The White Goddess (69 page)

Llew Llaw Gyffes (‘the Lion with the Steady Hand’), a type of Dionysus or Celestial Hercules worshipped in ancient Britain, is generally identified with Lugh, the Goidelic Sun-god, who has given his name to the towns of Laon, Leyden, Lyons and Carlisle (Caer Lugubalion). The name ‘Lugh’ may be connected with the Latin
lux
(light) or
lucus
(a grove); it may even be derived from the Sumerian
lug
meaning ‘son’. ‘Llew’ is a different word, connected with
leo
(lion), an appellation of Lugh’s. In Ireland he was called ‘Lugh the Long-handed’, defeater of the Africans, the earliest settlers in Ireland; he possessed a magic spear which thirsted for blood and flashed fire or roared aloud in battle; and he was the first to use the horse in warfare. When he approached from the West, at the Battle of Moytura, Breas (Boreas?) Balor, the one-eyed King of the old Gods and later styled Lugh’s grandfather, cried out: ‘I wonder that the Sun has risen in the West today rather than in the East.’ His druids answered: ‘Would that it were no more than the Sun! It is the glowing face of Lugh the Long-handed’ – which nobody could gaze upon without being dazzled. Another account of his parentage quoted by H. d’Arbois de Joubainville in his monumental
Cycle
Mythologique
Irlandaise
makes him the son not of Balor’s daughter Ethne by one Cian, but of Clothru (who is apparently a single form of the Triple Goddess Eire, Fodhla and Banbha) by Balor’s three grandsons Brian, Iuchar and Iuchurba; a row of red circles on his neck and belly marking off the parts of his body that each father had begotten. His death on the first Sunday in August – called
Lugh
nasadh
(‘Commemoration of Lugh’), later altered to ‘Lugh-mass’ or ‘Lammas’ – was until recently observed in Ireland with Good Friday-like mourning and kept as a feast of dead kinsfolk, the mourning procession being always led by a young man carrying a hooped wreath. Lammas was also observed as a mourning feast in most parts of England in mediaeval times; which accounts for the extraordinary popular demonstrations when William Rufus’s body was brought up from the New Forest for burial. The peasants were bewailing a mythical Lugh when along came the body of their
own red-headed king laid on a harvest cart. Nowadays the only English Lammas celebrated is the Lancashire Wakes Week, the dismal meaning of which has been forgotten among the holiday distractions of Blackpool.

The famous Tailltean Games of Ireland, originally funeral games in the Etruscan style, with chariot races and sword-play, take place at Lammas. The Irish tradition that they were held in memory of one Tailte, Lugh’s dead foster-mother, is late and misleading. The games, which in early mediaeval times were so well-frequented that the chariots occupied six miles of road, were marked by Tailtean (or Teltown) marriages in honour of Lugh and his capricious bride. These were trial marriages and lasted ‘for a year and a day’, that is, for 365 days, and could be dissolved only by an act of divorce performed in the place where they had been celebrated. Then the man and woman stood back to back in the centre of the Black Rath and walked apart, one to the north, the other to the south. Lugh was incarnate in the famous Ulster hero Cuchulain: he flew in at the mouth of Cuchulain’s mother Dechtire in the form of a may-fly. Cuchulain was so much of a sun-god that when he plunged into a cold bath the water hissed and began to boil. That Lugh’s magical weapon was a spear suggests that he belongs to the earlier Bronze Age invaders of Ireland; the later ones were armed with swords. He may be identified with Geryon, King of the West, ‘with three bodies in one’, whom Hercules despoiled of his red cattle, guarded by a two-headed dog, and killed in Erytheia (red island).

According to the mythographers, Hercules sailed to the West from Greece, with ships from Crete, and went by way of North Africa, the Straits of Gibraltar, Tartessus, and Gaul (where he fathered the Celts). This is the same course as the Milesians took, and the Tenth Labour of Hercules reads like one more account of the defeat of the New Stone Age invaders – Partholan’s and Nemed’s peoples – by Bronze Age men from Spain; but Erytheia is perhaps Devonshire, famous for its bright red soil and red cattle, which the Bronze Age men also conquered from New Stone Age people. It was during this Labour that Hercules borrowed the golden cup from the Sun, and became lotus-borne. Geryon appears to have been a Western version of the Vedic god Agni, the earliest Indian trinity, who had three births and three bodies. As born of water, Agni was a calf who yearly grew to ‘a bull that sharpens his horns’; as born of two sticks (the fire-drill), he was a glutton with a fiery tongue; as born in the highest heaven, he was an eagle. The Vedic hymns also celebrate him as a supporter of the sky, namely the pillar of cloud that rises up when fires are lighted in his honour, and as an omniscient immortal who has taken up his abode among mortals. Thus when Hercules killed Geryon and carried off his cattle he was, in fact, gaining a victory over one of his own selves.

In some parts of Wales Lammas is still kept as a fair. Sir John Rhys records that in the 1850’s the hills of Fan Fach and South Barrule in
Carmarthenshire were crowded with mourners for Llew Llaw on the first Sunday in August, their excuse being that they were ‘going up to bewail Jephthah’s daughter on the mountain’. This, oddly enough, was the very same excuse that the post-Exilic Jewish girls had used, after the Deuteronomic reforms, to disguise their mourning for Tammuz, Llew Llaw’s Palestinian counterpart. But with the Welsh Revival the practice was denounced as pagan and discontinued.

Here is Llew Llaw’s own story (translated by Lady Charlotte Guest) which forms the second part of the
Romance
of
Math
the
Son
of Mathonwy.
Though not a saga in the grand style, like that of Cuchulain, and in part falsified by the intrusion of the God Woden (Gwydion) into territory not originally his, it is one of the best summaries extant of the single poetic Theme.

The first part of this romance relates to Gwydion’s stealing of the sacred pigs from Pryderi the King of the Pembrokeshire Annwm, on behalf of Math the son of Mathonwy, King of North Wales. Math is pictured as a sacred King of the ancient type whose virtue was resident in the feet. Except when his kingdom was attacked and he was obliged to ride into battle, Math was bound by convention to keep his foot in the lap of a priestess. The office of royal foot-holder survived in the Welsh princely courts until early mediaeval times, but was then assigned to a man, not a woman. Math’s was a matrilinear kingdom, his heirs being his sister’s sons; that is to say the husbands of his sister-in-law’s daughters. One of them, Gilvaethwy, attempts to usurp the throne by seducing the reigning queen, Math’s foot-holder, while Math is away on campaign. Math counters with all his magical resources, eliminates his rival, and then decides to marry his niece Arianrhod. The holding of the foot was doubtless protective, the heel being the one vulnerable point of sacred kings: witness the heel of Achilles pierced by Paris’s arrow; the heel of Talus pierced by Medea’s pin; the heel of Diarmuid pierced by the bristle of the Benn Gulban Boar; the heel of Harpocrates stung by the scorpion; the heel of Balder (in the Danish version of the myth) pierced by the mistletoe flung by the god Holder at the instigation of Loki; the heel of Ra stung by the magic snake sent by Isis; the heel of Mopsus the Lapith stung by the black snake of Libya, the heel of Krishna in the
Mahabharata,
pierced by an arrow which his brother Jara the Hunter shot. Talus is closely related to Achilles in Apollodorus’s version of the myth, where the cause of his death is given as a wound in the foot from an arrow shot by Hercules’s heir, Poeas.

Since recently I had the ill-luck to tread on a Pyrenean viper – a variety stated to be eight times more lethal than the English – I can take the argument further and assert confidently that ‘Silver Island’ or ‘White Island’, or ‘Revolving Island’, to which the sacred king goes at his death, is prophetically seen by him when his heel is bitten by the serpent or scorpion,
or pricked with the (presumably) poisoned arrow. Soon after the first pain and vomiting my eyesight began to fail. A small silver spot appeared in the centre of my field of vision, which gradually enlarged into an island with sharply defined bastions; the shores spread wider and wider, as though I were nearing it across a sea. When I started to walk home, I could not see where I was going; and then the island began slowly to revolve in a clockwise direction. I cannot say whether it would have revolved the canonical four times if the poison had been more virulent or if I had been obsessed by the sense of coming death as these kings were; the illusion had faded long before I was given an anti-toxin. I was thankful that, unlike my youngest son whom I was carrying on my shoulder at the time, I had not been born on the day of the winter solstice. My foot remained so swollen for a couple of months that I could only hobble. Finally a Catalan doctor prescribed hot fomentations of wild-olive leaves, which reduced the swelling within three days. This traditional remedy has mythological sense as well as practical value: the wild-olive was the timber of Hercules’s club, and therefore a prime expulsive of lingering venom.

I should, of course, have remembered the Emperor Claudius’s special edict recorded in Suetonius, ‘how there is nothing better for the bite of a viper than the juice of yew’. This was the correct homoeopathic treatment; as wild-olive was the allopathic. I find that Topsell in his
Serpents
(1658), recommends the juice of the periwinkle; this is another homoeopathic remedy, the periwinkle being ‘the flower of death’.

*

The Romance Of Llew Llaw Gyffes

…Math the Son of Mathonwy said: ‘Give
your counsel unto me, what maiden I shall seek.’ ‘Lord,’ said Gwydion the son of Don, ‘it is easy to give thee counsel; seek Arianrod, the daughter of Don, thy niece, thy sister’s daughter.’

And they brought her unto him, and the maiden came in. ‘Ha, damsel,’ said he, ‘art thou the maiden?’ ‘I know not, lord, other than that I am.’ Then he took up his magic wand, and bent it. ‘Step over this,’ said he, ‘and I shall know if thou art the maiden.’ Then stepped she over the magic wand, and there appeared forthwith a fine chubby yellow-haired boy. And at the crying out of the boy, she went towards the door. And thereupon some small form was seen; but before anyone could get a second glimpse of it, Gwydion had taken it, and had flung a scarf of velvet around it, and hidden it. Now the place where he hid it was the bottom of a chest at the foot of his bed.

‘Verily,’ said Math the son of Mathonwy, concerning the fine yellow-haired boy, ‘I will cause this one to be baptized, and Dylan is the name I will give him.’

So they had the boy baptized, and as they baptized him he plunged into the sea. And immediately when he was in the sea, he took its nature, and
swam as well as the best fish that was therein. And for that reason was he called Dylan, the son of the Wave. Beneath him no wave ever broke. And the blow whereby he came to his death, was struck by his uncle Govannion. The third fatal blow was it called.

As Gwydion lay one morning on his bed awake, he heard a cry in the chest at his feet; and though it was not loud, it was such that he could hear it. Then he arose in haste, and opened the chest: and when he opened it, he beheld an infant boy stretching out his arms from the folds of the scarf, and casting it aside. And he took up the boy in his arms, and carried him to a place where he knew there was a woman that could nurse him. And he agreed with the woman that she should take charge of the boy. And that year he was nursed.

And at the end of the year he seemed by his size as though he were two years old. And the second year he was a big child, and able to go to the Court by himself. And when he came to the Court, Gwydion noticed him, and the boy became familiar with him, and loved him better than anyone else. Then was the boy reared at the Court until he was four years old, when he was as big as though he had been eight.

And one day Gwydion walked forth, and the boy followed him, and he went to the Castle of Arianrod, having the boy with him; and when he came into the Court, Arianrod arose to meet him, and greeted him and bade him welcome. ‘Heaven prosper thee,’ said he. ‘Who is the boy that followeth thee?’ she asked. ‘This youth, he is thy son,’ he answered. ‘Alas,’ said she, ‘what has come unto thee that thou shouldst shame me thus, wherefore dost thou seek my dishonour, and retain it so long as this?’ ‘Unless thou suffer dishonour greater than that of my bringing up such a boy as this, small will be thy disgrace.’ ‘What is the name of the boy?’ said she. ‘Verily,’ he replied, ‘he has not yet a name.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I lay this destiny upon him, that he shall never have a name until he receives one from me.’ ‘Heaven bears me witness,’ answered he, ‘that thou art a wicked woman. But the boy shall have a name how displeasing soever it may be unto thee. As for thee that which afflicts thee is that thou art no longer called a damsel.’ And thereupon he went forth in wrath, and returned to Caer Dathyl, and there he tarried that night.

And the next day he arose and took the boy with him, and went to walk on the sea shore between that place and Aber Menei. And there he saw some sedges and sea weed, and he turned them into a boat. And out of dry sticks and sedges he made some Cordovan leather, and a great deal thereof, and he coloured it in such a manner that no one ever saw leather more beautiful than it. Then he made a sail to the boat, and he and the boy went in it to the port of the castle of Arianrod. And he began forming shoes and stitching them, until he was observed from the castle. And when he knew that they of the castle were observing him, he disguised his aspect, and put another semblance upon himself, and upon the boy, so
that they might not be known. ‘What men are those in yonder boat?’ said Arianrod. ‘They are cordwainers,’ answered they. ‘Go and see what kind of leather they have, and what kind of work they can do.’