In Central America chan meant serpent, in which connection it is noteworthy that in Scandinavian mythology Wotan presides over the great world snake coiled at the roots of the mighty Ash Tree, named Iggdrasil. This word may, I think, be resolved into igg dra sil, or High Tree Holy, and the Ash of our innumerable Ashdowns, Ashtons, Ashleys, Ashursts, etc., may in all probability be equated not only with aes, the Welsh for tree, but also with oes, the Welsh for life. That Janus, whose coin was entitled the as, was King As has already been suggested, and that As or Ash[1004] was Odin is hardly open to doubt. According to Borlase (W. C.): “There is reason to believe that the Sun was a principal divinity worshipped under the name of Fal, Phol, Bel, Beli, Balor, and Balder, all synonymous terms in the comparative mythology of the Germanic peoples whether Celtic or Teutonic in speech. A curious passage in Johannes Cornubiensis permits us to equate this deity with Asch or As, one name of Odin. The more deeply we study this portion of the subject the more certain becomes the identity of the members of the pantheon of the two western branches of the Aryan-speaking peoples.”[1005]
The word Kent or Cantium is, I think, connected with Candia, but whether Votan of the race of Chan came from Candia, Cantium, or Scandinavia is a discussion which must be reserved for a subsequent volume: it is sufficient here to note in passing that one-third of the language of the Mayas is said to be pure Greek, whence the question has very pertinently been raised, “Who brought the dialect of Homer to America? or who took to Greece that of the Mayas?”
It is now well known that there was communication between the East and West long before America was rediscovered by Columbus, and there is nothing therefore improbable in the Chiapenese tradition that their Votan, after settling affairs in the West, visited Spain and Rome. The legend relates that Votan “went by the road which his brethren, the Culebres, had bored,” these Culebres being presumably either the inhabitants of Calabar in Africa now embraced in the Niger Protectorate, or of Calabria, the southernmost province of Italy. The allusion to a road which the Culebres had bored might be dismissed as a fiction were it not for the curious fact mentioned by Livingstone that tribes lived underground in Rua: “Some excavations are said to be thirty miles long and have running rills in them; a whole district can stand a siege in them. The ‘writings’ therein I have been told by some of the people are drawings of animals and not letters, otherwise I should have gone to see them.” The primitive but, in many respects, advanced culture of Mykenae and of Troy does not seem to have possessed the art of writing, and contemporary ideas must thus necessarily have been expressed by symbols akin to the multifarious animal-hieroglyphics of ancient Candia: it would even seem possible that the writings of underground Rua were parallel to the records of Egypt alleged in the following passage: “It is affirmed that the Egyptian priests, versed in all the branches of religious knowledge, and apprised of the approach of the Deluge, were fearful lest the divine worship should be effaced from the memory of man. To preserve the memory of it, therefore, they dug in various parts of the kingdom subterranean winding passages, on the walls of which they engraved their knowledge, under different forms of animals and birds, which they call hieroglyphics, and which are unintelligible to the Romans.”[1006]
The existence of underground ways seems to be not infrequent in Africa, for Captain Grant, who accompanied Captain Speke in his exploration for the source of the Nile, tells of a colossal tunnel or subway bored under the river Kaoma. Grant asked his native guide whether he had ever seen anything like it elsewhere and the guide replied, “This country reminds me of what I saw in the country to the south of Lake Tanganyika”: he then described a tunnel or subway under another river named also Kaoma, a tunnel so lengthy that it took the caravan from sunrise to noon to pass through. This was said to be so lofty that if mounted upon camels the top could not be touched: “Tall reeds the thickness of a walking-stick grew inside; the road was strewed with white pebbles, and so wide—400 yards—that they could see their way tolerably well while passing through it. The rocks looked as if they had been planed by artificial means.” The guide added that the people of Wambeh Lake shelter in this tunnel,[1007] and live there with their families and cattle.[1008]
In view of these Rider-Haggard-like facts it is unnecessary to discredit the tradition that the South American Votan of the tribe of Chan visited his kinsmen the Culebres, by the road which the Culebres had bored. The journey is said to have taken place in the year 3000 of the world or 1000 B.C., and among the spots alleged to have been visited was the city of Rome where Votan “saw the house of God building”. It is well known that great cities almost invariably exhibit traces of previous cities on the same site: Schliemann’s excavations at Troy proved the pre-existence of a succession of cities on the site of Troy, and the same fact has recently been established at Seville and elsewhere. The city of Rome is famous for a labyrinth of catacombs, the building of which has always been a mystery: the catacombs abound in pagan emblems, and it is, I believe, now generally supposed that they are of pre-Christian origin.
A correspondent of Notes and Queries suggested in 1876 that the Roman Catacombs were the work of the prehistoric Cimmerii who notoriously dwelt in subterraneis domiciliis. The rocks of the Crimea, notably at Inkerman, are honeycombed with caverns; in fact the burrowing proclivities of the Kymbri are proverbialised in the expression “Cimmerian darkness”. The same correspondent of Notes and Queries[1009] further drew attention to the remarkable fact that in the year 1770 coal mining operations in Ireland, at Fair Head, near The Giant’s Causeway, disclosed prehistoric quarryings together with stone hammers “of the rudest and most ancient form”. It is difficult to believe that prehistoric man, surrounded by inexhaustible supplies of fuel in the form of forest and peat, found it necessary to mine, with his poor implements, for coal fuel, and the description of the supposedly prehistoric mine—“wrought in the most expert manner, the chambers regularly dressed and pillars left at proper intervals to support the roof”—arouses not only a strong suspicion that the souterrain in question was actually a shrine, but also that the place-name Antrim—where these quarryings occur—may be connected with antre, a cave. When the Fair Head labyrinth was accidentally disclosed we are told that two lads were sent forward who soon found themselves in “numerous apartments in the mazes and windings of which they were completely bewildered and were finally extricated, not without some difficulty”.
With Joun of Etruria, and Janus of Janicula may be connoted the Ogane of Africa, whose toe, like that of Peter, was reverently kissed: that Northern Africa, Etruria, and Dodona were once peopled by a kindred race is one of the commonplaces of anthropology, and these Iberian people are, I think, traceable not only in Britain and Hibernia, but in the actual names Berat, Britain, Aparica (now Africa), Barbary, Berber or Barabbra, Epirus, Hebrew, Culebre, Calabria, and Celtiberia. Tacitus, who describes the ancient Britons as being dark complexioned and curly haired, adds: “that portion of Spain in front of Britain encourages the belief that the ancient Iberians had come over and colonised this district—the Gauls took possession of the adjacent coast”. According to Huxley and Laing the aboriginal inhabitants of Caledonia were from—“the great Iberian family, the same stock as the Berbers of North Africa”:[1010] the prehistoric inhabitants of Wales similarly belonged to the Iberian stock and—“no other race of men existed in Wales until the neolithic period”.[1011]
In Cornwall the persisting Iberian type is popularly supposed to be the offspring of Spanish sailors wrecked at the time of the Armada, but this theory is not countenanced by anthropologists. Speaking of the short natives of the Hebridean island of Barra—a significant name—Campbell, in his West Highland Tales, observes: “Behind the fire sat a girl with one of these strange foreign faces which are occasionally to be seen in the Western Isles, a face which reminded me of the Nineveh sculptures, and of faces seen in St. Sebastian. Her hair was as black as night, her clear eyes glittered through the peat smoke. Her complexion was dark and her features so unlike those who sat about her, that I asked if she were a native of the island, and learned that she was a Highland girl.”
Whether this Barra maiden was a persistent type of Hebrew may be questioned: she was certainly not Mongolian, the other great family whose traces still persist here. The Hebrews traditionally came from Candia, and the Candians or Cretans are universally described as diminutive and dark-haired: according to Prof. Keith the typical Bronze Age man was narrow-faced, round-headed, handsome, and about 5 feet 8 inches in height. “It is curious,” he says, “that men of this type are playing leading parts in large proportion to the number living.”
The antithesis to the round-headed Gael, and the oval-headed Cynbro is the square-headed Teuton, Finn, or Mongol. While the Cretan was essentially creative and artistic, we are told on the other hand that “it must always be remembered that the Phœnicians were only intermediaries and created no art of their own”.[1012] The same verity is still curiously true of the modern Jew who almost invariably is an intermediary, rarely if ever a producer: neither in Caledonia, Cambria, or Hibernia does one often find a Jewish nose, and the craftsmen-artists of the primeval world were, I think, not the Jews of Tyre, but the older Jous of Candia or Crete. In the name Drew, translated to have meant skilful, we have apparently a true tradition of the Jous of Cornwall and the Jous of Droia, or Troy.