Among the meanings assigned to the Hebrew og is “long necked,” and it is not improbable that the mysterious Inn sign of the “Swan with two necks” was originally an emblem of Mother and Father Goose. In Fig. 61 the geis or swan is facing fore and aft, like Cuno, which is radically the same Great Uno as Juno or Megale, to whom the goose was sacred. Geyser, a gush or spring, is the same word as geeser, and there was a famous swan with two necks at Goswell Road, where the word Goswell implies an erstwhile well of Gos, Goose, or the Gush.[268] A Wayzgoose is a jovial holiday or festival, gust or gusto means enjoyment, and the Greengoose Fair, which used to be held at Stratford, may be connoted with the “Goose-Intentos,” a festival which was customarily held on the sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Pentecost, the time when the Holy Ghost descended in the form of “cloven tongues,” resolves into Universal Good Ghost.
The Santones, whose emblem was the Pig and Fleur-de-lis, were neighbours of the Pictones. Our British Picts, the first British tribe known by name to history, are generally supposed to have derived their title because they depicted pictures on their bodies. In West Cornwall there are rude stone huts known locally as Picts’ Houses, but whether these are attributed to the Picts or the Pixies it is difficult to say. In Scotland the “Pechs” were obviously elves, for they are supposed to have been short, wee men with long arms, and such huge feet that on rainy days they stood upside down and used their feet as umbrellas. That the Picts’ Houses of Cornwall were attributed to the Pechs is probable from the Scottish belief, “Oh, ay, they were great builders the Pechs; they built a’ the auld castles in the country. They stood a’ in a row from the quarry to the building stance, and elka ane handed forward the stanes to his neighbour till the hale was bigget.”
That the pig and the bogie were intimately associated is evidenced by a Welsh saying quoted by Sir John Rhys:—
A cutty black sow on every style
Spinning and carding each November eve.
In Ireland Pooka was essentially a November spirit, and elsewhere November was pre-eminently the time of All Hallows or All Angels. Hallow is the same word as elle the Scandinavian for elf or fairy, and at Michaelmas or Hallowe’en, pixies, spooks, and bogies were notoriously all-abroad:—
On November eve
A Bogie on every stile.
The time of All Hallows, or Michaelmas used to be known as Hoketide, a festival which in England was more particularly held upon St. Blaze’s Day; and at that cheerless period the people used to light bonfires or make blazes for the purpose of “lighting souls out of Purgatory”. In Wales a huge fire was lighted by each household and into the ashes of this bonfire, this alban or elphin fire,[269] every member of the family threw a white or “Alban,” or an elphin stone, kneeling in prayer around the dying fire.[270] In the Isle of Man Hallowtide was known as Hollantide,[271] which again permits the equation of St. Hellen or Elen and her train with Long Meg and her daughters. On the occasion of the Hallow or Ellie-time saffron or yellow cakes, said to be emblematical of the fires of purgatory, used to be eaten. To run amok in the East means a fiery fury—the words are the same; and that bake (or beeak as in Yorkshire dialect) meant fire is obvious from the synonymous cook. Coch is Welsh for red, and the flaming red poppy or corncockle, French—coquelicot, was no doubt the symbol of the solar poppy, pope, or pap. The Irish for pap or breast is cich, and in Welsh cycho means a hive, or anything of concave or hivelike shape. Possibly here we have the origin of quick in its sense of living or alive.