[762] Teutonic Mythology.
[763] A New Description of England, 1724, p. 61.
[764] An ouche is a bugle: “the bugles they do shine”.
[765] Quoted from Adamnan’s Life of Columba (Huyshe, W.).
[CHAPTER XII]
Peter’s Orchards.
“But all the beauty of the pleasaunce drew its being from the song of the bird; for from his chant flowed love which gives its shadow to the tree, its healing to the simple, and its colour to the flower. Without that song the fountain would have ceased to spring, and the green garden become a little dry dust, for in its sweetness lay all their virtue.”—Provençal Fairy Tale.
Among the relics preserved at the monastery of St. Nicholas of Bari is a club with which the saint, who is said to have become a friar at the age of eleven, was beaten by the devil: a club was the customary symbol of Hercules; the Celtic Hercules was, as has been seen, depicted as a baldhead leading a rout of laughter-loving followers by golden chains fastened to their ears, and as it was the habit of St. Nicholas-of-the-Club to wander abroad singing after the ancient fashion, one may be sure that Father Christmas is the lineal descendant of the British Ogmios or Mighty Muse, alias the Wandering Jew or Joy. That Bride “the gentle” was at times similarly equipped is obvious from a ceremony which in Scotland and the North of England used to prevail at Candlemas: “the mistress and servants of each family take a sheaf of oats and dress it up in woman’s apparel, put it in a large basket and lay a wooden club by it, and this they call “Briid’s Bed,” and then the mistress and servants cry three times: “Briid is come, Briid is welcome”! This they do just before going to bed”: another version of this custom records the cry as—“Bridget, Bridget, come is; thy bed is ready”.
In an earlier chapter we connected Iupiter or Jupiter with Aubrey or Oberon, and that this roving Emperor of Phairie Land was familiar to the people of ancient Berkshire is implied not only by a river in that county termed the Auborn, but also by adjacent place-names such as Aberfield, Burfield, Purley, and Bray. Skeat connotes Bray (by Maidenhead) with “Old English braw, Mercian breg, an eyebrow,” but what sensible or likely connection is supposed to exist between the town of Bray and an eyebrow I am unable to surmise: we have, however, considered the prehistoric “butterfly” or eyebrows, and it is not impossible that Bray was identified with this mysterious Epeur (Cupid) or Amoretto. The claims to ubiquity and antiquity put by the British poet into the mouth of Taliesin or Radiant Brow—the mystic child of Nine constituents[766]—is paralleled by the claims of Irish Ameurgin, likewise by the claims of Solomonic “Wisdom,” and there is little doubt that the symbolic forms of the “Teacher to all Intelligences” are beyond all computation.