The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  3 I was nine months almost

  In the belly of the hag Caridwen;

  I was at first little Gwion,

  At length I am Taliesin.

  4 I was with my Lord

  In the highest sphere,

  When Lucifer fell

  Into the depths of Hell.

  5 I carried the banner

  Before Alexander.

  I know the names of the stars

  From the North to the South.

  6 I was in Caer Belion

  Tetragrammaton;

  I conveyed Heon [the Divine Spirit]

  Down to the vale of Ebron.

  7 I was in Canaan

  When Absalom was slain;

  I was in the Hall of Dôn

  Before Gwydion was born.

  8 I was on the horse’s crupper

  Of Eli and Enoch;

  I was on the high cross

  Of the merciful Son of God.

  9 I was the chief overseer

  At the building of the tower of Nimrod;

  I have been three times resident

  In the castle of Arianrhod.

  10 I was in the Ark

  With Noah and Alpha;

  I saw the destruction

  Of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  11 I was in Africa [Asia?]

  Before the building of Rome,

  I am now come here

  To the remnants of Troia.

  12 I was with my King

  In the manger of the ass;

  I supported Moses

  Through the waters of Jordan.

  13 I was in the firmament

  With Mary Magdalene;

  I obtained my inspiration

  From the cauldron of Caridwen.

  14 I was Bard of the harp

  To Deon of Llychlyn;

  I have suffered hunger

  With the son of the Virgin.

  15 I was in the White Hill

  In the Hall of Cynvelyn,

  In stocks and fetters

  A year and a half

  16 I have been in the buttery

  In the land of the Trinity;

  It is not known what is the nature

  Of its meat and its fish.

  17 I have been instructed

  In the whole system of the universe;

  I shall be till the day of judgement

  On the face of the earth.

  18 I have been in an uneasy chair

  Above Caer Sidin,

  And the whirling round without motion

  Between three elements.

  19 Is it not the wonder of the world

  That cannot be discovered?

  The sequence is different and the Lapwing has been as busy as ever. But I learned a good deal from the variants. In place of ‘the land of the Summer Stars’, ‘the land of the Cherubim’ is mentioned. Both mean the same thing. The Eighteenth Psalm (verse 10) makes it clear that the Cherubim are storm-cloud angels; and therefore, for Welshmen, they are resident in the West, from which quarter nine storms out of every ten blow. The Summer Stars are those which lie in the western part of the firmament.

  The first two lines in stanza 18, ‘I have been in an uneasy chair above Caer Sidin’, helped me. There is a stone seat at the top of Cader Idris, ‘the Chair of Idris’ where, according to the local legend, whoever spends the night is found in the morning either dead, mad, or a poet. The first part of this sentence evidently belongs to the Idris riddle, though Gwion, in his Kerdd am Veib Llyr mentions a ‘perfect chair’ in Caer Sidi (‘Revolving Castle’), the Elysian fortress where the Cauldron of Caridwen was housed.

  The text of stanza 2, ‘Johannes the Diviner I was called by Merddin’, seems to be purposely corrupt, since in the Mabinogion version the sense is: ‘Idno and Heinin called me Merddin.’ I thought at first that the original line ran: ‘Johannes I was called, and Merddin the Diviner’, and I was right so far as I went. Merddin, who in mediaeval romances is styled Merlin, was the most famous ancient prophet in British tradition. The manifest sense of the stanza is that Gwion had been called Merddin, ‘dweller in the sea’, by Heinin, Maelgwyn’s chief bard, because like the original Merddin he was of mysterious birth and, though a child, had confounded the bardic college at Dyganwy exactly as Merddin (according to Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth) had confounded Vortigern’s sages; that he had also been called ‘John the Baptist’ (‘But thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Most Highest’); but that eventually everyone would call him Taliesin (‘radiant brow’) the chief of poets. Dr. MacCulloch suggests that there was an earlier Taliesin than the sixth-century bard, and that he was a Celtic Apollo; which would account for the ‘radiant brow’ and for his appearance among other faded Gods and heroes at King Arthur’s Court in the Romance of Kilhwych and Olwen. (Apollo himself had once been a dweller in the sea – the dolphin was sacred to him – and oddly enough John the Baptist seems to have been identified by early Christian syncretists in Egypt with the Chaldean god Oannes who according to Berossus used to appear at long intervals in the Persian Gulf, disguised as the merman Odacon, and renew his original revelation to the faithful. The case is further complicated by the myth of Huan, the Flower-goddess Blodeuwedd’s victim, who was really the god Llew Llaw, another ‘sea-dweller’.)

  It took me a long time to realize that the concealed sense of stanza 2, which made the textual corruption necessary, was a heretical paraphrase of the passage in the three synoptic Gospels (Matt. XVI, 14, Mark VI, 15, Luke IX, 7, 8):

  ‘Some say thou art John the Baptist, and some Elias; and some, one of the ancient prophets risen from the dead….’ But Peter answered: ‘Thou art the Christ.’

  The completing phrase ‘and Elias’ occurs in stanza 8. The Divine Child is speaking as Jesus Christ, as I believe he also is in stanza 14: ‘I have suffered hunger with the Son of the Virgin.’ Jesus was alone then except for the Devil and the ‘wild beasts’. But the Devil did not go hungry; and the ‘wild beasts’ in the Temptation context, according to the acutest scriptural critics – e.g. Professor A. A. Bevan and Dr. T. K. Cheyne – were also of the Devil’s party. The Mabinogion version, line 31, is: ‘I have suffered hunger for the Son of the Virgin,’ which comes to the same thing: Jesus suffered hunger on his own account. The answer to this riddle was simply ‘Jesus’, as ‘Taliesin’ was the answer to ‘Joannes, and Merddin the Diviner, and Elias I was called’.

  ‘I was in the Ark with Noah and Alpha’, in stanza 10, and ‘I was in Caer Bedion, Tetragrammaton’, stanza 6, must together refer to the ‘Holy Unspeakable Name of God’. ‘Alpha and Omega’ was a divine periphrasis which it was permitted to utter publicly; and the ‘tetragrammaton’ was the cryptogrammic Hebrew way of spelling the secret Name in four letters as JHWH. I thought at first that ‘I was in Caer Bedion’ belonged to the Lot riddle: because ‘Lot’ is the Norman-French name for Lludd, the king who built London, and Caer Bedion is Caer Badus, or Bath, which according to Geoffrey of Monmouth was built by Lludd’s father Bladud. But to Gwion the Welshman Lludd was not ‘Lot’, nor is there any record of Lludd’s having lived at Bath.

  I let the ‘Caer Bedion’ riddle stand over for a while, and also the riddle ‘I was Alpha Tetragrammaton’ – if this conjunction composed the riddle – the answer to which was evidently a four-lettered Divine Name beginning with A. Meanwhile, who was ‘bard of the harp to Deon, or Lleon, of Lochlin, or Llychlyn’ (line 28; and stanza 14)? ‘Deon King of Lochlin and Dublin’, is an oddly composite character. Deon is a variant spelling of Don, who, as already pointed out, was really Danu the Goddess of the Tuatha dé Danaan, the invaders of Ireland, patriarchized into a King of Lochlin, or Lochlann, and Dublin. Lochlann was the mythical undersea home of the later Fomorian invaders of Ireland, against whom the Tuatha dé Danaan fought a bloody war. The god Tethra ruled it. It seems that legends of the war between these two nations were worked by later poets into ballad cycles celebrating the ninth-century wars between the Irish and the Danish and Norse pirates. Thus t
he Scandinavians came to be called ‘the Lochlannach’ and the Danish King of Dublin was also styled ‘King of Lochlin’. When the cult of the Scandinavian god Odin, the rune-maker and magician, was brought to Ireland he was identified with his counterpart Gwydion who in the fourth century BC had brought a new system of letters with him to Britain, and had been enrolled as a son of Danu or Dôn. Moreover, according to the legend, the Danaans had come to Britain from Greece by way of Denmark to which they had given the name of their goddess, and in mediaeval Ireland Danaan and Dane became confused, the Danes of the ninth century AD getting credit for Bronze Age monuments. So ‘Deon of Lochlin’ must stand for ‘the Danes of Dublin’. These pirates with their sea-raven flag were the terror of the Welsh, and the minstrel to the Danes of Dublin was probably the sea-raven, sacred to Odin, who croaked over their victims. If so, the answer to the riddle was ‘Morvran’ (sea-raven), who was the son of Caridwen and, according to the Romance of Kilhwych and Olwen, the ugliest man in the world. In the Triads he is said to have escaped alive from the Battle of Camlan – another of the ‘Three Frivolous Battles of Britain’ – because everyone shrank from him. He must be identified with Afagddu, son of Caridwen, for whom the same supreme ugliness is claimed in the Romance of Taliesin, and whom she determined to make as intelligent as he was ugly.

  I wondered whether ‘Lleon of Lochlin’, in the Myvyrian version, was a possible reading. Arthur had his Court at Caerlleon-upon-Usk and the word Caerlleon is generally taken to mean ‘The Camp of the Legion’; and certainly the two Caerlleons mentioned in the seventh-century Welsh Catalogue of Cities, Caerlleon-upon-Usk and Caerlleon-upon-Dee, are both there explained as Castra Legionis. If Gwion accepted this derivation of the word the riddle would read: ‘I was bard of the harp to the legions of Lochlin’, and the answer would be the same. The name Leon occurs in Gwion’s Kadeir Teyrnon (‘The Royal Chair’): ‘the lacerated form of the corsleted Leon’. But the context is corrupt and ‘Leon’ may be a descriptive title of some lion-hearted prince, not a proper name.

  Then there was the riddle in stanza 8 to consider: ‘I was on the horse’s crupper of Eli and Enoch’ – an alternative to the misleading Book of Enoch riddle in the Mabinogion version:

  I was instructor to Eli and Enoch

  of which the answer is ‘Uriel’. In both texts Elias is really a part of the heretical John the Baptist riddle, from which the Lapwing has done her best to distract attention; her false connexion of Elias and Enoch has been most subtly made. For these two prophets are paired in various Apocryphal Gospels – the History of Joseph the Carpenter, the Acts of Pilate, the Apocalypse of Peter and the Apocalypse of Paul. In the Acts of Pilate, for instance, which was current in Wales in Latin translation, occurs the verse:

  I am Enoch who was translated hither by the word of the Lord, and here with me is Elias the Tishbite who was taken up in a chariot of fire.

  But the real riddle in the Mabinogion version proves to be: ‘I was instructor to Enoch and Noah’. In this other version, ‘I was on the horse’s crupper of Eli and Enoch’, the mention of Elias is otiose: for Enoch, like Elias, was caught up alive into Heaven on a chariot drawn by fiery horses. So the answer again is Uriel, since ‘Uriel’ means ‘Flame of God’. Now perhaps I could also answer ‘Uriel’ to the riddle ‘I was in Caer Bedion’. For, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, a sacred fire was kept continually burning in a temple at Caer Bedion, or Bath, like that which burned in the House of God at Jerusalem.

  There is a variation between the texts: ‘a day and a year in stocks and fetters’ (line 30) and ‘a year and a half in stocks and fetters’ (stanza 15). ‘A year and a half makes no obvious sense, but ‘a day and a year’ can be equated with the Thirteen Prison Locks that guarded Elphin, if each lock was a 28-day month and he was released on the extra day of the 365. The ancient common-law month in Britain, according to Blackstone’s Commentaries (2, IX, 142) is 28 days long, unless otherwise stated, and a lunar month is still popularly so reckoned, although a true lunar month, or lunation, from new moon to new moon, is roughly 29½ days long, and though thirteen is supposed to be an unlucky number. The pre-Christian calendar of thirteen four-week months, with one day over, was superseded by the Julian calendar (which had no weeks) based eventually on the year of twelve thirty-day Egyptian months with five days over. The author of the Book of Enoch in his treatise on astronomy and the calendar also reckoned a year to be 364 days, though he pronounced a curse on all who did not reckon a month to be 30 days long. Ancient calendar-makers seem to have interposed the day which had no month, and was not therefore counted as part of the year, between the first and last of their artificial 28–day months: so that the farmer’s year lasted, from the calendar-maker’s point of view, literally a year and a day.

  In the Welsh Romances the number thirteen is of constant occurrence: ‘Thirteen Precious Things’, ‘Thirteen Wonders of Britain’, ‘Thirteen Kingly Jewels’. The Thirteen Prison Locks, then, were thirteen months and on the extra day, the Day of Liberation, the Day of the Divine Child, Elphin was set free. This day will naturally have fallen just after the winter solstice – two days before Christmas, when the Romans had their mid-winter festival. I saw that if the true reading is ‘in stocks and fetters a year and a day’, then this clause should be attached to ‘Primary chief bard am I to Elphin’, in line 1: for it was Elphin who was fettered.

  Now, Gwynn Jones dissents from the usual view that the word Mabinogion means ‘juvenile romances’; he suggests, by analogy with the Irish title Mac-ind-oic, applied to Angus of the Brugh, that it means ‘tales of the son of a virgin mother’ and shows that it was originally applied only to the four romances in which Pryderi son of Rhiannon appears. This ‘son of a virgin mother’ is always born at the winter solstice; which gives point to the story of Phylip Brydydd’s contention with the minstrels for the privilege of first presenting Prince Rhys Ieuanc with a song on Christmas Day, and also his mention of Maelgwyn and Elphin in that context.

  The riddle in stanza 16, ‘I have been in the buttery’, must refer to Kai, who was in charge of King Arthur’s Buttery. The line, cleverly muddled up with the Barnacle riddle, should probably be attached to ‘I was with my Lord in the highest sphere’ (line 5 and stanza 5), Kai appearing in the Triads as ‘one of the three diademed chiefs of battle’, possessed of magical powers. In the Romance of Kilhwych and Olwen there is this description of him:

  He could hold his breath under water for nine days and nights, and sleep for the same period. No physician could heal a wound inflicted by his sword. He could make himself at will as tall as the tallest tree in the wood. His natural heat was so great that in a deluge of rain whatever he carried in his hand remained dry a hand’s-breadth above and below. On the coldest day he was like a glowing fuel to his comrades.

  This is close to the account given of the Sun-hero Cuchulain in his battle rage. But in the later Arthurian legends Kai had degenerated into a buffoon and Chief of the Cooks.

  The memory of the thirteen-month year was kept alive in the pagan English countryside until at least the fourteenth century. The Ballad of Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar begins:

  But how many merry monthes be in the yeare?

  There are thirteen, I say;

  The mid-summer moon is the merryest of all,

  Next to the merry month of May.

  This has been altered in a manifestly later ballad:

  There are twelve months in all the year

  As I hear many men say.

  But the merriest month in all the year

  Is the merry month of May.

  1 The syllable ocur, like the Old Spanish word for a man-eating demon, Huergo or Uergo, is probably cognate with Orcus, the Latin God of the Dead, originally a masculinization of Phorcis, the Greek Sow-Demeter.

  1 Bran’s connexion with the White Hill may account for the curious persistence at the Tower of London of tame ravens, which are regarded by the garrison with superstitious reverence. There is even a legend t
hat the security of the Crown depends on their continuance there: a variant of the legend about Bran’s head. The raven, or crow, was Bran’s oracular bird.

  Chapter Six

  A VISIT TO SPIRAL CASTLE

  My suggested answers to the riddles of the Hanes Taliesin were as follows:

  Babel

  Lot or Lota

  Vran

  Salome

  Ne-esthan

  Hur

  David