Archaic England Part 4

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 const.i.tuent 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" a.s.sertions of the Pentateuch? It is true that the history of a nation, _if it were fully known_, must account for the const.i.tuent 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 fict.i.tious boundaries are the mediaeval 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 Ma.s.sey 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 trespa.s.sers. 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 a.s.sume that Grimm's Law goes all the way back. They cling to their limits, as the old Greek sailors hugged the sh.o.r.e, 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 a.s.sumes, 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 a.s.sertor 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 _car_, 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. _gluck_, 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 a.s.sertions 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 Moliere, 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 t.i.tles. 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 G.o.ds," 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 G.o.ddess 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 mediaeval story-teller is not unlike a peasant building his hut on the site of Ephesus or Halicarna.s.sus 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 ident.i.ties 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 sh.o.r.es 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 att.i.tude 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 a.s.sume that the mother and the child were not buried alive, nor committed suicide, but died in the odour of sanct.i.ty 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 ent.i.tled to a.s.sume 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 7.--From _Man the Primeval Savage_ (Smith, G.

Worthington).]

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

Is symbol the husk, the dry bone, Of the dead soul of ages agone?

Finger-post of a pilgrimage way Untrodden for many a day?

A derelict shrine in the fane Of an ancient faith, long since profane?

A gew-gaw, once amulet?

A forgotten creed's alphabet?

Or is it....[68]

Whatever symbolism may or may not be it has certainly not that close and exclusive connection with phallicism which some writers have been pleased to a.s.sign 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 Ma.s.sey 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 ident.i.ties 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 "G.o.d 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 att.i.tude 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 n.o.ble 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 a.s.sociates 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 G.o.d. To quote from a modern authority: "Track any G.o.d right home and you will find him lurking in a ritual sheath from which he slowly emerges, first as a _daemon_ 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 G.o.d, be he Dionysus or be he Apollo."[78]

The theory here a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sumption that the first idea of G.o.d evolved from the personation of the Sun G.o.d in a mystery play or harvest dance is not really or fundamentally a mental tracking of that G.o.d right home, but rather an inane confession that the idea of G.o.d 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 Athenaeum_ 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 pa.s.sage 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 Athenaeum'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 t.i.thes 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, princ.i.p.ally 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 G.o.d 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 archaeologists 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 a.s.surance 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-ga.s.sed vast tracts of modern thought is evident enough. The theories of Mannhardt, elaborated by Sir James Frazer and trans.m.u.ted 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 a.s.sociations."

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 superst.i.tions or are sufficiently alive to blossom in the dust.

It is quite proper to designate _The Golden Bough_ a puppet-play of corn-G.o.ds,[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 ent.i.tled 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 Idaea, but it was also ent.i.tled Doliche, which may be spelled to-day Idyllic. Crete, the Idyllic island, the island of Ideas, was also known as Aeria, and I think it probably was the centre whence was spun the gossamer of aerial and ethereal tales, which have made the Isles of Greece a land of immortal romance. We shall also see as we proceed that the mystic philosophy known to history as the Gnosis[83] was in all probability the philosophy taught in prehistoric times at Gnossus, the far-famed capital of Crete. From Gnossus, whence the Greeks drew all their laws and science, came probably the Greek word _gnosis_, meaning _knowledge_. But the mystic Gnosis connoted more than is covered by the word _knowledge_: it claimed to be the wisdom of the ancients, and to disclose the ideal value lying behind the letter of all mysteries, myths, and religious ordinances.

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

FOOTNOTES:

[39] _Words and Places._

[40] Schliemann, _Mykenae_.

[41] _Cf._ Johnson, W., _Byways in British Archaeology_.

[42] _The Cromlechs of Anglesey and Carnarvonshire._

[43] _Ancient Britain_, p. 70.

[44] Windle, Sir B. C. A., _Life in Early Britain_, p. 135.