Schliemann mentions in connection with Mykenae a small stream known nowadays as the Perseia, and as Mykenae was said to have been founded by Perseus, the stream Perseia was presumably connected with the ancient pherepolis. The survival of this fairy name is the more remarkable as Mykenae itself was utterly destroyed, buried, and lost sight of, yet the title of this rivulet survived: is there any valid reason to deny a similar vitality and antiquity to the brook- and river-names of Britain? Most of these have been complacently ascribed to German settlers, others to Keltic words, but some are admittedly pre-Keltic. Amongst the group of “rare insolubles” occurs the river Kennet which flows past Abury, and may be connoted with the river Kent in the Kendal district. Apart from the Kentish Cantii Herodotus speaks of a race called Kynetes or Kynesii, both of which terms, as Sir John Rhys says, “have a look of Greek words meaning dogmen”: according to Herodotus, “the Celts are outside the Pillars of Hercules and they border on the Kynetii, who dwell the farthest away towards the west of the inhabitants of Europe”. Ancient writers locate the Kynetes in the west of Spain which, according to Rhys, “suggests a still more important inference—namely, that there existed in Herodotus’ time a continental people of the same origin and habits as the non-Celtic aborigines of these islands”.[1023] Kennet, as we have seen, was a British word meaning Greyhound; I think the Kynetes were probably worshippers of every variety of chien, and that dog-headed St. Christopher, the kindly giant of Canaan, was the jackal-headed “Mercury” of the track-making merchants of Candia.[1024] In Ireland there figures in the Pantheon a Caindea, whose name is understood to mean the gentle goddess: the fact of the dove being held in such high estimation in Candia,[1025] as elsewhere, is presumptive evidence of the Candian goddess being fundamentally regarded as gentle, and that Candian adventurers were gentlemen. That Crete or Candia was an Idaeal, Idyllic, and an Aerial island is implied not only by its titles Idaea, Doliche, and Aeria, but also by the characteristics of its Art.
Etymology—by which I mean a Science that does not quibble at everything beyond the view of Mrs. Markham as being out of bounds—permits us to assume that the faith of the Iberii was belief in the Iberian peyrou, the Parthian peri, the British perry, phairy, or fairy. Anthropologists patronisingly describe the creed of primitive man as being animism by which they mean that an anima or soul was attributed to everything on earth: this may be a credulous and degraded faith, or it may be sublimated into the conception of the Egyptian philosophers of whom it has been said: “In their view the earth was a mirror of the heavens, and celestial intelligences were represented by beasts, birds, fishes, gems, and even by rocks, metals, and plants. The harmony of the spheres was answered by the music of the temples, and the world beheld nothing that was not a type of something divine.”
Speaking of the fairy tales of Ireland W. B. Yeats characterises them as full of simplicity and musical occurrences: “They are,” he adds, “the literature of a class for whom every incident in the old rut of birth, love, pain, and death, has cropped up unchanged for centuries; who have steeped everything in the heart to whom everything is a symbol”. It is generally supposed that fairy tales are of a higher antiquity than cromlechs and stone avenues, and anthropologists have not hesitated to extract from them incidents of crude character as evidence of the barbarous and objectionable period in which they originated. With a curious perversity Anthropology has, however, ignored the fair humanities of phairie, while eagerly seizing upon its crudities: in view of the prophet Micah’s environment there seems to me to be no justification for such prejudice, and if fairy-tale is really archaic its beauties may quite well be coeval with its horrors.
In his booklet on Folklore Mr. Sydney Hartland observes: “Turning from savage nations to the peasantry of civilised Europe, you will be still more astonished to learn that up to the present time the very same conditions of thought are discernible wherever they are untouched by modern education and the industrial and commercial revolution of the last hundred years. There can only be one interpretation of this. The human mind, alike in Europe and in America, in Africa and in the South Seas, works in the same way, according to the same laws.” This one and only permissible theory of independent evolution is daily losing ground, and in any case it can hardly be pushed to such extremes as identity of words and place-names.
But while I am convinced that Crete was a culture-centre of immense importance, this bright and particular star, was, one must think, too small a place to account for the vast influence apparently traceable to it. Schliemann, whom nobody now ridicules, claimed to have discovered at Troy a bronze vase inscribed in Phœnicean characters with the words: “From King Chronos of Atlantis,” and in a paper opened after his death he expressed his belief: “I have come to the conclusion that Atlantis was not only a great territory between America and the West Coast of Africa, but the cradle of all our civilisation as well”. The anonymous suggestion which appeared a few years ago in the columns of The Times, that Crete was the reality of the wonderful island “fabled” by Plato, seems to me to have nothing to support it, and I would commend to the attention of those interested the facts collected by Ignatius Donnelly in Atlantis, and by others elsewhere. Personally I incline to the opinion that Plato’s story was well founded, and that the identities found in Peru and Mexico, Britain, the Iberian Peninsula, and Northern Africa are due to these countries, like the Isles of the Mediterranean, being situated in the full sweep of Atlantean influence.
According to Plato, the inhabitants of Atlantis (“an island situated in front of the straits which you call the columns of Hercules: the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together and was the way to other islands”) were not only highly civilised, but they “despised everything but virtue not caring for their present state of life and thinking lightly on the possession of gold and other property”. It is thus quite possible that the Atlanteans and not the pious Trojans were the enthusiastic and altruistic missionaries who carried the spiral ornament to Mykenae as to New Grange. Prof. Macalister finds it difficult to believe in the existence of such a frame of mind, but it seems to accord very closely to that of the hypothetical peace-loving Aryans or “noble nations” which etymologists have already been compelled to postulate, and which my own findings both herein and elsewhere endorse: the semi-supernaturalness of the Idaens has already been noted, as likewise has that of the ancient Britons and of the modern Bretons.
In the year 1508 a French vessel met with a boat full of American Indians not far from the English coast,[1026] and there is thus one historic warrant for the possibility of very ancient maritime contact between Europe and America. The Maoris of New Zealand emigrated from Polynesia in frail canoes during the historic period, and I have little doubt that the Maoris of to-day, who tattoo themselves with spirals similar to those found upon the prehistoric monuments of Britain, were cognate with the woad-tattoed Britons, who opposed their naked bodies to the invincible legends of Cæsar. One can best account for the many and close connections between the South Sea islands and elsewhere by the supposition that some of these islands were colonised by Atlantis, Lyonesse, or whatever the traditional lost island was entitled: and as many of the maritime Atlanteans must have been at sea when the alleged catastrophe occurred, these survivors would have carried the dire news to many distant lands: whence perhaps the almost universal tradition of a Flood, and the salvation of only one boat load of people.
It has been said that the chief thing which makes Japan so fascinating a land to dwell in is the consciousness that you are there living in an atmosphere of universal kindliness and courtesy. There are still to-day races in Polynesia who display the same kindly and almost angelic dispositions,[1027] whence there is nothing ridiculous in the supposition that Peru, whose natives claimed to be children of the Sun, was associated with peyrou, the Iberian for phairy, or that the original Angles were deemed to be angels, and England or Inghilterra their country.
One of the most noted beliefs of all races, whether civilised or savage, is the erstwhile existence of a Golden Age when all men were well happified, and if existence to primitive man was merely the hideous and protracted nightmare which anthropologists assume, it is difficult to see at what period of his upward climb this curiously idyllic story came into existence: it would be simpler to assume that the tradition had some foundation in fact, and was not merely the frenzied invention of a dreamer. No race possesses more beautiful traditions of the Adamic Age than the British, and I have little doubt that the four quarters of the Holy Rood or Wheel are connected with the four fabulous Cities of Enchantment which figure in Keltic imagination. According to Irish MSS. the Tuatha de Danaan, or Tribe of the Children of Don, after suffering a terrible defeat at the hands of the Fomorians, quitted Ireland, returned to Thebes, and gave themselves up to the study of Magic: leaving Greece they next went to Denmark (named after them) where they founded four great schools of diabolical learning—the Four Cities of Keltic imagination. It would thus seem possible that the Children of Don were the fabricators of the Eden, or Adam, tradition, and that they may be connoted with the Danoi under which name Homer habitually refers to the Greeks: with these Danoi or Danaia, Dr. Latham connotes the Hebrew tribe of Dan, supposing that both these peoples traced their origin to the same culture-hero.[1028] That Gardens of Eden were frequent in these islands has been evidenced in a preceding chapter, and in Asia the custom of constructing Edens or Terrestrial Paradises was equally prevalent: Maundeville and other travellers have left detailed accounts of these abris, all of which seem to have been constructed more or less to the standard design of the Garden of Eden, watered by four rivers, with a Tree or Fountain in the midst.
It is supposed that the celebrated Epistle of Prester John was a malicious antepapal concoction of the Gnostic Troubadours, or Servants of Love: these were certainly the shuttles that disseminated it over Europe. I have elsewhere endeavoured to show the role played in mediæval Europe by the Troubadours and Minnesingers (Love Singers), and the subject might be infinitely extended. The derivation of trouvere, or troubadour, from trouver to find, is probably too superficial, and if the matter were more fully investigated it is probable that, like the Merry Andrew, these mystic singers and philanderers originated from some Troy or Ancient Troy. Whether the drui or druids are similarly traceable to the same root is debatable, but that the bards of Britain were depositaries and disseminators of the Gnosis I do not doubt: the evidence on that point is not only the testimony of outsiders, but it is inherent in the literature itself, and whether this literature was committed to writing in the sixth, twelfth, or eighteenth century is immaterial. There are in existence many unquestionably prehistoric tales and ideas which have been handed down verbally, and committed to writing for the first time only within the past few years: many more are living viva voce, and are not yet registered. The Welsh bards, like the bards of other races, were a recognised class, graduates in a particular Art, and were strictly and definitely trained in the traditional lore of their profession. This hereditary order which was known to the Romans certainly as early as 200 B.C., like the bards of other countries, almost unquestionably transmitted an enormous literature solely by word of mouth.[1029] If the feats of even the modern human memory were not well vouched for they would not be credited: in the past, the Zend Avesta, the Kalevala, the Popul Vuh, Homer, much of the Old Testament, and in fact all very ancient literature has come down to us simply by memory alone.