At Bancroft, in the neighbourhood of St. Albans, the festivities of May-day included “first” a personage with “a large artificial hump on his back,”[154] and we may recognise the Kaadman of St. Albans in the Cadi of Welsh pageantry. In Wales all the arrangements of May-day were made by the so-called Cadi, who was always the most active person in the company and sustained the joint rôle of marshal, orator, buffoon, and money collector. The whole party being assembled they marched in pairs headed by the Cadi, who was gaudily bedecked with gauds and wore a bisexual, half-male, half-female costume. With gaud and gaudy, which are the same words as good and cadi, may be connoted gaudeo the Latin for I rejoice.
Punch is always represented with an ample paunch, and this conspicuous characteristic of bonhomie is similarly a feature of Chinese and Japanese bonifaces or Bounty Gods. The skirt worn by the androgynous British Cadi may be connoted with the kilt in which the Etrurians figured their Hercules, and that in Etruria the All Father was occasionally depicted like Punch, is clear from the following passage from The Sepulchres of Ancient Etruria: “Hercules and Minerva were the most generally honoured of the Etruscan divinities, the one representing the most valuable qualities of a man’s body and the other of his soul. They were the excellencies of flesh and spirit, and according to Etruscan mythology they were man and wife. Minerva has usually a very fine face with that straight line of feature which we call Grecian, but which, from the sepulchral paintings and the votive offerings, would appear also to have been native. Hercules has a prominent and peaky chin, and something altogether remarkably sharp in his features, which, from the evidence of vases and scarabæi together, would appear to have been the conventional form of depicting a warrior. It is probably given to signify vigilance and energy. A friend of mine used to call it, not inaptly, ‘the ratcatcher style’. Neptune bears the trident, Jove the thunderbolt or sceptre, and these attributes are sometimes appended to the most grotesque figures when the Etruscans have been representing either some Greek fable, or some native version of the same story. This may be seen on one vase where Jove is entering a window, accompanied by Mercury, to visit Alcmena. Jove has just taken his foot off the ladder, and in my ignorance I looked at the clumsy but extraordinary vase, thinking that the figures represented Punch; and though I give the learned and received version of the story, I am at this moment not convinced that I was wrong, for I do not believe the professor who pointed it out to me, notwithstanding all his learning, extensive and profound as it was, knew that Punch was an Etruscan amusement. Supposing it, however, to have been Punch, which I think was my own very just discovery, the piece acted was certainly Giove and Alcmena.”
It is very obvious that the term holy has changed considerably in its meaning. To the ancients “holidays” were joy-days, pandemoniums, and the pre-eminent emblem of joviality was the holly tree. The reason for the symbolic eminence of the holy tree was its evergreen horned leaves which caused it to be dedicated to Saturn the horned All Father, now degraded into Old Nick. But “Old Nick” is simply St. Nicholas, or Santa Claus, and the name Claus is Nicholas minus the adjective ’n or ancient. Janus, the Latinised form of Joun, was essentially the God of geniality and joviality, otherwise Father Christmas and he is the same as Saturn, whose golden era was commemorated by the Saturnalia. The Hebrew name for the planet Saturn was Chiun, and this Chiun or Joun (?) was seemingly the same as the Gian Ben Gian, or Divine Being, who according to Arabian tradition ruled over the whole world during the legendary Golden Age.
On the first of January, a month which takes its name from Janus as being the “God of the Beginning,” all quarrelling and disturbances were shunned, mutual good-wishes were exchanged, and people gave sweets to one another as an omen that the New Year might bring nothing but what was sweet and pleasant in its train.
This “execrable practice,” a “mere relique of paganism and idolatry,” was, like the decorative use of holly, sternly opposed by the mediæval Church. In 1632 Prynne wrote: “The whole Catholicke Church (as Alchuvinus and others write), appointed a solemn publike faste upon this our New Yeare’s Day (which fast it seems is now forgotten), to bewail these heathenish enterludes, sports, and lewd idolatrous practices which had been used on it: prohibiting all Christians, under pain of excommunication, from observing the Calends, or first of January (which we now call New Yeare’s Day) as holy, and from sending abroad New Yeare’s Gifts upon it (a custom now too frequent), it being a mere relique of paganisme and idolatry, derived from the heathen Romans’ feast of two-faced Janus, and a practice so execrable unto Christians that not only the whole Catholicke Church, but even four famous Councils” [and an enormous quantity of other authorities which it is useless to quote], “have positively prohibited the solemnisation of New Yeare’s Day, and the sending abroad of New Yeare’s Gifts, under an anathema and excommunication.”
There is little doubt that the “Saint” Concord—an alleged subdeacon in a desert—who figures in the Roman Martyrology on January 1st, was invented to account for the Holy Concord to which that day was dedicated. Janus of January 1st, who was ranked by the Latins even above Jupiter, was termed “The good Creator,” the “Oldest of the Gods,” the “Beginning of all Things,” and the “God of Gods”. From him sprang all rivers, wells, and streams, and his name is radically the same as Oceanus.
Before the earth was known to be a ball, Oceanus, the Father of all the river-gods and water-nymphs, was conceived to be a river flowing perpetually round the flat circle of the world, and out of, and into this river the sun and stars were thought to rise and set. Our word ocean is assumed to be from the Greek form okeanus, and the official surmise as to the origin of the word is—“perhaps from okis—swift”. But what “swiftness” there is about the unperturbable and mighty sea, I am at a loss to recognise. In the Highlands the islanders of St. Kilda used to pour out libations to a sea-god, known as Shony, and in this British Shony we have probably the truer origin of ocean.
Fig. 25.—Personification of River.
From Christian Iconography (Didron).
The ancients generally supposed the All Good as wandering abroad and peering unobserved into the thoughts and actions of his children. This proclivity was a conspicuous characteristic of Jupiter, and also of the Scandinavian All Father, one of whose titles was Gangrad, or “The Wanderer”. The verb to gad, and the expression “gadding about,” may have arisen from this wandering proclivity of the gods or gads, and the word jaunt, a synonym for “gadding” (of unknown etymology), points to the probability that the rambling tendencies of “Gangrad” and other gods were similarly assigned by the British to their Giant, “jeyantt,” or Good John. Jaunty or janty means full of fire or life, and the words gentle, genial, and generous are implications of the original good Giant’s attributes.