Figs. 58 to 59.—Gaulish. From ibid.
Commenting upon Fig. 52 a numismatist has observed: “This seems made for two young women’s faces,” but whether Cunobelin’s wives, sisters, or children, he knows not. In Britain doubtless there were many kings who assumed the title of Cunobelin, just as in Egypt there were many Pharoahs; but it is no more rational to suppose that the designs on ancient coins are the portraits of historic kings, their wives, their sisters, their cousins, or their aunts, than it would be for an archæologist to imagine that the dragon incident on our modern sovereigns was an episode in the career of his present Majesty King George.
We shall subsequently connect George, whose name means ploughman, with the Blue or Celestial Boar, which, because it ploughed with its snout along the earth, was termed boar, i.e., boer or farmer. With bacco or bacon may be connoted boukolos, the Greek for cowherd, whence bucolic. The cattle of Apollo, or the Sun, are a familiar feature of Greek mythology.
Fig. 60.—Gaulish. From Akerman.
The female bacon, which inter alia was the symbol of fecundity, was credited with a mystic thirty teats. The sow figures prominently in British mythology as an emblem of Ked, and was seemingly venerated as a symbol of the Universal Feeder. The little pig in Fig. 60, a coin of the Santones, whose capital is marked by the modern town of Saintes, is associated with a fleur-de-lis, the emblem of purity. The word lily is all holy; the porker was associated with the notoriously pure St. Antony as well as with Ked or Kate, the immaculate Magna Mater, and although beyond these indications I have no evidence for the suggestion, I strongly suspect that the scavenging habits of the moch caused it, like the fly or mouche, to be reverenced as a symbol of Ked, Cadi, Katy, or Katerina, whose name means the Pure one or the All Pure. The connection between hog and cock is apparent in the French coche or cochon (origin unknown). Cochon is allied to cigne, the French for swan, Latin, cygnus, Greek, kuknos; the voice of the goose or swan is said to be its cackle, and the Egyptians gave to their All Father Goose a sobriquet which the authorities translate into “The Great Cackler”.
Fig. 61.—Swan with Two Necks. (Bank’s Collection, 1785).
From The History of Signboards (Larwood & Hotten).