The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

Taliesin

  Kai

  Caleb

  Hu Gadarn

  Morvran

  Gomer

  Rhea

  Idris

  Joseph

  Jesus

  Uriel

  This was as far as I could go without adopting the method of the crossword puzzler, which is to use the answers already secured as clues to the solution of the more difficult riddles that remain, but I made some progress with the riddle: ‘I have been three periods in the Castle of Arianrhod.’

  Arianrhod (‘Silver wheel’) appears in the 107th Triad as the ‘Silver-circled daughter of Dôn’, and is a leading character in the Romance of Math the Son of Mathonwy. No one familiar with the profuse variants of the same legend in every body of European myth can have doubts about her identity. She is the mother of the usual Divine Fish-Child Dylan who, after killing the usual Wren (as the New Year Robin does on St. Stephen’s day) becomes Llew Llaw Gyffes (‘the Lion with the Steady Hand’), the usual handsome and accomplished Sun-hero with the usual Heavenly Twin at his side. Arianrhod then adopts the form of Blodeuwedd, the usual Love-goddess, treacherously (as usual) destroys Llew Llaw – the story is at least as old as the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic – and is then transformed first into the usual Owl of Wisdom and then into the usual Old-Sow-who-eats-her-farrow; so feeds on Llew’s dead flesh. But Llew, whose soul has taken the form of the usual eagle, is then, as usual, restored to life. The story is given in full in Chapter Seventeen.

  In other words Arianrhod is one more aspect of Caridwen, or Cerridwen, the White Goddess of Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life; and to be in the Castle of Arianrhod is to be in a royal purgatory awaiting resurrection. For in primitive European belief it was only kings, chieftains and poets, or magicians, who were privileged to be reborn. Countless other less distinguished souls wandered disconsolately in the icy grounds of the Castle, as yet uncheered by the Christian hope of universal resurrection. Gwion makes this clear in his Marwnad y Milveib (‘Elegy on the Thousand Children’).

  Incomprehensible numbers there were

  Maintained in a chilly hell

  Until the Fifth Age of the world,

  Until Christ should release the captives.

  Where was this purgatory situated? It must be distinguished from the Celtic Heaven, which was the Sun itself – a blaze of light (as we know from Armorican tradition) caused by the shining together of myriads of pure souls. Well, where should one expect to find it? In a quarter from which the Sun never shines. Where is that? In the cold North. How far to the North? Beyond the source of Boreas, the North Wind; for ‘at the back of the North Wind’ – a phrase used by Pindar to locate the land of the Hyperboreans – is still a popular Gaelic synonym for the Land of Death. But precisely where beyond the source of the North wind? Only a poet would be persistent enough to ask this last question. The poet is the unsatisfied child who dares to ask the difficult question which arises from the schoolmaster’s answer to his simple question, and then the still more difficult question which arises from that. Surprisingly enough there is, on this occasion, a ready answer. Caer Arianrhod (not the submerged town off the coast of Caernarvon, but the real Caer Arianrhod) is, according to Dr. Owen of the Welsh Dictionary, the constellation called ‘Corona Borealis’. Not Corona Septentrionalis, ‘the Northern Crown’, but Corona Borealis, ‘the Crown of the North Wind’. Perhaps we have the answer here to the question which puzzled Herodotus: ‘Who are the Hyperboreans?’ Were the Hyperboreans, the ‘back-of-the-North-Wind-men’, members of a North Wind cult, as the Thracians of the Sea of Marmara were? Did they believe that when they died their souls were taken off by Hermes, conductor of souls, to the calm silver-circled castle at the back of the North Wind, of which the bright star Alpheta was the guardian?

  I should not venture to make such a fanciful suggestion if it were not for the mention of Oenopion and Tauropolus by the Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica. This Corona Borealis, which is also called ‘the Cretan Crown’, was in ancient times sacred to a Cretan Goddess, wife to the God Dionysus, and according to this Scholiast the mother of – that is, worshipped by – Staphylus, Thoas, Oenopion, Tauropolus and others. These men were the eponymous ancestors of Pelasgo-Thracian clans or tribes settled in the Aegean islands of Chios and Lemnos, on the Thracian Chersonese, and in the Crimea, and culturally connected with North-Western Europe. The Goddess was Ariadne, (‘Most Holy’,) alias Alpheta – alpha and eta being the first and last letters of her name. She was the daughter, or younger self, of the ancient Cretan Moon-Goddess Pasiphaë, ‘She who shines for all’, and the Greeks made her a sister of their ancient vine-hero Deucalion, who survived the Great Flood. Ariadne, on whom ‘Arianrhod’ seems to be modelled, was an orgiastic goddess, and it is evident from the legends of Lemnos, Chios, the Chersonese and the Crimea, that male human sacrifice was an integral part of her worship, as it was among the pre-Roman devotees of the White Goddess of Britain. Orpheus himself, who lived ‘among the savage Cauconians’ close to Oenopion’s home, was a sacred victim of her fury. He was torn in pieces by a pack of delirious women intoxicated by ivy and also, it seems, by the toadstool sacred to Dionysus. Eratosthenes of Alexandria, quoting Aeschylus’s Bassarides, records that Orpheus refused to conform to local religion but ‘believed the sun, whom he named Apollo, to be the greatest of the gods. Rising up in the night he ascended before dawn to the mountain called Pangaeum that he might see the sun first. At which Dionysus, being enraged, sent against him the Bassarids, who tore him in pieces….’ That is a dishonest way of telling the story. Proclus in his commentary on Plato is more to the point: ‘Orpheus, because he was the leader in the Dionysian rites, is said to have suffered the same fate as the god.’ But the head of Orpheus continued to sing and prophesy, like that of the God Bran. Orpheus, according to Pausanias, was worshipped by the Pelasgians, and the termination eus is always a proof of antiquity in a Greek name. ‘Orpheus’, like ‘Erebus’, the name of the Underworld over which the White Goddess ruled, is derived by grammarians from the root ereph, which means ‘to cover or conceal’. It was the Moon-goddess, not the Sun-god, who originally inspired Orpheus.

  The clearest sign that in Arianrhod we have the old matriarchal Triple Goddess, or White Goddess, lies in her giving her son Llew Llaw a name and a set of arms. In patriarchal society it is always the father who gives both. Llew Llaw has no father at all, in the Romance, and must remain anonymous until his mother is tricked into making a man of him.

  I thought at first that Gwion’s riddle about Caer Arianrhod was to be completed with ‘and the whirling round without motion between three elements’. The three elements are clearly fire, air and water, and the Corona Borealis revolves in a very small space compared with the southern constellations. But Gwion must have been taught that Arianrhod’s Castle does not lie within ‘the Arctic Circle’, which includes the two Bears and the Bear-Warden, and that when the Sun rises in the House of the Crab, it begins to dip over the Northern horizon and does not free itself until the summer is over. To describe it as whirling round without motion would have been inaccurate; only the Little Bear does so, pivoted on the Pole-star. (As I show in Chapter Ten, the whirling-round is part of the riddle to which the answer is Rhea; but I will not anticipate the argument at this point.)

  Yet, even if I knew the meaning of ‘a period in the Castle of Arianrhod’, could I answer the riddle? Who spent three periods there?

  The sequences of ‘I have been’ or ‘I am’ – the earliest of them indisputably pre-Christian – which occur in so many bardic poems of Wales and Ireland seem to have several different though related senses. The primitive belief is plainly not in individual metempsychosis of the vulgar Indian sort – at one time a bluebottle, at the next a flower, at the next perhaps a Brahmini bull or a woman, according to one’s merit. The ‘I’ is the Apollo-like god on whose behalf the inspired poet sings, not the poet himself. Sometimes the god may be referring mythically to his daily cycle as the Sun from dawn
to dawn; sometimes to his yearly cycle from winter solstice to winter solstice with the months as stations of his progress; perhaps sometimes even to his grand cycle of 25,800 years around the Zodiac. All these cycles are types of one another; as we still speak either of the ‘evening’ or ‘autumn’ of our lives when we mean old age.

  The commonest ‘I have been’ reference is to the yearly cycle, and to examine these seasonal ‘I have been’s (though for reasons of discretion the order has always been deliberately confused) is usually to find that they contain a complete series of round-the-year symbols.

  I am water, I am a wren,

  I am a workman, I am a star,

  I am a serpent;

  I am a cell, I am a chink,

  I am a depository of song,

  I am a learned person, etc.

  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 Ballymote, 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, ‘o
nly 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.