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“Scarce stand the vessels hauled upon the beach,

And bent on marriages the young men vie

To till new settlements, while I to each

Due law dispense and dwelling place supply,

When from a tainted quarter of the sky

Rank vapours, gathering, on my comrades seize,

And a foul pestilence creeps down from high.”

—Virgil, The Æneid.

The British Chronicles relate that when Brute and his companions reached these shores the island was then uninhabited, save only for a few giants. Seemingly these natives did not oppose the Trojan landing, for the story runs that “Nought gave Corineus (Brute’s second-in-command) greater pleasure than to wrestle with the giants of whom there was a greater plenty in Cornwall than elsewhere”. On a certain day, however, the existing relations ceased, owing to an obnoxious native named Goemagog, who, accompanied by a score of companions, interrupted a sacred function which the Trojans were holding. From the recommendations of the pious Æneas, it would seem that the Trojans had suffered similarly in other directions:—

When thy vessels, ranged upon her shore,

Rest from the deep, and on the beach ye light

The votive altars, and the gods adore,

Veil then thy locks, with purple hood bedight,

And shroud thy visage from a foeman’s sight,

Lest hostile presence, ’mid the flames divine,

Break in, and mar the omen and the rite.

This pious use keep sacred, thou and thine,

The sons of sons unborn, and all the Trojan line.[193]

The graceless Goemagog and his ruffianly crew did passing cruel slaughter on the British, howbeit at the last the Britons, rallying from all quarters, prevailed against them and slew all save only Goemagog. Him, Brute had ordered to be kept alive as he was minded to see a wrestling bout betwixt him and Corineus, “who was beyond measure keen to match himself against such a monster”. Corineus, all agog and o’erjoyed at the sporting prospect, girded himself for the encounter, and flinging away his arms challenged Goemagog to a bout at wrestling. After “making the very air quake with their breathless gaspings,” the match ended by Goemagog being lifted bodily into the air, carried to the edge of the cliff, and heaved over.[194]

One cannot read Homer without realising that this alleged incident was in closest accord with the habits and probabilities of the time. Alike among the Greeks and the Trojans wrestling was as popular and soul-absorbing a pastime as it is to-day, or was until yesterday, among Cornishmen:—

Tired out we seek the little town, and run

The sterns ashore and anchor in the bay,

Saved beyond hope and glad the land is won,

And lustral rites, with blazing altars, pay

To Jove, and make the shores of Actium gay

With Ilian games, as, like our sires, we strip

And oil our sinews for the wrestler’s play,

Proud, thus escaping from the foeman’s grip,

Past all the Argive towns, through swarming Greeks, to slip.[195]

The untoward Goemagog was probably one of an elementary big-boned tribe whose divinities were Gog and Magog, and there are distinct traces, at any rate, of Magog in Ireland. According to De Jubainville, “the various races that have successively inhabited Ireland trace themselves back to common ancestors descended from Magog or Gomer, son of Japhet, so that the Irish genealogy traditions are in perfect harmony with those of the Bible”.[196]

The figures of Gog and Magog used until recently to be cut into the slope of Plymouth Hoe: in Cambridgeshire, are the Gogmagog hills; at the extremity of Land’s End are two rocks known respectively as Gog and Magog, and there is an unfavourable allusion to the same twain in Revelation.[197] Gog and Magog are the “protectors” of London, and at civic festivals their images used with pomp and circumstance to be paraded through the City.

In some parts of Europe the civic giants were represented as being eight in number, and the Christian Clergy inherited with their office the incongruous duty of keeping them in good order. One of these ceremonials is described by an eye-witness writing in 1809, who tells us that in Valencia no procession of however little importance took place, without being preceded by eight statues of giants of a prodigious height. “Four of them represented the four quarters of the world, and the other four their husbands. Their heads were made of paste-board, and of an enormous size, frizzled and dressed in the fashion. Men, covered with drapery falling on the ground, carried them at the head of the procession, making them dance, jump, bow, turn, and twist about. The people paid more attention to these gesticulations than to the religious ceremony which followed them. The existence of the giants was deemed of sufficient importance to require attention as to the means of perpetuating them; consequently there was a considerable foundation in Valencia for their support. They had a house belonging to them where they were deposited. Two benefices were particularly founded in honour of them; and it was the duty of the Ecclesiastics who possessed these benefices to take care of them and of their ornaments, particular revenues being assigned for the expense of their toilettes.”[198]

Four pairs of elemental gods were similarly worshipped in Egypt, each pair male and female, and these eight primeval Beings were known as the Ogdoad or Octet. In Scotland, the Earth Goddess who is said to have existed “from the long eternity of the world,” is sometimes described as being the chief of eight “big old women,” at other times as “a great big old wife,” and with this untoward Hag we may equate the English “Awd Goggie” who was supposed to guard orchards.

The London figures of Gog and Magog—constructed of wicker work—had movable eyes which, to the great joy of the populace, were caused to roll or goggle as the images were perambulated. Skeat thinks the word gog is “of imitative origin,” but it is more likely that goggle was originally Gog oeuil or Gog Eye. The Irish and Gaelic for Goggle-eyed is gogshuileach, which the authorities refer to gog, “to move slightly” and suil, “an eye”.

At Gigglewick or Giggles-fort in Yorkshire (anciently Deira), there is a celebrated well of which the famed peculiarity is its eightfold flow, and it was of this Giggle Well that Drayton wrote in Polyolbion:—

At Giggleswick where I a fountain can you show,

That eight times a day is said to ebb and flow.

In Cornwall at St. Isseys there used to be a sacred fountain known as St. Giggy’s Well, and as every stream and fount was the supposed home of jinns or genii it is possible that “Saint Giggy” may be equated with igigi, a word meaning in Babylonian mythology “the spirits of Heaven”. Jinn or Genie may also be connoted with a well near Launceston known as Joan’s Pitcher, the pitcher or vase whence the living waters were poured being a constantly recurring emblem of Mother Nature. It will be noticed in Fig. 25, p. 142, and in Fig. 256, p. 428.

The French have an expression a gogo (“origin unknown”) which means at one’s ease, or in clover; in old French gogue (“origin unknown”) meant pleasantry or fun, and goguenard a funmaker, or a jester. All these and kindred terms are probably correlate to the jovial Gogmagog carnivals and festivals. In London the house of Gog and Magog is the Guildhall in Aldermanbury: if born within the sound of the bells of the neighbouring St. Mary-le-Bow a Londoner is entitled to be termed a cockney; Cockayne is an old and romantic term for London, and it would therefore seem likely that among the cluster of detached duns which have now coalesced into London, the followers of Gog and Magog had a powerful and perhaps aboriginal footing. Around Londonderry in Ireland are the memories of a giant Gig na Gog, and at Launceston in Cornwall there used to be held a so-called Giglot Fair. At this a gogo festival every wench was at liberty to bestow the eye of favour, ogle, or look gougou, on any swain she fancied: whence obviously the whole village was agog, or full of eagerness, and much ogling, giggling, goggling, and gougounarderie.

In Cornwall googou means a cave, den, souterrain, or “giants holt,” and there are several reasons to suppose that the Gogmagogei or gougouites were troglodytes. “Son of Man,” said Ezekiel, “set thy face against Gog the Land of Magog,” and to judge from similar references, it would seem that the followers of Gogmagog were ill-favoured and unloved. Sir John Maundeville (1322) mentions in his Travels, that in the Land of Cathay towards Bucharia, and Upper India, the Jews of ten lineages “who are called Gog and Magog” were penned up in some mountains called Uber. This name Uber we shall show is probably the same as obr, whence the Generic term Hebrew, and it is said by Maundeville that between those mountains of Uber were enclosed twenty-two kings, with their people, that dwelt between the mountains of Scythia.[199] Josephus mentions that the Scythians were called Magogoei by the Greeks: by some authorities the Scythians are equated with the Scotti or Scots. There are still living in Cornwall the presumed descendants of what have been termed the “bedrock” race, and these people still exhibit in their physiognomies the traces of Oriental or Mongoloid blood. The early passage tombs of Japan are, according to Borlase, (W. C.), literally counterparts in plan and construction of those giant-graves or passage-tombs which are prevalent in Cornwall, and, speaking of the inhabitants of Cornwall and Wales, Dr. Beddoe says: “I think some reason can be shown for suspecting the existence of traces of some Mongoloid race in the modern population of Wales and the West of England. The most notable indication is the oblique or Chinese eye. I have noted thirty-four persons with oblique eyes. Their heads include a wide range of relative breadth. In other points the type stands out distinctly. The cheek bones are almost always broad: the brows oblique, in the same direction as the eyes; the chin as a rule narrow and angular; the nose often concave and flat, seldom arched; and the mouth rather inclined to be prominent.... The iris is usually hazel or brown, and the hair straight, dark-brown, black, or reddish.” “It is,” he adds, “especially in Cornwall that this type is common.”

Our British Giants, Gog, Magog, Termagol, and the rest of the terrible tribe, sprang, according to Scottish myth, from the thirty-three daughters of Diocletian, a King of Syria, or Tyria. These thirty-three primeval women drifted in a ship to Britain, then uninhabited, where they lived in solitude, until an order of demons becoming enamoured of them, took them to wife and begot a race of giants. Anthropology and tradition thus alike refer the Magogoei to Syria, or Phœnicia, and there would seem to be numerous indications that between these people and the ethereal, romantic, and artistic Cretans there existed a racial, integral, antipathy.

The Gogonians may be connoted with the troglodyte Ciconians, or Cyclops, to whom Homer so frequently and unfavourably alludes, and the one-eyed Polyphemus of Homer is obviously one and the same with Balor, the one-eyed giant of Tory Isle in Ireland. This Balor or Conann the Great, as he is sometimes termed, was cock-eyed, one terrible eye facing front, the other situated in the back of his head facing to the rear. To this day the fateful eye of Balor is the Evil Eye in Ireland, whence anyone is liable to be o’erwished. Ordinarily the dreadful optic was close shut, but at times his followers raised the eyelid with an iron hook, whereupon the glance of Baler’s eye blasted everything and everybody upon whom it fell. On one occasion the fateful eye of Balor is said to have overflowed with water, causing a disastrous flood; whence, perhaps, why a watery eye is termed a “Balory” or “Bleary eye”. That Balor was Gog may be inferred from Belerium or Bolerium, being the name applied by Ptolemy to the Land’s End district where still stand the rocks called Gog and Magog. That Balor was Polyphemus, the Cyclopean Ciconian, is probable from the fact that he was blinded by a spear driven into his ill-omened eyeball, precisely as Polyphemus was blinded by a blazing stake from Ulysses. Did the unlettered peasantry of Tory Isle derive this tale from Homer, or did Homer get the story from Ogygia, a supposedly ancient name for Erin? Not only is there an identity between the myth of Balor and Polyphemus, but, further—to quote D’arbois de Jubainville—“As fortune strangely has it the Irish name Balor has preserved its identity with Belleros, whom the poems of Homer and Hesiod and many other Greek writers have handed down to us in the compound Bellero-phontes, ‘slayer of Belleros’”.[200]

The author of The Odyssey describes the Ciconians as a race endued with superior powers, but as troubling their neighbours with frequent wrongs:—