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8 - The Historical Conclusions
What are we now to conclude from the demonstration that the ritual language of the Old Religion was - and is still -Basque? I maintain that, if we accept the fact that the Old Religion, in its first fully defined form, was a product of Neolithic times, then it must have acquired its special language at the same period, when Basque was a spoken language covering a far greater area than it does today.
May one go as far with the theory of Basque's wider dissemination as to claim that the Basque-speaking area of Europe included Britain (or, at least, a part of Britain)? Or may one compromise by claiming that Britain was a Basque-speaking colony of the Basque 'empire'? In either case, there seems support for the theory that Basque is a Neolithic language; the language spoken in Britain before the arrival of the Celts (whose tongue displaced it in all but Old Religious circles; turning Basque from a spoken tongue to a ritual tongue).
Against that theory only one argument could be brought forward: that Basque arrived in Europe after the languages whose appearance on European soil we may date with a fair degree of accuracy - Celtic, Teutonic, Italic, Gothic and the later arrivals, Etruscan, Sicel and the Western Slav dialects such as Old Prussian, Sorb, Wendish as well as Magyar.
All these languages - Magyar and some other less enduring tongues entered Europe only during the present era - ringed the extreme West of Europe, so that, though access to, and exit from, what eventually became the 'Basque Country' was possible through its several good ports, it is hard to believe that Basque arrived in Europe later than, say, the earliest Celtic. As for the Indo-European Teutonic languages, the parent Teutonic exhibits the same phenomenon as does Welsh: that of a language originally non-Indo-European, upon which was imposed an Indo-European vocabulary.
The Teutonic system by which changes of meaning are contrived by alteration of the internal vowel or vowels - Umlaut - is so strikingly reminiscent of a similar device common to the Semitic family of languages that one might be forgiven for thinking that Common Germanic was. a formerly Semitic tongue on to which had been grafted an Aryan word-list. (A thought to make the supporters of 'race purity' ponder!)
In support of the theory that Basque, if not an autochthonous language, is at least one of the most primitive languages of Europe, in the sense of its being here before any of the existing others, is the fact that Basque, for all the plausible arguments of such scholars as W. von Humboldt, H. Schuchardt, R. Lafon, R. Menendez Pidal and E. Hubner, is still a language with no proven congeners. It is alone, not only in Europe, but, it seems, in the world. Schuchardt compiled a list of 'fundamental' words from Basque, and found parallels - he claimed -in Berber, Copto-Egyptian, Nubian, African Semitic, Cushite, Nilotic and Sudanese; altogether a total of 105 words, a list which included such basic words as 'go', 'give', 'take', 'do', 'come', 'good', 'new', 'cold', 'big', 'without', 'who?', 'sun', 'moon', 'man', 'woman', 'town', 'people', 'name', 'bread', 'meat', and so on. All 'fundamental', but not, as the choice of that adjective by Schuchardt would imply, indispensable.
No one denies the possibility of contact - and very close contact - among all the peoples of the Mediterranean; and even quite casual contact may impel a people to abandon a 'fundamental' word in favour of some linguistic novelty.
Take, for instance, the way that the Spanish word, hombre, has for all practical purposes displaced the corresponding English word amongst the English-speaking Americans on the Mexican border. Begun possibly in a joking manner, this use of 'hombre' for 'man' has now acquired the strength of habitual usage. And why did the Greeks suddenly drop their old word for 'king', anax, and adopt, from some as-yet-undiscovered source, the new word, Basileus?
Indeed, that Basque should have many words in common with the members of all the North African group of languages is not surprising, since modern opinion ever more inclines to credit the Basque with a North African origin - or, to be more precise, so credits the Basque language.
The other extremely ancient tongue of what we now call Spain is Iberian; a language which, though its texts remain undeciphered, seems to exhibit affinities with the Basque. That it was not identical with Basque is evident from the fact that, though the Iberian script may be read, it may still not be deciphered. Yet, as William J. Entwhistle says in his The Spanish Language, (1) 'In its vocabulary and structure [Iberian] probably resembled Basque closely, but the gap of a millennium between its documents and the earliest Basque texts prevents an accurate identification; it was used over a wide area of the central and eastern Peninsula [i.e. of Spain], and contributed at least place-names to the west and south.' That the Basque language was spoken over a very wide area in the past was recognised and recorded as a fact by the Romans, who followed the Carthaginians in considerably reducing the size of Basque-speaking territory.
The probability is that both Iberian and Basque - if, indeed, they were different languages and not merely two rather widely differing aspects of the same language, as Oscan and Latin in the past, or as Dutch and Danish, English and German, French and Italian, are today - arrived in the Spanish Peninsula from North Africa; at the beginning of our era the Straits of Gibraltar were only one-and-a-half miles across - swimming distance for a hardy North African.
Nor need the Basques have originated in North Africa, at a point close to the Straits; that may have been only a late stopping place on their way from an origin much farther to the east.
There appears to me to be a clue in the form of the name given to the Basques by outsiders - their own name for themselves Euskara (Uskara); the form of this name, 'Basque', nearest to the present territory of the Basques being 'Vasca'.
Now, a people considered to be either the descendants of the neolithic inhabitants of the Italian lake district, or one of the earliest immigrants to Italy, are the Ligurians, who, from their Italian 'centre', moved out, down the valley of the Po, and - according to some authorities - reached as far as Latium and Rome.
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[1] London: Faber & Faber, 1st edition, 1936.
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They migrated to Sardinia, Sicily, and had settled solidly in Gaul long before the arrival of the Celts. Whether or not the Ligurians were Indo-Europeans (or, at least, speakers of an Indo-European tongue) has been long and warmly debated: some of their words are obviously Indo-European, as are many of their place-names, but what would a scholar of the remote future make of the linguistic origins of English, if all that survived of the language were such words as tobacco, tomato, shekel, algebra, admiral, episode, etc.? 'So it has been affirmed with no less confidence that Ligurian is non-Indo-European (H. Krahe), and that the IE. character of some of the place-names is to be explained by the hypothesis that an IE. people superimposed itself at some stage on the neolithic population.' (2)
The archaeological researches into the prehistoric cultures of the Italian lake district reveals no trace of an invasion, and therefore no evidence that the Ligurians were an irrupting IE. people. Here archaeology supports the theory that the Ligurians were the descendants of the indigenous neolithic inhabitants of northern Italy.
One word-ending is so restricted to Ligurian that its occurrence is regarded as the proof of a former Ligurian settlement; this is the ending -asca, which is found in Italy, France, Switzerland and Spain. This termination is also found in river-names - Vinelasca, Tulelasca, Neviasca, etc.
What is important to note is that this is precisely the ending of the name applied to the Basque by their neighbours - and, on consideration, one sees the root in the actual name that the Basque use for themselves: esca-ldun, euska-ra. (Gascony of the Gascons exhibits the same root, -asca, so that it is clear that, either the Gascons were the same as the Basques or that Basques once held Gascony - and gave it its name.)
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[2] The Latin Language, op. cit.
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Were the Basques, then, originally Ligurians - a neolithic people from North Italy? Or were the Basques people who, on their long migration from North Africa, had been for some time in close contact with the Ligurians, sufficiently close to have learned to call themselves by a Ligurian-type name? - as a Teutonic tribe, the Alamanni, learnt to call themselves by an Arabic name. (3)
Whatever the answer to these questions, it must be apparent that the Basque arrival in Western Europe, if later than that of the earliest Ligurians, must have preceded, by perhaps more than a thousand years, the earliest of the Celtic irruptions into the same region.
There remains, in all justice to possibility, one hypothesis to be maintained: that, though it may be admitted that the Basque were settled in south-west Europe at a very early date, they need not have brought their Old Religion and Language to Britain until a date very much later. I do not support this theory, but I give it in fairness to the argument The Basques were - and are still - daring and competent sailors, who are believed to have fished regularly off the Great Banks long before Columbus set sail from Palos in 1492. If they arrived in Spain from Africa by sea, they could - I repeat that the theory holds that it was at a much later date - have followed the historical (pre-historical, in strict fact) 'Iberian' route around Spain and along the Biscay coast, and so to Britain, where they founded a colony, not necessarily before the Celts arrived.
Against this argument is the powerful one that, after the Celts arrived - the first wave possibly as early as 1800-1500 BC - non-Celtic invaders did not manage to gain a foothold in this desirable land until the Romans, but they only on the second attempt, and after a century of assessing the military situation, invaded Britain and succeeded in wresting control of the island from the Celts. I think that it would have been unlikely that a Basque colony would have been permitted by the Celts to establish itself in Britain; all the evidence tends to shew that the Basques - to have established themselves in Britain at all - must have been already in Britain when the first wave of Celts arrived.
There is one last possibility which should be mentioned: that the Old Religion, as developed, defined and 'codified' by the two forces of Druidism and the 'Basque-centred' Fertility Cult, was a product of established Celtic religious thought and Basque proselytising, following a contact which may not have needed to happen in Britain.
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[3] See page 153.
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When they broke into Europe and penetrated into almost every part of it - even modifying traditional Teutonic pro-nounciation as they made contact with the Germanic tribes -the Celts did what every invader, every immigrant does: follow the trails that necessity has driven earlier immigrants to follow. The Celts trod the paths into Europe that the Ligurians - and perhaps the Basques - had followed long before. As the Ligurians had already done, the Celts penetrated Europe by moving notably along the Rhone Basin, into the Franche-Comte, Switzerland, the Alpine regions, and settling, eventually, a great part of northern Italy, where they remained for a long period, 'taking breath', before moving south to Latium and Rome, and west along the northern Mediterranean seaboard and its hinterland. At some point in their long pilgrimage to the western outposts of the then known world, they encountered the Basques - perhaps in south-western Gaul (I use geographical names which were not then introduced), perhaps in Britain.
One important, one basic, fact would have made for a sympathetic meeting: the fact that the Celts, for all their military genius, for all the mechanical ingenuity shewn in their development of the wheeled vehicle's potential, with its extensive 'range of models', were primarily agriculturalists. As Dechelette has shewn, the Celts knew and used the sickle; indeed, so far as the metal sickle is concerned, they may well have invented it - the wooden (non-hooped) sickle, set with sharp blades of flint being known, of course, from the earliest Neolithic cultures.
With a people so dedicated to the soil, the Celts could have been dedicated to only one faith, the Fertility Cult; and, to this day, the surviving descendants of the Celts, whether in Scotland or Ireland, whether in Asia Minor or the Crimea, whether in Switzerland or North Italy, whether in France or Spain, are the people most linked with the soil - with agriculture, with horses (the Irish), cows and dairy produce (the Swiss, the French, the North Italian, the South German, the Irish). Seeing how tenacious of ancient ways of living are the descendants of the Celts, one may well understand how they have been equally tenacious of that early religion which centred about the production of good food from the good earth. The Roman Church has claimed the Irish Catholic as the most devout of all that Church's members, yet as late as the twelfth century, Giraldus Cambrensis was complaining of the prevalence in Northern Ireland of old, barbaric and 'obscene' customs, that all the priests' and monks' teaching and threats could not abolish.
One custom in particular filled the monkish historian with horror. The essential part of the 'coronation rite' of the Irish Kings of Donegal was the ritual coupling of the King-to-be with a rutting white mare; the candidate for royal honours being admitted to kingship only by satisfying priests and people of his worthiness not merely by going on all fours and achieving penetration of the mare, but also of encompassing an emission into the creature's vagina.
If the Irish could have remained as faithful to the Fertility Cult after some seven centuries of 'devout' Christianity, one may well imagine that even now their Roman Catholicism is not unmixed with the 'insurance' of a regard for the Power which causes mares to be in foal (for Derby and National winners), which causes butter to 'come', and which renders prolific and well-fleshed the family of 'the jintleman that pays the rint'.
Out of courtesy to those whose opinions are against the theory that Basque preceded Celtic as one language of Britain, I have given alternate theories, which - though I did not say so -might almost have included that which could hold that the Witches' ritual language was introduced here by those Basques who followed the Pope-given purple gonfanon of William the Conqueror. Or even that Basque had been introduced into British witchery when the persecutions of the Church had driven many Basques to seek refuge in less dangerous territory, as the Sephardic Jews had settled in Britain after their expulsion from Spain in 1492.
One might argue in favour of a relatively late introduction of 'ritual' Basque into Britain save for one - to me, decisive -piece of evidence that Basque/Ligurian settlement in Britain occurred at an early date: that is, evidence of the same type which assures pre-historians that the Ligurians settled in Italy, Switzerland, France, Spain, Sardinia and Sicily before the erruption of the Celts into western Europe. This is the evidence in Britain of Ligurian-type names: the -asca, -aksa (4) termination mentioned on page 184, to which may be added other names of Ligurian type, such as Entella, Eryx and Segesta.
Now, not only are names of these distinctive Ligurian types found in Britain; names which are now considered to be more Basque than Ligurian also appear.
To take the Ligurian names first, outstanding is the 'Celtic' Isca of both Isca Dummoniorum (Exeter) and Isca Silurum -'Isca' of the Dummonii and 'Isca' of the Silures.
Now I am well aware of the popular derivation of isca from one of the common Celtic words for 'water' (Modern Irish, uisce). But is isca a Celtic word? It looks, now that I come to think for myself, instead of unthinkingly accepting the too-often-heard and too-often-repeated dictum of the more traditional etymologists, remarkably like a Ligurian word. I used to think that Matlock - the name of the town - came to us from the Latin through the British (or Welsh), and was originally some such phrase as sedes metallicorum, 'headquarters of the miners'. But Matlock, in Roman and earlier and later times, was notable for its production of lead; and I note a town in north-east Spain once named Medubriga; a compound name, of which the first element is not Latin, but Basque - medu, 'lead' (the metal) - and the second, Celtic: 'Lead-town', or 'Leadsville'. The -briga ending occurs, of course, all over Britain, where such names as 'Stockbridge', 'Robertsbridge', etc. are very common, and in which the second element is almost always supposed (erroneously, I think), to be Anglo-Saxon.
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[4] Metathesis, the internal transposition of sounds in a syllable or of syllables in a word, is a phenomenon of speech-habits confined to no one language at no one time. It is a fruitful source of language change. Cf vulgar English 'articifer' for 'artificer', or 'ocifer' for 'officer'. It is particularly common in Spanish. A very early example is the contrast of Greek skeptomai, 'to view, to see' with Latin specie, 'to look, to behold', both from an IE. root, spak, whence Sanskrit spat• Thus in modern Basque, 'without, lacking' may be rendered indifferently as gabe or bage.
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In such names as Medubriga, we have the evidence of one culture's having imposed itself on another - or, maybe, more than one other - culture. 'It is supposed that the Iberians were invaders from Africa, racially akin to the Kabyle tribes of the Riff, who thrust north into the centre and east of the (Spanish) Peninsula, and hedged the Cantabro-Basques within their mountains.' (5) If this theory be correct, it pushes the immigration of the Basques into western Europe exceedingly far back in time.
The very evidence which indicates the former presence of Ligurian/Basque, Iberian and Celt in Spain and Southern France - the evidence of simple or compound place-names - is also available in Britain; notably, though not exclusively, in Cornwall.
I have already mentioned the significant occurrence of 'Ligurian' isca; other Cornish names with the evidential ask(a) or aks(a) element are, or seem to be, Axminster on the River Axe (obviously a variant of isca), Exmoor, Saltash and Ashcott, in which the original -sk- has been softened (as in modern Basque) to a 'shin' sound; Flax (Bourton), Boscastle, Liskeard, Portscatho, the last perhaps to be analysed 'Port-scatho'.
But the most significant of all these names is surely that of Askerswell, where the first element is not only Basque, but the Basques' own name for themselves: uskara or euskara.
The name, south of Exeter, of Alphington, is significant. Taking off the Anglo-Saxon termination, we have Basque alphor, 'vapour, mist, fog' - natural phenomenon or phenomena likely to impress those sailing up the River Exe for the first time.
To begin to seek the linguistic traces of the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Britain is to be forced to shed some received opinions. It is admitted - and admitted by me, also - that the first element of Hartland (Point) refers to the Greek divinity, Herakles; but what is so strange is that the name of a well-known cape on the Lleyn Promontory, that of Pwllheli, should not only be in Basque, but should be an exact translation of the Greek name of a cape famous in history.
I refer to Cape Marathon - marathon, meaning 'fennel' in Greek. But, in Basque, puhullu also means 'fennel', and the same name, in slightly different form, also occurs much farther south: Philleigh, on the northern extrusion of the St Mawes Peninsula, Cornwall.
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[5] The Spanish Language, op. cit.
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Cornish Marazion may well be Basque, from marro 'ram' (the animal) and zien, 'your' - 'the ram that you were seeking (was this the Golden Fleece? - and was Cornwall Colchis? [Basque kholco, 'a hidden pocket in the blouse; a secret receptacle']).
Certainly, it is hard to deny the derivation of Cornish Gorran-(Haven) from Basque gorri, 'red'. And surely we may see, despite the traditional etymologists, typical Basque words, such as berri, 'new', iri, or ili, 'town', ara, 'plain', in such 'typically English' names as Canterbury (the French spelling much closer to the original sound: Cantorbery); Cornish Modbury 'new lead (mine)'; the very common Lee and Leigh; Cornish Horrabridge. And so on.
To have established their names so tenaciously, so that all the invaders since - Celts, Teutons, Scandinavians, Normans, etc. - have been unable to efface the original names (some, of course, have been replaced) argues that the Ligurians, the Iberians and the Cantabro-Basques arrived in Britain before either the Celts or the Greeks. And if that is so, the Basques (or whatever name we care to give to the pre-Celtic Neolithic inhabitants of Britain) cannot have come here as missionaries, but as ordinary immigrants, looking for metals and other precious things, and staying on to settle down as tenant agriculturalists.
