The White Goddess (35 page)

What, for the early Church Councils, seemed the most diabolical and unpardonable heresy of all was the identification of the Hercules-Dionysus-Mithras bull, whose living flesh the Orphic ascetics tore and ate in their initiation ceremony, with Jesus Christ whose living flesh was symbolically torn and eaten in the Holy Communion. With this heresy,
which was second-century Egyptian, went another, the identification of the Virgin Mary with the Triple Goddess. The Copts even ventured to combine ‘the Three Maries’ who were spectators of the Crucifixion into a single character, with Mary Cleopas as a type of ‘Blodeuwedd’, the Virgin of ‘Arianrhod’, and Mary Magdalen as the third person of this ancient trinity, who appears in Celtic legend as Morgan le Faye, King Arthur’s sister. Morgan in Irish legend is ‘the Morrigan’, meaning ‘Great Queen’, a Death-goddess who assumed the form of a raven; and ‘le Faye’ means ‘the Fate’. According to Cormac’s
Glossary
the Morrigan was invoked in battle by an imitation on war-horns of a raven’s croaking. She was by no means the gentle character familiar to readers of the
Morte
D’Arthur
but like the ‘black screaming hag Cerridwen’ in the
Romance
of
Taliesin
was ‘big-mouthed, swarthy, swift, sooty, lame, with a cast in her left eye’.

Wherever these heresies survived in mediaeval Europe the Church visited them with such terrible penalties that British or Irish poets who played with them must have derived a dangerous joy from wrapping them up, as Gwion has done here, in riddling disguises. One can sympathize with the poets, in so far as their predecessors had accepted Jesus Christ without compulsion and had reserved the right to interpret Christianity in the light of their literary tradition, without interference. They saw Jesus as the latest theophany of the same suffering sacred king whom they had worshipped under various names from time immemorial. As soon as the big stick of Orthodoxy was waved at them from Rome or Canterbury they felt a pardonable resentment. The first Christian missionaries had conducted themselves with scrupulous courtesy towards the devotees of the pagan Sun-cult, with whom they had much mystical doctrine in common. Celtic and pre-Celtic gods and goddesses became Christian saints – for instance, St. Brigit, whose perpetual sacred fire was kept alight in a monastery at Kildare until the time of Henry VIII – and heathen festivals became Christianized with only a slight change of ritual. St. Brigit according to
The
Calendar
of Oengas
retained her original fire-feast,
Feile
Brighde,
on the evening of February 1st. She was so important that bishops were her Master-craftsmen; one of these, Connlaed, is said to have disobeyed her and to have been thrown to the wolves at her orders. She was greeted in the
Hymn
of Broccan
as ‘Mother of my Sovereign’, and in the
Hymn
of Ultan
as ‘Mother of Jesus’. (She had once been mother of The Dagda). In
The
Book
of
Lismore
she is named: ‘The Prophetess of Christ, the Queen of the South, the Mary of the Goidels’. Exactly the same thing had happened in Greece and Italy, where the Goddess Venus became St. Venere; the Goddess Artemis, St. Artemidos; the Gods Mercury and Dionysus, SS. Mercourios and Dionysius; the Sun-god Helios, St. Elias. In Ireland, when St. Columcille founded his church at Deny (‘Oak-wood’) he was ‘so loth to fell certain sacred trees that he turned his oratory to face north rather than east’ – north, towards Caer
Arianrhod. And when he was in Scotland he declared that ‘though he feared Death and Hell, the sound of an axe in the grove of Derry frightened him still more’. But the age of toleration did not last long; once Irish princes lost the privilege of appointing bishops from their own sept, and iconoclasts were politically strong enough to begin their righteous work, the axes rose and fell on every sacred hill.

It would be unfair to call the heretical poets ‘apostates’. They were interested in poetic values and relations rather than in prose dogma. It must have been irksome for them to be restricted in their poem-making by ecclesiastical conventions. ‘Is it reasonable?’ they may have exclaimed. ‘The Pope, though he permits our typifying Jesus as a Fish, as the Sun, as Bread, as the Vine, as a Lamb, as a Shepherd, as a Rock, as a Conquering Hero, even as a Winged Serpent, yet threatens us with Hell Fire if we ever dare to celebrate him in terms of the venerable gods whom He has superseded and from whose ritual every one of these symbols has been derived. Or if we trip over a simple article of this extraordinarily difficult Athanasian Creed. We need no reminder from Rome or Canterbury that Jesus was the greatest of all Sacred Kings who suffered death on a tree for the good of the people, who harrowed Hell and who rose again from the Dead and that in Him all prophecies are fulfilled. But to pretend that he was the first whom poets have ever celebrated as having performed these wonderful feats is, despite St. Paul, to show oneself either hypocritical or illiterate. So at his prophesied Second Coming we reserve the right to call him Belin or Apollo or even King Arthur.’

The most virtuous and enlightened of the early Roman Emperors, Alexander Severus (222–235
AD
) had held almost precisely the same view. He considered himself a reincarnation of Alexander the Great and, according to his biographer Lampridius, worshipped among his house-gods Abraham, Orpheus, Alexander and Jesus Christ. This mention of Alexander Severus suggests a reconsideration of the discredited word ‘Helio-Arkite’, which was used at the beginning of the nineteenth century to describe a hypothetic heathen cult revived by the bards as a Christian heresy, in which the Sun and Noah’s Ark were the principal objects of worship. ‘Arkite’ without the ‘Helio-’, was first used by the antiquary Jacob Bryant in 1774 in his
Analysis
of
Ancient
Mythology
;
but the word is incorrectly formed if it is to mean ‘Arcian’, or ‘Arcensian’, ‘concerned with the Ark’, as Bryant intended, since ‘-ite’ is a termination which denotes tribal or civic origin, not religious opinion. It seems indeed as if Bryant had borrowed the word ‘Arkite’ from some ancient work on religion and had misunderstood it.

There is only one famous Arkite in religious history – this same Alexander Severus, who was called ‘the Arkite’ because he was born in the temple of Alexander the Great at Arka in the Lebanon, where his Roman parents were attending a festival. His mother, Mamea, was some sort of
Christian. The Arkites who are mentioned in
Genesis,
X,
7
, and also in the Tell Amarna tablets of 1400
BC
, were an ancient Canaanite people well-known for their worship of the Moon-goddess Astarte, or Ishtar, to whom the acacia-wood ark was sacred; but Arka, which in the Tell Amarna tablets appears as ‘Irkata’, was not necessarily connected with the Indo-European root
arc
– meaning ‘protection’, from which we derive such Latin words as
arceo,
‘I ward off’,
area,
‘an ark’, and
arcana
,
‘religious secrets’. The Arkites are listed in
Genesis
X
with the Amathites, the Lebanon Hivites (probably Achaitites, or Achaeans) and the Gergasites of Lower Galilee, who seem to have originated in Gergithion near Troy and to be the people whom Herodotus names ‘the remnants of the ancient Teucrians’. The Arkite cult, later the Arkite heresy, was Alexander Severus’s own syncretic religion and in this sense of the word, Gwion may be styled an Arkite. The Sun and the Ark are, indeed, the most important elements of the Hercules myth, and Ishtar in the Gilgamesh Deluge romance of Babylonia, plays the same false part towards Gilgamesh as Blodeuwedd plays to Llew Llaw in the
Mabinogion
,
or Delilah to Samson in
Judges
,
or Deianeira to Hercules in Classical legend. It is a great pity that Bryant’s enthusiastic followers tried to substantiate a sound thesis by irresponsible and even fraudulent arguments.

The complimentary reference to the See of St. David in Gwion’s riddle – it is important to notice that St. David himself was a miraculous child, born from a chaste nun – and the anti-English vaticinations of a tenth-century poet, who also called himself Taliesin, which are bound up with the Gwion poems in the
Red
Book
of Hergest,
suggest that Gwion was hopefully trying to revive the Arkite heresy and elevate it into a popular pan-Celtic religion which should also include the Celticized Danes of the Dublin region and unite the Bretons, Irish, Welsh, and Scots in a political confederacy against the Anglo-Norman-French. If so, his hopes were disappointed. The Angevins were too strong: by 1282 Wales had become a province of England, the Normans were firmly established at Dublin and the head of Llewellyn Prince of North Wales, the leader of the nation, had been brought to London and exhibited on Tower Hill, crowned with an ivy wreath: in mocking allusion to the Welsh prophecy that he should be crowned there. Nevertheless, Gwion’s romance continued to be recited, and Welsh nationalism was revived towards the end of the fourteenth century under Prince Owen Glendower, who had a doubtful claim to descent from this same Prince Llewellyn, the last prince of the royal line that had been ruling Wales since the third century
AD
. Glendower, whose cause was supported by a new self-styled ‘Taliesin’, kept up a desultory war, with French help, until his death in 1416.

It was about that time that Dr. Sion Kent, the parish priest of Kenchurch, complained of what seems to have ben the same Arkite heresy, since Hu Gadarn, the hero who led the Cymry into Britain from
Taprobane (Ceylon), was invoked in it as an allegorical champion of Welsh liberty:

The ‘false and filthy prophecies’ probably concerned the expulsion of the English from Wales and the restored independence of the Welsh Church. Dr. Kent, whose name suggests that he was not of Welsh blood, was naturally anxious for the future, especially since nationalism implied an open return of the people of Kenchurch to a great many pagan superstitions which he spent much of his time trying to suppress; and perhaps, as a poet, was also jealous of the influence of the minstrels over his flock.

That the minstrels continued to stir up popular feeling by their anti-English vaticinations even after the fall of Owen Glendower is suggested by the repressive law of Henry IV enacted in 1402: ‘To eschew many diseases and mischiefs which have happened before this time in the Land of Wales by many wasters, rhymers, minstrels and other vagabonds. It is ordained and stablished that no waster, rhymer, minstrel nor vagabond be in any wise sustained in the Land of Wales to make commorthies’ [i.e.
kymhorthau
, ‘neighbourly gatherings’] ‘or gatherings upon the common people there.’ Pennant in his
Tours
comments that the object of these commorthies was to ‘collect a sufficient number of able-bodied men to make an insurrection’.

It is possible that the original Gwion who revived Druidism in Wales, as a pan-Celtic political weapon against the English, lived as early as in the reign of Prince Owain Gwynedd, son of the gifted Prince Grufudd ap Kynan who first brought Irish bards into North Wales; Owain reigned from 1137 to 1169 and resisted the armies of King Henry II with far greater success than either the Scots, Bretons or Irish. Cynddelw, in whose poems the word Druid first occurs, addressed Owain as ‘The Door of the Druids’, ‘door’ being mentioned as a synonym for the princely oak in the
Câd
Goddeu.
Owain may also be the hero celebrated in the badly garbled
Song
of
Daronwy,
from the
Book
of Taliesin:

Daronwy means ‘thunderer’, another synonym for oak, and Owain had driven off with heavy loss the sea-borne expedition which Henry sent
against Anglesey in 1157.

If anyone should doubt that Gwion could have picked up the Greek and Hebrew knowledge necessary to the construction of this riddle in Ireland, here is a passage from C. S. Boswell’s edition of the tenth-century Irish
Fis
Adamnain
,
‘The Vision of St. Adamnain’: