Fig. 431.—Sixteenth Century Printer’s Ornament.
In the emblem herewith the alan or cheery old Pater is associated like Nehelennia with the fruits of the earth, amongst which one may perhaps recognise coddlins and other varieties of Allan apple.
The Cornish Allantide was celebrated on the night of Hallow’een, and as Sir George Birdwood rightly remarks the English Arbor Day—if it be ever resuscitated—should be fixed on the first of November or old “Apple Fruit Day,” now All Hallows[808] or All Saint’s Day, the Christian substitute for the Roman festival of Pomona; also of the first day of the Celtic Feast of Shaman or Shony the Lord of Death. Shaman may in all probability be equated with Joe alone, and Shony with poor John alone alone: Shony, as has been seen, was an Hebridean ocean-deity, and the omniscient Oannes or John of Sancaniathon, the Phœnician historian, lived half his time in ocean: the Eros or Amoretto here illustrated from Kanauj may be connoted with Minnussinchen or the little Sinjohn of Tartary.
Fig. 432.—From Kanauj. From Symbolism of the East and West (Aynsley, Mrs. Murray).
With the apple orchard Pomona or of the Pierre, Pere, or Pater Alone, the monocle and monarch of the universe, may be connoted the far-famed paradise of Prester or Presbyter John: this mythical priest-king is rendered sometimes as Preste Cuan, sometimes as Un Khan or John King-Priest, and sometimes as Ken Khan: he was clearly a personification of the King of Kings, and his marvellous Kingdom, which streamed with honey and was overflowing with milk, was evidently none other than Paradise or the Land of Heaven. “Mediæval credulity” believed that this so-called “Asiatic phanton,” in whose country stood the Fountain of Youth and many other marvels, was attended by seven kings, twelve archbishops, and 365 counts: the seventy-two kings and their kingdoms said to be the tributaries of Prester John may be connoted with the seventy-two dodecans of the Egyptian and Assyrian Zodiac: these seventy-two dodecans I have already connoted with the seventy-two stones constituting the circle of Long Meg. Facing the throne of Prester John—all of whose subjects were virtuous and happy—stood a wondrous mirror in which he saw everything that passed in all his vast dominions. The mirror or monocle of Prester John is obviously the speculum of Thoth, Taut, or Doddy, and I suspect that the seventy-two dodecans of the Egyptian and Chaldean Zodiac were the seventy-two Daddy Kings of Un Khan’s Empire: none may take, nor touch, nor harm it—
For the round of Morian Zeus has been its watcher from of old
He beholds it and Athene thy own sea-grey eyes behold.[809]
The first written record of Preste Cuan figures in the chronicles of the Bishop of Freisingen (1145): the name Freisingen is radically singen: and it is quite probable that the Bungen Strasse at Hamelyn identified with the Pied Piper was actually the scene of a “Poor John, Alone, Alone,” incident such as Brand thus describes: “I remember to have seen one of these impostors some years ago in the North of England, who made a very hermit-like appearance and went up and down the streets of Newcastle with a long train of boys at his heels muttering, ‘Poor John alone, alone!’ I thought he pronounced his name in a manner singularly plaintive,”[810] we have seen that the Wandering Jew was first recorded at St. Albans: the ancient name for Newcastle-on-Tyne—where he seems to have made his last recorded appearance—was Pandon. With the panshen or pope of Tartary may be connoted the probability that the rosy Allan apple of Newlyn was a pippen: the parish of “Lynn or St. Margaret,” not only includes the wards of Paradise and Jews Lane, but we find there also an Albion Place, and the curious name Guanock; modern Kings Lynn draws its water supply from a neighbouring Gay wood.