Note 977 — Chapter XIV · DOWN UNDER.

With the old English custom of burying the dead in roses, and with the tradition that at times a white lady with a red rose in her mouth used to appear at Pendeen cave (Courtney, Miss M. L., Cornish Feasts and Folklore, p. 9), in Cornwall may be connoted the statement of Bunsen: “The Phœnicians had a grand flower show in which they hung chaplets and bunches of roses in their temples, and on the statue of the goddess Athena which is only a feminine form of Then or Thorn” (cf. Theta, The Thorn Tree, p. 40). The probability is that not only was the rose sacred to Athene but that Danes Elder (Sambucus ebulus), and Danes flower (Anemone pulsutilla) had no original reference to the Danes, but to the far older Dane, or donna, the white Lady. Both don and dan are used in English, as the equivalent of dominus, whence Shakespeare’s reference to Dan Cupid.