The White Goddess (52 page)

Nonnus, the Orphic writer, explains the shift in Crete from the goat to the bull-sacrifice by saying that Zagreus, or Dionysus, was a horned infant who occupied the throne of Zeus for a day. The Titans tore him in pieces and ate him after he had raced through his changes of shape: Zeus with the goatskin coat, Cronos making rain, an inspired youth, a lion, a horse, a horned snake, a tiger, a bull. It was as a bull that the Titans ate him. The Persian Mithras was also eaten in bull form.

There seems to have been a goat-cult in Ireland before the arrival of the Danaans and Milesians, for in a passage in the
Book
of
the
Dun
Cow
‘goatheads’ are a sort of demon associated with
leprechauns
,
pigmies, and the Fomorians, or African aborigines.
1
But by the time of the Ulster hero Cuchulain, the traditional date of whose death is 2
AD
, the royal bull-cult was well established. His destiny was bound up with that of a brown bull-calf, son of Queen Maeve’s famous Brown Bull. The Morrigan, the Fate-goddess, when she first met Cuchulain, warned him that only while the calf was still a yearling would he continue to live. The central episode in the Cuchulain saga is the
War
of
the
Bulls,
fought between the armies of Maeve and her husband King Ailell as the result of an idle quarrel about two bulls. At the close of it, the Brown Bull, Cuchulain’s other self, kills his rival, the White-horned, which considering itself too noble to serve a woman, has deserted Maeve’s herd for the herd of Ailell; it then goes mad with pride, charges a rock and dashes out its brains. It is succeeded by its calf, and Cuchulain dies.

The bull-cult was also established in Wales at an early date. In a Welsh poetic dialogue contained in the
Black
Book
of
Carmarthen
,
Gwyddno Garanhir, Elphin’s father, describes the hero Gwyn as: ‘A bull of conflict, quick to disperse an embattled host’, and ‘bull of conflict’ here and in later
poems seems to have been a sacred title rather than a complimentary metaphor; as ‘hawk’ and ‘eagle’ also were.

***

The
War
of
the
Bulls
contains an instance of the intricate language of myth: the Brown Bull and the White-horned were really royal swine-herds who had the power of changing their shapes. It seems that in ancient times swine-herds had an altogether different standing from that conveyed in the parable of the Prodigal Son: to be a swine-herd was originally to be a priest in the service of the Death-goddess whose sacred beast was a pig.
1
The
War
of
the
Bulls
is introduced by the
Proceedings
of
the
Grand
Bardic
Academy
,
a seventh-century satire against the greed and arrogance of the ruling caste of bards, apparently composed by some member of an earlier oracular fraternity which had been dispossessed with the advent of Christianity. The leading character here is Marvan, royal swineherd to King Guaire of Connaught; he may be identified with Morvran (‘black raven’) son of the White Sow-goddess Cerridwen, who appears as Afagddu in the similar Welsh satire
The
Romance
of
Taliesin.
In revenge for the loss of a magical white boar, at once his physician, music-maker and messenger, which the ruling bards have persuaded Guaire to slaughter, he routs them in a combat of wit and reduces them to silence and ignominy; Seanchan Torpest, the President of the Academy, addresses him as ‘Chief Prophet of Heaven and Earth’. There is a hint in the
Romance
of
Branwen
that the swine-herds of Matholwch King of Ireland were magicians, with a power of foreseeing the future. And this hint is expanded in
Triad
56
which attributes to Coll ap Collfrewr, the magician, one of ‘the Three Powerful Swine-herds of the Isle of Britain’, the introduction into Britain of wheat and barley. But the credit was not really his. The name of the White Sow whom he tended at Dallwr in Cornwall and who went about Wales with gifts of grain, bees and her own young, was Hen Wen, ‘the Old White One’. Her gift to Maes Gwenith (‘Wheatfield’) in Gwent was three grains of wheat and three bees. She
was, of course, the Goddess Cerridwen in beast disguise. (The story is contained in three series of Triads printed in the
Myvyrian
Archaiology
.)

The unpleasant side of her nature was shown by her gift to the people of Arvon of a savage kitten, which grew up to be one of the Three Plagues of Anglesey, ‘the Palug Cat’. Cerridwen then is a Cat-goddess as well as a Sow-goddess. This links her with the Cat-as-corn-spirit mentioned by Sir James Frazer as surviving in harvest festivals in north and north-eastern Germany, and in most parts of France and with the monster Chapalu of French Arthurian legend.

There was also a Cat-cult in Ireland. A ‘Slender Black Cat reclining upon a chair of old silver’ had an oracular cave-shrine in Connaught at Clogh-magh-righ-cat, now Clough, before the coming of St. Patrick. This cat gave very vituperative answers to inquirers who tried to deceive her and was apparently an Irish equivalent of the Egyptian Cat-goddess Pasht. Egyptian cats were slender, black, long-legged and small-headed. Another seat of the Irish cat-cult was Knowth, a burial in Co. Meath of about the same date as New Grange. In
The
Proceedings
of
the
Grand
Bardic
Academy
the Knowth burial chamber is said to have been the home of the King-cat Irusan, who was as large as a plough-ox and once bore Seanchan Torpest, the chief-ollave of Ireland, away on its back in revenge for a satire. In his
Poetic
Astronomy,
Hyginus identifies Pasht with the White Goddess by recording that when Typhon suddenly appeared in Greece – but whether he is referring to an invasion or to a volcanic eruption, such as destroyed most of the island of Thera, is not clear – the gods fled, disguised in bestial forms: ‘Mercury into an ibis, Apollo into a crane, a Thracian bird, Diana into a cat.’

The Old White Sow’s gift to the people of Rhiwgyverthwch was a wolf cub which also became famous. The Wolf-as-corn-spirit survives in roughly the same area as the Cat-as-corn-spirit; and in the island of Rügen the woman who binds the last sheaf is called ‘The Wolf’ and must bite the lady of the house and the stewardess, who placate her with a large piece of meat. So Cerridwen was a Wolf-goddess too, like Artemis. It looks as if she came to Britain between 2500–2000
BC
with the New Stone Age long-headed agriculturists from North Africa.

Why the cat, pig, and wolf were considered particularly sacred to the Moon-goddess is not hard to discover. Wolves howl to the moon and feed on corpse-flesh, their eyes shine in the dark, and they haunt wooded mountains. Cats’ eyes similarly shine in the dark, they feed on mice (symbol of pestilence), mate openly and walk inaudibly, they are prolific but eat their own young, and their colours vary, like the moon, between white, reddish and black. Pigs also vary between white, reddish and black, feed on corpse-flesh, are prolific but eat their own young, and their tusks are crescent-shaped.

What interests me most in conducting this argument is the difference that is constantly appearing between the poetic and prosaic methods of thought. The prosaic method was invented by the Greeks of the Classical age as an insurance against the swamping of reason by mythographic fancy. It has now become the only legitimate means of transmitting useful knowledge. And in England, as in most other mercantile countries, the current popular view is that ‘music’ and old-fashioned diction are the only characteristics of poetry which distinguish it from prose: that every poem has, or should have, a precise single-strand prose equivalent. As a result, the poetic faculty is atrophied in every educated person who does not privately struggle to cultivate it: very much as the faculty of understanding pictures is atrophied in the Bedouin Arab. (T. E. Lawrence once showed a coloured crayon sketch of an Arab Sheikh to the Sheikh’s own clansmen. They passed it from hand to hand, but the nearest guess as to what it represented came from a man who took the sheikh’s foot to be the horn of a buffalo.) And from the inability to think poetically – to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense – derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless the images resident in words must be securely related if the passage is to have any bite. This simple need is forgotten, what passes for simple prose nowadays is a mechanical stringing together of stereotyped word-groups, without regard for the images contained in them. The mechanical style, which began in the counting-house, has now infiltrated into the university, some of its most zombiesque instances occurring in the works of eminent scholars and divines.

Mythographic statements which are perfectly reasonable to the few poets who can still think and talk in poetic shorthand seem either nonsensical or childish to nearly all literary scholars. Such statements, I mean, as: ‘Mercury invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes’, or
‘Menw ab Teirgwaedd saw three rowan-rods growing out of the mouth of Einigan Fawr with every kind of knowledge and science written on them’.The best that the scholars have yet done for the poems of Gwion is ‘wild and sublime’; and they never question the assumption that he, his colleagues and his public were people of either stunted or undisciplined intelligence.