I write of her as the White Goddess because white is her principal colour, the colour of the first member of her moon-trinity, but when Suidas the Byzantine records that Io was a cow that changed her colour from white to rose and then to black he means that the New Moon is the white goddess of birth and growth; the Full Moon, the red goddess of love and battle; the Old Moon, the black goddess of death and divination. Suidas’s myth is supported by Hyginus’s fable of a heifer-calf born to Minos and Pasiphaë which changed its colours thrice daily in the same way. In response to a challenge from an oracle one Polyidus son of Coeranus correctly compared it to a mulberry – a fruit sacred to the Triple Goddess. The three standing stones thrown down from Moeltre Hill near Dwygyfylchi in Wales in the iconoclastic seventeenth century may well have represented the Io trinity. One was white, one red, one dark blue, and they were known as the three women. The local monkish legend was that three women dressed in those colours were petrified as a punishment for winnowing corn on a Sunday.
The most comprehensive and inspired account of the Goddess in all ancient literature is contained in Apuleius’s Golden Ass, where Lucius invokes her from the depth of misery and spiritual degradation and she appears in answer to his plea; incidentally it suggests that the Goddess was once worshipped at Moeltre in her triple capacity of white raiser, red reaper and dark winnower of grain. The translation is by William Adlington (1566):
About the first watch of the night when as I had slept my first sleep, I awaked with sudden fear and saw the moon shining bright as when she is at the full and seeming as though she leaped out of the sea. Then I thought with myself that this was the most secret time, when that goddess had most puissance and force, considering that all human things be governed by her providence; and that not only all beasts private and tame, wild and savage, be made strong by the governance of her light and godhead, but also things inanimate and without life; and I considered that all bodies in the heavens, the earth, and the seas be by her increasing motions increased, and by her diminishing motions diminished: then as weary of all my cruel fortune and calamity, I found good hope and sovereign remedy, though it were very late, to be delivered from my misery, by invocation and prayer to the excellent beauty of this powerful goddess. Wherefore, shaking off my drowsy sleep I arose with a joyful face, and moved by a great affection to purify myself, I plunged my head seven times into the water of the sea; which number seven is convenable and agreeable to holy and divine things, as the worthy and sage philosopher Pythagoras hath declared. Then very lively and joyfully, though with a weeping countenance, I made this oration to the puissant goddess.
‘O blessed Queen of Heaven, whether thou be the Dame Ceres which art the original and motherly source of all fruitful things on the earth, who after the finding of thy daughter Proserpine, through the great joy which thou didst presently conceive, didst utterly take away and abolish the food of them of old time, the acorn, and madest the barren and unfruitful ground of Eleusis to be ploughed and sown, and now givest men a more better and milder food; or whether thou be the celestial Venus, who, at the beginning of the world, didst couple together male and female with an engendered love, and didst so make an eternal propagation of human kind, being now worshipped within the temples of the Isle Paphos; or whether thou be the sister of the God Phoebus, who hast saved so many people by lightening and lessening with thy medicines the pangs of travail and art now adored at the sacred places of Ephesus; or whether thou be called terrible Proserpine by reason of the deadly howlings which thou yieldest, that hast power with triple face to stop and put away the invasion of hags and ghosts which appear unto men, and to keep them down in the closures of the Earth, which dost wander in sundry groves and art worshipped in divers manners; thou, which dost illuminate all the cities of the earth by thy feminine light; thou, which nourishest all the seeds of the world by thy damp heat, giving thy changing light according to the wanderings, near or far, of the sun: by whatsoever name or fashion or shape it is lawful to call upon thee, I pray thee to end my great travail and misery and raise up my fallen hopes, and deliver me from the wretched fortune which so long time pursued me. Grant peace and rest, if it please thee, to my adversities, for I have endured enough labour and peril….’
When I had ended this oration, discovering my plaints to the goddess, I fortuned to fall again asleep upon that same bed; and by and by (for mine eyes were but newly closed) appeared to me from the midst of the sea a divine and venerable face, worshipped even of the gods themselves. Then, little by little, I seemed to see the whole figure of her body, bright and mounting out of the sea and standing before me: wherefore I purpose to describe her divine semblance, if the poverty of my human speech will suffer me, or the divine power give me a power of eloquence rich enough to express it. First, she had a great abundance of hair, flowing and curling, dispersed and scattered about her divine neck; on the crown of her head she bare many garlands interlaced with flowers, and in the middle of her forehead was a plain circlet in fashion of a mirror, or rather resembling the moon by the light it gave forth; and this was borne up on either side by serpents that seemed to rise from the furrows of the earth, and above it were blades of corn set out. Her vestment was of finest linen yielding diverse colours, somewhere white and shining, somewhere yellow like the crocus flower, somewhere rosy red, somewhere flaming; and (which troubled my sight and spirit sore) her cloak was utterly dark and obscure covered with shining black, and being wrapped round her from under her left arm to her right shoulder in manner of a shield, part of it fell down, pleated in most subtle fashion, to the skirts of her garment so that the welts appeared comely. Here and there upon the edge thereof and throughout its surface the stars glimpsed, and in the middle of them was placed the moon in mid-month, which shone like a flame of fire; and round about the whole length of the border of that goodly robe was a crown or garland wreathing unbroken, made with all flowers and all fruits. Things quite diverse did she bear: for in her right hand she had a timbrel of brass [sistrum], a flat piece of metal carved in manner of a girdle, wherein passed not many rods through the periphery of it; and when with her arm she moved these triple chords, they gave forth a shrill and clear sound. In her left hand she bare a cup of gold like unto a boat, upon the handle whereof, in the upper part which is best seen, an asp lifted up his head with a wide-swelling throat. Her odoriferous feet were covered with shoes interlaced and wrought with victorious palm. Thus the divine shape, breathing out the pleasant spice of fertile Arabia, disdained not with her holy voice to utter these words to me:
‘Behold, Lucius, I am come; thy weeping and prayer hath moved me to succour thee. I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of the powers divine, queen of all that are in Hell, the principal of them that dwell in Heaven, manifested alone and under one form of all the gods and goddesses [deorum dearum-que facies uniformis]. At my will the planets of the sky, the wholesome winds of the seas, and the lamentable silences of hell be disposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout the world, in divers manners, in variable customs, and by many names. For the Phrygians that are the first of all men call me The Mother of the Gods at Pessinus; the Athenians, which are sprung from their own soil, Cecropian Minerva; the Cyprians, which are girt about by the sea, Paphian Venus; the Cretans which bear arrows, Dictynnian Diana; the Sicilians, which speak three tongues, Infernal Proserpine; the Eleusinians, their ancient goddess Ceres; some Juno, other Bellona, other Hecate, other Rhamnusia, and principally both sort of the Ethiopians which dwell in the Orient and are enlightened by the morning rays of the sun, and the Egyptians, which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine and by their proper ceremonies accustom to worship me, do call me by my true name, Queen Isis. Behold, I am come to take pity of thy fortune and turbulation; behold I am present to favour and aid thee; leave off thy weeping, and lamentation, put away all thy sorrow, for behold the healthful day which is ordained by my providence.’
Much the same prayer is found in Latin in a twelfth-century English herbal (Brit. Mus. MS. Harley, 1585, ff 12v–13r):
Earth, divine goddess, Mother Nature, who dost generate all things and bringest forth ever anew the sun which thou hast given to the nations; Guardian of sky and sea and of all Gods and powers; through thy influence all nature is hushed and sinks to sleep….Again, when it pleases thee, thou sendest forth the glad daylight and nurturest life with thine eternal surety; and when the spirit of man passes, to thee it returns. Thou indeed art rightly named Great Mother of the Gods; Victory is in thy divine name. Thou art the source of the strength of peoples and gods; without thee nothing can either be born or made perfect; thou art mighty, Queen of the Gods. Goddess, I adore thee as divine, I invoke thy name; vouchsafe to grant that which I ask of thee, so shall I return thanks to thy godhead, with the faith that is thy due….
Now also I make intercession to you, all ye powers and herbs, and to your majesty: I beseech you, whom Earth the universal parent hath borne and given as a medicine of health to all peoples and hath put majesty upon, be now of the most benefit to humankind. This I pray and beseech you: be present here with your virtues, for she who created you hath herself undertaken that I may call you with the good will of him on whom the art of medicine was bestowed; therefore grant for health’s sake good medicine by grace of these powers aforesaid….
How the god of medicine was named in twelfth-century pagan England is difficult to determine; but he clearly stood in the same relation to the Goddess invoked in the prayers as Aesculapius originally stood to Athene, Thoth to Isis, Esmun to Ishtar, Diancecht to Brigit, Odin to Freya, and Bran to Danu.
1 Thallus gives the earliest historical record of the Crucifixion.
2 A. R. Burn in his Minoans, Philistines and Greeks suggests that all traditional dates before 500 BC should be reduced to five-sixths of their distance from that date, since the Greeks reckoned three generations to a century, when four would be nearer the mark. However, Walter Leaf approves of 1183 BC as the date of the Fall of Troy, because the curse of one thousand years that had fallen on the city of Ajax in punishment for his rape of the Trojan priestess Cassandra was lifted about 183 BC. The date now favoured by most archaeologists is 1230 BC.
1 There was a third Ortygia (‘quail place’). According to Tacitus, the Ephesians in their plea before the Emperor Tiberius for the right of asylum in the Artemisian precinct, stated that the cult of their Great Goddess Artemis (whom the Romans called Diana) was derived from Ortygia, where her name was then Leto. Dr. D. C. Hogarth places this Ortygia in the Arvalian Valley to the north of Mount Solmissos, but the suggestion is not plausible unless, like the islets of the same name, it was a resting place for quail in the Spring migration from Africa.
1 The White Hill, or Tower Hill, at London preserves Albina’s memory, the Keep built in 1078 by Bishop Gundulf being still called the White Tower. Herman Melville in his Moby Dick devotes an eloquent chapter to a consideration of the contradictory emotions aroused by the word ‘white’ – the grace, splendour and purity of milk-white steeds, white sacrificial bulls, snowy bridal veils and white priestly vestments, as opposed to the nameless horror aroused by albinos, lepers, visitants in white hoods and so forth – and records that the blood of American visitors to Tower Hill is far more readily chilled by ‘This is the White Tower’, than by ‘This is the Bloody Tower.’ Moby Dick was an albino whale.
1 Cerdo is said to be derived from Setula, ‘a little sow’, but the violent metathesis of consonants that has to be assumed to make this derivation good cannot be paralleled in the names of other domestic animals.
1 Pythagoras is said to have been a Tyrrhenian Pelasgian from Samos in the Northern Aegean. This would account for the close connexion of his philosophy with the Orphic and Druidic. He is credited with having refrained not only from beans but from fish, and seems to have developed an inherited Pelasgian cult by travel among other nations. His theory of the transmigration of souls is Indian rather than Pelasgian. At Crotona he was accepted, like his successor Empedocles, as a reincarnation of Apollo.
2 The Platonists excused their abstention from beans on the rationalistic ground that they caused flatulence; but this came to much the same thing. Life was breath, and to break wind after eating beans was a proof that one had eaten a living soul – in Greek and Latin the same words, pneuma and anima, stand equally for gust of wind, breath and soul or spirit.
Chapter Five
GWION’S RIDDLE
When with this complicated mythological argument slowly forming in my mind, I turned again to the Hanes Taliesin (‘The Tale of Taliesin’), the riddling poem with which Taliesin first addresses King Maelgwyn in the Romance, I already suspected that Gwion was using the Dog, the Lapwing and the Roebuck to help him conceal in his riddle the new Gwydionian secret of the Trees, which he had somehow contrived to learn, and which had invested him with poetic power. Reading the poem with care, I soon realized that here again, as in the Câd Goddeu, Gwion was no irresponsible rhapsodist, but a true poet; and that whereas Heinin and his fellow-bards, as stated in the Romance, knew only ‘Latin, French, Welsh and English’, he was well read also in the Irish classics – and in Greek and Hebrew literature too, as he himself claims:
Tracthator fyngofeg
Yn Efrai, yn Efroeg,
Yn Efroeg, yn Efrai.
I realized too, that he was hiding an ancient religious mystery – a blasphemous one from the Church’s point of view – under the cloak of buffoonery, but had not made this secret altogether impossible for a well-educated fellow-poet to guess.
I here use the name ‘Gwion’ for ‘Taliesin’, to make it quite clear that I am not confusing the miraculous child Taliesin of the Romance of Taliesin with the historic Taliesin of the late sixth century, a group of whose authentic poems is contained in the Red Book of Hergest, and who is noticed by Nennius, in a quotation from a seventh-century genealogy of the Saxon Kings, as ‘renowned in British poetry’. The first Taliesin spent much of his time during the last third of the sixth century as a guest of various chiefs and princes to whom he wrote complimentary poems (Urien ap Cynvarch, Owein ap Urien Gwallag ap Laenaug, Cynan Garwyn ap Brochfael Ysgythrog, King of Powys, and the High King Rhun ap Maelgwn until he was killed by the Coeling in a drunken quarrel). He went with Rhun in the first campaign against the men of the North, the occasion of which was the killing of Elidir (Heliodorus) Mwynfawr, and the avenging raid of Clydno Eiddin, Rhydderch Hael (or Hen) and others, to which Rhun retaliated with a full-scale invasion. This Taliesin calls the English ‘Eingl’ or ‘Deifyr’ (Deirans) as often as he calls them ‘Saxons’, and the Welsh ‘Brython’ not ‘Cymry’. ‘Gwion’ wrote about six centuries later, at the close of the Period of the Princes.
In his Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry, Dr. Ifor Williams, the greatest recent authority on the text of the Taliesin poems, postulates from internal literary evidence that parts of the Romance existed in a ninth-century original. I do not dispute this, or his conclusion that the author was a paganistic cleric with Irish connexions; but must dispute his denial that there is ‘any mysticism, semi-mysticism, or demi-semi-mysticism’ in the poems and that the whole rigmarole can be easily explained as follows:
Taliesin is just showing off; like the kangaroo in Kipling’s story – he had to! That was the role he had to play.
As a scholar, Dr. Williams naturally feels more at home with the earlier Taliesin, who was a straight-forward court bard of the skaldic sort. But the point of the Romance to me is not that a pseudo-Taliesin humorously boasted himself omniscient, but that someone who styled himself Little Gwion, son of Gwreang of Llanfair in Caereinion, a person of no importance, accidentally lighted on certain ancient mysteries and, becoming an adept, began to despise the professional bards of his time because they did not understand the rudiments of their traditional poetic lore. Proclaiming himself a master-poet, Gwion took the name of Taliesin, as an ambitious Hellenistic Greek poet might
have taken the name of Homer. ‘Gwion son of Gwreang’ is itself probably a pseudonym, not the baptismal name of the author of the Romance. Gwion is the equivalent (gw for f) of Fionn, or Finn, the Irish hero of a similar tale. Fionn son of Mairne, a Chief Druid’s daughter, was instructed by a Druid of the same name as himself to cook for him a salmon fished from a deep pool of the River Boyne, and forbidden to taste it; but as Fionn was turning the fish over in the pan he burned his thumb, which he put into his mouth and so received the gift of inspiration. For the salmon was a salmon of knowledge, that had fed on nuts fallen from the nine hazels of poetic art. The equivalent of Gwreang is Freann, an established variant of Fearn, the alder. Gwion is thus claiming oracular powers as a spiritual son of the Alder-god Bran. His adoption of a pseudonym was justified by tradition. The hero Cuchulain (‘hound of Culain’) was first named Setanta and was a reincarnation of the god Lugh; and Fionn (‘fair’) himself was first named Deimne. Bran was a most suitable father for Gwion, for by this time he was known as the Giant Ogyr Vran, Guinevere’s father – his name, which means ‘Bran the Malign’ (ocur vran),1 has apparently given English the word ‘ogre’ through Perrault’s Fairy Tales – and was credited by the bards with the invention of their art and with the ownership of the Cauldron of Cerridwen from which they said that the Triple Muse had been born. And Gwion’s mother was Cerridwen herself.
The White Goddess Page 12