The Phœnician origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons : discovered by Phœnician & Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, by preroman Briton coins & a mass of new history : with over one hundred illustrations and maps
272 PHGENICIAN ORIGIN OF BRITONS & SCOTS
sacred ‘‘ Perpetual Fires,’ thus generated, still exist in Britain in some of our churches—in Cornwall, Dorset and York—in the so-called ‘‘ Cresset-stones,’’ some of which are placed in lamp niches furnished with flues, as pointed out by Dr. Baring Gould, who remarks that in the early centuries of our era, on the introduction of Christianity, ‘‘ the Church was converted into the sacred depository of the Perpetual Fire.” And as showing conclusively that the ‘“ NeedFires’ lit in Bel-Fire fashion by the friction of the two tinder sticks were pagan, their lighting was expressly forbidden by the Church in the eighth century; and the Church “ New-Fire”’ was transferred to Easter Day, to adapt it to the re-arranged Christian dates, and was obtained by striking flint and steel. ‘‘ But the people in their adversity went back to their old time-honoured way of preparing their sacred fire by wood-friction in the pagan (Bel) fashion.”? And it is significant to notice that St. Kentigern or St. Mungo (about 550 A.D.), the patron saint of Glasgow and bishop of Strath-Clyde down to the Severn, and whose many churches still bear his name in Wales and Cornwall, is recorded to have produced his sacred fire-offering by friction with two sticks. These medieval British doubtless derived their knowledge of generating this sacred fire from the ancestral descendants of the Phcenician Part-olon and Brutus and his predecessor Barats, just as the Phcenicians had generated their Perpetual Fire in the temple of Hercules at Gades (Cadiz), the penalty for extinguishing which was death.*
The truly solar character of the proper Bel-Fire festival of the Aryans to whom animal sacrifice was abhorrent, is seen not only from its date being at the Summer solstice, but also from the use at that festival of a wheel symbolizing the Sun, which they rolled about to signify the apparent movement of the Sun, and that the latter is then occupying its highest point in the zodiac and is about to descend; and, significantly, this Wheel is also rolled about at Yuletide, the old pagan. Fire-Festival at the shortest day, 7.e., the Winter solstice. 4
1 Strange Survivals, 120. 2 1b., 122. SGrAUR 7. * Durandus on Feast of St. John, H.F.F., 346.