The White Goddess (38 page)

The creation of Adam in Hebron rather than in Lower Mesopotamia is startling: for many Biblical scholars now regard the first three chapters of Genesis as a Jerahmeelite legend from the Negeb of Judaea, which was taken over by the Israelites and became Babylonianized during the Captivity. Jerahmeel (‘beloved of the moon’) is yet another name for Canopic Hercules. Dr. Cheyne restores the text of
Genesis,
II,
8,
as ‘Yahweh planted a garden in Eden of Jerahmeel.’ He writes:

The Hebron valley in Southern Judaea is four thousand feet above sea-level and before agriculture started the process of soil-erosion (which, according to Walter Clay Lowdermilk’s recent survey of Palestine, has taken an average of three feet of soil from the whole country), must have been wonderfully fertile. Dr. Cheyne was apparently unaware of this poem of Gwion’s, the substance of which can have come only from a Hebrew source uncontaminated by the Babylonian epic which the Jews picked up in their Captivity, and it is difficult to see from whom, other than the Essenes; especially as Gwion explains that the books from which he derives his wisdom were originally brought to Adam of Hebron by the angel Raphael. In
Tobit
and
The
Book
of
Enoch
Raphael is described as the
angel of healing and must therefore have been the chief patron of the therapeutic Essenes. ‘Emmanuel’ refers to Isaiah’s prophecy of the birth of the Divine Child from a virgin: Jesus as Hercules.

The story of Adam fasting in Jordan with water to his chin is found in the tenth-century Irish
Saltair
na
Rann
,
and in the early mediaeval
Life
of
Adam
and
Eve,
on which the
Saltair
is based; when Adam fasted, according to the
Saltair
,
God rewarded him with pardon. But no source is known for the dispensation of wisdom to Moses by means of three Dominical rods (i.e. the rods of Sunday). It may be Essene tradition, for Sunday was the Essenes’ great day, and recalls a reference to three rowan rods in one of the Iolo manuscripts. Sir John Rhys regards this manuscript as genuine:

The end of the poem, from stanza 27 onwards, is a separate piece, not Gwion’s work, dating perhaps from the year 1210 when, in the reign of King Llewelyn ap Iowerth, King John of England invaded North Wales and temporarily conquered it.

Dr. Ifor Williams has expressed surprise that in the middle of Gwion’s
Câd
Goddeu
occurs the
Triad
:

This seems to be a variant text of the lines I have printed from Nash’s translation, and which occur twice in the poem:

Dr. Williams’ s version makes perfect sense also in the Boibel-Loth story of Hercules riding on the flood in his golden cup – sacrificed on the mountain – judging and establishing. The Apostles’ Creed, indeed, is the same old story – ‘conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary – suffered, was sacrificed – shall come to judge the quick and the dead.’

It is possible that the Apostles’ Creed, the earliest Latin version of which is quoted by the second-century Tertullian, was originally composed by some Gnostic Christian in Egypt and syncretically modelled on the Hercules formula. For ‘conceived by the Holy Ghost’, when read in the Gnostic light, has a direct reference to the Flood. In Gnostic theory
– the Gnostics first appear as a sect in the first century
BC
– Jesus was conceived in the mind of God’s Holy Spirit, who was female in Hebrew and, according to
Genesis
I,
2
, ‘moved on the face of the waters’. The Virgin Mary was the physical vessel in which this concept was incarnate and ‘Mary’ to the Gnostics meant ‘Of the Sea’. The male Holy Ghost is a product of Latin grammar –
spiritus
is masculine – and of early Christian mistrust of female deities or quasi-deities. Conception by a male principle is illogical and this is the only instance of its occurrence in all Latin literature. The masculinization of the Holy Spirit was assisted by a remark in the
First
Epistle
of
St.
John
,
that Jesus would act as a paraclete or advocate for man with God the Father; in the
Gospel
of St
John
the same figure is put in Jesus’s own mouth in a promise that God will send them a paraclete (usually translated ‘comforter’) after he has gone; and this paraclete, a masculine noun, understood as a mystical emanation of Jesus, was wrongly identified with the archaic Spirit that moved on the face of the waters. The Gnostics, whose language was Greek, identified the Holy Spirit with Sophia, Wisdom; and Wisdom was female. In the early Christian Church the Creed was uttered only at baptism, which was a ceremony of initiation into the Christian mystery and at first reserved for adults; baptism was likewise a preliminary to participation in the Greek mysteries on which the Christian were modelled, as in the Druidic mysteries.

The town of Eleusis, where the most famous mysteries of all took place, was said to be named after the Attic King Eleusis. Eleusis means ‘Advent’ and the word was adopted in the Christian mysteries to signify the arrival of the Divine Child; in English usage it comprises Christmas and the four preceding weeks. The mother of Eleusis was ‘Daeira, daughter of Oceanus’, ‘the Wise One of the Sea’, and was identified with Aphrodite the Minoan Dove-goddess who rose from the sea at Paphos in Cyprus every year with her virginity renewed. King Eleusis was another name for the Corn-Dionysus, whose life-story was celebrated at the Great Mysteries, a Harvest Thanksgiving festival in late September; and his father was sometimes said to be Ogygus, or Ogyges, the Theban king in whose reign the great flood took place which engulfed the corn-lands of Boeotia. At an early stage of the yearly Eleusinian Mysteries the Divine Child, son of the Wise One who came from the Sea, was produced by mystagogues, dressed as shepherds, for the adoration of the celebrants. He was seated in a
liknos
,
or osier harvest-basket. To judge from the corresponding myths of Moses, Taliesin, Llew Llaw, and Romulus, the mystagogues declared that they found him on the river bank where he had landed after sailing over the flood in this same harvest-basket, caulked with sedge. It will shortly be mentioned that the
liknos
was used not only as harvest-basket, manger and cradle, but also as winnowing sieve; the method was to shovel up the corn and chaff together while the wind was
blowing strong and sieve them through the osiers; the chaff was blown away and the corn fell in a heap. The Mysteries probably originated as a winnowing feast, for they took place some weeks after the wheat-harvest, and at the time of the equinoctial winds.

An interesting survival of these winnowing-feast mysteries is the Majorcan
xiurell
or white clay whistle, decorated in red and green, and hand-made in the traditional shapes of mermaid, coiled serpent, bull-headed man, full-skirted woman with a round hat rocking a baby in her arms, or with a flower instead of a baby, the same with a moon-disk surmounted by cow’s horns, man with a tall peaked hat and arms upraised in adoration, and little man riding on a hornless, prick-eared, long-legged animal with a very short muzzle. It figures, with quince-boughs and boughs of the sorb-apple, in an ecclesiastical festival held at the village of Bonanova near Palma when the villagers perambulate a hill at night on the first Sunday after the 12th of September (the Feast of the Blessed Name of the Virgin Mary) which corresponds with the 23rd of September Old Style. The object of the whistle must originally have been to induce the North-East winnowing winds which, according to the local almanack, begin to blow at this season and which at the end of the month summon rain clouds from the Atlantic Ocean to soak the winter wheat planted earlier in the month. But this is forgotten: winnowing in Majorca is now done at any time after the harvest and not celebrated with any festivities. The mermaid, locally called a ‘siren’, evidently represents Daeira (Aphrodite) the moon-mother of Eleusis (the Corn-Dionysus who is shown with her in the woman-and-baby
xiurell
);
the bull-headed man is Dionysus himself grown to manhood; the man in the hat is a Tutor, or
gran
mascara
;
the little rider is likely to be Dionysus again but the species of his tall mount is indeterminate. The quince-boughs, sorb-boughs, and the white clay are also in honour of the Goddess – now invoked as the Virgin Mary. The Serpent is the wind itself. Since this is the only time of the year when wind is welcomed by the Majorcans who, being largely arboricultural, fear the sirocco as they fear the Devil – the farmer’s purse, as they say, hangs on the bough of a tree – the sound of whistling is not heard in the island except in the
xiurell
season. The ploughman sings as he drives his mule and the schoolboy as he runs home from school; for the rest
furbis,
flabis,
flebis
– ‘whistle shrill, weep long’. More about the White Goddess and whistling for wind will be found in Chapter Twenty-four.