The White Goddess (73 page)

Llew’s autumn name, omitted in the story, can be recovered by the logic of myth. That his rivalry with Gronw Lord of Penllyn for the love of Blodeuwedd is the same as that of Gwyn with Gwythyr ap Greidawl for the love of Creiddylad is proved by
Triad
14,
where Arianrhod is described as the mother of the twin heroes Gwengwyngwyn and Gwanat. Gwengwyngwyn is merely ‘The Thrice-white-one’, or Gwyn’s name three times repeated, and Gwyn’s duty, as we have seen, was to conduct souls to the Castle of Arianrhod, like Thrice-great Hermes; in fact, Gwyn, like Dylan and Llew, was Arianrhod’s son. But Dafydd ap Gwilym reports that the autumnal owl, Blodeuwedd in disguise, was sacred to Gwyn; it follows that when Llew who began the year as Dylan, reached goat-haunted Bryn Kyvergyr, the midsummer turning-point – and was killed by his rival ‘Victor, son of Scorcher’, he disappeared from view and presently became Gwyn the leader of the autumnal Wild Chase. Like the White Goddess, alternately Arianrhod of the silver wheel, Blodeuwedd of the white flowers, and Cerridwen the spectral white sow, he also was Thrice-white: alternately Dylan the silver fish, Llew the white stag, and Gwyn the white rider on the pale horse leading his white, red-eared pack. That Gwyn’s father was Nudd or Lludd, and Gwengwyngwyn’s was one Lliaws, does not spoil the argument. Hermes’s fatherhood was similarly disputed in Greece.

The chest in which Llew is laid by Gwydion is an ambivalent symbol. It is in one sense the chest of re-birth, of the sort in which dead Cretans were laid. In another it is the ark in which the Virgin and Child – Danaë and Perseus is the most familiar of several instances – are customarily set adrift by their enemies; this is the same acacia-wood ark in which Isis and her child Harpocrates sailed over the waters of the flooded Delta seeking the scattered fragments of Osiris. In this case, however, Arianrhod is not in the chest with Llew. The author is doing his best to keep the Goddess,
in her maternal aspect, out of the story; she does not even suckle Llew.

Mur-y-Castell, now called Tomen-y-Mur is a mediaeval British fort – a fair-sized artificial mound surmounted by a stockade – in the hills behind Ffestiniog in Merioneth. It has been constructed around the north gate of a Roman camp, and the considerable remains of the Roman baths, supplied by water from the river Cynfael, are still clearly visible near by. Apparently the Camp was occupied by the pagan Welsh when the Romans evacuated it in the fifth century, and then became the centre of a Llew Llaw cult – if it had not been so already, like the Roman camps of Laon, Lyons and Carlisle. The bath system lent itself to the story. The mound may be funerary, with the remains of a dead king buried in the ruins of the Roman gate around which it has been heaped.

The bath in the story of Llew’s murder is, as I have said, familiar. Sacred kings often meet their end in that way: for example, Minos the Cretan Sun-god at Agrigentum in Sicily at the hands of the priestess of Cocalus and her lover Daedalus; and Agamemnon, the sacred king of Mycenae, at the hands of Clytaemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus. It is a lustral bath of the sort that kings take at their coronation: for Llew Llaw anoints himself while in it. The merry-men in attendance are usually depicted as goat-legged satyrs. In the Romance of Llew Llaw, too, they are summoned as goats to assist in the sacrifice of their master.

The shoe-making business is odd, but it throws light on the mysterious twelfth-century French ballad of the Young Shoemaker.

The beautiful lady with the many lovers and a great square bed hung with white linen is unmistakably the Goddess, and the young shoemaker is Llew Llaw. The speaking parts have been interchanged. In stanza 2
‘Elle
a
tant
d’amouroux
’
should be, for the rhyme’s sake
‘Elle
a
tant
d’enam
ourés
’.
In stanza 4,
‘En
la
chaussant
Il
lui
fit
sa
demande
’
should be
‘Sur
la
chaussée
Elle
lui
fit
sa
demande
’.
‘La
belle
’
should be
‘Bel
homme
’
in stanza 5,
‘Roi’
should be ‘
rei
’ in stanza 9, and in the last stanza,
‘nous
dormirions
’ should be
‘vous
dormiriez
’
.
Those posies of periwinkles show that the ‘river’ (still a term for the sag furrowed in a mattress by love-making) where all the King’s horses could drink together, is the river of death, and that the shoemaker will never rise again from the bridal couch. His bride will bind him to the bedpost, and summon his rival to kill him. The periwinkle was the flower of death in French, Italian and British folklore. In mediaeval times a garland of
periwinkles was placed on the heads of men bound for execution. The flower has five blue petals and is therefore sacred to the Goddess, and its tough green vines will have been the bonds she used on her victim. This can be deduced from its Latin name
vinca
pervinca
(‘bind all about’), though mediaeval grammarians connected it with
vincere,
‘to conquer’, rather than
vincire,
‘to bind’, and so
‘pervinke
’
came to mean ‘the all-conquering’. But death is all-conquering; so it came to the same thing. Most likely that the custom of garlanding the criminal with periwinkle was taken over from the sacrifice ritual in honour of Llew Llaw the shoemaker. It is clear that the magical power of Arianrhod, like that of Math, rested in her feet and that once Llew had taken her foot in his hand as if to measure it for a shoe, he was able to make her do what he wished. Perhaps Perrault’s story of Cinderella’s slipper is a degenerate version of the same myth. Foot-fetishists are by no means rare even in modern times – the aberrants spend all their spare time buying or stealing women’s high-heeled shoes for the exaltation of spirit that the possession gives them. What is more, it is possible that foot-fetishism was an ancient cult in Ardudwy, the scene of this Romance, though I do not know whether the evidence has ever been officially recorded. A few miles from Mur-y-Castell, on the hills between Harlech (where I lived as a boy) and Llanfair, there is a Goidels’ Camp – a cluster of ruined round huts dating from perhaps the fourth century
AD
– and not far off, towards Llanfair, a woman’s footprint is sunk an inch or so deep in a large flat stone. It is locally called ‘the Virgin’s footprint’, and another mark near by is called the ‘Devil’s thumb print’. The stone is at the far left-hand corner of a field as one comes along the road from Harlech. Similar sacred footprints are
still worshipped in Southern India.

Why ‘Cordovan’ leather? Probably because the Llew cult came to Britain from Spain, as it is known that the buskin did. At Uxama in Spain a dedication has been found to ‘the Lugoves’, i.e. the Lughs, by a guild of shoemakers. And why coloured and gilded shoes? Because such shoes were a symbol of royalty among the Celts. They used also to figure in the English Coronation ceremony, but dropped out after the reign of George II. Though officially styled ‘sandals’, they were gilded half-boots, like the purple buskins in which the Byzantine Emperors were crowned, with purple soles and wooden heels covered with scarlet leather. Scarlet was a product of the kerm-oak and doubtless the heels were oaken. In the Romance the colour of the shoes is not specified; which suggests a further connexion with Spain, where
boszeguis
de
piel
colorado
does not mean ‘buskins of coloured leather’, but ‘buskins of scarlet leather’. Similar buskins are thought to have been used in the sanctification of the kings of Rome, since they were part of the sacred dress of the Triumphant General in Republican times, and this dress was of regal origin. Sandals also occur in the legends of the solar hero Theseus, whose Goddess mother gave him a pair at the same time as she gave him his arms and sent him out to slay monsters; of Perseus, another monster-slayer; and of Mercury.

The implication of this part of the story is that Llew Llaw kept the third pair of gold shoes for his own use. He was one of the Three Crimson-stained Ones of Britain, as we learn from
Triad
24;
another of these was King Arthur. To be ‘crimson-stained’ is to be a sacred king: at Rome the Triumphant General had his face and hands stained red as a sign of temporary royalty. Sacred kings, it seems, were not allowed to rest their heels on the ground but walked on their toes, like the Canaanite Agag. The
cothurnus,
or high-heeled buskin, of the God Dionysus can be explained only in this sense, though the reason was disguised in Greece by the observation that buskins gave an effect of height.

In
Genesis,
XXXII
Jacob wrestles all night with an angel at Peniel and is lamed by him so that the sinew in the hollow of his thigh is shrunken. Jacob sustained an injury once common to wrestlers, the inward displacement of the hip first described by Hippocrates. The result of this dislocation, which is produced by forcing the legs too widely apart, is that the injured person finds his leg flexed, abducted and externally rotated: in other words he can only walk, if at all, with a lurching or swaggering gait and on his toes. The leg affected is lengthened by the peculiar position of the head of the femur, or at least looks longer than the other. The lengthening of the leg tightens the tendons in the thigh and the muscles go into spasm, which is presumably what is meant by the shrinking of the sinew in the hollow of the thigh. Since Jacob belongs to the mother-right age, and since he won his sacred name and inheritance, both of which could only be given him by a woman, on this same occasion, the story has
evidently been censored by the patriarchal editors of
Genesis.
But the Arabic lexicographers agree that the result of Jacob’s injury was that he could walk only on the toes of his injured leg; and they should know.

While still in the womb Jacob supplants his twin Esau by catching at his heel, and so draining him of royal virtue.
Hosea,
XII,
4
connects this supplanting with the wrestling incident, which suggests that Jacob’s real name was Jah-aceb, ‘the heel-god’. Jacob is translated ‘the supplanter’ in the Authorised Version of the Bible and what does ‘supplant’ mean but to put one’s hand
sub
plantam
alicujus,
under someone’s foot, and trip him up? The Greek word
pternizein,
used by the Septuagint in this context, is still more accurate: it means ‘to trip up someone’s heel’ and is the first recorded use of the word in this sense. Jacob is the sacred king who has succeeded to office by tripping up a rival; but the penalty of his victory is that he must never again set his own sacred heel to the ground. The comment in
Genesis
on Jacob’s lameness is: ‘Therefore the Children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is in the hollow of the thigh, to this day.’ Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, also had a sacred thigh and in
Genesis,
XXIV,
2 he makes his servant put his hand under it when taking an oath, just as Jacob makes Joseph do in
Genesis,
XLVII,
29.
Mrs. Hermione Ashton writes that several tribes of Southern Arabia kiss the thigh of their Emir in homage; she has seen this done herself by the Qateibi who live about a hundred miles north of Aden – one of the four tribes of the Amiri race who boast that they are the sons of Ma’in and the oldest race in the world.