Archaic England

In this emblem here reproduced Chaos or Abyssus is figured as the youthful apex of a primeval peak; at the base are geese, and the creatures midway are evidently seals. The seal is the silliest of gentle creatures, and being amphibious was probably the symbol of Celi, the Concealed One, whose name occurs so frequently in British Mythology. To seal one’s eyelids means to close them, and the blind old man named Lieven, who sat in the porch of St. Maurice’s for eleven years, may be connoted with Homer the blind and wandering old Bard, who dwelt upon the rocky islet of Chios, query chaos? Among the Latins Amor or Love was the oldest of the gods, being the child of Nox or Chaos: Love—“this senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid”[245]—is proverbially blind, and the words Amor, Amour, are probably not only Homer, but likewise St. Omer. The British (Welsh) form of Homer is Omyr: the authorship of Homer has always been a matter of perplexity, and the personality of the blind old bard of Chios will doubtless remain an enigma until such time as the individuality of “Old Moore,” “Aunt Judy,” and other pseudonyms is unravelled. It has always been the custom of story-tellers to attribute their legends to a fabulous origin, and the most famous collection of fairy-tales ever produced was published in France under the title Contes de la Mere Oie—“The Tales of Mother Goose”. Goose is radically the same word as gas, a term which was coined by a Belgian chemist in 1644 from the Greek chaos: the Irish for swan is geis, and all the geese tribe are gassy birds which gasp.

In a subsequent chapter we shall analyse goose into ag’oos, the Mighty Ooze, whence the ancients scientifically supposed all life to have originated, and shall equate ooze with hoes, the Welsh word for life, and with Ouse or Oise, a generic British river name. In huss, the German for goose, we may recognise the oose without its adjectival ‘g’.

With the Blind Old Bard of Chios may be connoted the Cornish longstone known as “The Old Man,”[246] or “The Fiddler,” also a second longstone known as “The Blind Fiddler”.[247] In because or by cause we pronounce cause “koz,” and in Slav fairy-tales as elsewhere there is frequent mention of an Enchanter entitled Kostey, whose strength and vitality lay in a monstrous egg. The name Kostey may be connoted with Cystennyns,[248] an old Cornish and Welsh form of Constantine: at the village of Constantine in Cornwall there is what Borlase describes as a vast egg-like stone placed on the points of two natural rocks, and pointing due North and South. This Tolmen or Meantol—“an egg-shaped block of granite thirty-three feet long, and eighteen feet broad, supposed by some antiquaries to be Druidical, is here on a barren hill 690 feet high”.[249] The Greek for egg is oon, and our egg may be connoted not only with Echo—the supposed voice of Ech?—but also with egg, meaning to urge on, to instigate, to vitalise, or render agog.

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

It has already been suggested that derry or dru, an oak or tree, was equivalent to tre, an abode or Troy, and there is perhaps a connection between this root and terebinth, the Tyrian term for an oak tree. That the oak was regarded as the symbol of hospitality is exceedingly probable, and one of the earliest references to the tree is the story of Abraham’s hospitable entertainment given underneath the Oak of Mamre. The same idea is recurrent in the legend of Philemon and Baucis, which relates that on the mountains of Phrygia there once dwelt an aged, poor, but loving couple. One night Jupiter and Mercury, garbed in the disguise of two mysterious strangers who had sought in vain for hospitality elsewhere, craved the shelter of this Darby and Joan.[252] With alacrity it was granted, and such was the awe inspired by the majestic Elder that Baucis desired to sacrifice a goose which they possessed. But the bird escaped, and fluttering to the feet of the disguised gods Jupiter protected it, and bade their aged hosts to spare it. On leaving, the Wanderer asked what boon he could confer, and what gift worthy of the gods they would demand. “Let us not be divided by death, O Jupiter,” was the reply: whereupon the Wandering One conjured their mean cottage into a noble palace wherein they dwelt happily for many years. The story concludes that Baucis merged gradually into a linden tree, and Philemon into an oak, which two trees henceforward intertwined their branches at the door of Jupiter’s Temple.

The name Philemon is seemingly philo, which means love of, and mon, man or men, and at the time this fairy-tale was concocted Love of Man, or hospitality, would appear to have been the motif of the allegorist.

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

CHAPTER VI.
PUCK.

“Do you imagine that Robin Goodfellow—a mere name to you—conveys anything like the meaning to your mind that it did to those for whom the name represented a still living belief, and who had the stories about him at their fingers’ ends? Or let me ask you, Why did the fairies dance on moonlight nights? or, Have you ever thought why it is that in English literature, and in English literature alone, the fairy realm finds a place in the highest works of imagination?”—F. S. Hartland.

In British Faërie there figures prominently a certain “Man in the Oak”: according to Keightley, Puck, alias Robin Goodfellow, was known as this “Man in the Oak,” and he considers that the word pixy “is evidently Pucksy, the endearing diminutive sy being added to Puck like Betsy, Nancy, Dixie”.[255] It is probable that this adjectival si recurring in sweet, sooth, suave, swan, etc., may be equated with the Sanscrit su, which, as in swastika, is a synonym for the Greek eu, meaning soft, gentle, pleasing, and propitious. When used as an affix, this “endearing diminutive” yields spook, which was seemingly once “dear little Pook,” or “soft, gentle, pleasing, and propitious Puck”. In Wales the fairies were known as “Mothers’ Blessings,” and although spook now carries a sinister sense, there is no more reason to suppose that “dear little Pook” was primarily malignant than to suggest that the Holy Ghost was—in the modern sense—essentially ghastly. Skeat suggests that ghost (of uncertain origin) “is perhaps allied to Icelandic geisa, to rage like fire, and to Gothic us-gais-yan, to terrify”. Some may be aghast at this suggestion, others, who cannot conceive the Supreme Sprite except as a raging and consuming fury, will commend it. In the preceding chapter I suggested that the elementary derivation of ghost was ’goes, the Great Life or Essence, and as te in Celtic meant good, it may be permissible to modernise ghoste, also Kostey of the egg, into great life good.

That there was a good and a bad Puck is to be inferred from the West of England belief in Bucca Gwidden, the white or good spirit, and Bucca Dhu, the black, malevolent one.[256] Puck, like Dan Cupid, figures in popular estimation as a pawky little pickle; in Brittany the dolmens are known as poukelays or Puck stones, and the particular haunts of Puck were heaths and desert places. The place-name Picktree suggests one of Puck’s sacred oaks; Pickthorne was presumably one of Puck’s hawthorns, and the various Pickwells, Pickhills, Pickmeres, etc., were once, in all probability, spook-haunted. The highest point at Peckham, near London, is Honor Oak or One Tree Hill, and Peckhams or Puckhomes are plentiful in the South of England. One of them was inferentially near Ockham, at Great and Little Bookham, where the common or forest consists practically solely of the three pre-eminently fairy-trees—oak, hawthorne, and holly. The summit of the Buckland Hills, above Mickleham, is the celebrated, box-planted Boxhill, and at its foot runs Pixham or Pixholme Lane. On the height, nearly opposite Pixham Lane, the Ordnance Map marks Pigdon, but the roadway from Bookham to Boxhill is known, not as Pigdon Hill, but Bagden Hill. In all probability the terms Pigdon and Bagden are the original British forms of the more modern Pixham and Bok’s Hill.

In the North of England Puck seems more generally Peg, whence the fairy of the river Ribble was known as Peg O’Nell, and the nymph of the Tees, as Peg Powler.[257] Peg—a synonym for Margaret—is generally interpreted as having meant pearl.

The word puck or peg, which varies in different parts of the country into pug, pouke, pwcca, poake, pucke, puckle, and phooka, becomes elsewhere bucca, bug, bogie, bogle, boggart, buggaboo, and bugbear.

According to all accounts the Pucks, like the Buccas, were divided into two classes, “good and bad,” and it was only the clergy who maintained that “one and the same malignant fiend meddled in both”. As Scott rightly observes: “Before leaving the subject of fairy superstition in England we may remark that it was of a more playful and gentle, less wild and necromantic character, than that received among the sister people. The amusements of the southern fairies were light and sportive; their resentments were satisfied with pinching or scratching the objects of their displeasure; their peculiar sense of cleanliness rewarded the housewives with the silver token in the shoe; their nicety was extreme concerning any coarseness or negligence which could offend their delicacy; and I cannot discern, except, perhaps, from the insinuations of some scrupulous divines, that they were vassals to or in close alliance with the infernals, as there is too much reason to believe was the case with their North British sisterhood.”[258]

The elemental Bog is the Slavonic term for God,[259] and when the early translators of the Bible rendered “terror by night” as “bugs by night” they probably had spooks or bogies in their mind. In Etruria as in Egypt the bug or maybug was revered as the symbol of the Creator Bog, because the Egyptian beetle has a curious habit of creating small pellets or balls of mud. In Welsh bogel means the navel, also centre of a wheel, and hence Margaret or Peggy may be equated with the nave or peg of the white-rayed Marguerite or Day’s Eye.[260]

It must constantly be borne in mind that the ancients never stereotyped their Ideal, hence there was invariably a vagueness about the form and features of prehistoric Joy, and Shakespeare’s reference to Dan Cupid as a “senior-junior, giant-dwarf,” may be equally applied to every Elf and Pixy. It is unquestionable that in England as in Scandinavia and Germany “giants and dwarfs were originally identical phenomenon”.[261]

In the words of an Orphic Hymn “Jove is both male and an immortal maid”: Venus was sometimes represented with a beard, and as the Supreme Parent was indiscriminately regarded as either male or female, or as both combined, an occasional contradiction of form is not to be unexpected. The authorities attribute the contrariety of sex which is sometimes assigned to the Cornish saints as being due to carelessness on the part of transcribers, but in this case the monks may be exonerated, as the greater probability is that they faithfully transmitted the pagan legends. The Moon, which, speaking generally, was essentially a symbol of the Mother, was among some races, e.g., the Teutons and the Egyptians, regarded as masculine. In Italy at certain festivals the men dressed in women’s garments, worshipped the Moon as Lunus, and the women dressed like men, as Luna. In Wales the Cadi, as we have seen, was dressed partially as a woman, partially as a man, and in all probability the cassock of the modern priest is a survival of the ambiguous duality of Kate or Good. In Irish the adjective mo—derived seemingly from Mo or Ma, the Great Mother—meant greatest, and was thus used irrespective of sex.

The French word lune, like moon and choon, is radically une, the initial consonants being merely adjectival, and is just as sexless as our one, Scotch ane. In Germany hunne means giant, and the term “Hun,” meant radically anyone formidable or gigantic.

The Cornish for full moon is cann, which is a slightly decayed form of ak ann or great one, and this word can, or khan, meaning prince, ruler, king or great one, is traceable in numerous parts of the world. Can or chan was Egyptian for lord or prince; can was a title of the kings of ancient Mexico; khan is still used to-day by the kings of Tartary and Burmah and by the governors of provinces in Persia, Afghanistan, and other countries of Central Asia. In China kong means king, and in modern England king is a slightly decayed form of the Teutonic konig or kinig. The ancient British word for mighty chief was chun or cun, and we meet with this infinitely older word than king as a participle of royal titles such as Cunobelinus, Cunoval, Cunomor and the like. The same affix was used in a similar sense by the Greeks, whence Apollo was styled Cunades and also Cunnins. The Cornish for prince was kyn, and this term, as also the Irish cun, meaning chief, is evidently far more primitive than the modern king, which seems to have returned to us through Saxon channels. Prof. Skeat expresses his opinion that the term king meant “literally a man of good birth,” and he identifies it with the old High German chunig. Other authorities equate it with the Sanscrit janaka, meaning father, whence it is maintained that the original meaning of the word was “father of a tribe”. Similarly the word queen is derived by our dictionaries from the Greek gyne, a woman, or the Sanscrit jani, “all from root gan, to produce, from which are genus, kin, king, etc.”

The word chen in Cornish meant cause, and there is no doubt a connection between this term and kyn, the Cornish for prince; the connection, however, is principally in the second syllable, and I see no reason to doubt my previous conclusions formulated elsewhere, that kyn or king originally meant great one, or high one, whereas chun, jani, gyne, etc., meant aged one.

One of the first kings of the Isle of Man was Hacon or Hakon, a name which the dictionaries define as having meant high kin. In this etymology ha is evidently equated with high and con or kon with kin, but it is equally likely that Hakon or Haakon meant originally uch on the high one. In Cornish the adjective ughan or aughan meant supreme: the Icelandic for queen is kona, and there is no more radical distinction between king and the disyllabic kween, than there is between the Christian names Ion, Ian, and the monosyllabic Han.

Janaka, the Sanscrit for father, is seemingly allied to the English adjective jannock or jonnack, which may be equated more or less with canny. Uncanny means something unwholesome, unpleasant, disagreeable; in Cornish cun meant sweet or affable, and we still speak of sweets as candies.

In Gaelic cenn or ken meant head, the highest peak in the Himalayas is Mount Kun; one of the supreme summits of Africa is Mount Kenia, and in Genesis (14-19) the Hebrew word Konah is translated into English as “the Most High God”. Of this Supreme Sprite the cone or pyramid was a symbol, and the reverence in which this form was held at Albano in Etruria may be estimated from the monument here depicted.[262] In times gone by khans, cuns, or kings were not only deemed to be moral and intellectual gods, but in some localities bigness of person was cultivated. The Maoris of New Zealand, whose tattooings are identical in certain respects with the complicated spirals found on megaliths in Brittany and Ireland, and who in all their wide wanderings have carried with them a totemic dove, used to believe bigness to be a royal essence. “Every means were used to acquire this dignity; a large person was thought to be of the highest importance; to acquire this extra size, the child of a chief was generally provided with many nurses, each contributing to his support by robbing their own offspring of their natural sustenance; thus, whilst they were half-starved, miserable-looking little creatures, the chief’s child was the contrary, and early became remarkable by its good appearance.”[263]

The British adjective big is of unknown origin and has no Anglo-Saxon equivalent. In Norway bugge means a strong man, but in Germany bigge denoted a little child—as also a pig. The site of Troy—the famous Troy—is marked on modern maps Bigha, the Basque for eye is beguia; bega is Celtic for life. A fabulous St. Bega is the patron-saint of Cumberland; there is a Baggy Point near Barnstaple, and a Bigbury near Totnes—the alleged landing place of the Trojans. Close to Canterbury are some highlands also known as Bigbury, and it is probable that all these sites were named after beguia, the Big Eye, or Buggaboo, the Big Father.

At Canterbury paleolithic implements have been found which supply proof of human occupation at a time when the British Islands formed part of the Continent, and, according to a scholarly but anonymous chronology exhibited in a Canterbury Hotel, “Neolithic, bronze, and iron ages show continuous occupation during the whole prehistoric period. The configuration of the city boundaries and the still existing traces of the ancient road in connection with the stronghold at Bigbury indicate that a populous community was settled on the site of the present Canterbury at least as early as the Iron Age.”

The branching antlers of the buck were regarded as the rays of the uprising sun or Big Eye, and a sacred procession, headed by the antlers of a buck raised upon a pole, was continued by the clergy of St. Paul’s Cathedral as late as the seventeenth century.[264] A scandalised observer of this ceremony in 1726 describes “the whole company blowing hunters’ horns in a sort of hideous manner, and with this rude pomp they go up to the High Altar and offer it there. You would think them all the mad votaries of Diana!” On this occasion, evidently in accordance with immemorial wont, the Dean and Chapter wore special vestments, the one embroidered with bucks, the other with does. The buck was seemingly associated with Puck, for it was popularly supposed that a spectre appeared periodically in Herne’s Oak at Windsor headed with the horns of a buck. So too was Father Christmas or St. Nicholas represented as riding Diana-like in a chariot drawn by bucks.

The Greek for buck or stag is elaphos, which is radically elaf, and it is a singular coincidence that among the Cretan paleolithic folk in the Fourth Glacial Period “Certain signs carved on a fragment of reindeer horn are specially interesting from the primitive anticipation that they present of the Phœnician letter alef”.[265]

Peg or Peggy is the same word as pig, and it is generally supposed that the pig was regarded as an incarnation of the “Man in the Oak,” i.e., Puck or Buck, because the bacco or bacon lived on acorns. There is little doubt that the Saint Baccho of the Church Calendar is connected with the worship of the earlier Bacchus, for the date of St. Baccho’s festival coincides with the vintage festival of Bacchus. The symbolism of the pig or bacco will be discussed in a subsequent chapter, meanwhile one may here note that hog is the same as oak, and swine is identical with swan. So also Meg is connected with muc or moch which were the Celtic terms for hog. Among the appellations of ancient Ireland was Muc Inis,[266] or Hog Island and Moccus, or the pig, was one of the Celtic sobriquets for Mercury. The Druids termed themselves “Swine of Mon,”[267] the Phœnician priests were also self-styled Swine, and there is a Welsh poem in which the bard’s opening advice to his disciples is—“Give ear little pigs”.

The pig figures so frequently upon Gaulish coins that M. de la Saussaye supposed it with great reason to have been a national symbol. That the hog was also a venerated British emblem is evident from the coins here illustrated, and that CUNO was the Spook King is obvious from Figs. 52 and 57, where the features face fore and aft like those of Janus. The word Cunobeline, Cunbelin, or Cymbeline, described by the dictionaries as a Cornish name meaning “lord of the Sun,” is composed seemingly of King Belin. Belin, a title of the Sun God, is found also in Gaul, notably on the coinage of the Belindi: Belin is featured as in Fig. 58, and that the sacred Horse of Belin was associated with the ded pillar is evident from Fig. 59.

Commenting upon Fig. 52 a numismatist has observed: “This seems made for two young women’s faces,” but whether Cunobelin’s wives, sisters, or children, he knows not. In Britain doubtless there were many kings who assumed the title of Cunobelin, just as in Egypt there were many Pharoahs; but it is no more rational to suppose that the designs on ancient coins are the portraits of historic kings, their wives, their sisters, their cousins, or their aunts, than it would be for an archæologist to imagine that the dragon incident on our modern sovereigns was an episode in the career of his present Majesty King George.

We shall subsequently connect George, whose name means ploughman, with the Blue or Celestial Boar, which, because it ploughed with its snout along the earth, was termed boar, i.e., boer or farmer. With bacco or bacon may be connoted boukolos, the Greek for cowherd, whence bucolic. The cattle of Apollo, or the Sun, are a familiar feature of Greek mythology.

The female bacon, which inter alia was the symbol of fecundity, was credited with a mystic thirty teats. The sow figures prominently in British mythology as an emblem of Ked, and was seemingly venerated as a symbol of the Universal Feeder. The little pig in Fig. 60, a coin of the Santones, whose capital is marked by the modern town of Saintes, is associated with a fleur-de-lis, the emblem of purity. The word lily is all holy; the porker was associated with the notoriously pure St. Antony as well as with Ked or Kate, the immaculate Magna Mater, and although beyond these indications I have no evidence for the suggestion, I strongly suspect that the scavenging habits of the moch caused it, like the fly or mouche, to be reverenced as a symbol of Ked, Cadi, Katy, or Katerina, whose name means the Pure one or the All Pure. The connection between hog and cock is apparent in the French coche or cochon (origin unknown). Cochon is allied to cigne, the French for swan, Latin, cygnus, Greek, kuknos; the voice of the goose or swan is said to be its cackle, and the Egyptians gave to their All Father Goose a sobriquet which the authorities translate into “The Great Cackler”.

Among the meanings assigned to the Hebrew og is “long necked,” and it is not improbable that the mysterious Inn sign of the “Swan with two necks” was originally an emblem of Mother and Father Goose. In Fig. 61 the geis or swan is facing fore and aft, like Cuno, which is radically the same Great Uno as Juno or Megale, to whom the goose was sacred. Geyser, a gush or spring, is the same word as geeser, and there was a famous swan with two necks at Goswell Road, where the word Goswell implies an erstwhile well of Gos, Goose, or the Gush.[268] A Wayzgoose is a jovial holiday or festival, gust or gusto means enjoyment, and the Greengoose Fair, which used to be held at Stratford, may be connoted with the “Goose-Intentos,” a festival which was customarily held on the sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Pentecost, the time when the Holy Ghost descended in the form of “cloven tongues,” resolves into Universal Good Ghost.

The Santones, whose emblem was the Pig and Fleur-de-lis, were neighbours of the Pictones. Our British Picts, the first British tribe known by name to history, are generally supposed to have derived their title because they depicted pictures on their bodies. In West Cornwall there are rude stone huts known locally as Picts’ Houses, but whether these are attributed to the Picts or the Pixies it is difficult to say. In Scotland the “Pechs” were obviously elves, for they are supposed to have been short, wee men with long arms, and such huge feet that on rainy days they stood upside down and used their feet as umbrellas. That the Picts’ Houses of Cornwall were attributed to the Pechs is probable from the Scottish belief, “Oh, ay, they were great builders the Pechs; they built a’ the auld castles in the country. They stood a’ in a row from the quarry to the building stance, and elka ane handed forward the stanes to his neighbour till the hale was bigget.”

That the pig and the bogie were intimately associated is evidenced by a Welsh saying quoted by Sir John Rhys:—