SAMUEL HICKSON

St. John’s Wood, Jan. 12. 1850

     [We trust our correspondent will favour us with the further
     communications he proposes on this very interesting point.]

* * * * *

BEETLE MYTHOLOGY.

Mr. Editor,—­I never thought of asking my Low-Norman fellow-rustics whether the ladybird had a name and a legend in the best preserved of the northern Romance dialects:  on the score of a long absence (eight-and-twenty years), might not a veteran wanderer plead forgiveness?  Depend upon it, Sir, nevertheless, that should any reminiscences exist among my chosen friends, the stout-hearted and industrious tenants of a soil where every croft and paddock is the leaf of a chronicle, it will be communicated without delay.  There is more than usual attractiveness in the astronomical German titles of this tiny “red chafer,” or rother kaefer, SONNEN KAEFER and VNSER FRAWEN KVHLEIN, the Sun-chafer, and our Lady’s little cow. (Isis or Io?)

With regard to its provincial English name, Barnabee, the correct interpretation might be found in Barn-bie, the burning, or fire-fly, a compound word of Low-Dutch origin.

We have a small black beetle, common enough in summer, called PAN, nearly hemispherical:  you must recollect that the a is as broad as you can afford to make it, and the final n is nasal.  Children never forgot, whenever they caught this beetle, to place it in the palm of their left hand, when it was invoked as follows:—­

  “PAN, PAN, mourtre me ten sang,
  Et j’te dourai de bouan vin blianc!”

which means, being interpreted,

  “PAN, PAN, show me thy blood,
  And I will give thee good white wine!”

As he uttered the charm, the juvenile pontiff spat on poor Thammuz, till a torrent of blood, or what seemed such, “ran purple” over the urchin’s fingers.

Paul-Ernest Jablonski’s numerous readers need not be told that the said beetle is an Egyptian emblem of the everlasting and universal soul, and that its temple is the equinoctial circle, the upper hemisphere.[1]

As a solar emblem, it offers an instructive object of inquiry to the judicious gleaners of the old world’s fascinating nursery traditions.  Sicilian Diodorus tells us that the earth’s lover, Attis (or Adonis), after his resuscitation, acquired the divine title of PAPAN.[2] To hazard the inoffensive query, why one of our commonest great beetles is still allowed to figure under so distinguished a name, will therefore reflect no discredit upon a cautious student of nearly threescore years.  The very Welsh talked, in William Baxter’s time, of “Heaven, as bugarth PAPAN,” the sun’s ox-stall or resting-place; and here you likewise find his beetle-majesty, in a Low-Norman collection of insular rhymes:—­

 “Sus l’bord piasottaient, cote-a-cote,
  Les equerbots et leas PAPANS,
  Et ratte et rat laissaient leux crotte
  Sus les vieilles casses et meme dedans."[3]