Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/54

38 meaning handsome in the slaughter or mighty to kill. The epithet was doubtless meant as a flattering one, acceptable to the god in his character of warrior and slaughterer of his worshippers' enemies.

The next to be mentioned is Camulos, which I hesitate to call an epithet, as it is not a compound and possibly not an adjective, but a noun, and one of the god's strong, robust;' Breton caer, formerly cazr, 'beautiful, fine, magnificent:' so the whole word means fine or powerful at the kind of action indicated by the vocable belatu, which has the appearance of being a verbal noun. We have the stem bel (mutated into fel and pronounced vel) in the Welsh word for war, namely, rhyfel; it is also added to oer, 'cold,' to make oerfel, 'cold weather,' or cold as productive of inconvenience and harm. Again, we have it in ufel, 'fire or conflagration,' Irish óibell, óibel, which meant a spark, fire or heat, and was applied, for instance, to the summer heat that drives cattle to stand in pools; the other element in these words is the Celtic reflex of the first syllable of the Greek or of the Latin uro, 'I burn.' Irish supplies us with a strung verb from the stem bel, as in bebla (for be-bela), 'mortuus est,' atbail, 'interit,' atbél, 'peribo.' A corresponding Welsh compound has yielded a derivative adfeilio, 'to decay or fall into ruins;' but the Irish verb had as its base bel, meaning 'to die,' while belatu implies a derivative verb from a theme bela, associated probably with a modified meaning, namely, the causative one of killing or slaying; and an instance of it occurs in Welsh in a poem in the Book of Taliessin, where reference is made to the cattle of the Egyptians killed by the fifth plague or the grievous murrain spoken of in the Book of Exodus, ix. 1—7. See Skene, ii. 171, where the form used is belsit, which would seem to mean 'had been killed.' Having found a strong verb bel, we ought to be able to identify it in some of the kindred languages: now the Aryan combination gv becomes b in Celtic, while in the Teutonic languages it would be hardened into cw or qu; so we look in them for a verb beginning with quel or cwel to correspond to our Celtic bel, and we readily find it, without going out of this country, in the Anglo-Saxon verb cwelan, 'to die or perish,' from which was formed a causative cwellan or cwelian, 'to slay or cause to perish,' represented by the modern English verb to kill.