CHAPTER 4

Baptism

Thames is an old name. With the exception of Kent it is perhaps the most ancient name recorded in England. It is assumed to be of the same origin as that of the rivers Tamar, Teme and Taff; they may all be derived from Celtic tam, meaning smooth or wide-spreading. Isa or esa are both versions of a Celtic root word meaning running water, as in the present Ouse and Exe (Oxford is a corruption of Ousenford or Osenford). So we may construct a provisional translation for the Thames as running ooze. But this is merely informed supposition. The word may have another origin altogether. There is a river Temes in Hungary that flows into the Danube. There is a river Tamese in Italy, and the principal town of the Brutii in southern Italy was called Temesa.

There is also a tributary of the Ganges, known in Sanskrit as Tamasa. It derives from Sanskrit tamasa, or “dark.” In the second book of the Hindu text Ramayana there is a chapter on “The Tamasa.” So the name could be pre-Celtic. It may spring from the primordial tribes of the Mesolithic or Neolithic periods who, during their wanderings over the earth, shared a common language. The syllable teme may indeed indicate darkness, in the sense of holy or sacred fearfulness. It may be very ancient indeed, going back to the first naming of the world. It is a matter of interest, then, that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Thames was often described as the “dark river” in unwitting echo of its first description.

Perhaps it was not renamed, by the Celts or the Romans or the Saxons, because it was considered to be a numinous word. The river was known to the Celts as Tamesa or Tamesis. The Romans, in the shape of the conqueror Julius Caesar, translated it as Thamesis. This was also the name known to Tacitus and Dion Cassius. For the settling Saxons it became more simply Temes or Temese. The fact that it retained its final “s,” a rare occurrence in Anglo-Saxon, suggests very strongly that the Saxons knew the word already before its Celtic or Roman vesture. They had heard of the Thames as a great river over the seas. In a manuscript of 699 it is called “Thamise.” For Nennius, in his chronicles of the eighth and early ninth centuries, it is “Tamisia.” The name has no less than twenty-one variants in its Latin and Saxon forms, with a further nine in Middle English. But without exception they include tame or teme. This is the sacred element—this putative word for darkness.

It soon enters chronicle history, within the ancient charters of the Anglo-Saxons. In the first of them extant, from the seventh century, there are references to land belonging to Abbot Aldhelm “cujus vocabulum Temis juxta vadum qui appelatur Somerford.” Somerford Keynes still exists beside the Thames, no more than 2 or 3 miles from the source; it has a church built by Aldhelm himself (with a Viking carving) and the vestiges of Saxon watermills.

The baptism of a river requires the figure of a guardian or deity. Ludd, Celtic divinity of the Londoners, a mysterious and insubstantial god, may be related to Nudd or Nodens, who is the presiding deity of the Severn, but on these curious matters no certainty can be found. There is a more rotund figure in the form of Old Father Thames, a water divinity of unknown origin who bears a striking resemblance to the tutelary gods of the Nile and the Tiber. His flowing beard and hair call up the strange association between hair and water. The Ganges was supposed to flow through the matted hair of Shiva; in Leonardo’s notebooks there are drawings of hair and water that have been closely aligned, as if in the swirls and ripples of the water there was an echo of human organism. A Graeco-Roman sculpture of the Tiber, with flowing beard and hair, is dated from the first century BC; it is to be found at the base of the staircase of the Capitoline Hill in Rome. In the same setting reclines the god of the Nile, with similar appearance and pose.

In the myths of Greece and Rome Achelous, the god of all rivers, is also the fount or source of all knowledge. He mourned the loss of one of his horns in combat with Hercules. That became the “horn of plenty” which in turn was transformed into the urn held by Father Thames; this can be construed as an expression of the fact that the river, once tamed, becomes fruitful. Yet the images also suggest other attributes. Achelous is a strong god, who can be tempted to fierceness and anger. He is ancient but he has the gift of perpetual self-renewal so that he holds within himself the secret of eternal youth. That is the origin of the “fountain of youth.”

His avatar, Old Father Thames, is commemorated in a statue, once at Thames Head but now removed to Lechlade, the site of the first lock upon the water. He is here surrounded by barrels and bales of goods, in homage to the Thames as a river of commerce as well as sacred power. He also carries a spade, as an emblem of the industry required to create the locks that have in part tamed the water. There is another sculpture in the grounds of Ham House, beside the river, where it is known simply as “the river god” this is from the mid-eighteenth century, a hundred years older than the image at Lechlade, and the god holds an urn in homage to a more ancient sense of sacredness. Other copies have been lost.

There is a sculpture of Father Thames in Trinity Square, where it acts as genius loci for the erstwhile headquarters of the Port of London Authority; the god carries a trident and, with his other hand, points eastwards towards the open sea. Once more his beard and hair are carefully detailed. He surmounts the emblems of Produce and Exportation, Commerce and Navigation. There is a bronze figure of Father Thames in the courtyard of Somerset House, and on the Strand front of that building there is a keystone carved in his image. There are great sculpted heads of Father Thames at the river entrance of Hammersmith Town Hall, and upon Vauxhall Bridge there is a bas-relief of the god in combat with the creatures of the deep. There is an image upon Kew Bridge, and another upon the bridge at Henley where his hair and beard are surrounded by bulrushes and fish. So he has not altogether been forgotten. He is still the deity revered by one of the great celebrants of the Thames, Alexander Pope, who described his

…tresses drop’d with dews, and o’er the stream

His shining horns diffus’d a golden gleam:

Grav’d on his urn appear’d the moon, that guides

His swelling waters, and alternate tides.

The poetry of John Denham in “Cooper’s Hill” was once considered to be the purest in the language, as smooth and as mellifluous as the river that he invoked. He also paid homage to its deity as “Thames, the most loved of all the Ocean’s sons.” It would seem, then, that he comes from an old and distinguished family. He has a companion, however, who may claim even greater age and distinction.

The god of the Egyptians, Isis, has been generally associated with the Thames. The river itself has indeed been compared with the Nile, perhaps because of its fertility and its central place in the kingdom through which it flows. Sacrificial victims were thrown into the Nile to appease its deities; we will find the same rituals beside the banks of the Thames. There are reaches of the Thames that effortlessly summon up memories of the Nile. A stretch of the river just before Cricklade contains rushes and quicksands; a dreamy and melancholy passage of water at Chelsea has been compared to the Egyptian river. More importantly, however, the Nile and the tidal Thames contain intimations of death and rebirth, and of perpetual resurgence. They are both considered to be dark rivers.

One of the most famous monuments by the river must surely be that known as Cleopatra’s Needle, although the obelisk has only a slender connection with the famous queen. But it does, however, have some association with the Nile. It was created by the pharaoh Thutmose III, and for fifteen hundred years it stood at Heliopolis beside the east bank of the Nile. It was transported to the Thames in 1878 and set upon the bank by means of hydraulic power. Its pink granite, quarried at Syene, has been blackened by the fogs and smoke of London. It is now the same colour as the river itself, a hallowed token of the turbid and mysterious Thames.

The connection between the Thames and the Nile is first made in the Polychronicon, or “Universal History,” of Ranulphus Higden, monk of Chester, who lived in the first half of the fourteenth century. In that compilation of medieval learning Higden writes that “Tamisia videtur componi a nominibus duorum fluminium, quae sunt Thama et Ysa aut Usa.” Thus in translation: “Thamesis seems to be composed from the names of two rivers, that are the Thama and the Ysa or Usa.” It is more than probable that the Ysa and Usa of Higden’s account are in fact from the Celtic isa or esa. In the fourteenth century, then, the people along the banks of the river knew it from its Celtic term. Perhaps it was always known as the Ysa.

But then the historical record works its own recondite miracle. It was easy enough for Ysa to become the resplendent Isis. The error was promulgated by John Leland in his Itinerary (1546) where he announced that “Isis riseth at 3 myles from Cirincestre.” William Camden, in his Britannia (1586), uses the same name in a record of “Isis vulgo Ouse” or “Isis, commonly known as the Ouse.” It was without evidence or corroboration but it proved remarkably suggestive. The same explanation was followed by Holinshed and Stow. Such was Leland’s prestige, in fact, that no one cared to dispute it. In the late seventeenth century, for example, the Welsh scholar, Edward Lhwyd, followed Leland as one “against whom I dare not contend.” So in Parochialia (1695) he writes of Dorchester as the place “neere where the Thames dischargeth himself into Isis, from whence the name Tamesis, the Thames, proceeds.” By some strange process of misattribution and misunderstanding, Thamesis was then considered to be the conflation of Thames and Isis.

A theory was then proposed to explain the phenomenon: the “Isis” emerged at the source and continued to Dorchester, while the element of “Thames” came from the river Thame that entered at Dorchester. A glance at the Anglo-Saxon records, where it was always known as the Thames, would alone render the supposition worthless. Nevertheless it has persisted for centuries. The parliamentary Acts from 1750 to 1842 refer to the “Rivers Thames and Isis,” as does the Thames Conservancy Act of 1894. Even the maps of the Ordnance Survey still refer to its course from Thames Head to Dorchester as that of the “River Thames or Isis.” The naming of rivers is a difficult matter.

But if it is a confusion, it is a fruitful one. The persistence of the fallacy of Thame and Isis suggests that it has some inner resonance, some essential rightness in defiance of the laws of etymology. Isis, after all, is charged with general human memory. She is the Mother Goddess, the benefactress of rivers. She is the womb of regeneration. She is the goddess of fertility, the Lady of Abundance, the sister and consort of Osiris, who rules the underworld. The fertile Thames emerges from unknown depths. She is the female soul of the world, the anima, who may appear in a thousand different incarnations. Three Roman effigies of the son of Isis, Horus, have been found in the waters by London Bridge. The image is that of the mother giving birth to the son on a tidal river, representing one of the most powerful of all myths of regeneration.

The cult of Isis was maintained throughout the Roman empire, and at the temple of Isis in Pompeii water was sprinkled upon the heads of her adherents as blessing and benediction. The Thames itself was used for ritual inundation and Christian baptism. Isis was the winged goddess, hailed as “the oldest of the old,” who was the protectress of agriculture and of the arts of healing, of law and of justice. She was the “provider of sweetness in assemblies.” All of these activities, including the making of laws and the dispensing of justice, have for many centuries, and perhaps for many thousands of years, taken place beside the banks of the Thames. We may think of Runnymede. The Thames was the home of the Neolithic cursus. It is the home of the present Parliament.

Thus in the poetry of rivers she has become pre-eminent. In the verses of Spenser she is wreathed in ancientness like some primaeval god. At the marriage feast in The Faerie Queene, the Thames is preceded by:

His auncient parents, namely, th’auncient Thame;

But much more aged was his wife than he,

The Ouze, whom men doe Isis rightly name,

Full weak and crooked creature seemed shee,

And almost blind through Eld, that scarce her way could see.

In Drayton’s Polyolbion there is a younger incarnation of the goddess:

That Isis, Cotswolds heire, long woo’d was lastly wonne,

And instantly should wed with Tame, old Chiltern’s sonne.

And thus also in Warton:

Beauteous Isis, and her husband Thame,

With mingled waves for ever flow the same.

The poetry celebrates the sense of place, and creates in myth what has only a perilous and ambiguous foundation in fact. It is the story of the human race.

Isis is herself the progenetrix of all the river nymphs and river goddesses who decorate the streams and springs of the world. They are known as water fays, water shapes, water nixies, water wreaths, water elfs and water fairies. Virgil names fifty of them in the Aeneid. The Severn is named after the British goddess Habrina or Sabrina. The Clyde comes under the protection of Clota. The Dee belongs to Deva. Curiously enough the Thames has been associated with no tutelary goddess—except, of course, Isis herself. The absence of a known female deity may well have prompted Leland into making the connection with the Egyptian goddess in the first place. It was a way of affirming ancient beliefs about the power of the waters. That is why in 1806 Turner exhibited a painting of an idealised Thames, supposedly depicted at Weybridge, which he entitled Isis. It is a visionary conception of the river, with the darkening water flowing between great trees and with what seems to be the fragment of a ruined temple in the foreground.

When confronted with Father Thames and with Isis as the assumed deities of the Thames, it is perhaps not surprising that there has been some debate concerning the gender of the river. In the whole of the British Isles, however, only the Derwent is known unequivocally as “he.” The Thames itself seems to switch identity. In its upper reaches it is presumed to be feminine, and was known to William Morris as “this far off, lonely mother of the Thames,” yet as the river approaches London it is deemed to be masculine. When the river is fierce or strong, it is also regarded as masculine. So sexual stereotypes prevail in the understanding of nature itself. In the battle of the sexes, the tributaries of the Thames are generally regarded as feminine.

Isis represents the water as feminine. It is the water as the female principle, circling like amniotic fluid. In the images of Isis the water is also seen to be milk, the nutritive fluid. The water is feminine because, in mingling with clay, it creates shape and form. There are a host of associations and affiliations here that defy rational enquiry precisely because they go back to the earliest periods of human consciousness. So the Thames can enter mythic history alongside the Styx and the Acheron, Lethe and Phlegethon, a river that takes its traveller beyond the ordinary world and into another world of dream and spirit.

The legends of its sexuality are a recognition of the evident fact that the river is a living thing. The Thames has its own presence. It has its own organic laws of growth and change, charged with what Bernard Shaw described as a “life force.” The surface of the water has so complex a wave structure that it seems to function as the membrane of a living organism, like the ear; its capillary structure, stirred by movement, communicates its changes to the whole. It has been so intimately concerned with human destiny, replete with desires and fears, that it has acquired a human personality.

Over many centuries it has been venerated and propitiated. In The Historic Thames Hilaire Belloc wrote that “I cannot get away from it, that the Thames may be alive.” Some travellers have confessed to the sensation, along certain stretches of the river, of being watched. The great historian of the Thames, F. S. Thacker, has commented in The Thames Highway (1914) that “Thames is one living spirit, whole and indivisible, from the loneliness at Trewsbury Mead to his final loneliness seaward of the Nore.” For many devotees there is indeed some spirit, some atmosphere, some brooding life that persists through time.

When the river is described it always assumes a human dimension. It is patient, making its way through every obstacle. It is ruthless, wearing down the hardest rocks. It is unpredictable, especially when its current is interrupted or diverted. Its course from source to sea has been categorised as one of youth, maturity and old age. Its character changes within each terrain. It becomes terrible and vindictive. It becomes sportive. It becomes treacherous. It becomes imperial. It becomes industrious. It gives human characteristics to its topography.