Dear Mr Sadler,
It's great to see that your
organisation exists, and that your site provides details of lectures held in
London (where I live).
You include a very brief account
of your investigations into Bidston Hill (my friend tried to stop a housing
development there a few years back!).
Now, I have never seen, nor know
anything about the ancient carvings you mention, but would suspect that the
sun god is male and the moon god female.
By the Iron Age, Europe had a
multiplicity of deities, most of them having a very localised ambit.
In earlier times there were
probably two supreme deities, a male sun god and a female moon god. The importance
of the former is clearly evidenced by the henge monuments, of course. The
association of the moon with femininity derives from the fact that the
menstrual cycle has the same periodicity as that of the moon.
The names of these deities may
have been *Iken (sun god) and *Il (moon god).
There are no direct recorded
references to a moon god in ancient Europe, as far as I know, though Strabo
does offer a somewhat garbled account of moon worship in Northern Spain.
The Basque word for moon, ilargi,
literally means "bright, ie full, moon", the stem being il,
which also means "month". In the pre-Roman language of Iberia,
"moon", was il, as evidenced by the following phrase on the
Alcoy lead tablet: boist il igis did "I have seen many moons -
ie I have lived a very long time".
*Il is preserved in a
number of river names in Britain, including the Ilidh in Sutherland
(the Ila of Ptolemy), the Isle in Somerset (Yle
693), the Hyle in Essex (now the Roding) (Hile 958, Hyle
1250), and the village of Ilam in Staffordshire (Hilum 1002,
Ylum 1208), which may incorporate the old name of the Manifold.
There is also the Iller
in Germany (the Ilargus of Ptolemy) and the Allier in France
(Elaver). These may represent ilargi "full moon"
and ilberri "new moon".
There is also the town, Ilarkuri-s
"moon village", now lost, in Spain and the Ilergetes, a
tribe who lived in Catalonia before Romanisation, the name suggesting they
were moon worshipers.
We can reasonably conjecture that
rivers were considered to have sacred attributes, because people put precious
objects in them.
As for *Iken, he is
recorded as Iconna in Roman era inscriptions at Guarda, Portugal, and
Chateau-Chinon, France. This is similar to the Basque words ekaina
"June" and ekainaldi "summer solstice". The
former is a compound comprising eki "sun" and the
mysterious -aina suffix. eki may be compared with
Proto-Yeniseian *khiga (Kott and Arin ega).
He is also found in a number of
river names, including the Itchen, Hampshire (Ycenan 998),
the Itchen, Warwickshire (Icene 701), and Iken,
Suffolk (a village preserving the old name of the Alde) (Ykene
1212), and the Yonne in France (formerly Icauna).
Icknield Way, the ancient
track which runs from Norfolk through to Dorset may be "Iken's
highway" (Iccenhilde weg, 903). -ield may be compared
with Basque ildo "furrow, highway", and the ildi/ildu
(plural ildir/ildur), which appears in Iberian personal names and
some place names (Abarildur, Ildugoite, etc), and in the following
phrase from the Alcoy lead tablet: naltinge bidudedin ildu(n) niraenai
bekor sebagediren "given the opportunity, the animal tamer's mare
would throw me on a highway anywhere".
I hope the above is of some help.
The Romans frequently got the sex
of native deities wrong. Basque and Iberian arreba "sister"
was used as an epithet indicating female gender, but the Romans rendered this
as Reus and Revva. Also, Aegiammuniaegus, clearly a
female deity meaning something like "exalted grandmother", is given
a masculine Latin ending.
I cannot be contacted by e-mail,
only via Royal Mail, at: Suite 401, 302 Regent Street, London W1B 3HH,
07814-562194.
With best wishes,
Angus J Huck