Some consciousness of the sacred significance of certain words seems to have yet lingered livingly in the mind of the people of the Western Islands of Scotland when Martin visited them nearly two centuries since. In St. Kilda they had common and sacred words for the same things. They held it absolutely unlawful, he says, to call the island by its proper Irish name of hirt, but only designated it the 'High Country.' St. Kilda is the farthest west of the Scottish Isles; in this, Conachan, the highest point, is 1,450 feet above the sea.

In Egyptian the word hert means the high country. Hert is height, above, over, the name for heaven, and either they did not know that 'Hirt' was the proper name of the high country, or this was their mode of preserving the fact that it signified the high country, and so they kept the old name as too hallowed for common use, this being one of the most effective means of preserving the mental impress.

Hert, as the height, the upper land of England, would seem to have given the name to Hertfordshire, for it is the summit of the land. The Grand Junction Canal reaches its summit in Hertfordshire, and descends both ways for Middlesex and 'the Shires.' This is the highest of the counties south called by the name of shires, so that it is the Hert, the land above, in a double sense; highest in altitude and by name as the upper boundary of the shires. 'Scarce one county in England,' says Camden, 'can show more footsteps of antiquity' than Hertfordshire[1]. The highest hill in the county is named Kensworth, and worth answers to hert (Eg.), the highest or uppermost, as an enclosure.

The shore, Martin remarks, which in their language is expressed by 'Claddach,' must be called 'Vah.'[2] Fa, in Egyptian, denotes canals or water enclosed, and the peh is the hieroglyphic sign of a water-frontier. Pa is the shore or bank in Maori. These people were preserving their hieroglyphics; v or f being the earlier form of [p.371] Tep or tef (Eg.) signifies the point of commencement. This enters into the name of Dover. Tep-ru (Eg.) is the first outlet, gate or port. Tepru is the Egyptian name of Tabor, the sacred hill, a point of commencement in the solar allegory. Dover is our outlet and point of commencement. From Dover starts the great road called Watling Street; this runs northward on its way through the island. It is called the Roman Road, but uat is a name of the north in Egyptian; Uati is goddess of the north. Uat also means distance, the long, long road, and is determined by three roads arranged lengthwise[3]. So interpreted, the Watling is the long long north road, and the ling does but repeat one meaning of uat, a common mode of compounding English names.

Uat is both water and way, the water of Nile was the first road in Egypt. This dual meaning survives in English. Watford (Uatford) is the Waterford, and wat is the name for the ford, so that Watford is the ford of the uat (water), and the way (uat) across the water. The north where the three water-signs are placed was the uat (wet) quarter.

To wattle is to intertwine osiers and make wickerwork, and this wattling was an early form of Irish bridge or uat for crossing over water. Tiling a roof is still called watling.

The naming of the Isle of Thanet is a curious relic of Egyptian. It is not an island in the ordinary sense, not an isle of the sea, but is insulated by the aid of the river Stour forming two branches, which separate Thanet from the rest of Kent. A thousand years ago the arms of the Stour formed a channel three or four miles in width, named the Wantsume[4]. Tnat means divided in two, cut off, insulated, the river constituting the boundary line and landmark of the division called Thanet.

Our word gate is the Egyptian khet, which, in relation to the water, is a ford, port, or harbour; khet, a port, to navigate, go, stop, be enclosed. This supplies the water-gate as in Margate and Ramsgate. Mer (Eg.) is the sea and also a land-limit, the boundary of a region on the water. Mer-gate (Margate) is the gate at the limit of Thanet at the north-east extremity of the isle. Ruim or Ruym[5] is an ancient British name of Thanet. Ramsgate is the gate of Ruim. Ru (Eg.) is an outlet, waterway. Ima or im is the sea. Ruim is the mouth or outlet to the sea. The gate in Ramsgate is a repetition of the ru in Ruim; according to the reduplicative mode of compounding the later names, Ramsgate, the sea-gate of Thanet, is already expressed by the ancient name of Ruim or Ruima. There is a park in Thanet named Quex Park, still famous for its coursing. Khekh (Eg.) means to chase, follow, hunt. The Quex family are probably named as the Hunters. Theirs is a very ancient seat. [p.372] Deal, rendered by ter (Eg.), is an extreme limit of land, a frontier point. Caesar[6] writes the name Dola. In Domesday it is called Addelam. The corresponding Egyptian is Atr-am, or Atr-ma. Atr is the land-limit, and this modifies into ter (Deal) am (Eg.), belonging to, also the place of, as in the ham of hamlet. Ultima Thule, the northernmost point known to the Romans, the Thuly of Drayton[7], the Isle of Thyle (Thylens-el, a name of Shetland), we may derive from teru (Eg.), a measure of land, the extreme limit of the land, the frontier and boundary. This underlies the Gothic tiule, the most remote land, and the Greek telos, the end; tro, Cornish, circuit, turn; tora, Irish, border or boundary; tara-tara, Maori, palings. Dhal and Tyree are also found at the extreme end of 'the Lewis.' Dunnet Head, the Caledonian promontory mentioned by Richard of Cirencester as the extreme northern point of Great Britain[8], has that meaning in tun (Eg.), to complete, fill up, determine; and net, the limit, or end of all.

Ban or ben (Eg.) means to cap, to tip; the ben is the extreme point, as the roof; the ben was a pyramidion; with us it is a mountain. F adds the pronoun it. Ban-f, the extreme point applied to land, describes the promontory or jutting point of Banff. Near Banff is Gamrie Bay. Ka (Eg.) is the lofty, uplifted earth, the high place, headland, and meri denotes the limit of both land and sea. On the other side of Gamrie Bay is Crovie Head. Kherf (Eg.) means to steer, and paddle; and this was the headland by which the deep-sea fishers who left the shell-mounds of Banffshire had to steer or paddle in coming in. Out to sea stands Troup Head, the home and haunt of multitudes of sea-fowl; 'all the birds in the world' are said to come there. In Egyptian terp is a name of ducks and waterfowl, and also means food. Thus, this breeding-place of the terp (in America a particular kind of duck is the terapin) is designated in Egyptian as the place of the ducks and food.

The fowlers of Rutlandshire formerly celebrated St. Tibba's Day with great rejoicings. Tibba was their especial patroness. Camden mentions the town of Rihall as particularly addicted to this worship; the passage in which he describes this was ordered to be expunged from his Britannia, by the Index Expurgatorius, when the book was printed by Louis Sanchez at Madrid in 1612.*

* The passage runs thus: 'Rihall, ubi cum majores nostros ita facinasset super­stitio, ut deorum multitudine Deum verum propemodum sustulissit, Tibba minorum gentium diva, quasi Diana ab aucupibus utique rei accipitrariae praeses colebatur.'[9]

Teb is the Egyptian name of waterfowl; the duck and goose are called teb, tef, and ap. Ap or af (with the article) denotes the first (tep and tef) born of; the duck, goose, and swan were types of the genetrix, who, as the old great mother, was personified as Tep or Typhon, the bringer forth from the waters. Typhon was made a [p.373] saint in Tebba, but the fowlers of Rihall had the pre-Christian form of the lady, and the expurgators knew it.

Ru is another name of the waterfowl, and rui (Eg.) means mud, marsh, and reeds, hence, perhaps, the name of Rihall.

Caithness is assumed to derive its name from the Catti, of whom Tacitus[10] writes. The Ness is of course equivalent to the nose, or jutting, but we have no such expression as nose of land. In the hieroglyphics the nes is a tongue, and we have the expression, a tongue of land for the jutting. Moreover, at the base of this ness, the tongue is still preserved in the town and the Kyle of Tongue. Hence the Ness is probably the Egyptian tongue. Caithness may be the abraded form of Kheftness, Kêdness, the tongue of Kêd. Kheft is the north, the hind quarter to the north. Kheftness is the northern tongue of the land. This meaning of the north (Kheft, Caith) is corroborated by the south land lying next to it in Sutherlandshire. Sut, or Suten, is the Egyptian south, and the south of Sut (Dog-star) and the north (Kheft) were the two halves of the total land. In Egyptian khata is the end of land, and the unabraded khap-ta is the northern end, the Caithness of Egypt. In an ancient poem of the Irish Nennius[11], 'From the region of Cait to Forcu' is synonymous with from north to south. Cait is Caithness, and Forcu the Forth. Caith or Saith also signifies number seven, corresponding to the Egyptian Seb-ti, Hepti, or Khepti, for seven, and Kheft (Kêd) was goddess of the seven stars of the north.

Kaer Gybi (Holyhead) stands on an island at the western extremity of the county of Anglesea. The Kebi were the four genii of the four corners, the watchers over the sarcophagus or the four cardinal points. The Kaf or Hapi was the dog-headed watcher of the road east and west. The especial point of the west is connected with the goddess Khaft, as lady of the west. Khef or khep (Eg.) means to look, watch, watching, and in Ireland the hill of watching, which preceded and survives the watch-tower, is called a covade, Covet, or Kivet, as in Mully Kivet, Fermanagh. Lookout points, says Dr. Joyce[12], intended for places of watching, to guard against surprise, are usually designated by the word Coimhead, pronounced covade. The title is generally applied to hills which overlook a wide expanse, and Kaer-Gybi is the enclosure of watching, or the watchtower. On the mount of Gybi, 700 feet high, are the remains of a circular watchtower, and on the sides of the mountain traces of extensive British fortifications.

The Island of Sark, says Pomponius was greatly celebrated on account of the Gallic god[13]. Sarkh or serkh is in Egyptian the temple, palace, and shrine. This in the parent language gives the name to the island, as the place of the shrine and oracle of the god mentioned by the Roman writer. Also the island divinity is recognized as continental. Serkh, an Egyptian goddess, was a form of Isis-Sothis.

[p.374] The Islet of Staffa is named in Egyptian from the action of the water on the rock. Stu is to excavate, to make; fa, channels. Stafu signifies to melt down, with the determinative of water; a twofold description of Staffa. Stave, in English, is to break, throw, crumble down. Scart is the name of one of the caves, and skar-t in Egyptian is to be cut, cut out, cut piecemeal. Skart may be read as a picture carved, from skar, to cut and picture.

Opposite Tenby, in Pembrokeshire, there is a cave called the 'Cave of Caldi,' containing some marvellous chambers and passages underground, one of which is now designated the 'Fairy Chamber.' The equivalent, karti (Eg.), denotes holes, passages, and prisons underground, and as the word also relates to running waters, it may have included the stalactite grotto or cave, as at Caldi.

Some caverns in the chalk beds of Little Thurrock, Essex, are called Cunobelin's Gold Mines, from the local tradition that Cunobelin hid his gold in them. They are sometimes called Dane-holes, and of course the Danes are brought in, and these are claimed to have been their lurking-places. There is a very deep Dane-hole in the chalk near Tring, Herts, locally called 'Dannel's hole.' Cunobelin's gold was also stored in the chalk of the Dunstable Downs. It is known at Totternhoe as the Giant's Money, which you are supposed to hear ring if you stamp on the ground. Also Money-bury Hill is a part of the chalk range at Ashridge.

This hidden money is known by the name of Crow Gold, one form of which consists of nodular balls of iron pyrites, radiated within, which are frequently found in the white chalk without flint, that is, the mass of soft and pulverulent limestone of this formation.

The earliest gold of mythology is fire. The names afterwards applied to gold as a product of fire were given first to fire itself. The early men, be it remembered, had to mine for fire as diligently as the later dig for gold.

The Egyptian pur, to manifest, come forth, emanate, appear, is the same word as the Greek name of fire or πυρ. Pliny[14] says fire was first struck out of flint by pyrodes, the son of Cilix (i.e., Silex), and the name of the iron pyrites used with flakes of flint for striking fire points to this origin of fire or pur.

Among the African names for fire and the sun are the Biafada, fur, fire; Pepel, buro, fire; Mose, burum, fire; Dselana, burom, fire; Galla, berru, splendour, glory; Kise-Kise, afura, hot Okuloma, ofe re, heat; Mende, furo, the sun; Gbese, furo, sun; Toma, furo, sun; Bini, ufore, sun. In Arabic, afr is sultry, and birah is the sun; in Sanskrit, vira is fire, and peru the sun; breo, Gaelic, a fire; ver, Garo, fire; vuur, Dutch, fire. The fullest form of the word is extant in the Maori kapura, for fire. This modifies into the Egyptian and Hebrew afr (רוא), and Afr into the Welsh aur for gold. Gold and fire are identified by name in aur and [p.375] apr, afr being first. From aur comes ore. The first ore sought for was not gold, but the iron pyrites, which, when struck against the flint, yielded the precious element of fire. These were found with the flints in the chalks of our downs. The flint manufactories, as at Cissbury, must have also produced the equivalent of the 'steel' for striking fire in some form of the iron pyrites. The Eskimos at the present day, obtain fire by striking a shard of flint against a piece of iron pyrites. Iron was first extracted from the stone in the shape of fire, long before it was smelted. One name of these iron stones is crow. An iron bar is still a crow-bar. There is a poor kind of coal called crow-coal, which does for furnace-fuel, but is of an inferior kind. Crow means inferior, and is therefore the same as karu (Eg.), the lower of two; and crow-gold is inferior gold, not the true gold. The crow stone, then, is a fire stone; and the fire stones found in the chalk contained Cunobelin's gold, i.e., fire. The name of fire as tan or tek-n has already been traced to an origin in the spark, this being emphatically the fire of Baal.

Another English name for the iron pyrites is mundic. Mun (Eg.) is stone; tek is the spark; and as mundic is the equivalent of muntek, the pyrites is thus named as the spark-stone, the stone of Baal, son of kar-tek, the old spark-holder of the north. Some of the West Australian tribes still say they derived fire from the north[15]. As already said, an earlier form of teka, the spark, is shown by the Bushman t'jih or t'kih, for fire, the t of which is a click, and the jih or kih reaches its antecedent in the Swahili chechi, a spark, and koka, to set on fire with sparks; kiaoka, Mantshu Tartar, for a fire made with sparks and dry leaves; chik, Uraon, fire; kagh, Persian, fire; qaco, Fijian, burnt; and English coke.

Belin is the little Baal, the child Baal, who in Egypt was Bar-Sut. The name of Sut means fire and limestone, the firestone that fermented. Sut-Nub is both fire and gold. And this identity of fire and gold may be found in the god Sut-Nub, whose name includes both. Cunobelin was our Sut-Nub, god of the sun and Sirius combined, and the limestone (Sut) contained the ore, aur, afr, per, or fire, in the iron pyrites called Crow-gold, Cunobelin's gold, and the giant's money. Fire, then, was Cunobelin's gold. This was hidden in the chalk as Crow-gold, that is, fire-gold, in search of which the chalk of Dunstable Downs was undermined for miles together, and at one time the Dunstable people, who dwelt a considerable distance apart, could visit each other's houses by passing underground. As the firestones were obtained from the chalk, it follows that the word dane is the tein or tin for fire. Baal-tein signifies the fire of Baal, and Cunobelin's gold is Baal-tein. Tin also means money [p.376] and both the gold and the money were hidden in the Tin-hole or Dane-hole.

The name of Sut, earlier Sebti, contains seb, no. 5, and ti, no. 2, and is a form of no. 7, found also in hepti. At Lambourne, in Berks, there are tumuli at a place known as 'Strike-a-light, Seven Barrows.'[16] How the old names cling! Sut, the fire-god, our Cunobelin, was the embalmer of the dead. His name of Sutekh also means to embalm, and to lie hidden as did the dead in the barrows, where the fire-and-flint stones were often dug out to strike a light, and replaced by the bodies of the dead.

Kent's Cave or Hole has been called the Bone Cave from the quantity of bones found in it[17]. And if such a place had been named in Egyptian, it would be as the Ken-Kar, or, with the article suffixed, Kent-Kar, signifying a hole underground, having some relation to bone. Ken (Kent) is bone; kar, the hole, beneath. Ken also means carving in ivory or bone. The ken is the carving tool, the burin, as well as the cartouche in which the name is inscribed. The kent is the man of the ken, the sculptor, or literally the scraper. Kenti would be a plural form. In the stele C, 14, of the Louvre, Iritisen calls himself a kent, or sculptor. Ur-Kent, the chief sculptor, occurs in another text[18]. It may therefore be conjectured that Kent's Cave was the workshop of the bone-carvers, hence the bone implements discovered there, the bone awl, bodkin, and harpoon, which had been shaped by the rudest flint tools; the philological evidence shows the naming to be Egyptian, and the Kent-Cave, in English Kent's Cave, buried like a ten-thousand-years-older Pompeii, when opened up, reveals the earliest workers in stone and bone, ministering to the simplest human needs as Egyptians. Kent's Cave is in the parish of Tor, whence Torbay. Teru (Eg.) means to work, fabricate, decorate, ornament, and the teru implement is also the ken of the carvers. Later, teru is the name for portraying in colours with the scribe's palette, when the artists who had carved in bone became the men who drew in colours. The word teru enters into the name of Druid, who was doubtless the figurer of other things besides the time-cycles.

The bone age is the necessary complement of the stone age; the bone supplied the book for the pen of stone. Stone and bone were the first implements of registering, the primeval ken of the Kenners, who wrought in the Ken (cave and sanctuary) before temples of learning were built or books were made to bear that name.

The first men of Kent's Hole were Palaeolithic. They could not polish stones, but, as may be seen from extant specimens of their work, they attained great excellence in the art of drawing. In the Cresswell Cave the figure of a horse 'delicately incised on a fragment [p.377] of rib is the first trace of the art of design in this country.'[19] But the faculty must have been developed in a high degree among the cavemen of France, where they left their drawings of the reindeer and whale, their hunting scenes incised on antlers, and, in one instance, the mammoth engraved on ivory.

In the Deruthy Cave[20], near Sorde, in the Western Pyrenees, a necklace was found, formed of the teeth of lions and bears, and on the teeth were drawings of the seal and pike, also a pair of gloves. Altogether there were no less than forty teeth variously engraved. The cavemen cut their pictures on bone, antler, stone, and ivory[21]. Considering that their graving tools were only flakes of flint, the execution of their figures is marvellous. Strangely enough, their art of drawing, engraving, and sculpturing, was indefinitely superior to that of the later Neolithic age. And yet not so strange when we remember that this was the one especial art of the cavemen, of which the Eskimos, Kaffirs, and Hottentots have furnished such remarkable specimens.

The Cave of the Carvers, the Kennu or Kenti, found at Deruthy, is near Sorde, and in Egyptian surt or srt means to carve, engrave, and sculpture; which suggests that Sorde was named as the seat of the sculptors, carvers, and engravers, whose buried work has been found in the Deruthy cave. The word surt is determined by the ken graving tool, the sign of bone and ivory.

Tradition tells of the bloody rites of the Druids enacted in gloomy groves. The hallowed grove of the Celtae was called a nemet, whence probably the name of Nymet Rowland in Devon. The sacred character assigned to the secluded Nemet is found in nemet (Eg.), the retreat, The Egyptian nemet is also the place of execution, the name of the gallows and the block. This throws a light on the dark recesses of the Druidic nemet, where, no doubt, they put their criminals to death. The nemet (Eg.), as shown by the nam symbols, was the scene of judgment and execution. A form of the judge is yet extant in the Nompere, later Umpire. In Gaul the nemetum had become a temple, but the caves and sacred groves were the earlier temples.

Buchan, in his Annals of Peterhead[22], describes a vast stone, thirty-seven feet in circumference and twenty-seven feet across, which was still in the 'Den of Boddam' or Bodun, in the year 1819. Both names are Egyptian. 'Batun' means the bad, the criminal, the malefactor; whilst but-tem signifies the execution, cutting to pieces of the but, the criminal, hateful, evil, infamous, and abominably bad. The Den of Bodun was probably the dungeon of the malefactors; the Stone of Boddam, the block of their execution.

It was in the Links of Skail that the beetles were found in the stone [p.378] coffin of one of the ancient barrows. The name of Skail is identical with that of the Island of the Written-Rocks in the Cataract near Khartoum, just where the land of the inundation begins. Skul (Eg.) denotes not only writing but instruction, counsel, design, picturing, and planning; from which we may fairly infer that skail was a seat of learning named in the most ancient tongue. The root sekha (Eg.) means to memorize and remember.

The Cornish Guirrimears are supposed to have been miracle plays. Guirimir, according to Lhwyd[23], is a corruption of Guari­mirkle, a miracle play. The word 'guary' is found in English.

'Thys ys on of Britayne layes.
That was used by olde dayes,
Men called Playn Garye.'[24]

But Lhwyd does not go deep enough, to say nothing of the inevitable 'corruption.'

Guare, in Cornish, means a play, gware in Welsh, guary in English, and in Egyptian kher means speech and to speak. But the play was enacted on spacious downs and natural theatres of immense capacity, which were encompassed round with earthen banks and in some places with stonework. These places, it is now claimed, were the Mirs or Mears. The mer or mera (Eg.) is an enclosure of land or water. The water-mer is extant in the Mere. The mer is also a circle, and the guiri-mir or kheri-mer is the enclosure or circle where the speeches were made and the play was performed. The size of the Mears shows they were at times beyond speech, hence guare means a game, and kher (Eg.) is also a picture, a representation, that was acted, the acting drama being earliest. For the mir is a moor, and in Kirriemuir we probably have the Guirimir by name extant also as a place.

The so-called Anglo-Saxon and German worth, for an enclosure, is called a test-word, showing the Teutonic settlements. But the garth, garter, garten, and garden are equally the enclosure. The original of all is the kart (Eg.), an orbit or circle, that is, the Kar Caer with the article suffixed. The kart is the Russian grod and Polish grod, a burgh. The modified hert (Eg.) was the name of enclosure as a park or paradise. We have it as large as a county Hertfordshire, and small as the tiny cup of the Blae or blue berry. This is called the whortle-berry, that is, the enclosed berry. But another form of its name is the hert. In Hertfordshire it is known as the bilberry-hert. Thus we have the wort and hert in one. Did the Teutons also carry the hert into Egypt, together with its earlier form in kart? The fact is simply that the thing kart, garth, hert, and worth existed; the w is a later letter, and the later sounds were applied to the earlier names of places.

[p.379] The Egyptian kart had to do double duty. The terminal t may denote two, and one kar (kart) is the lower; the other, the upper, is the mar (hert), and the hert becomes the art, the ascent, the steep, the height. Kart is downward, and hert is above. This hert or art becomes the ard, of which there are 200 in Ireland, as the upper place, the height. The Irish ard is the Welsh alt, a steep place, and this becomes the Old, as the Old Man of Coniston and Old Man of Hoy. The art (Eg.), Irish ard, permutes with ret, the ascent, and this enters into the ridge or rudge, a back or height. In the Irish ard, the height, we have the mount of the Great Mother Macha, whose seat was at Ard-Macha (Armagh), and whose name of Arth is that of the Great Bear.

The Inland Wick, represented by the Anglo-Saxon vic, Irish fich, Maeso-Gothic vichs, is with us the homestead, the enclosure of the farm. It is the place of property, of plenty. Feck means plenty, much, most, the greatest part. It is the Egyptian fek, fullness, reward, abundance. The fog is a second crop, and the fat of land; allied to the vic, a marsh or moist land, where plenty of food was grown for cattle. This is the uakh (Eg.), a marsh, a moist meadow-land.

Cattle were an early form of fekh, feb, or fee. Pekau (Eg.) is fruit or grain. Pekh, as in English, is food. The fog, vic, or wick is the place of food, and becomes at last the enclosure or homestead where the produce is stored, it may be as fech (vetches), feh, cattle, fek (Eg.), the reward, abundance, plenty of food. The wick is thus finally the enclosure of the victuals.

The wick as a creek was derived neither from the Norse nor Saxon Vikings. It is the uakh (Eg.), an entrance, a road. This wick is so essentially a corner that in Northumberland the corners of the mouth are called wikes. It is well known that some of our wicks arc places where salt is produced. But these are sometimes far away from any sea-wick, and the wick as bay has no necessary relation to the wick as salt-work. Wick is a sediment and the name of a strainer. The word relates to the salt-making. A dairy is also a wick in the same sense, with butter for product instead of salt.

Mr. Taylor's[25] suggestion that the name of bay-salt is derived from the evaporation of sea-water in the bay may be doubted when we know that baa (Eg.) means stone, or rock, solid substance; it may be salt so far as the sign goes, and bay-salt is called rock-salt. Besides which bay is sure to stand for an earlier form of the word. Bab (Eg.) means to exhale; bak or bake is to encrust. Bekh (Eg.) is the rock, bakhn being a name of basalt. Also pakh (Eg.) means the separated; Maori paka, the dried.

The wick takes several forms. The Anglo-Saxon wig is a temple, monastery, or convent; the Gaelic haigh is a tomb, or grave, like the Quiche huaca. The name goes back to the chech or stone chest, and kak for a church; the kak (Eg.), a sanctuary; the khakha (Eg.), an [p.380] altar; chakka, Hindustani, a circle; khokheye, Circassian, circle cokocoko, Fijian, ring of beads; kigwe, Swahili, string of beads; kekee (lb.), a bracelet; gig, Scotch, a charm; vir (Heb.), a circle; igh, Irish, a ring; coiche, Irish, mountain; kaweka, Maori, mountain ridge; eca, Portuguese, an empty tomb, in honour of the dead, who are the Egyptian akh. In Cornish the modified hay is a name of the churchyard.

The 'ton,' says the author of Words and Places[26], is also true Teutonic, although non-extant in Germany. It is a genuine test-word to determine the Anglo-Saxon settlements in the isles, where there are thousands of tons, tuns, and duns, over 600 in Ireland alone, but none to speak of at home. What an amazing anomaly!

In a paper on the 'Distribution of English Place-Names,' read by Mr. W. R. Browne[27], he gave a table of the results obtained by examining 10,492 names in Dugdale's England and Wales[28]. Those ending in 'ton' formed nearly one-fourth of the whole, being 2,345 in number; the hams came next, 702 in number.

Dr. Leo has computed that in the first two volumes of the Codex Diplomaticus the proportion of our local names compounded with tun, as Leighton, Hunstanton, is one-eighth of the whole[29]. It is characteristic of Anglo-Saxon cultivation, he says, that their establishments were enclosures (tuns). No other German race names its settlements tuns. This fact struck Kemble[30], who observes 'it is very remarkable that the largest proportion of the names of places among the Anglo-Saxons should have been formed with this word, while upon the continent of Europe it is never used for such a purpose.'

Mr. Coote[31] sees in it another proof of Roman origin. Our tuns, enclosures, our hedgerows, he affirms, were all Roman. The truth is that the tun or tem marks an earlier stage or stratum of society than anything extant with the Germans, Angles, or Romans. They did not possess it, and could not have brought it here. Egyptian will tell us what the tun was. It is not necessarily the settlement, and consequently the arguments of Mr. Coote founded on its being so are beside the mark and of non-effect. The tun was not based on the Roman limitatio agri and allotment of the land, for it existed before there was any sense of possession in land that could be enclosed. In Egyptian the tun takes divers forms. The tun is a region, an elevated seat, a throne. This is extant in our Downs, the high and still most unenclosed of places. In the so-called 'Dânes' Graves' found on the Yorkshire wolds, where many tumuli are to be seen, the graves do but repeat the tun in a plural form, and pervert the old spelling in the name of the Danes. The downs were the judgment-seats of the Druids, like the Tynwald Hill of the Manxmen. The tun as high place is found on the downs, as are the two Gaddesdens. Tyntagel is the tun or elevated seat on a rock. Dynas Ennys was a [p.381] Druidicial Tun-as in Snowdon, the lofty seat of the gods. The Zulu Donga (Tun-ka) is a division or cutting in the land, but with no necessary sense of inclosing a property. One of the most primitive forms of the tun was the Cornish dynas or fort, a simple entrenchment with stones piled together without cement, and raised some twelve feet high. The tun is here the high seat, and as (Eg.) is the house, chamber, tomb, the secreting place. Hence the dynas or fort. So Ab Ithel[32] derives dinus from din and ysu. The barrows and burial-places of the dead are found near these forts, as if the first places of defence were built to protect the dead. To all appearance the first property claimed in land and right of enclosure was on behalf of the dead. We have a possible relic of this in the popular belief that a common right of way may be claimed wherever a corpse has been carried.

The first tun as an enclosure of land is the tomb. One hieroglyphic tun is the determinative of a tomb, and tun in this sense means to be cut off, separated. The teen, Chinese, is a grave; than is a shroud; tuna, Zulu Kaffir, a grave; tanu, New Zealand, to bury; dun, French Romance, a sepulchre; den, English, grave. The den or tun leads to the dynas, as the house or general sepulchre of the dead.

The Down, however, is one type-name for the elevated seat, the high place, the burial-place, and doubtless in some of these, now swept bare of all their ancient monuments, there are yet concealed precious proofs of the prehistoric past. The downs were the high places, and the reason why the word 'down;' came to mean below, is because the tun, den, or tomb, represented the underworld, where the dead went down at whatever height it opened. The tun, ton, or town, as the enclosure of the living and of property in land, is the final form, not the first; the Roman, not the Egyptian or Druidic. Tun or ton is far older than town, hence the reversionary tendency to the older formation in pronouncing the word town. The ton did not denote a town when it was the Cornish name of a farmyard.

In English, Scotch, Welsh, Irish, Gaelic, Manx, French Romance, Biscayan, Lusatian, Old Persian, Chinese, Coptic, Tonquinese, Phrygian, and other languages, the dun or tun is the hill, the summit found in the Egyptian tun, the elevated seat. Irish philologists understand the ton (or thone) to signify the same as the Latin podex, but the seat is primarily feminine and mystical, the mons veneris, the hes of Isis, the Khep of Khept or Kêd, extant in the Irish ceide or Keady, for the hill as the place of sepulchre.

Ten and tem permute; the tem (dumb, negative) are the dead, and the temple is also the house of the dead. So with us the tun and tom are interchangeable as names of the burial-ground. The tom, Gaelic, is a grave; tom, Welsh, a tumulus; tuaim, Irish, a grave; toma, Manchu Tartar, a tomb for the dead; toma, Maori, a [p.382] place where the dead are laid. The tema (Eg.) was also a fort, a place of defence. There is a mound or natural fort near Barcaldine old castle, known locally as Tom Ossian, or Ossian's Mound. It is a habit of the people roundabout to give many grave-mounds the name of Ossian. In this case it is said to be a place where Ossian sat, according to a local legend[33]. These mounds, being natural forts, were temau. The word tem (Eg.) also means to announce and pronounce. The tem as the seat of the singer agrees with the plural temau (Eg.) for choirs.

Now Ossian was a typical bard, one of the Asi or Hesi, by whom the announcements of the law were made from the seat. The as is this seat of rule and sovereignty; the as is also a mote or mound (which was the seat of justice) and the resting place of the dead. Thus the tom is the tumulus and the tomb, the seat of sanctity, defended as a tem or fort, used also as a mount of justice or a mote. Another mound named 'Tom-na-h-aire,' the mound of watching, between Dun Cathich and Connel, further identifies the tom and the tem, fort, as the watch tower.

Mr. Taylor describes the syllable 'ing as the most important element which enters into Anglo-Saxon names.'[34] This is found in more than one-tenth of the total names of English hamlets and villages. In such as Tring, Woking, Barking, it is the suffix merely, but in Paddington, Islington, Kensington, we have the ton or seat of the ing belonging to the name prefixed.

The Billings, for example, were a royal race doubtless because they were assimilated to the god Baal; the Thurings are from Thor; the Sulings, of Sullington, in Suffolk, from Sul-Minerva; the Ceafings, of Chevington, in Suffolk, the Cofings, of Covington, in Hunts, and the Jefings, of Jevington, in Suffolk, or of Ivinghoe, Bucks, from the Kef of Kêd. This is merely by way of illustrating the type-name.

The ing denotes a body of people founded on sonship, human or divine. The mother was the primary parent thus derived from, and afterwards the male. But Kemble's[35] theory, that names ending in 'ing' indicated an original seat of the Angles or English, is apparently negatived by the almost entire absence of 'ings' in South Suffolk[36]. One 'ing' of the Angles is an enclosure. We have it in the far older form of hank for a body of people confederated (Var. d.), identical with ankh (Eg.), to covenant. To be at inches with, meaning to be very near together, is an expression belonging to the ing relationship. The Ingle, a parasite, in a depraved sense, is named from the ing. Thus we have the ing as the hank, and the ankh was extant in Egypt not only as the living representative, [p.383] the son, but as the body of people belonging to a certain district, who are designated the ankh, whilst the topographical enclosure, the ing, eng, inch, mis, is as old as the naming of the isle, enclosed by the waters. Cheddington, for example, is the tun, the high place, seat, enclosure of the ing, which derives its name from Kêd, whose own tun, or elevated seat, her throne, was higher still at Gad's-den (Kêd's tun).

The Chipping, as in Chipping Norton, Chipping Ongar, Chipping Barnet, or Chippingham, did not originate in Chapping and Cheapening. Cheping Hill and Chepstow take us up to the old high places of Kêd, where we find her cave, cabin, or Kibno, as in the Kibno Kêd, a form of the Cefn or Cefn Bryn or Cefn Coed. This cefn is the kafn (Eg.), an oven (a symbol of the Llafdig), and the kabni (Eg.), a vessel, a ship, which was represented by the boat, the cauldron, and the divine sanctuary of birth and rebirth. The war-chariot of the Britons was a covine[37]. This too was a kind of Cefn Kibno, or cabin of Kêd, a type of the bearer, who was called Urt, the chariot. The Chevin, in Wharfdale, or on the hill near Derby, or the Cheviot Hills, is not merely the ridge, but the cabin, cave, or khep—sanctuary on the height, sometimes found in the hill itself, or in the stone-circle on the hill. The cef, or cev, is the Cornish coff, womb, and the wife. Now the ing community that bears this name are the children who derive that name from the mother's womb, the coff of kheft or Kêd, hence the Chiping and the Chevening on the great ridge in North Kent. The Kippings were still extant by name, not many years ago, in the neighbourhood of Ivinghoe (Kiv-ing-hoe) and Cheddington.

The coff being the birthplace, the coff-ing or chip-ing is the clan, confederacy, or hank, named from the feminine abode. The name of the Roman civitas, anciently an association of families, a corporation, and that of civ-ilization itself comes from the cave and the genetrix Khef. This is a principle of naming direct from nature. The Cefn Cave at the village of Cefn, near Denbigh, is not designated from the village of that name, as shown by the Cefn-caves elsewhere; and as this was only discovered and cleared out some forty or fifty years ago, and had then been filled up with sand from time immemorial, the name of Cefn must have been continued from time immemorial, before the cave was filled up.

The bed is another name of the uterus, and the Bed-ing is the gens named from the birthplace. The cwm, or quim, is another, whence the Cum-ing and the Cwm-mwd. In these cases the place of abode has extended to a county, in Bedfordshire and Cumberland. Thus combe, according to Ovid[38], was Mother of the Curetes. The ken is another form; hence the Ken-ing and the Ken-nings. The hem, another, whence the Hem-mings. Kêd, the mother and place [p.384] in one, supplies one of these type-names, whence Ched-ding-ton, the seat of the family of Kêd.

This subject will be pursued in the 'Typology of Naming.' Enough for the present. This alone is origin from the typical birthplace, and such names as Wamden in Bucks, Wambrook in Dorset, Wembury in Devon, Wampool in Cumberland, instead of being corruptions of Wodensburg, are from the living home, Wame, Weem, Uamh, Hem, Cwm itself. This is shown by the pool and the brook, for the Wam was the place and the Pool of the Two Waters and Two Truths of mythology. The wam as birthplace is identical with woman. The uamh is extant on a larger scale in the place named Meall na Uamh, South Uist, where the beehive is still a human habitation.

The Beck and By are said to be Norse or Saxon names. Both are Egyptian; both British. The bi (or bu) is a worn down form of the Beck. The bu is the feminine birthplace, which, with the terminal t, is the but, or beth, the abode. With the kh it is the bekh, the birthplace. Bekha is the land of the birth of the sun; the bekh is the solar birthplace. Our Beck is applied to the river at its source. The bekh of the sun was represented by the Hill of the Horizon, the Tser Rock, stationed as a figure of the equinox. The Egyptians placed their equinoxes high up in heaven, in the zenith; this was where the sun was reborn every 25th of March. The bekh was imaged as the bringer-forth, the earlier pekh, a form of the genetrix, also named Buto.

The Bekh-Mount had been Sabean first, the Mount of the Seven Stars, and was afterwards made use of as a figure for the initial point of the solar zodiac and the birthplace in the sign of the Fishes. The same hills served in both cults, the worshippers of the Great Mother turning, like the Jews, to the north, the adorers of the solar son to the east.

The mount, throne, royal seat, is the ten (Eg.), and the word also denotes the division, the birthplace at the equinox, the bekh. Thus the mount of the bekh is Ten-bekh, and in the worn-down form Tenby. Now we know the earlier name of Tenby is Tenbich or Den-bigh, and the name is founded on the mount of the Bekh, or solar place of birth. We may further infer the same origin for the town and shire of Denbigh, as the Bekh of the Ten, the birthplace on the mount.

The peak is another form of the word, also the pike, as in Lang­dale Pikes, the Welsh pig, the Pyrenean pic, Italian bec, and the puy in Auvergne. The hill behind Bacup is one of our bekhs. The mountains called 'Backs' (as Saddleback) are birthplaces, only these are pre-solar; they typify the mount of Kêd, and of the hinder part. And in this meaning only do we reach the root for the names of our Beacon Hills.

The bekhn (Eg.) is a fort, tower, fortress, magazine, or strong- [p.385] hold. Bekhn is a name of basalt, the hard, strong stone. The Beacon Hill would thus be the natural stronghold. The bukan (Eg.) is also an altar with fire burning on it, and that too was a beacon.

These, however, are but applications of the bekhn or beacon. The origin is in the bekh as place of birth. Bekhens (Eg.) are called dwellings of the gods, the bekhen being the pe, heaven; khen, sanctuary. Bekhn is the typical birthplace. This may be reckoned in the north, the east, or the south. We have each of these initial points, equinoctial and solstitial. For example, the ten is the division, and this may be either; at Tenbury we find the solstitial ten. The 20th of April is the great fair-day of Tenbury, and there is a belief that the cuckoo is never heard till the day of Tenbury Fair, or after Pershore fair-day, which is the 26th of June. The cuckoo is our bird of the cycle, and here the end of his period is the solstice. Bun (Eg.) denotes the highest ten or division.

The bekh represented the hill of the resurrection and ascent to heaven. Sinai was one of these as well as Tabor, the Egyptian tepr. From this top (tep) the sun-god mounted to the upper half of the circle. The rock of the horizon, as it is called, is perfectly portrayed in Blake's picturei of the old man entering the rock of the tomb below and the young spirit issuing from it upward[39]. It was the place of burial as the tser (rock), and the place of rebirth as the bekh. And this image of the mount of burial and rebirth is the prototype of our Beacon and Back hills, on the top of which the dead were buried in the symbolical birthplace.

On the Palatine Hill in Rome, they show an opening in the rock which is said to be the cave of the she-wolf that suckled the twins Romulus and Remus; this cave also represented the primeval place of birth, the bekh on the Bekhen Hill. The divine birthplace gives us the names of Buchan, Beckenham, and Buckingham, as the Ham of the celestial place of rebirth, our Heliopolis, and Sinai, for the Egyptian name of this mountain is the bekh (bekht). The bekh as the place of issuing forth may be variously applied to the sun of the resurrection, the infant stream, or the beak of a bird, and the bacch (bitch), the back of a mineral lode, the bag (womb), and others. But this is perhaps the most curious in its compound condition.

The Port of London extends for legal purposes to a point six miles and a half below London Bridge. This point of egress and entrance to the port is known as 'Bugsby's Hole.' The current interpretation of names would possibly explain this by asserting that it was derived from the circumstance of a man named Bugsby having 'made a hole' in the water at that precise spot.

This is a form of the bekh, which in one spelling is the puka, or hole. 'Bugsby's Hole' is the bekh or puka of entrance and egress by water to the City of London. In the hieroglyphics the bekhs (or beks) is the gullet, a passage of entrance and egress. The by repeats the bekh, [p.386] and the hole is a third name of the same significance. It is a common mode of continuing the ancient names by a sort of gloss. Beks-by­hole, as the place of passage at the boundary and dividing line of the port, is the bekh three times repeated.

But for the Teutons it seems we should never have found the English home. 'This word,' says the author of Words and Places, 'as well as the feeling of which it is the symbol, was brought across the ocean by the Teutonic colonists, and it is the sign of the most precious of all the gifts for which we have to thank them.'[40] There was no home in Britain, nor the feeling for it, till the Teuton came! Why, the home is as old as the womb. Word and thing existed as long ago as the Scottish weem and the Irish uamh, when the home was a hole in the ground. As for the particular forms in ham and hem, they come from the Egyptian hem, the seat, abode, dwelling-place, that goes back to the birthplace. Hem is the typical seat, and habitation, the female ems, the woman, the wife. It was so old that the hemu, abraded into amu, are the residents, residing, seated, and enclosed. The am likewise indicates a residence with a garden, park ('hert'), or paradise. Nor did the Egyptians bequeath us the ham undistinguished.

The hem sign, which is also the han, is the symbol of the seat or home on the water, and denotes a water-frontier. The hemu are the watermen, sailors, and fishers. The hannu or hanti are the voyagers to and fro. Both mu and nu are the water in Egyptian, hence the interchange of ham and han. In the same manner the names of our coast hams and hans interchange, and Ellingham in Hants is represented by Ellinghen in France. On the coast-line of Oldenburg and Hanover the ham takes the shape of urn, as the Frisian suffix. The Egyptian ham or han being primarily a water-frontier, a place on the coast or river-bank, rather upsets the Teutonic derivation of names based on it, whether found in England or France. It makes one feel afresh that the less we know the easier it is to generalize. The hun (hunt) is the matrix. This permutes with the hem or ham, the khen, khem, or skhem. All have one origin in the earliest place of birth, and were applied to the abodes of the living and the tomb of the dead, as a place of rebirth. How near to nature is the ham as the seat is manifest in the name of the thighs. The khem or ham might be illustrated by a score of types, and each one can be traced to the female, and her type of types, the womb, khem, hem, or ama, the primeval house and home; the kwam, which in khaling denotes the mouth or uterus; the quim, םוח, or khebma, who is the most ancient genetrix of Egypt and the black land.

The skhem (Eg.) is the shut place and secret shrine of the child Horus. This form is extant in the African Gura, saguma, and Icelandic skemma, for the house, the abode. One type of [p.387] the genetrix, and therefore of the khem or skhema, is the leopard-cat (pasht), and in Arabic a cheetah kept for hunting is the shukm, whilst in the African Bambarra the ziakuma is a kind of cat. The khem is the feminine shrine, a name of Hathor, the habitation kima, Arabic, house, home; kam, or kim, in Dumi, the home; chem, Tibetan, house; khema, Swahili, a tent; koma, Persian, straw hut. The kam, in Nupe, Susu, Basa, Doai, Ngodsin, and other African languages, is a farm; gama, Singhalese, a village; the chvmah (המוח), in Hebrew, is the wall, or the walled enclosure; yum Magar, a house; umah, Javanese, house; uami, Uhobo (African), house; chim, Zincali, country or kingdom. And it is here we shall find the true meaning of the combe, the place between the thighs of hills. The combe answers to the khem (Eg.), the secret shrine, the shut-place of Horus, the child, in which he transformed into Horus born again. The combe is supposed to be the bowl-shaped or crooked formation. The Welsh form of the name, the cwin, compared with the same word used in vulgar English, the quim, will sufficiently recover the ancient meaning. It is akin to the home, the weem, the cam(ber), for which there is but one prototype in nature.

The underground houses called weems, the Gaelic uaimh, a cave, are synonymous with wames or wombs, and represent the womb of the auld wife, the mother Kêd. Weem or uaimh answers to khem (Eg.), a shrine, a secret shut-place, which may be that of the living child, Horus in Khem, or of the dead (khema). 'Can a man enter a second time into his mother's womb,' Nicodemus[41] asks. That was exactly what these simple souls symbolically sought to do!

A large cromlech at Baldernock, nine or ten miles from Glasgow, is denominated the 'Auld Wives' Lift.' The lift is the heaven or sky. The 'Auld Wife' is probably the correct rendering. She was Kêd or Kef, whence wife, and in Cornish, kuf is both the wife and the womb. The 'Auld Wife's Lift' was the meskhen, or mastebah, the place of rebirth, to which they looked for a lift into another life in the lift above. Auld means first and great, the exact equivalent of urt (Eg.), the first, the great, the old mother, who was the bearer that gave the lift in her chariot, called the urt, or the womb of the khebma.

The place of birth being the type of the tomb, the abode of rebirth will account for and explain the hole-stones so frequently found at the circles. Through these apertures children and initiates were passed in the Druidic rites and representations of the mysteries, as a mode of regeneration and rebirth from the womb, the ark, the cwm, the prison, the cell under the flat stone, the weem or khem of Kêd. The root of both cwm and cefn is hhef or khep. Ma is the mother or place. The khef is the Cornish coff, the womb, or belly. The kep (Eg.) is the concealed place, a sanctuary; the khep, or khepsh is determined by the hinder thigh, as the feminine abode, and the birthplace in the not them heaven. As cognates we have the cop, an [p.388] enclosure with a ditch round it, a heap, and a mound; the cove and the cave; the oval, the hop or hoop, an inclosing circle. Khebm modifies into khem and kam. The same root with the terminal n forms the word khefn, chivan, or cefn, and this modifies into the chûn and ceann.

One of the cromlechs is called the 'Chün Cromlech.' This is a prevalent name for the maternal abode, the kun of birth and rebirth, the meskhen (Eg.), which the Chûn Cromlech imaged. Chûn is chiven in Hebrew, the Kymric cefn, at once the mount and the cave of birth. Now Grimm's Law need not be appealed to in paralleling the Gadhaelic ceann for the mount with the Cymric pen and Gaelic ben. It is the reduced form of the Cymric cefn and the name of the cevennes. This modification of cefn occurs in the English Keyntons in Devon, Shropshire, Dorset, and Wilts. The double n of Ceann occurs in Conan, the old name of Conisborough. The pen and ben are the Egyptian ben, the height, cap, roof, top. The ben was the solar pyramidion; the obelisk was one of its types. It is masculine, as another application of the pen will prove. The cefn is feminine. In this way the types will often take us beyond the region of mere sound-shunting, and give us the definiteness of things in place of verbal vagueness.

The Chün Cromlech shows the application of the womb-type to the tomb; the place of birth to that of rebirth. In Glamorganshire there is a circle of stones named kevn (cefn) Llechart. Thus the cromlech and circle of stones are identical with the type of the birthplace, which was first of all found in the feminine nature, then applied to the cave of the hill, and afterwards externalised in the rude stone structures erected outside as the burial-places of the dead.

The ark, pair, vessel, or uterus of Kêd was represented by such stone sanctuaries. The cauldron or cooking-place of the ancient mother was designated the Kibno-Kêd. In the hieroglyphics the kabni is also a vessel, a ship, or ark, the English cabin, and the Kibno-Kêd is the mother-ark. The kafen (Eg.) is an oven, and means to bake, and the kibno was figured as a cooking vessel, whether for boiling or baking. In one language the belly or womb is the kabin, and in Welsh the cafn is a boat and a baker's trough.

The cabin of the ark, the kafn or oven of the Lady of Bread, the kibno of Kêd, the Kevn Llechart, the chûn Cromlech, the cenn and cefn of the mountain cave, the Scottish govan are all illustrations of the one original type, the birthplace called the coff or kep of khept, the British Kêd.

The combe is often found with the Beacon Hill, and in 'Cwm Bechan' the birthplace is named twice over. The beehive-house, which was a human habitation before the type was passed by and left behind for the bees, has. two names in Gaelic, [p.389] the boh and the bothan. Boh corresponds to the per (Eg.), a form of the lower, hinder part, the hem, a female type; bothan to the but (Eg.), belly and nu, receptacle; the Hebrew תב, the receptaculum, and ןמב, the belly, the uterus, and primordial abode.

The primitive borough, burgh, barrow, bur, or bury, is the bru (Welsh), the mystical residence; bru, Irish, the womb; bara, Vei, the womb; apara, Sanskrit, the womb; pal, Akkadian, sexual part of woman; pir, Gond, the same; por, Armenian, the belly; bar, Hungarian, and bayar, Canarese, the belly, and, lastly, the belly is derived from the same origin.

The cairn does not mean a mere heap of stones above ground. Mr. Anderson[42] has shown that it is what we might infer by deriving the name from kar (Eg.), an underground cell or hole, and nu, a receptacle, house, feminine abode. Then it becomes manifest that the Welsh calon, or galon, for the womb, is a form of the word cairn. We derive the charnel or carnary from the cairn.

There is an ascidian simplicity about the beginnings of human thought, as manifested in the earliest typology, which shows the commencement to have been akin to that initial point in evolution, a mere sac, with the dual function of including and excluding water. In the human beginning the sac is the uterus, the abode of two truths of life, those of the water and the breath, feminine pubescence and gestation. All utterance appears to have originated with this primitive utterer.

All human feelings can be traced back to two desires, the one being that of self-preservation, the other of reproduction. These constituted the total stock at starting in the dimmest dawn of human consciousness. And to this early stage we have to look for the first rude mould of thought and expression. Nothing that ever belonged to it has been entirely obliterated, and its evidences are visibly extant, as are those of the Palaeolithic age. No origin has ever been wholly lost, any more than spoken language has altogether superseded the clicks. The desire of reproduction by itself alone is sufficient to account for what is termed the phallic mould of thought and utterance, and the final stage of that desire constitutes religion.

It can and will be shown that the leer of Priapus is an altogether later expression added to the face of the subject commonly called 'phallic worship.' There is no lewd grin in the look of the early men; their beginnings were lowly, but their observations were made in a spirit as seriously intent as that of modern science or of childhood. Hence Egyptian art, however near to nature, was pure and unashamed in its nakedness.

The feminine abode of birth was the typical home of the troglodytes, who dwelt in the caves of the earth and named these after the mother. These caves were afterwards devoted to the dead more freely when the living could defend themselves outside, in the open [p.390] space, or on the mound. In this way the abodes of the living were named as the habitations of the dead, as in the tun or the cleigh.

Cleigh is a Gaelic name for the burying-place. There is a clegh in Lochnell, identified as a burying ground by its monument, a great cairn some sixty feet in diameter. A stone chest, an urn, and a bronze dagger were found there. Cleigh resolves into kl or kr, the cell; and akh (Eg.), the dead, the cleigh being the cell of the dead. The Arabic kalagh is the stone enclosure of a tomb. The clach stone is another form of the same word, the stone being the representative sign of the burying-place. The proof may be found in the clachan. The cleigh (clach) is the dwelling of the dead, and around this was formed the clachan, a small village built round the church which had superseded the cil or cleigh of an earlier time. Thus the clachan of the living has its roots in the cleigh of the buried dead.

The glebe land and ecclesiastical revenue are not primarily the present made by the people to their god, as Mr. Spencer puts it[43], for the first possession of the land was taken by the dead, who constituted the earliest form of the landed interest, and instituted the most primitive kind of landed property. The dead were the cause of a sacerdotal class being established in their precincts to protect them, and the church lands as ecclesiastical property are the last result of this ownership, on behalf of the dead, of the soil thus made sacred at the centre, with its surrounding circle devoted to the sustenance of a priesthood.

The type of the tomb-temple becoming the house of the living was preserved in Egypt to a late period. Twelve thousand inhabitants are ascribed to a single temple at An (Heliopolis) by a census taken in the reign of Rameses III. So the tem or tomb became the fort, village, city, and king-dom.

This origin of the artificial enclosure as the sacred precinct of the buried dead is further corroborated by an Akkadian ideograph. Bat (Akk.) means to die, the ideograph being the portrait of a corpse. Bat is also a fortress, and the ideographic corpse is the sign of an enclosure. The corpse-enclosure was primal, as the kester, and the corpse remained as a determinative sign of primitive usage when the kester had become the castle, citadel, or city.

In the Black Book of Caermarthen[44] there is a long series of verses on the 'Cities of the Kymry.'[45] The cities are the graves. Each city is the grave of some mythological or legendary hero, whose name it bears, and these cities originated in the caers as circles of the dead. Beyond these are the 'Long Graves in Gwanas,' of which it is said 'their history is not to be had; whose they are and what their deeds.' We are told, 'There has been the family of Oeth and Anoeth, naked are their men and their youth—let him who seeks for them dig in Gwanas.'[46] [p.391] The long graves in Gwanas are the 'Long Graves' of the cavemen of the Neolithic age, who turned the natural cefns into chambered tombs, such as are found in cefn near St. Asaph, in Denbighshire[47]. Gwanas is gwan-as, that is, cefn-as. As (Eg.) is the sepulchre, the chamber of rest, of birth and rebirth, the maternal abode. The cave was this at first, and the chambers were excavated afterwards; the one being used by the men of the Palaeolithic age, the others by those of the Neolithic age. The cefn was a natural formation; the cefn-as (gwan-as) was artificial. Both are apparently recognized in the two burial-places by 'Oeth and Anoeth.'

The 'Long Graves in Gwanas' mean the same as the long barrow at West Kennet, Wiltshire, and others found in Somersetshire and Gloucestershire. The name of Kennet likewise identifies the khen sanctuary. Khen-net (Eg.) reads the lower-world khen, and the west was its entrance. The long barrow at West Kennet was 350 feet in length. These were made by the men of the Neolithic age.

Cleidh-na-h-Annait is the name of an ancient burial-ground in the west of Scotland with two stone cairns in it. The word annait is commonly connected with sacred places. Annoit, in O'Reilly's Irish Dictionary, is explained as 'One's Parish Church.'[48] In the Highlands the church was at one time synonymous with 'the stones.' The annoit, says Skene, is the parent church or monastery which is presided over by the patron saint, or which contains his relics[49].

The parent church is the mother church. The stone cairn was the earlier annait, sacred to the dead, and this was built by each person contributing a stone. Nat means an offering, to present tribute, as is done in accumulating the cairn. Annt (Eg.) is tribute, and in English anne means to give, and annet signifies first-fruits. Anit (Eg.) also means to anoint, and is the name of incense. But the offering of the stone, an, was a far earlier mode of making sacred, and the annait was the first stone sanctuary before larger stones were hewn. The annait can be traced upwards from the cairn to the church, and the stone chest or 'sanctuary of the saint's relics.' The Welsh annedd is a dwelling-place. In connection with this it is noticeable that the solar birthplace and the soul's place of rebirth in the Ritual is An, an being the name for stone, and one especial symbol of An is the stone or obelisk; also Anit is a name of the genetrix, who was the earliest form of the mother church. The Annait is probably identical with Taliesin's Circle of Anoeth[50]. An-at as Egyptian would also denote the circle of repetition.

Cuhelyn uses the term 'Anoeth' for Stonehenge, and speaks of the 'study of the circle of Anoeth.'[51] Arthur is said to have been imprisoned for three nights in the enclosure of Oeth and Anoeth[52], [p.392] like the other solar heroes who were three days in the fish's belly or in the underworld, the place of transformation and reproduction.

If asked, what is a hoe? most Englishmen would reply, a hill. So many hills are called hoes. But the hoe as name of a hill is secondary; the hoe is not the hill except that the high place and hoe place are synonymous. The hoe is primarily a circle, and need not be on a hill. The letter O is its symbol. Ho is a boundary; 'out of all ho' is out of all bounds. Our hoe is the hieroglyphic heh, the cycle with the sign of the circle. The hoes were stone-enclosures of a circular form, whether on the hill or in the plain. True to the primordial type, these circles have perpetuated the primitive idea even in their names. In the Orkney Isles they are called Ork-hows, that is ark-circles. 'Much fee was found in the ork-hows,' says an inscription in the Orkneys[53]. The primary form of hoe is kak or khekh.

The hay, haigh, or hak, as in the Cornish hay, a churchyard, and the hak-pen at Avebury, is derived from kak, an old local name for the church or stones. The kak is neither derived from the German hag, a town, nor the Dutch haag, an enclosure, nor the Sanskrit kaksha, a fence or bush. It exists as the root of all in kak (Eg.), a sanctuary, an enclosure, and kakui, a coffin. The kak or khekh may be manifold. One of the earliest is the kak, a boat, a caique, Welsh cwch; another is the English cege, a seat. It may be the keg or cask, the whiche or chest, the Cymric gwic or the Norse haugr, a sepulchral mound. The stone-chest or kistvaen is also called a chech by Camden[54]. The kak is an extant provincial name for church. The kak (Eg.) is a boat and a sanctuary. This boat is the Welsh cwch, the coracle of the goddess Kêd. Hence the hoe or how is an ark, and the Ork-hows are the arks of the dead.

The name of the Orkney Isles is undoubtedly derived from the old Cymric word orch, which means a border, a limit. This renders the Egyptian ark, an end, limit, to cease, be perfected, finis. They are named in Egyptian as the extremity or end of the isles. Nun (nnui) signifies countries in relation to water and fellows of the same type, as we say the Orkneys. Nnui (Eg.) is the name of water, and ark­nnui is both the land and water limit. The isle is also an ark of the water, especially chosen in ancient times as a place of sepulchre. The arach in Gaelic is a bier; the ork, Icelandic, a sarcophagus, and in Irish the womb.

The writer is fully aware that the repetition of certain words and names used so frequently by the Arkite triad, Bryant, Faber, and Davies, will be to many as the offering of water in hydrophobia. Nevertheless the dreary Arkite and Druidic subjects have to he gone over again with the expectation of seeing a winged transformation of the grub long buried underground, and stamped underfoot, as if for ever, by many a passer-by.

[p.393] The hieroglyphic sign of land and orbit, called the cake, occurs four times on a stone found in the Rose Hill tumulus at Aspatria, near St Bees[55]. This, like the hoe, is the symbol of a completed period. That period was fulfilled when the sun had passed through the three water signs, and entered the first of the nine dry signs. The cake signifies land and horizon, the place of landing from the waters. The circles represented the ark generally on the hill-top, out of the waters. Our cake is synonymous with the Egyptian khekh, to check.

The hoe or howe goes back to the khekh (Eg.), the horizon, collar, the round. Khekh, the balance or level, denotes the circle completed at the equinox. The khekh collar worn by Neith has nine symbolic beads, corresponding to the nine maiden stones and to the nine nobs on the Scottish Beltein cakes. Many of the circles consisted of nine stones. The relation of this number to land and a completed course will be amply illustrated. Enough for the present to point out that in Egyptian meh means to fill full and fulfil, to complete. Meh is the number 9, and a water line, the same in significance as the cake symbol. Meh-urt is a form of the cow-headed goddess Hathor, and Mehi a name of the lunar deity Taht. Meh is likewise the north. When we are told that maes means a field and magh a plain, that explains nothing. They mean much more than that for the present purpose. The magh, as plain, is based on the level of the equinox, the makhu (Eg.), level or balance. The ancient name of Dunstable was Magintum, and it is a lofty table-land. Ard-Macha (Armagh) is the level aloft. Hence the place makhu interchanges with mat, the midway; and the Swiss mat, the plain, level, or meadow, is the magh. Both meet in Egyptian, where mat is an old name of the makhu in An. Makh and meh denote the place of fulfilment.

There is no proof extant of the original number of stones in Maes How, which bears the same relation, however, to the standing stones of Stennis, in Orkney, that Maes Knoll does to the circles at Stanton Drew[56], showing a likeness in the nature of these monuments, as well as in the name. And we know, by the Nine Maidens of Cornwall, and the Nine Stone Rig, that some of the stones were nine in number, and that number would in Egyptian denote Meh's How, or the circle of Macha.

Kemp How is a tumulus in front of a circle among the remains at Shap. Shap, in the hieroglyphics, signifies time, epoch, period. The shebu is a collar forming three-fourths of a circle with nine points. Shebu means a certain quantity of flesh. Shap is to shape, figure, image; bring forth, evacuate. The root of the matter is the measure of time, nine solar months, that it took to clothe a soul in flesh or [p.394] shape it and bring to birth. The shapt were persons belonging to religious houses, such as we infer gave the name to Shap.

Kemp, in English, is a champion; kemb, a stronghold. In Egyptian, khem is the champion, and the khem is a shrine of the dead, with a circle for determinative. Khem-p-how is a circle of the dead. Khenf is bread or food offered to the dead, and the shebti are sepulchral figures and images of the dead.

Pomponius Mela speaks of the Island of Sena in the British Seas, where the nine priestesses ministered in a round temple, which they unroofed annually and covered again in one day, before sunset[57]. He relates that if in the process any one of the women dropped or lost the portion she was carrying to complete the work, she was torn in pieces by the rest, and the limbs were carried round the temple in triumph, until the Bacchic fury had abated. Strabo affirms that there always happened some instance of this cruel rite at the annual solemnity of uncovering the temple[58]. The same thing is alluded to by Taliesin as the metaphor of a hopeless calamity, 'a doleful tale, like the concussion, like the fall of a se, like the Deluge.'[59] It was most probably a representation in the mysteries. The nine 'Ses' were the nine months of child-bearing impersonated. If one of these let fall the burden, it was fatal to all; the eight were depicted as turning on her and rending her piecemeal. Such was the drama of mythology. In the same sense the Gallicenae are said to have turned themselves into whatsoever animals they pleased. So the sun's passage through Aries and Taurus was his transformation into the Ram and the Bull.

The name Seon is not necessarily that of an island, although Strabo mentions an island of Sena[60]. The root meaning enters into senate, sennet, a total or round, and is the Egyptian shen, a circle, orbit, round, circuit, period. The Druidic Caer-Sëons were the primitive type of these, and they were stone circles. The Caer-Sëon, or Sëon with the strong door, typified the landing-place of Hu after the deluge, the station of the sun on his ascending out of the three water signs into the circle of the nine land signs. Whether an island or a caer, the Sëon was the circle emblematic of the divine circle of the gods, the put of the hieroglyphics, signifying number nine. And the nine maids or priestesses were one with the nine muses of Greece, the nine that danced about the violet-hued fountain as described by Hesiod[61]. Taliesin says, 'The tuneful tribe will resort to the magnificent se of the Sëon.'[62] 'Sua,' in Egyptian, is loud singing; shen, the circle.

The vessel or cauldron of Keridwen, the symbol of this circle, was said to be warmed by the breath of nine damsels; in Taliesin's 'Spoils of the Deep,'[63] it is the cauldron of the ruler of the abyss[64]. [p.395] These were the nine muses of Britain, and of greater antiquity than those of Greece.

The nine personify the nine months of gestation and of giving breath to the child; in the eschatological phase they performed the rites of the dead, and represented the 'wake,' the resuscitation, and rebirth of the soul of the deceased, as did the nine in attendance upon Osiris. Hence the nine maidens of memorial in the nine stones.

The accented ë in Sëon shows the elided consonant. This is recoverable in segon (Caer Seiont, from Segont), and segon is the sekhen (Eg.), the enclosure, place of settling, of rest, a breathing place, from skhen, to give breath to. And in Caer-Seon the cauldron of Keridwen was warmed by the breath of nine damsels or muses, the Gwyllian of the sekhen who become the nine Gallicenae of Mela's account[65]. The Sëon or sekhen is found in several forms.

In the year 1843 seven urns were exhumed at Swinkie Hill; these were inverted and imbedded in an artificial mound. Near at hand is a monument called the Standing Stone of Sauchope. Sau-khep (Eg.) denotes the sanctuary or place of transformation for the mummy or dead body. Of course the sau may only have denoted the deceased, but doubtless they preserved the dead to the best of their ability.

Swin in Swinkie answers to skhen (Eg.). Ki (Eg.) signifies the land, earth, interior region. Thus swinkie is the domain of the sekhen, sanctuary, resting-place, where the dead were gathered together, literally, as the hieroglyphics show, to be embraced in the arms and enclosed in the womb of the mother earth in the sekhen or khen shrine, as at Swinkie.

We are now able to show that Scone in Scotland is another Sëon or Segon. The Moot Hill of Scone preserved the original, that is Egyptian, meaning of the name, as the sekhen[66]. It was designated the 'Collis Credulitatis' or Mount of Belief. It is called the 'Caislen Credhi' by Tighernach, which is rendered the 'Castellum Credi' in the Annals of Ulster[67]. The Pictish Chronicle, in recording the assembly in 906, says from this day the hill merited its name, viz., the 'Mount of Belief.'[68] Now the Egyptian name for belief is skhen, which also means to sustain and give rest. Thus the Scone Mount is the Sekhen Hill, in a double sense.

The nine maids of the Segon or circular temple have bequeathed their name and number to some stones standing on the downs leading from Wadebridge to St. Columb, which are generally called the 'Nine Maids.'[69] The legend relates that the nine maidens were turned into stone because they would otherwise keep dancing on Sunday, which riddle is easily read when we know the nature of the nine, and that the birth depends upon their established fixity. Other circles of nine [p.396] stones in Cornwall are known as the 'Nine Maidens.' In Scotland we find the Maidin stone or stones.

We have also the rekh or rig of Nine Stones. In Barthram's Dirge, 'They shot him at the Nine-Stane Rig, Beside the headless cross.'[70] Near this 'nine-stane rig,' in the vicinity of Hermitage Castle, was the 'Nine-Stane Burn.' Also there was the Lady-Well. A most precious preserve of the ancient imagery this of the nine stones, the waters, the feminine fount, the pre-Christian cross; we shall see, directly, the relationship of nine stones to the waters, and the cross without a head.

We are told in the poem on the Graves of the Kymry[71] that they also buried their dead on the shore where 'the ninth wave breaks,' and here we can arrest the symbol just where it passes into false belief. The ninth wave and earlier tenth does not mean the sea-wave, but relates to the reckoning by nine and ten in the time of ten moons or nine months and a three months' inundation, still manifest in the three water-signs. The water side of the circle was one quarter, and the nine waves, nine stones or nine maids, represented the nine dry months of bringing forth. The ninth wave and the tenth, the nine pins and the ten have their prototypes in the two Collars of Isis, the gestator who wears nine bubu or beads, whereas the collar of the wet-nurse called menat implies the reckoning by ten water periods of twenty-eight days each, as ment (or met, Coptic), signifies number ten, and men-t means liquid measure. The cross without a head is an equivalent symbol of three quarters out of four. So the put circle of the nine gods contains three quarters filled in and one quarter left hollow, á. The horse-shoe images and the headdress of Hathor likewise typifies the same three quarters of the circle as the nine stones or the headless cross; the zodiac, minus three water-signs.

The 'Nine-Stone Burn' was also represented near Dunstable (Bedfordshire). There is an earthwork near the town called the 'Maiden Bower' and the 'Maidening Burn.' The 'Maiden' identifies the nine stones when interpreted. It may be noticed that Dunstable stands on chalk hills that have been turned into catacombs by enormous excavations which were made with the most primitive implements of the Bone and Stone Age.

The 'Maidens' do not derive directly from the word maid, but from the nine, which is both meh and ma in Egyptian. The Egyptian meh, to fulfil, and meht, earlier makht, to be fulfilled, represent the German magd, for the maid, in madchen and in the Gaelic maigh-den, as the one whose period is fulfilled. Makha, to measure, is the earlier form of meh and ma; and the makht of the equinox was the meht of fulfilment in the north quarter The ten is the terminus; and the meh-ten, the terminus of the nine, is equivalent to the name of the maiden, makh-ten or maighdean. These circles were [p.397] the seat of the nine whether as the meh-t or the put. Taliesin calls himself the 'Bard of Budd'[72] who conversed much with men, and as budd is the Egyptian put, the divine circle of the nine, Bard of Budd is identical with the poet inspired by the nine, the nine muses or maidens of the budd circles formed of nine stones. In the Gododin[73] the bard celebrates the fame of the 'established enclosure of the band of the harmonious Budd,' that is, the put in the hieroglyphics, the nine. This circle of the nine called put and ma (meh) is established by Ptah and Ma in the Egyptian mythology. Ptah is the framer and Mâ the fulfiller. The circle of nine, it is repeated, is based on the nine months of fulfilment in gestation, and on the nine dry months which in Egypt with an inundation made a year.

The 'Maid' stones were probably limited to that number, and meht is the number nine fulfilled. This name is extant in Maidstone. The Maiden Stone in Scotland, and the Maiden Castle, possibly mean the 'ten' (Eg.), throne seat of meh, the nine. Bridget had her nine maidens, and in her legend as the Virgin Martyr it is affirmed that the castle of Edinburgh was called the Maiden after her. But there were 'Nine Maidens,' as at Boscawen-ûn, and three other places mentioned by Borlase[74], consisting of nineteen stones, which have been mixed up with the nine maids. Also the inner elliptical compartment of Stonehenge, within which stood the stone of astronomical observation, consisted of nineteen granite blocks. Now we shall see the further use of the root meh for nine. Meh (or ma) is the number, and 'ten' has different meanings, as ten, the throne, seat, place, division of the nine. Ten is also our English number, 10; ten, a weight of 10 Kat, a unity of weight, the ideographic ten, or sign, formed of two hands or ten digits.

Meh-ten may be read either the nine total or 9-10, our 19, the exact number of Maiden-stones at Boscawen-ûn. Now when we remember that the Metonic cycle is a period of nineteen years, at the end of which the new moons fall on the same days of the year and the eclipses recur, it is exceedingly strange if it was left for a Greek astronomer of the name of Meton to discover this cycle, BC 432[75]. The nineteen Maiden Stones in Cornwall, and the nineteen at Stonehenge, already figured and stood for the cycle of Meton, or possibly of Mehten, meaning the number nine-ten.

The stones varied in number according to the nature of the circle or caer. The caer was sometimes a quadrangular enclosure, then it symbolised the circle with four corners, like that of Yima in the Avesta which had four cardinal points, and was a four-cornered circle[76]. Two of these caers with four corners, but left open, would be the two houses of the sun, the lower and upper caers or courses, and these would equate with Sesennu the region of the eight great gods. The circle of nine, whether called a Bedd or Maes How, represented the [p.398] nine months of childbirth, and the sun in the nine non-water signs. There may have been a circle of ten stones, which number, as in the ten pins and tenth wave, was superseded by the solar nine. Twelve stones stood for the total of the solar signs, and nineteen for the Metonic or Maiden cycle. They range at least up to seventy-two, the one-seventh of a phoenix period of five hundred years. The dead were buried in or around them, but they served the purpose of the living registers and rolls, and were the figures of the astronomical chronology.

The reader will gather from this that the Men-an-tols of Cornwall meant something more than merely holed stones. Ter, the circle, round, to encircle, of course includes a hole, the Cornish tol, but is more than that. Ter, in the simplest form, is time, the mover in circles, tide, season, limit.

The Men-an-tols were gnomons and dials of time. Max Muller has observed that a Men-an-tol stands in a field near Lanyon, flanked by two stones standing erect on each side. Let any one go there, he says, to watch a sunset about the time of the autumn equinox, and he will see that the shadow thrown by the erect stone would fall straight through the hole of the Men-an-tol[77].

The name of Carnac, in Brittany, is the same as Karnak at Thebes, and resolves, as Egyptian, into kar-en-akh, the circle of the dead. It comes to the same thing if we read Carn-Akh, as the cairn in English; crwn, Welsh; cruin, Gaelic; cern, Cornish, and cren, Armoric, denote the cairn-circle. Kar is the underworld, underground; kar, a chest, sarcophagus or coffin; karas, a place of embalmment, a chamber for the mummy. This is the origin of our kar-stones, from which so many places are named. It is not that carragh (Ir.) merely means a rock. The car stone is a rock, but the full form of the rock, as craig or carragh, includes the car (kar) of the akh (Eg.) or dead. In that case the car-akh and car-rekh have the same signification, as both the akh and rekh denote the dead. The Rock is a worn down caraig or cleig­stone of the dead. At Carrowmore, in Ireland, a large number of sepulchral remains have been found. The unabraded form of the word is Car-raighea-mora. Mora is a region, land. Kar is the underworld, the sarcophagus, the hole or passage. But it may be questioned whether Raighea does not mean more than rock. In Egyptian ruka is to hide, to stow away in safe secrecy. We have the form ruck, to crouch down out of sight. Llvch, Welsh, a hiding-place, and llech, to lie flat or horizontal, apply equally to the dead and the flat-stone. So interpreted, Carraighea-mora is the region limited to the sarcophaguses or mummies of the hidden—that is, buried, dead. The part of Arthur's Seat called Salisbury Craig was doubtless a Car-akh Hill.

[p.399] There is a stone in Aberdeen designated the Craba Stone, and if we apply this principle of formation to its name, craba becomes car­akh-ba. Ba in the hieroglyphics is the stone or place of the hidden corse, and 'Car-akh-ba' reads the stone or place of the hidden—that is, buried, dead, the final form of which is the grave-stone, grave being a form of craba, and craba an abraded kar-akh-ba. With the ba rendered stone there are many crabas known as cra-stones. And as cra alternates with crow, other stones are called crow-stones, or clow-stones. In this transformation of car-raigh into crow, we come upon the meeting-place of rook and crow, two names of the black long-lived bird of renewal, adopted in our islands, and named after the Egyptian rekh.

In Cornwall the stones with a circular hole, made use of to pass the children through as a type of new birth, or some kind of covenanting, are called crick-stones. Crick-stones, they maintain, were also used for dragging people through to cure them of various diseases[78]. This offers us another car-rekh stone. And we must beware of supposing a compound word like this has but one meaning. In the crick-stone the kar (Eg.) is the circle, the hole, and rekh (Eg.) signifies to whiten and purify, therefore to heal. A feminine rekh (Eg.) is a laundress. The crick-stone, then, as the kar-rekh stone, becomes the hole-stone made use of for purification and healing. As the car, crow, or craba-stone it was a type of rebirth; the grave itself was but a hole of passage, the emaning womb of another life.

Kirkcaldy in the full form is probably the kar-rekh-caldy, the circle of the rekh, who were the Magi, known in Scotland as the Culdees, or, as kar-rekh becomes the kirk, known in the same country as the stones, and then the kirk, kar-rekh-caldy is the stone circle of the Culdees. Many of the stones are called Leckerstones, as those near Abernethy, the Liggarstone in Aberdeenshire, the Lykerstone at Kirkness. This is the reverse form of kar-raig, with the l instead of r. Here the name is identical with that of leckerbad, the place of the purifying sulphur baths.

Rekh (Eg.), to whiten, wash, purify, in connection with the crick-stones used for healing, makes it appear probable that the rocking-stones were employed as rekh-ing-stones—that is, stones of purification. Roke (Eng.) is to cleanse. Mineral ore is rocked in cleansing. The rocking-stone, says the Arch-Druid Myffyr Morganwy[79], was the yoni-stone; it typified the womb of Kêd, and was called the ark-stone. In the mysteries the initiated entered the womb of the mother, were cradled and rocked in it, renewed and born again from it. Rekh (Eg.) means to reckon, calculate, know, and the oscillating or rocking-stone was also used for purposes of divination.

Mr. Bottrell, a Cornishman, wrote to one of the papers some time ago, and informed the public that a few years before there was a rock [p.400] in the town-place of Sawah, in the parish of St. Levan, known by the name of Garrack-zans[80]. This is a dialect form of the crick and car­raig stones. The word zans is a valuable addition. Sans or snes (Eg.) signifies to salute, adore, invoke. Sens is to breathe, to breathe the earth, that is, begin to breathe. Ssen, to breathe, pass, begin, has for determinative the slug or snail, an image of the lowliest beginning to breathe the earth. San is also to heal, prepare, preserve, and save. We have it as same, to bless, and save. Sau in Cornish means health, and denotes healthy. The u and w imply an earlier f, as in save. Sefa (Eg.) is to purify, and sawah was the place of healing. San-su (Eg.) would signify preserve, heal, charm, save the child, as was done in the process of regeneration and rebirth by passing it through the kar-rekh or circle of purification.

In the parish of Lansannan, Denbighshire, there was, according to Stow[81], a circular plain cut out of the solid rock on the side of a stony bill which contained twenty-four seats, and was called Arthur's Round Table. Twenty-four, as the four-and-twenty elders, was a solar number as well as twelve. The Welsh llan is a shrine, a sacred enclosure. Ren (Eg.) is a symbol of inclosing. San (Eg.) means to preserve and save, also to heal. Nen may be the type and likeness.

Taoursanan is the Gaelic name given to the circles of stones. It is read 'Mournful Circles,' or supposed places of sacrifice. The sanan is one with the Welsh sannan, and the llan and taour, or ter, interchange. The dead were buried in these 'Mournful Circles,' and the mournful is extant in the ter (Eg.), the layer out and mourner.

The conclusion we arrive at here is that the circle of the sannan or sanan was the place of preserving the dead, and on that other circle through the stone was the symbol of salvation and renewal in the doctrinal sense. The transformation and regeneration postulated for the mummy laid in the womb of earth were applied to the child and the initiate in the mysteries, and they were reborn from the crick or cloven stone, the yoni-stone, connected with the circle of the dead.

Our ancient menhirs or high stones are named from men, a fixed stone memorial or monument, and 'her,' high, over, above. Mena also means the dead, whence the minnying-day, or anniversary in which prayers were offered for the dead. According to the Egyptian language, the 'Menhir' signifies the stone erected over the dead. The menhir was a symbol that conveyed a profound meaning. Men (Eg.) is a name of heaven. The her (her-t), means the image of heaven and of hereafter. Her is also the way, the road, to fly away, leave, go out, ascend. The menhir was a fixed and lofty memorial of the higher life.

The Men-Ambers, as they are called, through the modification of the k sound, were originally men-kam-bers, and the word is [p.401] commonly spelt Mencamber, or Mincamber, by the Cornish people. In this form the name explains itself. Men is the fixed memorial. Khem (Eg.) is a shrine, and the dead; her (Eg.) is the top of the obelisk, the roof of the house. Cam is the name for the ancient earthen mounds and ridges which the khem (Eg.) as shrine of the dead (khema) identifies. The cam-ber, or roofstone over the dead, is our first form of the chamber. Camber is also an English name for a harbour. The Mericambers were harbours of the dead. The oldest chambers, cambers, shrines, are the cams, mere ridges, mounds, burrows, tumuli on the downs. The Egyptians made some of their cambers and sarcophagi of obsidian, that stone being named kamu. The greatest weight, of hugest size, of hardest stone, lifted to the fullest height, was the fittest embodiment of their type of Eternal, and this they expressed with tremendous toil in quarrying, hewing, and heaving heavenward their monuments, menhirs, mencambers, and piles vast as Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid.

This meaning of kam and khem will account for a place like Camelot, near South Cadbury Hill, in Somerset. As described by Drayton[82], it was a hill of a mile in compass at the top. Four deep trenches with the steepest of earthen walls enclosed about twenty acres of ground. Egyptian will tell us what for, in the name of Camelot. Kham is a shrine for the dead, and ret (lot) signifies to retain the form. The ret is also the ascent or steps. Camelot was the shrine in which the dead could best and longest be preserved. Cadbury tells the same tale. It is the bury, barrow, burial-place. Khat (Eg.) is the corpse, dead body. Khet means shut and sealed; Khat, the womb, personated by the goddess Kêd. One of the Men-Kambers is described as being a rock of infinite weight, laid roofwise on other great stones, so equally poised that a child could move it, but no man remove it[83]. This would be rocked in the Mysteries. Another enormous stone in Gower was calculated to have weighed thirty tons, erected as the primary type of permanence. Such was the longing for life to be continued, as may be read in the various types of permanence, when we can see through the symbol, whether this be the mummy type perfectly preserved, or thirty tons of millstone grit elevated and suspended, or only a shinbone split and painted red and buried in a mound of shells.

The immense flat stone was called Arthur's Table. The table of Egypt is the hept, the sign of peace, offering, plenty, welcome, sunset; the table of heaven and of the sun, heaped with food[84]. This was Arthur's Table, and Camelot, the lofty shrine of the dead, was but this table on a larger scale, round which the gods were figured sitting at the eternal feast.

[p.402] The stone monuments of Britain are none the less Druidic because their likeness is found in other lands. They are some of the scattered remains of the primitive cult, relating to the keeping of time (tem) and the preservation of the dead. They are the dumb witnesses to the human desire for continuity, which attained such profound and persistent expression in the Egyptian art of symbolizing the mummy as the type of self-continuity.

In England the grave was formerly called the pytte, and the same name was given to a well with an intermittent spring; over this well the enormous flat stone of Arthur was elevated and suspended as at Kefn Bryn in Gower, where a vast unwrought stone, from twenty to thirty tons in weight, was supported by six or seven others over a well which had a flux and reflux with the sea. Here the well and grave were one in the pytte, as they were in the Great Pyramid or the Mastebah of Egypt.

The interior of each tomb consisted of three parts, typical of the vault and void of the two heavens, and the middle earth or passage between the two, called by excavators the serdab. The void was the well containing the mummies in the underworld. The open chamber typified the upper world of the future life, where the deceased sat at the celestial feast surrounded by his friends in his eternal home. When the friends in the earth-life come to visit their dead and bring their offerings, these are representative of contributions to the feast; the life above being the reflex image of the life below. In the passage between, or the serdab, was placed the sepulchral image called the shabti or double, the type of transformation from the one life to the other. This had the same significance as the scarab emblem of Khepra, the beetle, that went underground to make his change, and to issue forth once more in the shape of his own seed. The serdab was the place of Sem-sem or the re-genesis, and the only communication between it and the rest of the tomb was a small hole scarcely large enough for the hand to pass through. This usually opened toward the north, like the entrance to the Great Pyramid. It was the place of egress from the womb, the mest of the mastebah, and has its analogue in the hole-stone of our far ruder and far older structures. Mariette describes the mastebah as a 'sort of truncated pyramid built of enormous stones and covering, as with a massive lid, the well at the bottom of which was the mummy.'[85]

Our primitive sepulchres were open to the passers-by, as were the Egyptian mastebahs, in which the friends of the deceased deposited their offerings or came at times to pray and hold their feasts of dead on the anniversary day. The mastebah was the chapel over the grave or pit, representing the underworld. It contained the table on which the contributions were deposited.

[p.403] In the case of Arthur's Stone, the slab was the table, and the large stones still bear evidence of the offerings that were made as well as the mode of offering.

At Bonnington Mains, near Ratho, there is a cromlech with cups, bowls, and basins in the capstone. The capstone is a reminder that the cap, roof, top, is the ben in Egyptian, the cap or roof of a monument. Benen (Eg.) is also a surname of the Horus of Resurrection. The benn is the phoenix, another type of re-arising. The cups were hollowed on the outside of the covering, the capstone, so that, if no longer filled by friendly hands, they would still catch the rain, a type of the water of life besought by the builders of these monuments uplifted towards heaven as their petrified prayer.

Arthur's Flat-stone laid over seven others with the well beneath corresponds to the most colossal mastebah of Egypt. For the Great Pyramid is an enormous mastebah, and it contains seven chambers with the deep well underground. The oldest form of the pyramid known in Egypt is found at Saqqara, which has seven steps like the Babylonian towers. In this form the seven steps correspond to the seven chambers of the Great Pyramid, which has the mystical number within instead of without. Arthur's Stone was supported on six or seven other stones. We may be sure the correct number was seven.

In the hieroglyphics the number seven is hept, and the same word signifies the table of offerings, the heap of food, the shrine, the ark, and peace. The earlier form of hept is Khept, the goddess of the Seven Stars, and it is here claimed that the Seven-Stone, or stone supported by seven, or the seven-tiered tower, the seven-stepped or seven-chambered pyramid, represents the birthplace personified by the genetrix who was Khept in Egypt and Kêd in Britain. From this it follows that the British mastebah is of an earlier type than the Great Pyramid of Giza or the more ancient pyramid of Saqqara. The number seven is also connected with the name of Arthur in the form of seven companions in an ark. One of the Druidic stones is known as the Seven-Stone. The monument in Llan Beudy parish, or the house of the ox (sign of the bull), shows that Arthur's Table was identified with 'Gwal y Vilast,' the couch of the greyhound bitch, that is, the couch or lying-in chamber of Kêd. In this place the flat-stone or table supported by other stones is only about two and a half feet high[86]. This then was a burial-place that represented a birthplace, the birthplace of the divine child Arthur, and abode of rebirth, variously called the Cell of Kêd, Maen Llog, Llogel Byd, Maen Ketti, the Ark-Stone, and the Stone of Keridwen, known today as representing the womb of the Great Mother[87].

The aft, couch and name of the goddess Aft or Fet, is repeated in the Cornish veth for the grave, and Gaelic fuadh, the bier.

[p.404] The khet or kat, seat of the mother and her child, became our cat-stone, often supposed to denote a place of battle. The cat-stone is the stone of Kêd, the genetrix, and marks the birthplace of her child, whether Sabean or solar. Cat, the French chat, is the Egyptian kat. This seat was the mount of the Great Bear in the earliest rime; afterwards it was turned into the bekh or birthplace in the rock of the horizon when the zodiac was formed.

The seat in Egyptian is the khet, with steps denoting an ascent, and the kat, a seat or throne. The latter is a conventionalised lioness, which was used as a palanquin or portable throne, with considerable likeness to Arthur's Seat. The seat is the feminine abode; the same words signify the womb, the seat, or kat of the child. Thus Arthur's Seat is synonymous with Arthur's Stone at Kevn Bryn or Arthur's Table, or Arthur's Quoit, as the symbol of the mother, who was the habitation (kat or hat) of the child. Hence the lioness or the lioness-shaped portable throne was a type of the bearer.

At the foot of Arthur's Seat lies Duddingstone. Tut (Eg.) is the throne, image, or region of the eternal. Tattu was the established region in this sense. And in Tattu was the rock, the Tser Hill, the Hebrew Tzer. Duddingstone may be named from the stone of establishing, the type of the eternal identified as Arthur's Seat.

Our word 'dole' is the same as the Egyptian ter. Dole is to divide or separate, portion, tell, mark out. The Dole-stone is a land­mark or bourne. Dole is to lay out and grieve. Ter (Eg.) is an extreme limit, boundary; ter, to indicate; ter, a quantity; ter, erect a limit; ter, a layer out, or mourner.

Men (Eg.) is a monument, a stone of memorial; men-a, death, or the dead; men-t, a bier; men, to arrive and rest. These sufficiently identify our dolmens as places of burial, but whereas the cromlechs may have been cemeteries, the dolmens seem to have been marked off as more especially individual tombs. The dolmen is, however, the same word as the Irish termon, and the Toda Dermane, a god's house or residence of gods. Inside the enclosure or Dermane there was a round tower called a boath, a kind of Pictish tower or conical temple. 'Round about the Boath,' says Marshall[88], 'there was a kromlech, and numerous stone kairns dotted about with the outlines of stone walls on a large scale surrounding all.' The Dermane was also named a gudi, i.e., temple. Kudi, in Sanskrit, is a house, and to curve round. Kudu or godu, in Toda, is to collect together; kattu (Tamil), build, bind, bond; ketui (Eg.), a building, a circle.

In Ireland a small piece of ground fenced off round the church was in some places called a termon. It was land belonging by sacred right to the church, and to this termon the criminal and other fugitives could flee for refuge, and were held in safety for a time when once within the prescribed boundary. The phrase 'termon lands' is [p.405] common in Anglo-Irish writings. The termon of course agrees with the Latin terminus, but that does not explain the right of refuge. The full significance of the termon lands and sacred boundary can alone be found in the fact that it was the dead who protected the living within their own domain, and that mena (Eg.), denotes the dead, and the ter (Eg.) is the limit, boundary, the word also meaning to hinder. The termon was the boundary-limit within which the dead were allowed to hinder the further pursuit of those who sought sanctuary from justice or from their foes. It was the dead who conferred a right of refuge, and formed an asylum of their sanctuary to the criminal or debtor who fled to them for protection from the living, and in this sense the precincts of Holyrood House were a termon-refuge for the debtor on Sunday. The termon is extant in Termon Castle, an ancient residence of the Magraths, also called 'Termon Magrath' in the 'Four Masters.' The Magraths were hereditary wardens of the termon, and in this we have another allusion to a termon, founded on the charge of the dead, the sanctuary of the dead and living, like that deduced from the name and customs of Caistor church. Dr. Joyce[89] says the termon in several places shows the former existence of a sanctuary. The O'Morgans were the wardens of Termonomorgan in the West of Tyrone. Mer (Eg.) is a superintendent, and the khen (Eg.), would signify the sanctuary of the dead. The termon suggests that the tors of Devon, the rock-towers, the natural round towers or Turagans, may have been early places of sepulchre.

Mis Tor is in Devon, and mes (Eg.) denotes the birth or rebirth of the dead in the meskhen and, it may be, in the Mes-Tor. Yes-Tor and Hessary-Tor (Devon) possibly represent a kes (Eg.) tor; this being a burial and embalmment, at which point the Kestor and Kester would meet, the tor being the natural mound and type of the later Kester, Castra, and castle, when the sanctuary and defence of the dead was turned into a place of defence and offence for the living.

Ketui, in Egyptian, is an orbit, circle, with determinative of house and plural sign. It is literally ketui-house built circularly, our 'Ket's Coity Houses,' khet meaning in Egyptian shut and sealed. The ketui is the gudi of the Todas, the enclosed temple and place of burial, exactly as our churches stand in an enclosure amongst the dead. The Toda enclosure was crowned and typified by the boath, the shape of which, as of the Picts' towers, is preserved in the extinguisher. This boath, God's house or residence of the gods, is the same word as the Assyrian bit, Hebrew beth, Scottish bothie, Egyptian paut and pauti, lastly put, the circle and the company of nine gods; the hieroglyphic being a circle three-fourths or nine-twelfths filled in. Some of the stones were called coits; this name is preserved in the quoit or ring. Ket's Koity House is the koity, colt, or quoit, as the circle of the goddess Kêd. This circle of the goddess Kêd was a reality in spite of the Arkite lunacy of Bryant, Faber, and Davies, [p.406] and had its physiological and astronomical prototypes[90]. Khet, in Egyptian, is the secret, intimate abode. Khat is the womb, the secret, intimate abode of the creative powers on the physiological plane of the myth, and in the astronomical or eschatological stage, the ark, the circle, called by the name of Kêd. Koity fairly represents the Egyptian ketui, the circle, orbit, or quadrangular caer. The circle ketui or coity was the same as the Kibno-Kêd, the kafn (Eg.), or oven, the baking-place of the mother of corn or bread, and of the 'Pair Keridwen' of the Barddas[91]. But, whereas the earliest type was the cave, a natural formation, the stone circles and enclosures had to be erected, and ketui (Eg.) means built. Raising the stone of the Ketti was one of the three mighty labours of Britain.

Our 'Ket's Koity' is Kêd's ketui. The Welsh gwaith (as in Gwaith Emrys) means work, labour, workmanship, identical with kauti (Eg.), work, labour, especially to carry and to build. Gwaith Emrys (Stonehenge) is thus an enormous koity-house of Kêd, the bearer. Also gwaith (Welsh) signifies the course, turn, or time, and this is the Egyptian ketui, an orbit, circle, or course of time, showing the relationship of the building to Time as well as to the dead. Excavations made in the neighbourhood of Ket's Koity House showed that it was a burial-ground full of sepulchral chambers in groups, each single group being generally surrounded by a circle of stones[92].

About five hundred yards from the particular stones called Ket's Koity House is another monument, named the Countless Stones, and there are indications that the stones in this neighbourhood were countless. Ket's Koity House is but a perverted form of Kêd's Koity Hows, the bows or circles of Kêd, the Great Mother. Even without the name of the goddess, the words khet, to be shut and sealed, ketui, a circle of stones, an orbit, still suffice to identify the hows as the enclosures of the dead.

Khent, in the hieroglyphics, is a garden, and the English Kent is still called the Garden of England. Kent is our south land, and khent is the name of an unknown part of Egypt, but it was obviously one with the south, the way of the inundation and source of fertility. Horus, as Lord of the South, is designated the Lord of Khent.

In the Annals of Rameses III, the king, in an address to Ammon, says, 'I made thee a grand house in the Land of Khent.'[93] This is mentioned as one of the four quarters along with the north, east, and west. The Grand House in the south erected by the Cymry appears to have been represented by 'Ket's Coity.'

Both in Egyptian and Welsh, Kêd or khet signifies the enclosure. And this is applied also to Emrys, as Gwath Emrys or the enclosure of Emrys, which is Stonehenge. The name of Emrys is yet extant