The White Goddess (28 page)
Authors: Robert Graves
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Mythology, #Literature, #20th Century, #Britain, #Literary Studies, #Amazon.com, #Mysticism, #Retail
Pwyll and Pryderi were successive rulers of the ‘Africans’ of Annwm in Pembroke, the earliest invaders of Wales; at their death, like Minos and Rhadamanthus of Crete, they became Lords of the Dead. It was from Pryderi, son of Rhiannon, that Gwydion stole the sacred swine and Gwair seems to have gone on a similar marauding expedition in the company of Arthur; for his prison called, in
Triad
61
,
the Castle of Oeth and Anoeth is also the prison from which, according to
Triad
50,
Arthur was rescued by his page Goreu, son of Custennin; Gwair is thus to Arthur as Peirithoüs was to Theseus, and Goreu is to Arthur as Hercules was to Theseus.
Possibly Gwion in the Romance is counting on the court-bards to guess ‘Arthur’, not ‘Jesus’, as the answer to ‘I was three periods in the Castle of Arianrhod’, since in
Triad
50
Arthur is said to have been rescued by this same Goreu from three prisons – the Castle of Oeth and Anoeth; the Castle of Pendragon (‘Lord of Serpents’); the Dark Prison under the Stone – all of them death-prisons. Or is he covertly presenting Jesus as an incarnation of Arthur?
Prydwen was King Arthur’s magic ship; Llaminawg, in whose hands Arthur left the flashing sword, appears in the
Morte
D’Arthur
as ‘Sir Bedivere’. Caer Wydr is Glastonbury, or
Inis
Gutrin,
thought of as the glass castle
1
in which Arthur’s soul was housed after death; Glastonbury is also the Isle of Avalon (Appletees) to which his dead body was conveyed by Morgan le Faye. The heavy blue chain is the water around the Island of Death. The myth of Cwy, like that of Gwair and Arthur, is no longer extant, but the ‘animal with the silver head’ is perhaps the White Roebuck of which we are in search, and the name of the Ox’s headband is one of the prime bardic secrets which Gwion in his
Cyst
Wy
’r
Beirdd
(‘Reproof of the Bards’) taunts Heinin with not possessing:
The
name
of
the
firmament,The
name
of
the
elements,And
the
name
of
the
language,And
the
name
of
the
Head-band.Avaunt,
ye
bards
–
About a hundred years before Gwion wrote this, the Glastonbury monks had dug up an oak coffin, sixteen feet underground, which they claimed to be Arthur’s, and faked a Gothic inscription on a leaden cross a foot long, said to have been found inside, which Giraldus Cambrensis saw and believed authentic. I think Gwion is here saying – ‘You bards think that Arthur’s end was in that oak coffin at Glastonbury. I know better.’ The inscription ran: ‘Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur with Guenevere his second wife in the Isle of Avalon.’
The joke is that the monks had really, it seems, discovered the body of Arthur, or Gwyn, or whatever the original name of the Avalon hero was. Christopher Hawkes describes in his
Prehistoric
Foundations
of
Europe
this
form of burial:
Inhumation (and more rarely burial after cremation in tree-trunk coffins covered by a barrow) was already practised in Schleswig-Holstein in the beginning of its Bronze Age…. It is probable that the coffin originally represented a dug-out boat, and that the idea of a voyage by water to the next world, well attested in Scandinavia in the later Bronze Age and again in the Iron Age down to its famous culmination in Viking times, is here to be recognized at its first beginning, inspired, it may well be, ultimately from Egypt through the Baltic connexions with the South now passing along the Amber Route. The same rite of boat-or coffin-burial appears simultaneously in Britain in the middle centuries of the second millennium, when the North Sea trade-route was flourishing, and penetrates the Wessex culture along the south coast where the burial at Hove noted for its Scandinavian affinities [it contained a handled cup of Baltic amber] was of this type, but more prominent on the east coast, especially in Yorkshire where the Irish route over the Pennines [barter of Irish gold against Baltic amber] reached the sea. The classic example is the Gristhorpe coffin-burial near Scarborough [an oak coffin containing the skeleton of an old man, with oak-branches and what appeared to be mistletoe over it], but the recent discovery in the great barrow of Loose Howe on the Cleveland Moors of a primary burial with no less than three boat dug-outs must henceforward stand at the head of the series and serve to show how the same rite took hold among the seafarers on both sides of the North Sea between about 1600 and 1400
BC
The nine damsels of the cauldron recall the nine virgins of the Isle of Sein in Western Brittany in the early fifth century
AD
, described by Pomponius Mela. They were possessed of magical powers and might be approached by those who sailed to consult them.
1
The sacred king, then, is a Sun-king and returns at death to the Universal Mother, the White Moon Goddess, who imprisons him in the extreme north. Why the north? Because that is the quarter from which the Sun never shines, from which the wind brings snow; only dead suns are to be found in the cold polar north. The Sun-god is born at mid-winter when the Sun is weakest and has attained his most southerly station; therefore
his representative, the Sun-king, is killed at the summer solstice when the Sun attains his most northerly station. The relation between Caer Sidi and Caer Arianrhod seems to be that the burial place of the dead king was a barrow on an island, either in the river or the sea, where his spirit lived under charge of oracular and orgiastic priestesses; but his soul went to the stars and there hopefully awaited rebirth in another king. And the evidence of the oak coffin at the Isle of Avalon points plainly to the derivation of the Arthur cult from the Eastern Mediterranean by way of the Amber Route, the Baltic and Denmark, between 1600 and 1400
BC
; though the cult of other oracular heroes in Britain and Ireland is likely to be seven or eight centuries older.
In Britain the tradition of Spiral Castle survives in the Easter Maze dance of country villages, the mazes being called ‘Troy Town’ in England and in Wales ‘Caer-droia’. The Romans probably named them after the Troy Game, a labyrinthine dance of Asia Minor, performed by young noblemen at Rome under the Early Empire in memory of their Trojan origin; but Pliny records that Latin children performed it too. In Delos it was called the Crane Dance and was said to record the escape of Theseus from the Labyrinth. The maze dance seems to have come to Britain from the Eastern Mediterranean with the New Stone Age invaders of the third millennium
BC
, since ancient rough stone mazes of the same pattern as the English are found in Scandinavia and North-eastern Russia. On a rock slab near Bosinney in Cornwall, two mazes are carved; and another is carved on a massive granite block from the Wicklow Hills, now in the Dublin National Museum. These mazes have the same pattern, too: the Labyrinth of Daedalus shown on Cretan coins, and in ecclesiastical mazes of South-eastern Europe used for penitential purposes.
1
‘The Thirteen Precious Things’, ‘The Thirteen Kingly Jewels’, ‘The Thirteen Wonders of Britain’, etc., mentioned in the
Mabinogion
are likely to represent sets of cypher equivalents for the thirteen consonants of the British Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet.
1
Caer Wydr (Glass Castle) is a learned pun of Gwion’s. The town of Glastonbury is said by William of Malmesbury to have been named after its secular founder Glasteing, who came there from the north with his twelve brothers at some time before 600. The Latin equivalent of
Gutrin
was
vitrinus;
and the Saxon was
glas.
This colour word covered any shade between deep blue and light-green – it could be applied equally to Celtic blue enamel and Roman bottle-glass. The ‘glass’ castles of Irish, Manx and Welsh legend are thus seen to be either island shrines, surrounded by glassy-green water, or star-prisons islanded in the dark-blue night sky; but in mediaeval legend they were made of glass, and their connexion with death and with the Moon-goddess has been preserved in the popular superstition that it is unlucky to see the Moon through glass.
1
The Island of Sein, which is not far from the great religious centre of Carnac and must have had a ritual connexion with it, retained its magical reputation very late. It was the last place in Europe to be Christianized: by seventeenth-century Jesuits. The island women wear the highest head-dresses in Brittany – the nine priestesses must have worn the same – and until recently had a reputation for enticing sailors to destruction on the rocks by witchcraft. There are two megalithic menhirs on the island, which is completely treeless, but no archaeological excavations have yet been made there.
Chapter Seven
A Goidelic alphabet, called Ogham, was used in Britain and Ireland some centuries before the introduction of the Latin ABC. Its invention is credited in the mediaeval Irish
Book
of
Bally
mote
to ‘Ogma Sun-face son of Breas’ – one of the early gods of the Goidels. Ogma, according to Lucian, who wrote in the second century
AD
, was pictured as a veteran Hercules, with club and lion-skin, drawing crowds of prisoners along with golden chains connected by their ears to the tip of his tongue. The alphabet consisted of twenty letters – fifteen consonants and five vowels – apparently corresponding to a deaf-and-dumb finger-language.
Numerous examples of this alphabet occur in ancient stone inscriptions in Ireland, the Isle of Man, North and South Wales, and Scotland; with one at Silchester in Hampshire, the capital of the Atrebates who took part in the Second Belgic Invasion of Britain between Julius Caesar’s raid and the Claudian conquest. Here are two versions: the first quoted from Brynmor-Jones and Rhys’s
History
of
the
Welsh
People
,
and the second from Dr. Macalister’s
Secret
Languages
of
Ireland
:
It will be seen that both these alphabets are ‘Q-Celt’, or Goidelic, because they contain a Q but no P; Goidels from the Continent were established in South-Eastern Britain two hundred years before the Belgic (P-Celt) invasions from Gaul in the early fourth century
BC
; and it is thought that the common language of Bronze Age Britain was an early form of Goidelic, as it was in Ireland. The Ogham alphabet quoted in the
Oxford
English
Dictionary
(as if it were the only one in existence) differs from both the Rhys and Macalister Oghams by having M.G.Y.Z.R. as its last line of consonants: but the Y is doubtless an error for NY, another way of spelling the Gn as in Catalogne. In still another version, quoted in Charles
Squire’s
Mythology
of
the
British
Isles,
the fourteenth letter is given as ST and an X sign is offered for P.
Dr. Macalister proves that in Ireland Oghams were not used in public inscriptions until Druidism began to decline: they had been kept a dark secret and when used for written messages between one Druid and another, nicked on wooden billets, were usually cyphered. The four sets, each of five characters, he suggests, represented fingers used in a sign language: to form any one of the letters of the alphabet, one needed only to extend the appropriate amount of fingers of one hand, pointing them in one of four different directions. But this would have been a clumsy method of signalling. A much quicker, less conspicuous and less fatiguing method would have been to regard the left hand as a key-board, like that of a typewriter, with the letters marked by the tips, the two middle joints, and the bases of the fingers and thumb, and to touch the required spots with the forefinger of the right hand. Each letter in the inscriptions consists of nicks, from one to five in number, cut with a chisel along the edge of a squared stone; there are four different varieties of nick, which makes twenty letters. I assume that the number of nicks in a letter indicated the number of the digit, counting from left to right, on which the letter occurred in the finger language, while the variety of nick indicated the position of the letter on the digit. There were other methods of using the alphabet for secret signalling purposes. The
Book
of
Ballymote
refers to
Cos-ogham
(‘leg-ogham’) in which the signaller, while seated, used his fingers to imitate inscriptional Ogham with his shin bone serving as the edge against which the nicks were cut. In
Sron-ogham
(‘nose-ogham’) the nose was used in much the same way. These alternative methods were useful for signalling across a room; the key-board method for closer work. Gwion is evidently referring to
Sron-ogham
when he mentions, among all the other things he knows, ‘why the nose is ridged’; the answer is ‘to make ogham-signalling easier’.
