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

SUN HORSE & SPIRALS IN EARLY BRITAIN 287

The traditional worship of “‘ Odinn’s horses”’ still persists in some parts of England—for example in Sussex, where I observed bunches of corn tied up to the gables of several old timbered cottages and steadings, and was told that it was to feed ‘‘ Odinn’s horses’’ as a propitiation against lightning bolts. Offerings of grain to Indra’s Sun-horses are repeatedly mentioned in the Vedic hymns; and the horses are invoked also in prayers as the vehicle for Indra’s visitations :—

“ They who for Indra, picture his horses in their mind, And harness them to their prayers, Attain by such (pious) deeds an (acceptable) offering.”—R.V., I, 20, 2.

The Sun-horse of the Ancient Britons is also the source of the modern superstition regarding the good luck of finding a horse-shoe pointing towards you—on the notion that it might have been dropped by Odinn’s horse.

The Spirals also, which are found on British coins (as in Fig. 44, etc.), on Bronze Age work and on prehistoric monuments and rocks in Britain, and usually in series of twos, are already found in Sumerian, Hittite and Phcenician Seals, and as a decorative device on vases, etc., in old Phoenician settlements in Cyprus and Crete and along the Mediterranean. Yet the meaning of this spiral does not appear to have been hitherto elicited. It is now seen by our new evidence to represent the dual phases of the Sun of the Sumerians. The right-handed or westward moving spiral represented the Day Sun, and the left-handed or eastward moving spiral represented the “ returning ’’ Sun at Night—as we have already seen illustrated through the Sumerian cup-marks with standard Sumerian script and on the amulets of Troy. The concentric “ Rings,’ which have usually a radial “ gutter,” and are often arranged in twos and sometimes threes, now appear to be merely an easy way, by means of the “gutter,” of giving the effect of a spiral.

And so widespread was “‘Sun-worship”’ formerly in Ancient Britain, and so famous in antiquity were the