The Gogonians may be connoted with the troglodyte Ciconians, or Cyclops, to whom Homer so frequently and unfavourably alludes, and the one-eyed Polyphemus of Homer is obviously one and the same with Balor, the one-eyed giant of Tory Isle in Ireland. This Balor or Conann the Great, as he is sometimes termed, was cock-eyed, one terrible eye facing front, the other situated in the back of his head facing to the rear. To this day the fateful eye of Balor is the Evil Eye in Ireland, whence anyone is liable to be o’erwished. Ordinarily the dreadful optic was close shut, but at times his followers raised the eyelid with an iron hook, whereupon the glance of Baler’s eye blasted everything and everybody upon whom it fell. On one occasion the fateful eye of Balor is said to have overflowed with water, causing a disastrous flood; whence, perhaps, why a watery eye is termed a “Balory” or “Bleary eye”. That Balor was Gog may be inferred from Belerium or Bolerium, being the name applied by Ptolemy to the Land’s End district where still stand the rocks called Gog and Magog. That Balor was Polyphemus, the Cyclopean Ciconian, is probable from the fact that he was blinded by a spear driven into his ill-omened eyeball, precisely as Polyphemus was blinded by a blazing stake from Ulysses. Did the unlettered peasantry of Tory Isle derive this tale from Homer, or did Homer get the story from Ogygia, a supposedly ancient name for Erin? Not only is there an identity between the myth of Balor and Polyphemus, but, further—to quote D’arbois de Jubainville—“As fortune strangely has it the Irish name Balor has preserved its identity with Belleros, whom the poems of Homer and Hesiod and many other Greek writers have handed down to us in the compound Bellero-phontes, ‘slayer of Belleros’”.[200]
The author of The Odyssey describes the Ciconians as a race endued with superior powers, but as troubling their neighbours with frequent wrongs:—
... o’er the Deep proceeding sad, we reach’d
The land at length, where, giant-sized and free
From all constraint of law, the Cyclops dwell
They, trusting to the Gods, plant not, or plough
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
No councils they convene, no laws contrive
But in deep caverns dwell, found on the heads