The White Goddess (16 page)

But why Dog? Why Roebuck? Why Lapwing?

The Dog with which Aesculapius is pictured, like the dog Anubis, the companion of Egyptian Thoth, and the dog which always attended Melkarth the Phoenician Hercules, is a symbol of the Underworld; also of the dog-priests, called Enariae, who attended the Great Goddess of the Eastern Mediterranean and indulged in sodomitic frenzies in the Dog days at the rising of the Dog-star, Sirius. But the poetic meaning of the Dog in the
Câd
Goddeu
legend, as in all similar legends, is ‘Guard the Secret’, the prime secret on which the sovereignty of a sacred king depended. Evidently Amathaon had seduced some priest of Bran – whether it was a homosexual priesthood I do not pretend to know – and won from him a secret which enabled Gwydion to guess Bran’s name correctly. Hercules overcame the Dog Cerberus by a narcotic cake which relaxed its vigilance; what means Amathaon used is not recorded.

The Lapwing, as Cornelius Agrippa, the early sixteenth-century occult philosopher, reminds us in his
Vanity
and
Uncertainty
of
the
Arts
and
Sciences
(translated by James Sanford in 1569): ‘seemeth to have some royal thing and weareth a crown.’ I do not know whether Agrippa seriously meant to include the lapwing among royal birds, but if he did his best authority was
Leviticus
XI,
19
.
The lapwing is there mentioned as an unclean, that is to say tabooed, bird in the distinguished company of the eagle, the griffon-vulture, the ibis, the cuckoo, the swan, the kite, the raven, owl and little owl, the solan-goose (here not gannet but barnacle
goose
1
), the stork, the heron and the pious pelican. That these taboos were of non-Semitic origin is proved by their geographical distribution: several of the birds do not belong to the heat-belt which is the Semitic homeland, and every one of them was sacred in Greece or Italy, or both, to a major deity. Biblical scholars have been puzzled by the ‘uncleanness’ of the lapwing – and doubt whether the bird
is
a lapwing and not a hedgehog – but whenever uncleanness means sanctity the clue must be looked for in natural history. The Greeks called the lapwing
polyplagktos
,
‘luring on deceitfully’, and had a proverbial phrase ‘more beseechful than a lapwing’ which they used for artful beggars. In Wales as a boy I learned to respect the lapwing for the wonderful way in which she camouflages and conceals her eggs in an open field from any casual passer-by. At first I was fooled every time by her agonized
peewit,
peewit
,
screamed from the contrary direction to the one in which her eggs lay, and sometimes when she realized that I was a nest-robber, she would flap about along the ground, pretending to have a broken wing and inviting capture. But as soon as I had found one nest I could find many. The lapwing’s poetic meaning is ‘Disguise the Secret’ and it is her extraordinary discretion which gives her the claim to sanctity. According to the
Koran
she was the repository of King Solomon’s secrets and the most intelligent of the flock of prophetic birds that attended him.

As for the White Roebuck, how many kings in how many fairy tales have not chased this beast through enchanted forests and been cheated of their quarry? The Roebuck’s poetic meaning is ‘Hide the Secret’. So it seems that in the
Câd
Goddeu
story elements of a Hercules myth, which in Greek legend describes how the Achaeans of Mycenae captured the most important tribal shrines in the Peloponnese from some other Greek tribe, probably the Danaans, are used to describe a similar capture in Britain many centuries later. Any attempt to date this event involves a brief summary of British pre-history. The generally accepted scheme of approximate dates derived from archaeological evidence is as follows:

Old Stone Age hunters, not numerous, maintained a few settlements in scattered places.

Occasional and gradual immigration of New Stone Age hunters who brought polished stone axes with them and the art of making rough pots.

Regular traffic across the English Channel and invasion by New Stone
Age long-headed agriculturists, who domesticated animals, practised flint-mining on a large scale and made crude ornamented pottery which has affinities with the ware found in burials in the Baltic islands of Bornholm and Aland. They came from Libya, by way of Spain, Southern and Northern France, or by way of Spain, Portugal and Brittany; some of them went on from France to the Baltic, and then crossed over into Eastern England after trade contact with the Black Sea area. They introduced megalithic burials of the long-barrow style found in the Paris area, with inhumation but with little funeral furniture except the leafshaped arrow-head, the manufacture of which goes back to the Old Stone Age; the leaves copied are apparently the crack-willow, or purple osier, and the elder. Sometimes a leaf-shaped ‘port-hole’ is knocked out between two contiguous slabs of the burial chamber, the leaf copied being apparently the elder.

Invasion by a bronze-weaponed, broad-headed, beaker-making, avenue-building people from Spain by way of Southern France and the Rhine. Further immigration of long-heads from the Baltic, and from South-Eastern Europe by way of the Rhine. Cremation and the less ostentatious though better furnished round barrows were introduced. The leaf-shaped arrow-heads persisted, as they did in burials in France until early Imperial times; but the characteristic type was barbed and tanged in the shape of a fir-tree.

Uninterrupted development of Bronze Age culture. Cross-channel traffic without large-scale invasion, though settlements of iron-weaponed visitors dating from about 800
BC
are found in the South. Invasion of North Britain by the Picts. Small segmented blue faience beads manufactured in Egypt between 1380 and 1350
BC
were imported into Wiltshire in large quantities. The language spoken in Britain except by the Picts and Old Stone Age Aboriginals is thought to have been ‘proto-Celtic’.

Invasion by a Goidelic people, identified by their ‘frill-comb-smear’ pottery, who migrated from the Baltic coast of Germany, entered the Rhineland where they adopted the ‘Hallstadt’ Iron Age culture, then invaded Britain; but were forced to remain in the South-Eastern counties.

First Belgic invasion of Britain – ‘La Tène’ Iron Age culture; and of Ireland between 350 and 300
BC
. These people were a mixture of Teutons and Brythons (‘P-Celts’) and overran the greater part of the country: they were the ancient British whom the Romans knew. The Druidic culture of Gaul was ‘La Tène’.

Second Belgic invasion. The principal tribesmen were the Atrebates who came from Artois, their settlements being identified by their bead-rimmed bowls. They had their capital at Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester) in North Hampshire, and their area of conquest extended from Western Surrey to the Vale of Trowbridge in Wiltshire, including Salisbury Plain.

*

If the story of
Câd
Goddeu
concerns the capture of the national necropolis on Salisbury Plain from its former holders, this is most likely to have happened during either the first or the second Belgic invasion. Neither the coming of the round-barrow men, nor the Goidelic seizure of South-Eastern Britain, nor the Claudian conquest, which was the last before the coming of the Saxons, corresponds with the story. But according to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s mediaeval
History
of
the
Britons
two brothers named Belinus and Brennius fought for the mastery of Britain in the fourth century
BC
; Brennius was beaten and forced north of the Humber. Brennius and Belinus are generally acknowledged to be the gods Bran and Beli; and Beli in the Welsh
Triads
is described as the father of Arianrhod (‘Silver Wheel’), the sister of Gwydion and Amathaon. Amathaon evidently entered the Battle of the Trees as champion of his father Beli, the Supreme God of Light.

So the
Câd
Goddeu
can perhaps be explained as the expulsion of a long-established Bronze Age priesthood from the national necropolis by an alliance of agricultural tribesmen, long settled in Britain and worshippers of the Danaan god Bel, Beli, Belus or Belinus, with an invading Brythonic tribe. The Amathaonians communicated to their Brythonic allies – Professor Sir John Rhys takes Gwydion for a mixed Teuton-Celt deity and equates him with Woden – a religious secret which enabled Amathaon to usurp the place of Bran, the God of Resurrection, a sort of Aesculapius, and Gwydion to usurp that of Arawn King of Annwm, a god of divination and prophecy, and both together to institute a new religious system in the place of the old. That it was Gwydion who usurped Arawn’ s place is suggested by the cognate myth in the
Romance
of
Math
the
Son
of
Mathonwy
where Gwydion stole the sacred swine from Pryderi, the King of the Pembrokeshire Annwm. Thus the high sprigs of Bran’s alder were humbled, and the Dog, Roebuck and Lapwing stolen from Arawn were installed as guardians of the new religious secret. The Amathaonians’ motive for betraying their kinsmen to the foreign invaders will be discussed in Chapter Eight.

It appears that Bran’s people did not retire, after their spiritual defeat, without offering armed resistance; for the tradition is that 71,000 men fell in battle after the secret was lost.

What sort of a secret? Caesar records that the Gallic Celts claimed descent from ‘Dis’ – that is to say, from a god of the dead corresponding
to Dis in the Latin pantheon – and also worshipped deities corresponding with Minerva, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Mercury. Since he also records that the Gallic Druids came to Britain for instruction in religion, the principal seat of the Dis cult was evidently in Britain. The capture of this shrine by a continental tribe was an epoch-making event, for it is clear from Caesar’s account that the Druidic ‘Dis’ was a transcendent god who took precedence of Minerva, Apollo, Mars, Mercury, (to whom we may add Venus and Saturn, the Latin Crow-god, cognate with Aesculapius) and even of Jupiter. And Lucan, in his poem
Pharsalia
, written in Nero’s reign, expressly states that souls, according to the Druids, do not go down to the gloomy Underworld of the Latin Dis, but proceed elsewhere and that death ‘is but the mid-point of a long life’.

The British Dis, in fact, was no mere Pluto but a universal god corresponding closely with the Jehovah of the Hebrew prophets. Similarly, it can be argued that since the prime religious ritual of the Druids ‘in the service of God Himself, as Pliny records, was bound up with the mistletoe, ‘which they call all-heal in their language’ and ‘which falls from Heaven upon the oak’, the name of ‘Dis’ could not have been Bran, there being no mythic or botanical connexion between the alder and the mistletoe. Thus it is likely that the guessing of Bran’s name was merely a clue towards guessing that of the Supreme God: Gwydion did not become Dis, nor did Amathaon; but they together displaced Bran (Saturn) and Arawn (Mercury) in their service of Dis, and redefined his godhead as Beli. But if so, was Dis originally Donnus, in fact Danu?

It happens that we know the Norse name of Gwydion’ s horse, if Gwydion was indeed Woden, or Odin. It was
Askr
Yggr-drasill
,
or Ygdrasill, ‘the ash-tree that is the horse of Yggr’, Yggr being one of Woden’s titles. Ygdrasill was the enchanted ash, sacred to Woden, whose roots and branches in Scandinavian mythology extended through the Universe. If Bran had been clever enough at the
Câd
Goddeu
he would have pronounced his
englyn
first, with:

The Battle of the Trees thus ended in a victory of the Ash-god and his ally over the Alder-god and his ally.

The pre-Celtic Annwm from which Gwydion is said to have stolen the sacred swine of King Pryderi, and over which Arawn reigned in the
Romance
of
Pwyll
Prince
of
Dyved
,
was in the Prescelly Mountains of Pembrokeshire. But it is likely that there were at least two Annwms, and that the ‘Battle of the Trees’ took place at the Annwm in Wiltshire before Gwydion’s people invaded South Wales. It would be fallacious to regard Stonehenge as Bran’s shrine, because it is an unsuitable site for the
worship of an Alder-god. The older, larger, grander Avebury ring thirty miles to the north at the junction of the Kennet and a tributary, is the more likely site; and is proved by the débris removed from the ditch about it to have been in continuous use from the early Bronze Age to Roman times. All the available evidence points to Stonehenge as Beli’s seat, not Bran’s; it is laid out as a sun-temple in cultured Apollonian style which contrasts strangely with the archaic roughness of Avebury.