The figures beneath each entry give reference numbers for the Bibliography
See also GREAT BRITAIN.
# 562: Carthaginian trade with Britain, broken down by the Greeks. Celtic element in Britain. Magic indigenous in Britain. Votive inscriptions to Æsus, Teutates, and Taranus found in Britain; dead carried from Gaul to Britain; Ingsel, son of King of Britain. Visit of Demetrius. Bran, King of Britain; Caradawc rules over in his father's name. Caswallan conquers Britain. The 'Third Fatal Disclosure' in Britain.
# 156: The realm ruled by Arthur. The island derives its name from the Priteni, the term the Picts used for themselves. The Roman province of Britain did not include Scotland (except for the Lowlands) though, in legend, Arthur, seen as the Romans' successor, ruled the entire island. - Legendary historians claimed the country was first ruled by Albion, a giant. The career of Albion delineated in Holinshed's CHRONICLES (1577). Geoffrey does not mention him, but says the giants predated men there. Subsequently, he says, the island was colonized by Brutus, a descendant of Aeneas, and remained independent until Roman times. Another tradition is found in the WHITE BOOK OF RHYDDERCH (fourteenth century). This says the country was first called Myrddin's (Merlin's) Precinct, then the Isle of Honey and finally named Prydein (Britain) after its conquest by Prydein, son of Aedd. Geoffrey does not mention this tradition, but it may predate him. Aedd may be identical with the Irish sun god, Aedh. It was also said that Prydein came from Cornwall and conquered Britain after the death of Porrex, one of the successors of Brutus in Geoffrey. Geoffrey may have known of traditions concerning Prydein, but may have felt they contradicted his story about Britain deriving its name from Brutus. Irish tradition said that Britain derived its name from Britain, son of Nemedius, who settled there.
Ordinary history tells us little about Britain before Roman times. Archaeology informs us that, before 2800 BC, the inhabitants were Neolithic farmers referred to as the Windmill Hill People. Then came the Beaker People who used copper and gold. These people may have been Celts. At some stage Celts able to use iron became the foremost people of the island, but it is difficult to say when they were actually established. The problem is discussed by M. Dillon and N. K. Chadwick. Julius Caesar landed on the island a couple of times but the Roman conquest actually took place in the reign of Claudius. Britain was eventually abandoned by the Romans and left to fend for herself against Picts from the north, Irish from the west and Angles, Saxons and Jutes from beyond the North Sea. The period of the historical Arthur would have been after this. # 687:It is typical of the Roman Period that it is the only one which is precisely timed as to its beginning and ending. They came in 43 and they left in 476. After that we are landed in a sort of no-man's time in which the Celtic elements in Roman Britain come to the fore again and instead of combining to hold the forts of the Saxon Shore they follow the old game of local emulation. The P. Celts (Welshspeaking) of the Forth-Clyde region descend on the Q. Celts (Irishspeaking) who are settled on the western seabord, including the Isle of Anglesey. While the slaughter is going on between tribe and tribe, which had been good neighbours under the Roman rule, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes are making almost unopposed landings in the Humber, the Wash, the Thames, and on the Isle of Thanet. This period (because it is temporarily obscure to the archaeologist) is given the name Dark Ages, which is a little unfair to people like King Arthur and his fellowship of the Round Table, and even more to the many shining lights who were saints in the Celtic Church. The monuments of this time are principally earthworks and inscribed monoliths. Among the former perhaps the most typical are Wansdyke and Offa's Dyke. The former lies east and west and was actually built on top of a good Roman road. Some fine sections of it remain on the downs near Tan Hill, south-west of Marlborough. The ditch of Wansdyke is on the northern side of the rampart, so it was presumably built by a tribal group lying southward of it, but who they were and why they needed such a colossal earthwork, sixty miles long, is one of the mysteries of the Dark Ages. On the other hand, Offa's Dyke is a comparatively well dokumented affair. It was built by Offa king of Mercia (eighth century) along the western boundary of his kingdom, which rested on the marches of Wales. It superseded (very advantageously for the Saxons) an earlier work of exactly similar type called Watt's Dyke, of which large fragments still remain. Although Offa's Dyke was only built as the western boundary of one of the seven Saxon kingdoms it remained the official boundary between England and Wales for centuries.
One of the best views that can be had of it is at the little village of Mainstone in Montgomeryshire. Although the Vikings were destructive in the matter of churh property when they first raided Saxon England, the Celtic Isle of Man, and Ireland, on conversion to Christianity they took particularly kindly to the cult of the high cross. They introduced new interlaced patterns in the design of it, and added to the usual Gospel series picturesque scenes from the old Norse sagas and fairy tales. The best example of this type of cross is to be seen in the Isle of Man, which was wholly under Viking sway until the thirteenth century. In the west of Scotland there was a strong and very beautiful development, notably at Iona. But in the east of that kingdom, in the old land of the Picts, a type of decorated memorial stone is found which is in a class by itself.
The 'symbol stone,' as it is called, is a plain, undressed monolith like the old inscribed stones of Wales, but, unlike them, it bears no clue to its date. It is, however, a very early and highly conventionalised and expertly carved with symbols and it is odd that no more attention has been drawn to this remarkable work of art. From the Celtic Church, in which monasticism of a certain type (similar to that practised by the Coptic Church in Egypt) was such a strong feature, nothing monumental has remained to us except what has been discovered on the headland of Tintagel. Here an ancient religious settlement which may go back to the sixth or even the fifth century was unearthed back in 1935. Of monasteries of the Roman orders belonging to the Dark Ages, the best relic is that built by the Venerable Bede at Jarrow. It remains with its nearly perfect Saxon church in a secluded and peaceful precinct beside the Tyne, in spite of its neighbourhood of industrialism and industrial depression. The Norman period could have been a 'new Roman' in Britain, but there was a curious Fait Manqu‚ about the Scandinavians. They had the opportunity of forming an empire which would have bid fair to replace the fallen one of Rome, but they never seem to have given such an idea a moment's thought. They conquered parts of Gaul, Italy, Sicily, England, and secured the whole of Iceland. It is more than likely, too, that they planted a strong colony in Greenland, from where they went as far as across the North Atlantic to the 'Vineland', the eastern coast of America. Yet each conquering band kept its own territory, and as there were no ties of confederacy with a mother land, the claims of kinship were not kept up. But the Normans had learnt one thing from the Roman Empire in their attacks on its towns, namely that stone buildings withstand fire, and that was an invaluable lesson for any conqueror to learn, especially if he intended to make and hold his conquest by the church as well as with the castle. And after the Norman period we are leaving the ancient time of Britain and with that no more within our purview.
# 156 - 187 - 243 - 562 - 687
The mysteries of Britain are both large and small. In some cases, they are so large as to be almost invisible to the human eye, and may only be seen to advantage from an aeroplane - as for example in the case of the huge hill-figures cut through turf into the chalk below, which have become more accessible only since flight became possible at the beginning of our century. In other cases, the mysteries are so small as to be easily missed by those who have little time to stand and stare. The Christian fish symbol high on the walls of Glastonbury Abbey, and where the design suggest that it was incised there in the fourteenth century, may be passed by unnoticed even by one who has gone to the place to steep himself in the more famous legends of King Arthur, or the sacred well, or the story of Joseph of Arimathaea. Even if it is not possible to study them from the air, the larger mysteries must be visited, if only to savour the atmosphere around them. Stonehenge in Wiltshire is a good example of such a 'must', for something of the occult power of the place may still be felt among its stones, even though much of its sacred character has been damaged in modern times by the nearby buildings, sentry posts, and the awful underpass constructed by English Heritage. The 'Carles' circle at Castlerigg in Cumbria is another such site, and here the mysterious forces work more freely, being less impeded by insensitive officialdom.
But perhaps the most spiritually-charged of all the ancient stone circles is that at Callanish, on the island of Lewis, which, until comparatively modern times, was protected beneath many feet of boggy peat and has now been revealed as a stellar computer, on much the same line as Stonehenge to the south. The largest of the stone circle complexes is at Avebury - a site which contains the vast man-made mound of Silbury Hill, the largest of such mounds in Europe - and though a village has been built into the middle of the stones (making use, indeed, of fragments of broken menhirs for house-building), this circle still retains that distinctive feeling of magic which proclaims it as a living wonder in our age. The ancient circles, and the complex of stone outliers and mounds which serves them, are not the largest of the mysteries of Britain, however. By far the biggest (if it is indeed a genuine thing, and not just a figment of the human imagination) is the so-called Glastonbury Zodiac, which some authorities claim to trace in the landscape around the village of Butleigh, in a vast circle with a diameter of just over nine miles. Like the white horses which are found in the most outlandish and surprising places in Britain, such as Kilburn, Uffington and Westbury, the Glastonbury Zodiac may be seen to advantage only from the air - though of course many attempts have been made to map out the figures traced within its vast circumference in diagrammatic form. One wonders, indeed, how the people of ancient times saw these circles, hill-figures and earth-zodiacs which they built, for it is only occultists, and not historians, who insist that the people of old had access to a special form of flying machine. Perhaps the smallest British wonder (though it is really a Romano-British artefact) related to the stone circles and earth-zodiacs, is the Mithraic zodiac now preserved in the Museum of London. Although size is often one of the factors which play a part in revealing a thing as a wonder, or even as a mystery, size itself is not always important. There are other mysteries in Britain which are not as large as Stonehenge, Castlerigg, Callanish or Avebury, and are often small enough to be held in the palm of the hand, or preserved in display cases or in churches, as a part of the ornamentation.
The simple truth is that the glory of Britain's history is recorded in our churches. Not only does almost every monument tell a story about some detail of British history, but, more often than not, such memorials contain symbols which reveal secret and occult notions belonging to the past rather than to the present, and are therefore mysteries to the modern mind. Such are the curious pigs on a tomb in Hereford Cathedral, the lovely woman and child lying on a pillow of a lion at Scarcliffe, or the curiously carved chair at Sprotbrough, which gave respite to criminals in a past age. The charnel case of skulls and bones in the monument to the wives of Sir Gervase at Clifton is also of a similar mysterious symbolism, even if its meaning is all too obvious. The carving reminds us that such charnel pits were once part and parcel of the British heritage, as old prints of crypts reveal. Yet its survival in an English church is perhaps just as remarkable as the survival of the dozen or so sculptures of skeletal effigies and cadavers intended as models of those buried below, as, for example, in Worsbrough or Hatfield. Within the churches of Britain we find emblems of life, as well as of death. What, for example, can be more life-enhancing than the legends of the Grail, and of that armoured superman of the past, King Arthur, who has done so much to mould our image of British history and destiny? The round table of Arthur at Mayburgh - perhaps confused with the old circle at Eamont Bridge nearby - the death-place of the King at Dozmary Pool on Bodmin Moor, and the secret place of Glastonbury itself, where monkish cunning claimed the King was buried, are all well-known sites for those interested in Arthurian legends. Yet perhaps the most impressive of the esoteric collections linked with Arthurian mythology is in the church of St James, in Kilkhampton, Devon. The dedication to James, the patron saint of pilgrims, is said to arise from the fact that the village was once on the famous pilgrimage route from St David's in the far east of Wales to Compostela in Spain. In the stained glass of this lovely church we find what is undoubtedly the most impressive image in Britain of Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph, who holds the flowering thorn and the Holy Grail, is supposed to have brought the latter from Jerusalem to England and buried it under the Tor at Glastonbury. In the same stained glass of the east windows is an image of Arthur himself, in the romantic guise of a medieval knight. Among the fascinating bench-ends still in use within the church is a carving of a cup, which some take to represent a chalice and which others maintain is an image of the Holy Grail itself - as is the one carried by Joseph in the stained glass image. Kilkhampton reminds, perhaps more than any other church, of the way in which certain places seem to attract secret symbols, almost as though such symbols need to seek out a home where thay may be preserved. Why have so many symbols of British mythology and esoteric thought found their way into one single church? It is easy to explain why so many esoteric symbols - of the ouroboros time-serpent, of the green man, of zodiacal images, and so on - should be found at Kilpeck church as they are the work of one man. But time and time again one finds certain places attract many mysteries from different ages and sources. This is indeed one of the mysteries of Britain itself. The mysteries are found in the strangest of places, in sites as remote as the Hebridean islands, as accessible as the city of London, in museums, hillsides and in churches - the very places where one might expect miracles, but not mysteries. Indeed, the very number of British mysteries is almost a wonder in itself. Why have these islands been singled out as the repository for such a welter of mysterious remains? Was there something special in the British earth that the ancients should build so many stone circles, of which almost 500 still survive? Or is it true that Britain is itself a fragmented survival of the fabled continent of Atlantis, which sank beneath the waves of the Atlantic thousands of years ago? Whatever the reasons, there are so many centres in Britain where the mind is almost numbed by the weight of mythology and mystery associated with them that one is hardpressed to visit them all in the space of one lifetime. The vastly differing histories of the countries which make up Britain have resulted in memorials and mementoes with almost regional characters. For example, the growth of witchcraft in Scotland - especially under the reign of James VI (later James I of England) - was far more pervasive than in England. This has resulted in popular witchcraft stories being linked with many Scottish villages, towns and kirks, and even in the survival of many Scottish witchcraft stones which mark places where victims of the witch-craze met their deaths. One of the most famous is the witch-stone at Spott, set into a hillside dominated by a prehistoric defensive castle which was also associated later with witch-burnings. Another is at Forres, not far from where Macbeth is supposed to have lived, while an equally well-known memorial stone is in Dornoch, marking the last place in Scotland where a witch was burned. The author, Charles Walker, wonder if there is a single stone circle or menhir in Scotland which does not have its own witchcraft story or diabolical mythology. Where curious Scottish stones are not associated with the Devil or witchcraft, then, more often than not, they are linked with the ancient giants who (as some claim) swarmed to the mountainous land from the sinking Atlantis. Such giants are supposed to have built many of the Scottish stone circles, and, since the hero Fiann was of the gigantic race, they also built the basaltic island of Staffa. Sir Joseph Banks, who 'discovered' the island for the modern world in 1772, wrote that it is to be 'reckoned one of the greatest natural curiosities in the world.' There is little of the dark northern witchcraft in Wales, and the legends are mainly about heroes of battle, of song-making and of magic.
More often than not, the legends and mysteries point to the delicate realm of faery, to the Celtic underworld, where dragons lived alongside men and sometimes had to be slaughtered in order to rescue princesses. In Wales, even today, one walks among the archetypes, and the mythological stories are impressed into the natural landscape of such wonders as Pistyll Rhaeadr, rather than into man-made objects and buildings. Among the mysterious wonders of Wales are the chambered tombs - now so often stripped of their earth covering and revealed as so many gaunt bones of stone, petrified in some delicate balancing act, as at Pentre Ifan. If one spends time studying the British mysteries, one gradually becomes aware of the exrent to which the calendar plays an important part in the secrets hidden behind their forms and symbols. In modern times, expert archaeologists have revealed that the huge stone circles of Stonehenge, Avebury and Callanish were used as complex (if primitive) calendrical machines for determining the cycles of the years in terms of eclipses, sun-settings, sun-risings, and similar lunar points - all phenomena of great importance to the rituals practised by the ancients. Additionally, many of the strange and mysterious customs which have survived, in a more or less garbled form, into modern times are also linked with the symbolism of the calendar - with the zodiacal points, with the four directions of space, with the solstices and the equinoxes, and the sequence of the zodiac. For this reason, if we wish to reach a little more deeply into the mysteries of Britain, it will be as well for us to glance at one or two of the calendrical traditions. When looked at from the point of view of mythology, the British calendar is revealed as a complex thing; some of the events it marks are derived from our first Christian civilizers those Romans who came as soldiers and stayed as monks - and some are distinctly pagan, being even older than the first recorded history of our land. The moment one begins to relate places, architectural forms and mythologies to the calendar, one is faced with the lore of astrology, which attempts to relate man to the cosmos and to the earth. It is the traditions attached to astrology, in regard to the pictorial imagery revealing the passing of the seasons, or the movement of the sun against the zodiacal belt, and the relationship these were believed to hold to the human being, which account for many of the secret symbols in the British Isles. It would be impossible to treat of all these mysteries from this astrological point of view, yet it will be instructive if we examine just one - the zodiacal font at Hook Norton, which is one of the lesser mysteries of the British Isles. Why should one find a figure of a horse-man archer on a font? What is the relationship between a figure of the constellation, or zodiacal sign Sagittarius, and Christianity - what has it to do with baptism, for which the font is used? In the astrological tradition there is a standard figure called 'the zodiacal man' - an image which was introduced to the west with the new astrology of the eleventh century. This figure portrays man with the twelve signs of the zodiac associated with the different part of the body. The rulership was intended to portray both the inner and outer forms of the connexion between the zodiac and the human body. For example, Aries the Ram had rule over the human head, but it also had rule over what went on inside the head - namely, thinking - just as the sign Leo had rule over the heart, and also over the inner activity of the heart, which was feeling. Sagittarius had rule over the thigh, but its inner activity was not as obvious as with Aries and Leo. Tradition insisted that it was the movement of the thigh which permitted man to walk as an erect being: thus, the thigh represented the inner power of movement, and by extension all movement connected with human aspiration. Since the greatest aspirations were always ideals, and linked with the wish to learn more - in medieval terms, to move out more closely to God - Sagittarius was soon linked with education and with the church, or religious life. By this reasoning, when we find on a medieval font the image of Sagittarius, we can be sure that it is a symbolic reference to the idea that the child who is to be baptised at this font is being protected by the image, is being vouchsaved a good education, within the framework of the religious life. It is not surprising that on the same Hook Norton font we should find images of Adam and Eve next to the horse-archer, for they represent the innocence of childhood, while the horseman represents the educational guide who will protect the innocent child and teach him the way of Christ as he grows into the world, away from the Garden of Eden which is the childhood state. The symbolism of the Hook Norton font is, indeed, a good example of how easily one may miss the hidden meaning of a symbol if one is not prepared to consider what the ancient sculptors and symbol-makers believed themselves. The font should remind us that the mysteries of Britain may not always be grasped at first glance, yet if one pays enough attention to them they will always speak, and reveal at least something of their inner content. To hear their voices, however, one must visit them and be prepared to seek, behind the familiar appearances of their symbols, the hidden meanings which men of old considered a necessary part of their art, and which contribute so wonderfully to make Britain such a place of mystery.
# 702
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