The elemental Bog is the Slavonic term for God,[259] and when the early translators of the Bible rendered “terror by night” as “bugs by night” they probably had spooks or bogies in their mind. In Etruria as in Egypt the bug or maybug was revered as the symbol of the Creator Bog, because the Egyptian beetle has a curious habit of creating small pellets or balls of mud. In Welsh bogel means the navel, also centre of a wheel, and hence Margaret or Peggy may be equated with the nave or peg of the white-rayed Marguerite or Day’s Eye.[260]
It must constantly be borne in mind that the ancients never stereotyped their Ideal, hence there was invariably a vagueness about the form and features of prehistoric Joy, and Shakespeare’s reference to Dan Cupid as a “senior-junior, giant-dwarf,” may be equally applied to every Elf and Pixy. It is unquestionable that in England as in Scandinavia and Germany “giants and dwarfs were originally identical phenomenon”.[261]
In the words of an Orphic Hymn “Jove is both male and an immortal maid”: Venus was sometimes represented with a beard, and as the Supreme Parent was indiscriminately regarded as either male or female, or as both combined, an occasional contradiction of form is not to be unexpected. The authorities attribute the contrariety of sex which is sometimes assigned to the Cornish saints as being due to carelessness on the part of transcribers, but in this case the monks may be exonerated, as the greater probability is that they faithfully transmitted the pagan legends. The Moon, which, speaking generally, was essentially a symbol of the Mother, was among some races, e.g., the Teutons and the Egyptians, regarded as masculine. In Italy at certain festivals the men dressed in women’s garments, worshipped the Moon as Lunus, and the women dressed like men, as Luna. In Wales the Cadi, as we have seen, was dressed partially as a woman, partially as a man, and in all probability the cassock of the modern priest is a survival of the ambiguous duality of Kate or Good. In Irish the adjective mo—derived seemingly from Mo or Ma, the Great Mother—meant greatest, and was thus used irrespective of sex.
The French word lune, like moon and choon, is radically une, the initial consonants being merely adjectival, and is just as sexless as our one, Scotch ane. In Germany hunne means giant, and the term “Hun,” meant radically anyone formidable or gigantic.
The Cornish for full moon is cann, which is a slightly decayed form of ak ann or great one, and this word can, or khan, meaning prince, ruler, king or great one, is traceable in numerous parts of the world. Can or chan was Egyptian for lord or prince; can was a title of the kings of ancient Mexico; khan is still used to-day by the kings of Tartary and Burmah and by the governors of provinces in Persia, Afghanistan, and other countries of Central Asia. In China kong means king, and in modern England king is a slightly decayed form of the Teutonic konig or kinig. The ancient British word for mighty chief was chun or cun, and we meet with this infinitely older word than king as a participle of royal titles such as Cunobelinus, Cunoval, Cunomor and the like. The same affix was used in a similar sense by the Greeks, whence Apollo was styled Cunades and also Cunnins. The Cornish for prince was kyn, and this term, as also the Irish cun, meaning chief, is evidently far more primitive than the modern king, which seems to have returned to us through Saxon channels. Prof. Skeat expresses his opinion that the term king meant “literally a man of good birth,” and he identifies it with the old High German chunig. Other authorities equate it with the Sanscrit janaka, meaning father, whence it is maintained that the original meaning of the word was “father of a tribe”. Similarly the word queen is derived by our dictionaries from the Greek gyne, a woman, or the Sanscrit jani, “all from root gan, to produce, from which are genus, kin, king, etc.”
The word chen in Cornish meant cause, and there is no doubt a connection between this term and kyn, the Cornish for prince; the connection, however, is principally in the second syllable, and I see no reason to doubt my previous conclusions formulated elsewhere, that kyn or king originally meant great one, or high one, whereas chun, jani, gyne, etc., meant aged one.
One of the first kings of the Isle of Man was Hacon or Hakon, a name which the dictionaries define as having meant high kin. In this etymology ha is evidently equated with high and con or kon with kin, but it is equally likely that Hakon or Haakon meant originally uch on the high one. In Cornish the adjective ughan or aughan meant supreme: the Icelandic for queen is kona, and there is no more radical distinction between king and the disyllabic kween, than there is between the Christian names Ion, Ian, and the monosyllabic Han.
Janaka, the Sanscrit for father, is seemingly allied to the English adjective jannock or jonnack, which may be equated more or less with canny. Uncanny means something unwholesome, unpleasant, disagreeable; in Cornish cun meant sweet or affable, and we still speak of sweets as candies.
