Archaic England Part 5

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

[46] Preface to _The Place-names of Oxfordshire_.

[47] 1915.

[48] _Cf._ Bonwick, J., _Irish Druids_, p. 278.

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

[50] _Cf._ _Brittany_, p. 28.

[51] Clodd, Ed., _The Story of Primitive Man_, 9, 18.

[52] Sweet, H., _The History of Language_, p. vi.

[53] _The Principles of Comparative Philology._

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

[55] _Alphana_ vient d'_equus_, sans doute, Mais il faut avouer aussi Qu'en venant de la jusqu'ici Il a bien change sur la route.

[56] Westropp, T. J., _Proc. R. Irish Acad._, x.x.xiv., C., 8, p.

159.

[57] Dallas, H. A.

[58] Norwood, J. W.

[59] Such obvious concoctions of the study as _exsufflicate_, _deracinate_, _incarnadine_, etc., never strike root or survive.

[60] Petrie, W. M. F., _The Formation of the Alphabet_, p. 3.

[61] _A Book of the Beginnings_, 1, p. 136.

[62] _Lectures on the English Language_, 1862, p. 16.

[63] Quoted from _ibid._, p. 30.

[64] The _Edin_ of the prehistoric British _Dun edin_, now Edinburgh, has been calmly misappropriated to a supposed _Edwin_.

[65] _Ancient Britain_, pp. 273, 283.

[66] _Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft._

[67] Johnson, W., _Byways in British Archaeology_, p. 304.

[68] Cloudesley Brereton, in _The Quest_.

[69] _Luniolatry_, p. 2.

[70] _Ancient Britain_, p. 298.

[71] This dictum would have cheered the heart of Tertullian, who maintained that G.o.d could never forgive an actor because Christ said: _No man by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature_; a statement which the actor impiously falsified by wearing high heeled boots. Commenting upon _The Lost Language of Symbolism_, _The Expository Times_ very courteously observed: "To the reader of the Bible its worth is more than to all others, for the Bible is full of symbols and we have lost their language. We are very prosaic. The writers of the Old Testament and of the New were very imaginative. Between us there is a gulf fixed of which we are aware only in unquiet moments."

[72] "There must have been a time when a simple instinct for poetry was possessed by all nations as it still is by uncivilised races and children. Among European nations this instinct appears to be dead for ever. We can name neither a mountain nor a flower."--Prof. Weekley, _Romance of Words_.

"Who did first name the flowers? Who first gave them, not their Latin t.i.tles, but the old, familiar, fanciful, poetic, rustic ones, that run so curiously alike in all the vulgar tongues? Who first called the lilies of the valley the Madonna's tears? the wild blue hyacinth, St. Dorothy's flower? the starry pa.s.siflora, the Pa.s.sion of Christ; who named them all first, in the old days that are forgotten? All the poets that ever the world has known might have been summoned together for the baptism of the flowers, and have failed to name them half so well as popular tradition has done long ago in the dim lost ages, with names that still make all the world akin."--Anon.

[73] "This pretty name (which Fitzgerald, _History of Limerick_, vol. i., p. 320, calls the River Dawn) arose from a change of Samhair or Samer to Caimher, 'the daybreak,' or 'Morning Star'".--Westropp, T. J., _Proc. of Royal Irish Acad._, x.x.xiii., C. 2, p. 13.

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

[75] Coneybeare, Dr. F. C., _The Historical Christ_, p. 19.

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

[76] Quoted from Wentz, W. D. Y., _The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries_.

[77] "The current ignorance of those pre-Christian evidences that have been preserved by the petrifying past must be wellnigh invincible when a man like Prof. Jowett could say, as if with the voice of superst.i.tion in its dotage: '_To us the preaching of the Gospel is a New Beginning, from which we date all things; beyond which we neither desire, nor are able, to inquire_.'"--Ma.s.sey, G., _The Logic of the Lord_, 1897.

[78] Harrison, Miss Jane, _Ancient Art and Ritual_, pp. 192-3.

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

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

Fear made the first divinities on earth The sweeping flames of heaven; the ruined tower, Scathed by its stroke. The softly setting sun, The slow declining of the silver moon, And its recovered beauty. Hence the signs Known through the world, and the swift changing year, Circling divided in its varied months.

Hence rose the error. Empty folly bade The wearied husbandman to Ceres bring The first fair honours of his harvest fields To gird the brow of Bacchus with the palm, And taught how Pales, 'mid the shepherd bands, Stood and rejoiced, how Neptune in the flood Plunged deep, and ruled the ever-roaring tide; How Vallas reigned o'er earth's stupendous caves Mightily. He who vowed and he who reaped With eager contest, made their G.o.ds themselves.

[81] The intelligible forms of ancient poets The fair humanities of old religion The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain Or forest or slow stream, or pebbly spring Our chasms and watery depths; all these have vanished They live no longer in the faith of reason.

--COLERIDGE.

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

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

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

[84] Holmes, Rice, _Ancient Britain_, p. 295.

[85] _Ibid._, p. 373.

CHAPTER III

A TALE OF TROY

Upon the Syrian sea the people live, Who style themselves Phoenicians, These were the first great founders of the world-- Founders of cities and of mighty states-- Who showed a path through seas before unknown.