R, ruis, the dwarf elder in Ogham. The rochat, or ... - Rodney Mackay

followed by a mock execution, the authority and the godspirit
afterwards being reincarnated in the old king.
Pretend deaths of a monarch survive in the activities
of the English whitsuntide mummers, and in the Scottish
goloshans or galatians. Also known as gysarts, guisers, or
disguisers, the goloshans wore masks, since recognition
"broke the luck". Each of the five or six travelling
companions appeared on Samhainn eve wearing white
sheets and a dunces caps, "casques of brown paper shaped
like a mitre. They journeyed from house to house and put on
a playlet couched in expressionless doggerel. In an 1815
version a character who identified himself as "The Admiral"
used a wooden sword to cut down "King Galatians". In every
version, the hero is revived by some equivalent of the
mummer referred to as the "Doctor", who appears to be a
latter-day druid. Once a fee has been set, the Doctor goes
to work applying "Inky Pinkey, a little to his nose, a little
to his toes." In Falkirk the elixir of life was called hoxycroxy,
and in some places the resurrection occurred with
the passes of a magic wand. To show that Galatians is a
new-born monarch, the resurrected hero was afterwards
called "jack". If these plays are based, as we suspect, on
actual incidents of king-killing, the need for disguises is
obvious!
We have already mentioned the schizophrenic nature
of divine kings, which is most clearly seen in the Old Norse
God Tyr, Tiu, or Tue, who is also called Deo, Deu or the
Deuce. This alter-ego, or second personality is still
reflected in our own minor devils and the English Devil, who
is the Anglo-Saxon Deoful, literally one full of the spirit of
Tyr, the god of war. In his benign role Tyr was a god of the
sky and martial courage but his berserker side was greatly
feared. Odin and Uller present a similar ying-yang situation
as do the Celtic boon-companions, Lugh and Ogma, the
former a god of free love, horse-racing, gaming and war, the
latter a straight- laced supporter of world-order, rather
than chaos, the inventor of ogham, a cryptic "puzzlelanguage"
favoured by Gaelic orators.