Not only by the Romans but likewise by the Greeks, Britain was known as Albion, and one may therefore conjecture that the white-cliff theory is an unsound fancy.
Strabo alludes to a certain district generally supposed to be Land’s End, under the name “Kalbion,”[141] a word manifestly having some radical relation to “Albion”. By an application of the comparative method to place-names and proper-names, I arrived several years ago at the seemingly only logical conclusion that in many directions ak and its variants meant great or mighty. On every hand there is presumptive evidence of this fact, and I have since found that Bryant and also Faber, working by wholly independent methods, reached a very similar conclusion. My modus operandi, with many of its results, having been already published,[142] it is unnecessary here to restate them, and I shall confine myself to new and corroborative evidence.
In addition to great or mighty it is clear that the radical in question meant high. The German trisagion of hoch! hoch! hoch! is still equivalent to the English high! high! high! the Swedish for high is hog, the Dutch is oog, and in Welsh or British high is uch. It is presumably a trace of the gutteral ch that remains in our modern spelling of high with a gh now mute, but the primordial Welsh uch has also become the English ok, as in Devonshire where Okment Hill is said to be the Anglicised form of uch mynydd, the Welsh or British for high hill. I shall, thus, in this volume treat the syllable ’k or ’g as carrying the predominant and apparently more British meaning of high. That the sounds ’g and ’k were invariably commutable may be inferred from innumerable place-names such as Ogbourne St. Andrew, alternatively printed Okebourne, and that the same mutability applies to words in general might be instanced from any random page of Dr. Murray’s New English Dictionary. We may thus assume that “Kalbion,” meant Great Albion or High Albion, and it remains to analyse Alba or Albion.
B and P being interchangeable, the ba of Alba is the same word as pa, which, according to Max Müller, meant primarily feeder; papa is in Turkish baba, and in Mexico also ba meant the same as our infantile pa, i.e., feeder or father. In paab, the British for pope, one p has become b the other has remained constant.
The inevitable interchange of p and b is conspicuously evident in the place-name—Battersea, alternatively known as Patrickseye, and on that little ea, eye, or eyot in the Thames at one time, probably, clustered the padres or paters who ministered to the church of St. Peter—the architypal Pater—whose shrine is now Westminster Abbey.
It is a custom of children to express their superlatives by duplications, such as pretty pretty, and in the childhood[143] of the world this habit was seemingly universal. Thus pa, the Aryan root meaning primarily feeder, has been duplicated into papa, which is the same word as pope, defined as indicating the father of a church. In A.D. 600 the British Hierarchy protested against the claims of the “paab” of Rome to be considered “the Father of Fathers,”[144] and there is little doubt that Pope is literally pa-pa or Father Father. In Stow’s time there existed in London a so-called “Papey”—“a proper house,” wherein sometime was kept a fraternity of St. Charity and St. John. This was, as Stow says, known as the Papey;[145] “for in some language priests are called papes”.
In the Hebrides the place-names Papa Stour, Papa Westray, and so forth are officially recognised as the seats of prehistoric padres, patricks, or papas. Skeat imagines that the words pap meaning food, and pap meaning teat or breast, are alike “of infantine origin due to the repetition of pa pa in calling for food”. They may be so, but to understand the childhood of the world one must stoop to infantile levels.
In Celtic alp or ailpe meant high, and also rock. Among the ancients rock was a generally recognised symbol of the undecaying immutable High Father, and in seemingly every tongue will be found puns such as pierre and pere, Peter the pater, and Petra the Rock. The papacy of Peter is founded traditionally upon St. Petra, the Rock of Ages, “Upon this Rock will I found my Church,” and the St. Rock of this country, whose festival was celebrated upon Rock Monday, was assumedly a survival of pagan pre-Christian symbolism.
