It is taught by the mothers of Europe that at Yule-Tide the Senile All Bounty wanders around bestowing gifts, and St. Nicholas, or Father Christmas, is in some respects the same as the Wandering Jew of mediæval tradition. The earliest mention of the Everlasting Jew occurs in the chronicles of the Abbey of St. Albans,[158] and is probably a faint memory of the original St. Alban or All Bounty. It was said that this mysterious Wanderer “had a little child on his arm,” and was an eye-witness of the crucifixion of Christ. Varied mythical appearances of the Everlasting Jew are recorded, and his name is variously stated as Joseph, and as Elijah. Joseph is radically Jo, Elijah is Holy Jah, whence it may follow, that “Jew” should be spelled “Jou,” and that the Wandering or Everlasting Jew may be equated with the Sunshine or the Heavenly Joy.
Fig. 29.—The Three Divine Heads within a single triangle. From an Italian Wood Engraving of the XV. cent.
From Christian Iconography (Didron).
In France the sudden roar of the wind at night is attributed to the passing of the Everlasting Jew. In Switzerland he is associated with the mighty Matterhorn, in Arabia he is represented as an aged man with a bald head, and I strongly suspect that the Elisha story of “Go up, thou bald head” arose from the misinterpretation of a picture of the Ancient of Days surrounded by a happy crowd of laughing youngsters. In this respect it would have accorded with the representation of the Divine bald-head of the Celts, leading a joyful chain of smiling captives. In England the Wandering Jew was reputed never to eat but merely to drink water which came from a rock. Some accounts specify his clothing sometimes as a “purple shag-gown,” with the added information, “his stockings were very white, but whether linen or jersey deponent knoweth not, his beard and head were white and he had a white stick in his hand. The day was rainy from morning to night, but he had not one spot of dirt upon his clothes”.[159] This tradition is evidently a conception of the white and immaculate Old Alban, in the usual contradistinction to the young or le jeun, and we still speak of an honest or jonnock person as “a white man”. By the Etrurians it was believed that the soul preserved after death the likeness of the body it had left and that this elfin or spritely body composed of shining elastic air was clothed in airy white.[160] There figures in The Golden Legend an Italian St. Albine, whose name, says Voragine, “is as much as to say primo; as he was white and thus this holy saint was all white by purity of clean living”. The tale goes on that this St. Albine had two wives, also two nurses which did nourish him. While lying in his cradle he was carried away by a she-wolf and borne into the fields where happily he was espied by a pair of passing maidens. One of these twain exclaimed “Would to God I had milk to foster thee withal,” and these words thus said her paps immediately rose and grew up filled with milk. Semblably said and prayed the second maid, and anon she had milk as her fellow had and so they two nourished the holy child Albine.
Figs. 30 to 38.—From Les Filigranes (Briquet, C. M.).
It has been suggested that the Wandering Jew is a personification “of that race which wanders Cain-like over the earth with the brand of a brother’s blood upon it”; by others the story is connected particularly with the gipsies. The Romany word for moon is choon, the Cornish for full moon is cann, and it is a curious thing that the Etrurian Dante entitles the Man in the Moon, Cain:—
Now doth Cain with fork of thorns confine
On either hemisphere touching the wave