The White Goddess
Page 23
At the period in question, the traditional literature of Ireland would appear to have entered into the national life to no less a degree than in Greece itself. Indeed, in certain respects, it was still more closely interwoven with the habits of the people and the framework of society than in Greece, for the literary profession was provided for by a public endowment, something like that of an established National Church, and its professors constituted a body organised by law, and occupying a recognized position in the State.
The reiterated ‘I have been’ and ‘I was’ of Gwion’s Hanes Taliesin riddle suggests that the Boibel-Loth alphabet, which is the solution, originally consisted of twenty mystical titles of a single Protean male deity, corresponding with his seasonal changes; and that these titles were kept secret, at first because of their invocatory power, later because they were regarded as heretical by the Christian Church. But why does the Boibel-Loth contain so many approximations to Biblical names, taken from Genesis and Exodus, which in Christian times had lost their religious importance: Lot, Telmen, Jachin, Hur, Caleb, Ne-esthan – all names concerned with Sinai, Southern Judaea and the Edomite Dead Sea region?
This is the region in which the Essene communities were settled from about 150 BC to 132 AD. The Essenes appear to have been an offshoot of the Therapeutae, or Healers, an ascetic Jewish sect settled by Lake Mareotis in Egypt; Pliny described them as the strangest religious body in the world. Though Jews, and a sort of Pharisees at that, they believed in the Western Paradise – of which precisely the same account is given by Josephus when describing Essene beliefs as by Homer, Hesiod and Pindar – and, like the later Druids, in the return of pure souls to the Sun, whose rising they invoked every day. They also avoided animal sacrifices, wore linen garments, practised divination, meditated within magic circles, were expert in the virtues of plants and precious stones and are therefore generally supposed to have been under the philosophic influence of Pythagoras, the ascetic pupil of Abaris the Hyperborean. They refrained from worshipping at the Jerusalem Temple, perhaps because the custom of bowing to the East at dawn had been discontinued there, and exacted the penalty of death from anyone who blasphemed God or Moses.
Since among the Jerusalem Pharisees, Moses as a man could not be blasphemed, it follows that for the Essenes he had a sort of divinity. The story of Moses in the Pentateuch was the familiar one of Canopic Hercules – the God who was cradled in an ark on the River Nile, performed great feats, died mysteriously on a mountain-top, and afterwards became a hero and judge. But it is plain that the Essenes distinguished the historic Moses, who led the Israelites out of Egypt, from the demi-God Moses; just as the Greeks distinguished the historic Hercules, Prince of Tiryns, from Celestial Hercules. In Chapter Twenty-Five I shall give reasons for supposing that though the Essenes adapted the Greek formula of Celestial Hercules to their cult of Moses as demi-god, and though they seem to have been disciples of Pythagoras, it was from a sixth-century BC Jewish source that the Pythagoreans derived the new sacred name of God that the tribes of Amathaon and Gwydion established in Britain about the year 400 BC.
The Essene initiates, according to Josephus, were sworn to keep secret the names of the Powers who ruled their universe under God. Were these powers the letters of the Boibel-Loth which, together, composed the life and death story of their demi-god Moses? ‘David’ may seem to belong to a later context than the others, but it is found as a royal title in a sixteenth-century BC inscription; and the Pentateuch was not composed until long after David’s day. Moreover, David for the Essenes was the name of the promised Messiah.
If all the vowel names of the Boibel-Loth, not merely Jaichin, are preceded by a J, they become Jacab, Jose, Jura, Jesu, Jaichin – which are Jacob, Joseph, Jerah, Joshua and Jachin, all names of tribes mentioned in Genesis. The Essene series of letter-names, before Gwion in his riddle altered some of them to names taken from the New Testament, the Book of Enoch, and Welsh and Latin mythology, may be reconstructed as follows:
Jacob Babel Hur Moriah
Joseph Lot David Gad
Jerah Ephron Telmen Gomer
Joshua Kohath Jethro Salem
Jachin Ne-esthan Caleb Reu
Of these, only four names are not those of clans or tribes, namely: Babel, the home of wisdom; Moriah, Jehovah’s holy mountain; Salem, his holy city; Ne-esthan, his sacred serpent. It seems possible, then, that the Essene version of the Boibel-Loth letter-names was brought to Ireland in early Christian times, by Alexandrian Gnostics who were the spiritual heirs of the Essenes after Hadrian had suppressed the Order in 132 AD. Dr. Joyce in his Social History of Ancient Ireland records that in times of persecution Egyptian monks often fled to Ireland; and that one Palladius was sent from Rome to become a bishop of the Irish Christians long before the arrival of St. Patrick.
The alphabet itself was plainly not of Hebrew origin: it was a Canopic Greek calendar-formula taken over by Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt, who disguised it with the names of Scriptural characters and places. As I suggest in my King Jesus, it is likely that in Essene usage each letter became a Power attendant on the Son of Man – Moses as Celestial Hercules who was subservient to the Ancient of Days, Jehovah as the Transcendent God. It is recorded that the Essene novice wore a blue robe, the adept a white one. Was this because the novice was still ‘lotus-borne’, that is to say, not yet initiated? The Egyptian lotus was blue. I also suggest in King Jesus that the two mysterious Orders of the Essenes, Sampsonians and Helicaeans, were adepts in the calendar mysteries and were named after Samson (the second s is a ps in some Greek texts) the sun-hero and the Helix or cosmic circle. (An Essene who wished to meditate would insulate himself from the world within a circle drawn around him on the sand.) The twenty Powers of the Babel-Lot will have been among those distastefully mentioned by St Paul in Galatians IV, 8-10 as ‘weak and cringing Elements (stoicheia)’. The back-sliding Galatian Jews were now again worshipping such Powers as gods, with careful observation of the calendar. In I Corinthians, XV, 24–25 he claims that they have been vanquished by Jesus Christ who alone mediates with the Father. Paul’s influence was decisive: to the orthodox Church they soon became demons, not agents of the Divine Will. The Essenes invoked angels in their mysteries. Here is something odd: that the ‘Hounds of Herne the Hunter, or the ‘Dogs of Annwm’, which hunt souls across the sky are, in British folklore, also called ‘Gabriel ratches’ or ‘Gabriel hounds’. Why Gabriel? Was it because Gabriel, whose day is Monday, ran errands for Sheol (the Hebrew Hecate) and was sent to summon souls to Judgement? This was Hermes’s task, and Herne, a British oak-god whose memory survived in Windsor Forest until the eighteenth century, is generally identified with Hermes. Gabriel and Herne are equated in the early thirteenth-century carvings around the church door at Stoke Gabriel in South Devon. The angel Gabriel looks down from above, but on the right as one enters are carved the wild hunter, his teeth bared in a grin and a wisp of hair over his face, and a brace of his hounds close by. But Hermes in Egypt, though Thoth in one aspect, in another was the dog-headed god Anubis, son of Nepthys the Etian Hecate; so Apuleius pictures him in the pageant at the end of The Golden Ass as ‘his face sometimes black, sometimes fair, lifting up the head of the Dog Anubis. This makes the equation Gabriel = Herne = Hermes = Anubis. But was Gabriel ever equated with Anubis in ancient times? By a piece of good luck an Egyptian gem has been found showing Anubis with palm and pouch on the obverse, and on the reverse an archangel described as gabrier sabao, which means ‘Gabriel Sabaoth’, the Egyptians having, as usual, converted the L into an R. (This gem is described in de Haas’s Bilderatlas.) Then is ‘Annwm’, which is a contracted form of ‘Annwfn’, a Celtic version of ‘Anubis’? The B of Anubis would naturally turn into an F in Welsh.
So much nonsense has been written about the Essenes by people who have not troubled to find out from Josephus, Pliny the Elder, Philo the Byblian and others, who they were and what they believed, that I should not bring them into this story if it were not for a poem of Gwion
’s called Yr Awdil Vraith (‘Diversified Song’). The text in the Peniardd MSS is incomplete, but in some stanzas preferable to that of the Red Book of Hergest:
1 The All-Being made,
Down in Hebron Vale,
With his plastic hands,
Adam y s fair form:
And five hundred years,
Void of any help,
There he lingered and lay
Without a soul.
He again did form,
In calm paradise,
From a left-side rib,
Bliss-throbbing Eve.
Seven hours they were
The orchard keeping,
Till Satan brought strife,
The Lord of Hell
5 Thence were they driven,
Cold and shivering,
To gain their living,
Into this world.
To bring forth with pain
Their sons and daughters,
To have possession
Of Asia’s land.
Twice five, ten and eight,
She was self-bearing,
The mixed burden
Of man-woman.
And once, not hidden,
She brought forth Abel,
And Cain the solitary
Homicide.
To him and his mate
Was given a spade,
To break up the soil,
Thus to get bread.
10 The wheat pure and white,
In tilth to sow,
Every man to feed,
Till great yule feast.
An angelic hand
From the high Father,
Brought seed for growing
That Eve might sow;
But she then did hide
Of the gift a tenth,
And all did not sow
In what was dug.
Black rye then was found,
And not pure wheat grain,
To show the mischief
Thus of thieving.
For this thievish act,
It is requisite,
That all men should pay
Tithe unto God.
15 Of the ruddy wine,
Planted on sunny days,
And the white wheat planted
On new-moon nights;
The wheat rich in grain,
And red flowing wine
Christ’s pure body make,
Son of Alpha.
The wafer is flesh,
The wine, spilt blood,
The words of the Trinity
Consecrate them.
The concealed books
From Emmanuel’s hands
Were brought by Raphael
As Adam’s gift.
When in his old age,
To his chin immersed
In Jordan’s water,
He kept a fast.
20 Twelve young men,
Four of them angels,
Sent forth branches
From the flower Eve.
To give assistance,
In every trouble,
In all oppression,
While they wondered.
Very great care
Possessed mankind,
Until they obtained
The tokens of grace.
Moses obtained
In great necessity
The aid of the three
Dominical rods.
Solomon obtained
In Babel’s tower,
All the sciences
Of Asia’s land.
25 So did I obtain
In my bardic books,
Asia’s sciences,
Europe’s too.
I know their arts,
Their course and destiny,
Their going and coming
Until the end.
Oh! what misery,
Through extreme of woe,
Prophecy will show
On Troia’s race!
A chain-wearing serpent,
The pitiless hawk
With winged weapons,
From Germany.
Loegria and Britain
She will overrun,
From Lychlyn sea-shore
To the Severn.
30 Then will the Britons
As prisoners be
By strangers swayed
From Saxony.
Their Lord they will praise,
Their speech they will keep,
Their land they will lose,
Except Wild Wales.
Till some change shall come,
After long penance,
When shall be made equal
The pride of birth.
Britons then shall have
Their land and their crown
And the stranger swarm
Shall vanish away.
All the angel’s words,
As to peace and war,
Will thus be fulfilled
To Britain’s race.
The creation of Adam in Hebron rather than in Lower Mesopotamia is startling: for many Biblical scholars now regard the first three chapters of Genesis as a Jerahmeelite legend from the Negeb of Judaea, which was taken over by the Israelites and became Babylonianized during the Captivity. Jerahmeel (‘beloved of the moon’) is yet another name for Canopic Hercules. Dr. Cheyne restores the text of Genesis, II, 8, as ‘Yahweh planted a garden in Eden of Jerahmeel.’ He writes:
The Jerahmeelites, from whom the Israelites took the story, probably located Paradise on a vastly high mountain, sometimes in a garden, in some part of Jerahmeelite territory. The mountain with a sacred grove on its summit has dropped out of the story in Genesis, II but is attested in Ezekiel; and in the Ethiopian Enoch, XXIV the tree of life is placed in a mountain range to the south. As to the locality, if it be correct that by the Hebrew phrase ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’ a part of the Negeb was originally meant (Numbers, XIII, 23,27), we might infer that this fruitful land with its vines, pomegranate trees and fig trees (see Genesis, III, 7) had once upon a time been the Jerahmeelite Paradise.
The Hebron valley in Southern Judaea is four thousand feet above sea-level and before agriculture started the process of soil-erosion (which, according to Walter Clay Lowdermilk’s recent survey of Palestine, has taken an average of three feet of soil from the whole country), must have been wonderfully fertile. Dr. Cheyne was apparently unaware of this poem of Gwion’s, the substance of which can have come only from a Hebrew source uncontaminated by the Babylonian epic which the Jews picked up in their Captivity, and it is difficult to see from whom, other than the Essenes; especially as Gwion explains that the books from which he derives his wisdom were originally brought to Adam of Hebron by the angel Raphael. In Tobit and The Book of Enoch Raphael is described as the angel of healing and must therefore have been the chief patron of the therapeutic Essenes. ‘Emmanuel’ refers to Isaiah’s prophecy of the birth of the Divine Child from a virgin: Jesus as Hercules.
The story of Adam fasting in Jordan with water to his chin is found in the tenth-century Irish Saltair na Rann, and in the early mediaeval Life of Adam and Eve, on which the Saltair is based; when Adam fasted, according to the Saltair, God rewarded him with pardon. But no source is known for the dispensation of wisdom to Moses by means of three Dominical rods (i.e. the rods of Sunday). It may be Essene tradition, for Sunday was the Essenes’ great day, and recalls a reference to three rowan rods in one of the Iolo manuscripts. Sir John Rhys regards this manuscript as genuine:
Then Menw ap Teirgwaedd took the three rowan-rods growing out of the mouth of Einigan Gawr, and learned all the kinds of knowledge and science written on them, and taught them all, EXCEPT THE NAME OF GOD WHICH HAS ORIGINATED THE BARDIC SECRET, and blessed is he who possesses it.