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.
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