TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:

Most spelling variants are retained. Punctuation is occasionally corrected, especially in the index and in footnotes, to maintain consistency.

Figures have been moved to before or after the paragraphs near which they appeared in the text. On occasion, the pagination shown here may be slightly disordered. Internal references to pages have been hyperlinked to the original page. Given the approximate placement of figures, the reader may need to scroll up or down a bit to find the figure.

A Transcriber’s Endnote at the end of this text contains more detailed information about corrections made.

[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

[CONTENTS]

“Of all the many thousands of earthworks of various kinds to be found in England, those about which anything is known are very few, those of which there remains nothing more to be known scarcely exist. Each individual example is in itself a new problem in history, chronology, ethnology, and anthropology; within every one lie the hidden possibilities of a revolution in knowledge. We are proud of a history of nearly twenty centuries: we have the materials for a history which goes back beyond that time to centuries as yet undated. The testimony of records carries the tale back to a certain point: beyond that point is only the testimony of archæology, and of all the manifold branches of archæology none is so practicable, so promising, yet so little explored, as that which is concerned with earthworks. Within them lie hidden all the secrets of time before history begins, and by their means only can that history be put into writing: they are the back numbers of the island’s story, as yet unread, much less indexed.”—A. Hadrian Allcroft.

“It is a gain to science that it has at last been recognised that we cannot penetrate far back into man’s history without appealing to more than one element in that history. Some day it will be recognised that we must appeal to all elements in that history.”—Gomme.

“History bears and requires Authors of all sorts.”—Camden.

[CHAPTER I]
INTRODUCTION

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”—H. D. Thoreau.

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.

BRITISH ALPHABET.

Fig. 1.—From Celtic Researches (Davies, E.).

CELTIBERIAN ALPHABET, SHEWING THE DESCRIPTION OF CHARACTERS FOUND ON THE COINS OF TARRACONENSIS AND BÆTICA.

Fig. 2.—From Ancient Coins (Akerman, J. Y.).

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.

Fig. 3.—Section of the Dolmen Chapel of the Seven Sleepers near Plouaret.

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Dent, 1909.

[2] The Lost Language of Symbolism: An inquiry into the origin of certain letters, words, names, fairy-tales, folklore, and mythologies. 2 vols. London, 1912 (Williams & Norgate).

[3] Manchester Guardian, 23rd December, 1912.

[4] Sonia.

[5] “Topographical comment—I will not say criticism—has been equally inefficient. A theory is not refuted by saying ‘all the great antiquarians are against you,’ ‘the Psalter of Tara refutes that,’ or ‘O’Donovan has set the question past all doubt’. These remarks only prove that we have hardly commenced scientific archæology in this country.”—;Westropp, Thos. J., Proc. of Royal Irish Acad., vol. xxxiv., C., No. 8, p. 129.

[6] We found precisely the same things as were found by our predecessors, remains of extinct animals in the cave earth, and with them flint implements in considerable numbers. You want, of course, to know how the scientific world received these latter discoveries. They simply scouted them. They told us that our statements were impossible, and we simply responded with the remark that we had not said that they were possible, only that they were true.—Pengally, W., Kent’s Cavern. Its Testimony to the Antiquity of Man, p. 12.

[7] Lubbock, J., Prehistoric Times.

[8] In the course of his criticism the same writer pertinently observes:—

“Why, what a wonderful thing is this! We have, in the first place, the most weighty and explicit testimony—Strabo’s, Cæsar’s, Lucan’s—that this race once possessed a special, profound, spiritual discipline, that they were, to use Mr. Nash’s words, ‘Wiser than their neighbours’. Lucan’s words are singularly clear and strong, and serve well to stand as a landmark in this controversy, in which one is sometimes embarrassed by hearing authorities quoted on this side or that, when one does not feel sure precisely what they say, how much or how little. Lucan, addressing those hitherto under the pressure of Rome, but now left by the Roman Civil War to their own devices, says:—

“‘Ye too, ye bards, who by your praises perpetuate the memory of the fallen brave, without hindrance poured forth your strains. And ye, ye Druids, now that the sword was removed, began once more your barbaric rites and weird solemnities. To you only is given the knowledge or ignorance (whichever it be) of the gods and the powers of heaven; your dwelling is in the lone heart of the forest. From you we learn that the bourne of man’s ghost is not the senseless grave, not the pale realm of the monarch below; in another world his spirit survives still.’”

[9] “Circles form another group of the monuments we are about to treat of.... In France they are hardly known, though in Algeria they are frequent. In Denmark and Sweden they are both numerous and important, but it is in the British Islands that circles attained their greatest development.”—;Fergusson, J., Rude Stone Monuments, p. 47. Referring to Stanton Drew the same authority observes: “Meanwhile it may be well to point out that this class of circles is peculiar to England. They do not exist in France or Algeria. The Scandinavian circles are all very different, so too are the Irish.”—Ibid., p. 153.

[10] Stevens, F., Stonehenge To-day and Yesterday, 1916, p. 14.

[11] Toland, History of the Druids, p. 163.

[12] Schrader, O., cf. Taylor, Isaac, The Origin of the Aryans, p. 48.

[13] Latham, Dr. R. G.

[14] Spain and Portugal, vol. i., p. 16.

[15] Mr. Hammer, a German who has travelled lately in Egypt and Syria, has brought, it seems, to England a manuscript written in Arabic. It contains a number of alphabets. Two of these consist entirely of trees. The book is of authority.—Davies, E., Celtic Researches, 1804, p. 305.

[16] The Cretans were rulers of the sea, and according to Thucydides King Minos of Crete was “the first person known to us in history as having established a navy. He made himself master of what is now called the Hellenic Sea, and ruled over the Cyclades, into most of which he sent his first colonists, expelling the Carians and appointing his own sons governors; and thus did his best to put down piracy in those waters.”

[17] Jones, J. J., Britannia Antiquissima, 1866.

[18] Mackenzie, D. A., Myths of Crete, p. xxix.

[19] Gray, Mrs. Hamilton, The Sepulchres of Etruria, p. 223.

[20] This might be due to the coasts being less liable to the plough. See, however, the map of distribution, published by Fergusson, in Rude Stone Monuments.

[21] Herbert, A., Cyclops Britannica, p. 68.

[22] Taliesin, p. 23.

[23] Connellan, A. F. M., p. 337.

[24] Aristotle.

[25] Smith, Worthington, G., Man the Primeval Savage, p. 53.

[26] Short History, p. 15.

[27] Bede.

[28] The cities which had been erected in considerable numbers by the Romans were sacked, burnt, and then left as ruins by the Anglo-Saxons, who appear to have been afraid or at least unwilling to use them as places of habitation. An instance of this may be found in the case of Camboritum, the important Roman city which corresponded to our modern Cambridge, which was sacked by the invaders and left a ruin at least until the time of the Venerable Bede, 673-735.—Windle, B. C. A., Life in Early Britain, p. 14.

[29] Hearnshaw, F. J. C., England in the Making, p. 14.

[30] Hawkins, E., The Silver Coins of England, p. 17.

[31] Coins of the Ancient Britons, p. 121.

[32] Bello Gallico, Bk. v., 12, § 3.

[33] Smith, Dr. Wm., Lectures on the English Language, p. 29.

[34] The Americans would describe Gildas as a “Calamity-howler”.

[35] Le Braz, A., The Night of Fires.

[36] A Cantanzaro, dans la Calabre, la cathédrale fut le théâtre de scènes de désordre extraordinaires. Le nouvel archevêque avait dernièrement manifesté l’intention de mettre un terme à certaines coutumes qu’il considérait comme entachées de paganisme. Ses instructions ayant été méprisées, il frappa d’interdit pour trois jours un édifice religieux. La population jura de se venger et, lorsque le nouvel archevêque fit son entrée dans la cathédrale, le jour de Pâques pour célébrer la grand’ messe, la foule, furieuse, manifesta bruyamment contre lui. Comme on craignait que sa personne fût l’objet de violences, le clergé le fit sortir en hâte par une porte de derrière. Les troupes durent être réquisitionnées pour faire évacuer le cathédrale.—La Dernière Heure, April, 1914.

[37] There is a story told of a certain Gilbert de Stone, a fourteenth century legend-monger, who was appealed to by the monks of Holywell in Flintshire for a life of their patron saint. On being told that no materials for such a work existed the litterateur was quite unconcerned, and undertook without hesitation to compose a most excellent legend after the manner of Thomas à Becket.

[38] “Ireland being ‘the last resort of lost causes,’ preserved record of a European ‘culture’ as primitive as that of the South Seas, and therefore invaluable for the history of human advance; elsewhere its existence is only to be established from hints and equivocal survivals. Our early tales are no artificial fiction, but fragmentary beliefs of the pagan period equally valuable for topography and for mythology.”—Westropp, Thos. J., Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. xxxiv. sec. C, No. 8, p. 128.

[CHAPTER II]
THE MAGIC OF WORDS

“As the palimpsest of language is held up to the light and looked at more closely, it is found to be full of older forms beneath the later writing. Again and again has the most ancient speech conformed to the new grammar, until this becomes the merest surface test; it supplies only the latest likeness. Our mountains and rivers talk in the primeval mother tongue whilst the language of men is remoulded by every passing wave of change. The language of mythology and typology is almost as permanent as the names of the hills and streams.”—Gerald Massey.

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.

British.
Fig. 4.—From Evans. Fig. 5.—From Akerman.

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—

Holly and his Merry men they dawnsin and they sing,

Ivy and her maydons they wepen and they wryng.

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.

Fig. 6.—From Proc. of the Royal Irish Acad., xxxiii., C., No. 2.

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.

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 superstitious “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 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]

FOOTNOTES:

[39] Words and Places.

[40] Schliemann, Mykenæ.

[41] Cf. Johnson, W., Byways in British Archæology.

[42] The Cromlechs of Anglesey and Carnarvonshire.

[43] Ancient Britain, p. 70.

[44] Windle, Sir B. C. A., Life in Early Britain, p. 135.

[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 Müller 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 là jusqu’ici

Il a bien changé sur la route.

[56] Westropp, T. J., Proc. R. Irish Acad., xxxiv., 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 Archæology, 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 God 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 titles, 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 passiflora, the Passion 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., xxxiii., 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.”