibly here we have the origin of quick in its sense of living or alive.

One of the features of Michaelmas in Scotland was the concoction and cooking of a giant cake, bun, or bannock. According to Martin this was “enormously large, and compounded of different ingredients. This cake belonged to the Archangel, and had its name from him. Every one in each family, whether strangers or domestics, had his portion of this kind of shew-bread, and had of course some tithe to the friendship and protection of Michael.”[272] In Hertfordshire during a corresponding period of “joy, plenty, and universal benevolence,” the young men assembled in the fields choosing a very active leader who then led them a Puck-like chase through bush and through briar, for the sake of diversion selecting a route through ponds, ditches, and places of difficult passage.[273] The term Ganging Day applied to this festival may be connoted with the Singin ’een of the Scotch Hogmanay, and with the leader of St. Micah’s rout may be connoted demagog. This word, meaning popular leader, is attributed to demos, people, and agogos, leading, but more seemingly it is Dame Gog or Good Mother Gog.

In Durham is a Pickburn or Pigburn; beck is a generic term for a small stream; in Devon is a river Becky, and in Monmouthshire a river Beeg. In Kent is Bekesbourne, and Pegwell Bay near St. Margarets in Kent, may be connoted with Backwell or Bachwell in Somerset. In Herefordshire is a British earthwork, known as Bach Camp, and on Bucton Moor in Northumberland there are two earth circles. In Devonshire is Buckland-Egg, or Egg-Buckland, and with the various Boxmoors, Boxgroves, Boxdales, and Boxleys may be connoted the Box river which passes Keynton and crosses Akeman Street. A Christmas box is a boon or a gift, a box or receptacle is the same word as pyx; and that the evergreen undying box-tree was esteemed sacred, is evident from the words of Isaiah: “I will set in the desert the fir tree, and the pine tree, and the box tree together”.[274]

Figs. 62 to 64.—Iberian. From Akerman.

Bacon, radically bac, in neighbouring tongues varies into baco, bakke, bak, and bache. Bacon is a family name immortally associated with St. Albans, and it is probable that Trebiggan—a vast man with arms so long that he could take men out of the ships passing by Land’s End, and place them on the Long Ships—was the Eternal Biggan or Beginning. In British Romance there figures a mystic Lady Tryamour, whose name is obviously Tri or Three Love, and it is probable that Giant Trebiggan was the pagan Trinity, or Triton, whose emblem was the three-spiked trident. Triton alias Neptune was the reputed Father of Giant Albion, and the shell-haired deity represented on Figs. 62 to 64 is probably Albon, for the inscription in Iberian characters reads BLBAN. In the East Bel was a generic term meaning lord: in the West it seemingly meant, just as it does to-day, fine or beautiful. The city of Blban or beautiful Ban is now Bilbao, and the three fish on this coin are analogous to the trident, and to numberless other emblems of the Triune.

The radiating fan of the cockle shell connects it with the Corn-cockle as the Dawn, standing jocund on the misty mountain tops, is related to the flaming midday Sun. All conchas, particularly the echinea or “St. Cuthbert’s Bead,” were symbols of St. Katherine or Cuddy, and in Art St. Jacques or St. Jack was always represented with a shell. Coquille, the French for shell, is the same word as goggle, and in England the cockle was popularly connected with a strange custom known as Hot Cockles or Cockle Bread. Full particulars of this practice are given by Hazlitt, who observes: “I entertain a conviction that with respect to these hot cockles, and likewise to leap-candle, we are merely on the threshhold of the enquiry ... the question stands at present much as if one had picked up by accident the husk of some lost substance.... Speaking conjecturally, but with certain sidelights to encourage, this seems a case of the insensible degradation of rite into custom.”[275]

Shells are one of the most common deposits in prehistoric graves, and at Boston in Lincolnshire stone coffins have been found completely filled with cockle-shells. There would thus seem to be some connection between Ickanhoe, the ancient name for Boston, a town of the Iceni, situated on the Ichenield Way, and the echinea or concha. As the cockle was particularly the symbol of Birth, the presence of these shells in coffins may be attributed to a hope of New Birth and a belief that Death was the yoni or Gate of Life.

The word inimical implies un-amicable, or unfriendly, whence Michael was seemingly the Friend of Man. Maculate means spotted, and the coins here illustrated, believed to have been minted at St. Albans, obviously feature no physical King but rather the Kaadman or Good Man of St. Albans in his dual aspect of age and youth. The starry, spotted, or maculate effigy is apparently an attempt to depict the astral or spiritual King, for it was an ancient idea that the spirit-body and the spirit-world were made of a so-called stellar-matter—a notion which has recently been revived by the Theosophists who speak of the astral body and the astral plane. Our modern breath, old English breeth, is evidently the Welsh brith which means spotted, and it is to this root that Sir John Rhys attributes the term Brython or Britain, finding in it a reference to that painting or tattooing of the body which distinguished the Picts.[276] The word tattoo, Maori tatau, is the Celtic tata meaning father, and the implication seems to follow that the custom of tattooing arose from picking, dotting, or maculating the tribal totem or caste-mark.

Figs. 65 and 66.—British. From Akerman.

In the Old English representation here illustrated either St. Peter or God the Father is conspicuously tattooed or spotted; Pan was always assigned a panther’s skin, or spotted cloak.

A speck is a minute spot, and among the ancients a speck or dot within a circle was the symbol of the central Spook or Spectre. This, like all other emblems, was understood in a personal and a cosmic sense, the little speck and circle representing the soul surrounded by its round of influence and duties; the Cosmic speck, the Supreme Spirit, and the circle the entire Universe. In many instances the dot and ring seems to have stood for the pupil in the iris of the eye. In addition it is evident that ⨀ was an emblem of the Breast, and hieroglyphed the speck in the centre of the zone or sein, for the Greek letter theta written—⨀ is identical with teta, teat, tada, dot or dad. The dotted effigy on the coins supposedly minted at St. Albans may be connoted with the curious fact that in Welsh the word alban meant a primary point.[277]

Fig. 67.—Christ’s Ascent from Hell. From Ancient Mysteries (Hone, W.).

Speck is the root of speculum, a mirror, and it might be suggested by the materialist that the first reflection in a metal mirror was assumed to be a spook. The mirror is an attribute of nearly every ancient Deity, and the British Druids seem to have had some system of flashing the sunlight on to the crowd by means of what was termed by the Bards, the Speculum of the Pervading Glance. Specula means a watch-tower, and spectrum means vision. Speech, speak, and spoke, point to the probability that speech was deemed to be the voice of the indwelling spook or spectre, which etymology is at any rate preferable to the official surmise “all, perhaps, from Teutonic base sprek—to make a noise”.

Fig. 68.—The Mirror of Thoth. From The Correspondences of Egypt (Odhner, C.T.)

Fig. 69.

Figs. 70 to 72.—British. From English Coins and Tokens (Jewitt & Head).

The Egyptian hieroglyph here illustrated depicts the speculum of Thoth, a deity whom the Phoenicians rendered Taut, and to whom they attributed the invention of the alphabet and all other arts. The whole land of Egypt was known among other designations as “the land of the Eye,” and by the Egyptians as also by the Etrurians, the symbolic blue Eye of Horus was carried constantly as an amulet against bad luck. Fig. 69 is an Egyptian die-stamp, and Figs. 70 to 72 are British coins of which the intricate symbolism will be considered in due course. The arms of Fig. 73 are extended into the act of benediction, and utat, the Egyptian word for this symbol, resolves into the soft, gentle, pleasing, and propitious Tat. That the utat or eye was familiar in Europe is evidenced by the Kio coin here illustrated.

Fig. 73.—From The Correspondences of Egypt
(Odhner, C. T.).

Fig. 74.—From Numismatique Ancienne (Barthelemy, J.B.A.A.)

Spica, which is also the same word as spook, meant ear of corn; the wheatear is proverbially the Staff of Life, and loaf, old English loof, is the same word as life. Not infrequently the Bona Dea was represented holding a loaf in her extended hand, and the same idea was doubtless expressed by the two breasts upon a dish with which St. Agatha, whose name means Good, is represented. Christianity accounts for this curious emblem by a legend that St. Agatha was tortured by having her breasts cut off, and it is quite possible that this nasty tale is correctly translated; the original tyrant or torturer being probably Winter, or the reaper Death, which cuts short the fruit fulness of Spring. In the Tartar emblem herewith the Phrygian-capped Deity is holding, like St. Agatha, the symbol of the teat or feeder, or fodder.[278]

Fig. 75.—From Symbolism of the East and West (Aynsley, Mrs. Murray).

The wheatear or spica, or buck-wheat was a frequent emblem on our British coins, and to account for this it has been suggested that the British did a considerable export trade in corn; but unfortunately for this theory the spica figures frequently upon the coins of Spain and Gaul. As a symbol the buckwheat typified plenty, but in addition to the wheatear proper there appear kindred objects which have been surmised to be, perhaps, fishbones, perhaps fern-leaves. There is no doubt that these mysterious objects are variants of the so-called “ded” amulet, which in Egypt was the symbol of the backbone of the God of Life. This amulet, of which the hieroglyph has been rendered variously as ded, didu, tet, and tat, has an ancestry of amazing antiquity, and according to Mackenzie, “in Paleolithic times, at least 20,000 years ago, the spine of the fish was laid on the corpse when it was entombed, just as the ‘ded,’ amulet, which was the symbol of the backbone of Osiris, was laid on the neck of the Egyptian mummy”.[279] Frequently this “ded” emblem took the form of a column or pillar, which symbolised the eternal support and stability of the universe. On the summit of Fig. 85 is a bug, cockroach, or cockchafer: in Etruria as in Egypt the bug amulet or scarabeus was as popular as the Eye of Horus.

Figs. 76 and 77.—Iberian. From Akerman.

Figs. 78 to 84.—British. Nos. 1 to 8 from Ancient British Coins (Evans, J.). No. 4 from A New Description of England and Wales (Anon., 1724). No. 5 from English Coins and Tokens (Jewitt & Head).

Fig. 85.—From The Correspondences of Egypt (Odhner, C. T.).

In Fig. 68 the spectral Eye was supported by Thoth, whose name varies into Thot, Taut, and numerous intermediate forms, which equate it with ded or dad: similarly it will be found that practically every place-name constituted from Tot or Tat varies into Dot or Dad, e.g., Llandudno, where is found the cradle of St. Tudno. Sometimes the Egyptians represented two or more pillars termed deddu, and this word is traceable in Trinidad, an island which, on account of its three great peaks, was named after trinidad, the Spanish for trinity. But trinidad is evidently a very old Iberian word, for its British form was drindod, as in the place-name Llandrindod or “Holy Enclosure of the Trinity”. The three great mounts on Trinidad, and the three famous medicinal springs at Llandrindod Wells render it probable that the site of Llandrindod was originally a pagan dedication to the trine teat, or triune dad.

Amid numerous hut circles at Llandudno is a rocking stone known as Cryd-Tudno, or the Cradle of Tudno. Who was the St. Tudno of Llandudno whose cradle or cot, like Kit’s Coty in Kent, has been thus preserved in folk-memory? The few facts related of him are manifestly fabulous, but the name itself seemingly preserves one of the numerous sites where the Almighty Child of Christmas Day was worshipped, and the no of Tudno may be connoted with new, Greek, neo, Danish, ny, allied to Sanscrit, no, hence new, “that which is now”.

At Llanamlleck in Wales there is a cromlech known as St. Illtyd’s House, near which is a rude upright stone known as Maen-Illtyd, or Illtyd-stone. We may connote this Illtyd with All-tyd or All Father, in which respect Illtyd corresponds with the Scandinavian Ilmatar, Almatar, or All Mother.

Fig. 86.—From Numismatique Ancienne.

It is told of Saint Illtyd that he befriended a hunted stag, and that like Semele, the wife of Jove, his wife was stricken with blindness for daring to approach too near him. The association of Illtyd with a stag is peculiarly significant in view of the fact that at Llandudno, leading to the cot or cradle of St. Tudno, are the remains of an avenue of standing stones called by a name which signifies “the High Road of the Deer”. The branching antlers of the deer being emblems of the dayspring, the rising or new sun, is a fact somewhat confirmatory of the supposition that the Cradle of Tudno was the shrine of the new or Rising Tud, and in all probability the High Road of the Deer was once the scene of some very curious ceremonies.

Many of our old churches even to-day contain in their lofts antlers which formed part of the wardrobe of the ancient mummers or guise dancers.

In the Ephesian coin herewith Diana—the divine Ana—the many-breasted Alma Mater, is depicted in the form of a pillar-palm tree between two stags. Among the golden treasures found by Schliemann at Mykenæ, were ornaments representing two stags on the top of a date palm tree with three fronds.[280] The date palm may be connoted with the ded pillar, and the triple-fronded date of Mykenæ with the trindod or drindod of Britain.

Assyrian Ornament. (Nimroud.)

Greek Honeysuckle Ornament.

Greek Honeysuckle Ornament.

Sacred Tree (N.W. Palace, Nimroud).

Ornament on the Robe of King.
Fig. 87.—From Nineveh (Layard).

The honeysuckle, termed conventionally a palmette, is classically represented as either seven or nine-lobed, and this symbol of the Dayspring or of Wisdom was common alike both East and West. The palm branch is merely another form of the fern or fish-bone, and the word palm is radically alma, the all nourisher. The palm leaf appears on one of the stones at New Grange, but as Fergusson remarks, “how a knowledge of this Eastern plant reached New Grange is by no means clear”.[281] The feather was a further emblem of the same spiritual father, feeder, or fodder, and in Egypt Ma or Truth was represented with a single-feather headdress (ante, p. 136). From the mistletoe to the fern, a sprig of any kind was regarded as the spright, spirit, or spurt of new life or new Thought (Thaut?), and the forms of this young sprig are innumerable. The gist, ghost, or essence of the Maypole was that it should be a sprout well budded out, whence to this day at Saffron Walden the children on Mayday sing:—

Fig. 88.—From Irish Antiquities Pagan and Christian (Wakeman).

Teat may be equated with the Gaulish tout, the whole or All, and it is probable that the Pelasgian shrine of Dodona was dedicated to that All One or Father One. It is noteworthy that the sway of the pre-Grecian Pelasgians extended over the whole of the Ionian coast “beginning from Mykale”:[282] this Mykale (Megale or Michael?) district is now Albania, and its capital is Janina, query Queen Ina?

It is probable that Kenna, the fairy princess of Kensington who is reputed to have loved Albion, was canna, the New King or New Queen. On the river Canna in Wales is Llangan or Llanganna: Llangan on the river Taff is dedicated to St. Canna, and Llangain to St. Synin. All these dedications are seemingly survivals of King, Queen, or Saint, Ina, Una, Une, ain or one. In Cornwall there are several St. Euny’s Wells: near Evesham is Honeybourne, and in Sussex is a Honey Child. Upon Honeychurch the authorities comment, “The connection between a church and honey is not very obvious, and this is probably Church of Huna”. Quite likely, but not, I think, a Saxon settler.

The ancients supposed that the world was shaped like a bun, and they imagined it as supported by the tet or pillar of the Almighty. It is therefore possible that the Toadstool or Mushroom derived its name not because toads never sit upon it, but because it was held to be a perfect emblem of the earth. In some districts the Mushroom is named “Pooka’s foot,”[283] and as the earth is proverbially God’s footstool, the Toad-stool was held seemingly to be the stool of earth supported on the ded, or pillar of Titan. The Fairy Titania, who probably once held sway in Tottenham Court Road, may be connoted with the French teton, a teat; tetine, an udder; teter, to milk; and tetin, a nipple.

Fig. 89.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Fig. 90.—The Spirit of Youth. From a French Miniature of the fourteenth century. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

It is probable that “The Five Wells” at Taddington, “the Five Kings at Doddington,” where also is “the Duddo Stone,” likewise Dod Law at Doddington; Dowdeswell, Dudsbury, and the Cornish Dodman, are all referable originally to the fairy Titan or the celestial Daddy.

Fig. 91.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).

In accordance with universal wont this Titan or Almighty, “this senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid,” was conceived as anon a tiny toddling tot or Tom-tit-tot, anon as Old Tithonus, the doddering dotard: the Swedish for death or dead is dod; the German is tod. Tod is an English term for a fox, and Thot was the fox or jackal-headed maker-of-tracts or guide: thought is invariably the guide to every action, and Divine Thought is the final bar to which the human soul comes up for judgment. It has already been seen that in Europe the holder of the sword and scales was Michael, and there is reason to suppose that the Dog-headed titanic Christopher, who is said to have ferried travellers pick-a-back across a river, was at one time an exquisite conception of Great Puck or Father Death carrying his children over the mystic river. By the pagans—the unsophisticated villagers among whom Pucca mostly survived—Death was conceived as not invariably or necessarily frightful, but sometimes as a lovely youth. In Fig. 91 Death is Amor or Young Love, and in Fig. 90 an angel occupies the place of Giant Christopher: the words death and dead are identical with dad and tod.

Fig. 92.—Figure of Christ, beardless. Roman Sculpture of the IV. cent.
From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Fig. 93.—Iberian. From Akerman.

Fig. 94.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).

The Christian emblems herewith represent Christ supported by the Father or Mother upon a veil or scarf, which is probably intended for the rainbow or spectrum: the pagan Europa was represented, vide Fig. 93, holding a similar emblem. According to mythology, Iris or the Rainbow was like Thot or Mercury, the Messenger of the Gods, and the symbolists delighted to blend into their hieroglyphs that same elusive ambiguity as separates Iris from Eros and the blend of colours in the spectrum.

In the ninth century a learned monk expressed the opinion that only two words of the old Iberian language had then survived: one of these was fern, meaning anything good, and with it we may connote the Fern Islands among which stands the Megstone. Ferns, the ancient capital of Leinster, attributes its foundation to a St. Mogue, and St. Mogue’s Well is still existing in the precincts of Ferns Abbey. The equation of Long Meg and her Daughters with Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins is supported by the tradition that the original name of St. Ursula’s husband was Holofernes,[284] seemingly Holy Ferns or Holy Phoroneus. What is described as “the highest term in Grecian history” was the ancestral Inachus, the father of a certain Phoroneus. The fabulous Inachus[285]—probably the Gaelic divinity Oengus[286]—is the Ancient Mighty Life, and Phoroneus is radically fern or frond. There figures in Irish mythology “a very ancient deity” whose name, judging from inscriptions, was Feron or Vorenn, and it is noteworthy that Oengus is associated particularly with New Grange, where the fern palm leaf emblem has been preserved. The Dutch for fern is varen, and the root of all these terms is fer or ver: the Latin ferre is the root of fertile, etc., and in connection with the Welsh ver, which means essence, may be noted ver the Spring and vert, green, whence verdant, verdure, vernal, and infernal(?).

Among the ferns whose spine-like fishbone fronds seemingly caused them to be accepted as emblems of the fertile Dayspring or the permeating Spirit of all Life, the osmunda was particularly associated with the Saints and Gods: in the Tyrol it is still placed over doors for Good Luck, and one species of Osmunda (Crispa) is in Norway called St. Olaf’s Beard. This is termed by Gerarde the Herb Christopher, and the Latin crispa somewhat connects it with Christopher. The name Osmund is Teutonic for divine protector, but more radically Osmunda was oes munda, or the Life of the World. In Devonshire the Pennyroyal is also known as organ, organy, organie, or origane, all of which are radically the same as origin.

Figs. 95 to 102.—British. Nos. to from Akerman. Nos. to from Evans.

Fig. 103.—Green Man (Roxburghe Ballads, circa 1650).—From The History of Signboards (Larwood & Hotten).

The British coins inscribed Ver are believed to have emanated from Verulam or St. Albans, but the same VER, VIR, or kindred legend is found upon the coins of Iberia and Gaul. It is not improbable that Verulam was at one time the chief city in Albion, but the place which now claims to be the mother city is Canterbury or Durovern. The ancient name of Canterbury is supposed to have been bestowed upon it by the Romans, and to have denoted evergreen; but Canterbury is not physically more evergreen than every other spot in verdant England: Canterbury is, however, permeated with relics, memories, and traditions of St. George; and St. George is still addressed in Palestine as the “evergreen green one”. Green was the symbol of rejuvenescence and immortality, and “the Green Man” of our English Inn Signs, as also the Jack-in-Green who used to figure along with Maid Marian and the Hobby Horse in the festivities of May Day, was representative of the May King or the Lord of Life. The colour green, according to the Ecclesiastical authorities, still signifies “hope, plenty, mirth, youth, and prosperity”: as the colour of living vegetation, it was adopted as a symbol of life, and Angels and Saints, particularly St. John, are represented clad in green. In Gaul the Green Man was evidently conceived as Ver Galant, and the two cups, one inverted, in all probability implied Life and Death. According to Christian Legend, St. George was tortured by being forced to drink two cups, whereof the one was prepared to make him mad, the other to kill him by poison. The prosperity of an emblem lies entirely in the Eye, and it is probable that all the alleged dolours to which George was subjected are nothing more than the morbid misconceptions of men whose minds dwelt normally on things most miserable and conceived little higher. Thus seemingly the light-shod Mercury was degraded into George’s alleged torture of being “made to run in red hot shoes”: the heavy pillars laid upon him suggest that he was once depicted bearing up the pillars of the world: the wheel covered with razors and knives to which he was attached imply the solar wheel of Kate or Catarina: the posts to which he was fastened by the feet and hands were seemingly a variant of the deddu, and the sledge hammers with which he was beaten were, like many other of the excruciating torments of the “saint,” merely and inoffensively the emblems of the Heavenly Hercules or Invictus.

Fig. 104.—From The Everyday Book (Hone, W.).

Fig. 105.—Ver Galant (Rue Henri, Lyons, 1759). From The History of Signboards.

Fig. 106.—Green Man and Still
(Harleian Collection, 1630). Ibid.

Maid Marion, who was not infrequently associated with St. George, is radically Maid Big Ion, or Fairy Ion, and that St. George was also a marine saint is obvious from the various Channels which still bear his name. The ensign of the Navy is the red cross on a white ground, known originally as the Christofer or Jack, and in Fig. 106 the Green Man is represented with the scales of a Merman, or Blue John. The Italian for blue is vera; vera means true; “true blue” is proverbial; and that Old George was Trajan, Tarchon, Tarragone, or Dragon is obvious from the dragon-slaying incident. Little George has already been identified by Baring-Gould with Tammuz, the Adonis, or Beauty, who is identified with the Sun:[287] “Thou shining and vanishing in the beauteous circle of the Horæ, dwelling at one time in gloomy Tartarus, at another elevating thyself to Olympus, giving ripeness to the fruits”.[288]

Fig. 107.—From The Everyday Book (Hone, W.).

The St. George of Diospolis, the City of Light, who by the early Christians was hailed as “the Mighty Man,” the “Star of the Morning,” and the “Sun of Truth,” figures in Cornwall, particularly at Helston, where there is still danced the so-called Furry dance: Helston, moreover, claims to show the great granite stone which was intended to cover the mouth of the Nether Regions, but St. Michael met Satan carrying it and made him drop it.

It is unnecessary to labour the obvious identity between Saints George and Michael: “George,” meaning husbandman, i.e., the Almighty in a bucolic aspect, is merely another title for the archangel, but more radically it may be traced to geo (as in geology, geography, geometry) and urge, i.e., earth urge. It is physically true that farmers urge the earth to yield her increase, and until quite recently, relics of the festival of the sacred plough survived in Britain. Within living memory farmers in Cornwall turned the first sod to the formula “In the name of God let us begin”:[289] in China, where the Emperor himself turns the first sod, much of the ancient ceremonies still survive.

The legend of St. George and the dragon has had its local habitation fixed in many districts notably in Berkshire at the vale of the White Horse. The famous George of Cappadocia is first heard of as “a purveyor of provisions for the Army of Constantinople,” and he was subsequently associated with a certain Dracontius (i.e., dragon), “Master of the Mint”. The same legend is assigned at Lambton in England not to George but to “John that slew ye worm”: in Turkey St. George is known as Oros, which is obviously Horus or Eros, the Lord of the Horæ or hours, and the English dragon-slayer Conyers of Sockburn is presumably King Yers, whose burn or brook was presumably named after Shock or Jock. In some parts of England a bogey dog is known under the title of “Old Shock,” and in connection with Conyers and John that slew ye worm may be noted near Conway the famous Llandudno headlands, Great and Little Orme or Worm.

The St. George of Scandinavia is named Gest: that Gest was the great Gust or Mighty Wind is probable, and it is more likely that Windsor, a world-famous seat of St. George, meant, not as is assumed winding shore, but wind sire. That St. George was the Ruler of the gusts or winds is implied by the fact that among the Finns, anyone brawling on St. George’s Day was in danger of suffering from storms and tempests. The murmuring of the wind in the oak groves of Dodona was held to be the voice of Zeus, and the will of the All Father was there further deduced by means of a three-chained whip hanging over a metal basin from the hand of the statue of a boy. From the movements of these chains, agitated by the wind and blown by the gusts till they tinkled against the bowl, the will of the Ghost was guessed, and the word guess seemingly implies that guessing was regarded as the operation of the good or bad geis within. In Windsor Great Forest stood the famous Oak or Picktree, where Puck, alias Herne the Hunter, appeared occasionally in the form of an antlered Buck. The supposition that St. George was the great Gush or geyser is strengthened by the fact that near the Cornish Padstow, Petrock-Stowe, or the stowe of the Great Pater, there is a well called St. George’s Well. This well is described as a “mere spring which gushes from a rock,” and the legend states that the water gushed forth immediately St. George had trodden on the spot and has ne’er since ceased to flow.

The Italian for blue—the colour of the deep water and of the high Heavens—is also turchino, and on 23rd April (French Avril), blue coats used to be worn in England in honour of the national saint whose red cross on a white ground has immemorially been our Naval Ensign.[290] St. George figured particularly in the Furry or Flora dance at Helston, and the month of Avril, a period when the earth is opening up its treasures, seemingly derives its name from Ver or Vera, the “daughter deare” of Flora. On 23rd April “the riding of the George” was a principal solemnity in certain parts of England: on St. George’s Day a White Horse used to stand harnessed at the end of St. George’s Chapel in St. Martin’s Church, Strand, and the Duncannon Street, which now runs along the south side of this church, argues the erstwhile existence either here or somewhere of a dun or down of cannon. A cannon is a gun, and our Dragoon guards are supposed to have derived their title from the dragons or fire-arms with which they were armed. The inference is that the first inventors of the gun, cannon, or dragon, entertained the pleasing fancy that their weapon was the fire-spouting worm.[291] The dragon was the emblem of the Cynbro or Kymry: associated with the red cross of St. George it is the cognisance of London, and a fearsome dragon stands to-day at the boundary of the city on the site of Temple Bar.

In the reign of Elizabeth an injunction was issued that “there shall be neither George nor Margaret,” an implication that Margaret was once the recognised Consort of St. George, and the expression “riding of the George,” points to the probability that the White Horse, even if riderless, was known as “the George”. The White Horse of Kent with its legend Invicta implies—unless Heraldry is weak in its grammar—not a horse but a mare: George was Invictus or the Unconquerable, and, as will be seen, there are good reasons to suppose that the White Horse and White Mare were indigenous to Britain long before the times of the Saxon Hengist and Horsa. It is now generally accepted that Hengist, which meant horse, and Horsa, which meant mare, were mythical characters. With the coming of the Saxons no doubt the worship of the White Horse revived for it was an emblem of Hanover, and in Hanover cream-coloured horses were reserved for the use of royalty alone. With the notorious Hanoverian Georges may be connoted the fact that opposite St. George’s Island at Looe (Cornwall) is a strand or market-place named Hannafore: at Hinover in Sussex a white horse was carved into the hillside.

Fig. 108.—From The Scouring of the White Horse (Hughes, T.).

Fig. 109.—British. From A New Description of England (1724).

Figs. 110 to 113.—British No. 110 from Camden. No. 112 from Akerman. No. 113 from Evans.

Fig. 114.—Iberian. From Akerman.

Figs. 115 and 116.—British. From Akerman.

Fig. 117.—Iberian. From Akerman.

Fig. 118.—British. From Evans.

Fig. 119.—British. From Akerman.

The White Horse—which subsequently became the Hobby Horse, or the Hob’s Horse, of our popular revels—has been carved upon certain downs in England and Scotland for untold centuries. That these animals were designedly white is implied by an example on the brown heather hills of Mormond in Aberdeenshire: here the subsoil is black and the required white has been obtained by filling in the figure with white felspar stones.[292] It will be noticed that the White Horse at Uffington as reproduced overleaf is beaked like a bird, and has a remarkable dot-and-circle eye: in Figs. 110 to 113 the animal is similarly beaked, and in Fig. 111 the object in the bill is seemingly an egg. The designer of Fig. 109 has introduced apparently a goose or swan’s head, and also a sprig or branch. The word BODUOC may or may not have a relation to Boudicca or Boadicea of the Ikeni—whose territories are marked by the Ichnield Way of to-day—but in any case Boudig in Welsh meant victory or Victorina, whence the “very peculiar horse” on this coin may be regarded as a prehistoric Invicta. The St. George of Persia there known as Mithras was similarly worshipped under the guise of a white horse, and Mithras was similarly “Invictus”. The winged genius surmounting the horse on Fig. 114, a coin of the Tarragona, Tarchon, or dragon district—is described as “Victory flying,” and there is little doubt that the idea of White Horse or Invictus was far spread. At Edgehill there used to be a Red Horse carved into the soil, and the tenancy of the neighbouring Red Horse Farm was held on the condition that the tenant scoured the Red Horse annually on Palm Sunday: the palm is the emblem of Invictus, and it will be noticed how frequently the palm branch appears in conjunction with the horse on our British coinage.

Fig. 120.—Gaulish. From Akerman.

Fig. 121.

The story of St. George treading on the Padstow Rock, and the subsequent gush of water, is immediately suggestive of the Pegasus legend. Pegasus, the winged steed of the Muses, which, with a stroke of its hoof, caused a fountain to gush forth, is supposed to have been thus named because he made his first appearance near the sources—Greek pegai—of Oceanus. It is obvious, however, from the coins of Britain, Spain, and Gaul, that Pegasus—occasionally astral-winged and hawk-headed—was very much at home in these regions, and it is not improbable that pegasus was originally the Celtic Peg Esus. The god Esus of Western Europe—one of whose portraits is here given—was not only King Death, but he is identified by De Jubainville with Cuchulainn, the Achilles or Young Sun God of Ireland.[293] Esus, the counterpart of Isis, was probably the divinity worshipped at Uzes in Gaul, a coin of which town, representing a seven-rayed sprig springing from a brute, is here reproduced, and that King Esus or King Osis was the Lord of profound speculation, is somewhat implied by gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge. Tacitus mentions that the neighing of the sacred white horse of the Druids was regarded as oracular; the voice of a horse is termed its neigh, from which it would seem horses were regarded as super-intelligent animals which knew.[294] The inscription CUN or CUNO which occurs so frequently on the horse coins of Western Europe is seemingly akin to ken, the root of know, knew, canny, and cunning. In India the elephant Ganesa—seemingly a feminine form of Genesis and Gnosis—was deemed to be the Lord of all knowledge.

In connection with Pegasus may be noted Bukephalus, the famed steed of Alexander. The Inscriptions EPPILLUS and EPPI[295] occur on the Kentish coins, Figs. 122 and 123; hipha or hippa was the Phœnician for a mare; in Scotland the nightmare is known as ephialtus; a hippodrome is a horse course, whence, perhaps, Bukephalus may be translated Big Eppilus. The little elf or elve under a bent sprig is presumably Bog or Puck, and in connection with the Eagle-headed Pegasus of Fig. 164 may be noted the Puckstone by the megalithic Aggle Stone at Purbeck, where is a St. Alban’s Head.[296]

Figs. 122 and 123.—British. From Akerman.

Whether or not Pegasus was Big Esus or Peg or Puck Esus is immaterial, but it is quite beyond controversy that the animals now under consideration are Elphin Steeds and that they are not the “deplorable abortions” which numismatists imagine. The recognised authorities are utterly contemptuous towards our coinage, to which they apply terms such as “very rude,” “an attempt to represent a horse,” “barbarous imitation,” and so forth; but I am persuaded that the craftsmen who fabricated these archaic coins were quite competent to draw straightforward objects had such been their intent. Akerman is seriously indignant at the indefiniteness of the object which resembles a fishbone and “has been called a fern leaf,” and he sums up his feelings by opining that this uncouth representation may be as much the result of incompetent workmanship as of successive fruitless attempts at imitation.[297]

Figs. 124 to 127.—Iberian. From Barthelemy.

Figs. 128 and 129.—Iberian. From Akerman.

Fig. 130.—Gaulish. From Akerman.

Incompetent comprehension would condemn Figs. 124 to 129, particularly the draughtsmanship of the head: it is hardly credible, yet, says Akerman, the small winged elf in these coins “apparently escaped the observation of M. de Saulcy”. They emanated from the Tarragonian town of Ana or Ona, and are somewhat suggestive of the mythic tale that Minerva sprang from the head of Jove: the horses on the Gaulish coin illustrated in Fig. 130, which is attributed either to Verdun or Vermandois, are inscribed Vero Iove and that Jou was the White Horse is, to some extent, implied by our elementary words Gee and Geho. According to Hazlitt “the exclamation Geho! Geho! which carmen use to their horses is not peculiar to this country, as I have heard it used in France”:[298] it is probable that the Jehu who drove furiously was a memory of the solar charioteer; it is further probable that the story of Io, the divinely fair daughter of Inachus, who was said to have been pursued over the world by a malignant gadfly, originated in the lumpish imagination of some one who had in front of him just such elfin emblems as the pixy horse now under consideration. That in reality the gadfly was a good mouche is implied by the term gad: the inscription Kio on Fig. 74 (p. 253) reads Great Io or Great Eye, and in connection with the remarkable optic of the White Horse at Uffington may be connoted the place-name Horse Eye near Bexhill. The curious place-name Beckjay in Shropshire is suggestive of Big Jew or Joy: the blue-crested monarch of the woods we call a jay (Spanish, gayo, “of doubtful origin”) was probably the bird of Jay or Joy—just as picus or the crested woodpecker was admittedly Jupiter’s bird—and the Jaye’s Park in Surrey, which is in the immediate neighbourhood of Godstone, Gadbrooke, and Kitlands, was seemingly associated at some period with Good Jay or Joy.

We speak ironically to-day of our “Jehus,” and the word hack still survives: in Chaucer’s time English carters encouraged their horses with the exclamation Heck![299] the Irish for horse was ech, and the inscription beneath the effigy on Fig. 131, a Tarragonian coin, reads, according to Akerman, Ekk. That the hack was connected in idea with the oak is somewhat implied by a horse ornament in my possession, the eye or centre of which is represented by an oak corn or acorn. In the North of England the elves seem to have been known as hags, for fairy rings are there known as hag tracks. The word hackney is identical with Boudicca’s tribe the Ikeni, and it is believed that Cæsar’s reference to the Cenimagni or Cenomagni refers to the Ikeni: whence it is probable that the Ikeni, like the Cantii, were worshippers of Invicta, the Great Hackney, the Ceni Magna or Hackney Magna.

The water horse which figures overleaf may be connoted with the Scotch kelpie, which is radically ek Elpi or Elfi: the kelpie or water horse of Scotch fairy lore is a ghastly spook, just as Alpa in Scandinavia is a ghoul and Ephialtes in Albany or Scotland is a nightmare: but there must almost certainly have been a White Kelpie, for the Greeks held a national horse race which they termed the Calpe, and Calpe is the name of the mountain which forms the European side of the Pillars of Hercules. From the surnames Killbye and Gilbey one may perhaps deduce a tribe who were followers of ’K Alpe the Great All Feeder: that the kelpie was regarded as the fourfold feeder is obvious from the four most unnatural teats depicted on the Pixtil coin of Fig. 133.

Fig. 131.—Iberian. From Akerman.

Fig. 132.—British. From Akerman.

Fig. 133.—Channel Islands. From Barthelemy.

The Welsh form of Alphin is Elphin, and the Cornish height known as Godolphin—whence the family name Godolphin—implies, like Robin Goodfellow, Good Elphin. With Elphin, Alban, and Hobany may be connected the Celtic Goddess Epona, “the tutelar deity of horses and probably originally a horse totem”. To Epona may safely be assigned the word pony; Irish poni; Scotch powney, all of which the authorities connect with pullus, the Latin for foal: it is quite true there is a p in both. We have already traced a connection between neighing, knowing, kenning, and cunning, and there is seemingly a further connection between Epona, the Goddess of Horses, and opine, for according to Plato the horse signified “reason and opinion coursing about through natural things”.[300]

British horses used to be known familiarly as Joan, and the term jennet presumably meant Little Joan: the Italian for a hackney is chinea. At Hackney, which now forms part of London, there is an Abney Park which was once, it may be, associated with Hobany or Epona: the main street of Hackney or Haconey (which originally contained the Manor of Hoxton) is Mare Street; and this mare was seemingly the Kenmure whose traces are perpetuated in Kenmure Road, Hackney. At the corner of Seven Sisters Road is the church of St. Olave, and the neighbouring Alvington Street suggests that this Kingsland Road district was once a town or down of Alvin the Elphin King. Godolphin Hill in Cornwall was alternatively known as Godolcan, and there is every reason to suppose that Elphin was the good old king, the good all-king, and the good holy king.

Hackney was seemingly once one of the many congregating “Londons,” and we may recognise Elen or Ollan in London Fields, London Lane, Lyne Grove, Olinda (or Good Olin) Road, Londesborough Road, Ellingfort (or Strong Ellin) Road, Lenthall (or Tall Elen) Road. In Linscott Street there stood probably at one time a Cot, Cromlech, or “Kit’s Coty,” and at the neighbouring Dalston[301] was very possibly a Tallstone, equivalent to the Cornish tal carn or high rock.

The adjective long or lanky is probably of Hellenic origin, and the giants or long men sometimes carved in hill-sides (as at Cerne Abbas) were like all Longstones once perhaps representations of Helen.

Fig. 134.—“Metal ornaments found on horse trappings (North Lincolnshire, 1907). Nos. 1-8 represent forms of the crescent amulet; Nos. 8-11, the horseshoe. No. 12 is a well-known mystic symbol. No. 15 shows the cross potencée, and No. 16 the cross patée: these seem to denote Christian influence. Nos. 13 and 14 indicate the decay of folk memory concerning amulets, though the heart pattern was originally talismanic. Nos. 7 and 8 form bridle ‘plumes,’ No. 6 is a hook for a bearing-rein; the remainder are either forehead medallions or breeching decorations. The patterns 1-4, 9, 11, 13, 14, and 16, are fairly common in London.”

From Folk Memory (Johnson, W.).

Fig. 135.—Iberian. From Akerman.

Fig. 136.—British. From Evans.

The Town Hall at Hackney stands on a plot of ground known as Hackney Grove, and the neighbouring Mildmay Park and Mildmay Grove suggest a grove or sanctuary of the Mild May or Mary. That Pegasus was known familiarly in this district is implied by the White Horse Inn on Hackney Marshes and by its neighbour “The Flying Horse”: Hackney neighbours Homerton, and that the national Hackney or mare was Homer or Amour is obvious from Fig. 135, where a heart, the universal emblem of amour, is represented at its Hub, navel, or bogel. According to Sir John Evans the “principal characteristic” of Fig. 136 is “the heart-shaped figure between the forelegs of the horse, the meaning of which I am at a loss to discover”:[302] but any yokel could have told Sir John the meaning of the heart or hearts which are still carved into tree trunks, and were rarely anything else than the emblems of Amor. The observant Londoner will not fail to notice particularly on May Day—the Mary or Mother Day—when our Cockney horses parade in much of their immemorial finery and pomp—that golden hearts, stringed in long sequences over the harness, are conspicuous among the half-moons, stars, and other prehistoric emblems of the Bona dea or pre-Christian Mary.

Hackney includes the churches of St. Mary, St. Michael, and St. Jude: Jude is the same word as good, and the St. Jude of Scripture who was surnamed Thadee, and was said to be the son of Alpheus, is apparently Good Tadi or Daddy, alias St. Alban the All Good, the Kaadman. St. Jude is also St. Chad, and there was a celebrated Chadwell[303] at the end of the Marylebone Road now known as St. Pancras or King’s Cross: at King’s Cross there is a locality still known as Alpha Place.

At Hackney is a Gayhurst Road, which may imply an erstwhile hurst or wood of Gay or Jay, and “at the south end of Springfield Road there is a curious and interesting little hamlet lying on the water’s edge. The streets are very steep, and some of them extremely narrow—mere passages like the wynds in Edinburgh.”[304] This little hamlet is “encircled” by Mount Pleasant Lane, whence one may assume that the eminence itself was known at some time or other as Mount Pleasant.

The “Mount Pleasant” at Hackney may be connoted with the more famous “Mount Pleasant” at Dun Ainy, Knock Ainy, or the Hill of Aine in Limerick. The “pleasant hills” of Ireland were defined as “ceremonial hills,” and it was particularly on the night of All Hallows that the immemorial ceremonies were there observed. To this day Aine or Ana, a beautiful and gracious water-spirit, “the best-natured of women,” is reverenced at Knockainy, and the legend persists that “Aine promised to save bloodshed if the hill were given to her till the end of the world”.[305] That Mount Pleasant at Hackney or Hackoney was similarly dedicated to High Aine or Ana is an inference to which the facts seem clearly to point.

It would also be permissible to interpret Hackney as Oaken Island, in which light it may be connoted with Glastonbury, the word glaston being generally supposed to be glasten, the British for oak. Glastonbury, the celebrated Avalon, Apple Island, Apollo Island, or Isle of Rest, was a world-famous “Mount Pleasant,” and on its most elevated height there stands St. Michael’s Tower. Glastonbury itself,[306] “its two streets forming a perfect cross,” is almost engirdled by a little river named the Brue. The French town Bray is in the so-called Santerre or Holy-land district: the remains of a megalithic santerre, saintuarie or sanctuary are still standing at Abury or Aubury in Wiltshire, and we may equate this place-name with abri, a generic term in French, “origin unknown,” for sanctuary or refuge.

Near Bray, Santerre, is Auber’s Ridge, which may be connoted with Aubrey Walk, the highest spot in Kensington, and it would seem that Abury’s, abris, or “Mount Pleasants” were once plentiful in the bundle of communities, townships, parishes, and lordships which have now merged into the Greater London: Ebury Square in the South-West may mark one, and Highbury in the North, with its neighbouring “Mount Pleasant,” another.

The immortal Mount Pleasant of the Muses was named Helicon, and from here sprang the celebrated fountains Aganippe and Hippocrene. At Holywell in Wales there is a village called Halkin lying at the foot of a hill named Helygen: there is a Heligan Hill in Cornwall, and a river Olcan in Hereford: there is an Alconbury in Hunts, and an Elkington (Domesday Alchinton) at Louth. An Elk is a gigantic buck whose radiating antlers are so fern-like that a genus has appropriately been designated the Elk fern. Ilkley in Yorkshire is thought to be the Olicana of Ptolemy, and there is standing to-day at Ramsgate a Holy Cone or Helicon modernised into “Hallicondane”. The dane here probably implies a dun or hill-fort, and the Hallicon itself consists of a peak crossed by four roads.[307] This Ramsgate Hallicondane, which stands by Allington Park, may have been a dun of the Elle or Elf King: in France Hellequin is associated with Columbine, and the little figure labelled Cuin (infra, p. 397 Fig. 336), may be identified with this virgin. The Alcantara district to which this Cuin coin has been attributed was, it may safely be assumed, a tara, tre, or troy of Alcan.

On the top of Tory Hill in Kilkenny, i.e., Kenny’s Church, stood a pagan altar: the more famous Tara or Temair is associated primarily with a “son of Ollcain”; it is said next to have passed into the possession of a certain Cain, and to have been known as Druim Cain or “Cain’s Ridge”.[308]

Halcyon days mean blissful, pleasant, radiant, ideal, days, and of the Holy King or All King the blue jewelled King-fisher or Halcyon seems to have been a symbol. Whether there be any connection between Elgin and the Irish Hooligans, or whether these trace their origin to the “son of Ollcain,” I do not know. From the colossal Kinia and Acongagua down to the humblest peg, every peak seems to have been similarly named. The pimple is a diminutive hill or pock, and the pykes of Cumberland are the peaks of Derbyshire. At the summit of the Peak District stands Buxton, claiming to be the highest market-town in England: around Buxton, formerly written “Bawkestanes,” still stand cromlechs and other Poukelays or Buk stones: Backhouse is a surname in the Buxton district, and the original Backhouses may well have worshipped either Bacchus, i.e., St. Baccho, or the gentle Baucis who merged into a Linden tree.

Fig. 137.—Ancient Pagan Altar on Tory Hill. From Sketches of Irish History (Anon., 1844).

Near Buxton are the sources of the river Wye, and by Wye in Kent, near Kennington, we find Olantigh Park, St. Alban’s Court, Mount Pleasant, Little London, and Trey Town: by the church at Wye are two inns, named respectively “The Old Flying Horse,” and “The New Flying Horse”; Wye races are still held upon an egg-shaped course, and close to Kennington Oval—which I am unable to trace beyond its earlier condition of a market-garden—stands a celebrated “White Horse Inn”. At Kennington by Wye a roadside inn sign is “The Golden Ball,” which once presumably implied the Sun or Sol, for in the immediate neighbourhood is Soles Court.

Fig. 138.—Iberian. From Akerman.

The horse was a constantly recurring emblem in the coins of Hispania, and the object on the Iberian coin here illustrated is defined by Akerman as “an apex”: the appearance of this symbol, seemingly a spike or peg posed upon a teathill, on an Iberian or Aubreyan coin is evidence of its sanctity in West Europe. Theologians of the Dark Ages have been ridiculed for debating the number of angels that could stand upon a pin-point, but it is more than probable that the question was a subject of discussion long before their time: the Chinese believe that “at the beginning of Creation the chaos floated as a fish skims along the surface of a river; from whence arose something like a thorn or pickle, which, being capable of motion and variation, became a soul or spirit”.[309] The fairy sanctity of the thorn bush would therefore seem to have arisen from its spikes, and the abundance of these emblems would naturally elevate it into the house or abode of spooks: the burning bush, in which form the Almighty is said to have appeared before Moses, was, according to Rabbinical tradition, a thorn bush: the Elluf and the Alvah trees—the aleph or the alpha trees?—are described as large thorned species of Acacia; and the spiky acacia, Greek Akakia, is related to akis, a point or thorn.

One of the attributes of the Man-in-the-Moon is a Thorn Bush, whence Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Moonshine, “This thorn bush is my thorn bush; and this dog my dog”. The Man-in-the-Moon being identified with Cain, it becomes interesting to note that the surname Kennett is accepted as a Norman diminutive of chien, a dog.[310] On p. 149—a mediæval papermark—the Wanderer is surmounted by a bush; a bush is a little tree, and the word bush (of unknown origin) is a variant of Bogie—also of bougie, the French for candle: bushes and briars were the acknowledged haunts of Bogie, alias Hobany or Hob-with-a-canstick or bougie.

Bouche used to be an English word meaning meat and drink, whence Stow, referring to the English archers, says they had bouch of court (to wit, meat and drink) and great wages of sixpence by the day.[311] In Rome and elsewhere a suspended bush was the sign of an inn, whence the expression “Good wine needs no bush”: the bouche or mouth is where meat and drink goes in, similarly mouth may be connoted with the British meath, meaning nourishment. Peck is also an old word for provender, and we still speak of feeling peckish.[312]

The word bucket—allied to Anglo-Saxon buc, meaning a pitcher—implies that this variety of large can or mug was used for peck purposes: the illustration herewith, representing the decoration on a bronze bucket found at Lake Maggiore, consists of speck-centred circles, and dotted, spectral, or maculate geese, bucks, and horses.

Fig. 139.—Bronze from bucket, Sesto Calendo, Lake Maggiore. From the British Museum’s Guide to the Antiquities of the Early Iron Age.

It is unnecessary to dilate on the great importance played in civic life by inns: numberless place-names are directly traceable to inn-signs; and the brewing of church ales, considered in conjunction with facts which will be noted in a subsequent chapter, make it almost certain that churches once dispensed food and drink and that inn was originally an earlier name for church. Among the inscriptions of the catacombs is one which the authorities believe marks the sepulchre of a brewer: but these pictographs are without exception emblems, and it is more likely that the design in question (Fig. 140) stands for “that Brewer,”[313] the Lord of the Vineyard, or the Vinedresser. The Green Man with his Still implies a brewer; the distilling of Benedictine is still an ecclesiastical occupation, and the word brew suggests that brewing was once the peculiar privilege of the pères or priests who brewed the sacred ales. The word keg is the same as the familiar Black Jack, and under jug Skeat writes: “Drinking vessels of all kinds were formerly called jocks, jills, and jugs, all of which represent Christian names. Jug and Judge were usual as pet female names, and equivalent to Jenny or Joan.”

Fig. 140.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).

The Hackney inn known as “The Flying Horse” may possibly owe its foundation and sign to the Templars, who possessed property in Hackney: the Templars’ badge of Pegasus still persists in the Temple at Whitefriars, and the circular churches of the Templars had certainly some symbolic connection with Sun or Golden Ball. At Jerusalem, the ideal city which was always deemed to be the hub, bogel, or navel of the world, there are some extraordinary rock-hewn water tanks, known as the stables of King Solomon: Jerusalem was known as Hierosolyma or Holy Solyma, and that Solyma, Salem, or Peace was associated in Europe with the horse is clear from the coin of the Gaulish tribe known as the Solmariaca (Fig. 141). The animal here represented is treading under foot a dragon or scorpion, and the Solmariaca, whose city is now Soulosse, were seemingly followers of Solmariak, the Sol Mary, or Fairy. The aim of the Freemasons is the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon or Wisdom, and it is quite evident that the front view of a temple on Fig. 142 is not the representation of a material building such as the Houses of Parliament now depicted on our modern paper-money. The centre of Fig. 142 is a four-specked cross, the centre-piece of Fig. 143 is the six-breasted Virgin, and Fig. 144 is a very elaborated pantheon, hierarchy, or habitation of All Hallows: the inscription reads Basilica ulpia, i.e., The Church Ulpia.

Fig. 141.—Gaulish. From Akerman.

Fig. 142.—Iberian. From Akerman.

Fig. 143.—From Barthelemy.

Fig. 144.—From Barthelemy.

Fig. 145.—Iberian. From Akerman.

Abdera, now Adra, is a Spanish town on the shores of the Mediterranean, founded, according to Strabo, by the Tyrians, and the name thus seems to connote a tre of Ab or Hob. I have elsewhere endeavoured to prove that King Solomon, the Mighty Controller of the Jinns, was the Eye of Heaven or the Sun, and this emblem appears in the triangle or delta of Fig. 145: the corresponding inscription on Fig. 145 are Phœnician characters, reading The sun,[314] and the curious fish-pillars are almost certainly a variant of the deddu. In Ireland a Salmon of Wisdom enters largely into Folklore: the word salmon is Solomon or Wisdom, as also is solemn: in Latin solemn is solennis, upon which Skeat comments: “Annual, occurring yearly, like a religious rite, religious, solemn, Latin sollus, entire, complete: annus, a year. Hence solemn—returning at the end of a complete year. The old Latin sollus is cognate with Welsh holl, whole, entire.” The cognomen Solomon occurs several times in the lists of British Kings, and one may see it figuring to-day on Cornish shop-fronts in the form of variants such as Sleeman, Slyman, etc. Solomon may be resolved into the Sol man, the Seul man, the Silly[315] (innocent) man, or the Sly man, the Cunning man, or Magus. The “Sea horse” to the right, illustrated by Akerman on Plate XX, No. 8, is a coin of the Gaulish Magusa, and bears the inscription Magus which, as will be remembered, was a title of the Wandering Jew.

Maundrell, the English traveller, describing his journey in the seventeenth century to Jerusalem, has recorded that, “Our quarters, this first night, we took up at the Honeykhan, a place of but indifferent accommodation, about one hour and a half west of Aleppo”. He goes on to say: “It must here be noted that, in travelling this country, a man does not meet with a market-town and inns every night, as in England. The best reception you can find here is either under your own tent, if the season permit, or else in certain public lodgments, founded in charity for the use of travellers. These are called by the Turks khani; and are seated sometimes in the towns and villages, sometimes at convenient distances upon the open road. They are built in fashion of a cloister, encompassing a court of 30 or 40 yards square, more or less, according to the measure of the founder’s ability or charity. At these places all comers are free to take shelter, paying only a small fee to the khan-keeper (khanji), and very often without that acknowledgment; but one must expect nothing here but bare walls. As for other accommodations of meat, drink, bed, fire, provender, with these it must be every one’s care to furnish himself.”[316]

The main roads of Britain were once seemingly furnished with similar shelters which were known as Coldharbours, and the Coldharbour Lanes of Peckham and elsewhere mark the sites of such refuges.

The Eastern khans, “built in fashion of a cloister,” find their parallel in the enclosed form of all primitive shelters, and the words close and cloister are radically eccles, eglos, or eglise. Whence the authorities suppose Beccles in Silly Suffolk to be a corruption of beau eglise or Beautiful Church: but to whom was this “beautiful church” first reared and dedicated, and by what name did the inhabitants of Beccles know their village? The surname Clowes, which may be connoted with Santa Claus, is still prevalent at Beccles, a town which belonged anciently to Bury Abbey.

The patron saint of English inns, travellers, and cross-roads, was the Canaanitish Christopher, and the earliest block prints representing Kit were “evidently made for pasting against the walls in inns, and other places frequented by travellers and pilgrims.”[317] Kit’s intercession was thought efficacious against all dangers, either by fire, flood, or earthquake, hence his picture was sometimes painted in colossal size and occupied the whole height of the building whether church or inn. The red cross of St. John of Jerusalem was the Christopher; travellers carried images of Cuddy as charms, and the equation of St. John with Canaanitish Christopher will account for Christopher’s Houses being entitled Inns,[318] or Johns, or Khans. Under the travellers’ images of Christopher used to be printed the inscription, “Whosoever sees the image of St. Christopher shall that day not feel any sickness,” or alternatively, “The day that you see St. Christopher’s face, that day shall you not die an evil death”. The emblem on page 262, was, I think, wrongly guessed by Didron as “the spirit of youth”: it is more probably a variant of Christopher, or the Spirit of Love, helping the palmer or pilgrim of life.

Figs. 146 and 147.—Gaulish. From Akerman.

Fig. 146, a coin of the Turones, whose ancient capital is now Tours, consists of a specky or spectral horse accompanied by an urn: this urn was the symbol of the Virgin, and the reader will be familiar with a well-known modern picture in which La Source is ambiguously represented as a maiden standing with a pitcher at a spring. Yver is Norse for a warm bubbling spring, and on the coins of Vergingetorix we find the pitcher and the horse: the word virgin is equivalent to Spring Queen, and as ceto figures largely in British mythology as the ark, box, or womb of Ked, it is probable that Virgingetorix may be interpreted King Virgin Keto. In Gaul rex meant King or Queen, but this word is less radical than the Spanish rey, French roi, British rhi: according to Sir John Rhys, “the old Irish ri, genitive rig, king, and rigan queen would be somewhat analogous, although the Welsh rhian, the equivalent of the Irish rigan, differs in being mostly a poetic term for a lady who need not be royal”.[319] The name Maria, which in Spain is bestowed indiscriminately upon men and women, would therefore seem to be Mother Queen, and Rhea, the Great Mother of Candia, might be interpreted as the Princess or the Queen.

Fig. 148.—Egyptian.

Fig. 149.—Etrurian. From Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (Dennis, G.).

Fig. 150.—British. From A New Description of England and Wales (Anon, 1724).

Among inscriptions to the Gaulish Apollo the most common are those in which he is entitled Albiorix and Toutiorix: these are understood by the authorities as having meant respectively “King of the World,” and “King of the People”.

With the Cornish Well known as Joan’s Pitcher may be connoted the variety of large bottle called a demijohn: according to Skeat this curious term is from the French damejeanne, Spanish damajuana—“Much disputed but not of Eastern origin. The French form is right as it stands though often much perverted. From French dame (Spanish dama), lady; and Jeanne (Spanish Juana), Joan, Jane.” In our word pitcher the t has been wrongly inserted, the French picher is the German becher, Greek bikos, and all these terms including beaker are radically Peggy, Puck or Big. Pitchers are one of the commonest sepulchral offerings, and we are told that the Iberian bronze-working brachycephalic invaders of Britain introduced the type of sepulchral ceramic known as the beaker or drinking cup: “This vessel,” says Dr. Munro, “was almost invariably deposited beside the body, and supposed to have contained food for the soul of the departed on its way to the other world.”[320]

The German form of Peggy or Margaret is Gretchen, which resolves into Great Chun or Great Mighty Chief: Margot and Marghet may be rendered Big God or Fairy God or Mother Good.

That the pitcher, demijohn, or jug was regarded in some connection with the Big Mother or Great Queen is obvious from the examples illustrated, and the apparition of this emblem on the coins of Tours may be connoted with the female-breasted jugs which were described by Schliemann as “very frequent” in the ruins of Troy. Similar objects were found at Mykenæ in connection with which Schliemann observes: “With regard to this vase with the female breasts similar vases were found on the islands of Thera (Santorin) and Therassia in the ruins of the prehistoric cities which, as before stated, were covered by an eruption of that great central volcano which is believed by competent geologists to have sunk and disappeared about 1700 to 1800 B.C.”.[321] It is peculiarly noticeable that the dame Jeanne or jug is thus associated in particular with Troy, Etruria, Therassia, Thera (Santorin), the Turones, and Tours.

The centre stone of megalithic circles constituted the speck or dot within the circle of the feeder or pap, and not infrequently one finds a Longstone termed either The Fiddler or The Piper. The incident of the Pied Piper is said to have occurred at Hamelyn on June 26th, 1284, during the feast of St. John and St. Paul. The street known as Bungen Strasse through which the Piper went followed by the enraptured children is still sacred to the extent that bridal and other processions are compelled to cease their music as they traverse it: Bungen of Bungen Street may thus seemingly be equated with bon John or St. John on whose feast day the miracle is said to have happened. The Hamelyn Piper who—

may be connoted with Pan or Father An, and the mountain now called Koppenberg, into which the Hamelyn children were allured, was obviously Arcadia or the happy land of Pan: the berg of Koppenberg is no doubt relatively modern, and the original name, Koppen, resolves into cop, kopje, or hill-top of Pan. The Land of the Pied Piper was manifestly Himmel, which is the German for heaven, and it may also be the source of the place-name Hamelyn.

The story of the Piper and the children is found also in Abyssinia, and likewise among the Minussinchen Tartars: the word Minnusinchen looks very like small Sinchen or beloved Sinchen, and with this Sinchen or bungen may be connoted the Tartar panshen or pope, and also Gian Ben Gian, the Arabian name for the All Ruler of the Golden Age. That Cupid was known among the Tartars is somewhat implied by the divinity illustrated on p. 699.

The Tartar story makes the mysterious Piper a foal which courses round the world, and with our pony may be connoted tarpon, the Tartar word for the wild horse of the Asiatic steppes. Cano is the Latin for I sing, and on Figs. 152 and 153 the Great Enchantress or Incantatrice is represented with the Pipes of Pan: among the wonders in the land of Hamelyn’s Piper were horses with eagles’ wings and these, together with the celestial foal and other elphin marvels, are to be found depicted on the tokens of prehistoric Albion. The tale of the Pied Piper may be connoted with the emblem of Ogmius leading his tongue-tied willing captives, and in Fig. 158 the mighty Muse is playing in human form upon his lute. In Fig. 160 the story of St. Michael or St. George is being played by a Pegasus, and in Fig. 158 CUNO is represented as a radiant elf. The arrow on Fig. 163 connects the exquisitely executed little figure with Cupid, Eros, or Amor—the oldest of the Gods—and probably this particular cherub was known as Puck, for his coin was issued in the Channel Islands by a people who inscribed their tokens Pooctika, Bucato, Pixtil, and Pichtil, i.e., Pich tall or chief(?).

Figs. 151 to 158.—British. No. 151 from Whitaker’s Manchester. No. 152 from Evans. Nos. 153 to 157 from Akerman. No. 158 from A New Description of England and Wales.

Figs. 159 to 163.—Channel Islands. From Akerman.

Figs. 164 to 167.—British. From Akerman.

It is not improbable that this young sprig was known as the Little Leaf Man, for in Thuringia as soon as the trees began to bud out, the children used to assemble on a Sunday and dress one of their playmates with shoots and sprigs: he was covered so thoroughly as to be rendered blind, whereupon two of his companions, taking him by the hand lest he should stumble, led him dancing and singing from home to home. Amor, like Homer, was reputed blind, and the what-nots on Fig. 167 may possibly be leaves, the symbols of the living, loving Elf, or Life—“this senior-junior, giant-dwarf Dan Cupid”.

It was practically a universal pagan custom to celebrate the return of Spring by carrying away and destroying a rude idol of the old Dad or Death:—

Fig. 168.—From The Everyday Book (Hone, W.).

In other parts of Bohemia—and the curious reader will find several Bohemias on the Ordnance maps of England—the song varies; it is not Summer that comes back but Life:—

At the feast of the Ascension in Transylvania, the image of Death is clothed gaudily in the dress of a girl: having wound throughout the village supported by two girls the image is stripped of its finery and flung into the river; the dress, however, is assumed by one of the girls and the procession returns singing a hymn. “Thus,” says Miss Harrison, “it is clear that the girl is a sort of resuscitated Death.” In other words, like the May Queen she symbolised the Virgin or Fairy Queen—Vera or Una, the Spirit, Sprout, or Spirit of the Universe, the Fair Ovary of Everything who is represented on the summit of the Christmas Tree: in Latin virgo means not only a virgin but also a sprig or sprout.

The old Welsh poets commemorate what they term Three National Pillars of the Island of Britain, to wit: “First—Hu, the vast of size, first brought the nation of the Cymry to the Isle of Britain; and from the summer land called Deffrobani they came (namely, the place where Constantinople now is), and through Mor Tawch, the placid or pacific sea, they came up to the Isle of Britain and Armorica, where they remained. Second—Prydain, son of Aedd the Great, first erected a government and a kingdom over Ynys Prydain, and previous to that time there was but little gentleness and ordinance, save a superiority of oppression. Third—Dyfnwal Moelmud—and he was the first that made a discrimination of mutual rights and statute law, and customs, and privileges of land and nation, and on account of these things were they called the three pillars of the Cymry.”[323]

The Kymbri of Cambria claim themselves to be of the same race as the Kimmeroi, from whom the Crimea takes its name, also that Cumberland is likewise a land of the Cumbers. The authorities now usually explain the term Kymbri as meaning fellow countrymen, and when occurring in place-names such as Kemper, Quimper, Comber, Kember, Cymner, etc., it is invariably expounded to mean confluence: the word would thus seem to have had imposed upon it precisely the same meaning as synagogue, i.e., a coming together or congregation, and it remains to inquire why this was so.

The Kymbri were also known as Cynbro, and the interchangeability of kym and kin is seemingly universal: the Khan of Tartary was synonymously the Cham of Tartary; our Cambridge is still academically Cantabrigia, a compact is a contract, and the identity between cum and con might be demonstrated by innumerable instances. This being so, it is highly likely that the Kymbri were followers of King Bri, otherwise King Aubrey, of the Iberii or Iberian race. In Celtic aber or ebyr—as at Aberdeen, Aberystwith, etc.—meant a place of confluence of streams, burns, or brooks; and aber seems thus to have been synonymous with camber.

Ireland, or Ibernia, as it figures in old maps, now Hibernia, traces its title to a certain Heber, and until the time of Henry VII., when the custom was prohibited, the Hibernians used to rush into battle with perfervid cries of Aber![324] It is a recognised peculiarity of the Gaelic language to stress the first of any two syllables, whereas in Welsh the accent falls invariably upon the second: given therefore one and the same word “Aubrey,” a Welshman should theoretically pronounce it ‘Brey, and an Irishman Aubr’; that is precisely what seems to have happened, whence there is a probability that the Heber and “St. Ibar” of Hibernia and the Bri of Cambria are references to one and the same immigrants.

Having “cambred” Heber with Bri, or Bru, and finding them both assigned traditionally to the Ægean, it is permissible to read the preliminary vowels of Heber or Huber, as the Greek eu, and to assume that Aubrey was the soft, gentle, pleasing, and propitious Brey. Britain is the Welsh Prydain, Hu was pronounced He, and it is thus not improbable that Pry was originally Pere He, or Father Hu, and that the traditions of Hu and Bru referred originally to the same race.

Hyper, the Greek for upper, is radically the same word as Iupiter or Iu pere, and if it be true that the French pere is a phonetically decayed form of pater, then again, ‘Pry or ‘Bru may be regarded as a corrosion of Iupiter.

Hu the Mighty, the National Pillar or ded, who has survived as the “I’ll be He” of children’s games, was indubitably the Jupiter of Great Britain, and he was probably the “Hooper” of Hooper’s Blind, or Blind Man’s Buff. According to the Triads, Hu obtained his dominion over Britain not by war or bloodshed, but by justice and peace: he instructed his people in the art of agriculture; divided them into federated tribes as a first step towards civil government, and laid the foundations of literature and history by the institution of Bardism.[325] In Celtic, barra meant a Court of Justice, in which sense it has survived in London, at Lothbury and Aldermanbury. The pious Trojans claimed “the stubborn tribes with justice to refrain,” and it is possible that barri the Cornish for divide or separate also owes its origin to Bri or pere He, who was the first to divide them into federated tribes. Among the Iberians berri meant a city, and this word is no doubt akin to our borough.

In Hibernia, the Land of Heber, Aubrey or Oberon, it is said that every parish has its green and thorn, where the little people are believed to hold their merry meetings, and to dance in frolic rounds.[326] A parish, Greek paroika, is an orderly division, and as often as not the civic centre was a fairy stone: according to Sir Laurence Gomme, who made a special study of the primitive communities, when and where a village was established a stone was ceremoniously set up, and to this pierre the headman of the village made an offering once a year.[327]

Situated in Fore Street, Totnes, there stands to-day the so-called Brutus Stone, from which the Mayor of Totnes still reads official proclamations. At Brightlingsea we have noted the existence of a Broadmoot: there is a Bradstone in Devon, a Bradeston in Norfolk, and elsewhere these Brude or Brutus stones were evidently known as pre stones. The innumerable “Prestons” of this country were originally, I am convinced, not as is supposed “Priests Towns,” but Pre Stones i.e., Perry or Fairy Stones. King James in his book on Demonology spells fairy—Phairy; in Kent the cirrhus cloudlets of a summer day are termed the “Perry Dancers,” and the phairies of Britain probably differed but slightly, if at all, from the perii or peris of Persia.[328]

Among the Greeks every town and village had its so-called “Luck,” or protecting Goddess who specially controlled its fortunes, and by Pindar this Presiding Care is entitled pherepolis, i.e., the peri or phairy of the city.

The various Purleys and Purtons of England are assigned by the authorities to peru a pear, and supposed to have been pear-tree meadows or pear-tree hills, but I question whether pear-growing was ever the national industry that the persistent prevalence of peru in place-names would thus imply.

Around the pre-stones of each village our forerunners indubitably used to pray, and in the memoirs of a certain St. Sampson we have an interesting account of an interrupted Pray-meeting—“Now it came to pass, on a certain day as he journeyed through a certain district which they call Tricurius (the hundred of Trigg), he heard, on his left hand to be exact, men worshipping (at) a certain shrine, after the custom of the Bacchantes, by means of a play in honour of an image. Thereupon he beckoned to his brothers that they should stand still and be silent while he himself, quietly descending from his chariot to the ground, and standing upon his feet and observing those who worshipped the idol, saw in front of them, resting on the summit of a certain hill an abominable image. On this hill I myself have been, and have adored, and with my hand have traced the sign of the cross which St. Sampson, with his own hand, carved by means of an iron instrument on a standing stone. When St. Sampson saw it (the image), selecting two only of the brothers to be with him, he hastened quickly towards them, their chief, Guedianus, standing at their head, and gently admonished them that they ought not to forsake the one God who created all things and worship an idol. And when they pleaded as an excuse that it was not wrong to keep the festival of their progenitors in a play, some being furious, some mocking, but some being of saner mind strongly urging him to go away, straightway the power of God was made clearly manifest. For a certain boy driving horses at full speed fell from a swift horse to the ground, and twisting his head under him as he fell headlong, remained, just as he was flung, little else than a lifeless corpse.” The “corpse” was seemingly but a severe stun, for an hour or so later, St. Sampson by the power of prayer successfully restored the patient to life, in view of which miracle Guedianus and all his tribe prostrated themselves at St. Sampson’s feet, and “utterly destroyed the idol”.[329]

The idol here mentioned if not itself a standing stone, was admittedly associated with one, and happily many of these Aubrey or Bryanstones are still standing. One of the most celebrated antiquities of Cornwall is the so-named men scryfa or “inscribed rock,” and the inscription running from top to bottom reads—RIALOBRAN CUNOVAL FIL.

Fig. 169—From Symbolism of the East and West. (Aynsley, Mrs. Murray.)

As history knows nothing of any “Rialobran, son of Cunoval,” one may suggest that Rialobran was the Ryall or Royal Obran, Obreon or Oberon, the bren or Prince of Phairyland who figures so largely in the Romance of mediæval Europe. The Rialobran stone of Cornwall may be connoted with the ceremonial perron du roy still standing in the Channel Islands, and with the numerous Browny stones of Scotland. In Cornwall the phairy brownies seem to have been as familiar as in Scotland[330]: in the Hebrides—and as the Saint of this neighbourhood is St. Bride, the word Hebrides may perhaps be rendered eu Bride—every family of any importance once possessed a most obliging household Browny. Martin, writing in the eighteenth century, says: “A spirit by the country people called Browny was frequently seen in all the most considerable families in these Isles and North of Scotland in the shape of a tall man, but within these twenty or thirty years past he is seen but rarely.” As the cromlechs of Brittany are termed poukelays or “puck stones,” it is possible that the dolmens or tolmens of there and elsewhere were associated with the fairy tall man. Still speaking of the Hebrides Martin goes on to say: “Below the chapels there is a flat thin stone called Brownie’s stone, upon which the ancient inhabitants offered a cow’s milk every Sunday, but this custom is now quite abolished”. The official interpretation of dolmen is daul or table stone, but it is quite likely that the word tolmen is capable of more than one correct explanation.

The Cornish Rialobran was in all probability originally the same as the local St. Perran or St. Piran, whose sanctuary was marked by the parish of Lanbron or Lamborne. There is a Cornish circle known as Perran Round and the celebrated Saint who figures as, Perran, Piran, Bron, and Borne,[331] is probably the same as Perun the Slav Jupiter. From a stone held in the hand of Perun’s image the sacred fire used annually to be struck and endeavours have been made to equate this Western Jupiter with the Indian Varuna. That there was a large Perran family is obvious from the statement that “till within the last fifty years the registers of the parish from the earliest period bear the Christian name of ‘Perran,’ which was transmitted from father to son; but now the custom has ceased”.[332] Thus possibly St. Perran was not only the original of the modern Perrin family, but also of the far larger Byrons and Brownes. Further inquiry will probably permit the equation of Rialobran or St. Bron or Borne with St. Bruno, and as Oberon figures in the traditions of Kensington it is possible that the Bryanstone Square in that district, into which leads Brawn Street, marks the site of another Brownie or Rialobran stone. This Bryanstone district was the home of the Byron family, and the surname Brinsmead implies the existence here or elsewhere a Brin’s mead or meadow.

The Brownies are occasionally known as “knockers,” whence the “knocking stone” which still stands in Brahan Wood, Dingwall, might no doubt be rightly entitled a Brahan, Bryan, or Brownie Stone.[333]

Legend at Kensington—in which neighbourhood is not only Bryanstone Square but also on the summit of Campden Hill an Aubrey Walk—relates that Kenna, the fairy princess of Kensington Gardens, was beloved by Albion the Son of Oberon; hence we may probably relate young Kenna with Morgana the Fay, or big Gana, the alleged Mother of Oberon.[334] Mediæval tales represent the radiant Oberon not only as splendid, as a meteor, and as a raiser of storms, but likewise as the childlike God of Love and beauteous as an angel newly born.

It is not unlikely that the Princess Kenna was Ken new or the Crescent Moon, and the consociation at Kensington of Kenna with Oberon, permits not only the connotation of Oberon with his Fay mother Morgana, but also permits the supposition that Cuneval, the parent of Rialobran, was either Cune strong or valiant. It is obvious that the most valiant and most valorous would inevitably become rulers, whence perhaps why in Celtic bren became a generic term for prince: the words bren and prince are radically the same, and stand in the same relation to one another as St. Bron to his variant St. Piran.

Oberon or Obreon, the leader of the Brownies, Elves, or Alpes, may I think be further traced in Cornwall at Carn Galva, for this Carn of Galva, Mighty Elf or Alva, was, it is said, once the seat of a benignant giant named Holiburn. The existence of Alva or Ellie-stones is implied by the fairly common surnames Alvastone, Allistone, and Ellistone, and it is probable that Livingstone was originally the same name as Elphinstone.

From the Aubry, Obrean, Peron stones, or Brownlows were probably promulgated the celebrated Brehon laws:[336] as is well known the primitive Prince or Baron sat or stood in the centre of his barrow, burra, or bury, and ranged around him each at his particular stone stood the subordinate peers, brehons (lawyers), and barons of the realm. A peer means an equal, and it is therefore quite likely that the Prestons of Britain mark circles where the village peers held their parish or parochial meetings.

With the English Preston the Rev. J. B. Johnston connotes Presteign, and he adds: “In Welsh Presteign is Llanandras, or Church of St. Andrews”.[337] This illuminating fact enables us to connect the Perry stones with the cross of St. Andrew or Ancient Troy, and as Troy was an offshoot of Khandia we may reasonably accept Crete as the starting-point of Aubrey’s worldwide tours. That Candia was the home of the gentle magna mater is implied by the ubiquitous dove: in Hibernia the name Caindea is translated as being Gaelic for gentle goddess, and we shall later connect this lady with “Kate Kennedy,” whose festival is still commemorated at St. Andrews.

To the East of Cape Khondhro in Crete, and directly opposite the town of Candia or Herakleion, lies the islet of Dhia: in Celtic dia, dieu, or duw meant God,[338] and as in Celtic Hugh meant mind, we may translate dieu as having primarily implied good Hu, the good Mind or Brain. In a personal sense the Brain is the Lord of Wits, whence perhaps why Obreon—as Keightley spells Oberon—was said to be the Emperor of Fairyland, attended by a court and special courtiers, among whom are mentioned Perriwiggen, Perriwinkle, and Puck.

At the south-eastern extremity of Dhia is a colossal spike, peak, or pier, entitled Cape Apiri, and we may connote Apiri with the Iberian town named Ipareo. The coinage of Ipareo pourtrays “a sphinx walking to the left,” at other times it depicted the Trinacria or walking legs of Sicily and the Isle of Man. The Three Legs of Sicily were represented with the face of Apollo, as the hub or bogel, and the ancient name of Sicily was Hypereia. On the Feast Day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Sicilians or Hypereians hold what they still term the “Festival of the Bara”. An immense machine of about 50 feet high is constructed, designing to represent heaven; and in the midst is placed a young female personating the Virgin, with an image of Jesus on her right hand; round the Virgin twelve little children turn vertically, representing so many seraphim, and below them twelve more children turn horizontally, as cherubim; lower down in the machine a sun turns vertically, with a child at the extremity of each of the four principal radii of his circle, who ascend and descend with his rotation, yet always in an erect posture; and still lower, reaching within about 7 feet of the ground, are placed twelve boys who turn horizontally without intermission around the principal figure, designing thereby to exhibit the twelve apostles, who were collected from all corners of the earth, to be present at the decease of the Virgin, and witness her miraculous assumption. This huge machine is drawn about the principal streets by sturdy monks, and it is regarded as a particular favour to any family to admit their children in this divine exhibition, although the poor infants themselves do not seem long to enjoy the honours they receive as seraphim, cherubim, and apostles; the constant twirling they receive in the air making some of them fall asleep, many of them sick, and others more grievously ill.[339]

Not only this Hypereian Feast but the machine itself is termed the Bara, whence it is evident that, like St. Michael, Aubrey or Aber the Confluence, was regarded as the Camber, Synagogue, Yule or Holy Whole, and the fact that the Sicilian Bara is held upon the day of St. Alipius indicates some intimate connection with St. Alf or Alpi. The Walking Sphinx of the Iparean coins is identified by M. Lenormant as the Phœnician deity Aion, and according to Akerman the type was doubtless chosen in compliment to Albinus, who was born at Hadrumetum, a town not far from Carthage.[340] What was the precise connection between this Aion and Albinus I am unaware.

Among the coins of Iberia some bear the inscriptions Iliberi, Ilibereken, and Iliberineken, which accord with Pliny’s reference to the Iliberi or Liberini. Liber was the Latin title of the God of Plenty, whence liberal, liberty, labour, etc., and seemingly the Elibers or Liberins deified these virtues as attributes of the Holy Aubrey or the Holy Brain-King.

Fig. 170.—Iberian. From Akerman.

Directly opposite Albania, the country of the Epirotes—known anciently as Epirus—is Cantabria at the heel of Italy, and we meet again with the Cantabares in Iberia where they occupied Cantabria which comprised Alava. It may be noted in passing that in Epirus the olive was a supersacred tree: according to Miss Harrison—some of whose words I have italicised—this Moria, or Fate Tree, was the very life of Athens; the life of the olive which fed her and lighted her was the very life of the city. When the Persian host sacked the Acropolis they burnt the holy olive, and it seemed that all was over. But next day it put forth a new shoot and the people knew that the city’s life still lived. Sophocles sang of the glory of the wondrous life-tree of Athens:—

From Epirus one is attracted to the river Iberus or Ebro which is bounded by the Pyrenees, and had the town of Hibera towards its mouth. Of the Iberian people in general Dr. Lardner states: “They are represented as tenacious of freedom, but those who inhabited the coasts were probably still more so of gain”. I am at a loss to know why this offensive suggestion is gratuitously put forward, as the Iberians are said to have been remarkably slender and active and to have held corpulency in much abhorrence.[341] Of the Spanish Cantabres we are told that the consciousness of their strength gave them an air of calm dignity and a decision in their purposes not found in any other people of the Peninsula. “Their loud wailings at funerals, and many other of their customs strongly resemble those of the Irish.”[342]

Pere and parent are radically the same word, and that the Iberians reverenced their peres is obvious from the fact that parricides were conducted beyond the bounds of the Kingdom and there slain; their very bones being considered too polluted to repose in their native soil.[343]

Lardner refers to the unbending resolution, persevering energy, and native grandeur of the Cantabrians, but he contemptuously rejects Strabo’s “precious information” that some of the Spanish tribes had for 6000 years possessed writing, metrical poems, and even laws. In view of the superior number of Druidical remains which are found in certain parts of Spain it is not improbable that the Barduti of Iberia corresponded with the Bards or Boreadæ of Britain.

There are many references in the classics to certain so-called Hyperboreans, in particular the oft-quoted passage from Diodorus of Sicily or Hypereia: “Hecataeus and some other ancient writers report that there is an island about the bigness of Sicily, situated in the ocean, opposite to the northern coast of Celtica (Gaul), inhabited by a people called Hyperboreans, because they are ‘beyond the north wind’. The climate is excellent, and the soil is fertile, yielding double crops. The inhabitants are great worshippers of Apollo, to whom they sing many, many hymns. To this god they have consecrated a large territory, in the midst of which they have a magnificent round temple, replenished with the richest offerings. Their very city is dedicated to him, and is full of musicians and players on various instruments, who every day celebrate his benefits and perfections.”

Claims to being the original Hyperborea have been put in by scholars from time to time on behalf of Stonehenge, the Hebrides, Hibernia, Scythia, Tartary, and Muscovy, “stretching quite to Scandinavia or Sweden and Norway”: the locality is still unsettled and will probably remain so, for there is some reason to suppose that the Hyperboreans were a sect or order akin perhaps to the Albigenses, Cathari, Bridge Builders, Comacine Masters, Templars, and other Gnostic organizations of the Dark Ages.

The chief Primary Bard of the West was entitled Taliesin, which Welsh scholars translate into Radiant Brow: the brow is the seat of the brain, and the two words stand to each other in the same relation as Aubrey to Auberon.

Commenting upon the Elphin bairn, illustrated in Fig. 162, Akerman observes that it is supposed to illustrate the Gaulish myth of the Druid Abaris to whom Apollo is said to have given an arrow on which he travelled magically through the air. It is an historic fact that a physical Abaris visited Athens where he created a most favourable impression; it is likewise a fact that Irish literature possesses the account of a person called Abhras, which perfectly agrees with the description of the Hyperborean Abaris of Diodorus and Himerius. The classic Abaris went to Greece to whip up subscriptions for a temple: the Irish Abhras is said to have gone to distant parts in quest of knowledge, returning by way of Scotland where he remained seven years and founded a new system of religion. In Irish Abar means “God the first Cause,” and as in Ireland cad (which is our good) meant holy, the magic word Abracadabra may be reasonably resolved into Abra, Good Abra. As already mentioned the Irish cried Aber! when rushing into battle, and the word was no doubt used likewise at peaceful feasts and festivals. The inference would thus seem that the title of Abaris was assumed by the chief Druid or High Priest who personified during his tenure of office the archetypal Abaris. It is well known that the priest or king enacted in his own person the mysteries of the faith; and it is not improbable that chief Guedianus, whose sacred play was so rudely disturbed by St. Sampson, was personifying at the time the Good Janus or Genius.

Fig. 171.—From Barthelemy.

If my suggestion that Taliesin or Radiant Brow was a generic title assumed by every Primary-Chief-Bard in Britain for the time being be correct, it is likely that the same principle applied elsewhere than in Wales. The first bard mentioned in Ireland was Amergin, which resolves into Love King, and may thus be equated with Homer the blind old man of Chios. The supposedly staid and gloomy Etrurians attributed all their laws and wisdom to an elphin child who was unexpectedly thrown up from the soil by a plough. As the Etrurian name for Cupid was Epeur, in all probability the aged child on Fig. 171 represents this elphin high-brow, and with Epeur may be connoted the Etrurian Perugia—probably the same word as Phrygia. The local saint of Perugia, the land of Peru (?) was known as Good John of Perugia: in Hibernia St. Ibar is mentioned as being “like John the Baptist”.[344]

It was the custom in Etruria to represent good genii as birds: birds sporting amid foliage are even to-day accepted and understood as symbolic of good genii in Paradise, and birds or brids, as we used to spell them, are of course Nature’s little singing men, i.e., bards or boreadæ. A percipient observer of the Pictish inscriptions found in Scotland has recently pointed out that, “With the exception of the eagle which conveys a special meaning, shown in many early Scottish stones, the image of a bird is a sign of good omen. Winged creatures, indeed, almost always stand for angelic and spiritual things, whether in pagan or Christian times. The bird symbol involved the conception of ethereality or spirituality. The bird motif occurs in the decoration of metallic objects in the British Islands during the early centuries in this era. I have found in Wigtownshire the image of a bird in bronze. It belongs to a time early in this era. It occurs within the pentacle symbol engraved on a pebble from the Broch of Burrian, Orkney. Birds are shown within the pedestal of a cross at Farr. Birds with a similar symbolism are found on the Shandwick stone, and on a stone at St. Vigeans. They are of frequent occurrence in foliageous work, often with the three-berried branch or with the three-lobed leaf, as at Closeburn. The pagan conception, absorbed into the early Christian ideas, was that the bird represented the disembodied spirit which was reputed to voyage here and there with a lightning celerity, like the flash of a swallow on the wing.”[345]

The Bards of Britain attributed the foundation of their order to Hu the First Pillar of the Island, and to unravel the personality of the early Bards will no doubt prove as impracticable as the disclosure of Homer, Amergin, Old Moore, and Old Parr.

As St. Bride, whose name may be connoted with brid or bird, was the goddess of eloquence and poetry, the Welsh term Prydain is no doubt cognate with prydu the Welsh for “to compose poetry”. Probably prate, mediæval praten, meant originally to preach in a fervid, voluble, and sententious manner, but in any case it is impossible to agree with Skeat that prate was “of imitative origin”. Imitative of what—a parrot?

The hyper of Hyperborean is our word upper; over, German uber, means aloft, which is radically alof, and exuberant and exhuberance resolve into, from or out of Auberon: the bryony is a creeper of notoriously exuberant growth, in Greek bruein means to teem or grow luxuriantly.

Fig. 172.—From Barthelemy.

With the river Ebro may be connoted the South Spanish town of Ebora or Epora which is within a few miles of Andura. The coins of this city are inscribed Epora, Aipora, and Iipora, and the “bare bearded head to the right within a laurel garland” may here no doubt be identified with Hyperion, the father of Helios the Sun. In Homer, Helios himself is alluded to as Hyperion, which is the same name as our Auberon: the coins of the Tarragonensian town of Pria, which has been sometimes confused with Baria, in the south of Spain, figure a bull and are inscribed Prianen.

There are in existence certain coins figuring an ear of corn, a pellet, a crescent, the head of Hercules, and a club, inscribed Abra: the site of this city is unknown, but is believed to have been near Cadiz.

On the banks of the Tagus there was a city named Libora and its coins pourtrayed a horse: in the opinion of Akerman the unbridled horse was the symbol of liberty, and it is quite likely that among other interpretations this was one, for it is beyond question that symbolism was never fettered into one solitary and stereotyped form.

The ancient Libora is now known as Talavera la Reyna which may seemingly be modernised into Tall Vera, the Queen. The Tarraconensian town of Barea—whose emblem was the thistle—is now known as Vera: the old Portuguese Ebora is now Evora, uber is the German for over; Varvara is the Cretan form of Barbara, and it is quite obvious that in various directions Vera and Bera with their derivatives were synonymous terms.

It would seem that Aubrey or Avery toured with his cross into Helvetia, planting it particularly at Ginevra, now Geneva, and there for the moment we may leave him amid the Alpine Oberland at Berne.

The ancient town of Berne memorises in its museum a famed St. Bernard dog named “Barry,” which saved the lives of forty travellers: this “Barry” associated with Oberthal may be connoted with “Perro,” a shepherd’s dog in Wales, whose curious name Borrow was surprised to find corresponded with perro, the generic term for dog in Spain.[346]

Berne still maintains its erstwhile sacred Bruin or bears in their bear-pit, but the Gaulish Eburs or Iburii seemingly reverenced not Bruin but the boar, vide the Ebur coin here illustrated. The capital of the ancient Eburii is now Evreux, and they seem, no doubt for some excellent reason, to have been confused with the Cenomani, a people seemingly akin to our British Cenomagni, Iceni, or Cantii.

Fig. 174, bearing the inscription Eburo, is a coin of the Eburones who inhabited the neighbourhood of Liége. It is a noteworthy fact that the people of Liége are admittedly conspicuous as the most courteous and charming of all Belgians. Their coins were inscribed Ebur, Eburo, and sometimes Com—a curious and unexplained legend which occurs frequently upon the tokens of Britain.

The Celtiberian town of Cunbaria is now known as La Maria, the Kimmeroi were synonymously the Kymbri, and it is not improbable that these dual terms have survived in the compère and commère of modern France. The pères or priests of France, like the parsons, priests, and presbyters of Britain, assign to infants at Baptism a God-Father and a God-Mother, which the French term respectively parrain and marrain. Compère and commère figure not only in the Church but also in the Theatre, and it is more than likely that the commère and compère of the modern Revue are the direct descendants of the patriarchal Abaris, Abhras, Priest, and Presbyter of prehistoric times.

Figs. 173 and 174.—Gaulish. From Akerman.

On the Sierra de Elvira near Granada used to stand Ilibiris whose coins are inscribed Iliberi, Ilbrs, Iliberris, Liber, Ilbernen, Ilbrnakn, Ilbrekn, and these legends may be connoted with the famous Irish Leprechaun, Lobaircin, or Lubarkin who figures less prominently in England as the Lubrican or Lubberkin. Sometimes the Irish knock off the holy and refer simply to “a little prechaun,” but the more usual form is Lubarkin:[347] this most remarkable of the fairy tribe in Ireland is supposed to be peculiar to that island, but one would probably have once met with him at Brecon, or Brychain at Brecknock, at Brechin in Forfarshire, at Birchington in Kent, at Barking near London, and in many more directions. In connection with Iberia in the West there occur references to a giant Bergyon, who may be connoted with Burchun of the Asiatic Buratys. The religion of these Buratys was, said Bell, downright paganism of the grossest kind: he adds the information, “they talk, indeed, of an Almighty and Good Being who created all things, whom they call Burchun; but seem bewildered in obscure and fabulous notions concerning His nature and government”.[348] Inquiries may prove that these Burchun-worshipping Buratys were of the Asiatic Iberian race which Strabo supposed were descendants of the Western Iberi.[349]

In addition to Barking near London (Domesday Berchinges) there is a Birchin Lane, and buried away in obscurity, opposite the Old Bailey in London, there is standing to-day a small open court entitled Prujean Square. In connection with this may be connoted the tradition that the origin of the societies of the inns of court is to be found in the law schools existing in the city: the first of these legal institutions entitled Johnstone’s Inn,[350] was situated in Newgate; and the vulgarity of the name Johnstone raises a suspicion that Johnstones were as plentiful in Scotland as Prestons in England, both alike being Aubry or Bryanstones, where the Brehon laws were enunciated and administered. Whether the present Prujean Square marks the site of the original Johnstone, whence Johnstone’s Inn, is a matter which may possibly be settled by future inquiry, but the word Prujean, which is père John, renders it extremely likely that the original Johnstone of Johnstone’s Inn, Newgate, was alternatively père Johnstone. If this were so, Prujean Square marks the primary Law Court of the Old Bailey, and at some remote period the officers of the Law merely stepped across the road into more commodious premises.

The Governors of Gray’s Inn, another most ancient Law School, are entitled “the Ancients”; equity is radically the same word as equus, a horse; and the Mayors, or Mares, of Britain and Brittany seemingly represented the mare-headed Demeter or Good Mother. Juge is geegee, our judges still wear horse-hair wigs of office, and the figure on the British coin here illustrated looks singularly like a brehon or barrister who has been called to the Bar.

Fig. 175.—British. From Akerman.

It is common knowledge that the primitive Bar was a barrow, from the summit of which the Druid, King, or Abaris administered justice, and around which presumably were ranged each at his stone the prehistoric barristers or abaristers? Even until the eighteenth century the lawyers were assigned each a pillar in St. Paul’s Church, and at their respective pillars the Men of Law administered advice. On the summit of Prestonbury Rings in Devonshire evidently once stood a phairie stone, and the name of Prestonpans in Scotland suggests that Prestons were not unknown in Albany.

The laws of Greece were admittedly derived from Crete, and such was the reputation of King Minos that the mythologists made him the Judge of the Under-world. Lycurgus, the Cretan, would not permit his Code to be committed to writing, deeming it more permanent if engraved upon the brain: the Brehon laws of Ireland were enunciated in rhymed triplets termed Celestial Judgments, and the most ancient Law Codes of all nations are assigned without exception to Bards and a divine origin.

Not only were laws enunciated from barrows, but the dead were buried in a barrow, and the knees of the deceased were tucked up under his chin so that the body assumed the position of an unborn child: in Welsh bru meant the belly or matrix, in Cornish bry meant breast, and the notion seems to have been that the body of the deceased was restored as it were into Abraham’s bosom whence it had sprung.[351]

It is a remarkable fact that neither in the Greek nor Latin language is there any equivalent to the word barrow, whence it would seem, judging also from the immense number of round and oval barrows found in Britain, that these islands were pre-eminently the home of the barrow, and that the barrow was essentially a British institution.

Connected with barrow is the civic borough, also the berg or hill: in Cornish bre, bar, or per meant hill,[352] and bar meant top or summit; birua is the Basque for head, and in Gaelic barra meant supposedly mount of the circle.[353]

In Cornish bron meant breast or pap, and one of the most popular heroines of Welsh Romance is the beautiful Bronwen or Branwen, a name which the authorities translate as meaning Bosom White. In old English bosom was written bosen, and as en was our ancient plural, as in brethren, children, etc., it is probable that not only did bosen mean the bosses but that bron or breast was originally bru en, bre en or bar en, i.e., the tops or hills. This symbol of the Great Mother was represented frequently by two hills—from the Paps of Anu down to twin barrows, and it was also represented mathematically by two circles.

In Celtic bryn meant hillock or hill, in Cornish bern meant a hayrick, and that the mows or hayricks were made in the form of bron, the breast, may be implied from ancient Inn Signs of the Barley Mow. Bara was Cornish for bread; in the same language barn meant to judge, barner a judge, and there is good reason to suppose that the tithe barns connected with Monasteries and Churches served originally not merely as store-houses, but as Courts of Justice, theatres, and centres of religion. In Cornish bronter meant priest, priest is the same word as breast, and the notion of parsons being pastors, feeders, or fathers is commemorated in the words themselves. In Cornish brein or brenn meant royal and supreme; the sacred centre stone of King’s County in Ireland was situated at Birr, and birua has already been noted as being the Basque for head. The probability of these words being connected is strengthened by Keightley’s observation: “There must by the way some time or other have been an intimate connection between Spain and England, so many of our familiar words seem to have a Spanish origin”.[354]

Fig. 176.—From A Guide to Avebury (Cox, R. Hippesley).

In addition to the famous earthwork at Abury in Wilts there is a less familiar one at Eubury in Gloucestershire: at Redbourne in Herts is a “camp” known as “Aubrey’s” or “Aubury,” whence it would seem that abri, the generic term for a shelter or refuge, might also have originated in Britain.[355] The colossal abri at Abury, or Aubrey, consisted of two circles within a greater one, and at the head of the avenue facing due east it will be noticed that Aubrey, the seventeenth-century antiquary, records twin barrows situated on what is now Overton Hill.

Fig. 177.—Avebury “restored”.

Lying in the sea a mile or so off the Cornish town of St. Just are a pair of conical bergs or pyramids known as the Brisons, and opposite these is a little bay named Priest’s Cove. There is no known etymology for Brisons, but it has been suggested that these remarkable burgs were once used as prisons: probably they were, for the stocks were frequently placed at the church door, and without doubt the ancient holy places served on necessity as prisons as well as Courts of St. Just. In the vicarage garden at St. Just was found a small bronze bull, and as the Phœnicians have been washed out of reckoning we may assign this idol either to the Britons who, until recently wassailed under the guise of a bull termed “the Broad,”[356] or to the Bronze-age Cretans, among whom the Bull or Minotaur was sacred. Perhaps instead of “Cretans” it would be more just to say Hellenes, for the headland opposite the Brisons was known originally as Cape Helenus, and there are the ruins of St. Hellen’s Chapel still upon it.

Hellen, the mythical ancestor from whom the Hellenes attributed their national descent, may possibly be recognised not only as the Long Man or Lanky Man of country superstition but also in Partholon or Bartholon, the alleged son of Terah (Troy?), who is said to have landed with an expedition at Imber Scene in Ireland within 300 years after the Flood. Partholon, Father Good Holon (?) or Pure Good Holon (?) is said to have had three sons “whose names having been conferred on localities where they are still extant their memories have been thus perpetuated so that they seem still to live among us”. This passage, quoted from Silvester Giraldus,[357] who was surnamed Cambrensis because he was a Welshman, permits the assumption that a similar practice prevailed also elsewhere, and if in the time of Giraldus (1146) place-names had survived since the Flood, there is no reason to suppose that they have since ceased to exist.

Hellen was the son of Deucalion and Pyrrha, who correspond to the Noah and Alpha of our British mythology: after floating for nine days during the Flood the world was said to have been re-peopled by these twain, two-one, giant or joint pair, who created men by casting stones over their shoulders. In the Christian emblem here illustrated the divine Père or Parent, is being assisted by an angel, peri, or phairy, and it is possible that the Prestons of Britain were at one time Pyrrha stones. As the syllable zance of Penzance is always understood as san, holy, possibly the two Brisons may be translated into Pair Holy: with the Greek Pyrrha-Flood story may be connoted Peirun the name of the Chinese Noah.

Fig. 178.—An Angel assisting the Creator. Italian Miniature of the XIII. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

The church of St. Just was originally known as Lafroodha, which is understood to have meant laf church and rhooda,[358] “a corruption of the Saxon word rood or cross”. Rhooda is, however, much older than Saxon, rhoda is the Greek for rose, and the Rhodian Greeks used the rose as their national symbol. The immediate surroundings of the Dane John at Durovernum are known to this day as Rodau’s Town, and we shall consider Rhoda at greater length in subsequent chapters.

In the church of Roodha or St. Just there is standing a so-called “Silus stone” which was discovered in 1834, during alterations to the chancel: this object has carved upon it Silus hic jacet, the Greek letters Χ ΡHêΧ.Ρ., and a crosier, whence it has been surmised that Silus was a priest or pastor. Mr. J. Harris Stone inquires: “Who was Silus? No one has yet discovered,” and he adds: “It is a reasonable conjecture that he was one of those early British bishops who preached the Gospel before the mission of Augustine.”

Fig. 179.—Iberian coin of Rhoda, now Rosas. From Akerman.

I agree that he was British, but I am inclined to place him still farther back, and to assign his name at any rate to the Selli, under which title the priests of Epirus were known. The Selli were pre-eminently the custodians at Dodona, whence Homer’s reference:—

The Spartan courage and simplicity of the British papas is sufficiently exemplified by their voyages to Iceland and to the storm-tossed islands of the Hebrides, where they have left names such as Papa Stour, Papa Westray, etc. One may assume that the selli of Dodona—as probably also the salii or augurs of Etruria—lived originally in cells either single or in clusters which became the foundations of later monasteries: Silus may thus be connoted with solus, and the word celibate suggests that the selli led solitary lives.

Close to Perry Court, in Kent, is Selgrove, and the numerous Selstons, Seldens, Selsdens, Selwoods, and Selhursts, were in all probability hills, woods, denes, and groves where the Selli congregated, and celebrated the benefits and perfections of the Solus or Alone. Near Birmingham is Selly Oak, which may be connoted with allon, the Hebrew for oak, and with the fact that the oak groves of the selli at Dodona were universally renowned. The Scilly Islands and Selsea or Sels Island in Hampshire may be connoted with Selby or Selebi, the abode of the selli (?), in Yorkshire, now Selby Abbey. In Devonshire is Zeal Monachorum, and judging by what was accomplished we may define the selli as zealous and celestial-minded souls. In Welsh celli means a grove; in Latin sylva means a wood; it is notorious that the Druids worshipped in groves, and it is not unlikely that Silbury Hill was particularly the selli’s hill or barrow. On the other hand the pervasiveness of Bury at Abury as exemplified in the immediately adjacent Barbury Castle, Boreham Downs, Bradenstoke, Overton Hill, and Olivers Castle, makes it likely that the Sil of Silbury may have been the Sol of Solway and Salisbury Crags.

In Ireland our soft cell is kil, whence Kilkenny, Kilbride, and upwards of 1400 place-names, all meaning cell of, or holy to so and so. The enormous prevalence of this hard kil in Ireland renders it probable that the word carried the same meaning in many other directions, notably at Calabria in Etruria: the wandering priests of Asia Minor and the near East were known as Calanders, a word probably equivalent to Santander, and as has been seen every Welsh Preston was a Llanandras or church of Andrew.

Fig. 180.—From The Celtic Druids (Higgens, G.).

At Haverfordwest there is a place named Berea, upon which the Rev. J. B. Johnston comments: “Welsh Non-conformists love to name their chapels and villages around them so”: among the Hebrew Pharisees there existed a mystic haburah or fellowship;[359] and the Welsh word Berea, probably connected with abri, meaning a sanctuary, is associated by Mr. Johnston with the passage in Acts xvii., i.e.: “And the brethren immediately sent away Paul and Silas by night into Berea”. That Paul preached from an abri, or Mount Pleasant, is implied by the statement that he stood in the midst of Mars Hill, whence he admonished his listeners against their altars to the Unknown God. It was traditionally believed that St. Paul preached not only to the people of Cornwall, but also to Londoners from Parliament Hill, where a prehistoric stone still stands.

That Hellen was once a familiar name at Abury is implied by Lansdown, Lynham, and perhaps Calne or uch alne the Great Alone. Both the river Colne in Lancashire and the village of Calne near Abury are attributed as possibly to calon, the Welsh for heart or centre: the word centre is radically San Troy, as also is saintuary or sanctuary. Stukeley speaks particularly of Overton Hill as being the sanctuary, but the entire district was traditionally sacrosanct, and it was popularly supposed that reptiles died on entering the precincts: of the Hyperboreans, Diodorus expressly records they had consecrated a large territory.

The village of Abury was occasionally spelled Avereberie, at other times Albury, and with this latter form may be connoted Alberich,[360] the German equivalent to Auberon. Chilperic, a variant of Alberich, is stated by Camden to be due to a German custom of prefacing certain names with ch or k, a contracted form of king: I was unaware of this fact when first formulating my theory that an initial K meant great.

It is considered that Alberich meant Elf rich, and the official supposition is that the French Alberon, or Auberon, was made in Germany: according to Keightley, the German Albs or Elves have fallen from the popular creed, but in most of the traditions respecting them we recognise benevolence as one of the principal traits of their character.[361]

Alberich may, as is generally supposed, have meant Alberich, or Albe wealthy, but brich, brick, brook, etc., are fundamental terms and are radically ber uch. Brightlingsea—of which there are 193 variants of spelling—is pronounced by the natives Bricklesea, and there are innumerable British Brockleas, Brixtons, Brixhams, Brockhursts, etc.

Among the many unsolved problems of archæology are the Hebridean brochs, which are hollow towers of dry built masonry formed like truncated cones. These erections, peculiar to Scotland, are found mainly in the Hebrides, and there is a surprising uniformity in their design and construction. Among the most notable brochs are those situated at Burray, Borrowston, Burrafirth, Burraness, Birstane, Burgar, Brindister, Birsay and in Berwickshire, at Cockburnlaw, and the remarkable recurrence of Bur, or Burra, in these place-names is obviously due to something more than chance.

Figs. 181 and 182.—From Notes on the Structure of the Brochs (Anderson, J.). Proceedings of the Scotch Society of Antiquaries.

At Brookland Church in Kent—within a few miles of Camber Castle—a triplex conical belfrey or berg of wooden construction is standing, not on the tower, but on the ground in the immediate neighbourhood of the sacred edifice. The amazing cone-tomb illustrated on page 237 is that of Lars Porsenna, which means Lord Porsenna, and the bergs or conical pair of Brison rocks lying off Priest’s Cove at St. Just may be connoted not only with the word parson but with Parsons and Porsenna. Malory, in Morte d’Arthur, mentions an eminent Dame Brisen, adding that: “This Brisen was one of the greatest enchantresses that was at that time in the world living.”[362]

Fig. 183.—From Symbolism of the East and West (Aynsley, Mrs. Murray).

There is a famous broch at Burrian in the Orkneys; near St. Just are the parishes of St. Buryan and St. Veryan, both of which are identified with an ancient Eglosberrie, i.e., the eglise, close, or cloister of Berrie. A berry is a diminutive egg, and in some parts of the country gooseberries are known as deberries.[363] De berry seemingly means good or divine berry, and the pickly character of the gooseberry bush no doubt added to the sanctity: from the word goosegog gog was seemingly once a term equivalent to berry; a goose is often termed a barnacle, and the phantom dog—sometimes a bear—entitled the bargeist or barguest was no doubt a popular degradation of the Hound of Heaven. Two hounds in leash are known as a brache, which is the same word as brace, meaning pair: in connection with the supposition that the Brisons were originally prisons may be noted that barnacles were primarily a pair of curbs or handcuffs.

Fig. 184.—From The Correspondences of Egypt (Odhner C. T.).

From the typical ground plan of two brochs here given it will be seen that their form was that of a wheel, and it is possible that the flanged spokes of these essential abris were based upon the svastika notion of a rolling, running trinacria such as that of Hyperea and of the Isle of Man. Brochs are in some directions known as peels, and at Peel Castle, in the Isle of Man, legend points to a grave 30 yards long as being that of Eubonia’s first king: a curious tradition, says Squire, credits him with three legs, and it is these limbs arranged like the spokes of a wheel that appear on the arms of the Island.[364]

In connection with the giant’s grave at Peel may be connoted the legend in Rome that St. Paul was there beheaded “at the Three Fountains”. The exact spot is there shown where the milk spouted from his apostolic arteries, and where moreover his head, after it had done preaching, took three jumps to the honour of the Holy Trinity, and at each spot on which it jumped there instantly sprang up a spring of living water which retains to this day a plain and distinct taste of milk.[365] This story of three jumps is paralleled in Leicester by a legend of Giant Bell who took three mighty leaps and is said to be buried at Belgrave:[366] Bell is the same word as Paul and Peel.

Fig. 185.—Iberian. From Akerman.

Fig. 186.—From An Essay on Ancient Coins, Medals, and Gems (Walsh, R.).

Fig. 187.—From the British Museum’s Guide to the Antiquities of the Early Iron Age.

The Lord of the Isle of Man is said to have swept swift as the spring wind over land and sea upon a horse named Splendid Mane: the Mahommedans tell of a milk-white steed named Al Borak, each of whose strides were equal to the furthest range of human vision: in Chaucer’s time English carmen addressed their steeds as brok, and in Arabic el boraka means the blessing. Broch is the same word as brooch, and upon ancient brooches a brok, as in Fig. 187, was sometimes represented: the magnificent ancestral brooches of the Highland families will be found on investigation frequently to be replete with ancient symbolism, the centre jewel representing the All-seeing Eye. Broch or broca means a pin or spike, and prick means dot or speck: prick, like brok, also meant horse, and every one is familiar with the gallant knight who “pricks,” i.e., rides on horseback o’er the plain. Prick and brok thus obviously stand in the same relation to each other as Chilperic and Alberic.

The phairy first king of the Isle of Man was regarded as the special patron of sea-faring men, by whom he was invoked as “Lord of Headlands,” and in this connection Berry Head at Brixham, Barras Head at Tintagel, and Barham or Barenham Down in Kent are interesting. The southern coast of Wales is sprinkled liberally with Bru place-names from St. Bride’s Bay wherein is Ramsey Island, known anciently as ynis y Bru, the Isle of Bru, to Burry river and Barry Isle next Sulli Isle (the selli isle?).

Aubrey or Auberon may be said almost to pervade the West and South of England: at Barnstaple or Barn Market we meet with High Bray, river Bray, Bratton, Burnham, Braunton, Berrynarbor, the Brendon Hills, Paracombe and Baggy Point; in the Totnes neighbourhood are Bigbury, Burr Island, Beer Head, Berry Head, Branscombe, Branshill, and Prawle Point, which last may be connoted with the rivers Barle, Bark, and Brue. It is perhaps noteworthy that the three spots associated until the historic period with flint-knapping[367] are Beer Head in Devon, Purfleet near Barking, and Brandon in Suffolk.

Totnes being the traditional landing-place of Bru it is interesting to find in that immediate district two Prestons, a Pruston, Barton, Bourton or Borton, Brookhill, Bructon, Brixham, Prescott, Parmount, Berry Pomeroy, Prestonberry and Preston Castle or Shandy’s Hill.[368] Ebrington suggests an ington or town of the children of Ebr; Alvington may be similarly connected with Alph, and Ilbert and Brent seemingly imply the Holy Ber or Bren. The True Street by Totnes may be connoted with the adjacent Dreyton, and Bosomzeal Cross in all probability once bore in the centre, or bogel, the boss which customarily forms the eye of Celtic crosses. Hu being the first of the three deddu, tatu, or pillars, the term Totnes probably as in Shoeburyness meant Totnose, and the adjacent Dodbrooke, Doddiscombleigh, and Daddy’s Hole may all be connoted with the Celtic tad, dad, or daddy. With the Doddi of Doddiscombleigh or Doddy’s Valley Meadow, may be connoted the gigantic and commanding Cornish headland known as Dodman. The Hollicombe by Preston was presumably the holy Coombe, and Halwell, at one time a Holy Well: in this neighbourhood of Kent’s Cavern and Kent’s Copse are Kingston and Okenbury; at Kingston-on-Thames is Canbury Park, and it is extremely likely that the true etymology of Kingston is not King’s Town but King Stone, i.e., a synonymous term for Preston and the same word as Johnstone.

If as now suggested Bru was père Hu we may recognise Hu at Hoodown which, at Totnes, where it occurs, evidently does not mean a low-lying spit of land but, as at Plymouth Hoe or Haw, implied a hill. In view of the preceding group of local names it is difficult to assume that some imaginative Mayor of Totnes started the custom of issuing his proclamations from the so-called Brutus Stone in Fore Street merely to flatter an obscure Welsh poet who had vain-gloriously uttered the tradition that the British were the remnants of Droia: it is far more probable that the Mayor and corporation of Totnes had never heard of Taliesin, and that they stolidly followed an immemorial wont.

With the church of St. Just or Roodha, and with the Rodau of Rodau’s Town neighbouring the Danejohn at Canterbury or Durovernum, we shall subsequently connote Rutland or Rutaland and the neighbouring Leicester, anciently known as Ratæ. The highest peak in Leicestershire is Bardon Hill, followed, in order of altitude, by “Old John” in Bradgate Park, Bredon, and Barrow Hill.

Adjacent to Ticehurst in Sussex—a hurst which is locally attributed to a fairy named Tice—may be found the curious place-names Threeleo Cross and Bewl Bri. These names are the more remarkable being found in the proximity of Priestland, Parson’s Green, Barham, and Heart’s Delight. Under the circumstances I think Threeleo Cross must have been a tri holy or three-legged cross, and that Huggins Hall, which marks the highest ground of the district, was Huge or High King’s Hall: in close proximity are Queen’s Street, Maydeacon House, Grovehurst, and Great Old Hay.

Fig. 188.—From A Guide to Avebury (Cox, R. Hippesley).

With Bredon in Leicestershire, a district where the tradition of a three-jumping giant, as has been seen, prevailed, may be connoted the prehistoric camp, or abri, of Bradenstoke, and that Abury itself was regarded as a vast trinacria is probable from the fact that in the words of a quite impartial archæologist: “The triangle of downs surrounding Avebury may be considered the hub of England and from it radiates the great lines of hills like the spokes of a wheel, the Coltswolds to the north, the Mendips to the west, the Dorsetshire Hills to the south west, Salisbury Plain to the south, the continuation of the North and South Downs to the east, and the high chalk ridge of the Berkshire Downs north-east to the Chilterns.”[369]

In this quotation I have ventured to italicise the word triangle which idea again is recurrent in the passage: “The Downs round Avebury are the meeting-place of three main watersheds of the country and are the centre from which the great lines of hills radiate north-east, and west through the Kingdom. Here at the junction of the hills we find the largest prehistoric temple in the world with Silbury, the largest artificial earth mound in Europe, close by.”[370]

Fig. 189.—British. From Evans.

The assertion by Stukeley that Avebury described the form of a circle traversed by serpentine stone avenues has been ridiculed by less well-informed archæologists, largely on the ground that no similar erection existed elsewhere in the world. But on the British coin here illustrated a cognate form is issuing from the eagle’s beak, and in Fig. 190 (a Danish emblem of the Bronze Age), the Great Worm or Dragon, which typified the Infinite, is supporting a wheel to which the designer has successfully imparted the idea of movement.

Fig. 190.—From Symbolism of the East and West (Aynsley, Mrs. Murray).

Five miles N.-E. of Abury there stands on the summit of a commanding hill the natural great fortress known as Barbury Castle, surrounded by the remains of numerous banks and ditches. The name Barbara—a duplication of Bar—is in its Cretan form Varvary, and it was seemingly the Iberian or Ivernian equivalent of “Very God of Very God,” otherwise Father of Fathers, or Abracadabra. In Britain, and particularly in Ireland, children still play a game entitled, The Town of Barbarie, which is thus described: “Some boys line up in a row, one of whom is called the prince. Two others get out on the road and join hands and represent the town of Barbarie. One of the boys from the row then comes up to the pair, walks around them and asks—

They answer—

Being unsuccessful, he goes back to the prince and tells him that they won’t surrender. The prince then says—

This is done, and the whole row of boys are brought up one after the other till the town is taken by their parting the joined hands of the pair who represent the town of Barbarie.[371]

Fig. 191.—From The Cross: Heathen and Christian (Brock, M.).

It will be remarked that Barbarie is represented by a pair, which is suggestive of the Dioscuri or Heavenly Twins, and on referring to the life of St. Barbara we find her recorded as the daughter of Dioscorus, and as having been born at Heliopolis, or the city of the sun. The Dioscuri—those far-famed heroes Castor and Pollux—were said to have been born out of an egg laid by Leda the Swan: elsewhere the Dioscuri were known as the Cabiri, a term which is radically abiri. It is probable that St. Barbara was once represented with the emblems of the two Dioscuri or Cabiri, for one of her “tortures” is said to have been that she should be hanged between two forked trees. These two trees were doubtless two sprigs such as shown in Fig. 191 or two flowering pillars between which the Virgin was extended Andrew-wise in benediction. The next torture recorded of St. Barbara was the scorching of her sides with burning lamps, from which we may deduce that the Virgin was once depicted with two great lights on either side. Next, St. Barbara’s oppressors made her strongly to be beaten, “and hurted her head with a mallet”: the Slav deity Peroon was always depicted with a mallet, and the hammer or axe was practically a universal symbol of Power. As already noted, Peroon, the God with a mallet, has been equated by some scholars with Varuna of India; in Etruria the God of Death was generally represented with a great hammer, and the mallet with which St. Barbara was “hurted” may be further equated with the celebrated Hammer of Thor.

The gigantic hammer cut into the hillside at Tours, and associated in popular estimation with Charles Martel, in view of the name Tours is far more likely to have been the hammer of Thor, who, as we have seen, was assigned to Troy.

We are told that St. Barbara’s father imprisoned his daughter within a high and strong tour, tor, or tower, that no man should see her because of her great beauty: this incident is common alike to fairy-tale—notably at Tory Island—and hagiology, and one meets persistently with the peerless princess imprisoned in a peel, broch, or tower. In Fig. 192 is represented a so-called Trinity of Evil, but in all probability this is a faithful reproduction of the Iberian Aber or Aubrey, i.e., the trindod seated upon his symbolic tor, tower, or broch. The strokes at the toes, like the more accentuated lines from the fingers of Fig. 193, denoted the streaming light, and when we read that one of the exquisite tortures inflicted upon St. George was the thrusting of poisoned thorns into his finger-nails it is a reasonable conclusion that St. George was likewise represented with rayed fingers. The feast of St. Ibar in Hibernia is held upon 23rd April or Aperil, which is also St. George’s Day.

Fig. 192.—The Trinity of Evil. From a French Miniature of the XIII. Cent.

Fig. 193.—God the Father Wearing a Lozenge-Shaped Nimbus. Miniature of the XIV. Cent. Italian Manuscript in the Bibliotheque Royale.

From Christian Iconography (Didron).

St. Barbara, we are told, was marvellously carried on a stone into a high mountain, on which two shepherds kept their sheep, “the which saw her fly”; and it is apparent in all directions that Barbara was peculiarly identified with the Two-One Twain or Pair. Barbara is popularly contracted into Babs or Bab, and the little Barbara or Babette may probably be identified with the Babchild of Kent. The coin here illustrated was unearthed at the village of Babchild, known also as Bacchild, and its centre evidently represents the world pap, Pope, paab, or baba: in Christian Art the All Father is represented as a Pope, and as twin Popes, and likewise as a two-faced Person.

Fig. 194.—British. From Akerman.

Fig. 195.—God the Father, the Creator, as an Old Man and a Pope. From a French stained glass window of the XVI. cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

There is little doubt that the pre-Christian Pope was sometimes represented as a mother and child, and it was probably the discovery of one of these images or pictures that started the horrible scandal of Pope Joan or Papesse Jeanne. It is said that this accomplished but unhappy lady occupied the papal-chair for a period of two years five months under the title of John the Eighth, but having publicly become the mother of a little son her life ended in infamy and ill odour. To commemorate this shocking and incredible event a monument representing the Papess with her baby was, we are told, erected on the actual spot which was accordingly declared accursed to all ages: but as the incident thus memorised occurred as long ago as the ninth century, it is more probable that the statue was the source of the story and not vice versa. According to some accounts Joan was baptised Hagnes which is the feminine form of Hagon or Acon: others said her name was Margaret, and that she was the daughter of an English missionary who had left England to preach to the Saxons. At the time of the Reformation Germany seized with avidity upon the scandal as being useful for propaganda purposes, and with that delicacy of touch for which the Lutherans were distinguished, embroidered the tale with characteristic embellishments. According to Baring-Gould the stout Germans, not relishing the notion of Joan being a daughter of the Fatherland, palmed her off on England, but “I have little doubt myself,” he adds, “that Pope Joan is an impersonification of the great whore of Babylon seated on the Seven Hills”:[372] on the contrary, I think she was more probably a personification of the Consort of St. Peter the Rock, and the Keeper of the Keys of Heaven’s Gate. Among Joan’s sobriquets was Jutt, which is believed to have been “a nickname surely!”: more seemingly Jutt was a Latinised form of Kud, Ked, Kate, or Chad, and Engelheim, or Angel Home, the alleged birth-place of Jutt, was either entirely mystical, or perhaps Anglesea, if not Engel Land.

Fig. 196.—The Divine Persons Distinct. A French Miniature of the XVI. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Fig. 197.—The Three Divine Persons Fused One into the Other. From a Spanish Miniature of the XIII. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Fig. 198.—From An Essay on Ancient Coins, Medals, and Gems (Walsh, R.).

Fig. 199.—From The Gnostics and their Remains (King, C. W.).

The father of Jutt’s child was said to have been Satan himself, who, on the occasion of the birth, was seen and heard fluttering overhead, crowing and chanting in an unmusical voice:—

This description would seem to have been derived from some ancient picture in which the Papa was represented either as a fluttering or chanting cock, or as cockheaded. Such representations were common among the Gnostics, and the legend, papa-pater-patrum, Father, Father of Fathers, is curiously suggestive of Barbara or Varvary: in the Gnostic emblem here reproduced is the counterpart to the cock-headed deity, and the reverse is obviously Vera, Una, or the naked Truth.

Gretchen, the German for Margaret, being Great Jane, will account for Pope Joan, and Gerberta, another of her names is radically Berta: Bertha, or Peratha, among the Germans is equated with Perchta, and translated “Bright One,” or the “Shining One”: the same roots are found in St. Cuthbert, or Cudbright as he becomes in Kirkcudbrightshire.

The child of Papesse Jeanne, Gerberta, Hagnes or Jutt was deemed to be Antichrist: according to other accounts the mother of the feared and anticipated Antichrist was a very aged woman, of race unknown, called Fort Juda. Fort Juda was probably Strong Judy, Judy, the wife of Punch, being evidently a form of the very aged wife of Pan, the goat-headed symbol of Gott.[373] As Peter was the Janitor of the Gate, so Kate or Ked was similarly connected with the Gate which is the same word as Gott or Goat: the Gnostic God here represented is a seven-goat solar wheel.

The horns and head of the goat still figure in representations of Old Nick, and there is no doubt that the horns of the crescent moon, under the form of Io, the heifer, were particularly worshipped at Byzantium: this City of the Golden Horn, now known as Constantinople, to which it will be remembered the British Chronicles assign our origin, was founded by a colony of Greeks from Megara, and in Scandinavia it is still known as Megalopolis, or the City of Michael; its ancient name Byzantium will probably prove to have been connected with byzan or bosen, the bosses or paps, and Pera, the Christian district which borders the Bosphorus, may be connoted with Epeur.

Fig. 200, reproduced from a Byzantine bronze pound weight, is supposed to represent “two military saints,” but it more probably portrays the celestial pair, Micah and Maggie. Their bucklers are designed in the form of marguerites or marigolds; the A under the right hand figure is Alpha, whence we may perhaps equate this saint with Alpha, the consort of Noah. The spear-head under the other Invictus is the “Broad” arrow of Britain, and the meaning of this spear-head or arrow of Broad will be subsequently considered. It will be noticed that the stars which form the background are the triple dots, and the five-fruited tree is in all probability the Tree of Alpha, Aleph, or Life. Why five was identified with vif or vive, i.e., life, I am unable to surmise, but that it was thus connected will become apparent as we proceed.

Fig. 200.—From the British Museum’s Guide to Early Christian and Byzantine Antiquities.

Fig. 201.—British. From The Silver Coins of England (Hawkins, E.).

Fig. 202.—Bronze Reliquary Cross, XII. Cent. (No. 559).
From the British Museum’s Guide to Early Christian and Byzantine Antiquities.

Fig. 203.—From A Collection of 500 Facsimiles of the Watermarks used by Early Papermakers (1840).

The Arabic form of Constantinople is Kustantiniya, which compares curiously with Kystennyns, one of the old variants of the Cornish village named Constantine. There is a markedly Byzantine style about the group of British coins here reproduced, and Nos. 45 and 46 manifestly illustrate the Dioscuri, Twins, or Cabiri. The Greek word for brothers or twins is adelphi, and as according to Bryant the Semitic ad or ada meant first we may translate adelphi into First Elphi or First Fay-ther. The head of No. 49, which is obviously an heraldic or symbolic figure, consists of the three circles, intricate symbolism underlies the Byzantine reliquary cross here illustrated, and the same fantastic system is behind the Gnostic paper-mark represented on Fig. 203. In this it will be noted the eyes are represented by what are seemingly two feathers: the feather was a symbol of the Father, and will be noted in the Alephant emblem illustrated on page 160.

Fig. 204.—The Trinity, in Combat with Behemoth and Leviathan. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

In Fig. 204 the Celestial Invictus is depicted as a Trinity; three feathers are the emblem of the British Prince of Wales, and there is evidently some recondite meaning in the legend that St. Barbara insisted upon her father making three windows in a certain building on the grounds that “three windows lighten all the world and all creatures”. Upon Dioscorus inquiring of his daughter why she had upset his arrangements for two windows, Barbara’s reply is reported to have been: “These three fenestras or windows betoken clearly the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the which be three persons and One Very God”. The word person is radically the same as appear and appearance, and the portrayal of the Supreme Power as One, Two, or Three seems evidently to have been merely a matter of inclination: Queen Vera or Virtue may be regarded as One or as the Three Graces or Virtues. The mythic mother of St. David is said to have been Gwen of the Three Paps, and this St. Gwen Tierbron, or Queen of the Three Breasts, may be equated with the Lady Triamour, and with the patron of Llandrindod or St. triune dad Wells. On the horse ornament illustrated ante (No. 14, Fig. 134, p. 286), three hearts are represented: on Fig. 205 three circles, together with a palm branch,[374] associated with the national horse.

Fig. 205.—British. From Barthelemy.

Fig. 206.—Decoration on British chalk drum. From A Guide to Antiquities of Bronze Age (B.M.).

The emblems on page 499 depict two flying wheels, and likewise Three-in-One: near St. Just in Cornwall used to be three interlaced stone circles, and the phenomenon of three circles is noticeable elsewhere; there is little doubt, says Westropp, that in the three rings of Dunainy on the Knockainy Hill the triad of gods, Eogabal, Feri, and Aine, were supposed to dwell.[375]

Fig. 207.—Temple at Abury. From The Celtic Druids (Higgens, G.).

Avebury consists of two circles within one, and that “Avereberie” was regarded as the great periphery may be concluded from the name Avereberie which is equivalent to periphery, Varvary, or Barbara. The bird emblem existing at Farr is suggestive that the county of Forfar was once inhabited by worshippers of Varvara, Barbara, the Fair of Fairs, or Fire of Fires.

Having set his labourers to work, the legend continues that Barbara’s father departed thence and went into a far country, where he long sojourned: the Greeks used the word barbaroi to mean not ruffians but those who lived or came from abroad; the same sense is born by the Hebrew word obr, and it is to this root that anthropologists assign the name Hebrew which they interpret as meaning men who came from abroad.

Fig. 208.—Temple at Abury.
From The Celtic Druids (Higgens, G.).

It is noteworthy that, according to Herodotus, the messengers of the Hyperboreans who came from abroad, i.e., barbaroi, were entitled by the Delians, “Perpherees” and held in great honour:[376] the inverted commas are original, whence it would seem that perpheree was a local pronunciation of hyperboreæ.

The general impression is that the Hebrew, or Ebrea as the Italians spell it, derived his title from Abraham whose name means Father of a Multitude. At Hebron Abraham, the son of Terah, entertained three Elves or Angels: “He saw three and worshipped one”:[377] at Hebron Abram bought a piece of land from a merchant named Ephron,[378] and I cannot believe that Ephron really meant, as we are told, of a calf; it is more probable that he derived his title from Hebron where Ephron was evidently a landowner. Tacitus records a tradition that the Hebrews were originally “natives of the Isle of Crete,”[379] and my suggestion that the Jews were the Jous gains somewhat from the fact that York—a notorious seat of ancient Jewry—was originally known as Eboracum or Eboracon. Our chroniclers state that York was founded by a King Ebrauc, the Archbishop of York signs himself to-day “Ebor,” and the river Eure used at one time to be known as the Ebor: the Spanish river Ebro was sometimes referred to as the Iber.[380]

Fig. 209.—From The Everyday Book (Hone, W.).

An interesting example of the Cabiri or Adelphi once existed at the Kentish village of Biddenden where the embossed seven-spiked ladies here illustrated, known as the Biddenden Maids, used to be impressed on cakes which were distributed in the village church on Easter Sunday. This custom was connected with a charity consisting of “twenty acres of land called the Bread and Cheese Land lying in five pieces given by persons unknown, the rent to be distributed among the poor of this parish”. The name of the two maidens is stated to have been Preston, and that this was alternatively a name for Biddenden is somewhat confirmed by an adjacent Broadstone, Fairbourne, and Bardinlea. Whether it is permissible here to read Bardinlea as Bard’s meadow I do not know, but considered in connection with the local charity from five pieces of land it is curious to find that according to the laws of Dyvnwal Moelmud, the different functionaries of the Bardic Gorsedd had a right each to five acres of land in virtue of their office, were entitled to maintenance wherever they went, had freedom from taxes, no person was to wear a naked weapon in their presence, and their word was always paramount.[381] In view of this ordinance it almost looks as though the charitable five acres at Biddenden were the survival of some such privileged survival.

As Biddy is a familiar form of Bridget or Bride, Biddenden may be understood as the dun or den of the Biddys, and the modern sense of our adjective bad is, it is to be feared, an implication either that the followers of the Biddy’s fell from grace, or that at any rate newer comers deemed them to have done so. The German for both is beide, but that both the Biddenden maidens were bad is unlikely: the brace of chickabiddies[382] illustrated overleaf may perhaps have fallen a little short of the designer’s ideals, yet they were undoubtedly deemed fit and good, otherwise they would not have survived. That their admirers, while seeing Both or Twain, worshipped Ane is obviously possible from the popular “Heathen chant” here quoted from Miss Eckenstein’s Comparative Study of Nursery Rhymes:—

In the near neighbourhood of Biddenden are Peckham, Buckman’s Green, Buckhill, and Buggles, or Boglesden: the two bogles now under consideration were possibly responsible for the neighbouring Duesden, i.e. the Dieu’s den or the Two’s den. According to Skeat the word bad, mediæval badde, is formed from the Anglo-Saxon baeddel, meaning an hermaphrodite; all ancient deities seem to have been regarded as hermaphrodites, and it is impossible to tell from the Britannia, Bride, or Biddy figures on p. 120 whether Bru or Brut was a man or a maid. Apollo was occasionally represented in a skirt; Venus was sometimes represented with a beard; the beard on the obverse of No. 46, on p. 364, is highly accentuated, and that this feature was a peculiarity of Cumbrian belief is to be inferred from the life of Saint Uncumber. St. Uncumber, or Old Queen Ber, was one of the seven daughters born at a birth to the King of Portugal, and the story runs that her father wanting her to marry the prince of Sicily, she grew whiskers, “which so enraged him that he had her crucified”.[383]

One may infer that the fabricator of this pious story concocted it from some picture of a bearded virgin extended like Andrew on the Solar wheel: close to Biddenden is Old Surrender, perhaps originally a den or shrine of Old Sire Ander.[384]

At Broadstone, by Biddenden, we find Judge House, and doubtless the village juge once administered justice at that broad stone. In Kent the paps are known colloquially as bubs or bubbies: by Biddenden is a Pope’s Hall, and a Bubhurst or Bubwood, which further permit the equation of the Preston Maids with Babs, Babby, or Barbara. St. Barbara was not only born at Heliopolis, but her tomb is described by Maundeville as being at Babylon, by which he means not Babylon in Chaldea, but Heliopolis in Egypt. In The Welsh People Sir J. Morris Jones establishes many remarkable relationships between the language of Wales and the Hamitic language of early Egypt; in 1881 Gerald Massey published a list of upwards of 3000 similarities between British and Egyptian words[385]; and In Malta and the Mediterranean Race, Mr. R. N. Bradley prints the following extraordinary statement from Col. W. G. MacPherson of the Army Medical Service: “When I was in Morocco City, in 1896, I met a Gaelic-speaking missionary doctor who had come out there and went into the Sus country (Trans-atlas), where ‘Shluh’ is the language spoken, just as it is the language of the Berber tribes in the Cis-atlas country. He told me that the words seemed familiar to him, and, after listening to the natives speaking among themselves, found they were speaking a Gaelic dialect, much of which he could follow. This confirmed my own observation regarding the names of the Berber tribes I myself had come across, namely, the Bini M’Tir, the Bini M’Touga, and the Bini M’Ghil. The ‘Bini’ is simply the Arabic for ‘Children of,’ and is tacked on by the Arabs to the ‘M’ of the Berbers, which means ‘sons of’ and is exactly the same as the Irish ‘M,’ or Gaelic ‘Mac’. Hence the M’Tir, M’Touga, and M’Ghil, become in our country MacTiers, the MacDougalls, and the MacGills. I prepared a paper on this subject which was read by my friend Dr. George Mackay of Edinburgh, at the Pan-Celtic Congress there in 1907, I think, or it may have been 1908. It caused a leading article to be written in the Scotsman, I believe, but otherwise it does not appear to have received much attention.”

As it is an axiom of modern etymology to ignore any statements which cannot be squared with historical documents it is hardly a matter of surprise that Col. MacPherson’s statements have hitherto received no consideration. But apart from the fact that certain Berber tribes still speak Gaelic, the Berbers are a highly interesting people: they extend all over the North of Africa, and the country between Upper Egypt and Abyssinia is known as Barbara or Barba. The word Africa was also written Aparica, and the Berbers, apart from founding the Old Kingdom of Bornou and the city of Timbuctoo, had an important seat at Berryan. They had in the past magnificent and stately temples, used the Arabic alphabet, and the Touriacks—the purest, proudest, most numerous, and most lordly family of the Berbers—have an alphabet of their own for which they claim great antiquity: they have also a considerable native literature.[386] The Touriack alphabet is almost identical with that used by the Tyrians in later times, and the name Touriack is thus probably connected with Tyre and Troy. In 1821, a traveller described the Touriacks as “the finest race of men I ever saw—tall, straight, and handsome, with a certain air of independence and pride that is very imposing. They are generally white, that is to say, comparatively so, the dark brown of their complexion being occasioned only by the heat of the climate. Their arms and bodies, where constantly covered, are as white as those of many Europeans.”[387]

To Britons the Berbers should be peculiarly interesting, as anthropologists have already declared that the primitive Scotch race were formed from “the great Iberian family, the same stock as the Berbers of North Africa”: Laing and Huxley further affirm that among these Scotch aborigines they recognise the existence of men “of a very superior character”.[388] It will probably prove that the “St. Barbe” of Gaul—a name connected with the megalithic monuments at Carnac—originated from Barba, or Berber influences: with this Gaulish St. Barbe may be connoted the fact that the pastors of the heretical Albigenses, whose headquarters were at the town of Albi, were for some unknown reason entitled barbes.

A traveller in 1845 describes the Berbers or Touriacks as very white, always clothed, and wearing pantaloons like Europeans. The word pantaloon comes from Venice where the patron saint is St. Pantaleone, but the British for pantaloons is breeks or breeches. It was a distinction of the British to wear breeks: Sir John Rhys attributes the word Briton to “cloth and its congeners,” and when, circa 500 B.C., the celebrated Abaris visited Athens his hosts were evidently impressed by his attire: “He came, not clad in skins like a Scythian, but with a bow in his hand, a quiver hanging on his shoulders, a plaid wrapped about his body, a gilded belt encircling his loins, and trousers reaching from the waist down to the soles of his feet. He was easy in his address; affable and pleasant in his conversation; active in his despatch, and secret in his management of great affairs; quick in judging of present accuracies; and ready to take his part in any sudden emergency; provident withal in guarding against futurity; diligent in the quest of wisdom; fond of friendship; trusting very little to fortune, yet having the entire confidence of others, and trusted with everything for his prudence. He spoke Greek with fluency, and whenever he moved his tongue you would imagine him to be some one out of the midst of the academy or very Lyceum.”[389]

I have suggested that Abaris or Abharas was a generic term for Druid or Chief Druid, and it is likely that the celebrated Arabian philosopher Averrhoes, who was born in Spain A.D. 1126, was entitled Averroes (his real name seems to have been Ibn Roshd) in respect of his famous philosophy: it is noteworthy that the Berbers were known alternatively as Barabbras.[390]

In No. 41, on p. 364, two small brethren are like Romulus and Remus sucking nourishment from a wolf. This animal is the supposed ancestor of all the dog-tribe: the word wolf is eu olf, and the term bitch, applied to all females of the wolf tribe, is radically pige, peggy, or Puck. The Bitch-nourished Brethren are radically bre, for the -ther of brother is the same adjective as occurs in father, mother, and sister.

Taliesin, the mystic title of the Welsh Chief Druid of the West, is translated as having meant radiant brow: the brow is the covering of the brain, and in No. 2, on p. 120, Britannia is pointing to her brow. In No. 3 of the same plate she is represented in the remarkable and unusual attitude of gazing up to Heaven: it will be remembered that, according to Cæsar, Britain was the cradle of the Druidic Philosophy, and that those wishing to perfect themselves in the system visited this country; that the Britons prided themselves on their brains is possibly the true inference to be drawn from the two curious coins now under consideration.

The President of Celtic poetry and bardic music is said to have been a being of gigantic height named Bran: it is to Bran the Blessed that tradition assigns the introduction of the Cross into Britain, and when Bran died his head is stated to have been deposited under the White Tower of London, where it acted as a talisman against foreign aggression. One of the disastrous blunders alleged against King Arthur was the declaration that he disdained to hold the realm of England, except in virtue of his own prowess,[391] and Romance affirms that he disinterred the magic head of the Blessed Bran, thereby bringing untold woes upon the land. As a parallel to this story may be connoted the historic fact that when the Romans in 390 B.C. inquired the name of the barbaric general who had led the Celts victoriously against them, the Celtic officer replied by giving the name of the God to whom he attributed the success of his arms, and whom he figured to himself as seated invisible in a chariot, a javelin in his hand, while he guided the victorious host over the bodies of its enemies.[392] Now the name of this invisible chief under whom the Gaulish conquerors of Rome and Delphi claimed to fight, was Brennos, whom De Jubainville equates with Brian, the First of the Three divine Sons of Dana, or Brigit, the Bona Dea of Britain. The highest town in France, and the principal arsenal and depot of the French Alps is entitled Briancon, and as this place was known to the Romans as Brigantium, we may connote Briancon with King Brian. Brigan may probably be equated with the fabulous Bregon of Hibernia, with Bergion of Iberia, and with St. Brychan of Wales, who is said to have been the parent of fifty sons and daughters, “all saints”. The Hibernian super-King, entitled Brian Boru, had his seat at Tara, and from him may be said to have descended all the O’Briens, the Brownes, and the Byrons. The name Burgoyne is assigned to Burgundy, and it is probable that inquiry would prove a close connection between the Burgundii and giant Burgion of Iberia. In the Triads the Welsh prince Brychan is designated as sprung from one of the three holy families of Prydain: through Breconshire, or Brecknock, runs the river Bran; and that Awbrey was a family name in Brecon is implied by the existence in the priory church of St. John, or Holyrood, of tombs to the Awbreys.

Fig. 210.—Idols of the Bona Dea found at Troy. From Ilios (Schliemann).

Figs. 211 to 213.—From British “chalk drums,” illustrated in British Museum’s Guide to Antiquities of Bronze Age.

Figs. 214 to 219.—Mediæval Papermarks from Les Filigranes (Briquet, C. M.).

Fig. 220.—From History of Paganism in Caledonia (Wise, T. A.).

Fig. 221.—The Creator, under the Form of Jesus Christ. Italian Miniature of the close of the XII. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

When the head of the beneficent and blessed Bran was deposited at London it is said to have rested there for a long time with the eyes looking towards France. One of the most remarkable and mysterious of the Pictish symbols, found alike in Picardy and Pictland generally, is the so-called butterfly design of which three typical examples are here illustrated. What it seems to represent is Browen or the Brows, but it is also an excellent bird, butterfly, or papillon: or as we speak familiarly of using our brains, and as the grey matter of the brain actually consists of two divisions, which scientists entitle the cerebrum and the cerebellum, the two-browed butterfly might not illogically be designated the brains. Both Canon Greenwell and Sir Arthur Evans have drawn attention to similar representations of the human face on early objects from Troy and the Ægean; the same symbol is found on sculptured menhirs of the Marne and Gard valleys in France, while clay vessels with this ornament, belonging to the early age of metal, have been found in Spain. The “butterfly” is seen on gold roundels from the earliest (shaft) graves at Mycenæ, and as Sir Hercules Read has rightly said, “everything points to the transmission of that influence to the British Isles by way of Spain”.[393]

Fig. 222.—The Trinity in One God, Supporting the World. Fresco of the Campo Santo of Pisa, XIV. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

The Scandinavians assigned three eyes to Thor, and Thor, as has been seen, was attributed by them to Troy. On the stone illustrated on p. 381, now built into the church at Dingwall—a name which means court hill—three circles are on one side and two upon the other: some of the Trojan idols are three-eyed and some are “butterflies”. Is it possible that this Elphin little face, or papillon, was the precursor of the modern cherub or Amoretto, and that it was the Puck of the Iberian Picts, who conceived their Babchild or Bacchild as peeping, prying, touting, and peering perpetually upon mankind? The ancients imagined that every worthy soul became a star, whence it is possible that the small blue flower we call a periwinkle was, like the daisy, a symbol of the fairy, phairy, or peri periscope. In Devonshire the speedwell (Veronica +chamædrys) is known as Angels’ Eyes; in Wales it is entitled the Eye of Christ:[394] the word periwinkle may be connoted with the phairies Periwinkle, and Perriwiggen, who figure in the court of Oberon.

In the magnificent emblem here illustrated the Pillar of the Universe, “to Whom all thoughts and desires are known, from Whom no secrets are hid,” is supporting a great universe zoned round and round by Eyes, Cherubs, or Amoretti, and the earth within is represented by a cone or berg. In Fig. 221 the Creator is depicted as animating nine choirs of Amoretti by means of three rays or breaths, and as will be shown subsequently the creation of the world by means of three rays or beams of light from heaven was an elemental feature of British philosophy.

The periwinkle, known in some districts as the cockle, may, I think, be regarded as a prehistoric symbol of the world-without-end query:—

The term cockle was applied not only to the periwinkle and the poppy, but likewise to the burdock, whose prickly burrs are obviously a very perfect emblem of the Central Pyre, Fire, Burn, or Brand. In Italy the barberry, or berberis, is known as the Holy Thorn, as it is supposed that from this bush of pricks and prickles was woven Christ’s crown of thorns. As a home of the spooks the brakes or bracken rivalled the hawthorn,[395] and it was generally believed that by eating fern or bracken seed one became invisible. Witches were supposed to detest bracken, because it bears on its root the character C, the initial of the holy name Christ, “which may be plainly seen on cutting the root horizontally”. Commenting on this belief the author of Flowers and Folklore remarks: “A friend suggests, however, that the letter intended is not the English C, but the Greek X (Chi), the initial letter of the word Christos which really resembles the marks on the root of the bracken.”[396]

In Cornish broch denoted the yew tree, the sanctity of which is implied by the frequency with which a brace or pair of yews are found in churchyards. The yew is probably the longest living of all trees, accredited instances occurring of its antiquity to the extent of 1400 years, and at Fortingal in Perthshire there is a famous yew tree which has been estimated to be 3000 years of age. This is deemed to be the most venerable specimen of living European vegetation, but at Brabourne, in Kent, used to be a superannuated yew which claimed precedence in point of age even over that of Perthshire. A third claimant (2000 years) is that at Hensor (the ancient sire?) in Buckinghamshire, and a fourth exists at Buckland near Dover.[397]

Fig. 223.—Iberian. From Akerman.

The yew (Irish eo), named in all probability after Io, or Hu the Jupiter,[398] or Ancient Sire of Britain, is found growing profusely in company with the box on the white chalky brow of Boxhill overlooking Juniper Hall. The foot of this slope around which creeps the placid little river Mole is now entitled Burford Bridge, but before the first bridge was here built, the site was seemingly known as Bur ford. The neighbouring Dorking, through which runs the Pipbrook, is equivalent to Tor King, Tarchon, or Troy King, and there is a likelihood that the Perseus who redeemed Andromeda, the Ancient Troy Maid, was a member of the same family. In the Iberian coin herewith inscribed Ho, which is ascribed to Ilipa or Ilipala, one may perhaps trace Hu, i.e., Hugh the mind or brain in transit to these islands.

To the yews on Boxhill one may legitimately apply the lines which Sir William Watson penned at the neighbouring Newlands or the lands of the self-renewing Ancient Yew:—

From Newlands Corner where the yews—the self-seeded descendants of immemorial ancestors—are thickly dotted, is a prospect unsurpassed in England.

The beech trees which are also a feature in the neighbourhood of Boxhill irresistibly turn one’s mind to the immortal beeches at Burnham in Bucks. Bucks supposedly derives its name from the patronymic Bucca or Bucco, and this district was thus presumably a seat of the Bucca, Pukka, or Puck King, alias Auberon, to whom at Burnham the beech or boc would appear to have been peculiarly dedicated. There is a Burnham near Brightlingsea; a Burnby near Pocklington, a Burnham on the river Brue, a Burn in Brayton parish, Yorks; a river Burn or Brun in Lancashire, a river Burry in Glamorganshire, and in Norfolk a Burnham-Ulph. In Brancaster Bay are what are termed “Burnham Grounds”; hereabouts are Burnham Westgate, Burnham Deepdale, Burnham Overy, etc., and the local fishermen maintain “there are three other Burnhams under Brancaster Bay”.[399] Doubtless the sea has claimed large tracts of Oberon’s empire, but from Brean Down, Brown Willy, and Perran Round in the West to the famous Birrenswerk in Annandale, and the equally famous Bran Ditch in Cambridgeshire, the name of the Tall Man is ubiquitous. Among the innumerable Brandons or Branhills, Brandon Hill in Suffolk, where the flint knappers have continued their chipping uninterruptedly since old Neolithic times, may claim an honourable pre-eminence.

According to Gaelic mythology Brigit was the daughter of the supreme head of the Irish gods of Day, Life, and Light—whose name Dagda Mor, the authorities translate into Great Good Fire. Some accounts state there were three Brigits, but these three, like the three Gweneveres or Ginevras who were sometimes assigned to King Arthur, are evidently three aspects of the one and only Queen Vera, Queen Ever, or Queen Fair. Brigit’s husband was the celebrated Bress, after whom we are told every fair and beautiful thing in Ireland was entitled a “bress”.

Brigit and Bress were the parents of three gods entitled Brian, Iuchar, and Uar, and it looks as though these three were equivalent to the Persian trinity of Good Thought, Good Deed, and Good Word. The term word is derived by Skeat from a root wer, meaning to speak, whence Uar was seemingly werde or Good Word. Brian, I have already connoted with brain, whence Good Brian was probably equivalent to Good Thought, and Iuchar, the third of Bride’s brats, looks curiously like eu cœur, eu cor, or eu cardia, i.e., soft, gentle, pleasing, and propitious heart, otherwise Kind Action or Good Deed.

Figs. 224 to 231.—British. From Evans.

These three mythic sons constitute the gods of Irish Literature and Art, and are said to have had in common an only son entitled Ecne,[400] whose name, according to De Jubainville, meant “knowledge or poetry”.[401] The legend Cuno which appears so frequently in British coins in connection with Pegasus—the steed of the Muses—or the Hackney, varies into Ecen, vide the examples herewith, and the palm branch or fern leaf constituting the mane points to the probability that the animal portrayed corresponds to “Splendid Mane,” the magic steed of three-legged Mona.

Mona was a headquarters of the British Druids by whom white horses were ceremoniously maintained. Speaking of the peculiar credulity of the German tribes Tacitus observes: “For this purpose a number of milk-white steeds unprophaned by mortal labour are constantly maintained at the public expense and placed to pasture in the religious groves. When occasion requires they are harnessed to a sacred chariot and the priest, accompanied by the king or chief of the state, attends to watch the motions and the neighing of the horses. No other mode of augury is received with such implicit faith by the people, the nobility, and the priesthood. The horses upon these solemn occasions are supposed to be the organs of the gods.”[402]

The horse is said to be exceptionally intelligent,[403] whence presumably why it was elevated into an emblem of Knowing, Kenning, Cunning, and ultimately of the Gnosis. That the Gnostics so regarded it is sufficiently evident apart from the collection of symbolic horses dealt with elsewhere.[404]

The old French for hackney was haquenee, the old Spanish was hacanea, the Italian is chinea, a contracted form of acchinea: jennet or Little Joan is connected with the Spanish ginete which has been connoted with Zenata, the name of a tribe of Barbary celebrated for its cavalry.

Fig. 232.

Fig. 233.—From The Cross: Heathen and Christian (Brock, M.).

That Jeanette was worshipped in Italy sub rosa, would appear from the emblem here illustrated, which is taken from the title page of a work published in 1601.[405] The Hackney, the New-moon (Kenna?) and the Staff or Branch are emblems, which, as already seen, occur persistently on British coins, and the legend Philos ippon in dies crescit reading: “Love of the Horse; in time it will increase,” obviously applied to some philosophy, and not a material taste for stud farms and the turf.

In 1857, during some excavations in Rome in the palace of the Cæsars on the Palatine Hill, an inscription which is described as a “curious scratch on the wall” was brought to light. This so-called graffito blasfemo has been held to be a vile caricature of the crucifixion, some authorities supposing the head to be that of a wild ass, others that of a jackal: beneath is an ill-spelt legend in Greek characters to the effect: “Alexamenos worships his god,” and on the right is a meanly attired figure seemingly engaged in worship.[406]

I am unable to recognise either a jackal or a wild ass in the figure in dispute, which seems in greater likelihood to represent a not ill-executed horse’s head. Nor seemingly is the creature crucified, but on the contrary it is supporting the letter “T,” or Tau, an emblem which was so peculiarly sacred among the Druids that they even topped and trained their sacred oak until it had acquired this holy form.[407] The Tau was the sign mentioned by Ezekiel as being branded upon the foreheads of the Elect, and this “curious scratch” of poor Alexamenos attributed to the very early part of the third century was not, in my humble opinion, the work of some illiterate slave or soldier attached to the palace of the Cæsars, ridiculing the religion of a companion, but more probably the pious work of a Gnostic lover of philosophy: that the Roman church was honeycombed with Gnostic heresies is well known.

The word philosophy is philo sophy or the love of wisdom, but sophi, or wisdom, is radically ophi, or opi, i.e., the Phœnician hipha, Greek hippa, a mare: the name Philip is always understood as phil ip or “love of the horse,” and the hobby horse of British festivals was almost certainly the hippa or the hippo.