The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  After the misleading ‘through the water of Jordan’ had been removed from line 25, ‘I strengthened Moses’ remained. Well, who did strengthen Moses? And where was this strengthening done? I remembered that Moses was strengthened at the close of his battle with the Amalekites, by having his hands held up by two companions. Where did this battle take place and who were the strengtheners? It took place at Jehovah-Nissi, close to the Mount of God, and the strengtheners were Aaron and Hur. So I could recompose the riddle as: ‘I strengthened Moses in the land of the Deity’. And the answer was: ‘Aaron and Hur’. If only one name was needed, it would probably be Hur because this is the only action recorded of him in the Pentateuch.

  Similarly, in line 25, ‘I have been with Mary Magdalene’ had to be separated from the misleading ‘in the firmament’ and the other part of the riddle looked for in another verse. I had already found it by studying the list of people present at the Crucifixion: St. Simon of Cyrene, St. John the Apostle, St. Veronica, Dysmas the good thief, Gestas the bad thief, the Centurion, the Virgin Mary, Mary Cleopas, Mary Magdalene….But I had not overlooked the woman who (according to the Proto-evangelium of St. James) was the first person ever to adore the child Jesus, the prime witness of his parthenogenesis, and his most faithful follower. She is mentioned in Mark XV, as standing beside Mary Magdalene. So: ‘I was with Mary Magdalene at the place of the Crucifixion of the merciful Son of God.’ The answer was: ‘Salome’.

  Who instructed Enoch? (Eli does not, apparently, belong to this riddle.) I agree with Charles, Burkitt, Oesterley, Box and other Biblical scholars that nobody can hope to understand the Sayings of Jesus who has not read the Book of Enoch, omitted from the canon of the Apocrypha but closely studied by the primitive Christians. I happened to have been reading the book and knew that the answer was ‘Uriel’, and that Uriel instructed Enoch ‘on the fall of Lucifer into the depth of hell’. A curious historical point is that the verse about Uriel’s instruction of Enoch is not included in the fragments of the Greek Book of Enoch quoted by the ninth-century Byzantine historian Syncellus, nor in the Vatican MS. (1809), nor in the quotations from the Book of Enoch in the Epistle of St. Jude. It occurs only in the text dug up at Akhmim in Egypt in 1886, and in the Ethiopian translation of an earlier Greek text, which is the only version which we know to have been extant in the thirteenth century. Where did Gwion find the story? Was a knowledge of Ethiopian among his attainments? Or did he find a complete Greek manuscript in the library of some Irish abbey that had escaped the fury of the Vikings’ war against books? The passage in the First Book of Enoch, XVIII, 11, and XIX, 1, 2, 3, runs:

  And I saw a deep abyss and columns of heavenly fire, and among them I saw columns of fire falling, which were beyond measure alike upwards and down wards…. And Uriel said to me: ‘Here shall stand

  the angels who have lain with women and whose spirits, assuming many different forms, defile mankind and lead them astray into demonolatry and sacrificing to demons: here shall they stand until the Day of Judgement…. And the women whom they seduced shall become Sirens.’ I, Enoch, alone saw this vision of the end of all things; no other shall see as far as I.

  This discovery took me a stage further, to line 7: ‘I have borne a banner before Alexander.’ Among the poems attributed to Taliesin in the Red Book of Hergest is a fragment called Y Gofeisws Byd (‘A Sketch of the World’) which contains a short panegyric of the historical Alexander, and another Anrhyfeddonau Alexander, ‘The Not-wonders of Alexander’ – a joke at the expense of a thirteenth-century Spanish romance ascribing to Alexander adventures properly belonging to the myth of Merlin – which tells mockingly how he went beneath the sea and met ‘creatures of distinguished lineage among the fish….’ But neither of these poems gave me a clue to the riddle. If it must be taken literally I should perhaps have guessed the answer to be ‘Neoptolemus’, who was one of Alexander’s bodyguard and the first man to scale the walls of Gaza at the assault. But more probably the reference was to Alexander as a re-incarnation of Moses. According to Josephus, when Alexander came to Jerusalem at the outset of his Eastern conquests, he refrained from sacking the Temple but bowed down and adored the Tetragrammaton on the High Priest’s golden frontlet. His astonished companion Parmenio asked why in the world he had behaved in this unkingly way. Alexander answered: ‘I did not adore the High Priest himself but the God who has honoured him with office. The case is this: that I saw this very person in a dream, dressed exactly as now, while I was at Dios in Macedonia. In my dream I was debating with myself how I might conquer Asia, and this man exhorted me not to delay. I was to pass boldly with my army across the narrow sea, for his God would march before me and help me to defeat the Persians. So I am now convinced that Jehovah is with me and will lead my armies to victory.’ The High Priest then further encouraged Alexander by showing him the prophecy in the Book of Daniel which promised him the dominion of the East; and he went up to the Temple, sacrificed to Jehovah and made a generous peace-treaty with the Jewish nation. The prophecy referred to Alexander as the ‘two-horned King’ and he subsequently pictured himself on his coins with two horns. He appears in the Koran as Dhul Karnain, ‘the two-horned’. Moses was also ‘two-horned’, and in Arabian legend ‘El Hidr, the ever-young prophet’, a former Sun-hero of Sinai, befriended both Moses and Alexander ‘at the meeting place of two seas’. To the learned Gwion, therefore, a banner borne before Alexander was equally a banner borne before Moses; and St. Jerome, or his Jewish mentors, had already made a poetic identification of Alexander’s horns with those of Moses.

  The banner of Moses was ‘Nehushtan’, the Brazen Serpent, which he raised up to avert the plague in the wilderness. When he did so he became an ‘Alexander’, i.e. a ‘warder-off-of-evil-from-man’. So the answer of this riddle is ‘Nehushtan’ or, in the Greek Septuagint spelling, in which I imagine Gwion had read the story, ‘Ne-Esthan’. It should be remembered that this Brazen Serpent in the Gospel According to John, III, 14 and the apocryphal Epistle of Barnabas, XII, 7 is a type of Jesus Christ. Barnabas emphasizes that the Serpent ‘hung on a wooden thing’, i.e. the Cross, and had the power of making alive. In Numbers, XXI, 9 it is described as a ‘seraph’, a name given by Isaiah to the flying serpents that appeared in his vision as the attendants of the Living God and flew to him with a live coal from the altar.

  The next riddle I had to solve, a combination of lines 9 and 26, was: ‘I have been in the firmament, on the Galaxy.’ The Galaxy, or Milky Way, is said to have been formed when the milk of the Great Goddess Rhea of Crete spouted abundantly into the sky after the birth of the infant Zeus. But since the Great Goddess’s name varies from mythographer to mythographer – Hyginus, for example, debates whether to call her Juno or Ops (Wealth) – Gwion has considerately given us another clue: ‘When Roma was built’. He is correctly identifying a Cretan with a Roman goddess, and what is more surprising, recognizes Romulus as a Latin deity of the same religious system as Cretan Zeus. Romulus’s mother was also named Rhea, and if she had trouble with her milk when she was forced to wean her twins in order to conceal their birth, so had Cretan Rhea in the same circumstances. The main difference was that Romulus and Remus had a she-wolf for their foster-mother, whereas Zeus (and some say his foster-brother Goat Pan, too), was suckled by the she-goat Amalthea, whose hide he afterwards wore as a coat; or, as still others say, by a white sow. Both Romulus and Zeus were brought up by shepherds. So: ‘I have been in the firmament, on the Galaxy, when Roma was built.’ The answer is Rhea, though it was not Rhea herself but the spurt of her milk, rhea in Greek, that was on the Galaxy. Gwion had been anticipated by Nennius in giving more importance to Rhea, mother of Romulus, than the Classical mythologists had done: Nennius called her ‘the most holy queen’.

  This riddle is purposely misleading. The only legend about the Galaxy that Heinin and the other bards at Maelgwyn’s court would have known concerns Blodeuwedd, conjured by Gwydion to be the bride of Llew Llaw Gyffes. Llew’s other name was Huan and Bl
odeuwedd was transformed into an owl and called Twyll Huan (‘the deceiving of Huan’) for having caused Llew’s death: the Welsh for owl being tylluan. The legend of Blodeuwedd and the Galaxy occurs in the Peniardd MSS.:

  The wife of Huan ap Dôn was a party to the killing of her husband and said that he had gone to hunt away from home. His father Gwydion, the King of Gwynedd, traversed all countries in search of him, and at last made Caer Gwydion, that is the Milky Way, as a track by which to seek his soul in the heavens; where he found it. In requital for the injury that she had done he turned the young wife into a bird, and she fled from her father-in-law and is called to this day Twyll Huan. Thus the Britons formerly treated their stories and tales after the manner of the Greeks, in order to keep them in memory.

  It should be added that the form ‘Caer Gwydion’, instead of ‘Caer Wydion’, proves the myth to be a late one. Blodeuwedd (as shown in Chapter Two) was Olwen, ‘She of the White Track’, so Gwydion was right to search for her in the Galaxy: Rhea with her white track of stars was the celestial counterpart of Olwen-Blodeuwedd with her white track of trefoil.

  Who, in line 21, witnessed the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah? Lot, or perhaps the unnamed ‘wife of Lot’.

  Who, in line 18, was ‘the chief director of the work of the tower of Nimrod’? I saw that the Lapwing was at her tricks again. The question really ran: ‘Of the work on what tower was Nimrod the chief director?’ The answer was ‘Babel’. Gower’s lines on the inconvenience caused to Nimrod and his masons when the confusion of tongues began, had run in my head for years:

  One called for stones, they brought him tyld [tiles]

  And Nimrod, that great Champioun,

  He raged like a young Lioun.

  Who, in line 24, was ‘with my Lord in the manger of the Ass’? Was the answer ‘swaddling clothes’? Then someone called my attention to the text of Luke II, 16: ‘And they came with haste and found Mary and Joseph and the babe lying in a manger.’ Gwion was being mischievous: literally, the sentence reads as though Joseph, Mary and the child were all together in the manger. The answer was evidently ‘Joseph’, since that was St. Joseph’s most glorious moment.

  Who was it that said, in line 23: ‘I am now come here to the remnant of Troia.’ According to Nennius, Sigebertus Gemblasensis, Geoffrey of Monmouth and others, Brutus the grandson of Aeneas landed with the remnants of the Trojans at Totnes in Devon in the year 1074 BC–109 years after the accepted date of the Fall of Troy. A people who came over the Mor Tawch (the North Sea) some seven centuries later to join them were the Cymry. They cherished the notion that they were descended from Gomer, son of Japhet, and had wandered all the way from Taprobane (Ceylon – see Triad 54) by way of Asia Minor before finally settling at Llydaw in North Britain. So: ‘I have been in India and Asia (line 20) and am now come here to the remnant of Troia.’ The answer was ‘Gomer’.

  ‘I know the names of the stars from north to south’ in line 8, suggested one of the Three Happy Astronomers of Britain mentioned in the Triads, and I judged from the sentence ‘my original country is the region of the summer stars’ (i.e. the West) which seemed to belong to this riddle, that no Greek, Egyptian, Arabic, or Babylonian astronomer was intended. Idris being the first named of the three astronomers, the answer was probably ‘Idris’.

  ‘I have been on the White Hill, in the Court of Cynvelyn (Cymbeline)’ in line 29, evidently belonged with ‘I was in the Court of Don before the birth of Gwydion’, in line 12. The answer was ‘Vron’ or ‘Bran’, whose head, after his death, was according to the Romance of Branwen buried on the White Hill (Tower Hill) at London as a protection against invasion – as the head of King Eurystheus of Mycenae was buried in a pass that commanded the approach to Athens, and the alleged head of Adam was buried at the northern approach to Jerusalem – until King Arthur exhumed it. For Bran was a son of Dôn (Danu) long before the coming of the Belgic Gwydion.1

  The answer to ‘I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain’ (line 10), was clearly ‘David’. King David had crossed over Jordan to the Canaanite refuge-city of Mahanaim, while Joab fought the Battle of the Wood of Ephraim. There in the gateway he heard the news of Absalom’s death. In compliment to the See of St. David’s, Gwion has combined this statement with ‘I have been winged by the genius of the splendid crozier.’ (‘And St. David!’ as we Royal Welch Fusiliers loyally add to all our toasts on March 1st.) One of the chief aims of Prince Llewelyn and the other Welsh patriots of Gwion’s day was to free their Church from English domination. Giraldus Cambrensis had spent the best part of his quarrelsome ecclesiastical life (1145–1213) in campaigns to make the See of St. David’s independent of Canterbury and to fill it with a Welsh Archbishop. But King Henry II and his two sons saw to it that only politically reliable Norman-French churchmen were appointed to the Welsh sees, and appeals by the Welsh to the Pope were disregarded because the power of the Angevin kings weighed more at the Vatican than the possible gratification of a poor, divided and distant principality.

  Who, in line 20, when the misleading ‘in Asia’ has been removed, was ‘with Noah in the Ark’? I guessed ‘Hu Gadarn’, who according to the Triads led the Cymry from the East. With his plough-oxen he also drew up from the magic lake the monster avanc which caused it to overflow in a universal flood. He had been ‘fostered between the knees of Dylan in the Deluge’. But the Lapwing, I found later, was deliberately confusing Dylan with Noah; Noah really belongs to the Enoch riddle in line 13. The present riddle must run: ‘I have been fostered in the Ark.’ But it could be enlarged with the statement in line 33: ‘I have been teacher to all intelligences’, for Hu Gadarn, ‘Hu the Mighty’, who has been identified with the ancient Channel Island god Hou, was the Menes, or Palamedes, of the Cymry and taught them ploughing – ‘in the region where Constantinople now stands’ – music and song.

  Who, in line 27, ‘obtained the Muse from the cauldron of Caridwen’? Gwion himself. However, the cauldron of Caridwen was no mere witch’s cauldron. It would not be unreasonable to identify it with the cauldron depicted on Greek vases, the name written above Caridwen being ‘Medea’, the Corinthian Goddess who killed her children, as the Goddess Thetis also did. In this cauldron she boiled up old Aeson and restored him to youth; it was the cauldron of rebirth and re-illumination. Yet when the other Medea, Jason’s wife, played her famous trick (recorded by Diodorus Siculus) on old Pelias of Iolcos, persuading his daughters to cut him up and stew him back to youth and then calmly denouncing them as parricides, she disguised her Corinthian nationality and pretended to be a Hyperborean Goddess. Evidently Pelias had heard of the Hyperborean cauldron and had greater faith in it than in the Corinthian one.

  ‘It is not known whether my body is flesh or fish.’ This riddle, in line 36, was not hard to answer. I remembered the long-standing dispute in the mediaeval Church whether or not it was right to eat barnacle goose on Fridays and other fast-days. The barnacle goose does not nest in the British Isles. (I handled the first clutch of its eggs ever brought there; they were found at Spitzbergen in the Arctic.) It was universally believed to be hatched out of the goose barnacle – to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘a white sea-shell of the pedunculate genus of Cirripedes.’ The long feathery cirri protruding from the valves suggested plumage. Giraldus Cambrensis once saw more than a thousand embryo barnacle geese hanging from one piece of drift wood on the shore. Campion wrote in his Elizabethan History of Ireland: ‘Barnacles, thousands at once, are noted along the shoares to hang by the beakes about the edges of putrified timber…which in processe taking lively heate of the Sunne, become water-foules.’ Barnacle geese were therefore held by some to be fish, not fowl, and legitimate Friday eating for monks. The word ‘barnacle’, the same dictionary suggests, is formed from the Welsh brenig, or Irish bairneach, meaning a limpet or barnacle-shell. Moreover, the other name for the barnacle goose, the ‘brent’ or the ‘brant’, is apparently formed from the same word. Caius, the Elizabethan naturalist, called it Anser Brendinus
and wrote of it: “‘Bernded” seu “Brended” id animal dicitur.’ This suggests a connexion between bren, bairn, brent, brant, bern and Bran who, as the original Câd Goddeu makes plain, was an Underworld-god. For the northward migration of wild geese is connected in British legend with the conducting to the icy Northern Hell of the souls of the damned, or of unbaptized infants. In Wales the sound of the geese passing unseen overhead at night is supposed to be made by the Cwm Annwm (‘Hounds of Hell’ with white bodies and red ears), in England by Yell Hounds, Yeth Hounds, Wish Hounds, Gabriel Hounds, or Gabriel Ratchets. The Hunter is called variously Gwyn (‘the white one’) – there was a Gwyn cult in pre-Christian Glastonbury – Herne the Hunter, and Gabriel. In Scotland he is Arthur. ‘Arthur’ here may stand for Arddu (‘the dark one’) – Satan’s name in the Welsh Bible. But his original name in Britain seems to have been Bran, which in Welsh is Vron. The fish-or-flesh riddle must therefore belong with the other two Vron riddles already answered.

  The alternative text of the Hanes Taliesin published in the Myvyrian Archaiology is translated by D. W. Nash as follows:

  1 An impartial Chief Bard

  Am I to Elphin.

  My accustomed country

  Is the land of the Cherubim.

  2 Johannes the Diviner

  I was called by Merddin,

  At length every King

  Will call me Taliesin.