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
The female bacon, which _inter alia_ was the symbol of fecundity, was
credited with a mystic thirty teats. The sow figures prominently in
British mythology as an emblem of Ked, and was seemingly venerated as a
symbol of the Universal Feeder. The little pig in Fig. 60, a coin of the
Santones, whose capital is marked by the modern town of Saintes, is
associated with a fleur-de-lis, the emblem of purity. The word _lily_ is
_all holy_; the porker was associated with the notoriously pure St.
Antony as well as with Ked or Kate, the immaculate Magna Mater, and
although beyond these indications I have no evidence for the suggestion,
I strongly suspect that the scavenging habits of the _moch_ caused it,
like the fly or _mouche_, to be reverenced as a symbol of Ked, Cadi,
Katy, or Katerina, whose name means the Pure one or the All Pure. The
connection between _hog_ and _cock_ is apparent in the French _coche_ or
_cochon_ (origin unknown). _Cochon_ is allied to _cigne_, the French for
swan, Latin, _cygnus_, Greek, _kuknos_; the voice of the goose or swan
is said to be its _cackle_, and the Egyptians gave to their All Father
Goose a sobriquet which the authorities translate into "The Great
Cackler".
[Illustration: FIG. 61.--Swan with Two Necks. (Bank's Collection,
1785).
From _The History of Signboards_ (Larwood & Hotten).]
Among the meanings assigned to the Hebrew _og_ is "long necked," and it
is not improbable that the mysterious Inn sign of the "Swan with two
necks" was originally an emblem of Mother and Father Goose. In Fig. 61
the _geis_ or swan is facing fore and aft, like Cuno, which is radically
the same _Great Uno_ as Juno or Megale, to whom the goose was sacred.
_Geyser_, a gush or spring, is the same word as _geeser_, and there was
a famous swan with two necks at Goswell Road, where the word Goswell
implies an erstwhile well of Gos, Goose, or the Gush.[268] A Wayz_goose_
is a jovial holiday or festival, _gust_ or _gusto_ means enjoyment, and
the Greengoose Fair, which used to be held at Stratford, may be connoted
with the "Goose-Intentos," a festival which was customarily held on the
sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost. Pentecost, the time when the Holy
Ghost descended in the form of "cloven tongues," resolves into
_Universal Good Ghost_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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