Archaic England Part 17

According to Sir John Rhys, Elen the Fair of Britain figures like St.

Ursula as the leader of the heavenly virgins; St. Levan's cell is shown at Bodellen in St. Levan, and as in Cornwall _bod_--as in Bodmin--meant _abode of_, one may resolve Bodellen into the _abode of Ellen_, and equate Ellen or Helen with Long Meg or St. Michael.

We may recognise St. Kayne in the Kendale-Lonsdale district of North Britain, where also in the neighbourhood of the rivers Ken or Can, and Lone or Lune is a maiden way and an Elen's Causeway.[238] On the river Can is a famous waterfall at Levens, and in the same neighbourhood a seat of the ancient Machel family. In 1724 there existed at Winander Mere "the carca.s.s of an ancient city,"[239] and it is not improbable that the _ander_ of Winander is related to the divine Thorgut, whose effigy from a coin is reproduced in a later chapter (Fig 422, p. 675).

Kendal or Candale has always been famous for its British "cottons and coa.r.s.e cloaths".

In Etruria and elsewhere good genii were represented as winged elves--old plural _elven_--and the word _mouche_ implies that not only b.u.t.terflies and moths, but also all winged flies were deemed to be the children of Michael or Michelet. According to Payne Knight, "The common Fly, being in its first stage of existence a princ.i.p.al agent in dissolving and dissipating all putrescent bodies, was adopted as an emblem of the Deity".[240] Thus it would seem that not only the _mouches_, but likewise the _maggots_ were deemed to be among Maggie's millions, fighting like the Hosts of Michael against filth, decay, and death.

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

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

That St. Michael was Lord of the Muckle and the Mickle, is supported in the statement that "he was prince of the synagogue of the Jews".[243]

The word _synagogue_ is understood to have meant--a bringing together, a congregation; but this was evidently a secondary sense, due, perhaps, to the fact that the earliest synagogues were not held beneath a roof, but were congregations in sacred plains or hill-sides. It may reasonably be a.s.sumed that synagogues were prayer meetings in honour primarily of San Agog, St. Michael, or the Leader and Bringer together of all souls.

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

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 50.--From _Christian Iconography_ (Didron).]

In this emblem here reproduced Chaos or Abyssus is figured as the youthful apex of a primeval peak; at the base are geese, and the creatures midway are evidently seals. The _seal_ is the silliest of gentle creatures, and being amphibious was probably the symbol of _Celi_, the Concealed One, whose name occurs so frequently in British Mythology. To _seal_ one's eyelids means to close them, and the blind old man named Lieven, who sat in the porch of St. Maurice's for eleven years, may be connoted with Homer the blind and wandering old Bard, who dwelt upon the rocky islet of Chios, query _chaos_? Among the Latins _Amor_ or Love was the oldest of the G.o.ds, being the child of Nox or Chaos: Love--"this senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid"[245]--is proverbially blind, and the words Amor, Amour, are probably not only Homer, but likewise St. Omer. The British (Welsh) form of Homer is Omyr: the authorship of Homer has always been a matter of perplexity, and the personality of the blind old bard of Chios will doubtless remain an enigma until such time as the individuality of "Old Moore," "Aunt Judy,"

and other pseudonyms is unravelled. It has always been the custom of story-tellers to attribute their legends to a fabulous origin, and the most famous collection of fairy-tales ever produced was published in France under the t.i.tle _Contes de la Mere Oie_--"The Tales of Mother Goose". Goose is radically the same word as _gas_, a term which was coined by a Belgian chemist in 1644 from the Greek _chaos_: the Irish for swan is _geis_, and all the geese tribe are ga.s.sy birds which gasp.

In a subsequent chapter we shall a.n.a.lyse _goose_ into _ag'oos_, the Mighty _Ooze_, whence the ancients scientifically supposed all life to have originated, and shall equate _ooze_ with _hoes_, the Welsh word for _life_, and with _Ouse_ or _Oise_, a generic British river name. In _huss_, the German for _goose_, we may recognise the _oose_ without its adjectival '_g_'.

With the Blind Old Bard of Chios may be connoted the Cornish longstone known as "The Old Man,"[246] or "The Fiddler," also a second longstone known as "The Blind Fiddler".[247] In _because_ or _by cause_ we p.r.o.nounce _cause_ "_koz_," and in Slav fairy-tales as elsewhere there is frequent mention of an Enchanter ent.i.tled _Kostey_, whose strength and vitality lay in a monstrous egg. The name _Kostey_ may be connoted with _Cystennyns_,[248] an old Cornish and Welsh form of Constantine: at the village of Constantine in Cornwall there is what Borlase describes as a vast egg-like stone placed on the points of two natural rocks, and pointing due North and South. This Tolmen or Meantol--"an egg-shaped block of granite _thirty-three_ feet long, and _eighteen_ feet broad, supposed by some antiquaries to be Druidical, is here on a barren hill 690 feet high".[249] The Greek for egg is _oon_, and our _egg_ may be connoted not only with _Echo_--the supposed voice of Ech?--but also with _egg_, meaning to urge on, to instigate, to vitalise, or render agog.

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

It has already been suggested that _derry_ or _dru_, an oak or tree, was equivalent to _tre_, an abode or Troy, and there is perhaps a connection between this root and _tere_binth, the Tyrian term for an oak tree. That the oak was regarded as the symbol of hospitality is exceedingly probable, and one of the earliest references to the tree is the story of Abraham's hospitable entertainment given underneath the Oak of Mamre.

The same idea is recurrent in the legend of Philemon and Baucis, which relates that on the mountains of Phrygia there once dwelt an aged, poor, but loving couple. One night Jupiter and Mercury, garbed in the disguise of two mysterious strangers who had sought in vain for hospitality elsewhere, craved the shelter of this Darby and Joan.[252] With alacrity it was granted, and such was the awe inspired by the majestic Elder that Baucis desired to sacrifice a goose which they possessed. But the bird escaped, and fluttering to the feet of the disguised G.o.ds Jupiter protected it, and bade their aged hosts to spare it. On leaving, the Wanderer asked what boon he could confer, and what gift worthy of the G.o.ds they would demand. "Let us not be divided by death, O Jupiter," was the reply: whereupon the Wandering One conjured their mean cottage into a n.o.ble palace wherein they dwelt happily for many years. The story concludes that Baucis merged gradually into a linden tree, and Philemon into an oak, which two trees henceforward intertwined their branches at the door of Jupiter's Temple.

The name Philemon is seemingly _philo_, which means _love of_, and _mon_, man or men, and at the time this fairy-tale was concocted _Love of Man_, or hospitality, would appear to have been the motif of the allegorist.

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

FOOTNOTES:

[193] Virgil, _The aeneid_, Bk. III., c. liii.

[194] _Cf._ Geoffrey's _Histories of the Kings of Britain_ (Everyman's Library), p. 202.

[195] Virgil, _The aeneid_, Bk. III., 37.

[196] _Irish Mythological Cycle_, p. 50.

[197] xx. 8.

[198] Wood, E. J. _Giants and Dwarfs_, p. 54.

[199] Chap. xxvi.

[200] _The Irish Mythological Cycle_, p. 116.

[201] Wood, E.J., _Giants and Dwarfs_, p. 5.

[202] _The Romance of Names_, p. 65.

[203] Hone, W., _Ancient Mysteries_, p. 264.

[204] Wright, T., _Patrick's Purgatory_, p. 56.

[205] Courtney, Miss M. L., _Cornish Feasts and Folklore_, p. 28.

[206] Bartholomew, J. G., _A Survey Gazetteer of the British Islands_, I. 612.

[207] The duplication _c.o.c.k_, as in _hayc.o.c.k_, also meant a hill.

[208] Quoted from Brand's _Antiquities_, p. 42.

[209] _Cf._ Urlin, Miss Ethel, _Festivals, Holydays, and Saint Days_, p. 2.

[210] Anwyl, E., _Celtic Religion_.

[211] Anwyl, E., _Celtic Religion_, p. 40.

[212] _Curious Myths of the Middle Ages_, pp. 637-40.

[213] "Morien" _Light of Britannia_, p. 262.

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

[215] Baldwin, J. D., _Prehistoric Nations_, p. 240.

[216] Sophocles, _Ajax_, 694-700.

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

[218] _The Golden Legend_, V. 182-3.

[219] The ancient name "h.o.a.r rock," or white rock in the wood, may have referred to the white G.o.d probably once there worshipped, for actually there are no white rocks at St.

Michael's, or anywhere else in Cornwall.

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

[221] Wood, E. J., _Giants and Dwarfs_, p. 91.

[222] _Cf._ Friend, Rev. Hilderic, _Flowers and Folklore_, II., p.

455.