Mazed and Confused

Part nine: Nicka-Nicka-Nan

Mazed is one of the handful of Cornish dialect words still in common use.¹ It means to be confused, to be in a state of wonder, lost in thought. It has a witchcraft feel to it too, evoking the interior experience of what it is to be caught in a spirit trap, lost in a maze, or pisky led.

To penetrate the imaginal world of Cecil Williamson is to enter such a maze. In these essays we have witnessed how the antiquarian speculation about the Phoenician goddess Tanit, who allegedly made landfall in the far west during the Bronze Age and is commemorated in the undateable Troy Town mazes of Rocky Valley. A goddess, who he styled as Tanat, was transformed into a pisky woman in a cult which he both displayed and jealously protected.

Her consort was identified as Tan, the Cornish word for fire, a name that sent us in search of a lost fire temple at Lantinney at the prompting of Doreen Valiente, who was herself drawing on the unstable etymologies T. F G Dexter set forth in his speculative but influential pamphlet Fire Worship in Britain. Dexter records the 25th of December as the feast of St Anthony – and by implication Tan – at the winter solstice.
I write these words to mark that very day.

By scouring the records in the museum archives we further identified a ritual performed high on the moor in the moon mirror of Dozmary Pool where two cultic figures, the mass-produced brass pisky figures Tanat and Tan were taken to be charmed. Tan has a part in the charming too, in a dawn fire dance to be performed at:

THE MAGIC CIRCLE OF TAN SOUTH WEST CORNWALL

If the Moon Pool could be found, the Magic Circle can be too, and the potential timing and actions of the complementary solar rite.

The idea of fire and light is not enough to explain how Cecil took the Polperro pisky duo of Joan the Wad and Jack O Lantern and re-baptised them as Tan and Tanat. This dyad was his version of the Wiccan Goddess and God, but reimagined as the deities of a secret cult to which Gerald Gardner was not privy, and over which Williamson presided as the Man in Black. But something always felt concealed about Tan to me. Was there another folkloric connection to be found, perhaps in the work of local historians that gave Williamson his justification? Given that the Tan element of the cult clearly developed during his time in Polperro, there must be a further secret folded into that deep valley.

Sure enough, Thomas Quiller Couch² describes the antics that occur in Polperro on Hall Monday/Peasen Monday, the day before Shrove Tuesday where,

about the dusk of the evening, it is the custom for boys, and, in some cases, for those who are above the age of boys, to prowl about the streets with short clubs, and to knock loudly at every door, running off to escape detection on the slightest sign of a motion within. If, however, no attention be excited, and especially if any article be discovered negligently exposed, or carelessly guarded, then the things are carried away; and on the following day are discovered displayed in some conspicuous place, to expose the disgraceful want of vigilance supposed to characterise the owner. The time when this is practised is called 'Nicka-nan night' and the individuals concerned are supposed to represent some imps of darkness, that seize on and expose unguarded moments.

During the Nicka-nan period a Jack o’ Lent was also made. The stuffed straw figure was paraded through the streets on a cart, and pelted with rotten vegetables before being ceremonially burned on the beach. That tradition continued in Polperro up until the 19th century, with the figure said to represent Judas Iscariot.³ Cornish folklorists and antiquarians have long considered this to conceal a primal pagan deity and rite. No doubt William Paynter will have told Cecil as much. Williamson will have undoubtedly witnessed the mischievous antics of Roguery Night, and having heard of the older tradition intuited that there was indeed a pre-Christian god whose name was Fire, who ultimately transformed into the lantern-bearing pisky Jack. And then, in a single line of an undated document in the Museum archive, in a jumble of other notes, I found the hapax legomenon, the single surviving mention that proves it all. Cecil writes;

Hall Monday - Nicky Nan Night / Pisky Tan Night

The fragment confirms that Cecil understood the straw man as the lost Celtic god of fire guised as both Judas Iscariot and the pisky man, Tan.

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If the Bolventor ritual was performed at the full moon for maximum potency, then the fire dance should presumably be celebrated at the spring equinox or summer solstice. In order that Cecil could get his pisky charms empowered in time for the tourist trade, I suggest the spring. That would fit with the Celtic year of two seasons that Dexter proposed, with the coming of summer celebrated on 1st May and winter on 1st November, the twin poles of the Cornish ritual year.

All that remained was to find the magic circle in the south west where the dawn fire dance was staged. Again, the clues are sparse, the photographs lost, the references scattered and fragmentary.

Of perhaps a dozen Bronze Age circles, there are only four remaining in West Penwith that have not fallen to the plough or been broken for gateposts: Tregeseal at the foot of the Hooting Carn, the Merry Maidens in their blissful meadow, the lonely Nine Maidens in the shadow of Ding-Dong mine, and the charmed Boscawen-Ûn. It seemed it might be any one of them. All mark the metonic cycle of nineteen years with nineteen stones that harmonise the solar and lunar calendars. All are built, so the dowsers say, over blind springs. All four are within reach of St Michael’s Mount, the centre of the ancient tin trading network. What could lead Cecil to choose one over the others? Surely it would need a story that definitively linked the Phoenicians to the site.

The case for the Nine Maidens seems strong, given that the ruined engine house and spoils of Ding-Dong mine ride on the same ridge and offer a commanding view of Mount’s Bay. The mine has been in use since the Bronze Age, allegedly providing the metal for King Solomon’s temple, but the circle itself is primarily oriented towards the beacon fire on the Neolithic sanctuary of Carn Galva to the north. Under a great dish of sky, the now empty moor always feels a little raw, but most tourists and walkers only get as far as the famed Mên an Tol, which means that working in this circle is often undisturbed, and even more so at dawn.

Both Tregeseal and the Merry Maidens were originally called ‘Dawns Men’ a corruption of the Cornish ‘Dons Mên’ the dancing stones. So when Cecil talks of a ‘Dawn Fire Dance’ (Dons Tan Bora) he could certainly be indicating either of these atmospheric sites with their petrified dancers.

But having walked the labyrinth of the land, I can only come back to the beginning of our tale and the Phoenician Hercules who, according to the antiquarian William Stuckley, had built the last of the four circles under consideration: Boscawen-Ûn. That claim was taken up by William Borlase in his Antiquities, who insists that the Phoenician Hercules is the Sun, and can only be worshipped in an open temple, that is, a stone circle. Williamson’s familiarity with the work of Borlase is certain, and the final evidence I present for my identification of the site.

Laced into the spokes of a wheel of alignments, the circle is unique. Its central standing, or more accurately, leaning stone, is now known to be carved with the feet and breasts of a Neolithic goddess.⁴ There are few holier places, and it has been rightly venerated since the earliest people came to these Isles. Williamson will have gleaned its significance from his contact with William Paynter and the Old Cornwall Societies as the site of the first Cornish Gorsedd. As is typical of his approach, he posited an older cult than the duffers of the Celtic revival could claim. It was here with the rising Sun of the equinox that the fire dance, the dance of the Cornish year began.

Williamson makes clear his thoughts on dance in this yellowing display card;

Just when we thought we had found our circle, Williamson directs us back into the maze and its double meaning. Maze, in the Cornish telling, being the altered state of consciousness invoked by the witches’ dance; and the maze of the mysterious Troy Town, which gives the precise steps which open up a path to ‘the other world.’

The strange tale of how this became the central symbol of Cornish witchcraft and the Tanat cult in particular can now be told.

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1. From the Old English ‘māsan’ meaning ‘to confuse, bewilder.’ This is from the Proto-Germanic root ‘*maisan,’ which also meant ‘to confuse’ or ‘to dazzle.’

2. His son, Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote a novel Nicky-Nan Reservist, where the one-legged protagonist is a symbol of Cornish resilience in the face of war. Arthur, a significant literary figure, was initiated at the first Cornish Gorsedd in 1928 with the Bardic name Red Knight in reference to Spenser’s Faerie Queen. Arthur ultimately settled in Fowey, the next town down from Polperro, a place he referred to in his novels as ‘Troy Town.’

3. The Jack O’ Lent tradition was found across England, with a straw figure hung in the belfry mentioned by Falstaff in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor in Act III Scene 3.

4. https://tom.goskar.com/2015/09/14/neolithic-breton-style-rock-art-at-boscawen-un-stone-circle/