The White Goddess (27 page)

That bull’s blood was used for divination in ancient Ireland is not mere supposition. A rite called ‘The Bull Feast’ is mentioned in the
Book
of
the
Dun
Cow
:

The white bull recalls the sacred white bulls of the Gaulish mistletoe rite; the white bull on which the Thracian Dionysus rode; the white bulls sacrificed
on the Alban Mount and at the Roman Capitol; and the white bull representing the true seed of Israel in the apocalyptic
Book
of
Enoch.

Now we begin to understand the mysterious
Preiddeu
Annwm
(‘the Spoils of Annwm’) in which – between Gwion’s interpolative taunts at the ignorance of Heinin and the other court-bards – one Gwair ap Geirion laments that he cannot escape from Caer Sidi. The refrain is: ‘Except seven none returned from Caer Sidi.’ We know at least two who did return: Theseus and Daedalus, both Attic Sun-heroes. The stories of Theseus’s expedition to the Underworld and of his adventure in the Cretan labyrinth of Cnossos are really two parts of a single confused myth. Theseus (‘he who disposes’) goes naked, except for his lion-skin, to the centre of the maze, there kills the bull-headed monster of the double-axe – the
labris
from which the word ‘labyrinth’ is derived – and returns safely: and the goddess who enables him to do so is the Goddess Ariadne whom the Welsh called Arianrhod. In the second part of the myth he fails in his Underworld expedition: he has to be rescued by Hercules, and his companion Peirithous remains behind like Gwair, perpetually sighing for deliverance. The myth of the hero who defeats Death was combined by the Greek mythographers with a historical event: the sack of the labyrinthine palace of Cnossos by Danaan raiders from Greece about 1400
BC
and the defeat of King Minos, the Bull-king. Daedalus (‘the bright one’) similarly escapes from the Cretan labyrinth, guided by the Moon-goddess Pasiphaë, but without using violence; he was a Sun-hero of the Aegean colonists of Cumae, and of the Sardinians, as well as of the Athenians.

Caer Sidi in the
Preiddeu
Annwm
is given a new synonym in each of the seven stanzas. It appears as Caer Rigor (‘the royal castle’) with a pun maybe on the Latin
rigor
mortis
;
Caer Colur (‘the gloomy castle’); Caer Pedryvan (‘four-cornered castle’), four times revolving; Caer Vediwid (‘the castle of the perfect ones’); Caer Ochren (‘the castle of the shelving side’ – i.e. entered from the side of a slope); Caer Vandwy (‘the castle on high’).

I do not know who the canonical seven were, but among those eligible for the honour were Theseus, Hercules, Amathaon, Arthur, Gwydion, Harpocrates, Kay, Owain, Daedalus, Orpheus and Cuchulain. (When Cuchulain, mentioned by Gwion in a poem, harrowed Hell, he brought back three cows and a magic cauldron.) Aeneas is unlikely to have been one of the seven. He did not die as the others did; he merely visited an oracular cave, just as King Saul had done at Endor, or Caleb at Machpelah. The castle that they entered – revolving, remote, royal, gloomy, lofty, cold, the abode of the Perfect Ones, with four corners, entered by a dark door on the shelving side of a hill -was the castle of death or the Tomb, the Dark Tower to which Childe Roland came in the ballad. This description fits the New Grange burial cave, but ‘four-cornered’
refers, I think, to the kist-vaen method of burial which was invented by the pre-Greek inhabitants of Northern Greece and the islands about Delos and thence conveyed to Western Europe by Bronze Age immigrants, the round-barrow men: the kist being a small rectangular stone box in which the dead body was laid in a crouched position. Odysseus may be said to have been ‘three periods in the castle of Arianrhod’ because he entered with twelve companions into the Cyclops’ cave, but escaped; was detained by Calypso on Ogygia, but escaped; and by the enchantress Circe on Aeaea – another sepulchral island – but escaped. Yet it is unlikely that Odysseus is intended: I think that Gwion is referring to Jesus Christ, whom the twelfth-century poet Dafydd Benfras makes visit a Celtic Annwm, and who escaped from the gloomy cave in the hillside in which he had been laid by Joseph of Arimathea. But how was Jesus ‘three periods in the Castle of Arianrhod’? I take this for a heresy making Jesus, as the Second Adam, a reincarnation of Adam, and, as the Davidic Messiah, a reincarnation also of David. The Age of Adam and the Age of David are particularized in Gwion’s
Divregwawd
Taliesin.
Jesus is pictured there as still waiting in the heavens for the dawn of the Seventh Age: ‘Was it not to Heaven he went when he departed hence? And at the Day of Judgement he will come to us here. For the fifth age was the blessed one of David the Prophet. The sixth age is the age of Jesus, which shall last till the Day of Judgement.’ In the Seventh Age he would be called Taliesin.