Archaic England : $b an essay in deciphering prehistory from megalithic monuments, earthworks, customs, coins, place-names, and faerie superstitionsBayley, Harold
History
Archaic England : $b an essay in deciphering prehistory from megalithic monuments, earthworks, customs, coins, place-names, and faerie superstitions
Bayley, Harold
Archaeology; England -- Antiquities
This allusion to Bolloinge suggests that the chivalrous and intrepid
Long Meg was famous at Bulloigne, and that the name of that place is
cognate with Bellona, the Goddess of War. That the valiant St. Margaret
was as unconquerable as Micah was _invictus_, may be judged from the
sacred legend that the devil once appeared before her in the likeness of
a man, whereupon, after a short parley, "she caught him by the head and
threw him to the ground, and set her right foot on his neck saying: 'Lie
still, thou fiend, under the feet of a woman'. The devil then cried: 'O
Blessed Margaret, I am overcome'".
As St. Michael was the Leader of All Angels, so St. Margaret was the
Mother of All Children, and the circle of Long Meg was evidently a
mighty delineation of the Marguerite, Marigold, or Daisy. The Celts,
with their exquisite imagination, figured the daisy or marguerite as the
symbol of innocence and the newly-born. There is a Celtic legend to the
effect that every unborn babe taken from earth becomes a spirit which
scatters down upon the earth some new and lovely flower to cheer its
parents. "We have seen," runs an Irish tale, "the infant you regret
reclining on a light mist; it approached us, and shed on our fields a
harvest of new flowers. Look, oh, Malvina! among these flowers we
distinguish one with a golden disc surrounded by silver leaves: a sweet
tinge of crimson adorns its delicate rays; waved by a gentle wind we
might call it a little infant playing in a green meadow, and the flower
of thy bosom has given a new flower to the hills of Cromla. Since that
day the daughters of Morven have consecrated the Daisy to infancy. It is
called the flower of innocence; the flower of the new-born."[222]
The Scotch form of Margaret is Maisie, and from the word _muggy_,
meaning a warm, light mist, it would seem that Maisie or Maggy was the
divinity of mists and moisture. It was widely supposed that the mists of
Mother Earth, commingling with the beams of the Father Sun, were
together the source of all juvenescence and life. According to Owen
Morgan, "Ked's influence from below was supposed to be exercised by
exhalations, the breathings as it were of the Great Mother,"[223] and it
is still a British belief that--
Mist in spring is the source of wine,
Mist in summer is the source of heat,
Mist in autumn is the source of rain,
Mist in winter is the source of snow.
Maggie or Maisie being thus probably the Maid of the Mist, or Mistress
of the Moisture, and there being no known etymology for _fog_, the
unpopular Maggie Figgie who sat in her chair charming the spirits of the
ocean, was perhaps the ill-omened Maggie _Foggy_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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