The White Goddess (33 page)

Hercules becomes more glorious still, as Celestial Hercules. The mythographers record that he borrowed the golden cup of the Sun, shaped like a water lily or lotus, for the homeward journey from one of his Labours. This was the cup in which the Sun, after sinking in the West, nightly floated round again to the East along the world-girdling Ocean stream. The lotus, which grows as the Nile rises, typified fertility, and so attached itself to the Egyptian sun-cult. ‘Hercules’ in Classical Greece became in fact another name for the Sun. Celestial Hercules was worshipped both as the undying Sun, and as the continually dying and continually renewed Spirit of the Year – that is, both as a god and as a demi-god. This is the type of Hercules whom the Druids worshipped as Ogma Sun-face, the lion-skinned inventor of Letters,
1
god of eloquence, god of healing, god of fertility, god of prophecy; and whom the Greeks worshipped as ‘assigner of titles’, as ruler of the Zodiac, as president of festivals, as founder of cities, as healer of the sick, as patron of archers and athletes.

Hercules is represented in Greek art as a bull-necked champion, and may for all practical purposes be identified with the demi-god Dionysus of Delphi, whose totem was a white bull. Plutarch of Delphi, a priest of Apollo, in his essay
On
Isis
and
Osiris
compares the rites of Osiris with those of Dionysus. He writes:

Thus ‘Hercules’ is seen to be also another name for Osiris whose yearly death is still celebrated in Egypt, even after thirteen centuries of Mohammedanism. Rubber is now used for the traditional fertility symbol; prodigiously inflated, it still excites the same cries of laughter and grief as in the days of Joseph the Patriarch and Joseph the Carpenter.

Plutarch carefully distinguishes Apollo (Hercules as god) from Dionysus (Hercules as demi-god). This Apollo never dies, never changes his shape; he is eternally young, strong and beautiful. Dionysus perpetually changes, like Proteus the Pelasgian god, or Periclymenus the Minyan, son of Neleus, or the ancient Irish Uath Mac Immomuin (‘Horror son of Terror’), into an infinity of shapes. So Pentheus in the
Bacchae
of Euripides charges him to appear ‘as a wild bull, as a many-headed snake, or as a fire-breathing lion’ – whichever he pleases: almost exactly in the words of the Welsh bard Cynddelw, a contemporary of Gruffudd ap Kynan’s:
Yn
rith
llew
rac
llyw
goradein,
yn
rith
dreic
rac
dragon
prydein.

Thus in Britain, Amathaon was Hercules as Dionysus; his father Beli was Hercules as Apollo.

Plutarch writes, in his essay
On
the
Ei
at
Delphi,
revealing as much Orphic secret doctrine as he dares:

That Gwion knew Hercules to be another name for Ogma Sun-face, the inventor of the Ogham alphabet, is made perfectly clear in his Elegy on ‘Ercwlf’ where the alphabet figures as the four pillars, of five letters each, that support the whole edifice of literature:

‘The shield of Mordei’ is a reference to the famous Battle of Catterick Bridge in the late sixth century
AD
: 

The ‘he’ is a British hero named Erthgi, presumably a reincarnation of Ercwlf, who ‘went to Catterick in the dawn with the aspect of a prince in the shield-guarded battle-field’. The reference to Hercules as ‘Chief of Baptism’ identifies him with St. John the Baptist, in whose honour Hercules’s midsummer fires were lighted in Gwion’s day. As Sir James Frazer points out, Midsummer Day was always a water as well as a fire festival. ‘May the Trinity give thee a merciful day of judgement’ is Gwion’s view of Hercules as resident ‘
in
limbo
patrum’
–
in the abode of the just who had died before Jesus Christ’s advent. Baptism was not, of course, invented by the Christians. They had it from St. John, and he had it from the Hemero-baptists, a mysterious Hebrew sect usually regarded as a branch of the Pythagorean Essenes, who worshipped Jehovah in his Sun-god aspect. It should be observed that the devotees of the Thracian goddess Cotytto, the mother of the Cottians, had employed mystagogues called ‘Baptists’ – whether this was because they baptized the devotee before the orgies, or because they were charged with the ritual dipping (dyeing) of clothes or hair, is disputed – and that both the ancient Irish and ancient British used baptism before the Christians came. This is recorded in the Irish tales of
Conall
Der
g
and
Conall
Kernach,
and the Welsh tale of
Gwri
of
the
Golden
Hair.

Taliesin’s name in Welsh means ‘radiant brow’, a characteristic of Apollo’s, but the ‘Tal’ syllable is often present in the primitive names of
Hercules. In Crete he was Talus, the man of bronze, whom Medea killed. In Pelasgia he was the tortured Tan-talus, from whose name the word ‘tantalize’ derives. The Irish Tailltean Games are probably called after an agricultural Hercules the first syllable of whose name was Tal. In Syria he was Telmen. In Greece he was Atlas Telamon, and ‘Atlas’, like ‘Telamon’, was derived from the root
Tla
or
Tal
which contains the senses ‘take upon oneself’, ‘dare’, and ‘suffer’. Dr. MacCulloch suggests that ‘Taliesin’ is also a divine name and that the swallowing of the grain of corn by the black hen in the
Romance
of
Taliesin
proves Taliesin to have been a Barley-god.

The time has now come to draw closely around the thicket where the Roebuck is known to be harboured. And here is a hunting song from Gwion’s poem,
Angar
Cyvyndawd
: 

But we must transpose the lines of the couplet, because logically the axe comes first, then the tree is cut down, and one cannot put the oak-stump into one’s shovel unless it has been reduced to ashes – which are afterwards used to fertilize the fields. So:

If one looks carefully again at the names of the fifteen consonants of the Boibel-Loth, or the Babel-Lota, one notices clear correspondences with Greek legend. Not only ‘Taliesin’ with ‘Talus’, and ‘Teilmon’ with ‘Telamon’, but ‘Moiria’ with the ‘Moirae’, the Three Fates; and ‘Cailep’ with ‘Calypso’, daughter of Atlas, whose island of Ogygia – placed by Plutarch in the Irish Seas – was protected by the very same enchantment as Morgan le Faye’s Avalon, Cerridwen’s Caer Sidi, or Niamh of the Golden Hair’s ‘Land of Youth’. Put the whole series of letter-names into the nearest Greek words that make any sort of sense, using Latin characters and allowing for the difference between Greek and Irish vowels (the ancillary I in Irish is used as a sign of a long vowel) and for transposition of letters. Retain the digamma (F or V) in words in which it originally occurred, such as
ACHAIVA
and
DAVIZO
, and use the Aeolic A for long E, in
FOR
Ē
MENOS, NE-
Ē
GATOS, G
Ē
THEO
.

The consonants spell out the familiar story of Hercules in three chapters of five words each: