Fig. 50.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).
In this emblem here reproduced Chaos or Abyssus is figured as the youthful apex of a primeval peak; at the base are geese, and the creatures midway are evidently seals. The seal is the silliest of gentle creatures, and being amphibious was probably the symbol of Celi, the Concealed One, whose name occurs so frequently in British Mythology. To seal one’s eyelids means to close them, and the blind old man named Lieven, who sat in the porch of St. Maurice’s for eleven years, may be connoted with Homer the blind and wandering old Bard, who dwelt upon the rocky islet of Chios, query chaos? Among the Latins Amor or Love was the oldest of the gods, being the child of Nox or Chaos: Love—“this senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid”[245]—is proverbially blind, and the words Amor, Amour, are probably not only Homer, but likewise St. Omer. The British (Welsh) form of Homer is Omyr: the authorship of Homer has always been a matter of perplexity, and the personality of the blind old bard of Chios will doubtless remain an enigma until such time as the individuality of “Old Moore,” “Aunt Judy,” and other pseudonyms is unravelled. It has always been the custom of story-tellers to attribute their legends to a fabulous origin, and the most famous collection of fairy-tales ever produced was published in France under the title Contes de la Mere Oie—“The Tales of Mother Goose”. Goose is radically the same word as gas, a term which was coined by a Belgian chemist in 1644 from the Greek chaos: the Irish for swan is geis, and all the geese tribe are gassy birds which gasp.
In a subsequent chapter we shall analyse goose into ag’oos, the Mighty Ooze, whence the ancients scientifically supposed all life to have originated, and shall equate ooze with hoes, the Welsh word for life, and with Ouse or Oise, a generic British river name. In huss, the German for goose, we may recognise the oose without its adjectival ‘g’.
With the Blind Old Bard of Chios may be connoted the Cornish longstone known as “The Old Man,”[246] or “The Fiddler,” also a second longstone known as “The Blind Fiddler”.[247] In because or by cause we pronounce cause “koz,” and in Slav fairy-tales as elsewhere there is frequent mention of an Enchanter entitled Kostey, whose strength and vitality lay in a monstrous egg. The name Kostey may be connoted with Cystennyns,[248] an old Cornish and Welsh form of Constantine: at the village of Constantine in Cornwall there is what Borlase describes as a vast egg-like stone placed on the points of two natural rocks, and pointing due North and South. This Tolmen or Meantol—“an egg-shaped block of granite thirty-three feet long, and eighteen feet broad, supposed by some antiquaries to be Druidical, is here on a barren hill 690 feet high”.[249] The Greek for egg is oon, and our egg may be connoted not only with Echo—the supposed voice of Ech?—but also with egg, meaning to urge on, to instigate, to vitalise, or render agog.
The acorn is an egg within a cup, and the Danish form of oak is eeg or eg: the oak tree was pre-eminently the symbol of the Most High, and the German eiche may be connoted with uch the British for high. The Druids paid a reverential homage to the oak, worshipping under its form the god Teut or Teutates: this latter word is understood to have meant “the god of the people,”[250] and the term teut is apparently the French tout, meaning all or the total. The reason suggested by Sir James Frazer for oak-worship is the fact that the Monarch of the Forest was struck more frequently by lightning than any meaner tree, and that therefore it was deemed to be the favoured one of the Fire god. But to rive one’s best beloved with a thunderbolt is a more peculiar and even better dissembled token of affection than the celebrated kicking-down-stairs. According to the author of The Language and Sentiment of Flowers[251] the oak was consecrated to Jupiter because it had sheltered him at his birth on Mount Lycaeus; hence it was regarded as the emblem of hospitality, and to give an oak branch was equivalent to “You are welcome”. That the oak tree was originally a Food provider or Feed for all is implied by the words addressed to the Queen of Heaven by Apuleus in The Golden Ass: “Thou who didst banish the savage nutriment of the ancient acorn, and pointing out a better food, dost, etc.”
It has already been suggested that derry or dru, an oak or tree, was equivalent to tre, an abode or Troy, and there is perhaps a connection between this root and terebinth, the Tyrian term for an oak tree. That the oak was regarded as the symbol of hospitality is exceedingly probable, and one of the earliest references to the tree is the story of Abraham’s hospitable entertainment given underneath the Oak of Mamre. The same idea is recurrent in the legend of Philemon and Baucis, which relates that on the mountains of Phrygia there once dwelt an aged, poor, but loving couple. One night Jupiter and Mercury, garbed in the disguise of two mysterious strangers who had sought in vain for hospitality elsewhere, craved the shelter of this Darby and Joan.[252] With alacrity it was granted, and such was the awe inspired by the majestic Elder that Baucis desired to sacrifice a goose which they possessed. But the bird escaped, and fluttering to the feet of the disguised gods Jupiter protected it, and bade their aged hosts to spare it. On leaving, the Wanderer asked what boon he could confer, and what gift worthy of the gods they would demand. “Let us not be divided by death, O Jupiter,” was the reply: whereupon the Wandering One conjured their mean cottage into a noble palace wherein they dwelt happily for many years. The story concludes that Baucis merged gradually into a linden tree, and Philemon into an oak, which two trees henceforward intertwined their branches at the door of Jupiter’s Temple.
The name Philemon is seemingly philo, which means love of, and mon, man or men, and at the time this fairy-tale was concocted Love of Man, or hospitality, would appear to have been the motif of the allegorist.
We British pre-eminently boast our ships and our men as being Hearts of Oak: the Druids used to summon their assemblies by the sending of an oak-branch, and at the national games of Etruria the diadem called Etrusca Corona, a garland of oak leaves with jewelled acorns, was held over the head of the victor.[253] There is little doubt that Honor Oak, Gospel Oak, Sevenoaks, etc., derived their titles from oaks once sacred to the Uch or High, the Allon or Alone, who was alternatively the Seven Kings or the Three Kings. “It is strange,” says Squire, “to find Gael and Briton combining to voice almost in the same words this doctrine of the mystical Celts, who while still in a state of semi-barbarism saw with some of the greatest of ancient and modern philosophers the One in the Many, and a single Essence in all the manifold forms of life.”[254]
FOOTNOTES:
[193] Virgil, The Æneid, Bk. III., c. liii.