Fig. 334.—British. From Akerman.
Occasionally the two footprints are found cut into simple rock: in Scotland the King of the Isles used to be crowned at Islay, standing on a stone with a deep impression on the top of it made on purpose to receive his feet. The meaning of the feet symbol in Britain is not known, but Scotch tradition maintained that it represented the size of the feet of Albany’s first chieftain. On Adam’s Peak in Ceylon (ancient Tafrobani) there is a super-sacred footprint which is still the goal of millions of devout pilgrims, and on referring to India where the foot emblem is familiar we find it explained as very ancient, and used by the Buddhists in remembrance of their great leader Buddha. In the tenth century a Hindu poet sang:—
In my heart I place the feet
The Golden feet of God.
and it would thus seem that the primeval Highlander anticipated by many centuries Longfellow’s trite lines on great men, happily, however, before departing, graving the symbolic footprints of his “first Chieftain,” not upon the sands of Time, but on the solid rocks.
The Ancients, believing that God was centred in His Universe, a point within a circle was a proper and expressive hieroglyph for Pan or All. The centre stone of the rock circles probably stood similarly for God, and the surrounding stones for the subsidiary Principalities and Powers thus symbolising the idea: “Thou art the Eternal One, in whom all order is centred; Lord of all things visible and invisible, Prince of mankind, Protector of the Universe”.[624] A tallstone or a longstone is physically and objectively the figure one, 1.
If it were possible to track the subsidiary Powers of the Eternal One to their inception we should, I suspect, find them to have been personifications of Virtues, and this would seem to apply not merely to such familiar Trinities as Faith, Hope, and Charity; Good Thought, Good Deed, and Good Word, but to quartets, quintets, sextets, and septets such as the Seven Kings or Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, i.e., “Ye gifte of wisdome; ye gifte of pittie; ye gifte of strengthe; ye gifte of comfaite; ye gifte of understandinge; ye gifte of counyinge; ye gifte of dreede”.
The Persian Trinity of Thought, Deed, and Word, is perfectly expressed in the three supposed Orders of the Christian hierarchy. As stated in The Golden Legend these are—sovereign Love as touching the order of Seraphim, perfect Knowledge, and perpetual Fruition or usance. “There be some,” continues De Voragine, “that overcome and dominate over all vices in themselves, and they by right be called of the world, gods among men.”[625]
It is related of King Arthur that he carried a shield named Prydwen, and if the reader will trouble to count the dots ranged round the centre boss of the shield on page 120 the number will be found to be eleven. At Kingston on Thames, where the present market stone is believed to be the surviving centre-piece of a stone-circle, a brass ring ornamented with eleven bosses was discovered.[626] In Etruria eleven mystic shields were held in immense veneration:[627] it will further be noted that the majority of the wheatears on British and Celtiberian coins consist of eleven corns.