The White Goddess (22 page)

The deceitful cry of the Lapwing! Gwion was not so ignorant of sacred history as he pretended: he must have known perfectly well that Moses never crossed the Jordan, that Mary Magdalene was never in the Firmament, that Lucifer’s fall had been recorded by the prophet Isaiah centuries before the time of Alexander the Great. Refusing to be lured away from the secret by his apparently nonsensical utterances, I began my unravelling of the puzzle by answering the following questions:

I felt confident that I would presently catch a gleam of white through the tangled thicket where the Roebuck was harboured.

Now, according to the Pentateuch, Moses died on Pisgah on the other side of Jordan and ‘no man knoweth his sepulchre to this day’; and of all the Children of Israel who had come with him into the wilderness out of the house of bondage, only two, Caleb and Joshua, crossed into the Promised Land. As spies they had already been bold enough to cross and recross the river. It was Caleb who seized Hebron from the Anakim on behalf of the God of Israel and was granted it by Joshua as his inheritance. So I realized that the Dog had torn the whole poem into shreds with his teeth and that the witty Lapwing had mixed them up misleadingly, as she did with the torn shreds of the fruit passage in the
Câd
Goddeu.
The original statement was: ‘I conveyed the Divine Spirit through the water of Jordan to the level of the vale of Hebron.’ And the ‘I’ must be Caleb.

If the same trick had been played with every line of the
Hanes
Taliesin,
I could advance a little farther into the thicket. I could regard the poem as a sort of acrostic composed of twenty or thirty riddles, each of them requiring separate solution; what the combined answers spelt out promised to be a secret worth discovering. But first I had to sort out and reassemble the individual riddles.

After the misleading ‘through the water of Jordan’ had been removed from line 25, ‘I strengthened Moses’ remained. Well, who
did
strengthen
Moses? And where was this strengthening done? I remembered that Moses was strengthened at the close of his battle with the Amalekites, by having his hands held up by two companions. Where did this battle take place and who were the strengtheners? It took place at Jehovah-Nissi, close to the Mount of God, and the strengtheners were Aaron and Hur. So I could recompose the riddle as: ‘I strengthened Moses in the land of the Deity’. And the answer was: ‘Aaron and Hur’. If only one name was needed, it would probably be Hur because this is the only action recorded of him in the Pentateuch.

Similarly, in line 25, ‘I have been with Mary Magdalene’ had to be separated from the misleading ‘in the firmament’ and the other part of the riddle looked for in another verse. I had already found it by studying the list of people present at the Crucifixion: St. Simon of Cyrene, St. John the Apostle, St. Veronica, Dysmas the good thief, Gestas the bad thief, the Centurion, the Virgin Mary, Mary Cleopas, Mary Magdalene….But I had not overlooked the woman who (according to the
Proto-evangelium
of St. James) was the first person ever to adore the child Jesus, the prime witness of his parthenogenesis, and his most faithful follower. She is mentioned in Mark XV, as standing beside Mary Magdalene. So: ‘I was with Mary Magdalene at the place of the Crucifixion of the merciful Son of God.’ The answer was: ‘Salome’.

Who instructed Enoch? (Eli does not, apparently, belong to this riddle.) I agree with Charles, Burkitt, Oesterley, Box and other Biblical scholars that nobody can hope to understand the Sayings of Jesus who has not read the
Book
of
Enoch
,
omitted from the canon of the
Apocrypha
but closely studied by the primitive Christians. I happened to have been reading the book and knew that the answer was ‘Uriel’, and that Uriel instructed Enoch ‘on the fall of Lucifer into the depth of hell’. A curious historical point is that the verse about Uriel’s instruction of Enoch is not included in the fragments of the Greek
Book
of
Enoch
quoted by the ninth-century Byzantine historian Syncellus, nor in the Vatican MS. (1809), nor in the quotations from the
Book
of
Enoch
in the
Epistle
of
St.
Jude.
It occurs only in the text dug up at Akhmim in Egypt in 1886, and in the Ethiopian translation of an earlier Greek text, which is the only version which we know to have been extant in the thirteenth century. Where did Gwion find the story? Was a knowledge of Ethiopian among his attainments? Or did he find a complete Greek manuscript in the library of some Irish abbey that had escaped the fury of the Vikings’ war against books? The passage in the
First
Book
of
Enoch,
XVIII,
11
,
and
XIX,
1,
2,
3,
runs:

This discovery took me a stage further, to line 7: ‘I have borne a banner before Alexander.’ Among the poems attributed to Taliesin in the
Red
Book
of
Hergest
is a fragment called
Y
Gofeisws
By
d
(‘A Sketch of the World’) which contains a short panegyric of the historical Alexander, and another
Anrhyfeddonau
Alexander
,
‘The Not-wonders of Alexander’ – a joke at the expense of a thirteenth-century Spanish romance ascribing to Alexander adventures properly belonging to the myth of Merlin – which tells mockingly how he went beneath the sea and met ‘creatures of distinguished lineage among the fish….’ But neither of these poems gave me a clue to the riddle. If it must be taken literally I should perhaps have guessed the answer to be ‘Neoptolemus’, who was one of Alexander’s bodyguard and the first man to scale the walls of Gaza at the assault. But more probably the reference was to Alexander as a re-incarnation of Moses. According to Josephus, when Alexander came to Jerusalem at the outset of his Eastern conquests, he refrained from sacking the Temple but bowed down and adored the Tetragrammaton on the High Priest’s golden frontlet. His astonished companion Parmenio asked why in the world he had behaved in this unkingly way. Alexander answered: ‘I did not adore the High Priest himself but the God who has honoured him with office. The case is this: that I saw this very person in a dream, dressed exactly as now, while I was at Dios in Macedonia. In my dream I was debating with myself how I might conquer Asia, and this man exhorted me not to delay. I was to pass boldly with my army across the narrow sea, for his God would march before me and help me to defeat the Persians. So I am now convinced that Jehovah is with me and will lead my armies to victory.’ The High Priest then further encouraged Alexander by showing him the prophecy in the
Book
of
Daniel
which promised him the dominion of the East; and he went up to the Temple, sacrificed to Jehovah and made a generous peace-treaty with the Jewish nation. The prophecy referred to Alexander as the ‘two-horned King’ and he subsequently pictured himself on his coins with two horns. He appears in the Koran as Dhul Karnain, ‘the two-horned’. Moses was also ‘two-horned’, and in Arabian legend ‘El Hidr, the ever-young prophet’, a former Sun-hero of Sinai, befriended both Moses and Alexander ‘at the meeting place of two seas’. To the learned Gwion, therefore, a banner borne before Alexander was equally a banner borne before Moses; and St. Jerome, or his Jewish mentors, had already made a poetic identification of Alexander’s horns with those of
Moses.

The banner of Moses was ‘Nehushtan’, the Brazen Serpent, which he raised up to avert the plague in the wilderness. When he did so he became an ‘Alexander’, i.e. a ‘warder-off-of-evil-from-man’. So the answer of this riddle is ‘Nehushtan’ or, in the Greek Septuagint spelling, in which I imagine Gwion had read the story, ‘Ne-Esthan’. It should be remembered that this Brazen Serpent in the
Gospel
According
to
John,
III,
14
and the apocryphal
Epistle
of
Barnabas,
XII,
7
is a
type of Jesus Christ. Barnabas emphasizes that the Serpent ‘hung on a wooden thing’, i.e. the Cross, and had the power of making alive. In
Numbers,
XXI,
9
it is described as a ‘seraph’, a name given by Isaiah to the flying serpents that appeared in his vision as the attendants of the Living God and flew to him with a live coal from the altar.

The next riddle I had to solve, a combination of lines 9 and 26, was: ‘I have been in the firmament, on the Galaxy.’ The Galaxy, or Milky Way, is said to have been formed when the milk of the Great Goddess Rhea of Crete spouted abundantly into the sky after the birth of the infant Zeus. But since the Great Goddess’s name varies from mythographer to mythographer – Hyginus, for example, debates whether to call her Juno or Ops (Wealth) – Gwion has considerately given us another clue: ‘When Roma was built’. He is correctly identifying a Cretan with a Roman goddess, and what is more surprising, recognizes Romulus as a Latin deity of the same religious system as Cretan Zeus. Romulus’s mother was also named Rhea, and if she had trouble with her milk when she was forced to wean her twins in order to conceal their birth, so had Cretan Rhea in the same circumstances. The main difference was that Romulus and Remus had a she-wolf for their foster-mother, whereas Zeus (and some say his foster-brother Goat Pan, too), was suckled by the she-goat Amalthea, whose hide he afterwards wore as a coat; or, as still others say, by a white sow. Both Romulus and Zeus were brought up by shepherds. So: ‘I have been in the firmament, on the Galaxy, when Roma was built.’ The answer is Rhea, though it was not Rhea herself but the spurt of her milk,
rhea
in Greek, that was on the Galaxy. Gwion had been anticipated by Nennius in giving more importance to Rhea, mother of Romulus, than the Classical mythologists had done: Nennius called her ‘the most holy queen’.

This riddle is purposely misleading. The only legend about the Galaxy that Heinin and the other bards at Maelgwyn’s court would have known concerns Blodeuwedd, conjured by Gwydion to be the bride of Llew Llaw Gyffes. Llew’s other name was Huan and Blodeuwedd was transformed into an owl and called Twyll Huan (‘the deceiving of Huan’) for having caused Llew’s death: the Welsh for owl being
tylluan.
The legend of Blodeuwedd and the Galaxy occurs in the
Peniardd
MSS
.:

It should be added that the form ‘Caer Gwydion’, instead of ‘Caer Wydion’, proves the myth to be a late one. Blodeuwedd (as shown in Chapter Two) was Olwen, ‘She of the White Track’, so Gwydion was right to search for her in the Galaxy: Rhea with her white track of stars was the celestial counterpart of Olwen-Blodeuwedd with her white track of trefoil.

Who, in line 21, witnessed the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah? Lot, or perhaps the unnamed ‘wife of Lot’.

Who, in line 18, was ‘the chief director of the work of the tower of Nimrod’? I saw that the Lapwing was at her tricks again. The question really ran: ‘Of the work on what tower was Nimrod the chief director?’ The answer was ‘Babel’. Gower’s lines on the inconvenience caused to Nimrod and his masons when the confusion of tongues began, had run in my head for years:

Who, in line 24, was ‘with my Lord in the manger of the Ass’? Was the answer ‘swaddling clothes’? Then someone called my attention to the text
of
Luke
II,
16
:
‘And they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger.’ Gwion was being mischievous: literally, the sentence reads as though Joseph, Mary and the child were all together in the manger. The answer was evidently ‘Joseph’, since that was St. Joseph’s most glorious moment.