The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  From the Imperial Roman point of view Belin-worship constituted no political danger once its central authority, the Druidic Synod at Dreux, had been broken by Caesar’s defeat of Vercingetorix and animal victims had been substituted for human ones. The British priests were not converted to Roman religion, for the Roman Pantheon was already allied to theirs and the Mithras-worship of the Roman legionaries was merely an Oriental version of their own Hercules cult. That they should honour the Emperor as the temporal incarnation of their variously named Sun-god was the only religious obligation put upon them, and they cannot have found it a difficult one. When Christianity became the official Roman religion, no attempt was made to coerce the natives into uniformity of worship and even in the towns the churches were small and poor; most of the large pagan temples remained in operation, it seems. There was no religious problem in Britain, as there was in Judaea, until the Romans withdrew their garrisons and the barbarous Jutes, Angles and Saxons poured in from the East, and the civilized Roman Britons fled before them into Wales or across the Channel. But the presence in England of these barbarians at least protected the Welsh and Irish churches from any effective intervention in their religious affairs by continental Catholicism, and the Archiepiscopal See of St. David’s remained wholly independent until the twelfth century, when the Normans pressed the right of the Archbishop of Canterbury to control it; which was the occasion of the Anglo-Welsh wars

  What, for the early Church Councils, seemed the most diabolical and unpardonable heresy of all was the identification of the Hercules-Dionysus-Mithras bull, whose living flesh the Orphic ascetics tore and ate in their initiation ceremony, with Jesus Christ whose living flesh was symbolically torn and eaten in the Holy Communion. With this heresy, which was second-century Egyptian, went another, the identification of the Virgin Mary with the Triple Goddess. The Copts even ventured to combine ‘the Three Maries’ who were spectators of the Crucifixion into a single character, with Mary Cleopas as a type of ‘Blodeuwedd’, the Virgin of ‘Arianrhod’, and Mary Magdalen as the third person of this ancient trinity, who appears in Celtic legend as Morgan le Faye, King Arthur’s sister. Morgan in Irish legend is ‘the Morrigan’, meaning ‘Great Queen’, a Death-goddess who assumed the form of a raven; and ‘le Faye’ means ‘the Fate’. According to Cormac’s Glossary the Morrigan was invoked in battle by an imitation on war-horns of a raven’s croaking. She was by no means the gentle character familiar to readers of the Morte D’Arthur but like the ‘black screaming hag Cerridwen’ in the Romance of Taliesin was ‘big-mouthed, swarthy, swift, sooty, lame, with a cast in her left eye’.

  Wherever these heresies survived in mediaeval Europe the Church visited them with such terrible penalties that British or Irish poets who played with them must have derived a dangerous joy from wrapping them up, as Gwion has done here, in riddling disguises. One can sympathize with the poets, in so far as their predecessors had accepted Jesus Christ without compulsion and had reserved the right to interpret Christianity in the light of their literary tradition, without interference. They saw Jesus as the latest theophany of the same suffering sacred king whom they had worshipped under various names from time immemorial. As soon as the big stick of Orthodoxy was waved at them from Rome or Canterbury they felt a pardonable resentment. The first Christian missionaries had conducted themselves with scrupulous courtesy towards the devotees of the pagan Sun-cult, with whom they had much mystical doctrine in common. Celtic and pre-Celtic gods and goddesses became Christian saints – for instance, St. Brigit, whose perpetual sacred fire was kept alight in a monastery at Kildare until the time of Henry VIII – and heathen festivals became Christianized with only a slight change of ritual. St. Brigit according to The Calendar of Oengas retained her original fire-feast, Feile Brighde, on the evening of February 1st. She was so important that bishops were her Master-craftsmen; one of these, Connlaed, is said to have disobeyed her and to have been thrown to the wolves at her orders. She was greeted in the Hymn of Broccan as ‘Mother of my Sovereign’, and in the Hymn of Ultan as ‘Mother of Jesus’. (She had once been mother of The Dagda). In The Book of Lismore she is named: ‘The Prophetess of Christ, the Queen of the South, the Mary of the Goidels’. Exactly the same thing had happened in Greece and Italy, where the Goddess Venus became St. Venere; the Goddess Artemis, St. Artemidos; the Gods Mercury and Dionysus, SS. Mercourios and Dionysius; the Sun-god Helios, St. Elias. In Ireland, when St. Columcille founded his church at Deny (‘Oak-wood’) he was ‘so loth to fell certain sacred trees that he turned his oratory to face north rather than east’ – north, towards Caer Arianrhod. And when he was in Scotland he declared that ‘though he feared Death and Hell, the sound of an axe in the grove of Derry frightened him still more’. But the age of toleration did not last long; once Irish princes lost the privilege of appointing bishops from their own sept, and iconoclasts were politically strong enough to begin their righteous work, the axes rose and fell on every sacred hill.

  It would be unfair to call the heretical poets ‘apostates’. They were interested in poetic values and relations rather than in prose dogma. It must have been irksome for them to be restricted in their poem-making by ecclesiastical conventions. ‘Is it reasonable?’ they may have exclaimed. ‘The Pope, though he permits our typifying Jesus as a Fish, as the Sun, as Bread, as the Vine, as a Lamb, as a Shepherd, as a Rock, as a Conquering Hero, even as a Winged Serpent, yet threatens us with Hell Fire if we ever dare to celebrate him in terms of the venerable gods whom He has superseded and from whose ritual every one of these symbols has been derived. Or if we trip over a simple article of this extraordinarily difficult Athanasian Creed. We need no reminder from Rome or Canterbury that Jesus was the greatest of all Sacred Kings who suffered death on a tree for the good of the people, who harrowed Hell and who rose again from the Dead and that in Him all prophecies are fulfilled. But to pretend that he was the first whom poets have ever celebrated as having performed these wonderful feats is, despite St. Paul, to show oneself either hypocritical or illiterate. So at his prophesied Second Coming we reserve the right to call him Belin or Apollo or even King Arthur.’

  The most virtuous and enlightened of the early Roman Emperors, Alexander Severus (222–235 AD) had held almost precisely the same view. He considered himself a reincarnation of Alexander the Great and, according to his biographer Lampridius, worshipped among his house-gods Abraham, Orpheus, Alexander and Jesus Christ. This mention of Alexander Severus suggests a reconsideration of the discredited word ‘Helio-Arkite’, which was used at the beginning of the nineteenth century to describe a hypothetic heathen cult revived by the bards as a Christian heresy, in which the Sun and Noah’s Ark were the principal objects of worship. ‘Arkite’ without the ‘Helio-’, was first used by the antiquary Jacob Bryant in 1774 in his Analysis of Ancient Mythology; but the word is incorrectly formed if it is to mean ‘Arcian’, or ‘Arcensian’, ‘concerned with the Ark’, as Bryant intended, since ‘-ite’ is a termination which denotes tribal or civic origin, not religious opinion. It seems indeed as if Bryant had borrowed the word ‘Arkite’ from some ancient work on religion and had misunderstood it.

  There is only one famous Arkite in religious history – this same Alexander Severus, who was called ‘the Arkite’ because he was born in the temple of Alexander the Great at Arka in the Lebanon, where his Roman parents were attending a festival. His mother, Mamea, was some sort of Christian. The Arkites who are mentioned in Genesis, X, 7, and also in the Tell Amarna tablets of 1400 BC, were an ancient Canaanite people well-known for their worship of the Moon-goddess Astarte, or Ishtar, to whom the acacia-wood ark was sacred; but Arka, which in the Tell Amarna tablets appears as ‘Irkata’, was not necessarily connected with the Indo-European root arc – meaning ‘protection’, from which we derive such Latin words as arceo, ‘I ward off’, area, ‘an ark’, and arcana, ‘religious secrets’. The Arkites are listed in Genesis X with the Amathites, the Lebanon Hivites (probably Achaitites, or Achaeans) and the Gerg
asites of Lower Galilee, who seem to have originated in Gergithion near Troy and to be the people whom Herodotus names ‘the remnants of the ancient Teucrians’. The Arkite cult, later the Arkite heresy, was Alexander Severus’s own syncretic religion and in this sense of the word, Gwion may be styled an Arkite. The Sun and the Ark are, indeed, the most important elements of the Hercules myth, and Ishtar in the Gilgamesh Deluge romance of Babylonia, plays the same false part towards Gilgamesh as Blodeuwedd plays to Llew Llaw in the Mabinogion, or Delilah to Samson in Judges, or Deianeira to Hercules in Classical legend. It is a great pity that Bryant’s enthusiastic followers tried to substantiate a sound thesis by irresponsible and even fraudulent arguments.

  The complimentary reference to the See of St. David in Gwion’s riddle – it is important to notice that St. David himself was a miraculous child, born from a chaste nun – and the anti-English vaticinations of a tenth-century poet, who also called himself Taliesin, which are bound up with the Gwion poems in the Red Book of Hergest, suggest that Gwion was hopefully trying to revive the Arkite heresy and elevate it into a popular pan-Celtic religion which should also include the Celticized Danes of the Dublin region and unite the Bretons, Irish, Welsh, and Scots in a political confederacy against the Anglo-Norman-French. If so, his hopes were disappointed. The Angevins were too strong: by 1282 Wales had become a province of England, the Normans were firmly established at Dublin and the head of Llewellyn Prince of North Wales, the leader of the nation, had been brought to London and exhibited on Tower Hill, crowned with an ivy wreath: in mocking allusion to the Welsh prophecy that he should be crowned there. Nevertheless, Gwion’s romance continued to be recited, and Welsh nationalism was revived towards the end of the fourteenth century under Prince Owen Glendower, who had a doubtful claim to descent from this same Prince Llewellyn, the last prince of the royal line that had been ruling Wales since the third century AD. Glendower, whose cause was supported by a new self-styled ‘Taliesin’, kept up a desultory war, with French help, until his death in 1416.

  It was about that time that Dr. Sion Kent, the parish priest of Kenchurch, complained of what seems to have ben the same Arkite heresy, since Hu Gadarn, the hero who led the Cymry into Britain from Taprobane (Ceylon), was invoked in it as an allegorical champion of Welsh liberty:

  Two kinds of inspiration in good truth

  Exist and manifest their course on earth:

  Inspiration from sweet-spoken Christ,

  Orthodox and gladdening the soul,

  And that most unwise other Inspiration,

  Concerned with false and filthy prophecy

  Received by the devotees of Hu (Gadarn),

  The unjustly usurping bards of Wales.

  The ‘false and filthy prophecies’ probably concerned the expulsion of the English from Wales and the restored independence of the Welsh Church. Dr. Kent, whose name suggests that he was not of Welsh blood, was naturally anxious for the future, especially since nationalism implied an open return of the people of Kenchurch to a great many pagan superstitions which he spent much of his time trying to suppress; and perhaps, as a poet, was also jealous of the influence of the minstrels over his flock.

  That the minstrels continued to stir up popular feeling by their anti-English vaticinations even after the fall of Owen Glendower is suggested by the repressive law of Henry IV enacted in 1402: ‘To eschew many diseases and mischiefs which have happened before this time in the Land of Wales by many wasters, rhymers, minstrels and other vagabonds. It is ordained and stablished that no waster, rhymer, minstrel nor vagabond be in any wise sustained in the Land of Wales to make commorthies’ [i.e. kymhorthau, ‘neighbourly gatherings’] ‘or gatherings upon the common people there.’ Pennant in his Tours comments that the object of these commorthies was to ‘collect a sufficient number of able-bodied men to make an insurrection’.

  It is possible that the original Gwion who revived Druidism in Wales, as a pan-Celtic political weapon against the English, lived as early as in the reign of Prince Owain Gwynedd, son of the gifted Prince Grufudd ap Kynan who first brought Irish bards into North Wales; Owain reigned from 1137 to 1169 and resisted the armies of King Henry II with far greater success than either the Scots, Bretons or Irish. Cynddelw, in whose poems the word Druid first occurs, addressed Owain as ‘The Door of the Druids’, ‘door’ being mentioned as a synonym for the princely oak in the Câd Goddeu. Owain may also be the hero celebrated in the badly garbled Song of Daronwy, from the Book of Taliesin:

  In driving back the oppressor across the sea

  What tree has been greater then he, Daronwy?

  Daronwy means ‘thunderer’, another synonym for oak, and Owain had driven off with heavy loss the sea-borne expedition which Henry sent against Anglesey in 1157.

  If anyone should doubt that Gwion could have picked up the Greek and Hebrew knowledge necessary to the construction of this riddle in Ireland, here is a passage from C. S. Boswell’s edition of the tenth-century Irish Fis Adamnain, ‘The Vision of St. Adamnain’:

  While the Christian Church of Teutonic England owed its existence, in the main, to the missionary enterprise of Rome, the much older Celtic Churches, and notably the Church of Ireland, were more closely connected with Gaul and the East. It was to Gaul that Ireland was mainly indebted for its original conversion, and the intercourse between the two countries remained close and unbroken. But the Church in the south of Gaul – and it was the south alone that preserved any considerable culture, or displayed any missionary activity, in the early Middle Ages – had from the very first been closely in touch with the Churches in the East. The great monastery of Lerins, in which St. Patrick is said to have studied, was founded from Egypt, and for many centuries the Egyptian Church continued to manifest a lively interest in Gallic matters. Indeed, not only Lerins, but Marseilles, Lyons, and other parts of Southern Gaul maintained a constant intercourse with both Egypt and Syria, with the natural result that many institutions of the Gallic Church, despite its increasing subjection to Rome, dating from the year 244, bore the impress of Oriental influences. Hence the close relations with Gaul maintained by the Irish churchmen and scholars necessarily brought them into contact with their Egyptian and Syrian brethren, and with the ideas and practices which prevailed in their respective Churches.

  Nor was Ireland’s connection with the East confined to the intermediary of Gaul. Irish pilgrimages to Egypt continued until the end of the eighth century, and Dicuil records a topographical exploration of that country made by two Irishmen, Fidelis and his companion. Documentary evidence is yet extant, proving that even home-keeping Irishmen were not debarred from all acquaintance with the East. The Saltair na Rann contains an Irish version of the Book of Adam and Eve, a work written in Egypt in the fifth or sixth century, of which no mention outside of Ireland is known. Adamnain’s work, De Locis Sanctis, contains an account of the monastery on Mount Tabor, which might stand for the description of an Irish monastic community of his day. Indeed, the whole system both of the anchoretic and coenobitic life in Ireland corresponds closely to that which prevailed in Egypt and Syria; the monastic communities, consisting of groups of detached huts or beehive cells, and of the other earliest examples of Irish ecclesiastical architecture, all suggest Syrian origin; and Dr. G. T. Stokes holds that ‘the Irish schools were most probably modelled after the forms and rules of the Egyptian Lauras’.

  But it was not only Syrian and Egyptian influences to which Ireland was subjected by its intercourse with South Gaul. The civilization of that country was essentially Greek, and so remained for many centuries after the Christian era; and this circumstance no doubt contributed to the well-known survival of Greek learning in the Irish schools, long after it had almost perished in the rest of Western Europe. It is not to be supposed that this learning was characterised by accuracy of scholarship, or by a wide acquaintance with Classical literature; but neither was it always restricted to a mere smattering of the language or, to passages and quotations picked up at second-hand
. Johannes Scotus Erigena translated the works of the pseudo-Areopagite; Dicuil and Firghil (Virgilius, Bishop of Salzburg), studied the Greek books of Science; Homer, Aristotle, and other Classical authors were known to some of the Irish writers; several of the Irish divines were acquainted with the Greek Fathers and other theological works. Nor were the Greeks in person unknown to Ireland. Many Greek clerics had taken refuge there during the Iconoclast persecution, and left traces which were recognizable in Archbishop Ussher’s day; and the old poem on the Fair of Carman makes mention of the Greek merchants who resorted thither.

  It is thus apparent that the Irish writer possessed ample means of becoming acquainted with the traditions, both oral and written, of the Greek and Eastern Churches. The knowledge thus acquired extended to the Apocalyptic Visions, as is proved by internal evidence furnished by the Irish Visions, both by way of direct reference, and by the nature of their contents. It remains to see how far the predilection which the Irish writers manifested for this class of literature, and the special characteristics which it assumes in their hands, may have been determined by their familiarity with analogous ideas already existing in their national literature.