Figs. 254 and 255.—Gaulish. From Barthelemy.
At Land’s End, opposite the titanic headland known as Pardenick, or Pradenic, is Cairn Voel which is also known locally as “The Diamond Horse”:[446] there is likewise a headland called The Horse, near Kynance Cove, and a stupendous cliff-saddle at Zennor,[447] named the Horse’s Back. It would thus seem that the mythology of the Voel extended to the far West, and it is not improbable that Tegid Voel, the Consort of Keridwen the Mare, alias Cendwen, meant inter alia the Good Foal.
Prof. Macalister has recently hooked up from the deep waters of Irish mythology a deity whose name Fal he connotes with a Teutonic Phol. This Fal, a supposedly non-Aryan, neolithic (?) “pastoral horse-divinity,” belonging to an older stratum of belief than the divine beings among the Tuatha De Danann, Prof. Macalister associates with the famous stone of Fal at Tara, and he remarks: “He looks like a Centaur, but is in parentage and disposition totally different from the orthodox Centaurs. He is, in fact, just the sort of being that would develop out of an ancient hippanthropic deity who had originally no connection with Centaurs, but who found himself among a people that had evolved the conception of the normal type of those disagreeable creatures.”[448]
In Cornwall is a river Fal; a well is a spring, the whale or elephant of the sea was venerated because like the elephant it gushed out a fountain of water from its head. The Wilton crescent, opposite one of the ancient conduits by Rotten Row, Kensington, may well have meant Well town, for the whole of this district was notoriously a place of wells: not only do we find Wilton Crescent, but in the immediate neighbourhood of Ovington Square and Flounders Field is Walton Street and Hooper’s Court. Sennen Cove at Land’s End was associated with a mysterious sea-spirit known as the Hooper, and we shall meet again with Hooper, or Jupiter, the Hidden one in “Hooper’s Hide,” an alternative title for the game of Blind Man’s Buff.
The authorities derive avon, or aune, the Celtic for a gently flowing river, from ap, the Sanscrit for water, but it is more likely that there is a closer connection with Eve, or Eva—Welsh Efa—whose name is the Hebrew for life or enlivening, whence Avon would resolve most aptly into the enlivening one. Not only are rivers actually the enlivening ones, but the ancients philosophically assigned the origin of all life to water or ooze. According to Persian, or Parthian philosophy—and Parthia may be connoted in passing with Porthia, an old name for the Cornish St. Ives, for St. Ive was said to be a Persian bishop—the Prime appointed six pure and beneficent Archangels to supervise respectively Fire, Metals, Agriculture, Verdure, the Brutes, and Water. With respect to the last the injunction given was: “I confide to thee, O Zoroaster! the water that flows; that which is stagnant; the water of rivers; that which comes from afar and from the mountains; the water from rain and from springs. Instruct men that it is water which gives strength to all living things. It makes all verdant. Let it not be polluted with anything dead or impure, that your victuals, boiled in pure water, may be healthy. Execute thus the words of God.”[449]
Etymology points to the probability that water in every form, even the stagnant fen—the same word as Aven, font, and fount—was once similarly sacred in Britain, whence it may follow that even although Fulham and Walham were foul, vile, evil, and filthy,[450] the root fal still meant originally the enlivening all.
The word pollute (to be connoted with pool, Phol, or Fal) is traced by Skeat to polluere, which means not necessarily foul, but merely to flow over. The willow tree (Welsh helygen), which grows essentially by the water-side, may be connoted with wallow.