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Title: Archaic England

an essay in deciphering prehistory from megalithic monuments, earthworks, customs, coins, place-names, and faerie superstitions

Author: Harold Bayley

Release date: January 5, 2013 [eBook #41785]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by KD Weeks, Dave Maddock and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ARCHAIC ENGLAND ***

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:

Most spelling variants are retained. Punctuation is occasionally corrected, especially in the index and in footnotes, to maintain consistency.

Figures have been moved to before or after the paragraphs near which they appeared in the text. On occasion, the pagination shown here may be slightly disordered. Internal references to pages have been hyperlinked to the original page. Given the approximate placement of figures, the reader may need to scroll up or down a bit to find the figure.

The titles and page references for the five appendices have been added to the table of contents.

A Transcriber’s Endnote at the end of this text contains more detailed information about corrections made.

ARCHAIC ENGLAND

AN ESSAY IN DECIPHERING PREHISTORY FROM
MEGALITHIC MONUMENTS, EARTHWORKS,
CUSTOMS, COINS, PLACE-NAMES, AND
FAERIE SUPERSTITIONS

BY

HAROLD BAYLEY

AUTHOR OF “THE SHAKESPEARE SYMPHONY,” “A NEW LIGHT ON THE RENAISSANCE,”
“THE LOST LANGUAGE OF SYMBOLISM,” ETC.

“One by one tiny fragments of testimony accumulate attesting such a survival and continuance of folk memory as few men of to-day have suspected.”—Johnson

LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL LTD.
11 HENRIETTA STREET
1919

TO
W. L. GROVES
WHO HAS GREATLY AIDED ME

CONTENTS

CHAP |  | PAGE
I. | Introductory | 1
II. | The Magic of Words | 34
III. | A Tale of Troy | 78
IV. | Albion | 124
V. | Gog and Magog | 186
VI. | Puck | 230
VII. | Oberon | 309
VIII. | Scouring the White Horse | 389
IX. | Bride’s Bairns | 455
X. | Happy England | 522
XI. | The Fair Maid | 593
XII. | Peter’s Orchards | 663
XIII. | English Edens | 710
XIV. | Down Under | 764
XV. | Conclusions | 832
| Appendix | 871
| Appendix A: Ireland and Phœnicia. | 871
| Appendix B: Perry-Dancers and Perry Stones. | 873
| Appendix C: British Symbols. | 874
| Appendix D: Glastonbury. | 875
| Appendix E: The Druids and Crete. | 875
| Index | 877

“Of all the many thousands of earthworks of various kinds to be found in England, those about which anything is known are very few, those of which there remains nothing more to be known scarcely exist. Each individual example is in itself a new problem in history, chronology, ethnology, and anthropology; within every one lie the hidden possibilities of a revolution in knowledge. We are proud of a history of nearly twenty centuries: we have the materials for a history which goes back beyond that time to centuries as yet undated. The testimony of records carries the tale back to a certain point: beyond that point is only the testimony of archæology, and of all the manifold branches of archæology none is so practicable, so promising, yet so little explored, as that which is concerned with earthworks. Within them lie hidden all the secrets of time before history begins, and by their means only can that history be put into writing: they are the back numbers of the island’s story, as yet unread, much less indexed.”—A. Hadrian Allcroft.

“It is a gain to science that it has at last been recognised that we cannot penetrate far back into man’s history without appealing to more than one element in that history. Some day it will be recognised that we must appeal to all elements in that history.”—Gomme.

“History bears and requires Authors of all sorts.”—Camden.

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”—H. D. Thoreau.

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Dent, 1909.

[2] The Lost Language of Symbolism: An inquiry into the origin of certain letters, words, names, fairy-tales, folklore, and mythologies. 2 vols. London, 1912 (Williams & Norgate).

[3] Manchester Guardian, 23rd December, 1912.

[4] Sonia.

[5] “Topographical comment—I will not say criticism—has been equally inefficient. A theory is not refuted by saying ‘all the great antiquarians are against you,’ ‘the Psalter of Tara refutes that,’ or ‘O’Donovan has set the question past all doubt’. These remarks only prove that we have hardly commenced scientific archæology in this country.”—;Westropp, Thos. J., Proc. of Royal Irish Acad., vol. xxxiv., C., No. 8, p. 129.

[6] We found precisely the same things as were found by our predecessors, remains of extinct animals in the cave earth, and with them flint implements in considerable numbers. You want, of course, to know how the scientific world received these latter discoveries. They simply scouted them. They told us that our statements were impossible, and we simply responded with the remark that we had not said that they were possible, only that they were true.—Pengally, W., Kent’s Cavern. Its Testimony to the Antiquity of Man, p. 12.

[7] Lubbock, J., Prehistoric Times.

[8] In the course of his criticism the same writer pertinently observes:—

“Why, what a wonderful thing is this! We have, in the first place, the most weighty and explicit testimony—Strabo’s, Cæsar’s, Lucan’s—that this race once possessed a special, profound, spiritual discipline, that they were, to use Mr. Nash’s words, ‘Wiser than their neighbours’. Lucan’s words are singularly clear and strong, and serve well to stand as a landmark in this controversy, in which one is sometimes embarrassed by hearing authorities quoted on this side or that, when one does not feel sure precisely what they say, how much or how little. Lucan, addressing those hitherto under the pressure of Rome, but now left by the Roman Civil War to their own devices, says:—

“‘Ye too, ye bards, who by your praises perpetuate the memory of the fallen brave, without hindrance poured forth your strains. And ye, ye Druids, now that the sword was removed, began once more your barbaric rites and weird solemnities. To you only is given the knowledge or ignorance (whichever it be) of the gods and the powers of heaven; your dwelling is in the lone heart of the forest. From you we learn that the bourne of man’s ghost is not the senseless grave, not the pale realm of the monarch below; in another world his spirit survives still.’”

[9] “Circles form another group of the monuments we are about to treat of.... In France they are hardly known, though in Algeria they are frequent. In Denmark and Sweden they are both numerous and important, but it is in the British Islands that circles attained their greatest development.”—;Fergusson, J., Rude Stone Monuments, p. 47. Referring to Stanton Drew the same authority observes: “Meanwhile it may be well to point out that this class of circles is peculiar to England. They do not exist in France or Algeria. The Scandinavian circles are all very different, so too are the Irish.”—Ibid., p. 153.

[10] Stevens, F., Stonehenge To-day and Yesterday, 1916, p. 14.

[11] Toland, History of the Druids, p. 163.

[12] Schrader, O., cf. Taylor, Isaac, The Origin of the Aryans, p. 48.

[13] Latham, Dr. R. G.

[14] Spain and Portugal, vol. i., p. 16.

[15] Mr. Hammer, a German who has travelled lately in Egypt and Syria, has brought, it seems, to England a manuscript written in Arabic. It contains a number of alphabets. Two of these consist entirely of trees. The book is of authority.—Davies, E., Celtic Researches, 1804, p. 305.

[16] The Cretans were rulers of the sea, and according to Thucydides King Minos of Crete was “the first person known to us in history as having established a navy. He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic Sea, and ruled over the Cyclades, into most of which he sent his first colonists, expelling the Carians and appointing his own sons governors; and thus did his best to put down piracy in those waters.”

[17] Jones, J. J., Britannia Antiquissima, 1866.

[18] Mackenzie, D. A., Myths of Crete, p. xxix.

[19] Gray, Mrs. Hamilton, The Sepulchres of Etruria, p. 223.

[20] This might be due to the coasts being less liable to the plough. See, however, the map of distribution, published by Fergusson, in Rude Stone Monuments.

[21] Herbert, A., Cyclops Britannica, p. 68.

[22] Taliesin, p. 23.

[23] Connellan, A. F. M., p. 337.

[24] Aristotle.

[25] Smith, Worthington, G., Man the Primeval Savage, p. 53.

[26] Short History, p. 15.

[27] Bede.

[28] The cities which had been erected in considerable numbers by the Romans were sacked, burnt, and then left as ruins by the Anglo-Saxons, who appear to have been afraid or at least unwilling to use them as places of habitation. An instance of this may be found in the case of Camboritum, the important Roman city which corresponded to our modern Cambridge, which was sacked by the invaders and left a ruin at least until the time of the Venerable Bede, 673-735.—Windle, B. C. A., Life in Early Britain, p. 14.

[29] Hearnshaw, F. J. C., England in the Making, p. 14.

[30] Hawkins, E., The Silver Coins of England, p. 17.

[31] Coins of the Ancient Britons, p. 121.

[32] Bello Gallico, Bk. v., 12, § 3.

[33] Smith, Dr. Wm., Lectures on the English Language, p. 29.

[34] The Americans would describe Gildas as a “Calamity-howler”.

[35] Le Braz, A., The Night of Fires.

[36] A Cantanzaro, dans la Calabre, la cathédrale fut le théâtre de scènes de désordre extraordinaires. Le nouvel archevêque avait dernièrement manifesté l’intention de mettre un terme à certaines coutumes qu’il considérait comme entachées de paganisme. Ses instructions ayant été méprisées, il frappa d’interdit pour trois jours un édifice religieux. La population jura de se venger et, lorsque le nouvel archevêque fit son entrée dans la cathédrale, le jour de Pâques pour célébrer la grand’ messe, la foule, furieuse, manifesta bruyamment contre lui. Comme on craignait que sa personne fût l’objet de violences, le clergé le fit sortir en hâte par une porte de derrière. Les troupes durent être réquisitionnées pour faire évacuer le cathédrale.—La Dernière Heure, April, 1914.

[37] There is a story told of a certain Gilbert de Stone, a fourteenth century legend-monger, who was appealed to by the monks of Holywell in Flintshire for a life of their patron saint. On being told that no materials for such a work existed the litterateur was quite unconcerned, and undertook without hesitation to compose a most excellent legend after the manner of Thomas à Becket.

[38] “Ireland being ‘the last resort of lost causes,’ preserved record of a European ‘culture’ as primitive as that of the South Seas, and therefore invaluable for the history of human advance; elsewhere its existence is only to be established from hints and equivocal survivals. Our early tales are no artificial fiction, but fragmentary beliefs of the pagan period equally valuable for topography and for mythology.”—Westropp, Thos. J., Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. xxxiv. sec. C, No. 8, p. 128.

CHAPTER II
THE MAGIC OF WORDS

“As the palimpsest of language is held up to the light and looked at more closely, it is found to be full of older forms beneath the later writing. Again and again has the most ancient speech conformed to the new grammar, until this becomes the merest surface test; it supplies only the latest likeness. Our mountains and rivers talk in the primeval mother tongue whilst the language of men is remoulded by every passing wave of change. The language of mythology and typology is almost as permanent as the names of the hills and streams.”—Gerald Massey.

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—

Holly and his Merry men they dawnsin and they sing,

Ivy and her maydons they wepen and they wryng.

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:—

Greek | p | Gothic | f | Old High German | b(v)
" | b | " | p | " | f
" | ph | " | b | " | p
" | t | " | th | " | d
" | d | " | t | " | z
" | th | " | d | " | t
" | k | " | (h) | " | g(h)
" | g | " | k | " | ch
" | kh | " | g | " | k

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.

Is symbol the husk, the dry bone,

Of the dead soul of ages agone?

Finger-post of a pilgrimage way

Untrodden for many a day?

A derelict shrine in the fane

Of an ancient faith, long since profane?

A gew-gaw, once amulet?

A forgotten creed’s alphabet?

Or is it....[68]

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]

FOOTNOTES:

[39] Words and Places.

[40] Schliemann, Mykenæ.

[41] Cf. Johnson, W., Byways in British Archæology.

[42] The Cromlechs of Anglesey and Carnarvonshire.

[43] Ancient Britain, p. 70.

[44] Windle, Sir B. C. A., Life in Early Britain, p. 135.

[45] Johnston, Rev. James B., The Place-names of England and Wales, 1915, p. 321. The Horse-lie-down theory is enunciated by Sir Walter Besant.

[46] Preface to The Place-names of Oxfordshire.

[47] 1915.

[48] Cf. Bonwick, J., Irish Druids, p. 278.

[49] Virchow, intro. to Schliemann, Ilios XII.

[50] Cf. Brittany, p. 28.

[51] Clodd, Ed., The Story of Primitive Man, 9, 18.

[52] Sweet, H., The History of Language, p. vi.

[53] The Principles of Comparative Philology.

[54] Even after Troy had been discovered by Schliemann, Max Müller maintained his belief that the Siege of Troy was a Sun and Dawn myth.

[55]

Alphana vient d’equus, sans doute,

Mais il faut avouer aussi

Qu’en venant de là jusqu’ici

Il a bien changé sur la route.

[56] Westropp, T. J., Proc. R. Irish Acad., xxxiv., C., 8, p. 159.

[57] Dallas, H. A.

[58] Norwood, J. W.

[59] Such obvious concoctions of the study as exsufflicate, deracinate, incarnadine, etc., never strike root or survive.

[60] Petrie, W. M. F., The Formation of the Alphabet, p. 3.

[61] A Book of the Beginnings, 1, p. 136.

[62] Lectures on the English Language, 1862, p. 16.

[63] Quoted from ibid., p. 30.

[64] The Edin of the prehistoric British Dun edin, now Edinburgh, has been calmly misappropriated to a supposed Edwin.

[65] Ancient Britain, pp. 273, 283.

[66] Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft.

[67] Johnson, W., Byways in British Archæology, p. 304.

[68] Cloudesley Brereton, in The Quest.

[69] Luniolatry, p. 2.

[70] Ancient Britain, p. 298.

[71] This dictum would have cheered the heart of Tertullian, who maintained that God could never forgive an actor because Christ said: No man by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature; a statement which the actor impiously falsified by wearing high heeled boots. Commenting upon The Lost Language of Symbolism, The Expository Times very courteously observed: “To the reader of the Bible its worth is more than to all others, for the Bible is full of symbols and we have lost their language. We are very prosaic. The writers of the Old Testament and of the New were very imaginative. Between us there is a gulf fixed of which we are aware only in unquiet moments.”

[72] “There must have been a time when a simple instinct for poetry was possessed by all nations as it still is by uncivilised races and children. Among European nations this instinct appears to be dead for ever. We can name neither a mountain nor a flower.”—Prof. Weekley, Romance of Words. “Who did first name the flowers? Who first gave them, not their Latin titles, but the old, familiar, fanciful, poetic, rustic ones, that run so curiously alike in all the vulgar tongues? Who first called the lilies of the valley the Madonna’s tears? the wild blue hyacinth, St. Dorothy’s flower? the starry passiflora, the Passion of Christ; who named them all first, in the old days that are forgotten? All the poets that ever the world has known might have been summoned together for the baptism of the flowers, and have failed to name them half so well as popular tradition has done long ago in the dim lost ages, with names that still make all the world akin.”—Anon.

[73] “This pretty name (which Fitzgerald, History of Limerick, vol. i., p. 320, calls the River Dawn) arose from a change of Samhair or Samer to Caimher, ‘the daybreak,’ or ‘Morning Star’”.—Westropp, T. J., Proc. of Royal Irish Acad., xxxiii., C. 2, p. 13.

[74] The peculiar temperament of “us moderns alone” is, I am afraid, more acutely diagnosed by Prof. Weekley, in Surnames, where he observes: “The ‘practical man,’ when his attention is accidentally directed to the starry sky, appraises that terrific spectacle with a non-committal grunt: but he would receive with a positive snort any suggestion that the history of European civilisation is contained in the names of his friends and acquaintances. Still, even the practical man, if he were miraculously gifted with the power of interpreting surnames, could hardly negotiate the length of Oxford Street on a motor-bus without occasionally marvelling and frequently chuckling.”

[75] Coneybeare, Dr. F. C., The Historical Christ, p. 19. [Italics mine.] The views of Dr. Coneybeare may be connoted with those of his fellow-cleric, the Rev. H. C. Christmas: “The astrotheology into which Egyptian fables are ultimately resolved having taken animals as symbols, soon elevated those symbols in the minds of the people at large into real divinities. The signs of the zodiac were worshipped, and the constellations not in that important circle did not go without adoration. Various stars became noted as rising or setting at particular seasons, and serving as marks of time; while the physical circumstances of the animal creation gave an easy means of naming the stars and constellations, and thus connected natural history with the symbolical theology of the times.... In their [the Egyptians’] view the earth was but a mirror of the heavens, and celestial intelligences were represented by beasts, birds, fishes, gems, and even by rocks, metals, and plants. The harmony of the spheres was answered by the music of the temples, and the world beheld nothing that was not a type of something divine.”—Universal Mythology, 1838, p. 19.

[76] Quoted from Wentz, W. D. Y., The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.

[77] “The current ignorance of those pre-Christian evidences that have been preserved by the petrifying past must be wellnigh invincible when a man like Prof. Jowett could say, as if with the voice of superstition in its dotage: ‘To us the preaching of the Gospel is a New Beginning, from which we date all things; beyond which we neither desire, nor are able, to inquire.’”—Massey, G., The Logic of the Lord, 1897.

[78] Harrison, Miss Jane, Ancient Art and Ritual, pp. 192-3.

[79] A bogey of the present Bishop of London is not “no crops” but “no foreign monarchs”. The Daily Chronicle of 13th May, 1914, reports his Lordship as saying: “If the British Empire was not to be disgraced by the heart of London becoming pagan, his fund must be kept going.” [Italics mine.] “Once religion went, everything else went; it would be good-bye to the visits of foreign monarchs to London, because Londoners would have disgraced the Empire and themselves before the whole world.”

[80] The “celebrated but infamous” Petronius, surnamed Arbiter, philosophised in the first century to the following up-to-date effect:—

Fear made the first divinities on earth

The sweeping flames of heaven; the ruined tower,

Scathed by its stroke. The softly setting sun,

The slow declining of the silver moon,

And its recovered beauty. Hence the signs

Known through the world, and the swift changing year,

Circling divided in its varied months.

Hence rose the error. Empty folly bade

The wearied husbandman to Ceres bring

The first fair honours of his harvest fields

To gird the brow of Bacchus with the palm,

And taught how Pales, ’mid the shepherd bands,

Stood and rejoiced, how Neptune in the flood

Plunged deep, and ruled the ever-roaring tide;

How Vallas reigned o’er earth’s stupendous caves

Mightily. He who vowed and he who reaped

With eager contest, made their gods themselves.

[81]

The intelligible forms of ancient poets

The fair humanities of old religion

The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty

That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain

Or forest or slow stream, or pebbly spring

Our chasms and watery depths; all these have vanished

They live no longer in the faith of reason.

—Coleridge.

[82] There is, of course, no novelty in these ideas, which are merely a recrudescence and restatement of the notions to which Plutarch thus alludes:—

“We shall also get our hands on the dull crowd, who take pleasure in associating the ideas about these gods either with changes of the atmosphere according to the seasons, or with the generation of corn and sowings and ploughings, and in saying that Osiris is buried when the sown corn is hidden by the earth, and comes to life and shows himself again when it begins to sprout.... They should take very good heed, and be apprehensive lest unwittingly they write off the sacred mysteries and dissolve them into winds and streams and sowings and ploughings and passions of earth and changes of seasons.”

[83] “The Gnostic movement began long before the Christian era (what its original historical impulse was we do not know), and only one aspect of it, and that from a strictly limited point of view, has been treated by ecclesiastical historians.”—Lamplugh, Rev. F., The Gnosis of the Light, 1918, p. 10.

[84] Holmes, Rice, Ancient Britain, p. 295.

[85] Ibid., p. 373.

CHAPTER III
A TALE OF TROY

Upon the Syrian sea the people live,

Who style themselves Phœnicians,

These were the first great founders of the world—

Founders of cities and of mighty states—

Who showed a path through seas before unknown.

In the first ages, when the sons of men

Knew not which way to turn them, they assigned

To each his first department; they bestowed

Of land a portion and of sea a lot,

And sent each wandering tribe far off to share

A different soil and climate. Hence arose

The great diversity, so plainly seen,

’Mid nations widely severed.

—Dyonysius of Susiana, A.D. 300.

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 equal bands the triple troops divide,

Then turn, and rallying, with spears bent low,

Charge at the call. Now back again they ride,

Wheel round, and weave new courses to and fro,

In armed similitude of martial show,

Circling and intercircling. Now in flight

They bare their backs, now turning, foe to foe,

Level their lances to the charge, now plight

The truce, and side by side in friendly league unite.

E’en as in Crete the Labyrinth of old

Between blind walls its secret hid from view,

With wildering ways and many a winding fold,

Wherein the wanderer, if the tale be true,

Roamed unreturning, cheated of the clue;

Such tangles weave the Teucrians, as they feign

Fighting, or flying, and the game renew;

So dolphins, sporting on the watery plane,

Cleave the Carpathian waves and distant Libya’s main.

These feats Ascanius to his people showed,

When girdling Alba Longa; there with joy

The ancient Latins in the pastime rode,

Wherein the princely Dardan, as a boy,

Was wont his Trojan comrades to employ.

To Alban children from their sires it came,

And mighty Rome took up the “game of Troy,”

And called the players “Trojans,” and the name

Lives on, as sons renew the hereditary game.[103]

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—

A shrewd Phœnician, in all fraud adept,

Hungry, and who had num’rous harm’d before,

By whom I also was cajoled, and lured

T’ attend him to Phœnicia, where his house

And his possessions lay; there I abode

A year complete his inmate; but (the days

And months accomplish’d of the rolling year

And the new seasons ent’ring on their course)

To Lybia then, on board his bark, by wiles

He won me with him, partner of the freight

Profess’d, but destin’d secretly to sale,

That he might profit largely by my price.

Not unsuspicious, yet constrain’d to go,

With this man I embark’d.

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:—

They enter’d each a bath, and by the hands

Of maidens laved, and oil’d, and cloath’d again

With shaggy mantles, and resplendent vests,

Sat both enthroned at Menelaus’ side.

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—

Open’d his broad chamber-valves, and sat

On his couch-side: then putting off his vest

Of softest texture, placed it in the hands

Of the attendant dame discrete, who first

Folding it with exactest care, beside

His bed suspended it, and, going forth,

Drew by its silver ring the portal close,

And fasten’d it with bolt and brace secure.

There lay Telemachus, on finest wool

Reposed, contemplating all night his course

Prescribed by Pallas to the Pylian shore.[123]

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:—

So spake Jove’s daughter; they obedient heard.

The heralds, then, pour’d water on their hands,

And the attendant youths, filling the cups,

Served them from left to right.[124]

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.”

FOOTNOTES:

[86] Taylor, Rev. T., The Celtic Christianity of Cornwall, p. 27.

[87] Morris-Jones, Sir J., Y. Cymmrodor, xxvii., p. 240.

[88] Margoliouth, M., The Jews in Great Britain, p. 33.

[89] As bearing upon this statement I reprint in the Appendix to the present volume a very remarkable extract from Britain and the Gael (Wm. Beal), 1860.

[90] Wilkes, Anna, Ireland: Ur of the Chaldees, p. 6.

[91] Introduction to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (Everyman’s Library).

[92] Plutarch, De Defectu Oraculorum, xvii.

[93] Eckenstein, L., Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes, p. 70.

[94] Clodd, E., Tom Tit Tot, p. 131.

[95] Mackenzie, D. A., Myths of Crete and Pre-Hellenic Europe, p. 326.

[96] Cf. Poste, B., Britannic Researches, p. 220.

[97] Y Cymmrodor, xxviii.

[98] Triad 4.

[99] “The notion that the Albanian is a mere mixture of Greek and Turkish has long been superseded by the conviction that though mixed it is essentially a separate language. The doctrine also that it is of recent introduction into Europe has been similarly abandoned. There is every reason for believing that as Thunmann suggested, it was, at dawn of history, spoken in the countries where it is spoken at the present moment.”—Latham, R. G., Varieties of Man, p. 552.

[100] Rhys, J., Celtic Britain.

[101] The same root may be behind deruish or dervish.

[102] Gordon, E. O., Prehistoric London, p. 127.

[103] Virgil, Æneid, 79, 80, 81.

[104] Cornish Feasts and Folklore, p. 119.

[105] Malory, viii.

[106] I question the current supposition that this is a corruption of chy an woon or “house on the hill”.

[107] Beal, W., Britain and the Gael, p. 22.

[108] Herodotus, 11, 52.

[109] Johnston, J. B., Place-names of England and Wales, p. 413.

[110] Burrows, R. M., The Discoveries in Crete, p. 11.

[111] Hastings (Ward Lock & Co.), p. 63.

[112] xxvii. 12.

[113] Sepulchres of Ancient Etruria, p. 9.

[114] From mercari, to trade (Skeat).

[115] Jonnock is probably cognate with yankee, which was in old times used in the New England States as an adjective meaning “excellent,” “first-class”. Thus, a “yankee” horse would be a first-class horse, just as we talk of English beef and other things English, meaning that they are the best. Another explanation of yankee is that when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, near Massachusetts Bay, in 1620, they were met on the shore by native Indians who called them “Yangees”—meaning “white man”—and the term was finally completed into “Yankees”.

[116] Taylor, Rev. R., Diegesis, p. 158.

[117] The remarkable serpentine, shell-mosaiked shrine, known as Margate Grotto, is discussed in chap. xiii.

[118] i., 367.

[119] Odyssey, Book IV.

[120] Cf. Smith, G., Religion of Ancient Britain, p. 65.

[121] Myths of Crete and Prehistoric Europe, p. 239.

[122] Rydberg, V., Teutonic Mythology, pp. 22-36.

[123] Odyssey, Book I.

[124] Ibid., Book III.

[125] The Myth of Br. Islands, p. 324.

[126] The current idea that London was Llyn din, the Lake town, has been knocked on the head since it has been “proved that the lake which was described so picturesquely by J. R. Green did not exist”. Cf. Rice Holmes, Ancient Britain, p. 704.

[127] Londres, the Gaulish form of London, implies that the radical was Lon—and perhaps further, that London was a holy enclosure dun or derry where luna, the moon, was worshipped. There is a persistent tradition that St. Paul’s, standing on the summit of Ludgate Hill or dun, occupies the site of a more ancient shrine dedicated to Diana, i.e., Luna.

[128] This name will subsequently be traced to Cres, the son of Jupiter, to whom the Cretans assigned their origin.

[129] Wright, T., Essays on Archæological Subjects, vol. i., p. 273.

[130] Wright, T., Essays on Archæological Subjects, vol. i., p. 283.

[131] In Albany the memory of “the gudeman” lingered until late, and according to Scott: “In many parishes of Scotland there was suffered to exist a certain portion of land, called the gudeman’s croft, which was never ploughed or cultivated, but suffered to remain waste, like the Temenos of a pagan temple. Though it was not expressly avowed, no one doubted that ‘the goodman’s croft’ was set apart for some evil being; in fact, that it was the portion of the arch-fiend himself, whom our ancestors distinguished by a name which, while it was generally understood, could not, it was supposed, be offensive to the stern inhabitant of the regions of despair. This was so general a custom that the Church published an ordinance against it as an impious and blasphemous usage.

“This singular custom sunk before the efforts of the clergy in the seventeenth century; but there must still be many alive who, in childhood, have been taught to look with wonder on knolls and patches of ground left uncultivated, because, whenever a ploughshare entered the soil, the elementary spirits were supposed to testify their displeasure by storm and thunder,”

Demonology and Witchcraft.

[132] These Sources of Life or vessels of Almighty Power were described as Crown, Wisdom, Prudence, Magnificence, Severity, Beauty, Victory, Glory, Foundation, Empire. Cf. King, C. W., The Gnostics and their Remains, p. 34.

[133] Johnston, Rev. J. B., Place-names of England and Wales.

[134] “The origin of the name is quite unknown to history.... Possibly because so many dogs were drowned in the Thames here.”—Johnston, Rev. J. B., Place-names of England, p. 321.

[135] Walsh, R., An Essay on Ancient Coins, Medals, and Gems, p. 58.

[136] Rhys, Sir J., Celtic Heathendom, pp. 14-16.

[137] British children still cross their forefingers as a sign of treus, pax, or fainits.

[138] Britannia Antiquissima, p. 4.

[139] Cf. Thomas, J. J., Britannia Antiquissima, pp. 84, 85.

CHAPTER IV
ALBION

The Anglo-Saxons, down to a late period, retained the heathenish Yule, as all Teutonic Christians did the sanctity of Easter-tide; and from these two, the Yule-boar and Yule-bread, the Easter pancake, Easter sword, Easter fire, and Easter dance could not be separated. As faithfully were perpetuated the name and, in many cases, the observances of midsummer. New Christian feasts, especially of saints, seem purposely as well as accidentally to have been made to fall on heathen holidays. Churches often rose precisely where a heathen god or his sacred tree had been pulled down; and the people trod their old paths to the accustomed site: sometimes the very walls of the heathen temple became those of the church; and cases occur in which idol-images still found a place in a wall of the porch, or were set up outside the door, as at Bamberg Cathedral where lie Sclavic-heathen figures of animals inscribed with runes.”—Grimm.

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:—

One is all alone,

And ever doth remain so.

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:—

O infinite Lord of Gods! the world’s abode,

Thou undivided art, o’er all supreme,

Thou art the first of Gods, the ancient Sire,

The treasure-house supreme of all the worlds.

The Knowing and the Known, the highest seat.

From Thee the All has sprung, O Boundless Form!

Varuna, Vazu, Agni, Yama thou,

The Moon; the Sire and Grandsire too of men.

The infinite in power, of boundless force,

The All thou dost embrace; the “Thou art All”.

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:—

Now doth Cain with fork of thorns confine

On either hemisphere touching the wave

Beneath the towers of Seville. Yesternight

The moon was round.[161]

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:—

High on the hill-top the Old King sits

He is now so old and grey, he’s nigh lost his wits.

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:—

Of the ruddy vine,

Planted on sunny days,

And on new-moon nights;

And the white wine.

The wheat rich in grain

And red flowing wine

Christ’s pure body make,

Son of Alpha.

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:—

Prometheus did create

A man of many parts from beasts derived,

That man so made he called Elfe to wit,

Quick the first author of all Elfin kind,

Who wandering through the world with wearie feet

Did in the gardens of Adonis find

A goodly creature whom he deemed in mind

To be no earthly wight, but either sprite

Or angel, the author of all woman-kind.[164]

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:—

From Burnsall’s Tower the midnight hour

Had toll’d and its echo was still,

And the Elphin bard from faerie land

Was upon Elboton Hill.

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.).

To every branch a torch they tie

To every torch a light apply,

At each new light send forth huzzahs

Till all the tree is in a blaze;

Then bear it flaming through the town,

With minstrelsy and rockets thrown.[165]

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—

Then let them all encircle him about

And Fairy-like to pinch the unclean Knight,

And ask him why that hour of fairy revel

In their so sacred paths he dares to tread.

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—

... he was chaste and no lechour

And sweet as is the bramble flower,

That beareth the red hip.

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

Here the Queen of Fairie

With harpe and pipe and symphonie

Dwelleth in this place.

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:—

Nature’s great masterpiece, an Elephant

The onely harmelesse great thing; the giant

Of beasts; who thought none bad, to make him wise

But to be just and thankful, loth t’ offend

(Yet nature hath given him no knees to bend)

Himself he up-props, on himself relies

And foe to none.

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 moon, full-orbed, into the well looks down,

Her face is mirrored in the waters clear,

And fées are gathering in the beech shade brown,

From missions far and near.

And there erect and tall, Abonde the Queen,

Brow-girt with golden circlet, that doth bear

A small bright scintillating star between

Her braids of dusky hair.[176]

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:—

Mountains are altars rais’d to God by hands

Omnipotent, and man must worship there.

On their aspiring summits glad he stands

And near to Heaven.

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—

If dying mortals doom they sing aright,

No ghosts descend to dwell in dreadful night

No parting souls to grisly Pluto go

Nor seek the dreary silent shades below,

But forth they fly immortal to their kind

And other bodies in new worlds they find.

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—

Believe in Christ, who died for thee,

And sure as He hath died,

Thy debt is paid, thy soul is free,

And thou art justified.[187]

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:—

In every person there is a soul,

In every soul there is intelligence:

In every intelligence there is thought,

In every thought there is either good or evil:

In every evil there is death:

In every good there is life,

In every life there is God.[188]

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:—

Grant, O God, Thy protection;

And in Thy protection, strength,

And in strength, understanding;

And in understanding, knowledge,

And in knowledge, the knowledge of justice;

And in the knowledge of justice, the love of it,

And in that love, the love of all existences;

And in that love of all existences, the love of God.

God and all goodness.

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—

Of pansy, pink, and primrose leaves,

Most curiously laid on in threaves.[191]

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”.

FOOTNOTES:

[140] Toland, History of the Druids, p. 428.

[141] Cf. Poste, B., Britannic Researches, p. 110.

[142] The Lost Language of Symbolism, 1912.

[143] The earliest example of Irish Bardism is to the following effect:—

I invoke thee Erin

Brilliant Brilliant sea,

Fertile Fertile Hill,

Wavy Wavy Wood

Flowing Flowing stream,

Fishy Fishy Lake, etc.

[144] Haslam, W., Perran Zabuloe, p. 8.

[145] Survey of London, Ev. Lib., p. 132.

[146] Golden Legend, III, 248.

[147] Skeat postulates a mute vowel by deriving lazar or leper from Eleazer—He whom God assists.

[148] Extinct Civilisations of the East, p. 104.

[149] I have a chapter of evidence in MSS. supporting this suggestion.

[150] Frazer, Sir J. G., Folklore in the Old Testament, iii., 45.

[151] Bulfinch put the horse before the cart when he wrote: “As the name of the god signifies all, Pan came to be considered a symbol of the universe and personification of nature.”

[152] Wavrin, John de, Chronicles.

[153] This name is supposed to have meant a miser or father of pennies. The penny is said to have been so named from the pen or head figured upon it.

[154] Hone, W., Everyday Book, i., col. 566.

[155] The New English Dictionary notes the following “forms” of “pigeon,” pejon, pejoun, pegion, pegyon, pigin, pigen, pigion, pygon. The supposed connection between pigeon and pipio, “I chirp,” is surely remote, for young pigeons do not “chirp”.

[156] Mrs. Hamilton Gray in The Sepulchres of Ancient Etruria, writes: “I was particularly struck with one large carved group, which bore a greater resemblance to a Hindoo representation of a trinity than anything not Indian I have ever seen. Did we not know the thing to be impossible, I should be tempted on the strength of this sculptured stone to assert that Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu must at some former period have found adorers in Etruria. Three monstrous faces, growing together, one full face in the middle and a profile on each side” (p. 309).

[157] The official etymology of June is “probably from root of Latin juvenis, junior,” but where is the sense in this?

[158] Baring-Gould, S., Curious Myths, p. 5.

[159] Curious Myths, p. 23.

[160] Gray, Mrs. Hamilton, Sepulchres of Ancient Etruria, pp. 187, 189.

[161] Hell., c. xx.

[162] Yeats, W. B., Fairy and Folk-tales of the Irish Peasantry, p. 306.

[163] “Theta,” The Thorn Tree, being a History of Thorn Worship. London, 1863, p. 127.

[164] Faërie Queene, Book XI., c. ix., st. 70-71.

[165] Hone, W., Everyday Book, 111., col. 27.

[166] Keightley, T., Fairy Mythology, p. 138.

[167] Davies, E., Myth of Brit. Druids, pp. 203, 204.

[168] Baring-Gould, Curious Myths, p. 194.

[169] Spence, Lewis, Myths of Mexico and Peru, p. 170.

[170] P. 159.

[171] Surnames, p. 230.

[172] The ecclesiastical raison d’être for St. Andrew’s situation is stated as having been “to the end that his pain should endure the longer”.

[173] “Diogenes Lærtius, in the proem of his philosophical history, reckons the Druids among the chief authors of the barbarous theology and philosophy, long anterior to the Greeks, their disciples: and Phurnutus, in his treatise of the Nature of the Gods, says most expressly that among the many and various fables which the antient Greecs had about the Gods, some were derived from the Mages, the Africans, and Phrygians, and others from other nations: for which he cites Homer as a witness, nor is there anything that bears a greater witness to itself.”—Toland, History of Druids. London, 1814, p. 106.

[174] Ancient Britain, p. 284.

[175] Keightley, Fairy Mythology, p. 818.

[176] Anon., The Fairy Family, 1857.

[177] Keightley, Fairy Mythology, pp. 25, 441.

[178] Quoted from Davies, E., Celtic Researches, p. 560.

[179] Livy mentions that during the Macedonian War a Gaulish soldier foretold an eclipse of the moon to the Roman Army (Liber XLIV., c. xxxvii.).

[180] “A few years ago it would have been deemed the height of absurdity to imagine that the English and the Hindus were originally one people, speaking the same language, and clearly distinguished from other families of mankind; and yet comparative philology has established this fact by evidence as clear and irresistible as that the earth revolves round the sun.”—Smith, Dr. Wm., Lectures on the English Language, p. 2.

[181] Keightley, Fairy Mythology, p. 290.

[182] Canon ffrench, Prehistoric Faith in Ireland, p. 80.

[183] Cf. Frazer, Sir J. G., Psyche’s Task, pp. 7, 14.

[184] Cf. Ibid.

[185] Curious Myths, p. 557.

[186] Cf. Keightley, T., Fairy Mythology, p. 298.

[187] There is a certain section of Christianity that still revels in hymns such as the following:—

“His nostrils breathe out fiery streams,

He’s a consuming fire,

His jealous eyes His wrath inflame

And raise His vengeance higher.”

[188] This and the several subsequent quotations from Bardic “Philosophy” are taken from the collection published in 1862, by the Welsh MSS. Society, under the title Barddas. Whatever may be the precise date of these axioms the ideas they express well repay careful consideration.

[189] According to Cæsar the Druidic philosophy was transmitted orally for the purpose of strengthening the memory. The disciples of Pythagoras followed a similar precept, hence when the majority of them were destroyed in a fire the axioms of Pythagoras were largely lost. That the traditional tales of Ireland were maintained in their verbal integrity for untold years is implied by Mr. Yeats’ statement: “In the Parochial Survey of Ireland it is recorded how the story-tellers used to gather together of an evening, and if any had a different version from the others, they would all recite theirs and vote, and the man who had varied would have to abide by their verdict. In this way stories have been handed down with such accuracy, that the long tale of Dierdre was, in the earlier decades of this century, told almost word for word, as in the very ancient MSS. in the Royal Dublin Society. In one case only it varied, and then the MSS. was obviously wrong—a passage had been forgotten by the copyist. But this accuracy is rather in the folk and bardic tales than in the fairy legends, for these vary widely, being usually adapted to some neighbouring village or local fairy-seeing celebrity.”—Yeats, W. B., Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, p. 11.

[190] Cf. Yeats, W.B., Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, p. 318.

[191] Keightley, T., Fairy Mythology, p. 346.

[192] Myth, Ritual and Religion, 1. 186.

CHAPTER V
GOG AND MAGOG

“Scarce stand the vessels hauled upon the beach,

And bent on marriages the young men vie

To till new settlements, while I to each

Due law dispense and dwelling place supply,

When from a tainted quarter of the sky

Rank vapours, gathering, on my comrades seize,

And a foul pestilence creeps down from high.”

—Virgil, The Æneid.

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:—

When thy vessels, ranged upon her shore,

Rest from the deep, and on the beach ye light

The votive altars, and the gods adore,

Veil then thy locks, with purple hood bedight,

And shroud thy visage from a foeman’s sight,

Lest hostile presence, ’mid the flames divine,

Break in, and mar the omen and the rite.

This pious use keep sacred, thou and thine,

The sons of sons unborn, and all the Trojan line.[193]

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:—

Tired out we seek the little town, and run

The sterns ashore and anchor in the bay,

Saved beyond hope and glad the land is won,

And lustral rites, with blazing altars, pay

To Jove, and make the shores of Actium gay

With Ilian games, as, like our sires, we strip

And oil our sinews for the wrestler’s play,

Proud, thus escaping from the foeman’s grip,

Past all the Argive towns, through swarming Greeks, to slip.[195]

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:—

At Giggleswick where I a fountain can you show,

That eight times a day is said to ebb and flow.

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:—

... o’er the Deep proceeding sad, we reach’d

The land at length, where, giant-sized and free

From all constraint of law, the Cyclops dwell

They, trusting to the Gods, plant not, or plough

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .   .

No councils they convene, no laws contrive

But in deep caverns dwell, found on the heads

Of lofty mountains.

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:—

Aurora’s harbinger—who

Scatters the rear of darkness thin.

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.

Three weeks before the day whereon was borne the Lorde of Grace,

And on the Thursdaye boyes and girls do runne in every place,

And bounce and beate at every doore, with blowes and lustie snaps,

And crie, the Advent of the Lord not borne as yet perhaps,

And wishing to the neighbours all, that in the houses dwell,

A happie yeare, and every thing to spring and prosper well:

Here have they peares, and plumbs, and pence, ech man gives willinglee,

For these three nightes are alwayes thought unfortunate to bee;

Wherein they are affrayde of sprites and cankred witches spight,

And dreadful devils blacke and grim, that then have chiefest might.[208]

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

As we used to do in old King Henry’s day,

Sing fellows, sing Hagman heigh!

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:—

Aeon hath seen age after age in long succession roll,

But like a serpent which has cast its skin,

Rose to new life in youthful vigour strong.

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:—

Io! Io! Pan! Pan!

Oh Pan thou ocean Wanderer.[216]

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—

Mist in spring is the source of wine,

Mist in summer is the source of heat,

Mist in autumn is the source of rain,

Mist in winter is the source of snow.

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 age of Jesus, the fair and energetic Hu

In God’s Truth was eleven hundred.[227]

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:—

... the axle of the Sky,

The Bear revolving points his Golden Eye.

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]

FOOTNOTES:

[193] Virgil, The Æneid, Bk. III., c. liii.

[194] Cf. Geoffrey’s Histories of the Kings of Britain (Everyman’s Library), p. 202.

[195] Virgil, The Æneid, Bk. III., 37.

[196] Irish Mythological Cycle, p. 50.

[197] xx. 8.

[198] Wood, E. J. Giants and Dwarfs, p. 54.

[199] Chap. xxvi.

[200] The Irish Mythological Cycle, p. 116.

[201] Wood, E.J., Giants and Dwarfs, p. 5.

[202] The Romance of Names, p. 65.

[203] Hone, W., Ancient Mysteries, p. 264.

[204] Wright, T., Patrick’s Purgatory, p. 56.

[205] Courtney, Miss M. L., Cornish Feasts and Folklore, p. 28.

[206] Bartholomew, J. G., A Survey Gazetteer of the British Islands, I. 612.

[207] The duplication cock, as in haycock, also meant a hill.

[208] Quoted from Brand’s Antiquities, p. 42.

[209] Cf. Urlin, Miss Ethel, Festivals, Holydays, and Saint Days, p. 2.

[210] Anwyl, E., Celtic Religion.

[211] Anwyl, E., Celtic Religion, p. 40.

[212] Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, pp. 637-40.

[213] “Morien” Light of Britannia, p. 262.

[214] The phallic symbolism of the serpent has been over-stressed so obtrusively by other writers, that it is unnecessary here to enlarge upon that aspect of the subject.

[215] Baldwin, J. D., Prehistoric Nations, p. 240.

[216] Sophocles, Ajax, 694-700.

[217] Windle, Sir B. C. A., Remains of the Prehistoric Age in Britain, p. 198.

[218] The Golden Legend, V. 182-3.

[219] The ancient name “hoar rock,” or white rock in the wood, may have referred to the white god probably once there worshipped, for actually there are no white rocks at St. Michael’s, or anywhere else in Cornwall.

[220] The Golden Legend records an apparition of St. Michael at a town named Tumba.

[221] Wood, E. J., Giants and Dwarfs, p. 91.

[222] Cf. Friend, Rev. Hilderic, Flowers and Folklore, II., p. 455.

[223] “Morien,” Light of Brittania, p. 27.

[224] Anon, A New Description of England and Wales (1724), p. 121.

[225] Dennis, G., Cities and Centuries of Etruria, p. 31.

[226] Munro, R., Prehistoric Britain, p. 223.

[227] Barddas, p. 222.

[228] Kains-Jackson, Our Ancient Monuments, p. 112. Fergusson states “about 330 feet”.

[229] Vol. vi., p. 64.

[230] Vol. vi., p. 66.

[231] Gray, Mrs. Hamilton, Sepulchres of Etruria.

[232] Vol., iii., p. 73.

[233] Golden Legend, vol. v., p. 184.

[234] Simpkins, J. E., Fife, p. 4; County Folklore, vol. vii.

[235] Simpkins, J. E., Kinross-shire, p. 377.

[236] Ibid., p. 241.

[237] Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, p. 336.

[238] I am unable to lay my hand on the reference for this Elen’s Causeway in Westmoreland.

[239] Anon., A New Description of England, 1724, p. 318.

[240] Symbolical Language, p. 37.

[241] Golden Legend, vol. v., p. 189.

[242] Cornish Feasts and Folklore, p. 131.

[243] Golden Legend, vol. v., p. 181.

[244] Jubainville, D’arbois de, Irish Mythological Cycle, p. 140.

[245] Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, iii., 1.

[246] Ossian, the hero poet of Gaeldom, is represented as old, blind, and solitary.

[247] Cf. Windle, Sir B.C.A., Remains of the Prehistoric Age, pp. 197-8.

[248] Salmon, A.L., Cornwall, p. 88.

[249] Wilson, J.M., The Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales, i., p. 484.

[250] Anwyl, E., Celtic Religion, p. 39.

[251] “L.V.,” London (undated).

[252] I do not think this proverbially loving couple were exclusively Scotch. The darbies, i.e., handcuffs or clutches of the law may be connoted with Gascoigne’s line (1576): “To bind such babes in father Darbie’s bands”. “Old Joan” figures as one of the characters in the festivities of Plough Monday, and in Cornwall any very ancient woman was denominated “Aunt Jenny”.

[253] Gray, Mrs. Hamilton, Sepulchres of Ancient Etruria, p. 131.

[254] The Mythology of the British Islands, p. 125.

CHAPTER VI.
PUCK.

“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:—

A cutty black sow on every style

Spinning and carding each November eve.

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:—

On November eve

A Bogie on every stile.

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:—

A branch of May we have brought you,

And at your door it stands;

It is a sprout that is well budded out,

The work of our Lord’s hands.

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—

... blew three notes, such sweet

Soft notes as never yet musician’s cunning

Gave to the enraptured air,

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.

He led us, he said, to a joyous land

Joining the town and just at hand,

Where waters gushed and fruit trees grew,

And flowers put forth a fairer hue,

And everything was strange and new.

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:—

Now carry we Death out of the village,

The new Summer into the village,

Welcome, dear Summer,

Green little corn.

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:—

We have carried away Death,

And brought back Life.[322]

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[255] Fairy Mythology, p. 298.

[256] Courtney, Miss, Cornish Feasts and Folklore, p. 129.

[257] Hope, R. C., Sacred Wells.

[258] Demonology and Witchcraft.

[259] At the time of writing the Servians say they are putting their trust in “Bog and Britannia”.

[260] This is an official etymology. It is the one and only poetic idea admitted into Skeat’s Dictionary.

[261] Cf. Johnson, W., Folk Memory, p. 159.

[262] Pliny relates Varro’s description as follows: “King Porsenna was buried beneath the city of Clusium, in a place where he left a monument of himself in rectangular stone. Each side was 300 feet long and 50 feet high, and within the basement he made an inextricable labyrinth, into which if anyone ventured without a clue, there he must remain, for he never could find the way out again. Above this base stood five pyramids, one in the centre and four at the angles, each of them 75 feet in circumference at the base, and 150 feet high, tapering to the top so as to be covered by a cupola of bronze. From this there hung by chains a peal of bells, which, when agitated by the wind, sounded to a great distance. Above this cupola rose four other pyramids, each 100 feet high, and above these again, another story of five pyramids, which towered to a height so marvellous and improbable, that Varro hesitates to affirm their altitude.” And in this he was wise, for he had already said more upon the subject than was credible. However, any one who has seen the tomb of Aruns, the son of Porsenna, near the gate of Albano, will be struck with the similarity of style, which, comparing small things with great, existed between the monuments of father and son. Those who have never been in Italy may like to know that this tomb of Aruns is said to have been built by Porsenna, for the young Prince who fell there in battle with the Latins, and with the Greeks from Cuma, and it is certainly the work of Etruscan masons. Five pyramids rise from a base of 55 sq. feet, and the centre one contains a small chamber, in which was found, about fifty years since, an urn full of ashes.—Gray, Mrs. Hamilton, Sepulchres of Etruria, p. 450.

[263] Taylor, R., Te Ika A Maui, or New Zealand and its Inhabitants, p. 352.

[264] Cf. Stow, London.

[265] Evans, Sir Arthur, quoted in Crete of Pre-hellenic Europe, p. 32.

[266] Bonwick Irish Druids and Old Irish Religion, p. 230.

[267] Anwyl, E.

[268] It is not unlikely that the Goss and Cass families of to-day are the descendants of the British tribe referred to by the Romans as the Cassi.

[269] The Welsh for alban or alpin is elphin.

[270] Urlin, Miss Ethel M., Festivals, Holy Days, and Saints’ Days, p. 192.

[271] Ibid., p. 196.

[272] Cf. Hone, W., Everyday Book, vol. i., col. 1340.

[273] Cf. Hone, W., Everyday Book, vol. i., col. 1340.

[274] xli. 19.

[275] Faiths and Folklore, i., 332.

[276] Celtic Britain, p. 211. Sir John frequently changed his mind.

[277] Barddas, p. 416.

[278] The Phrygian Cap was symbolic.

[279] Myths of Crete and Pre-Hellenic Europe, p. xxxii.

[280] Mykenæ, p. 179.

[281] Rude Stone Monuments, p. 207.

[282] Baldwin, J. G., Prehistoric Nations, p. 162.

[283] Keightley, Fairy Mythology, p. 317.

[284] Hazlitt, W. Carew, Faiths and Folklore, ii., 608.

[285] Rhys, Sir J., Celtic Britain, p. 271.

[286] The Celtic Angus is translated excellent virtue.

[287] Cf. Baring-Gould, Rev. S., Curious Myths, pp. 266-316.

[288] Orphic Hymn, lv., 5, 10, and 11.

[289] Courtney, Miss M. L., Cornish Feasts and Folklore, p. 136.

[290] From prehistoric times this ensign seems to have been known as “the Jack,” and the immutability of the fabulous element was evidenced anew during the present year when on 23rd April the Admiral on shore wirelessed to the Zeebrugge raiding force: “England and St. George”. To this was returned the reply: “We’ll give a twist to the dragon’s tail”.

[291] Since writing I find this surmise to be well founded. At the present moment there is a Persian cannon (A.D. 1547) captured at Bagdad, now on exhibition in London. It bears an inscription to the effect:—

“‘Succour is from God, and victory is at hand.’

The Commander of Victory and Help, the Shah,

Desiring to blot out all trace of the Turks,

Ordered Dglev to make this gun.

Wherever it goes it burns up lives,

It spits forth flames like a dragon.

It sets the world of the Turks on fire.”

[292] Wise, T. A., History of Paganism in Caledonia, p. 114.

[293] Irish Mytho. Cycle, p. 229.

[294] The Norwegian for neigh is kneggya, the Danish, gnegge.

[295] There is no evidence to support the supposition that Eppillus may have been an English king.

[296] An omniscient eagle was associated with Achill (Ireland).

[297] Ancient Coins of the Romans Relating to Britain, p. 197.

[298] Faiths and Folklore, vol. i., p. 329.

[299] Faiths and Folklore, vol. i., p. 329.

[300] Madeley, E., The Science of Correspondence, p. 194.

[301] Dalston in Cumberland is assumed to have been a town in the dale or dale’s town. But surely “towns” were never thus anonymous?

[302] P. 299.

[303] Compare also Shadwell in East London, “said to be St. Chad’s Well”.

[304] Mitton, G. E., Hackney, p. 11.

[305] Cf. Westropp, T. J., Proceedings of Royal Irish Academy, vol. xxxiv., Sec. C., Nos. 3 and 4.

[306] Walters, J. Cuming, The Lost Land of King Arthur, p. 219.

[307] One of these has been slightly diverted by the exigencies of the railway station.

[308] Macalister, R. A. S., Temair Breg: A Study of the Remains and Traditions of Tara, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, sec. C., Nos. 10 and 11, p. 284.

[309] Picard, Ceremonies of Idolatrous People, vol. iv., p. 291.

[310] Weekley, E., Romance of Names, p. 224.

[311] Survey of London (Everyman’s Library), p. 416.

[312] The Peck family may have been inn-keepers or dealers in peck or fodder, but more probably, like the Bucks and the Boggs, they may trace their descent much farther.

[313] See infra, p. 689.

[314] Akerman, J. Y., Ancient Coins, p. 17.

[315] There is a river Slee or Slea in Lincolnshire.

[316] Travels in the East (Bohn’s Library), p. 384.

[317] Larwood & Hotten, The History of Signboards, p. 285.

[318] It is simply futile to refer the word inn to “within, indoors” (see Skeat).

[319] Celtic Britain, p. 66. It is therefore feasible that Wrens Park, by Mildmay Park, Hackney, was primarily reines Park.

[320] Prehistoric Britain, p. 247.

[321] Mykenæ, p. 293.

[322] Ancient Art and Ritual, pp. 70 and 71.

CHAPTER VII
OBERON

“O queen, whom Jove hath willed

To found this new-born city, here to reign,

And stubborn tribes with justice to refrain,

We, Troy’s poor fugitives, implore thy grace,

Storm-tost and wandering over every main,—

Forbid the flames our vessels to deface,

Mark our afflicted plight, and spare a pious race.

“We come not hither with the sword to rend

Your Libyan homes, and shoreward drive the prey.

Nay, no such violence our thoughts intend.”

—Virgil, Æneid, I., lxix., 57.

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.

At once the storm is fled; serenely mild

Heav’n smiles around, bright rays the sky adorn

While beauteous as an angel newly born

Beams in the roseate day spring, glow’d the child

A lily stalk his graceful limbs, sustain’d

Round his smooth neck an ivory horn was chain’d

Yet lovely as he was on all around

Strange horror stole, for stern the fairy frown’d.[335]

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:—

The untended, the self-planted, self-defended from the foe,

Sea-grey, children-nurturing olive tree that here delights to grow,

None may take nor touch nor harm it, headstrong youth nor age grown bold

For the round of Morian Zeus has been its watcher from of old;

He beholds it, and, Athene, thy own sea-grey eyes behold.

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.

No bird has ever uttered note

That was not in some first bird’s throat,

Since Eden’s freshness and man’s fall

No rose has been original.

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:—

Great King, Dodona’s Lord, Pelasgian Jove,

Who dwell’st on high, and rul’st with sov’reign sway,

Dodona’s wintry heights; where dwell around

Thy Sellian priests, men of unwashen feet,

That on the bare ground sleep.

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—

Will you surrender, will you surrender

The town of Barbarie?

They answer—

We won’t surrender, we won’t surrender,

The town of Barbarie.

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

Take one of my good soldiers.

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:—

Papa pater patrum, Papissae pandito partum

Et tibi tunc eadem de corpore quando recedam.

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:—

1.  We will a’ gae sing, boys,

Where will we begin, boys?

We’ll begin the way we should,

And we’ll begin at ane, boys.

O, what will be our ane, boys?

O, what will be our ane, boys?

—My only ane she walks alane,

And evermair has dune, boys.

2.  Now we will a’ gae sing, boys;

Where will we begin, boys?

We’ll begin where we left aff,

And we’ll begin at twa, boys.

What will be our twa, boys?

—Twa’s the lily and the rose

That shine baith red and green, boys,

My only ane she walks alane,

And evermair has dune, boys.

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:—

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,

How I wonder what you are.

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:—

Old Emperor Yew, fantastic sire,

Girt with thy guard of dotard Kings,

What ages hast thou seen retire

Into the dusk of alien things?

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[323] Cf. Thomas, J. J., Brit. Antiquissima, p. 29.

[324] Hone, W., Everyday Book, i., 502.

[325] Squire, C., Mythology of Ancient Britain and Ireland, p. 52.

[326] Hazlitt, W. Carew, Faiths and Folklore, ii., 338.

[327] Cf. Johnson, W., Folk Memory, p. 143.

[328] Among the many Prestons I have enquired into is one with which I am conversant near Faversham. Here the Manor House is known as Perry Court; similarly there is a Perry Court at a second Preston situated a few miles distant. In the neighbourhood are Perry woods. There is a modern “Purston” at Pontefract, which figured in Domesday under the form “Prestun”.

[329] Taylor, Rev. T., Celtic Christianity of Cornwall, p. 33.

[330] Courtney, Miss M. L., Cornish Feasts and Folklore, p. 123.

[331] Haslam, Wm., Perranzabuloe.

[332] Ibid., p. 60.

[333] “Mr. W. Mackenzie, Procurator Fiscal of Cromarty, writes me from Dingwall (10th September, 1917), as follows: ‘We are not without some traces and traditions of phallic worship here. There is a stone in the Brahan Wood which is said to be a “knocking stone”. Barren women sat in close contact upon it for the purpose of becoming fertile. It serves the purpose of the mandrake in the East. I have seen the stone. It lies in the Brahan Wood about three miles from Dingwall.’”—Frazer, Sir J. G., quoted from Folklore, 1918, p. 219.

[334] Guerber, H. A., Myths and Legends of the Middle Ages, p. 219.

[335] Guerber, H. A., Myths and Legends of the Middle Ages, p. 221.

[336] “The Brehon laws are the most archaic system of law and jurisprudence of Western Europe. This was the code of the ancient Gaels, or Keltic-speaking Irish, which existed in an unwritten form long before it was brought into harmony with Christian sentiments.... It is impossible to study these laws and the manners and customs of the early Irish, together with their land tenure, and to compare them with the laws of Manu, and with the light thrown on the Aryans of India by the Sanskrit writings without coming to the conclusion that they had a common origin.”—Macnamara, N. C., Origin and Character of the British People, p. 94.

[337] Place-names of England and Wales, p. 406.

[338] Of the Teutonic Tiw, Dr. Taylor observes: “This word was used as the name of the Deity by all the Aryan nations. The Sanskrit deva, the Greek theos, the Latin deus, the Lithuanian dewas, the Erse dia, and the Welsh dew are all identical in meaning. The etymology of the word seems to point to the corruption of a pure monotheistic faith.” In Chaldaic and in Hebrew di meant the Omnipotent, in Irish de meant goddess, and in Cornish da or ta meant good. From the elementary form de, di, or da, one traces ramifications such as the Celtic dia or duw meaning a god. In Sanskrit Dya was the bright heavenly deity who may be equated with the Teutonic Tiu, whence our Tuesday, and with the Sanskrit Dyaus, which is equivalent to the Greek Zeus. The same radical d’ is the base of dies, and of dieu; of div the Armenian for day; of div the Sanskrit for shine; of Diva the Sanskrit for day. Our ancestors used to believe that the river Deva or Dee sprang from two sources, and that after a very short course its waters passed entire and unmixed through a large lake carrying out the same quantity of water that it brought in.

The word “Dee” seems widely and almost universally to have meant good or divine, and it may no doubt be equated with the “Saint Day” who figures so prominently in place-names, and the Christian Calendar.

[339] Hone, W., Everyday Book, i., 1118.

[340] Ancient Coins, p. 3.

[341] Lardner, D., History of Spain and Portugal, vol. i, p. 18.

[342] Ibid., p. 13.

[343] Ibid., p. 6.

[344] Macalister, R. A. S., Proc. Roy. Ir. Acad., xxxiv., C., 10-11.

[345] Mann, L. M., Archaic Sculpturings, p. 34.

[346] Wild Wales (Everyman’s Library), p. 258.

[347] Keightley, Fairy Mythology, p. 523.

[348] Bell’s Travels, i., 248.

[349] Cf. Guest, Dr., Origines Celticæ, i., 61.

[350] Bellot, H. H. L., The Temple, p. 12.

[351] That there is nothing far-fetched in this possibility is proved by a Vedic Hymn circa 2500 B.C.: “Enter, O lifeless one, the mother earth, the widespread earth, soft as a maiden in her arms rest free from sin. Let now the earth gently close around you even as a mother gently wraps her infant child in soft robes. Let now the fathers keep safe thy resting-place, and let Yama, the first mortal who passed the portals of Death, prepare thee for a new abiding place.”

[352] Near Land’s End is Bartinny or Pertinny, which is understood to have meant Hill of the Fire.

[353] At Bradfield is a British camp on Barley Hill. Notable earthwork abris exist at Brayford, Boringdon Camp, “Old Barrow,” Parracombe, and Prestonbury in Devonshire: at Buriton, and Bury Hill in Hampshire: at Breedon Hill, Burrough-on-the-hill, and Bury Camp in Leicestershire: at Borough Hill in Northamptonshire: at Burrow Wood, Bury Ditches, Bury Walls, and Caerbre in Shropshire: at Carn Brea in Cornwall: at Bourton, and Bury Castle, in Somerset: at Barmoor in Warwickshire: at Barbury, Bury Camp, and Bury Hill in Wiltshire: at Berrow in Worcestershire. Earthworks are also to be found on Brow downs, Bray downs, Bray woods, and Bury woods in various directions.

[354] F. M., p. 464.

[355] “Camps of indubitably British date, Saxon, and Norman entrenchments, to say nothing of minor matters such as dykes and mounds and so-called amphitheatres, all are accredited to a people who very probably had nothing at all to do with many of them.”—Allcroft, A. Hadrian, Earthwork of England, p. 289.

[356] The Bull’s head will have been noted on the buckler of Britannia, ante, p. 120.

[357] Bohn’s Library, p. 114.

[358] Stone, J. Harris, England’s Riviera.

[359] Abelson, J., Jewish Mysticism, p. 31.

[360] The authorities equate the names Alberic and Avery.

[361] F. M., p. 206.

[362] Book xl., chap. i.

[363] Friend, Rev. H., Flowers and Folklore, ii., 474.

[364] Myths of Ancient Britain, p. 18.

[365] Taylor, Rev. R., Diegesis, p. 271.

[366] Wood, E. J., Giants and Dwarfs, p. 44.

[367] Johnson, W., Folk Memory, p. 185.

[368] Cf. Shandwick or Shandfort ante, p. 327, also Shanid, p. 55.

[369] Cox, R. Hippesley, A Guide to Avebury, p. 55.

[370] Ibid.

[371] Folklore, XXIX., i., p. 182.

[372] Curious Myths of the Middle Ages.

[373] Jupiter is said to have been suckled by a goat.

[374] The Sanscrit for palm is toddy—whence the drink of that name.

[375] Proc. of Royal Irish Acad., xxxiv., C., 3, 4.

[376] Book IV., 33.

[377] Maundeville, in his Travels, mentions that near Hebron, “a sacerdotal city, that is a sanctuary on the Mount of Mamre, is an oak tree which the Saracens call dirpe, which is of Abraham’s time, and people called it the dry tree. They say that it has been there since the beginning of the world, and that it was once green and bore leaves, till the time that our Lord died on the cross, and then it died, and so did all the trees that were then in the world.”—Travels in the East, p. 162.

[378] Gen. xxiii.

[379] History, v., 2.

[380] Guest, Dr., Origines Celticæ, i., 54.

[381] Barddas, p. xxx.

[382] Vide inscription Chuckhurst?

[383] Dawson, L. H., A Book of the Saints, p. 221.

[384] Skeat considers that Sirrah is “a contemptuous extension of sire, perhaps by addition of ah! or ha! (so Minsheu); Old French sire, Provencial sira”.

[385] A Book of the Beginnings.

[386] “The Berbers, their language, and their books ought to be fully explored and studied. Archæology and linguistic science have lavished enthusiastic and toilsome study on subjects much less worthy of attention, for these Berbers present the remains of a great civilisation, much older than Rome or Hellas, and of one of the most important peoples of antiquity. Here are ‘ruins’ more promising, and, in certain respects, more important, than the buried ruins of Nineveh; but they have failed to get proper attention, partly because a false chronology has made it impossible to see their meaning and comprehend their importance. The Berbers represent ancient communities whose importance was beginning to decline before Rome appeared, and which were probably contemporary with ancient Chaldea and the old monarchy of Egypt.”—Baldwin, J. D., Prehistoric Nations, p. 340.

[387] Ibid., p. 342.

[388] Laing, S., and Huxley, T. H., The Prehistoric Remains of Caithness, pp. 70, 71.

[389] Quoted from Higgens, G., Celtic Druids.

[390] Latham, R. G., The Varieties of Man, p. 500.

[391] “Thy prowess I allow, yet this remember is the gift of Heaven.”—Homer.

[392] De Jubainville, Irish Myth. Cycle, p. 84.

[393] A Guide to the Antiquities of the Bronze Age (B. M.).

[394] Wright, E. M., Rustic Speech and Folklore, p. 334.

[395] Rev. Hilderic Friend. This gentleman adds: “Interesting as the study proves, we shall none of us regret that the English nation is daily becoming more and more intelligent and enlightened, and is leaving such follies to the heathen and the past” (vol. ii., 568).

[396] As bracken is the plural of brake, fern was once presumably the plural of pher.

[397] See Johnson, W., Byways in British Archæology, 375-7.

[398] Since writing I find that Didron, in vol. ii. of Christian Iconography, p. 180, illustrates a drawing of Jupiter upon which he comments, “a crown of yew leaves surrounds his head”.

[399] Guest, Dr., Origines Celticæ, i., 12.

CHAPTER VIII
SCOURING THE WHITE HORSE

“Where one might look to find a legitimate national pride in the monuments of our forefathers there seems to be a perverse conspiracy to give the credit to anyone rather than to the Briton, and preferably to the Roman interloper. If any evidence at all be asked for, the chance finding of a coin or two, or of a handful of shivered pottery, is deemed enough. Such evidence is emphatically not enough.”—A. Hadrian Allcroft.

The owld White Harse wants zettin to rights,

And the Squire hev promised good cheer,

Zo we’ll gee un a scrape to kip un in zhape,

And a’ll last for many a year.

—Berkshire Ballad.

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.

Fig. 234.—Macedonian. From English Coins and Tokens (Jewitt & Head).

Of the 486 varieties of British coins illustrated by Sir John Evans no less than 360 represent a horse in one form or another, whence it is obvious that the hobby horse was once a national emblem of the highest import. In the opinion of this foremost authority all Gaulish and all British coins are contemptible copies of a wondrous Macedonian stater, which circulated at Marseilles, whence the design permeated Gaul and Britain in the form of rude and clownish imitations: this supposed model, the very mark and acme of all other craftsmen, is here illustrated, and the reader can form his own opinion upon its artistic merits. “It appears to me,” says Sir John Evans, “that in most cases the adjuncts found upon the numerous degraded imitations of this type are merely the result of the engraver’s laziness or incompetence, where they are not attributable to his ignorance of what the objects he was copying were originally designed to represent. And although I am willing to recognise a mythological and national element in this adaptation of the Macedonian stater which forms the prototype of the greater part of the ancient British series, it is but rarely that this element can be traced with certainty upon its numerous subsequent modifications.”[408]

The supposed modifications attributed to the laziness or incompetence of British craftsmen are, however, so astonishing and so ably executed that I am convinced the present theory of feeble imitation is ill-founded. The horses of Philippus are comparatively stiff and wooden by the side of the work of Celtic craftsmen who, when that was their intention, animated their creations with amazing verve and elan. Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt, who regards our early coins as “deplorable abortions,” laments that one remarkable feature in the whole group of numismatic monuments of British and Celtic extraction is the spirit of servile imitation which it breathes, as well as the absence of that religious sentiment which confers a character on the Greek and Roman coinages.[409] How this writer defines religious sentiment I am unaware, but in any case it is difficult to square his assertion with Akerman’s reference to “the great variety of crosses and other totally uninteresting objects” found on the post-Roman coinage.[410]

We have already noted certain exquisitely modelled coins of Gaul and there are many more yet to be considered. Dr. Jewitt concedes that the imitations were not always servile “having occasionally additional features as drapery, a torque round the neck, a bandlet or what not,” but this writer obsequiously follows Sir John Evans in the opinion that the stater of Philip was “seized on by the barbarians who came in contact with Greek civilisation as an object of imitation. In Gaul this was especially the case, and the whole of the gold coinage of that country may be said to consist of imitations more or less rude and degenerate of the Macedonian Philippus.”[411]

Fig. 235.—Cambre Castle, from Redruth. From Excursions in the County of Cornwall (Stockdale, F. W. L.).

In 1769 a hoard of 371 gold British coins was discovered on the Cornish hill known as Carn Bre, near Cambourne, in view of which (and many other archæological finds) Borlase entertained the notion that Carn Bre was a prehistoric sanctuary. This conclusion is seemingly supported by the near neighbourhood of the town Redruth which is believed to have meant—rhe druth, or “the swift-flowing stream of the Druids”. It is generally supposed that primitive coins were struck by priests within their sacred precincts,[412] and the extraordinary large collection found upon Carn Bre seems a strong implication that at some period coins were there minted. We find seemingly the Bre of Carn Bre, doubtless the Gaulish abri or sanctuary, recurrent in Ireland, where at Bri Leith it was believed that Angus Mac Oge, the ever-young and lovely son of Dagda Mor, had his brugh or bri, which meant fairy palace. The Cornish Cambourne, which the authorities suppose to have been Cam bron, and to have meant crooked hill, was more probably like Carn Bre the seat or abri of King Auberon, “Saint” Bron, or King Aubrey.

Fig. 236.—Iberian. From Akerman.

Fig. 237.—British. From Evans.

Fig. 238.—From Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism (Inman, I.).

Fig. 239.—Greek. From Barthelemy.

The generic term coin is imagined to be derived from cuneum, the Latin accusative of cuneus, a wedge, “perhaps,” adds Skeat, “allied to cone”. It is, however, almost an invariable rule to designate coins by the design found upon their face, whence “angel,” “florin,” “rose,” “crown,” “kreuzer” (cross), and so forth. The British penny is supposed to have derived its title from the head—Celtic pen—stamped upon it:[413] the Italian ducat was so denominated because it bore the image of a duke, whose coins were officially known as ducati, or “coins of the duchy”; and as not only the legend cuin, cuno, etc., appears upon early coinage, but also an image of an angel which we have endeavoured to show was regarded as the Cun or Queen, it seems likely that the word coin (Gaelic cuinn) is as old as the Cuin legend, and may have had no immediate relation either with cunneus or cone. Nevertheless, the Queen of Heaven was occasionally depicted on coins in the form of a cone, as on the token here illustrated: on the coins of Cyprus Venus was represented under the symbolism of a cone-shaped stone.[414] The ancient minters not only customarily portrayed the features of their pherepolis or Fairy of the City, but they occasionally rendered her identity fool-proof by inscribing her name at full length as in the Arethusa coin here illustrated: some of our seventh-century money bears the legend Lux—an allusion to the Light of the World; in the East coins were practically religious manifestos and bore inscriptions such as God is one; God is the Eternal; There is no God but God Alone; May the Most High Perpetuate His Kingdom; and among the coins of Byzantium is an impression of the Virgin bearing the legend O Lady do thou keep in safety.[415]

The early coinage of Genoa represented a gate or janua; the Roman coin of Janus was known as the As, an implication that Janus, the first and most venerable of the Roman pantheon, was radically genus or King As: in the same way it is customary among us to speak colloquially of “George,” or more ceremoniously of “King George,” and in all probability the full and formal title of the Roman As was the Janus. On these coins there figured the prow or forefront of a ship, and the same prow will be noticed on the tokens of Britannia (ante, p. 120). It is remarkable that even 500 years after the coins of Janus had been out of circulation the youth of Rome used to toss money to the exclamation “Heads or Ships”—a very early instance of the pari mutuel!

In connection with archaic coins it is curious that one cannot get away from John or Ion. The first people to strike coins are believed to have been either the Ionians or the Lydians, both of whom inhabited the locality of ancient Troy:[416] as early as the middle of the seventh century B.C., the Ægean island of Ægina, then a great centre of commerce, minted money, but the annalists of China go far further in their claim that as far back as 1091 B.C., a coinage was instituted by Cheng, the second King of Chou.[417] The generic term token is radically Ken, shekel is seemingly allied to Sheik, the Moorish or Berberian for a chief, and with daric, the Persian coin, one may connote not only Touriack but ultimately Troy or Droia. Our guinea was so named after gold from Guinea; Guinea presumably was under Touriack or Berber influences, and we shall consider in a subsequent chapter Ogane, a mighty potentate of northern Africa whose toe, like that of Janus, the visitor most reverently kissed.

Figs. 240 and 241.—Archaic Carvings.

Figs. 242 and 243.—Archaic Carvings.

The Hackney of our early coinage thus not only appears pre-eminently upon it, but the very terms coin, token, chink, and jingle,[418] are permeated with the same root, i.e., Ecna, Ægina, or Jeanne.

That the worship of the Hackney stretches backward into the remotest depths of antiquity is implied by the carvings of prehistoric horse-heads found notably in the trous or cave shelters of Derbyshire and Dordogne. The discoveries at Torquay in Kent’s Cavern, in Kent’s Copse, (or Kent’s Hole as it is named in ancient maps), included bone, or horn pins, awls, barbed harpoons, and a neatly formed needle precisely similar to analogous objects found in the rock shelters of Dordogne.[419] Many representations of horses and horse-heads have been found among the coloured inscriptions at Font de Gaune—the Fount of Gaune, and likewise at Combarelles: the Combar is here seemingly King Bar, and Bruniquel, another famous site of horse remains, is in all probability connected with the broncho. Perigord, the site of ancient Petrocorii, is radically peri, and Petrocorii, the Father or Rock Heart, may be connoted with Iuchar, the brother of Bryan and the father of Ecna, or philosophy.

In England horse-teeth in association with a flint celt have been found at Wiggonholt in Sussex: the term holt is applied in Cornwall to Pictish souterrains, and it is probable that Wiggonholt was once a holt or hole of eu Igon: Ægeon was an alternative title of Briareus of the Hundred Hands, and as already shown Briareus was localised by Greek writers upon a British islet (ante, p. 82).

The white horse constituted the arms of Brunswick or Burn’s Wick; horses were carved upon the ancient font at Burnsall in Yorkshire, and that the broncho was esteemed in Britain by the flint knappers is implied by the etching of a horse’s head found upon a polished horse rib in a cave at Cresswell Crags in Derbyshire. Ceres or Demeter was represented as a mare, cres is the root of cresco—I grow, and among the white horses carved upon the chalk downs of England, one at Bratton was marked by an exaggerated “crescentic tail”. Bratton, or Bra-ton? Hill, whereon this curious brute was carved, may be connoted with Bradon, and Bratton may also be compared with prad, a word which in horsey circles means a horse, whence prad cove, a dealer in horses: with the white horse at Bratton may be connoted the horse carved upon the downs at Preston near Weymouth. For a mass of miscellaneous and interesting horse-lore the curious reader may refer to Mr. Walter Johnson’s Byways in British Archæology: the opinion of this painstaking and reliable writer is that the famed white horse of Bratton, like its fellow at Uffington, although usually believed to commemorate victories over the Danes are more probably to be referred to the Late Bronze, or Early Iron Age.

It has already been noted that artificially white horses were inscribed at times on Scotch hills, but these earth-monuments are unrecorded either in Ireland or on the Continent. On the higher part of Dartmoor there is a bare patch on the granite plateau in form resembling a horse, but whether the clearing is artificial is uncertain: the probabilities are, however, in favour of design for the site is known as White Horse Hill.[420]

The White Horse of Berkshire—the shire of the horse, Al Borak, or the brok?—is situated at Uffington, a name which the authorities decode into town or village of Uffa: I do not think this imaginary “Uffa” was primarily a Saxon settler, and it is more probable that Uffa was hipha, the Tyrian title of the Great Mother whose name also meant mare, whence the Hellenic hippa. The authorities would like to read Avebury, a form of Abury or Avereberie, as burg of Aeffa, but near Avebury there is a white horse cut upon the slope of a down, and the adjacent place-name Uffcot suggests that here also was an hipha-cot, or cromlech. The ride of Lady Godiva nude upon a white horse was, as we shall see later, probably the survival of an ancient festival representative of Good Hipha, the St. Ive, or St. Eve, who figures here and there in Britain, otherwise Eve, the Mother of All Living.

There used to be traces at Stonehenge of a currus or horse-course, and all the evidence is strongly in favour of the supposition that the horse has been with us in these islands for an exceedingly long time.

When defending their shores against the Roman invaders the British cavalry drove their horses into the sea attacking their enemies while in the water, and one of the facts most impressive to Cæsar was the skill with which our ancestors handled their steeds. Speaking of the British charioteers he says: “First they advance through all parts of their Army, and throw their javelins, and having wound themselves in among the troops of horse, they alight and fight on foot; the charioteers retiring a little with their chariots, but posting themselves in such a manner, that if they see their masters pressed, they may be able to bring them off; by this means the Britons have the agility of horse, and the firmness of foot, and by daily exercise have attained to such skill and management, that in a declivity they can govern the horses, though at full speed, check and turn them short about, run forward upon the pole, stand firm upon the yoke, and then withdraw themselves nimbly into their chariots.”[421]

According to Mr. and Mrs. Hawes, two-wheeled chariots are delineated on Gnossian seals, among which is found a four-wheeled chariot having the front wheels armed with spikes:[422] the Britons are traditionally supposed to have attached scythes to their wheels, and Homer’s description of a chariot fight might well have expressed the sensations of the British Jehu:—

his flying steeds

His chariot bore, o’er bodies of the slain

And broken bucklers trampling; all beneath

Was splash’d with blood the axle, and the rails

Around the car, as from the horses’ feet

And from the felloes of the wheels were thrown

The bloody gouts; and onward still he pressed,

Panting for added triumphs; deeply dyed

With gore and carnage his unconquer’d hands.[423]

Fig. 244.—From A Guide to the Antiquities of Bronze Age (B.M.).

Biga, the Greek for chariot, is seemingly buggy, the name of a vehicle which was once very fashionable with us: the term, now practically extinct in this country, is still used largely in America, whither like much other supposedly American slang, it was no doubt carried by the pilgrim fathers.[424] To account satisfactorily for buggy one must assume that the earliest bigas were used ceremoniously in sacred festivals to Big Eye or the Sun: that this was a prevalent custom is proved by the Scandinavian model representing the Solar Chariot here illustrated. Among the cave-offerings of Crete the model biga was very frequent, and no doubt it had some such mental connection with the constellation King Charles’s Wain, as still exists in Breton folklore. In what was known as King’s barrow in Yorkshire, the skeleton of an old man was uncovered accompanied by chariot wheels, the skeletons of two small horses, and the skulls of two pigs: similar sepulchres have been found in great number in the Cambrai–Peronne–Bray district of France. Not only do we here find the term Santerre applied to an extensive plain, but the exquisite bronze plaques, discs, and flagons recovered from the tombs “appear to be of Greek workmanship”. In the words of Dr. Pycraft (written in August, 1918): “The Marne is rich in such relics—though, happily, they need no little skill in finding, for they date back to prehistoric times ranging from the days of the Stone Age to the dawn of history. The retreat of this foul-minded brood [the German Army] towards the Vesle will probably mean the doom of the celebrated Menhirs, or standing stones, of the Marne Valley. These date back to about 6000 B.C., and are remarkable for the fact that they bear curiously sculptured designs, of which the most striking is a conventionalised representation of the human face.[425] This, and the general character of the ornamentation, bears a close likeness to that found on early objects from Hissarlik and the Greek islands.... These megalithic monuments mark the appearance in Europe of a new race, bringing with them new customs—and, what is still more important, the use of metal.”[426]

Among the finds at Troy, Schliemann recovered some curious two-holed whorls or wheels, in the eyes of which are representations of a horse: he also discovered certain small carved horse-heads.[427] That the horse was of good omen among the Trojans is implied by the description of the building of Æneas’s new colony, for of this new-born tre we read—

A grove stood in the city, rich in shade,

Where storm-tost Tyrians, past the perilous brine,

Dug from the ground by royal Juno’s aid

A war-steed’s head, to far-off days a sign

That wealth and prowess should adorn the line.[428]

Such was the auspiciousness of this find that the Trojans forthwith erected an altar to Juno, i.e., Cuno?

At the home of the Mother Goddess in Gnossus there has been discovered a seal impression which is described as a noble horse of enormous size being transported on a one-masted boat driven by Minoan oarsmen, seated beneath an awning:[429] it has been assumed by one authority after another that this seal-stone represented and commemorated the introduction into Crete of the thorough-bred horse, but more probably it was the same sacred horse as is traditionally associated with the fall of Troy. There is some reason to think that this supposedly fabulous episode may have had some historic basis: historians are aware that the Druids were accustomed to make vast wicker frames, sometimes in the form of a bull, and according to Roman writers these huge constructions filled either with criminals or with sacrificial victims were then burnt. Two enormous white horses constructed from wood and paper formed part of a recent procession in connection with the obsequies of the late Emperor of Korea, and it is quite possible that the wily Greeks strategically constructed a colossal horse by means of which they introduced a picked team of heroes in the Trojan sanctuary. According to Virgil—

Broken by war, long baffled by the force

Of fate, as fortune and their hopes decline,

The Danaan leaders build a monstrous horse,

Huge as a hill, by Pallas’ craft divine,

And cleft fir-timbers in the ribs entwine.

They feign it vowed for their return, so goes

The tale, and deep within the sides of pine

And caverns of the womb by stealth enclose

Armed men, a chosen band, drawn as the lots dispose.[430]

That this elaborate form of the wicker-cage was introduced into Troy upon some religious pretext would appear almost certain from the inquiry of the aged Priam—

but mark, and tell me now,

What means this monster, for what use designed?

Some warlike engine? or religious vow?

Who planned the steed, and why? Come, quick, the truth avow.[431]

The Trojans were guileless enough to “through the gates the monstrous horse convey,” and even to lodge it in the citadel fatuously ignoring the recommendation of Capys

... to tumble in the rolling tide,

The doubtful gift, for treachery designed,

Or burn with fire, or pierce the hollow side.

Unless there had been some highly superstitious feeling attaching to the votive horse, one cannot conceive why the sound advice of Capys was not immediately put into practice.

Although both Greeks and Trojans were accomplished charioteers, riding on horseback was, we are told, so rare and curious an exhibition in ancient Greece that only one single reference is found in the poems of Homer. According to Gladstone, equestrian exercise was “the half-foreign accomplishment of the Kentauroi,” who were fabulously half-man and half-horse: similarly, in most ancient Ireland there are no riders on horseback, and the warriors fight invariably from chariots.[432] On the other hand, in Etruria there are found representations of what might be a modern race meeting, and the effect of these pictures upon the early investigators of Etrurian tombs seems to have been most surprising. In the words of Mrs. Hamilton Gray: “The famous races of Britain seemed there to find their type. The racers, the race-stand, the riders with their various colours, the judges, the spectators, and the prizes were all before us. We were unbelieving like most of our countrymen.... Our understandings and imaginations were alike perplexed.”[433]

The verb to canter is supposed to be derived from the pace at which pilgrims proceeded to Canterbury. But pilgrims either footed it or else ambled leisurely along on their palfreys, and the connection between canter and Cantuar is seemingly much deeper than supposed. At Kintyre in Scotland the patron saint is St. Cheiran, who may be connoted with Chiron, the wise and good Kentaur chief; and this connection of Chiron-Kentaur, Cheiran-Kintyre is the more curious, inasmuch as both an Irish MS. and Ptolemy refer independently by different terms to the Mull of Kintyre, as “the height of the horse”.[434]

Fig. 245.—From The Heroes (Kingsley, C.).Fig. 245.—From The Heroes (Kingsley, C.).

The illustration herewith is an early Victorian conception of Chiron, the wise and kindly Kentaur King, and Cantorix, an inscription found on the spectral steeds of Fig. 146, might seemingly without outrage be interpreted as Canto rex, or Song King: in Welsh canto, a song or chant, was gan, and the title tataguen meant “the father of the muse”;[435] according to mythology the walls of Troy were built by Oceanus to the music of Apollo’s lyre.

It would appear probable that Kent, the county of Invicta, the White Horse, was pre-eminently a horse-breeding county, as it remains to this day: part of Cantuarburig is known as Hackington, and in view of the Iceni hackney-coins there is little doubt that horse-breeding was extensively practised wherever the equine Eceni, Cantii, and Cenomagni were established. It is noteworthy that the Icknield Way was known alternatively as Hackington Way, Hackney Way, Acknil Way, and Hikenilde Street.[436]

It is a curious fact that practically the first scratchings of a horse represent the animal as bridled, whence the authorities assume that horses were kept semi-domesticated in a compound for purposes of food: immense collections of horse bones have been discovered, whence it seems probable that horses were either sacrificed in hecatombs or were eaten in large quantities; but the Tartars kept horses mainly for the mare’s milk.

Pliny mentions a horse-eating tribe, in Northern Spain, entitled the Concanni, with which Iberians may be connoted the Congangi of Cumberland, whose headquarters were supposedly Kendal: the western point of Carnarvonshire is named by Ptolemy Gangani, and the same geographer mentions another Gangani in the West of Hibernia. The Hibernian Ganganoi, situated in the neighbourhood of the Shannon, worshipped a Sengann whose name is supposed to mean Old Gann: we have illustrated the earthwork wheel cross of Shanid (ante p. 55), and have suggested the equation of Sen Gann with Sinjohn. In all probability the fairy known in Ireland as Gancanagh, who appears in lonesome valleys and makes love to milkmaids, is a survival of the Gangani’s All Father. The name Konken occurs among the kingly chronology of Archaic Britain; the most ancient inscribed stone in Wales is a sepulchral stone of a certain Cingen: the Saxon name Cunegonde is translated as having meant royal lady.

The French cancan, an exuberant dance which is associated with Paris, the city of the Parisii, may be a survival from the times of the Celtiberian Concanni: Paris was the Adonis of the Hellenes, or Children of Hellas, and it is not unlikely that the lament helas! or alas! was the cry wailed by the women on the annual waning of the Solar Power. At Helstone in Cornwall—supposed to be named from hellas, a marsh—there is still danced an annual Furry dance of which the feature is a long linked chain similar to that of the French farandole: if faran, like fern, be the plural of far, it follows that the furry and the farandole were alike festivals of the Great Fire, Phare, Fairy, Phairy, or Peri; the Parisii who settled in the Bridlington district are by some scholars assigned to Friesland.

Persia, the home of the peris, is still known locally as Farsistan, whence the name Farsees or Parsees is now used to mean fire worshippers: the Indian Parsees seem chiefly to be settled in the district of India, which originally formed part of the ancient Indian Konkan kingdom, and the probabilities are that the Konkani of the East, like the Cancanii of the West, were worshippers of the Khan Khan, or King of Kings.

In the most ancient literature of India entire hymns are addressed to the Solar Horse, and the estimation in which the White Horse was held in Persia may be judged from the annual salutation ceremony thus described by Williamson in The Great Law: “The procession to salute the God formed long before the rising of the sun. The High Priest was followed by a long train of Magi, in spotless white robes chanting hymns and carrying the sacred fire on silver censers. Then came 365 youths in scarlet, to represent the days of the year, and the colour of fire. These were followed by the chariot of the sun, empty, decorated with garlands, and drawn by superb white horses, harnessed with pure gold. Then came a white horse of magnificent size, his forehead blazing with gems, in honour of Mithras. Close behind him rode the king, in a chariot of ivory inlaid with gold, followed by his royal kindred, in embroidered garments and a long train of nobles, riding on camels richly caparisoned. This gorgeous retinue, facing the East, slowly ascended Mount Orontes. Arrived at the summit, the high priest assumed his tiara, wreathed with myrtle, and hailed the first rays of the rising sun with incense and with prayer. The other Magi gradually joined him in singing hymns to Ormuzd, the source of all blessings, by whom the radiant Mithra had been sent to gladden the earth, and preserve the principle of life. Finally, they all joined in the one universal chorus of praise, while king, princes, and nobles prostrated themselves before the orb of day.”

There is every likelihood that this festival was celebrated on a humbler scale at many a British “Hallicondane,” and as the glory of the horse or courser is its speed—“swift is the sun in its course”—we may also be sure that no pains were spared to secure a worthy representative of the Supreme Ecna, Ekeni, or Hackney.

In Egypt the whole land was ransacked in order to discover the precise and particular Bull, which by its special markings was qualified to play Apis, and when this precious beast was found there were national rejoicings. Reasoning by analogy it is probable that not only did each British horse-centre have its local races, but that there was in addition what might be called a Grand National either at Stonehenge or at one or another of the tribal centres. In such case the winners would become the sacred steeds, which, as we know, were maintained by the Druids in the sanctuaries, and from whose neighing or knowing auguries were drawn. Such was the value placed in Persia upon the augury of a horse’s neigh, that on one memorable occasion the rights of two claimants to the throne were decided by the fact that the horse of the favoured one neighed first.[437]

It is probable that the primitive horse-races of the Britons were elemental Joy-days, Hey-days, and Holy-days, similar to the time-honoured Scouring and Cleansing of the White Horse of Berkshire or Barrukshire. On the occasion of this festival in 1780, The Reading Mercury informed its readers that: “Besides the customary diversions of horse-racing, foot-races, etc., many uncommon rural diversions and feats of activity were exhibited to a greater number of spectators than ever assembled on any former occasion. Upwards of 30,000 persons were present, and amongst them most of the nobility and gentry of this and the neighbouring counties, and the whole was concluded without any material accident.”

Fig. 246. From The Scouring of the White Horse (Hughes, T.).

Below the head of the White Horse, which at festival time was thoroughly scoured and restored to its pristine whiteness, is a huge scoop in the downs forming a natural amphitheatre, and at the base of this so-called “manger” are the clear traces of artificial banks or tiers. In 1825 the games were held at Seven Barrows, distant two miles in a south-easterly direction from the White Horse itself. These Seven Barrows are imagined to be the burial places of seven chieftains slain at the battle of Ashdown, and adjacent mounds supposedly contain the corpses of the rank and file. But the starting-post of Lewes race-course, which is also two miles in extent, is shown in the Ordnance map as being likewise situated at a group of seven tumuli, and as the winning-post at Lewes is at the base of Offham Hill the fact of starting at Seven Barrows, racing for two miles, and finishing respectively at Offham and Uffington is too conspicuous to be coincidence. Referring to the Stonehenge track Stukeley writes: “This course which is two miles long,” and he adds casually, “there is an obscure barrow or two round which they returned”.

At Uffington are the remains of a cromlech known as Wayland’s Smithy, Wayland, here as elsewhere, being an invisible, benevolent fairy blacksmith[438]: on Offham Hill, Lewes, stands an inn entitled the “Blacksmith’s Arms,” and below it Wallands Park.

The sub-district of Lewes, where the De Vere family seem to have been very prominent, contains the parishes of St. John, Southover, and Berwick: opposite the Castle Hill is Brack Mount, also a district called The Brooks; running past All Saints Church is Brooman’s Lane, and the “rape” of Lewes contains the hundreds of Barcomb and Preston. The principal church in Lewes is that of St. Michael, which is known curiously as St. Michaels in Foro, and it stands, in all probability like the Brutus Stone, in Fore Street, Totnes, in what was the centre or forum of the original settlement.

The name Lewes is thought to be lowes, which means barrows or toothills, and this derivation is no doubt correct, for within the precincts of Lewes Castle, which dominates the town, are still standing two artificial mounds nearly 800 feet apart from centre to centre.

These two barrows, known locally as the Twin Mounds of Lewes, may be connoted with the duas tumbas or two tumps, elsewhere associated with St. Michael: at their base lies Lansdowne Place, and at another Elan’s Town, or Wick, i.e., Alnwick on the river Aln or Alone, near Berwick, we find a remarkable custom closely associated with so-called Twinlaw or Tounlow cairns. This festival is thus described by Hope: “On St. Mark’s Day the houses of the new freemen are distinguished by a holly-tree planted before each door, as the signal for their friends to assemble and make merry with them. About eight o’clock the candidates for the franchise, being mounted on horseback and armed with swords, assemble in the market-place, where they are joined by the chamberlain and bailiff of the Duke of Northumberland, attended by two men armed with halberds. The young freemen arranged in order, with music playing before them and accompanied by a numerous cavalcade, march to the west-end of the town, where they deliver their swords. They then proceed under the guidance of the moorgrieves through a part of their extensive domain, till they reach the ceremonial well. The sons of the oldest freemen have the honour of taking the first leap. On the signal being given they pass through the bog, each being allowed to use the method and pace which to him shall seem best, some running, some going slow, and some attempting to jump over suspected places, but all in their turns tumbling and wallowing like porpoises at sea, to the great amusement of the populace, who usually assemble in vast numbers. After this aquatic excursion, they remount their horses and proceed to perambulate the remainder of their large common, of which they are to become free by their achievement. In passing the open part of the common the young freemen are obliged to alight at intervals, and place a stone on a cairn as a mark of their boundary, till they come near a high hill called the Twinlaw or Tounlaw Cairns, when they set off at full speed, and contest the honour of arriving first on the hill, where the names of the freemen of Alnwick are called over. When arrived about two miles from the town they generally arrange themselves in order, and, to prove their equestrian abilities, set off with great speed and spirit over bogs, ditches, rocks, and rugged declivities till they arrive at Rottenrow Tower on the confines of the town, the foremost claiming the honour of what is termed ‘winning the boundaries,’ and of being entitled to the temporary triumphs of the day.”[439]

The occurrence of this horsey festival on St. Mark’s Day may be connoted with the fact that in Welsh and Cornish march, in Gaelic marc, meant horse: obviously marc is allied to the modern mare.

There is a Rottenrow at Lewes, and Rottenrow Tower on the confines of Alnwick is suggestive of the more famous Rotten Row in London. It would seem that this site was also the bourne or goal of steeplechases similar to those at Alnwick, for upwards of a mile westward there was once a street called Michael’s Grove, of which the site is now occupied by Ovington Square. This “Ovington” may be connoted not only with Offham Hill and Uffington of the White Horse, but also with Oving in Bucks, where is an earthwork also a spring known as “the Horse Spring,” traditionally associated with Horsa.[440]

Ovington Square at Kensington seems also to have been designated Brompton Grove, and as Brondesbury, a few miles northward, was known alternatively as Bromesbury, and Bromfield, in Shropshire, as Brunefield, we may safely regard the Brom which appears here, and in numerous Bromptons, Bromsgroves, Bromsberrows, Bromleas, also Brimham Rocks, as being the same word as Bron. The Latin name for broom—planta genista—apart from other evidence in my notebooks is an implication that the golden broom was deemed a symbol of Genista, the Good Genus or Janus: and as Janus of January, and planta genista, was the first, the word prime may be connoted with broom. On 1st January, i.e., the first day of the first month, it was customary in England to make a globe of blackthorn, a plant which is the first to come into flower: we have already connoted the thorn or spica with the Prime Cause, and with the prime letter of the alphabet A, or Aleph, whence in all probability bramble may be equated also with broom and prime.

Mitton, in Kensington, observes that before being Brompton Grove this part of the district had been known as Flounders Field,[441] but why tradition does not say. Flounders Field is on the verge of, if not within, the district known as Kensington Gore, and those topographers who have assigned gore to the old English term meaning mud are probably correct. From Kensington Gore, or Flounders Field, we may assume that the freemen of Kensington once wallowed their way as at Alnwick to Rottenrow, and the plight of these sportsmen must have been the more pitiable inasmuch as, at any rate at Alnwick, the freemen were by custom compelled to wear white robes. In this connection it may be noted that at the triennial road-surveying ceremony known in Guernsey as the Chevauchee or Cavalcade of St. Michael (last held in 1837), a white wand was carried and the regimental band of the local militia was robed in long white smocks. “This very unmilitary costume,” says a writer in Folklore, “must, I think, have been traditionally associated with the Chevauchee as it is quite unlike all the uniforms of that date worn by our local militia; it may have been a survival of some ancient, perhaps rustic, possibly priestly band of minstrels and musicians.”[442]

Whether our Whit or White Monday parade of carthorses has any claim to antiquity I am unaware, but it is noteworthy that the Scouring of the Uffington White Horse was celebrated on Whit Monday with great joyous festivity. The Cavalcade of St. Michael, in which all the nobility and gentry took part, was ordained to be held on the Monday of Mid May and was evidently a most imposing ritual. It seems to have culminated at the Perron du Roy (illustrated on p. 315), which was once the boundary stone of the Royal Fief: at this spot stood once an upright stone known as La Rogue des Fees, and a repast to the revellers was here served in a circular grass hollow where according to tradition the fays used to dance. During the procession the lance-bearer carried a wand eleven and a quarter feet long, the number of Vavasseurs was eleven, and it is possible that the eleven pools in Kensington, which were subsequently merged into the present Serpentine,[443] were originally constructed or adapted to this Elphin number in order to make a ceremonial course for the freemen floundering from Flounders Field to Rottenrow.

Kensington in days gone by was pre-eminently a district of springs and wells; the whole of south-west London was more or less a swamp or “holland,” and the early Briton, whose prehistoric canoe was found some years ago at Kew, might if he had wished have wallowed the whole way from Turnham Green, via Brook Green, Parson’s Green, Baron’s Court, Walham and Fulham to Tyburn.

If it be true that Boudicca were able to put 4000 war chariots into the field there must at that time have been numerous stud farms, and the low-lying pastures of the larger Kent, which once contained London, were ideal for the purpose. The Haymarket is said to have derived its name from the huge amount of hay required by the mews of Charing Cross; a mile or so westward is Hay Hill; old maps indicate enormous mews in the Haymarket district, and there are indications that some of the present great mews and stables of south-western London are the relics of ancient parks or compounds. According to Homer—

By Dardanus, of cloud-compelling Jove

Begotten, was Dardania peopled first,

Ere sacred Ilium, populous city of men,

Was founded on the plain; as yet they dwelt

On spring-abounding Ida’s lowest spurs.

To Dardanus was Erichthonius born,

Great King, the wealthiest of the sons of men;

For him were pastur’d in the marshy mead,

Rejoicing with their foals, three thousand mares;

Them Boreas, in the pasture where they fed,

Beheld, enamour’d; and amid the herd

In likeness of a coal-black steed appear’d;

Twelve foals, by him conceiving, they produc’d.

These, o’er the teeming corn-fields as they flew,

Skimm’d o’er the standing ears, nor broke the haulm;

And o’er wide Ocean’s bosom as they flew,

Skimm’d o’er the topmost spray of th’ hoary sea.[444]

Boreas, whom we may connote with Bress, the Consort of Brigit, or Bride, is here represented as wallowing, a term which Skeat derives from the Anglo-Saxon wealwian, to roll round: he adds, “see voluble,” but in view of the world-wide rites of immersion or baptism it is more seemly to connect wallow with hallow. Mr. Weller, Senr., preferred to spell his name with a “V”: there is no doubt that Weller and Veller were synonymous terms, and therefore that Fulham, in which is now Walham Green, was originally a home of Wal or Ful, perhaps the same as Wayland or Voland, the Blacksmith of Wayland’s Smithy and of Walland Park.[445] It is supposed that Fulham was the swampy home of fowlen, or water fowls, but it is an equally reasonable conjecture that it was likewise a tract of marshy meads whereon the foalen or foals were pastured. As already noted the Tartar version of the Pied Piper represents the Chanteur or Kentaur as a foal, coursing perpetually round the world. The coins of the Gaulish Volcae exhibit a wheel or veel with the inscription Vol, others in conjunction with a coursing horse are inscribed Vool, and we find the head of a remarkable maned horse on the coins of the Gaulish Felikovesi. As felix means happy, one may connote the hobby horse with happiness, or one’s hobby, and it is not improbable that both Felixstowe and Folkestone were settlements of the adjacent Felikovesi, whose coins portray the Hobby’s head or Foal.

Figs. 247 to 253.—Gaulish. From Akerman.

Figs. 254 and 255.—Gaulish. From Barthelemy.

At Land’s End, opposite the titanic headland known as Pardenick, or Pradenic, is Cairn Voel which is also known locally as “The Diamond Horse”:[446] there is likewise a headland called The Horse, near Kynance Cove, and a stupendous cliff-saddle at Zennor,[447] named the Horse’s Back. It would thus seem that the mythology of the Voel extended to the far West, and it is not improbable that Tegid Voel, the Consort of Keridwen the Mare, alias Cendwen, meant inter alia the Good Foal.

Prof. Macalister has recently hooked up from the deep waters of Irish mythology a deity whose name Fal he connotes with a Teutonic Phol. This Fal, a supposedly non-Aryan, neolithic (?) “pastoral horse-divinity,” belonging to an older stratum of belief than the divine beings among the Tuatha De Danann, Prof. Macalister associates with the famous stone of Fal at Tara, and he remarks: “He looks like a Centaur, but is in parentage and disposition totally different from the orthodox Centaurs. He is, in fact, just the sort of being that would develop out of an ancient hippanthropic deity who had originally no connection with Centaurs, but who found himself among a people that had evolved the conception of the normal type of those disagreeable creatures.”[448]

In Cornwall is a river Fal; a well is a spring, the whale or elephant of the sea was venerated because like the elephant it gushed out a fountain of water from its head. The Wilton crescent, opposite one of the ancient conduits by Rotten Row, Kensington, may well have meant Well town, for the whole of this district was notoriously a place of wells: not only do we find Wilton Crescent, but in the immediate neighbourhood of Ovington Square and Flounders Field is Walton Street and Hooper’s Court. Sennen Cove at Land’s End was associated with a mysterious sea-spirit known as the Hooper, and we shall meet again with Hooper, or Jupiter, the Hidden one in “Hooper’s Hide,” an alternative title for the game of Blind Man’s Buff.

The authorities derive avon, or aune, the Celtic for a gently flowing river, from ap, the Sanscrit for water, but it is more likely that there is a closer connection with Eve, or Eva—Welsh Efa—whose name is the Hebrew for life or enlivening, whence Avon would resolve most aptly into the enlivening one. Not only are rivers actually the enlivening ones, but the ancients philosophically assigned the origin of all life to water or ooze. According to Persian, or Parthian philosophy—and Parthia may be connoted in passing with Porthia, an old name for the Cornish St. Ives, for St. Ive was said to be a Persian bishop—the Prime appointed six pure and beneficent Archangels to supervise respectively Fire, Metals, Agriculture, Verdure, the Brutes, and Water. With respect to the last the injunction given was: “I confide to thee, O Zoroaster! the water that flows; that which is stagnant; the water of rivers; that which comes from afar and from the mountains; the water from rain and from springs. Instruct men that it is water which gives strength to all living things. It makes all verdant. Let it not be polluted with anything dead or impure, that your victuals, boiled in pure water, may be healthy. Execute thus the words of God.”[449]

Etymology points to the probability that water in every form, even the stagnant fen—the same word as Aven, font, and fount—was once similarly sacred in Britain, whence it may follow that even although Fulham and Walham were foul, vile, evil, and filthy,[450] the root fal still meant originally the enlivening all.

The word pollute (to be connoted with pool, Phol, or Fal) is traced by Skeat to polluere, which means not necessarily foul, but merely to flow over. The willow tree (Welsh helygen), which grows essentially by the water-side, may be connoted with wallow.

Of Candian or Cretan god-names only two are tentatively known, to wit—Velchanos and Apheia: Apheia may be connoted with Hephaestus, the Greek title of Vulcan or Vulcanus, and the connection between Hephaestus and Velchanos is clearly indicated by the inscribed figure of Velchanos which appears upon the coins of the Candian town of Phaestus. That the falcon was an emblem of the Volcae is obvious from the bird on Fig. 248, and the older forms of the English place-name Folkestone, i.e., Folcanstan, Folcstane, Fulchestan supposed to mean “stone of a man Folca,” more probably imply a Folk Stone, or Falcon Stone, or Vulcan Stone. The Saxon gentleman named Folca is in all probability pure imagination.

The more British title of Wayland or Voland, the Vulcan or Blacksmith of Uffington, and doubtless also of the Blacksmith of Walland’s Park, Offham, is Govannon. One may trace Govan, the British Hammersmith, from St. Govans at Fairfield near Glasgow, or from St. Govan’s Head in South Wales, to St. Govan’s Well, opposite De Vere Gardens in Kensington. In Welsh govan was a generic term for smith; one of the triune aspects of St. Bride was that of a metal worker, and it is reasonable to equate the Lady Godiva of Coventry, with Coventina or Coven of the Tyne, whose images from Coventina’s Well in Northumberland are here reproduced. As will be seen she figures as Una or the One holding an olive branch, and as Three holding a phial or vial, a fire, and a what-not too obscure for specification. “The founding of the Temple of Coventina,” says Clayton, “must be ascribed to the Roman officers of the Batavian Cohort, who had left a country where the sun shines every day and where in pagan times springs and running waters were objects of adoration.”[451] But is there really no other possible alternative? Mr. Hope describes the goddess represented in Fig. 256 as floating on the leaf of a water-lily; the legend of the patron saint of St. Ives in Cornwall is to the effect that this maiden came floating over the waves upon a leaf, and it thus seems likely that Coventry, the home of Lady Godiva, derived its name from being the tre, tree, or trou of Coven, or St. Govan.

Fig. 256.—From The Legendary Lore of the Holy Wells of England (Hope, R. C.).

Fig. 257.—From The Legendary Lore of the Holy Wells of England (Hope, R. C.).

In his account of a great and triumphant jousting held in London on May Day, 1540, on which occasion all the horses were trapped in white velvet, Stow several times alludes to an Ivy Bridge by St. Martin’s in the Fields, and this Ivy Bridge must have been closely adjacent to what is now Coventry Street and Cranbrook Street. Crene is Greek for brook,[452] the Hippocrene or the horse brook was the fountain struck by the hoof of the divine Pegasus: Cranbrook Street is a continuation of Coventry Street, and I rather suspect that the neighbouring Covent Garden is not, as popularly supposed, a corruption of Convent Garden, but was from time immemorial a grove or garden of Good Coven. The Maiden Lane here situated probably derived its title from a sign or tablet of the Maiden similar to the Coventina pictures, and it is not improbable that Coven or Goodiva once reigned from Covent Garden via Coventry Street to St. Govan’s Well in Kensington. Near Ripon is an earthwork abri known seemingly as Givendale,[453] and on Hambleton Hill in this neighbourhood used to be a White Horse carved on the down side.[454] The primal Coventrys were not improbably a tribal oak or other sacred tree, such as the Braintree in Essex near Bradwell,[455] and the Picktree previously noted.

At Coveney, in Cambridgeshire—query, Coven ea or Coven’s island?—bronze bucklers have been found which in design “bear a close resemblance to the ribbon pattern seen on several Mycenæan works of art, and the inference is that even as far north as Britain, the Mycenæan civilisation found its way, the intermediaries being possibly Phœnician traders”.[456] But the Phœnicians having now been evicted from the court it is manifestly needful to find some other explanation.

Coveney is not many miles from St. Ives, Huntingdon, named supposedly after Ivo, a Persian bishop, who wandered through Europe in the seventh century. Possibly this same episcopal Persian founded Effingham near Bookham and Boxhill, for at the foot of the Buckland Hills is Givon’s Grove, once forming part of a Manor named Pachevesham. On the downs above is Epsom, which certainly for some centuries has been Ep’s home,[457] and the Pacheve of Pachevesham was possibly the same Big Hipha: there is second Evesham in the same neighbourhood. Speaking of the British inscription Eppilos, Sir John Rhys observes that it is very probably a derivation from epo, a horse; and of the town of Epeiacon, now Ebchester, the same authority states: “The name seems to signify a place for horses or cavalry”.[458] Near Pachevesham, below Epsom, is an old inn named “The Running Mare”.

Fig. 258.—British. From A New Description of England and Wales (Anon, 1724).

In connection with Givon, or Govan, or Coven, it is interesting to note that the word used by Tacitus to denote a British chariot is covinus. Local tradition claims that the scythes of Boudiccas coveni were made at Birmingham, and there may be truth in this for the bir of Birmingham is the radical of faber, feuber, or fire father, and likewise of Lefebre, the French equivalent of Smith. That Birmingham was an erstwhile home of the followers of the Fire Father, the Prime, or Forge of Life, is deducible not only from the popular “Brum” or “Brummagem,” but from the various forms recorded of the name.[459] The variant Brymecham may be modernised into Prime King; the neighbouring Bromsgrove is equivalent to Auberon’s Grove; Bromieham was no doubt a home of the Brownies, and the authorities are sufficiently right in deriving from this name “Home of the sons of Beorn”. Bragg is a common surname in Birmingham: Perkunas or Peroon, the Slav Pater or Jupiter, was always represented with a hammer. In Fig. 175 ante, p. 332, the British Fire Father, or Hammersmith, was labouring at what is assumed to be a helmet or a burnie, and Fig. 258 is evidently a variant of the same subject. In the Red Book of Hergest there occurs a line—“With Math the ancient, with Gofannon,” from which one might gather that Math and Gofannon were one. In any case the word smith is apparently se mith, se meath, or Se Math, and the Smeath’s Ridge at Avebury was probably named after the heavenly Smith or Gofan.

According to Rice Holmes the bronze image of a god with a hammer has been found in England, but where or when is not stated: it is, however, generally believed that this Celtic Hammer Smith was a representation of the Dis Pater,[460] to whom the Celts attributed their origin.

The London place-name Hammersmith appears in Domesday Book as Hermoderwode: in Old High German har or herr meant high, whence I suggest that Hermoderwode has not undergone any unaccountable phonetic change into Hammersmith, but was then surviving German for Her moder or High Mother Wood. From Broadway Hammersmith to Shepherd’s Bush runs “The Grove,” and that originally this grove had cells of the Selli in it is somewhat implied by the name Silgrave, still applied to a side-street leading into The Grove. “Brewster Gardens,” “Bradmore House,” “British Grove,” and Broadway all alike point similarly to Hammersmith being a pre-Saxon British settlement. Bradmore was the Manor house at Hammersmith, and the existence of lewes, leys, or barrows on this Brad moor is implied by the modern Leysfield Road. The lewes at Folkestone were in all probability situated on the commanding Leas, and as the local pronunciation of Lewis in the Hebrides is “the Lews” there likewise were probably two or more lowes or laws whence the laws were proclaimed and administered. Bradmore is suggestive of St. Bride, the heavenly Hammersmith who was popularly associated with a falcon, and the great Hammersmith or Vulcan may be connoted with the Golden Falcon, whose memory has seemingly been preserved in Hammersmith at Goldhawk Road.

When Giraldus Cambrensis visited the shrine of the glorious Brigit at Kildare he was told the tale of a marvellous lone hawk or falcon popularly known as “Brigit’s Bird”. This beauteous tame falcon is reported to have existed for many centuries, and customarily to have perched on the summit of the Round Tower of Kildare.[461] Doubtless this story was the parallel of a fairy-tale current at Pharsipee in Armenia. “There,” says Maundeville, “is found a sparrow-hawk upon a fair perch, and a fair lady of fairie, who keeps it; and whoever will watch that sparrow-hawk seven days and seven nights, and, as some men say, three days and three nights, without company and without sleep, that fair lady shall give him, when he hath done, the first wish that he will wish of earthly things; and that hath been proved oftentimes.”[462]

Goldhawk Road at Hammersmith is supposedly an ancient Roman Road, and in 1884 the remains of a causeway were uncovered. Both road and route are the same word as the British rhod, and Latin rota meaning a wheel, and it is likely that the term roadway meant primarily a route along which rotæ or wheels might travel: as rotten would be the ancient plural of rot, Rottenrow may thus simply have meant a roadway for wheeled traffic. According to Borlase the British fighting chariot was a rhod, the rout of this traffic presumably caused ruts upon the route, whence it is quite likely that Rotten Row was a rutty and foul thoroughfare. The ordinary supposition that this title is a corruption of route du roi may possibly have some justification, for immediately opposite is Kingston House, and at one time Rotten Row was known as the King’s Road: originally the world of fashion used to canter round a circular drive or ring of trees, some of which are still carefully preserved on the high ground near the present Tea House, and thus it might reasonably follow that Rotten Row was a corrupted form of rotunda row.

Opposite to Rotten Row are Rutland Gate and Rutland House, where lived the Dukes of Rutland, anciently written Roteland. Rutlandshire neighbours Leicester, a town known to the Romans under the name of Ratae; Leicestershire is watered by the river Welland, and in Stukeley’s time there existed in a meadow near Ratae “two great banks called Rawdikes, which speculators look on as unaccountable”.[463] That Leicester or Ratae paid very high reverence to the horse may be inferred from the fact that here the annual Riding of the George was one of the principal solemnities of the town, and one which the inhabitants were bound legally to attend. In addition to the Rottenrows at Kensington and Lewes there is a Rottenrow in Bucks, and a Rottenrow near Reading, all of which, together with Rottenrow Tower near Alnwick, must be considered in combination.

Redon figures as a kingly name among the British chronologies, and as horses are associated so intimately with the various Rotten Rows, the name Redon may be connoted with Ruadan, a Celtic “saint” who is said to have presented King Dermot with thirty sea-green horses which rose from the sea at his bidding. Sea horses are a conspicuous feature on the coins of the Redones who dwelt in Gaul and commanded the mouth of the Loire.[464] The horse was certainly at home at Canterbury where Rodau’s Town is in immediate proximity to what is now called Riding Gate.

There is a river Roden at Wroxeter, a river Roding in Essex; Yorkshire is divided into three divisions called Ridings, and in East Riding, in the churchyard of the village of Rudstone, there stands a celebrated monolith which is peculiar inasmuch as its depth underground was said to equal its height above.[465] There is another Rudstone near Reading Street, Kent, and the Givon’s Grove near Epsom is either in or immediately adjacent to a district known as Wrydelands. To ride was once presumably to play the rôle of the Kentaur Queen, whether equine as represented in the Coventry Festival or as riding in a triumphal biga, rhod, wain or wagon. That such riding was once a special privilege is obvious from the statement of Tacitus: “She claimed a right to be conveyed in her carriage to the Capitol; a right by ancient usage allowed only to the sacerdotal order, the vestal virgins, and the statues of the gods”.[466]

That the Lady of Coventry was the Coun or Queen is possibly implied by the Coundon within the borough of modern Coventry which also embraces a Foleshill,[467] and Radford.

The coins of the Gaulish Rotomagi, whose headquarters were the Rouen district, depict the horse not merely cantering but galloping apace, whence obviously the Rotomagi were an equine or Ecuina people. With their coins inscribed Ratumacos may be compared the coinage of the Batavian Magusæ which depicts “a sea horse to the right,” and is inscribed Magus.[468] Magus, as we have seen, was a title of the Wandering Geho, Jehu, or Jew, and he may here be connoted with the “Splendid Mane” which figures under the name Magu, particularly in Slav fairy-tale:—

Magu, Horse with Golden Mane,

I want your help yet once again,

Walk not the earth but fly through space

As lightnings flash and thunders roll,

Swift as the arrow from the bow

Come quick, yet so that none may know.[469]

Figs. 259 and 260.—Gaulish. From Akerman.

The French roue meaning a wheel, and rue, a roadway, are probably not decayed forms of the Latin rota but ruder, more rudimentary, and more radical: like the Candian Rhea, the Egyptian Ra or Re, and our ray, they are probably the Irish rhi, the Spanish rey, and the French roi.

There is a river Rea in Shropshire and a second river Rea upon which stands Birmingham: that this Rea was connected with the Candian Rhea is possible from the existence at Birmingham of a Canwell, or Canewell. Near Cambourne, or Cambre, is the rhe druth (Redruth) which the authorities decode into stream of the Druids. Running through the village of Berriew in Wales, is a rivulet named the Rhiw, and rising on Bardon Hill, Leicestershire, is “the bright and clear little river Sence”. As the word mens, or mind, is usually assigned to Minerva, Rhea was possibly the origin of reason, or St. Rhea, and to Rhi Vera may be assigned river and revere; a reverie is a brown study.

According to Persian philosophy the soul of man was fivefold in its essence, one-fifth being “the Roun, or Rouan, the principle of practical judgment, imagination, volition”:[470] another fifth, “the Okho or principle of conscience,” seemingly corresponds to what western philosophers termed the Ego or I myself.

In the neighbourhood of Brough in Westmorland is an ancient cross within an ancient camp, known as Rey Cross, and that Leicester or Ratae—which stands upon the antique Via Devana or Divine Way—was intimately related with the Holy Rood is obvious from the modern Red Cross Street and High Cross Street.

The ruddy Rood was no doubt radically the rolling four-spoked wheel, felloe, felly, periphery, or brim, and although perhaps Reading denoted as is officially supposed, “Town of the Children of Reada,” the name Read, Reid, Rea, Wray, Ray, etc., did not only mean ruddy or red-haired. I question whether Ripon really owes its title as supposed to ripa, the Latin for bank of a stream.

The town hall of Reading is situated at Valpy Street in Forbury Gardens on what is known as The Forbury, seemingly the Fire Barrow or prehistoric Forum, and doubtless a holy fire once burned ruddily at Rednal or Wredinhal near Bromsgrove. In Welsh rhedyn means fern, whence the authorities translate Reddanick in Cornwall into the ferny place: the connection, however, is probably as remote and imaginary as that between Redesdale and reeds.

The place-name Rothwell, anciently Rodewelle, is no doubt with reason assumed to be “well of the rood or cross”. Ruth means pity, and the ruddy cross of St. John, now (almost) universally sacrosanct to Pity, was, I think, probably the original Holy Rood. The knights of St. John possessed at Barrow in Leicester or Ratae a site now known as Rothley Temple, and as th, t, and d, are universally interchangeable it is likely that this Rothley was once Roth lea or Rood Lea. Similarly Redruth, in view of the neighbouring Carn Bre, was probably not “Stream of the Druids,” but an abri of the Red Rood. The sacred rod or pole known generally as the Maypole was almost invariably surmounted by one or more rotæ, or wheels, and the name “Radipole rood” at Fulham (nearly opposite Epple St.) renders it likely that the Maypole was once known alternatively as the Rood Pole. From the Maypoles flew frequently the ruddy cross of Christopher or George.

In British mythology there figures a goddess of great loveliness named Arianrod, which means in Welsh the “Silver Wheel”: the Persians held that their Jupiter was the whole circuit of heaven, and Arianrhod, or “Silver Wheel,” was undoubtedly the starry welkin, the Wheel Queen, or the Vulcan of Good Law. With Wayland Smith may be connoted the river Welland of Rutland and Rataeland.

Silver, a white metal,[471] was probably named after Sil Vera, the Princess of the Silvery Moon and Silvery Stars. Silver Street is a common name for old roads in the south of England:[472] Aubrey Walk in Kensington, is at the summit of a Silver Street, and the prime Aubrey de Vere of this neighbourhood was, I suspect, the same ghost as originally walked Auber’s Ridge in Picardy, and the famous French Chemin des Dames. France is the land of the Franks,[473] and near Frankton in Shropshire at Ellesmere, i.e., the Elle, Fairy, or Holy mere, are the remains of a so-called Ladies Walk. This extraordinary Chemin des Dames, the relic evidently of some old-time ceremony, is described as a paved causeway running far into the mere, with which more than forty years ago old swimmers were well acquainted. It could be traced by bathers until they got out of their depth. How much farther it might run they of course knew not. Its existence seems to have been almost forgotten until, in 1879, some divers searching for the body of a drowned man came upon it on the bottom of the mere, and this led to old inhabitants mentioning their knowledge of it.[474]

England abounds in Silverhills, Silverhowes, Silverleys, Silvertowns, Silverdales, and Perryvales. By Silverdale at Sydenham is Jews Walk, and on Branch Hill at Hampstead is a fine prospect known as Judges Walk: here is Holly Bush Hill and Holly Mound, and opposite is Mount Vernon, to be connoted with Durovernon, the ancient name of Canterbury or Rodau’s Town.

Jews Walk, and the Grove at Upper Sydenham, are adjacent to Peak Hill, which, in all probability, was once upon a time Puck’s Hill, and the wooded heights of Sydenham were in all likelihood a caer sidi, or seat of fairyland.

My chair is prepared in Caer Sidi

The disease of old age afflicts none who is there.

.    .    .    .     .     .     .     .

About its peaks are the streams of ocean

And above it is a fruitful fountain.

Sir John Morris-Jones points out that sidi is the Welsh equivalent of the Irish sid, “fairyland”[475] and he connects the word with seat. In view of this it is possible that St. Sidwell at Exeter was like the River Sid at Sidmouth, a caer sidi, or seat of the shee.

Sydenham, like the Phœnician Sidon, is probably connected with Poseidon, or Father Sidon, and Rhode the son of Poseidon may be connoted with Rhadamanthus, the supposed twin brother of Minos. Near Canterbury is Rhodesminnis, or Rhode Common,[476] and on this common Justice was doubtless once administered by the representatives of Rhadamanthus, who was praised by all men for his wisdom, piety, and equity. It is said that Rhode was driven to Crete by Minos, and was banished to an Asiatic island where he made his memory immortal by the wisdom of his laws: Rhode, whose name is rhoda, the rose or Eros, is further said to have instructed Hercules in virtue and wisdom, and according to Homer he dwells not in the underworld but in the Elysian Fields.

A. Postern Gate. | G. Site of Return Wall.
B. Decuman Gate. | H. Site of Tower.
C. Tower. | I. Surface of Subterranean Building.
D. Circular Tower. |
E. & F. Towers. |

Fig. 261.—From A Short Account of the Records of Richborough (W.D.).

A rose coin of Rhoda was reproduced ante, page 339; the rhoda or rose, like the rood, is a universal symbol of love, and with Rodau’s Town, Canterbury, or Durovernon, which is permeated with the rose of St. George, or Oros, i.e., rose, may be connoted the neighbouring Rutupiae, now Richborough. From the ground-plan of this impressive ruin it will be seen to be unlike anything else in Europe, inasmuch as it originally consisted of a quadrangle surrounding a massive rood or cross imposed upon a titanic foundation.[477]

With Rutupiae, of which the Rutu may be connoted with the rood within its precincts, Mr. Roach Smith, in his Antiquities of Richborough, connotes the Gaulish people known as the Ruteni. The same authority quotes Malebranche as writing “all that part of the coast which lies between Calais and Dunkirk our seamen now call Ruthen,” whence it is exceedingly likely that the Reading Street near Broadstairs, and the Rottingdean near Brighton were originally inhabited by children of Reada or Rota.

Apparently “Rotuna” was in some way identified in Italy with Britain, or natione Britto, for according to Thomas an inscription was discovered at Rome, near Santa Maria Rotuna, bearing in strange alphabetical characters Natione Britto, somewhat analogous at first sight to Hebrew, Greek, or Phœnician letters.[478]

From the plan it will be seen that the northern arm of the Rutupian rood points directly to the high road, and Rutupiæ itself constitutes the root or radical of the great main route leading directly through Rodau’s Town, and Rochester to London Stone. The arms of Rochester or Durobrivum—where, as will be remembered, is a Troy Town—are St. Andrew on his roue Or rota.

Fig. 262.—Arms of Rochester.

The name Durobrivæ was also applied by the Romans to the Icenian town of Caistor, where it is locally proverbial that,

Caister was a city when Norwich was none,

And Norwich was built of Caistor stone.

There is a second Caistor which the Romans termed Venta Icenorum: the neighbouring modern Ancaster, the Romans entitled Causeimei. It is always taken for granted that the numerous chesters, casters, cesters of this country are the survivors of some Roman castra or fort. Were this actually the case it is difficult to understand why the Romans called Chester Deva, Ancaster Causeimei, Caistor Durobrivæ, and Rochester Durobrivum: in any case the word castra has to be accounted for, and I think it will be found to be traceable to some prehistoric Judgment Tree, Cause Tree, Case Tree, or Juge Tree. No one knows exactly how “Zeus” was pronounced, but in any case it cannot have been rigid, and in all probability the vocalisation varied from juice to sus, and from juge to jack and cock.[479]

The rider of a race-horse is called a jockey, and the child in the nursery is taught to

Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross

To see a white lady ride on a white horse.

An English CAC horse is illustrated on page 453, and the White Lady of Banbury who careered to the music of her bells was very certainly the Fairy Queen whom Thomas the Rhymer describes as follows: “Her Steed was of the highest beauty and spirit, and at his mane hung thirty silver bells and nine, which made music to the wind as she paced along. Her saddle was of ivory, laid over with goldsmiths’ work: her stirrups, her dress, all corresponded with her extreme beauty and the magnificence of her array. The fair huntress had her bow in hand, and her arrows at her belt. She led three greyhounds in a leash, and three hounds of scent followed her closely.”

This description might have been written of Diana, in which connection it may be noted that at Doncaster (British Cair Daun), the hobby horse used to figure as “the Queen’s Pony”. Epona, the Celtic horse-goddess, may be equated with the Chanteur or Centaur illustrated on so many of our “degraded” British coins, and Banstead Downs, upon which Ep’s Home stands, may be associated with Epona, and with the shaggy little ponies[480] which ranged in Epping Forest. Banstead, by Epsom (in Domesday Benestede), is supposed to have meant “bean-place or store”: at Banwell in Somerset, supposed to have meant “pool of the bones,” there is an earthwork cross which seemingly associates this Banwell with Banbury Cross, and ultimately to the cross of Alban.

The bells on the fingers and bells on the White Lady’s toes may be connoted with the silver bell of the value of 3s. 4d., which in 1571 was the prize awarded at Chester—a town of the Cangians or Cangi—to the horse “which with speede of runninge then should run before all others”.[481]

Fig. 263.—Banwell Cross. From Earthwork of England (A. Hadrian Allcroft).

With this Chester Meeting may be noted Goodwood near Chichester. Chichester is in Sussex, and was anciently the seat of the Regni, a people whose name implies they were followers of re gni or Regina, but the authorities imagine that Chichester, the county town of Sussex, owes its name to a Saxon Cissa, who also bestowed his patronymic on Cissbury Ring, the famous oval entrenchment near Broadwater. At Cissbury Ring, the largest and finest on the South Downs, great numbers of Neolithic relics have been found, and the name may be connoted with Chisbury Camp near Avebury.

Near Stockport is Geecross, supposedly so named from “an ancient cross erected here by the Gee family”. Presumably that Geecross was the chi cross or the Greek chi: the British name for Chichester was Caer Kei,[482] which means the fortress of Kei, but at more modern Chichester the famous Market Cross was probably a jack, for the four main streets of Chichester still stand in the form of the jack or red rood. The curious surname Juxon is intimately connected with Chichester; there is an inscription at Goodwood relating to a British ruler named Cogidumnus[483]—apparently Cogi dominus or Cogi Lord—whence it seems probable that Chichester or Chichestra (1297) was as it is to-day an assize or juges tree, or even possibly a jockey’s tre.

The adjacent Goodwood being equivalent to Jude wood, it is worthy of notice that Prof. Weekley connotes the name Judson with Juxon. His words are: “The administration of justice occupied a horde of officials from the Justice down to the Catchpole.[484] The official title Judge is rarely found, and this surname is usually from the female name Judge, which like Jug was used for Judith and later for Jane.

“Janette, Judge, Jennie; a woman’s name (Cotgrave). The names Judson and Juxon sometimes belong to these.”[485]

The word Chester is probably the same as the neighbouring place-name Goostrey-cum-Barnshaw in Cheshire, and the Barn shaw or Barn hill here connected with Goostrey may be connoted with Loch Goosey near Barhill in Ayrshire.

Chi or Jou, who may be equated with the mysterious but important St. Chei of Cornwall, was probably also once seated at Chee Dale in Derbyshire, at Chew Magna, and Chewton, as well as at the already mentioned Jews Walk and Judges Walk near London.

In Devonshire is a river Shobrook which is authoritatively explained as Old English for “brook of Sceocca, i.e., the devil, Satan! cf. Shuckburgh”: on referring we find Shuckburgh meant—“Nook and castle of the Devil, i.e., Scucca, Satan, a Demon, Evil Spirit; cf. Shugborough”. I have not pursued any inquiries at Shugborough, but it is quite likely that the Saxons regarded the British Shug or Shuck with disfavour: there is little doubt he was closely related to “Old Shock,” the phantom-dog, and the equally unpopular “Jack up the Orchard”. In some parts of England Royal Oak Day is known as Shick Shack Day,[486] and in Surrey children play a game of giant’s stride, known as Merritot or Shuggy Shaw.[487]

Merrie Tot was probably once Merrie Tod or Tad, and Shuggy Shaw may reasonably be modernised as Shaggy Jew or Shaggy Joy. It will be remembered that the Wandering Jew, alias Elijah, wore a shag gown (ante, p. 148): this shagginess no doubt typified the radiating beams of the Sun-god, and it may be connoted with the shaggy raiment and long hair of John the Baptist. As shaggy Pan, “the President of the Mountains,” almost certainly gave his name to pen, meaning a hill, it may be surmised that shaw, meaning a wooded hill, is allied to Shuggy Shaw. The surname Bagshaw implies a place-name which originated from Bog or Bogie Shaw: but Bagshawes Cavern at Bradwell, near Buxton,[488] is suggestive of a cave or Canhole[489] attributed to Big Shaw, and the neighbouring Tideswell is agreeably reminiscent of Merrie Tot or Shuggy Shaw.

In connection with jeu, a game, may be connoted gewgaw, in Mediæval English giuegoue: the pronunciation of this word, according to Skeat, is uncertain, and the origin unknown; he adds, “one sense of gewgaw is a Jew’s Harp; cf. Burgundian gawe, a Jew’s Harp”.

Virgil, in his description of a Trojan jeu or show, observes—

This contest o’er, the good Æneas sought,

A grassy plain, with waving forests crowned

And sloping hills—fit theatre for sport,

Where in the middle of the vale was found

A circus. Hither comes he, ringed around

With thousands, here, amidst them, throned on high

In rustic state, he seats him on a mound,

And all who in the footrace list to vie,

With proffered gifts invites, and tempts their souls to try.[490]

It will be noted that the juge or showman seats himself amid shaws, upon a toothill or barrow, and doubtless just such eager crowds as collected round Æneas gathered in the ancient hippodrome which once occupied the surroundings of St. John’s Church by Aubrey Walk, Kensington. “St John’s Church,” says Mitton, “stands on a hill, once a grassy mound within the hippodrome enclosure, which is marked in a contemporary map ‘Hill for pedestrians,’ apparently a sort of natural grand-stand.”[491] A large tract of this district was formerly covered by a race-course known as the hippodrome. “It stretched,” continues Mitton, “northward in a great ellipse, and then trended north-west and ended up roughly where is now the Triangle at the west-end of St. Quintin Avenue. It was used for both flat-racing and steeplechasing, and the steeplechase course was more than 2 miles in length. The place was very popular being within easy reach of London, but the ground was never very good for the purpose as it was marshy.”[492]

That the grassy mound or natural grand-stand of St. John was once sacred to the divine Ecne, Chinea, or Hackney, and that this King John or King Han was symbolised by an Invictus or prancing courser is implied from the lines of a Bardic poet: “Lo, he is brought from the firm enclosure with his light-coloured bounding steeds—even the sovereign On, the ancient, the generous Feeder”.[493] We have seen that in Ireland Sengann meant Old Gann, and that “Saint” John of Kensington was originally Sinjohn, Holy John, or Elgin, seems to be somewhat further implied from the neighbouring Elgin Crescent, Elgin Avenue, and Howley Street.

The Fulham place almost immediately adjacent, considered in conjunction with Fowell Street, suggests that here, as at the more western Fulham, was a home of Foals or wild Fowl, or perhaps of Fal, the Irish Centaur-god.

The sovereign On, the ancient Courser “of the blushing purple and the potent number,” was mighty Hu, whose name New, or Ancient Yew, is, I think, perpetuated at Newbury—where Hewson is still a family name—at Newington Padox (said to be for paddocks) in Warsickshire, at Newington near Wye, in Kent, and possibly at other Newmarkets or tons, which are intimately associated with horse-racing. With the river Noe in Derbyshire may be connoted Noe, the British form of Noah: The Newburns in Scotland and Northumberland can hardly have been so named because they were novel or new rivers, and in view of the fact that British mythology combined Noah’s ark (Welsh arch) with a mare, it may be questioned whether the place-name Newark (originally Newarcha), really meant as at present supposed New Work.[494] It may be that the Trojan horse story was purely mythological, and had originally relation to the supposition that mankind all emerged from the body of the Solar Horse.

The Kensington Hippodrome was eventually closed down on account of the noise and disorders which arose there, and one may safely assume there was always a certain amount of rudeness and rowdiness among the rout at all hippodromes. Had Herr Cissa, the imaginary Saxon to whom the authorities so generously ascribe Cissbury Ring, Chichester, and many other places, been present on some prehistoric Whit Monday, doubtless like any other personage of importance he would have arrived at Kensington seated in a reidi—the equivalent of the British rhod. And if further, in accordance with Teutonic wont, Cissa had sneered at the shaggy little keffils[495] of the British, certainly some keen Icenian[496] would have pointed out that not only was the keffil or cafall a horse of very distinguished antiquity, but that the word cafall reminded him agreeably of the Gaulish cheval and the Iberian cabal, both very chivalrous or cavalryous old words suggestive of valiant, valid, and strong Che or Jou.

Hereupon some young Cockney would inevitably have uttered the current British byword—

For acuteness and valour the Greeks

For excessive pride the Romans

For dulness the creeping Saxons.[497]

Unless human nature is very changeable Herr Cissa would then have delivered himself somewhat as follows: “It is really coming to this, that we Germans, the people to whose exquisite Kultur the nations of Europe and of America, too, owe the fact that they no longer consist of hordes of ape-like savages roaming their primordial forests, are about to allow ourselves to be dictated to.”[498]

Irritated by the allusion to ape-like savages one may surmise that a jockey of Chichestra inquired whether Herr Cissa claimed the river Cuckmere and also Cuckoo- or Houndean-Bottom, the field in which Lewes racecourse stands? He might also have insinuated that the White Horse cut in the downs below Hinover[499] in the Cuckmere valley was there long before the inhabitants of Hanover adopted it as a totem, and that the Juxons were just as much entitled to the sign of the Horse as the Saxons of Saxony, or Sachsen. To this Herr Cissa would have replied that the White Horse at Uffington was a “deplorable abortion,” and that its barbaric design was “a slander on the Saxon standard”. Hereupon a yokel from Cuckhamsley Hill, near Zizeter, sometimes known as Cirencester, probably inquired with a chuckle whether Herr Cissa claimed every Jugestree, Tree of Justice, Esus Tree, Assize or Assembly Tree in the British Islands? He pertinently added that in Cirencester, or Churncester, they were in the habit of celebrating at Harvest Home the festival of the Kernababy, or Maiden, which he always understood represented the Corn baby, elsewhere known as the Ivy Girl, or “Sweet Sis”. This youth had a notion that Sweet Sis, or the Lady of the Corn[500] was somehow connected with his native Cirencester, or Zizeter, and he produced a token or coin upon which the well coiffured head of a chic little maiden or fairy queen was portrayed.[501]

Fig. 264.—British. From Evans.

An Icenian charioteer, who explained that his people alternatively termed themselves the Jugantes,[502] also produced a medal which he said had been awarded him at Caistor, pointing out that the spike of Corn was the sign of the Kernababy, that the legend under the hackney read Cac, and that he rather thought the white horse of the Cuckmere valley and also the one by Cuckhamsley were representations of the same Cock Horse.[503] He added that he had driven straight from Goggeshall in his gig—a kind of coach similar to that in which the living image of his All Highest used of old time to be ceremoniously paraded.

Herr Cissa hereupon maintained that it was impossible for anyone to drive straight anywhere in a gig, for it was an accepted axiom of the science of language that the word gig, “probably of imitative origin,” meant “to take a wrong direction, to rove at random”.[504] At this juncture a venerable columba from St. Columbs, Nottinghill, intervened and produced an authentic Life of the Great St. Columba, wherein is recorded an incident concerning the holy man’s journey in a gig without its linch pins. “On that day,” he quoted, “there was a great strain on it over long stretches of road,” nevertheless “the car in which he was comfortably seated moved forward without mishap on a straight course.”[505]

Fig. 265.—Sculptured Stone, Meigle, Perthshire. From The Life of St. Columba (Huyshe, W.).

In view of this feat, and of an illustration of the type of vehicle in which the journey was supposedly accomplished, it was generally accepted that Herr Cissa’s definition of gig was fantastic, whereupon the Saxon, protesting, “You do not care one iota for our gigantic works of Kultur and Science, for our social organisation, for our Genius!” asserted the dignity of his gig definition by whipping up his horses, taking a wrong direction, and roving at random from the enclosure.

FOOTNOTES:

[400] With Ecne may be connoted ech, the Irish for horse.

[401] Irish Myth. Cycle, p. 82.

[402] Germania, x.

[403] “The senses of the horse are acute though many animals excel it in this respect, but its faculties of observation and memory are both very highly developed. A place once visited or a road once traversed seems never to be forgotten, and many are the cases in which men have owed life and safety to these faculties in their beasts of burden. Even when untrained it is very intelligent: horses left out in winter will scrape away the snow to get at the vegetation beneath it, which cattle are never observed to do.”—Chambers’s Encyclopædia, v., 792.

[404] Bayley, H., The Lost Language of Symbolism, vol. ii. Cf. chapter, “The White Horse”.

[405] Nauticaa Mediterranea, Rome, 1601.

[406] Brock, M., The Cross: Heathen and Christian, p. 64.

[407] “The oak, tallest and fairest of the wood, was the symbol of Jupiter. The manner in which the principal tree in the grove was consecrated and ordained to be the symbol of Jupiter was as follows: The Druids, with the general consent of the whole order, and all the neighbourhood pitched upon the most beautiful tree, cut off all its side branches and then joined two of them to the highest part of the trunk, so that they extended themselves on either side like the arms of a man, making in the whole the shape of a cross. Above the insertions of these branches and below, they inscribed in the bark of the tree the word Thau, by which they meant God. On the right arm was inscribed Hesus, on the left Belenus, and on the middle of the trunk Tharamus.”—Quoted by Borlase in Cornwall from “the learned Schedius”.

[408] Ancient British Coins, p. 49.

[409] The Coin Collector, p. 159.

[410] Numismatic Manual, p. 225.

[411] Jewitt, L., English Coins and Tokens, p. 4.

[412] Head, Barclay, V., A Guide to the Coins of the Ancients, p. 1 (B. M.).

[413] Akerman, J. Y., Numismatic Manual, p. 228.

[414] Akerman, J. Y., Numismatic Manual, p. 10.

[415] The earliest “Lady” of Byzantium was the fabulous daughter of Io, Cf. Schliemann, Mykene.

[416] Macdonald, G., The Evolution of Coinage, p. 5.

[417] Macdonald, G., The Evolution of Coinage, p. 9.

[418] According to Skeat jingle, “a frequentative verb from the base jink,” is allied to chink, and chink is “an imitative word”.

[419] Munro, Dr. Robt., Prehistoric Britain, p. 45. The italics are mine.

[420] Johnson, W., Folk Memory, p. 321.

[421] Bella Gallico, Bk. IV.

[422] Crete, the Forerunner of Greece, p. 72.

[423] Iliad, XX., 570-80.

[424] “It’s you English who don’t know your own language, otherwise you would realise that most of what you call ‘Yankeeisms’ are merely good old English which you have thrown away.”—J. Russell Lowell.

[425] As illustrated ante, p. 381.

[426] Illustrated London News, 10th August, 1918.

[427] Cf. Troy, p. 353; Ilios, 619.

[428] Il., lix.

[429] Hawes, C. H. and H. B., Crete the Forerunner of Greece, p. 44.

[430] Æneid, Book II., 111.

[431] Ibid., 20.

[432] Johnson, W., Byways, 419.

[433] Sepulchres of Ancient Etruria, p. 10.

[434] Johnston, Rev. W. B., Place-names of England and Wales, p. 2.

[435] Morris-Jones, Sir J., Taliesin, p. 32.

[436] Guest, Dr., Origines Celticæ, ii., 218-27.

[437] Fraser, J. B., Persia.

[438] There is an Uffington in Lincoln on the river Welland.

[439] Holy Wells, p. 102.

[440] Allcroft, A. Hadrian, Earthwork of England, p. 136.

[441] P. 16.

[442] Carey, Miss E. F., Folklore, xxv., No. 4, p. 417.

[443] Mitton, C. F., Kensington, p. 58.

[444] Iliad, XX., 246, 262.

[445] The first lessee of the Manor at Kensington, now known as Holland Park, was a certain Robert Horseman. Holland House being built in a swamp, or holland, may owe its title to that fact or to its having been erected by a Dutchman. The Bog of Allen in Ireland is authoritatively equated with holland.

[446] This information was given me verbally by Miss Mary George of Sennen Cove.

[447] Zennor is understood to have meant Holy Land.

[448] Proc. of Roy. Ir. Acad., xxxiv., C., 10-11, p. 376.

[449] Fraser, J.B., Persia, p. 132.

[450] According to Johnston, Felixstowe was the church of St. Felix of Walton, sometimes said to be stow of Felix, first bishop of East Anglia. “But this does not agree with the form in 1318 Filthstowe which might be ‘filth place,’ place full of dirt or foulness. This is not likely” (p. 259).

[451] Cf. Holy Wells.

[452] The numerous British Cranbrooks and Cranbournes are assumed to have been the haunts of cranes.

[453] Allcroft, A. Hadrian, Earthwork of England, p. 462.

[454] Johnson, W., Folk Memory, p. 321.

[455] Domesday Branchtrea, later Branktry. “This must be ’tree of Branc,’ the same name as in Branksome (Bournemouth), Branxton (Coldstream), and Branxholm (Hawick).”—Johnston, J. B., Place-names of England and Wales, p. 165.

[456] A Guide to the Antiquities of the Iron Age (Brit. Museum), p. 35.

[457] Ep in old Breton meant horse; cf. Origines Celticæ, i., 373, 380, 381.

[458] Celtic Britain, p. 229.

[459] 1158 Brimigham; 1166 Bremingeham; 1255 Burmingeham; 1413 Brymecham; 1538 Bromieham.

[460] Ancient Britain, p. 282.

[461] Historical Works (Bohn’s Library), p. 98.

[462] Travels in the East (Bohn’s Library), p. 202.

[463] Avebury and Stonehenge, p. 43.

[464] A Guide to the Antiquities of the Iron Age, p. 29.

[465] Higgens, G., Celtic Druids, p. lxxiv.

[466] Annals, Bk. xii, xii.

[467] In 1200 Folkeshull. Of Flixton in Lancashire the authorities suggest, “perhaps a town of the flitch”. Of Flokton in Yorkshire, “Town of an unrecorded Flocca”. I suspect Flokton was really a Folk Dun or Folks Hill.

[468] Akerman, p. 166.

[469] Slav Tales, p. 182.

[470] Fraser, J. B., Persia, p. 134.

[471] The word silver is imagined to be derived from Salube, a town on the Black Sea.

[472] Johnston, J. B., Place-names, p. 445.

[473] The Frankish chroniclers assigned the origin of the Franks to Troy. The word Frank is radically feran or veran.

[474] Hope, R. C., Holy Wells, p. 137.

[475] Taliesin, p. 238.

[476] Minnis, said to be a Kentish word for common, is seemingly the latter portion of communis.

[477] “Within the area towards the north-east corner is a solid rectangular platform of masonry, 145 feet by 104 feet, and 5 feet in thickness. In the centre there is a structure of concrete in the form of a cross, 87 feet in length, 7 feet 6 inches wide, which points to the north. The transverse arm, 47 feet long and 22 feet wide, points to the gateway in the west wall. The platform rests upon a mass of masonry reaching downward about 30 feet from the surface, it measures 124 feet north to south and 80 feet east to west. At each corner there are holes 5 to 6 inches square, penetrating through the platform. A subterranean passage, 5 feet high, 3 feet wide, has been excavated under the overhanging platform, around the foundation beneath, which may be entered by visitors.

“The efforts that have been made to pierce the masonry have failed in ascertaining whether there are chambers inside. No satisfactory explanation of its origin and purpose has yet been discovered. It may have formed the foundation of a ‘pharos’. The late C. R. Smith, whose opinion on the subject is of especial value, and also later authorities, have thought that this remarkable structure enclosed receptacles either for the storage of water, or for the deposit of treasure awaiting shipment.”—A Short Account of the Records of Richborough (W. D.).

[478] Britannia Antiquissima, p. 5.

[479] This on the face of it looks far-fetched, but the intermediate forms may easily be traced, and the suggestion is really more rational than the current claim that fir and quercus are the “same word”.

[480] Statues of Epona represent her seated “between foals”. Ancient Britain, p. 279.

[481] A small bell swinging in a circle may often be seen to-day as a “flyer” ornament on the heads of London carthorses.

[482] Guest, Dr., Origines Celticæ, ii., p. 159.

[483] Tacitus in Agricola gives Cogidumnus an excellent reference to the following effect: “Certain districts were assigned to Cogidumnus, a king who reigned over part of the country. He lived within our own memory, preserving always his faith unviolated, and exhibiting a striking proof of that refined policy, with which it has ever been the practice of Rome to make even kings accomplices in the servitude of mankind.”

[484] This functionary is said to have acquired his title by distraining on, or catching the people’s pullets.

[485] The Romance of Names, p. 184.

[486] Hazlitt, W. C., Faiths and Folklore, ii., 543.

[487] Ibid., ii., 408.

[488] At Bickley (Kent) is Shawfield Park.

[489] The neighbouring “Canholes” will be considered in a later chapter.

[490] Æneid, Bk. V., 39.

[491] Kensington, p. 89.

[492] Ibid., p. 89.

[493] Davies, E., Mytho. of Ancient Druids, p. 528.

[494] The oldest church in Ireland (the Oratory of Gallerus) is described as exactly like an upturned boat, and the nave or ship of every modern sanctuary perpetuates both in form and name the ancient notion of Noah’s Ark, or the Ark of Safety. The ruins of Newark Priory, near Woking, are situated in a marshy mead amid seven branches of the river Wey which even now at times turn the site into a swamp. There is a Newark in Leicestershire and a Newark in St. John’s Parish, Peterborough; here the land is flat and mostly arable. At Newark, in Notts, the situation was seemingly once just such a wilderness of waters as surrounded Newark Priory, in Send Parish, Woking. The ship of Isis, symbolizing the fecund Ark of Nature, figured prominently in popular custom, and the subject demands a chapter at the very least.

[495] Keffil meaning horse is still used in Worcestershire, and Herefordshire. “This is a pure Welsh word nor need one feel much surprised at finding it in use in counties where the Saxon and the Brython must have had many dealings in horse flesh. But what is significant is the manner in which it is used, for it is employed only for horses of the poorest type, or as a word of abuse from one person to another as when one says—‘you great keffil,’ meaning you clumsy idiot.”—Windle, B. C. A., Life in Early Britain, p. 209.

[496] “The Icenians took up arms, a brave and warlike people.”—Tacitus, Annals.

[497] Windle, B. C. A., Life in Early Britain, p. 210.

[498] Quoted in The Daily Express, 9th October, 1918, from Der Rheinisch Westfalische Zeitung.

[499] Cf. Johnson, W., Folk Memory, p. 326.

[500] The Cornish for corn was izik.

[501] Cf. Fig. 358, p. 596.

[502] Evans, Sir J., Ancient British Coins, p. 404.

[503] “Under any circumstances the legend Cac on the reverse would have still to be explained.”—Ibid., p. 353.

[504] Skeat, p. 212.

[505] Huyshe, W., Adamnan’s Life of St. Columba, p. 173.

CHAPTER IX
BRIDE’S BAIRNS

“But, I do not know how it comes to pass, it is the unhappy fashion

of our age to derive everything curious and valuable, whether the

works of art or nature, from foreign countries: as if Providence

had denied us both the genius and materials of art, and sent us

everything that was precious, comfortable, and convenient, at

second-hand only, and, as it were, by accident, from charity of our

neighbours.”—Borlase (1754).

Homer relates that the gods watched the progress of the siege of Troy from the far-celebrated Mount Ida in Asia Minor: there is another equally famous Mount Ida in Crete, at the foot of which lived a people known as the Idaei. With Homer’s allusion to “spring-abounding Ida’s lowest spurs,” where wandered—

... in the marshy mead

Rejoicing with their foals three thousand mares,

may be connoted his reference to “Hyde’s fertile vale,”[506] and there is little doubt that spring-abounding Idas and Hyde Parks were once as plentiful as Prestons, Silverdales, and Kingstons.

The name Ida is translated by the dictionaries as meaning perfect happiness, and Ada as rich gift: we have already seen that the ideal pair of Ireland were Great King Conn and Good Queen Eda, and that it was during the reign of these royal twain that Ibernia, “flowed with the pure lacteal produce of the dairy”.[507]

Hyde Park, now containing Rotten Row at Kensington, occupies the site of what figured in Domesday Book as the Manor of Hyde: the immediately adjacent Audley Streets render it possible that the locality was once known as Aud lea, or meadow, whence subsequent inhabitants derived their surname. Hyde Park is partly in Paddington, a name which the authorities decode into “town of the children of Paeda”. This Paeda is supposed to have been a King of Mercia, but he would hardly have been so prolific as to have peopled a town, and, considered in conjunction with the neighbouring Praed or pere Aed street, it is more likely that Paeda was Father Eda, the consort of Maida or Mother Eda, after whom the adjacent Maida Vale and Maida Hill seemingly took their title. By passing up Maida Vale one may traverse St. John’s Wood, Brondesbury or Brimsbury, Kensal Green, Cuneburn, and eventually attain the commanding heights of Caen, or Ken wood, from whence may be surveyed not only “Hyde’s fertile vale,” situated on “spring-abounding Ida’s lowest spurs,” but a comprehensive sweep of greater London.

According to Tacitus “some say that the Jews were fugitives from the island of Crete,”[508] and he continues: “There is a famous mountain in Crete called Ida; the neighbouring tribe, the Idaei, came to be called Judaei by a barbarous lengthening of the national name”. Modern editors of Tacitus regard this statement as no doubt the invention of some Greek etymologer, but with reference to the Idaei they speak of this old Cretan race as “being regarded as a kind of mysterious half-supernatural beings to whom mankind were indebted for the discovery of iron and the art of working it”.[509]

There is evidence of a similar idealism having once existed among the Britons and the Jews in the second Epistle of Monk Gildas to the following effect: “The Britons, contrary to all the world and hostile to Roman customs, not only in the mass but also in the tonsure, are with the Jews slaves to the shadows of things to come rather than to the truth”.[510] By “truth” Gildas here of course means his own particular “doxy,” and the salient point of his testimony is the assertion that practically alone in the world the British and the Jews were dreamy, immaterial, superstitious idealists. That the Idaeians of Crete, Candia, or Idaea were singularly pure or candid may be judged from the testimony of Sir Arthur Evans: “Religion entered at every turn, and it was, perhaps, owing to the religious control of art that among all the Minoan representations—now to be numbered by thousands—no single example of indecency has come to light”.[511] Referring to British candour, Procopius affirms: “So highly rated is chastity among these barbarians that if even the bare mention of marriage occurs without its completion the maiden seems to lose her fair fame”.[512]

This alleged purity of the British Maid is substantiated by the words prude and proud, both of which like pretty, purity, and pride, are radically pure Ide. Skeat defines prude as a woman of affected modesty, and adds “see prowess”; but prudery has little connection with prowess, and is it really necessary to assume that primitive prudery was “affected”? The Jewish Jah is translated by scholars as “pure Being”; the passionate adoration of purity is expressed in the prehistoric hymn quoted ante page 183, Hu the Mighty was pre-eminently pure, and it is thus likely that the ancient Pere, Jupiter, or Aubrey meant originally the Pure.

We have seen that Jupiter, the divine Power, was conceived indifferently as either a man or an immortal maid: a maid is a virgin, and the words maid or mayde, like Maida, is radically “Mother Ida”. According to Skeat maid is related to Anglo-Saxon magu, a son or kinsman; and one may thus perhaps account for brother, bruder, or frater, as meaning originally the produce or progeny of the same pere—but not necessarily the same pair.

To St. Bride may be assigned not only the terms bride and bridegroom, or brideman; but likewise breed and brood. Skeat connects the latter with the German bruhen to scald, but a good mother does not scald her brood, and as St. Bride was known anciently as “The Presiding Care”; even although bairn is the same word as burn, we may assume that St. Bride did not burn her brat.

There is a Bridewell and a church of St. Bride in London, but to the modern Londoner this “greatest woman of the Celtic Church” is practically unknown. In Hibernia and the Hebrides, however, St. Bride yet lives, and in the words of a modern writer is “more real than the great names of history. They, pale shadows moving in an unreal world, have gone, but she abides. With each revolving year she flits across the Machar, and her tiny flowers burn golden among the short, green, turfy grass at her coming. Her herald, the Gillebrighde, the servant of Bride, calls its own name and hers among the shores, a message that the sea, the treasury of Mary, will soon yield its abundance to the fisher, haven-bound by the cold and stormy waters of winter. He sees St. Bride, the Foster Mother, but his keen vision penetrates a vista far beyond the ages when Imperial Rome held sway and, in that immemorial past, beholds her still. In the uncharted regions of the Celtic imagination, she abides unchanging, her eyes starlit, her raiment woven of fire and dew; her aureole the rainbow. To him she is older than the world of men, yet eternally young. She is beauty and purity and love, and time for her has no meaning. She is a ministering spirit, a flame of fire. It is she who touches with her finger the brow of the poet and breathes into his heart the inspiration of his song. She is born with the dawn, and passes into new loveliness when the sun sets in the wave. The night winds sing her lullaby, and little children hear the music of her voice and look into her answering eyes. Who and what, then, is St. Bride? She is Bridget of Kildare, but she is more. She is the daughter of Dagda, the goddess of the Brigantes; but she is more. She is the maid of Bethlehem, the tender Foster Mother; but she is more even than that. She is of the race of the immortals. She is the spirit and the genius of the Celtic people.”[513]

St. Bride was known occasionally as St. Fraid, and Brigit, or Brigid, an alternative title of the Fair Ide, may be modernised into Pure Good. With her white wand Brigit was said to breathe life into the mouth of dead Winter, impelling him to open his eyes to the tears, the smiles, the sighs, and the laughter of Spring, whence to Brid, or Bryth of the Brythons, may be assigned the word breathe; and as Bride was represented by a sheaf of grain carried joyously from door to door, doubtless in her name we have the origin of bread.

The name Bradbury implies that many barrows were dedicated to Brad; running into the river Rye of Kent is a river Brede, and as the young goddess of Crete was known to the Hellenes as Britomart, which means sweet maiden, we may equate Britomart with Britannia. At the village of Brede in Kent the seat now known as Brede Place is also known as the Giant’s House, whence in all probability St. Bride was the maiden Giant, Gennet, or Jeanette.

In the province of Janina in Albania is the town of Berat, and the foundation of either this Berat or else the Beyrout of Canaan was ascribed by the Greek mythologists to a maiden named Berith or Beroë.

Hail Beroë, fairest offering of the Nereids!

Beroë all hail! thou root of life, thou boast

Of Kings, thou nurse of cities with the world

Coeval; hail thou ever-favoured seat of Hermes ...

With Tethys and Oceanus coeval.

But later poets feign that lovely Beroë

Derived her birth from Venus and Adonis

Soon as the infant saw the light with joy

Old Ocean straight received her in his arms.

And e’en the brute creation shared the pleasure.

... In succeeding years

A sacred town derived its mystic name

From that fair child whose birth coeval was

With the vast globe; but rich Ausonia’s sons

The city call Berytus.[514]

The same poet repeatedly maintains that the age of the city of Beroë was equal to that of the world, and that it could boast an antiquity much greater than that of Tarsus, Thebes, or Sardis. The reference to Beroë or Berith as the ever-favoured seat of Hermes implies the customary equation of Britannia = Athene = Wisdom. The prehistoric car illustrated in the preceding chapter is reproduced from a stone in Perthshire or Perithshire, and in a description written in 1569 this stone was then designated the Thane Stone.[515] That this was an Athene stone is somewhat implied by the further details, “it had a cross at the head of it and a goddess next that in a cart, and two horses drawing her and horsemen under that, and footmen and dogs”. The Thanes of Scotland were probably the official representatives of Athene, or Wisdom, or Justice, and the dogs of the Thane Stone may be connoted with the Hounds of Diana or Britomart, and the greyhounds of the English Fairy Queen.

Athene is presumably the same as Ethne, the reputed mother of St. Columba, and also as Ieithon, the Keltic goddess of speech or prating, after whom Anwyl considers the river Ieithon in Radnorshire was named. This Welsh river-name may be connoted with the river Ythan in Scotland, and the legend Ida, found upon the reverse of some of the Ikenian coins of England, may be connoted with the place-name Odestone, or Odstone, implying seemingly a stone of Od, or Odin.

At Oddendale in Westmorland are the remains of a Druidic circle and traces of old British settlements: with the Thanestone may be connoted the carved example illustrated ante, page 381, from Dingwall, and also the decorated “Stone of the Fruitful Fairy,” which exists in Ireland.[516]

The authorities think it possible that the river Idle—a tributary of the Trent—derived its name from being empty, vain, or useless; but it is more probable that this small stream was christened by the Idaeans, and that the resident Nymph or Fruitful Fairy was the idyll, or the idol, whom they idealised. It is not without significance that the starting point of the races at Uffington was Idles Bush: “As many as a dozen or more horses ran, and they started from Idle’s Bush which wur a vine owld tharnin-tree in thay days—a very nice bush. They started from Idle’s Bush as I tell ’ee sir, and raced up to the Rudge-way.”[517] Doubtless there were also many other “Idles Bush’s,” perhaps at some time one in every Ideian town or neighbourhood: there is seemingly one notable survival at Ilstrye or Idelestree, now Elstree near St. Albans.

That the Idaean ideal was Athene is implied by the adjective ethnic. The word ethic which means, “relating to morals,” is connected by Skeat with sitte, the German for custom: there is, however, no seeming connection between German custom and the Idyllic.[518]

The early followers of Britomart are universally described as an industrious and peaceful people who made their conquests in arts and commerce: to them not only was ascribed the discovery of iron and the working of it, but the Cretan treatment of bronze proves that the Idaeans were consummate bronzesmiths. In Crete, according to Sir Arthur Evans, “new and refined crafts were developed, some of them like inlaid metal-work unsurpassed in any age or country”.

That the Britons were expert blacksmiths is evident not merely from their chariot wheels, but also from the superb examples of bronze art-craft, found notably in the Thames. For the sum of one shilling the reader may obtain A Guide to the Antiquities of the Iron Age, published by the British Museum, in which invaluable volume two wonderful examples of prehistoric ironmongery are illustrated in colour. One of these, a bronze shield discovered at Battersea, is rightly described by Romilly Allen, as “about the most beautiful surviving piece of late Celtic metal-work”. The Celts, as this same authority observes, had already become expert workers in metal before the close of the Bronze Age; they could make beautiful hollow castings for the chapes of their sword sheaths; they could beat out bronze into thin plates and rivet them together sufficiently well to form water-tight cauldrons; they could ornament their circular bronze shields and golden diadems with repoussé patterns, consisting of corrugations and rows of raised bosses; and they were not unacquainted with the art of engraving on metal.[519]

Not only were the Britons expert in ordinary metal-work but they are believed to have invented the art of enamelled-inlay. Writing in the third century of the present era, an oft-quoted Greek observed: “They say that the barbarians who live in Ocean pour colours on heated bronze and that they adhere, become as hard as stone, and preserve the designs that are made in them”.

It is admitted that nowhere was greater success attained by this art of the early Iron Age than in Britain, and as Sir Hercules Read rightly maintains: “There are solid reasons for supposing this particular style to have been confined to this country”.[520] The art of enamelling was of course practised elsewhere, particularly at Bibracte in Gaul, long before the Roman Conquest, but in the opinion of Dr. Anderson, the Bibracte enamels are the work of mere dabblers in the art compared with the British examples: the home of the art was Britain, and the style of the patterns, as well as the associations in which the objects decorated with it were found, demonstrate with certainty that it had reached its highest stage of indigenous development before it came in contact with the Roman culture.[521] The evidence of the bronze spear-head points to the same remarkable conclusions as the evidence of enamelled bronze, and in the opinion of the latest and best authorities, from its first inception throughout the whole progress of its evolution the spear-head of the United Kingdom has a character of its own, one quite different from those found elsewhere. In no part of the world did the spear-head attain such perfection of form and fabric as it did in these islands, and the old-fashioned notion that bronze weapons were imported from abroad is now hopelessly discredited. “Why, then,” ask the authors of The Origin, Evolution, and Classification of the Bronze Spear-Head,[522] “may not a bronze culture have had its birth in our country where it ultimately attained a development scarcely equalled, certainly not surpassed, by that in any other part of the world?”

One of the distinctions of the British spear-head is a certain variety of tang, of which the only parallel has been found in one of the early settlements at Troy. Forms also, somewhat similar, have been discovered in the Islands of the Ægean sea, and in the Terramara deposits of Northern Italy, but it is the considered opinion of Canon Greenwell and Parker Brewis, that whatever may be the true explanation of the history of the general development of a bronze culture in Great Britain and Ireland, “there can be no doubt whatever that the spear-head in its origin, progress, and final consummation was an indigenous product of those two countries, and was manufactured within their limits apart from any controlling influence from outside”.[523]

The magnificent bronze shield and bric a brac found in London were thus presumably made there, and it is not improbable that the principal smitheries were situated either at Smithfield in the East, or Smithfield in the West in the ward of Farringdon or Farendone.

Stow in his London uses the word fereno to denote an ironmonger, in old French feron meant a smith, and wherever the ancient ferenos or smiths were settled probably became known as Farindones or fereno towns. Stow mentions several eminent goldsmiths named Farendone; from feron, the authorities derive the surname Fearon, which may be seen over a shop-front near Farringdon Street to-day.

Modern Farringdon Street leads from Smithfield or Smithy field[524] to Blackfriars, and it may be suggested that the original Black Friars were literally freres or brethren, who forged with industrious ferocity at their fires and furnaces. Without impropriety the early fearons might have adopted as their motto Semper virens: smiting in smithies is smutty work, and all these terms are no doubt interrelated, but not, I think, in the sense which Skeat supposes them, viz.: “Smite, to fling. The original sense was to smear or rub over. ‘To rub over,’ seems to have been a sarcastic expression for ‘to beat’; we find well anoynted—well beaten.”

The word bronze was derived, it is said, from Brundusinum or Brindisi, a town which was famous for its bronze workers. Brindisi is almost opposite Berat in Epirus; the smith or faber is proverbially burly, i.e., bur like or brawny, and it is curious that the terms brass, brasier, burnish, bronze, etc., should all similarly point to Bru or Brut. With St. Bride or St. Brigit, who in one of her three aspects was represented as a smith, may be connoted bright, and with Bress, the Consort of Brigit, may be connoted brass. And as Bride was alternatively known as Fraid, doubtless to this form of the name may be assigned fer, fire, fry, frizzle, furnace, forge, fierce, ferocious, and force.

That the island of Bru or Barri in South Wales was a reputed home of the burly faber, feuber, or Fire Father, is to be inferred from the statement of Giraldus Cambrensis, that “in a rock near the entrance of the island there is a small cavity to which if the ear is applied a noise is heard like that of smiths at work, the blowing of the bellows, strokes of the hammers, grinding of tools and roaring of furnaces”.[525] It is supposed that Barri island owes its name to a certain St. Baroc, the remains of whose chapel once stood there: that St. Baroc was Al Borak, the White Horse or brok, upon whom every good Mussalman hopes eventually to ride, is implied by the story that St. Baroc borrowed a friend’s horse and rode miraculously across the sea from Pembrokeshire to Ireland.

On the coast between Pembroke and Tenby is Manorbeer, known anciently as Maenor Pyrr, that is, says Giraldus, “the mansion of Pyrrus, who also possessed the island of Chaldey, which the Welsh call Inys Pyrr, or the island of Pyrrus”. But the editor of Giraldus considers that a much more natural and congenial conjecture may be made in supposing Maenor Pyrr to be derived from Maenor a Manor, and Pyrr, the plural of Por, a lord. I have already suggested a possible connection between the numerous pre stones and Pyrrha, the first lady who created mankind out of stones.

Near Fore Street, in the ward of Farringdon by Smithfield, will be found Whitecross Street, Redcross Street, and Cowcross Street: the last of these three cross streets by which was “Jews Garden,” may be connoted with the Geecross of elsewhere. The district is mentioned by Stow as famous for its coachbuilders, and there is no more reason to assume that the word coach (French coche) was derived from Kocsi, a town in Hungary, than to suppose that the first coach was a cockney production and came from Chick Lane or from Cock Lane, both of which neighbour the Cowcross district in Smithfield. The supposition that the gig or coach (the words are radically the same) was primarily a vehicle used in the festivals to Gog the High High, or Mighty Mighty, is strengthened by the testimony of the solar chariot illustrated ante, page 405.

Not only were the British famed from the dawn of history[526] for their car-driving but from the evidence of sepulchral chariots and sepulchral harness the authorities are of opinion that the fighting car was long retained by the Kelts, “and its presence in the Yorkshire graves seems to show that it persisted in Britain longer than elsewhere”.[527]

Somewhere in the Smithfield district originally existed what Stow mentions as Radwell, and this well of the Redcross, or Ruddy rood, may be connoted with the Rood Lane a mile or so more eastward. Between Rood Lane and Red Cross Street is Lothbury: the suffix bury (as in Lothbury, and Aldermanbury) is held by Stow, and also by Camden, to mean a Court of Justice, and this definition accords precisely with the theory that the barrow was originally the seat of Justice. At Lothbury the noise or bruit made by the burly fabers was so vexatious that Stow seriously defines the place-name Lothbury as indicating a loathsome locality.[528] The supposition that Cowcross Street, Jews Garden, and the Redcross or Ruddy rood site were primarily in the occupation of men of Troy or Droia may possibly be strengthened by the fact that here was a Tremill brook, and the seat of a Sir Drew Drury. The parish church of Blackfriars is St. Andrews, there is another St. Andrews within a bow-shot of Smithfield, and that the “drews” were a skilled family is obvious from the fact that the name Drew is defined as Teutonic skilful. Both Scandinavians and Germans possess the Trojan tradition; the All Father of Scandinavia was named Borr, Thor, the Hammer God, was assigned to Troy, and in Teutonic mythology there figure two celestial Smith-brethren named Sindre and Brok.

The cradle of the Cretan Zeus is assigned sometimes not to Mount Ida but to the neighbouring Mount Juktas which is described as an extraordinary “cone”. When the Cretan script is deciphered it will probably transpire that Mount Juktas was associated with Juk, Jock, or Jack, and the name may be connected with jokul, the generic term in Scandinavia for a snow-covered or white-crowned height. Jack is seemingly the same word as the Hebrew Isaac, which is defined as meaning laughter; Jack may thus probably be equated with joke and jokul with chuckle, all of which symptoms are the offspring of joy or gaiety. To kyg, an obsolete adjective meaning lively—and thus evidently a variant of agog—are assigned by our authorities the surnames Keach, Ketch, Kedge, and Gedge. In connection with kyg Prof. Weekley quotes the line—

Kygge or joly, jocundus.

Among the gewgaws found in the sacred shrines of Juktas are numerous bijou gigs, or coaches, all no doubt once very juju, or sacred.

To appreciate the outlook of the “half-supernatural” Idaeans one may find a partial key in the words of Aratus: “Let us begin with Zeus, let us always call upon and laud his name; all the network of interwending roads and all the busy markets of mankind are full of Zeus, and all the paths and fair havens of the sea, and everwhere our hope is in Zeus for we are also his children”.[529]

Stow mentions the firmly-rooted tradition that the Cathedral of St. Paul stands upon the site of an ancient shrine to Jupiter. It may be merely coincidence that close to St. Paul’s once stood an Ypres Hall:[530] in the immediate vicinity of Old St. Paul’s used also to exist a so-called Pardon Churchyard, perhaps an implication that Ludgate Hill was once known as Par dun or Par Hill. That “Pardon” was equivalent to “Pradon” is evident from the fact that modern Dumbarton was originally Dun Brettan, or the Briton’s Fort. The slope leading from the Southern side of St. Paul’s or Pardon Churchyard, is still named Peter’s Hill, and in view of the Jupiter tradition it is not altogether unlikely that Peter’s Hill was originally eu Peter’s Hill, synonymously Pere dun. The surname Pardon may still be found in this Godliman Street neighbourhood, where in Stow’s time stood not only Burley House, but likewise Blacksmiths Hall. A funeral pyre is a fire; a phare is a lighthouse, and the intense purity of Bride’s fire, phare, or pyre is implied by the fact that it was not suffered to be blown by human breath but by bellows only. From time immemorial the Fire of Bride was tended by nineteen holy maids, each of whom had the care of the Fire for one night in turn: on the twentieth night the nineteenth maid, having piled wood upon the fire, said: “Brigit, take charge of your own fire, for this night belongs to you”. The tale ends that ever on the twentieth morning the fire had been miraculously preserved.[531]

The patron saint of engineers is Barbara or Varvara, the sacred pyre of Bride was maintained within a circle or periphery of stakes and brushwood, and close at hand were certain very beautiful meadows called St. Bridget’s pastures, in which no plough was ever suffered to turn a furrow. The words mead and meadow are the same as maid and maida, whence it seems to follow that all meadows were dedicated to Bride, the pretty Lady of the Kine. Homer’s “fertile vale of Hyde,” and the Londoner’s Hyde Park, were alike probably idealised and sacred meadows corresponding to the Irish Mag-Ithe or Plains of Ith; it is not unlikely that all heaths were dedicated to Ith. To the Scandinavian Ith or Ida Plains we find an ancient poet thus referring: “I behold Earth rise again with its evergreen forests out of the deep ... the Anses meet on Ida Plain, they talk of the mighty earth serpent, and remember the great decrees, and the ancient mysteries of the unknown God”. After foretelling a time when “All sorrows shall be healed and Balder shall come back,” the poet continues: “Then shall Hœni choose the rods of divination aright, and the sons of the Twin Brethren shall inhabit the wide world of the winds”.[532]

Fig. 266.—Etruscan Bucket, Offida, Picenum. From A Guide to the Antiquities of the Early Iron Age, p. 17.

In Fig. 266—an Etrurian bucket—two diminutive Twin Brethren are being held by the Bona Dea—a winged Ange or Anse—who is surmounted by the symbolic cockle or coquille. The fact that this bucket was found at Offida renders it possible that the mother here represented was known to the craftsman who portrayed her as Offi divine, otherwise Hipha, Eve, or Good Iva. It will be noticed that the child on the right is white, that on the left black, and I have elsewhere drawn attention to many other emblems in which two A’s, Alphas, Alifs, or Elves were similarly portrayed, the one as white, the other as black.[533] The intention of the artist seems to have been to express the current philosophy of a Prime or Supreme supervising both good and evil, light and dark, or day and night. Pliny says that British women used to attend certain religious festivals with their nude bodies painted black like Ethiopians, and there is probably some close connection between this obscure function, and the fact that Diana of the Ephesians, the many-breasted All-mother of Life, was portrayed at times as white, at times as black. There must be a further connection between this black and white Bona Dea, and the fact that in the Lady Godiva processions near Coventry, which took place at the opening of the Great May Fair festival, there were two Godivas, one of whom was the natural colour but the other was dyed black.[534]

The Bona Dea of Egypt, like the figure on the Etrurian bucket, was represented holding in her arms two children, one white and one black; and the two circles at Avebury, lying within the larger Avereberie or periphery, were probably representative of Day and Night circled by all-embracing and eternal Time.

The Twin Brethren or Gemini are most popularly known as Castor and Pollux, and the propitious figures of these heavenly Twins were carved frequently upon the prows of ancient ships. The phosphorescent stars or Will-o-the-wisps, which during storms sometimes light upon the masts of ships, used to be known as St. Elmo’s Fires: St. Elmo is obviously St. Alma or St. All Mother, and the St. Helen with whom she is identified is seemingly St. Alone. It was believed that two stars were propitious, but that a solitary one boded bad luck; according to Pliny a single St. Elmo’s fire was called Helen, “but the two they call Castor and Pollux, and invoke them as gods”.

Fig. 267.—From Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism (Inman, C. W.)

The appearance of the will-o-the-wisps, Castor and Pollux, was held to be an argument that the tempest was caused by “a sulphurous spirit rarefying and violently moving the clouds, for the cause of the fire is a sulphurous and bituminous matter driven downwards by the impetuous motion of the air and kindled by much agitation”. I quote this passage as justifying the suggestion that sulphur—the yellow and fiery—is radically phur, and that brimstone, or brenstoon, as Wyclif has it, may be the stone of Brim or Bren, which burns.

The identification of Castor and Pollux with stars or asters, enables us to equate Castor as the White god or Day god, for dextra, the Latin for right, is de castra, i.e., good great astra. The white child in Fig. 266 is that on the right hand of the Bona Dea: that Pollux was the dark, sinister, sinistra, or left-hand power, is somewhat confirmed by the fact that the Celtic Pwll was the Pluto or deity of the underworld. Possibly the Latin castra, meaning a fort, originated from the idea that Castor was the heroic Invictus who has developed into St. Michael and St. George. The sin of sinister may possibly be the Gaelic sen, meaning senile, and the implication follows that the dark twin was the old in contradistinction to the new god.

The French for nightmare is cauchemar, the French for left is gauche, and it is the left-hand mairy, or fairy, in Fig. 266 which is the shady one. Not only does gauche mean left, but it also implies awkward, uncanny, and inept, whence it is to be feared that the Gooches, the Goodges, and their affiliated tribes were originally “Blackfriars,” and followers of the Black God. I have already suggested that the Gogs were unpopular among the Greeks, and the intensity of their feeling is seemingly reflected by the Greek adjective kakos[535] (the English gagga?), which means evil, dirty, or unpleasant.

Castor and Pollux, or the Fires of St. Helen, were known along the shores of the Mediterranean as St. Telmo’s Fires, the word Telmo being seemingly t Elmo or Good Alma. By the Italians they are known as the Fires of St. Peter and St. Nicholas; Peter here corresponding probably to the auburn Aubrey, and Nicholas to “Old Nick”.

It was fabled that Castor and Pollux were alike immortal, that like day and night they periodically died, but that whenever one of the brothers expired the other was restored to life, thus sharing immortality between them. “There was,” says Duncan, “an allusion to this tradition in the Roman horse-races, where a single rider galloped round the course mounted on one horse while he held another by the rein.”[536] This ceremony becomes more interesting when we find that the cauchemar, the nightmare, or the blackmare used in England to be known as the “ephialtes”.[537] That this ill-omened hipha, or hobby, was ill-boding Helena, seems somewhat to be confirmed by the custom in Cumberland of allotting to servants the years’ allowance for horse-meat on St. Helen’s, Eline’s, or Elyn’s day.[538] It is believed that horse meat is now taboo in Britain, because the eating of horse was so persistently denounced by Christianity as a heathen rite.

Fig. 268.—British Altar. By kind permission of the authorities of the British Museum.

[To face page 479.

I have shown elsewhere some of the innumerable forms under which the fires of Elmo, or the heavenly Twain, were represented. In England it is evident that a pair of horses served as one form of expression, for among the treasures at the British Museum is an article which is thus described: “Bronze plate representing an altar decorated with blue, green, and red sunk enamels, and evidently unfinished, hence native work of the fourth or fifth century. Found in the river Thames, 1847”. The principal decoration of this bijou altar—significantly 7 inches high—is two winged steeds supporting a demijohn, vase, or phial, the handles of which, in the form ofhandles, are detached from the vase, but are emerging flame-like from the supporters’ heads. The fact of these steeds appearing upon an “altar” is evidence of their sacred character, and one finds apparently the same two beasts delineated on a bucket, vide Fig. 270. This so termed “barbaric production,” discovered in an Aylesford gravel pit belonging to a gentleman curiously named Wagon, is attributed to the first century B.C., and has been compared unfavourably with the Etruscan bucket reproduced on page 474. The authorities of the British Museum comment upon it as follows: “The effect of barbaric imitation during two or three centuries may be appreciated by comparing the Etruscan cista of the fourth century, with the Aylesford bucket of the first century B.C. The first thing to be noticed is the absence from the latter of the heavy solid castings that form the feet and handle-attachments of the classical specimen. Such work was beyond the range of the British artificer, who was never successful with the human or animal form, but there is an evident desire to reproduce the salient features of the prototype. The solid uppermost band of the Etruscan specimen is represented by a thin embossed strip at Aylesford, while the classical motives are woefully caricatured. Minor analogies are noticed later, but the degradation of the ornament may fitly be dwelt on here as showing the limitations, and at the same time the originality of the native craftsman.”

Fig. 269.—Bronze-mounted bucket, Aylesford. From A Guide to Antiquities of the Early Iron Age (B.M.).

Fig. 270.—Embossed frieze of bucket, Aylesford. From A Guide to Antiquities of the Early Iron Age (B.M.).

I confess myself unable either to appreciate or dwell upon the alleged degradation of this design, or the woeful inadequacy of the craftmanship. The bold execution of the spirals proves that the British artist—had such been his intent—could without difficulty have delineated a copybook horse: what, however, he was seemingly aiming at was a facsimile of the heraldic and symbolic beasts which our coins prove were the cherished insignia of the country, and these “deplorable abortions” I am persuaded were no more barbarous or unsuccessful than the grotesque lions and other fantastics which figure in the Royal Arms to-day.

In all probability the Aylesford bucket was made in the neighbourhood where it was found, for at Aylesford used to stand a celebrated “White Horse Stone”. The attendant local legend—that anyone who rode a beast of this description was killed on or about the spot[539]—is seemingly a folk-memory of the time when the severe penalty for riding a white mare was death.[540] The place-name Aylesbury is derived by the authorities from bury, a fortified place of, and Aegil, the Sun-archer of Teutonic mythology: the head-dress of the face constituting the hinge of the Aylesford bucket consists of two circles which correspond in idea with the two children in the arms of the Etruscan hinge. That the bucket was originally a sacerdotal and sacred vessel is implied not only by the word but by the ancient custom thus recorded: “First on a pillar was placed a perch on the sharp prickled back whereof stood this idol ... in his left hand he held up a wheel, and in his right he carried a pail of water wherein were flowers and fruits”.[541] I have elsewhere reproduced several emblems of Jupiter and Athene each seated on a “sharp prickled back,” i.e., a broccus, saw, or zigzag, symbolic of the shaggy solar rays.

Figs. 271 to 273.—British. From Akerman.

There is nothing decadent or seriously wrong with the drawing of the steeds delineated in Figs. 271 and 272, although the “what-not” proceeding from the mouth of the Geho is somewhat perplexing. This is seemingly a ribbon or a chain, and like the perfect chain surrounding our Solido coins, and the chain which will be noted upon the Trojan spindle whorl illustrated on page 583, was probably intended to portray what the ancients termed Jupiter’s Chain: “All things,” says Marcus Aurelius, “are connected together by a sacred chain, and there is not one link in it which is not allied with the whole chain, for all things have been so blended together as to form a perfect whole, on which the symmetry of the universe depends. There is but one world, and it comprehends everything; one God endued with ubiquity; one eternal matter; and one law, which is the Reason common to all intelligent creatures.”

Figs. 274 to 276.—British. From Evans, and from Barthelemy.

A chain of pearls is proceeding from the mouth of the little figure which appears on some of the Channel Island coins, vide the Drucca example herewith: students of fairy-tale are familiar with the story of a Maid out of whose mouth, whenso’er she opened it fell jewels, and that this fairy Maid was Reason is implied by the present day compliment in the East, “Allah! you are a wise man, you spit pearls.” The Drucca coin is officially described as a “female figure standing to the left, her right hand holding a serpent (?)” and it is quite likely that the serpent or symbol of Wisdom was intended by the artist. There is no question about the serpents in the Tyrian coin here illustrated, where on either side of the Maiden they are represented with almost precisely the same handles form as the handles proceeding from the mouths of the two steeds on the British “altar”. In the latter case the centre is a vase or demijohn, in the former the centre is a Maid or Virgin. Without a doubt this Ber virgin is Beroë or Berith, the pherepolis of Beyrout: in Fig. 278 the two serpents are associated with a phare, fire, or pyre; from the mouth of the British “Jupiters,” illustrated in Figs. 274 and 275, the same two serpentine flames or S’s are emerging.

The word Ber, as has been seen, is equivalent to Vir, and in all probability the word virgin originally carried the same meaning as burgeon. That old Lydgate, the monk of Bery, knew all about Vera and how she made the buds to burgeon is obvious from his lines:—

Mightie Flora Goddesse of fresh flowers

Which clothed hath the soyle in lustie greene,

Made buds spring with her sweet showers

By influence of the sunne-shine

To doe pleasaunce of intent full cleane,

Unto the States which now sit here

Hath Vere down sent her own daughter deare.

Figs. 277 and 278.—From Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism (Inman, C. W.).

Fig. 279.—Bas Relievo on the Portal of the Temple of Montmorillon in France. From Antiquities of Cornwall (Borlase).

It is evident that Vere is here the equivalent of Proserpine, the Maid who was condemned to spend one-half her time in Hades, and that “Verray” was occasionally noxious is implied by the old sense attributed to this word of nightmare, e.g., Chaucer:—

Lord Jesus Christ and Seynte Benedykte

Bless this house from every wikked wight

Fro nyghte’s verray, etc.

Some authorities connoted this word verray with Werra, a Sclavonic deity, and the connection is probably well founded: the Cornish Furry dance was also termed the Flora dance.

Fig. 280.—The Church as a Dove with Six Wings. A Franco-German Miniature of the XI. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

The name Proserpine is seemingly akin to Pure Serpent—the same Serpent, perhaps, whose form is represented in extenso at Avebury: the Bona Dea of Crete was figured holding serpents and the nude figure on the left of Fig. 279 has been ingeniously, and, I think, rightly interpreted by Borlase as Truth, or Vera. It was doubtless some such similar emblem as originated the ridiculous story that St. Christine of Tyre was “tortured” by having live serpents placed at her breasts: “The two asps hung at her breasts and did her no harm, and the two adders wound them about her neck and licked up her sweat.”[542] Not only is this suffering Christine assigned to Tyre (in Italy), but she is said to have been enclosed in a certain tower and to have been set upon a burning tour or wheel. Christine is the feminine of Christ, and that Christ was identified with Sophia or Wisdom is obvious from the design herewith.

Fig. 281.—Jesus Christ as Saint Sophia. Miniature of Lyons, XII. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

The Sicilian coins of Janus depicted Columba or the Dove, and the same symbol of the Cretan, Epheia, Britomart, Athene, or Rhea figures in the hand of the Elf on page 627, and on the reverse of other British coins illustrated on the same page. The Dove is the acknowledged symbol of the Holy Ghost, yet the symbolists depicted even the immaculate Dove as duplex: the six wings of the parti-coloured Columba have in all probability an ultimate connection with the six beneficent world-supervisors of the Persian philosophy.

Fig. 282.—The Holy Ghost, as a Child, Floating on the Waters. From a Miniature of the XIV. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

In the Christian emblem below, the Holy Ghost is represented as a Child floating on the Waters of Chaos between the circles of Day and Night, and that the Supreme was the Parent alike of both Good and Evil is expressed in the verse: “I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things.” The preceding sentence runs: “There is none beside me. I am the Lord and there is none else.”[543] That this idea was prevalent among the Druids of the west is strongly to be inferred from an ancient chant still current among the Bretons, which begins—

Beautiful child of the Druid, answer me right well.

What would’st thou that I should sing?

Sing to me the series of number one, that I may learn it this very day.

There is no series for one, for One is Necessity alone.

The father of death, there is nothing before and nothing after.[544]

The Magna Mater of Fig. 266 might thus appropriately have been known as Fate, Destiny, Necessity, or Fortune. Fortuna is radically for, and with the Fortunes or fates may be connoted the English fairies known as Portunes. The Portunes are said to be peculiar to England, and are known by the French as Neptunes: the English Portunes are represented as diminutive little people who, “if anything is to be carried into the house, or any laborious work to be done, lend a hand and finish it sooner than any man could”.[545] A jocular and amiable little people who loved to warm themselves at the fire.

Fig. 283.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Among the heathen chants of the Spanish peasantry is one in which the number One stands for the wheel of Fortune, and the number six “for the loves you hold”. These six loves may be connoted with the six pinions of the Dove illustrated on page 486, and that Janus of the Dove was regarded as the Chaos, Ghost, or Cause is obvious from the words which are put into his mouth by Ovid: “The ancients called me Chaos (for I am the original substance). Observe, how I can unfold the deeds of past times. This lucid air, and the three other bodies which remain, fire, water, and earth, formed one heap.[546] As soon as this mass was liberated from the strife of its own discordant association, it sought new abodes. Fire flew upwards: air occupied the next position, and earth and water, forming the land and sea, filled the middle space. Then I, who was a globe, and formless, assumed a countenance and limbs worthy of a god. Even now, as a slight indication of my primitive appearance, my front and back are the same.”

In the mouth of Fig. 283 is the wheel of the four quarters, and variants of this wheel-cross form the design of a very large percentage of English coins: I here use the word English in preference to British as “there was no native coinage either in Scotland, Wales, or Ireland”: in England alone have prehistoric British coins been found,[547] and in England alone apparently were they coined. Somewhat the same conclusions are indicated by the wheel-cross which is peculiar to Wales, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man: neither in Scotland or Ireland does the circular form exist.[548]

Fig. 284.—Cretan Seal.

Fig. 285.—British. From English Coins and Tokens (Jewitt & Head).

Fig. 286.—British. From Evans.

Among the seals of Crete there has been found one figuring a ship and two half-moons: it has been supposed that this token signified that the devotee had ventured on a two months’ voyage and signalised the successful exploit by the fabrication of an ex voto; but if the subject in question actually represents a material vessel one may question whether the mariner could successfully have negotiated even a two hours’ trip. The pair of crescents which figure so frequently on the wheel-cross coins of Britain probably implied the twin lily-white maids of Druidic folk-song, and the superstitions in connection with this symbol of the two sickles—the word is essentially the same as cycle, Greek kuklos—seem in Anglesea or Mona even to linger yet.[549] Among sepulchral offerings found in a prehistoric barrow near Bridlington or Burlington, were “two pieces of flint chipped into the form of crescents,”[550] and it is possible that Ida the Flame bearer, whose name is popularly connected with flame bearer or Flamborough Head, was not the Anglian chieftain, but the divine Ida, Head, or Flame to whom all Forelands and Headlands were dedicated. With Bridlington or Burlington may be connoted the fact that this town of the children of Brid is situated in the Deira district, which was occupied by the Parisii: this name is by some authorities believed to be only a corruption of that of the Frisii, originally settlers from the opposite coast of Friesland.

The Etruscan name for Juno was Cupra, which may be connoted with Cabira, one of the titles of Venus, also with Cabura, the name of a fountain in Mesopotamia wherein Juno was said to bathe himself. The mysterious deities known as the Cabiri are described as “mystic divinities (? Phœnician origin) worshipped in various parts of the ancient world. The meaning of their name, their character, and nature are quite uncertain”.[551] Faber, in his Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabiri, states that the Cabiri were the same as the Abiri:[552] in Hebrew Cabirim means the Mighty Ones, and there is seemingly little doubt that Cabiri was originally great abiri. In Candia or Talchinea, the Cabiri were worshipped as the Telchines, and as chin or khan meant in Asia Minor Priest as well as King, and as the offices of Priest and King were anciently affiliated, the term talchin (which as we have seen was applied to St. Patrick) meant seemingly tall or chief King-Priest. The custom of Priest-Kings adopting the style and titles of their divinities renders it probable that the historical Telchins worshipped an archetypal Talchin. The original Telchins are described by Diodorus, as first inhabiting Rhodes, and the Colossus of Rhodes was probably an image of the divine Tall King or Chief King.

It is related that Rhea entrusted the infant Neptune to the care of the Telchines who were children of the sea, and that the child sea-god was reared by them in conjunction with Caphira or Cabira, the daughter of Oceanus. As Faber observes: “Caphira is evidently a mere variation of Cabira,” and he translates Cabira as Great Goddess: in view of the evidence already adduced one might likewise translate it Great Power, Great Pyre, or Great Phairy. The Cabiri are often equated with the Dioscuri or Great Pair, and these Twain were not infrequently expressed symbolically by Twin circles.

Fig. 287.—Mykenian.

Fig. 288.—Cretan.

Fig.289.—Scotch.

From Myths of Crete and Prehellenic Europe (Mackenzie, D. A.).

The emblem of the double disc, “barnacle,” or “spectacle ornament” is found most frequently in Scotland where it is attributed to the Picts: sometimes the discs are undecorated, others are elaborated by a zigzag or zed, which apparently signified the Central and sustaining Power, Fire, or Force. Figs. 287 and 288 from Crete represent the discs transfixed by a broca or spike and the winged ange or angel with a wand—the magic rod or wand which invariably denoted Power—may be designated King Eros. In Scotland the central brocco, i.e., skewer, shoot, or stalk is found sprouting into what one might term broccoli, and in Fig. 291 the dotted eyes, wheels, or paps are elaborated into sevens which possibly may have symbolised the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. Notable examples of this disc ornament occur at Doo Cave in Fife, and as the Scotch refer to a Dovecote as “Doocot,” it may be suggested that Doo Cave was a Dove Cave sacred to the deux, or duo, or Dieu. Other well-known specimens are found on a so-called “Brodie” stone and on the Inchbrayock stone in Forfarshire. Forfar, I have already suggested, was a land of St. Varvary: Overkirkhope, where the symbol also occurs, was presumably the hope or hill of Over, or uber, Church, and Ferriby,[553] in Lincolnshire, where the emblem is again found, was in all probability a by or abode of Ferri. The name Cupar may be connoted with Cupra—the Juno of Etruria—and Inchbrayock is radically Bray or Brock.

Figs. 290 to 292.—Scotch. From Archaic Sculpturings (Mann, L. M.).

Sometimes the discs—which might be termed Brick a Brack or, Bride’s Bairns—are centred by what looks like a tree (French arbre) or, in comparison with Fig. 295, from the catacombs, might be an anchor: it has no doubt rightly been assumed that this and similar carvings symbolised the Tree of Life with Adam and Eve on either hand. According to a recent writer: “The symbol group of a man and woman on either side of a tree with a serpent at times introduced is of pre-Christian origin. The figures narrowly considered as Adam and Eve and broadly as the human family are accompanied by the Tree which stands for Knowledge, and the serpent which represents Wisdom. This old world-wide symbol seems to crop up in Pictland twisted and changed in a curious fashion.”[554] One of these fantastic forms is, I think, the feathered elphin or antennaed solar face of Fig. 293.

Figs. 293 and 294.—From Archaic Sculpturings (Mann, L.M.).

Fig. 295.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Among the ancients the word Eva, not only denoted life, but it also meant serpent: the jumbled traditions of the Hebrews associated Eve and the Serpent unfavourably, but according to an early sect of Gnostic Christians known as the Ophites, i.e., Evites, or “Serpentites,” the Serpent of Genesis was a personification of the Good principle, who instructed Eve in all the learning of the world which has descended to us. There is frequent mention in the Old Testament of a people called the Hivites or Hevites, so called because, like the Christian Ophites, they were worshippers of the serpent. We meet again with Eff the serpent in F the fifth letter of the alphabet: this letter, according to Dr. Isaac Taylor, was formed originally like a horned or sacred serpent, and the two strokes of our F are the surviving traces of the two horns.[555]

Fig. 296.—From A Dictionary of Non-Classical Mythology (Edwardes and Spence).

The term Hivites is sometimes interpreted to mean Midlanders, which seems reasonable as they lived in the middle of Canaan. In connection with these serpent-worshipping Midlanders or Hivites it is significant that not only is the English Avebury described as being “situated in the very centre or heart of our country,”[556] but that it is geographically the very nave or bogel of the surrounding neighbourhood.

Fig. 297.—British. From Akerman.

Eva is in all probability the source of the word ivy, German epheu, for the evergreen ivy is notoriously a long-lived plant, and even by the early Christian Church[557] Ivy was accepted as the emblem of life and immortality. As immortality was the primary dogma of the Druids, hence perhaps why they and their co-worshippers decked themselves with wreaths of this undying and seemingly immortal plant.[558] The figure of the Græco-Egyptian “Jupiter,” known as Serapis, appears (supported by the Twins) surrounded by an ivy wreath, and that the ancient Jews ivy-decked themselves like the British on festival occasions is evident from the words of Tacitus: “Their priests it is true made use of fifes and cymbals: they were crowned with wreaths of ivy, and a vine wrought in gold was seen in their temple”.[559] The leaf on the British Viri coin here illustrated has been held to be a vine “which does not appear to have been borrowed from any Roman coin,” but, continues Sir John Evans, “whether this was an original type to signify the fertility of the soil in respect of vines or adapted from some other source it is hard to say”.[560] If the device be a Vine leaf it probably symbolised the True Vine; if a fig leaf it undoubtedly was the sign of Maggie Figgy, the Mother of Millions, and the Ovary of Everything: the Sunday before Easter used to be known as Fig Sunday, and on this occasion figs were eaten in large quantities.

Fig. 298.—Thrones.—Fiery Two-winged Wheels. From Didron.

Fig. 299.—The Trinity under the Form of Three Circles. From a French Miniature of the close of the XIII. Cent. From Didron.

Fig. 300.—French MS., XIII. Cent. From Didron.

From Aubrey’s plan of the Overton circle constituting the head of the serpent at Avebury, it will be seen that the neck was carefully modelled, and that a pair of barrows appeared at the mouth (see ante, page 335). This head of the Eve or serpent was a stone circle distant about a mile from the larger peripheries, and the whole design covered upwards of two miles of country. As already noted the serpent was the symbol of immortality and rejuvenescence, because it periodically sloughed its skin and reappeared in one more beautiful.

Fig. 301.—From Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism (Inman, C. W.).[561]

That the two and the three circles were taken over intact by Christianity is evident from the emblems illustrated on p. 499, and that the French possessed the tradition of Good Eva or the Good Serpent is manifest from Fig. 300.

The Iberian inscription around Fig. 301—a French example—has not been deciphered, but it is sufficiently evident that the emblem represents the Iberian Jupiter with Juno and the Tree of Life.

Fig. 302.—God the Father, without a Nimbus and Beardless, Condemning Adam to Till the Ground and Eve to Spin the Wool. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

The Jews or Judeans of to-day are known indifferently as either Jews or Hebrews, and it would seem that Jou was “Hebrew,” or, as the Italians write the word, Ebrea: the French for Jew is juif, evidently the same title as Jove or Jehovah.

In Fig. 302, Jehovah is rather surprisingly represented as a puer or boy: as already mentioned, the Eros of Etruria was named Epeur, and it is possible that the London church of St. Peter le Poor—which stood in Brode Street next Pawlet or Little Paul House—was originally a shrine of Jupiter the puer, or Jupiter the Boy.[562]

In the design now under consideration the Family consists of three—the Almighty and Adam and Eve—but frequently the holy group consists of five, the additional two probably being Cain and Abel, Cain who slew his brother Abel, being obviously Night or Evil. In the emblems here illustrated which are defined by Briquet as “cars”; four cycles are supported by a broca or spike, constituting the mystic five. In Jewish mysticism the Chariot of Jehovah, or Yahve, was regarded as “a kind of mystic way leading up to the final-goal of the soul”.[563]

Figs. 303 to 306.—Mediæval Paper Marks. From Les Filigranes (Briquet, C. M.).

The number of the Cabiri was indeterminate, and there is a probability that the sacerdotal Solar Chariot of the Cabiri, whether four or two-wheeled, originated the term cabriolet, whence our modern cab. I have elsewhere reproduced two pillars bearing the legend Cab, and we might assume that the two-wheeled vehicle illustrated, ante, page 454, represented a cab were it not for the official etymology of cabriolet. This term, we are told, is from cabriole, a caper, leap of a goat, “from its supposed lightness”.[564] I have never observed a cab either skipping like a ram, or capering like a goat; and in the days before springs the alleged skittishness of the cab must have been even less marked. In any case the particular vehicle illustrated ante, page 454, cannot with propriety be termed “a caperer,” for it is reproduced by the editor of Adamnan’s Life of Columba, as being no doubt the type of car in which the Saint, even without his lynch pins, successfully drove a sedate and undeviating course.

The goat or caper was a familiar emblem of Jupiter, and our words kid and goat are doubtless the German gott: the horns and the hoofs of the Solar goat—see ante, page 361—are perpetuated in the current notions of “Old Nick,” and in many parts of Europe Saints Nicholas and Michael are equated;[565] hence there is very little doubt that these two once occupied the position of the two Cabiri, Nick or Nixy being nox or night, and Michael—Light or Day.

The Gaulish coin here illustrated is described by Akerman, as “Two goats (?) on their hind legs face to face; the whole within a beaded circle”: on the reverse is a hog, and some other animal represented with a broccus, or saw on its back. As this is a coin of the people inhabiting Agedincum Senonum (now Sens), the revolving twain are probably gedin—either goats, kids, or gods, and the baroque animal with the broccus on its back may be identified with a boar. There is not much evidence in this coin, which was found at Brettenham, Norfolk, of “degradation” from the Macedonian stater illustrated ante, page 394, nevertheless, Sir John Evans sturdily maintains: “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”.[566]

Fig. 307.—Gaulish. From Akerman.

The Meigle in Perthshire, where the two-wheeled barrow or barouche was inscribed on the Thane stone, may be equated with St. Michael, and upon another stone at the same Meigle there occurs a carving which is defined as a group of four men placed in svastika form, one hand of each man holding the foot of the other. The author of Archaic Sculpturings describes this attitude as indicating the unbreakable character of the association of each figure with its neighbours, and expresses the opinion: “This elaborate variant of the symbol seems to symbolise aptly the four quarters of the earth, each quarter being represented by a man. The four quarters make a complete circle, and therefore all humanity, through love and affinity, should join from the four parts and form one inseparable bond of brotherhood.”[567]

Fig. 308.—British. From Evans.

The wheel of Fortune was sometimes represented by four kings, one on each quadrant, and this emblem was used not only as an inn-sign, but also in churches, notably in Norfolk—the land of the Ikeni. The authors of A History of Signboards cite continental examples surviving at Sienna, and in San Zeno at Verona. The wheels of San Zeno, Sienna, or Verona may be connoted with the Sceatta wheel-coin figured in No. 39 of page 364 ante, and with the seemingly revolving seals on the coin here illustrated.[568] The Sceatta four beasts connected by astral spokes are probably intended to denote seals, the phoca or seal having, as we have seen (ante, page 224), been associated with Chaos or Cause. In all probability the phoca was a token of the Phocean Greeks who founded Marseilles: the phoca was pre-eminently associated with Proteus, and in the Faroe Islands they have a curious idea that seals are the soldiers of Pharaoh who was drowned in the sea. Pharaoh, or Peraa, as the Egyptian wrote it, was doubtless the representative Priest-King of Phra, the Egyptian Sun-god, and the drowning of Pharaoh in the Red Sea was probably once a phairy-tale based on the blood-red demise of a summer sun sinking beneath the watery horizon.

On Midsummer Day in England children used to chant—

Barnaby Bright, Barnaby Bright,

The longest day and the shortest night,

whence it would appear that Barnaby was the auburn[569] divinity who was further connected with the burnie bee, lady bird, or “Heaven’s little chicken”. The rhyme—

Burnie bee, Burnie bee, fly away home

Your house is on fire, your children will burn,

is supposed by Mannhardt to have been a charm intended to speed the sun across the dangers of sunset, in other words, the house on fire, or welkin of the West.

The name Barnabas or Barnaby is defined as meaning son of the master or son of comfort; Bernher is explained as lord of many children, and hence it would seem that St. Barnaby may be modernised into Bairnsfather. In this connection the British Bryanstones may be connoted with the Irish Bernesbeg and with “The Stone of the Fruitful Fairy”. Bertram is defined by the authorities as meaning fair and pure, and Ferdy or Ferdinand, the Spanish equivalent of this name, may be connoted with the English Faraday.

Fig. 309.—Jehovah, as the God of Battles. Italian Miniature, close of the XII. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Fig. 310.—Emblem of the Deity. Nineveh (Layard).

The surname Barry, with which presumably may be equated variants such as Berry and Bray, is translated as being Celtic for good marksman: the Cretans were famed archers, and the archery of the English yeomen was in its time perhaps not less famous. If Barry meant good marksman, it is to be inferred that the archetypal Barry was Jou, Jupiter, or Jehovah as here represented, and as there is no known etymology for yeoman, it may be that the original yeomen were like the Barrys, “good marksmen”. The Greeks portrayed Apollo, and the Tyrians Adad, as a Sovereign Archer, and as the lord of an unerring bow. The name Adad is seemingly ad-ad, a duplication of Ad probably once meaning Head Head, or Haut Haut,[570] and the Celtic dad or tad is presumably a corroded form of Adad. The famous archer Robin Hood, now generally accepted as a myth survival, will be considered later; meanwhile it may here be noted that the authorities derive the surnames Taddy, Addy, Adkin, Aitkin, etc., from Adam. One may connote Adkin or Little Ad with Hudkin, a Dutch and German elf akin to Robin Goodfellow: “Hudkin is a very familiar devil, who will do nobody hurt, except he receive injury; but he cannot abide that, nor yet be mocked. He talketh with men friendly, sometimes visibly, sometimes invisibly. There go as many tales upon this Hudkin in some parts of Germany as there did in England on Robin Goodfellow.”[571] To this Hud the Leicestershire place-name Odestone or Odstone near Twycross—query Two or Twa cross—may be due.

I have suggested that the word bosom or bosen, was originally the plural of boss, whence it is probable that the name Barnebas meant the Bairn, Boss, or teat. The word bosse was also used to denote a fountain or gush, and the Boss Alley, which is still standing near St. Paul’s, may mark either the site of a spring, or more probably of what was known as St. Paul’s Stump. As late as 1714 the porters of Billingsgate used to invite the passer-by to buss or kiss Paul’s Stump; if he complied they gave him a name, and he was compelled to choose a godfather: if he refused to conform to the custom he was lifted up and bumped heavily against the stump. This must have been the relic of an extremely ancient formality, and it is not unlikely that the Church of Boston in Norfolk covers the site of a similar stump: Boston, originally Ickenhoe, a haw or hill of Icken, is situated in what was once the territory of the Ikeni, and its church tower to this day is known as “Boston Stump”. At Boskenna (bos or abode of ikenna?) in the parish of St. Buryan, Cornwall, is a stone circle, and a cromlech “thought to have been the seat of an arch Druid”. The chief street of Boston is named Burgate, there is a Burgate at Canterbury near which are Bossenden Woods, and Bysing Wood.

In the West of England the numerous bos- prefixes generally mean abode: one of the earliest abodes was the beehive hut, which was essentially a boss.

At Porlock (Somerset) is Bossington Beacon; there is a Bossington near Broughton, and a Bosley at Prestbury, Cheshire. In the immediate proximity of Bosse Alley, London, Stow mentions a Brickels Lane, and there still remains a Brick Hill, Brooks Wharf, and Broken Wharf. It is not improbable that the river Walbrook which did not run around the walls of London but passed immediately through the heart of the city was named after Brook or Alberick, or Oberon: in any case the generic terms burn, brook, and bourne (Gothic brunna, a spring or well), have to be accounted for, and we may seemingly watch them forming at the English river Brue, and at least two English bournes, burns, or brooks known as Barrow.

We have already considered the pair of military saints famous at Byzantium or St. Michael’s Town: in the neighbourhood of Macclesfield, Cheshire, is a Bosley: the Bosmere district in Cumberland includes a Mickfield, in view of which it becomes interesting to note, near Old Jewry, in London, the parish church of St. Michael, called St. Michael at Bassings hall. With Michael at Bassings hall may be connoted St. Michael of Guernsey, an island once divided into two great fiefs, of which one was the property of Anchetil Vicomte du Bessin. The bussing of St. Paul’s Stump or the Bosse of Billingsgate had evidently its parallel in the Fief du Bessin, for Miss Carey in her account of the Chevauchee of St. Michael observes that, “the one traditional dance connected with all our old festivals and merry-makings has always been the one known as A mon beau Laurier, where the dancers join hands and whirl round, curtsey, and kiss a central object”.[572]

We may reasonably assume that John Barton, who is mentioned by Stow as a great benefactor to the church of St. Michael, was either John Briton, or John of some particular Barton, possibly of the neighbouring Pardon Churchyard. The adjacent Bosse Alley is next Huggen Lane, wherein is the Church of All Hallows, and running past the church of St. Michael at Bassings hall is another Hugan Lane. Gyne, as in gynæcology, is Greek for woman, whence the gyne or queen of the Ikenian Ickenhoe or Boston Stump, may have meant simply woman, maiden, queen, or “a flaunting extravagant quean”. Somewhat east from the Sun tavern,[573] on the north side of this Michael’s church, is Mayden Lane, “now so called,” says Stow, “but of old time Ingene Lane, or Ing Lane”: “down lower,” he continues, “is Silver Street (I think of Silversmiths dwelling there)”. It has been seen that Silver Streets are ubiquitous in England, and as this Silver Street is in the immediate proximity of Adle Street and Ladle Lane, there is some presumption that Silver was here the Leda, or Lady, or Ideal, by whom it was said that Jupiter in the form of a swan became the Parent of the Heavenly twins or Fairbairns. We have considered the sign of the Swan with two necks as found near Goswell Road, and the neighbouring Goose Lane, Windgoose Lane, Pentecost Lane, and Chiswell Street are all in this connection interesting. I have already suggested that Angus, Aengus, or Oengus, the pre-Celtic divinity of New Grange, meant ancient goose: Oengus was alternatively known as Sen-gann or Old Gann, connected with whom were two young Ganns who were described sometimes as the sons of Old Gann, sometimes as his father. In the opinion of Prof. Macalister Oengus, alias Dagda mor, the Great Good Fire, alias Sengann, “was not originally son of the two youths, but father of the two youths, and he thus falls into line with other storm gods as the parent of Dioscuri.”[574]

There is little doubt that Aengus, the ancient goose, the Father of St. Bride, was Sengann the Old Gander, and in connection with St. Michael’s goose it is noteworthy that Sinann, the Goddess of the Shannon, was alternatively entitled Macha. Mr. Westropp informs[575] us that Sengann was the god of the Ganganoi who inhabited Connaught, hence no doubt he was the same as Great King Conn, and Sinann was the same as Good Queen Eda.

At the north end of London Bridge stands Old Swan Pier, upon the site of which was once Ebgate, an ancient water-gate. “In place of this gate,” says Stow, “is now a narrow passage to the Thames called Ebgate Lane, but more commonly the Old Swan.” Ebgate may be connoted with the neighbouring Abchurch Lane, where still stands what Stow termed “the parish church of St. Marie Abchurch, Apechurch, or Upchurch, as I have read it,” and this same root seemingly occurs in the Upwell of St. Olave Upwell distant only a few hundred yards. This spot accurately marks the hub of ancient London, and there is here still standing the once-famous London stone: “some have imagined,” says Stow, “the same to be set up by one John, or Thomas Londonstone, dwelling there against, but more likely it is that such men have taken name of the stone than the stone of them”.

There is little doubt that London stone, where oaths were sworn and proclamations posted, was the Perry stone of the men who made the six main roads or tribal tracks which centred there, of which great wheel Abchurch formed seemingly the hob or hub. Abchurch was in all probability originally a church of Hob, and it may aptly be described as one of the many primitive abbeys: there is an Ibstone at Wallingford, which the modern authorities—like the “John Londonstone” theorists of Stow’s time—urge, was probably Ipa’s stone: there is an Ipsley at Redditch, assumed to be either aspentree meadow or perhaps Aeppas mead. Ipstones at Cheadle, we are told, “may be from a man as above”; of Hipswell in Yorkshire Mr. Johnston concludes, “there is no name at all likely here, so this must be well at the hipple or little heap”. But as Hipswell figures in Leland as Ipreswell, is there any absolute must about the “hipple,” and is it not possible that Ipres or Hipswell may have been dedicated to the same hipha or hip, the Prime Parent of our Hip! Hip! Hip! who was alternatively the Ypre of Ypres Hall and Upwell by Abchurch? At Halifax there is a Hipperholme which appeared in Domesday as Huperun, and here the authorities are really and seriously nonplussed. “It seems hard to explain Huper or Hipper. There is nothing like it in Onom, unless it be Hygebeort or Hubert; but it may be a dissimilated form of hipple, hupple, and mean ‘at the little heaps’.”[576]

Let us quit these imaginary “little heaps” and consider the position at the Halifax Hipperholme, or Huperun. The church here occupied the site of an ancient hermitage said to have been dedicated to St. John the Baptist, the Father of hermits, and to have possessed as a sacred relic the alleged true face of St. John: my authority continues that this attracted great numbers of pilgrims who “approached by four ways, which afterwards formed the main town thoroughfares concentrating at the parish church; and it is supposed to have given rise to the name Halifax, either in the sense of Holy Face with reference to the face of St. John, or in the sense of Holy ways with reference to the four roads, the word fax being Old Norman French for highways”.[577] More recent authorities have compared the word with Carfax at Oxford, which is said to mean Holy fork, or Holy road, converging as in a fork. The roads at Carfax constitute a four-limbed cross; Oxenford used to be considered “the admeasured centre of the whole island”;[578] it was alternatively known as Rhydychain, whence I do not think that Rhydychain meant a ford for oxen, but more probably either Rood King, or Ruddy King.

Fig. 311.—From The Cross: Heathen and Christian (Brock, M.).

In 1190 Halifax was referred to as Haliflex, upon which the Rev. J. B. Johnston comments: “the l seems to be a scribe’s error, and flex must be feax. Holy flax would make no sense. In Domesday it seems to be called Feslei, can the fes be feax too?” In view of the cruciform streets of Chichester, of our cruciform rood or rota coins, and of the four rivers supposed by all authorities to flow to the four quarters out of Paradise, is it not possible that four-quartered Haliflex was a fay’s lea or meadow, whose founders built their “abbey”[579] in the true-face form of the Holy Flux or Fount, the ain or flow of living water? Four ains or eyes are clearly exhibited on the emblems here illustrated, which show the four-quartered sacramental buns or brioches, whence the modern Good Friday bun has descended.

Fig. 312.—Roman roads. From A New Description of England and Wales (Anon. 1724).

It was a prevalent notion among our earliest historians that “In such estimation was Britain held by its inhabitants, that they made in it four roads from end to end, which were placed under the King’s protection to the intent that no one should dare to make an attack upon his enemy on these roads”.[580] These four great roads, dating from the time of King Belinus, and supposedly running from sea to sea, were probably mythical, but in view of the sanctity of public highways and the King’s Peace which was enforced thereon, it is not improbable that numerous “Holloways”—now supposed to mean hollow or sunk ways—were originally and actually holy ways.

The Punjaub is so named because it is watered not by four but by five rivers, and that five streams possessed a mystic significance in British mythology is evident from the story of Cormac’s voyage to the Land of Paradise or Promise.[581] “Palaces of bronze and houses of white silver, thatched with white bird’s wings are there. Then he sees in the garth a shining fountain with five streams flowing out of it, and the hosts in turn a-drinking its water.”[582]

It has been recently pointed out that the Celtic conception of Paradise “offers the closest parallel to the Chinese,” whence it is significant to find that in the Chinese “Abyss of Assembly” there were supposed to lie five fairy islands of entrancing beauty, which were inhabited by spirit-like beings termed shên jên.[583] I have in my possession a Chinese temple-ornament consisting of a blue porcelain broccus of five rays or peaks, which, like the five fundamental cones of the Etruscan tomb (ante, p. 237), in all probability represent the five bergs or islands of the blessed. The inner circle of Stonehenge consisted of five upstanding trilithons of which the stones came—by popular repute—from Ireland. Among the Irish divinities mentioned by Mr. Westropp is not only the gracious Aine who was worshipped by five Firbolg tribes, but also an old god who kindled five streams of magic fire from which his sons—the fathers of the Delbna tribes—all sprang.[584]

It will be remembered that the Avebury district is the boss, gush, or spring of five rivers, and Avebury or Abury was almost without doubt another “abbey” or bri of Ab on similar lines to the six-spoked hub, hob, or boss of Abchurch, Londonstone. It is difficult to believe that the six roads meeting at Abchurch arranged themselves so symmetrically by chance, and it is still more difficult to attribute them to the Roman Legions.

As Mr. Johnson has pointed out there is a current supposition, seemingly well based, that some of the supposedly Roman roads represent older trackways, straightened and adapted for rougher usage.[585] That London stone at Abchurch was the hub, navel or bogel of the Cantian British roads may be further implied by the immediately adjacent Bucklesbury, now corrupted into Bucklersbury. Parts of the Ichnield Way—notably at Broadway—are known as Buckle Street, the term buckle here being seemingly used in the sense of Bogle or Bogie. It is always the custom of a later race to attribute any great work of unknown origin to Bogle or the Devil, e.g., the Devil’s Dyke, and innumerable other instances.

Ichnos in Greek means track, ichneia a tracking; whence the immemorial British track known as the Ichnield Way may reasonably be connoted with the ancient Via Egnatio near Berat in Albania. That Albion, like Albania, possessed very serviceable ways before the advent of any Romans is clear from Cæsar’s Commentaries. After mentioning the British rearguard—“about 4000 charioteers only being left”—Cæsar continues: “and when our cavalry for the sake of plundering and ravaging the more freely scattered themselves among the fields, he (Cassivelaunus) used to send out charioteers from the woods by all the well-known roads and paths, and to the great danger of our horse engage with them, and this source of fear hindered them from straggling very extensively”.[586]

It has been seen that the Welsh tracks by which the armies marched to battle were known as Elen’s Ways, whence possibly six such Elen’s Ways concentrated in the heart of London, which I have already suggested was an Elen’s dun. In French forests radiating pathways, known as etoiles or stars, were frequent, and served the most utilitarian purpose of guiding hunters to a central Hub or trysting-place.

One of the marvels which impress explorers in Crete is the excellence of the ancient Candian roads. According to Tacitus the British, under Boudicca, chiefly Cantii, Cangians, and Ikeni, “brought into the field an incredible multitude”.[587] The density of the British population in ancient times is indicated by the extent of prehistoric reliques, whereas the Roman invaders were never numerically more than a negligible fraction. It is now admitted by historians that Roman civilisation did not succeed in striking the same deep roots in British soil as it did into the nationality of Gaul or Spain. “For one thing, the numbers both of Roman veterans and of Romanised Britons remained comparatively small; for another, beyond the Severn and beyond the Humber lay the multitudes of the un-Romanised tribes, held down only by the terror of the Roman arms, and always ready to rise and overwhelm the alien culture.”[588]

Commenting upon the Icknield Way, Dr. Guest remarks the lack upon its course of any Roman relics, a want, however, which, as he says, is amply compensated for by the many objects, mostly of British antiquity, which crowd upon us as we journey westward—by the tumuli and “camps” which show themselves on right and left—by the six gigantic earthworks which in the intervals of eighty miles were raised at widely different periods to bar progress along this now deserted thoroughfare.[589] In a similar strain Mr. Johnson writes of the Pilgrim’s Way in Surrey: “To my thinking, the strongest argument for the prehistoric way lies in the plea expressed by the grim old earthworks and silent barrows which stud its course, and by the numerous relics dug up here and there, relics of which we may rest assured not one-half has been put on record.”[590]

Tacitus pictures a Briton as reasoning to himself “compute the number of men born in freedom and the Roman invaders are but a handfull”.[591] Is it in these circumstances likely that the Roman handful troubled to construct six great arteries or main roads centring to London stone?

The Romans ran military roads from castra to castra, but in Roman eyes London was merely “a place not dignified with the name of a colony, but the chief residence of merchants and the great mart of trade and commerce”.[592]

Holloway Road, in London, implies, I think, at least one Holy Way, and there seems to me a probability that London stone was a primitive Jupiterstone, yprestone, preston, pray stone, or phairy stone, similar to the holy centre-stone of sacred Athens: “Look upon the dance, Olympians; send us the grace of Victory, ye gods who come to the heart of our city, where many feet are treading and incense streams: in sacred Athens come to the holy centre-stone”.

FOOTNOTES:

[506] Iliad, Bk. XX., 434.

[507] A King Cunedda figures in Welsh literature as the first native ruler of Wales, and tradition makes Cunedda a son of the daughter of Coel, probably the St. Helen who was the daughter of Old King Cole, and who figures as the London Great St. Helen and Little St. Helen: possibly, also, as the ancient London goddess Nehallenia = New Helen, Nelly = Ellen.

[508] History, Bk. V.

[509] Church, A. J. and Brodribb, W. J., The History of Tacitus, 1873, p. 229.

[510] Quoted in Celtic Britain, Rhys, Sir J., p. 74.

[511] Address to British Association.

[512] Quoted in The Veil of Isis, Reade, W. W., p. 47.

[513] Wilkie, James, Saint Bride, the Greatest Woman of the Celtic Church.

[514] Nonnus, quoted from A Dissertation on The Mysteries of the Cabiri, Faber, G. S., vol. ii., p. 313.

[515] Huyshe, W., The Life of St. Columba, p. 247.

[516] Canon ffrench, Prehistoric Faith and Worship, p. 56.

[517] Hughes, T., The Scouring of the White Horse, p. 111.

[518] Apart from recent experiences and the records of the Saxon invaders of this country, one may connote the candid maxims of the Frederick upon whom the German nation has thought proper to confer the sobriquet of “Great,” e.g.:—

“It was the genius of successive rulers of our race to be guided only by self-interest, ambition, and the instinct of self-preservation.”

“When Prussia shall have made her fortune, she will be able to give herself the air of good-faith and of constancy which is only suitable for great States or small Sovereigns.” “As for war, it is a profession in which the smallest scruple would spoil everything.”

“Nothing exercises a greater tyranny over the spirit and heart than religion.... Do we wish to make a treaty with a Power? If we only remember that we are Christians all is lost, we shall always be duped.”

“Do not blush at making alliances with the sole object of reaping advantage for yourself. Do not commit the vulgar fault of not abandoning them when you believe it to be to your advantage to do so; and, above all, ever follow this maxim that to despoil your neighbours is to take from them the means of doing you harm.”

In the eyes of the stupid and unappreciative Britons the Saxons were “swine,” and the “loathest of all things,” vide Layamon’s Brut, e.g.: “Lo! where here before us the heathen hounds, who slew our ancestors with their wicked crafts; and they are to us in land loathest of all things. Now march we to them, and starkly lay on them, and avenge worthily our kindred, and our realm, and avenge the mickle shame by which they have disgraced us, that they over the waves should have come to Dartmouth. And all they are forsworn, and all they shall be destroyed; they shall be all put to death, with the Lord’s assistance! March we now forward, fast together”—(Everyman’s Library, p. 195).

“The Saxons set out across the water, until their sails were lost to sight. I know not what was their hope, nor the name of him who put it in their mind, but they turned their boats, and passed through the channel between England and Normandy. With sail and oar they came to the land of Devon, casting anchor in the haven of Totnes. The heathen breathed out threatenings and slaughter against the folk of the country. They poured forth from their ships, and scattered themselves abroad amongst the people, searching out arms and raiment, firing homesteads and slaying Christian men. They passed to and fro about the country, carrying off all they found beneath their hands. Not only did they rob the hind of his weapon, but they slew him on his hearth with his own knife. Thus throughout Somerset and a great part of Dorset, these pirates spoiled and ravaged at their pleasure, finding none to hinder them at their task”—(Ibid., p. 47).

[519] Allen J. Romilly, Celtic Art in Pagan and Christian Times, p. 130.

[520] A Guide to the Antiquities of the Iron Age, p. 89.

[521] Quoted by J. Romilly Allen, in Celtic Art, p. 138.

[522] Rev. Wm. Greenwell and Parker Brewis, Archæologia, vol. lxi., pp. 439, 472 (1909).

[523] Rev. Wm. Greenwell and Parker Brewis, Archæologia, vol. lxi., p. 4.

[524] The standard supposition that Smithfield is a corruption of smooth field may or may not be well founded.

[525] Bohn’s ed., p. 382.

[526] The psychology of Homer’s description of the Vulcan menage is curiously suggestive of a modern visit to the village blacksmith:—

“Him swelt’ring at his forge she found, intent

On forming twenty tripods, which should stand

The wall surrounding of his well-built house,

The silver-footed Queen approach’d the house,

Charis, the skilful artist’s wedded wife,

Beheld her coming, and advanc’d to meet;

And, as her hand she clasp’d, address’d her thus:

‘Say, Thetis of the flowing robe, belov’d

And honour’d, whence this visit to our house,

An unaccustom’d guest? but come thou in,

That I may welcome thee with honour due.’

Thus, as she spoke, the goddess led her in,

And on a seat with silver studs adorn’d,

Fair, richly wrought, a footstool at her feet,

She bade her sit; then thus to Vulcan call’d;

‘Haste hither, Vulcan; Thetis asks thine aid.’

Whom answer’d thus the skill’d artificer:

‘An honour’d and a venerated guest

Our house contains; who sav’d me once from woe,

Then thou the hospitable rites perform,

While I my bellows and my tools lay by.’

He said, and from the anvil rear’d upright

His massive strength; and as he limp’d along,

His tott’ring knees were bow’d beneath his weight.

The bellows from the fire he next withdrew,

And in a silver casket plac’d his tools;

Then with a sponge his brows and lusty arms

He wip’d, and sturdy neck and hairy chest.

He donn’d his robe, and took his weighty staff;

Then through the door with halting step he pass’d;

... with halting gait,

Pass’d to a gorgeous chair by Thetis’ side,

And, as her hand he clasp’d, address’d her thus:

‘Say Thetis, of the flowing robe, belov’d

And honour’d, whence this visit to our house,

An unaccustom’d guest? say what thy will,

And, if within my pow’r esteem it done.’”

Iliad, Bk. XVIII., p. 420-80.

[527] British Museum, A Guide to the Antiquities of the Early Iron Age, p. 54.

[528] “Antiquities to be noted therein are: First the street of Lothberie, Lathberie, or Loadberie (for by all these names have I read it), took the name (as it seemeth) of berie, or court of old time there kept, but by whom is grown out of memory. This street is possessed for the most part by founders, that cast candlesticks, chafing-dishes, spice mortars, and such like copper or laton works and do afterward turn them with the foot, and not with the wheel, to make them smooth and bright with turning and scrating (as some do term it), making a loathsome noise to the by-passers that have not been used to the like, and therefore by them disdainfully called Lothberie.”—London (Ev. Lib.), p. 248.

[529] Phenomena, p. xvii.

[530] Stow, London, p. 221.

[531] Giraldus Cambrensis, p. 97.

[532] Cf. Rhys, Sir J., Celtic Heathendom, p. 613.

[533] Cf. A New Light on the Renaissance and The Lost Language of Symbolism.

[534] Windle, B. C. A., Life in Early Britain, p. 116.

[535] Cacus figures in mythology as a huge giant, the son of Vulcan, and the stealer of Hercules’ oxen.

[536] Duncan, T., The Religions of Profane Antiquity, p. 59.

[537] Hazlitt, W. Carew, Faith and Folklore, vol. i., p. 210.

[538] A trace of the old sacrificial eating?

[539] Gomme, L., Folklore as an Historic Science, p. 43.

[540] See Johnson, W., Byways of British Archæology. “Among the Saxons only a high priest might lawfully ride a mare,” p. 436.

[541] Faber, G. S., The Mysteries of the Cabiri, i., 220.

[542] Golden Legend, iv., 96.

[543] Is. xlv. 7.

[544] Quoted from Eckenstein, Miss Lena, Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes, p. 153.

[545] Keightley, Fairy Mythology, p. 285.

[546] The “one heap” of chaos was illustrated ante, p. 224.

[547] Allen F. Romilly, Celtic Art, p. 78.

[548] Ibid., p. 188.

[549] The following letter appeared in Folklore of June 29, 1918:—

“Twenty-five years ago an old man in one of the parishes of Anglesey invariably bore or rather wore a sickle over his neck—in the fields, and on the road, wherever he went. He was rather reticent as to the reason why he wore it, but he clearly gave his questioner to understand that it was a protection against evil spirits. This custom is known in Welsh as ‘gwisgo’r gorthrwm,’ which literally means ‘wearing the oppression’. Gorthrwm = gor, an intensifying affix = super, and trwm = heavy, so that the phrase perhaps would be more correctly rendered ‘wearing the overweight’. It is not easy to see the connection between the practice and the idea either of overweight or oppression; still, that was the phrase in common use.

“For a similar reason, that is, protection from evil spirits during the hours of the night, it was and is a custom to place two scythes archwise over the entrance-side of the wainscot bed found in many of the older cottages of Anglesey. It is difficult to find evidence of the existence of this practice to-day as the old people no doubt feel that it is contrary to their prevailing religious belief and will not confess their faith in the efficacy of a ‘pagan’ rite which they are yet loth to abandon.

“R. Gwynedon Davies.”

[550] Wright T., Essays on Arch. Subjects, i., 26.

[551] Smith, W., A Smaller Classical Dictionary.

[552] Vol. i., p. 210.

[553] Domesday Ferebi, “probably dwelling of the comrade or partner”. Do the authorities mean friend?

[554] Mann, L., Archaic Sculpturings, p. 30.

[555] Cf. The Alphabet, i., 12.

[556] Lord Avebury. Preface to A Guide to Avebury, p. 5.

[557] Durandus, Rationale.

[558] “Ruddy was the sea-beach and the circular revolution was performed by the attendance of the white bands in graceful extravagance when the assembled trains were assembled in dancing and singing in cadence with garlands and ivy branches on the brow.”—Cf. Davies, E. Mythology of British Druids.

[559] History, V., 5.

[560] Ancient British Coins, p. 178.

[561] “Copied by Higgins, Anacalypsis, on the authority of Dubois, who states (vol. iii., p. 88), that it was found on a stone in a church in France, where it had been kept religiously for six hundred years. Dubois regards it as wholly astrological, and as having no reference to the story told in Genesis.”

[562] It is quite improbable that there was any foundation for Stow’s surmise that the epithet Poor was applied to the parish of St. Peter in Brode Street, “for a difference from others of that name, sometimes peradventure a poor parish”. It is, however, possible that the church was dedicated to Peter the Hermit, i.e., the poor Peter.

[563] Cf. Abelson, J., Jewish Mysticism, p. 34.

[564] Cf. also Brachet A., Ety. Dictionary of French Language: “A two-wheeled carriage which being light leaps up”. Had our authorities been considering phaeton, this definition might have passed muster. Although Skeat connects phaeton with the Solar Charioteer he nevertheless connotes phantom. Why?

[565] Blackie, C., Place-names, p. 137.

[566] Coins of the Ancient Britons, p. 121.

[567] P. 28.

[568] It is a miracle that this and the other coins illustrated on page 364 did not go into the dustbin. The official estimate of their value and interest is expressed in the following reference from Hawkin’s Silver Coins of England, p. 17:—

“After the final departure of the Romans, about the year 450, the history of the coinage is involved in much obscurity; the coins of that people would of course continue in circulation long after the people themselves had quitted the shores, and it is not improbable that the rude and uncouth pieces, which are imitations of their money, and are scarce because they are rejected from all cabinets and thrown away as soon as discovered, may have been struck during the interval between the Romans and Saxons.”

The italics are mine, and comment would be inadequate. Happily, in despite of “the practised numismatist,” Time, which antiquates and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor monuments.

[569] Auburn hair is golden-red—hence I am able to recognise only a remote comparison with alburnum, the white sap wood or inner bark of trees.

[570] “We also find Adad numbered among the gods whom the Syrians worshipped; nevertheless we find but little concerning him, and that little obscure and unsatisfactory, either in ancient or modern writers. Macrobius says, “The Assyrians, or rather the Syrians, give the name Adad to the god whom they worship, as the highest or greatest,” and adds that the signification of this name is the One or the Only. This writer also gives us clearly to understand that the Syrians adored the sun under this name; at least, the surname Adad, which was given to the sun by the natives of Heliopolis, makes them appear as one and the same.”—Christmas, H. Rev., Universal Mythology, p. 119.

[571] Discourse concerning Devils, annexed to The Discovery of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot, i., chap. xxi.

[572] Folklore, xxv., 4, p. 426.

[573] “The Sun and Moon have been considered as signs of pagan origin, typifying Apollo and Diana,” History of Signboards, p. 496.

[574] Proc. of Royal Irish Acad., xxxiv., c. 10-11, pp. 318, 320.

[575] Ibid., c. 8, p. 159.

[576] Johnston, Rev. J. B., The Place-names of England and Wales, p. 304.

[577] Wilson, J. M., Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales, i., 839.

[578] Herbert, A., Cyclops Christianus, p. 93.

[579] In Ireland an “abbey” is a cell or hermitage.

[580] Cf. Guest, Dr., Origines Celticæ, ii., 223.

[581] The name Cormac is defined as meaning son of a chariot. Is it to be assumed that the followers of Great Cormac understood a physical road car?

[582] Wentz., W. Y. E., The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, p. 341.

[583] “The inhabitants are called shên jên, spirit-like beings, a term hardly synonymous with hsien, though the description of them is consistent with the recognised characteristics of hsien. The passage runs as follows: ‘Far away on the Isle of Ku-shê there dwell spirit-like beings whose flesh is [smooth] as ice and [white] as snow, and whose demeanour is as gentle and unassertive as that of a young girl. They eat not of the Five Grains, but live on air and dew. They ride upon the clouds with flying dragons for their teams, and roam beyond the Four Seas. The shên influences that pervade that isle preserve all creatures from petty maladies and mortal ills, and ensure abundant crops every year.’”—Yetts, Major W. Perceval, Folklore, XXX., i., p. 89.

[584] Proc. Roy. Irish Acad., xxxiv., c. 8, p. 135.

[585] Folk Memory, p. 339.

[586] De B. Gallico, v., 19.

[587] Annals, xxxiv.

[588] Hearnshaw, F. J. C., England in the Making, p. 22.

[589] Origines Celticæ, ii., 240.

[590] Folk Memory, p. 349.

[591] Agricola, xv.

[592] Tacitus, Annals, xxxiii.

CHAPTER X
HAPPY ENGLAND

“In the old time every Wood and Grove, Field and Meadow, Hill and Cave, Sea and River, was tenanted by tribes and communities of the great Fairy Family, and at least one of its members was a resident in every House and Homestead where the kindly virtues of charity and hospitality were practised and cherished. This was the faith of our forefathers—a graceful, trustful faith, peopling the whole earth with beings whose mission was to watch over and protect all helpless and innocent things, to encourage the good, to comfort the forlorn, to punish the wicked, and to thwart and subdue the overbearing.”—Anon, The Fairy Family, 1857.

“It is very much better to believe in a number of gods than in none at all.”—W. B. Yeats.

It is generally supposed that the site of London has been in continuous occupation since that remote period when the flint-knappers chipped their implements at Gray’s Inn, and the pile-dwelling communities, whose traces have been found in the neighbourhood of London Stone, drove their first stakes into the surrounding marshes. Not only are there in London the material evidences of antediluvian occupation, but “the fact remains that in the city of London there are more survivals from past history than can be found within the compass of any other British city, or of any other area in Britain.”[593]

Sir Laurence Gomme assigns some importance to the place-name “Britaine Street”—now “Little Britain”—where, according to Stow, the Earls of Britain were lodged, but it is probable that in Upwell, Ebgate, Abchurch, Apechurch or Upchurch, we may identify relics of an infinitely greater antiquity.

When Cæsar paid his flying visit to these islands he learned at the mouth of the Thames that what he terms an oppidum or stronghold of the British was not far distant, and that a considerable number of men and cattle were there assembled. As it has been maintained that London was the stronghold here referred to, the term oppidum may possibly have been a British word, Cæsar’s testimony being: “The Britons apply the name of oppidum to any woodland spot difficult to access, and fortified with a rampart and trench to which they are in the habit of resorting in order to escape a hostile raid”.[594] That the dum of oppidum was equivalent to dun is manifest from the place-name Dumbarton, which was originally Dunbrettan.

In view of the natural situation of St. Alban’s there is a growing opinion among archæologists that London, and not St. Alban’s, was the stronghold which stood the shock of Roman conquest when Cæsar took the oppidum of Cassivellaunus.

The inscriptions Ep, Eppi, and Ippi figure frequently on British coins, and there were probably local hobby stones, hobby towns, and oppi duns in the tribal centre of every settlement of hobby-horse worshippers. In Durham is Hoppyland Park, near Bridgewater is Hopstone, near Yarmouth is Hopton, and Hopwells; and Hopwood’s, Happy Valley’s, Hope Dale’s, Hope Point’s, Hopgreen’s, Hippesley’s and Apsley’s may be found in numerous directions. It is noteworthy that none of these terms can have had any relation to the hop plant, for the word hops is not recorded until the fifteenth century; nor, speaking generally, have they any direct connection with hope, meaning “the point of the low land mounting the hill whence the top can be seen”.[595]

The word hope, meaning expectation, is in Danish haab, in German hoffe: Hopwood, near Hopton, is at Alvechurch (Elf Church?), apart from which straw one would be justified in the assumption that Hop, Hob, or Hoph, where it occurs in place-names, had originally reference to Hob-with-a-canstick, alias Hop-o’-my-Thumb. The Hebrew expression for the witch of Endor, consulted by King Saul, is ob or oub, but in Deuteronomy xviii. 11, the term oph is used to denote a familiar spirit.[596] As we find a reference in Shakespeare to “urchins, ouphes, and fairies,” the English ouphes would seem to have been one of the orders of the Elphin realm: the authorities equate it with alph or alp, and the word has probably survived in the decadence of Kipling’s “muddied oaf”.

Offa, the proper name, is translated by the dictionaries as meaning mild, gentle: it is further remarkable that the root oph, op, or ob, is very usually associated with things diminutive and small. In Welsh of or ov means “atoms, first principles”;[597] in French œuf, in Latin ova, means an egg; the little egg-like berry of the hawthorn is termed a hip; to ebb is to diminish, and in S.W. Wiltshire is “a small river,” named the Ebbe. Hob, with his flickering candlestick, or the homely Hob crouching on the hob, seems rarely to have been thought of otherwise than as the child Elf, such as that superscribed Ep upon the British coin here illustrated: yet to the ubiquitous Hob may no doubt be assigned up, which means aloft or overhead, and hoop, the symbol of the Sun or Eye of Heaven.

Fig. 313.—British. From Akermann.

Within and all around the oppida the military and sacerdotal hubbub was undoubtedly at times uproarious, and the vociferation used on these occasions may account for the word hubbub,[598] a term which according to Skeat was “imitative”. This authority adds to his conjecture: “formerly also whoobub, a confused noise. Hubbub was confused with hoop-hoop, re-duplication of hoop and whoobub with whoop-hoop.” But even had our ancestors mingled hip! hip! in their muddled minds even then the confusion would have been excusable.

Ope, when occurring in proper-names such as Panope or Europe, is usually translated Eye—thus, Panope as Universal Eye, and Europa as Broad Eye. The small red eye-like or optical berries of the hawthorn are termed hips or haws, and it is probable that once upon a time the hips were deemed the elphin eyes of Hob, the Ubiquitous or Everywhere. In India the favourite bead in rosaries is the seed named rudraksha, which means “the Eye of the god Rudra or S’iva”: Rudra, or the ruddy one, is the Hub or centre of the Hindoo pantheon, and S’iva, his more familiar name (now understood to mean “kindly, gracious, or propitious”) is more radically “dear little Iva or Ipha”. In India millions of S’eva stones are still worshipped, and the rudraksha seeds or Eyes of S’iva are generally cut with eleven facets,[599] evidently symbolising the eleven Beings which are said to have sprung from the dual personalities—male and female—of the Creative Principle.

Epine, the French for thorn, is ultimately akin to Hobany, and hip may evidently be equated with the friendly Hob. According to Bryant Hip or Hipha was a title of the Phœnician Prime Parent, and it is probable that our Hip! Hip! Hip!—the parallel of the Alban Albani! Albani!—long antedated the Hurrah!

The Hobdays and the Abdys of Albion may be connoted with Good Hob, and that this Robin Goodfellow or benevolent elf was the personification of shrewdness and cunning is implied by apt and inept, and that happy little Hob was considered to be pretty is implied by hübsch, the Teutonic for pretty: the word pretty is essentially British, and the piratical habits of the early British are brought home to them by the word pirate. We shall, however, subsequently see that pirates originally meant “attempters” or men who tried.

The surname Hepburn argues the existence at some time of a Hep bourne or brook; in Northumberland is Hepborne or Haybourne, which the authorities suppose meant “burn, brook, with the hips, the fruit of the wild rose”: but hips must always have been as ubiquitous and plentiful as sparrows. In Yorkshire is Hepworth, anciently written Heppeword, and this is confidently interpreted as meaning Farm of Heppo: in view, however, of our hobby-horse festivals, it is equally probable that in the Hepbourne the Kelpie, the water horse, or hippa was believed to lurk, and one may question the historic reality of farmer Heppo.

The hobby horse was principally associated with the festivals of May-Day, but it also figured at Yule Tide. On Christmas Eve either a wooden horse head or a horse’s skull was decked with ribbons and carried from door to door on the summit of a pole supported by a man cloaked with a sheet: this figure was known as “Old Hob”:[600] in Welsh hap means fortune—either good or bad.

Apparently the last recorded instance of the Hobby-Horse dance occurred at Abbot’s Bromley, on which occasion a man carrying the image of a horse between his legs, and armed with a bow and arrow (the emblems of Barry the Sovereign Archer), played the part of Hobby: with him were six companions wearing reindeer heads (the emblems of the Dayspring) who danced the hey and other ancient dances. Tollett supposes the famous hobby horse to be the King of the May “though he now appears as a juggler and a buffoon with a crimson foot-cloth fretted with gold, the golden bit, the purple bridle, and studded with gold, the man’s purple mantle with a golden border which is latticed with purple, his golden crown, purple cap with a red feather, and with a golden knop”.[601]

Figs. 314 to 317.—British. From Akerman.

Fig. 318.—British. From Camden.

Fig. 319.—Head Dress of the King (N.W. Palace Nimroud). From Nineveh (Layard).

A knop or knob means a boss, protuberance, or rosebud—originally, of course, a wild rosebud which precedes the hip—and it is probably the same word as the Cunob which occurs so frequently in British coins. In Fig. 314 Cunob occurs alone, and I am not sure that Figs. 315 and 318 should not be read Elini Cunob. The knob figured not only on our Hobby Horse, but also as a symbol on the head-dress of Tyrian kings, and there is very little doubt that the charming small figure on the obverse of Cunob Elini is intended for King Ob, or Ep. There is a Knap Hill at Avebury, a Knapton in Yorkshire, and a Knapwell in Suffolk: Knebworth in Herts was Chenepenorde in Domesday, and the imaginary farmer Cnapa or Cnebba, to whom these place-names are assigned, may be equated with the afore-mentioned farmer Heppo of Hepworth.

Knaves Castle (Lichfield), now a small mound—a heap?—is ascribed to “cnafa, a boy or servant, later a knave, a rogue”: Cupid is a notorious little rogue, nevertheless, proverbially Love makes the world go round, and constitutes its nave, navel, hub, or boss: with snob Skeat connotes snopp, meaning a boy or anything stumpy.

In course of time like boss, Dutch baas, knob seems to have been applied generally to mean a lord or master, and the Londoner who takes an agreeable interest in the “nobs”[602](and occasional snobs) riding in Hyde Park is possibly following an ancestral custom dating from the time when the Ring was originally constructed. Apsley House, now standing at the east end of Rotten Row, occupies the site of the park ranger’s lodge, the Ranger was a highly important personage, and it is not improbable that the site of Apsley House was once known as Ap’s lea or meadow. The immediately adjacent Stanhope Gate and Stanhope Street, or Stanhope in Durham, may mark the site of a stone hippa or horse similar to the famous stone horse in Brittany upon which—I believe to this day—women superstitiously seat themselves with the same purpose as they sit upon the Brahan stone in Ireland: Bryanstone Square in London is not more than a mile from Stanhope Street and Apsley House.

Fig. 320.—La Venus de Quinipily, near Baud Morbihan, Brittany. From Symbolism of the East and West (Aynsley, Mrs. Murray).

The Breton statue of Quinipily may be deemed a portrait of holy Queen Ip, and Gwennap, near Redruth, where is a famous amphitheatre, was probably a Queen Hip lea or seat of the same Queen’s worship.

Gwen Ap was presumably the same as Queen Aph or Godiva, the Lady of the White Horse, and Godrevy on the opposite side of St. Ives Bay may be equated with Good rhi Evy, or Good Queen Evie. A few miles from Liskeard there is a village named St. Ive, which the natives pronounce St. Eve: the more western, better-known Saint Ive’s, is mentioned in a document of 1546 as “Seynt Iysse,” and what apparently is this same dedication reappears at a place four miles west of Wadebridge termed St. Issey. “Whose name is it,” inquires W. C. Borlase, “that the parish of St. Issey bears?” He suggests somewhat wildly that it may be the same as Elidius, corrupted to Liddy, Ide, or Idgy, endeavouring to prove that this Elidius is the same as the great Welsh Teilo.

It would be simpler and more reasonable to assume that St. Issey is a trifling corruption of “Eseye,” which was one of the titles of the old British Mother of Life. The goddess Esseye—alternatively and better known as Keridwen—is described by Owen in his Cambrian Biography as “a female personage, in the mythology of the Britons considered as the first of womankind, having nearly the same attributes with Venus, in whom are personified the generative powers”.

With Eseye and with St. Issey, alias St. Ive, may be connoted the deserted town of Hesy in Judea: on the mound now known as Tell el Hesy, or the hill town of Hesy, the remains of at least eight super-imposed prehistoric cities have been excavated, and among the discoveries on this site was a limestone lampstand subscribed on the base Aphebal.[603] The winged maiden found at the same time is essentially Cretan, and it is not an unreasonable assumption that on this Aphe fragment of pottery from Hesy we have a contemporary portrait of the Candian Aphaia or Britomart, alias Hesy, or St. Issy, or St. Ive: the British Eseye was alternatively known as Cendwen.

Fig. 321.—From A Mound of Many Cities (Bliss, J. B.).

Fig. 322.—From A Mound of Many Cities (Bliss, J. B.).

The British built their oppida not infrequently in the form of an eye or optic, and also of an oeuf, ova, or egg. The perfect symmetry of these designs point conclusively to the probability that the earthworks were not mere strongholds scratched together anyhow for mere defence: the British burial places or barrows were similarly either circular or oval, and that the Scotch dun illustrated in Fig. 324 was British, is implied not only by its name Boreland-Mote, but by its existence at a place named Parton, this word, like the Barton of Dumbarton, no doubt signifying Dun Brettan or Briton.

Fig. 323.—From The Motes of Kirkcudbrightshire (Coles, F. R.). (Soc. Antiq. Scot.).

Fig. 324.—From The Motes of Kirkcudbrightshire (Coles, F. R.). (Soc. Antiq. Scot.)

Fig. 325.—“Spindle-whorls” from Troy. From Prehistoric London (Gordon, E. O.).

[To face page 534.

Egypt was known as “The Land of the Eye”:[604] the amulet of the All-seeing Eye was perhaps even more popular in Egypt than in Etruria, and the mysterious and unaccountable objects called “spindle whorls,” which occur so profusely in British tombs, and which also have been found in countless numbers underneath Troy, were probably Eye amulets, rudely representative of the human iris. The Trojan examples here illustrated are conspicuously decorated with the British Broad Arrow, which is said to have been the symbol of the Awen or Holy Spirit. In their accounts of the traditional symbols, speech, letters, and signs of Britain, according to their preservation by means of memory, voice, and usages of the Chair and Gorsedd, the Welsh Bards asserted that the three strokes of the Broad Arrow or bardic hieroglyph for God originated from three diverging rays of light seen descending towards the earth. Out of these three strokes were constituted all the letters of the bardic alphabet, the three strokes 3 strokes reading in these characters respectively 0 1 0, and thus spelling the mystic Ohio or Yew; hence it would seem that this never-to-be-pronounced Name[605] was a faerie conception originating in the mind of some primitive poet philosophising from a cloud-encumbered sunrise or sunset. According to tradition there were five ages of letters: “The first was the age of the three letters, which above all represented the Name of God, and which were a sign of Goodness and Truth, and Understanding and Equity, of whatsoever kind they might be”.[606] On these rays, it is said, were inscribed every kind and variety of Science and Knowledge, and on His return to Heaven the Almighty Architect is described as—

Followed with acclamation, and the sound

Symphonious of ten thousand harps that tun’d

Angelic harmonies.

The philosophers of Egypt believed that the universe was created by the pronunciation of the divine name; similarly the British bards taught that: “The universe is matter as ordered and systematised by the intelligence of God. It was created by God’s pronouncing His own name—at the sound of which light and the heavens sprang into existence. The name of God is itself a creative power. What in itself that name is, is known to God only. All music or natural melody is a faint and broken echo of the creative name.”[607]

Everywhere and in everything the Druids recognised this celestial Trinity: not only did their Hierarchy consist of three orders, i.e., Druids, Bards, and Seers, each group being again subdivided into three, but also, as we have seen, they uttered their Triads or aphorisms in triple form. There is little doubt that the same idea animated the Persian philosophy of Good Thought, Good Deed, Good Word, and Micah’s triple exordium: “Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly”. The bards say distinctly: “The three mystic letters signify the three attributes of God, namely, Love, Knowledge, and Truth, and it is out of these three that justice springs, and without one of the three there can be no justice”.[608]

This is a simpler philosophy than the incomprehensibilities of the Athanasian Creed,[609] and it was seemingly drilled with such living and abiding force into the minds of the Folk, that even to-day the Druidic Litanies or Chants of the Creed still persist. Throughout Italy and Sicily the Chant of the Creed is known as The Twelve Words of Verita or Truth, and it is generally put into the mouth of the popular Saint Nicholas of Bari.[610] The Sicilian or Hyperean festival of the Bara has already been noted ante, p. 320.

The British chant quoted ante, page 373, continues: “What will be our three boys”? “What will be our four”? five? six? and onwards up to twelve, but always the refrain is—

My only ain she walks alane

And ever mair has dune, boys.

Fig. 326.—St. John. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Fig. 327.—Christ, with a Nimbus of Three Clusters of Rays. Miniature of the XVI. Cent. MS. of the Bib. Royale. Ibid.

In Irish mythology we are told that the Triad similarly “infected everything,” hence Trinities such as Oendia (the one god), Caindea (the gentle god), and Trendia (the mighty god): other accounts specify the three children of the Boyne goddess, as Tear Bringer, Smile Bringer, and Sleep Bringer: the word sleep is in all probability a corruption of sil Eep.

Among the Trojan “spindle whorls” some are decorated with four awens, corresponding seemingly to the Four Kings of the Wheel of Fortune; others with three groups constituting a total of nine strokes. As each ray represented a form of Truth, the number nine—which as already noted is invariably true to itself—was essentially the symbol of Truth, and that this idea was absorbed by Christianity is obvious from representations such as Figs. 326 and 327.

Fig. 328.—“Cross” at Sancreed (Cornwall). From The Cornish Riviera (Stone, J. Harris).

[To face page 538.

Fig. 329.—Caerbrân Castle in Sancred. From Antiquities of Cornwall (Borlase).

Figs. 330 and 331.—British. From Evans.

At Sancreed in Cornwall—supposedly a dedication to the holy Creed—there is a remarkable “cross” which is actually a holed stone on a shank:[611] and in the same parish is a “castle” which was once evidently a very perfect Eye. In the Scilly Islands, lying within a stone circle, is what might be a millstone with a square hole in its centre: this Borlase ranks among the holed stones of Cornwall, and that it was a symbol of the Great Eye is a reasonable inference from the name Salla Key where it is still lying. We have seen the symbolic Eye on the Kio coin illustrated ante, page 253; the word eye pronounced frequently oy and ee, is the same as the hey of Heydays and the Shepherds’ Dance or Hey, hence in all probability Salla Key or Salakee Downs[612] were originally sacred to the festivals of Sala Kee, i.e., silly, innocent, or happy, ’Kee or Great Eye. The old plural of eye was eyen or een, and it is not unlikely that the primeval Ian, John, or Sinjohn, was worshipped as the joint Sun and Moon, or Eyes of Day and Night. On the hobby-horse coins here illustrated, the body consists of two curiously conspicuous circles or eyen, possibly representing the awen.

My only ane she walks alane

And ever mair has dune, boys.

On Salla Key Downs is Inisidgen Hill, which takes its name from an opposite island: in old MSS. this appears as Enys au geon, which the authorities assume meant “Island of St. John”. Geon, however, was the Cornish for giant; on Salla Key Downs is “Giant’s Castle,” and close at hand is the Giant’s Chair: this is a solid stone worked into the form of an arm-chair: “It looks like a work of art rather than nature, and, according to tradition, it was here the Arch Druid was wont to sit and watch the rising Sun”.[613] The neighbouring island of Great Ganilly was thus in all probability sacred to Geon, the Great King, or Queen Holy.

The Saints’ days, heydays, and holidays of our predecessors seem to have been so numerous that the wonder is that there was ever any time to work: apparently from such evidence as the Bean-setting dance, even the ancient sowing was accomplished to the measure of a song, and the festivities in connection with old Harvest Homes are too multifarious and familiar to need comment.

The attitude of the clergy towards these ancient festivals seems to have been uniform and consistent.

These teach that dancing is a Jezebel,

And barley-break the ready way to hell;

The morrice-idols, Whitsun-ales, can be

But profane relics of a jubilee.[614]

One of the greatest difficulties of the English Church was to suppress the dancing which the populace—supported by immemorial custom—insisted upon maintaining, even within the churches and the churchyards. Even to-day English churches possess reindeer heads and other paraphernalia of archaic feasts, and in Paris, as recently as the seventeenth century, the clergy and singing boys might have been seen dancing at Easter in the churches.[615] In Cornwall on the road from Temple to Bradford Bridge is a stone circle known as The Trippet Stones, and doubtless many churches occupy the sites of similar places where from time immemorial the Folk tripped it jubilantly on jubilees: custom notoriously dies hard.

In the Eastern counties of England the two principal reapers were known as the Harvest Lord and Lady, who presided over the Hoppings, and other festivities of the season. Sometimes the Harvest Lady was known as the Hop Queen,[616] and this important potentate may be connoted with the harvest doll which, in Kent particularly, was termed the Ivy Girl. As Prof. Weekley connotes the surname Hoppe with Hobbs, Hobson, and Hopkins, we may infer from the name Hopkinson, there must once have been a Hop King as well as a Hop Queen, and the rôle of this English Hopkin was probably similar to that enacted by other Jack-in-Greens, King-of-the-Years, or Spirit-of-the-Years. The pomp and circumstance of the parallel of the Hopkin ceremony in Greece may be judged from the following particulars: “They wreathe,” says Plato, “a pole of olive wood with laurel and various flowers. On the top is fitted a bronze globe from which they suspend smaller ones. Midway round the pole they place a lesser globe, binding it with purple fillets, but the end of the pole is decked with saffron. By the topmost globe they mean the sun, to which they actually compare Apollo. The globe beneath this is the moon; the smaller globes hung on are the stars and constellations, and the fillets are the course of the year, for they make them 365 in number. The Daphnephoria is headed by a boy, both whose parents are alive, and his nearest male relation carries the filleted pole. The Laurel-Bearer himself, who follows next, holds on to the laurel; he has his hair hanging loose, he wears a golden wreath, and he is dressed out in a splendid robe to his feet and he wears light shoes. There follows him a band of maidens holding out boughs before them, to enforce the supplication of the hymns.”[617]

With this Greek festival of the Laurel-Bearer may be connoted the “one traditional dance connected with all our old festivals and merry makings” in Guernsey, and known as A mon beau Laurier. In this ceremony the dancers join hands, whirl round, curtsey, and kiss a central object, in later days either a man or a woman, but, in the opinion of Miss Carey, “perhaps originally either a sacred stone or a primeval altar”.[618] Adulation of this character is calculated to create snobs, the word as we have seen being fundamentally connected with stump. I have already suggested a connection between the salutation A mon beau Laurier and the kissing or bussing of Paul’s stump at Billingsgate, which is situated almost immediately next Ebgate. On Mount Hube, in Jersey, have been found the remains of a supposed Druidic temple, and doubtless Mount Hube, like Apechurch or Abechurch, was a primitive Hopeton, oppidum, or Abbey.

Fig. 332.—From The Everyday Book (Hone, W.).

Fig. 333.—From The Everyday Book (Hone, W.).

The Hoop is a frequent inn sign generally associated with some additional symbol such as is implied in the familiar old signs, Swan-on-the-Hoop, Cock-on-the-Hoop, Crown-on-the-Hoop, Angel-on-the-Hoop, Falcon-on-the Hoop, and Bunch-of-Grapes-on-the-Hoop.[619] That the hoop or circle was a sacred form need not be laboured, for the majority of our megalithic monuments are circular, and there is no doubt that these rude circles are not simply and solely “adjuncts of stone age burials,” but were the primitive temples of the Hoop Lady or Fairy Queen. It was customary to represent the Hop Lady within hoops or wheels; and that the Virgin was regarded indifferently as either One, Two, Three or Four is clear from the indeterminate number of dolls which served on occasion as the idola or ideal. In Irish oun or ain means the cycle or course of the seasons, and the great Queen Anu or Aine who was regarded as the boss, hub, or centre of the Mighty Wheel may be equated with Una, the Fairy Queen.

The Druids are said to have considered it impious to enclose or cover their temples, presumably for the same reasons as prevailed among the Persians. These are explained by Cicero who tells us that in the expedition of Xerxes into Greece all the Grecian temples were destroyed at the instigation of the Magi because the Grecians were so impious as to enclose those gods within walls who ought to have all things around them open and free, their temple being the universal world. In Homer’s time—

On rough-hewn stones within the sacred cirque

Convok’d the hoary sages sat.

and there is little doubt that similarly in these islands the priest-chiefs held their solemn and ceremonial sessions.

The word Druid is in disfavour among modern archæologists; nevertheless, apparently all over Britain the Druids were traditionally associated in the popular memory with megalithic monuments. Martin, in the relation of his Tour of the Hebrides, made in the middle of the eighteenth century, observes: “In the Western Islands where there are many, what are called by the common people Druin Crunny, that is Druids’ Circles,” and the same observer recounts: “I inquired of the inhabitants what tradition they had concerning these stones, and they told me it was a place appointed for worship in the time of heathenism, and that the chief Druid stood near the big stone in the centre from whence he addressed himself to the people that surrounded him”.[620]

There is presumptive and direct evidence that the stone circles of Britain served the combined uses of Temple, Sepulchre, Place of Assembly, and Law Court. The custom of choosing princes by nobles standing in a circle upon rocks, prevailed until comparatively recent times, and Edmund Spenser, writing in 1596 on the State of Ireland, thus described an installation ceremony: “One of the Lords arose and holding in his hand a white wand perfectly straight and without the slightest bend, he presented it to the chieftain-elect with the following words, ‘Receive the emblematic wand of thy dignity, now let the unsullied whiteness and straightness of this wand be thy model in all thy acts, so that no calumnious tongue can expose the slightest stain on the purity of thy life, nor any favoured friend ever seduce thee from dealing out even-handed justice to all’.”[621]

The white wand figuring in this ceremony is evidently the magic rod or fairy wand with which the Elphin Queen is conventionally equipped, and which was figured in the hand of the Cretan “Hob,” ante, page 494.

Sometimes in lieu of a centre stone the circles contained stone chairs. Many of these old Druidic thrones have been broken up into gate-posts or horse-troughs, but several are still in existence, and some are decorated with a carving of two footprints. These two footprints were in all probability one of the innumerable forms in which the perennial Pair were represented, vide the Vedic invocation: “Like two lips speaking sweetly to the mouth, like two breasts feed us that we may live. Like two nostrils as guardians of the body, like two ears be inclined to listen to us. Like two hands holding our strength together ... like two hoofs rushing in quickly,” etc.

In the British coin here illustrated the Giant Pair are featured as joint steeds: “Coming early like two heroes on their chariots ... ye bright ones every day come hither like two charioteers, O ye strong ones! Like two winds, like two streams your motion is eternal; like two eyes[622] come with your sight toward us! Like two hands most useful to the body; like two feet lead us towards wealth.”[623]

Fig. 334.—British. From Akerman.

Occasionally the two footprints are found cut into simple rock: in Scotland the King of the Isles used to be crowned at Islay, standing on a stone with a deep impression on the top of it made on purpose to receive his feet. The meaning of the feet symbol in Britain is not known, but Scotch tradition maintained that it represented the size of the feet of Albany’s first chieftain. On Adam’s Peak in Ceylon (ancient Tafrobani) there is a super-sacred footprint which is still the goal of millions of devout pilgrims, and on referring to India where the foot emblem is familiar we find it explained as very ancient, and used by the Buddhists in remembrance of their great leader Buddha. In the tenth century a Hindu poet sang:—

In my heart I place the feet

The Golden feet of God.

and it would thus seem that the primeval Highlander anticipated by many centuries Longfellow’s trite lines on great men, happily, however, before departing, graving the symbolic footprints of his “first Chieftain,” not upon the sands of Time, but on the solid rocks.

The Ancients, believing that God was centred in His Universe, a point within a circle was a proper and expressive hieroglyph for Pan or All. The centre stone of the rock circles probably stood similarly for God, and the surrounding stones for the subsidiary Principalities and Powers thus symbolising the idea: “Thou art the Eternal One, in whom all order is centred; Lord of all things visible and invisible, Prince of mankind, Protector of the Universe”.[624] A tallstone or a longstone is physically and objectively the figure one, 1.

If it were possible to track the subsidiary Powers of the Eternal One to their inception we should, I suspect, find them to have been personifications of Virtues, and this would seem to apply not merely to such familiar Trinities as Faith, Hope, and Charity; Good Thought, Good Deed, and Good Word, but to quartets, quintets, sextets, and septets such as the Seven Kings or Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, i.e., “Ye gifte of wisdome; ye gifte of pittie; ye gifte of strengthe; ye gifte of comfaite; ye gifte of understandinge; ye gifte of counyinge; ye gifte of dreede”.

The Persian Trinity of Thought, Deed, and Word, is perfectly expressed in the three supposed Orders of the Christian hierarchy. As stated in The Golden Legend these are—sovereign Love as touching the order of Seraphim, perfect Knowledge, and perpetual Fruition or usance. “There be some,” continues De Voragine, “that overcome and dominate over all vices in themselves, and they by right be called of the world, gods among men.”[625]

It is related of King Arthur that he carried a shield named Prydwen, and if the reader will trouble to count the dots ranged round the centre boss of the shield on page 120 the number will be found to be eleven. At Kingston on Thames, where the present market stone is believed to be the surviving centre-piece of a stone-circle, a brass ring ornamented with eleven bosses was discovered.[626] In Etruria eleven mystic shields were held in immense veneration:[627] it will further be noted that the majority of the wheatears on British and Celtiberian coins consist of eleven corns.

The word eleven, like its French equivalent onze, ange, or angel, points to the probability that for some reason eleven was essentially the number sacred to the elven, anges, or onzes. Elphinstone, a fairly common surname, implies the erstwhile existence of many Elphinstones: there is an Alphian rock in Yorkshire; bronze urns have been excavated at Alphamstone in Essex, and the supposititious Aelfin, to whom the Alphington in Exeter is attributed, was far more probably Elphin.

The dimensions of many so-called longstones—whether solitary or in the centres of circles—point to the probability that menhirs or standing-stones were frequently and preferably 11 feet high. In Cornwall alone I have noted the following examples of which the measurements are extracted from The Victoria County History. The longstone at Trenuggo, Sancreed, now measures 11 feet 2 inches; that at Sithney 11 feet; that at Burras “about 10 feet,” that at Parl 12 feet; and that at Bosava 10 feet. In the parish of St. Buryan the longstones standing at Pridden, Goon Rith, Boscawen Ros, and Trelew, now measure respectively 11 feet 6 inches, 10 feet 6 inches, 10 feet, and 10 feet 4 inches.

If one takes into account such casualties of time as weathering, washing away of subsoil, upcrop of undergrowth, subsidence, and other accidents, the preceding figures are somewhat presumptive that each of the monuments in question was originally designed to stand 11 feet high.

Frequently a circle of stones is designated The Nine Maids, or The Virgin Sisters, or The Merry Maidens. The Nine Maidens is suggestive of the Nine Muses, and of the nine notorious Druidesses, which dwelt upon the Island of Sein in Brittany. The Merry Maidens may be equated with the Fairy or Peri Maidens, and that this phairy theory holds good likewise in Spain is probable from the fact that at Pau there is a circle of nine stones called La Naou Peyros.[628]

“When we inquired,” says Keightley, “after the fairy system in Spain, we were told that there was no such thing for that the Inquisition had long since eradicated such ideas.” He adds, however, “we must express our doubt of the truth of this charge”: I concur that not even the Inquisition was capable of carrying out such fundamental destruction as the obliteration of all peyros. Probably the old plural for peri or fairy was peren or feren, in which case the great Fernacre circle in the parish of St. Breward, Cornwall, was presumably the sacred eye or hoop of some considerable neighbourhood. About 160 feet eastward of Fernacre (which is one of the largest circles in Cornwall), and in line with the summit of Brown Willy (the highest hill in Cornwall) is a small erect stone. The neighbouring Row Tor (Roi Tor or Rey Tor?) rises due north of Fernacre circle, and as the editors of Cornwall point out: “If as might appear probable this very exact alignment north and south, east and west, was intentional, and part of a plan where Fernacre was the pivot of the whole, it is a curious feature that the three circles mentioned should have been so effectively hidden from each other by intervening hills”.[629]

The major portion of this district is the property of an Onslow family; there is an Onslow Gardens near Alvastone Place in Kensington, and there is a probability that every Alvastone, Elphinstone, or Onslow neighbourhood was believed to be inhabited by Elven or Anges: it is indeed due to this superstition that the relatively few megalithic monuments which still exist have escaped damnation, the destruction where it has actually occurred having been sometimes due to a deliberate and bigoted determination, “to brave ridiculous legends and superstitions”.[630] Naturally the prevalent and protective superstitions were fostered and encouraged by prehistoric thinkers for the reasons doubtless quite rightly surmised by an eighteenth century archæologist who wrote: “But the truth of the story is, it was a burying place of the Britons before the calling in of the heathen sexton (sic query Saxon) into this Kingdom. And this fable invented by the Britons was to prevent the ripping up of the bones of their ancestors.” The demise of similar fables under the corrosive influence of modern kultur, has involved the destruction of countless other stone-monuments, so that even of Cornwall, their natural home, Mr. T. Quiller Couch was constrained to write: “Within my remembrance the cromlech, the holy well, the way-side cross and inscribed stone, have gone before the utilitarian greed of the farmer and the road man, and the undeserved neglect of that hateful being, the cui bono man”.

Parish Councils of to-day do not fear to commit vandalisms which private individuals in the past shrank from perpetrating.[631] A Welsh “Stonehenge” at Eithbed, Pembrokeshire, shown on large-scale Ordinance maps issued last century, has disappeared from the latest maps of the district, and a few years ago an archæologist who visited the site reported that the age-worn stones had been broken up to build ugly houses close by—“veritable monuments of shame”.

In the Isle of Purbeck near Bournemouth, Branksea, Bronksea (Bronk’s ea or island) Branksome and numerous other Bron place-names which imply that the district was once haunted by Oberon, is a barrow called Puckstone, and on the top of this barrow, now thrown down, is a megalith said to measure 10 feet 8 inches. In all probability this was once 11 feet long, and was the Puckstone or Elphinstone of that neighbourhood: near Anglesea at Llandudno is a famous longstone which again is eleven feet high.

In Glamorganshire there is a village known as Angel Town, and in Pembroke is Angle or Nangle: Adamnan, in his Life of Columba, records that the saint opened his books and “read them on the Hill of the Angels, where once on a time the citizens of the Heavenly Country were seen to descend to hold conversation with the blessed man”. Upon this his editor comments: “this is the knoll called ‘great fairies hill’. Not far away is the ‘little fairies hill’. The fairies hills of pagan mythology became angels hills in the minds of the early Christian saints.”[632] One may be permitted to question whether this metamorphosis really occurred, and whether the idea of Anges or Angles is not actually older than even the Onslows or ange lows. The Irish trinity of St. Patrick, St. Bride, and St. Columba, are said all to lie buried in one spot at Dunence, and the place-name Dunence seemingly implies that that site was an on’s low, or dun ange. The term angel is now understood to mean radically a messenger, but the primary sense must have been deeper than this: in English ingle—as in inglenook—meant fire, and according to Skeat it also meant a darling or a paramour. Obviously ingle is here the same word as angel, and presumably the more primitive Englishman tactfully addressed his consort as “mine ingle”. The Gaelic and the Irish for fire is aingeal; we have seen that the burnebee or ladybird was connected with fire, and that similarly St. Barneby’s Day was associated with Barnebee Bright: hence the festival held at Englewood, or Inglewood (Cumberland) yearly on the day of St. Barnabas would appear to have been a primitive fire or aingeal ceremony. It is described as follows: “At Hesket in Cumberland yearly on St. Barnabas Day by the highway side under a Thorn tree according to the very ancient manner of holding assemblies in the open air, is kept the Court for the whole Forest of Englewood, the ‘Englyssh wood’ of the ballad of Adam Bel”.[633]

Stonehenge used to be entitled Stonehengels, which may be modernised into the Stone Angels,[634] each stone presumably standing as a representative of one or other of the angelic hierarchy. When the Saxons met the British in friendly conference at Stonehenge—apparently even then the national centre—each Saxon chieftain treacherously carried a knife which at a given signal he plunged into the body of his unarmed, unsuspecting neighbour; subsequently, it is said, hanging the corpses of the British royalties on the cross rocks of Stonehenge: hence ever after this exhibition of Teutonic realpolitik Stonehenge has been assumed to mean the Hanging Stones, or Gallow Stones.[635] We find, however, that Stonehenge was known as Stahengues or Estanges, a plural form which may be connoted with Hengesdun or Hengston Hill in Cornwall: Stonehenge also appears under the form Senhange, which may have meant either Old Ange or San Ange, and as the priests of ancient cults almost invariably assumed the character and titles of their divinity it is probable that the Druids were once known as Anges. In Irish the word aonge is said to have meant magician or sorcerer, which is precisely the character assigned by popular opinion to the Druids. In Rode hengenne, another title of Stonehenge,[636] we have apparently the older plural hengen with the adjectival rood or ruddy, whence Stonehenge would seem to have been a shrine of the Red Rood Anges.

Fig. 336.—Stonehenge. From The Celtic Druids (Higgens, G.).

As this monument was without doubt a national centre it is probable that as I have elsewhere suggested Stonehenge meant also the Stone Hinge: the word cardinal means radically hinge; the original Roman cardinals whose round red hats probably typified the ruddy sun, were the priests of Janus, who was entitled the Hinge, and there is no reason to suppose that the same idea was not equally current in England.

That the people of Cardia associated their angel or ange with cardo, a hinge or angle is manifest from the coin illustrated in Fig. 336.

According to Prof. Weekley, “Ing, the name of a demi-god, seems to have been early confused with the Christian angel in the prefix Engel common in German names, e.g., Engelhardt anglicised as Engleheart. In Anglo-Saxon we find both Ing and Ingel. The modern name Ingoll represents Ingweald (Ingold) and Inglett is a diminutive of similar origin. The cheerful Inglebright is from Inglebeort. The simple Ing has given through Norse Ingwar the Scottish Ivor.”[637] But is it not possible that Ivor never came through Ingwar, but was radically a synonym—fairy = Ing, or fire = ingle? Inga is a Scandinavian maiden-name, and if the Inge family—of gloomy repute—are unable to trace any cheerier origin it may be suggested that they came from the Isle of Man where the folk claim to be the descendants of fairies or anges: “The Manks confidently assert that the first inhabitants of their island were fairies, and that these little people have still their residence amongst them. They call them the ‘Good people,’ and say they live in wilds and forests, and mountains, and shun great cities because of the wickedness acted therein.”[638]

As there is no known etymology for inch and ounce it is not improbable that these diminutive measures were connected with the popular idea of the ange’s size and weight: Queen Mab, according to Shakespeare, was “no bigger than an agate stone on the forefinger of an alderman,” and she weighed certainly not more than an ounce. The origin of Queen Mab is supposedly Habundia, or La Dame Abonde, discussed in a preceding chapter, and there connoted with Eubonia, Hobany, and Hob: in Welsh Mab means baby boy, and the priests of this little king were known as the Mabinogi, whence the Mabinogion, or books of the Mabinogi.

Whether there is any reason to connect the three places in Ireland entitled Inchequin with the Ange Queen, or the Inchlaw (a hill in Fifeshire) with the Inch Queen Mab I have had no opportunity of inquiring.

The surnames Inch, Ince, and Ennis, are all usually connoted with enys or ins, the Celtic and evidently more primitive form of insula, an island, ea or Eye.

The Inge family may possibly have come from the Channel Islands or insulæ, where as we have seen the Ange Queen, presumably the Lady of the Isles or inces, was represented on the coinage, and the Lord of the Channel Isles seems to have been Pixtil or Pixy tall. That this Pixy tall was alternatively ange tall is possibly implied by the name Anchetil, borne by the Vicomte du Bessin who owned one of the two fiefs into which Guernsey was anciently divided. It will be remembered that in the ceremony of the Chevauchee de St. Michel, eleven Vavasseurs functioned in the festival; further, that the lance-bearer carried a wand 11¼ feet long. The Welsh form of the name Michael is Mihangel, and as Michael was the Leader of all angels, the mi of this British mihangel may be equated with the Irish mo which, as previously noted, meant greatest.

As Albion or albi en, is the equivalent to Elphin or elven, it is obvious that England—or Inghilterra, as some nations term it—is a synonym for Albion, in both cases the meaning being Land of the Elves or Angels. For some reason—possibly the Masonic idea of the right angle, rectitude, and square dealing—angle was connected with angel, and in the coin here illustrated the angel has her head fixed in a photographic pose by an angle. In Germany and Scandinavia, Engelland means the mystic land of unborn souls, and that the Angles who inhabited the banks of the Elbe (Latin Alva) believed not only in the existence of this spiritual Engelland, but also in the living existence of Alps, Elves, Anges, or Angels is a well-recognised fact. The Scandinavians traced their origin to a primal pair named Lif and Lifthraser: according to Rydberg it was the creed of the Teuton that on arriving with a good record at “the green worlds of the gods”; “Here he finds not only those with whom he became personally acquainted while on earth, but he may also visit and converse with ancestors from the beginning of time, and he may hear the history of his race, nay, the history of all past generations told by persons who were eye-witnesses”.[639] The fate of the evil-living Teuton was believed to be far different, nevertheless, in sharp distinction to the Christian doctrine that all unbaptised children are lost souls, and that infants scarce a span in size might be seen crawling on the fiery floor of hell, even the “dull and creeping Saxon” held that every one who died in tender years was received into the care of a Being friendly to the young, who introduced them into the happy groves of immortality.

Fig. 336.—Greek. From Barthelemy.

The suggestion that the land of the Angels derived its title from the angelic superstitions of the inhabitants, may be connoted with seemingly a parallel case in Sweden, i.e., the province of Elfland. According to Walter Scott this district “had probably its name from some remnant of ancient superstition”:[640] during the witch-finding mania of the sixteenth century at one village alone in Elfland, upwards of 300 children “were found more or less perfect in a tale as full of impossible absurdities as ever was told round a nursery fire”. Fifteen of these hapless little visionaries were led to death, and thirty-six were lashed weekly at the church doors for a whole year: an unprofitable “conspiracy” for the poor little “plotters”!

Fig. 337.—From Essays on Archæological Subjects (Wright, T.).

There figures in Teutonic mythology not only Lif the first parent, but also a divinity named Alf who is described as young, but of a fine exterior, and of such remarkably white splendour that rays of light seemed to issue from his silvery locks. Whether the Anglo-Saxons, like the Germans, attributed any significance to eleven I do not know: if they did not the grave here illustrated which was found in the white chalk of Adisham, Kent, must be assigned to some other race. It is described by its excavator as follows: “The grave which was cut very neatly out of the rock chalk was full 5 feet deep; it was of the exact shape of a cross whose legs pointed very minutely to the four cardinal points of the compass; and it was every way eleven feet long and about 4 feet broad. At each extremity was a little cover or arched hole each about 12 inches broad, and about 14 inches high, all very neatly cut like so many little fireplaces for about a foot beyond the grave into the chalk.”[641] It would seem possible that these crescentic corner holes were actually ingle nooks, and one may surmise a primitive lying-in-state with corner fires in lieu of candles. As the Saxons of the fifth and sixth centuries were notoriously in need of conversion to the Cross it is difficult to assign this crucial sepulchre to any of their tribes.

Whether Albion was ever known as Inghilterra or Ingland before the advent of the Angles from the Elbe need not be here discussed, but, at any rate, it seems highly unlikely that Anglesea, the sanctuary or Holyhead of British Druidism, derived its name from Teutonic invaders who can hardly have penetrated into that remote corner for long after their first friendly arrival. At the end of the second century Tertullian made the surprising and very puzzling statement: “Places in Britain hitherto unvisited by the Romans were subjected to Christianity”:[642] that the cross was not introduced by the Romans is obvious from the apparition of this emblem on our coinage one to two hundred years before the Roman invasion; the famous megalithic monument at Lewis in the Hebrides is cruciform, and the equally famed pyramid at New Grange is tunnelled in the form of a cross.

Fig. 338.—Plan an Guare, St. Just. From Cornwall (Borlase).

According to Pownal, New Grange was constructed by the Magi “or Gaurs as they were sometimes called”:[643] Stonehenge or Stonehengels is referred to by the British Bards as Choir Gawr, a term which is of questioned origin: the largest stone circle in Ireland is that by Lough Gur; the amphitheatre at St. Just is known as Plan an Guare or Plain of Guare, and the place-name Gorhambury or Verulam, where are the remains of a very perfect amphitheatre, suggests that this circle, as also that at Lough Gur, and Choir Gawr, was, like Bangor, a home, seat, or Gorsedd of the Gaurs or Aonges. Doubtless the gaurs of Britain like the guru or holy men of India, and the augurs of Rome, indulged in augury: in Hebrew gor means a congregation, and that the ancients congregated in and around stone circles choiring, and gyrating in a gyre or wheel, is evident from the statement of Diodorus Siculus, which is now very generally accepted as referring to Stonehenge or Choir Gawr. “The inhabitants [of Hyperborea] 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.”

Among the superstitions of the British was the idyll that the music of the Druids’ harps wafted the soul of the deceased into heaven: these harps were constructed with the same mysterious regard to the number three as characterised the whole of the magic or Druidic philosophy: the British harp was triangular, its strings were three, and its tuning keys were three-armed: it was thus essentially a harp of Tara. That the British were most admirable songsters and musicians is vouched for in numerous directions, and that Stonehenge was the Hinge of the national religion is evident from the fact that it is mentioned in a Welsh Triad as one of the “Three Great Cors of Britain in which there were 2400 saints, that is, there were 100 for every hour of the day and night, in rotation perpetuating the praise of God without intermission”.[644] That similar choirs existed among the gaurs of ancient Ireland would appear from an incident recorded in the life of St. Columba: the popularity of this saint was, we are told, so great, even among the pagan Magi, that 1200 poets who were in Convention brought with them a poem in his praise: they sang this panegyric with music and chorus, “and a surpassing music it was”; indeed, so impressive was the effect that the saint felt a sudden emotion of complacency and gave way to temporary vanity.

The circle of St. Just was not only known as Plan an guare, but also as Guirimir, which has been assumed to be a contraction of Guiri mirkl, signifying in Cornish a mirkl or miracle play.[645] Doubtless not only Miracle Plays, but sports and interludes of every description were centred in the circles: that the Druids were competent and attractive entertainers is probable in view of the fact that the Arch Druid of Tara is shown as a leaping juggler with golden ear-clasps, and a speckled coat: he tosses swords and balls into the air “and like the buzzing of bees on a beautiful day is the motion of each passing the other”.[646]

The circles were similarly the sites of athletic sports, duels, and other “martial challenges”: the prize fight of yesterday was fought in a ring, and the ring still retains its popular hold. The Celts customarily banquetted in a circle with the most valiant chieftain occupying the post of honour in the centre.

We know from Cæsar that the Gauls who were “extremely devoted to superstitious rites,” sent their young men to Britain for instruction in Druidic philosophy: we also know that it was customary when a war was declared to vow all captured treasures to the gods: “In many states you may see piles of these things heaped up in their consecrated spots, nor does it often happen that anyone disregarding the sanctity of the case dares either to secrete in his house things captured or take away those deposited: and the most severe punishment with torture has been established for such a deed”.[647] As British customs “did not differ much” from those of Gaul it is thus almost a certainty that Stonehenge was for long periods a vast national treasure-house and Valhalla.

Notwithstanding the abundance of barrows, earthworks, and other evidences of prehistoric population it is probable that Salisbury Plain was always a green spot, and we are safe in assuming that Choir Gawr was the seat of Gorsedds. By immemorial law and custom the Gorsedd had always to be held on a green spot, in a conspicuous place in full view and hearing of country and aristocracy, in the face of the sun, the Eye of Light, and under the expansive freedom of the sky that all might see and hear. As sedum is the Latin for seat, and there seems to be some uncertainty as to what the term Gorsedd really meant, I may be permitted to throw out the suggestion that it was a Session, Seat, or Sitting of the Gaurs or Augurs: by Matthew Arnold the British Gorsedd is described as the “oldest educational institution in Europe,” and moreover as an institution not known out of Britain.

Slightly over a mile from Stonehenge or Choir Gawr is the nearest village now known as Amesbury, originally written Ambrosbury or Ambresbury: here was the meeting-place of Synods even in historic times, and here was a monastery which is believed to have taken its name from Ambrosius Aurelius, a British chief. It is more probable that the monastery and the town were alike dedicated to the “Saint” Ambrose, particulars of whose life may be found in De Voragine’s Golden Legend. According to this authority the name Ambrose may be said “of ambor in Greek which is to say as father of light, and soir that is a little child, that is a father of many sons by spiritual generations, clear and full of light”. Or, says De Voragine, “Ambrose is said of a stone named ambra which is much sweet, oderant, and precious, and also it is much precious in the church”. That amber was likewise precious in the eyes of the heathen is obvious from its frequent presence in prehistoric tombs, and from the vast estimation in which it was held by the Druids. Not only was the golden amber esteemed as an emblem of the golden sun, but its magical magnetic properties caused it to be valued by the ancients as even more precious than gold. There was also a poetic notion connecting amber and Apollo, thus expressed by a Greek poet:—

The Celtic sages a tradition hold

That every drop of amber was a tear

Shed by Apollo when he fled from heaven

For sorely did he weep and sorrowing passed

Through many a doleful region till he reached

The sacred Hyperboreans.[648]

It will be remembered that Salisbury Plain was sometimes known as Ellendown, with which name may be connoted the statement of Pausanias that Olen the Hyperborean was the first prophet of Delphi.[649]

On turning to The Golden Legend we seem to get a memory of the Tears of Apollo in the statement that St. Ambrose was of such great compassion “that when any confessed to him his sin he wept so bitterly that he would make the sinner to weep”. The sympathies of St. Ambrose, and his astonishing tendency to dissolve into tears, are again emphasised by the statement that he wept sore even when he heard of the demise of any bishop, “and when it was demanded of him why he wept for the death of good men for he ought better to make joy, because they went to Heaven,” Ambrose made answer that he shed tears because it was so difficult to find any man to do well in such offices. The legend continues, “He was of so great stedfastness and so established in his purpose that he would not leave for dread nor for grief that might be done to him”. In connection with this proverbial constancy it may be noted that at the village of Constantine there is a Longstone—the largest in Cornwall—measuring 20 feet high and known as Maen Amber, or the Amber Stone: this was apparently known also as Men Perhen, and was broken up into gateposts in 1764. In the same parish is a shaped stone which Borlase describes as “like the Greek letter omega, somewhat resembling a cap”: from the illustration furnished by Borlase it is evident that this monument is a knob very carefully modelled and the measurements recorded, 30 feet in girth, eleven feet high,[650] imply that it was imminently an Elphinstone, Perhenstone, or Bryanstone. With this constantly recurrent combination of 30 and 11 feet, may here be connoted the measurements of the walls of Richborough or Rutupiæ: according to the locally-published Short Account “the north wall is the most perfect of the three that remain, 10 feet 8 inches in thickness and nearly 30 feet in height; the winding courses of tiles to the outer facing are in nearly their original state”.[651] The winding courses here mentioned consists of five rows of a red brick, and if one allows for inevitable detritus the original measurements of the quadrangle walls may reasonably be assumed as having been 30 × 11 feet: the solid mass of masonry upon which Rutupiæ’s cross is superimposed reaches “downward about 30 feet from the surface”. Four or five hundred yards from the castle and upon the very summit of the hill are the remains of an amphitheatre in the form of an egg measuring 200 × 160 feet. To this, the first walled amphitheatre discovered in the country, there were three entrances upon inclined planes, North, South, and West.

The first miracle recorded of St. Ambrose is to the effect that when an infant lying in the cradle a swarm of bees descended on his mouth; then they departed and flew up in the air so high that they might not be seen. Greek mythology relates that the infant Zeus was fed by bees in his cradle upon Mount Ida, and a variant of the same fairy-tale represents Zeus as feeding daily in Ambrosia—

The blessed Gods those rooks Erratic call.

Birds cannot pass them safe, no, not the doves

Which his ambrosia bear to Father Jove.[652]

Ambrosia, the fabled food of the gods, appears to have been honey: it is said that the Amber stones were anointed with Ambrosia, hence it is significant to find in immediate proximity to each other the place-names Honeycrock and Amberstone in Sussex. The Russians have an extraordinary idea that Ambrosia emanated from horses’ heads,[653] and as there is a “Horse Eye Level” closely adjacent to the Sussex Honeycrock and Amberstone we may assume that the neighbouring Hailsham, supposed to mean “Home of Aela or Eile,” was originally an Ellie or Elphin Home. Layamon refers to Stonehenge, “a plain that was pleasant besides Ambresbury,” as Aelenge, which probably meant Ellie or Elphin meadow, for ing or inge was a synonym for meadow. The correct assumption may possibly be that all flowery meads were the recognised haunts of the anges or ingles: the fairy rings are usually found in meadows, and the poets feigned Proserpine in a meadow gathering flowers ere she was ravished below by Pluto: as late as 1788 an English poet expressed the current belief, “’Tis said the fairy people meet beneath the bracken shade on mead and hill”.

Across the Sussex mead known as Horse Eye Level runs a “Snapsons Drove”: Snap is a curious parental name and is here perhaps connected with Snave, a Kentish village, presumably associated with San Aphe or San Ap.[654] Not only was the hipha or hobby horse decorated with a knop or knob, but a radical feature of its performance seems to have been movable jaws with which by means of a string the actor snapped at all and sundry: were these snappers, I wonder, the origin of the Snapes and Snapsons? In view of the fact that the surname Leaper is authoritatively connoted with an entry in a fifteenth century account-book: “To one that leped at Chestre 6s. 8d.,” the suggestion may possibly be worth consideration.

In Sussex there are two Ambershams and an Amberley: in Hants is Amberwood. St. Ambrose is recorded to have been born in Rome, whence it is probable that he was the ancient divinity of Umbria: in Derbyshire there is a river Amber, and in Yorkshire a Humber, which the authorities regard as probably an aspirated form of cumber, “confluence”. The magnetic properties of amber, which certainly cause a humber or confluence, may have originated this meaning; in any case cumber and umber are radically the same word. Probably Humberstones and Amberstones will be found on further inquiry to be as plentiful as Prestons or Peri stones: there is a Humberstone in Lincolnshire, another at Leicester, near Bicester is Ambrosden, and at Epping Forest is Ambresbury. This Epping Ambresbury, known alternatively as Ambers’ Banks, is admittedly a British oppidum: the remains cover 12 acres of ground and are situated on the highest plateau in the forest. As there is an Ambergate near Buxton it is noteworthy that Ambers’ Banks in Epping are adjacent to Beak Hill, Buckhurst Hill, and High Beech Green. I have already connoted Puck or Bogie with the beech tree, and it is probable that Fairmead Plain by High Beech Green was the Fairy mead where once the pixies gathered: close by is Bury Wood, and there is no doubt the neighbourhood of Epping and Upton was always very British.

Fig. 339.—A Persian King, adorned with a Pyramidal Flamboyant Nimbus. Persian Manuscript, Bibliothèque Royale. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

In old English amber or omber meant a pitcher—query a honey-crock[655]—whence the authorities translate the various Amberleys as meadow of the pitcher, and Ambergate, near Buxton, as “probably pitcher road”. The Amber Hill near Boston, we are told, “will be from Old English amber from its shape,” but as it is extremely unusual to find hills in the form of a pitcher this etymology seems questionable. At the Wiltshire Ambresbury there is a Mount Ambrosius at the foot of which, according to local tradition, used to exist a college of Druidesses,[656] in which connection it is noteworthy that just as Silbury Hill is distant about a mile from the Avebury Circle, so Mount Ambrosius is equally distant from Choir Gawr.

To Amber may be assigned the words umpire and empire; Oberon, the lovely child, is haply described as the Emperor of Fairyland, whence also no doubt he was the lord and master of the Empyrean. When dealing elsewhere with the word amber I suggested that it meant radically Sun Father,[657] and there are episodes in the life of St. Ambrose which support this interpretation, e.g., “it happened that an enchanter called devils to him and sent them to St. Ambrose for to annoy and grieve him, but the devils returned and said that they might not approach to his gate because there was a great fire all about his house”. Among the Persians it was customary to halo their divinities, not with a circle but with a pyre or pyramid of fire, and in all probability to the auburn Auberon the Emperor of the Empyrean may be assigned not only burn and brand, but also bran in the sense of bran new. That St. Ambrose was Barnaby Bright or the White god of day is implied by the anecdote “a fire in the manner of a shield covered his head, and entered into his mouth: then became his face as white as any snow, and anon it came again to his first form”.[658] The basis of this story would seem to have been a picture representing Ambrose with fire not entering into, but emerging from, his mouth and forming a surrounding halo “in the manner of a shield”. Embers now mean ashes, and the Ember Days of Christianity probably trace backward to the immemorial times of prehistoric fire-worship. At Parton, near Salisbury, one meets with the curious surname Godber: and doubtless inquiry would establish a connection between this Godber of Parton and Godfrey.

Fig. 340.—The Divine Triplicity, Contained within the Unity. From a German Engraving of the XVI. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

The weekly fair at Ambresbury used to be held on Friday; the maid Freya, to whom Friday owes its name, was evidently Fire Eye; the Latin feriæ were the hey-days or holidays dedicated to some fairy. Fairs were held customarily on the festival of the local saint, frequently even to-day within ancient earthworks: the most famous Midsummer Fair used to be that held at Barnwell: Feronia, the ancient Italian divinity at whose festival a great fair was held, and the first-fruits of the field offered, is, as has been shown, equivalent to Beronia or Oberon.

Fig. 341.—God, Beardless, either the Son or the Father. French Miniature of the XI. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Fig. 342.—British. From Evans.

According to Borlase there is in Anglesea “a horse-shoe 22 paces in diameter called Brangwyn or Supreme court; it lies in a place called Tre’r Drew or Druids’ Town”.[659] Stonehenge consists of a circle enclosing a horse-shoe or hoof—the footprint and sign of Hipha the White Mare, or Ephialtes the Night Mare, and a variant of this idea is expressed in the circle enclosing a triangle as exhibited in the Christian emblem on p. 571. That Christianity did not always conceive the All Father as the Ancient of Days is evident from Fig. 341, where the central Power is depicted within the writhings of what is seemingly an acanthus wreath: the Cunob fairy on the British coin illustrated ante, page 528, is extending what is either a ball of fire or else a wreath. The word wraith, meaning apparition, is connoted by Skeat with an Icelandic term meaning “a pile of stones to warn a wayfarer,” hence this heap may be connoted with rath the Irish, and rhaith the Welsh, for a fairy dun or hill. Skeat further connotes wraith with the Norwegian word vardyvle, meaning “a guardian or attendant spirit seen to follow or precede one,” and he suggests that vardyvle meant ward evil. Certainly the wraiths who haunted the raths were supposed to ward off evil, and the giant Wreath,[660] who was popularly associated with Portreath near Redruth, was in all probability the same wraith that originated the place-name Cape Wrath. In Welsh a speech is called ar raith or on the mound, hence we may link rhetoric to this idea, and assume that the raths were the seats of public eloquence as we know they were.

As wreath means a circle it is no doubt the same word as rota, a wheel, and Rodehengenne or Stonehengels may have meant the Wheel Angels. The cruciform rath, illustrated ante, page 55, is pre-eminently a rota, and in Fig. 343 Christ is represented in a circle supported by four somewhat unaerial Evangelists or Angels.

Mount Ida in Phrygia was the reputed seat of the Dactyli, a word which means fingers, and these mysterious Powers were sometimes identified with the Cabiri. The Dactyli, or fingers, are described as fabulous beings to whom the discovery of iron and the art of working it by means of fire was ascribed, and as the philosophy of Phairie is always grounded upon some childishly simple basis, it is probable that the Elphin eleven in its elementary sense represented the ten fingers controlled by Emperor Brain. The digits are magic little workmen who level mountains and rear palaces at the bidding of their lord and master Brain: the word digit, French doight, is in fact Good god, and dactyli is the same word plus a final yli.

Fig. 343.—Christ with a Plain Nimbus, Ascending to Heaven in a Circular Aureole. Carving in Wood of the XIV. Cent. From Evans.

In Folklore as an Historical Science Sir Laurence Gomme lays some stress upon a tale which is common alike to Britain and Brittany, and is therefore supposed to be of earlier date than the separation of Britons and Bretons. This tale which centres at London, is to the effect that a countryman once upon a time dreamed there was a priceless treasure hidden at London Bridge: he therefore started on a quest to London where on arrival he was observed loitering and was interrogated by a bystander. On learning the purpose of his trip the Cockney laughed heartily at such simplicity, and jestingly related how he himself had also dreamed a dream to the effect that there was treasure buried in the countryman’s own village. On his return home the rustic, thinking the matter over, decided to dig where the cockney had facetiously indicated, whereupon to his astonishment he actually found a pot containing treasure. On the first pot unearthed was an inscription reading—

Look lower, where this stood

Is another twice as good.

Encouraged he dug again, whereupon to his greater astonishment he found a second pot bearing the same inscription: again he dug and found a third pot even yet more valuable. This fabulously ancient tale is notably identified with Upsall in Yorkshire; it is, we are told, “a constant tradition of the neighbourhood, and the identical bush yet exists (or did in 1860) beneath which the treasure was found; a burtree or elder.”[661] Upsall was originally written Upeshale and Hupsale (primarily Ap’s Hall?) and the idea is a happy one, for in mythology it is undeniably true that the deeper one delves the richer proves the treasure trove. In suggesting that eleven may have been the number of the ten digits guided and controlled by the Brain one may thus not only remark the injunction to the Jews: “Thou shalt make curtains of goatshair to be a covering upon the tabernacle: eleven curtains shalt thou make,”[662] but one may note also the probable elucidation of this Hebrew symbolism:—

Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes

Or any searcher know by mortal mind;

Veil after veil will lift, but there must be

Veil upon veil behind.[663]

Assuming that in the simplest sense the elphin eleven were the ten digits and the Brain, one may compare with this combination the ten Powers or qualities which according to the Cabala emanated from “The Most Ancient One”. “He has given existence to all things. He made ten lights spring forth from His midst, lights which shone with the forms which they had borrowed from Him and which shed everywhere the light of a brilliant day. The Ancient One, the most Hidden of the hidden, is a high beacon, and we know Him only by His lights which illuminate our eyes so abundantly. His Holy Name is no other thing than these lights.”[664]

According to The Golden Legend the Emperor of Constantinople applied to St. Ambrose to receive the sacred mysteries, and that Ambrose was Vera or Truth is hinted by the testimony of the Emperor. “I have found a man of truth, my master Ambrose, and such a man ought to be a bishop.” The word bishop, Anglo-Saxon biscop, supposed to mean overseer, is like the Greek episcopus, radically op, an eye.[665] Egyptian archæologists tell us that in Egypt the Coptic Land of the Great Optic, even the very games had a religious significance; whence there was probably some ethical idea behind the British “jingling match by eleven blind-folded men and one unmasked and hung with bells”. This joyous and diverting jeu is mentioned as part of the sports-programme at the celebrated Scouring of the White Horse: we have already noted the blind-folded Little Leaf Man, led blind Amor-like from house to house, also the Blind Man who is said to have sat for eleven years in the Church of St. Maur (or Amour?), and among other sports at the Scouring, eleven enters again into an account of chasing the fore wheel of a wagon down the hill slope. The trundling of a fiery wheel—which doubtless took place at the several British Trendle Hills—is a well-known feature of European solar ceremonies: the greater interest of the Scouring item is perhaps in the number of competitors: “eleven on ’em started and amongst ’em a sweep-chimley and a millard [milord], and the millard tripped up the sweep-chimley and made the zoot fly a good ’un—the wheel ran pretty nigh down to the springs that time”.[666]

Figs. 344 and 345.—British. From Akerman and Evans.

The Jewish conception of The Most Ancient One, the most Hidden of the hidden, reappears in Jupiter Ammon, whose sobriquet of Ammon meant the hidden one: “Verily, Thou art a God that hidest Thyself”. In England the game of Hide and Seek used to be known as Hooper’s Hide,[667] and this curious connection between Jupiter, the Hidden one, and Hooper’s Hide somewhat strengthens my earlier surmise that Hooper = Iupiter.

In the opinion of Sir John Evans “there can be little doubt” of the head upon the obverse of Fig. 344 being intended for Jupiter Ammon;[668] in Cornish Blind Man’s Hide and Seek, the players used to shout “Vesey, vasey vum: Buckaboo has come!”[669]

Fig. 346.—Glass Beads, England and Ireland. From A Guide to the Antiquities of the Early Iron Age (B.M.).

Fig. 347.—From A Guide to the Antiquities of the Bronze Age (B.M.).

Fig. 348.—From Archaic Sculpturings (L. Mann).

If as now suggested the wheel and the “spindle whorl” were alike symbols of the Eye of Heaven, it is equally probable that the amber, and many other variety of bead, was also a talismanic eyeball:[670] among grave deposits the blue bead was very popular, assumedly for the reason that blue was the colour of heaven. Large quantities of blue “whorls” were discovered by Schliemann[671] at Mykenæ, and among the many varieties of beads found in Britain one in particular is described as “of a Prussian Blue colour with three circular grooves round the circumference, filled with white paste”.[672] This design of three circles reappears in Fig. 347 taken from the base of a British Incense-cup; likewise in a group of rock sculpturings (Fig. 348) found at Kirkmabreck in Kirkcudbrightshire. Mr. Ludovic Mann, who sees traces of astronomical intention in this sculpture, writes: “If the pre-historic peoples of Scotland and indeed Europe had this conception, then the Universe to their mind would consist of eleven units, namely, the nine celestial bodies already referred to, and the Central Fire and the ‘Counter-Earth’. Very probably they knew also of elliptical motions. Oddly enough the cult of eleven units (which I detected some fifteen years ago) representing the universe can be discerned in the art of the late Neolithic and Bronze Ages in Scotland and over a much wider area. For example, in nearly all the cases of Scottish necklaces of beads of the Bronze Age which have survived intact, it will be found that they consist of a number of beads which is eleven or a multiple of eleven. I have, for example, a fine Bronze Age necklace from Wigtownshire consisting of 187 beads (that is of 17 × 11) and a triangular centre piece. The same curious recurrence of the number and its multiples can often be detected in the number of standing stones in a circle, in the number of stones placed in slightly converging rows found in Caithness, Sutherland, some parts of England, Wales, and in Brittany. The number eleven is occasionally involved in the Bronze Age pottery decorations, and in the patterns on certain ornaments and relics of the Bronze Age.... The Cult of eleven seems to survive in the numerous names of Allah, who was known by ninety-nine names, and hence it is invariably the case that the Mahommedan has a necklace consisting of either eleven or a multiple of eleven beads but not exceeding ninety-nine, as he is supposed to repeat one of the names for each bead which he tells.”[673]

We have seen that the rudraksha or eye of the god S’iva seeds are usually eleven faceted, and my surmise that the whorls of Troy were universal Eyes is further implied by the group here illustrated. According to Thomas, our British Troy Towns or Caer Troiau were originally astronomical observatories, and he derives the word troiau from the verb troi to turn, or from tro signifying a flux of time:—[674]

By ceaseless actions all that is subsists;

Constant rotation of th’ unwearied wheel

That Nature rides upon, maintains her health,

Her beauty and fertility. She dreads

An instant’s pause and lives but while she moves.

The Trojan whorls are unquestionably tyres or tours, and the notion of an eye is in some instances clearly imparted to them by radiations which resemble those of the iris. The wavy lines of No. 1835 and 1840 probably denote water or the spirit, in No. 1847 the “Jupiter chain” of our Solido coin reappears; the astral specks on 1841 and 1844 may be connoted with the stars and planets, and in 1833 the sense of rolling or movement is clearly indicated.

Fig. 349.—Specimen Patterns of Whorls Dug up at Troy. From Ilios (Schliemann).

Fig. 350.—Specimen Patterns of Whorls Dug up at Troy. From Ilios (Schliemann).

Schliemann supposes that the thousands of whorls found in Troy served as offerings to the tutelary deity of the city, i.e., Athene: some of them have the form of a cone, or of two cones base to base, and that Troy was pre-eminently a town of the Eternal Eye is perhaps implied by the name Troie.

Fig. 351 is a ground plan of Trowdale Mote in Scotland which, situated on a high and lonely marshland within near sight of nothing but a few swelling hillocks amongst reeds and mosses and water, has been described as the “strangest, most solitary, most prehistoric looking of all our motes”.[675]

Fig. 351.—From Proceedings Soc. Ant. Scot.

It was popularly supposed that all the witches of West Cornwall used to meet at midnight on Midsummer Eve at Trewa (pronounced Troway) in the parish of Zennor, and around the dying fires renewed their vows to the Devil, their master. In this wild Zennor (supposedly holy land) district is a witch’s rock which if touched nine times at midnight reputedly brought good luck.

The “Troy Town” of Welsh children is the Hopscotch of our London pavements; at one time every English village seems to have possessed its maze (or Drayton?), and that the mazes were the haunts of fairies is well known:—

... the yellow skirted fays

Fly after the night steeds

Leaving their moon-loved maze.

In A Midsummer-Night’s Dream Titania laments:—

The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green

For lack of tread are indistinguishable.

At St. Martha’s Church near Guildford, facing Newlands Corner are the remains of an earthwork maze close by the churchyard, and within this maze used to be held the country sports.[676] We shall consider some extraordinarily quaint mazes and Troy Towns in a subsequent chapter, but meanwhile it may here be noted that in the Scilly Islands (which the Greeks entitled Hesperides) is a monument thus described: “Close to the edge of the cliff is a curious enclosure called Troy Town, taking its name from the Troy of ancient history; the streets of ancient Troy were so constructed that an enemy, once within the gates, could not find his way out again. The enclosure has an outer circle of white pebbles placed on the turf, with an opening at one point, supposed to represent the walls and gate of Troy. Within this there are several rows of stones; the spaces between them represent the streets. It presents quite a maze, and but few who enter can find their way out again without crossing one of the boundary lines. It is not known when or by whom it was constructed, but it has from time to time been restored by the islanders.”[677]

This Troy Town is situated on Camperdizil Point; in the same neighbourhood is Carn Himbra Point, and Himbrian, Kymbrian, or Cambrian influences are seemingly much evident in this district, as doubtless they also were at Comberton[678] famous for its maze.

At the very centre, eye, or San Troy of St. Mary’s Island is situated Holy Vale, and here also are the place-names Maypole, Burrow, and Content. It has already been suggested that Bru or Burrow was originally pure Hu or pere Hu, Hu being, as will be remembered, the traditional Leader of the Kymbri into these islands, and the first of the Three National Pillars of Britain: the chief town of St. Mary’s is Hugh Town, and running through Holy Vale is what is described as a paved way (in wonderful preservation) known as the Old Roman Road, formerly supposed to be the main-way to Hugh Town. One may be allowed to question whether the Legions of Imperial Rome ever troubled to construct so fine a causeway in so insignificant an island; or if so, for what reason? The houses of Holy Vale are embowered in trees of larger growth than those elsewhere in the neighbourhood: they “complete a picture of great calm and repose,” and that this Holy Vale was anciently an abri is fairly self-evident apart from the interesting place-name Burrow, and the neighbouring Bur Point.

The Romans entitled the Scillies Sillinæ Insulæ: I have already suggested they were a seat of the Selli; we have met with Selene in connection with St. Levan’s, and it is not improbable that the deity of Sillinæ Insulæ was Selene, Helena, or Luna. The Silus stone from the ruined chapel of St. Helen’s at Helenium or Land’s End (Cape Cornwall) has been already noted: the most ancient building in all the Sillinæ Insulæ or the Scillies is the ruined chapel on St. Helen’s of which the northern aisle now measures 12 feet wide and 19 feet 6 inches long. As the Hellenes usually had ideas underlying all their measurements it is probable that the 19 feet 6 inches was primarily 19 feet, for nineteen was a highly mystic Hellenic number. Of the Hyperboreans Diodorus states: “They say, moreover, that Apollo once in nineteen years comes into the island in which space of time the stars perform their courses and return to the same points, and therefore the Greeks call the revolutions of nineteen years the Great Year”. Nineteen nuns tended the sacred fire of St. Bridget, and according to some observers the inmost circle of Stonehenge consisted of nineteen “Blue Stones”.[679] These nineteen Stone Hengles may be connoted with the nineteen ruined huts on the summit of Ingleborough in Yorkshire: the summit of Ingleborough is a plateau of about a mile in circuit and hereupon are “vestiges of an ancient British camp of about 15 acres inclosing traces of nineteen ancient horseshoe shaped huts”.[680]

As the word ingle, meaning fire, is not found until 1508 the authorities are unable to interpret Ingleborough as meaning Fire hill, although without doubt it served as a Beacon: the same etymological difficulty likewise confronts them at Ingleby Cross, Inglesham, numerous Ingletons, and at Ingestre. We have seen that Inglewood was known as Englysshe Wood;[681] in Somerset is Combe English, and in the Scillies is English Island Hill: 500 yards from this English Hill is a stone circle embracing an upright stone the end of which is 18 inches square.

Fig. 352.—Stonehenge Restored. From Our Ancient Monuments (Kains-Jackson).

Eighteen courtiers were assigned to the ange Oberon: the megalith Long Meg is described as a square unhewn freestone column 15 feet in circumference by 18 feet high, and there is no doubt that eighteen or twice nine possessed at one time some significance. I suspect that the double nine stood for the Twain, each of which was reckoned as nine or True: on the top of Hellingy Downs in the Scillies is a barrow covered with large stones nine feet long, and built upon a mound which is surrounded by inner and outer rows of stone.[682]

On Salakee Downs there is a monolith resting on a large flat rock, on three projections situated at a distance of eighteen inches from one another and each having a diameter of about 2 inches:[683] this is known as the Druid’s throne, and about 5 yards to the east are two more upright rocks of similar size and shape named the Twin Sisters.[684] The Twin Sisters of Biddenden, whose name was Preston, were associated with five pieces of ground known as the Bread and Cheese Lands, in which connection it is interesting to find that near English Island Hill is Chapel Brow, constituting the eastern point of a deep bay known by the curious name of Bread and Cheese Cove.[685] In connection with Biddenden we connoted Pope’s Hall and Bubhurst; it is thus noteworthy that near Bread and Cheese Cove is a Bab’s Carn, and a large sea cavern known as Pope’s Hole.

In Germany and Scandinavia the stone circles are known not as Merry Maidens, but as Adam’s Dances. Close to Troy Town on St. Agnes in the Scillies are two rocks known as Adam and Eve: these are described as nine feet high with a space about nine inches between them: “Here, too, is the Nag’s Head, which is the most curious rock to be met with on the islands; it has a remote resemblance to the head of a horse, and would seem to have been at one time an object of worship, being surrounded by a circle of stones”.[686]

On the lower slopes of Hellingy are the remains of a primitive village, and the foundations of many circular huts: among these foundations have been found a considerable quantity of crude pottery, and an ancient hand-mill which the authorities assign to about 2000 b.c. We have seen that the goddesses of Celtdom were known as the Mairæ, Matronæ, Matres, or Matræ (the mothers): further, that the Welsh for Mary is Fair, whence the assumption becomes pressing that the “Saint” Mary of the Scillies was primarily the Merry Fairy. The author of The English Language points out that in Old English merry meant originally no more than “agreeable, pleasing”. Heaven and Jerusalem were described by old poets as “merry” places; and the word had supposedly no more than this signification in the phrase “Merry England,” into which we read a more modern interpretation.[687] That the Scillies were permeated with the Fairy Faith is sufficiently obvious; at Hugh Town we find the ubiquitous Silver Street, and the neighbouring Holvear Hill was not improbably holy to Vera.

Near the Island of St. Helen’s is a group of rocks marked upon the map as Golden Ball Bar; near by is an islet named Foreman. The farthest sentinel of the Scillies is an islet named the Bishop, now famous to all sea-farers for its phare. It is quite certain that no human Bishop would ever have selected as his residence an abode so horribly exposed, whence it is more likely that the Bishop here commemorated was the Burnebishop or Boy Bishop whose ceremonies were maintained until recent years, notably and particularly at Cambrai. In England it is curious to find the Lady-bird or Burnie Bee equated with a Bishop, yet it was so; and hence the rhyme:—

Bishop, Bishop Burnebee, tell me when my wedding will be,

Fly to the east, fly to the west,

Fly to them that I love best.

In connection with the Island of St. Agnes it may be noted that ignis is the Latin for fire, whence it is possible that the islets, Big Smith and Little Smith, Burnt Island and Monglow, all had some relation to the Fieryman, Fairy Man, or Foreman: it is also possible that the neighbouring Camperdizil Point is connected with deiseul, the Scotch ejaculation, and with dazzle. Troy Town in St. Agnes is almost environed by Smith Sound, and this curious combination of names points seemingly to some connection between the Cambers and the metal smiths.[688]

It will be remembered that Agnes was a title of the Papesse Jeanne, who was said to have come from Engelheim or Angel’s Home: in Germany the Lady Bird used to be known as the Lady Mary’s Key-bearer, and exhorted to fly to Engelland: “Insect of Mary, fly away, fly away, to Engelland. Engelland is locked, its key is broken.”[689] Sometimes the invocation ran: “Gold chafer up and away to thy high storey to thy Mother Anne, who gives thee bread and cheese. ’Tis better than bitter death.”[690]

Thanks to an uncultured and tenacious love of Phairie, the keys of rural Engelland have not yet been broken, nor happily is Engelland locked. Our history books tell us of a splendid pun[691] perpetrated by a Bishop of many centuries ago: noticing some captured English children in the market-place at Rome, he woefully exclaimed that had they been baptised then would they have been non Angli sed angeli. Has this episcopal pleasantry been overrated? or was the good Bishop punning unconsciously deeper than he intended?

FOOTNOTES:

[593] Gomme, Sir L., London, p. 74.

[594] De bello Gallico, v., 21.

[595] Blackie, C., Dictionary of Place-names, p. 21.

[596] Garnier, Col., The Worship of the Dead, p. 240.

[597] Thomas, J., Brit. Antiquissima, p. 108.

[598] The choral music of the Teutons did not create a favourable impression on the mind of Tacitus, vide his account of a primitive Hymn of Hate: “The Germans abound with rude strains of verse, the reciters of which, in the language of the country, are called Bards. With this barbarous poetry they inflame their minds with ardour in the day of action, and prognosticate the event from the impression which it happens to make on the minds of the soldiers, who grow terrible to the enemy, or despair of success, as the war-song produces an animated or a feeble sound. Nor can their manner of chanting this savage prelude be called the tone of human organs: it is rather a furious uproar; a wild chorus of military virtue. The vociferation used upon these occasions is uncouth and harsh, at intervals interrupted by the application of their bucklers to their mouths, and by the repercussion bursting out with redoubled force.”—Germania, I., iii., p. 313.

[599] Blackman, Winifred S., The Rosary in Magic and Religion, Folklore, xxiv., 4.

[600] Wright, E. M., Rustic Speech and Folklore, p. 303.

[601] Cf. Hazlitt, W. Carew, Faiths and Folklore, i., p. 314.

[602] Cockney dialect is closely akin to Kentish, and abounds in venerable verbal relics: “The stranger enters, but he nonetheless pays his toll; he does not leave any mark on London, but London leaves an indelible stamp upon him. The children of the foreigner, the children of the Yorkshireman or Lancastrian, belong in speech neither to Yorkshire nor Lancashire, they become more Cockney than the Cockneys; and even the alien voices of the east end, notably less musical than those of our own people, take on the tones of London’s ancient speech.”—MacBride, Mackenzie, London’s Dialect, An Ancient form of English Speech, with a Note on the Dialects of the North of England, and the Midlands and Scotland, p. 8.

[603] Bliss, J. B., A Mound of Many Cities or Tell el Hesy Excavated.

[604] I was unaware of this rather corroborative evidence when I put forward the suggestion five years ago that Egypt was radically ypte or Good Eye.

[605] The Iberians and Jews also possessed a never-to-be-uttered sacred Name.

[606] Barddas, p. 95.

[607] Ibid., p. 251.

[608] Barddas, p. 23.

[609] As also was the Bardic conception of God, summed up in the Triad:—

“Three things which God cannot but be; whatever perfect

Goodness ought to be; whatever perfect

Goodness would desire to be; and whatever perfect

Goodness can be.”

Again—

“There is nothing beautiful but what is just;

There is nothing just but love;

There is no love but God.”

And thus it ends. Tydain, the Father of Awen, sang it, says the Book of Sion Cent (Barddas, p. 219).

[610] Eckenstein, L., Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes, p. 146.

[611] Illustrated on page opposite.

[612] This name appears on maps sometimes as Salla Key, sometimes as Salakee.

[613] Tonkin, J. C., Lyonesse, p. 38.

[614] Randolph (1657).

[615] Johnson, W., Byways, p. 185.

[616] Hazlitt, W. Carew, Faiths and Folklore, i., 309.

[617] Quoted from Harrison, J., Ancient Art and Ritual, p. 188.

[618] Folklore, XXV., iv., p. 426.

[619] Larwood and Hotten, Hist. of Signboards, p. 504.

[620] Cf. Borlase, W., Cornwall, pp. 193, 201.

[621] One may connote this ceremony with the Bardic triad: “God is the measuring rod of all truth, all justice, and all goodness, therefore He is a yoke on all, and all are under it, and woe to him who shall violate it”.

[622] See Fig. 331, p. 538.

[623] Quoted from Science of Language, Max Müller, p. 540.

[624] Sabean Litany attributed to Enoch.

[625] G. L., v. 185, 195.

[626] Walford E., Greater London, vol. ii., p. 299.

[627] Dennis G., Cities of Etruria.

[628] Cornwall, vol. i., 397; Victoria County Histories.

[629] Cornwall, vol. i., 394; Victoria County Histories.

[630] Blackie’s Dictionary of Place-Names defines Godmanham as follows: “the holy man’s dwelling, the site of an idol temple destroyed under the preaching of Paulinus whose name it bears,” p. 98.

[631] “The year before last I went to Bodavon Mountain to take photographs of the cromlech that used to lie there. When I got there, however, I found the place absolutely bare, not a vestige of the cromlech remaining. On making inquiries, a road newly metalled was pointed out to me, and I was told that the cromlech had been used for that purpose. This was done despite the fact that many tons of loose stone are lying on the mountain-side close by.”—Griffith, John E., The Cromlechs of Anglesey and Carnarvon, 1900.

[632] Huyshe, W., Life of St. Columba, p. 176.

[633] Hazlitt, W. Carew, Faiths and Folklore, i., 210.

[634] “The metrical historian Hardyng twice employed but without explaining the appellation stone Hengels, ‘which called is the Stone Hengles certayne’. This reads like lapides Anglorum or lapides Angelorum.”—Herbert, A., Cyclops Christianus, p. 165.

[635] “Who would ween, in this worlds realm, that Hengest thought to deceive the king who had his daughter. For there is never any man, that men may not over-reach with treachery. They took an appointed day, that these people should come together with concord and with peace, in a plain that was pleasant beside Ambresbury; the place was Aelenge; now hight it Stonehenge. There Hengest the traitor, either by word or by writ, made known to the king; that he would come with his forces, in honour of the king; but he would not bring in retinue but three hundred knights, the wisest men of all that he might find. And the king should bring as many on his side bold thanes, and who should be wisest of all that dwelt in Britain, with their good vestments, all without weapons, that no evil, should happen to them, through confidence of the weapons. Thus they it spake, and eft they it brake; for Hengest the traitor thus gan he teach his comrades, that each should take a long saex (knife), and lay be his shank, within his hose, where he it might hide. When they came together, the Saxons and Britons, then quoth Hengest, most deceitful of all knights: ‘Hail be thou, lord king, each is to thee thy subject! If ever any of thy men hath weapon by his side, send it with friendship far from ourselves, and be we in amity, and speak we of concord; how we may with peace our lives live.’ Thus the wicked man spake there to the Britons. Then answered Vortiger—here he was too unwary—‘If here is any knight so wild, that hath weapon by his side, he shall lose the hand through his own brand, unless he soon send it hence’. Their weapons they sent away, then had they nought in hand; knights went upward, knights went downward, each spake with other as if he were his brother.

“When the Britons were mingled with the Saxons, then called Hengest of knights most treacherous: ‘Take your saexes, my good warriors, and bravely bestir you and spare ye none!’ Noble Britons were there, but they knew not of the speech, what the Saxish men said them between. They drew out the saexes, all aside; they smote on the right side, they smote on the left side; before and behind they laid them to the ground; all they slew that they came nigh; of the king’s men there fell four hundred and five, woe was the king alive!”—Layamon, Brut..

[636] Cf. Herbert, A., Cyclops Christianius, p. 163.

[637] Surnames, p. 31.

[638] Cf. Hazlitt, W. Carew, Faith and Folklore, ii., 389.

[639] Teutonic Mythology, Rydberg, p. 360.

[640] Demonology, 177.

[641] Cf. Wright, T., Essays on Archæological Subjects, i., 120.

[642] Davies, D., The Ancient Celtic Church of Wales, p. 14.

[643] Cf. Sketches of Irish History, anon., Dublin, 1844.

[644] Cf. Gordon, E. O., Prehistoric London, its Mounds and Circles, p. 67.

[645] Borlase, Cornwall, p. 208.

[646] Cf. Bonwick, J., Irish Druids, p. 11.

[647] De Bello Gallico, VI., x., 17.

[648] Quoted by Bryant from Appollon Argonaut, L. 4, V. 611.

[649] Cf. Wilkes, Anna, Ireland, Ur of the Chaldees, p. 88.

[650] Borlase, Antiquities of Cornwall, p. 173.

[651] p. 6.

[652] Odyssey, XII.

[653] Johnson, W., Byways, p. 440.

[654] As all our Avons are traced to Sanscrit ap, meaning water, one may here note the Old English word snape, meaning a spring in arable ground.

[655] In the mediæval Story of Asenath, the Angel who describes himself as “Prince of the House of God and Captain of His Host,” and was thus presumably Michael, says to Asenath; “Look within thine Aumbrey, and thou shall find withal to furnish thy table”. Then she hastened thereto and found “a store of Virgin honey, white as snow of sweetest savour”. The archangel tells Asenath that “all whom Penitence bringeth before Him shall eat of this honey gathered by the bees of Paradise, from the dew of the roses of Heaven, and those who eat thereof shall never see death but shall live for evermore.”—Aucassin and Nicolette and other Mediæval Romances, p. 209 (Everyman’s Library).

[656] Gordon, A. O., Prehistoric London, p. 66.

[657] Lost Language, ii., 141.

[658] Golden Legend, iii., 117.

[659] Cornwall, p. 207.

[660] Hunt, J., Popular Romances of the West of England, p. 76.

[661] P. 20

[662] Exod. xxvi. 7.

[663] Arnold, E., Light of Asia.

[664] Cf. Abelson, J., Jewish Mysticism, p. 137.

[665] The Bryan of popular ballad seems to have been famed for the casting of his glad eye:—

“Bryan he was tall and strong

Right blithsome rolled his een.”

—Percy Reliques, i., 276.

[666] Hughes, T., Scouring the White Horse, p. 110.

[667] Taylor, J., The Devil’s Pulpit, ii., 297.

[668] P. 344.

[669] Courtney, Miss M. L., Cornish Feasts and Folklore, p. 175.

[670] Among the Maoris potent powers were supposed to reside in the human eye. “When a warrior slew a chief, he immediately gouged out his eyes and swallowed them, the atua tonga, or divinity, being supposed to reside in that organ; thus he not only killed the body, but also possessed himself of the soul of his enemy, and consequently the more chiefs he slew, the greater did his divinity become.”—Taylor, R., Te Ika A Maui, or New Zealand and its Inhabitants.

[671] Mykenæ, p. 77.

[672] B.M., Guide to the Early Iron Age, p. 107.

[673] Archaic Sculpturings, p. 23.

[674] Britannia Antiquissima, p. 50.

[675] Coles, F. R., The Motes of Kirkcudbrightshire, p. 151.

[676] Johnson, W., Byways, p. 195.

[677] Lyonesse, a Handbook for the Isles of Scilly, p. 70.

[678] The Cambridgeshire Comberton is situated on the Bourn brook: there is also a Great and Little Comberton underlying Bredon Hill in the Pershore district of Worcester.

[679] The term “Bluestone” in the West of England meant holy stone.

[680] Wilson, J. G., Imperial Gazetteer.

[681] On the tip-top of Highgate Hill is now standing an Englefield House immediately adjacent to an Angel Inn.

[682] Lyonesse, p. 41.

[683] Ibid., p. 39.

[684] Ibid., p. 39.

[685] Ibid., p. 79.

[686] Ibid., p. 78.

[687] P. 112.

[688] Writing not in connection with either Monglow or Camperdizil Miss Gordon observes: “We may conjure up the scene where the watery stretches reflected in molten gold the ‘pillars of fire’ symbolising the presence of God; we seem to behold the reverend forms of the white clad Druids revolving in the mystic ‘Deasil’ dance from East to West around the glowing pile, and so following the course of the Sun, the image of the Deity”.—Prehistoric London, p. 72.

[689] Eckenstein, L., Comp. St. Nursery Rhymes, p. 97.

[690] P. 98.

[691] Skeat believed pun meant something punched out of shape. Is it not more probably connected with the Hebrew pun meaning dubious?

CHAPTER XI
THE FAIR MAID

“We could not blot out from English poetry its visions of the fairyland without a sense of irreparable loss. No other literature save that of Greece alone can vie with ours in its pictures of the land of fantasy and glamour, or has brought back from that mysterious realm of unfading beauty treasures of more exquisite and enduring charm.”—Alfred Nutt.

“We have already shown how long and how faithfully the Gaelic and Welsh peasants clung to their old gods in spite of all the efforts of the clerics to explain them as ancient kings, or transform them into wonder-working saints, or to ban them as demons of Hell.”—Charles Squire.

In the preceding chapter it was shown that the number eleven was for some reason peculiarly identified with the Elven, or Elves: in Germany eleven seems to have carried a somewhat similar significance, for on the eleventh day of the eleventh month was always inaugurated the Carnival season which was celebrated by weekly festivities which increased in mirthful intensity until Shrove Tuesday.[692] Commenting upon this custom it has been pointed out that “The fates seem to have displayed a remarkable sense of artistry in decreeing that the Great War should cease at the moment when it did, for the hostilities came to an end at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month”.[693]

Etymologists connect the word Fate with fay; the expression fate is radically good fay, and it is merely a matter of choice whether Fate or the Fates be regarded as Three or as One: moreover the aspect of Fate, whether grim or beautiful, differs invariably to the same extent as that of the two fairy mothers which Kingsley introduces into The Water Babies, the delicious Lady Doasyouwouldbedoneby and the forbidding Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid.

Fig. 353.—Printer’s Ornament (English, 1724).

The Greek Moirae or Fates were represented as either three austere maidens or as three aged hags: the Celtic mairae, of which Rice Holmes observes that “no deities were nearer to the hearts of Celtic peasants,” were represented in groups of three; their aspect was that of gentle, serious, motherly women holding new-born infants in their hands, or bearing fruits and flowers in their laps; and many offerings were made to them by country folk in gratitude for their care of farm, and flock, and home.[694]

In the Etrurian bucket illustrated on page 474, the Magna Mater or Fate was represented with two children, one white the other black: in the emblems herewith the supporting Pair are depicted as two Amoretti, and the Central Fire, Force, or Tryamour is portrayed by three hearts blazing with the fire of Charity. There is indeed no doubt that the Three Charities, Three Graces, and Three Fates were merely presentations of the one unchanging central and everlasting Fire, Phare, or Force. Among the Latins the Moirae were termed Parcae, and seemingly all mythologies represent the Great Pyre, Phare, or Fairy as at times a Fury. In Britain Keridwen—whose name the authorities state meant perpetual love—appears very notably as a Fury, and on certain British coins she is similarly depicted. What were the circumstances which caused the moneyers of the period to concentrate such anguish into the physiognomy of the pherepolis it would be interesting to know: the fact remains that they did so, yet we find what obviously is the same fiery-locked figure with an expression unmistakably serene.

Fig. 354.—Printer’s Ornament (English, 1724).

Figs. 355 to 358.—British.

Fig. 359.—Mary, in an Oval Aureole, Intersected by Another, also Oval, but of smaller size. Miniature of the X. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Tradition seems to have preserved the memory of the Virgin Mary as one of the Three Greek Moirae or Three Celtic Mairae or Spinners, for according to an apocryphal gospel Mary was one of the spinsters of the Temple Veil: “And the High priest said; choose for me by lot who shall spin the gold and the white and fine linen, and the blue and the scarlet, and the true purple. And the true purple and the scarlet fell to the lot of Mary, and she took them and went away to her house.”[695] The purple heart-shaped mulberry in Greek is moria, and the Athenian district known as Moria is supposed to have been so named from its similitude to a mulberry leaf. In Cornwall the scarlet-berried holly is known as Aunt Mary’s Tree, and as aunt in the West of England was a title applied in general to old women, it is evident that Aunt Mary of the Holly Tree must have been differentiated from the little Maid of Bethlehem. According to The Golden Legend St. Mary died at the age of seventy-two, a number of which the significance has been partially noted, and she was reputed to have been fifteen years of age when she gave birth to the Saviour of the World: the number fifteen is again connected with St. Mary in the miracle thus recorded of her early childhood: “And when the circle of three years was rolled round, and the time of her weaning was fulfilled, they brought the Virgin to the Temple of the Lord with offerings. Now there were round the temple according to the fifteen Psalms of Degrees, fifteen steps going up.”[696] Up these mystic fifteen steps we are told that the new-weaned child miraculously walked unaided.

The New Testament refers to three Marys; in the design overleaf the figure might well represent Fate, and that there was once a Great and a Little Mary is somewhat implied by the fact that in Jerusalem adjoining the church of St. Mary was “another church of St. Mary called the Little”:[697] that there was also at one time a White Mary and a Black Mary is indubitable from the numerous Black Virgins which still exist in continental churches. Even the glorious Diana of Ephesus was, as has been seen, at times represented as black: the name Ephesus, where the Magna Mater was pre-eminently worshipped, is radically Ephe, and that Godiva of Coventry was alternatively associated with night is clear from the fact that the Godiva procession at a village near Coventry included two Godivas, one white, the other black.[698]

Near King’s Cross, London, in the ward of Farendone, used to exist a spring known as Black Mary’s Hole: this name was popularly supposed to have originated from a negro woman who kept a black cow and used to draw water from the spring, but tradition also said that it was originally the Blessed Mary’s Well, and that this having fallen into disrepute at the time of the Reformation the less attractive cognomen was adopted.[699]

Fig. 360.—Engraving on Pebble, Montastruc, Bruniquel.

Fig. 361.—Dagger-handle in form of mammoth, Bruniquel.

From A Guide to the Antiquities of the Stone Age (B.M.).]

The immense antiquity of human occupation of this site is indicated by the fact that opposite Black Mary’s Hole there was found at the end of the seventeenth century a pear-shaped flint instrument in the company of bones of some species of elephant: after lying unappreciated for many years the tool in question has since been recognised as a piece of human handiwork, and may fairly claim to be the first of its kind recorded in this or any other country.[700] That the contemporaries of the mammoth were no mean artists is proved by the Bruniquel objects—particularly the engraving on pebble—here illustrated: not only does the elephant figure on our prehistoric coinage, but it is also found carved on upwards of a hundred stones in Scotland and notably upon a broch at Brechin in Forfarshire. Such was the skill of the Brigantian flintworkers who were settled around Burlington or Bridlington (Yorkshire, anciently Deira) that they successfully fabricated small fish-hooks out of flint, a feat forcing one to endorse the dictum of T. Quiller Couch: “This is a matter not unconnected with our present subject, as the hand which fashioned so skilfully the barbed arrow-head of flint, and the polished hammer-axes may be fairly associated with a brain of high capabilities”.[701]

Fig. 362.—Probable Restoration of Dagger with Mammoth Handle.
From A Guide to the Antiquities of the Stone Age (B.M.).

We have seen that in Scandinavia Mara—doubtless Black Mary—was a ghastly spectre associated with the Night Mare: to this Black Mary may perhaps be assigned mar, meaning to injure or destroy, and probably also morose, morbid, and murder. We again get the equation mar = Mary in marrjan the old German for mar, for marrjan is equivalent to the name Marian which is merely another form of Mary. The Maid Marian who figured in our May-day festivities in association with the sovereign archer Robin Hood, was obviously not the marrer nor the morose Mary but the Merry Lady of the Morris Dance, alias the gentle Maiden Vere or daughter deare of Flora. To White Mary or Mary the Weaver of the scarlet and true purple, may be assigned mere, meaning true and also merry, mirth, and marry: to Black Mary may be assigned myrrh or mar, meaning bitterness, and it is characteristic of the morose tendency of clericalism that it is to this root that the authorities attribute the Mary of Merry England.

The association of the May-fair or Fairy Mother with fifteen, and merriment is pointed by the custom that the great fair which used to be held in the Mayfair district of London began on May 1 and lasted for fifteen days: this fair, we are told, was “not for trade and merchandise, but for musick, showes, drinking, gaming, raffling, lotteries, stage plays, and drolls”.[702] That the Mayfair district was once dedicated to Holy Vera is possible from Oliver’s Mount, the site of which, now known as Mount Street, is believed to mark a fort erected by Oliver Cromwell. We have noted an Oliver’s Castle at Avebury or Avereberie, hence it becomes interesting to find an Avery Row in northern Mayfair, and an Avery Farm Row in Little Ebury Street. The term Ebury is supposed to mark the site of a Saxon ea burgh or island fort, an assumption which may be correct: at the time of Domesday there existed here a manor of Ebury, and that this neighbourhood was an abri or sanctuary dedicated to Bur or Bru is hinted in the neighbouring place-names Bruton Street (adjoining Avery Row, which is equivalent to Abery Row), Bourdon Street, Burton Street, and Burwood Place. Among the charities of Mayfair is one derived from a benefactor named Abourne: we have noticed that the tradition of the neighbourhood is that Kensington Gardens were the haunt of Oberon’s fair daughter, and I have already ventured the suggestion that Bryanstone Square—by which is Brawn Street—marks the site of a Brawn, Bryan, Obreon, or Oberon Street. Northwards lies Brondesbury or Bromesbury: at Bromley in Kent the parish church was dedicated to St. Blaze, and the local fair used to be held on St. Blaze’s Day,[703] and that the Broom or planta genista was sacred to the primal Blaze is further pointed by the ancient custom of firing broom-bushes on 1st May—the Mayfair’s day.[704] In Cornwall furze used to be hung at the door on Mayday morning: at Bramham or Brimham Rocks in Yorkshire the custom of making a blaze on the eve of the Summer Solstice prevailed until the year 1786.[705] By Bromesbury or Brondesbury is Primrose Hill, which was also known as Barrow Hill: there are, however, no traces of a barrow on this still virgin soil which was probably merely a brownlow, brinsley, or brinsmead, unmarked except by fairy bush or stone.[706] The French for primrose is primevere, and that the Mayfair was the Prime and Princess of all meads is implied by Herrick’s lines:—

Come with the Spring-time forth, fair Maid, and be

This year again the Meadow’s Deity.

Yet ere ye enter, give us leave to set

Upon your head this flowry coronet;

To make this neat distinction from the rest,

You are the Prime, and Princesse of the feast:

To which with silver feet lead you the way,

While sweet-breath’d nymphs attend you on this day.

This is your houre; and best you may command,

Since you are Lady of this fairie land.

Full mirth wait on you, and such mirth as shall

Cherrish the cheek, but make none blush at all.

With the “silver feet” of the Meadow Maid may be connoted the curious custom of the London Merrymaids thus described by a French visitor to England in the time of Charles II.: “On the first of May, and the five or six days following, all the pretty young country girls, that serve the town with milk, dress themselves up very neatly and borrow abundance of silver plate whereof they make a pyramid which they adorn with ribbons and flowers, and carry upon their heads instead of their common milk-pails.”[707] That this pyramid or pyre of silver represented a crown or halo is further implied by an engraving of the eighteenth century depicting a fiddler and two milk-maids dancing, one of the maids having on her head a silver plate. It is probable that this symbolised the moon, and that the second dancer represented the sun, the twain standing for the Heavenly Pair, or the Powers of Day and Night.

In Ireland there is little doubt that St. Mary was bracketed inextricably with St. Bride, whence the bardic assertion:—

There are two holy virgins in heaven

By whom may I be guarded

Mary and St. Brighed.[708]

In a Latin Hymn Brighid—“the Mary of the Gael”—is startlingly acclaimed as the Magna Mater or Very Queen of Heaven:—

Brighid who is esteemed the Queen of the true God

Averred herself to be Christ’s Mother, and made herself such by words and deeds.[709]

At Kildare where the circular pyreum assuredly symbolised the central Fire, the servants of Bride were known indeterminately as either Maolbrighde or Maolmuire, i.e., servants of Brighde, or servants of Muire, and it is probable that Muire, the Gaelic form of Mary, was radically mother ire, the word ire being no doubt the same as ur, an Aryan radical meaning fire, whence arson, ardent, etc. The circular pyreum of Bride or Brighit the Bright, may be compared with the “round church of St. Mary” in Gethsemane: here the Virgin was said to have been born, and on the round church in question containing her sepulchre it was fabled that “the rain never falls although there is no roof above it”.[710] This circular church of St. Mary was thus like the circular hedge of St. Bride open to the skies, and it is highly probable that the word Mary, Mory, Maree, etc., sometimes meant mor, mawr, or Big Eye. The golden centre or Bull’s Eye will be subsequently considered, meanwhile it is relevant to Mor eye to point out that less than 200 years ago it was customary to sacrifice a bull on 25th August—a most ardent period of the year—to the god Mowrie and his “$1”lians” on the Scotch island of Inis Maree, evidently Mowrie’s island.[711] At other times and in other districts, Mowrie, Muire, or Mary was no doubt equated with the Celtic Saints Amary and Omer: the surviving words amor, amour, pointing logically to the conclusion that love was Mary’s predominant characteristic. There is no radical distinction between amour and humour, both words probably enshrining the adjectival eu, meaning soft, gentle, pleasing, and propitious: humour is merriment. A notable connection with Mary and amour is found in Germany where Mother Mary is alternately Mother Ross or Rose: not only is the rose the symbol of amour, but the word rose is evidently a corrosion of Eros, the Greek title of Cupid or Amor. Miss Eckenstein states: “I have come across Mother Ross in our own [English] chapbook literature,”[712] whence it becomes significant to find that Myrrha, the Virgin Mother of the Phrygian Adonis, was the consort of a divine Smith, or Hammer-god named Kinyras. The word Kinyras may thus reasonably be modernised into King Eros, and it is not unlikely that inquiries at Ross, Kinross, and Delginross would elicit a connection between these places and the God of Love.

Fig. 363.—From Cities of Etruria (Dennis, C.).

Fig. 364.—From Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism (Inman, C. W.).

Fig. 365.—Maya, the Hindoo Goddess, with a Cruciform Nimbus. Hindostan Iconography. From Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism (Inman, C. W.).

The authorities are slovenly content to equate Mary with Maria, Muire, Marion, etc., assigning all these variations without distinction to mara, or bitterness: with regard to Maria, however, it may be suspected that this form is more probably to be referred to Mother Rhea, and more radically to ma rhi, i.e., Mother Queen, Lady, or Princess. That the word was used as generic term for Good Mother or Pure Mother is implied by its almost universal employment: thus not only was Adonis said to be the son of Myrrha, but Hermes was likewise said to be the child of Maia or Myrrha. The Mother of the Siamese Saviour was entitled Maya Maria, i.e., the Great Mary; the Mother of Buddha was Maya; Maia was a Roman Flower goddess, and it is generally accepted that May, the month of the Flower goddess, is an Anglicised form of Maia.

The earliest known allusion to the morris dance occurs in the church records of Kingston-on-Thames, where the morris dancers used to dance in the parish church.[713] There are in Britain not less than forty or fifty Kingstons, three Kingsburys, four Kentons, seven Kingstons, one Kenstone, and four Kingstones: all these may have been the towns or seats of tribal Kings, but under what names were they known before Kings settled there? It is highly improbable that royal residences were planted in previously uninhabited spots, and it is more likely that our Kings were crowned and associated with already sacred sites where stood a royal and super-sacred stone analogous to the Scotch Johnstone. This was certainly the case at Kingston-on-Thames where there still stands in the market-place the holy stone on which our ancient Kings were crowned: near by is Canbury Park, and it would not surprise me if the original barrow or mound of Can were still standing there. The surname Lovekyn, which appears very prominently in Kingston records, may be connoted with the adjective kind, and it is probable that Moreford, the ancient name of Kingston-on-Thames, did not—as is supposed—mean big ford, but Amor or Mary ford. In Spain and Portugal (Iberia) the name Maria is bestowed indiscriminately upon men and women: that the same indistinction existed in connection with St. Marine may be inferred from the statement in The Golden Legend: “St. Marine was a noble virgin, and was one only daughter to her father who changed the habit of his daughter so that she seemed and was taken for his son and not a woman”.[714]

If the Mary of the Marigolds or “winking marybuds,” which “gin to ope their golden eyes,” was Mary or Big Eye, it may also be surmised that San Marino was the darling of the Mariners, and was the chief Mary-maid, Merro-maid or Mermaid: although the New Testament does not associate the Virgin Mary with mare the sea, amongst her titles are “Myrhh of the Sea,” “Lady of the Sea,” and “Star of the Sea”. At St. Mary’s in the Scillies, in the neighbourhood of Silver Street, is a castle known as Stella Maria: this castle is “built with salient angles resembling the rays of a star,” and Pelistry Bay on the opposite side of the islet was thus presumably sacred to Belle Istry, the Beautiful Istar or Star. It has often been supposed that Start Point was named after Astarte, and there is every probability that the various rivers Stour, including the Kentish Great Stour and Little Stour, were also attributed to Istar or Esther. The Greek version of the Book of Esther—a varient of Istar—contains the remarkable passage, “A little fountain became a river, and there was light, and the sun, and much water”: in the neighbourhood of the Kentish Stour is Eastry; in Essex there is a Good Easter and a High Easter, and in Wilts and Somerset are Eastertowns. In England the sun was popularly supposed to dance at Eastertide, and in Britain alone is the Easter festival known under this name: the ancient Germans worshipped a Virgin-mother named Ostara, whose image was common in their consecrated forests.

What is described as the “camp” surrounding St. Albans is called the Oyster Hills, and amid the much water of the Thames Valley is an Osterley or Oesterley. On the Oyster Hills at St. Albans was an hospice for infirm women, dedicated to St. Mary de Pree, the word pree here being probably pre, the French for a meadow—but Verulam may have been pre land, for in ancient times it was known alternatively as Vrolan or Brolan.[715] The Oesterley or Oester meadow in the Thames Valley, sometimes written Awsterley, was obviously common ground, for when Sir Thomas Gresham enclosed it his new park palings were rudely torn down and burnt by the populace, much to the offence of Queen Elizabeth who was staying in the place at the time. Notwithstanding the royal displeasure, complaints were laid against Gresham “by sundry poor men for having enclosed certain common ground to the prejudice of the poor”.

Next Osterley is Brentford, where once stood “the Priory of the Holy Angels in the Marshlands”: other accounts state that this organisation was a “friary, hospital, or fraternity of the Nine holy orders of Angels”. With this holy Nine may be connoted the Nine Men’s Morrice and the favourite Mayday pageant of “the Nine Worthies”. As w and v were always interchangeable we may safely identify the “worthies” with the “virtues,” and I am unable to follow the official connection between worth and verse: there is no immediate or necessary relation between them. The Danish for worth is vorde, the Swedish is varda, and there is thus little doubt that worthy and virtue are one and the same word. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Constable Dull expresses his willingness to “make one in a dance or so, or I will play the tabor to the Worthies and let them dance the Hey”.

Osterley is on the river Brent, which sprang from a pond “vulgarly called Brown’s Well,”[716] whence it is probable that the Brent vulgarly derived its name from Oberon, the All Parent. Brentford was the capital of Middlesex; numerous pre-historic relics have been found there, and that it was a site of immemorial importance is testified by its ancient name of Breninford, supposed to mean King’s Road or Way. But brenen is the plural of bren—a Prince or King, and two fairy Princes or two fairy Kings were traditionally and proverbially associated with the place. In Cowper’s Task occur the lines:—

United yet divided twain at once

So sit two kings of Brentford on one throne.

Prior, in his Alma, refers to the two Kings as being “discreet and wise,” and it is probable that in Buckingham’s The Rehearsal, of which the scene is laid at Brentford, we have further scraps of genuine and authentic tradition. The Rehearsal introduces us to two true Kings and two usurpers: the true Kings who are represented as being very fond of one another come on to the stage hand-in-hand, and are generally seen smelling at one rose or one nosegay. Imagining themselves being plotted against, one says to the other:—

Then spite of Fate we’ll thus combined stand

And like true brothers still walk hand in hand.

Driven from their throne by usurpers, nevertheless, towards the end of the play, “the two right Kings of Brentford descend in the clouds singing in white garments, and three fiddlers sitting before them in green”. Adjacent to Brentford is the village of Twickenham where at the parish church used to prevail a custom of giving away on Easter Day the divided fragments of two great cakes.[717] This apparently innocuous ceremony was, however, in 1645 deemed to be a superstitious relic and was accordingly suppressed. We have seen that charity-cakes were distributed at Biddenden in commemoration of the Twin Sisters; we have also seen that St. Michael was associated with a great cake named after him, hence it is exceedingly probable that Twickenham of the Two Easter Cakes was a seat of the Two or Twa Kings who survived in the traditions of the neighbouring Breninford or King’s Ford.

Figs. 366 to 370.—British. From Akerman.

That the Two or Twa Kings of Twickenham were associated with Two Fires is suggested by the alternative name Twittanham: in Celtic tan meant fire, and the term has survived in tandsticker, i.e., fire-sticks, or matches: it has also survived in tinder, “anything for kindling fires from a spark,” and in etincelle, the French for spark. In Etruria Jupiter was known as Tino or Tin, and on the British Star-hero coin here illustrated the legend reads Tin: the town of Tolentino, with which one of the St. Nicholas’s was associated in combination with a star, was probably a shrine of Tall Ancient Tino; in modern Greece Tino is a contracted form of Constantine. The Beltan or Beltein fires were frequently in pairs or twins, and there is a saying still current in Ireland—“I am between Bels fires,” meaning “I am on the horns of a dilemma”. The Dioscuri or Two Kings were always associated with fires or stars: they were the beau-ideal warriors or War Boys, and to them was probably sacred the “Warboy’s Wood” in Huntingdon, where on May Day the poor used to go “sticking” or gathering fuel. The Dioscuri occur frequently on Roman coins, and it will be noticed that the British Warboy is often represented with a star, and with the palm branch of Invictus. On the assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary it is said that an angel appeared before her bearing “a bough of the palm of paradise—and the palm shone by right great clearness and was like to a green rod whose leaves shone like to the morrow star”.[718] There is very little doubt that the mysterious fish-bone, fern-leaf, spike, ear of corn, or back-bone, which figures so frequently among the “what-nots” of our ancient coinage represented the green and magic rod of Paradise.

Fig. 371.—Star or Bush (MS., circa 1425). From The History of Signboards (Larwood & Hotten).

At Twickenham is Bushey Park, which is assumed to have derived its name from the bushes in which it abounded: for some reason our ancestors combined their Bush and Star inn-signs into one, vide the design herewith: we have already traced a connection between bougie—a candle, and the Bogie whose habitation was the brakes and bushes: whence it is not unlikely that Bushey Park derived its title from the Elphin fires, Will-o-the-wisps, or bougies which must have danced nightly when Twickenham was little better than a swamp. The Rev. J. B. Johnston decodes Bushey into “Byssa’s” isle or peninsula, and it is not improbable that Bushey in Hertfordshire bears the same interpretation, only I do not think that the supposititious Byssa, Bissei, or Bisi was an Anglo-Saxon. That “Bisi” was Bogie or Puck is perhaps implied further by the place-name Denbies facing Boxhill: we have already noted in this district Bagdon, Pigdon, Bookham, and Pixham, whence Denbies, situated on the brow of Pigdon or Bagdon, suggests that here seemingly was the actual Bissei’s den. The supposititious Bissei assigned to Bushey may be connoted with the giant Bosow who dwelt by repute on Buzza’s Hill just beyond Hugh Town, St. Mary’s. According to Miss Courtney the Cornish family of Bosow are traceable to the giant of Buzza’s Hill.[719] Presumably to Puck or Bog, are similarly traceable the common surnames Begg, Bog, etc.

By the Italians the phosphorescent lights or bougies of St. Elmo are known not as Castor and Pollux, but as the fires of St. Peter and St. Nicholas: the name Nicholas is considered to mean “Victory of the People”; in Greek nike means victory: we have seen that in Russia Nicholas was equated with St. Michael, in face of which facts it is presumptive that St. Nicholas was Invictus, or the Unconquerable. In London, at Paternoster Lane used to stand “the fair parish church of St. Michael called Paternoster,”[720] and that St. Nicholas was originally “Our Father” or Paternoster is implied by the corporate seal of Yarmouth: this represents St. Nicholas supported on either side by angels, and bears the inscription O Pastor Vere Tibi Subjectis Miserere. It must surely have savoured of heresy to hail the supposed Nicholas of Patara in Lycia as O Pastor Vere, unless in popular estimation St. Nicholas was actually the Great Pastor or True Feeder: that Nicholas was indeterminately either the Father or the Mother is deducible from the fact that in Scotland the name Nicholas is commonly bestowed on girls.

In France and Italy prayers are addressed to Great St. Nicholas, and it is probable that there was always a Nichol and a Nicolette or nucleus: we are told that St. Nicholas, whose mother’s name was Joanna, was born at Patara, and that he became the Bishop of Myra: on his fete day the proper offering was a cock, and that Nicholas or Invictus was the chanteur or Chanticleer, is implied by the statement: “St. Nicholas went abroad in most part in London singing after the old fashion, and was received with many people into their houses, and had much good cheer, as ever they had in many places”: on Christmas Eve St. Nicholas still wanders among the children, notwithstanding the sixteenth century censure—“thus tender minds to worship saints and wicked things are taught”.

Nicholas is an extended form of Nike, Nick, or Neck, and the frequent juxtaposition of St. Nicholas and St. George is an implication that these Two Kings were once the Heavenly Twins. We have already noted an Eleven Stone at Trenuggo—the abode of Nuggo? and there is a likelihood that Nuggo or Nike was there worshipped as One and Only, the Unique: that he was Lord of the Harvests is implied by the fabrication of a harvest doll or Neck. According to Skeat neck originally meant the nape or knop of the neck; it would thus seem that neck—Old English nekke—was a synonym for knob or knop. In Cornwall Neck-day was the great day of the year, when the Neck was “cried”[721] and suspended in the ingle nook until the following year: in the words of an old Cornishwoman: “There were Neck cakes, much feasting and dancing all the evening. Another great day was Guldise day when the corn was drawn: Guldise cakes and a lump of pease-pudding for every one.”[722]

Near London Stone is the Church of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey, and at Old Jewry stood St. Mary Cole Church: it is not unlikely that this latter was originally dedicated to Old King Cole, the father of the lovely Helen and the Merry Old Soul whose three fiddlers may be connoted with the three green fiddlers of the Kings of Brentford. The great bowl of Cole, the ghoul of other ages, may be equated with the cauldron or calix of the Pastor Vere: the British word for cauldron was pair, and the Druidic bards speak with great enthusiasm of “their cauldron,” “the cauldron of Britannia,” “the cauldron of Lady Keridwen,” etc. This cauldron was identified with the Stone circles, and the Bardic poets also speak of a mysterious pair dadeni which is understood to mean “the cauldron of new birth or rejuvenescence”.[723] The old artists seemingly represented the Virtues as emerging from this cauldron as three naked boys or Amoretti, for it is said that St. Nicholas revived three murdered children who had been pickled in brine by a wicked inn-keeper who had run short of bacon. This miracle is his well-known emblem, and the murder story by which the authorities accounted for the picture is probably as silly and brutal an afterthought as the horrid “$1”tures” and protracted dolours of other saints. Nevertheless some ghoulish and horrible practices seem to have accompanied the worship of the cauldron, and the author of Druidism Exhumed reproduces a Scotch sculpture of a cauldron out of which protruding human legs are waving ominously in the air.

St. Nicholas of Bari is portrayed resuscitating three youths from three tubs: that Nicholas was radically the Prince of Peace is implied, however, from the exclamation “Nic’las!” which among children is equivalent to “fainites”: the sign of truce or fainites is to cross the two fore-fingers into the form of the treus or cross.

St. Nicholas is the unquestioned patron of all children, and in the past bands of lads, terming themselves St. Nicholas’ Clerks or St. Nicholas’ Knights, added considerably to the conviviality of the cities. Apparently at all abbeys once existed the custom of installing upon St. Nicholas’ Day a Boy Bishop who was generally a choir or singing boy: this so-called Bearn Bishop or Barnebishop was decked, according to one account, in “a myter of cloth and gold with two knopps of silver gilt and enamelled,” and a study of the customs prevailing at this amazing festival of the Holy Innocent leaves little doubt that the Barnebishop personified the conception of the Pastor Vere in the aspect of a lad or “knave”. The connection between knop and knave has already been traced, and the “two knopps” of the episcopal knave or bairnbishop presumably symbolised the bren or breasts of Pastor Vere, the celestial Parent: it has already been suggested that the knops on Figs. 30 to 38 (p. 149) represented the Eyes or Breasts of the All Mighty.

In Irish ab meant father or lord, and in all probability St. Abb’s Head, supposedly named after a Bishop Ebba, was once a seat of Knebba worship: that Cunobe was the Mighty Muse, singing like St. Nicholas after the old fashion, is evident from the British coin illustrated on page 305, a sad example of carelessness, declension, and degradation from the Macedonian Philippus.

The festival of the Burniebishop was commemorated with conspicuous pomp at Cambrai, and there is reason to think that this amazing institution was one of Cambrian origin: so fast and furious was the accompanying merriment that the custom was inevitably suppressed. The only Manor in the town of Brentford is that of Burston or Boston, whence it is probable that Brentford grew up around a primeval Bur stone or “Denbies”. That the place was famous for its merriment and joviality is sufficiently evidenced by the fact that in former times the parish rates “were mainly supported by the profits of public sports and diversions especially at Whitsuntide”.[724]

According to The Rehearsal when the True Kings or Two Kings, accompanied by their retinue of three green-clad fiddlers, descended from the clouds, a dance was then performed: “an ancient dance of right belonging to the Kings of Brentford, but since derived with a little alteration to the Inns of Court”. On referring to the famous pageants of the Inns of Court we find that the chief character was the Lord of Misrule, known otherwise as the King of Cockneys or Prince of Purpool. We have seen that the Hobby Horse was clad in purple, and that Mary was weaver of the true purple—a combination of true blue and scarlet. The authorities connote purple, French purpre, with the Greek porphureos, “an epithet of the surging sea,” and they ally it with the Sanscrit bhur, meaning to be active. The cockney, and very active Prince of Purpool or Portypool was conspicuously celebrated at Gray’s Inn which occupies the site of the ancient Manor of Poripool, and the ritual—condemned and suppressed by the Puritans as “popish, diabolical, and antechristian”—seems invariably to have started by a fire or phare lighted in the hall: this at any rate was the custom and status with which the students at St. John’s, Oxford, opened the proceedings on All Hallows’ Eve.

The Druidic Bards allude to their sacred pyreum, or fire-circle, as a pair dadeni, and that a furious Fire or Phare was the object of their devotion is obvious from hymns such as—

Let burst forth ungentle

The horse-paced ardent fire!

Him we worship above the earth,

Fire, fire, low murmuring in its dawn,

High above our inspiration,

Above every spirit

Great is thy terribleness.[725]

Pourpre or purple, the royal or imperial colour, was doubtless associated with the Fire of Fires, and the connection between this word and porphureos must, I think, be sought in the idea of pyre furious or fire furious, rather than any epithet of the surging sea. The Welsh for purple is porffor.

Either within or immediately adjacent to the Manor of Poripool or Purpool were some famous springs named Bagnigge Wells: at the corner of Bathhurst Street, Paddington, was a second Bagnigge Wells, and the river Fleet used also at one time to be known as the Bagnigge. This ubiquitous Bagnigge was in all probability Big Nigge or Big Nicky—

Know you the Nixies gay and fair?

Their eyes are black and green their hair,

They lurk in sedgy shores.

The fairy Nokke, Neck, or Nickel, is said to have been a great musician who sat upon the water’s edge and played a golden harp, the harmony of which operated on all nature:[726] sometimes he is represented as a complete horse who could be made to work at the plough if a bridle of particular kind were used: he is also represented as half man and half horse, as an aged man with a long beard, as a handsome young man, and as a pretty little boy with golden hair and scarlet cap. That Big Nigge once haunted the Bagnigge Wells is implied by the attendant legend of Black Mary, Black Mary’s Hole being the entrance, or immediately adjacent, to one of the Bagnigge springs: similarly, as has been noted, Peg Powler, and Peg this or that, haunted the streams of Lancashire.

We have seen that Keightley surmised the word pixy to be the endearing diminutive sy added to Puck, whence, as in Nancy, Betsy, Dixie, and so forth, Nixy may similarly be considered as dear little Nick. In Suffolk, the fairies are known as farisees, seemingly, dear little fairies, and our ancestors seem to have possessed a pronounced partiality for similar diminutives: we find them alluding to the Blood of the Lambkin, an expression which Adamnan’s editors remark as “a bold instance of the Celtic diminutive of endearment so characteristic of Adamnan’s style”: they add: “Throughout Adamnan’s work, diminutives are constantly used, and these in most cases are used in a sense of endearment difficult to convey in English, perfectly natural as they are in the mouth of the kindly and warm-hearted Irish saint. In the present case Dr. Reeves thinks the diminutives may indicate the poorness of the animals from the little there was to feed them upon.”[727] As the traditions of Fairyland give no hint for the assumption of any rationing or food-shortage it seems hardly necessary to consider either the pixies, the farisees, or the nixies as either half-starved or even impoverished.

In Scandinavia and Germany the nixies are known as the nisses, and they there correspond to the brownies of Scotland: according to Grimm the word nisse is “Nicls, Niclsen, i.e., Nicolaus, Niclas, a common name in Germany and the North, which is also contracted to Klas, Claas”; but as k seems invariably to soften into ch, and again into s, it is a perfectly straight road from Nikke to Nisse, and the adjective nice is an eloquent testimonial to the Nisses’ character. Some Nisses were doubtless nice, others were obviously nasty, noxious, and nocturnal: the Nis of Jutland is in Friesland called Puk, and also Niss-Puk, Nise-Bok, and Niss-Kuk: the Kuk of this last mentioned may be connoted with the fact that the customary offering to St. Nicholas was a cock—the symbol of the Awakener—and as St. Nicholas was so intimately connected with Patara, the cock of St. Peter is no doubt related to the legend.

St. Nicholas, or Santa Claus, customarily travels by night: the nixies were black-eyed; Old Nick was always painted black; nox, or night, is the same word as nixy; and nigel, night, or nicht all imply blackness. According to Cæsar: “all the Gauls assert that they are descended from the god Dis, and say that this tradition has been handed down by the Druids. For that reason they compute the divisions of every season not by the number of days but by nights; they keep birthdays, and the beginnings of months and years in such an order that the day follows the night.”[728] The expressions fortnight, and sen’night thus not only perpetuate an idea of great antiquity but one which is philosophically sound: to our fore-runners Night was no wise evil, but the beneficent Mother of a Myriad Stars: the fairies revelled in the dark, and in eyes of old “the vast blue night was murmurous with peris wings”[729].

The place-name Knightsbridge is probably a mis-spelling of Neyte, one of the three manors into which Kensington was once divided: the other two were Hyde and Ebury, and it is not unlikely that these once constituted a trinity—Hyde being the Head, Ebury the Brightness, and Neyte—Night. The Egyptian represented Nut, Naut, or Neith as a Mother Goddess with two children in her arms, one white the other black: to her were assigned the words: “I am what has been, what is, and what will be,” and her worshippers declared: “She hath built up life from her own body”. In Scandinavia Nat was the Mother of all the gods: she was said to be an awe-inspiring, adorable, noble, and beneficent being, and to have her home on the lower slopes of the Nida mountains: nid is the French for nest, and with Neyte may be connoted nuit, the French for night. That St. Neot was le nuit is implied by the tradition that the Church of St. Neot in Cornwall was built not only by night, but entirely by Neot himself who drew the stones from a neighbouring quarry, aided only by the help of reindeer. These magic reindeer are obviously the animals of St. Nick, and it is evidently a memory of Little Nick that has survived in the tradition that St. Neot was a saint of very small stature—somewhere about 15 inches high.[730] With Mother Nat of Scandinavia, and Mother Naut or Neith of Egypt, may be connoted Nutria, a Virgin-Mother goddess of Etruria; a divine nurse with whose name may be connected nutrix (nurse) and nutriment.

St. Nicholas is the patron saint of seafarers and there are innumerable dedications to him at the seaside: that Nikke was Neptune is unquestionable, and connected with his name is doubtless nicchio the Italian for a shell. From nicchio comes our modern niche, which means a shell-like cavity or recess: in the British Eppi coin, illustrated on page 284, the marine monster may be described as a nikke, and the apparition of the nikke as a perfect horse might not ineptly be designated a nag.

I have elsewhere illustrated many representations of the Water-Mother, the Mary-Maid, the Mermaid, the Merrow-Maid, or as she is known in Brittany—Mary Morgan. The resident nymph or genius of the river Severn was named Sabrina; the Welsh for the Severn is Havren, and thus it is evident that the radical of this river name is brina, vren, or vern: the British Druids recognised certain governing powers named feraon: fern was already noted as an Iberian word meaning anything good, whence it is probable that in Havren or Severn the affix ha or se was either the Greek eu or the British and Sanscrit su, both alike meaning the soft, gentle, pleasing, and propitious.

Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou art sitting

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,

In twisted braids of lilies, knitting

The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair.

In the neighbourhood of Bryanstone Square is Lissom Grove, a corruption of Lillestone Grove: here thus seemingly stood a stone sacred to the Lily or the All Holy, and the neighbouring church of St. Cyprian probably marks the local memory of a traditional sy brian, Sabrina, or dear little brownie.

Near Silchester, on the boundary line between Berks and Hants, is a large stone known as the Imp stone, and as this was formerly called the Nymph stone,[731] it is probable that in this instance the Imp stone was a contraction of Imper or Imber stone—the Imp being the Nymph of the amber-dropping hair. The Scandinavians believed that the steed of the Mother Goddess Nat produced from its mouth a froth, which consisted of honey-dew, and that from its bridle dropped the dews in the dales in the morning: the same idea attached to the steeds of the Valkyre, or War Maidens, from whose manes, when shaken, dew dropped into the deep dales, whence harvests among the people.[732]

Originally, imp meant a scion, a graft, or an offspring, a sprout, or sprig: sprig, spright, spirit, spirt, sprout, and sprack (an old English word meaning lively, perky, or pert), are all radically pr: in London the sparrow “was supposed to be the soul of a dead person”;[733] in Kent, a sparrow is termed a sprug, whence it would appear that this pert, perky, little bird was once a symbol of the sprightly sprout, sprite, or spirit.

Fig. 372.—Six-winged angel holding lance, wings crossed on breast, arrayed in robe and mantle. (From Didron.)

Stow mentions that the fair parish church of St. Michael called Paternoster when new built, was made a college of St. Spirit and St. Mary. All birds in general were symbols of St. Spirit, but more particularly the Columba or Culver,[734] which was pre-eminently the emblem of Great Holy Vere: we have already illustrated a half white, half black, six-winged representation of this sacred sign of simplicity and love, and the six-winged angel here reproduced is, doubtless, another expression of the far-spread idea:—

The embodied spirit has a thousand heads,

A thousand eyes, a thousand feet, around

On every side, enveloping the earth,

Yet filling space no larger than a span.

He is himself this very universe;

He is whatever is, has been, and shall be;

He is the lord of immortality.[735]

It is difficult to conceive any filthiness or evil of the dove, yet the hagiologists mention “a foul dove or black culver,” which is said to have flown around the head of a certain holy Father named Nonnon.[736] We may connote this Nonnon with Nonna or Non, the reputed mother of St. David, for of St. David, we are told, his birth was heralded by angels thirty years before the event, and that among other miracles (such as restoring sight to the blind), doves settled on his shoulders. Dave or Davy is the same word as dove; in Welsh dof means gentle, and it is more probable that the gentle dove derived its title from this word than as officially surmised from the Anglo-Saxon dufan, “to plunge into”. According to Skeat, dove means literally diver, but doves neither dive nor plunge into anything: they have not even a diving flight. The Welsh are known familiarly as Taffys, and the Church of Llandaff is supposed to mean Church on the River Taff: it is more probable that Llandaff was a shrine of the Holy Dove, and that David with the doves upon his shoulder was a personification of the Holy Spirit or Wisdom. Non is the Latin for not, and the black dove associated with Nonnon or not not was no doubt a representation of that Negation, non-existence or inscrutable void, which existed before the world was, and is otherwise termed Chaos or Cause. That Wisdom or the Holy Spirit was conceived as the primal and inscrutable Darkness, is evident from the statement in The Wisdom of Solomon: “For God loveth none but him that dwelleth with Wisdom. For she is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the orders of stars: being compared with the light she is found before it.”

The Nonnon of whom “it seemed that a foul dove or black culver flew about him whilst he was at Mass at the alter” was said to be the Bishop of Heliopolis, i.e., the city of the Sun, and he comes under notice in connection with St. Pelagienne—“said of pelagus which is as much to say as the sea”. The interpretation further placed upon St. Pelagienne is that “she was the sea of iniquity, and the flood of sins, but she plunged after into the sea of tears and washed her in the flood of baptism”. That poor Pelagienne was the Water Mother of Mary Morgan is implied further by the fragment of autobiography—“I have been called from my birth Pelagienne, but for the pomp of my clothing men call me Margaret”:[737] we have seen that Pope Joanna of Engelheim was also called Margaret, whence it is to be suspected that although it is true that pelagus meant the sea St. Pelagienne was primarily the Bella or beautiful Jeanne, i.e., Mary Morgan or Morgiana.

Figs. 373 to 376.—Greek. From Barthelemy.

Fig. 377.—British. From Akerman.

Fig. 378.—British. From Evans.

Figs. 379 to 384.—British (Channel Islands). From Barthelemy.

On the coins of King Janus of Sicily there figured a dove; jonah, yuneh, or Ione are the Hebrew and Greek terms for dove; the Ionian Greeks were worshippers of the dove, and the consociation of St. Columbe Kille or the “little dove of the church” with the Hebridean island of Iona is presumptive evidence of the worship of the dove in Iona. In the Rhodian Greek coins here illustrated the reverse represents the rhoda or rose of Rhodes, and the obverse head may be connoted with the story of St. Davy with the dove settled on his shoulder: that the dove was also an English emblem is obvious from the British coins, Figs. 377 to 384; the dove will also be found frequently introduced on the contemned sceattae illustrated ante, page 364.

Fig. 385.—The Father, Represented as Slightly Different to the Son. French Miniature of the Close of the XIII. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Fig. 386.—The Divine Dove, in a Radiating Aureole. From a French Miniature of the XV. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Among the golden treasures unearthed by Schliemann at Mykenae was a miniature “model of a temple” on which are seated two pigeons with uplifted wings:[738] among the curious and interesting happenings which occurred during the childhood of the Virgin Mary it is recorded that “Mary was in the Temple of the Lord as if she were a dove that dwelt there, and she received food as from the hand of an angel”: Fig. 380 appears to illustrate this dove dwelling in a Temple. The legend continues that when the Holy Virgin attained the age of twelve years the Angel of the Lord caused an assembly of all the widowers each of whom was ordained to bring with him his rod: the High Priest then took these rods and prayed over them, but there came no sign: at last Joseph took his rod “and behold a dove came out of the rod and flew upon Joseph’s head”.[739] It is said by Lucian that in the most sacred part of the temple of Hieropolis, the holy city of Syria, were three figures of which the centre one had a golden dove upon its head: not only was no name given to this, but the priests said nothing concerning its origin or form, calling it simply “The sign”: according to the British Bards—“To Addav came the sign. It was taught by Alpha, and it was the earliest polished melody of Holy God, and by a wise mouth it was canticled.” There is little doubt that the descending dove with wings outstretched was a variant of the three rays or Broad Arrow, that the awen was the Iona, and that this same idea was conveyed by the Three ains, or eyen, Eyes, Golden Balls, or pawnbroker’s sign. It is recorded of St. Nicholas of Bari, the patron saint of pawnbrokers, that immediately he was born he stood up in the basin in which he was being washed and remained with hands clasped, and uplifted eyes, for two hours: in later life he became wealthy, and threw into a window on three successive nights a bag of gold as a dowry for three impoverished and sore-tempted maidens. In commemoration of these three bags of gold St. Nicholas became the patron saint of pawnbrokers whose sign of the Three Golden Balls is a conversion of the three anonymous gifts.

Fig. 387.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Fig. 388.—God the Father, with a Bi-Triangular Nimbus; God the Son, with a Circular Nimbus; God the Holy Ghost, without a Nimbus, and within an Aureole. (Fresco at Mount Athos.) From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Fig. 389.—The Three Divine Persons, Adorned with the Cruciform Nimbus. Miniature of the close of the XIII. Cent. MS. in the Bibliothèque Royale. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Fig. 390.—God the Father, and God the Son, with Features Exactly Identical. French Miniature of the commencement of the XIII. Cent. From Christian Iconography (Didron).

In Hebrew the Three Apples, Eyes, or Golden Balls are called ains or fountains of living water, and to this day in Wales a spring of water is called in Welsh the Eye of the Fountain or the Water Spring. It will be remembered that the sister of St. Nonna, and therefore the aunt of St. Davy, was denominated Gwen of the Three Breasts, Tierbron, or three breasts, may be connoted with three-eyed Thor, and the combination of Eyes and Sprigs is conspicuously noticeable in Fig. 39, page 364: one will also note the head of No. 49 on the same plate.

Fig. 391.—From Barthelemy.

Fig. 392.—British (Channel Islands). From Barthelemy.

The Three Holy Children on the reverse of Fig. 391—a Byzantine coin—are presumably the offspring of St. Michael alias Nichol on the obverse: the arms of Cornwall consist of fifteen golden balls called besants; the county motto is One and All. Of St. Nicholas of Tolentino who became a friar at the age of eleven, we are told that a star rested over his altar and preceded him when he walked, and he is represented in Art with a lily in his hand—the symbol of his pure life—and a star over his head: that Nicolette was identified with the Little Star or Stella Maris is clear from Troubadour chansons, such as the following from that small classic Aucassin and Nicolette—

Little Star I gaze upon,

Sweetly drawing to the moon,

In such golden haunt is set

Love, and bright-haired Nicolette.

God hath taken from our war

Beauty, like a shining star.

Ah, to reach her, though I fell

From her Heaven to my Hell.

Who were worthy such a thing,

Were he emperor or king?

Still you shine, oh, perfect Star,

Beyond, afar.

It is impossible to say whether the three-eyed elphin faces illustrated ante, page 381, are asters, marguerites, marigolds, or suns: in the centre of one of them is a heart, and without doubt they one and all symbolised the Great Amour or Margret. During excavations at Jerusalem in 1871, the symbol of Three Balls was discovered under the Temple of King Solomon on Mount Moriah: this temple was circular, and it is probable that the name Moriah meant originally Moreye or Big Eye. That the three cavities in question were once ains or eyes is implied by the explorer’s statement: “Within this recess are three cylindrical holes 5¼ inches in diameter, the lines joining their centres forming the sides of an equilateral triangle. Below this appears once to have been a basin to collect the water, but whatever has been there, it has been violently removed ... there can be little doubt that this is an ancient overflow from the Birket Israil.”[740] It is probable that the measure of these three cup-like holes was once 5 inches, and that the resultant fifteen had some original connection with the fifteen besants or basins of Byzantine Britain.

Fig. 393.—From The Recovery of Jerusalem (Wilson and Warren).

Figs. 394 to 396.—British. From Evans.

Fig. 397.—British (Channel Islands). From Barthelemy.

Fig. 398.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).

With the brook Birket Israil at Mount Moriah may be connoted the neighbouring “large pool called El Burak”: the existence on Mount Moriah of subterranean cisterns or basins known as Solomon’s Stables renders it probable that El Burak was El Borak, the fabulous white steed upon which the faithful Mussulman expects one day to ride. The Eyes of the British broks or nags here illustrated are curiously prominent, and in Fig. 396 the eleven-eared wheat sprig is springing from a trefoil: with the lily surmounting the Cuno steed may be connoted the two stars or morrow stars which frequently decorate this triune emblem of Good Deed, Good Thought, Good Word: they may be seen to-day on the badges of those little Knights of To-morrow, the Boy Scouts.

The lily appears in the hand of the Pixtilos figure here illustrated, and among the Pictish emblems found on the vitrified fort at Anwath in Scotland is the puckish design illustrated on page 496, Fig. 293. This was probably a purely symbolic and elementary form of the dolorous and pensive St. John which Christianity figured with a pair of marigolds or marguerites in lieu of feathers or antennae.

Fig. 399.—From An Essay on Ancient Gems (Walsh, R.).

Fig. 400.—Gaulish. From Akerman.

Figs. 401 and 402.—Gaulish. From Akerman.

Accompanying the Pictish inscription in question were the elaborate barnacles or spectacles reproduced ante, page 495: in Crete the barnacles, as illustrated on page 494, are found humanised by a small winged figure holding a wand, and the general effect of the two circles when superimposed is that of the figure 8. The nine-rayed Abracax lion as portrayed by the Gnostics, and doubtless a variant of Abracadabra, has its serpentine body twined into an 8; on a Longstone in Brittany there is a figure holding an 8 tipped staff, and the same emblem will be noticed on the coins of the Longostaliti, a Gaulish people who seemingly were so ghoulish as to venerate a calix or cauldron: from the pair dadeni or cauldron of renaissance represented on these astral coins it will be noticed there are emerging two stars and other interesting nicknacks. The locks of hair on the astral figure represented on the coins of Marseilles—a city founded by a colony of Phocean Greeks from Ionia—number exactly eight: in Scotland we have traced the memory of eight ancient hags, the Mothers of the World: in Valencia we have noted the procession of eight scrupulously coiffured Giants, and there is very little doubt that the eight survivors of the Flood,[741] by whom the world was re-peopled, is a re-statement of the same idea of the Gods of the four quarters and their Consorts. In connection with the Ogdoad or Octet of eight gods one may connote the curious erection which once decorated the London Guildhall, the seat of Gogmagog:[742] here, “on each side of the flight of steps was an octangular turreted gallery, balustraded, having an office in each, appropriated to the hallkeeper: these galleries assumed the appearance of arbours from being each surrounded by six palm-trees in ironwork, the foliage of which gave support to a large balcony, having in front a clock (with three dials) elaborately ornamented, and underneath a representation of the Sun, resplendent with gilding; the clock frame was of oak. At the angles were the cardinal virtues, and on the top a curious figure of Time with a young child in his arms.”[743] At the village of Thame-on-Thames, which the authorities state meant rest, quiet, otherwise tame or kindly, gentle Time, there is a celebrated figure of St. Kitt, alias Father Time, with the little figure of New Time or Change upon his shoulder. In Etruria a parallel idea would seem to have been current, for Mrs. Hamilton Gray describes an Etruscan work of art inscribed “Isis nourishing Horus, or Truth teaching Time”.[744] It is most unusual to find the Twins depicted as old men, or Bald ones with the mystic Lock of Horus on their foreheads, but in the eighteenth-century emblem here reproduced the intention of the deviser is unmistakable, and the central Sun is supported by two Times.

Fig. 403.—From Symbolism of the East and West (Aynsley, Mrs. Murray).

Fig. 404.—English Eighteenth Century Printer’s Ornament.

In a cave situated at the cross roads at Royston in Hertfordshire, there is the figure of St. Kitt beneath which are apparently eight other figures: these are assumedly “other saints,” but the Christian Church does not assign any singular pre-eminence to St. Christopher, and the decorators of the Royston Cave evidently regarded St. Kitt as the Supreme One or God Himself. It is abundantly evident that to our ancestors Kit or Kate was God, Giant, Jeyantt,[745] or Good John: that he was deemed the deity of the ocean is obvious from instances where the water in which he stands is full of crabs, dolphins, and other ocean creatures. I have suggested that Christopher was a representation of dad or Death carrying the soul over the river of Death, i.e., “Dowdy” with the spriggan on his back. Among sailors Death is known familiarly as “Old Nick,” “Old Davy,” or “Davy Jones,” and in Cornwall they have a curious and inexplicable saying: “as ancient as the Flood of Dava”. I think this Dava must have been the genius of the rivers Dove, Taff and Tavy.

Fig. 405.—St. Christopher. From Royston Cave.

[To face page 640.

Fig. 406.—Mediæval Paper mark. From Les Filigranes (Briquet, C. M.).

That Kit was connected with the eight of the Cretan Eros figure is further implied by the fact that on the summit of a lofty hill near Royston or Roystone there is, or was, a “hollow oval”. The length of this prehistoric monument was stated in 1856 as about 31 feet (originally 33?) and its breadth about 22 feet. “Within this bank are two circular excavations meeting together in the middle and nearly forming the figure eight. Both excavations descend by concentric and contracting rings to the walls which form the sides of the chambers.”[746] From this description the monument would appear to be identical in design with the 8-in-an-oval emblem here illustrated, a mediæval papermark traceable to the Italian town of St. Donino. Examples of twin earthwork circles forming the figure 8 are not unknown in Ireland.

At Royston, which, as we shall see, was the Lady Roesia’s town, is a place called Cocken Hatch, but whether this is the site of the eight-form monument in question, I am unaware: in the megalithic stone illustrated on p. 638 the Cadi is not only holding an 8 on the tip of his caduceus, but he has also a cadet or little son by the hand: cadi is Arabic for a judge, and in Wales the Cadi no doubt acted as the final judge. In Celtic the word cad meant war, an implication that in one of his aspects Ked or St. Kitt was the ever-victorious Michael or the all-conquering Nike: there is a Berkshire ballad extant, in which the word caddling, meaning fighting, is employed, yet caddling is the same word as cuddling. In Scotland, caddie means a messenger or errand boy: Mercury or Hermes was the Messenger of the Gods: among the Greeks, Iris was the Messenger, and Iris was unquestionably the Turkish Orus or St. George. In Arabia, St. George is known as El Khoudr, and it is believed that El Khoudr is not yet dead, but still flies round and round the world: in a subsequent chapter it will be shown that Orus is the same as Horus the Egyptian dragon-slayer; hence Giggras, another of St. George’s titles, may be resolved into Mighty Mighty Horus or Eros, and it is possible that the Pictish town of Delginross should read Tall King Eros.

The eleven rows of rocks at Carnac extend, it is said, for eight miles, and at the neighbouring Er-lanic are two megalithic circles, one dipping into the sea, the other submerged in deep water: according to Baring-Gould, these two rings are juxtaposed, forming an 8, and lie on the south-east of the island; the first circle consists of 180 stones (twice nine), but several are fallen, and it can only be seen complete when the tide is out; one stone is 16 feet high; the second circle can be seen only at low tide.[747]

It is probable that the measurements of the Venus de Quinipily, illustrated on p. 530, are not without significance: the statue stands upon a pedestal, 9 feet high, and the figure itself rises 8 feet high.[748] With eight may be further connoted the eastern teaching of the “Noble Eightfold Path,” and also the belief of Western Freemasonry as stated in Mackey’s Lexicon of Freemasonry: “Eight was esteemed as the first cube (2 × 2 × 2), and signified friendship, prudence, counsel, and justice. It designated the primitive Law of Nature, which supposes all men to be equal.” The root of eight, octave, and octet or ogdoad is Og, the primeval giant, who, as we have seen, was reputed to have waded alongside the ark with its eight primordial passengers.

When flourishing, the megalithic monument at Carnac must have dwarfed our dual-circled, two-mile shrine at Avebury: “The labour of its erection,” to quote from Deane, “may be imagined from the fact that it originally consisted of eleven rows of stones, about 10,000 in number, of which more than 300 averaged from 15 to 17 feet in height, and from 16 to 20 or 30 feet in girth; one stone even measuring 42 feet in circumference”.

One of the commonest of sepulchral finds in Brittany is the stone axe, sometimes banded in alternate stripes of black and white: the axe was pre-eminently a Cretan emblem, and my suggestion that the Carnac stones were originally erected to the honour of St. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins is somewhat strengthened by the coincidence that the London Church of St. Mary Axe was closely and curiously identified with the legend. According to Stow: “In St. Marie Street had ye of old time a parish church of St. Marie the Virgin, St. Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins, whose church was commonly called St. Marie at the Axe of the sign of an axe over against the east, and thereof on St. Marie Pellipar”. In view of the fact that the town of Ypres boasted an enormous collection of relics of the 11,000 Virgins, the title Pellipar may be reasonably resolved into Belle power: the Cretan axe or double axe symbolised almighty power.[749]

Fig. 407.—Bronze statuette, Despeña Perros.

Fig. 408.—Bronze statuette, Aust-on-Severn, Gloucs.

From A Guide to the Antiquities of the Bronze Age (B.M.).

According to an Assyrian hymn, Istar, the immaculate great Star, the “Lady Ruler of the Host of Heaven,” the “Lady of Ladies,” “Goddess without peer,” who shaped the lives of all mankind was the “Stately world-Queen sov’ran of the Sky”.

Adored art thou in every sacred place,

In temples, holy dwellings, and in shrines.

Where is thy name not lauded? Where thy will

Unheeded, and thy images not made?[750]

In the caves or “fetish shrines” of Crete have been found rude figurines of the Mother and the Child, and it is probable that the pathetically crude bronze statuettes here illustrated represent the austere wielder of the wand of doom. Fig. 407 comes from Iberia where it was discovered in the vicinity of what was undoubtedly a shrine near the pass over the Sierra Morena at Despena Perros: Fig. 408 comes from the English village of Aust-on-Severn. The place-name Aust appears in Domesday as Austreclive, and the authorities suppose it to have meant “not East as often thought, but the Roman Augusta”: I doubt whether any Roman Augusta ever troubled to claim a mere cleeve, and it is more probable that Austreclive was a cleft or pass sacred to the austere Austre. There is an Austrey at Atherstone, an Austerfield at Bawtry, and an “Austrells” at Aldridge: this latter, which may be connoted with the Oyster Hills round Verulam, the authorities assume to have meant “Austerhill, hill of the hearth, forge or furnace”. That Istar was the mighty Hammer Smith is probable, for the archaic hymnist writes:—

I thee adore—

The gift of strength is thine for thou art strong.

In all likelihood the head-dress of our figurines was intended to denote the crescent moon for the same hymnist continues:—

O Light divine,

Gleaming in lofty splendour over the earth,

Heroic daughter of the moon, O hear!

O stately Queen,

At thought of thee the world is filled with fear,

The gods in heaven quake, and on the earth

All spirits pause and all mankind bow down

With reverence for thy name ... O Lady Judge

Thy ways are just and holy; thou dost gaze

On sinners with compassion, and each morn

Leadest the wayward to the rightful path.

Now linger not, but come! O goddess fair,

O Shepherdess of all, thou drawest nigh

With feet unwearied.

I have suggested that the circle of Long Meg and her daughters originally embodying the idea of a Marygold, Marguerite, or Aster, was erected to the honour of St. Margaret the Peggy, or Pearl of Price, and it is possible that the oyster or producer of the pearl may have derived its name from Easter or Ostara: that Astarte was St. Margaret is obvious from the effigies herewith, and the connection is further pointed by the already noted fact that in the neighbourhood of St. Margaret’s, Westminster, there prevailed traditions of a Giantess named Long Meg. This powerful Maiden was evidently Margaret or Invicta, on the War-path, her pugilistic exploits being far-famed: it is particularly related that Long Meg distinguished herself in the wars at Bulloigne, whence it will probably prove that “Bulloigne” was associated with the War Maid whom the Romans termed Bellona, and that both Bulloigne and Bologna were originally shrines of Bello gina, either the Beautiful Woman or the War Queen.

Fig. 409.—St. Margaret. From Westminster Abbey. From The Cross: Christian and Heathen (Brock, M.).

Fig. 410.—Astarte, the Syrian Venus. From a Coin in the British Museum. From The Cross: Christian and Heathen (Brock, M.).

That Istar, “the heroic daughter of the moon,” was Bellona or the Queen of War is clear from the invocation—

O hear!

Thou dost control our weapons and award

In battles fierce the Victory at will,

O crowned majestic Fate. Ishtar most high,

Who art exalted above all the gods,

Thou bringest lamentation; thou dost urge

With hostile hearts our brethren to the fray.

The gift of strength is thine for thou art strong,

Thy will is urgent brooking no delay,

Thy hand is violent, thou queen of war,

Girded with battle and enrobed with fear,

Thou sov’ran wealder of the wand of Doom,

The heavens and earth are under thy control.

There is very little doubt that the heroic Long Meg of Westminster was alternatively the Mary Ambree of old English ballad: in Ben Jonson’s time apparently any remarkable virago was entitled a Mary Ambree, and the name seems to have been particularly associated with Ghent.[751] As the word Ambree is radically bree, it is curious to find John of Gaunt, who is associated with Kensington, also associated with Carn Brea in Cornwall: here, old John of Gaunt is believed to have been the last of the giants, and to have lived in a castle on the top of Carn Brea, whence in one stride he could pass to a neighbouring town four miles distant. The Heraldic Chain of SSS was known as John of Gaunt’s chain: the symbol of SSS occurs frequently on Candian or Cretan monuments, and it is probable that John of Gaunt’s chain was originally Jupiter’s, or Brea’s chain.[752]

The name Ghent, Gand, or Gaunt may be connoted not only with Kent or Cantium, and Candia or Crete, but also with Dr. Lardner’s statement: “That the full moon was the chief feast among the ancient Spaniards is evident from the fact that Agandia or Astartia is the name for Sunday among the Basques”.

We have already seen that Cain was identified with “the Man in the Moon,” that cann was the Cornish for full moon, and we have connoted the fairy Kenna of Kensington with the New Moon: the old English cain, meaning fair or bright, is clearly connected with candid and candescent. Kenna is the saint to whom the village of Keynsham on the Somersetshire Avon is dedicated, and St. Kenna is said there to have lived in the heart of a wood. To the north of Kensington lies St. John’s Wood, and also the ancient seat named Caen or Ken Wood: this Ken Wood, which is on the heights of Highgate, and is higher than the summit of St. Paul’s, commands a panoramic view of the metropolis that can nowhere else be matched. Akin to the words ken, cunning, and canny, is the Christian name Conan which is interpreted as being Celtic for wisdom. The Celtic names Kean and Kenny—no doubt akin to Coyne—meant vast, and in Cornish ken meant pity. On the river Taff there is a Llangain of which the church is dedicated to St. Canna, and on the Welsh river Canna there is a Llanganna or Llangan: at Llandaff by Cardiff is Canon’s Park.

There is a celebrated well in Cornwall known as St Kean’s, St. Kayne’s, St. Keyne’s, or St. Kenna’s, and the supposed peculiarity of this fountain is that it confers mastery or chieftainship upon whichever of a newly-wedded couple first drinks at it after marriage. St. Kayne or St. Kenna is also said to have visited St. Michael’s Mount, and to have imparted the very same virtue to a stone seat situated dizzily on the height of the chapel tower: “whichever, man or wife, sits in this chair first shall rule through life”: this double tradition associating rule and mastery with St. Kayne makes it justifiable to equate the “Saint” with kyn, princess and with khan the great Han or King. There was a well at Chun Castle whose waters supposedly bestowed perpetual youth: can, meaning a drinking vessel, is the root of canal, channel, or kennel, meaning water course: we have already connoted the word demijohn or Dame Jeanne with the Cornish well termed Joan’s Pitcher, and this root is seemingly responsible for canopus, the Egyptian and Greek term for the human-headed type of vase as illustrated on page 301. A writer in Notes and Queries for 3rd January, 1852, quotes the following song sung by children in South Wales on New Year’s morning, i.e., 1st January, when carrying a can of water newly drawn from the well:—

Here we bring new water

From the well so clear,

For to worship God with

The happy New Year.

Sing levez dew, sing levez dew,

The water and the wine;

The seven bright gold wires

And the bugles they do shine.

Sing reign of Fair Maid

With gold upon her toe,

Open you the west door,

and let the old Year go.

Sing reign of Fair Maid

With gold upon her chin,

Open you the east door,

And let the New Year in.

We have traced Maggie Figgy of St. Levan on her titanic chair supervising the surging waters of the ocean, and there is little doubt that the throne of St. Michael’s was the corresponding seat of Micah, the Almighty King or Great One. The equation of Michael = Kayne may be connoted with the London Church now known as St. Nicholas Acon: this name appearing mysteriously in ancient documents as alternatively “Acun,” “Hakoun,” “Hakun,” and “Achun” it is supposed may have denoted a benefactor of the building. In Cornish ughan or aughan meant supreme; in Welsh echen meant origins or sources,[753] and as Nicholas is the same word as nucleus it is impossible now to say whether St. Nicholas Acon was a shrine of the Great One or of echen the little Nicholas or nucleus. Probably as figured at Royston where Kitt is bearing the Cadet or the small chit upon his shoulder, the two conceptions were concurrent: on the opposite side of the Royston Cave is figured St. Katherine, Kathleen, or Kate: Catarina means the pure one, but catha as in catholic also means the universal, and there is no doubt that St. Kathleen or Kate was a personification of the Queen of the Universe.

Cendwen or Keridwen, alias Ked, was represented by the British Bards as a mare, whale, or ark, whence emerged the universe: the story of Jonah and the whale is a variant of the Ark legend, and it is not without significance that the Hebridean island of Iona is identified as the locale of a miraculous “Whale of wondrous and immense size lifting itself up like a mountain floating on the surface”.[754] Notwithstanding the forbidding aspect of this monster, St. Columba’s disciple quiets the fears of his companion by the assurance: “Go in peace; thy faith in Christ shall defend thee from this danger, I and that beast are under the power of God”.

It has been seen that Night was not necessarily esteemed as evil, nor were the nether regions considered to be outside the radius of the Almighty: that Nicholas, Nixy, or Nox was the black or nether deity is obvious, yet without doubt he was the same conception as the Babylonish “exalted One of the nether world, Him of the radiant face, yea radiant; the exalted One of the nether world, Him of the dove-like voice, yea dove-like”.[755]

That St. Margaret was the White Dove rather than the foul Culver is probable from her representation as the Dragon-slayer, and it is commonly accepted that this almost world-wide emblem denoted Light subduing Darkness, Day conquering Night, or Good overcoming Evil. But there is another legend of St. Margaret to the effect that the maid so meek and mild was swallowed by a Dragon: her cross, however, haply stuck in its throat, and the beast perforce let her free by incontinently bursting (date uncertain); in Art St. Margaret therefore appears as holding a cross and rising from a dragon, although as Voragine candidly admits—“the story is thought to be apocryphal”. We have seen that Magus or the Wandering Jew was credited with the feat of wriggling out of a post—“and they saw that he was no other than a beardless youth and fair faced”: that the adventure of Maggie was the counterpart to that of Magus is rendered probable by the fact that St. Margaret’s birth is assigned to Antioch, a city which was alternatively known as Jonah. With Jonah or Iona may be connoted the British Aeon—

Aeon hath seen age after age in long succession,

But like a serpent which has cast its skin,

Rose to new life in youthful vigour strong.

In Calmet’s Biblical Dictionary there is illustrated a medal of ancient Corinth representing an old man in a state of decrepitude entering a whale, but on the same medal the old man renewed is shown to have come out of the same fish in a state of infancy.

Among the Greeks Apollo or the Sun was represented as riding on a dolphin’s back: the word dolphin is connected with delphus, the womb, and doubtless also with Delphi, the great centre of Apollo worship and the legendary navel of the Universe. Alpha has been noted as the British name of Noah’s wife, and it is probable that Delphi meant at one time the Divine Alpha or Elf: in the Iberian coin here illustrated (origin uncertain) the little Elf or spriggan is equipped with a cross; in the coin of Carteia (Spain) the inscription Xidd probably corresponds to the name which the British Bards wrote—“Ked”.

Figs. 411 and 412.—Iberian. From Akermann.

In India the Ark or Leviathan of Life is represented as half horse or half mare, and among the Phœnicians the word hipha denoted both mare and ship: in Britain the Magna Mater, Ked, was figured as the combination of an old giantess, a hen, a mare, and as a ship which set sail, lifted the Bard from the earth and swelled out like a ship upon the waters. Davies observes: “And that the ancient Britons actually did portray this character in the grotesque manner suggested by our Bard appears by several ancient British coins where we find a figure compounded of a bird, a boat, and a mare”. The coin to which Davies here refers is that illustrated on page 596, Fig. 356: that the Babylonians built their ships in the combined form of a mare and fish is clear from the illustration overleaf.

The most universal and generally understood emblem of peace is a dove bearing in its beak an olive-branch,[756] or sprig, and this emblem is intimately associated with the Ark: among the poems of the Welsh Bard Aneurin is the expectation—

The crowned Babe will come like Iona

Out of the belly of the whale; great will be his dignity.

He will place every one according to his merits,

He is the principal strong tower of the Kingdom.[757]

Fig. 413.—A Galley (Khorsabad). From Nineveh (Layard).

Figs. 414 and 415.—British (Channel Islands). From Barthelemy.

As Iona means dove, the culver on the hackney’s back (Fig. 415) is evidently St. Columba, and the crowned Babe in Fig. 414 is in all probability that same “spriggan on Dowdy’s back,” or Elphin, as the British Bards speak so persistently and mysteriously of “liberating”. In Egypt the spright is portrayed rising from a maculate or spotted beast, and in all these and parallel instances the emblem probably denoted rejuvenescence or new birth; either Spring ex Winter, Change ex Time, the Seen from the Unseen, Amor ex Nox, Visible from Invisible, or New from Old.

Fig. 416.—From The Correspondences of Egypt (Odhler).Fig. 416.—From The Correspondences of Egypt (Odhler).

Fig. 417.—Mediæval Papermark. From Les Filigranes (Briquet, C. M.)

The eight parents from the Ark may be connoted with Aught from Naught, for eight is the same word as aught and naught is the same word as night, nuit, or not: naughty means evil, whence the legend of Amor being born from Nox or Night might perhaps have been sublimated into the idea of Good emerging even from things noxious or nugatory.[758] Yet in the Cox and Box like rule of Night and Day the all-conquering Nikky was no doubt regarded as unique: “Shining and vanishing in the beauteous circle of the Hours, dwelling at one time in gloomy Tartarus, at another elevating himself to Olympus giving ripeness to the fruits”: it is not unlikely that the ruddy nectarine was assigned to him, and similarly nectar the celestial drink of the gods, or ambrosia in a liquid form.

Of the universally recognised Dualism the black and white magpie was evidently an emblem, and the superstitions in connection with this bird are still potent. The Magpie is sometimes called Magot-pie, and Maggoty-pie, and for this etymology Skeat offers the following explanation: “Mag is short for Magot—French Margot, a familiar form of Marguerite, also used to denote a Magpie. This is from Latin Margarita, Greek Margarites, a pearl.” There is no material connection between a pearl and a Magpie, but both objects were alike emblems of the same spiritual Power or Pair: between Margot and Istar the same equation is here found, for in Kent magpies were known popularly as haggisters.[759] Although I have deemed hag to mean high it will be remembered that in Greek hagia meant holy, whence haggister may well have been understood as holy ister.

Layamon in his Brut mentions that the Britons at the time of Hengist’s invasion “Oft speak stilly and discourse with whispers of two young men that dwell far hence; the one hight Uther the other Ambrosie”. Of these fabulous Twain—the not altogether forgotten Two Kings of their ancestors—we may equate Uther with the uter or womb of Night and Aurelie Ambrosie with Aurora the Golden Sunburst.

It is probable that the Emporiae, some of whose elphin horse coins were reproduced on page 281, were worshippers of Aurelie Ambrosie or “St. Ambrose” of whom it will be remembered: “some said that they saw a star upon his body”: it is also not unlikely that our Mary Ambree or Fair Ambree was the daughter of Amber, the divine Umpire and the Emperor of the Empyrean. The ballad recalls:—

There was none ever like Mary Ambree,

Shee led upp her souldiers in battaile array

’Gainst three times theyr number by breake of the day;

Seven howers in skirmish continued shee,

Was not this a brave bonny lasse, Mary Ambree?[760]

The sex of this braw Maiden was disguised under a knight’s panoply, and it was only when the fight was finished that her personality was revealed.

No captain of England; behold in your sight

Two breasts in my bosome, and therefore no knight,

No knight, sons of England, nor captain you see,

But a poor simple lass called Mary Ambree.

If the reader will turn back to the Virago coins illustrated ante, p. 596, which I think represent Ked in the aspect of Hecate—the names are no doubt cognate—he will notice the pastoral crook of the little Shepherdess or Bishop of all souls, and there is little doubt that these figures depict what a Welsh Bard termed “the winged genius of the splendid crosier”.

Although Long Meg of Westminster was said to be a Virago, and was connected in popular opinion with “Bulloigne,” it is not unlikely that Bulloigne was a misconception of Bulinga; the ornamental water of what is now St. James’ Park is a reconstruction of what was originally known as Bulinga Fen, and in that swamp it is probable that Kitty-with-her-canstick, alias Belinga the Beautiful Angel, was supposed to dwell. The name Bolingbroke implies the existence somewhere of a Bolinga’s brook where Belle Inga might also probably have been seen “dancing to the cadence of the stream”; in Shropshire is an earthwork known as Billings Ring, and at Truro there is a Bolingey which is surmised to have meant “isle of the Bollings”. These Bollings were presumably related to the Billings of Billingsgate and elsewhere,[761] and the Bellinge or Billing families were almost certainly connected with Billing, the race-hero of the Angles and Varnians. According to Rydberg the celestial Billing “represents the evening and the glow of twilight, and he is ruler of those regions of the world where the divinities of light find rest and peace”: Billing was the divine defender of the Varnians or Varinians, which word, says Rydberg, “means ‘defenders’ and the protection here referred to can be none other than that given to the journeying divinities of light when they have reached the Western horizon”.[762]

Fig 418.—Adapted from the Salisbury Chapter Seal. From The Cross: Christian and Pagan (Brock, M.).

That Billing and the Ingles were connected with Barkshire, the county of the Vale of the White Horse or Brok, is implied by place-names such as Billingbare by Inglemeer Pond in the East, by Inkpen Beacon—originally Ingepenne or Hingepenne—in the South, and by Inglesham near Fearnham and Farringdon in the West. Near Inglemeer is Shinfield and slightly westward is Sunning, which must once have been a place of uncanny sanctity for “it is amazing that so inconsiderable a village should have been the See of eight Bishops translated afterwards to Sherborn and at last to Salisbury.”[763] The seal of Salisbury represents the Maiden of the Sun and Moon, and it is probable that the place-name Maidenhead, originally Madenheith, near Marlow (Domesday Merlawe—Mary low or hill?) did not, as Skeat so aggressively assumes, mean a hythe or landing place for maidens, but Maidenheath, a heath or mead sacred to the braw Maiden.

With the Farens and the Varenians may be connoted the Cornish village of Trevarren or the abode of Varren: this is in the parish of St. Columb, where Columba the Dove is commemorated not as a man but as a Virgin Martyr. Many, if not all, Cornish villages had their so-called “Sentry field” and the Broad Sanctuary at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, no doubt marks the site of some such sanctuary or city of refuge as will be considered in a following chapter. That St. Margaret the Meek or Long Meg was the Bride of the adjacent St. Peter is a reasonable inference, and it is probable that “Broad Sanctuary” was originally hers. According to The Golden Legend: “Margaret is Maid of a precious gem or ouche[764] that is named a Margaret. So the blessed Margaret was white by virginity, little by humility, and virtuous by operation. The virtue of this stone is said to be against effusion of blood, against passion of the heart, and to comfortation of the spirit.” I am unable to trace any immediate connection between St. Margaret and the Dove, but an original relation is implied by the epithets which are bestowed by the Gaels to St. Columbkille of Iona who is entitled “The Precious Gem,” “The Royal Bright Star,” “The Meek,” “The Wise,” and “The Divine Branch who was in the yoke of the Pure Mysteries of God”. These are titles older than the worthy monk whose biography was written by Adamnan: they belong to the archetypal Columba or Culver. There is a river Columb in Devonshire upon which stands the town of Cullompton: in Kent is Reculver once a Royal town of which “the root is unknown, but the present form has been influenced by old English culfre, culfer, a culver-dove or wood-pigeon”.

That St. Columba of Iona was both the White and the Black Culver is implied by his two names of Colum (dove) and Crimthain (wolf): that the great Night-dog or wolf was for some reason connected with the nutrix (vide the coin illustrated on page 364, and the Etrurian Romulus and Remus legend) is obvious, apart from the significance of the word wolf which is radically olf. Columbas’ mother, we are told, was a certain royal Ethne, the eleventh in descent from Cathair Mor, a King of Leinster: Leinster was a stadr, ster, or place of the Laginenses, and that Columba was a personification of Young Lagin or the Little Holy King of Yule is implied (apart from much other evidence) in the story that one of his visitors “could by no means look upon his face, suffused as it was with a marvellous glow, and he immediately fled in great fear”.

Among the Gaels the Little Holy King of Tir an Og, or the Land of the Young, was Angus Og or Angus the youthful: when discussing Angus (excellent virtue) in connection with the ancient goose and the cain goose I was unaware that the Greek for goose is ken. In the far-away Hebrides the men, women, and children of Barra and South Uist (or Aust?) still hold to a primitive faith in St. Columba, St. Bride, or St. Mary, and as a shealing hymn they sing the following astonishingly beautiful folk-song:—

Thou, gentle Michael of the white steed,

Who subdued the Dragon of blood,

For love of God and the Son of Mary

Spread over us thy wing, shield us all!

Spread over us thy wing, shield us all!

Mary, beloved! Mother of the White Lamb

Protect us, thou Virgin of nobleness,

Queen of Beauty! Shepherdess of the flocks!

Keep our cattle, surround us together,

Keep our cattle, surround us together.

Thou Columkille, the friendly, the kind,

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit Holy,

Through the Three-in-One, through the Three,

Encompass us, guard our procession,

Encompass us, guard our procession.

Thou Father! Thou Son! Thou Spirit Holy!

Be the Three-One with us day and night,

On the Machair plain, on the mountain ridge,

The Three-One is with us, with His arm around our head,

The Three-One is with us, with His arm around our head.

But the Boatmen of Barray sing for the last verse:—

Thou Father! Thou Son! Thou Spirit Holy!

Be the Three-One with us day and night,

And on the crested wave, or on the mountain side,

Our Mother is there, and Her arm is under our head,

Our Mother is there, and Her arm is under our head.[765]

FOOTNOTES:

[692] The Evening Standard, 12th Nov., 1918.

[693] Ibid.

[694] Ancient Britain, p. 283.

[695] Cf. Stoughton, Rev. J., Golden Legends of the Olden Time, p. 9.

[696] Cf. Stoughton, Rev. J., Golden Legends of the Olden Time, p. 5.

[697] Wright, T., Travels in the East, p. 39.

[698] Windle, Sir B. C. A., Life in Early Britain, p. 116.

[699] Mitton, G. E., Clerkenwell, p. 79.

[700] B.M., Guide to Antiquities of Stone Age, p. 26.

[701] Holy Wells of Cornwall.

[702] Mitton, G. E., Mayfair, p. 1.

[703] Walford, E., Greater London.

[704] Bonwick, E., Irish Druids, p. 208.

[705] Hardwick, C., Traditions, Superstitions, and Folklore, p. 34.

[706] The surname Brinsmoad still survives in the Primrose Hill neighbourhood.

[707] Faiths and Folklore, ii., 401.

[708] Herbert, A., Cyclops Christianus, p. 114.

[709] Ibid., p. 114.

[710] Travels in the East, p. 28.

[711] Donnelly, I., Atlantis, p. 428.

[712] Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes, p. 82.

[713] Walford, E., Greater London, ii., 305.

[714] iii., 226.

[715] A New Description of England, p. 112.

[716] A New Description of England, p. 118.

[717] Walford, E., Greater London, i., 77.

[718] Golden Legend, iv., p. 235.

[719] Cornish Feasts and Folklore, p. 114.

[720] Stow, p. 217.

[721] In some parts this ceremony was known as “crying the Mare”: in Wales the horse of the guise or goose dancers was known as Mari Lhwyd.

[722] Mrs. George of Sennen Cove.

[723] Irvine, C., St. Brighid and her Times, p. 6.

[724] Greater London, l., p. 40.

[725] Quoted, St. Brighid and Her Times, p. 7.

[726] Keightley, I., F. M., pp. 139-49.

[727] Huyshe, W., Life of Columba, p. 129.

[728] De Bello Gallico, p. 121.

[729] See Appendix B, p. 873.

[730] Cf. Courtney, Miss M. E., Cornish Feasts and Folklore, p. 105.

[731] Wilson, J., Imperial Gazetteer, i., 1042.

[732] Rydberg, V., Teutonic Mythology, p. 361.

[733] Windle, Sir B. C. A., Life in Early Britain, p. 63.

[734] The cul of culver or culfre and columba was probably the Irish Kil: hence the umba of columba may be connoted with imp.

[735] Rig-Veda (mandala X, 90).

[736] Golden Legend, v., 235.

[737] Golden Legend, v., 236.

[738] Mykenae, p. 267.

[739] Stoughton, Dr. J., Golden Legends of the Olden Time, p. 9.

[740] Wilson and Warren, The Recovery of Jerusalem, i., 166.

[741] Noah, Shem, Ham, Japhet, and their respective wives.

[742] Gogmagog is also found at Uriconium, now Wroxeter, in Shropshire. Since suggesting a connection between Gog and Coggeshall in Essex, I find that Coggeshall was traditionally associated with a giant whose remains were said to have been found. Cf. Hardwick, C., Traditions, Superstitions and Folklore, p. 205.

[743] Thornbury, W., Old and New London, i., 386.

[744] Sepulchres of Ancient Etruria, p. 16.

[745] The civic giant of Salisbury is named Christopher.

[746] Archæologia, from The Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. i., p. 124.

[747] Brittany, p. 232.

[748] Aynsley, Mrs. Murray, Symbolism of the East and West, p. 87.

[749] I have elsewhere reproduced examples of the double axe crossed into the form of an ex (X). Sir Walter Scott observes that in North Britain “it was no unusual thing to see females, from respect to their supposed views into futurity, and the degree of divine inspiration which was vouchsafed to them, arise to the degree of Haxa, or chief priestess, from which comes the word Hexe, now universally used for a witch”. He adds: “It may be worth while to notice that the word Haxa is still used in Scotland in its sense of a druidess, or chief priestess, to distinguish the places where such females exercised their ritual. There is a species of small intrenchment on the western descent of the Eildon hills, which Mr. Milne, in his account of the parish of Melrose, drawn up about eighty years ago, says, was denominated Bourjo, a word of unknown derivation, by which the place is still known. Here a universal and subsisting tradition bore that human sacrifices were of yore offered, while the people assisting could behold the ceremony from the elevation of the glacis which slopes inward. With this place of sacrifice communicated a path, still discernible, called the Haxellgate, leading to a small glen or narrow valley called the Haxellcleuch—both which words are probably derived from the Haxa or chief priestess of the pagans” (Letters on Demonology). It may be suggested that the mysterious bourjo was an abri of pere Jo or Jupiter. The Scotch jo as in “John Anderson my Jo,” now signifying sweetheart, presumably meant joy.

[750] Cf. McKenzie, Donald A., Myths of Babylonia, p. 18.

[751]

Mary Ambree

Who marched so free,

To the siege of Gaunt,

And death could not daunt

As the ballad doth vaunt.

[752] In Kirtlington Park (Oxon) was a Johnny Gaunt’s pond in which his spirit was supposed to dwell. A large ash tree was also there known as Johnny Gaunt’s tree.

[753] Herbert, A., Cyclops, p. 202.

[754] Life of Columba, p. 40.

[755] Cf. Mackenzie, D. A., Myths of Babylonia, p. 86.

[756] There is a London church entitled “St. Nicholas Olave”.

[757] Cf. Morien, Light of Britannia, p. 67.

[758] Skeat connotes naughty with “na not, wiht a whit, see no and whit”: it would thus seem to have been equivalent to no white, which is black or nocturnal.

[759] Hardwick, C., Traditions, Superstitions, and Folklore, p. 254.

[760] The seven hours in skirmish are suggestive of the Fair maid with gold upon her toe:—

The seven bright gold wires

And the bugles they do shine,

ante, p. 650.

[761] Presumably Billingham River in Durham was a home of the Billings: there is a Billingley in Darfield parish, Yorkshire, a Billingsley in Bridgenorth, Salop: Billingbear in Berks is the seat of Lord Braybrook: Billingford or Pirleston belonged to a family named Burley: at Billington in Bradley parish, Staffs, is a commanding British camp known as Billington Bury. Billinge Hill, near Wigan, has a beacon on the top and commands a view of Ingleborough.

[762] Teutonic Mythology.

[763] A New Description of England, 1724, p. 61.

[764] An ouche is a bugle: “the bugles they do shine”.

[765] Quoted from Adamnan’s Life of Columba (Huyshe, W.).

CHAPTER XII
Peter’s Orchards.

“But all the beauty of the pleasaunce drew its being from the song of the bird; for from his chant flowed love which gives its shadow to the tree, its healing to the simple, and its colour to the flower. Without that song the fountain would have ceased to spring, and the green garden become a little dry dust, for in its sweetness lay all their virtue.”—Provençal Fairy Tale.

Among the relics preserved at the monastery of St. Nicholas of Bari is a club with which the saint, who is said to have become a friar at the age of eleven, was beaten by the devil: a club was the customary symbol of Hercules; the Celtic Hercules was, as has been seen, depicted as a baldhead leading a rout of laughter-loving followers by golden chains fastened to their ears, and as it was the habit of St. Nicholas-of-the-Club to wander abroad singing after the ancient fashion, one may be sure that Father Christmas is the lineal descendant of the British Ogmios or Mighty Muse, alias the Wandering Jew or Joy. That Bride “the gentle” was at times similarly equipped is obvious from a ceremony which in Scotland and the North of England used to prevail at Candlemas: “the mistress and servants of each family take a sheaf of oats and dress it up in woman’s apparel, put it in a large basket and lay a wooden club by it, and this they call “Briid’s Bed,” and then the mistress and servants cry three times: “Briid is come, Briid is welcome”! This they do just before going to bed”: another version of this custom records the cry as—“Bridget, Bridget, come is; thy bed is ready”.

In an earlier chapter we connected Iupiter or Jupiter with Aubrey or Oberon, and that this roving Emperor of Phairie Land was familiar to the people of ancient Berkshire is implied not only by a river in that county termed the Auborn, but also by adjacent place-names such as Aberfield, Burfield, Purley, and Bray. Skeat connotes Bray (by Maidenhead) with “Old English braw, Mercian breg, an eyebrow,” but what sensible or likely connection is supposed to exist between the town of Bray and an eyebrow I am unable to surmise: we have, however, considered the prehistoric “butterfly” or eyebrows, and it is not impossible that Bray was identified with this mysterious Epeur (Cupid) or Amoretto. The claims to ubiquity and antiquity put by the British poet into the mouth of Taliesin or Radiant Brow—the mystic child of Nine constituents[766]—is paralleled by the claims of Irish Ameurgin, likewise by the claims of Solomonic “Wisdom,” and there is little doubt that the symbolic forms of the “Teacher to all Intelligences” are beyond all computation.

That Berkshire, the shire of the White Horse, was a seat of beroc or El Borak the White Horse is further implied by the name Berkshire: according to Camden this originated “some say from Beroc, a certain wood where box grew in great plenty”; according to others from a disbarked oak [i.e., a bare oak!] to which when the state was in more than ordinary danger the inhabitants were wont to resort in ancient times to consult about their public affairs”.[767] Overlooking Brockley in Kent is an Oak of Honor Hill, and probably around that ancient and possibly bare Oak the natives of old Brockley or Brock Meadow met in many a consultation.[768] At Coventry is Berkswell: Berkeleys are numerous, and that these sites were abris or sanctuaries is implied by the official definition of Great Berkhamstead, i.e., “Sheltered, home place, or fortified farm”.

At St. Breock in Cornwall there is a pair of Longstones, one measuring 12 feet 4 inches, the other 8 feet, and in all probability at some time or other these pierres or petras were symbols of the phairy Pair who were the Parents and Protectors of the district. At St. Columb in Cornwall there is a Longstone known as “The Old Man”: now measuring 7 feet 6 inches, in all probability this stone was originally 8 feet high; it was also “once apparently surrounded by a small circle”.

Fig. 419.—British. From Akerman.

In the British coin here illustrated the Old Man jogging along with a club is probably Cun the Great One, or the Aged One. The brow of Honor Oak ridge is known as Canonbie Lea, which may be resolved into the “meadow of the abode of King On”: from this commanding height one may contemplate all London lying in the valley; facing it are the highlands of Cuneburn, Kenwood, Caenwood, and St. John’s Wood. London stone is situated in what is now termed Cannon Street—a supposed corruption of Candlewick Street: the greater probability is that the name is connected with the ancient Kenning or Watch Tower, known as a burkenning, which once occupied the site now marked by Tower Royal in Cannon Street: the ancient Cenyng Street by Mikelgate at York, or Eboracum—a city attributed to a King Ebrauc who will probably prove to be identical with Saint Breock—marked in all likelihood the site of a similar broch, burgkenning, barbican, or watch tower. One may account for ancient Candlewick by the supposition that this district was once occupied by a candle factory, or that it was the property of a supposititious Kendal, who was identical with the Brook, Brick, or Broken of the neighbouring Brook’s wharf, Brickhill, and Broken wharf. At Kendal in Westmorland, situated on the river Can or Kent, around which we find Barnside, the river Burrow or Borrow, and Preston Hall, we find also a Birbeck, and the memories of a Lord Parr: this district was supposedly the home of the Concanni. The present site of Highbury Barn Tavern by Canonbury (London) was once occupied by a “camp” in what was known as Little St. John’s Wood,[769] and as this part of London is not conspicuously “high,” it is not improbable that Highbury was once an abri: in the immediate neighbourhood still exists Paradise Road, Paradise Passage, Aubert Park and a Calabria Road which may possibly mark the site of an original Kil abria. At Highbury is Canonbury Tower, whence tradition says an underground passage once extended to the priory of St. John’s in Clerkenwell: from Highbury to the Angel at Islington there runs an Upper Street: upper is the Greek hyper meaning over (German uber), and that the celebrated “Angel” was originally a fairy or Bellinga, is somewhat implied by the neighbouring Fairbank Street—once a fairy bank?—and by Bookham Street—once a home of Bogie or Puck? From Canonbie Lea at Honor Oak, Brockley (London), one overlooks Peckham, Bickley, Beckenham, and Bellingham, the last named being decoded by the authorities into home of Belling.

We have noted the tradition at Brentford of Two Kings “united yet divided twain at once,” yet there is also an extant ballad which commences—

The noble king of Brentford

Was old and very sick.

The Cornish hill of Godolphin was also known as Godolcan, and in view of the connection between Nicolas and eleven it may be assumed that this site was sacred either to Elphin, the elven, the Holy King, or the Old King. At Highbury is an Old Cock Tavern, and in Upper Street an Old Parr Inn: not improbably Old Parr was once the deity of “Upper” Street or “Highbury,” and it is also not unlikely that the St. Peter of Westminster was similarly Old Parr, for according to The History of Signboards—“‘The Old Man,’ Market Place, Westminster, was probably intended for Old Parr, who was celebrated in ballads as ‘The Olde, Olde, Very Olde Manne’. The token represents a bearded bust in profile, with a bare head.[770] In the reign of James I. it was the name of a tavern in the Strand, otherwise called the Hercules Tavern, and in the eighteenth century there were two coffee-houses, the one called ‘the Old Man’s,’ the other ‘the Young Man’s’ Coffee-house.”[771]

If the Old, Old, Very Old Man were Peter the white-haired warden of the walls of Heaven it is obvious that the Young Man would be Pierrot: it is not by accident that white-faced Pierrot, or Peterkin, or Pedrolino, is garbed in white and wears a conical white cap, the legend that accounts for this curious costume being to the effect that years and years ago St. Peter and St. Joseph were once watching (from a burkenning?) over a wintry plain from the walls of Paradise, when they beheld what seemed a pink rose peering out from beneath the snow; but instead of being a rose it proved to be the face of a child, who St. Peter picked up in his arms, whereupon the snow and rime were transformed into an exquisite white garment. It was intended that the little Peter should remain unsullied, but, as it happened, the Boy, having wandered from Paradise, started playing Ring-o-Roses on a village green where a little girl tempted him to talk: then the trouble began, for Pierrot speckled his robe, and St. Peter was unable to allow him in again; but he gave him big black buttons and a merry heart, and there the story ends.[772]

In Pantomime—which has admittedly an ancestry of august antiquity—the counterpart to Pierrot is Columbine, or the Little Dove; doubtless the same Maiden as the Virgin Martyr of St. Columb, Cornwall: this parish is situated in what was termed “The Hundred of Pydar”; in Welsh Bibles Peter is rendered Pedr, and one of the Welsh bards refers to Stonehenge as “the melodious quaternion of Pedyr”: in Cornwall there is also a Padstow or Petroxstowe, and there is no doubt that Peter, like Patrick, was the Supreme Padre or Parent. According to the native ancient ecclesiastical records of Wales known as the Iolo MSS., the native name of St. Patrick was Maenwyn, which means stone sacred: hence one may assume that the island of Battersea or Patrixeye was the abode of the padres who ministered at the neighbouring shrine of St. Peter or petra, the Rock upon which the church of Christ is traditionally built.

Fig. 420.—From A New Description of England (1724).

At Patrixbourne in Kent was a seat known as Bifrons, once in the possession of a family named Cheyneys:[773] whether there be any connection between this estate named Bifrons and Bifrons, or Two fronted, a sobriquet applied to Janus, I am unaware: the connection Cheyneys—Bifrons—Patrixbourne is, however, the more curious inasmuch as they immediately neighbour a Bekesbourne, and on referring to Peckham we find that a so-termed Janus bifrons was unearthed there some centuries ago. The peculiarity of this Peckham Janus is that, unlike any other Janus-head I know, it obviously represents a Pater and Mater, and not two Paters, or a big and little Peter. The feminine of Janus is Jane or Iona, and at Iona in Scotland there existed prior to the Reformation when they were thrown into the sea, some remarkable petræ, to wit, three noble marble globes placed in three stone basins, which the inhabitants turned three times round according to the course of the sun:[774] these were known as clacha brath or Stones of Judgment.

Tradition connects St. Columba of Iona in the Hebrides with Loch Aber, or, as it was sometimes written, Loch Apor, and among the stories which the honest Adamnan received and recorded “nothing doubting from a certain religious, ancient priest,” is one to the effect that Columba on a memorable occasion, turning aside to the nearest rock, prayed a little while on bended knees, and rising up after prayer blessed the brow of the same rock, from which thereupon water bubbled up and flowed forth abundantly. With the twelve-mouthed petra or rock of Moses which, according to Rabbinic tradition, followed the Israelites into the wilderness, may be connoted the rock-gushing fountain at Petrockstowe, Cornwall. That St. Patrick was Shony the Ocean-deity, to whom the Hebrideans used to pour out libations, is deducible from the legend that on the day of St. Patrick’s festival the fish all rise from the sea, pass in procession before his altar, and then disappear. The personality of the great St. Patrick of the Paddys is so remarkably obscure that some hagiographers conclude there were seven persons known by that name; others distinguish three, and others recognise two, one of whom was known as “Sen Patrick,” i.e., the senile or senior Patrick: there is little doubt that the archetypal Patrick was represented indifferently as young and old and as either seven, three, two, or one: whence perhaps the perplexity and confusion of the hagiographers.

It is not improbable that the Orchard Street at Westminster may mark the site of a burial ground or “Peter’s Orchard,” similar to that which was uncovered in Wiltshire in 1852: this was found on a farm at Seagry, one part of which had immemorially been known as “Peter’s Orchard”.[775] From generation to generation it had been handed down that in a certain field on this farm a church was built upon the site of an ancient heathen burial ground, and the persistence of the heathen tradition is seemingly presumptive evidence, not only of inestimable age, but of the memory of a pre-Christian Peter.

It may be assumed that “Peter’s Orchard” was originally an apple orchard or an Avalon similar to the “Heaven’s Walls,” which were discovered some years ago near Royston: these “walls,” immediately contiguous to the Icknield or Acnal Way, were merely some strips of unenclosed but cultivated land which in ancient deeds from time immemorial had been called “Heaven’s Walls”. Traditional awe attached to this spot, and village children were afraid to traverse it after dark, when it was said to be frequented by supernatural beings: in 1821 some labourers digging for gravel on this haunted spot inadvertently discovered a wall enclosing a rectangular space containing numerous deposits of sepulchral urns, and it then became clear that here was one of those plots of ground environed by walls to which the Romans gave the name of ustrinum.[776]

The old Welsh graveyards were frequently circular, and there is a notable example of this at Llanfairfechan: the Llanfair here means holy enclosure of Fair or Mairy, and it is probable that Fechan’s round churchyard was a symbol of the Fire Ball or Fay King. At Fore in Ireland the Solar wheel figures notably at the church of “Saint” Fechan on an ancient doorway illustrated herewith. That the Latin ustrinum was associated with the Uster or Easter of resurrection is likely enough, for both Romans and Greeks had a practice of planting roses in their graveyards: as late as 1724 the inhabitants of Ockley or Aclea in Surrey had “a custom here, time immemorial, of planting rose trees in the graves, especially by the young men and maidens that have lost their lovers, and the churchyard is now full of them”.[777] That “The Walls of Heaven” by Royston was associated with roses is implied by the name Royston, which was evidently a rose-town, for it figures in old records as Crux Roies, Croyrois, and Villa de cruce Rosia. The expression “God’s Acre” still survives, seemingly from that remote time when St. Kit of Royston, the pre-Christian “God,” was worshipped at innumerable Godshills, Godstones, Gaddesdens, and Goodacres.

Fig. 421.—From The Age of the Saints (Borlase, W. C.).

Tradition asserts that the abbey church of St. Peter’s at Westminster occupies the site of a pagan temple to Apollo—the Etrurian form of Apollo was Aplu, and there is no doubt that the sacred apple of the Druids was the symbol of the “rubicund, radiant Elphin” or Apollo. According to Malory, a certain Sir Patrise lies buried in Westminster, and this knight came to his untoward end by eating an apple, whereupon “suddenly he brast (burst)”:[778] from this parallel to the story of St. Margaret erupting from a dragon it is probable that Sir Patrise was the original patron of Westminster, or ancient Thorney Eye. Patera was a generic title borne by the ministers at Apollo’s shrines, and as glorious Apollo was certainly the Shine, it is more than likely that Petersham Park at Sheen, where still stands a supposedly Roman petra or altar-stone, was a park or enclosure sacred to Peter, or, perhaps, to Patrise of the apple-bursting story.

The Romans applied the title Magonius to the Gaulish and British Apollo; sometimes St. Patrick is mentioned as Magounus, and it is probable that both these epithets are Latinised forms of the British name Magon: the Druidic Magon who figures in the traditions of Cumberland is in all probability the St. Mawgan whose church neighbours that of the Maiden St. Columb in the Hundred of Pydar in Cornwall.

One of the principal towns in Westmorland is Appleby, which was known to the Romans as Abellaba: the Maiden Way of Westmorland traverses Appleby, starting from a place called Kirkby Thore, and here about 200 years ago was found the supposed “amulet or magical spell,” illustrated in Fig. 422. The inscription upon the reverse is in Runic characters, which some authorities have read as Thor Deus Patrius; and if this be correct the effigy would seem to be that of the solar Sir Patrise, for apparently the object in the right hand is an apple: there is little doubt that the great Pater figures at Patterdale, at Aspatria, and at the river Peterill, all of which are in this neighbourhood, and in all probability the Holy Patrise or Aspatria was represented by the culminating peak known as the “Old Man” of Coniston.

Some experts read the legend on Fig. 422 as Thurgut Luetis, meaning “the face or effigies of the God Thor”: according to others Thurgut was the name of the moneyer or mintmaster; according to yet others the coin was struck in honour of a Danish Admiral named Thurgut: where there is such acute diversity of opinion it is permissible to suggest that Thurgut—whose effigy is seemingly little suggestive of a sea-dog—was originally the Three Good or the Three God, for the figure’s sceptre is tipped by the three circles of Good Thought, Good Deed, and Good Word. In Berkshire the country people, like the Germans with their drei, say dree instead of three, and thus it may be that the Apples Three, or the Apollos Three (for the ancients recognised Three Apollos—the celestial, the terrestrial, and the infernal) were worshipped at Appledre, or Appledore opposite Barnstable, and at Appledur Comb or Appledurwell, a manor in the parish of Godshill, Isle of Wight.

Fig. 422.—From A New Description of England.

English “Appletons” are numerous, and at Derby is an Appletree which was originally Appletrefelde: it is known that this Apple-Tree-Field contained an apple-tree which was once the meeting place of the Hundred or Shire division, and it is probable that the two Apuldre’s of Devon served a similar public use. As late as 1826 it was the custom, at Appleton in Cheshire, “at the time of the wake to clip and adorn an old hawthorn which till very lately stood in the middle of the town. This ceremony is called the bawming (dressing) of Appleton Thorn”.[779] Doubtless Appleton Thorn was originally held in the same estimation as the monument bushes of Ireland, which are found for the most part in the centre of road crossings. According to the anonymous author of Irish Folklore,[780] these ancient and solitary hawthorns are held in immense veneration, and it would be considered profanation to destroy them or even remove any of their branches: from these fairy and phooka-haunted sites, a lady dressed in a long flowing white robe was often supposed to issue, and “the former dapper elves are often seen hanging from or flitting amongst their branches”. We have in an earlier chapter considered the connection between spikes and spooks, and it is obvious that the White Lady or Alpa of the white thorn or aubespine is the Banshee or Good Woman Shee:—

She told them of the fairy-haunted land

Away the other side of Brittany,

Beyond the heaths, edged by the lonely sea;

Of the deep forest-glades of Broce-liande,

Through whose green boughs the golden sunshine creeps,

Where Merlin,[781] by the enchanted thorn-tree sleeps.

In the forest of Breceliande—doubtless part of the fairy Hy Breasil—was a famed Fountain of Baranton or Berendon into which children threw tribute to the invocation, “Laugh, then, fountain of Berendon, and I will give thee a pin”.[782] The first pin was presumably a spine or thorn; the first flower is the black-thorn; on 1st January (the first day of the first month), people in the North of England used to construct a blackthorn globe and stand hand in hand in a circle round the fire chanting in a monotonous voice the words “Old Cider,” prolonging each syllable to its utmost extent. I think that Old Cider must have been Thurgut, and that in all probability the initial Ci was sy, the ubiquitous endearing diminutive of pucksy, pixie, etc.

According to Maundeville, “white thorn hath many virtues; for he that beareth a branch thereof upon him, no thunder nor tempest may hurt him; and no evil spirit may enter in the house in which it is, or come to the place that it is in”: Maundeville refers to this magic thorn as the aubespine, which is possibly a corruption of alba thorn, or it may be of Hob’s thorn. In modern French aube means the dawn.

We have seen that there are some grounds for surmising that Brawn Street and Bryanstone Square (Marylebone) mark the site of a Branstone or fairy stone, in which connection it may be noted that until recently: “near this spot was a little cluster of cottages called ‘Apple Village’”:[783] in the same neighbourhood there are now standing to-day a Paradise Place, a Paradise Passage, and Great Barlow Street, which may quite possibly mark the site of an original Bar low or Bar lea. Apple Village was situated in what was once the Manor of Tyburn or Tyburnia: according to the “Confession” of St. Patrick the saint’s grandfather came from “a village of Tabernia,”[784] and it is probable that the Tyburn brook, upon the delta of which stands St. Peter’s (Westminster), was originally named after the Good Burn or Oberon of Bryanstone and the neighbouring Brawn Street. The word tabernacle is traceable to the same roots as tavern, French auberge, English inn.

Around the effigy of Thurgut will be noted either seven or eight M’s: in mediæval symbolism the letter M stood usually for Mary; the parish church of Bryanstone Square is dedicated to St. Mary, and we find the Virgin very curiously associated with one or more apple-trees. According to the author of St. Brighid and Her Times: “Bardism offers nothing higher in zeal or deeper in doctrine than the Avallenan, or Song of the Apple-trees, by the Caledonian Bard, Merddin Wyllt. He describes his Avallenan as being one Apple-tree, the Avallen, but in another sense it was 147 apple-trees, that is, mystically (taking the sum of the digits, 1 4 7 equal 12), the sacred Druidic number. Thus in his usual repeated description of the Avallen as one apple-tree, he writes:—

Sweet apple-tree! tree of no rumour,

That growest by the stream, without overgrowing the circle.

Again, as 147 apple trees—

Seven sweet apple-trees, and seven score

Of equal age, equal height, equal length, equal bulk;

Out of the bosom of mercy they sprung up.

Again—

They who guard them are one curly-headed virgin.”

In fairy-tale the apple figures as the giver of rejuvenescence and new life, in Celtic mythology it figures as the magic Silver Branch which corresponds to Virgil’s Golden Bough. According to Irvine the word bran meant not only the Druidical system, but was likewise applied to individual Druids who were termed brans: I have already suggested that this “purely mystical and magical name” is our modern brain; according to all accounts the Druids were eminently men of brain, whence it is possible that the fairy-tale “Voyage of Bran” and the Voyage of St. Brandon were originally brainy inventions descriptive of a mental voyage of which any average brain is still capable. The Voyage of Bran relates how once upon a time Bran the son of Fearbal[785] heard strange music behind him, and so entrancing were the sounds that they lulled him into slumber: when he awoke there lay by his side a branch of silver so resplendent with white blossom that it was difficult to distinguish the flowers from the branch. With this fairy talisman, which served not only as a passport but as food and drink, and as a maker of music so soothing that mortals who heard it forgot their woes and even ceased to grieve for their kinsmen whom the Banshee had taken, Bran voyaged to the Islands called Fortunate, wherein he perceived and heard many strange and beautiful things:—

A branch of the Apple Tree from Emain

I bring like those one knows;

Twigs of white silver are on it,

Crystal brows with blossoms.

There is a distant isle

Around which sea horses glisten:

A fair course against the white swelling surge,

Four feet uphold it.

In Wales on 1st January children used to carry from door to door a holly-decked apple into which were fixed three twigs—presumably an emblem of the Apple Island or Island of Apollo, supported on the three sweet notes of the Awen or creative Word. Into this tripod apple were stuck oats:[786] the effigy of St. Bride which used to be carried from door to door consisted of a sheaf of oats; in Anglo-Saxon oat was ate, plural aten, and it is evident that oats were peculiarly identified with the Maiden.

In Cormac’s Adventure in the Land of Promise there again enters the magic Silver Branch, with three golden apples on it: “Delight and amusement to the full was it to listen to the music of that branch, for men sore wounded or women in childbed or folk in sickness would fall asleep, at the melody when that branch was shaken”. The Silver Branch which seems to have been sometimes that of the Apple, sometimes of the Whitethorn, corresponds to the mistletoe or Three-berried and Three-leaved Golden Bough: until recent years a bunch of Mistletoe or “All Heal”—the essential emblem of Yule—used to be ceremoniously elevated to the proclamation of a general pardon at York or Ebor: it is still the symbol of an affectionate cumber or gathering together of kinsmen. King Camber is said to have been the son of Brutus; he was therefore, seemingly, the young St. Nicholas or the Little Crowned King, and in Cumberland the original signification of the “All Heal” would appear to have been traditionally preserved. In Tales and Legends of the English Lakes Mr. Wilson Armistead records that many strange tales are still associated with the Druidic stones, and in the course of one of these alleged authentic stories he prints the following Invocation:—

1st Bard. Being great who reigns alone,

Veiled in clouds unseen unknown;

Centre of the vast profound,

Clouds of darkness close Thee round.

3rd Bard. Spirit who no birth has known,

Springing from Thyself alone,

We thy living emblem show

In the mystic mistletoe,

Springs and grows without a root,

Yields without flowers its fruit;

Seeks from earth no mother’s care,

Lives and blooms the child of air.

4th Bard. Thou dost Thy mystic circle trace

Along the vaulted blue profound,

And emblematic of Thy race

We tread our mystic circle round.

Chorus.  Shine upon us mighty God,

Raise this drooping world of ours;

Send from Thy divine abode

Cheering sun and fruitful showers.

In view of the survival elsewhere of Druidic chants and creeds which are unquestionably ancient, it is quite possible that in the above we have a genuine relic of prehistoric belief: that the ideas expressed were actually held might without difficulty be proved from many scattered and independent sources; that Cumberland has clung with extraordinary tenacity to certain ancient forms is sufficiently evident from the fact that even to-day the shepherds of the Borrowdale district tell their sheep in the old British numerals, yan, tyan, tethera, methera,[787] etc.

The most famous of all English apple orchards was the Avalon of Somerset which as we have seen was encircled by the little river Brue: with Avalon is indissolubly associated the miraculous Glastonbury Thorn, and that Avalon[788] was essentially British and an abri of King Bru or Cynbro is implied by its alternative title of Bride Hay or Bride Eye: not only is St. Brighid said to have resided at Avalon or the Apple Island, but among the relics long faithfully preserved there were the blessed Virgin’s scrip, necklace, distaff, and bell. The fact that the main streets of Avalon form a perfect cross may be connoted with Sir John Maundeville’s statement that while on his travels in the East he was shown certain apples: “which they call apples of Paradise, and they are very sweet and of good savour. And though you cut them in ever so many slices or parts across or end-wise, you will always find in the middle the figure of the holy cross.”[789] That Royston, near the site of “Heaven’s Walls,” was identified with the Rood, Rhoda, or Rose Cross is evident from the ancient forms of the name Crux Roies (1220), Croyrois (1263), and Villa de Cruce Rosia (1298): legend connects the place with a certain Lady Roese, “about whom nothing is known,” and probability may thus associate this mysterious Lady with Fair Rosamond or the Rose of the World. In the Middle Ages, The Garden of the Rose was merely another term for Eden, Paradise, Peter’s Orchard, or Heaven’s Walls, and the Lady of the Rose Garden was unquestionably the same as the Ruler of the Isles called Fortunate—

—a Queen

So beautiful that with one single beam

Of her great beauty, all the country round

Is rendered shining.

Some accounts state that the bride of Oberon was known as Esclairmond, a name which seemingly is one with eclair monde or “Light of the World”.

Figs. 423 and 424.—British. From Akerman.

We have seen that the surroundings of the Dane John at Canterbury are still known as Rodau’s Town: the coins of the Rhodian Greeks were sometimes rotae or wheel crosses in the form of a rose, and there is little doubt that our British rota coins were intended to represent various conceptions of the Rose Garden, or Avalon, or the Apple Orchard: using another simile the British poets preached the same Ideal under the guise of the Round Table.[790] Fig. 179, (ante, p. 339) represented a rose combined with four sprigs or sprouts, and in Fig. 423 (British) the intention of the rhoda is clearly indicated: on the carved column illustrated on page 708 the rood is a rhoda, and my suggestion in an earlier chapter that “Radipole road,” near London, may have marked the site of a rood pole is somewhat strengthened by the fact that Maypoles occasionally displayed St. George’s red rood or the banner of England, and a white pennon or streamer emblazoned with a red cross terminating like the blade of a sword. Occasionally the poles were painted yellow and black in spiral lines, the original intention no doubt being representative of Night and Day.

Alas poore Maypoles what should be the cause

That you were almost banished from the earth?

Who never were rebellious to the lawes,

Your greatest crime was harmless honest mirth,

What fell malignant spirit was there found

To cast your tall Pyramids to ground?

The same poet[791] deplores the gone-for-ever time when—

All the parish did in one combine

To mount the rod of peace, and none withstood

When no capritious constables disturb them,

Nor Justice of the peace did seek to curb them,

Nor peevish puritan in rayling sort,

Nor over-wise churchwarden spoyled the sport.

Overwise scholars have assumed that the Maypole was primarily and merely a phallic emblem; it was, however, more generally the simple symbol of justice and “the rod of peace”: rod, rood, and ruth are of course variants of one and the same root.

Among, if not the prime of the May Day dances was one known popularly as Sellingers Round: here probably the r is an interpolation, and the immortal Sellinga was in all likelihood sel inga or the innocent and happy Ange of Islington:—

To Islington and Hogsdon runnes the streame,

Of giddie people to eate cakes and creame.

At the famous “Angel” of Islington manorial courts were held seemingly from a time immemorial: on a shop-front now facing it the curious surname Uglow may be seen to-day, and in view of the adjacent Agastone Road it is reasonable to assume that at Hogsdon, now spelt Hoxton, stood once an Hexe or Hag stone, perhaps also that the hill by the Angel was originally known as the ug low or Ug hill. We have noted that fairy rings were occasionally termed hag tracks, and that the Angel district was once associated with these evidences of the fairies is seemingly implied by a correspondent who wrote to The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1792 as follows: “Having noticed a query relating to fairy rings having once been numerous in the meadow between Islington and Canonbury, and whether there were any at this time, and having never seen those extraordinary productions whether of Nature or of animals, curiosity led me on a late fine day to visit the above spot in search of them, but I was disappointed. There are none there now; the meadow above mentioned is intersected by paths on every side and trodden by man and beast.” Man and beast have since converted these intersections into mean streets among which, however, still stand Fairbank and Bookham Streets.

Fig. 425.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).

The Maypole was generally a sprout and was no doubt in this respect a proper representative of the “blossoming tree” referred to in a Gaelic Hymn in honour of St. Brighid—

Be extinguished in us

The flesh’s evil, affections

By this blossoming tree

This Mother of Christ.

The May Queen was invariably selected as the fairest and best dispositioned of the village maidens, and before being “set in an Arbour on a Holy Day” she was apparently carried on the shoulders of four men or “deacons”:[792] assuredly these parochial deacons were personages of local importance, and they may possibly account for the place-name Maydeacon House which occurs at Patrixbourne, Kent, in conjunction with Kingston, Heart’s Delight, Broome Park, and Barham. The word deacon is Good King or Divine King: we have seen that four kings figured frequently in the wheel of Fortune, and the ceremonious carrying by four deacons was not merely an idle village sport for it formed part of the ecclesiastical functions at the Vatican. An English traveller of some centuries ago speaking of the Pope and his attendant ceremonial, states that the representative of Peter was carried on the back of four deacons “after the maner of carrying whytepot queenes in Western May games”:[793] the “Whytepot Queen” was no doubt representative of Dame Jeanne, the demijohn or Virgin, and the counterpart to Janus or St. Peter.

Fig. 426.—Cretan. From Barthelemy.

One of what Camden would have dubbed the sour kind of critics inquired in 1577: “What adoe make our young men at the time of May? Do they not use night-watchings to rob and steal yong trees out of other men’s grounde, and bring them home into their parish with minstrels playing before? And when they have set it up they will deck it with floures and garlands and dance around, men and women together most unseemly and intolerable as I have proved before.” The scenes around the Maypole (“this stinckyng idoll rather”) were unquestionably sparkled by a generous provision of “ambrosia”:—

From the golden cup they drink

Nectar that the bees produce,

Or the grapes ecstatic juice,

Flushed with mirth and hope they burn.[794]

On that ever-memorable occasion at Stonehenge, when the Saxons massacred their unsuspecting hosts, a Bard relates that—

The glad repository of the world was amply supplied.

Well did Eideol prepare at the spacious circle of the world

Harmony and gold and great horses and intoxicating mead.

The word mead implies that this celestial honey-brew was esteemed to be the drink of the Maid; ale as we know was ceremoniously brewed within churches, and was thus probably once a holy beverage drunk on holy-days: the words beer and brew will account for representations of the senior Selenus, as at times inebriate. The Fairy Queen, occasionally the “Sorceress of the ebon Throne,” was esteemed to be the “Mother of wildly-working dreams”; Matthew Arnold happily describes the Celts as “drenched and intoxicated with fairy dew,” and it seems to have a general tenet that the fairy people in their festal glee were sometimes inebriated by ambrosia:—

From golden flowers of each hue,

Crystal white, or golden yellow,

Purple, violet, red or blue,

We drink the honey dew

Until we all get mellow,

Until we all get mellow.[795]

In the neighbourhood of Fair Head, Antrim, there is a whirlpool known as Brecan’s Cauldron in connection with which one of St. Columba’s miracles is recorded. That the Pure King or Paragon was also deemed to be “that brewer” or the Brew King of the mystic cauldron, is evident from the magic recipe of Taliesin, which includes among its alloy of ingredients “to be mixed when there is a calm dew falling,” the liquor that bees have collected, and resin (amber?) and pleasant, precious silver, the ruddy gem and the grain from the ocean foam (the pearl or margaret?):—

And primroses and herbs

And topmost sprigs of trees,

Truly there shall be a puryfying tree,

Fruitful in its increase.

Some of it let that brewer boil

Who is over the five-woods cauldron.

We have noted the five acres allotted to each Bard, five springs at Avebury, five fields at Biddenden, “five wells” at Doddington, five banners at the magic fountain of Berenton, and five fruits growing on a holy tree: the mystic meaning attached to five rivers was in all probability that which is thus stated in Cormac’s Adventure in the Land of Promise: “The fountain which thou sawest with the five streams out of it is the fountain of Knowledge, and the streams are the five senses through which Knowledge is obtained. And no one will have Knowledge who drinketh not a draught out of the fountain itself and out of the streams.” That Queen Wisdom was the Lady of the Isles called Fortunate, is explicitly stated by the poet who tells us that there not Fantasy but Reason ruled: he adds:—

All this is held a fable: but who first

Made and recited it, hath in this fable

Shadowed a truth.[796]

From the group of so-called Sun and Fire Symbols here reproduced, it will be seen that the svastika or “Fare ye well” cross assumed multifarious forms: in Thrace, the emblem was evidently known as the embria, for there are in existence coins of the town of Mesembria, whereon the legend Mesembria, meaning the (city of the) midday sun, is figured by the syllable Mes, followed by the svastika as the equivalent of Embria.[797]

Fig. 427.—Sun and Fire Symbols from Denmark of the later Bronze Age. From Symbolism of the East and West (Murray-Aynsley).

The whirling bird-headed wheel on page 709 is a peculiarly interesting example of the British rood, or rota of ruth; as also is No. 40 of Fig. 201 (ante, p. 364) where the peacock is transformed into a svastika: the pear-shaped visage on the obverse of this coin may be connoted with the Scotch word pearie, meaning a pear-shaped spinning-top, and the seven ains or balls may be connoted with the statement of Maundeville, that he was shown seven springs which gushed out from a spot where once upon a time Jesus Christ had played with children.

No. 43 of the contemned sceattae (p. 364) evidently represents the legendary Bird of Fire, which, together with the peacock and the eagle, I have discussed elsewhere: this splendid and mysterious bird—as those familiar with Russian ballet are aware—came nightly to an apple-tree, but there is no reason to assume that the apple was its only or peculiar nourishment. The Mystic Boughs illustrated on page 627 (Figs. 379 to 384) may well have been the mistletoe or any other berried or fruit-bearing branch: in Fig. 397 (p. 635) the Maiden is holding what is seemingly a three-leaved lily, doubtless corresponding to the old English Judge’s bough or wand, now discontinued, and only faintly remembered by a trifling nosegay.[798]

Symbolists are aware that in Christian and Pagan art, birds pecking at either fruit or flowers denote the souls of the blessed feeding upon the joys of Paradise: all winged things typified the Angels or celestial Intelligences who were deemed to flash like birds through the air, and the reader will not fail to note the angelic birds sitting in Queen Mary’s tree (Fig. 425, p. 686).

There is a delicious story of a Little Bird in Irish folk-tale, and among the literature of the Trouveres or Troubadours, there is A Lay of the Little Bird which it is painful to curtail: it runs as follows: “Once upon a time, more than a hundred years ago, there lived a rich villein whose name I cannot now tell, who owned meadows and woods and waters, and all things which go to the making of a rich man. His manor was so fair and so delightsome that all the world did not contain its peer. My true story would seem to you but idle fable if I set its beauty before you, for verily I believe that never yet was built so strong a keep and so gracious a tower. A river flowed around this fair domain, and enclosed an orchard planted with all manner of fruitful trees. This sweet fief was builded by a certain knight, whose heir sold it to a villein; for thus pass baronies from hand to hand, and town and manor change their master, always falling from bad to worse. The orchard was fair beyond content. Herbs grew there of every fashion, more than I am able to name. But at least I can tell you that so sweet was the savour of roses and other flowers and simples, that sick persons, borne within that garden in a litter, walked forth sound and well for having passed the night in so lovely a place. Indeed, so smooth and level was the sward, so tall the trees, so various the fruit, that the cunning gardener must surely have been a magician, as appears by certain infallible proofs.

“Now in the middle of this great orchard sprang a fountain of clear, pure water. It boiled forth out of the ground, but was always colder than any marble. Tall trees stood about the well, and their leafy branches made a cool shadow there, even during the longest day of summer heat. Not a ray of the sun fell within that spot, though it were the month of May, so thick and close was the leafage. Of all these trees the fairest and the most pleasant was a pine. To this pine came a singing bird twice every day for ease of heart. Early in the morning he came, when monks chant their matins, and again in the evening, a little after vespers. He was smaller than a sparrow, but larger than a wren, and he sang so sweetly that neither lark, nor nightingale, nor blackbird, nay, nor siren even, was so grateful to the ear. He sang lays and ballads, and the newest refrain of the minstrel and the spinner at her wheel. Sweeter was his tune than harp or viol, and gayer than the country dance. No man had heard so marvellous a thing; for such was the virtue in his song that the saddest and the most dolent forgot to grieve whilst he listened to the tune, love flowered sweetly in his heart, and for a space he was rich and happy as any emperor or king, though but a burgess of the city, or a villein of the field. Yea, if that ditty had lasted 100 years, yet would he have stayed the century through to listen to so lovely a song, for it gave to every man whilst he hearkened, love, and riches, and his heart’s desire. But all the beauty of the pleasaunce drew its being from the song of the bird; for from his chant flowed love which gives its shadow to the tree, its healing to the simple, and its colour to the flower. Without that song the fountain would have ceased to spring, and the green garden become a little dry dust, for in its sweetness lay all their virtue. The villein, who was lord of this domain, walked every day within his garden to hearken to the bird. On a certain morning he came to the well to bathe his face in the cold spring, and the bird, hidden close within the pine branches, poured out his full heart in a delightful lay, from which rich profit might be drawn. ‘Listen,’ chanted the bird in his own tongue, ‘listen to my voice, oh, knight, and clerk, and layman, ye who concern yourselves with love, and suffer with its dolours: listen, also, ye maidens, fair and coy and gracious, who seek first the gifts and beauty of the world. I speak truth and do not lie. Closer should you cleave to God than to any earthly lover, right willingly should you seek His altar, more firmly should you hold to His commandment than to any mortal’s pleasure. So you serve God and Love in such fashion, no harm can come to any, for God and Love are one. God loves sense and chivalry; and Love holds them not in despite. God hates pride and false seeming; and Love loveth loyalty. God praiseth honour and courtesy; and fair Love disdaineth them not. God lendeth His ear to prayer; neither doth Love refuse it her heart. God granteth largesse to the generous, but the grudging man, and the envious, the felon and the wrathful, doth he abhor. But courtesy and honour, good sense and loyalty, are the leal vassals of Love, and so you hold truly to them, God and the beauty of the world shall be added to you besides. Thus told the bird in his song’.”[799]

It is not necessary to relate here the ill-treatment suffered by the bird which happily was full of guile, nor to describe its escape from the untoward fate destined for it by the villein.

In Figs. 428 to 430 are three remarkable British coins all of which seemingly represent a bird in song: it is not improbable that the idea underlying these mystic forms is the same as what the Magi termed the Honover or Word, which is thus described: “The instrument employed by the Almighty, in giving an origin to these opposite principles, as well as in every subsequent creative act, was His Word. This sacred and mysterious agent, which in the Zendavesta is frequently mentioned under the appellations Honover and I am, is compared to those celestial birds which constantly keep watch over, the welfare of nature. Its attributes are ineffable light, perfect activity, unerring prescience. Its existence preceded the formation of all things—it proceeds from the first eternal principal—it is the gift of God.”[800]

Figs. 428 to 430.—British. From Evans.

The symbol of Hanover[801] was the White Horse and we have considered the same connection at Hiniver in Sussex: it is also a widely accepted verity that the White Horse—East and West—was the emblem of pure Reason or Intelligence; the Persian word for good thought was humanah, which is seemingly our humane, and if we read Honover as ancient ver the term may be equated in idea with word or verbum. The Rev. Professor Skeat derives the words human and humane from humus the ground, whence the Latin homo, a man, literally, “a creature of earth,” but this is a definition which the pagan would have contemptuously set aside, for notwithstanding his perversity in bowing down to wood and stone he believed himself to be a creature of the sun and claimed: “my high descent from Jove Himself I boast”.

We have seen that Jove, Jupiter, or Jou was in all probability Father Joy, and have suggested that the Wandering Jew was a personification of the same idea: it has also been surmised that Elisha—one of the alternative names of the Wanderer—meant radically Holy Jou: it is not improbable that the Shah or Padishah of Persia was similarly the supposed incarnation of this phairy père. The various well-authenticated apparitions of the Jew are quite possibly due to impersonations of the traditional figure, and two at least of these apparitions are mentioned as occurring in England: in one case the old man claiming to be the character wandered about ejaculating “Poor Joe alone”; in another “Poor John alone alone”.[802] Both “Joe” and “John” are supposed by Brand to be corruptions of “Jew”: the greater probability is that they were genuine British titles of the traditional Wanderer.

The exclamation of “alone alone” may be connoted with the so-called Allan apples which used to figure so prominently in Cornish festivities: these Allan apples doubtless bore some relation to the Celtic St. Allan: haleine means breath,[803] elan means fire or energy, and it is in further keeping with St. Allan that his name is translated as having meant cheerful.

The festival of the Allan apple was essentially a cheery proceeding: two strips of wood were joined crosswise by a nail in the centre; at each of the four ends was stuck a lighted candle with large and rosy apples hung between. This construction was fastened to a beam or the ceiling of the kitchen, then made to revolve rapidly, and the players whose object was to catch the Allan apples in their mouths frequently instead had a taste of the candles.[804] Obviously this whirling firewheel was an emblem of Heol the Celtic Sun wheel, and as Newlyn is particularly mentioned as a site of the festival, we may equate St. Newlyna of Newlyn with the Noualen of Brittany, and further with the Goddess Nehellenia or New Helen of London. Nehellenia has seemingly also been traced at Tadcaster in Yorkshire where the local name Helen’s Ford is supposed to be a corruption of the word Nehellenia:[805] Nelly, however, is no corruption but a variant of Ellen. The Goddess Nehallenia is usually sculptured with a hound by her side, and in her lap is a basket of fruits “symbolising the fecundating power of the earth”.[806] In old English line meant to fecundate or fertilise, and in Britain Allan may be considered as almost a generic term for rivers—the all fertilisers—for it occurs in the varying forms Allen, Alan, Alne, Ellen, Elan, Ilen, etc.: sometimes emphasis on the second syllable wears off the preliminary vowel, whence the river-names Len, Lyn, Leen, Lone, Lune, etc., are apparently traceable to the same cause as leads us to use lone as an alternative form of the word alone. The Extons Road, Jews Lane, and Paradise now found at King’s Lynn point to the probability that King’s Lynn (Domesday Lena, 1100 Lun, 1314 Lenne[807]) was once a London and an Exton. The great red letter day in Lynn used to be the festival of Candlemas, and on that occasion the Mayor and Corporation attended by twelve decrepit old men, and a band of music, formerly opened a so-called court of Piepowder: on reference to the Cornish St. Allen it is agreeable to find that this saint “was the founder of St. Allen’s Church in Powder”. This Powder, sometimes written Pydar, is not shown on modern maps, but it was the title for a district or Hundred in Cornwall which contains the village of Par: it would appear to be almost a rule that the place-name Peter should be closely associated with Allen, e.g., Peterhead in Scotland, near Ellon, and Petrockstowe or Padstowe in Cornwall is near Helland on the river Allan.

Fig. 431.—Sixteenth Century Printer’s Ornament.

In the emblem herewith the alan or cheery old Pater is associated like Nehelennia with the fruits of the earth, amongst which one may perhaps recognise coddlins and other varieties of Allan apple.

The Cornish Allantide was celebrated on the night of Hallow’een, and as Sir George Birdwood rightly remarks the English Arbor Day—if it be ever resuscitated—should be fixed on the first of November or old “Apple Fruit Day,” now All Hallows[808] or All Saint’s Day, the Christian substitute for the Roman festival of Pomona; also of the first day of the Celtic Feast of Shaman or Shony the Lord of Death. Shaman may in all probability be equated with Joe alone, and Shony with poor John alone alone: Shony, as has been seen, was an Hebridean ocean-deity, and the omniscient Oannes or John of Sancaniathon, the Phœnician historian, lived half his time in ocean: the Eros or Amoretto here illustrated from Kanauj may be connoted with Minnussinchen or the little Sinjohn of Tartary.

Fig. 432.—From Kanauj. From Symbolism of the East and West (Aynsley, Mrs. Murray).

With the apple orchard Pomona or of the Pierre, Pere, or Pater Alone, the monocle and monarch of the universe, may be connoted the far-famed paradise of Prester or Presbyter John: this mythical priest-king is rendered sometimes as Preste Cuan, sometimes as Un Khan or John King-Priest, and sometimes as Ken Khan: he was clearly a personification of the King of Kings, and his marvellous Kingdom, which streamed with honey and was overflowing with milk, was evidently none other than Paradise or the Land of Heaven. “Mediæval credulity” believed that this so-called “Asiatic phanton,” in whose country stood the Fountain of Youth and many other marvels, was attended by seven kings, twelve archbishops, and 365 counts: the seventy-two kings and their kingdoms said to be the tributaries of Prester John may be connoted with the seventy-two dodecans of the Egyptian and Assyrian Zodiac: these seventy-two dodecans I have already connoted with the seventy-two stones constituting the circle of Long Meg. Facing the throne of Prester John—all of whose subjects were virtuous and happy—stood a wondrous mirror in which he saw everything that passed in all his vast dominions. The mirror or monocle of Prester John is obviously the speculum of Thoth, Taut, or Doddy, and I suspect that the seventy-two dodecans of the Egyptian and Chaldean Zodiac were the seventy-two Daddy Kings of Un Khan’s Empire: none may take, nor touch, nor harm it—

For the round of Morian Zeus has been its watcher from of old

He beholds it and Athene thy own sea-grey eyes behold.[809]

The first written record of Preste Cuan figures in the chronicles of the Bishop of Freisingen (1145): the name Freisingen is radically singen: and it is quite probable that the Bungen Strasse at Hamelyn identified with the Pied Piper was actually the scene of a “Poor John, Alone, Alone,” incident such as Brand thus describes: “I remember to have seen one of these impostors some years ago in the North of England, who made a very hermit-like appearance and went up and down the streets of Newcastle with a long train of boys at his heels muttering, ‘Poor John alone, alone!’ I thought he pronounced his name in a manner singularly plaintive,”[810] we have seen that the Wandering Jew was first recorded at St. Albans: the ancient name for Newcastle-on-Tyne—where he seems to have made his last recorded appearance—was Pandon. With the panshen or pope of Tartary may be connoted the probability that the rosy Allan apple of Newlyn was a pippen: the parish of “Lynn or St. Margaret,” not only includes the wards of Paradise and Jews Lane, but we find there also an Albion Place, and the curious name Guanock; modern Kings Lynn draws its water supply from a neighbouring Gay wood.

In the year 1165 a mysterious letter circulated in Europe emanating, it was claimed, from the great Preste Cuan, and setting forth the wonders and magnificence of his Kingdom: this epistle was turned into verse, sung all over Europe by the trouveres, and its claims to universal dominion taken so seriously by Pope Alexander that this Pontiff or Pontifex[811] published in 1177 a counter-blast in which he maintained that the Christian professions of the mysterious Priest King were worse than worthless, unless he submitted to the spiritual claims of the See of Rome. There is little doubt that the popular Epistle of Prester John was the wily concoction of the Gnostic Trouveres or Merry Andrews, and that the unimaginative Pope who was so successfully stung into a reply, was no wise inferior in perception to the scholars of recent date who have located to their own satisfaction the mysterious Kingdom of Prester John in Tartary, in Asia Minor, or in Abyssinia: by the same peremptory and supercilious school of thought the Garden of Eden has been confidently placed in Mesopotamia, and the Irish paradise of Hy Breasil, “not unsuccessfully,” identified with Labrador.

The probability is that every community attributed the Kingdom of Un Khan to its own immediate locality, and that like the land of the Pied Piper it was popularly supposed to be joining the town and close at hand. In the fifteenth century a hard-headed French traveller who had evidently fallen into the hands of some whimsical mystic, recorded: “There was also at Pera a Neapolitan, called Peter of Naples, with whom I was acquainted. He said he was married in the country of Prester John, and made many efforts to induce me to go thither with him. I questioned him much respecting this country, and he told me many things which I shall here insert, but I know not whether what he said be the truth, and shall not therefore warrant any part of it.” Upon this honeymoon the archæologist, Thomas Wright, comments: “The manner in which our traveller here announces the relation of the Neapolitan shows how little he believed it; and in this his usual good sense does not forsake him. This recital is, in fact, but a tissue of absurd fables and revolting marvels, undeserving to be quoted, although they may generally be found in authors of those times. They are, therefore, here omitted; most of them, however, will be found in the narrative of John de Maundeville.”[812]

We have seen that the Wandering Jew was alternatively termed Magus, a fact already connoted with the seventy-two stones of Long Meg, or Maggie: it was said that Un Khan was sprung from the ancient race of the Magi,[813] and I think that the solar circle at Shanagolden by Canons Island Abbey, on the Shannon in the country of the Ganganoi, was an abri of Ken Khan, Preste Cuan, or Un Khan.

The rath or dun of Shanid or Shenet, as illustrated ante, p. 55, has a pit in its centre which, says Mr. Westropp, “I can only suppose to have been the base of some timber structure”: whether this central structure was originally a well, a tower, or a pole, it no doubt stood as a symbol of either the Tower of Salvation, the Well of Life, or the Tree of Knowledge. There is little doubt that this solar wheel or wheel of Good Fortune—which as will be remembered was occasionally depicted with four deacons or divine kings, a variant of the seventy-two dodecans—was akin to what British Bardism alluded to as “the melodious quaternion of Peter,” or “the quadrangular delight of Peter, the great choir of the dominion”;[814] it was also akin to the design on the Trojan whorl which Burnouf has described as “the four epochs (quarters) of the month or year, and the holy sacrifice”.[815]

The English earthwork illustrated in Fig. 433 (A) is known by the name of Pixie’s Garden, and its form is doubtless that of one among many varieties of “the quadrangular delight of Peter”. A pixy is an elf or ouphe, and the Pixie’s Garden of Uffculme Down (Devon) may be connoted in idea with “Johanna’s Garden” at St. Levans: Johanna, as we have seen, was associated with St. Levan (the home of Maggie Figgie), and in the words of Miss Courtney: “Not far from the parish of St. Levan is a small piece of ground—Johanna’s Garden—which is fuller of weeds than of flowers”.[816] I suspect that Johanna, like Pope Joan of Engelheim and Janicula, was the fabulous consort of Prester John or Un Khan.

Fig. 433.—From Earthwork of England (A. Hadrian Allcroft).

Fig. 434.—From Symbolism of the East and West (Aynsley, Mrs. Murray).

Fig. 433 (B) represents two diminutive earthworks which once existed on Bray Down in Dorsetshire: these little Troytowns or variants of the quadrangular delight of Peter may be connoted with the obverse design of the Thorgut talisman found near Appleby and illustrated on page 675: the two crescent moons may be connoted with two sickles still remembered in Mona, and the twice-eight crescents surrounding Fig. 434 which is copied from a mosaic pavement found at Gubbio, Italy.

Fig. 435.—From The Word in the Pattern (Watts, Mrs. G.F.).

The Pixie’s Garden illustrated in Fig. 433 (A) obviously consists of four T’s centred to one base and the elaborate svastika, illustrated in Fig. 435, is similarly distinguished by four concentric T’s. The Kymbri or Cynbro customarily introduced the figure of a T into the thatch of their huts, and it is supposed that ty, the Welsh for a house or home, originated from this custom. We have seen that the Druids trained their super sacred oak tree (Hebrew allon) into the form of the T or Tau, which they inscribed Thau (ante, p. 393), and as ty in Celtic also meant good, the four T’s surrounding the svastika of Fig. 435 would seem to be an implication of all surrounding beneficence, good luck, or all bien.

The Cynbro are believed to have made use of the T—Ezekiel’s mark of election—as a magic preservative against fire and all other misfortunes, whence it is remarkable to find that even within living memory at Camberwell by Peckham near London, the chi-shaped or ogee-shaped[817] angle irons, occasionally seen in old cottages, were believed to have been inserted “in order to protect the house from fire as well as from falling down”.[818]

Fig. 436.—Celtic Emblem. From Myths of Crete (Mackenzie, D. A.).

Figs. 437 and 438.—Mediæval Papermarks. From Les Filigranes (Briquet, C. M.).

Commenting upon Fig. 435, which is taken from a Celtic cross at Carew in Wales, Mrs. G. F. Watts observes: “This symbol was used by British Christians to signify the labyrinth or maze of life round which was sometimes written the words “God leadeth”.[819] Among the Latin races the Intreccia or Solomon’s Knot, which consists frequently of three strands, is regarded as an emblem of the divine Being existent without beginning and without end—an unbroken Unity: coiled often into the serpentine form of an S it decorates Celtic crosses and not infrequently into the centre of the maze is woven the svastika or Hammer of Thor. The word Svastika is described by oriental scholars as being composed of svasti and ka: according to the Dictionaries svasti means welfare, health, prosperity, blessing, joy, happiness, and bliss: in one sense ka (probably the chi [Greek: ch]) had the same meaning, but ka also meant “The Who,” “The Inexplicable,” “The Unknown,” “The Chief God,” “The Object of Worship,” “The Lord of Creatures,” “Water,” “The Mind or Soul of the Universe”.

In southern France—the Land of the Troubadours—the Solomon’s Knot, as illustrated in Fig. 438, is alternatively known as lacs d’amour, or the knot of the Annunciation: this design consists, as will be noted, of a svastika extended into a rose or maze, and a precisely similar emblem is found in Albany. The title lacs d’amour or lakes of love, consociated with the synonymous knot of the Annunciation, is seemingly further confirmation of the equation amour = Mary: another form of knot is illustrated in Fig. 440, and this the reader will compare with Fig. 439, representing a terra-cotta tablet found by Schliemann at Troy.

Fig. 439.—From Troy (Schliemann).

Figs. 440 and 441.—Mediæval Papermarks. From Les Filigranes (Briquet, C. M.).

It will be remembered that according to the Pierrot legend St. Peter looking out from the Walls of Heaven detected what he first took to be a rosebud in the snow: the name Piers, which like Pearce is a variant of Peter, is essentially pieros, either Father Rose or Father Eros. The rood or rhoda pierre here illustrated is a Rose cross, and is conspicuously decorated with intreccias, or Solomon’s Knots: whether the inscription—which looks curiously Arabic—has ever been deciphered I am unable to say; it would, however, seem that the Andrew or Chi cross, which figures upon it, permits the connection of this Chooyvan rood with Choo or Jou.

Fig. 442.—From A New Description of England (Anon, 1724).

Fig. 443.—From Evans.

Among the whorls from Troy, Burnouf has deciphered objects which he describes as a wheel in motion; others as the Rosa mystica; others as the three stations of the Sun, or the three mountains. The Temple of Solomon was situated on Mount Moriah, one of the three holy hills of Hierosolyma, and it is probable that Meru, the paradise peak of Buddhism, was like Mount Moriah, originally Amour. That the wheel coins of England were symbolic of the Apple Orchard, the Garden of the Rose, or of the Isles called Fortunate is further pointed by the variant here illustrated, which is unmistakeably a Rosa mystica.

As has been pointed out by Sir George Birdwood it was the Apple Tree of the prehistoric Celtic immigrants that gave to the whole peninsular of the West of England—Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, Dorsetshire, Devonshire, and Cornwall, the mystic name of “Ancient Avalon,” or Apple Island:—

Deep meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns,

And bowery hollows, crowned with summer seas.

Fig. 443a—British. From Evans.

FOOTNOTES:

[766]

Primary chief bard am I to Elphin,

And my original country is the region of the summer stars;

Idno and Heinin called me Merddin,

At length every king will call me Taliesin.

I was with my Lord in the highest sphere,

On the fall of Lucifer into the depth of hell

I have borne a banner before Alexander;

I know the names of the stars from north to south;

I have been on the galaxy at the throne of the Distributer;

I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain;

I conveyed the Divine Spirit to the level of the vale of Hebron;

I was in the court of Don before the birth of Gwdion.

I was instructor to Eli and Enoc;

I have been winged by the genius of the splendid crosier;

I have been loquacious prior to being gifted with speech;

I was at the place of the crucifixion of the merciful Son of God;

I have been three periods in the prison of Arianrod;

I have been the chief director of the work of the tower on Nimrod;

I am a wonder whose origin is not known.

I have been in Asia with Noah in the ark,

I have seen the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra;

I have been in India when Roma was built,

I am now come here to the remnant of Troia.

I have been with my Lord in the manger of the ass:

I strengthened Moses through the water of Jordan;

I have been in the firmament with Mary Magdalene;

I have obtained the muse from the cauldron of Caridwen;

I have been bard of the harp to Lleon or Lochlin,

I have been on the White Hill, in the court of Cynvelyn,

For a day and a year in stocks and fetters,

I have suffered hunger for the Son of the Virgin,

I have been fostered in the land of the Deity,

I have been teacher to all intelligences,

I am able to instruct the whole universe.

I shall be until the day of doom on the face of the earth

And it is not known whether my body is flesh or fish.

[767] A New Description of England (1724), p. 57.

[768] Braxfield Road at modern Brockley may mark the site of this meadow.

[769] Wilson, J., Imperial Gazetteer, i., 946.

[770] Cf. Cun, coin, ante, p. 666.

[771] P. 494.

[772] Cf. Pierrot’s Family Tree. T.P.’s Weekly, 1st August, 1914.

[773] Wilson, J., Imperial Gazetteer, ii., 584.

[774] Toland, History of Druids, p. 356.

[775] Cf. Gomme, Sir L., Folklore as an Historic Science, pp. 43, 44.

[776] Cf. Gomme, Sir L., Folklore as an Historic Science, p. 44.

[777] A New Description of England, p. 65.

[778] Morte D’Arthur, Bk. xviii, ch. viii.

[779] Hazlitt, W. Carew, Faiths and Folklore, i., 12.

[780] “Lageniensis,” p. 86.

[781] Taliesin or Radiant Brow claims to have been Merlin.

[782] “All the old traditions which give an interest to the Forest continue to be current there. The Fairies, who are kind to children, are still reported to be seen in their white apparel upon the banks of the Fountain; and the Fountain itself (whose waters are now considered salubrious) is still said to be possessed of its marvellous rain-producing properties. In seasons of drought the inhabitants of the surrounding parishes go to it in procession, headed by their five great banners, and their priests, ringing bells and chanting Psalms. On arriving at the Fountain, the Rector of the Canton dips the foot of the Cross into its waters, and it is sure to rain before a week elapses.”

“Brecilicn etait une de ces forets sacrees qu’habitaient les pretresses du druidisme dans le Gaule; son nom et celui de sa vallee l’attesteraient a defaut d’autre temoignage; les noms de lieux sont les plus surs garans des evenemens passés.”—Cf. Notes on The Mabinogion (Everyman’s Library), p. 383-90.

[783] Mitton, G. E., Hampstead and Marylebone.

[784] Probably the Glamorganshire “Tabernae Amnis,” now Bont y Von.

[785] Fearbal or sometimes Fibal. The “Merry Devil” associated in popular tradition with Edmonton beyond Islington was known by the name of Peter Fabell: I think he was originally “the Angel,” and that the names Fearbal or Fabell meant Fairy or Fay Beautiful.

[786] “Morien,” Light of Britannia, p. 61.

[787] I am inclined to think that the eena deena dina dux of childrens’ games may be a similarly ancient survival.

[788] There was also an Aballo, now Avalon, in France: there is also near Dodona in Albania an Avlona or Valona. A correspondent of The Westminster Gazette points out that: “Valona is but a derivative of the Greek (both ancient and modern) Balanos. This is clearer still if you realise that the Greek b is (and no doubt in ancient days also was) pronounced like an English v: thus, valanos.”

[789] Travels in the East, p. 152.

[790] According to Malory: “Merlin made the Round Table in tokening of roundness of the world, for by the Round Table is the world signified by right, for all the world, Christian and heathen, repair unto the Round Table; and when they are chosen to be of the fellowship of the Round Table they think them more blessed and more in worship than if they had gotten half the world; and ye have seen that they have lost their fathers and their mothers, and all their kin, and their wives and their children, for to be of your fellowship.”—Morte D’Arthur, Book xiv. 11.

[791] Fenner, W., Pasquils Palinodia, 1619.

[792] Faiths and Folklore, ii., 401.

[793] Ibid., 402.

[794] Aneurin’s Gododin.

[795] Cf. “Laganiensis,” Irish Folklore, p. 35.

[796] Cf. New Light on Renaissance, p. 169.

[797] Birdwood, Sir G., preface to Symbolism of East and West, p. xvi.

[798] Hazlitt, W. Carew, Faiths and Folklore, ii., 402.

[799] Cf. Aucassin and Nicoletté, Everyman’s Library.

[800] Fraser, J. B., Persia, p. 129.

[801] At Looe in Cornwall the site of what was apparently the ancient forum or Fore street, is now known as “Hannafore”. Opposite is St. George’s Islet. The connection between George and Hanover suggests that St. George was probably the patron saint of Hanover.

[802] Hardwick, C., Traditions, Superstitions, and Folklore, p. 159.

[803] The lungs are the organs of haleine.

[804] Courtney, Miss M. E., Cornish Feasts, p. 3.

[805] Johnson, W., Folk Memory, p. 212.

[806] Cf. ibid., p. 211.

[807] The authorities are perplexed by this place-name. “O. E. Llynn means usually a torrent running over a rock which does not exist here. Its later meaning, a pool, is not recorded until 1577”.

[808] The Elsdale Street at Hackney which is found in close contact with Paradise Passage, Well Street, and Paragon Road may mark an original Elves or Ellie’s Dale. Leading to “The Grove” is Pigwell Passage.

[809] Ante, p. 323.

[810] Cf. Hardwick, C., Trad. Super. and Folklore, p. 159.

[811] This word means evidently much more than, as supposed, bridge builder.

[812] The Rev. Baring-Gould quotes portions of this epistle in his Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, but its contents are evidently distasteful to him as he breaks off: “I may be spared further extracts from this extraordinary letter which proceeds to describe the church in which Prester John worships, by enumerating the precious stones of which it is constructed, and their special virtues”: as a matter of fact, the account is an agreeable fairy-tale or fable which is no more extravagant than the account of the four-square, cubical, golden-streeted New Jerusalem attributed to the Revelations of St. John.

[813] Chambers’ Encyclopædia, viii., 398.

[814] Guest, Dr., Origines Celtica, ii., 182.

[815] Cf. Schliemann, Troy.

[816] Cornish Feasts, p. 76.

[817] Cf. ante, p. 345, Fig. 183, No. 10.

[818] Aynsley, Mrs. Murray, Symbolism of the East and West, p. 60.

[819] The Word in the Pattern.

CHAPTER XIII.
ENGLISH EDENS

At bottom, a man is what his thinking is, thoughts being the artists who give colour to our days. Optimists and pessimists live in the same world, walk under the same sky, and observe the same facts. Sceptics and believers look up at the same great stars—the stars that shone in Eden, and will flash again in Paradise.—Dr. J. Fort Newton.

The name under which Jupiter was worshipped in Crete is not yet deciphered, but as we are told that the favourite abode of King Jou at Gnossus was on Mount Olympus where in its delightful recesses he held his court, and administered patriarchal justice; and as we are further told by Julius Firmicus that: “vainly the Cretans to this day adore the tumulus of Jou,” it is fairly obvious that, however many historic King Jou’s there may have been, the archetypal Jou was a lord of the tumulus or dun.

The ancient Irish were accustomed to call any hill or artificial mound under which lay vaults, a shee, which also is the generic term for fairy: similarly we have noted a connection between the term rath—or dun—and wraith. Although fairies were partial to banks, braes, purling brooks, brakes, and bracken, they particularly loved to congregate in duns or raths, and their rapid motions to and fro these headquarters were believed to create a noise “somewhat resembling the loud humming of bees when swarming from a hive”. I have little doubt that all hills, bryns, or barrows were regarded not only as bruen, or breasts, but as ethereal beehives, and the superstitions still associated with bees are evidence that bees themselves were once deemed sacred. There are upwards of a thousand localities in Ireland alone where the word rath, raw, rah, ray, or ra marks the site of a fairy rath,[820] and without going so far as to assert that every British -dun or -ton was a fairy dun or doun further investigation will probably establish an unsuspected multitude of Dunhills or Edens.

Fig. 444.—Birs Nimroud.

We have seen that in Ireland fern meant anciently anything good, and also in all probability fer en the Fires or Fairies: at the romantic hill of Cnock-Firinn or the Hill of firinn was supposed to dwell a fairy chief named Donn Firineach, i.e., Donn the Truthful or the Truthteller;[821] evidently, therefore, this Don was a counterpart and consort of Queen Vera, and as he is reputed to have come from Spain his name may be connoted with the Spanish don which, like the Phœnician adon, is a generic term meaning the lord. With “Generous Donn the King of Faery” may be connoted the Jewish Adonai, a plural form of Adon “lord” combined with the pronoun of the first person: when reading the Scriptures aloud the Jews rather than utter the super-sacred word Jhuh, substitute Adonai, and in Jewry Adonai is thus a title of the Supreme Being. Among the Phœnicians Adon or the lord was specially applied to the King of Heaven or the Sun and that sacred Nineveh was essentially a dunhill is evidenced by Fig. 444

With Adon may be connoted Adonis, the lovely son of Myrrha and Kinyras, whose name has been absorbed into English as meaning any marvellously well-favoured youth: prior to the festivals of Adonis it was customary to grow forced gardens in earthen or silver pots, and there would thus seem to have been a close connection in ideas between our English “whytepot queen” or maiden with the pyramid of silver, and with the symbolic Gardens of Adonis or Eden as grown in Phrygia and Egypt.

Skeat connotes the word maiden—which is an earlier form than maid—with the Cornish maw, a boy: if, however, we read ma as mother the word maiden becomes Mother Iden, and I have little doubt that the Maiden of mythology and English harvest-homes was the feminine Adonis. Adonis was hymned as the Shepherd of the Twinkling Stars; I have surmised that Long Meg of the seventy-two Daughters was the Mighty Maiden of the Stars, whence it is interesting to find Skeat connoting maiden with Anglo-Saxon magu, a kinsman: that Long Meg was the All Mother whence mag or mac came to mean child of has already been suggested. Not only does Long Meg of Cumberland stand upon Maiden Way, but there is in the same district a Maidenmoor probably like Maidenhead or Maidenheath, a heath or mead dedicated to the Maid. Our dictionaries define the name May as a contraction of either Mary or Margaret, i.e., Meg: in the immediate neighbourhood of Long Meg is another circle called Mayborough, of which the vallum or enclosure is composed of stones taken from the beds of the Eamount or Eden rivers; in the centre of Mayborough used to stand four magnificent monoliths probably representative of the four deacons or Good Kings who supported the Whytepot Queen.

There is a seat called St. Edans in Ireland close to Ferns where, as will be remembered, is St. Mogue’s Well: in Lincolnshire is a Maidenwell-cum-Farworth, and at Dorchester is a Haydon Hill in the close proximity of Forstone and Goodmanstone. That this Haydon was the Good Man is implied by the stupendous monument near by known as Mew Dun, Mai Dun, or Maiden Castle: this chef d’œuvre of prehistoric engineering, generally believed to be the greatest earthwork in Britain, is an oblong camp extending 1000 yards from east to west with a width of 500 yards, and it occupies an area of 120 acres:[822] entered by four gates the work itself is described as puzzling as a series of mazes, and to reach the interior one is compelled to pass through a labyrinth of defences. The name Dorchester suggests a Droia or Troy camp, and I have little doubt that the labyrinthine Maiden was a colossal Troy Town or Drayton. Among the many Draytons in England is a Drayton-Parslow, which suggests that it stood near or upon a Parr’s low or a Parr’s lea: out of great Barlow Street, Marylebone, leads Paradise Place and Paradise Passage: there is a Drayton Park at Highbury, and in the immediate proximity an Eden Grove and Paradise Road: there was a Troy Town where Kensington Palace now stands,[823] and in all likelihood there was another one at Drayton near Hanwell and Hounslow. That Hounslow once contained an onslow or ange hill seems to me more probable than that it was merely the “burial mound” of an imaginary Hund or Hunda: in Domesday Hounslow figures as Honeslow which may be connoted with Honeybourne at Evesham and Honeychurch in Devon. With regard to the latter it has been observed: “The connection between a church and honey is not very obvious, and this is probably Church of Huna”: the official explanation of “Honeybourne” is—“brook with honey sweet water,” but it is more probable that Queen Una was reputed to dwell there. That Una was not merely the creation of Spenser is evidenced from the fact that in Ireland “Una is often named by the peasantry as regent of the preternatural Sheog tribes”:[824] at St. Mary’s-in-the-Marsh, Thanet, is a Honeychild Manor and an Old Honeychild: with the Three White Balls at Iona it may be noted that on the summit of Hydon Heath (Surrey) is a place marked Hydon’s Ball.

At a distance of “about 110 yards” from Mayborough is another circle known as Arthur’s Round Table: a mile from Dunstable is a circular camp known as Maiden Bower, whence it is probable that Dunstable meant either Dun staple (market), or that the circular camp there was a “table” of “generous Donn”. That the term “Maiden” used here and elsewhere means maiden as we now understand it may be implied from the famous Maiden Stone in Scotland: this sculptured Longstone, now measuring 10 feet in height, bears upon it the mirror and comb which were essentially the emblems of the Mairymaid.

There is an eminence called Maiden Bower near Durham which figures alternatively as Dunholme; Durham is supposed to mean—“wild beast’s home or lair,” but I see no more reason to assign this ferocious origin to Durham than, say, to Dorchester or Doracestria: Ma, the mistress of Mount Ida, was like Britomart[825] esteemed to be the Mother of all beasts or brutes, and particularly of deer; Diana is generally represented with a deer, and the woody glens of many-crested Ida were indubitably a lair of forest brutes—

Thus Juno spoke, and to her throne return’d,

While they to spring-abounding Ida’s heights,

Wild nurse of forest beasts, pursued their way.[826]

Yorkshire, or Eboracum and the surrounding district, the habitat of the Brigantes, was known anciently as Deira: by the Romans Doracestria, or Dorchester was named Durnovaria upon which authority comments: “In the present name there is nothing which represents varia, so that it really seems to mean ‘fist camp’”; doubtless, fisticuffs, boxing-matches, and many other kind of Trojan game were once held at Doracestria as at every other Troy or Drayton.

King Priam, the Mystic King of Troy, is said to have had fifty sons and daughters: the same family is assigned not only to St. Brychan of Cambria, but also to King Ebor, or Ebrauc of York, whence in all probability the Brigantes who inhabited Yorkshire and Cumberland were followers of one and the same Priam, Prime, Broom, Brahm, or Brahma: the name Abraham or Ibrahim is defined as meaning “father of a multitude”. The Kentish Broom Park near Patrixbourne whereby is Hearts Delight, Maydeacon House, and Kingston is on Heden Downs, and immediately adjacent is a Dennehill and Denton: at Dunton Green, near Sevenoaks, the presence of a Mount Pleasant implies that this Dunton was an Eden Town.

There is an Edenkille, or Eden Church at Elgin, and at Dudley is a Haden Cross, supposed to have derived its title “from a family long resident here”: it would be preferable and more legitimate to assign this family name to the site and describe them as the “De Haden’s”. There is a Haddenham at Ely, and at Ely Place, Holborn, opposite St. Andrews, is Hatton Garden: I suggest that Sir Christopher Hatton, like the Hadens of Haden Cross, derived his name from his home, and not vice versa.

In the Hibernian county of Clare is an Eden Vale: Clare Market in London before being pulled down was in the parish of St. Clement Dane, here also stood Dane’s Inn, and within a stone’s throw is the church of St. Dunstan. The numerous St. Dunstans were probably once Dane stones, or Dun stanes, and the sprightly story of St. Dunstan seizing the nose of a female temptress with the tongs must be relegated to the Apocrypha. In the opinion of Sir Laurence Gomme the predominant cult in Roman London was undoubtedly that of Diana, for the evidence in favour of this goddess includes not only an altar, but other finds connected with her worship: Sir Laurence goes even further than this, stating his conviction that “Diana practically absorbed the religious expression of London”:[827] that London was a Lunadun has already been suggested.

It has always been strongly asserted by tradition that St. Paul’s occupies the site of a church of Diana: if this were so the Diana stones on the summit of Ludgate Hill would have balanced the Dun stones on the opposing bank of the river Fleet, or Bagnigge. We have seen that mam in Gaelic meant a gently sloping hill; the two dunhills rising from the river Fleet, or Bagnigge, were thus probably regarded like the Paps of Anu at Killarney, as twin breasts of the Maiden: there are parallel “Maiden Paps” near Berriedale (Caithness), others near Sunderland, and others at Roxburgh. According to Stow the famous cross at Cheapside was decorated with a statue of Diana, the goddess, to which the adjoining Cathedral had been formerly dedicated: prior to the Reformation, two jets of water—like the jets in Fig. 44 (p. 167)—prilled from Diana’s naked breast “but now decayed”.

By Claremarket and the church of St. Clement Dane stood Holywell Street, somewhat north of which was yet another well called—according to Stow—Dame Annis the Clear, and not far from it, but somewhat West, was also one other clear water called Perilous Pond. This “perilous” was probably once peri lass, i.e., perry lass, or pure lass, and the neighbouring Clerkenwell (although the city clerks or clerken may in all likelihood have congregated there on summer evenings), was once seemingly sacred to the same type of phairy as the Irish call a cluricanne.[828] The original Clerken, or Cluricanne, was in all probability the resplendent clarus, clear, shining, Glare King, or Glory King: but it is equally likely that the -ken of Clerken was the endearing diminutive kin, as in Lambkin. That St. Clare was adored by her disciples is clear from The Golden Legend, where among other interesting data we are told: “She was crowned with a crown right clear shining that the obscurity of the night was changed into clearness of midday”: we are further told that once upon a time as a certain friar was preaching in her presence: “a right fair child was to fore St. Clare, and abode there a great part of the sermon”. It is thus permissible to assume that this marvellous holy woman, whose doctrine shall “enlumine all the world,” was originally depicted in company of the customary Holy Child, or the Little Glory King.

The original Clerken Well stood in what is now named Ray Street, and quite close to it is Braynes Row; not far distant was Brown’s Wood.[829] The name Sinclair implies an order or a tribe of Sinclair followers, and that the St. Dunstan by St. Clement’s Dane and Claremarket was something more than a monk is obvious from the tradition that “Our Lord shewed miracles for him ere he was born”: the marvel in point is that on a certain Candlemas Day the candle of his Mother Quendred[830] miraculously burned full bright so that others came and lighted their tapers at the taper of St. Dunstan’s mother; the interpretation placed upon this marvel was that her unborn child should give light to all England by his holy living.[831]

Fig. 445.—Gaulish. From Akerman.

As recorded in The Golden Legend the life of poor St. Clare was one long dolorous great moan and sorrow: it is mentioned, however, that she had a sister Agnes and that these two sisters loved marvellously together. We may thus assume that the celestial twins were Ignis, fire and Clare, light: Agnes is the Latin for lamb, and this symbol of Innocence is among the two or three out of lost multitudes which have been preserved by the Christian Church. In the illustration herewith the lambkin, in conjunction with a star, appears upon a coin of the Gaulish people whose chief town was Agatha: its real name, according to Akerman, was Agatha Tyke, and its foundation has been attributed both to the Rhodians and the Phoceans. Agatha is Greek for good, and tyke meant fortune or good luck: the effigy is described as being a bare head of Diana to the right and without doubt Diana, or the divine Una, was typified both by ignis the fire, and by agnes the lamb: in India Agni is represented riding on a male agnes, and in Christian art the Deity was figured as a ram.

Fig. 446.—Agni.

Fig. 447.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).

At the Cornish town of St. Enns, St. Anns, or St. Agnes, the name of St. Agnes—a paragon of maiden virtue—is coupled with a Giant Bolster, a mighty man who is said to have held possession of a neighbouring hill, sometimes known as Bury-anack: at the base of this hill exists a very interesting and undoubtedly most ancient earthwork known as “The Bolster”.[832] As Anak meant giant,[833] Bury Anack was seemingly the abri, brugh, bri, or fairy palace of this particular Anak, and if we spell Bolster with an e he emerges at once into Belstar, the Beautiful Star who is represented in association with Agnes on page 719: probably the maligned Bolster of Cornwall had another of his abris at Bellister Castle on the Tyne, now a crumbling mass of ruins.

Some accounts mention the Clerkenwell pool of Annis the Clear as being that of Agnes the Clear: opposite the famous Angel of this neighbourhood is Claremont Square, and about half a mile eastward is Shepherdess Walk; that the Shepherdess of this walk was Diane, i.e., Sinclair the counterpart of Adonis, the Shepherd of the twinkling stars, is somewhat implied by Peerless Street, which leads into Shepherdess Walk. Perilous Pool at Clerkenwell was sometimes known as Peerless Pool: it has been seen that the hags or fairies were associated with this Islington district which still contains a Paradise Passage, and of both “Perilous” and “Peerless” I think the correct reading should be peri lass; it will be remembered that the peris were quite familiar to England as evidenced by the feathery clouds or “perry dancers,” and the numerous Pre Stones and Perry Vales.[834] In Red Cross Street, Clerkenwell, are or were Deane’s Gardens; at Clarence Street, Islington, the name Danbury Street implies the existence either there or elsewhere of a Dan barrow.

Opposite Clare Market and the churches of St. Dunstan and St. Clement Dane is situated the Temple of which the circular church, situated in Tanfield Court,[835] is dedicated to St. Anne: St. Anne, the mother of St. Mary, is the patron saint of Brittany, where she has been identified with Ma or Cybele, the Magna Mater of Mount Ida; that Anna was the consort of Joachim or the Joy King I do not doubt, and in her aspect of a Fury or Black Virgin she was in all probability the oak-haunting Black Annis of Leicestershire: “there was one flabby eye in her head”. In view of the famous round church of St. Mary the Virgin it is permissible to speculate whether the “small circular hut of stone,” in which Black Mary of Black Mary’s Hole was reputed to have dwelt on the banks of the Fleet, Bagnigge or Holeburn (now Holborn) was or was not the original Eye dun of the Pixy, or Big Nikke.

The emblems associated with the Temple and its circular church are three; the Flying Horse or Pegasus; two men or twain riding on a single horse (probably the Two Kings) and the Agnus Dei: in the emblem herewith this last is standing on a dun whence are flowing the four rivers of Eden. The lamb was essentially an emblem of St. John who, in Art, is generally represented with it; whence it is significant that in Celtic the word for lamb is identical with the name Ion, the Welsh being oen, the Cornish oin, the Breton oan, the Gaelic uan, and the Manx eayn. That Sinjohn was always sunshine and the sheen, never apparently darkness, is implied by the Basque words egun meaning day, and Agandia or Astartea meaning Sunday. The Basque for God is jainco, the Ugrian was jen, and the Basque jain, meaning lord or master, is evidently synonymous with the Spanish don or donna.

Fig. 448.—Divine Lamb, with a Circular Nimbus, not Cruciform, Marked with the Monogram of Christ, and the A and Ω. Sculptured on a Sarcophagus in the Vatican. The earliest ages of Christianity. From Christian Iconography (Didron).]

In addition to St. Annes opposite St. Dunstans, and St. Clement Dane there is a church of St. Anne in Dean Street, Soho: Ann of Ireland was alternatively Danu, and it is clear from many evidences that the initial d or t was generally adjectival. The Cornish for down or dune is oon, and Duke was largely correct when he surmised in connection with St. Anne’s Hill, Avebury: “I cannot help thinking that from Diana and Dian were struck off the appellations Anna and Ann, and that the feriæ, or festival of the goddess, was superseded by the fair, as now held, of the saint. I shall now be told that the fane of the hunting goddess would never have been seated on this high and bare hill, that the Romans would have given her a habitation amidst the woods and groves, but here Callimachus comes to my aid. In his beautiful Hymn on Diana he feigns her to entreat her father Jupiter, ‘also give me all hills and mountains’.”

Not only is Diana (Artemis) made to say “give me all hills and mountains,” but Callimachus continues, “for rarely will Artemis go down into the cities”: hence it is probable that all denes, duns, and downs were dedicated to Diana. In Armenia, Maundeville mentions having visited a city on a mountain seven miles high named Dayne which was founded by Noah; near by is the city of Any or Anni, in which he says were one thousand churches. Among the rock inscriptions here illustrated, which are attributed to the Jews when migrating across Sinai from Egypt, will be noticed the name Aine prefixed by a thau cross: the mountain rocks of the Sinai Peninsular bear thousands of illegible inscriptions which from time to time fall down—as illustrated—in the ravines; by some they are attributed to the race who built Petra.[836] I am unable to offer any suggestion as to how this Roman lettering Aine finds itself in so curious a milieu.

Fig. 449.—View of Wady Mokatteb from the S. E. From The One Primeval Language (Forster, O.).

Speaking of the bleak moorlands of Penrith (the pen ruth?), where are found the monuments of Long Meg and of Mayborough, Fergusson testily observes: “No one will now probably be found seriously to maintain that the long stone row at Shap was a temple either of the Druids or of anyone else. At least if these ancient people thought a single or even a double row of widely-spaced stones stretching to a mile and a half across a bleak moor was a proper form for a place to worship in, they must have been differently constituted from ourselves[837].” Indubitably they were; and so too must have been the ancient Greeks: the far-famed Mount Cynthus, whence Apollo was called Cynthus, is described by travellers as “an ugly hill” which crosses the island of Delos obliquely; it is not even a mountain, but “properly speaking is nothing but a ridge of granite”. I am told that Glastonbury—the Avalon, the Apple Orchard, the Sacred Eden of an immeasurable antiquity—is disappointing, and that nowadays little of any interest is to be seen there. “Donn’s House,” the gorgeous bri or palace of generous Donn the King of Faery, is in reality no better than a line of sandhills in the Dingle Peninsula, Kerry; of the inspiring Tipperary I know nothing, but can sympathise with the prosaic Governor of the Isle of Man, who a century or so ago reported that practically every dun in Manxland was crowned with a cairn which seemed “nothing but the rubbish of Nature thrown into barren and unfruitful heaps”.

“Miserable churl” sang the wily, enigmatic Bird, whose advice to the rich villein has been previously quoted,[838] “when you held me fast in your rude hand easy was it to know that I was no larger than a sparrow or a finch, and weighed less than half an ounce. How then could a precious stone three ounces in weight be hid in my body? When he had spoken thus he took his flight, and from that hour the orchard knew him no more. With the ceasing of his song the leaves withered from the pine, the garden became a little dry dust and the fountain forgot to flow.”

Among the legends of the Middle Ages is one to the effect that Alexander, after conquering the whole world determined to find and compass Paradise. After strenuous navigation the envoys of the great King eventually arrived before a vast city circled by an impenetrable wall: for three days the emissaries sailed along this wall without discovering any entrance, but on the third day a small window was discerned whence one of the inhabitants put out his head, and blandly inquired the purpose of the expedition; on being informed the inhabitant, nowise perturbed, replied: “Cease to worry me with your threats but patiently await my return”. After a wait of two hours the denizen of Heaven reappeared at the window and handed the envoys a gem of wonderful brilliance and colour which in size and shape exactly reproduced the human eye[839]. Alexander, not being able to make head or tail of these remarkable occurrences, consulted in secret all the wisest of the Jews and Greeks but received no suitable explanation; eventually, however, he found an aged Jew who elucidated the mystery of the hidden Land by this explanation: “O King, the city you saw is the abode of souls freed from their bodies, placed by the Creator in an inaccessible position on the confines of the world. Here they await in peace and quiet the day of their judgment and resurrection, after which they shall reign forever with their Creator. These spirits, anxious for the salvation of humanity, and wishing to preserve your happiness, have destined this stone as a warning to you to curb the unseemly desires of your ambition. Remember that such insatiable desires merely end by enslaving a man, consuming him with cares and depriving him of all peace. Had you remained contented with the inheritance of your own kingdom you would have reigned in peace and tranquillity, but now, not even yet satisfied with the conquest of enormous foreign possessions and wealth, you are weighed down with cares and danger.”

The name of the aged Jew who furnished Alexander with this information is said to have been Papas, or Papias: Papas was an alternative name for the Phrygian Adonis, whence we may no doubt equate the old Adonis (i.e., Aidoneus, or Pluto?) with the Aged Jew, or the Wandering Jew. It has been seen that the legend of the Wandering Jew apparently originated at St. Albans: in France montjoy was a generic term for herald, and I have little doubt that these Mountjoys were originally so termed as being the denizens of some sacred Mount. There is a Mount Joy near Jerusalem, and there was certainly at least one in France: among the legends recorded in Layamon’s Brut is one relating to a Mont Giu and a wondrous Star: “From it came gleams terribly shining; the star is named in Latin, comet. Came from the star a gleam most fierce; at this gleam’s end was a dragon fair; from this dragon’s mouth came gleams enow! But twain there were mickle, unlike to the others; the one drew toward France, the other toward Ireland. The gleam that toward France drew, it was itself bright enow; to Munt-Giu was seen the marvellous token! The gleam that stretched right west, it was disposed in seven beams.”[840] It is probable that Chee Tor in the neighbourhood of Buxton, Bakewell,[841] and Haddon Hall, was once just as bogie a Mount as Munt-Giu: at Churchdown in Gloucester is a Chosen Hill, which apparently was sacred to Sen Cho, and this hill was presumably the original church of Down; all sorts of “silly traditions” are said to hang around this spot, and the natives ludicrously claim themselves to be “the Chosen” People.

Fig. 450.—From The Everyday Book (Hone, W.).

Chee Tor at Buxton overlooks the river Wye, a name probably connected with eye, and with numerous Eamounts, Eytons, Eatons, Howdens, etc.: that Eton in Bucks was an Eye Dun is inferable from the ad montem ceremonies which used until recently to prevail at Salt Hill.[842] In British, hy or ea, as in Hy Breasil, Battersea, Chelsea, etc., meant an island, and the ideal Eden was usually conceived and constructed in island form: if a natural “Eye Town” were not available it was customary to construct an artificial one by running a trench around some natural or artificial barrow. The word eye also means a shoot, whence we speak of the eye of a potato, and the standard Eyedun seems always to have possessed an eye of eyes in the form either of a tree, a well, or a tower: it was not unusual to surmount the Beltan fire or Tan-Tad with a tree; the favourite phare tree was a fir tree, in Provence the Yule log was preferably a pear tree. It was anciently supposed that the earth was an island established upon the floods, and Homer preserves the belief of his time by referring to Oceanus as a river-stream:—

And now, borne seaward from the river stream

Of the Oceanus, we plow’d again

The spacious Deep, and reach’d th’ Ææan Isle,

Where, daughter of the dawn, Aurora takes

Her choral sports, and whence the sun ascends.[843]

According to Josephus, the Garden of Eden “was watered by one river which ran round about the whole earth,[844] and was parted into four parts,” and this immemorial tradition was expressed upon the circular and sacred cakes of ancient nations which were the forerunners of our Good Friday’s Hot Cross Buns. Associated with the pagan Eucharists here illustrated[845] will be noted Eros—whose name is at the base of eucharist—also what seemingly is the Old Pater. In Egypt the cross cake was a hieroglyph for “civilised land,” and was composed of the richest materials including milk and honey, the familiar attributes of Canaan or the Promised Land. The remarkable earthwork cross at Banwell has no doubt some relation to the Alban cross on our Easter bun, Greek boun, and the so-termed Pixies’ Garden illustrated in Fig. 433(A), probably was once permeated by the same phairy imagination as perceived Paradise in the dusty “Walls of Heaven,” “Peter’s Orchard,” and “Johanna’s Garden”.

Fig. 451.—Love-Feast with Wine and Bread. Relief in the Kircher Museum at Rome, presumably pagan. After Roller, pl. LIV. 7.

Fig. 452.—A Pagan Love-Feast. Now in the Lateran Museum. From Roller, Les Cata. de Rome, pl. LIV. The pagan character is assured by the winged Eros at the left.

The name Piccadilly is assumed to have arisen because certain buns called piccadillies were there sold: the greater likelihood is that the bun took its title from Piccadilly. This curious place-name, which commemorates the memory of a Piccadilly Hall, is found elsewhere, and is probably cognate with Pixey lea, Poukelay, and the legend Pixtil, etc. Opposite Down Street, Piccadilly, or Mayfair, there are still standing in the Green Park the evidences of what may once have been tumuli or duns, and the Buckden Hill by St. Agnes’ Well in Hyde Park may, as is supposed, have been a den for bucks, or, as is not more improbable, a dun sacred to Big Adon:[846] leading to Buck Hill and St. Agnes’ Well there is still a pathway marked on the Ordnance map Budge Walk, an implication seemingly that Bougie, or Bogie, was not unknown in the district. We have connoted Rotten Row of Hyde Park with Rotten Row Tower near Alnwick: this latter is situated on Aidon Moor. By Down Street, Mayfair, is Hay Hill, at the foot of which flowed the Eye Brook, and this beck no doubt meandered past the modern Brick Street, and through the Brookfield in the Green Park where the fifteen joyful heydays of the Mayfair were once celebrated: whether the Eye Brook wandered through Eaton Square—the site of St. Peter’s Church—I do not know, nor can I trace whether or not the “Eatons” hereabout are merely entitled from Eaton Hall in the Dukeries. Each Eaton or island ton, certainly every sacred island, seems to have been deemed a “central boss of Ocean: that retreat a goddess holds,”[847] and this central boss appears to have been conceived indifferently or comprehensively as either a Cone, a Pyramid, a Beehive, or a Teat. Wyclif, in his translation of the Bible, refers to Jerusalem as “the totehill Zyon,” and there is little doubt that all teathills were originally cities or sites of peace: according to Cyprien Roberts: “The first basilicas, placed generally upon eminences, were called Domus Columbæ, dwellings of the dove, that is, of the Holy Ghost. They caught the first rays of the dawn, and the last beams of the setting sun.”[848] Everywhere in Britain the fays were popularly “gentle people,” “good neighbours,” and “men of peace”: a Scotch name for Fairy dun or High Altar of the Lord of the Mound used to be—sioth-dhunan, from sioth “peace,” and dun “a mound”: this name was derived from the practice of the Druids “who were wont occasionally to retire to green eminences to administer justice, establish peace, and compose differences between contending parties. As that venerable order taught a saogle hal, or World-beyond-the-present, their followers, when they were no more, fondly imagined that seats where they exercised a virtue so beneficial to mankind were still inhabited by them in their disembodied state”.[849]

In Cornwall there is a famous well at Truce which is legendarily connected with Druidism:[850] Irish tradition speaks of a famous Druid named Trosdan; St. Columba is associated with a St. Trosdan;[851] at St. Vigeans in Scotland there is a stone bearing an inscription which the authorities transcribe “Drosten,”[852] probably all the dwellers on the Truce duns were entitled Trosdan,[853] and it is not unlikely that the romantic Sir Patrise of Westminster was originally Father Truce. It has already been noted that treus was Cornish for cross, that children cross their fingers as a sign of fainits or truce, and there is very little doubt that cruciform earthworks, such as Shanid, and cruciform duns such as Hallicondane in Thanet were truce duns. The Tuatha de Danaan, or Children of Donn, who are supposed to have been the introducers of Druidism into Ireland, were said to have transformed into fairies, and the duns or raths of the Danaan are still denominated “gentle places”.[854] That the ancient belief in the existence of “gentle people” is still vivid, is demonstrated beyond question by the author of The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, who writes (1911): “The description of the Tuatha de Danaan in the ‘Dialogue of the Elders’ as ‘sprites or fairies with corporeal or material forms, but endued with immortality,’ would stand as an account of prevailing ideas as to the ‘good people‘ of to-day”.[855] The generous Donn, the King of Faery, is obviously Danu, or Anu, or Aine, the Irish goddess of prosperity and abundance, for we are told that well she used to cherish the circle of the gods.[856] At Knockainy, or the Hill of Ainy, Aine, whose name also occurs constantly on Gaulish inscriptions,[857] was until recent years worshipped by the peasants who rushed about carrying burning torches of hay: that Aine was Aincy, or dear little aine, is inferred by the alternative name of her dun Knockaincy: “Here,” says Mr. Westropp, “a cairn commemorates the cult of the goddess Aine, of the god-race of the Tuatha De Danaan. She was a water-spirit, and has been seen, half raised out of the water, combing her hair. She was a beautiful and gracious spirit, ‘the best-natured of women,’ and is crowned with meadow-sweet (spiræa), to which she gave its sweet smell. She is a powerful tutelary spirit, protector of the sick, and connected with the moon, her hill being sickle-shaped, and men, before performing the ceremonies, used to look for the moon—whether visible or not—lest they should be unable to return.”[858] By St. Anne’s in Dean Street, Soho, is Dansey Yard, where probably dancing took place, and dins of every sort arose.

The original sanctuary at Westminster was evidently associated with a dunhill which seems to have long persisted for Loftie, in his History of Westminster, observes: “The hillock on which we stand is called Thorn Ey”.[859] Tothill Street, Westminster, marks the site of what was probably the teat hill of Sir Patrise: the tothills being centres of neighbourly intercourse a good deal of tittle-tattle doubtless occurred there, and from the toothills watchmen touted, the word tout[860] really meaning peer about or look out: “How beautiful on the Mounds are the feet of Him that bringeth tidings—that publisheth Peace”.[861] It has been supposed that certain of the Psalms of David were addressed not to the Jewish Jehovah, but to the Phœnician Adon or Adonis, and it is not an unreasonable assumption that these hymns of immemorial antiquity were first sung in some simple Eyedun similar to the wattled pyreum at Kildare, or that at Avalon or Bride Eye.

The oldest sanctuary in Palestine is a stone circle on the so-called Mount of God, and in Britain there is hardly a commanding eminence which is not crowned with a Carn or the evidences of a circle. The Cities of Refuge and the Horns of the Altar, so constantly mentioned in the Old Testament, may be connoted with the fact that in an island fort at Lough Gur, Limerick, were discovered “two ponderous horns of bronze,” which are now in the British Museum: it will be remembered that at Lough Gur is the finest example of Irish stone circles. But stone circles are probably much more modern than the reputed founding of St. Bride’s first monastery at Kildare. We are told that Bride the Gentle, the Mary of the Gael, who occasionally hanged her cloak upon a lingering sunbeam, had a great love of flowers, and that once upon a time when wending her way through a field of clover[862] she exclaimed, “Were this lovely plain my own how gladly would I offer it to the Lord of Heaven and Earth”. She then begged some sticks from a passing carter, staked and wattled them into a circle, and behold the Monastery was accomplished. The character of this simple edifice reminds one of “that structure neat,” to which Homer thus alludes:—

Unaided by Laertes or the Queen,

With tangled thorns he fenced it safe around,

And with contiguous stakes riv’n from the trunks

Of solid oak black-grain’d hemm’d it without.[863]

The circle of Mayborough originally contained two cairns which are suggestive of Andromache’s “turf-built cenotaph with altars twain”: the great bicycle within a monocycle at Avebury is trenched around, and the summit of the circumference is still growing thickly with “tangled thorns”. On the Wrekin there is a St. Hawthorn’s Well; of “Saint” Hawthorn nothing seems to be known, and I strongly suspect that he was originally a sacred thorn or monument bush. The first haies or hedges were probably the hawthorn or haw hedges around the sacred Eyes, and the original ha-has or sunk ditches were presumably the water trenches which surrounded the same jealously-guarded Eyes: and as ha-ha is also defined as “an old woman of surprising ugliness, a caution,” it may be suggested that the caretakers or beldames[864] of the awful Eyes were, like some of the vergers and charwomen of the present day, not usually comely.

Fig. 453.—Trematon, Cornwall.

Fig. 454.—Chun Castle.

The iris-form of the Eye was shown in the ground plan ante, page 534, and that this design was maintained even for ages after the first primitive Rock or Tower had given place to statelier edifices might be shown by many more evidences than the design here illustrated: the maton of this Trematon Castle was in all probability the same Maiden as the Shee of Maiden Castle, Maiden Paps, and the Maiden Stane. Trematon, in Cornwall, was the site of a Stannary Court, whence arose the proverbial localism “Trematon Law,” and there are peculiarities about the Castle which merit more than passing attention. Rising majestically amid the surrounding foliage the keep is described as standing on the summit of a conical mound: Baring-Gould characterises the aspect as being that of a pork pie, whence its windowless walls would seem to bear a resemblance to the massive masonry at Richborough. The Richborough walls now measure 10 feet 8 inches in thickness and nearly 30 feet in height; those at Trematon are stated as being 10 feet thick and 30 feet high. Like Maiden Castle at Dorchester, Trematon is of an oval form and it was formerly divided into apartments, but as there are no marks of windows they would appear to have been lighted from the top.[865] The gateway consisted of three strong arches, and the general arrangements would seem to have resembled those at Chun where, as will be noted, there were three outer chambers encircling about a dozen inner stalls. Chun is cyclopean unmortared stonework; Maiden Castle is earthwork; Richborough is supposedly Roman masonry: of Trematon little is known that may be deemed authentic, but it is generally believed to have been originally erected prior to the Conquest: as, however, the Anglo-Saxons were incapable of masonry it would seem that Trematon might be assigned to an antiquity not less than that of Richborough Castle which it so curiously parallels. With the various Maiden Lanes of King’s Cross, Covent Garden, and elsewhere may be connoted the Mutton Lane of Hackney, which was famous for a bun house which once rivalled that at Cheynes Walk, Chelsea: Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, is a continuation of Chandos Street, and it will probably prove that the surname Chandos is ultimately traceable to Jeanne douce. In Caledonia douce is not necessarily feminine, and the King John tradition, which unaccountably lingered around Canonbury,[866] may be connoted with the John Street and Mutton Hill of Clerkenwell. The sheep or mutton is the proper emblem of St. John, and perhaps the same King John may be further identified with the Goodman of the adjacent Goodman’s Fields. We have seen that in Caledonia the gudeman was the devil, whence it becomes interesting to find near Brown’s Wood, Islington, stood once a “Duval’s (vulgarly called Devil’s) Lane”.[867]

St. Columba alludes affectionately to—

My derry, my little oak grove,

My dwelling and my little cell.

The Eye dun illustrated ante, page 584, which is described as the strangest, most solitary, most prehistoric-looking of all our motes, is known as Trowdale Mote; St. Columba is associated with Tiree; he is also said to have been imprisoned at Tara, and to have written the book Durrow with his own hand: there is thus some ground for tracing the Mote, Maton, Maid or Maiden, alias St. Columba, to Droia or Troy. That the dove was pre-eminently a Cretan emblem is well known, and that all derrys or trees were sacred Troys or sanctuaries is further implied by the ancient meaning of the adjective terribilis, i.e., sacred: thus we find Westminster or Thorn Ey alluded to by old writers as a locus terribilis,[868] and it would seem that any awe-inspiring or awful spot was deemed terrible or sacred.

In the Celtic Calendar there figures a St. Maidoc or Aidan: Maidoc is maid high, and I am afraid St. Aidan was occasionally “a romping girl” or hoiden. One does not generally associate Pallas Athene with revelry, and it is difficult to connect with gaiety the grim example of Athene which the present proprietors of The Athenæum have adopted as their ideal; yet, says Plato, “Our virgin Lady, delighting in the sports of the dance, thought it not meet to dance with empty hands; she must be clothed in full armour, and in this attire go through the dance. And youths and maidens should in every respect imitate her example, honouring the goddess, both with a view to the actual necessities of war and to the festivals.” Hoiden or hoyden meant likewise a gypsy—a native of Egypt “the Land of the Eye”—and also a heathen: Athene, who was certainly a heathen maid, may be connoted with Idunn of Scandinavia, who keeps the apples which symbolise the ever-renewing and rejuvenating force of Nature.[869] Tradition persistently associates Eden with an apple, although Holy Writ contains nothing to warrant the connection: similarly tradition says that Eve had a daughter named Ada: as Idunn was said to be the daughter of Ivalde we may equate Idunn, the young and lovely apple-maid, with Ada or Ida, and Ivalde, her mother with the Old Wife, or Ive Old.[870] In an earlier chapter we connected Eve with happy, Hob, etc., and there is little doubt that Eve, “the Ivy Girl,” was the Greek Hebe who had the power of making old men young again, and filled the goblets of the gods with nectar.

Idunn, “the care-healing maid who understands the renewal of youth,” was, we are told, the youthful leader of the Idunns or fairies: in present-day Welsh edyn means a winged one, and ednyw a spirit or essence. It is said that from the manes of the horses of the Idunns dropped a celestial dew which filled the goblets and horns of the heroes in Odin’s hall; it is also said that the Idunns offer full goblets and horns to mortals, but that these, thankless, usually run away with the beaker after spilling its contents on the ground. There must be an intimate connection between the legend of the fair Idunns, and the fact that at the Caledonian Edenhall, on the river Eden, is preserved an ancient goblet known as The Luck of Edenhall:—

If this glass do break or fall

Farewell the luck of Edenhall.

The river Eden flows into the Solway Firth, possibly so named because the Westering Sun must daily have been seen to create a golden track or sun-way over the Solway waters. Ptolemy refers to Solway Firth as Ituna Estuarium, so that seemingly Eden or Ituna may be equated not only with the British rivers Ytene and Aeithon, but also with the Egyptian Aten. According to Prof. Petrie, the cult of Aten “does not, so far, show a single flaw in a purely scientific conception of the source of all life and power upon earth. The Sun is represented as radiating its beams on all things, and every beam ends in a hand which imparts life and power to the king and to all else. In the hymn to the Aten, the universal scope of this power is proclaimed as the source of all life and action, and every land and people are subject to it, and owe to it their existence and allegiance. No such grand theology had ever appeared in the world before, so far as we know, and it is the forerunner of the later monotheist religions while it is even more abstract and impersonal and may well rank as a scientific theism.”

Fig. 455.—British. From Evans

Egyptian literature tells of a King Pepi questing for the tree of life in company with the Morning Star carrying a spear of Sunbeams.

Thy rising is beautiful, O living Aton, Lord of Eternity,

Thou art shining, beautiful, strong,

Thy love is great and mighty.

Thy rays are cast into every face

Thy glowing hue brings life to hearts

When thou hast filled the two Lands with thy love

O God, who himself fashioned himself,

Maker of every land.

Creator of that which is upon it,

Men, all cattle, large and small.

All trees that grow in the soil,

They live when thou dawnest for them.

Thou art the mother and the father of all that thou has made.

Yet this resplendent Pair or Parent was also addressed by the Egyptians as the Sea on High and invoked—

Bow thy head, decline thy arms, O Sea!

The Maiden Morning Star or Stella Maris was imagined as refreshing the heart of King Pepi to life: “She purifies him, she cleanses him, he receives his provision from that which is in the Granary of the Great God, he is clothed by the Imperishable Stars.” The intimate connection between Candia and Egypt, the “Land of the Eye” is generally admitted, and as it is an etymological fact that the letters m and n are almost invariably interchangeable (indeed if language begins with voice and ends with voice it is impossible to suppose that two such similar sounds could have maintained their integrity), it is probable that Candia is radically related to Khem, which seemingly was the most ancient name for Egypt. The celebrated “Maiden Bower,” by Mount Pleasant, Dunstable, is believed to be the modern equivalent of magh din barr, pronounced mach dim barr, and it is decoded as magh, a level expanse, din, a hill or hill fortress, and barr, a summit: I note this derivation—which certainly cannot be applied to the Maiden Stane—as it equates din with dim, in which connection it is noteworthy that in France and Belgium Edinburgh becomes Edimbourg. In all probability therefore Adam, Master of Eden, was originally Adon or “the Lord,” and Notre Dame of France was equivalent to the Madonna of Italy.

Fig. 456.—From The Correspondences of Egypt (Odhner).

In Caledonia the moothills were known alternatively as Domhills, and in the “Chanonry of Aberdeen” was a dun known as Donidon or Dunadon: doom still means fate or judgment; in Scots Law giving sentence was formerly called “passing the doeme”; the judge was denominated the Doomster, and the jury the Doomsmen. In the Isle of Man the judges are termed Deemsters, and in Scandinavia stone circles are known as Doom rings: the Hebrew Dan meant judgment, and the English Dinah[871] is interpreted as one who judges; in the Isle of Man the Laws are not legal until they have been proclaimed from the Tynwald Hill. That the Domhills of Britain have largely preserved their physical condition is no doubt due to the doom frequently inflicted on malefactors that they should carry thither a certain quantity of earth and deposit it.[872]

In Europe there are numerous megalithic monuments known popularly as “Adam’s Graves,” and near Draycott at Avebury the maps mark an Adam’s Grave. On the brow of a hill near Heddon (Northumberland) is a trough-like excavation in the solid rock known as the Giant’s Grave; there is a similar Giant’s Grave near Edenhall by Penrith, and a neighbouring chasm entitled The Maiden’s Step is popularly connected with Giant Torquin: this Torquin suggests Tarquin of Etruria, between which and Egypt there was as close if not a closer connection than that between Candia and Khem.

At Maidstone, originally Maidenstone, there is a Moat Park: in Egypt Mut was one of the names given to the Queen of Heaven, or Lady of the Sky: Mut was no doubt a variant of Maat, or Maht, the Egyptian Goddess of Truth, for in the worship of the Egyptian Aton “Truth” occupied a pre-eminent position, and the capital of Ikhnaton, the most conspicuous of the Aton-worshipping kings, was called the “Seat of Truth”.

Fig. 457.—Maat.

Fig. 458.—Mut.

Surmounting the Maat here illustrated is a conspicuous feather which we have already connoted with feeder and fodder. Maat, the giver of provision from that which is in the granary of the Great God, is thus presumably allied with meat, also to mud,[873] or liquid earth. The word mud is not found in Anglo-Saxon, but is evidently the Phœnician mot, and it would be difficult for modern science to add very much to the prehistoric conception of the Phœnicians. According to their great historian Sancaniathon: “The beginning of all things was a condensed, windy air, or a breeze of thick air, and a chaos turbid and black as Erebus. Out of this chaos was generated Môt, which some call Ilus” (mud), “but others the putrefaction of a watery mixture. And from this sprang all the seed of the creation, and the generation of the universe.... And, when the air began to send forth light, winds were produced, and clouds, and very great defluxions and torrents of the heavenly waters.”[874] It is probable that Sancaniathon, the Phœnician sage to whom the above passage is attributed, was radically Iathon or Athene.

We have connoted the Egyptian sun-god Phra with Pharoah, or Peraa, who was undoubtedly the earthly representative of the same Fire or Phare as was worshipped by the Parsees, or Farsees of Persia: the Persian historians dilate with enthusiasm on the justice, wisdom, and glory of a fabulous Feridoon whose virtues acquired him the appellation of the Fortunate, and it is probable that this Feridoon was the Fair Idoon whose palace, like the Fairy Donn’s, was located on some humble fire dun, or peri down. The name Feridoon, or Ferdun (the Fortunate),[875] is translated as meaning paradisiacal: Ferdusi is etymologically equivalent to perdusi, which is no doubt the same word as paradise, and we can almost visualise the term feridoon transforming itself into fairy don. Nevertheless by one Parthian poet it was maintained—

The blest Feridoon an angel was not,

Of musk or of amber, he formed was not;

By justice and mercy good ends gained he,

Be just and merciful thou’lt a Feridoon be.[876]

In Germany, Frei or Frey meant a privileged place or sanctuary: in London such a sanctuary until recently existed around the church of St. Mary Offery, or Overy (now St. Saviours, Southwark), and in a subsequent chapter we shall consider certain local traditions which permit the equation of St. Mary Overy, and of the Brixton-Camberwell river Effra, with the Fairy Ovary of the Universe. The Gaelic and Welsh for an opening or mouth is aber, whence Aberdeen is held to mean the mouth of the Don: but at Lochaber or Loch Apor this interpretation cannot apply, and it is not improbable that Aberdeen on the river Don was primarily a Pictish Abri town—a Britain or Prydain. As the capital of Caledonia is Edinburgh or Dunedin, it may be suggested that the whole of Caledonia stern and wild was originally a Kille, or church of Don.

At Braavalla, in Osturgothland, there are remains of a marvellous “stone town,” whence we may assume that this site was originally a Braavalla, or abri valley: the chief of the Irish Barony of Barrymore who was entitled “The Barry” is said to have inhabited an enchanted brugh in one of the Nagles Hills. Near New Grange in Ireland there is a remarkable dolmen known locally as the house or tomb of Lady “Vera, or Birra”:[877] five miles distant is Bellingham, and I have little doubt that every fairy dun or fairy town, the supposed local home of Bellinga, the Lord Angel or the Beautiful Angel, was synonymously a “Britain”; that Briton and Barton are mere variants of the same word is evident from such place-names as Dumbarton, originally Dunbrettan.

Fig. 459.—New Grange, Ireland.

Fig. I The Barrow at New Grange

Fig. II Section of the Tumulus

Fig. III Section of the Gallery & Dome

Fig. 460—Kit’s Coty, near Maidstone.

[To face page 751.

It has been seen that Prydain—of whom it was claimed that before his coming there was little ordinance in these Islands save only a superiority of oppression—was the reputed child of King Aedd: Aedd was one of the titles of Hu, the first of our national Three Pillars, and he was probably identical with Aeddon, a name which, says Davies, “I think was a title of the god himself”: the priests of Hu were apparently termed Aeddons, whence like the Mountjoys of France we may assume they were the denizens of the Aeddon duns: inquiry will probably establish one of these sanctuaries at Haddington; at Addington (Domesday Edintone) in Kent there are the remains of one still standing. With the pagan Aeddons may be connoted the Celtic Saint Aidan, Æden, or Aiden, whose name is associated with Lindisfarne, also the St. Aidan, or Maidoc of Ferns, who among other prodigies is recorded as having driven to and from Rome in twenty-four hours. At Farn MacBride in Glencolumkille, there are some cromlechs which exactly resemble in plan the house of Lady Vera, or Birra, at New Grange:[878] at Evora, in Portugal, situated on bleak heathland, is a similar monument which Borrow described as the most perfect and beautiful of its kind he had ever seen: “It was circular, and consisted of stones immensely large and heavy at the bottom, which towards the top became thinner, having been fashioned by the hand of art to something like the shape of scallop shells.... Three or four individuals might have taken shelter within the interior in which was growing a small thorn tree.”[879] The scallop shell, like the cockle and all coquilles, was obviously an emblem of Evora, the Ovary, the Aber, the opening.

The Bona dea of Candia was represented with a headdress in the form of a cat; we shall connote this animal (German kater) with St. Caterina or Kate, the immaculate pure one, and it is not unnoteworthy that the Kentish Kit’s coty, near Maidstone, vide the photograph here reproduced, contains what might be a rude much-weathered image of the sacred cat, lioness, or kitten:[880] In Caledonia is a famous Cat[881] Stane, and the Duchess of Sutherland still bears the honorary title “Lady of the Cat”.[882] The word kitten resolves into Great Itten: the New Forest used to be known as the Forest of Ytene,[883] and I do not think that the great British Forest of Dean has any real connection with the supposition that the Danes may have taken up their residence there: Dean was almost a generic name for forest, and we meet with it from Arden to the Ardennes.[884]

For an explication of the word dawn Skeat observes: “see day”; it is, however, probable that dawn was the little or young Don or Adon. By the Welsh the constellation Cassiopeaia is known under the title of Don’s chair. That the Irish Don was Truth is probable from the statement “His blue dome (the sky) was an infallible weather-glass, whence its name the Hill of Truth”.[885]

According to the Edda,[886] a collection of traditions which have been assigned variously by scholars to Norway, Greenland, and the British Isles, the world was created by the sons of Bor, and in the beginning the gods built a citadel in Ida-plain and an age of universal innocence prevailed. Situated on Cockburn Law in Berwickshire—a wick or fortress of Ber upon which stands the largest of all the brochs—is a prehistoric circle known as Edina or Wodens Hall. The English name Edana or Edna, defined as meaning perfect happiness or rich gift, is stated to be a variant of Ida or Ada: in Hebrew the name Adah means beauty, and Ada, the lovely daughter of Adam, is probably Eda, the “passionately beloved”[887] Breaton princess of Hibernia, or Ma Ida of Tyburnia or Marylebone.

The Garden of Eden has somewhat unsuccessfully, I believe, been located in Mesopotamia: the Jews doubtless had their Edens even though Palestine is arid, and the authorities translate the name Adam as having meant red earth: according to early Rabbinical writers Adam was a giant; he touched the Arctic pole with one hand and the Antarctic with the other.[888] I have here noted but a handful of the innumerable Edens in Britain which includes five rivers of that name:[889] that the Lady of Britain was Prydain, Brython, or pure Athene, i.e., Wisdom, is a well-recognised tradition, for she is conventionally represented as Athene. In Greece the girl-name Theana meant Divine Intelligence,[890] and Ida was interpreted far seeing: in Troy the goddess of the city, which originally stood upon a dun hill, was Athene, and the innumerable owl-headed emblems found there by Schliemann were her sign: “Before the human form was adopted her (Athene’s) proper symbol was the Owl; a bird which seems to surpass all other creatures in acuteness and refinement, of organic perception; its eyes being calculated to discern objects which to all others are enveloped in darkness; its ear to hear sounds distinctly when no other can perceive them at all, and its nostrils to discriminate effluvia with such nicety that it has been deemed prophetic from discovering the putridity of death even in the first stages of disease.”[891]

We have noted the existence of some exclusively British fairies known as Portunes: among the Latins Portunas was a name of Triton or Neptune: the Mother of the British Portunes might be termed Phortuna, or, as we should now write the word, Fortuna, and the stone circle at Goodaver in Cornwall might be described as a Wheel of Good Phortune: the Hebrew for fortune is gad, and it is probable that the famous Gadshill, near Rochester, was at one time a God’s Hill; from Kit’s Coty on the heights above Rochester it is stated that according to tradition a continuous series of stone monuments once extended to Addington where are still the remains of another coty or cromlech.

There are in England numerous Addingtons or Edintones, and at at least two of these are Druidic remains: the Kentish Addington, near Snodland and Kit’s Coty, is dedicated to St. Margaret, and the church itself is situated on a rise or dun. Half a mile from Bacton in Hereford is a small wood known as St. Margaret’s Park, and in the centre of this is a cruciform mound, its western arm on the highest ground, its eastern on the lowest: this cruciform mound was described in 1853 as being 15 feet at base,[892] a familiar figure which may be connoted with the statement in The Golden Legend that St. Margaret was fifteen years of age. In addition to the cruciform mount at St. Margaret’s Park, Bacton, there are further remains of archæologic interest: about 100 years ago nine large yew trees which were surrounding it—one of gigantic size—were felled to the ground, and my authority states that its venerable antiquity was evident from the decayed stumps of oaks still visible felled ages ago together with more recent ones.[893] In addition to the cross in this prehistoric Oak grove of the Lady Margaret there are three curious cavities, two of them circular, the third oval or egg-shaped: the ancient veneration for the oeuf, or egg, has degenerated to the Easter egg, and in Ireland the Dummy’s Hill,[894] associated with egg-trundling may, I think, be equated with Donna or the Dame.

The Cretan Britomart in Greek was understood to mean sweet maiden; in Welsh pryd meant precious, dear, fair, beautiful; Eda of Ireland was “passionately beloved,” and to the Britons the sweet maiden was inferentially Britannia, the new pure Athene, Ma Ida the Maid or Maiden whose character is summed up in the words prude, proud, pride, and pretty. In Ireland we may trace her as Meave, alias Queen Mab, and the headquarters of this Maiden were either at Tara or at Moytura: the latter written sometimes Magh Tuireadh, probably meant the plain of Troy, for there are still all the evidences here of a megalithic Troy town. The probabilities are that Stanton Drew in Somerset, like Drewsteignton in Devon, with which tradition connects St. Keyna, was another Dru stonetown for here are a cromlech, a logan stone, two circles, some traces of the Via Sacra or Druid Way and an ancient British camp: in Aberdeen there are circles at Tyrebagger, Dunadeer, and at Deer.

Among other so-called monuments of the Brugh at Moytura recorded in the old annalists are “the Two Paps of the Morrigan,” “The Mound of the Morrigan,” i.e., the Mound of the Great Queen, also a “Bed of the Daughter of Forann”:[895] Forann herself was doubtless the Hag whose weirdly-sculptured chair exists at Lough Crew in Meath: Meath was esteemed the mid, middle, or midst, of Ireland, and here as we have seen existed the central stone at Birr. There is a celebrated Hag’s Bed at Fermoy, doubtless the same Hag as the “Old Woman of Beare,” whose seven periods of youth necessitated all who lived with her to die of old age: this Old Woman’s grandsons and great grandsons were, we are told, tribes and races, and in several stories she appears to the hero as a repulsive hag who suddenly transforms herself into a beautiful Maid. At Moytura—with which tradition intimately associates the Children of Don—is a cairn called to this day the “cairn of the One Man”: with this One Man we may connote Un Khan or Prester John, of whose mystic Kingdom so many marvellous legends circulated during the Middle Ages.

Among the miracles attributed to St. Patrick is one to the effect that by the commandment of God he “made in the earth a great circle with his staff”: this might be described as a byre, i.e., an enclosure or bower, and we may connote the word with the stone circle in Westmoreland, at Brackenbyr, i.e., the byre of Brecon, Brechin, or the Paragon? The husband of Idunn was entitled Brage, whose name inter alia meant King: Brage was the god of poetry and eloquence; a superfluity of prating, pride, and eloquence is nowadays termed brag.

The burial place of St. Patrick, St. Bride, and Columba the Mild, is alleged to be at Duno in Ulster: “In Duno,” says The Golden Legend, “these three be buried all in one sepulchre”: the word Duno is d’uno, the divine Uno, and the spot was no doubt an Eden of “the One Man”: Honeyman[896] is a fairly common English surname, and although this family may have been dealers in honey, it is more probable that they are descendants of the One Man’s ministers: in Friesland are megalithic Hunnebeds, or Giant’s Beds, and I have little doubt that the marvellously scooped stone at Hoy in the Hebrides[897]—the parallel of which existed in Egypt, the Land of the Eye—was originally a Hunne Bed or grotte des fees.

“Of Paradise,” says Maundeville, “I cannot speak for I have not been there”: nevertheless this traveller—who was not necessarily the arch liar of popular assumption—has recorded many artificial paradises which he was permitted to explore: the word paradise is the Persian pairidaeza, which means an enclosure, or place walled in: it is thus cognate with our park, and the first parks were probably sanctuaries of the divine Pair. Nowhere that I know of is the place-name Paradise[898] more persistent than in Thanet or Tanet, a name supposed by the authorities to be Celtic for fire: at the nose of the North Foreland old maps mark Faire Ness, and I have little doubt that Thanet, “by some called Athanaton and Thanaton,”[899] was originally sacred to Athene. In Suffolk is a Thingoe, which is understood to mean “how, or mound of the thing, or provincial assembly”: the chief Cantian thing or folkmoot was probably held at the Dane John at Cantuarbig or Durovernon; the word think implies that Athene was a personification of Reason or Holy Rhea, and the equivalence of the words remercie and thank, suggest that all dons, donatives, and donations were deemed to have come from the Madonna or Queen Mercy, to whom thanks or remerciements were rendered by the utterance of her name. In the North of England there are numerous places named Unthank, which seemingly is ancient Thank: the Deity is still thanked for meat, i.e., fare, or forage; free, according to Pearsall, “comes from an Aryan root meaning dear (whence also our word friend), and meant in old Teutonic times those who are dear to the head of the household—that is connected with him by ties of friendship, and not slaves, or in bondage”.[900] The word dear, French adore, connects tre or abode with Droia or Troy: yet the Sweet Maiden of Crete could at times show dour displeasure, and one of her best known representations is thus described: “The pose of the little figure is dignified and firm, the side face is even winning, but the eyes are fierce, and the outstretched hands holding the heads of the snakes are so tense and show such strength that we instinctively feel this was no person to be played with”.[901] The connection at Edanhall of The Maiden’s Step with Giant Torquin establishes a probability that the Maid or the Maiden was either the Troy Queen or the Eternal Queen, or dur queen, the hard Queen, at times a little dragon, oftener a dear Queen, i.e., Britomart, the Sweet Maiden, or Eda, the passionately beloved, the Adorée. “Bride, the gentle” is an epithet traditionally applied to St. Bride, St. Brigit, or St. Brig; in Welsh, brig and brigant mean tip top or summit, and these terms may be connoted with the Irish brig meaning pre-eminent power, influence, authority, and high esteem. At Chester, or Deva, there has been found an inscription to the “Nymph-Goddess Brig,” and at Berrens in Scotland has been found an altar to the Goddess of Brigantia, which exhibits a winged deity holding a spear in one hand, and a globe in the other.

In the British Museum is a coin lettered Cynethryth Regina: this lady, who is described as the widow of Offa, is portrayed “in long curls, behind head long cross”: assuredly there were numerous Queen Cynethryths, but the original Cynethryth was equally probably Queen Truth, and in view of the fact that the motto of Bardic Druidism was “the Truth against the world,” we may perhaps assume that the Druid was a follower of Truth or Troth.

In the opinion of the learned Borlase the sculpture illustrated on page 485 represents the six progressive orders of Druidism contemplating Truth, the younger men on the right viewing the Maiden draped in the garb of convention, the older ones on the left beholding her nude in her symbolic aspect as the feeder of two serpents: it is not improbable that Quendred, the miraculous light-bearing Mother of St. Dunstan, was a variant of the name Cynethryth, at times Queen Dread, at times Queen Truth.

Fig. 461.—Britannia, A.D. 1919.
By permission of the Proprietors of “Punch”.

The frequent discovery of coins—Roman and otherwise—within cromlechs such as Kit’s Coty and other sacred sites appears to me to prove nothing in respect of age, but rather a survival of the ancient superstition that the fairies possessed from time immemorial certain fields which could not be taken away or appropriated without gratifying the pixy proprietors by a piece of money:[902] the land-grabber is no novelty, nor seemingly is conscience money. That important battles occurred at such sites as Moytura and Braavalla is no argument that those fantastic Troy Towns or Drewsteigntons were, as Fergusson laboriously maintained, monuments to commemorate slaughter. According to Homer—

Before the city stands a lofty mound,

In the mid plain, by open space enclos’d;

Men call it Batiaea; but the Gods

The tomb of swift Myrinna; muster’d there

The Trojans and Allies their troops array’d.[903]

Nothing is more certain than that with the exception of a negligible number of conscientious objectors, a chivalrous people would defend its Eyedun to the death, and that the last array against invaders would almost invariably occur in or around the local Sanctuarie or Perry dun.

It is a wholly unheard of thing for the British to think or speak of Britain as “the Fatherland”: the Cretans, according to Plutarch, spoke of Crete as their Motherland, and not as the Fatherland: “At first,” says Mackenzie, “the Cretan Earth Mother was the culture deity who instructed mankind ... in Crete she was well developed before the earliest island settlers began to carve her images on gems and seals or depict them in frescoes. She symbolised the island and its social life and organisation.”[904]

FOOTNOTES:

[820] Irish Folklore, p. 32.

[821] Irish Folklore, p.78

[822] Heath, F. R. and S., Dorchester, p. 40.

[823] Dorchester stands on the “Econ Way”

[824] Irish Folklore, p. 79.

[825] In Crete the Forerunner of Greece, Mr. and Mrs. Hawes remark that Browning’s great monologue corresponds perfectly with all we know of the Minoan goddess—

I shed in Hell o’er my pale people peace

On earth, I caring for the creatures guard

Each pregnant yellow wolf and fox-bitch sleek,

And every feathered mother’s callow brood,

And all that love green haunts and loneliness.

[826] Iliad, xv., 175.

[827] London, p. 59.

[828] Irish Folklore, p. 34.

[829] Gomme, Sir L., The Topography of London, ii., 215.

[830] See Cynethryth post, p. 761.

[831] Golden Legend, iii., 188.

[832] Hunt, R., Popular Romances of the West of England, p. 73.

[833] Cf. Numbers xiii. 33.

[834] Adjacent to Perry Mount, Perrivale, Sydenham, are Adamsrill road, Inglemere road, Allenby road, and Exbury road.

[835] This Tanfield Court supposedly takes its name from an individual named Tanfield. Wherever the original Tanfield was it was doubtless the scene of many a bonfire or Beltan similar to the joyous “Tan Tads,” or “Fire Fathers” of Brittany.

[836] Cf. Forster, Rev. C., The One Primeval Language, 1851.

[837] Rude Stone Monuments, p. 131.

[838] “His feathers were all ruffled for he had been grossly handled by a glove not of silk, but of wool, so he preened and plumed himself carefully with his beak.”

[839] Folklore, xxix., No. 3, p. 195.

[840] P. 165.

[841] At Bickley in Kent there is a Shawfield Park, which may be connoted with the Bagshaw’s Cavern at Buxton.

[842] By Chee Tor is Monsal Dale, and we may reasonably connote sal and “salt” with Silbury and Sol: into the waters of the Solway Firth flows the river Eden or Ituna, and doubtless the Edinburgh by Salisbury Crags is older than any Saxon Edwin or Scandinavian Odin. (Since writing I find it was originally named Dunedin, cf. Morris Jones, Sir G., Taliesin.)

[843] Odyssey, Book I., 67.

[844] Chapter I.

[845] From an article by Dr. Paul Carus in The Open Court.

[846] The fine megalith now standing half a mile distant at “The Den” was transported from Devonshire about a century ago—no doubt with the idea of tripping some unwary archæologist.

[847] Odyssey, Book I., 67.

[848] Cours d’Hieroglyphique Chretienne, in L’Universite Catholique, vol. vi., p. 266.

[849] Cf. Hazlitt, W. C., Faiths and Folklore, i., 222.

[850] Hunt, p. 328.

[851] Deer, near Aberdeen, is said to have derived its name from deur, the Gaelic for tear, because St. Drostan shed tears there. The monkish authority in the Book of Deer says: “Drostan’s tears came on parting with Columcille”. Said Columcille, “Let Dear be its name henceforward”.

[852] Fergusson, p. 273.

[853] The Tuttle family may similarly be assigned to one or other of the innumerable Toothills.

[854] Irish Folklore, p. 31.

[855] Wentz, W. Y. Evans, p. 404.

[856] In Irish aine means circle.

[857] Westropp, T. J., Proc. of Royal Irish Academy.

[858] Cf. Folklore, xxix., No. 2, p. 159.

[859] Quoted from Besant’s Westminster.

[860] Besant supposes that Tothill Street took its name from watermen touting there for fares.

[861] Ps. lii. 7.

[862] In Persia the Shamrakh was held sacred as being emblematical of the Persian triads.

[863] Odyssey, xiv., 12.

[864] Skeat comments upon the word hag as “perhaps connected with Anglo-Saxon haga, a hedge enclosure, but this is uncertain”: this authority’s definition of a ha-ha is as follows: “Ha-ha, Haw-haw, a sunk fence (F.). From F. haha an interjection of laughter, hence a surprise in the form of an unexpected obstacle (that laughs at one). The French word also means an old woman of surprising ugliness, a ‘caution’.”

The Celts were conspicuously chivalrous towards women, and I question whether they burst into haw-haws whensoever they met an ill-favoured old dame. As to the ha-has, or “unexpected obstacles,” Cæsar has recorded that “the bank also was defended by sharp stakes fixed in front, and stakes of the same kind fixed under the water were covered by the river”: if, then, the amiable victim who unexpectedly stumbled upon this obstacle chuckled ha-ha! or haw-haw! as he nursed his wounded limbs, the ancient Britons must have possessed a far finer sense of humour than has usually been assigned to them.

[865] Stockdale, F. W. L., Excursions Through Cornwall, 1824, p. 116.

[866] Gomme, Sir L., The Topography of London, ii., 222.

[867] Ibid., ii., 216.

[868] Besant, W., Westminster, p. 20.

[869] Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology, p. 118.

[870] In the Kentish neighbourhood of Preston, Perry-court, Perry-wood, Holly Hill, Brenley House, and Oversland is an Old Wives Lees, and Britton Court Farm.

[871] A London cockney refers to his sweetheart as his donah.

[872] See “Archæologia” (from The Gentleman’s Magazine), i., 286.

[873] The English moot hills are sometimes referred to as mudes or muds, Johnson, W., Byways, p. 67.

[874] Quoted from Donnelly, I., Ragnarok.

[875] Moody, S., What is Your Name? p. 266.

[876] Anon, Secret Societies of the Middle Ages: History of the Assassins.

[877] Fergusson, J., Rude Stone Monuments, p. 231.

[878] Fergusson, p. 523.

[879] Ibid., p. 390.

[880] Almost immediately above the cromlech is Dan’s Hill, and in close neighbourhood are Burham, Borough Court, Preston Hall, Pratling Street, and Bredhurst, i.e., Bred’s Wood. That Bred was San Od is possibly implied by the adjacent Snodhurst and Snodland. At Sinodun Hill in Berkshire, Skeat thinks Synods may have once been held. The Snodland neighbourhood in Kent abounds in prehistoric remains.

[881] The authorities assume that the cat is here cath, the Gaelic for war. It might equally well be cad, the Gaelic for holy: in the East a jehad is a Holy War.

[882] Lang, A., Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i., 72.

[883] A New Description of England, 1724.

[884] Sharon Turner informs us, on the authority of Cæsar, Strabo, and Diodorus Siculus, that the Britons “cleared a space in the wood, on which they built their huts and folded their cattle; and they fenced the avenues by ditches and barriers of trees. Such a collection of houses formed one of their towns.” Din is the root of dinas, the Welsh word in actual use for a town.

[885] Westropp, T. J., Proceedings of Royal Irish Academy, p. 165.

[886] With Edda, a general term for the rules and materials for verse-making, may be connoted our ode.

[887] According to the original Irish of the story-teller, translated and published for the first time in 1855, Conn, the Consort of Eda, “was a puissant warrior, and no individual was found able to compete with him either on land or sea, or question his right to his conquest. The great King of the West held uncontrolled sway from the island of Rathlin to the mouth of the Shannon by sea, and as far as the glittering length by land. The ancient King of the West, whose name was Conn, was good as well as great, and passionately loved by his people. His Queen (Eda) was a Breaton (British) princess, and was equally beloved and esteemed, because she was the great counterpart of the King in every respect; for whatever good qualification was wanting in the one, the other was certain to indemnify the omission. It was plainly manifest that heaven approved of the career in life of the virtuous couple; for during their reign the earth produced exuberant crops, the trees fruit ninefold commensurate with their usual bearing, the rivers, lakes and surrounding sea teemed with abundance of choice fish, while herds and flocks were unusually prolific, and kine and sheep yielded such abundance of rich milk that they shed it in torrents upon the pastures; and furrows and cavities were filled with the pure lacteal produce of the dairy. All these were blessings heaped by heaven upon the western districts of Innes Fodhla, over which the benignant and just Conn swayed his sceptre, in approbation of the course of government he had marked out for his own guidance. It is needless to state that the people who owned the authority of this great and good sovereign were the happiest on the face of the wide expanse of earth. It was during his reign, and that of his son and successor, that Ireland acquired the title of the ‘happy Isle of the West’ among foreign nations. Con Mor and his good Queen Eda reigned in great glory during many years.”

[888] Wood, E. J., Giants and Dwarfs, p. 11. According to Maundeville in Egypt “they find there also the apple-tree of Adam which has a bite on one side”.

[889] There is a conspicuously interesting group of names around the river Eden in Sussex. At Edenbridge is Dencross, and in close neighbourhood Ide Hill, Dane Hill, Paxhill Park, Brown Knoll, St. Piers Farm, Hammerwood, Pippenford Park, Allen Court, Lindfield, Londonderry, and Cinder Hill. With Broadstone Warren and Pippinford Park it is noteworthy that opposite St. Bride’s Church, Ludgate Hill, is Poppins Court and Shoe Lane: immediately adjacent is a Punch Tavern, whence I think that Poppins was Punch and Shoe was Judy. The gaudy popinjay, at which our ancestors used to shoot, may well have stood in Poppins Court: a representation of this brilliant parrot or parrakeet is carved into one of the modern buildings now occupying the site.

[890] Moody, S., What is Your Name? p. 257.

[891] Knight, R. Payne, The Symbolic Language of Ancient Art and Mythology, p. 128.

[892] “Archæologia” (from The Gentleman’s Magazine), p. 270.

[893] “Archæologia” (from The Gentleman’s Magazine), p. 270.

[894] “When I was a child I would no more have thought of going out on Easter morning without a real Easter egg than I would have thought of leaving my stocking unsuspended from the foot of my bed on Christmas Eve. A few days before Easter I used to go out to the park, where there were a great many whin bushes, and gather whinblossoms, which I carried home to my mother, who put two eggs in a tin, one for me and one for my sister, and added the whinblossoms and water to them, and set them to boil together until the eggs were hard and the shells were stained a pretty brown hue.

“On Easter Monday my sister and I would carry our eggs to a mound in the park called ‘The Dummy’s Hill,’ and would trundle them down the slope. All the boys and girls we knew used to trundle their eggs on Easter Monday. We called it ‘trundling’. The egg-shell generally cracked during the operation of ‘trundling,’ and then the owner of it solemnly sat down and ate the hard-boiled egg, which, of course, tasted very much better than an egg eaten in the ordinary way. ‘The Dummy’s Hill’ was sadly soiled with egg-shells at the end of Easter Monday morning.

“My uncle, who was a learned man, said that this custom of ‘trundling’ eggs was a survival of an old Druidical rite. It seems to me to be queer that we in the North of Ireland should still be practising that ancient ceremony when English children should have completely forgotten it, and should think of an Easter egg, not as a real thing laid by hens and related to the ancient religion of these islands, but as a piece of confectionery turned out by machinery and having no ancient significance whatever.”—Ervine, St. John, The Daily Chronicle, 4th April, 1919.

[895] Fergusson, J., Rude Stone Monuments, p. 191.

[896] The surname Honeywell found at Kingston implies either there or somewhere a Honeywell. There are several St. Euny Wells in Cornwall.

[897] It measures 36 feet x 18 feet 9 inches, see ante, p. 9.

[898] At Margate are Paradise Hill, Dane Park, Addington Street leading to Dane Hill, and Fort Paragon: at Ramsgate is also a Fort Paragon, and a four-crossed dun called Hallicondane. There used to be a Paradise near Beachy (Bougie, or Biga Head (?)): by Broadstairs or Bridestowe which contains a shrine to St. Mary to which all passing vessels used to doff their sails, is Bromstone, and a Dane Court by Fairfield, all of which are in St. Peter’s Parish. By the Sister Towers of Reculver are Eddington, Love Street, Hawthorn Corner, and Honey Hill: in Thanet, Paramour is a common surname. By Minster is Mount Pleasant and Eden Farm: by Richborough is Hoaden House and Paramore Street. To Reculver as to Broadstairs passing mariners used customarily to doff their sails:—

Great gods, whom Earth and Sea and Storms obey,

Breathe fair, and waft us smoothly o’er the main.

Fresh blows the breeze, and broader grows the bay,

And on the cliffs is seen Minerva’s fane.

We furl the sails, and shoreward row amain

Eastward the harbour arches, scarce descried,

Two jutting rocks, by billows lashed in vain,

Stretch out their arms the narrow mouth to hide.

Far back the temple stands and seems to shun the tide.

—Æneid, Bk. III., lxviii.

[899] A New Description of England and Wales, 1724, p. 84.

[900] The English Language, p. 141.

[901] Mr. and Mrs. Hawes, Crete the Forerunner of Greece, p. 123.

[902] Hazlitt, W. Carew, Faiths and Folklore, i., 222.

[903] Iliad, ii., 940.

[904] Myths of Crete and Pre-Hellenic Europe, pp. 70, 190. The italics are mine.

CHAPTER XIV.
DOWN UNDER.

“It is our duty to begin research even if we have to penetrate many a labyrinth leading to nowhere and to lament the loss of many a plausible system. A false theory negatived is a positive result.”—Thos. J. Westropp.

In the year 1585 a curious occurrence happened at the small hamlet of Mottingham in Kent: betimes in the morning of 4th August the ground began to sink, so much so that three great elm trees in a certain field were swallowed up into a pit of about 80 yards in circumference and by ten o’clock no part of them could be seen. This cavity then filled with water of such depth that a sounding line of 50 fathoms could hardly find or feel any bottom: still more alarming grew the situation when in an adjacent field another piece of ground sunk in like manner near the highway and “so nigh a dwelling house that the inhabitants were greatly terrified therewith”.[905]

To account for a subsidence much deeper than an elm tree one must postulate a correspondingly lofty soutterrain: the precise spot at Mottingham where these subsidences are recorded was known as Fairy Hill, and I have little doubt that like many other Dunhills this particular Fairy Hill was honeycombed or hollowed. Almost every Mottingham[906] or Maiden’s Home consisted not only of the characteristic surface features noted in the preceding chapter, but in addition the thoroughly ideal Maiden’s Home went down deep into the earth: in Ireland the children of Don were popularly reputed to dwell in palaces underground; similarly in Crete the Great Mother—the Earth Mother associated with circles and caves, the goddess of birth and death, of fertility and fate, the ancestress of all mankind—was assumed to gather the ghosts of her progeny to her abode in the Underworld.[907]

Caves and caverns play a prime and elementary part in the mythologies of the world: their role is literally vital, for it was believed that the Life of the World, in the form of the Young Sun, was born yearly anew on 25th December, always in a cave: thus caves were invariably sacred to the Dawn or God of Light, and only secondarily to the engulfing powers of Darkness; from the simple cell, kille, or little church gradually evolved the labyrinthine catacomb and the stupendous rock-temple.

The County of Kent is curiously rich in caves which range in importance from the mysterious single Dene Hole to the amazing honeycomb of caverns which underlie Chislehurst and Blackheath: a network of caves exists beneath Trinity Church, Margate; moreover, in Margate is a serpentine grotto decorated with a wonderful mosaic of shell-work which, so far as I am able to ascertain, is unique and unparalleled. The grotto at Margate is situated in the Dene or Valley underneath an eminence now termed Dane Hill: one of the best known of the Cornish so-called Giant’s Holts is that situated in the grounds of the Manor House of Pendeen, not in a dene or valley, but on the high ground at Pendeen Point. In Cornish pen meant head or point, whence Pendeen means Deen Headland, and one again encounters the word dene in the mysterious Dene holes or Dane holes found so plentifully in Kent: these are supposed to have been places of refuge from the Danes, but they certainly never were built for that purpose, for the discovery within them of flint, bone, and bronze relics proves them to be of neolithic antiquity.

There must be some close connection in idea between the serpentine grotto in The Dane, Margate, the subterranean chamber at Pendeen, Cornwall, the Kentish Dene Holes and the mysterious tunnellings in the neighbourhood of County Down, Ireland: these last were described by Borlase as follows: “All this part of Ireland abounds with Caves not only under mounts, forts, and castles, but under plain fields, some winding into little hills and risings like a volute or ram’s horn, others run in zigzag like a serpent; others again right forward connecting cell with cell. The common Irish think they are skulking holes of the Danes after they had lost their superiority in that Island.”[908] They may conceivably have served this purpose, but it is more probable that these mysterious tunnellings were the supposed habitations of the subterranean Tuatha te Danaan, i.e., the Children of Don or Danu.

Fig. 462.—Ground plan of a section of the Chislehurst caves, from an article by Mr. W. J. Nichols, published in The Journal of the British Archæological Association, 1903.

In County Down we have a labyrinthine connection of cell with cell, and in some parts of Kent the same principle appears to have been at work culminating in the extraordinary subterranean labyrinth known as “The Chislehurst Caves”: these quarryings, hewn out of the chalk, cover in seemingly unbroken sequence—superposed layer upon layer—an enormous area, under the Chislehurst district: between 20 and 30 miles of extended burrowings have, it is said, already been located, yet it is suspected that more remain to be discovered. Commenting upon this extraordinary labyrinth Mr. W. J. Nichols, a Vice-President of the British Archæological Association, has observed: “Not far from this shaft we see one of the most interesting sights that these caves can show us: a series of galleries, with rectangular crossings, containing many chambers of semicircular, or apsidal form, to the number of thirty or more—some having altar-tables formed in the chalk, within a point or two of true orientation. This may be accidental, but the fact remains; and the theory is supported by the discovery of an adjoining chamber, apparently intended for the officiating priest. There is an air of profound mystery pervading the place: a hundred indications suggest that it was a subterranean Stonehenge; and one is struck with a sense of wonder, and even of awe, as the dim lamplight reveals the extraordinary works which surround us.”

In the caverns of Mithra twelve apses corresponding to the twelve signs of the Zodiac used to be customary: the thirty apses at Chislehurst may have had some relation to the thirty dies or days, and if the number of niches extended to thirty-three this total should be connoted with the thirty-three elementary giants considered in an earlier chapter.

There are no signs of the Chislehurst Caverns having at any time been used systematically as human abodes, but in other parts of the world similar sites have been converted into villages: one such existing at Troo in France is thus described by Baring-Gould: “What makes Troo specially interesting is that the whole height is like a sponge perforated with passages giving access to halls, some of which are circular and lead into stone chambers; and most of the houses are wholly or in part underground. The caves that are inhabited are staged one above another, some reached by stairs that are little better than ladders, and the subterranean passages leading from them form a labyrinth within the bowels of the hill and run in superposed stories.”[909] The name of this subterranean city of Troo may be connected with trou, the French generic term for a hole or pit: the Provençal form of trou is trauc, which etymologists identify with traugum, the Latin for a cave or den. The Latin traugum (origin unknown) is radically the same as troglos, the Greek for a cave, whence the modern term troglodite or cave dweller, and it is not unlikely that the dene of denehole is the same word as den: the Provençal trauc may be connoted with the English place-name Thurrock, which is on the Essex side of the river Thames, and is famous for the large number of deneholes that still exist there.

The place-name Thurrock and the word trauc, meaning a cave, may evidently be equated with the two first syllables of traugum and troglos. According to my theories the primitive meaning of tur og was Eternal, or Enduring Og, and it is thus a felicitous coincidence that Og, the famous King of Bashan, was a troglodite: the ruins of his capital named Edrei, which was situated in the Zanite Hills, still exist, and are thus described by a modern explorer: “We took with us a box of matches and two candles. After we had gone down the slope for some time, we came to a dozen rooms which, at present, are used as goat stalls and store-rooms for straw. The passage became gradually smaller, until at last we were compelled to lie down flat and creep along. This extremely difficult and uncomfortable progress lasted for about eight minutes, when we were obliged to jump down a steep well, several feet in depth. Here I noticed that the younger of my two attendants had remained behind, being afraid to follow us; but probably it was more from fear of the unknown European, than of the dark and winding passages before us. We now found ourselves in a broad street, which had dwellings on both sides, whose height and width left nothing to be desired. The temperature was mild, the air free from unpleasant odours, and I felt not the smallest difficulty in breathing. Further along there were several cross-streets, and my guide called my attention to a hole in the ceiling for air, like three others which I afterwards saw, now closed from above. Soon after we came to a market-place, where, for a long distance, on both sides of the pretty broad street were numerous shops in the walls, exactly in the style of the shops seen in Syrian cities. After a while we turned into a side street, where a great hall, whose roof was supported by four pillars, attracted my attention. The roof, or ceiling, was formed of a single slab of jasper, perfectly smooth and of immense size, in which I was unable to perceive the slightest crack.”[910] The here-described holes in the ceiling for air “now closed from above” correspond very closely to the shafts running up here and there from the Chislehurst caves to the private gardens overhead.

In connection with the troglodite town of Troo, and with the French word trou meaning a hole, it is worthy of note that a subterranean chamber or “Giant’s Holt,” exists at Trew in Cornwall, and a similar one at the village of Trewoofe: the name Trewoofe suggests the word trough, a generic term for a scooped or hollowed-out receptacle: we have already noted that in the west of England a small ship is still called a trow; the Anglo-Saxon for a trough was troh, the German is trog, the Danish is trug, and the Swedish trag.

The artificial cave at Trewoofe also suggests a connection with the famous Cave-oracle in Livadia known as the Den of Trophonius: this celebrated oracle contained small niches for the reception of gift-offerings and there are curious little wall-holes in some of the Cornish souterrains which cannot, so far as one can judge, have filled any other purpose than that served by the niches in the Cave of Trophonius. The calcareous mountain in which the oracle of Trophonius was situated is tunnelled by a number of other excavations, but over the entrance to what is believed to be the veritable prophetic grotto is graved the mysterious word Chibolet, or, according to others, Zeus Boulaioz, meaning Zeus the Counsellor. The Greek for counsellor is bouleutes, and the radical bouleut of this term is curiously suggestive of Bolleit, the name applied to two of the Cornish subterranean chambers, i.e., the Bolleit Cave in the parish of St. Eval and the Bolleit Cave near St. Buryan: the latter of these sites includes a stone circle and other monolithic remains which are believed by antiquarians to mark the site of some battle; whence the name Bolleit is by modern etymologers interpreted as having meant field of blood, but it exceeds the bounds of coincidence that there should also be a Bolleit cave elsewhere, and the greater probability would seem that these Cornish souterrains were sacred spots serving among other uses the purposes of Oracle and Counsel Chambers. If the disputed inscription over the Trophonian Den really read Chibolet it would decode agreeably in accordance with my theories into Chi or Jou the Counsellor; but I am unaware that the Greek Zeus was ever known locally as Chi.[911]

The celebrated Blue John cave of Derbyshire—where we have noted Chee Dale—is situated in Tray Cliff, and in the neighbouring “Thor’s Cave” have been found the remains of prehistoric man: similar remains have been unearthed at Thurrock where the dene holes are conspicuously abundant, and in view of the persistent recurrence of the cave-root tur or trou it is worth noting that cave making was a marked characteristic of the people of Tyre: “Wherever the Tyrians penetrated, to Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, similar burial places have been discovered.”[912] According to Baring-Gould all the subterranean dwellings of Europe bear a marked resemblance to the troglodite town of King Og at Edrei—a veritable Tartarus or Underworld—and the drei of Edrei is no doubt a variant of trou, Troo, Trew or Troy, for, as already seen, in the Welsh language “Troy town” is Caer Droia or Caer Drei.

One has to consider three forms or amplifications of the same phenomenon: (1) the single cave; (2) several caves connected to one another by serpentine tunnels; (3) a labyrinth or honeycomb of caves leading one out of the other and ranged layer upon layer. Etymology and mythology alike point to the probability, if not the certainty, that among the ancients a cave, natural or artificial, was regarded as the symbol of, and to some extent a facsimile of the intricate Womb of Creation, or of Mother Nature. “Man in his primitive state,” says a recent writer, “considers himself to have emerged from some cave; in fact, from the entrails of the Earth. Nearly all American creation-myths regard men as thus emanating from the bowels of the great terrestrial mother.”[913]

Fig. 463.

Sections of a Dene-hole and Ground Plan of Chambers. (Based upon a plan and description by Mr. T. V. Holmes, F.G.S.)
Fig. 464.—From The Chislehurst Caves (Nichols, W. J.).

Fig. 463, evidently representative of the Great terrestrial Mother holding in her hand a simple horn, the fore-runner of the later cornu copia or horn of abundance, is the outline sketch of a rock-carved statue, 2 feet in height, discovered on the rubble-covered face of a rock cliff in the Dordogne: this has been proved to be of Aurignacian age and is the only yet discovered statue of any size executed by the so-called Reindeer men; in the Chislehurst caves have been discovered the deer horn picks of the primeval men who apparently first made them.

Fig. 465.—Ground plan of a group of Dene Holes in Hangman’s Wood, Kent. From a plan by Mr. A. R. Goddard, F.S.A.

The Kentish Dene hole is never an aimless quarrying; on the contrary it always has a curiously specific form, dropping about 100 feet as a narrow shaft approximately 3 feet in diameter and then opening out into a six-fold chamber, vide the plans[914] herewith. This is not a rational or business-like form of chalk quarry, and it must have been very difficult indeed to bucket up the output in small driblets, transport it from the tangled heart of woods, and pack-horse it on to galleys in the Thames: nevertheless something similar seems to have been the procedure in Pliny’s time for he tells that white chalk, or argentaria, “is obtained by means of pits sunk like wells with narrow mouths to the depth sometimes of 100 feet, when they branch out like the veins of mines and this kind is chiefly used in Britain”.[915]

In view of the fact that either chalk or flints could have been had conveniently in unlimited quantities for shipment, either from the coast cliffs of Albion, or if inland from the commonsense everyday form of chalk quarry, it is difficult to suppose otherwise than that the Deneholes—which do not branch out indiscriminately like ordinary mine-veins—were dug under superstitious or ecclesiastical control. Of this system perhaps a parallel instance may be found in the remarkable turquoise mines recently explored at Maghara near Sinai: “These mines,” says a writer in Ancient Egypt,[916] “lie in the vicinity of two adjacent caves facing an extensive site of burning, which has the peculiarities of the high-places of which we hear so much in the Bible. These caves formed a sanctuary which, judging from what is known of ancient sanctuaries in Arabia generally, was at once a shrine and a store house, presumably in the possession of a priesthood or clan, who, in return for offerings brought to the shrine, gave either turquoise itself, or the permission to mine it in the surrounding district. The sanctuary, like other sanctuaries in Arabia, was under the patronage of a female divinity, the representative of nature-worship, and one of the numerous forms of Ishthar.”

The name of this Istar-like or Star Deity is not recorded, but in this description she is alluded to as Mistress of the Turquoise Country, and later simply as Mistress of Turquoise. We may possibly arrive at the name of the British Lady of the star-shaped dene holes by reference to a votive tablet which was unearthed in 1647 near Zeeland: this is to the following effect:—

To the Goddess Nehalennia—

For his goods well preserved—

Secundus Silvanius

A chalk Merchant

Of Britain

Willingly performed his merited vow.

I am acquainted with no allusions in British mythology to Nehalennia, but she is recognisable in the St. Newlyna of Newlyn, near Penzance, and of Noualen in Brittany: it is not an unreasonable conjecture that St. Nehalennia of the Thames was a relative of Great St. Helen, and she was probably the little, young, or new Ellen. At Dunstable, where also there are dene holes, we find a Dame Ellen’s Wood, and it may be surmised that Nelly was originally a diminutive of Ellen.

Among the Bretons as among the Britons precisely the same mania for burrowing seems at one period to have prevailed, and in an essay on The Origin of Dene Holes, Mr. A. R. Goddard pertinently inquires: “What, then, were these great excavations so carefully concealed in the midst of lone forests?” Mr. Goddard points out that an interesting account of the use made of very similar places in Brittany by the peasant armies, during the war in La Vendee, is to be found in Victor Hugo’s Ninety Three, and that that narrative is partially historic, for it ends, “In that war my father fought, and I can speak advisedly thereof”. Victor Hugo writes: “It is difficult to picture to oneself what these Breton forests really were. They were towns. Nothing could be more secret, more silent, and more savage. There were wells, round and narrow, masked by coverings of stones and branches; the interior at first vertical, then horizontal, spreading out underground like funnels, and ending in dark chambers.” These excavations, he states, had been there from time immemorial, and he continues: “One of the wildest glades of the wood of Misdon, perforated by galleries and cells, out of which came and went a mysterious society, was called The Great City. The gloomy Breton forests were servants and accomplices of the rebellion. The subsoil of every forest was a sort of madrepore, pierced and traversed in all directions by a secret highway of mines, cells, and galleries. Each of these blind cells could shelter five or six men.”

The notion that the dene holes of Kent were built as refuges from the Danes, and that the tortuous souterrains of County Down were constructed by the defeated Danes as skulking holes is on a par with the supposition that the souterrains of La Vendee were built as an annoyance to the French Republic; and the idea that the solitary or combined dene holes situated in the heart of lone, dense, and inaccessible forests were due to action of the sea, or mere shafts sunk by local farmers simply for the purpose of obtaining chalk seems to me irrational and inadequate. It is still customary for hermits to dwell in caves, and in Tibet there are Buddhist Monasteries “where the inmates enter as little children, and grow up with the prospect of being literally immured in a cave from which the light of day is excluded as well as the society of their fellow-men, there to spend the rest of their life till they rot”: it is thus not impossible that each dene hole in Britain was originally the abode of a hermit or holy man, and that clusters of these sacred caves constituted the earliest monasteries. In Egypt near Antinoe there is a rock-hewn church known as Dayn Aboo Hannes, which is rendered by Baring-Gould as meaning “The Convent of Father John”: it would thus appear that in that part of the world dayn was the generic term for convent, and it is not unlikely that the ecclesiastical dean of to-day does not owe his title to the Greek word diaconus, but that the original deaneries were congeries of dene holes or dens. The mountains and deserts of Upper Egypt used to be infested with ascetics known as Therapeutæ who dwelt in caves, and the immense amount of stone which the extensive excavations provided served secondarily as material for building the pyramids and neighbouring towns: the word Therapeut, sometimes translated to mean “holy man,” and sometimes as “healer,” is radically thera or tera, and one of the most remarkable of the Egyptian cave temples is that situated at Derr or Derri.

In addition to dene holes on the coast of Durham and at Dunstable there are dene holes in the dun, down, or hill overlooking Kit’s Coty: it may reasonably be surmised that the latter were inhabited by the drui or wise men who constructed not only Kit’s Coty but also the other extensive megalithic remains which exist in the neighbourhood. The well-known cave at St. Andrews contains many curious Pictish sculptures, and the connection between antrou (or Andrew), a cave, and trou, a hole, extends to the words entrails, intricate, and under. Practically all the “Mighty Childs” of mythology are represented as having sprung from caves or underground: Jupiter or Chi (the chi or [Greek: ch] is the cross of Andrew[917]) was cave-born and worshipped in a cave; Dionysos was said to have been nurtured in a cave; Hermes was born at the mouth of a cave, and it is remarkable that, whereas a cave is still shown as the birthplace of Jesus Christ at Bethlehem, St. Jerome complained that in his day the pagans celebrated the worship of Thammuz, or Adonis, i.e., Adon, at that very cave.

Etymology everywhere confirms the supposition that underlying cave construction and governing worship within caves was a connection, in idea, between the cave and the Mother of Existence or the Womb of Nature. The “Womb of Being” is a common phrase applied to Divinity, and in Scotland the little pits which were constructed by the aborigines are still known as weems, from wamha, meaning a cave. In Lowland Scotch wame meant womb, and wamha, a cave, is obviously akin not only to wame but also to womb, Old English wambe; indeed the cave was considered so necessary a feature of Mithra-worship that where natural cavities did not exist artificial ones were constructed. The standard reason given for Mithraic cave-worship was that the cave mystically signified “the descent of the soul into the sublunary regions and its regression thence”. Doubtless this sophisticated notion at one period prevailed: that all sorts of Mysteries were enacted within caves is too well known to need emphasis, and I think that the seemingly unaccountable apses within the Chislehurst labyrinth may have served a serious and important purpose in troglodite philosophy.

Fig. 466.—Section of Royston Cave traced from a drawing in Cliff Castles and Cliff Dwellings of Europe (Baring-Gould, S.).

Fig. 467.—From Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism (Inman, C. W.).

The celebrated cave at Royston is remarkably bell-shaped; many of the barrows at Stonehenge were bell-formed, and in Ceylon the gigantic bell-formed pyramids there known as Dagobas are connected by etymologists with gabba, which means not only shrine but also womb. In the design on p. 783, Isis, the Great Mother, is surrounded by a cartouche or halo of bell-like objects: the sistrum of Isis which was a symbol of the Gate of Life was decorated with bells; bells formed an essential element of the sacerdotal vestments of the Israelites; bells are a characteristic of modern Oriental religious usage, and in Celtic Christianity the bell was regarded—according to C. W. King—as “the actual type of the Godhead”.[918]

Fig. 468.

[To face page 788.

The Royston Cave is said to be an exact counterpart to certain caves in Palestine,[919] which are described as “tall domes or bell-shaped apartments ranging in height from 20 to 30 feet, and in diameter from 10 to 12 to 20 or 30 feet, or more. The top of these domes usually terminates in a small circular opening for the admission of light and air. These dome-shaped caverns are mostly in clusters three or four together. They are all hewn regularly. Some of them are ornamented either near the bottom or high up, or both with rows of small holes or niches like pigeon holes extending quite round.”[920] It was customary to sell pigeons in the Temple at Jerusalem: there is a prehistoric cave in Dordogne on the river Dronne which vide, Fig. 468 is distinguished by pigeon holes. This sacred cave is still used as a pigeonry, and in view of the mass of evidence connecting doves with prehistoric caves and Diana worship, I should not be surprised if the pigeons which congregate to-day around St. Paul’s are the direct descendants of the Diana’s Doves of the prehistoric domus columbae.[921] At Chadwell in Essex are ordinary dene holes, and at Tilbury there were “several spacious caverns in a chalky cliff built artificially of stone to the height of 10 fathoms and somewhat straight at the top”: I derive this information, as also the illustrations here reproduced, from the anonymous New Description of England and Wales, published in 1724.

Figs. 469 and 470.—From A New Description of England (Anon, 1724).

Fig. 471.—Sculpturings from the interior of Royston Cave

[To face page 784.

Both St. Kit and St. Kate figure on the walls of the bell-shaped cave situated beneath Mercat House at the cross roads at Royston; and thus the name Mercat may here well have meant Big Kit or Kate: close by was an ancient inn known as the Catherine Wheel. We shall probably be safe not only in assigning Kit’s Coty to Kate or Ked “the most generous and most beauteous of ladies,” but also in assigning to her the Kyd brook, on the right bank of which the Chislehurst caves are situated: “It is somewhat remarkable,” says Mr. Nichols, “that the archæological discoveries hitherto made have been for the most part on the line of this stream”. The Kyd brook rises in what is now known as the Hawkwood, which was perhaps once equivalent to the Og from whom the King of Edrei took his title.

Following the course of the Kyd brook—in the neighbourhood of which the Ordnance Map records a “Cadlands”—there exists to this day within Elmstead Woods a sunken road, a third of a mile in length, now covered with venerable oaks: three miles southward are the great earthworks at Keston, the supposed site of the Roman station of Noviomagus, “with its temple tombs and massive foundations of flint buildings scattered through the fields and woodland in the valley below”.[922]

The name Noviomagus meant seemingly New Magus; that Keston was a seat of the Magi is implied by the fact that the ruins in question are situated in Holwood Park: whether this meant Holywood Park, or whether it was so known because there were holes in it, is not of essential importance; it is sufficiently interesting to note that there are legends at Keston that two subterranean passages once ran from the ruins, the one to Coney Hall Hill adjoining Hayes Common, the other towards Castle Hill at Addington.[923] These burrows have not been explored within living memory, but at Addington itself near the remains of a monastery which stand upon an eminence “a subterranean passage communicates which even now is penetrable for a considerable distance”.[924] At Addington are not only numerous tumuli, but it is a tradition among the inhabitants that the place was formerly of much greater extent than at present, and we are told that timbers and other material of ruined buildings are occasionally turned up by the plough: here also is an oak of which the trunk measures nearly 36 feet in girth, and in the churchyard is a yew which from the great circumference of its trunk must be of very great antiquity; that Addington was once a seat of the Aeddons or Magi, is an inference of high probability.

Addington is situated in what is now Surrey, and is in close proximity to a place named Sanderstead: the Sander whose stead or enclosure here stood may be connoted with the French Santerre, which district abounds with souterrains: in the valley of the Somme alone there are at least thirty “singular excavations” which communicate with parish churches:[925] these Santerre and Sanderstead similarities may be connoted with the fact that on the coast of Durham are caverns hewn in the limestone and known as Dane’s holes.

In the forest of Tournehem near St. Omer are some curious square and circular fosses known locally as Fosses, Sarrasines, or Fosses des Inglais:[926] saracens is the name under which the Jews or Phœnicians are still known in Cornwall, and in view of the Tyrians love of burrowing or making trous, Tournehem may here perhaps be identified with Tyre, or the Tyrrhenians of Etruria. The Inglais can hardly be the modern English, but are more probably the prehistoric Ingles whose marvellous monument stands to-day at Mount Ingleborough in Yorkshire, or ancient Deira: this must have been a perfect Angel borough, or Eden, for not only is it a majestic hill crowned by a tower called the Hospice, and with other relics previously noted, but it also contains one of the most magnificent caverns in the kingdom. This is entered by a low wide arch and consists for the first 600 feet, or thereabouts, of a mere tunnel which varies in height from 5 to 15 feet: one then enters “a spacious chamber with surface all elaborated in a manner resembling the work of a Gothic cathedral in limestone formations of endless variety of form and size, and proceeds thence into a series of chambers, corridors, first made accessible in 1838, said to have an aggregate extent of about 2000 feet, and displaying a marvellous and most beautiful variety of stalactites and stalagmites. A streamlet runs through the whole, and helps to give purity to the air.”[927] This description is curiously reminiscent of the famous and gigantic Han Grotto near Dinant: with the Han Grotto, through which run the rivers Lesse and Tamise, may be connoted the Blue John Cavern in Derbyshire, and I have little doubt that Han or Blue John, or Tarchon was the Giant originally worshipped by the Chouans or Jacks, who inhabited the terrible recesses of La Vendee. The name Joynson which occurs in the Kentish dene hole district implies possibly the son of a Giant, or a son of Sinjohn: it is not unlikely that the “Hangman’s” Wood, in which the group of dene holes here planned occur, was originally the Han, Hun, giant, or Hahnemann’s Wood. At Tilbury the spacious caverns were adjacent to Shenfield, in the neighbourhood of Downs Farm: at Dunstable is a little St. John’s Wood, a Kensworth, and a Mount Pleasant; this district is dotted with “wells,” and the adjacent Caddington is interpreted as having meant “the hill meadow of Cedd or Ceadda”.

Dinant or Deonant is generally supposed to derive its name from Diana, and we are told that the town originally possessed “onze eglises paroissales”. Whether these eleven parishes were due to chance or whether they were originally sacred to an elphin eleven must remain a matter of conjecture: at the entry to the Grotto in Dane Hill, Margate (Thanet), is a shell-mosaic yoni surmounted by an eleven-rayed star.

The association of “les Inglais” with the fosses in the forest of Tournehem may possibly throw some light upon the curiously persistent sixfold form in which our British dene holes seem invariably to have been constructed. Engelland as we have seen was the mystic Angel Land in which the unborn children of the future were awaiting incarnation: that six was for some reason associated with birth and creation is evident from the six days of Jewish tradition, and from the corresponding 6000 years of Etrurian belief. The connection between six and creation is even more pointed in the Druidic chant still current in Brittany, part of which has already been quoted:—

Beautiful child of the Druid, answer me right well.

What would’st thou that I should sing?

Sing to me the series of number one that I may learn it this very day.

There is no series for one, for One is Necessity alone.

The father of death, there is nothing before and nothing after.

Nevertheless the Druid or Instructor runs through a sequence expounding three as the three Kingdoms of Merlin, five as the terrestrial zones, or the divisions of time, and six as “babes of wax quickened into life through the power of the moon”:[928] the moon which periodically wanes and waxes like a matron, was of course Diana, whence possibly the sixfold form of the dene or Dane holes.

In the Caucasus—the land of the Kimbry, don was a generic term for water and for river:[929] we have a river Dane in Cheshire, a river Dean in Nottinghamshire, a river Dean in Forfarshire, a river Dun in Lincolnshire, a river Dun in Ayrshire, and a river Don in Yorkshire, Aberdeen, and Antrim. There is a river Don in Normandy, and elsewhere in France there is a river Madon which is suggestive of the Madonna: the root of all these terms is seemingly Diane, Diana, or Dione, and it may reasonably be suggested that the dene or Dane holes of this country, like many other dens, were originally shrines dedicated to the prehistoric Madonna.

The fact that the subsidence at Modingham immediately filled up with water is presumptive evidence not only of a vast cavern, but also of a subterranean river, or perhaps a lake. That such spots were sacrosanct is implied by numerous references such as that quoted by Herbert wherein an Italian poet describes a visit of King Arthur to a small mount situated in a plain, and covered with stones: into that mount the King followed a hind he was chasing, tracking her through subterranean passages until he reached a cavern where “he saw the preparations for earthquakes and volcanic fires. He saw the flux and reflux of the sea.”

Thirteenth Century Window from Chartres.
Fig. 472.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).

Among the poems of Taliesin is one entitled The Spoils of Hades, wherein the mystic Arthur is figured as the retriever of a magic cauldron, no doubt the sun or else the pair dadeni, or cauldron of new birth: “It commences,” says Herbert, “with reference to the prison-sepulchre of Arthur describing in all six such sanctuaries; though I should rather say one such under six titles”. This mysterious six is suggestive of the sixfold dene holes, and that this six was for some reason associated with the Madonna is obvious from the Christian emblem here illustrated. According to the theories of the author of L’Antre des Nymphes, “the cave was considered in ancient times as the universal matrix from which the world and men, light and the heavenly bodies, alike have sprung, and the initiation into ancient mysteries always took place in a cave”. I have not read this work, and am unacquainted with the facts upon which M. Saintyves bases his conclusions: these, however, coincide precisely with my own. It will not escape the reader’s attention that Fig. 472 is taken from Chartres, the central site of Gaul, to which as Cæsar recorded the Druids annually congregated.

Layamon in his Brut recounts that Arthur took counsel with his knights on a spot exceeding fair, “beside the water that Albe was named”:[930] I am unable to trace any water now existing of that name which, however, is curiously reminiscent of Coleridge’s romantic Alph:—

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree,

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

It has already been noted that the Saxon monks filled up passages at St. Albans which ran even under the river: that similar constructions existed elsewhere is clear from the Brut of Kings where it is stated that Lear was buried by his daughter Cordelia in a vault under the river Soar in Leicestershire: “a place originally built in honour of the god Janus, and in which all the workmen of the city used to hold a solemn ceremony before they began upon the new year”.[931] That the Druids worshipped and taught in caves is a fact well attested; that solemn ceremonies were enacted at Chislehurst is probable; that they were enacted in Ireland at what was known as Patrick’s Purgatory even to comparatively modern times is practically certain. This famous subterranean Purgatory, which Faber describes as a “celebrated engine of papal imposture,” flourished amazingly until 1632, when the Lords Justices of Ireland ordered it to be utterly broken down, defaced, and demolished; and prohibited any convent to be kept there for the time to come, or any person to go into the said island on a superstitious account.[932] The popularity of Patrick’s Purgatory, to which immense numbers of pilgrims until recently resorted, is connected with a local tradition that Christ once appeared to St. Patrick, and having led him to a desert place showed him a deep hole: He then proceeded to inform him that whoever entered into that pit and continued there a day and a night, having previously repented and being armed with the true faith, should be purged from all his sins, and He further added that during the penitent’s abode there he should behold both the torments of the damned, and the joyful blisses of the blessed. That both these experiences were dramatically represented is not open to doubt, and that the actors were the drui or magi is equally likely: Lough Derg, the site of the Purgatory, is suggestive of drui, and also of Thurrock where, as we have seen, still exist the dene holes of troglodites.

On page 558 was reproduced a coin representing the Maiden in connection with a right angle, and there may be some connection between this emblem and the form of Patrick’s Purgatory: “Its shape,” says Faber, “resembles that of an L, excepting only that the angle is more obtuse, and it is formed by two parallel walls covered with large stones and sods, its floor being the natural rock. Its length is 16½ feet, and its width 2 feet, but the building is so low that a tall man cannot stand erect in it. It holds nine persons, and a tenth could not remain in it without considerable inconvenience.”[933] This Irish chapel to hold nine may be connoted with Bishop Arculf’s description in a.d. 700 of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. He describes this church as very large and round, encompassed with three walls, with a broad space between each, and containing three altars of wonderful workmanship, in the middle wall, at three different points; on the south, the north, and the west. “It is supported by twelve stone columns of extraordinary magnitude; and it has eight doors or entrances through the three opposite walls, four fronting the north-east, and four to the south-east. In the middle space of the inner circle is a round grotto cut in the solid rock, the interior of which is large enough to allow nine men to pray standing, and the roof of which is about a foot and a half higher than a man of ordinary stature.”[934] To the above particulars Arculf adds the interesting information that: “On the side of Mount Olivet there is a cave not far from the church of St. Mary,[935] on an eminence looking towards the valley of Jehoshaphat, in which are two very deep pits. One of these extends under the mountain to a vast depth; the other is sunk straight down from the pavement of the cavern, and is said to be of great extent. These pits are always closed above. In this cavern are four stone tables; one, near the entrance, is that of our Lord Jesus, whose seat is attached to it, and who, doubtless, rested Himself here while His twelve apostles sat at the other tables.”[936]

Jerusalem was for many centuries regarded as the admeasured centre of the whole earth, and doubtless every saintuaire was originally the local centre: in Crete there has been discovered a small shrine at Gournia “situated in the very centre of the town,” and with the mysterious pits of elsewhere may be connoted the “three walled pits,” nearly 25 feet deep, which remain at the northern entrance of Knossus: the only explanation which has been suggested for these constructions is that “they may have been oubliettes”.

Around Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg were built seven chapels, and it is evident that at or near the site were many other objects of interest: Giraldus Cambrensis says there were nine caves there,[937] another account states that an adventurer—a venerable hermit, Patrick by name—“one day lighted on this cave which is of vast extent. He entered it and wandering on in the dark lost his way so that he could no more find how to return to the light of day. After long rambling through the gloomy passages he fell upon his knees and besought Almighty God if it were His will to deliver him from the great peril wherein he lay.”[938] This adventure doubtless actually befell an adventurous Patrick, and before starting on his foolhardy expedition he would have been well advised to have consulted some such experienced Bard as the Taliesin who—claiming himself to be born of nine constituents—wrote—

I know every pillar in the Cavern of the West.

Similarly the author of The Incantation of Cunvelyn maintained:—

With the habituated to song (Bard)

Are flashes of light to lead the tumult

In ability to descend

Through spikes along brinks

Through the opening of trapdoors.[939]

This same poet speaks of the furze or broom bush in blossom as being a talisman: “The furzebush is it not radiance in the gloom?” and he adds “of the sanctity of the winding refuge they (the enemy) have possessed themselves”. Upon this Herbert very pertinently observes: “This sounds as if the possessors of the secret had an advantage over their opponents from their faculty of descending into chambers and galleries cunningly contrived, and artfully obscured and illuminated.... I think there was somewhere a system of chambers, galleries, etc.,[940] approaching to the labyrinthine character.”[941]

The Purgatory of St. Patrick was once called Uamh Treibb Oin, the wame, or cave of the tribe of Oin or Owen, upon which Faber comments: “Owen, in short, was no other than the Great God of the Ark, and the same as Oan, Oannes, or Dagon”: he was also in all probability the Janus of the river Soar, the Shony of the Hebrides, the Blue John of Buxton, the Tarchon of Etruria, and the St. Patrick on whose festival and before whose altar all the fishes of the sea rose and passed by in procession. After expressing the opinion “I am persuaded that Owen was the very same person as Patrick,” Faber notes the tradition, no doubt a very ancient one among the Irish, that Patrick was likewise called Tailgean or Tailgin: there is a celebrated Mote in Ireland named Dundalgan, and the Glendalgeon, to which the miraculous Bird of St. Bridget is said to have taken its flight, was presumably a glen once sacred to the same Tall John, or Chief King, or Tall Khan, or High Priest, as was worshipped at the Pictish town of Delginross in Caledonia; we have already considered this term in connection with the Telchines of Telchinia, Khandia, or Crete.

That Lough Derg was associated with Drei, Droia, or Troy, and with the drui or Druids, is further implied by its ancient name Lough Chre, said to mean lake of the soothsayers. Sooth is Truth and the Hibernian chre may be connoted with the “Cray,” which occurs so persistently in the Kentish dene hole district, e.g., Foots Cray, St. Mary Cray, and St. Paul’s Cray: the Paul of this last name may be equated with the Poole of the celebrated Buxton Poole’s Cavern, Old Poole’s Saddle, and Pell’s Well: the “bogie” of Buxton was no doubt the same Puck, Pooka, or Bwcca, as that of the Kentish Bexley, Bickley, and Boxley at each of which places are dene holes.

Fig. 473.—Sculpture on the Wall of St. Clement’s Cave, Hastings.

[To face page 797.

The cauldron of British mythology was known occasionally as Pwyll’s Cauldron, Pwyll, the chief of the Underworld, being the infernal or Plutonic form of the Three Apollos. Referring to the Italian tale of King Arthur’s entrance into the innermost caverns of the earth, Herbert observes: “Valvasone’s account of this place is a just description of the Cor upon Mount Ambri, and goes to identify it with the mystical Ynys Avallon (Island of Apples). All that he says of it is in wide departure from the tales which he might have read in Galfridus and Giraldus. But when we further see that he places within its recesses the cauldron of deified nature or Keridwen, it truly moves our wonder whence this matter can have come into his pages.”[942] Doubtless Herbert would have puzzled still more in view of what is apparently the same mystic cauldron, bowl, or tureen carved upon the walls of St. Clement’s Caves at Hastings.[943]

Presumably the St. Clement of these caves which have been variously ascribed to the Romans and the Danes, was a relative of St. Clement Dane in London by St. Dunstan in the West: the Hastings Caves are situated over what is marked on the Ordnance map as Torfield, and as this is immediately adjacent to a St. Andrew it is probable that the Anderida range, which commences hereby and terminates at the Chislehurst Caves, was all once dedicated to the ancient and eternal Ida. Antre is a generic term for cave, and as trou means hole, the word antrou is also equivalent to old hole. When first visiting the famous Merlin’s Cave at Tintagel or Dunechein, where it is said that Arthur or Artur, the mystic Mighty Child, was cast up by the ninth wave into the arms of the Great Magician, my companion’s sense of romance received a nasty jar on learning that Merlin’s Cave was known locally as “The Old Hole”: it may be, however, that this term was an exact rendering of the older Keltic antrou, which is literally old hole: the Tray Cliff in Derbyshire, where is situated the Blue John Mine, may well have been the trou cliff.

The highest point of the highland covering St. Clement’s Caves is known as “The Ladies’ Parlour”; at the foot of this is Sandringham Hotel, whence—in view of the neighbouring St. Andrew and Tor field—it is possible that “Sandringham”[944] was here, as elsewhere, a home of the children of Sander: immediately adjacent is a Braybrook, and a Bromsgrove Road. Near Reigate is a Broome Park which we are told “in the romantic era rejoiced in the name of Tranquil Dale”:[945] the neighbouring Buckland, Boxhill, and Pixhome Lane may be connoted with Bexhill by Hastings, and there are further traditional connections between the two localities. Under the dun upon which stand the remains of Reigate Castle are a series of caves, and besides the series of caves under the castle there are many others of much greater dimensions to the east, west, and south sides:[946] my authority continues, “Here many of the side tunnels are sealed up; one of these is said to go to Reigate Priory—which is possible—but another which is reputed to go to Hastings, impels one to draw the line somewhere”.[947]

We have seen that Brom and Bron were obviously once one and the same, and there is very little doubt that the Bromme of Broompark or Tranquil Dale was the same Peri or Power as was presumably connected with Purley, and as the Bourne or Baron associated with Reigate. In one of the Reigate caverns is a large pool of clear water which is said to appear once in seven years, and is still known as Bourne water:[948] under the castle is a so-called Baron’s Cave which is about 150 feet long, with a vaulted roof and a circular end with a ledge or seat around it. In popular estimation this is where the Barons met prior to the signing of Magna Charta: possibly they did, and without doubt many representatives of The Baron—good, bad, bold, and indifferent—from time to time sat and conferred upon the same ledge. From the Baron’s Cave a long inclined plane led to a stairway of masonwork which extended to the top of the mound.

Reigate now consists of a pair of ancient Manors, of which one was Howleigh; the adjacent Agland Moor, as also Oxted, suggests the troglodyte King Og of Edrei. Among the Reigate caves is one denominated “The Dungeon”: Tintagel was known alternatively not only as Dundagel, but also as Dunechein, evidently the same word as the great Dane John tumulus at Canterbury. The meaning of this term depends like every other word upon its context; a dungeon is a down-under or dene hole, the keep or donjon of a castle is its main tower or summit: similarly the word dunhill is identical with dene hole; abyss now means a yawning depth, but on page 224 Abyss was represented as a dunhill.

From the cavern at Pentonville, known as Merlin’s Cave, used to run a subterranean passage: modern Pentonville takes its title from a ground landlord named Penton, a tenant who presumably derived his patronymic either from that particular penton or from one elsewhere. In connection with the term pen it is curious to find that at Penselwood in Somerset there are what were estimated to be 22,000 “pen pits”: these pits are described as being in general of the form which mathematicians term the frustrum of a cone, not of like size one with another, but from 10 to 50 feet over at top and from 5 to 20 feet in the bottom.[949] I have already surmised that the various Selwoods, Selgroves, and Selhursts were so named because they contained the cells of the austere selli: by Penselwood is Wincanton, a place supposed to have derived its title from “probably a man’s name; nasalised form of Hwicca, cf. Whixley, and see ton”; but in view of the innumerable cone-shaped cells hereabout, it would seem more feasible that canton meant cone town. We have already illustrated the marvellous cone tomb said to have once existed in Etruria: in connection with this it is further recorded that within the basement King Porsenna made an inextricable labyrinth, into which if one ventured without a clue, there he must remain for he never could find the way out again; according to Mrs. Hamilton Gray the labyrinth of a counterpart of this tomb still exists, “but its locality is unascertained”.

There are said to be pits similar to the Wincanton pen pits in Berkshire, there known as Coles pits: we have already connoted St. Nichol of the tub-miracle, likewise King Cole of the Great Bowl with Yule the Wheel or Whole. The Bowl of Cole was without doubt the same as the pair dadeni, or Magic Cauldron of Pwyll which Arthur “spoiled” from Hades: with Paul’s Cray may be connoted the not-far-distant Pol Hill overlooking Sevenoaks. Otford, originally Ottanford, underlies Pol Hill, which was no doubt a dun of the celestial Pol, alias Pluto, or Aidoneus: in the graveyard at Ottanford may be seen memorials of the Polhill family, a name evidently analogous to Penton of Pentonville.

The memory of our ancestors dwelling habitually in either pen pits, dene holes, or cole pits, has been preserved in Layamon’s Brut, where it is recorded: “At Totnes, Constantin the fair and all his host came ashore; thither came the bold man—well was he brave!—and with him 2000 knights such as no king possessed. Forth they gan march into London, and sent after knights over all the kingdom, and every brave man, that speedily he should come anon. The Britons heard that, where they dwelt in the pits, in earth and in stocks they hid them (like) badgers, in wood and in wilderness, in heath and in fen, so that well nigh no man might find any Briton, except they were in castle, or in burgh inclosed fast. When they heard of this word, that Constantin was in the land, then came out of the mounts many thousand men; they leapt out of the wood as if it were deer. Many hundred thousand marched toward London, by street and by weald all it forth pressed; and the brave women put on them men’s clothes, and they forth journeyed toward the army.”

It has been assumed that the means of exit from the dene holes, and from the subterranean city with which they communicated, was a notched pole, and it is difficult to see how any other method was feasible: in this connection the Mandan Indians of North America have a curious legend suggestive of the idea that they must have sprung from some troglodite race. The whole Mandan nation, it is said, once resided in one large village underground near a subterranean lake; a grape-vine extended its roots down to their habitation and gave them a view of the light. Some of the most adventurous climbed up the vine and were delighted with the sight of the earth which they found covered with buffalo and rich with every kind of fruit: men, women, and children ascended by means of the vine (the notched pole?), but when about half the nation had attained the surface of the earth a big or buxom woman, who was clambering up the vine, broke it with her weight and closed upon herself and the rest the light of the Sun. There is seemingly some like relation between this legend and the tradition held by certain hill tribes of the old Konkan kingdom in India, who have a belief that their ancestors came out of a cave in the earth. In connection with this Konkan tale, and with the fact that the Concanii of Spain fed on horses, it may here be noted that not only do traces of the horse occur in the most ancient caves, but that vast deposits of horse bones point to the probability that horses were eaten sacrificially in caves.[950] In the Baron’s Cave at Reigate, “There are many bas relief sculptures, Roman soldiers’ heads, grotesque masks of monks, horses’ heads and other subjects which can only be guessed at”:[951] these idle scribblings have been assigned to the Roman soldiery, who are supposed at one time to have garrisoned the castle, and the explanation is not improbable: the favourite divinity of the Roman soldiery was Mithra, the Invincible White Horse, and several admittedly Mithraic Caves have been identified in Britain.[952] It has always been supposed that these were the work of Roman invaders, and in this connection it should be noted that deep in the bowels of the Chislehurst labyrinth there is a clean-cut well about 70 feet deep lined with Roman cement: but granting that the Romans made use of a ready-made cave, it is improbable that they were responsible for the vast net-work of passages which are known to extend under that part of Kent. There is—I believe—a well in the heart of the Great Pyramid; a deep subterranean well exists in one of the series of caves at Reigate.

In his article on the Chislehurst Caves Mr. Nichols inquires, “might not the shafts of these dene holes have lent themselves to the study of the heavenly bodies?” That the Druids were adepts at astronomy is testified by various classical writers, and according to Dr. Smith there are sites in Anglesey still known in Welsh as “the city of the Astronomers,” the Place of Studies, and the Astronomers’ Circle.[953] There was a famous Holy Well in Dean’s Yard, Westminster, and it would almost seem that a well was an integral adjunct of the sacred duns: according to Miss Gordon “there is a well of unknown antiquity at Pentonville under Sadlers Wells Theatre (Clerkenwell), lined with masonry of ancient date throughout its entire depth, similar to the prehistoric wells we have already mentioned in the Windsor Table Mound, on the Wallingford Mound, and the Well used by the first Astronomer Royal at Greenwich”.[954] But masonry-lined wells situated in the very bowels of the earth as at Chislehurst and Reigate cannot have served any astronomic purpose; they must, one would think, have been constructed principally for ritualistic reasons. At Sewell, near Dunstable, immediately next to Maiden Bower there once existed a very remarkable dene hole: this is marked on the Ordnance Maps as “site of well,” but in the opinion of Worthington Smith, “this dene hole was never meant for a well”. It was recently destroyed by railway constructors who explored it to the depth of 116 feet; but, says Worthington Smith, “amateur excavators afterwards excavated the hole to a much greater depth and found more bones and broken pots. The base has never been reached. The work was on the top of a very steep and high bank.”[955] On Mount Pleasant at Dunstable was a well 350 feet deep,[956] and any people capable of sinking a narrow shaft to this depth must obviously have been far removed from the savagery of the prime.

In 1835 at Tinwell, in Rutlandshire, the singular discovery was made of a large subterranean cavern supported in the centre by a stone pillar: this chamber proved on investigation to be “an oblong square extending in length to between 30 and 40 yards, and in breadth to about 8 feet. The sides are of stone, the ceiling is flat, and at one end are two doorways bricked up.”[957] About forty years ago, at Donseil in France—or rather in a field belonging to the commune of Saint Sulpice le Donseil[958]—a ploughman’s horse sank suddenly into a hole: the grotto which this accident revealed was found to have been cut out from soft grey granite in an excellent state of preservation and is thus described: “After passing through the narrow entrance, you make your way with some difficulty down a sloping gallery some 15 yards in length, to a depth beneath the surface of nearly 20 feet; this portion is in the worst condition. Then you find yourself in a circular gallery measuring about 65 feet in circumference, with the roof supported by a huge pillar, 18 feet in diameter. It is worth noticing that the walls, which are hewn out of the granite, are not vertical, but convex like an egg. At 19 feet to the left of the inclined corridor, and at an elevation of 30 inches above the level of the soil of the circular gallery, we come upon a small opening, through which it is just possible for a man to squeeze himself: it gives access to a gallery thirty-three feet long, at the bottom of which a loftier and more spacious gallery has been begun, but, apparently, not completed.”[959]

Fig. 474. PLAN OF THE GROTTO AT MARGATE.

I invite the reader to note the significance of these measurements and to compare the general design of the Donseil souterrain with the form of Fig. 474: this is the ground plan of a grotto which was accidentally discovered by some schoolboys in 1835, and exists to-day in the side of Dane Hill, Margate. Its form is very similar to the apparent design of the great two-mile Sanctuary at Avebury, see page 351, and its situation—a dene or valley on the side of a hill—coincides exactly with that of the small Candian cave-shrines dedicated to the serpent goddess. In Candia no temples have been discovered but only small and insignificant household shrines: “It is possible,” says Mr. Hall, “that the worship of the gods on a great scale was only carried out in the open air, or the palace court, or in a grave or cave not far distant. Certainly the sacred places to which pilgrimage was made and at which votive offerings were presented, were such groves, rocky gorges, and caves.”[960]

The sanctity of Cretan caves is indisputably proved by the immense number of votive offerings therein found, in many cases encrusted and preserved by stalagmites and stalactites. Among the house shrines of the Mother Goddess and her Son remain pathetic relics of the adoration paid by her worshippers: one of these saved almost intact by Sir Arthur Evans is described as a small room or cell, smaller even than the tiny chapels that dot the hills of Crete to-day—a place where one or two might pray, leave an offering and enjoy community with the divinity rudely represented on the altar ... one-third of the space was for the worshipper, another third for the gifts, the last third for the goddess.[961]

There are diminutive souterrains in Cornwall notably at St. Euny in the parish of Sancreed where the gift niches still remain intact: in many instances these “Giants Holts” are in serpentine form, and the serpentine form of the Margate Grotto is unmistakable. The Mother Goddess of Crete has been found figured with serpents in her hands and coiling round her shoulders: according to Mr. Mackenzie: “Her mysteries were performed in caves as were also the Paleolithic mysteries. In the caves there were sacred serpents, and it may be that the prophetic priestesses who entered them were serpent charmers: cave worship was of immense antiquity. The cave was evidently regarded as the door of the Underworld in which dwelt the snake-form of Mother Earth.”[962]

Fig. 475.—Ground plan of Souterrain at St. Euny’s, Sancreed, Cornwall.

It has been seen that the serpent because of sloughing its skin was the emblem of rejuvenescence, regeneration, and New Birth; it is likely that the word sanctus is radically the same as snag, meaning a short branch, and as snake, which in Anglo-Saxon was snaca: it is certain that the snake trou or snake cave was one of the most primitive sanctuaries.[963] Not only is the Margate Grotto constructed in serpentine form, but upon one of the panels of its walls is a Tree of Life, of which two of the scrolls consist of horned serpents: these are most skilfully worked in shells, and from the mouth of each serpent is emerging the triple tongue of Good Thought, Good Deed, Good Word.

The word dean, French doyen, is supposed to be the Latin decanum the accusative of decanus, one set over ten soldiers or ten monks: it is, as already suggested, more probable that the original deans were the priests of Diane, and that they worshipped in dene holes, in dens, in denes, on downs, and at dunhills. The word grot is probably the same as kirit, the Turkish form of Crete, and as the Keridwen or Kerid Holy of Britain. The ministers of the Cretan Magna Mater were entitled curetes, and the modern curate may in all likelihood claim a verbal descent from the Keridwen or Sancreed whose name is behind our great, crude, and cradle. The Magna Mater of Kirid or Crete was sometimes as already mentioned depicted with a cat upon her head: I have equated the word cat with Kate, Kitty, or Ked, and in all probability the catacombs of Rome anciently Janicula were originally built in her honour. In Scotland souterrains are termed weems, a word which is undoubtedly affiliated both in form and idea with womb, tomb, and coombe: the British bards allude frequently to the grave as being the matrix or womb of Ked; as archæologists are well aware, primitive burials frequently consisted of contracting the body into the form of the fœtus, depositing it thus in a stone cist, chest, or “coty”: and there is little doubt that the St. Anne who figures so prolifically in the catacombs of Janicula, was like St. Anne of Brittany the pre-Christian Anne, Jana, or Diane.

At Caddington by Dunstable there is a Dame Ellen’s Wood; Caddington itself is understood to have meant—“the hill meadow of Cedd or Ceadda,” and among the prehistoric tombs found in this neighbourhood was the interment illustrated on page 64. It has been cheerily suggested that “the child may have been buried alive with its mother”: it may, but it equally may not; the pathetic surround of sea-urchins or popularly-called fairy loaves points to sentiment of some sort, particularly in view of the tradition that whoso keeps a specimen of the fairy loaf in his house shall never lack bread.[964] Echinus, the Latin for sea-urchin, is radically the same word as Janus; in the Margate grotto an echinus forms the centre of most of the conchological suns or stars with which the walls are decorated, and a large echinus appears in each of the four top corners of the oblong chamber.

I have suggested that the Kentish Rye, a town which once stood on a conical islet and near to which is an earthwork known nowadays as Rhee wall, was once dedicated to Rhea or Maria, and that Margate owes its designation to the same Ma Rhea or Mother Queen. According to “Morien” Rhi was a Celtic title of the Almighty, and is the root of the word rhinwedd (Virtue): according to Rhys rhi meant queen, and was a poetic term for a lady: according to Thomas Rhea is the feminine noun of rhi, prince or king; it would thence follow that regina, like the French name Rejane, meant originally Queen Gyne, either Queen Woman or Royal Jeanne. There are numerous Ryhalls, Ryhills, and in Durham is a Ryton which figured anciently as Ruyton, Rutune, and Ruginton: near Kingston is Raynes Park, and at Hackney, in the neighbourhood of the Seven Sisters and Kingsland Roads, is Wren’s Park.

That the Candians colonised the North of Africa is generally supposed, whence it becomes likely that the marvellous excavations at Rua were related to the worship of the serpentine Rhea: these are mentioned by Livingstone who wrote: “Tribes live in underground houses in Rua. Some excavations are said to be 30 miles long, and have running rills in them; a whole district can stand a siege in them. The ‘writings’ therein, I have been told by some of the people, are drawings of animals and not letters, otherwise I should have gone to see them.”[965]

The word grotesque admittedly originated from the fantastic designs found so frequently within grottos or grots, and if the natives of Rua could construct a souterrain 30 miles in extent, I see no reason to doubt the accuracy of the tradition that the natives of Reigate had run a tunnel towards Rye which is within a few miles of St. Clement’s Caves at Hastings. The gate of Margate and Reigate means opening; wry means awry or twisting, and we may probably find the original name of Reigate in the neighbouring place-name Wray Common.

The Snake grotto at Margate, which is situated almost below a small house named “Rosanna Lodge,” is decorated throughout with a most marvellous and beautiful mosaic of shellwork, the like of which certainly exists nowhere else in Britain: the dominant notes of this decoration are roses or rosettes, and raisins or grapes; over the small altar in the oblong chamber, at the extremity, are rising the rays of the Sun. The shells used as a groundwork for this decorative scheme were the yellow periwinkle now naturally grey with antiquity but which, when fresh, must, when illuminated, have produced an effect of golden and surpassing beauty. In the shrines of Candia large numbers of sea-shells, artificially tinted in various colours, have come to light:[966] that the altar at the Cantian Margate grotto was constructed to hold a lamp or a candle cannot be doubted, in which connection one may connote a statement by “Morien” that “All shell grottos with a candle in it (sic) were a symbol of the cave of the sun near the margin of the ocean with the soul of the sun in it”.[967] There is indeed little doubt that the snake trou under Rosanna Lodge was, like the grotto at St. Sulpice le Donseil, dedicated to le Donseil or donna sol. At the mouth of the shrine is a figurine seated, of which, unfortunately, the head is missing, but the right hand is still holding a cup: in Fig. 44 ante, page 167, Reason is holding a similar cup into which is distilling la rosee, or the dew of Heaven—doubtless the same goblet as was said to be offered to mortals by the fairy Idunns; their earthly representatives, the Aeddons, may be assumed once to have dwelt in the Dane Park or at Addington Street, now leading to Dane Hill where the grotto remains.

We have connected the Cup of Reason with the mystic Cauldron of Keridwen, or “cauldron of four spaces,” and have noted among the recipe “the liquor that bees have collected and resin,” to be prepared “when there is a calm dew falling”: another Bard alludes to “the gold-encircled liquor contained in the golden cup,” and I have little doubt that resin, rosin, or rosine was valued and venerated as being, like amber, the petrified tears of Apollo. I do not suggest that the Rosanna Lodge in the dene at Margate has any direct relation to the grotto of Reason beneath, but there is evidently a close connection with the small figurine holding a cup and the Lady Rosamond of Rosamond’s Well at Woodstock. “There was,” says Herbert, “a popular notion of an infernal maze extending from the bottom of Rosamond’s Well”: this labyrinth almost certainly once existed, for as late as 1718 there were to be seen by the pool at Woodstock the foundations of a very large building which were believed to be the remains of Rosamond’s Labyrinth.[968]

The story of Fair Rosamond being compelled to swallow poison is precisely on a par with the monkish legend that St. George was “tortured by being forced to drink a poisoned cup,” and how the Rosamond story originated is fairly obvious from the fact that on her alleged tombstone, “among other fine sculptures was engraven the figure of a cup. This, which perhaps at first was an accidental ornament (perhaps only the chalice), might in aftertimes suggest the notion that she was poisoned; at least this construction was put upon it when the stone came to be demolished after the nunnery was dissolved.” The above is the opinion of an archæologist who died in 1632, and it is in all probability sound: the actual site of Rosamond’s Bower at Woodstock seems to have been known as Godstone, and it was presumably the ancient Ked Stone that gave birth to the distorted legend. According to the Ballad of Fair Rosamond, that maiden was a ladye brighte, and most peerlesse was her beautye founde:—

Her crisped locks like threads of gold

Appeared to each man’s sighte,

Her sparkling eyes like Orient pearls

Did cast a heavenlye light.

The blood within her crystal cheekes

Did such a colour drive

As though the lillye and the rose

For mastership did strive.

The ballad continues that the enamoured King—

At Woodstock builded such a bower

The like was never seene,

Most curiously that bower was built

Of stone and timber strong

An hundered and fifty doors[969]

Did to this bower belong,

And they so cunninglye contrived

With turnings round about,

That none but with a clue of thread

Could enter in or out.

According to Drayton, Rosamond’s Bower consisted of vaults underground arched and walled with brick and stone: Stow in his Annals quotes an obituary stone reading, Hic jacet in tumba Rosa Mundi; non Rosa Munda, non redolet sed olet, which may be Anglicised into, Here lies entombed a mundane Rosa not the Rose of the World; she is not redolent, but “foully doth she stinke”. I am inclined, however, to believe that the traditional Rosamond was really and indeed the “cleane flower” and that the ignorant monks added calumny to their other perversions. History frigidly but very fortunately relates that “the tombstone of Rosamond Clifford was taken up at Godstone and broken in pieces, and that upon it were interchangeable weavings drawn out and decked with roses red and green and the picture of the cup, out of which she drank the poison given her by the Queen, carved in stone”.[970] At the Cornish village of Sancreed, i.e., San Kerid or St. Ked, engraved upon the famous nine foot cross is a similar cup or chalice, out of which rises a tapering fleur de lys: with the word creed may be connoted the fact that the artist of Kirid or Crete, “with a true instinct for beauty, chose as his favourite flowers the lovely lily and iris, the wild gladiolus and crocus, all natives of the Mediterranean basin, and the last three, if not the lily, of his own soil”.[971] Opinions differ as to whether the Sancreed lily is a spear head or a fleur de lys: they also differ as to the precise meaning of the cup: in the opinion of Mr. J. Harris Stone, “the vessel or chalice is roughly heart-shaped—that is the main body of it—and the head of the so-called spear is distinctly divided and has cross-pieces which, being recurved, doubtless gave rise to the lily theory of the origin. Now there was an ancient Egyptian cross of the Latin variety rising out of a heart like the mediæval emblem of Cor in Cruce, Crux in Corde, and this is irresistibly brought to my mind when looking at this Sancreed cross. The emblem I am alluding to is that of Goodness.”[972]

Fig. 476.—The famous Sancreed Cross. From The Cornish Riviera (Stone, J. Harris). [To face page 816.

With this theory I am in sympathy, and it may be reasonably suggested that the alleged “tombstone” of Rosamond at Godstone was actually a carved megalith analogous to that at Sancreed: the carving on the latter may be comparatively modern, but in all probability the rock itself is the original crude Creed stone, Ked stone, or Good stone, touched up and partly recut.

The Rose is the familiar emblem of St. George or Oros who, according to some accounts, was the son of Princess Sophia the Wise: his legs were of massive silver up to the knees, and his arms were of pure gold from the elbows to the wrists. According to other traditions George was born at Coventry, and “is reported to have been marked at his birth (forsooth!) with a red bloody cross on his right hand”.[973] The first adventure of St. George was the salvation of a fair and precious princess named Sabra from a foul dragon who venomed the people with his breath and this adventure is located at Silene: with this Silene may be connoted the innocent Una, who in some accounts occupies the position of the Lady Sabra: Sabra is suggestive of Sabrina, the little Goddess of the river Severn, whose name we have connected with the soft, gentle, pleasing and propitious Brina: that St. Burinea, the pretty daughter of Angus whose memory is sanctified as the patron of St Burian’s or Eglosberrie, was originally pure Una is more likely than that this alleged Maiden was an historic personage of the sixth century.

The series of excavations at Reigate, of which the principal is the Baron’s Cave, extends to a Red Cross Inn which marks the vicinity where stood the chapel of the Holy Cross, belonging to the Priory of the Virgin and Holy Cross: about a mile from Reigate in a little brook (the Bourne Water) used to stand a great stone stained red by the victims of a water Kelpie, who had his lair beneath. The Kelpie was exorcised by a vicar of Buckland: nevertheless the stone remained an object of awe to the people, which, says Mr. Ogilvie, “was regarded as a vile superstition by a late vicar who had the stone removed to demonstrate to his parishioners that there was nothing under it, but some of the old folks remember the story yet”.[974] Part of Reigate is known as Red Hill, obviously from the red sandstone which abounds there: at Bristol or Bristowe, i.e., the Stockade of Bri, the most famous church is that of St. Mary Redcliffe: the Mew stone off Devonshire is red cliff, the inscriptions at Sinai are always on red stone, and there is little doubt that red rock was particularly esteemed to be the symbol of gracious Aine, the Love Mother. In Domesday the Redcliff of St. Mary appears as Redeclive,[975] and may thus also have meant Rood Cleeve: in London we have a Ratcliffe Highway, and in Kensington a Redcliffe Square.

Fig. 477.—Iberian. From Akerman

In what is now the Green Park, Mayfair, used to be a Rosamond’s Pool: with Rosamond, the Rose of the World, and Rosanna—whose name may be connoted with the inscription Ru Nho or Queen New,[976] which occurs on one of the Sancreed crosses may also be connoted St. Rosalie of Sicily or Hypereia, whose grotto and fete still excite “an almost incredible enthusiasm”. The legend of St. Rosalie represents her as—

Something much too fair and good

For human nature’s daily food,

and her mysterious evanishment is accounted for by the tradition that, disgusted by the frivolous life and empty gaiety of courts, she voluntarily retired herself into an obscure cavern, where her remains are now supposed to be buried under wreaths of imperishable roses which are deposited by angels.[977]

Fig. 478.—Kerris Roundago. From Antiquities of Cornwall.

Fig. 479.—Christ, with a Nimbus Resembling a Flat Cap, or Casquette. From a Carving on Wood in the Stalls of Notre Dame d’Amiens. XVI. Cent. From Didron.

According to ecclesiastical legend the beloved St. Rosalie—whose fete is celebrated in Sicily on the day of St. Januarius—was the daughter of a certain Tancred, the first King of Sicily: it is not unlikely that this Tancred was Don Cred or Lord Cred, a relation of the Cornish Sancreed.[978] Sancreed is supposed to derive its name as being “an abstract dedication to the Holy Creed”: but it is alternatively known as Sancris: the Cretans, or Kiridians, or Eteocretes claimed Cres the Son of Jupiter by the nymph Idea as their first King, and they traced their descent from Cres. In a subsequent volume we shall consider this Cres at greater length, and shall track him to India in the form of Kristna, to whose grace the subterranean cross at Madura seems to have been dedicated. In Celtic cris meant pure, holy; crios meant the Sun:[979] the principal site of Apollo-worship was the island of Crissa; in England Christy[980] is a familiar surname, and I am convinced that the Christ tradition in Britain owed little to the Roman mission of Augustine, but was of far older origin. We may perhaps trace the original transit of Cris to Sancris at Carissa, now Carixa, in Spain: among the numerous coins of this district some as figured herewith bear the legend Caris, some bear the head of the young Hercules, others a female head.[981] As in classic Latin C was invariably pronounced hard, it is probable that the maiden Caris was Ceres, and that the Cretan pair are responsible for Kerris Roundago, an egg-like monument near Sancreed; also for Cresswell in Durham where is the famous Robin Hood Cave:[982] one may further trace Caris at Carisbrook near Ryde, at the diminutive Criss Brook near Maidstone, and at the streamlet Crise in Santerre.

The town of Carissa, now Carixa, may be connoted with the synonymous cross or crux: the Cornish for cross was crows, and at Crows-an-Rha, near St. Buryans, there is a celebrated wayside cross or crouch.[983] That Caris was carus or dear, and that he was the inception of charis or charity will also eventually be seen: I have elsewhere suggested that charis, or love, was originally ’k Eros or Great Eros; in the Christian emblem here illustrated Christ is associated with a rose cross, which is fabricated from the four hearts, and thus constitutes the Rosa mystica. At Kerris Roundago are four megaliths.

Fig. 480.

Fig. 481.

The Sancris cup or chalice[984] might legitimately be termed a cruse: Christ’s first miracle was the conversion of a cruse or can of water into wine, and the site of this miracle was Cana. The souterrain of St. Sulpice le Donseil is situated in a district known as La Creuse, and the solitary pillar in the heart of this grotto, as also that in the Margate grotto, and that in the souterrain at Tinwell, were probably symbols of what the British Bard describes as “Christ the concealed pillar of peace”. The Celtic Christs here reproduced from an article in The Open Court by Dr. Paul Carus are probably developments of ancient Prestons or Jupiter Stones: the connection between these crude Christs and Cres, the Son of Jupiter, by the nymph Idea, is probably continuous and unbroken.

A cruse corresponds symbolically to a cauldron or a cup: according to Herbert, “The Cauldron of the Bards was connected by them with Mary in that particular capacity which forms the portentous feature in St. Brighid (viz., her being Christ’s Mother) to the verge of identification. The reason was that divine objects considered by them essentially, and, as it were, sacramentally as being Christ, were prepared within and produced out of that sacred and womb-like receptacle.” He then quotes two bardic extracts to the following effect:—

(1) The One Man and our Cauldron,

And our deed, and our word,

With the bright pure Mary daughter of Anne.

(2) Christ, Creator, Emperor and our Mead,

Christ the Concealed, pillar of peace,

Christ, Son of Mary and of my Cauldron, a pure pedigree![985]

The likelihood is that the solitary great Jasper stone in the roof of the four-columned hall at Edrei, the Capital of King Og, was similarly a symbol of the ideal Corner Stone or the Concealed Pillar of Peace.

At Mykenae the celebrated titanic gateway is ornamented by two lions guarding or supporting a solitary pillar or numeral 1: at other times a figure of the Magna Mater takes the place of this One, and it is probable that the Io of Mykenae was originally My Kene, i.e., Mother Queen or, more radically, Mother Great One. That Io was represented by the horns or crescent moon is obvious from the innumerable idols in the form of cows horns found at Mykenae: we have already connected Cain, Cann, and Kenna with the moon or choon, Latin luna, French lune, otherwise Cynthia or Diana.

Not only was Crete or Candia essentially an island of caves, but the district of the British Cantii seems if anything to have been even more riddled: canteen is a generic term for cellar or cool cave, and the origin of this word is not known. In Mexico cun meant pudenda muliebris, in London cunny and cunt carry the same meaning, and with cenote, the Mexican for cistern, may be connoted our English rivers Kennet and Kent. Dr. Guest refers to the cauldron of Cendwen (Keridwen): according to Davidson the magic cup of the Cabiri corresponded to the Condy Cup[986] of the Gnostics which is the same as that in which Guion (Mercury) made his beverage—the beverage of knowledge or divine Kenning, the philosophical Mercury of the mediæval alchemists. Sometimes the Egg or Cup was encircled by two serpents said to represent the Igneous and Humid principles of Nature in conjunction: it is not improbable that the spirals found alike at Mykenae and New Grange represented this dual coil, spire, or maze of Life, and the Coil Dance or the Snail’s Creep, which was until recently executed in Cornwall, may have borne some relation to this notion.[987]

Fig. 482.—Entry to New Grange.

In the neighbourhood of Totnes and the river Teign is the world-famous Kent’s Cavern,[988] whence has emanated evidence that man was living in what is now Devonshire, contemporaneously with the mammoth, the cave-lion, the woolly rhinoceros, the bison, and other animals which are now extinct. Kent’s Cavern is in a hill, dun, tun, or what the Bretons term a torgen, and the torgen containing Kent’s Cavern is situated in the Manor of Torwood in the parish of Tor, whence Torbay, Torquay, etc.: in Cornwall tor, or tur, meant belly, and tor may be equated with door, Latin janua.

The entrance to Kent’s Hole is in the face of a cliff, and the people mentioned in the Old Testament as the Kenites were evidently cliff-cave dwellers, for it is related that Balaam looked on the Kenites and said: “Strong is thy dwelling-place, and thou puttest thy nest in a rock”:[989] Kent is the same word as kind, meaning genus; also as kind, meaning affectionate and well-disposed, and it is worthy of note that the cave-dwelling Kenites of the Old Testament were evidently a kindly people for the record reads: “Saul said unto the Kenites ‘Go, depart, get you down from among the Amalekites, lest I destroy you with them: for ye shewed kindness to all the children of Israel when they came up out of Egypt’.[990] So the Kenites departed from among the Amalekites.”[991]

There is evidence that Thor’s Cavern in Derbyshire was inhabited by prehistoric troglodites; the most high summit in the Peak District is named Kinder Scout, and in the southern side of Kinder Scout is the celebrated Kinderton Cavern: at Kinver in Staffordshire there are prehistoric caves still being lived in by modern troglodites, and at Cantal in France there are similar cave dwellings.

In Derbyshire are the celebrated Canholes and at Cannes, by Maestricht, is an entrance to the amazing grottos of St. Peter: this subterranean quarry is described as a succession of long horizontal galleries supported by an immense number of square pillars whose height is generally from 10 to 20 feet: the number of these vast subterranean alleys which cross each other and are prolonged in every direction cannot be estimated at less than 2000, the direct line from the built up entrance near Fort St. Peter to the exit on the side of the Meuse measures one league and a half. That these works were at one time in the occupation of the Romans, is proved by Latin inscriptions, but evidently the Romans did not do the building for, “underneath these inscriptions you can trace some ill-formed characters traditionally attributed to the Huns; which is ridiculous since the Huns did not build, and therefore had no need of quarries, and moreover were ignorant of the art of writing”.[992] In view of the fact that the gigantic cavern farther up the Meuse, is entitled the Han Grotto, this tradition of Hun “writing” is not necessarily ridiculous: the Huns in question, whoever they were, probably were the people who built the Hun’s beds and were worshippers of “the One Man and our Cauldron”.

The Peter Mount now under consideration does not appear to have been such a Peter’s Purgatory as found on “the island of the tribe of Oin”: on the contrary its galleries, based on pillars about 16 feet high, are traced on a regular plan. These cross one another at right angles, and their most noticeable feature is the extreme regularity and perfect level of the roof which is enriched with a kind of cornice—a cornice of the severest possible outline, but with a noble simplicity which gives to the galleries a certain monumental aspect.

Within the criss-cross bowels of the Peter Mount is another very remarkable curiosity—a small basin filled with water called Springbronnen (“source of living water”) which is incessantly renewed, thanks to the drops falling from the upper portion of a fossil tree fixed in the roof.[993] The modern showman does not vaunt among his attractions a “source of living water,” and we may reasonably assume that this appellation belongs to an older and more poetic age: the Hebrew for “fountain of living waters” is ain, a word to be connoted with Hun, Han, and St. Anne of the Catacombs: St. Anne is the patron of all springs and wells; at Sancreed is a St. Eunys Well, and the word aune or avon was a generic term for any gentle flowing stream.

It is reasonable to equate St. Anne of the Catacombs with “Pope Joan” of Engelheim, and it is probable that the original Vatican was the terrestrial seat of the celestial Peter, the Fate Queen or Fate King: with St. Peter’s Mount may be connoted the Arabian City of Petra which is entirely hewn out of the solid rock. The connection between the Irish Owen, or Oin, and the Patrick of Patrick’s Purgatory has already been considered, and that Janus or Janicula was the St. Peter of the Vatican is very generally admitted: we shall subsequently consider Janus in connection with St. Januarius or January; at Naples there are upwards of two miles of catacombs, and the Capo di Chino, under which these occur, may probably be identified with the St. Januarius whose name they bear.

Fig. 483.—Seventeenth Century Printer’s Mark.

That Janus, the janitor of the Gates of Heaven and of all other gates, was a personification of immortal Time is sufficiently obvious from the attributes which were assigned to him; that the Patrick of Ireland was also the Lord of the 365 days is to be implied from the statement of Nennius that St. Patrick “at the beginning” founded 365 churches and ordained 365 bishops.[994] I was recently accosted in the street by a North-Briton who inquired “what dame is it?”: on my failure to catch his meaning his companion pointed to my watch chain and repeated the inquiry “what time, is it”; but even without such vivid evidence it is clear that dame and time are mere variants of the same word. It is proverbial that Truth, alias Una, alias Vera, is the daughter of Time: that Time is also the custodian of Truth is a similar commonplace: Time is the same word as Tom, and Tom is a contracted form of Thomas which the dictionaries define as meaning twin, i.e., twain: Thomas is the same name as Tammuz, a Phrygian title of Adonis, and in Fig. 404 (ante, p. 639), Time was emblemised as the Twain or Pair; in Fig. 483, Father Time is identified with Veritas or Truth, for the legend runs, “Truth in time brings hidden things to light”.[995] The Lady Cynethryth, who dwells proverbially at the bottom of a well, is, of course, daily being brought to light; it is, however, unusual to find her thus depicted clambering from a dene hole or a den. In all probability the “Sir Thomas” who figures in the ballad as Fair Rosamond’s custodian was originally Sir Tammuz, Tom, or Time—

And you Sir Thomas whom I truste

To bee my loves defence,

Be careful of my gallant Rose

When I am parted hence.

The relentless Queen who appears so prominently in the story may be connoted with the cruel Stepmother who figures in the Cinderella cycle of tales—a ruthless lady whom I have considered elsewhere. The silken thread by which the Queen reached Rosamond—to whose foot, like Jupiter’s chain, it was attached—is paralleled by the thread with which Ariadne guided the fickle Theseus. In an unhappy hour the Queen overcomes the trusty Thomas, and guided by the silken thread—

Went where the Ladye Rosamonde

Was like an Angel sette.

But when the Queen with steadfast eye

Beheld her beauteous face

She was amazed in her minde

At her exceeding grace.

The word grace is the same as cross, and grace is the interpretation given by all dictionaries of the name John or Ian: the red cross was originally termed the Jack, and to the Jack, without doubt, was once assigned the meaning “Infinite in the East, Infinite in the West, Infinite in the South. Thus it is said, He who is in the fire, He who is in the heart, He who is in the Sun, they are One and the same:” in China the Svastika is known as the Wan.

FOOTNOTES:

[905] Walford, E., Greater London, ii., 95.

[906] Mottingham, anciently Modingham, is supposed to be from Saxon modig, proud or lofty, and ham, a dwelling. Johnstone derives it as, “Enclosure of Moding,” or “of the Sons of Mod or Mot”. We may assume these people were followers of the Maid, and that Mottingham was equivalent to Maiden’s Home.

[907] Mackenzie, D. A., Myths of Crete, p. xlvi.

[908] Borlase, Wm., Antiquities of Cornwall, p. 296.

[909] Cliff Castles, p. 33.

[910] Cf. Baring-Gould, Cliff Castles.

[911] Chislehurst is supposed to mean the pebble hurst or wood, but Chislehurst is on chalk and is less pebbly than many places adjacent: at Chislehurst is White Horse Hill: Nantjizzel or jizzle valley, in Cornwall, is close to Carn Voel, alias the Diamond House, and thus, I am inclined to think that Chislehurst was a selhurst or selli’s wood sacred to Chi the great Jehu.

[912] Adams, W. H. A., Famous Caves and Catacombs, p. 90.

[913] Spence L., Myths of Mexico and Peru, p. 293.

[914] In 1867 Mr. Roach Smith published the following description: “The ground plan of the caves was like a six-leaved flower diverging from the central cup which is represented by the shaft. The central cave of each three is about 14 yards long and about 6 yards high. The side caves are smaller, about 7 yards long and 2 yards wide. The section is rather singular: taken from end to end the roof line is horizontal: but the floor rises at the end of the cave so that a sketch of the section from end to end of the two principal caves is like the outline of a boat, the shaft being in the position of the mainmast. The section across the cave is like the outline of an egg made to stand on its broader end. They are all hewn out of the chalk, the tool marks, like those which would be made by a pick, being still visible.”—Archæologia, i., 32.

Dr. Munro states: “They are usually found on the higher ground of the lower reaches of the Thames ... in fact, North Kent and South Essex appear to be studded with them.”—Prehistoric Britain, p. 222.

[915] Nat. Hist., lib. xvii., cap. viii.

[916] Part I.

[917] One of the most characteristic symbols of the Ægean is St. Andrew’s Cross: I have suggested that the Scotch Hendrie meant ancient drie or drew, and it is not without significance that tradition closely connects St. Andrews in Scotland with the Ægean. The legend runs that St. Rule arrived at St. Andrews bringing with him a precious relic—no less than Sanct Androwis Arme. “This Reule,” continues the annalist, “was ane monk of Grece born in Achaia and abbot in the town of Patras”—Simpkins, J. E., Fife, Country Folklore, vol. vli., p. 243.

[918] The Gnostics and their Remains, p. 72.

[919] “It is certain that ancient caves do exist in Palestine which in form and circumstance, and to some extent also in decoration, approximate so nearly to the Royston Cave that if any historical connection could be established between them, it would scarcely seem doubtful that the one is a copy of the other.”—Beldam, J., The Royston Cave, p. 24. According to the same authority there are indications at the Royston Cave “of an extreme and primeval antiquity,” and he adds, “it bears, indeed, a strong resemblance in form and dimension to the ancient British habitation; and certain marks and decorations in its oldest parts such as indentations and punctures, giving a diapered appearance to the surface, are very similar to what is seen in confessedly Druidical and Phœnician structures,” p. 22.

[920] Beldam, J., The Royston Cave, p. 24.

[921] In Caledonia dovecots or doocats are still superstitiously maintained: there may be a connection between doocat and the “Dowgate” Hill which neighbours the present Cathedral of St. Paul.

[922] Nichols, W. J., The Chislehurst Caves and Dene Holes, p. 5.

[923] Walford, E., Greater London, ii., 127.

[924] Ibid., p. 131.

[925] Goddard, A. R., Essex Archæological Society’s Transactions, vol. vii., 1899.

[926] Courtois, Dictionaire Geographique de l’Arrondissement de Saint Omer, p. 156.

[927] Wilson, J. G., Gazetteer, i., 1044.

[928] Eckenstein, L., Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes, p. 154.

[929] Dan or Don is one of the main European root river names; it occurs notably in the story of the Danaides who carried water in broken urns to fill a bottomless vessel, and again in Danaus who is said to have relieved Argos from drought.

[930] P. 242.

[931] Herbert, A., Cyclops, p. 154.

[932] Wright, T., Patrick’s Purgatory, p. 162.

[933] Ibid., p. 231.

[934] Travels in the East, p. 2.

[935] “This was the round church of St. Mary, divided into two stories by slabs of stone; in the upper part are four altars; on the eastern side below there is another, and to the right of it an empty tomb of stone, in which the Virgin Mary is said to have been buried; but who moved her body, or when this took place, no one can say. On entering this chamber, you see on the right-hand side a stone inserted in the wall, on which Christ knelt when He prayed on the night in which He was betrayed; and the marks of His knees are still seen on the stone, as if it had been as soft as wax.”

[936] Wright comments upon this: “Dr. Clarke is the only modern traveller who has given any notice of these subterranean chambers or pits, which he supposes to have been ancient places of idolatrous worship”.

[937] Cf. Baring-Gould, Curious Legends, p. 238.

[938] Mysteries of the Cabiri, ii., 393.

[939] Cf. Herbert, A., Cyclops, p. 155.

[940] Ibid., p. 154.

[941] It is not improbable that the Pied Piper incident was actually enacted annually at the Koppenburg, and that the children of Hamelyn were given the treat of being taken through some brilliantly lit cavern “joining the town and close at hand”. Whether the Koppenburg contains any grottos I am unable to say.

[942] Cyclops, p. 156.

[943] The authorities connect the surnames Kettle and Chettle with the Kettle or Cauldron of Norse mythology, whence Prof. Weekley writes: “The renowned Captain Kettle, described by his creator as a Welshman, must have descended from some hardy Norse pirate”. Why Norse? The word kettle, Gaelic cadhal, is supposedly borrowed from the Latin catillus, a small bowl: the Greek for cup is kotulos, and it is probable that kettle and cotyledon are alike radically Ket, Cot, or Cad. In Scotland adhan meant cauldron, whence Rust thinks that Edinbro or Dunedin was once a cauldron hill.

[944] Sandringham, near King’s Lynn, appeared in Domesday as Sandersincham: upon this Johnston comments, “Curious corruption. This is ‘Holy Dersingham, as compared with the next parish Dersingham. French saint, Latin sanctus, Holy.”

[945] Ogilvie, J. S., A Pilgrimage in Surrey, ii., 183.

[946] Ibid., p. 166.

[947] Ibid., p. 167. The italics are mine.

[948] “The old Bourne stream, generally known as the ‘Surrey Woe Water,’ has already commenced to flow through Caterham Valley, and at the moment there is quite a strong current of water rushing through an outlet at Purley.

“There are also pools along its course through Kenley, Whyteleafe, and Warlingham, which suggest that the stream is rising at its principal source, in the hills around Woldingham and Oxted, where it is thought there exists a huge natural underground reservoir, which, when full, syphons itself out at certain periods about every seven years.

“Tradition says that when the Bourne flows ‘out of season’ or at irregular times it foretells some great calamity. It certainly made its appearance in a fairly heavy flow in three of the years of the war, but last year, which will always be historical for the declaration of the armistice and the prelude of peace, there was no flow at all.”—The Star, 15th March, 1919.

[949] “Archæologia” (from The Gentleman’s Magazine), i., 283.

[950] Cf. Johnson, W., Byeways, pp. 411, 417.

[951] Ogilvy, J. S., A Pilgrimage in Surrey, ii., 164.

[952] That the solar horse was sacred among the Ganganoi of Hibernia is probable, for: “On that great festival of the peasantry, St. John’s Eve, it is the custom, at sunset on that evening, to kindle immense fires throughout the country, built like our bonfires, to a great height, the pile being composed of turf, bogwood, and such other combustibles as they can gather. The turf yields a steady, substantial body of fire, the bogwood a most brilliant flame: and the effect of these great beacons blazing on every hill, sending up volumes of smoke from every part of the horizon, is very remarkable. Early in the evening the peasants began to assemble, all habited in their best array, glowing with health, every countenance full of that sparkling animation and excess of enjoyment that characterise the enthusiastic people of the land. I had never seen anything resembling it: and was exceedingly delighted with their handsome, intelligent, merry faces; the bold bearing of the men, and the playful, but really modest deportment of the maidens; the vivacity of the aged people, and the wild glee of the children. The fire being kindled, a splendid blaze shot up; and for a while they stood contemplating it, with faces strangely disfigured by the peculiar light first emitted when the bogwood is thrown on. After a short pause, the ground was cleared in front of an old blind piper, the very beau-ideal of energy, drollery, and shrewdness, who, seated on a low chair, with a well-plenished jug within his reach, screwed his pipes to the liveliest tunes and the endless jig began.

“But something was to follow that puzzled me not a little. When the fire burned for some hours, and got low, an indispensable part of the ceremony commenced. Every one present of the peasantry passed through it, and several children were thrown across the sparkling embers; while a wooden frame of some 8 feet long, with a horse’s head fixed to one end, and a large white sheet thrown over it, concealing the wood and the man on whose head it was carried, made its appearance. This was greeted with loud shouts as the ‘white horse’; and having been safely carried by the skill of its bearer several times through the fire with a bold leap, it pursued the people, who ran screaming and laughing in every direction. I asked what the horse was meant for, and was told it represented all cattle.

“Here was the old pagan worship of Baal, if not of Moloch too, carried on openly and universally in the heart of a nominally Christian country, and by millions professing the Christian name! I was confounded; for I did not then know that Popery is only a crafty adaptation of pagan idolatries to its own scheme; and while I looked upon the now wildly excited people, with their children and, in a figure, all their cattle passing again and again through the fire, I almost questioned in my own mind the lawfulness of the spectacle, considered in the light that the Bible must, even to the natural heart, exhibit it in to those who confess the true God.”—Elizabeth, Charlotte, Personal Recollections, quoted from “S. M.” Sketches of Irish History, 1845.

[953] The Religion of Ancient Britain, p. 28.

[954] Prehistoric London, p. 137.

[955] Man the Primeval Savage, p. 328.

[956] Ibid., p. 66.

[957] Archæologia, i., 29.

[958] Le donseil probably here means donsol, or lord sun. Adonis and all the other Sun lords were supposed to have beep born in a cave on 25th December. We have seen that Michael’s Mount (family name St. Levan), was known alternatively as dinsol.

[959] Adams, W. H. D., Famous Caves and Catacombs, p. 183.

[960] Ægean Archæologia, p. 156.

[961] Mr. and Mrs. Hawes, Crete the Forerunner of Greece, p. 65.

[962] Myths of Crete and Pre-Hellenic Europe, p. 183.

[963] “Herodotus in Book VIII. says that the ancients worshipped the Gods and Genii of any place under the form of serpents. ‘Set up,’ says some one in Persius’ Satires (No. 1), ‘some marks of reverence such as the painting of two serpents to let boys know that the place is sacred.’”—Seymour, F., Up Hill and Down Dale in Ancient Etruria, p. 237.

[964] Johnson, W., Byways, p. 304.

[965] Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, 1869.

[966] MacKenzie, D. A., Myths of Crete, p. 138.

[967] Light of Britannia, p. 200.

[968]Cf. Percy Reliques (Everyman’s Library), p. 21.

[969] The Baron’s Cave at Reigate is “about 150 feet long” (ante, p. 799).

[970] Percy Reliques, p. 20.

[971] Hawes, Crete the Forerunner of Greece, p. 125.

[972] The Cornish Riviera, p. 265.

[973] H. O. F., St. George for England, p. 15.

[974] A Pilgrimage in Surrey, ii., 177.

[975] At Bristol is White Lady’s Road.

[976] The curious name Newlove occurs as one of the erstwhile owners of the Margate grotto: the Lovelace family, for whose name the authorities offer no suggestions except that it is a corruption of the depressing Loveless, probably either once worshipped or acted the Lovelass. This conjecture has in its favour the fact that “many of our surnames are undoubtedly derived from characters assumed in dramatic performances and popular festivities”.—Weekley, A. B., The Romance of Names, p. 197. “To this class belong many surnames which have the form of abstract nouns, e.g., charity, verity, virtue, vice. Of similar origin are perhaps, bliss, chance, luck, and goodluck.”—Ibid., p. 197.

[977] With the old English custom of burying the dead in roses, and with the tradition that at times a white lady with a red rose in her mouth used to appear at Pendeen cave (Courtney, Miss M. L., Cornish Feasts and Folklore, p. 9), in Cornwall may be connoted the statement of Bunsen: “The Phœnicians had a grand flower show in which they hung chaplets and bunches of roses in their temples, and on the statue of the goddess Athena which is only a feminine form of Then or Thorn” (cf. Theta, The Thorn Tree, p. 40). The probability is that not only was the rose sacred to Athene but that Danes Elder (Sambucus ebulus), and Danes flower (Anemone pulsutilla) had no original reference to the Danes, but to the far older Dane, or donna, the white Lady. Both don and dan are used in English, as the equivalent of dominus, whence Shakespeare’s reference to Dan Cupid.

[978] Adams, W. H. D., Famous Caves and Catacombs, p. 177.

[979] Davidson, P., The Mistletoe and its Philosophy, p. 51.

[980] The term Christ is interpreted as “the anointed”.

[981] Akerman, J. Y., Ancient Coins, p. 25.

[982] We shall consider Robin Hood whom the authorities already equate with Odin in a subsequent chapter. In Robin Hood’s Cave have been discovered remains of paleolithic Art representing a horse’s head. In Kent the ceremony of the Hooden Horse used until recently to survive, and the same Hood or Odin may possibly be responsible for “Woodstock”.

[983] Crutched Friars in London marks the site of a priory of the freres of the Crutch or Crouch.

[984] The Sancreed chalice may be connoted ideally and philologically with the Sangraal, Provençal gradal: the apparition of a child in connection with the graal or gradal also permits the equation gradal = cradle. At Llandudno is the stone entitled cryd Tudno, i.e., the cradle of Tudno.

[985] Cyclops, p. 137

[986] The Mistletoe and its Philosophy, p. 31.

[987] “The young people being all assembled in a large meadow, the village band strikes up a simple but lively air, and marches forward, followed by the whole assemblage, leading hand-in-hand (or more closely linked in case of engaged couples) the whole keeping time to the tune with a lively step. The band or head of the serpent keeps marching in an ever-narrowing circle, whilst its train of dancing followers becomes coiled around it in circle after circle. It is now that the most interesting part of the dance commences, for the band, taking a sharp turn about, begins to retrace the circle, still followed as before, and a number of young men with long, leafy branches in their hands as standards, direct this counter-movement with almost military precision.”—Cf. Courtney, Miss M. L., Cornish Feasts and Folklore, p. 39.

[988] The name Kent here appears to be of immemorial antiquity, and was apparently first printed in a 1769 map which shows “Kent’s Hole Field”.

[989] Num. xxiv. 21.

[990] In modern Egyptian kunjey means kinship.

[991] 1 Sam. xv. 6.

[992] Adam, W. H. D., Famous Caves and Catacombs, p. 167.

[993] Adams, W. H. D., Famous Caves and Catacombs, p. 163.

[994] Usher, Dr. J., A Discourse on the Religion Anciently Professed by the Irish and British, p. 77.

[995] At the foot of this emblem the designer has introduced an intreccia or Solomon’s knot between his initials R. S.

CONCLUSIONS

“I can affirm that I have brought it from an utter darknesse to a thin mist, and have gonne further than any man before me.”—John Aubrey.

“But for my part I freely declare myself at a loss what to say to things so much obscured by their distant antiquity; and you, when you read these conjectures, will plainly perceive that I have only groped in the dark.”—Camden.

Fig. 484.—From Mythology of the Celtic Races (Rolleston, T. W.).

Fig. 485.—Ibid.

One may perhaps get a further sidelight on the marvellous labyrinthic cave temples of the ancients by a reference to the so-called worm-knots or cup-and-ring markings on cromlechs and menhirs. With regard to these sculptures Mr. T. W. Rolleston writes: “Another singular emblem, upon the meaning of which no light has yet been thrown, occurs frequently in connection with megalithic monuments. The accompanying illustrations show examples of it. Cup-shaped hollows are made in the surface of the stone, these are often surrounded with concentric rings, and from the cup one or more radial lines are drawn to a point outside the circumference of the rings. Occasionally a system of cups are joined by these lines, but more frequently they end a little way outside the widest of the rings. These strange markings are found in Great Britain and Ireland, in Brittany, and at various places in India, where they are called mahadeos. I have also found a curious example—for such it appears to be—in Dupaix’ Monuments of New Spain. It is reproduced in Lord Kingsborough’s Antiquities of Mexico, vol. lv. On the circular top of a cylindrical stone, known as the Triumphal Stone, is carved a central cup, with nine concentric circles round it, and a duct or channel cut straight from the cup through all the circles to the rim. Except that the design here is richly decorated and accurately drawn, it closely resembles a typical European cup-and-ring marking. That these markings mean something, and that wherever they are found they mean the same thing, can hardly be doubted, but what that meaning is remains yet a puzzle to antiquarians. The guess may perhaps be hazarded that they are diagrams or plans of a megalithic sepulchre. The central hollow represents the actual burial-place. The circles are the standing stones, fosses, and ramparts which often surrounded it: and the line or duct drawn from the centre outwards represents the subterranean approach to the sepulchre. The apparent avenue intention of the duct is clearly brought out in the varieties given herewith, which I take from Simpson. As the sepulchre was also a holy place or shrine, the occurrence of a representation of it among other carvings of a sacred character is natural enough; it would seem symbolically to indicate that the place was holy ground. How far this suggestion might apply to the Mexican example I am unable to say.”[996]

Mr. Rolleston is partially right in his idea that the designs are as it were ground plans of monuments, but that theory merely carries the point a step backward and the question remains—Why were monuments constructed in so involved and seemingly absurd a form? I hazard the conjecture that the Triumphal Stone with its central cup and nine concentric circles was a symbol of Life, and of the nine months requisite for the production of Human Life; that the duct or channel straight from the cup through all the circles to the rim implied the mystery of creation; and that the seemingly senseless meander of long passages was intended as a representation of the maw or stomach. That the Druids were practised physiologists is deducible from the complaint made against one of them, that he had dissected 600 bodies: the ancient anatomists might quite reasonably have traced Life to a germ or cell lying within a mazy and seemingly unending coil of viscera: we know that auguries were drawn from the condition of the entrails of sacrificial victims, whence originally the entrails were in all probability regarded as the seat of Life. Mahadeo, the Indian term for a worm-knot or cup-marking, resolves as it stands into maha, great; and deo, Goddess: our English word maw, meaning stomach, is evidently allied to the Hebrew moi, meaning bowels; with moeder, the Dutch for womb, may be connoted Mitra or Mithra, and perhaps Madura. It is well known that the chief Festival celebrated in the Indian cave temples at Madura and elsewhere is associated with the lingam, or emblem of sex, and it may be assumed that the invariable sixfold form of the Kentish dene holes was connected in some way with sex worship. The word six is for some reason, which I am unable to surmise, identical with the word sex: the Chaldees—who were probably not unconnected with the “pure Culdees” of Caledonia—taught that Man, male and female, was formed upon the sixth day: Orpheus calls the number six, “Father of the celestial and mortal powers,” and, says Davidson, “these considerations are derived from the doctrine of Numbers which was highly venerated by the Druids”.[997] Six columbas centring in the womb of the Virgin Mary were illustrated on page 790, and it will probably prove that columba meant holy womb, just as culver seemingly meant holy ovary.

Figs. 486 to 491.—Paper-marked Mediæval Emblems, Showing the Combination of Serpent, Circle, and Six Lobes. From Les Filigranes (Briquet, C. M.).

Figs. 492 to 502.—Paper-marked Mediæval Emblems, Showing Circle and Serpent “like the intestines”. From Les Filigranes (Briquet, C.M.).

The sixfold marigold or wheel was used not infrequently as an emblem during the Middle Ages: in Fig. 504—a mediæval paper-mark—this design is sanctified by a cross, and the centre of Fig. 486 consists of the circle and Serpent. Figs. 492 to 502 exhibit further varieties of this circle and Serpent design—the symbol of fructifying Life—and some of these examples bear a curious resemblance to the twists and convolutions of the entrails. In Egypt, Apep, the Giant Serpent, was said to have—“resembled the intestines”:[998] the word Apep is apparently related to pepsis, the Greek for digestion, as likewise to our pipe, meaning a long tube.

Fig. 503

Prof. Elliot Smith, who has recently published some lectures entitled The Evolution of the Dragon, sums up his conclusions as follows: “The dragon was originally a concrete expression of the divine powers of life-giving; but with the development of a higher conception of religious ideals it became relegated to a baser rôle, and eventually became the symbol of the powers of evil”.[999] I have elsewhere illustrated a mediæval dragon-mark which was sanctified by a cross, and it is a highly remarkable fact that the papermakers of the Middle Ages were evidently au fait with the ancient meaning of this sign. Several of their multifarious serpent designs are associated with the small circle or pearl, in which connection it is noteworthy that not only had pearls the reputation of being givers of Life, but that margan, the ancient Persian word for pearl, is officially interpreted as meaning mar, “giver,” and gan, “life”. This word, says Prof. Elliot Smith, has been borrowed in all the Turanian languages ranging from Hungary to Kamchatka, also in the non-Turanian speech of Western Asia, thence through Greek and Latin (margarita) to European languages.[1000] The Persian gan, in Zend yan, seeming corresponds to the European John, or Ian; and it is evident that Figs. 486 to 491 might justly be termed marguerites.

One of the most favourite decorations amongst Cretan artists is the eight-limbed octopus, and it is believed that the Mykenian volute or spiral is a variant of this emblem. According to Prof. Elliot Smith the evidence provided by Minoan paintings, and Mykenian decorative art, demonstrates that the spiral as a symbol of life-giving was definitely derived from the octopus.[1001] Other authorities believe that the octopus symbolised “the fertilising watery principle,” and that the svastika is a conventionalised form of this creature. In the light of these considerations it would thus seem highly probable that the knot, maze, Troy Town, or trou town, primarily was emblematic of the Maze or Womb of Life, conceived either physically or etherially in accord with the spirit of the time and people.

There is a certain amount of testimony to the fact that the Druids taught and worshipped within caves, and there is some reason to suppose that the Druids had a knowledge, not only of the lense, telescope, or Speculum of the Pervading Glance, but also of gunpowder, for Lucan, writing of a grove near Marseilles, remarks: “There is a report that the grove is often shaken and strangely moved, and that dreadful sounds are heard from its caverns; and that it is sometimes in a blaze without being consumed”. That abominations were committed in these eerie places I do not doubt: that animals were maintained in them there is good reason to suppose; and in all probability the story of the Cretan Minotaur, to whom Athenian youths were annually sacrificed, was based on a certain amount of fact. The Bull being the symbol of life and fecundity, there would have been peculiar propriety in maintaining a bull or toro, Celtic tarw, within the trou, labyrinth, or maze of life: upon two of the British coins here illustrated the Mithraic Bull appears in combination with an intreccia. The colossal labyrinths built in Egypt to the honour of the sacred toro are well known: in Europe remains of the horse are constantly discovered within caves,[1002] and it is a cognate fact that in Mexico a tapir—the nearest approach Mexico could seemingly show to a horse—was maintained in the subterranean temple of the god Votan.

Figs. 504 to 506.—British. From Akerman.

This Votan of South America is an interesting personality: according to the native traditions of the Chiapenese Indians—there was once a man named Votan, who was the grandson of the man who built the ark to save himself and family from the Deluge. Votan was ordered by the Lord to people America and “He came from the East” bringing with him seven families: Votan, we are further told, was of the race of Chan, and built a city in America named Nachan, after Chan his family name. The name Votan is seemingly a variant of Wotan, the Scandinavian All Father, and also of Wootton, which is a common Kentish family name: Wotan of Wednesday was, it is believed, once widely worshipped in Kent, notably at Woodnesborough, which is particularly associated with the tradition: on Christmas Eve Thanet used to celebrate a festival called Hoodening which consisted of decorating either the skull of a horse, or the wooden figure of a horse’s head, which then was perambulated on a pole by a man hidden beneath a sheet.[1003]

In Central America chan meant serpent, in which connection it is noteworthy that in Scandinavian mythology Wotan presides over the great world snake coiled at the roots of the mighty Ash Tree, named Iggdrasil. This word may, I think, be resolved into igg dra sil, or High Tree Holy, and the Ash of our innumerable Ashdowns, Ashtons, Ashleys, Ashursts, etc., may in all probability be equated not only with aes, the Welsh for tree, but also with oes, the Welsh for life. That Janus, whose coin was entitled the as, was King As has already been suggested, and that As or Ash[1004] was Odin is hardly open to doubt. According to Borlase (W. C.): “There is reason to believe that the Sun was a principal divinity worshipped under the name of Fal, Phol, Bel, Beli, Balor, and Balder, all synonymous terms in the comparative mythology of the Germanic peoples whether Celtic or Teutonic in speech. A curious passage in Johannes Cornubiensis permits us to equate this deity with Asch or As, one name of Odin. The more deeply we study this portion of the subject the more certain becomes the identity of the members of the pantheon of the two western branches of the Aryan-speaking peoples.”[1005]

The word Kent or Cantium is, I think, connected with Candia, but whether Votan of the race of Chan came from Candia, Cantium, or Scandinavia is a discussion which must be reserved for a subsequent volume: it is sufficient here to note in passing that one-third of the language of the Mayas is said to be pure Greek, whence the question has very pertinently been raised, “Who brought the dialect of Homer to America? or who took to Greece that of the Mayas?”

It is now well known that there was communication between the East and West long before America was rediscovered by Columbus, and there is nothing therefore improbable in the Chiapenese tradition that their Votan, after settling affairs in the West, visited Spain and Rome. The legend relates that Votan “went by the road which his brethren, the Culebres, had bored,” these Culebres being presumably either the inhabitants of Calabar in Africa now embraced in the Niger Protectorate, or of Calabria, the southernmost province of Italy. The allusion to a road which the Culebres had bored might be dismissed as a fiction were it not for the curious fact mentioned by Livingstone that tribes lived underground in Rua: “Some excavations are said to be thirty miles long and have running rills in them; a whole district can stand a siege in them. The ‘writings’ therein I have been told by some of the people are drawings of animals and not letters, otherwise I should have gone to see them.” The primitive but, in many respects, advanced culture of Mykenae and of Troy does not seem to have possessed the art of writing, and contemporary ideas must thus necessarily have been expressed by symbols akin to the multifarious animal-hieroglyphics of ancient Candia: it would even seem possible that the writings of underground Rua were parallel to the records of Egypt alleged in the following passage: “It is affirmed that the Egyptian priests, versed in all the branches of religious knowledge, and apprised of the approach of the Deluge, were fearful lest the divine worship should be effaced from the memory of man. To preserve the memory of it, therefore, they dug in various parts of the kingdom subterranean winding passages, on the walls of which they engraved their knowledge, under different forms of animals and birds, which they call hieroglyphics, and which are unintelligible to the Romans.”[1006]

The existence of underground ways seems to be not infrequent in Africa, for Captain Grant, who accompanied Captain Speke in his exploration for the source of the Nile, tells of a colossal tunnel or subway bored under the river Kaoma. Grant asked his native guide whether he had ever seen anything like it elsewhere and the guide replied, “This country reminds me of what I saw in the country to the south of Lake Tanganyika”: he then described a tunnel or subway under another river named also Kaoma, a tunnel so lengthy that it took the caravan from sunrise to noon to pass through. This was said to be so lofty that if mounted upon camels the top could not be touched: “Tall reeds the thickness of a walking-stick grew inside; the road was strewed with white pebbles, and so wide—400 yards—that they could see their way tolerably well while passing through it. The rocks looked as if they had been planed by artificial means.” The guide added that the people of Wambeh Lake shelter in this tunnel,[1007] and live there with their families and cattle.[1008]

In view of these Rider-Haggard-like facts it is unnecessary to discredit the tradition that the South American Votan of the tribe of Chan visited his kinsmen the Culebres, by the road which the Culebres had bored. The journey is said to have taken place in the year 3000 of the world or 1000 B.C., and among the spots alleged to have been visited was the city of Rome where Votan “saw the house of God building”. It is well known that great cities almost invariably exhibit traces of previous cities on the same site: Schliemann’s excavations at Troy proved the pre-existence of a succession of cities on the site of Troy, and the same fact has recently been established at Seville and elsewhere. The city of Rome is famous for a labyrinth of catacombs, the building of which has always been a mystery: the catacombs abound in pagan emblems, and it is, I believe, now generally supposed that they are of pre-Christian origin.

A correspondent of Notes and Queries suggested in 1876 that the Roman Catacombs were the work of the prehistoric Cimmerii who notoriously dwelt in subterraneis domiciliis. The rocks of the Crimea, notably at Inkerman, are honeycombed with caverns; in fact the burrowing proclivities of the Kymbri are proverbialised in the expression “Cimmerian darkness”. The same correspondent of Notes and Queries[1009] further drew attention to the remarkable fact that in the year 1770 coal mining operations in Ireland, at Fair Head, near The Giant’s Causeway, disclosed prehistoric quarryings together with stone hammers “of the rudest and most ancient form”. It is difficult to believe that prehistoric man, surrounded by inexhaustible supplies of fuel in the form of forest and peat, found it necessary to mine, with his poor implements, for coal fuel, and the description of the supposedly prehistoric mine—“wrought in the most expert manner, the chambers regularly dressed and pillars left at proper intervals to support the roof”—arouses not only a strong suspicion that the souterrain in question was actually a shrine, but also that the place-name Antrim—where these quarryings occur—may be connected with antre, a cave. When the Fair Head labyrinth was accidentally disclosed we are told that two lads were sent forward who soon found themselves in “numerous apartments in the mazes and windings of which they were completely bewildered and were finally extricated, not without some difficulty”.

With Joun of Etruria, and Janus of Janicula may be connoted the Ogane of Africa, whose toe, like that of Peter, was reverently kissed: that Northern Africa, Etruria, and Dodona were once peopled by a kindred race is one of the commonplaces of anthropology, and these Iberian people are, I think, traceable not only in Britain and Hibernia, but in the actual names Berat, Britain, Aparica (now Africa), Barbary, Berber or Barabbra, Epirus, Hebrew, Culebre, Calabria, and Celtiberia. Tacitus, who describes the ancient Britons as being dark complexioned and curly haired, adds: “that portion of Spain in front of Britain encourages the belief that the ancient Iberians had come over and colonised this district—the Gauls took possession of the adjacent coast”. According to Huxley and Laing the aboriginal inhabitants of Caledonia were from—“the great Iberian family, the same stock as the Berbers of North Africa”:[1010] the prehistoric inhabitants of Wales similarly belonged to the Iberian stock and—“no other race of men existed in Wales until the neolithic period”.[1011]

In Cornwall the persisting Iberian type is popularly supposed to be the offspring of Spanish sailors wrecked at the time of the Armada, but this theory is not countenanced by anthropologists. Speaking of the short natives of the Hebridean island of Barra—a significant name—Campbell, in his West Highland Tales, observes: “Behind the fire sat a girl with one of these strange foreign faces which are occasionally to be seen in the Western Isles, a face which reminded me of the Nineveh sculptures, and of faces seen in St. Sebastian. Her hair was as black as night, her clear eyes glittered through the peat smoke. Her complexion was dark and her features so unlike those who sat about her, that I asked if she were a native of the island, and learned that she was a Highland girl.”

Whether this Barra maiden was a persistent type of Hebrew may be questioned: she was certainly not Mongolian, the other great family whose traces still persist here. The Hebrews traditionally came from Candia, and the Candians or Cretans are universally described as diminutive and dark-haired: according to Prof. Keith the typical Bronze Age man was narrow-faced, round-headed, handsome, and about 5 feet 8 inches in height. “It is curious,” he says, “that men of this type are playing leading parts in large proportion to the number living.”

The antithesis to the round-headed Gael, and the oval-headed Cynbro is the square-headed Teuton, Finn, or Mongol. While the Cretan was essentially creative and artistic, we are told on the other hand that “it must always be remembered that the Phœnicians were only intermediaries and created no art of their own”.[1012] The same verity is still curiously true of the modern Jew who almost invariably is an intermediary, rarely if ever a producer: neither in Caledonia, Cambria, or Hibernia does one often find a Jewish nose, and the craftsmen-artists of the primeval world were, I think, not the Jews of Tyre, but the older Jous of Candia or Crete. In the name Drew, translated to have meant skilful, we have apparently a true tradition of the Jous of Cornwall and the Jous of Droia, or Troy.

It is presumably the Mongolian influence in Prussia, the home of the square-headed, that justified Matthew Arnold in writing: “The universal dead-level of plainness and homeliness, the lack of all beauty and distinction in form and feature, the slowness and clumsiness of the language, the eternal beer, sausages, and bad tobacco, the blank commonness everywhere pressing at last like a weight on the spirits of the traveller in Northern Germany, and making him impatient to be gone—this is the weak side, the industry, the well-doing, the patient, steady elaboration of things, the idea of science governing all departments of human activity—this is the strong side; and through this side of her genius, Germany has already obtained excellent results.”

The unimaginative and plodding German is the antithesis to the impressionable, poetic, and romantic Celt, as probably were the loathed Magogei to the chic Cretans whose national characteristics are commemorated in their frescoes and vases. I have already suggested that the same antipathies existed between the ugsome Mongolians and the swarthy slim Iberians of Epirus or Albania. Descendants of both Mongolians and Jous undoubtedly exist to-day in Britain, particularly in Cornwall, where Dr. Beddoe notes and comments upon the slanting Ugrian or Mongolian eye. The same authority observes that anthropologists had long been calling out for the remains of an Iberian, or pre-Celtic, language in the British Isles before their philological brethren awoke to the consciousness of their existence. “Mongolian or Ugrian types have been recognised though less distinctly; and now Ugrian grammatical forms are being dimly discerned in the Welsh and Irish languages.”[1013] In Ireland only two Iberian words are known to have survived, one of which, as we have seen, was fern, meaning anything good. In view of the fact that the Celtiberians were also known as Virones,[1014] and as the Berones (these last named neighbouring the Pyrenees), it would seem possible that the Iberians were the Hibernians, and had originally a first-class reputation. As already noted our records state of Prydain, the son of Aedd, that before his advent there was little gentleness in Britain, and only a superiority in oppression.

It is probable that the Iberians were the original builders of barrows, and the excavators of the stupendous burrows, found from Burmah to Peru, and from Aparica to Barra: in which direction the Iberian culture flowed it would be premature at present to discuss, but the question will ultimately be settled by an exercise of the perfectly sound canon of etymology, that in comparing two words a and b belonging to the same language, of which a contains a lesser number of syllables, a must be taken to be a more original word unless there be evidence of contractions or other corruption. The theory of a generation ago that our innumerable British monosyllables are testimonies of phonetic decay is probably as false as many similar notions that have recently been relegated to limbo. In a paroxysm of enthusiasm for the German-made Science of Language, and for the theory that sound etymology has nothing to do with sound, one of the disciples of Max Müller has observed that unless every letter in a modern word can be scientifically accounted for according to rule the derivation and definition cannot be accepted. The Dictionaries now prove that spelling was a whimsical, temporary, shallow thing, and it will, I am confident, be an accepted axiom in the future that “Language begins with voice, language ends with voice”. If the present book fails to add any weight to this dictum of Latham the evidence is none the less everywhere, and is merely awaiting the shaping hand of a stronger, more competent, and more influential workman than the present writer.

Whether or not the radicals I have used will prove to be chips of Iberian speech remains to be further tested, but in any case, the official contention that the language we speak to-day is, “of course, in no sense native to England but was brought thither by the German tribes who conquered the island in the fifth and sixth centuries”[1015] may be confidently impugned: Prof. Smith is, however, doubtless correct in his statement that when our Anglo-Saxon ancestors came first to ravage Britain, and finally to settle there, they found the island inhabited by a people “weaker, indeed, but infinitely more civilised than themselves”.

The present essay will not have been published in vain if to any extent it discredits the dull contempt in which our traditions and ancient coinage are now held; still less if it negatives the offensive supposition that England was “the one purely German nation which arose out of the wreck of Rome,” and that practically all our English place-names are of German origin.

On re-reading my MSS. in as far as possible a detached and impartial spirit, there would appear to be much prima facie evidence in favour of the traditional belief that these islands once possessed a very ancient culture, and that the Kimbri, or followers of Brute, were originally pirates or adventurers who reached these shores “over the hazy sea from the summer country which is called Deffrobani, that is where Constantinoblys now stands”.[1016] Constantinople—originally the Greek colony of Byzantium—is the city nearest the site of Troy; Ægean influences have long been recognised in Britain, and the accepted theory is that these influences penetrated overland via Gaul. This supposition seems, however, to be strikingly negatived in a fact noted recently by Prof. Macalister, who, speaking of the spiral decoration found alike at Mykenae and New Grange, observes: “But spirals cannot travel through the air; they must be depicted on some portable object in order to find their way from Orchomenos to the neighbourhood of Drogheda. The lines of the trade routes connecting these distant places ought to be peppered with objects of late Minoan Art-bearing spirals. Even a few painted potsherds would be sufficient. But there is no such thing. The media through which the spiral patterns were ex hypothesi carried to the north have totally disappeared.”[1017] We have seen a similar lack of connective evidence in the case of the British spearhead, which seemingly either evolved independently in this country, or was brought hither by sea from the Ægean.

With regard to Celtic and Ægean spiral decoration, Prof. Macalister writes: “People in the cultural stage of the builders of New Grange do not cultivate Art for Art’s sake. Some simple religious or magical significance must lie hidden in these patterns.... Therefore, if we are to suppose that the barbarians acquired the spiral patterns from the Ægean merchants we must once more postulate the enthusiastic trading missionary who taught them how to draw spirals in the intervals of business. I, for one, cannot believe in that engaging altruist. I prefer to believe that the spirals at New Grange are not derived from the Ægean at all, but that they are an independent growth.”[1018]

The Trojans were proverbially a pious race, and personally I should prefer the theory of enthusiastic (sea) trading missionaries to the painfully overworked hypothesis of independent growth.

According to Mr. Donald A. Mackenzie the process of developing symbols from natural objects can be traced even in the Paleolithic Age:[1019] the earliest town at Troy which was built in the Neolithic Age existed on a hillock and has been likened to the ubiquitous hill fort of Caledonia; seemingly Troy was originally a Dunhill and it was not until about 2500 B.C. that the original hillock, dunhill, or Athene Hill,[1020] was levelled. It is a most remarkable fact that, according to Prof. Virchow, “the few skulls which were saved out of the lower cities have this in common, that without exception they present the character of a more civilised people: all savage peculiarities in the stricter sense are entirely wanting in them”.[1021] So far, then, as the testimony of anthropology carries weight, the Trojan fell from a high state of grace, and neolithic Man was quite as capable of the fair humanities as any modern Doctor of Divinity.

If, as I now suggest, the Iberians, the Hebrews, and the British or Kimbry were originally one and the same race, and if, as I further suggest, fragments of the “British” language are recoverable, it follows that the same words will unlock doors in every direction where Iberian or Kimbrian influence permeated: this in a subsequent volume I shall endeavour to show is actually the case, from Burmah to Peru.[1022]

Schliemann mentions in connection with Mykenae a small stream known nowadays as the Perseia, and as Mykenae was said to have been founded by Perseus, the stream Perseia was presumably connected with the ancient pherepolis. The survival of this fairy name is the more remarkable as Mykenae itself was utterly destroyed, buried, and lost sight of, yet the title of this rivulet survived: is there any valid reason to deny a similar vitality and antiquity to the brook- and river-names of Britain? Most of these have been complacently ascribed to German settlers, others to Keltic words, but some are admittedly pre-Keltic. Amongst the group of “rare insolubles” occurs the river Kennet which flows past Abury, and may be connoted with the river Kent in the Kendal district. Apart from the Kentish Cantii Herodotus speaks of a race called Kynetes or Kynesii, both of which terms, as Sir John Rhys says, “have a look of Greek words meaning dogmen”: according to Herodotus, “the Celts are outside the Pillars of Hercules and they border on the Kynetii, who dwell the farthest away towards the west of the inhabitants of Europe”. Ancient writers locate the Kynetes in the west of Spain which, according to Rhys, “suggests a still more important inference—namely, that there existed in Herodotus’ time a continental people of the same origin and habits as the non-Celtic aborigines of these islands”.[1023] Kennet, as we have seen, was a British word meaning Greyhound; I think the Kynetes were probably worshippers of every variety of chien, and that dog-headed St. Christopher, the kindly giant of Canaan, was the jackal-headed “Mercury” of the track-making merchants of Candia.[1024] In Ireland there figures in the Pantheon a Caindea, whose name is understood to mean the gentle goddess: the fact of the dove being held in such high estimation in Candia,[1025] as elsewhere, is presumptive evidence of the Candian goddess being fundamentally regarded as gentle, and that Candian adventurers were gentlemen. That Crete or Candia was an Idaeal, Idyllic, and an Aerial island is implied not only by its titles Idaea, Doliche, and Aeria, but also by the characteristics of its Art.

Etymology—by which I mean a Science that does not quibble at everything beyond the view of Mrs. Markham as being out of bounds—permits us to assume that the faith of the Iberii was belief in the Iberian peyrou, the Parthian peri, the British perry, phairy, or fairy. Anthropologists patronisingly describe the creed of primitive man as being animism by which they mean that an anima or soul was attributed to everything on earth: this may be a credulous and degraded faith, or it may be sublimated into the conception of the Egyptian philosophers of whom it has been said: “In their view the earth was a mirror of the heavens, and celestial intelligences were represented by beasts, birds, fishes, gems, and even by rocks, metals, and plants. The harmony of the spheres was answered by the music of the temples, and the world beheld nothing that was not a type of something divine.”

Speaking of the fairy tales of Ireland W. B. Yeats characterises them as full of simplicity and musical occurrences: “They are,” he adds, “the literature of a class for whom every incident in the old rut of birth, love, pain, and death, has cropped up unchanged for centuries; who have steeped everything in the heart to whom everything is a symbol”. It is generally supposed that fairy tales are of a higher antiquity than cromlechs and stone avenues, and anthropologists have not hesitated to extract from them incidents of crude character as evidence of the barbarous and objectionable period in which they originated. With a curious perversity Anthropology has, however, ignored the fair humanities of phairie, while eagerly seizing upon its crudities: in view of the prophet Micah’s environment there seems to me to be no justification for such prejudice, and if fairy-tale is really archaic its beauties may quite well be coeval with its horrors.

In his booklet on Folklore Mr. Sydney Hartland observes: “Turning from savage nations to the peasantry of civilised Europe, you will be still more astonished to learn that up to the present time the very same conditions of thought are discernible wherever they are untouched by modern education and the industrial and commercial revolution of the last hundred years. There can only be one interpretation of this. The human mind, alike in Europe and in America, in Africa and in the South Seas, works in the same way, according to the same laws.” This one and only permissible theory of independent evolution is daily losing ground, and in any case it can hardly be pushed to such extremes as identity of words and place-names.

But while I am convinced that Crete was a culture-centre of immense importance, this bright and particular star, was, one must think, too small a place to account for the vast influence apparently traceable to it. Schliemann, whom nobody now ridicules, claimed to have discovered at Troy a bronze vase inscribed in Phœnicean characters with the words: “From King Chronos of Atlantis,” and in a paper opened after his death he expressed his belief: “I have come to the conclusion that Atlantis was not only a great territory between America and the West Coast of Africa, but the cradle of all our civilisation as well”. The anonymous suggestion which appeared a few years ago in the columns of The Times, that Crete was the reality of the wonderful island “fabled” by Plato, seems to me to have nothing to support it, and I would commend to the attention of those interested the facts collected by Ignatius Donnelly in Atlantis, and by others elsewhere. Personally I incline to the opinion that Plato’s story was well founded, and that the identities found in Peru and Mexico, Britain, the Iberian Peninsula, and Northern Africa are due to these countries, like the Isles of the Mediterranean, being situated in the full sweep of Atlantean influence.

According to Plato, the inhabitants of Atlantis (“an island situated in front of the straits which you call the columns of Hercules: the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together and was the way to other islands”) were not only highly civilised, but they “despised everything but virtue not caring for their present state of life and thinking lightly on the possession of gold and other property”. It is thus quite possible that the Atlanteans and not the pious Trojans were the enthusiastic and altruistic missionaries who carried the spiral ornament to Mykenae as to New Grange. Prof. Macalister finds it difficult to believe in the existence of such a frame of mind, but it seems to accord very closely to that of the hypothetical peace-loving Aryans or “noble nations” which etymologists have already been compelled to postulate, and which my own findings both herein and elsewhere endorse: the semi-supernaturalness of the Idaens has already been noted, as likewise has that of the ancient Britons and of the modern Bretons.

In the year 1508 a French vessel met with a boat full of American Indians not far from the English coast,[1026] and there is thus one historic warrant for the possibility of very ancient maritime contact between Europe and America. The Maoris of New Zealand emigrated from Polynesia in frail canoes during the historic period, and I have little doubt that the Maoris of to-day, who tattoo themselves with spirals similar to those found upon the prehistoric monuments of Britain, were cognate with the woad-tattoed Britons, who opposed their naked bodies to the invincible legends of Cæsar. One can best account for the many and close connections between the South Sea islands and elsewhere by the supposition that some of these islands were colonised by Atlantis, Lyonesse, or whatever the traditional lost island was entitled: and as many of the maritime Atlanteans must have been at sea when the alleged catastrophe occurred, these survivors would have carried the dire news to many distant lands: whence perhaps the almost universal tradition of a Flood, and the salvation of only one boat load of people.

It has been said that the chief thing which makes Japan so fascinating a land to dwell in is the consciousness that you are there living in an atmosphere of universal kindliness and courtesy. There are still to-day races in Polynesia who display the same kindly and almost angelic dispositions,[1027] whence there is nothing ridiculous in the supposition that Peru, whose natives claimed to be children of the Sun, was associated with peyrou, the Iberian for phairy, or that the original Angles were deemed to be angels, and England or Inghilterra their country.

One of the most noted beliefs of all races, whether civilised or savage, is the erstwhile existence of a Golden Age when all men were well happified, and if existence to primitive man was merely the hideous and protracted nightmare which anthropologists assume, it is difficult to see at what period of his upward climb this curiously idyllic story came into existence: it would be simpler to assume that the tradition had some foundation in fact, and was not merely the frenzied invention of a dreamer. No race possesses more beautiful traditions of the Adamic Age than the British, and I have little doubt that the four quarters of the Holy Rood or Wheel are connected with the four fabulous Cities of Enchantment which figure in Keltic imagination. According to Irish MSS. the Tuatha de Danaan, or Tribe of the Children of Don, after suffering a terrible defeat at the hands of the Fomorians, quitted Ireland, returned to Thebes, and gave themselves up to the study of Magic: leaving Greece they next went to Denmark (named after them) where they founded four great schools of diabolical learning—the Four Cities of Keltic imagination. It would thus seem possible that the Children of Don were the fabricators of the Eden, or Adam, tradition, and that they may be connoted with the Danoi under which name Homer habitually refers to the Greeks: with these Danoi or Danaia, Dr. Latham connotes the Hebrew tribe of Dan, supposing that both these peoples traced their origin to the same culture-hero.[1028] That Gardens of Eden were frequent in these islands has been evidenced in a preceding chapter, and in Asia the custom of constructing Edens or Terrestrial Paradises was equally prevalent: Maundeville and other travellers have left detailed accounts of these abris, all of which seem to have been constructed more or less to the standard design of the Garden of Eden, watered by four rivers, with a Tree or Fountain in the midst.

It is supposed that the celebrated Epistle of Prester John was a malicious antepapal concoction of the Gnostic Troubadours, or Servants of Love: these were certainly the shuttles that disseminated it over Europe. I have elsewhere endeavoured to show the role played in mediæval Europe by the Troubadours and Minnesingers (Love Singers), and the subject might be infinitely extended. The derivation of trouvere, or troubadour, from trouver to find, is probably too superficial, and if the matter were more fully investigated it is probable that, like the Merry Andrew, these mystic singers and philanderers originated from some Troy or Ancient Troy. Whether the drui or druids are similarly traceable to the same root is debatable, but that the bards of Britain were depositaries and disseminators of the Gnosis I do not doubt: the evidence on that point is not only the testimony of outsiders, but it is inherent in the literature itself, and whether this literature was committed to writing in the sixth, twelfth, or eighteenth century is immaterial. There are in existence many unquestionably prehistoric tales and ideas which have been handed down verbally, and committed to writing for the first time only within the past few years: many more are living viva voce, and are not yet registered. The Welsh bards, like the bards of other races, were a recognised class, graduates in a particular Art, and were strictly and definitely trained in the traditional lore of their profession. This hereditary order which was known to the Romans certainly as early as 200 B.C., like the bards of other countries, almost unquestionably transmitted an enormous literature solely by word of mouth.[1029] If the feats of even the modern human memory were not well vouched for they would not be credited: in the past, the Zend Avesta, the Kalevala, the Popul Vuh, Homer, much of the Old Testament, and in fact all very ancient literature has come down to us simply by memory alone.

To an inquirer such as myself, incompetent to criticise Welsh literature, yet hesitating to accept the once current theories of fabrication, forgery, and deception, it is peculiarly gratifying to find so distinguished a scholar as Sir John Morris-Jones vindicating at any rate some portion of the suspect literature. In his study Taliesin, Sir John grinds detractors past and present into as fine and small a powder as that to which Spedding imperturbably reduced the flashy superficialities of Macaulay,[1030] and I confess it has caused me most agreeable emotions to find Sir John alluding to a certain truculent D.Litt. as “that naïve type of mind which naturally assumes that what it does not understand is mere silliness”:[1031] it is even more stimulating to witness the iconoclastic and dogmatic Nash rolled in the dust for his “unparalleled impudence” in laying down the law of antiquity in language.

Among the fragments of Welsh poetry occurs the claim “Bardism or Druidism originated in Britain—pure Bardism was never well understood in other countries—of whatever country they might be, they are entitled Bards according to the rights and institutes of the Bards of the Island of Britain.”[1032] Before superciliously dismissing the high claims of British Bardism it would be well to consider not only the recent findings of Prof. Sir John Morris-Jones, but to bear steadily in mind the following points: (1) The cultured shape of the extraordinarily ancient British skull: (2) Avebury, the strangest megalithic monument in the world: (3) Stonehenge, a unique and most developed form of stone circle: (4) that England was the principal home of stone circles: (5) that England not only possessed the greatest earth-pyramid in the world, but that Britain was peculiarly the home of the barrow, and that there is no word barrow in either Greek or Latin, thus seeming to have been essentially British: (6) that in Cæsar’s time the youth of the Continent were sent to Britain to study the Druidic philosophy which was believed to have originated there: (7) the remarkable character of the English coinage which dates back admittedly to 200 B.C., and for aught one knows much earlier: (8) that the art of enamelling on bronze probably originated in Britain, and the craft of spear-making evolved there.

In Earthwork of England Mr. Allcroft observes: “Of all the many thousands of earth-works of various kinds to be found in England, those about which anything is known are very few, those of which there remains nothing more to be known scarcely exist. Each individual example is in itself a new problem in history, chronology, ethnology, and anthropology; within every one lie the hidden possibilities of a revolution in knowledge. We are proud of a history of nearly twenty centuries: we have the materials for a history which goes back beyond that time to centuries as yet undated. The testimony of records carries the tale back to a certain point: beyond that point is only the testimony of archæology, and of all the manifold branches of archæology none is so practicable, so promising, yet so little explored, as that which is concerned with earthworks. Within them lie hidden all the secrets of time before history begins, and by their means only can that history be put into writing: they are the back numbers of the island’s story, as yet unread, much less indexed.”

The prehistoric building here illustrated might be any age: it is standing to-day in a remote corner of Britain, and, so far as I am able to trace, has been hitherto uncharted and unrecognised. Whether it were a temple or the compound of a chieftain, the authorities to whom it has been referred are unable to say: my brother, to whom its discovery was due, is of the opinion that it was a temple, and on a subsequent occasion we hope—after digging—to publish a more detailed account of it, merely now noting it as an example of the innumerable objects of interest which exist in this country at present unrecognised, unconsidered, and unvalued.

Fig. 507.—Ground plan of a hitherto Uncharted English Edifice.

Evidence has been forthcoming that a cave in Oban was occupied by human beings, at an epoch when the sea was 30 feet higher than its present level, and it is now generally admitted that humanity existed in these islands prior to the Glacial Period. Archæology of the future will provide strong wine of astonishment to her followers: she will prove beyond question that mythology is not merely fossil philosophy, but is likewise to a large extent fossil history, and that the records may be pieced together from the traditionary blissful Tertiary Period to that time and onwards when a perilous torrent-fire struck the earth, resulting in sequent horrors, and the slow replenishment of the world.[1033] She will prove, I think, further that the land now called England possesses a documentary record, and an intellectual ancestry which is practically beyond computation, and if History shies at her findings she will instance Brandon as a typical example of continuous occupation and unbroken sequence from the Stone Age to to-day. Further, she will in all probability prove that in either Crete or England the main doctrines of Christianity were practically indigenous. The version of Christianity which returned to us about 1500 years ago is now generally attributed to the mystic Therapeuts of Egypt: from the time it was officially adopted by the temporal powers the materialising process seems almost steadily to have progressed, notwithstanding the allegorising teaching of the Troubadours and kindred Gnostics who claimed really to know.[1034] Happily petrifaction is a preservative, and it may be doubted whether when Comparative Archæology has finished her researches any of the prehistoric Christianity preached by the Celtic Christies will prove actually lost, and whether the supposedly impassable gulf of ages which separates the earliest literature from the testimony of the Stones may not practically be bridged. That our popular customs were the detrita of dramatised mythology, and that many of these customs evidence an astonishing beauty of imagination and depth of thought, will not be questioned except by those unfamiliar with English folklore. In many cases the quaint customs which still linger in the countryside, and the cults which underlie them are, as Dr. Rendel Harris has recently observed, those of misunderstood rituals and lost divinities, and thus embalmed like flies in the amber of unchanging habit turn out to be the very earliest beliefs and the most primitive religious acts of the human race: “Every surviving fragment of such a ritual is as valuable to us as a page of an early Gospel which time has blurred or whose first hand has been overwritten”.[1035]

Few nowadays have any sympathy with the theories which a generation ago autocratically ascribed Myth to a Disease of Language; still less is it possible to accept the more modern supposition that Mythology is merely the gross growth of disgusting savagery! There is more truth in Bacon’s dictum that in the first ages when such inventions and conclusions of the human reason as are now trite and common were new, and little known, all things abounded with fables, parables, similes, comparisons, and illusions which were not intended to conceal, but to inform and teach. Research tends more and more to justify Bacon in his penetrating judgment: “And this principally raises my esteem of these fables, which I receive not as the product of the age or invention of the poets, but as sacred relics, gentle whispers, and the breath of better times, that from the traditions of more ancient nations came at length into the flutes and trumpets of the Greeks”. Whence these sacred relics came, whether from Atlantis, Crete, or Britain,[1036] we are not yet in a position to assert, but eventually the Comparative Method will decide this point. Dr. Rendel Harris who has, to quote his own words, “audaciously affirmed that Apollo was only our apple in disguise,”[1037] further concludes: “It is tolerably certain that Apollo in the Greek religion is a migration from the more northerly regions and his mythical home is somewhere at the back of the north wind”.[1038] While I am in sympathy with many of Dr. Harris’ findings, it is, however, difficult to accept his conclusions that the Olympian divinities were merely “personifications of, or projections from the vegetable word”: the greater probability seems to me that the Apple was named after Apollo rather than Apollo from the Apple: similarly the mandrake was in greater likelihood an emblem of Venus rather than Aphrodite a projection from the Mandrake. The Venus of the Gael was Bride or Brigit, “The Presiding Care,” who was represented with a brat in her arms: there is an old Spanish proverb to the effect that “An ounce of Mother is worth a ton of Priest”; nowhere was Woman more devoutly idealised than among the Celts, and it is more probable that the conception of an immaculate Great Mother originated somewhere in Europe rather than in the sensuous and woman-degrading East. Of the legends of Ireland Mr. Westropp has recently observed: “When we have removed the strata of euhemerist fiction and rubbish from the ruin, the foundations and beautiful fragments of the once noble fane of Irish mythology will stand clear to the sun”:[1039] “Whether,” said Squire, “the great edifice of Celtic mythology will ever be wholly restored one can at present only speculate. Its colossal fragments are perhaps too deeply buried and too widely scattered. But even as it stands ruined it is a mighty quarry from which poets yet unborn will hew spiritual marble for houses not made with hands.”

Finis

British. From Akerman.

FOOTNOTES:

[996] Mythology of the Celtic Races, p. 68.

[997] The Mistletoe, p. 30.

[998] Budge, W., Legends of the Gods, lxxii.

[999] P. 234.

[1000] Smith, Prof. Elliot, The Evolution of the Dragon, p. 157.

[1001] Ibid., p. 176.

[1002] Notably at Solutre—the Sol uter?

[1003] Wright, Miss E. M., Rustic Speech and Folklore, p. 303.

[1004] Odin was essentially a Wind God: in Rutlandshire gales are termed Ash winds. N. and Q., 1876, p. 363.

[1005] The Age of the Saints, p. xxvii.

[1006] Cf. Christmas, H. C., Universal Mythology, p. 43.

[1007] In Wambeh we again seem to detect womb.

[1008] Quoted from Donnelly, I., Atlantis.

[1009] Henry Kilgour, Notes and Queries, 8th January and 19th February, 1876.

[1010] The Prehistoric Remains of Caithness, pp. 70, 71.

[1011] Macnamara, N. C., Origin and Character of the British People, p. 179.

[1012] Read, Sir H., A Guide to Antiquities of Bronze Age, p. 17.

[1013] Races of Britain, p. 46.

[1014] Strabo, III., lv., 5.

[1015] Smith, L. P., The English Language, p. 1.

[1016] Triad, 4.

[1017] Proceedings of Royal Irish Academy, xxxiv., C. 10, 11, p. 387.

[1018] Ibid.

[1019] Myths of Crete and Pre-Hellenic Europe, p. 235.

[1020] Myths of Crete and Pre-Hellenic Europe, p. 232.

[1021] Ilios, p. xii.

[1022] There were peoples in the Caucasus known as the Britani or Burtani.

[1023] Celtic Britain, p. 268.

[1024] In a subsequent volume I shall trace the Iberian perro or dog to Peru, where the perro or dog was the supreme object of devotion.

[1025] The capital of old Ceylon was Candy: I am unable to trace the origin of the port of Colombo.

[1026] Baring-Gould, S., Curious Myths, p. 527.

[1027] The inhabitants of Tukopia are described as: “Tall, light-coloured men with thick manes of long, golden hair ... wonderful giants, with soft dark eyes, kind smiles, and child-like countenances”. The surroundings of the villages of this Polynesian island were like well-tended parks, all brushwood having been carefully removed. “They presented sights so different in blissful simplicity from what were to be seen in Melanesia, they all looked so happy, gay, and alluring, that it hardly needed the invitations of the kind people, without weapons or suspicion, and with wreaths of sweet-scented flowers round their heads and bodies, to incline us to stay.” This exquisite morsel of Arcadia was, like other parts of pure Polynesia, governed by a dynasty of hereditary chieftains, who were looked up to with the greatest respect, and to whom honours were paid almost as to demi-gods.—Cf. Sir Harry Johnston in The Westminster Gazette.

[1028] “I think that the Eponymus of the Argive Danaia was no other than that of the Israelite Tribe of Dan; only we are so used to confine ourselves to the soil of Palestine in our consideration of the Israelites that we treat them as if they were adscriptigleboe, and ignore the share they may have taken in the history of the world.”—Ethnology of Europe, p. 137.

[1029] Cæsar says it took twenty years’ study to acquire: other writers say the Druids taught 20,000 verses.

[1030] Cf. Evenings with a Reviewer.

[1031] Y Cymmroder, xxiii.

[1032] Cf. Davies, E., Celtic Researches, p. 183.

[1033] In Ragnarok Donnelly argues that the glacial epoch and the “drift” were due to the earth’s collision with one of the many million comets which are careering through the solar universe. It would certainly appear probable that such abnormous masses of ice as are evidenced by the Glacial Period, must have been the result of abnormous heat first sucking up the lakes and rivers, and then returning them in the form of clouds, rain, and snow. Practically all mythologies contain an account of some unparalleled catastrophe, and in the opinion of Donnelly the widespread story of man’s progenitors emerging from a cave is based upon the literal probability of man—if he survived at all—surviving in caverns. Among the numerous myths which Donnelly cites in support of his ingenious theory is the following British one: “The profligacy of mankind had provoked the great Supreme to send a pestilential wind upon the earth. A pure poison descended, every blast was death. At this time the patriarch, distinguished for his integrity, was shut up, together with his select company, in the inclosure with the strong door (the cave?). Here the just ones were safe from injury. Presently a tempest of fire arose. It split the earth asunder to the great deep. The lake Llion burst its bounds, and the waves of the sea lifted themselves on high around the borders of Britain, the rain poured down from heaven, and the waters covered the earth.” Donnelly believes that comets were the origin of the world-wide fiery-dragon myth. In support of this theory he might have instanced the following Scotch legend: “There lived once upon a time in Sutherland a great dragon, very fierce and strong. It was this dragon that burnt all the fir woods in Ross, Sutherland, and the Reay country, of which the remains charred, blackened, and half-decayed may be found in every moss. Magnificent forests they must have been, but the dragon set fire to them with his fiery breath and rolled over the whole land. Men fled from before his face and women fainted when his shadow crossed the sky-line. He made the whole land desert.”—(Henderson, Dr. G. H., Intro. to The Celtic Dragon Myth, p. xxii.) The burnt forests found in Ireland were noted on p. 21.

[1034] All these “heretics” claimed to be the real possessors of the true Christian doctrine, and they charged Rome with being Mère sotte, an ignorant and blatant usurper: the incessant and insidious conflict which was carried on between Gnosticism and Rome has been considered in A New Light on the Renaissance, also in The Lost Language of Symbolism, and with the exception of a few surface errors there is little in those volumes which I should now rewrite. The murderous campaign which was launched against the Albigenses not only failed seemingly to stamp them out, but if Baring-Gould’s opinion is valid the descendants of the Albigenses are even to-day not extinct. In Cliff Castles he writes as follows: “There was a curious statement made in a work by E. Bose and L. Bonnemere in 1882, which if true would show that a lingering paganism is to be found among these people. It is to this effect: ‘What is unknown to most is that at the present day there exist adepts of the worship (of the Celts) as practised before the Roman invasion, with the sole exception of human sacrifices, which they have been forcibly obliged to renounce. They are to be found on the two banks of the Loire, on the confines of the departments of Allier and Saone-et-Loire, where they are still tolerably numerous, especially in the latter department. They are designated in the country as Les Blancs, because that in their ceremonies they cover their heads with a white hood, and their priests are vested like the Druids in a long robe of the same colour. They surround their proceedings with profound mystery; their gatherings take place at night in the heart of large forests, about an old oak, and as they are dispersed through the country over a great extent of land, they have to start for the assembly from different points at close of day so as to be able to reach home again before daybreak. They have four meetings in the year, but one, the most solemn, is held near the town of La Clayette under the presidence of the high priest. Those who come from the greatest distance do not reach their homes till the second night, and their absence during the intervening day alone reveals to the neighbours that they have attended an assembly of the Whites. Their priests are known, and are vulgarly designated as the bishops or archbishops of the Whites; they are actually druids or archdruids.... We have been able to verify these interesting facts brought to our notice by M. Parent, and our personal investigations into the matter enable us to affirm the exactitude of what has been advanced.’ If there be any truth in this strange story we are much more disposed to consider the Whites as relics of a Manichæan or Albigensian sect than as a survival of Druidism.” P. 46.

[1035] Origin and Meaning of Apple Cults.

[1036] “Lords and Commons of England—Consider what nation whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the Governors: a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit; acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to. Therefore, the studies of learning in her deepest sciences have been so ancient and so eminent among us, that writers of good antiquity and able judgment have been persuaded that the School of Pythagoras, and the Persian Wisdom, took beginning from the old philosophy of this Island, Britain.”—Milton.

[1037] In The Lost Language of Symbolism I anticipated this opinion.

[1038] Writing of the Pied Piper story Mr. Ernest Rhys observes: “There is every reason to believe that Hamelin was as near home as Newton, Isle of Wight, and that the Weser, deep and wide, was the Solent”.—Preamble to Fairy Gold (Ev. Library).

[1039] Proc. of Royal Irish Academy, xxxiv., C., No. 8, p. 140.

APPENDIX A.
IRELAND AND PHŒNICIA.

The following extract is taken from Britain and the Gael: or Notices of Old and Successive Races; but with special reference to the Ancient Men of Britain and its Isles.—Wm. Beal, London, 1860.

Plautus, a dramatic writer, and one of the great poets of antiquity, who lived from one to two centuries before the Christian era; was mentioned in the last section. In his Pænulus, is the tale of some young persons said to have been stolen from Carthage, by pirates, taken to Calydonia, and there sold; one of these was Agorastocles, a young man; the others were two daughters of Hanno, and Giddeneme, their nurse. Hanno, after long search, discovered the place where his daughters were concealed, and by the help of servants who understood the Punic language, rescued his children from captivity. Plautus gives the supposed appeal of Hanno, to the gods of the country for help, and his conversations with servants in the Punic language, are accompanied with a Latin translation. The Punic, as a language, is lost, and those long noticed, but strange lines had long defied the skill of learned men. But at length, by attending to their vocal formation (and all language, Wills states, is addressed to the ear). It was discovered by O’Neachtan, or some Irish scholar, that they were resolvable into words, which exhibited but slight differences from the language of Keltic Ireland. The words were put into syllables, then translated by several persons, and these translations not only accorded with the drama, but also, with the Plautine Latin version. The lines were put to the test of more rigid examination, placed in the hands of different persons one of whom was Dr. Percy, bishop of Dromore. They were also given to different Irish scholars for translation, to persons who had no correspondence with each other on this subject, nor knew the principal object in view; and by the whole the same meaning was given.

Bohn’s edition, by H. T. Riley, B.A., is before the writer; but from the edition used by the late Sir W. Betham, some few lines from Plautus, with the Gaelic or Irish underneath, are given, and the eye will at once perceive how closely the one resembles the other. Milphio, the servant of Agorastocles, addressed Hanno and his servants in Punic, and asked them “of what country are you, or from what city?”

The following is the reply, and the supposed appeal of Hanno to the god, or gods of the country:—

Plautus.
Irish.
English
}
Hanno Muthumballe bi Chaedreanech.
Hanno Muthumbal bi Chathar dreannad.
I am Hanno Muthumbal dwelling at Carthage.

Plautus.
Irish.
English
}
Nyth al O Nim ua-lonuth sicorathissi me com syth.
N’iaith all O Nimh uath-lonnaithe socruidhse me comsith.
Omnipotent much dreaded Deity of this country, assuage my troubled mind.

Plautus.
Irish.
English
}
Chim lach chumyth mum ys tyal mycthi barii im schi.
Chimi lach chuinigh muini is toil miocht beiridh iar mo scith.
Thou the support of feeble captives, being now exhausted with fatigue, of thy free will guide me to my children.

Plautus.
Irish.
English
}
Lipho can ethyth by mithii ad ædan binuthi.
Liomtha can ati bi mitche ad eadan beannaithe.
O let my prayers be perfectly acceptable in thy sight.

Plautus.
Irish.
English
}
Byr nar ob syllo homal O Nim! Ubymis isyrthoho.
Bior nar ob siladh umhal O Nimh! ibhim A frotha.
An inexhaustible fountain to the humble; O Deity! Let me drink of its streams.

Plautus.
Irish.
English
}
Byth lym mo thym noctothii nel ech an ti daise machon.
Beith liom mo thime noctaithe, neil ach tanti daisic mac coinne.
Forsake me not! my earnest desire is now disclosed, which is only that of recovering my daughters.

Plautus.
Irish.
English
}
Uesptis Aod eanec Lic Tor bo desiughim lim Nim co lus.
Is bidis Aodh eineac Lic Tor bo desiussum le mo Nimh co lus.
And grateful Fires on Stone Towers will I ordain to blaze to Heaven.

Plautus.
Irish.
English
}
Gau ebel Balsameni ar a san.
Guna bil Bal-samen ar a san.
O that the good Bal-samhen (i.e. Beal the sun) may favour them. Act v. scene 1 and 2.

This alleged work of Plautus, and these strange lines, have long been before the world, and under the notice of men of letters. Is there any reason to doubt whether it is genuine? If not, can it be supposed that the writer purposely placed some strange jargon before his readers to bewilder them? and if so, by what singular hazzard should it so closely resemble the language of the Gael. Plautus avers, that Milphio addressed the strangers (Hanno and servants), in Punic, and declared to Agorastocles, his master, that “no Punic or Carthaginian man speaks Punic better than I”. Unless these statements can be proved to be worthless, will they not as connecting links appear to say, probably the Gaels of Britain, and the Punic people of Carthage, were branches of the old and once celebrated race, known as Phenicians?

APPENDIX B.
PERRY-DANCERS AND PERRY STONES.

On page 312 I stated that in Kent the light cloudlets of a summer day were known as “Perry-dancers”: as I am unable to trace any printed authority for this statement it is possible that it was a mis-remembrance of the following passage from Ritson’s “Dissertation on Fairies,” prefacing English Folklore and Legends, London, 1890: “Le Grand is of opinion that what is called Fairy comes to us from the Orientals, and that it is their genies which have produced our fairies ... whether this be so or not, it is certain that we call the auroræ boreales, or active clouds in the night, perry-dancers.”

In connection with my suggestion that Stonehengles, now Stonehenge, of which the outer circle consists of thirty stones, meant Stone Angels, may be considered the repeated statements of Pausanias that the oldest gods of all were rude stones in the temple, or the temple precincts. In Achaean Pharae he found some thirty squared stones named each after a god: obviously these were phairy or peri stones, and the chief stone presumably stood for the pherepolis.

That ange or inge varied into ink is implied not only by Inkpen Beacon figuring in old records as Ingepenne and Hingepene, but also by Ritson’s statement: “In days of yore, when the church at Inkberrow was taken down and rebuilt upon a new site, the fairies, whose haunt was near the latter place, took offence at the change”. The following passage quoted by Keightley from Aubrey’s Natural History of Surrey is of interest apart from the significant names: “In the vestry of Frensham Church, in Surrey, on the north side of the chancel is an extraordinary great kettle or cauldron, which the inhabitants say, by tradition, was brought hither by the fairies, time out of mind, from Borough-hill about a mile hence. To this place, if anyone went to borrow a yoke of oxen, money, etc., he might have it for a year or longer, so he kept his word to return it. There is a cave where some have fancied to hear music. In this Borough-hill is a great stone lying along of the length of about 6 feet. They went to this stone and knocked at it, and declared what they would borrow, and when they would repay, and a voice would answer when they should come, and that they should find what they desired to borrow at that stone. This cauldron, with the trivet, was borrowed here, after the manner aforesaid, and not returned according to promise; and though the cauldron was afterwards carried to the stone, it could not be received, and ever since that time no borrowing there.”

APPENDIX C.
BRITISH SYMBOLS.

In Wookey Hole Mr. H. E. Balch quotes the following important passage from Gildas: “A blind people [the Britons], they paid divine honour to the mountains, wells, and streams. Their altars were pillars of stone inscribed with emblems of the sun and moon, or of a beast or bird which symbolised some force of nature”. This passage justifies the supposition that the inscribed “barnacles,” elephants, etc., were symbolic, and supports the contention that a people using such subtleties were far from “blind”. The Museum at Glastonbury contains a bronze ring about 3 inches in diameter, in the form of a serpent with its tail in its mouth. Obviously this object, which was found at Stanton Drew, i.e., the stone town of the Druids, was symbolic, probably, of the Eternal Wisdom.

APPENDIX D.
GLASTONBURY.

In view of the fact that Halifax claimed to possess the Holy Face of St. John, and that four roads centred there in the form of a cross at the chapel of St. John, it is interesting to note that the four cross-roads of Glastonbury are similarly associated with St. John. In the words of a local guidebook, “From the Tor, a walk will bring you to Weary-All Hill to view the town, and it is curious to note that from this hill it seems to be laid out as a perfect cross, St. John’s Church being the central point”.

The probability is that there was some connection between the St. John of modern Glastonbury and the Fairy King Gwyn who was exorcised from the neighbouring Tor by a certain St. Collen.

APPENDIX E.
THE DRUIDS AND CRETE.

Since the preceding pages were in the press I have come into the possession of La Religion des Gaulois by Jacques Martin (Paris, 1727). This standard writer favours the idea that druid is derived from the Celtic deru, meaning an oak, but he also makes a remarkable statement to the following effect: “If the opinion of P. Pezron was well founded one should also say that certain people of Crete whom one called Druites, because their country was full of oaks, made a trade of magic and enchantment, which is far removed from the truth and perhaps also from good sense” (vol. i., p. 176). In the same volume (pp. 406-7) Martin illustrates a Gaulish god whose name Dolichenius is curiously suggestive of Dalgeon, Telchin, Talgean, and Telchinea.

L’ENVOI.

Now if any brother or well-wisher shall conscientiously doubt or be dissatisfied, touching any particular point contained in this treatise, because of my speaking to many things in a little room: and if he or they shall be serious in so doing, and will befriend me so far, and do me that courtesy, to send to me before they condemn me, and let me know their scruples in a few words of writing, I shall look upon myself obliged both in affection and reason, to endeavour to give them full satisfaction.

H. B.

Overbye,
Church Cobham,
Surrey.

INDEX

Abar,
325

Abaris,
325, 330, 377

Abb, St.,
617

Abbey,
515

Abchurch,
513, 518

Abdera,
296

Abdy,
526

Aber,
310

Aber!
310, 325

Aber, Loch,
670, 749

Aberdeen,
749

Aberfield,
664

Aberystwyth,
194

Abhras,
325

Abonde,
165, 216

— La Dame,
557

Abra,
328

Abracadabra,
325

Abraham,
227

Abraham,
716

Abri,
289

Abroad,
369

Abundance,
216

Abundia,
165

Abyss,
224

Ac,
48

Ache,
200

Achil,
280

Achill,
82

Achilles,
82

Acorn,
227

Ada,
455, 742

Ada,
753

Adad,
508

Adam,
745, 754

Adam and Eve,
495, 501, 589

Adam Cædmon,
110

Adam’s Dances,
589

— Graves,
746

— Peak,
546

Addington,
750, 755, 785, 813

Addy,
509

Adelphi,
365

Adisham,
560

Adkin,
509

Adon,
712

Adonai,
712

Adonis,
46, 112, 153, 605, 712

Aedd, K.,
309, 749

Aeddon,
749

Aeddons, The,
750

Ægean influences,
850

— The,
81, 93

Ægeon,
402

Ægina,
399

Aeithon, R.,
743

Aeon,
203, 652

Aeons,
204

Aeria,
76

Africa,
375

Agatha,
719

— St.,
253

Agland Moor,
799

Agglestone,
280

Agnes, St.,
591

Agnes, St., Well,
732

— the Clear,
721

Agni,
591, 719

Ague,
200

Aidan, St.,
742, 751

Aidon Moor,
732

Aine,
288, 368, 544, 724

Aion,
321

Aitkin,
509

Akeman, St.,
38, 200

Alas!
412

Alava,
322

Alban,
251

Alban, St.,
129

Albani!
125

Albania,
84, 86, 112, 261

Albano,
89, 112

Albans, St.,
107, 208, 268, 523, 791

Albanus, R.,
89

Albany, The,
162

Alberic,
342

Alberich,
510

Albi,
377

Albigenses,
865

Albine, St.,
148

Albinia, R.,
97

Albinus,
321

Albion,
124

Albion, Prince,
162, 317

Albiorix,
301

Albon,
247

Al Borak,
468347

Albs,
342

Albury,
342

Alcmena,
140, 200

Alcantara,
290

Alef,
240

Alexander,
727

Alf,
559

Alfred,
153

Alibone,
131

Alipius, St.,
321

Allah,
581

Allan apples,
696

— St.,
696

Allantide,
698

Allan Water,
103

Allen,
104

Allen, St.,
132

All Hallows,
244, 288

All-Heal,
181, 681

Allington,
290

“All is one”,
133

Allistone,
318

Alma,
136

Alma Mater,
258

Alma Mater Cantabrigia,
167

Almaquah,
136

Almo, R.,
136

Almond, R.,
137

Aln, R.,
417

Alne, R.,
103, 697

Alnwick,
417

Aloft,
165

Alone, R.,
103, 417

Alp,
127

Alpha,
152, 363, 653

Alphabet,
12, 13

— Bardic,
14

— Celtiberian,
14

Alphage, St.,
154

Alpha Place,
288

Alph, R.,
791

Alpheus,
288

Alphey,
154

Alphian Rock,
153, 548

Alphin,
284

Alphington,
548

Aluph,
165

Alva, Lady,
153

Alvastone,
318

Alvechurch,
524

Alvescott,
153

Amber,
565

— R.,
569

— Stone,
566

Amberstone,
568

Amberwood, etc.,
569

Ambresbury,
554, 569

Ambrose, St.,
565

Ambrosden,
569

Ambrosia,
567, 688

Ambrosius aurelius,
565

Amergin,
326, 327, 665

Amicable,
249

Amor,
225, 287

Amoretti,
381

Amour,
604

Ana,
282, 288

Ancaster,
444

Anchetil,
557, 878

Anchor,
496

Ancient One,
577

Anderida,
797

Andrew,
117, 122

Andrew, St.,
117, 163, 319, 443, 471, 780

Andrews, St.,
160

Androgynous,
122

Ange,
217, 556

Angel,
305

Angel Christopher,
262

Angel Inn,
588

— The,
667, 685

Angel,
552

Angels,
175

Angle,
552, 558, 792

Angle,
556

Anglesea,
492, 560

Anglo-Saxon,
60

Anglo-Saxons,
22, 85, 107

Angus Og,
661

Angus,
266

Angus Mac Oge,
397

Anlaf, St.,
154

Anne, St.,
722, 811, 828

Annesbury,
565

Annis, Dame,
717

— the clear,
721

Anses,
473

Antiquity of European habitation,

Antlers,
257

Antony, St.,
242

Antre,
797

Antrim,
845

Anu,
197, 722

— Paps of,
717

Anubis,
111

Any,
724

Apep,
836

Apex,
292

Apheia,
426, 532

Apsley,
529

Apt,
526

Apollo,
71, 104, 134, 242, 320, 324, 508, 562, 867

Apollo,
673

Apor, Loch,
749

Appear,
867

Apple,
674, 742

Apple,
674, 867

Apple of Adam,
754

— village,
678

Appleby,
674

Appledore,
675

Appledurwell,
675

Apples, Three,
181

Appleton,
675

Archdruid of Tara,
563

Archery,
508

Arethusa,
398

Argonauts,
84

Arianrod,
438

Ark,
56, 158, 450, 653

Arrow,
325

Arrow-Elf,
306

Artemis,
258, 724

Arthur, K.,
63, 798

Aryans,
10, 168

Asch,
841

Ash,
841

Ass,
114, 212

Astarte,
646

Astronomy,
167

— Druidic,
804

Aten,
743

Athenæum,
742

Athene,
323, 461, 584, 742, 819

Athens,
322

Atlantis,
19, 855

Attire,
100

Aubers Ridge,
289

Auborn, R.,
664

Aubrey Walk,
289, 439

Auburn,
507, 572

Aubury,
335

Aught,
655

Aulph,
165

Aumbrey,
569

Aunt,
597

Aunt Judy,
225

— Mary,
220

— Mary’s Tree,
597

Austerfield,
645

Aust on Severn,
645

Austreclive,
645

Alvington,
349

Avagddu,
158

Avalon,
289, 682

Avebury,
27, 335, 351, 368, 475, 498, 518, 808

Avebury,
403

Averroes,
378

Avery,
601

Avereberie,
342

Avon,
425

— R.,
828

“Awd Goggie,”
189

Axe,
643

Aylesbury,
481

Aylesford,
480, 481

Ayliffe,
162

Babchild,
356

Babe,
653

Babes of wax,
788

Babette,
356

Bab’s,
356

— Cairn,
589

Baccho, St.,
240

Bacchus,
240

Bach Camp,
246

Backbone,
254

Bacon,
240

Bacon,
246

Bacton,
755

bad,
372

Badcock,
195

Bagden,
232

Baggy Point,
238

Bagnigge, R.,
722

— Wells,
618

Bagshaw,
448, 728

Bain, R.,
137

bairn,
325

bake,
245

Balder,
71, 76, 473, 841

Bald one,
640

Baldwin,
154

Ball,
158

Balor,
192, 841

Balls, Three,
181

Bana, R.,
137

Banac, R.,
137

Bancroft,
138

Bandog,
112

Bandon, R.,
137

Banney, R.,
137

Bannockburn,
137

Banon, R.,
137

Banstead,
445

Banwell,
445

Bara, Feast of,
320

Baranton,
676

Barbara,
329, 473

Barbara,
353

Barbara, St.,
354

Barbarie, The Town of,
353

barbaroi,
889

barbes,
377

Barbe, St.,
377

Barbury,
353

Bardic Triads,
177, 181, 184, 185

Bardism,
860

Bardon,
350

Barea,
329

Bargeist,
346

Barle, R.,
348

Barlow,
678, 714

Bark, R.,
348

Barnabas, St.,
553

Barnabas,
507

Barnacles,
346

Barnebas,
509

Barneby Bright,
507

Barnwell,
572

Baroc,
468

baron,
319

Baron’s Cave,
799

Barra, I.,
661, 846

Barri, I.,
467

Barrow, R.,
510

barrow,
319

Barrows,
333

Barry,
839

Barry,
508

Barry, I.,
348

— The,
749

Bashan,
194

Basilica Ulpia,
296

Basinghall,
511

Basques,
648

Battersea,
464, 669

Baucis,
227, 291

Beads,
82, 579

Beaker,
302

Beane, R.,
110, 137

Bean-setting dance,
539

Bear,
72

Beard,
373

Beare, Old Woman of,
757

Beccles,
299

Beckjay,
282

Becky, R.,
246

Bee,
46

Beech,
387, 569

Beeg, R.,
246

Beelzebub,
222

Beer Head,
349

Bees,
567

Bega, St.,
238

Bekesbourne,
670

Bel,
46, 841

bel,
248

Belerium,
193

Belgrave,
347

Beli,
841

Belin,
241

Belindi,
241

Bell,
445, 781

— Giant,
347

Belleros,
193

Bellingham,
749

Bellister,
721

Bellona,
647

Bel’s Fires,
612

Ben, R.,
137

Beneficia R.,
110

Beltan,
730

Beltane,
169

Beltan fires,
611

Berat,
460, 467

Berbers,
205, 375, 846

Berberis,
385

Berea,
341

Bergyon, Giant,
331

Berith,
460

Berkeley,
666

Berkhampstead,
666

Berkshire,
664

Berkswell,
666

Berne,
329

Bernesbeg,
507

Beroë,
460, 484

Berrens,
761

Berries, Three,
181

Berry,
345

Bertha,
362

Bertinny,
334

Bertram,
507

Bewl Bri,
350

Beyrout,
460

Beyrut,
134

Bickley,
448

Biddenden,
589

— Maids,
371

Biddy,
372

Bifrons,
670

big,
238

Bigbury,
238

Bigha,
238

Bigness,
238

Billing-,
558, 668

Birbeck,
667

Bird of Fire,
691

Birds,
326, 691

Bird-wheel,
691

Birmingham,
431, 437

Birr,
335

Birra, Lady,
749

Birrenswork,
387

Bishop, The,
590

bishop,
577

Black,
475

— Annis,
722

— and White Dove,
486

Blackfriars,
467

Black Mary,
598, 722

— Mary’s Hole,
619

Blackthorn,
419, 677

Blaze, St.,
244, 602

Blban,
248

bleary,
193

Blind Fiddler, The,
226

— Man’s Buff,
425

Blue,
270, 273, 579

— John,
795

— — Cavern,
787

— Stones,
587

Boar,
58, 241, 242, 329

Bocock,
195

Boduo,
276

Boduoc,
277

boer,
242

Bog,
233

bogel,
233

Boggart,
232

Bogle,
518

Bohemia,
307

Bolerium,
193

Bolingbroke,
658

Bolleit caves,
771

Bolster, Giant,
720

Bonchurch,
163

Bond,
162

Bonfire,
169, 245

Bookham,
231, 667, 686

Bor,
752

Boreas,
422

Boreland Mote,
533

borough,
312

Borr,
471

Borrowdale,
682

Boskenna,
510

bosom,
509

Bosomzeal,
349

Bosow, Giant,
613

boss,
529

Bosse Alley,
509

Bossenden Woods,
510

Boston,
248, 510

both,
372

bouche,
293

Boudicca,
519

Boulogne,
210, 647

Bourdon,
601

Bourjo,
644

Bournemouth,
551

Bourne Water,
799, 818

Bowl,
615

Box-,
246

Boxhill,
231

Box Hill,
386

— tree,
665

Boy Bishop,
590, 616

Boyne R.,
110

Braavalla,
749

Bracken,
385

Brackenbyr,
758

Bradford,
82

Bradmore,
432

Bradstone,
312

Brage,
758

Brahan Stone,
530

Brahma,
145, 161, 223

Brahma,
716

Brahmins,
163

Brahan Wood,
317

Brain,
378, 574

brain,
320, 324

Braintree,
430

Bramble,
159

Branch, Silver,
679

— The Divine,
660

Bran Ditch,
387

Brandon,
36, 349

— St.,
679

Brangwyn,
572

Branksea,
551

Bran, the Blessed,
379

— Voyage of,
679

Brantome Cave,
783

brass,
467

brat,
458

Bratton,
402

Brawn, St.,
317

Bray,
406, 664

— Down,
704

— R.,
348

Braybroke,
798

Braynes Row,
718

bread,
460

Bread and Cheese Lands,
371, 589

breath,
460

Brecan’s Cauldron,
689

Breceliande,
676

Brecon,
380

Brede Place,
460

Bredon,
350

Breeches,
377

breed,
458

Brehon Laws,
318, 333

Brennos,
379

Brent, R.,
609

Brentford,
609, 617, 668

Breock, St.,
666

Bress,
46, 389, 467

Bretons,
575

Breton souterrains,
778

Brewer,
295

Brew King,
689

Brian,
379, 389

— Boru,
380

Briancon,
379

Briareus,
82, 402

Brickel’s Lane,
510

Bride Eye,
682

— St.,
119, 327, 458, 552, 603, 663, 686, 736, 761, 823

Bridewell,
458

Bride’s Fire, St.,
472

Bridget, St.,
169

Bridlington,
492

Brig,
761

Brigan,
379

Brigantes,
715

Brightlingsea,
119, 312, 343

Brigid,
459, 467

Brigit,
388

Brigit’s Bird,
433

Bri Leith,
397

Brimham Rocks,
602

brimstone,
477

Brinsmead,
317

Brinsmead,
602

Brisen, Dame,
343

Brisons, The,
336, 343

Bristol,
818

Britani,
852

Britannia,
118, 461

British character,
122

Britomart,
118, 460, 715, 757

Briton,
100, 377

Brittany,
44

Brixham,
343

Brixton,
343

Broad arrow,
363, 534, 629

— Sanctuary,
660

Broadstairs,
95, 119

Broad, The,
121, 337

Brochs,
343

Brockhurst,
343

Brockley,
343, 666

Brodhulls,
119

broglodite,
769

brok,
347

Brok,
471

Broken Wf.,
510

Bromfield,
419

Bromley,
602

Bromley’s, etc.,
419

Brompton,
419

Brondesbury,
419, 602

Bronwen,
334

Bronze,
463

bronze,
467

Brooch,
348

brood,
458

brook,
510

Brookland,
343

Broom,
419, 602, 795

Broome Park,
716, 798, 799

brow,
324

Browne,
317

Brownies,
620

Brownie Stone,
316

Brownlows,
318

Brown Willy,
387

Brown’s Well,
609

— Wood,
718, 741

Browny,
315

Bru,
311, 348, 349

Brue, R.,
289, 348

Bruin,
329

Brun, R.,
387

Bruno, St.,
317

Brunswick,
402

Brute,
124

Brutes, Mistress of,
715

Bruton, St.,
601

Brutus,
83, 119, 186, 681

— Stone,
312, 350

Bryan,
577

Bryanstone,
314, 507, 530, 601, 678

— Sq.,
317

Brychan St.,
379, 716

bryony,
328

Brython,
100

bubs,
374

Bubwood,
374

Bucato,
305

Bucca Dhu,
231

— Gwidden,
231

Buck,
239

Buckaboo,
578

Buckden,
732

Bucket,
294, 474, 479, 481

Buckingham,
387

Buckland,
231, 246

Bucklersbury,
518

Buckwheat,
254

Bug,
255

Bugbear,
232

Buggaboo,
232

Buggy,
405

Bukephalus,
280

Bulinga Fen,
658

Bull,
46, 119, 259, 265, 328, 336, 414, 604, 840

Bun,
261, 515

— Hot cross,
731

Bungen,
303

Bunhill,
155

Buratys,
331

Burchun,
331

Burdock,
385

Burfield,
664

Burford,
386

Burgate,
510

burgeon,
484

Burgoyne,
380

Burinea, St.,
817

Burkenning,
666

burn,
510, 572

Burn, R.,
387

Burnebishop,
590

Burnham,
387

Burnie Bee,
507

Burnsall,
402

Burrian,
327

Burry, R.,
348, 387

Burtani,
852

Burtree,
576

Burwood,
601

bury,
319

Buryan, St.,
345, 510

Buryan’s St.,
817

Buryanack,
720

bush,
293

Bush,
612

Bushey Park,
612

Butterfly,
46, 176

— idols,
360

Buxton,
291, 796

Buzza’s Hill,
613

Byron,
317

Byzantium,
362, 510

Byzing Wood,
510

Cab,
504

Cabala,
577

Cabalists,
135

Cabiri,
493

Cabura,
493

Cac Horse,
453

cackle,
243

Cacus,
478

caddie,
642

Caddington,
787, 811

Cadi,
136, 234, 641

Cadlands,
785

Cadman,
110

Caenwood,
151

Cain,
149

— and Abel,
503

Caindea,
151, 319, 537

Cairn Voel,
424

Caistor,
443

cake,
245

calandar,
341

Caleb,
150

Calne,
342

Calpe,
283

Camber, K.,
681

Camberwell,
705

Cambrai,
406, 617

Cambre Castle,
396

Cambria,
310

Cambourne,
222, 397

Camperdizil,
586

Can,
310, 630

Can-,
826

Can, R.,
221, 667

Canaan,
150

Canbury,
349, 607

Cancan,
412

candescent,
212

Candia,
151, 319

candid,
212

Candle,
171

— in cave,
813

candour,
212

Candour, British,
101

Cane Goose,
223

Cangians,
519

Canhole,
448

Canna, R.,
261

— St.,
649

Cannibalism, Jewish,
185

Cannon,
274

— St.,
666

canny,
212

Canonbie Lea,
666

Canonbury,
667

Cantabria,
322

Cantabres,
323

canteen,
824

canter,
409

Canterbury,
87, 90, 168, 239, 409

Cantii,
411, 519

Cantorix,
410

Cape Wrath,
574

Caphira,
494

Cardia,
556

Cardinal,
555

Carfax,
514

Caris,
820

Carisbroke,
821

Carnac,
217, 642

Carn Bre,
396

Cars,
503

Cart-wheeling,
164

Cass,
243

Cassock,
234

Castor and Pollux,
354, 475

castra,
477

Cat,
58, 751

— Lady of,
752

— Stane,
752

Catacombs,
810, 844

Catchpole,
446

Cathay,
191

Catherine,
243

Catherine, St.,
784

Caucasus,
852

Cauchemar,
477

Cauldron,
615, 687, 797, 823, 875

— of Pwyll,
801

cause,
224

Causeway,
439

Cave,
765, 773, 780

Cave, at Bethlehem,
780

Cave = matrix,
790

Caverns,
193, 194

Celi,
224

celibate,
340

Celtiberia,
12

Celtiberians,
323

Celtic words,
61

Celts,
116, 228

Cendwen,
651, 824

Cenimagni,
283

Cenomagni,
411

Cenomani,
329

Centaur,
305, 424

Centaurs,
409

Centre,
794

Ceres,
402, 821

Chac,
161

Chad, St.,
288

Chadfish,
212

Chadwell,
288, 783

Chain,
482

Chairs, Stone,
545

Chalice,
167

Chalk pits,
776

Chandos,
741

change,
146

Chaos,
224, 225, 292, 490, 507

Chariot,
435, 470, 517

— of Jehovah,
503

Charis,
469

Charon,
282

Chartres,
791

Chastity,
457

Chee Dale,
447

— Tor,
728

Chei, St.,
447

Cheiran, St.,
409

Chemin des Dames,
439

Chester,
444, 445

Chester,
447

Chevauchée,
511

— de St. Michael,
420

Chew Magna,
447

Cheyne,
93, 741

Cheyneys,
670

Chi,
772, 780

Chi (Χ),
385, 446

Chiana, R.,
97

chic,
97

Chichester,
445

Children in Hell,
558

Chilperic,
342

Chin,
161

China,
191, 216, 272, 292

chink,
400

Chios,
225

Chiron,
409

Chisbury Camp,
446

Chislehurst,
766, 772

Chiun,
140

Choir, Gawr,
561

Chosen Hill,
729

Christ,
178, 206, 211, 214, 250, 264, 265, 487, 537, 574

Christ,
820

Christianity,
31, 864

Christian “tortures,”
107

Christine, St.,
496

Christmas,
257

Christofer, The,
270

Christopher, St.,
54, 107, 112, 151, 164, 204, 264, 267, 299, 640, 853

Chuckhurst,
372

chuckle,
471

chun,
92

Chun,
649, 740

— Castle,
90

Chwyvan Cross,
708

Chyandour,
97

Ciconians,
192

Cimmerians,
844

Cingen,
412

Circle,
604

— and Triangle,
571, 573

Circles,
499, 503

— Stone,
543

Cirencester,
453

Cissbury Ring,
446

Cities of Refuge,
736

Clare, St.,
718

Claus,
140

Clement, St.,
716, 797

Clerkenwell,
718

Clover,
737

Clowes,
299

Club,
663, 666

Cluricanne,
718

coach,
468

Coal-mining, prehistoric,
845

cock,
195

Cock,
196, 197, 361, 620

— R.,
197

Cockayne,
190, 195, 196

Cockburn Law,
752

Cockchafer,
255

Cocker, R.,
198

Cockey,
197

Cock horse,
444

— Law,
197

Cockle,
245, 385, 473

— bread,
248

Cockles, Hot,
248

Cocknage,
197

Cockney,
190

— dialect,
529

Cockshott,
197

Cocks Tor,
197

Codfish,
213

cog,
195

Cogenhoe,
197

Coggeshall,
197, 639

Coggo,
197

Cogidumnus,
446

Cogs,
195

Cogynos,
197

Cohen,
112

Coil Dance,
824

coin,
397

Coinage,
394

— British,
240

Coins,
763

Coke hill,
197

Coldharbour,
299

Cole Abbey,
615

— Old King,
103

Coleman,
155

Coles pits,
801

Colman, St.,
43

Colne, R.,
342

Cologne,
216

Columb, R.,
661

Columba, St.,
43, 552, 660

Columbine,
93, 669

— St.,
93, 669

com,
310

Com,
330

Comb,
715

Combarelles,
402

Comber,
310

Comberton,
586

Comet,
864

commére,
330

common,
440

Comparative method,
75

compére,
330

Conan,
649

Conann,
192

Concangi,
411

Concanni,
411, 667

Concord, St.,
141

Condy Cup,
824

cone,
236

Cone,
398, 800

Coney Hall Hill,
785

Conical cap,
669

Coniston,
151

Conn,
753

— K.,
151, 512

Connaught,
151, 182, 512

Conneda,
182, 753

Constantine,
226, 365, 566

Constantinople,
64

Conyers,
272

Cook,
195, 196, 245

Cooknoe,
197

Cook’s Kitchen Mine,
222

Coquet, R.,
197

Coquille,
248

Cormac,
517

Cornish types,
848

Cos,
510

Coundon,
435

Counter Earth,
580

Coveney,
430

Covent Garden,
428

Coventina,
427

Coventry,
427, 435

Cox,
195

cradle,
810

Cranbrook,
427

Cray,
796

Cres,
105, 819

Crescent,
254, 286, 390, 392, 528

Crescents,
492, 704

Cresswell Crags,
402

Cretan Caves,
808

— Horse,
407

— Maze Coins,
87

— Ship,
491

Cretans,
846

Crete,
11, 76, 104, 182, 192, 493, 687, 855

Crew, Lough,
200

Crimea,
844

Crissa,
820

Cromlechs,
17

Cronus,
82

Cross,
104, 106, 286, 296, 441, 445, 560, 561, 683

cross,
107, 821

Cross of St. John,
104

— — — George,
104

— Red,
270

crude,
810

Cruse,
822

Cuchulainn,
278

Cuckmere, R.,
452

Cuckoo,
197

Cuin,
290

— coin,
397

Culdees,
835

Culebres,
842

Cullompton,
661

cumber,
569

Cumberland,
682

cun,
92

Cun-,
235

Cunbaria,
330

Cunegonde,
412

Cuneval,
318

cunning,
212, 280

Cuno

Cuno,
279, 305

Cunob,
528

Cunobeline,
241

Cup,
813

— and Ring markings,
833

Cupid,
225, 231, 233, 304, 326, 494, 594

Cupra,
493

curate,
810

Cuthbert, St.,
362

Cuthbert’s beads, St.,
248

Cyclops,
192

Cymbeline,
241

Cymner,
310

Cymry,
310

Cynethryth,
761

Cynopolis,
54

Cynthia,
151, 213

Cynthus, Mt.,
726

da,
320

Dactyli,
574

Dad-,
256

dad,
509

daddy,
209, 256

Daddy,
263

Daddy’s Hole,
349

Dagda Mor,
169, 389, 397, 512

Daisy,
169, 210, 216, 233, 384

Dalston,
285

dame,
745

Danaan, Tuatha te,
766

Danbury,
721

Dancing,
540

Dandelion,
189

Dane Hill,
765

— John,
90, 683, 800

— R.,
789

Dane’s Inn,
716

Danoi,
858

Dansey,
735

Daphnephoria,
541

Darbies,
227

Darby,
227

Darkness,
626

Date palm,
258

Dava, Flood of,
641

David, St.,
625

Davy Jones,
641

dawn,
752

day,
320

Day, St.,
320

Dayne,
724

dazzle,
591

deacon,
687

dean,
779, 810

Dean, Forest of,
752

— R.,
789

Deane’s Gardens,
721

Dear,
734

dear,
760

Death,
263, 264, 307

— disregarded,
173

Deberry,
345

Deemster,
746

Dee, R.,
320

Deer,
257, 405, 599, 715

Deffrobani,
84

Delginross,
605, 796

Delphi,
653

Demijohn,
302, 687

Denbies,
613

Deneholes,
765-74

Denmark,
690

Dennehill,
716

Derbyshire,
401

Derg, L.,
792, 796

derry,
36

Deucalion,
337

Devil’s Dyke,
519

Dew,
167

dextra,
477

Dhia,
319

Diamond Horse, The,
424

Diana,
134, 135, 239, 258, 444, 475, 717, 788

Dianthus,
189

Digits,
575

Diminutives,
619

di,
319

dieu,
319

Dinant,
788

Dingwall,
317

Dinsul,
208

Dioscoros,
366

Dioscorus,
354

Dioscuri,
354, 512

Dionysus,
71

Divinity of Kings,
172

Dod-,
256

Dodbrook,
349

Doddington,
262

Dodecans,
207, 700

Dodman, The,
263, 349

Dodona,
89, 92, 133, 260, 273, 339

Dog,
54, 57, 111, 112, 121, 150, 152, 155, 264, 293, 329, 346, 853

Doliche,
76

Dolmen chapel,
30

Dolphin,
653

Domhills,
745

Don,
664

Doncaster,
444

Donidon,
745

donjon,
800

Donn,
712

— Children of,
734

Don, R.,
749, 789

Don’s Chair,
752

Donseil cave,
806

Donn’s House,
726

Doo Cave,
494

Doom Rings,
746

Doomster,
745

Dorchester,
713, 715

Dordogne,
406, 774

Dorking,
386

Dot and Circle,
276, 547

Dots,
105, 250

Double Disc,
494

dour,
119

Dove,
92, 144, 486, 624, 627, 652, 853

dove,
625

Dove Cots,
733

Dover,
95

Doves,
790

Dowgate Hill,
783

Dowdeswell,
252

Dowdy,
640

Down, County,
786

Dragon,
208, 242, 260, 270, 272, 274, 655, 836

— guards,
274

— slayer,
651

Drainage,
103

Dray, River,
87

Drayton,
714

Dress,
100, 122

Drew,
471

Drewsteignton,
757

droit,
101

Drosten,
734

Drucca coin,
483

Druid,
761

Druidesses,
570

Druidic Creeds,
536

— Fairy tale,
166

— Music,
562

— Remains in Spain,
324

Druidism,
6-9, 66, 87, 167, 171, 393, 488, 544

Druid Physiologists,
834

Druids,
554

— caves,
791

— circles,
544

— Town,
572

Druids = brans,
679

ducat,
397

Dudsbury,
263

due,
223

Dumbarton,
472, 523

Dummy’s Hill,
756

Dun, R.,
789

Duncannon,
274

Dundalgan,
796

Dunechein,
90

Dunence,
552

dungeon,
800

Dunodon,
745

Duno,
758

Dunstable,
714, 745, 777

— grave,
64, 65

Dunstan, St.,
716

Dunton,
716

Durham,
715

Durovern,
258

Duval,
741

Eagle,
280

Earthwork,
862

Easter,
608

— dancing,
540

Eaton,
733

ebb
524

Ebbe, R.,
524

Ebchester,
431

Ebgate,
513

Ebony,
165

Ebor, R.,
370

Ebora,
328, 329

Ebrington,
349

Ebro, R.,
323, 370

Ebur,
329

Ebury,
601, 621

Eceni,
411

Echo,
226

Eclipse,
167

Ecne,
390

Eda,
455, 753

— good Queen,
151

— Queen,
512

Edans, St.,
713

Edda, The,
752

Eden,
683, 730, 858

Edenhall,
743

Edenkille,
716

Eden, R.,
713

— Vale,
716

Edimbourg,
745

Edina Hall,
753

Edinburgh,
730

Edinburgh,
797

Edmonton,
679

Edna
753

Edrei,
194, 769

Effingham,
430

Effra, R.,
749

Egg,
223, 226, 276, 532, 756

Egypt,
9, 46, 69, 135, 166, 189, 252, 254, 414, 475, 577, 843

Egypt,
534

Eight,
188, 189, 204, 636, 642

eight,
655

Eight Bishops,
659

Eighteen,
206, 207, 588

El,
132, 135

Elaine,
103

Elbarrow,
133

Elbe, R.,
558

El Borak,
635, 664

Elboton,
154

elder,
153

Elen,,
103, 221, 235

— R.,
103

Elens Ways,
519

Elephant,
160

Eleven,
214, 421, 548, 557, 574, 581, 593, 633, 788

eleven,
217

Eleven Blindfolded Men,
577

— curtains,
576

— feet longstones,
548, 552

— foot grave,
560

— hundred,
214

— Loch,
219

— thousand,
214

elf,
153

Elfe,
153

Elfland,
559

Elgin,
450

Elijah,
147

Elini Cunob,
528

Elisha,
147

Elk,
289

Ellan,
133

Ellen, Dame,
778

Ellendown,
565

Ellendune,
133

Elles, The,
154

Ellesmere,
439

Ellingfort,
285

Ellistone,
318

Elmo’s Fires, St.,
475

Elphin,
158, 664

— Horses,
281, 287

Elphinstone,
318

Elphinstone,
548

Elphinstones,
217

Elven,
217

Elwyn St.,
132

Ely,
716

Ember Days,
572

emerge,
219

Empire,
570

Empyrean,
570

enceinte,
220

Engelheim,
359, 591

Engelland,
558, 788

Englefield,
588

Englewood,
553

Englysshe Wood,
588

Ennis,
557

Enns, St.,
720

Ep,
430

Ep,
523

Epeur,
326

Ephesus,
598

Ephialtes,
478

Epirus,
322

epo,
430

Epona,
284, 445

Epora,
328

Eppi,
523

Eppilos,
430

Eppilus,
280

Epping,
445

Epsom,
430

equity,
332

Eros,
158, 604

Esclairmond,
683

Eseye,
531

Esus,
278

Ethereal Plant,
181

Ethereus,
215

Ethne,
461

ethnic,
462

Eton,
730

Etruria,
17, 89, 139, 145, 148, 217, 236, 475

Eubonia,
163, 165, 216, 346

Eubury,
335

Euchar,
389

Euny, St.,
261, 828

Eure, R.,
870

Europa,
265

Europe,
525

Eve,
152, 403, 500, 742

Eve,
496

Evesham,
430

Evora,
329, 751

Exton,
685, 697

exuberance,
328

Eye,
251, 252, 282, 532, 538, 604, 727

— ball,
579

— of Christ,
384

— of Heaven,
195, 216

— of Horus,
122

— Land of the,
252

— of S’iva,
526

— Towns,
730

Eyes,
499, 539, 624

F,
497

Fabell, Peter,
679

Fainites!
616

Fainits!
117

Fairbank,
667, 686

Fairmead,
569

Fairs,
572

Fairy Family,
522

— Hill,
764

— Hills,
552

— leaves,
65

— Queen,
308

fake,
206

Fal,
424, 450, 841

— R.,
424

Falcon,
426

Faraday,
508

Farandole,
412

farisees,
619

Farn,
751

Faroe Islands,
507

Farringdon,
466

Fata,
202

Fate,
593

— Tree,
322

fay,
153

Fearbal,
679

Feather,
160, 258, 366, 746

Feathers,
496

Fechan, St.,
672

feckless,
206

fecund,
206

Fées,
165

Felikovesí,
423

Felixstowe,
423, 426

Fen,
426

Ferdinand,
507

Feridoon,
748

fern,
266

Fern,
260, 267, 385

— Islands,
206, 209

Fernacre,
550

Ferns,
256

Feron,
286

Feronia,
572

Ferriby,
495

Fiddler, The,
225

Field-names,
41

Fiery cross,
107

Fife,
153, 201

Fifteen,
206, 598, 601, 633, 755, 806

Fifty Sons,
716

Fig,
206

— Sunday,
500

Fingers,
574

Finwell cave,
806

fir = quercus

Fir Tree,
730

fire,
467

Fire,
72, 166, 167, 618

— Halo,
571

— Insurance,
705

— of Heaven
164

Fish,
247, 254, 286, 296

five,
363

Five,
238, 437, 513, 503, 689

— acres,
372

— grains,
517

— islands,
517

— king’s,
262

— peaks,
518

— roads,
516

— streams,
517

— wells,
261

Flamborough,
492

Fleur de lys,
816

Fleur de lys,
242

Flint Knapping,
349

Flokton,
435

Flood,
857

— The,
20

Flora dance,
486

Flounders Field,
419

Flower names,
68

Fly,
221

Foal,
422

fog,
211

Foleshill,
435

Folkestone,
423, 426, 432

Font de Gaune,
402

Footprints,
546

Forbury, The,
438

Fore,
672

Forfar,
368, 495

Fortunate Isles,
683, 690

Fortune,
489

— Wheel of,
537

Fosses des Inglais,
786

— Sarrasins,
786

Fossils in tomb,
65

Fountain of Knowledge,
689

Four Cities,
859

— Kings,
687

— Quarters,
188

— Rivers,
722

— Roads,
515

— -streamed Mount,
130

— -teated Horse,
284

Fox,
263

Fraid, St.,
459

Frederick the Great,
462

free,
760

Freemasonry,
295

Frei,
748

Freisingen,
700

Freya,
572

Friday,
572

Fulham,
422, 426

fun,
57

Furry dance,
271, 274, 412, 486

Furze,
602, 795

gad,
143

Gaddeaden,
673

Gadfly,
282

Gadshill,
755

Gaelic,
79

— regrets,
69

Gaelic tenderness,
43

gagga,
478

Galva, Carn,
318

Gancanagh,
412

Gander,
223

Ganesa,
160, 280

Gangani,
411

Ganganoi,
54, 702

Ganging Day,
246

Gangrad,
143

Garden of the Rose,
683

Gardens of Adonis,
712

gas,
225

gauche,
477

Gauls and Britons, same speech,
91

Gaurs,
561

Gayhurst,
288

Gedge,
471

Gee,
91

Gee,
282

Geecross,
446

Geho,
282

Gemini,
475

general,
146

generate,
145

Genesis,
145

Geneva,
329

geniality,
140

genie,
146

genital,
145

genius,
146

gennet,
285

“Gentle People,”
733

“Gentle Places,”
734

Gentry, The,
146

genus,
145

George,
272

George, St.,
242, 268, 271, 304, 614, 642, 695, 817

Gerberta,
362

Germans,
525

Germany,
74

Gest,
272

gewgaw,
448

Geyser,
243

ghost,
231

Gian Ben Gian,
140, 304

Giant’s Beds,
758

— civic,
188

— grave,
746

— graves,
191

— hedges,
17

Giants = Dwarfs,
233

Gig,
433, 471

gigantic,
195

giggle,
190

Gigglewick,
189

Giggy’s, St.,
190

Giglet Fair,
194

Gig na Gog,
190

Gigonian Rock,
194

gigue,
195

Gilbey,
284

Givendale,
429

Givon’s grove,
430

Glastonbury,
289, 682

Gnosis,
76, 279, 859

Gnossus,
76, 794

Gnostic gems,
108, 112

Gnostics,
135, 361

Goat,
57, 361, 504

Goblet,
813

god,
178

Godber,
572

Gode,
220

Godiva,
41, 403, 475, 598

Godmanham,
550

Godolcan,
285

Godolphin,
284

— Hill,
668

Godrevy,
531

God’s Acre,
673

Godstone,
815

Godstones, etc.,
673

Goemagog,
186-8

Gofannon,
432

Gog,
188, 478

Gog,
194

goggle,
189

Goginan,
194

Gogmagog,
83, 639

Golden Age,
858

— Ball Bar,
590

Golden Bough, The,
71, 74

Goldhawk,
433

Gooch,
195

good,
178

Goodge,
195, 477

Goodman,
741

Goodmanstone,
713

“Good Neighbours,”
733

Good People,
556

— — The,
174

Goodwood,
446

Goose,
223, 228, 243, 276, 346, 512, 661

goose,
224, 225, 231

Goosegog,
345

Goosey,
447

Goostrey,
447

Gorhambury,
111, 562

Gorsedd,
564

— prayer,
181

Gosh,
195

Gospel oak,
228

Goss,
243

Goswell,
243

Govan,
426

Govannon,
426

Gowk,
198

Grace,
830

Graces, Three,
181

Great,
810

Great Bear,
216

Greek,
81

— in Mexico,
842

Greeks, indebted to barbarians,
163

Green,
263

Greengoose Fair,
243

Green Man,
268

— — and Still,
270

Gretchen,
302, 362

Greyhound bitch,
36

Grimm’s Law,
51, 60

grot,
810

grotesque,
812

Gudeman, The,
109

Guedienus,
325

guess,
273

Guinea,
400

Guion,
824

Gun,
274

Gunpowder,
839

Gur, Lough,
736

gush,
273

gust,
243, 272

Gwenevere,
389

Gwennap,
531

gyne,
511

Gyre,
562

Habonde,
165

Hack,
283

Hackington,
411

Hackney,
283

hackney,
392

Hackney,
285, 287, 699

Haddenham,
716

Haddington,
750

Haden Cross,
716

Hag,
737

Hagbourne,
38

Hagman,
199

Hag tracks,
200, 283

Hags,
685

— chair,
200

Haha,
58

Haha,
737

Haig,
199

Hailsham,
568

Hakon,
235

Halcyon,
290

Half moon,
490

Halifax,
514

Hallicondane,
290, 412, 734

Hamelyn,
867

Hammer,
270, 355

— of Thor,
706

Hammersmith,
431

Hand,
744

Hangman’s Wood,
787

Han Grotto,
787, 827

Hannafore,
275

Hanover,
275, 695

Happy Valley,
523

Harp,
562

Harper,
305

Harpocrates,
118

Hastings,
95, 798

Hathor,
46

Hatton Garden,
716

Hawk,
205

hawker,
205

Hawthorn,
152, 159

— St.,
737

Haxa,
644

haycock,
198

Haydon,
713

Hay Hill,
421

Haymarket,
421

Heart,
158, 287, 595, 816

— Cross,
105

Heart’s Delight,
350, 687

Heathen chant,
373

Heaven’s Walls,
672, 683

Hebe,
743

Heber,
310

Hebrew,
79

Hebrew,
191, 369

Hebrews,
184

Hebrews,
502

Hebrides,
165

Hebrides,
315

Hebron,
34, 370

Heck!
283

Heddon,
746

Helen,
103, 221, 286, 477

Helena,
104

Helen, St.,
456, 587

Helen’s day, St.,
478

Helens, St.,
95, 103

Helicon,
289

Heligan Hill,
289

Helios,
103, 104, 135

Hellana,
103

Hellas,
133, 412

Hellen,
337

Hellenes,
103, 412

Hellingy,
588

Helston,
271, 412

Hen,
197, 653

Hengist,
275

— and Horsa,
85

Hengston Hill,
554

Hensor,
386

Hepburn,
526

Hephaestus,
426

Hepworth,
527

Herculaneum and Pompeii,
19

Hercules,
97, 114, 139, 200, 666, 668

Hermes,
116

Herne’s Oak,
239

Herring-bone-walls,
91

Hesy, Tel el,
531

Hewson,
450

Hexe,
644

Hibera,
323

Hibernia,
310

Hidden One,
577

Hide and Seek,
578

Hieroglyphics,
114

high,
125

Highbury,
667

Himbra, Pt.,
586

Hindus,
168

hinge,
556

Hiniver,
695

Hinover,
275, 452

hip,
524

Hip! Hip! Hip!
526

Hipperholme,
514

hips,
526

Hipswell,
513

Hive,
710

Hivites,
497

Hob,
165, 513

Hobany,
216, 284

Hobby,
423

— Horse,
268, 275, 527

Hobday,
526

Hobredy,
165

hoch,
125

Hogg,
199

Hogmanay,
199

Hoketide,
244

Holborn,
722

Holda,
220

Holed stone,
538

Holiburn, Giant,
318

Holland House,
422

Hollantide,
245

Holle,
220

Holloway,
517, 521

Holly,
40, 140, 417, 597

Hollybush,
155

Hollyhock,
204

Holly tree,
220

Holofernes,
266

holy,
140

Holy Ghost,
487

— Holy Vale,
586

— Sepulchre,
793

Holvear Hill,
590

Holwood Park,
785

Homer,
63, 99, 225, 326, 327

Homerton,
287

Honeybourne,
261, 714

Honeybrooke,
38

Honey Child,
261, 714

Honeychurch,
714, 261

Honeycrock,
568

Honeydew,
623

Honeyman,
758

Honeysuckle,
258

Honor Oak,
228, 231, 666

Honover,
695

Hoodening,
841

Hoodown,
350

Hoof,
573

Hoop,
542

hoop,
525

Hooper,
425

Hooper’s Blind,
311

— Hide,
578

Hop,
523

Hop o’ my Thumb,
524

— Queen,
540

Hope,
523

hope,
524

Hopkin,
540

Hoppyland,
523

hops,
524

Horn,
286

Horns of Altar,
736

Horsa,
275

Horse,
241, 274, 389, 615, 623, 840

— Eye,
282

— Eye Level,
568

— flesh,
478

— hair wig,
332

— = Liberty,
328

Horselydown,
38

Horse-ornaments,
286

— ship,
654

Horseshoe,
572

Horus,
46

Hospitality,
227

Hounds,
461

Hounslow,
714

Howel,
104

Hoxton,
285, 685

Hoy,
758

Hoy obelisk,
9

Hoyden,
742

Hu,
84, 214, 320, 311, 327, 349, 386, 450, 586, 749

hubbub,
525

Hube, Mt.,
542

Hudkin,
509

huge,
198

Huggen Lane,
511

Huggins Hall,
350

Hugh,
320

Hugh Town,
586

humane,
695

Humber, R.,
569

Hun,
234

Hun,
827

Huns,
216

Hunsonby,
220

Hyde,
473, 455, 621

Hydon’s Ball,
714

Hyperboreans,
324, 370, 562

Hypereia,
320, 346

Hyperion,
328

Hymn of Hate,
525

Ibar, St.,
311, 826

Iberian coin,
292, 322, 397

— coins,
247, 254, 265, 297, 231, 386

— language,
266

Iberians,
451

Iceni,
248

Icenians,
451

Ichnield,
519

Ichnield way,
248, 411, 518, 520

Ickanhoe,
248

Ida,
742

Ida,
754

— Mt.,
574, 715, 455

— plain,
752

— plains,
473

Idaeiana,
456

Ideia,
76

Idle, R.,
462

Idle’s Bush,
462

Idunn,
742

Ieithon,
461

Iffley,
40

Iggdrasil,
841

Ikeni,
283, 519

Iliberi,
322

Ilibiris,
330

Iliffe,
162

Ilkley,
290

Illtyd St.,
257

Illtyds House,
257

Ilma,
136

Ilmatar,
137

Imp Stone,
623

Inachus,
266, 282

inane,
201

inch,
556

Inch,
557

Inchbrayock,
495

inept,
526

Ing,
556

Inga,
556

Inge,
556

Ingene Lane,
511

ingle,
552

Ingleborough,
587, 786

Inghilterra,
557

Inglesham, etc.,
659

Ingletons, etc.,
588

Inkberrow,
874

Inkpen,
659

Inn,
294, 298

Inquisition,
549

Intoxication,
688

Intreccia,
706, 840

Intreccia coins,
491

Invicta,
275

Invictus,
210

Io,
282, 362, 399

Iona,
627, 651, 670, 714

Ionia,
92

Ipareo,
320

Ippi,
523

Ireland,
182, 193

Iris,
265

Irish circles,
545

Iron,
574

Isaac,
471

Isle of Dogs,
38, 113

Islington,
685

Issey, St.,
531

Istar,
608, 644

Ith, Plain of,
473

Ivalde,
742

Ives, St.,
41, 425, 427, 430, 531

Ivy,
493

— Bridge,
427

— Girl, The,
40, 540

Ixion,
163

Iysse, St.,
531

Jack,
97, 195, 417

Jack a lantern,
152

— in green,
268

— The,
270, 273

— the Giant Killer’s well,
212

— up the orchard,
447

Jackal,
111, 263

jackass,
212

Jah,
161

Jaina cross,
105

Jana,
97

Jane,
447

Janicula,
828

Janina,
261, 460

janitor,
146

Januarius, St.,
828

January,
140, 146

— 1st,
650

Janus,
92, 141, 203, 140, 213, 241, 399, 490, 555, 626, 670, 795, 828, 841

— of Sicily,
143

Japan,
216, 857

Jason,
82

jaunty,
143

Jay,
91

Jay,
283

Jehovah,
184, 502, 508

Jehu,
282

jennet,
285

jenny,
212

Jenny, Aunt,
228

Jerusalem,
296, 794

Jesus,
214

jeu,
106, 448

Jew,
91

Jew, Eternal,
203

Jews,
502

Jews,
456

— Garden,
468

— in Cornwall,
80

— Harp,
448

— Lane,
697

— The Everlasting,
196

Jews Walk,
439

— Wandering,
448, 663, 696, 728

jig,
195

jingle,
400

jinn,
146

Jinn,
166

Jo,
644

Joan,
227

— Pope,
357

Joan’s Pitcher,
190, 301

Jock,
106

Jockey,
444

jocund,
106

Johanna,
213

Johanna’s garden,
703

John,
830

John,
53

— of Gaunt,
648

— of Perugia,
326

— St.,
165, 268, 449, 514, 537, 539, 636

— the Baptist,
448

Johnstone,
53

Johnstone’s Inn,
331

John’s Wood, St.,
151

Jonah,
652

Jones,
92

Jonn,
91

jonnock,
97, 236

Joseph,
147

Joseph’s Rod,
629

Jou,
91, 147, 151, 456, 508, 710

Jove,
140, 257

— androgynous,
233

— coin,
282

joviality,
140

Joy,
91

joy,
106, 147

Juda,
362

Jude, St.,
287

Judge,
447

Judge’s bough,
691

— walk,
439

Judson,
447

Judy,
362, 754

Jug,
295, 301

Jug,
447

Jugantes,
453

Juggling,
563

Juktas, Mt.,
471

June,
146

junior,
146

Juno,
144, 146, 223, 243, 407, 493, 715

Jupiter,
311

Jupiter,
142, 227, 283, 362, 386, 458, 508

— Ammon,
578

Jupiter’s Chain,
581, 830

Just, St.,
563

Jutt,
359

Juxon,
446

Kaadman,
109, 204, 249, 288

Kalbion,
125

Kate Kennedy,
319

— St.,
784

Katherine Wheel,
107

Kayne, St.,
212, 221, 649

Keach,
471

Kean,
212

Ked,
242

Kelpie,
283, 818

Kember,
310

Ken,
212

Ken, R.,
221

— wood,
151, 649

Kendal,
221, 411, 667

Kenia, Mt.,
236

Kenna,
213, 261, 317

— Princess,
162

— St.,
649

Kennet, R.,
853

Kenites.,
826

Kennington,
292

Kenny,
212, 649

Kensington,
317

— Gore,
420

— Hippodrome,
449

Kent,
95, 411

— R.,
667

Kent’s Cavern,
4, 401, 825

— Copse,
349

Keridwen,
158, 651

Keridwen,
157

Kerris Roundago,
820

Keston,
785

Kettle,
797

Keyne, St.,
757

Keynsham,
212

Khan,
234, 310

Khem,
745

Kid,
504

Kigbear,
194

Kilburn,
155

Kildare,
603

Kilkenny,
290

Kilkenny, etc.,
340

Killbye,
284

Kilts,
98

Kimball,
39

Kimbdton,
39

Kind,
826

King,
234, 342

King Charles’ Wain,
406

— of Cockney’s,
617

— of the May,
527

King’s cross,
288

— Lynn,
697

Kingston,
548, 606

Kingston,
349

Kingstons, etc.,
606

Kinross,
605

Kinyras,
605

Kintyre,
409

Kio,
282

— eye coin,
253

Kirkcudbright,
362

Kirkmabreck,
579

Kit, St.,
784

— with a canstick,
152

Kit’s Coty,
153, 750, 751, 780

Knap Hill,
528

— well,
528

Knave,
529

Knightsbridge,
621

Knockainy,
288, 735

Knocking Stone,
317

Knop,
528

Knot,
707

Know,
280

Konah,
236

Konkan,
412

Konken,
412

Koppenburg,
303

Kostey,
226, 231

Kristna,
105, 820

Kun, Mt.,
236

Kunnan, Island of,
157

Kwan yon,
216

Kyd brook,
784, 785

Kymbri,
16, 330

Kymbri,
310

Kymbric,
79

Kynetii,
853

L,
792

labour,
322

Labyrinth,
706

Labyrinths,
107

Lac d’Amour,
707

Ladies Walk,
439

lady,
512

Ladybird,
507

Lady Bird,
591

Lamb,
719, 722

Land’s End,
193

Language, poetic element

lanky,
285

Lanky man,
337

Lansdown,
342

Lansdowne,
417

Latin cross,
105

Laurel-Bearer,
541

Leaf,
427

— Man, Little,
305

Leaper,
568

Lear, K.,
791

Leda,
354, 512

Leen, R.,
697

Legs,
346

Leinster,
661

Len, R.,
697

Lense,
839

Lenthall,
285

Leprechaun,
330

Levan, St.,
212, 703

Leven, Loch,
219

Levens,
221

Leviathan,
162

Lewes,
416

Lewis,
432

liberal,
322

Liberini,
322

liberty,
322

Libora,
328

Liege,
330

Lieven,
217, 224

Lif and Lifthraser,
558

life,
153

Life Tree,
322

Lily,
242

Lily,
633

Linden,
154, 228

Linscott,
285

Lion,
57, 578

Lissom Grove,
623

Little Bird, Lay of,
692

— Britain,
522

— Leaf Man,
577

— London,
292

“Little Mothers,”
174

Livingstone,
318

Lizard,
284

Llan,
103

Llandrindod,
367

Llandudno,
256, 272, 552

Llanfairfechan,
672

Llangan-,
261

loaf,
253

Londesborough,
285

London,
104

London,
103, 521, 717

— Bridge,
575

— Fields,
285

— Stone,
513, 518

Lone, R.,
221, 697

long,
285

Long Man,
337

— Meg,
205, 209, 266, 588, 646, 713

Lonsdale,
221

Lord of Misrule,
617

Lothbury,
470

Lough Gur,
562

love,
153

Love,
168, 225

Lovekyn,
607

Lovelace,
818

Lucifer,
222

Luna,
234

Lune, R.,
221, 697

Lunus,
234

Lyne grove,
285

Lyn R.,
697

M,
678

m and n,
745

ma,
186

Ma,
136, 258

Maat,
746

Mab, Queen,
556, 757

Mabon,
163

Mabonogi,
557

Mac,
375

Mc,
205

McAlpine laws,
172

McAuliffe,
205

Macclesfield,
511

Macedonian stater,
394

Macha,
512

Madeira,
89

Madon, R.,
789

Madonna,
745

Madonna,
790

Madura,
104

Maga,
202

magazine,
205

Maggie Figgie,
205, 211

— Figgy,
500

— Witch,
219

Maggots,
222

Magi,
181, 413, 702

magic,
202

magna mater, medals,
128

Magog,
188

magog,
194

Magogoei,
191

Magon,
674

Magonius,
674

Magpie,
656

Magu,
436

magus,
202

Magus,
203, 436, 702

Magusae,
436

Mahadeo,
835

Mahadeos,
832

Maht,
746

Maia,
606

maid,
458

Maida,
151, 456

maiden,
712

Maiden Bower,
714, 745

— Castle,
713

— Lane,
428

— Paps,
209, 717

— Stane,
745

— Stone,
715

— Way,
206

Maidenhead,
660

Maidoc, St.,
742, 751

Mairae,
594

maisie,
211

Mama Allpa,
135

— Cochs,
196

mamma,
136

Mammoth dagger,
599

Man in the Moon,
149, 161, 293

— Isle of,
163, 205, 320, 346, 556

— in the Oak,
230, 240

Manorbeer,
468

Manston,
96

Maoris,
579, 857

Mara,
600

Marazion,
91

Mare,
616, 653

Mare Street,
285

Maree, Loch,
604

Margaret, St.,
208, 219, 220, 275, 647, 660, 755

Margate,
91

— Grotto,
765, 807

Margery Daw,
219

— Hall,
208

margot,
220

Marguerite,
210, 216

Marguerite,
839

Maria,
91, 301

Marian, Maid,
268

Marigold,
210, 607

Marine, St.,
607

Marion,
270

Market Jew,
91

Marlow,
660

Marne,
406

marrain,
330

marry,
601

Marseilles,
81

Martha’s, St.,
585

Martin, St.,
274

Mary,
201, 604

Mary,
201

— Ambree,
648, 657

— Morgan,
201, 626

— St.,
287, 590, 595, 793

Mary’s Island, St.,
586

Materialism,
74

Math,
432

Matterhorn,
147

Maur, St.,
217, 576

Maurus,
217

Maurice, St.,
217, 224

Mawgan, St.,
674

May,
606, 713

May doll,
542

— Queen,
308, 686

Maya,
606

Mayas,
842

Mayborough,
713

Maycock,
195

Mayday,
268, 287

Maydeacon,
687

— House,
350

Mayfair,
601

Maypole,
260, 438, 684

mazes,
87, 585

Meacock,
195

Mead,
688

mead,
473

Meadows,
568

Meantol,
226

meat,
747

Meath,
757

Meave,
757

Meek, The,
660

meek,
211

Meg,
208

Megale,
223

Megalopolis,
362

Megstone,
206, 266

Meigle,
505

“Men of Peace,”
733

mer,
91

merchant,
97

Mercury,
85, 97, 111, 134, 140, 195, 227, 262, 269, 347

mère,
91

Merlin’s Cave,
797, 800

Merritot,
447

merry,
590, 600

Merry Andrews,
701

— Maidens,
206, 549

Meru, Mt.,
708

Mesembria,
691

Metal inlay,
464

Mexico,
105, 161

Mirror,
251, 700, 715

Micah,
111, 184

Michal,
208

Michael, St.,
111, 207, 245, 271, 287, 304, 416, 420, 504, 511, 557, 661

Michael’s Mount,
208

Michaelmas,
245

— Day,
213

Michelet,
212

Mickleham,
208

Mihangel,
557

Mildmay,
287

Milkmaids,
603

Minerva,
139

Minnis Bay,
94

— Rock,
94

Minos,
333, 440

— King,
95

Minotaur,
840

Minster,
95

minster,
96

Mist,
211

Mistletoe,
181, 681

Mithra,
121, 768, 781, 835

Mithras,
413

mo,
234

Moccus,
240

Mogadur,
208

Mogounus,
202

Mogue, St.,
266

moke,
211

Moirae,
594

Mona,
391

monastery,
96

Mongols,
191, 847

Mont Giu,
728

montjoy,
728

Moon,
149, 234

Moot hills,
209, 747

morbid,
600

Morgan,
201

Morgana,
317

Moria,
597, 322

Moriah, Mt.,
633, 708

Morni,
175

Morning Star, R.,
68

morose,
600

Morrigan,
757

Morris dance,
606

Mother Goose,
223, 225

“Mother Margarets,”
222

Mother Ross,
604

“Mothers’ Blessings,”
174,
230

Mottingham,
764, 789

mouche,
221

Mound,
448

— of Peace,
733

Mounds,
171

Mount Pleasant,
288, 716

Mountain tops,
171

mouth,
293

Mowrie,
604

Moytura,
757

mud,
747

Mudes,
747

muggy,
211

Mug’s well,
208

Muire,
604

Mulberry,
596

murder,
600

Mushroom,
261

Music of Spheres,
67

Mut,
746

Mutton,
741

Mykale,
261

Mykenae,
258, 383, 430, 843, 850

mykenae,
824

Myrrh,
601

Myrrha,
605

Mysteries, The,

Nag,
622

Nag’s Head,
589

Name, Sacred,
535

Nat,
621

naught,
655

naughty,
656

Necessity,
489

neck,
614

Neck Day,
614

nectar,
656

Nectar,
688

Nehelennia,
456, 777

Nehellenia,
697

neigh,
279

Neith,
621

Nelly,
697, 777

Nelly,
456

Neot, St.,
621

new,
257

New Grange,
9, 166, 258, 266, 561, 750, 850

New Jerusalem,
702

New Year’s Gifts,
141

Newark,
450

Newbon,
162

Newcastle,
700

Newmarket,
450

Newington,
450

Newlands Corner,
387

Newlove,
818

Newlyn,
697

Neyte,
621

nice,
620

niche,
622

Nicholas,
613

Nicholas,
478

— St.,
140, 239, 504, 563, 614, 663

Nicolette,
633

Night,
621

night,
620

Nina,
46

Nine,
72, 94, 194, 214, 537, 549, 588, 609, 642, 664, 792, 834

Nine maids,
549

Nine men’s morris,
585, 609

Nine Worthies,
609

Nineteen,
169, 472, 587, 806

Nineveh,
93

Nisses,
620

Nixy,
619

Noah,
152, 450

Noe, R.,
450

Nonnon,
625

Norway,
96

November,
244

Noviomagus,
785

Nox,
225

nucleus,
614

Nut,
621

Nutria,
622

Nymph Stone,
623

Oaf,
524

Oak,
78, 67, 133, 226, 228, 370, 393, 665

Oannes,
201

Oats,
663, 680

Oberland,
329

Oberon,
317, 320, 570, 588, 683

ocean,
142

Oceanus,
142

— R.,
730

Ock, R.,
198

Ockbrook,
198

Ockham,
231

Ockley,
672

Octopus,
839

Oddendale,
461

Odestone,
461

Odin,
157, 461, 743, 842

Odstone,
509

Oendis,
537

Oengus,
266, 512

Offa,
524

Offham Hill,
416

Offida,
474

Og,
194, 195, 243

Og,
194, 769

— R.,
198

Ogane,
400, 845

Ogbury,
198

Ogdoad,
189

Ogle,
190

Ogmios,
114, 148, 195, 201, 304, 663

Ogmore, R.,
198

ogre,
198

Ogwell,
198

Ogygia,
193

Ohio,
535

Oin,
795

Oisin,
175

Ok,
126

Okehampton,
194

Okement, R.,
194

Okenbury,
349

Olaf’s Beard, St.,
267

Olantigh Park,
292

Olave St.,
155, 285

Olcan, R.,
239

Old Cider,
677

— Davy,
641

— Harry,
199

— Hob,
527

— Joan,
90, 227

— King, The,
152

— man, The,
152, 225, 666, 668, 675

— Moore,
225, 327

— Nick,
140, 476, 620

— Parr,
327, 668

— Poole’s Saddle,
796

— Shock,
447

— Surrender,
374

— Wife,
742

Olen,
566

Oliff,
162

Olinda Rd.,
285

Oliphaunt,
159

Olive,
155, 427

— tree,
322

Oliver,
601

Olivet, Mt.,
793

Oluf, St.,
157

Omar, St.,
225

On,
450

Ona,
282

One,
489, 537

“One and All,”
132

— Essence,
229

— Man,
758

— Man, The,
823

Onslow,
550

ope,
525

Ophites,
496

opine,
285

oppidum,
523

Orand,
572

Oratory of Gallerus,
450

Orchard,
671

Orme’s Head,
272

Osmund,
267

osmunda,
267

Ossian,
177, 225

Ostara,
608, 646

Osterley,
608

ounce,
556

Ouphes,
524

Ovary, St., Mary,
748

over,
329

Oving,
419

Ovington Sq.,
419

Overkirkhope,
495

Overton,
500

Owen,
795

Owl,
754

Oxford,
514

Oxted,
799

Oyster Hills,
608, 646

pa,
135

Pachevesham,
430

Padstow,
273, 669

Paddington,
151, 456

Pair,
354

pair,
458

Paleolithic symbol,
254

Palm,
278, 390

Palm leaf,
247, 255, 258

— of Paradise,
612

Palmette,
258

Palmtree,
256

Pan,
134, 137, 206, 250, 448

Pankhurst,
137

Panku,
137

Pann,
162

Pans,
169

Pansy,
169, 182

pantaloon,
377

papa,
126, 136

Papa Stour, etc.,
339

Papas,
728

Papermarks,
365, 381, 503

Pappas,
136

Paps,
209, 757

— of Anu,
334

Paradise,
759

Paradise,
517, 667, 678, 683, 697, 699, 701, 714

— Celtic,
174

Paragon,
759

Parcae,
595

Pardenic,
424

Pardon churchyard,
472

parent,
323

Paris,
412

parish,
312

Parisii,
493

parrain,
330

parricides,
323

parrot,
327

Parsees,
412, 748

Parslow,
714

Parsons,
343

Parthenon,
207

Partholon,
337

Parton,
533, 572

Patera,
674

Patrick,
794

— St.,
42, 113, 175, 182, 202, 552, 671, 758, 829

Patrick’s Purgatory,
791, 794

Patrise, Sir,
674, 734

Patrixbourne,
670, 687, 716

Paul. St.,
342, 346

Paul’s, St.,
239, 472

Paul’s Stump,
509, 542

paunch,
139

pawky,
231

Paxhill,
754

Peaceful immigrations,
85

Peace Mounds,
736

Peak,
291

— Hill,
440

Pear,
691

— Tree,
730

Pearce,
707

Pearl,
660, 836

Pechs,
244

Peck,
294

Peckham,
231, 373, 670

Pedlar of Swaffham,
575

Pedrolino,
668

peer,
319

Peerless Pool,
721

Peg,
232

Pegasus,
276, 277, 278, 287, 295, 305, 722

Peggy,
233

Peirun,
338

Pelagienne, St.,
626

Pelasgi,
92

Pelasgian Heresy,
178

Pell’s Well,
796

Pendeen,
766

Pennefather,
137

Penny,
169

penny,
397

Pennyfields,
169

Pennyroyal,
169, 267

Pen pits,
800

Penrith,
724

Penselwood,
800

Pentagon,
77

Pentargon,
90

Pentecost,
243

Penton,
800

Pentonville,
800

Pepi, King,
744

Pera,
702

pere,
323

Perigord,
402

Perilous Pool,
721

— Pond,
718

periphery,
368

Periwinkle,
384, 385

Perkunas,
431

Peronne,
406

Peroon,
358, 431

Perran Round,
387

Perranzabuloe,
316

Perriwiggen,
320

Perriwinkle,
320, 384,
385

Perro,
329

Perron du Roy,
315, 420

Perry Court,
313

— dancers,
312, 874

— Stones,
874

— Woods,
313

Perseia, R.,
852

Persia,
168, 412

Persians,
171, 181, 182, 183, 322, 544, 570

person,
367

Perth,
461

Peru,
135, 196,
858

Perugia,
326

Perun,
316

Peter,
669

Peter Mount,
826

— St.,
127, 249, 478, 613, 668

— the Poor,
502

Peter’s Hill,
472

— Orchard,
671, 683

— Purgatory,
827

Peterill, R.,
675

Peterkin,
668

Petersham,
674

Petra,
724

Petrockstow,
671

Petrocorii,
402

Petronius quoted,
73

Phæton,
504

Pharoah,
242

Pharoah,
507

Pherepolis,
313

Phial,
427

Philemon,
227

philosophy,
394

Phocean Greeks,
507

Phœbus,
111

Phœnicians,
13, 78,
99, 871

Phol,
424, 841

phooka,
206

Phoroneus,
266

Phra,
507, 748

Phrygia,
227, 326, 574

Phrygians,
164

Picardy,
381

Piccadilly,
731

Pichtil,
305

Pickhill,
231

Pickmere,
231

Pickthorne,
231

Picktree,
231

Pickwell,
231

Pictish sculptures,
381

Pictones,
244

Picts,
244

Pied Piper,
303, 700, 795

Piepowder,
698

Pierre,
668

Pierrot,
138, 668

Piers,
707

Pig,
240, 406

Pigdon,
231

pigeon,
144

Pigeon caves,
783

Pilgrim’s Way,
520

Pillar,
241, 255, 269, 384, 481, 823

— palm,
258

Pillars,
297, 309

Pink,
169, 182

Pipbrook,
386

Piper,
305

Pipes of Pan,
158

Piran, St.,
316

pirate,
526

Pisgies,
176

Pitcher,
300, 302, 570

Pixham,
231

Pixie’s Garden,
703

Pixtil,
264, 305, 557

pixy,
230

Place-name persistences,
34

Plan au guare,
561

planta genista,
419

Pleasant, Mt.,
759

Plough Monday,
227,
271

Plutarch quoted,
75

pock,
290

Pocock,
195

Pol Hill,
801

pollute,
426

Polyphemus,
193

Pontiff,
701

pony,
284, 445

Pooctika,
305

Poole’s cavern,
796

Poor John Alone,
696

pope,
126

Pope,
357-9

— Joan,
626, 703

Pope’s Hole,
589

Popinjay,
754

Poppy,
245, 385

Population, density,

Porsenna’s Tomb,
236

Portreath,
574

Portunes,
489, 755

Poseidon,
440

Pot of Treasure,
576

Poukelays,
231, 316

Power,
458

prad,
402

prate,
327

Prechaun,
330

Precious Gem, The,
660

Prehistoric edifice,
863

presbyter,
330

Presteign,
319

Prester, John,
699, 858

Preston,
312, 313, 349, 372, 402, 416

Prestonbury Rings,
332

pretty,
458

Pria,
328

Priam,
716

Prickle,
292

Priest,
330

pride,
119

Prime,
602

Primrose,
182

— Hill,
602

prince,
318

Prince of Purpool,
617

Prize Ring,
563

Proboscis deities,
161

Prometheus,
153

Proserpine,
484

Proteus,
507

proud,
458

Provence,
170

Prow,
399

prude,
119, 458

Prujean, Sq.,
331

Prussia,
847

Prydain,
118, 309, 311, 749

Prydwen,
548

Psyche,
177

Puck,
230, 280, 320

Puckstone,
552

Puckstones,
231, 316

pun,
592

Punch,
138, 754

Punchinello,
138

Punning,
54

Purbeck,
551

Pure,
458

Purfleet,
349

Purgatory,
175

Purity, Hymn to,
183

Purley,
664

Purple,
617

Pwll,
477

Pwyll,
796

Pydar,
698

— Hundred of,
669

Pyrenees,
323

Pyrrha,
337

Pythagoras,
180

Quean,
511

queen,
235

Quendred,
719,
761

Quick,
153

quick,
245

Quimper,
310

Quinipily,
531

Ra,
152

Racing, Etrurian,
409

Radipole,
684

— rood,
438

Radwell,
470

Rainbow,
265

Rath,
711

rath,
574

Rawdikes,
434

Rayed Fingers,
356

Rayham,
93

Raynes Park,
812

Reading,
437

— St.,
443

Rea, R.,
436

reason,
437

Reason,
690, 695, 813

Reculver,
95, 661, 759

Red cliff,
818

— Cross,
104, 438, 471

— Horse,
278

— Rood,
555

Reddanick,
438

Redon,
434

Redones,
435

Redruth,
396, 438

regina,
812

Regni,
445

Reigate,
798

Reigate,
812

Reindeer,
622

Resin,
689, 814

rex,
300

Rey cross,
437

Rhadamanthus,
440

Rhea,
301

Rhea,
92, 493

rhetoric,
574

rhi,
300

rhoda,
338

Rhoda coin,
339

Rhode,
440

Rhodesminnis,
440

Rhodians,
683

Rialobran,
314, 318

Richborough,
441, 567

ride,
435

rigan,
301

Ripon,
437

river,
437

River God,
142

Roads,
517

Roas Bank,
93

Robin Goodfellow,
230, 284

— Hood,
509

Rochester,
87, 443

Rock,
73, 127, 129, 207

— Monday,
127

— of Moses,
671

Rodau’s Town,
339, 350, 435, 683

Roden, R.,
435

Roding, R.,
435

roi,
300

Romans,
26, 520

Rome,
17

roue,
436

Rood,
437

Rosalie, St.,
819

Rosa mystica,
709

Rosamond,
683, 814, 830

Rosanna,
813

Rose,
604

Rose,
442, 610, 626, 669, 672, 817, 819

— coins,
683

Ross,
605

Rota coins,
683

Rothwell,
438

Rotomagi,
436

Rotten Row,
418, 732

Rottenrow,
433

Rottingdean,
443

Rotuna,
443

Round Table,
683

Row Tor,
550

Royal Bright Star, The,
660

Royston,
640, 641, 672, 678, 683, 781

Ruadan, St.,
434

Rua excavations,
812

Rudra,
526

Rudstone,
435

rue,
435

Rule, cave of St.,
160

Rule, St.,
780

Ruthen,
443

Rutland,
434

Rutupiae,
442

Rye,
811

Sabra, Lady,
817

Sabrina,
622, 817

Saffron Walden,
260

Saint’s, bisexual,
234

St., John and Father,
165

— Nicholas Acon,
850

Salakee,
589

Salisbury,
340

— Crags,
730

— Seal,
659

Salla Key,
538

Sampson, St.,
313

Sancreed,
538, 549, 816

— cross,
816

Sanctuary,
810

Sanderstead,
786

Sandringham,
798

Sangraal,
822

Sanscrit,
49

Santa Claus,
140

Santones,
244

Saturn,
140

Saul,
208

Saxons,
452, 481, 553

Scales,
218

Scandinavians,
471, 558

Scarab,
122

Scarabeus,
256

Scarf,
264

Sceattae,
364, 506

Scilly, Islands,
340585

Scroll coins,
252

Seal,
224, 506

Sea Urchins,
811

Secrecy,
118

Seeley,
213

Selby,
340

Selena,
213

Selenus,
688

Selgrove, etc.,
340

Sellinger’s Round,
685

Selli, The,
339

Selly Oak,
340

Selsea,
340

Semele,
257

Sence, R.,
437

Sengann,
411, 512

Senile,
146

Sennen,
425

Sentry Field,
660

Serapis,
497

Serpent,
204, 351, 352, 483, 486, 495, 500, 838

— Shrines,
809

Seven,
495, 657

— Barrows,
416

— Kings,
228, 547

Sevenoaks,
228

Seventy-two,
206, 597, 700

Severn, R.,
622

Shadwell,
288

Shah,
696

Shaman,
699

Shamrock,
101, 182, 737

Shandy’s Hill,
349

Shanid,
53, 411, 512

Shannon,
53, 411, 512

Shawfield,
448

Shec,
195

Sheen,
674

Sheep,
213

shekel,
400

Shells,
247, 248, 813

Shên jên,
517

Shened, Castle,
703

Shenstone,
53

Shepherdess,
657, 662

— walk,
721

Shick Shack Day,
447

Shield,
543

Ship,
166

— of Isis,
450

Shobrook, R.,
447

Shock, Old,
272

Shoe Lane,
754

Shoes,
269

Shony,
142, 201, 671, 699, 795

Shuck,
447

Shuckborough,
447

Shuggy Shaw,
447

Sicily,
320

Sickles,
492, 705

Sid,
440

Silbury,
340, 352

— Hill,
341

Silenus,
213

Silgrave,
432

Silly,
213

Silus Stone,
339

Silver,
439, 512

— plate,
603

— St.,
590

— wheel,
438

Silverhills, etc.,
439

Sinann,
512

Sinclair,
718

Sindre,
471

Sindry Island,
96

sinister,
477

Sinjohn,
201, 722

Sinodun,
751

S’iva,
526

Six,
487, 490, 624, 788, 790, 835

Six-winged Dove,
486

sleep,
537

Sleep Bringer,
537

Slee, R.,
298

Smile Bringer,
537

smite,
467

smith,
432

Smith, Big,
591

— -brethren,
471

Smithfield,
466

Snail’s creep,
824

Snake,
841

Snape,
568

Snapson’s Drove,
568

Snave,
568

snob,
529

Snodland,
751

Soar, R.,
791

Sockburn,
272

Soho,
722

Solar chariot,
405

— cross,
55

— faces,
381

solemn,
297

Soles Court,
292

Solmariaca,
296

Solomon,
296, 298

Solomon’s Knot,
706

— Seal,
77

Solutre,
840

Solway,
340, 730

Sophia,
817

— St.,
487

Soul,
148, 173

— fivefold,
437

Soul,
172

Spain,
549

Sparrow,
623

— hawk,
433

speak,
251

Spearheads,
465

Specks,
250

Spectacle ornament,
381

Spectral Horse,
294, 300

Speculum,
251

Sphinx,
306, 320, 321

Spike,
253

spike,
293

Spiked chariots,
404

Spindle Whorls,
534, 582

Spine,
254

Spirals,
825, 850

Spirit, St.,
624

Splendid Mane,
348

spook,
230, 293

Spots,
250

Spotted Beast,
655

— coins,
249

Sprig,
260, 689

Spring Festival,
307

Sprout,
260

SS,
479, 483

Stag,
257

Stanhope,
529

Stanton Drew,
757, 874

Star,
384, 612, 633, 744, 788

Statuettes,
645

Stella Maris,
607

Stone,
129

— circles,
8

— mortars,
17

— of Fruitful Fairy,
462

Stonehenge,
6, 18, 133, 403, 518, 553, 561, 688, 874

Stork,
46

Stour, R.,
608

Sulli, Isle,
348

sulphur,
477

Sun,
166, 167, 195

— and Fire symbols,
690

— god,
134

Sunning,
659

svastika,
230

Svastika,
18, 106, 117, 345, 361, 690, 704, 706, 831, 839

Swan,
224, 225, 243, 512

swan,
240

Sweet Sis,
453

swine,
240

Swine,
240

sy,
230

Sydenham,
440

Symbols, antiquity of,
851

Symbolism,
54, 56, 66, 834, 874

Synagogue,
222

T,
705

ta,
320

Table,
714

Taddington,
261

Taddy,
509

Tailgean,
796

Talavera,
329

Talchin,
493

Talchon,
113

Taliesin,
83, 180, 324, 325, 378, 664

tall,
113

Tallstones,
547

Tammuz,
271

Tanfield,
722

Tapir,
840

Tara,
101, 182, 290, 424, 757

Tarchon,
89, 270, 795

tariff,
98

Tarquin,
90

Tarragona,
89, 278

Tarshish,
96

Tartan,
98

Tartars,
96,
253

Tartary,
700

Tat,
256

Tattooing,
249

Tau,
392

Tear Bringer,
537

Tears of Apollo,
566

teat,
260

Tegid,
157

— Voel,
424

Telchines,
493

Telescope,
839

Telmo’s Fires, St.,
478

Temple,
296, 328

Ten Lights,
577

Terebinth,
227

Termagol,
192

terre,
99

terrible,
742

terror,
100

Teut or Teutates,
226

Teutons,
558

Thadee,
288

Thane Stone,
461

Thanet,
759

thank,
760

Theana,
754

Therapeuts,
779

theta,
250

Thing,
760

Thirty,
198, 199, 204, 242, 434

— and Eleven,
567

— by Eleven,
738

— three,
192, 198, 204, 214, 226, 641, 768, 806

Thistle,
328

Thopas, Sir,
159

Thor,
102, 355, 384, 674

Thorgut,
221

Thorn,
292, 558, 676

— bush,
152, 293

Thors Cavern,
826

Thoth,
251

Thought,
264

Thread,
830

three,
182

Three Apples,
632

— balls,
632

— basins,
634

— -berried branch,
327

— breasts,
632

— chained whip,
273

— circles,
367

— crescents,
286

— eyes,
102

— fates,
594

— feathers,
366

— fiddlers,
610

— fountains,
346

— fronds,
258

— Graces,
594

— grooves,
579

— hearts,
286

— holy hills,
708

— hundred and thirty,
203

— kings,
228

— legs,
163

— -One,
662

— paps,
367

— peaks,
257

Three rays,
535

— springs,
257

— stone balls,
670

— twigged apple,
680

— windows,
366

Threeleo cross,
350

Thurgut,
675

Thuringia,
305

Thurrock,
769

Thursday,
102

Ticehurst,
350

Tideswell,
448

Time,
829

Time,
639

— Three faced,
143

Tin,
611

Tino,
611

Tintagel,
90

tired,
123

Tirre, Sir,
104

Titan,
263

Titans,
206

Titania,
261

Tithonus,
263

Tiw,
319

Toadstool,
261

toddy,
367

token,
400

Tom-Tit-Tot,
263

Toothill,
788

Toothills,
209

Torfield,
797

Torquay,
95

Torquay, etc.,
826

Torquin,
760

Torrent-fire,
20

Tory Hill,
290

— Island,
96, 355

Tot,
256

— Hill,
309

— Hill, St.,
209

Totnes,
312

Tottenham,
261

Touriacks,
376

Tours,
355

tout,
226

Toutiorix,
301

Tower,
355

Tra mor, tra Brython,
122

Tradition,
19

Tranquil Dale,
798

Tray Cliff,
798

tre,
86

Trebiggan, Giant,
247

tree,
86

Tree,
96

— Crystal,
181

— of Fate,
322

— of Life,
495-2

Trefoil,
182

Trefoil,
286

Treleven,
214

Trematon,
738

Trendia,
537

Trendle Hills,
578

Treport,
96

Trevarren,
660

Trew,
770

Trewa Witcher,
584

Triangle,
571

— of Downs,
352

Trinacria,
320

Trinidad,
256

Trinity,
101, 499

— in moon,
150

— of Evil,
356

Trinovantes,
86

Triple-tongued Serpent,
810

Triton,
247

Troglodites,
191

Trojan,
123

— Horse,
408

Trojans,
186, 312

“Trojan’s or Jew’s Hall,”
91

Troo,
768

Trophonius, Den of,
771

Trosdan,
734

trou,
86

Troubadours,
701

trough,
771

trow,
98

Trowdale,
741

— mote,
584

Troy,
584

Troy,
16, 44, 79, 86, 118, 238, 406, 466, 707

— Game,
87

— goddess,
754

— Town,
292, 585

— Towns,
87

— weight,
104

Troynovant,
83, 123

truce,
117

Truce,
734

true,
86

True, St.,
349

Truth,
752, 830

— and Righteousness,
166

try,
101

Tryamour,
247

Tuatha de Danaan,
858

Tudas,
205

Tudno, St.,
256

Tuesday,
102

Tunnel,
843

tur,
90

turn, tourney,
88

Turones,
300

Turquoise mines,
776

Tuttle,
734

Twelve Old men,
698

Twickenham,
610

Twin Brethren,
473

— children,
474

— Mounds,
417

— Sisters,
589

Twinlaw cairns,
417

Two breasts,
253

— cakes,
610

— circles,
367, 495

— cups,
268

— eyes, etc.,
546

— horses,
479

— Kings,
610

— miles,
416

— mounts,
209

— necks,
243

— pigeons,
628

— pits,
793

— racehorses,
478

— rocks,
207

— serpents,
824

— stags,
258

— stars,
476

— tumuli,
208

— virgins,
603

Tyburn,
678

Tynwald,
746

Tyr,
102

tyrant,
100

Tyre,
79

Tyrians,
89, 772

Uar,
389

Uber, Mount,
191

Uffington,
275

Uffingham,
416

Uglow,
685

ugly,
201

Ugrians,
848

Uig,
198

Uist, Island,
661

Ule!
181

Ulysses,
198

Umbria,
569

Umpire,
570

Una,
261

Uncumber, St.,
373

unique,
614

up,
525

upper,
328

Upsall,
576

Upwell,
513

Urn,
300, 797

Ursula, St.,
266, 643

Uther, and Ambrosie,
656

V = W,
422

vague,
206

Valencia,
188

Vandalisms,
551

Varnians,
658

Varuna,
316

Varvara,
329

Vatican,
828

Vedas,
168

Veil, upon veil,
576

Velchanos,
426

Ver,
267

ver,
266

Vera,
329, 484

— Lady,
749

Verbal tradition,
180

Verdun,
282

Ver Galant,
268

Vergingetorix,
300

Vernon,
440

Verray,
484

Verulam,
608

Veryan, St.,
345

Via Egnatio,
519

Vidforull,
203

Vigeans,
827

Village Stone,
312

Vine,
499

virgin,
484

Virgin as Cone,
398

— Mary,
206

— Sisters,
549

— six-breasted,
296

virtue,
609

Virtues,
640

Virtues, Cardinal,
547

Vol coins,
423

Vorenn,
266

Votan,
840

Vulcan,
426, 478

W = V,
422

Wakes,
323

Walbrook,
510

Walham,
422

Wallands Park,
416

wallow,
422

Wambeh, Lake,
844

Wand,
545

Wanderer, the,
143

War Boys,
612

War treasures,
564

Water,
425

— horse,
284

Wayland,
426

Wayzgoose,
243

Well,
130

Welland, R.,
434

welkin,
438

Welsh language,
374

Werra,
485

Westminster Abbey,
673

Whale,
162

Wheatear,
255

Wheel,
164, 276, 438, 574

— cross,
490

— — coins,
491

— of Fortune,
506

whirligig,
195

Whitby,
95

White,
148

— Horse,
273-5, 695

— — Hill,
403

— — Stone,
481

— — Vale of,
272

— Lady,
676

— thorn,
677

Whit Monday,
420

Whorls,
407

Whylepot Queen,
687

Wicker monsters,
407

Wiggonholt,
402

Wilton,
424

Will o’ the Wisp,
152

willow,
426

Winander Mere,
221

Wincanton,
800

Winchelsea,
91

Windsor,
273

Winged genii,
326

— wheels,
499

Wisdom,
625

Wise, The,
660

Woden’s Hall,
753

Woe Water,
799

Wolf,
148, 758

Womb,
781

Woodnesborough,
841

Woodpecker,
283

word,
390

worthy,
609

Wotan,
841

wraith,
574

Wreath,
573

Wreath, giant,
574

Wren’s Park,
812

Wrestling,
186

Writing,
13

Wye,
292

— R.,
729

Xidd,
653

Yankee,
97

Yankeeisms,
405

yell,
131

yellow,
131

Yeoman,
508

Yeo, R.,
151

Yew,
385

— barrow,
151

Yokhanan,
196

Yole!
194

York,
370, 681

Young Man, the,
668

Ypres Hall,
472

Ytene,
752

— R.,
743

Ythan, R.,
461

Yule,
124

Zeal,
172

— Monachorum,
340

Zed,
495

Zendavesta,
695

Zennon,
424

Zeus,
444, 771

Zodiac,
207

ABERDEEN: THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
PAPER BY SPALDING & HODGE, LTD.
BINDING BY A. W. BAIN & CO., LTD.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:

Given the material, spelling errors were rarely corrected. Those in the table below seemed suspicious given other instances of the same word. Some punctuation errors have been silently corrected to avoid confusion or for consistency.

A number of words appear both hyphenated and unhyphenated. If a word was found hyphenated on an end-of-line, the most frequent version was followed.

Figures 235, 236, 237 were misnumbered as 335, 336, 337 respectively. These have been corrected.

William Carew Hazlitt’s work “Faiths and Folklore” is also cited as “Faith and Folklore”. The variant is retained.

A number of footnoted quotations were missing either opening or closing quote marks. Where possible, these have been confirmed in the referenced sources and placed properly; otherwise, they are simply noted.

The name ‘Akerman’ appears twice with an extraneous ‘n’, which has been removed.

Corrections and Comments

Page | Correction | Note
16 | wolves, beavers, and bisons.[”] | Provided closing quote.
62 | as English itself.[”] | Provided closing quote.
68n | mountain nor a flower[.]” | Missing period.
| the old, famil[i]ar, fanciful | Added ‘i’
70 | music and dancing[,] stories, | Missing comma.
77 | the old, famil[i]ar, fanciful | Added ‘i’.
100 | The[y] enter’d each a bath | ‘y’ missing, but space present.
105 | spindl[l]e whorls | Likely redundant ‘l’.
109n | [‘]the goodman’s croft’ | Leading ‘ restored.
122 | Centuries ago, Diodorus of Sicily... | The punctuation of this passage is confused by citations within citations, with some paraphrasing. It is left as printed.
127 | A[yr/ry]an | Corrected.
134 | signifies _all_[./,] Pan | Stop/comma error.
148 | festivit[i]es | Missing ‘i’ provided.
159 | gene[e]sis | Redundant ‘e’ across page break removed.
163 | run[n]ing | Added ‘n’ missing on line break hyphenation.
176 | metemphsychosis | sic
192 | black, or reddish.[”] | Added missing closing ”.
193 | ‘slayer of Belleros’” | Nested quotation marks corrected.
216 | [h/l]and of the Rising Sun | Likely typo
258 | fruit[]fulness | sic
267 | Figs. 95 to 102.—British. Nos.[ ] to [] from Akerman.  Nos.[ ]to [ ] from Evans.] | The range of images from Akerman & Evans are missing.
299 | and pilgrims.[”] | Added missing quote.
314 | “inscribed rock,[’/”] | Corrected.
335 | [b/B]asque for head | Corrected for consistency.
385 | the root of the bracken” | Closing quote missing.
386 | plura[l] | Added missing ‘l’.
386n | Byways in British Archæology, 3[7]5-7. | Missing ‘7’ provided and confirmed in source.
421 | floundering from F[l]ounders Field | Corrected to match prior instances.
428 | a corruption of Co[n]vent Garden | The intent seems to have been ‘Convent’ here.
431 | the scythes of Boudicca[’]s | Probably possessive, but left as in the text.
432 | lewe[’] | Removed incorrect apostrophe.
438 | Arianrod/Arianrhod | Alternate spellings/pronunciation.
449 | the hippodrome[,/.] | Comma/stop error corrected.
472 | and ever[]where our hope | sic.
479 | classica[l] | Provided missing ‘l’.
522 | but “the fact remains | Opening of quotation from Gomme missing.
555n | Cyclops Christiani[a/u]s | Changed to conform to other instances.
612 | Will[-]o-the-wisps | Added ‘-’ to conform.
635 | British [(]Channel [(]Islands) | Parenthesis misplaced, appears elsewhere as(Channel Islands).
649 | chieft[ia/ai]nship | Corrected.
665 | about their public affairs["]. | sic_. The opening quote mark for this citation could not be located.
674 | neigh[b]ours | Added missing ‘b’.
679 | one curly-headed virgin.” | Likely close of quoted passage.
703 | [“]the four epochs | Missing quotation mark provided.
706 | the words [“/‘]God leadeth[’”;]". | Corrected nested quotes.
736 | watermen [t]outing | Likely typo: added ‘t’.
754 | mea[n]t | Typo: added ‘n’.
779 | Budd[h]ist Monasteries | Added ‘h’ to conform.
819 | of the Cornish Sancreed.[978] | The second footnote on the page has no anchor in the text. One has been added, arbitrarily.
819n | _The Thorn Tree_, p. 40[)]. | Closed open ‘(’.
823 | Cyclops, p. 1[3]7. | May be p. 187.
859 | adscriptigleboe/adscripti glebæ | The author misquotes R.G. Latham. The spelling is retained.

Index

There were a number of anomalies in the Index, which have been corrected or completed to make the text useful. Punctuation has been made regular. Some entries had no page references at all, and no attempt was made to provide them.

878 | Antiquity of European habitation[] | sic: Page reference missing
881 | — British, 24[0] | 3rd digit missing, but this begins a description of the topic.
| coin, [8/3]97 | Corrected page reference to ‘397’.
| Co[n/o]knoe, 197 | Corrected typo.
| Co[n/o]k’s Kitchen Mine, 222 | Corrected typo.
| Cunbaria, 330 | The entry is correct; p. 330, however, is misnumbered as 300.
| fainites! / fainits! | The word is spelled both ways in the text, but the index entries reverse the references. They have been switched here.
| fecu[u/n]d | Corrected flipped ‘n’
884 | Five, 238, 437, [513], 503, 689 | No reference to ‘five’ on p. 513 (out of order)
| Grimm’s Law, [51], 60 | ‘51’ missing, but the Law is defined there.
885 | Herculaneum and Pompei[i, 19] | Final ‘i’ and page number missing. Supplied by a search.
886 | — coins, 247, 254, 265, 297, 2[3/8]1, 386 | Typo: there are Iberian coins on p. 281. Mis-ordering is retained.
888 | [Morin, 275 / Morni, 175] | This entry is corrupted in the text
| The Mysteries, [56] | The text had no page reference. ‘56’ was added as the only plausible reference.
890 | Population density, [ ] | sic: Page reference missing.
893 | Trefoil, 286 | The duplicate entry referring to p. 286 seems an error. There is an image there which which includes a shamrock but there is no mention in the text. The entry is retained.

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