The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Dr. R. S. Macalister in his Ancient Ireland (1935) takes an original view of New Grange. He holds that it was built by the Milesians, whom he dates about 1000 BC and supposes to have come from Britain, not Spain, on the ground that it incorporates a number of ornamental stones in the passage and chamber, one of them with its pattern broken, apparently arranged haphazard, and that on some of these the carving has been defaced by pick-surfacing like that found on the trilithons of Stonehenge. This is to suggest that it is a mock-antique in the style of several hundred years before; a theory to which no other archaeologist of repute seems to have subscribed. But his observations do suggest that the Milesians took over the oracular shrine from the Danaans and patched it, where it showed signs of decay, with ornamental stones borrowed from other burials. Another suggestion of his carries greater conviction: that Angus’ Brugh (‘palace’) was not New Grange but a huge circular enclosure not far off in a bend of the Boyne, which may have been an amphitheatre for funerary games in connexion with all the many burials of the neighbourhood.

  Most Irish archaeologists are now, I find, agreed that New Grange was built by a matriarchal passage-grave-making people that first reached Ireland about the year 2100 BC, but not until they had become well-established some five hundred years later and were able to command the enormous labour necessary for the task. The spirals, though paralleled in Mycenaean shaft-burials of 1600 BC, may be far earlier since examples of unknown date occur also at Malta. On one of the outer stones a symbol is carved which suggests a Cretan ideogram and apparently represents a ship with a high prow and stern and a single large sail; beside it are vertical scratches and a small circle. Christopher Hawkes, my principal informant on this subject, has written to me that not only are the skeletons and antlers unlikely to be co-eval with the building but that there may have been many successive despoilments of the burial before they were put there. The original funerary furniture cannot be guessed at, since no virgin passage-grave of this type has been opened in recent years; we must wait until the Cairn of Queen Maeve is opened. This overlooks Sligo Bay; it is built of some 40,000 tons of stone and the entrance is lost. We may have to wait a long time, because the Sligo people are superstitious and would consider a desecration of the tomb unlucky: Maeve is Mab, the Queen of Faery.

  What the basins contained may be inferred from Exodus, XXIV (verses 4-8). Moses, having set up twelve stone herms, or posts, at the foot of a sacred hill, offered bull-sacrifices and sprinkled half the blood on a thirteenth herm in the middle of the circle, or semi-circle; the rest of the blood he put into basins, which must have been of considerable size. Then he and his colleague Aaron, with seventy-two companions, went up to feast on the roasted flesh. On this occasion, the blood in the basins was sprinkled on the people as a charm of sanctification; but its use in the oracular shrine was always to feed the ghost of the dead hero and to encourage him to return from Caer Sidi or Caer Arianrhod to answer questions of importance.

  The visit of Aeneas, mistletoe-bough in hand, to the Underworld to cross-examine his father Anchises must be read in this sense. Aeneas sacrificed a bull and let the blood gush into a trough, and the ghost of Anchises (who had married the Love-goddess Venus Erycina, and been killed by lightning and was, in fact, a sacred king of the usual Herculean type), drank the blood and obligingly prophesied about the glories of Rome. Of course, the ghost did not really lap the blood, but a lapping sound was heard in the dark; what happened was that the Sibyl, who conducted Aeneas below, drank the blood and it produced in her the desired prophetic ecstasy. That Sibyls acted so is known from the case of the Priestess of Mother Earth at Aegira (‘Black Poplar’, a tree sacred to heroes) in Achaea, The peeping and muttering of ghosts on such occasions is understandable: two or three Biblical texts refer to the queer bat-like voices in which demons, or familiars, speak through the mouths of prophets or prophetesses. Bull’s blood was most potent magic and was used, diluted with enormous quantities of water, to fertilize fruit-trees in Crete and Greece. Taken neat it was regarded as a poison deadly to anyone but a Sibyl or a priest of Mother Earth; Jason’s father and mother died from a draught of it. So did ass-eared King Midas of Gordium.

  That bull’s blood was used for divination in ancient Ireland is not mere supposition. A rite called ‘The Bull Feast’ is mentioned in the Book of the Dun Cow:

  A white bull was killed and a man ate his fill of the flesh and drank of the broth; and a spell of truth was chanted over him as he slept off the meal. He would see in a dream the shape and appearance of the man who should be made king, and the sort of work in which he was at that time engaged.

  The white bull recalls the sacred white bulls of the Gaulish mistletoe rite; the white bull on which the Thracian Dionysus rode; the white bulls sacrificed on the Alban Mount and at the Roman Capitol; and the white bull representing the true seed of Israel in the apocalyptic Book of Enoch.

  Now we begin to understand the mysterious Preiddeu Annwm (‘the Spoils of Annwm’) in which – between Gwion’s interpolative taunts at the ignorance of Heinin and the other court-bards – one Gwair ap Geirion laments that he cannot escape from Caer Sidi. The refrain is: ‘Except seven none returned from Caer Sidi.’ We know at least two who did return: Theseus and Daedalus, both Attic Sun-heroes. The stories of Theseus’s expedition to the Underworld and of his adventure in the Cretan labyrinth of Cnossos are really two parts of a single confused myth. Theseus (‘he who disposes’) goes naked, except for his lion-skin, to the centre of the maze, there kills the bull-headed monster of the double-axe – the labris from which the word ‘labyrinth’ is derived – and returns safely: and the goddess who enables him to do so is the Goddess Ariadne whom the Welsh called Arianrhod. In the second part of the myth he fails in his Underworld expedition: he has to be rescued by Hercules, and his companion Peirithous remains behind like Gwair, perpetually sighing for deliverance. The myth of the hero who defeats Death was combined by the Greek mythographers with a historical event: the sack of the labyrinthine palace of Cnossos by Danaan raiders from Greece about 1400 BC and the defeat of King Minos, the Bull-king. Daedalus (‘the bright one’) similarly escapes from the Cretan labyrinth, guided by the Moon-goddess Pasiphaë, but without using violence; he was a Sun-hero of the Aegean colonists of Cumae, and of the Sardinians, as well as of the Athenians.

  Caer Sidi in the Preiddeu Annwm is given a new synonym in each of the seven stanzas. It appears as Caer Rigor (‘the royal castle’) with a pun maybe on the Latin rigor mortis; Caer Colur (‘the gloomy castle’); Caer Pedryvan (‘four-cornered castle’), four times revolving; Caer Vediwid (‘the castle of the perfect ones’); Caer Ochren (‘the castle of the shelving side’ – i.e. entered from the side of a slope); Caer Vandwy (‘the castle on high’).

  I do not know who the canonical seven were, but among those eligible for the honour were Theseus, Hercules, Amathaon, Arthur, Gwydion, Harpocrates, Kay, Owain, Daedalus, Orpheus and Cuchulain. (When Cuchulain, mentioned by Gwion in a poem, harrowed Hell, he brought back three cows and a magic cauldron.) Aeneas is unlikely to have been one of the seven. He did not die as the others did; he merely visited an oracular cave, just as King Saul had done at Endor, or Caleb at Machpelah. The castle that they entered – revolving, remote, royal, gloomy, lofty, cold, the abode of the Perfect Ones, with four corners, entered by a dark door on the shelving side of a hill -was the castle of death or the Tomb, the Dark Tower to which Childe Roland came in the ballad. This description fits the New Grange burial cave, but ‘four-cornered’ refers, I think, to the kist-vaen method of burial which was invented by the pre-Greek inhabitants of Northern Greece and the islands about Delos and thence conveyed to Western Europe by Bronze Age immigrants, the round-barrow men: the kist being a small rectangular stone box in which the dead body was laid in a crouched position. Odysseus may be said to have been ‘three periods in the castle of Arianrhod’ because he entered with twelve companions into the Cyclops’ cave, but escaped; was detained by Calypso on Ogygia, but escap
ed; and by the enchantress Circe on Aeaea – another sepulchral island – but escaped. Yet it is unlikely that Odysseus is intended: I think that Gwion is referring to Jesus Christ, whom the twelfth-century poet Dafydd Benfras makes visit a Celtic Annwm, and who escaped from the gloomy cave in the hillside in which he had been laid by Joseph of Arimathea. But how was Jesus ‘three periods in the Castle of Arianrhod’? I take this for a heresy making Jesus, as the Second Adam, a reincarnation of Adam, and, as the Davidic Messiah, a reincarnation also of David. The Age of Adam and the Age of David are particularized in Gwion’s Divregwawd Taliesin. Jesus is pictured there as still waiting in the heavens for the dawn of the Seventh Age: ‘Was it not to Heaven he went when he departed hence? And at the Day of Judgement he will come to us here. For the fifth age was the blessed one of David the Prophet. The sixth age is the age of Jesus, which shall last till the Day of Judgement.’ In the Seventh Age he would be called Taliesin.

  PREIDDEU ANNWM

  (The Spoils of Annwm)

  Praise to the Lord, Supreme Ruler of the Heavens,

  Who hath extended his dominion to the shore of the world.

  Complete was the prison of Gwair in Caer Sidi

  Through the spite of Pwyll and Pryderi.

  No one before him went into it;

  A heavy blue chain firmly held the youth,

  And for the spoils of Annwm gloomily he sings,

  And till doom shall he continue his lay.

  Thrice the fullness of Prydwen we went into it;

  Except seven, none returned from Caer Sidi.

  Am I not a candidate for fame, to be heard in the song?

  In Caer Pedryvan four times revolving,

  The first word from the cauldron, when it was spoken?

  By the breath of nine damsels it is gently warmed.

  Is it not the cauldron of the chief of Annwm, in its fashion

  With a ridge around its edge of pearls?

  It will not boil the food of a coward or one forsworn,

  A sword bright flashing to him will be brought,

  And left in the hand of Lleminawg,

  And before the portals of the cold place the horns of light shall

  be burning.

  And when we went with Arthur in his splendid labours,

  Except seven, none returned from Caer Vediwid.

  Am I not a candidate for fame, to be heard in the song?

  In the four-cornered enclosure, in the island of the strong door,

  Where the twilight and the black of night move together,

  Bright wine was the beverage of the host.

  Three times the fulness of Prydwen, we went on sea,

  Except seven, none returned from Caer Rigor.

  I will not allow praise to the lords of literature.

  Beyond Caer Wydr they behold not the prowess of Arthur.

  Three times twenty-hundred men stood on the wall.

  It was difficult to converse with their sentinel.

  Three times the fulness of Prydwen, we went with Arthur.

  Except seven, none returned from Caer Colur.

  I will not allow praise to the men with trailing shields.

  They know not on what day, or who caused it,

  Or at what hour of the splendid day Cwy was born,

  Or who prevented him from going to the dales of Devwy.

  They know not the brindled ox, with his thick head band,

  And seven-score knobs in his collar.

  And when we went with Arthur of mournful memory,

  Except seven, none returned from Caer Vandwy.

  I will not allow praise to men of drooping courage,

  They know not on what day the chief arose,

  Or at what hour in the splendid day the owner was born;

  Or what animal they keep of silver head.

  When we went with Arthur of mournful contention,

  Except seven, none returned from Caer Ochren.

  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 castle1 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 hol
d 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.