The White Goddess (20 page)
Authors: Robert Graves
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Mythology, #Literature, #20th Century, #Britain, #Literary Studies, #Amazon.com, #Mysticism, #Retail
How the god of medicine was named in twelfth-century pagan England is difficult to determine; but he clearly stood in the same relation to the Goddess invoked in the prayers as Aesculapius originally stood to Athene, Thoth to Isis, Esmun to Ishtar, Diancecht to Brigit, Odin to Freya, and Bran to Danu.
1
Thallus gives the earliest historical record of the Crucifixion.
2
A. R. Burn in his
Minoans,
Philistines
and
Greeks
suggests that all traditional dates before 500
BC
should be reduced to five-sixths of their distance from that date, since the Greeks reckoned three generations to a century, when four would be nearer the mark. However, Walter Leaf approves of 1183
BC
as the date of the Fall of Troy, because the curse of one thousand years that had fallen on the city of Ajax in punishment for his rape of the Trojan priestess Cassandra was lifted about 183
BC
. The date now favoured by most archaeologists is 1230 BC.
1
There was a third Ortygia (‘quail place’). According to Tacitus, the Ephesians in their plea before the Emperor Tiberius for the right of asylum in the Artemisian precinct, stated that the cult of their Great Goddess Artemis (whom the Romans called Diana) was derived from Ortygia, where her name was then Leto. Dr. D. C. Hogarth places this Ortygia in the Arvalian Valley to the north of Mount Solmissos, but the suggestion is not plausible unless, like the islets of the same name, it was a resting place for quail in the Spring migration from Africa.
1
The White Hill, or Tower Hill, at London preserves Albina’s memory, the Keep built in 1078 by Bishop Gundulf being still called the White Tower. Herman Melville in his
Moby
Dick
devotes an eloquent chapter to a consideration of the contradictory emotions aroused by the word ‘white’ – the grace, splendour and purity of milk-white steeds, white sacrificial bulls, snowy bridal veils and white priestly vestments, as opposed to the nameless horror aroused by albinos, lepers, visitants in white hoods and so forth – and records that the blood of American visitors to Tower Hill is far more readily chilled by ‘This is the White Tower’, than by ‘This is the Bloody Tower.’ Moby Dick was an albino whale.
1
Cerdo
is said to be derived from
Setula
,
‘a little sow’, but the violent metathesis of consonants that has to be assumed to make this derivation good cannot be paralleled in the names of other domestic animals.
1
Pythagoras is said to have been a Tyrrhenian Pelasgian from Samos in the Northern Aegean. This would account for the close connexion of his philosophy with the Orphic and Druidic. He is credited with having refrained not only from beans but from fish, and seems to have developed an inherited Pelasgian cult by travel among other nations. His theory of the transmigration of souls is Indian rather than Pelasgian. At Crotona he was accepted, like his successor Empedocles, as a reincarnation of Apollo.
2
The Platonists excused their abstention from beans on the rationalistic ground that they caused flatulence; but this came to much the same thing. Life was breath, and to break wind after eating beans was a proof that one had eaten a living soul – in Greek and Latin the same words,
pneuma
and
an
ima
,
stand equally for gust of wind, breath and soul or spirit.
Chapter Five
When with this complicated mythological argument slowly forming in my mind, I turned again to the
Hanes
Taliesin
(‘The Tale of Taliesin’), the riddling poem with which Taliesin first addresses King Maelgwyn in the Romance, I already suspected that Gwion was using the Dog, the Lapwing and the Roebuck to help him conceal in his riddle the new Gwydionian secret of the Trees, which he had somehow contrived to learn, and which had invested him with poetic power. Reading the poem with care, I soon realized that here again, as in the
Câd
Goddeu
,
Gwion was no irresponsible rhapsodist, but a true poet; and that whereas Heinin and his fellow-bards, as stated in the Romance, knew only ‘Latin, French, Welsh and English’, he was well read also in the Irish classics – and in Greek and Hebrew literature too, as he himself claims:
Tracthator
fyngofegYn
Efrai,
yn
Efroeg
,Yn
Efroeg,
yn
Efrai.
I realized too, that he was hiding an ancient religious mystery – a blasphemous one from the Church’s point of view – under the cloak of buffoonery, but had not made this secret altogether impossible for a well-educated fellow-poet to guess.
I here use the name ‘Gwion’ for ‘Taliesin’, to make it quite clear that I am not confusing the miraculous child Taliesin of the
Romance
of
Taliesin
with the historic Taliesin of the late sixth century, a group of whose authentic poems is contained in the
Red
Book
of
Hergest
, and who is noticed by Nennius, in a quotation from a seventh-century genealogy of the Saxon Kings, as ‘renowned in British poetry’. The first Taliesin spent much of his time during the last third of the sixth century as a guest of various chiefs and princes to whom he wrote complimentary poems (Urien ap Cynvarch, Owein ap Urien Gwallag ap Laenaug, Cynan Garwyn ap Brochfael Ysgythrog, King of Powys, and the High King Rhun ap Maelgwn until he was killed by the Coeling in a drunken
quarrel). He went with Rhun in the first campaign against the men of the North, the occasion of which was the killing of Elidir (Heliodorus) Mwynfawr, and the avenging raid of Clydno Eiddin, Rhydderch Hael (or Hen) and others, to which Rhun retaliated with a full-scale invasion. This Taliesin calls the English ‘Eingl’ or ‘Deifyr’ (Deirans) as often as he calls them ‘Saxons’, and the Welsh ‘Brython’ not ‘Cymry’. ‘Gwion’ wrote about six centuries later, at the close of the Period of the Princes.
In his
Lectures
on
Early
Welsh
Poetry
,
Dr. Ifor Williams, the greatest recent authority on the text of the Taliesin poems, postulates from internal literary evidence that parts of the Romance existed in a ninth-century original. I do not dispute this, or his conclusion that the author was a paganistic cleric with Irish connexions; but must dispute his denial that there is ‘any mysticism, semi-mysticism, or demi-semi-mysticism’ in the poems and that the whole rigmarole can be easily explained as follows:
Taliesin is just showing off; like the kangaroo in Kipling’s story – he had to! That was the role he had to play.
As a scholar, Dr. Williams naturally feels more at home with the earlier Taliesin, who was a straight-forward court bard of the skaldic sort. But the point of the Romance to me is not that a pseudo-Taliesin humorously boasted himself omniscient, but that someone who styled himself Little Gwion, son of Gwreang of Llanfair in Caereinion, a person of no importance, accidentally lighted on certain ancient mysteries and, becoming an adept, began to despise the professional bards of his time because they did not understand the rudiments of their traditional poetic lore. Proclaiming himself a master-poet, Gwion took the name of Taliesin, as an ambitious Hellenistic Greek poet might have taken the name of Homer. ‘Gwion son of Gwreang’ is itself probably a pseudonym, not the baptismal name of the author of the Romance. Gwion is the equivalent (
gw
for
f
)
of Fionn, or Finn, the Irish hero of a similar tale. Fionn son of Mairne, a Chief Druid’s daughter, was instructed by a Druid of the same name as himself to cook for him a salmon fished from a deep pool of the River Boyne, and forbidden to taste it; but as Fionn was turning the fish over in the pan he burned his thumb, which he put into his mouth and so received the gift of inspiration. For the salmon was a salmon of knowledge, that had fed on nuts fallen from the nine hazels of poetic art. The equivalent of Gwreang is Freann, an established variant of Fearn, the alder. Gwion is thus claiming oracular powers as a spiritual son of the Alder-god Bran. His adoption of a pseudonym was justified by tradition. The hero Cuchulain (‘hound of Culain’) was first named Setanta and was a reincarnation of the god Lugh; and Fionn (‘fair’) himself was first named Deimne. Bran was a most suitable father for Gwion, for by this time he was known as the Giant Ogyr Vran, Guinevere’s father – his name, which means ‘Bran the
Malign’ (
ocur
vran
),
1
has apparently given English the word ‘ogre’ through Perrault’s
Fairy
Tales
– and was credited by the bards with the invention of their art and with the ownership of the Cauldron of Cerridwen from which they said that the Triple Muse had been born. And Gwion’s mother was Cerridwen herself.
It is a pity that one cannot be sure whether the ascription of the romance in an
Iolo
manuscript printed by the
Welsh
MSS.
Society
,
to one ‘Thomas ap Einion Offeiriad, a descendant of Gruffydd Gwyr’, is to be trusted. This manuscript, called ‘Anthony Powel of Llwydarth’s MS.’, reads authentically enough – unlike the other notices of Taliesin printed by Lady Guest, on Iolo Morganwg’s authority, in her notes to the
Romance
of
Taliesin
:
Taliesin, Chief of the Bards, the son of Saint Henwg of Caerlleon upon Usk, was invited to the court of Urien Rheged, at Aberllychwr. He, with Elffin, the son of Urien, being once fishing at sea in a skin coracle, an Irish pirate ship seized him and his coracle, and bore him away towards Ireland; but while the pirates were at the height of their drunken mirth, Taliesin pushed his coracle to the sea, and got into it himself, with a shield in his hand which he found in the ship, and with which he rowed the coracle until it verged the land; but, the waves breaking then in wild foam, he lost his hold on the shield, so that he had no alternative but to be driven at the mercy of the sea, in which state he continued for a short time, when the coracle stuck to the point of a pole in the weir of Gwyddno, Lord of Gredigion, in Aberdyvi; and in that position he was found, at the ebb, by Gwyddno’s fishermen, by whom he was interrogated; and when it was ascertained that he was a bard, and the tutor of Elffin, the son of Urien Rheged, the son of Cynvarch: ‘I, too, have a son named Elffin,’ said Gwyddno, ‘be thou a bard and teacher to him, also, and I will give thee lands in free tenure.’ The terms were accepted, and for several successive years he spent his time between the courts of Urien Rheged and Gwyddno, called Gwyddno Garanhir, Lord of the Lowland Cantred; but after the territory of Gwyddno had become overwhelmed by the sea, Taliesin was invited by the Emperor Arthur to his court at Caerlleon upon Usk, where he became highly celebrated for poetic genius and useful, meritorious sciences. After Arthur’s death he retired to the estate given to him by Gwyddno, taking
Elffin, the son of that prince, under his protection. It was from this account that Thomas, the son of Einion Offeiriad, descended from Gruffyd Gwyr, formed his romance of Taliesin, the son of Cariadwen – Elffin, the son of Goddnou – Rhun, the son of Maelgwn Gwynedd, and the operations of the Cauldron of Ceridwen.
If this is a genuine mediaeval document, not an eighteenth-century forgery, it refers to a muddled tradition about the sixth-century poet Taliesin and accounts for the finding of the Divine Child in the weir near Aberdovey rather than anywhere else. But probably ‘Gwion’ was more than one person, for the poem
Yr
Awdyl
Vraith
, which is given in full in Chapter Nine, is ascribed in the
Peniardd
MS.
to Jonas Athraw, the ‘Doctor’ of Menevia (St. David’s), who lived in the thirteenth century. A complimentary reference to the See of St. David’s concealed in the
Hanes
Taliesin
supports this ascription. (Menevia is the Latin form of the original name of the place,
Hen
Meneu
,
‘the old bush’; which suggests the cult of a Hawthorn-goddess.)
Dr. Williams explains the confused state of the texts of the poems contained in the Romance by suggesting that they are the surviving work of the
Awenyddion
of the twelfth century, described by Giraldus Cambrensis:
There are certain persons in Cambria, whom you will find nowhere else, called Awenyddion, or people inspired; when consulted upon any doubtful event, they roar out violently, are rendered beside themselves, and become, as it were, possessed by a spirit. They do not deliver the answer to what is required in a connected manner; but the person who skilfully observes them will find, after many preambles, and many nugatory and incoherent though ornamented speeches, the desired explanation conveyed in some turn of word; they are then roused from their ecstasy, as from a deep sleep, and, as it were, by violence compelled to return to their proper senses. After having answered the question they do not recover until violently shaken by other people; nor can they remember the replies they have given. If consulted a second or third time upon the same point, they will make use of expressions totally different; perhaps they speak by means of fanatic and ignorant spirits. These gifts are usually conferred upon them in dreams; some seem to have sweet milk and honey poured on their lips; others fancy that a written schedule is applied to their mouths, and on awakening they publicly declare that they have received this gift…. They invoke, during their prophecies, the true and living God, and the Holy Trinity, and pray that they may not by their sins be prevented from finding the truth. These prophets are found only
among those Britons who are descended from the Trojans.