as Tacitus reminds us. Amber was apparently connected with this deity. In Northern mythology it is included among the substances formed from the tears of the goddess Freyja. It animated human beings. The "vigorous fresh Gael" was therefore, in a sense, the "ambered Gael." He was stimulated and protected by the amber of the mother goddess, as, according to Tacitus,[1] he was by the symbol of her boar—that is, the boar son of the sow goddess.[2]
The method I adopted and pursued for several years, in dealing with the problems of colour symbolism, was to collect evidence regarding the colours of the deities of various cults in different lands, and to make extracts from religious texts and folk-lore literature referring to the various colours and the beliefs connected with them. I hoped that in time something definite would emerge.
"The evidence derived from poetry and art," as Dr. Rivers reminds us, "must always be in some degree unsatisfactory, owing to the great part which convention plays in the productions of the human mind. Still, every convention must have had a starting point."
I have endeavoured to get at this "starting point," but only to find that the symbolic use of colour was prevalent even before man began to record his ideas by means of pictorial or alphabetic signs. Egyptian colour symbolism was already old at the dawn of the Dynastic period. In ancient Europe the symbolic use of colour was interfered with to a certain extent by the conventions of cave art.
- ↑ Tacitus, op. cit.
- ↑ Glaisin, the Irish-Gaelic word for woad, is of special interest. It is derived from glas. Apparently woad-dye protected warriors like amber and the boar symbol. In a story regarding Cormac mac Art reference is made to the queen's crop of glaisin. (Joyce, A Smaller Social History of Ireland, p. 92.) The queen was the living representative of the goddess. Woad was, no doubt, a sacred plant connected with the goddess which had origin, like amber, from her life substance.
