Fig. 267.—From Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism (Inman, C. W.)
The appearance of the will-o-the-wisps, Castor and Pollux, was held to be an argument that the tempest was caused by “a sulphurous spirit rarefying and violently moving the clouds, for the cause of the fire is a sulphurous and bituminous matter driven downwards by the impetuous motion of the air and kindled by much agitation”. I quote this passage as justifying the suggestion that sulphur—the yellow and fiery—is radically phur, and that brimstone, or brenstoon, as Wyclif has it, may be the stone of Brim or Bren, which burns.
The identification of Castor and Pollux with stars or asters, enables us to equate Castor as the White god or Day god, for dextra, the Latin for right, is de castra, i.e., good great astra. The white child in Fig. 266 is that on the right hand of the Bona Dea: that Pollux was the dark, sinister, sinistra, or left-hand power, is somewhat confirmed by the fact that the Celtic Pwll was the Pluto or deity of the underworld. Possibly the Latin castra, meaning a fort, originated from the idea that Castor was the heroic Invictus who has developed into St. Michael and St. George. The sin of sinister may possibly be the Gaelic sen, meaning senile, and the implication follows that the dark twin was the old in contradistinction to the new god.
The French for nightmare is cauchemar, the French for left is gauche, and it is the left-hand mairy, or fairy, in Fig. 266 which is the shady one. Not only does gauche mean left, but it also implies awkward, uncanny, and inept, whence it is to be feared that the Gooches, the Goodges, and their affiliated tribes were originally “Blackfriars,” and followers of the Black God. I have already suggested that the Gogs were unpopular among the Greeks, and the intensity of their feeling is seemingly reflected by the Greek adjective kakos[535] (the English gagga?), which means evil, dirty, or unpleasant.
Castor and Pollux, or the Fires of St. Helen, were known along the shores of the Mediterranean as St. Telmo’s Fires, the word Telmo being seemingly t Elmo or Good Alma. By the Italians they are known as the Fires of St. Peter and St. Nicholas; Peter here corresponding probably to the auburn Aubrey, and Nicholas to “Old Nick”.
It was fabled that Castor and Pollux were alike immortal, that like day and night they periodically died, but that whenever one of the brothers expired the other was restored to life, thus sharing immortality between them. “There was,” says Duncan, “an allusion to this tradition in the Roman horse-races, where a single rider galloped round the course mounted on one horse while he held another by the rein.”[536] This ceremony becomes more interesting when we find that the cauchemar, the nightmare, or the blackmare used in England to be known as the “ephialtes”.[537] That this ill-omened hipha, or hobby, was ill-boding Helena, seems somewhat to be confirmed by the custom in Cumberland of allotting to servants the years’ allowance for horse-meat on St. Helen’s, Eline’s, or Elyn’s day.[538] It is believed that horse meat is now taboo in Britain, because the eating of horse was so persistently denounced by Christianity as a heathen rite.
Fig. 268.—British Altar. By kind permission of the authorities of the British Museum.
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