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
In addition to associating St. Levan with the chad or "chuck child,"
legend also connects St. Levan with a woman named Johanna. W. C. Borlase
observes that Carew calls him St. Siluan, and that this form is still
retained in the euphonious name of an estate Selena. Selena was a title
under which the Mother of Night, the consort of Cain, the Man in the
Moon, was worshipped by the Greeks. With regard to the _Sel_ of Selena
or Silenus it will be seen as we proceed that _silly_, _Seeley_, etc.,
did not imply idiocy, but that _silly_, as in Scotland where it meant
_holy_, and as in the German _selig_, primarily meant _innocent_. We
speak to-day of "silly sheep"; in the Middle Ages Christ was termed the
silly Babe, and the county of Suffolk still vaunts itself as Silly
Suffolk. Silene or Selina would thus imply the Innocent or Holy Una: her
counterpart Silenus was usually represented as a jovial, genial, and
merry patriarch. Selenus, like Janus, was apparently the Old Father
Christmas, and Selena or _Cyn_thia seemingly the maiden Cain, Kayne, St.
Kenna, or Jana.
At Treleven, the _tre_ or the Home of Leven, there is a Lady's Well said
to possess exceptional healing properties, and the power of conferring
great vigour and might to the constitution. _Levin_ in Old English meant
the lightning flash, _Levant_ was the uprising, the Orient, or the East,
and _levante_ is Italian for the wind. According to Etruscan mythology,
there were _eleven_ thunderbolts or _levins_ wielded by Nine Great
Gods,[225] and that the number eleven was associated with Long Meg of
Westmorland, would appear from the fact that her circle measured "about
1100 feet in circumference". With this measurement may be connoted the
British camp on Herefordshire Beacon, "which takes the form of an
irregular oval 1100 yards in length,"[226] and that 1100 implied some
special sanctity may be gathered from the bardic lines--
The age of Jesus, the fair and energetic Hu
In God's Truth was eleven hundred.[227]
The more usually assumed age of Jesus, _i.e._, thirty-three, may be
connoted with the persistent thirty-threes elsewhere considered. The
diameter of the circle of Long Meg and her Daughters is stated as 330
feet,[228] a measurement which seemingly has some relation to the 330
years of age assigned to Magus when he accomplished his magic change.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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