Harold Bayley

“ In the Indian Code known as the Laws of Manu, the superstition is thus enunciated: “Because a King has been formed of particles of those Lords of the gods, he therefore surpasses all created beings in lustre, and like the Sun he burns eyes and hearts; nor can anybody on earth even gaze at him. Through his power he is Fire and Wind, he the Sun and Moon, he the Lord of Justice, he Kubera, he Varuna, he Great Indra. Even an infant King must not be despised that he is mortal; for he is a great deity in human form.” ”

“ Is it possible that this Elphin little face, or papillon, was the precursor of the modern cherub or Amoretto, and that it was the Puck of the Iberian Picts, who conceived their Babchild or Bacchild as peeping, prying, touting, and peering perpetually upon mankind? The ancients imagined that every worthy soul became a star, whence it is possible that the small blue flower we call a periwinkle was, like the daisy, a symbol of the fairy, phairy, or peri periscope. ”

“ The procession to salute the God formed long before the rising of the sun. The High Priest was followed by a long train of Magi, in spotless white robes chanting hymns and carrying the sacred fire on silver censers. Then came 365 youths in scarlet, to represent the days of the year, and the colour of fire. These were followed by the chariot of the sun, empty, decorated with garlands, and drawn by superb white horses, harnessed with pure gold. Then came a white horse of magnificent size, his forehead blazing with gems, in honour of Mithras. ”

“ Few nowadays have any sympathy with the theories which a generation ago autocratically ascribed Myth to a Disease of Language; still less is it possible to accept the more modern supposition that Mythology is merely the gross growth of disgusting savagery! There is more truth in Bacon’s dictum that in the first ages when such inventions and conclusions of the human reason as are now trite and common were new, and little known, all things abounded with fables, parables, similes, comparisons, and illusions which were not intended to conceal, but to inform and teach. ”

“ One of the most noted beliefs of all races, whether civilised or savage, is the erstwhile existence of a Golden Age when all men were well happified, and if existence to primitive man was merely the hideous and protracted nightmare which anthropologists assume, it is difficult to see at what period of his upward climb this curiously idyllic story came into existence: it would be simpler to assume that the tradition had some foundation in fact, and was not merely the frenzied invention of a dreamer. ”

“ It is much easier for the ordinary man to fill in by patient elaboration what has already been sketched for him in outline, than to venture upon a new line of discovery, in which the sole clue must be the combinative powers of his own imagination and comprehensive learning. And yet, now as much as ever, comparative philology has need at once of bold and wide-reaching conceptions, of cautious verification, and of a mastery of facts. It is true the science is no longer struggling for mere life, and the time is gone by for proving the possibility of its existence. ”

“ When they came together, the Saxons and Britons, then quoth Hengest, most deceitful of all knights: ‘Hail be thou, lord king, each is to thee thy subject! If ever any of thy men hath weapon by his side, send it with friendship far from ourselves, and be we in amity, and speak we of concord; how we may with peace our lives live.’ Thus the wicked man spake there to the Britons. ”

“ Nicholas of Bari is a club with which the saint, who is said to have become a friar at the age of eleven, was beaten by the devil: a club was the customary symbol of Hercules; the Celtic Hercules was, as has been seen, depicted as a baldhead leading a rout of laughter-loving followers by golden chains fastened to their ears, and as it was the habit of St. Nicholas-of-the-Club to wander abroad singing after the ancient fashion, one may be sure that Father Christmas is the lineal descendant of the British Ogmios or Mighty Muse, alias the Wandering Jew or Joy. ”

“ The universal dead-level of plainness and homeliness, the lack of all beauty and distinction in form and feature, the slowness and clumsiness of the language, the eternal beer, sausages, and bad tobacco, the blank commonness everywhere pressing at last like a weight on the spirits of the traveller in Northern Germany, and making him impatient to be gone—this is the weak side, the industry, the well-doing, the patient, steady elaboration of things, the idea of science governing all departments of human activity—this is the strong side ”

“ Rice Holmes:—The industry has been carried on since neolithic times, and even then it was ancient: for Brandon was an abode of flint makers in the Old Stone Age. Not only the pits but even the tools show little change: the picks which the modern workers use are made of iron, but here alone in Britain the old one-sided form is still retained, only the skill of the workers has degenerated: the exquisite evenness of chipping which distinguished the neolithic arrow heads is beyond the power of the most experienced knapper to reproduce. ”

“ It was the belief of the Celt that immediately at death man assumed a spiritual replica of his earthly body and passed into what was termed the Land of the Living, the White Land, or the Great Strand, or The Great Land, and many other titles. An Elphin Land, where there was neither death nor old age, nor any breach of law, where he heard the noble and melodious music of the gods, travelled from realm to realm, drank from crystal cups, and entertained himself with his beloved. ”

“ There are holy brightnesses in their eyes, on their lips, those doors to the borders of which the soul alone can come, from which it looks forth and all but shows itself. Goodness, kindness, as well as a cloistral spirituality, stream from their faces. ”

“ The comparative philologists have not gone deep enough, as yet, to see that there is a stage where likeness may afford guidance, because there was a common origin for the primordial stock of words. They assume that Grimm’s Law goes all the way back. They cling to their limits, as the old Greek sailors hugged the shore, and continually insist upon imposing these on all other voyagers, by telling terrible tales of the unknown dangers beyond. ”

“ Thus it would seem that not only the mouches, but likewise the maggots were deemed to be among Maggie’s millions, fighting like the Hosts of Michael against filth, decay, and death.
The connection between flies or mouches, and the elves or elven, seems to have been appreciated in the past, for The Golden Legend likens the lost souls of Heaven, i.e., the elven of popular opinion, to flies: “By the divine dispensation they descend oft unto us in earth, as like it hath been shewn to some holy men. They fly about us as flies, they be innumerable, and like flies they fill the air without number.” ”

“ All the poets that ever the world has known might have been summoned together for the baptism of the flowers, and have failed to name them half so well as popular tradition has done long ago in the dim lost ages, with names that still make all the world akin.”—Anon. ”

“ History knows nothing of violent and spasmodic jumps; the ideas of one era are impalpably transmitted to the next, and the continuity of custom makes it difficult to believe that the builders of Cyclopean works such as Avebury and Stonehenge, have left no imprint on our place-names, and no memories in our language. Even to-day the superstitious veneration for cromlechs and holy stones is not defunct, and it is largely due to that ingrained sentiment that more of these prehistoric monuments have not been converted into horse-troughs and pigsties. ”

“ The Germans, Poles, and Russians had no acquaintance with letters until the ninth century, and speech, which certainly existed for unnumbered centuries before either writing or spelling was evolved, must, primarily and essentially, have been a system of pure and simple phonetics, spreading, as a mother teaches her child, syllable by syllable, word upon word, and line upon line. To rule sound out of language, is, indeed, far more fatal than to purge Hamlet out of Hamlet. ”

“ It is generally supposed that the site of London has been in continuous occupation since that remote period when the flint-knappers chipped their implements at Gray’s Inn, and the pile-dwelling communities, whose traces have been found in the neighbourhood of London Stone, drove their first stakes into the surrounding marshes. Not only are there in London the material evidences of antediluvian occupation, but “the fact remains that in the city of London there are more survivals from past history than can be found within the compass of any other British city, or of any other area in Britain.” ”

“ The philosophers of Egypt believed that the universe was created by the pronunciation of the divine name; similarly the British bards taught that: “The universe is matter as ordered and systematised by the intelligence of God. It was created by God’s pronouncing His own name—at the sound of which light and the heavens sprang into existence. The name of God is itself a creative power. ”

“ It is a wholly unheard of thing for the British to think or speak of Britain as “the Fatherland”: the Cretans, according to Plutarch, spoke of Crete as their Motherland, and not as the Fatherland: “At first,” says Mackenzie, “the Cretan Earth Mother was the culture deity who instructed mankind ... in Crete she was well developed before the earliest island settlers began to carve her images on gems and seals or depict them in frescoes. She symbolised the island and its social life and organisation.” ”

“ Caves and caverns play a prime and elementary part in the mythologies of the world: their role is literally vital, for it was believed that the Life of the World, in the form of the Young Sun, was born yearly anew on 25th December, always in a cave: thus caves were invariably sacred to the Dawn or God of Light, and only secondarily to the engulfing powers of Darkness; from the simple cell, kille, or little church gradually evolved the labyrinthine catacomb and the stupendous rock-temple. ”

“ In every evil there is death:
In every good there is life,
In every life there is God. [188]
The Bards of Britain, who claimed to maintain the “sciences” of piety, wisdom, and courtesy, taught that—the three principal properties of the Hidden God were “Power, knowledge, and love”: that the three purposes of God in his works were “to consume the evil; to enliven the dead; and to cause joy from doing good”: that the three ways in which God worked were “experience, wisdom, and mercy”. ”

“ Our mountains and rivers talk in the primeval mother tongue whilst the language of men is remoulded by every passing wave of change. The language of mythology and typology is almost as permanent as the names of the hills and streams.”—Gerald Massey. ”

“ Research tends more and more to justify Bacon in his penetrating judgment: “And this principally raises my esteem of these fables, which I receive not as the product of the age or invention of the poets, but as sacred relics, gentle whispers, and the breath of better times, that from the traditions of more ancient nations came at length into the flutes and trumpets of the Greeks”. Whence these sacred relics came, whether from Atlantis, Crete, or Britain, [1036] we are not yet in a position to assert, but eventually the Comparative Method will decide this point. ”

“ Archæology of the future will provide strong wine of astonishment to her followers: she will prove beyond question that mythology is not merely fossil philosophy, but is likewise to a large extent fossil history, and that the records may be pieced together from the traditionary blissful Tertiary Period to that time and onwards when a perilous torrent-fire struck the earth, resulting in sequent horrors, and the slow replenishment of the world. ”

“ Speaking of the fairy tales of Ireland W. B. Yeats characterises them as full of simplicity and musical occurrences: “They are,” he adds, “the literature of a class for whom every incident in the old rut of birth, love, pain, and death, has cropped up unchanged for centuries; who have steeped everything in the heart to whom everything is a symbol”. ”

“ Nor should you wonder at his being represented as an old man, for the power of words is wont to show its perfection in the aged; for your poets are no doubt right when they say that the thoughts of young men turn with every wind, and that age has something wiser to tell us than youth. And so it is that honey pours from the tongue of that Nestor of yours, and the Trojan orators speak with one voice of the delicacy of the lily, a voice well covered, so to say, with bloom ”

“ In Cornwall is a river Fal; a well is a spring, the whale or elephant of the sea was venerated because like the elephant it gushed out a fountain of water from its head. The Wilton crescent, opposite one of the ancient conduits by Rotten Row, Kensington, may well have meant Well town, for the whole of this district was notoriously a place of wells: not only do we find Wilton Crescent, but in the immediate neighbourhood of Ovington Square and Flounders Field is Walton Street and Hooper’s Court. ”

“ From China to Peru one finds the persistent tradition of a drowned land, a story which is in itself so preposterous as unlikely to arise without some solid grounds of reality. Thierry has observed that legend is living tradition, and three times out of four it is truer than what we call history. Sir John Morris Jones would seemingly endorse this proposition, for he has recently contended that tradition is itself a fact not always to be disposed of by the hasty assumption that all men are liars. ”