The White Goddess (89 page)

Since ‘Maid Marian’ had been acting as Lady of Misrule in the Yuletide revels and deserting Robin for his rival, it is easy to see how she
earned a bad name for inconstancy. Thus ‘Maud Marian’ was often written for ‘Maid Marian’: ‘Maud’ is Mary Magdalene the penitent. In
Tom
o
’
Bedlam
’s
Song
she is Tom’s Muse – ‘Merry Mad Maud’.

Christmas was merry in the middle ages, but May Day was still merrier. It was the time of beribboned Maypoles, of Collyridian cakes and ale, of wreaths and posies, of lovers’ gifts, of archery contests, of merritotters (see-saws) and merribowks (great vats of milk-punch). But particularly of mad-merry marriages ‘under the greenwood tree’, when the dancers from the Green went off, hand in hand, into the greenwood and built themselves little love-bowers and listened hopefully for the merry nightingale. ‘Mad Merry’ is another popular spelling of ‘Maid Marian’, and as an adjective became attached to the magician Merlin (the original ‘Old Moore’ of the popular almanacks) whose prophetic almanacks were hawked at fairs and merrimakes. Merlin was really Merddin, as Spenser explains in the
Faerie
Queene,
but Robin Hood had taken his place as the May Bride’s lover, and he had become an old bearded prophet. The ‘merritotter’ is perhaps called after the scales (representing the Autumn equinox) in the hand of the Virgin in the Zodiac, who figured in the Mad Merry Merlin almanack: devoted readers naturally identified her with St. Mary Gipsy, for true-lovers’ fates tottered in her balance, see-sawing up and down.

Many of these greenwood marriages, blessed by a renegade friar styled Friar Tuck, were afterwards formally confirmed in the church-porch. But very often ‘merrybegots’ were repudiated by their fathers. It is probably because each year, by old custom, the tallest and toughest village lad was chosen to be Little John (or ‘Jenkin’) Robin’s deputy in the Merry Men masque, that Johnson, Jackson and Jenkinson are now among the commonest English names – Little John’s merrybegots. But Robin did as merrily with Robson, Hobson, Dobson (all short for Robin), Robinson, Hodson, Hudson and Hood; Greenwood and Merriman were of doubtful paternity. The Christmas ‘merrimake’ (as Sir James Frazer mentions in
The
Golden
Bough
)
also produced its crop of children. Who knows how many of the Morrises and Morrisons derive their patronymics from the amorous ‘morrice-men’
1
, Marian’s ‘merry-weathers’? Or how many ‘Princes’, ‘Lords’ and ‘Kings’ from the Christmas King, or Prince, or Lord, of Misrule?

The Christmas merry-night play was an important part of the English Yule-tide festivities: seven or eight versions survive. The principal incidents
are the beheading and restoration to life of the Christmas King, or Christmas Fool. This is one of the clearest survivals of the pre-Christian religion, and ultimately derives from ancient Crete. Firmicus Maternus in his
On
the
Error
of
Profane
Religion
tells how Cretan Dionysus (Zagreus) was killed at Zeus’s orders, boiled in a cauldron and eaten by the Titans. The Cretans, he says, celebrated an annual funeral feast, in which they played out the drama of the boy’s sufferings – and his shape-shifting – eating a live bull as his surrogate. Yet he did not die for, according to Epimenides, quoted by St. Paul, Minos made a panegyric over him:

St. Paul quoted a similar passage from the poet Aratus:

At Athens, the same festival, called the Lenaea, (‘Festival of the Wild Women’) was held at the winter solstice, and the death and rebirth of the harvest infant Dionysus were similarly dramatized. In the original myth it was not the Titans but the wild women, the nine representatives of the Moon-goddess Hera, who tore the child in pieces and ate him. And at the Lenaea it was a yearling kid, not a bull, that was eaten; when Apollodorus says that Dionysus was transformed into a kid, Eriphos, to save him from the wrath of Hera, this means that Hera once ate him as a human child, but that when men (the Titans or tutors) were admitted to the feast a kid was substituted as victim.

The most ancient surviving record of European religious practice is an Aurignacian cave-painting at Cogul in North-Eastern Spain of the Old Stone Age Lenaea. A young Dionysus with huge genitals stands unarmed, alone and exhausted in the middle of a crescent of nine dancing women, who face him. He is naked, except for what appear to be a pair of close-fitting boots laced at the knee; they are fully clothed and wear small cone-shaped hats. These wild women, differentiated by their figures and details of their dress, grow progressively older as one looks clock-wise around the crescent. The row begins with three young girls, the first two in long skirts, on the right and ends with two thin dark elderly women on the left and an emaciated crone on the far side; the crone has a face like the old moon and is dancing widdershins. In between are three vigorous golden-haired women, one of them in a short, bright party-frock. They clearly represent the New Moon, Old Moon and Full Moon triads – the crone being Atropos, the senior member of the Old Moon triad.

In front of the senior member of the New Moon triad is an animal whose fore-quarters are concealed by her skirt – it seems to be a black pig. And in the foreground of the picture, bounding away behind the backs of the Full Moon triad, is the very creature that Oisin saw in his vision when being conveyed by Niamh of the Golden Hair to the Land of Youth: a
hornless fawn. Balanced erect on the fawn’s neck, and facing backwards, is a boyish-looking imp or sprite, as clearly as anything the escaping soul of the doomed Dionysus. For the wild women are closing in on him and will presently tear him in bloody morsels and devour him. Though there is nothing in the painting to indicate the season, we can be sure that it was the winter solstice.

So we get back once more to the dramatic romance of Gwion – the boy who was eaten by the wild hag Cerridwen and reborn as the miraculous child Taliesin – and to the dispute between Phylip Brydydd and the ‘vulgar rhymesters’ (see Chapter Five) as to who should first present a song to their prince on Christmas Day. The
Romance
of
Taliesin
is a sort of Christmas play, in which the sufferings of the shape-shifting child are riddlingly presented. This is the elder version, reflecting the religious theory of early European society where woman was the master of man’s destiny: pursued, was not pursued; raped, was not raped – as may be read in the faded legends of Dryope and Hylas, Venus and Adonis, Diana and Endymion, Circe and Ulysses. The danger of the various islands of women was that the male who ventured there might be sexually assaulted in the same murderous way as, according to B. Malinowski in
The
Sexual
Life
of
Savages,
men of North-Western Melanesia are punished for trespass against female privilege. At least one coven of nine wild women seems to have been active in South Wales during early mediaeval times: old St. Samson of Dol, travelling with a young companion, was unlucky enough to trespass in their precinct. A frightful shriek rang out suddenly and from a thicket darted a grey-haired, red-garmented hag with a bloody trident in her hand. St. Samson stood his ground; his companion fled, but was soon overtaken and stabbed to death. The hag refused to come to an accommodation with St. Samson when he reproached her, and informed him that she was one of the nine sisters who lived in those woods with their mother – apparently the Goddess Hecate. Perhaps if the younger sisters had reached the scene first, the young man would have been the victim of a concerted sexual assault. Nine murderous black-garbed women occur in the Icelandic saga of Thidrandi, who one night opened his door to a knock, though warned against the consequences, and saw them riding against him from the north. He resisted their attack with his sword for awhile, but fell mortally wounded.

The transformations of Gwion run in strict seasonal order: hare in the autumn coursing season, fish in the rains of winter; bird in the spring when the migrants return, finally grain of corn in the summer harvest season. The Fury rushes after him in the form first of greyhound bitch, then of bitch-otter, then of falcon, finally overtakes him in the shape of a high-crested black hen – red comb and black feathers show her to be the Death Goddess. In this account the solar year ends in the winnowing season of early autumn, which points to an Eastern Mediterranean origin
of the story. In Classical times the Cretan, Cyprian and Delphic years, and those of Asia Minor and Palestine, ended in September.

However, when the victory of the patriarchal Indo-Europeans revolutionized the social system of the Eastern Mediterranean, the myth of the sexual chase was reversed. Greek and Latin mythology contains numerous anecdotes of the pursuit and rape of elusive goddesses or nymphs by gods in beast disguise: especially by the two senior gods, Zeus and Poseidon. Similarly in European folk-lore there are scores of variants on the ‘Two Magicians’ theme, in which the male magician, after a hot chase, outmagics the female and gains her maidenhead. In the English ballad of
The
Coal
Black
Smith,
a convenient example of this altered form of chase, the correct seasonal order of events is broken because the original context has been forgotten. She becomes a fish, he an otter; she a hare, he a greyhound; she becomes a fly, he a spider and pulls her to his lair; finally she becomes a quilt on his bed, he a coverlet and the game is won. In a still more debased French variant, she falls sick, he becomes her doctor; she turns nun, he becomes her priest and confesses her night and day; she becomes a star, he a cloud and muffles her.

In the British witch-cult the male sorcerer was dominant – though in parts of Scotland Hecate,
alias
the Queen of Elfin or Faerie, still ruled – and
The
Coal
Black
Smith
is likely to have been the song sung at a dramatic performance of the chase at a witches’ Sabbath; the association of smiths and horned gods is as ancient as Tubal Cain, the Kenite Goat-god. The horned Devil of the Sabbath had sexual connexion with all his witch attendants, though he seems to have used an enormous artificial member, not his own. Anne Armstrong, the Northumbrian witch already mentioned, testified in 1673 that, at a well-attended Sabbath held at Allansford, one of her companions, Ann Baites of Morpeth, successively transformed herself into cat, hare, greyhound and bee, to let the Devil – ‘a long black man, their protector, whom they call their God’ – admire her facility in changes. At first I thought that he chased Ann Baites, who was apparently the Maiden, or female leader of the coven, around the ring of witches, and that she mimicked the gait and cry of these various creatures in turn while he pursued her, adapting his changes to hers. The formula in
The
Coal
Black
Smith
is ‘he became a greyhound dog’, or ‘he became an otter brown’, ‘and fetched her home again’. ‘Home again’ is used here in the technical sense of ‘to her own shape’, for Isobel Gowdie of Auldearne at her trial in 1662, quoted the witch formula for turning oneself into a hare: 

It is clear from her subsequent account that there was no change of outward shape, but only of behaviour, and the verse suggests a dramatic dance. I see now that Ann Baites gave a solo performance, alternately mimicking the pursued and the pursuer, and that the Devil was content merely to applaud her. Probably the sequence was seasonal – hare and greyhound, trout and otter, bee and swallow, mouse and cat – and inherited from the earlier form of chase, with the pursuer as the black Cat-Demeter finally destroying the Sminthean mouse on the threshing-floor in the winnowing season. The whole song is easy to restore in its original version.
1

An intermediate form of the ‘Two Magicians’ myth, quoted by Diodorus Siculus, Callimachus in his
Hymn
to
Artemis
and Antoninus Liberalis, the second-century
AD
mythographer, in his
Transformations,
who all refer it to different regions, is that the Goddess Artemis,
alias
Aphaea, Dictynna, Britomart or Atergatis, is unsuccessfully pursued and finally escapes in fish form. Callimachus makes Minos of Crete the erotic pursuer and Britomart the chaste pursued, and relates that the pursuit lasted for nine months from the early flood season to the winnowing season. The myth is intended to explain the fish-tail in the statues of the goddess at Ascalon, Phigalia, Crabos, Aegina, Cephallenia, Mount Dictynnaeum in Crete and elsewhere, and to justify her local devotees in retaining their pre-Hellenic rites and marital customs. Fishermen figure prominently in the story – Dictynna means a net – and fishermen are notoriously conservative in their beliefs. In the Philistine version from Ascalon, quoted by Athenaeus, the Goddess was Derketo and the pursuer was one Moxus or Mopsus: perhaps this should be Moschus the ancestor of King Midas’s tribe who defeated the Hittites. Cognate with this myth is the fruitless attempt by Apollo on the maidenhead of the nymph Daphne.