The White Goddess (26 page)

Though the Pythagorean theory of metempsychosis, imported from the Greek colonies in Southern France, has been suspected in the Irish legend of Tuan MacCairill, one of the royal immigrants from Spain, who
went through the successive metamorphoses of stag, boar, hawk and salmon before being born as a man, this is unlikely: the four beasts are all seasonal symbols, as will be shown.

The poetic language of myth and symbol used in ancient Europe was not, in principle, a difficult one but became confused, with the passage of time, by frequent modifications due to religious, social and linguistic change, and by the tendency of history to taint the purity of myth – that is to say, the accidental events in the life of a king who bore a divine name were often incorporated in the seasonal myth which gave him the title to royalty. A further complication was that anciently a large part of poetic education, to judge from the Irish
Book
of
Bally
mote
,
which contains a manual of cryptography, was concerned with making the language as difficult as possible in order to keep the secret close; in the first three years of his educational course, the Irish student for the Ollaveship had to master one hundred and fifty cypher-alphabets.
1

What is the relation of Caer Sidi to Caer Arianrhod? Were they the same place? I think not, because Caer Sidi has been identified with Puffin Island off the coast of Anglesey and with Lundy Island in the Severn: both of them island Elysiums of the usual type. A clue to the problem is that though Caer Sidi, or Caer Sidin, means ‘Revolving Castle’ in Welsh, and though revolving islands are common in Welsh and Irish legend, the word ‘Sidi’ is apparently a translation of the Goidelic word
Sidhe
,
a round barrow fortress belonging to the Aes Sidhe (Sidhe for short), the prime magicians of Ireland. There are several ‘Fortresses of the Sidhe’ in Ireland, the most remarkable ones being Brugh-na-Boyne (now called ‘New Grange’), Knowth and Dowth, on the northern banks of the River Boyne. Their date and religious use must be considered in detail.

New Grange is the largest, and is said to have been originally occupied by The Dagda himself, the Tuatha dé Danaan Father-god who corresponds with the Roman Saturn, but afterwards by his Apollo-like son Angus who won it from him by a legal quibble. The Dagda on his first arrival in Ireland was evidently a son of the Triple Goddess Brigit (‘the High One’); but the myth has been tampered with by successive editors. First, he is said to have married the Triple Goddess. Then he is said to have had only one wife with three names, Breg, Meng and Meabel (‘Lie, Guile and Disgrace’), who bore him three daughters all called Brigit. Then it is said that not he but three of his descendants, Brian, Iuchar and Iuchurba married three princesses who together owned Ireland – Eire, Fodhla and Banbha. He was the son of ‘Eladu’ which the Irish glossarists explain as ‘Science or Knowledge’ but which may be a form of the Greek
Elate
(‘fir-tree’); Elatos (‘fir-man’) was an early Achaean King of Cyllene, a mountain in Arcadia sacred to Demeter and later renowned for its college of learned and sacrosanct heralds. The Dagda and Elatos may thus both be equated with Osiris, or Adonis, or Dionysus, who was born from a fir and mothered by the horned Moon-goddess Isis, or Io, or Hathor.

New Grange is a flat-topped round barrow, about a quarter of a mile in circumference and fifty feet high. But it is built of heaped stones, some 50,000 tons of them, not of earth, and was originally covered with white quartz pebbles: a Bronze Age sepulchral practice in honour of the White Goddess which may account in part for the legends of Kings housed after death in glass castles. Ten enormous stone herms, weighing eight or ten tons apiece stand in a semi-circle around the southern base of the barrow, and one formerly stood at the summit. It is not known how many more have been removed from the semi-circle but the gaps suggest an original set of twelve. A hedge of about a hundred long flat stones, set edge to edge, rings the base around. Deep inside the barrow is a pre-Celtic passage-burial cave built with great slabs of stone, several of them measuring as much as seven feet by four.

The ground plan is the shape of a Celtic cross; one enters by a dolmen door at the base of the shaft. The shaft consists of a narrow passage, sixty feet long, through which one has to crawl on hands and knees. It leads to a small circular chamber, with a bee-hive corbelled vault twenty feet high; and there are three recesses which make the arms of the cross. When this cave was re-discovered in 1699 it contained three large empty boat-shaped stone basins, the sides engraved with stripes; two complete skeletons lying beside a central altar, stags’ antlers, bones, and nothing else. Roman gold coins of the fourth century
AD
, gold torques and remains of iron weapons were later found on the site of the fort, not in the cave. The fort was sacked by the Danes but there is nothing to show whether they, or earlier invaders, rifled the chamber of its other funerary furniture. Slabs of the doorway and of the interior are decorated with spiral patterns and there is forked lightning carved on one lintel. Since the old poets record that each rath was presided over by an enchantress and since, as will be shown, the Sidhe were such skilful poets that even the Druids were obliged to go to them for the spells that they needed, it seems likely that the original Caer Sidi, where the Cauldron of Inspiration was housed, was a barrow of the New Grange sort. For these barrows were fortresses above and tombs below. The Irish ‘Banshee’ fairy is a Bean-Sidhe (‘Woman of the Hill’); as priestess of the great dead she wails in prophetic anticipation whenever anyone of royal blood is about to die. From an incident in the Irish romance of
Fionn
’s
Boyhood
,
it appears that the entrances to these burial caves were left open at
Samhain
,
All Souls’ Eve, which was also celebrated as a feast of the Dead in Ancient Greece, to allow the spirits of the heroes to come out for an airing; and that the interiors were illuminated until
cock-crow the next morning.

On the east side of the mound, diametrically opposite the entrance, a stone was discovered in 1901 which has three suns carved on it, two of them with their rays enclosed in a circle as if in prison, the other free. Above them is a much rougher, unenclosed sun and above that, notched across a straight line, the Ogham letters B and I – which, as will be explained presently, are the first and last letters of the ancient Irish alphabet, dedicated respectively to Inception and Death. The case is pretty plain: the sacred kings of Bronze Age Ireland, who were solar kings of a most primitive type, to judge by the taboos which bound them and by the reputed effect of their behaviour on crops and hunting, were buried beneath these barrows; but their spirits went to ‘Caer Sidi’, the Castle of Ariadne, namely
Corona
Borealis.
Thus the pagan Irish could call New Grange ‘Spiral Castle’ and, revolving a fore-finger in explanation, could say, ‘Our king has gone to Spiral Castle’: in other words, ‘he is dead’. A revolving wheel before the door of a castle is common in Goidelic legend. According to Keating, the magic fortress of the enchantress Blanaid, in the Isle of Man, was protected by one – nobody could enter until it was still. In front of the doorway of New Grange there is a broad slab carved with spirals, which forms part of the stone hedge. The spirals are double ones: follow the lines with your finger from outside to inside and when you reach the centre, there is the head of another spiral coiled in the reverse direction to take you out of the maze again. So the pattern typifies death and rebirth; though, according to Gwion’s poem
Preiddeu
Annwm
, ‘only seven ever returned from Caer Sidi’. It may well be that oracular serpents were once kept in these sepulchral caves, and that these were the serpents which St. Patrick expelled, though perhaps only metaphorically. Delphi, the home of Apollo, was once an oracular tomb of this same sort, with a spiralled python and a prophetic priestess of the Earth Goddess, and the ‘omphalos’ or ‘navel shrine’ where the python was originally housed, was built underground in the same beehive style, which derives originally from the African
masabo
,
or ghost-house. The antlers at New Grange were probably part of the sacred king’s head-dress, like the antlers worn by the Gaulish god Cernunnos, and the horns of Moses, and those of Dionysus and King Alexander shown on coins.

The provenience of the bee-hive tomb with a passage entrance and lateral niches is no mystery. It came to Ireland from the Eastern Mediterranean by way of Spain and Portugal at the close of the third millennium
BC
: the corbelled roof of New Grange occurs also at Tirbradden, Dowth and Seefin. But the eight double-spirals at the entrance, which are merely juxtaposed, not cunningly wreathed together in the Cretan style, are paralleled in Mycenaean Greece; and this suggests that the carvings were made by the Danaans when they took over the shrine from the previous occupants, who in Irish history appear as the
tribes of Partholan and Nemed that invaded the country in the years 2048 and 1718
BC
, coming from Greece by way of Spain. If so, this would account for the legend of the usurpation of the shrine by the god Angus from his father The Dagda. The arrival of the Danaans in Ireland, as was mentioned in Chapter III, is dated in the
Book
of
Invasions
at the middle of the fifteenth century
BC
. This is plausible: they will have been late-comers of the round-barrow tribes that first reached Ireland from Britain about 1700
BC
. That they propitiated the heroes of the previous cult is well established: their food-vessels are found in passage-grave burials.

Dr. R. S. Macalister in his
Ancient
Ireland
(1935) takes an original view of New Grange. He holds that it was built by the Milesians, whom he dates about 1000
BC
and supposes to have come from Britain, not Spain, on the ground that it incorporates a number of ornamental stones in the passage and chamber, one of them with its pattern broken, apparently arranged haphazard, and that on some of these the carving has been defaced by pick-surfacing like that found on the trilithons of Stonehenge. This is to suggest that it is a mock-antique in the style of several hundred years before; a theory to which no other archaeologist of repute seems to have subscribed. But his observations do suggest that the Milesians took over the oracular shrine from the Danaans and patched it, where it showed signs of decay, with ornamental stones borrowed from other burials. Another suggestion of his carries greater conviction: that Angus’ Brugh (‘palace’) was not New Grange but a huge circular enclosure not far off in a bend of the Boyne, which may have been an amphitheatre for funerary games in connexion with all the many burials of the neighbourhood.

Most Irish archaeologists are now, I find, agreed that New Grange was built by a matriarchal passage-grave-making people that first reached Ireland about the year 2100
BC
, but not until they had become well-established some five hundred years later and were able to command the enormous labour necessary for the task. The spirals, though paralleled in Mycenaean shaft-burials of 1600
BC
, may be far earlier since examples of unknown date occur also at Malta. On one of the outer stones a symbol is carved which suggests a Cretan ideogram and apparently represents a ship with a high prow and stern and a single large sail; beside it are vertical scratches and a small circle. Christopher Hawkes, my principal informant on this subject, has written to me that not only are the skeletons and antlers unlikely to be co-eval with the building but that there may have been many successive despoilments of the burial before they were put there. The original funerary furniture cannot be guessed at, since no virgin passage-grave of this type has been opened in recent years; we must wait until the Cairn of Queen Maeve is opened. This overlooks Sligo Bay; it is built of some 40,000 tons of stone and the entrance is lost. We may
have to wait a long time, because the Sligo people are superstitious and would consider a desecration of the tomb unlucky: Maeve is Mab, the Queen of Faery.

What the basins contained may be inferred from
Exodus,
XXIV
(verses 4-8). Moses, having set up twelve stone herms, or posts, at the foot of a sacred hill, offered bull-sacrifices and sprinkled half the blood on a thirteenth herm in the middle of the circle, or semi-circle; the rest of the blood he put into basins, which must have been of considerable size. Then he and his colleague Aaron, with seventy-two companions, went up to feast on the roasted flesh. On this occasion, the blood in the basins was sprinkled on the people as a charm of sanctification; but its use in the oracular shrine was always to feed the ghost of the dead hero and to encourage him to return from Caer Sidi or Caer Arianrhod to answer questions of importance.

The visit of Aeneas, mistletoe-bough in hand, to the Underworld to cross-examine his father Anchises must be read in this sense. Aeneas sacrificed a bull and let the blood gush into a trough, and the ghost of Anchises (who had married the Love-goddess Venus Erycina, and been killed by lightning and was, in fact, a sacred king of the usual Herculean type), drank the blood and obligingly prophesied about the glories of Rome. Of course, the ghost did not really lap the blood, but a lapping sound was heard in the dark; what happened was that the Sibyl, who conducted Aeneas below, drank the blood and it produced in her the desired prophetic ecstasy. That Sibyls acted so is known from the case of the Priestess of Mother Earth at Aegira (‘Black Poplar’, a tree sacred to heroes) in Achaea, The peeping and muttering of ghosts on such occasions is understandable: two or three Biblical texts refer to the queer bat-like voices in which demons, or familiars, speak through the mouths of prophets or prophetesses. Bull’s blood was most potent magic and was used, diluted with enormous quantities of water, to fertilize fruit-trees in Crete and Greece. Taken neat it was regarded as a poison deadly to anyone but a Sibyl or a priest of Mother Earth; Jason’s father and mother died from a draught of it. So did ass-eared King Midas of Gordium.