The White Goddess (34 page)

The vowels do not spell out a story but they characterize the progress of Hercules through the five stations of the year, typified by the five petals of the Lotus-cup – Birth, Initiation, Marriage, Rest from Labour, and Death:

The
boibalis
or
boibalus
(also
boubalis
or
boubalus
)
is the ferocious Libyan white antelope-ox or
leucoryx
,
from which according to Herodotus the Phoenicians made the curved sides of their lyres – with which they celebrated Hercules Melkarth.

Gwion’s version of the alphabet, with Rhea for Riuben, is older than O’Flaherty’s if O’Flaherty’s ‘Riuben’ stands for
Rymbonao
,
‘I swing about again’ – a word first used in the second century
AD
; the difference between Gwion’s ‘Salome’, and O’Flaherty’s ‘Salia’ also suggests that Gwion had an older version. That he has altered ‘Telamon’ to ‘Taliesin’ suggests that he is offering
Talasinoös
,
‘he that dares to suffer’, as an alternative to ‘Telamon’, which has the same meaning.
Ne-esthan
,
the Greek Septuagint transliteration of ‘Nehushtan’ (
2
Kings,
XVIII,
4
)
as an equivalent of
ne-ãgaton
is puzzling. But since Nehushtan was a name of contempt, meaning ‘a piece of brass’, said to have been given by King Hezekiah to the therapeutic Serpent or Seraph when idolatrously worshipped by his subjects, it is possible that Gwion read the original holy name as the Greek
Neo-sthenios,
or
Neo-sthenaros,
‘with new strength’, of which ‘Nehushtan’ was a Hebrew parody. This would imply that a Jew of Hellenistic times, not Hezekiah, invented the parody name; which is historically more plausible than the Biblical account. For it is incredible that Hezekiah took exception to idolatry: the Jews attempted to dispense with idols only in post-Exilic times.

But though we have learned the secret story of the Spirit of the Year, the Name of the transcendent God still remains hidden. The obvious
place to look for it is among the vowels, which are separated from the Hercules story told by the consonants; but Dog, Lapwing, and Roebuck must have learned wisdom after the Battle of the Trees and hidden their secret more deeply even than before.

Gwion evidently knew the Name, and it was this knowledge that gave him his authority at Maelgwn’s Court. He says in the
Cyst
Wy’r
Beirdd
(‘Reproof of the Bards’):

The best hope of guessing it lies in finding out first what the Name was that Gwydion succeeded in discovering with Amathaon’s aid, and then what refinement he made on his discovery.

The concentrated essence of Druidic, as of Orphic Greek, philosophy was
Rheo,
‘I flow away’, Gwion’s letter-name for R: – ‘
Panta
Rhei
’,
‘all things flow’. The main problem of paganism is contained in
Riuben,
the alternative name for R, if this stands for
Rymbonao
:
– ‘Must all things swing round again for ever? Or how can one escape from the Wheel?’ This was the problem of the blinded Sun-hero Samson when he was harnessed to the corn-mill of Gaza; and it should be noted that the term ‘corn-mill’ was applied in Greek philosophy to the revolving heavens. Samson resolved the problem magnificently by pulling down both posts of the temple so that the roof collapsed upon everyone. The Orphics had another, quieter solution and engraved it in cypher on gold tablets tied around the necks of their beloved dead. It was: not to forget, to refuse to drink the water of cypress-shaded Lethe however thirsty one might be, to accept water only from the sacred (hazel-shaded?) pool of Persephone, and thus to become immortal Lords of the Dead, excused further Tearings-to-Pieces, Destructions, Resurrections and Rebirths. The cypress was sacred to Hercules, who had himself planted the famous cypress grove at Daphne, and typified rebirth – and the word ‘cypress’ is derived from Cyprus, which was called after Cyprian Aphrodite, his mother. The cult of the sacred cypress is Minoan in origin and must have been brought to Cyprus from Crete.

The Hercules-god of the Orphic mystics was Apollo the Hyperborean; and in the first century
AD
Aelian, the Roman historian, records that Hyperborean priests visited Tempe in Northern Greece regularly to worship Apollo. Diodorus Siculus in his quotation from Hecataeus makes it clear that in the sixth century
BC
the ‘land of the Hyperboreans’, where Apollo’s mother Latona was born, and where Apollo was honoured above all other gods, was Britain. This does not contradict Herodotus’s account of an altogether different Hyperborean priesthood, probably Albanian, living near the Caspian Sea; or the view that in Aelian’s time, Ireland, which lay outside the Roman Empire, may have been ‘the Land of the
Hyperboreans’; or the view, which I propose later in this book, that the original Hyperboreans were Libyans.

Edward Davies was justified in regarding these British priests as a sort of Orphics: dress, dogma, ritual and diet correspond closely. And since
Câd
Goddeu
proves to have been a battle of letters rather than a battle of trees, his suggestion that the fabulous dance of trees to Orpheus’s lyre was, rather, a dance of letters, makes good historical and poetic sense.
1
Orpheus is recorded by Diodorus to have used the Pelasgian alphabet. That Gwion identified the Celestial Hercules of the Boibel-Loth with the Orphic Apollo is plain from this perfectly clear passage embedded in the riddling mazes of
Câd
Goddeu
:

Only Apollo can be the ‘I’ of this passage. He was herdsman to Admetus, the Minyan king of Pherae in Thessaly, several centuries before he set up at Delphi as the Leader of the Muses. And as a pre-Greek oracular hero he had been laid to rest in a hundred sacred islands. Once the Greeks had found it convenient to adopt him as their god of healing and music, hundreds of cities came to honour him and by Classical times he was making his daily and yearly circuit as the visible sun. Gwion is hinting to Heinin and the other court-bards that the true identity of the hero whom they thoughtlessly eulogize as King Arthur is Hercules-Dionysus,
rex
quondam,
rex-que
futurus
(‘King once and King again to be’), who at his second coming will be the immortal Hercules-Apollo. But they will not
understand. ‘It is long since I was a herdsman’ will convey nothing to them but a memory of
Triad
85, where the Three Tribe Herdsmen of Britain are given as Gwydion who kept the herd of the tribe of Gwynedd, Bennren who kept the herd of Caradoc son of Bran consisting of 21,000 milch kine, and Llawnrodded Varvawc who kept the equally numerous herd of Nudd Hael. Gwion had fetched his learning from Ireland, and perhaps from Egypt, but re-grafted it on a British stock. For though Druidism as an organized religion had been dead in Wales for hundreds of years, reliques of Druidic lore were contained in the traditional corpus of minstrel poetry, and in popular religious ritual. The primitive Druidic cult, which involved ritual cannibalism after omens had been taken from the victim’s death struggle, had been suppressed by the Roman general Paulinus in 61
AD
when he conquered Anglesey and cut down the sacred groves; the continental Druidism already adopted by the rest of Britain south of the Clyde was respectable Belin, or Apollo, worship of Celto-Thracian type.

From the Imperial Roman point of view Belin-worship constituted no political danger once its central authority, the Druidic Synod at Dreux, had been broken by Caesar’s defeat of Vercingetorix and animal victims had been substituted for human ones. The British priests were not converted to Roman religion, for the Roman Pantheon was already allied to theirs and the Mithras-worship of the Roman legionaries was merely an Oriental version of their own Hercules cult. That they should honour the Emperor as the temporal incarnation of their variously named Sun-god was the only religious obligation put upon them, and they cannot have found it a difficult one. When Christianity became the official Roman religion, no attempt was made to coerce the natives into uniformity of worship and even in the towns the churches were small and poor; most of the large pagan temples remained in operation, it seems. There was no religious problem in Britain, as there was in Judaea, until the Romans withdrew their garrisons and the barbarous Jutes, Angles and Saxons poured in from the East, and the civilized Roman Britons fled before them into Wales or across the Channel. But the presence in England of these barbarians at least protected the Welsh and Irish churches from any effective intervention in their religious affairs by continental Catholicism, and the Archiepiscopal See of St. David’s remained wholly independent until the twelfth century, when the Normans pressed the right of the Archbishop of Canterbury to control it; which was the occasion of the Anglo-Welsh wars