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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fig. 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]

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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]

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Welsh Archbard Taliesin makes the mystic statement:—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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