The White Goddess (25 page)

The memory of the thirteen-month year was kept alive in the pagan English countryside until at least the fourteenth century.
The
Ballad
of
Robin
Hood
and
the
Curta
l
Friar
begins:

This has been altered in a manifestly later ballad:

My suggested answers to the riddles of the
Hanes
Taliesin
were as follows:

This was as far as I could go without adopting the method of the crossword puzzler, which is to use the answers already secured as clues to the solution of the more difficult riddles that remain, but I made some progress with the riddle: ‘I have been three periods in the Castle of Arianrhod.’

Arianrhod (‘Silver wheel’) appears in the 107th
Triad
as the ‘Silver-circled daughter of Dôn’, and is a leading character in the
Romance
of
Math
the
Son
of Mathonwy.
No one familiar with the profuse variants of the same legend in every body of European myth can have doubts about her identity. She is the mother of the usual Divine Fish-Child Dylan who,
after killing the usual Wren (as the New Year Robin does on St. Stephen’s day) becomes Llew Llaw Gyffes (‘the Lion with the Steady Hand’), the usual handsome and accomplished Sun-hero with the usual Heavenly Twin at his side. Arianrhod then adopts the form of Blodeuwedd, the usual Love-goddess, treacherously (as usual) destroys Llew Llaw – the story is at least as old as the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic – and is then transformed first into the usual Owl of Wisdom and then into the usual Old-Sow-who-eats-her-farrow; so feeds on Llew’s dead flesh. But Llew, whose soul has taken the form of the usual eagle, is then, as usual, restored to life. The story is given in full in Chapter Seventeen.

In other words Arianrhod is one more aspect of Caridwen, or Cerridwen, the White Goddess of Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life; and to be in the Castle of Arianrhod is to be in a royal purgatory awaiting resurrection. For in primitive European belief it was only kings, chieftains and poets, or magicians, who were privileged to be reborn. Countless other less distinguished souls wandered disconsolately in the icy grounds of the Castle, as yet uncheered by the Christian hope of universal resurrection. Gwion makes this clear in his
Marwnad y
Milveib
(‘Elegy on the Thousand Children’).

Where was this purgatory situated? It must be distinguished from the Celtic Heaven, which was the Sun itself – a blaze of light (as we know from Armorican tradition) caused by the shining together of myriads of pure souls. Well, where should one expect to find it? In a quarter from which the Sun never shines. Where is that? In the cold North. How far to the North? Beyond the source of Boreas, the North Wind; for ‘at the back of the North Wind’ – a phrase used by Pindar to locate the land of the Hyperboreans – is still a popular Gaelic synonym for the Land of Death. But precisely where beyond the source of the North wind? Only a poet would be persistent enough to ask this last question. The poet is the unsatisfied child who dares to ask the difficult question which arises from the schoolmaster’s answer to his simple question, and then the still more difficult question which arises from that. Surprisingly enough there is, on this occasion, a ready answer. Caer Arianrhod (not the submerged town off the coast of Caernarvon, but the real Caer Arianrhod) is, according to Dr. Owen of the
Welsh
Dictionary,
the constellation called ‘Corona Borealis’. Not
Corona
Septentrionalis
,
‘the Northern Crown’, but
Corona
Borealis
, ‘the Crown of the North Wind’. Perhaps we have the answer here to the question which puzzled Herodotus: ‘Who are the Hyperboreans?’ Were the Hyperboreans, the ‘back-of-the-North-Wind-men’, members of a
North Wind cult, as the Thracians of the Sea of Marmara were? Did they believe that when they died their souls were taken off by Hermes, conductor of souls, to the calm silver-circled castle at the back of the North Wind, of which the bright star Alpheta was the guardian?

I should not venture to make such a fanciful suggestion if it were not for the mention of Oenopion and Tauropolus by the Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius’s
Argonautica.
This
Corona
Borealis,
which is also called ‘the Cretan Crown’, was in ancient times sacred to a Cretan Goddess, wife to the God Dionysus, and according to this Scholiast the mother of – that is, worshipped by – Staphylus, Thoas, Oenopion, Tauropolus and others. These men were the eponymous ancestors of Pelasgo-Thracian clans or tribes settled in the Aegean islands of Chios and Lemnos, on the Thracian Chersonese, and in the Crimea, and culturally connected with North-Western Europe. The Goddess was Ariadne, (‘Most Holy’,)
alias
Alpheta –
alpha
and
eta
being the first and last letters of her name. She was the daughter, or younger self, of the ancient Cretan Moon-Goddess Pasiphaë, ‘She who shines for all’, and the Greeks made her a sister of their ancient vine-hero Deucalion, who survived the Great Flood. Ariadne, on whom ‘Arianrhod’ seems to be modelled, was an orgiastic goddess, and it is evident from the legends of Lemnos, Chios, the Chersonese and the Crimea, that male human sacrifice was an integral part of her worship, as it was among the pre-Roman devotees of the White Goddess of Britain. Orpheus himself, who lived ‘among the savage Cauconians’ close to Oenopion’s home, was a sacred victim of her fury. He was torn in pieces by a pack of delirious women intoxicated by ivy and also, it seems, by the toadstool sacred to Dionysus. Eratosthenes of Alexandria, quoting Aeschylus’s
Bassarides
,
records that Orpheus refused to conform to local religion but ‘believed the sun, whom he named Apollo, to be the greatest of the gods. Rising up in the night he ascended before dawn to the mountain called Pangaeum that he might see the sun first. At which Dionysus, being enraged, sent against him the Bassarids, who tore him in pieces….’ That is a dishonest way of telling the story. Proclus in his commentary on Plato is more to the point: ‘Orpheus, because he was the leader in the Dionysian rites, is said to have suffered the same fate as the god.’ But the head of Orpheus continued to sing and prophesy, like that of the God Bran. Orpheus, according to Pausanias, was worshipped by the Pelasgians, and the termination
eus
is always a proof of antiquity in a Greek name. ‘Orpheus’, like ‘Erebus’, the name of the Underworld over which the White Goddess ruled, is derived by grammarians from the root
ereph,
which means ‘to cover or conceal’. It was the Moon-goddess, not the Sun-god, who originally inspired Orpheus.

The clearest sign that in Arianrhod we have the old matriarchal Triple Goddess, or White Goddess, lies in her giving her son Llew Llaw a name and a set of arms. In patriarchal society it is always the father who gives
both. Llew Llaw has no father at all, in the Romance, and must remain anonymous until his mother is tricked into making a man of him.

I thought at first that Gwion’s riddle about Caer Arianrhod was to be completed with ‘and the whirling round without motion between three elements’. The three elements are clearly fire, air and water, and the
Corona
Borealis
revolves in a very small space compared with the southern constellations. But Gwion must have been taught that Arianrhod’s Castle does not lie within ‘the Arctic Circle’, which includes the two Bears and the Bear-Warden, and that when the Sun rises in the House of the Crab, it begins to dip over the Northern horizon and does not free itself until the summer is over. To describe it as whirling round without motion would have been inaccurate; only the Little Bear does so, pivoted on the Pole-star. (As I show in Chapter Ten, the whirling-round is part of the riddle to which the answer is Rhea; but I will not anticipate the argument at this point.)

Yet, even if I knew the meaning of ‘a period in the Castle of Arianrhod’, could I answer the riddle? Who spent three periods there?

The sequences of ‘I have been’ or ‘I am’ – the earliest of them indisputably pre-Christian – which occur in so many bardic poems of Wales and Ireland seem to have several different though related senses. The primitive belief is plainly not in individual metempsychosis of the vulgar Indian sort – at one time a bluebottle, at the next a flower, at the next perhaps a Brahmini bull or a woman, according to one’s merit. The ‘I’ is the Apollo-like god on whose behalf the inspired poet sings, not the poet himself. Sometimes the god may be referring mythically to his daily cycle as the Sun from dawn to dawn; sometimes to his yearly cycle from winter solstice to winter solstice with the months as stations of his progress; perhaps sometimes even to his grand cycle of 25,800 years around the Zodiac. All these cycles are types of one another; as we still speak either of the ‘evening’ or ‘autumn’ of our lives when we mean old age.

The commonest ‘I have been’ reference is to the yearly cycle, and to examine these seasonal ‘I have been’s (though for reasons of discretion the order has always been deliberately confused) is usually to find that they contain a complete series of round-the-year symbols.