The White Goddess (30 page)

As for ‘Jaichim’, or ‘Jachin’, that was the name of one of the two mysterious pillars of Solomon’s Temple, the other being  ‘Boaz’. (The rabbis taught that Boaz meant ‘In it strength’, that Jachim (
yikkon
) meant ‘He shall establish’, and that they represented respectively the sun and the moon. The Freemasons seem to have borrowed this tradition.) How it happened that Solomon raised two pillars, one on each side of the façade of the Temple, called ‘Boaz’ (a word which is supposed by Hebrew scholars to have once had an L in the middle of it) and ‘Jachin’ – is a question that need not concern us yet. All we must notice is that Jaichim is the last letter of this alphabet, and that I in Celtic mythology is the letter of death and associated with the yew tree. Thus Jaichim is a synonym for Death – Euripides in his
Frantic
Hercules
used the same word,
iachema
,
to mean the deadly hissing of a serpent – and how Death came into the world, and what comes after Death, have always been the grand subjects of religious and philosophical dispute. Death will always remain upon the Earth, according to Christian dogma, until the Day of Doom.

Here, then, is Taliesin’s grand conundrum, taken to pieces and reassembled in orderly form, with the answer attached to each riddle:

So it seems that the answer to the conundrum is a bardic alphabet, closely resembling O’Flaherty’s, but with
Morvran
for
Moiria,
Ne-esthan
for
Neiagadon,
Rhea
for
Riuben,
Salome
for
Salia
,
1
Gadarn
for
Gath,
Uriel
for
Uria
,
and
Taliesin
for
Teilmon.

This may seem an anticlimax. Beyond establishing that the
Boibel-Loth
is at any rate as old as the thirteenth-century
Red
Book
of Hergest
in which the
Hanes
Taliesin
occurs, and not a mere pedantry or artificiality of O’Flaherty’s, what has been learned?

Well: by the time that O’Flaherty published the alphabet, the secret of its meaning had evidently been lost and there seemed to be no reason for further concealment of the letter-names. It had indeed been published long before in a tenth-century bardic primer. But we may be sure that
Gwion with his Dog, Roebuck and Lapwing would never have gone to such extravagant lengths in confusing the elements of their conundrum unless the answer had been something really secret, something of immensely greater importance than a mere ABC. But the only hope of getting any further in the chase lies in discovering what meaning the letters of the alphabet have apart from the proper names which are attached to them in the riddle. Do they perhaps spell out a secret religious formula?

* * *

Since solving this grand conundrum I realize that I misread the riddle: ‘I was chief overseer of the work of the Tower of Nimrod’, though I gave the correct answer. It refers to a passage in
The
Hearings
of
the
Scholars
, where ‘The Work of the Tower of Nimrod’ is explained as the linguistic researches carried on there (see Chapter Thirteen) by Feniusa Farsa and his seventy-two assistants. The tower is said to have been built of nine different materials: 

and these nine materials are poetically explained as:

The twenty-five noblest of the seventy-two assistants who worked on the language are said to have given their names to the Ogham letters. The names are as follows:

It will be noticed that the list is a somewhat degenerate one, with Hiruad (Herod) for Hur, and Nabgadon (Nebuchadnezzar) for Neesthan. The five last names represent the ‘foreign letters’ absent from the original canon. The ‘chief overseer’ of the riddle is not, as one would suspect, Feniusa Farsa, nor either of his two leading assistants, Gadel and Caoith, but Babel; for it is explained in the same section of the book that Babel is the letter B, that the birch is its tree and that ‘on a switch of Birch was written the first Ogham inscription made in Ireland, namely seven B’s, as a warning to Lug son of Ethliu, to wit, “Thy wife will be seven times overseer.”’ Lug realized that the seven B’s represented birch seven times repeated but, to make sense of the message, he had to convert the seven B’s, represented by single nicks, into two other letters of the same flight, namely S and F (four nicks and three nicks) the initials of the operative Irish words
sid
and
fer
and.

This riddle is conclusive proof, if any doubt remains, of Gwion’s acquaintance with contemporary Irish bardic lore.

To sum up the historical argument.

‘Gwion’, a North Welsh cleric of the late thirteenth century, whose true name is not known but who championed the popular minstrels against the Court bards, wrote (or rewrote) a romance about a miraculous Child who possessed a secret doctrine that nobody could guess; this doctrine is incorporated in a series of mystical poems which belong to the romance. The romance is based on a more primitive original, of the ninth century
AD
, in which Creirwy and Afagddu, the children of Tegid Voel and Caridwen, probably played a more important part than in Gwion’s version. (This original has been lost though, strangely enough, the same
dramatis
personae
occur in Shakespeare’s
Tempest
:
Prospero, who like Tegid Voel lived on a magic island; the black screaming hag Sycorax, ‘Pig Raven’, mother of Caliban the ugliest man alive; Prosperous daughter Miranda the most beautiful woman, whom Caliban tries to rape; Ariel the miraculous Child whom Sycorax imprisons. Perhaps Shakespeare heard the story from his Welsh schoolmaster at Stratford, the original of Sir Hugh Evans in
The
Merry
Wives
of
Windsor
.)

The miraculous Child set a riddle, based on a knowledge not only of British and Irish mythology, but of the Greek New Testament and Septuagint, the Hebrew Scriptures and Apocrypha, and Latin and Greek mythology. The answer to the riddle is a list of names which correspond closely with a list that Roderick O’Flaherty, the seventeenth-century confidant of the learned Irish antiquary Duald Mac Firbis, claimed to be the original letter-names of the Ogham alphabet, which is found in numerous inscriptions in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England and the Isle of Man, some of them pre-Christian. Its invention is ascribed by Irish tradition to the Goidelic god Ogma Sun-Face, who according to the account given by Lucian of Samosata, who wrote in the second century
AD
, was represented in Celtic art as a mixture of the gods Cronos, Hercules and Apollo. A connexion between the Ogham found in inscriptions and a fifth-century
BC
Greek alphabet from Etruria, the Formello-
Cervetri, has been proved; nevertheless there is evidence that an earlier form of Ogham, with a slightly different order of letters, was current in Ireland before the Druids of Gaul came into contact with the Formello-Cervetri alphabet. It may also have been current in Britain where, according to Julius Caesar, the Druids of Gaul went for their university training in secret doctrine.

I first suspected that an alphabet was contained in Gwion’s conundrum when I began to restore the purposely jumbled text of his
Battle
of
the
Trees
,
which refers to a primitive British tradition of the capture of an oracular shrine by the guessing of a god’s name. This capture seems to have taken place early in the fourth century
BC
when the Belgic Brythons, worshippers of the Ash-god Gwydion, with the help of an agricultural tribe already settled in Britain, seized the national shrine, perhaps Avebury, from the reigning priesthood, two of whose gods were Arawn and Bran. Bran is the Celtic name for the ancient Crow-god, variously known as Apollo, Saturn, Cronos and Aesculapius, who was also a god of healing and whose worship had been combined with that of a Thunder-god, pictured as a ram or bull, known variously as Zeus, Tantalus, Jupiter, Telamon and Hercules. The letter-names of Gwion’s alphabet apparently conceal the Name of the transcendent God, whom Caesar calls Dis, worshipped in Britain and Gaul. It may be inferred that the earlier alphabet, containing a pre-Belgic religious secret, had a different series of letter-names from those contained in Gwion’s conundrum, that the alphabetical order began with B.L.N., not B.L.F., and that after the capture of the shrine the Divine Name was altered.