GWION’S HERESY

The concentrated essence of Druidic, as of Orphic Greek, philosophy was Rheo, ‘I flow away’, Gwion’s letter-name for R: – ‘Panta Rhei’, ‘all things flow’. The main problem of paganism is contained in Riuben, the alternative name for R, if this stands for Rymbonao: – ‘Must all things swing round again for ever? Or how can one escape from the Wheel?’ This was the problem of the blinded Sun-hero Samson when he was harnessed to the corn-mill of Gaza; and it should be noted that the term ‘corn-mill’ was applied in Greek philosophy to the revolving heavens. Samson resolved the problem magnificently by pulling down both posts of the temple so that the roof collapsed upon everyone. The Orphics had another, quieter solution and engraved it in cypher on gold tablets tied around the necks of their beloved dead. It was: not to forget, to refuse to drink the water of cypress-shaded Lethe however thirsty one might be, to accept water only from the sacred (hazel-shaded?) pool of Persephone, and thus to become immortal Lords of the Dead, excused further Tearings-to-Pieces, Destructions, Resurrections and Rebirths. The cypress was sacred to Hercules, who had himself planted the famous cypress grove at Daphne, and typified rebirth – and the word ‘cypress’ is derived from Cyprus, which was called after Cyprian Aphrodite, his mother. The cult of the sacred cypress is Minoan in origin and must have been brought to Cyprus from Crete.

The Hercules-god of the Orphic mystics was Apollo the Hyperborean; and in the first century AD Aelian, the Roman historian, records that Hyperborean priests visited Tempe in Northern Greece regularly to worship Apollo. Diodorus Siculus in his quotation from Hecataeus makes it clear that in the sixth century BC the ‘land of the Hyperboreans’, where Apollo’s mother Latona was born, and where Apollo was honoured above all other gods, was Britain. This does not contradict Herodotus’s account of an altogether different Hyperborean priesthood, probably Albanian, living near the Caspian Sea; or the view that in Aelian’s time, Ireland, which lay outside the Roman Empire, may have been ‘the Land of the Hyperboreans’; or the view, which I propose later in this book, that the original Hyperboreans were Libyans.

Edward Davies was justified in regarding these British priests as a sort of Orphics: dress, dogma, ritual and diet correspond closely. And since Câd Goddeu proves to have been a battle of letters rather than a battle of trees, his suggestion that the fabulous dance of trees to Orpheus’s lyre was, rather, a dance of letters, makes good historical and poetic sense.1 Orpheus is recorded by Diodorus to have used the Pelasgian alphabet. That Gwion identified the Celestial Hercules of the Boibel-Loth with the Orphic Apollo is plain from this perfectly clear passage embedded in the riddling mazes of Câd Goddeu:

Only Apollo can be the ‘I’ of this passage. He was herdsman to Admetus, the Minyan king of Pherae in Thessaly, several centuries before he set up at Delphi as the Leader of the Muses. And as a pre-Greek oracular hero he had been laid to rest in a hundred sacred islands. Once the Greeks had found it convenient to adopt him as their god of healing and music, hundreds of cities came to honour him and by Classical times he was making his daily and yearly circuit as the visible sun. Gwion is hinting to Heinin and the other court-bards that the true identity of the hero whom they thoughtlessly eulogize as King Arthur is Hercules-Dionysus, rex quondam, rex-que futurus (‘King once and King again to be’), who at his second coming will be the immortal Hercules-Apollo. But they will not understand. ‘It is long since I was a herdsman’ will convey nothing to them but a memory of Triad 85, where the Three Tribe Herdsmen of Britain are given as Gwydion who kept the herd of the tribe of Gwynedd, Bennren who kept the herd of Caradoc son of Bran consisting of 21,000 milch kine, and Llawnrodded Varvawc who kept the equally numerous herd of Nudd Hael. Gwion had fetched his learning from Ireland, and perhaps from Egypt, but re-grafted it on a British stock. For though Druidism as an organized religion had been dead in Wales for hundreds of years, reliques of Druidic lore were contained in the traditional corpus of minstrel poetry, and in popular religious ritual. The primitive Druidic cult, which involved ritual cannibalism after omens had been taken from the victim’s death struggle, had been suppressed by the Roman general Paulinus in 61 AD when he conquered Anglesey and cut down the sacred groves; the continental Druidism already adopted by the rest of Britain south of the Clyde was respectable Belin, or Apollo, worship of Celto-Thracian type.

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 Gergasites 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:

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:

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’:

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:

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:

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 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:

The end of the poem, from stanza 27 onwards, is a separate piece, not Gwion’s work, dating perhaps from the year 1210 when, in the reign of King Llewelyn ap Iowerth, King John of England invaded North Wales and temporarily conquered it.

Dr. Ifor Williams has expressed surprise that in the middle of Gwion’s Câd Goddeu occurs the Triad:

This seems to be a variant text of the lines I have printed from Nash’s translation, and which occur twice in the poem:

Dr. Williams’ s version makes perfect sense also in the Boibel-Loth story of Hercules riding on the flood in his golden cup – sacrificed on the mountain – judging and establishing. The Apostles’ Creed, indeed, is the same old story – ‘conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary – suffered, was sacrificed – shall come to judge the quick and the dead.’

It is possible that the Apostles’ Creed, the earliest Latin version of which is quoted by the second-century Tertullian, was originally composed by some Gnostic Christian in Egypt and syncretically modelled on the Hercules formula. For ‘conceived by the Holy Ghost’, when read in the Gnostic light, has a direct reference to the Flood. In Gnostic theory – the Gnostics first appear as a sect in the first century BC – Jesus was conceived in the mind of God’s Holy Spirit, who was female in Hebrew and, according to Genesis I, 2, ‘moved on the face of the waters’. The Virgin Mary was the physical vessel in which this concept was incarnate and ‘Mary’ to the Gnostics meant ‘Of the Sea’. The male Holy Ghost is a product of Latin grammar – spiritus is masculine – and of early Christian mistrust of female deities or quasi-deities. Conception by a male principle is illogical and this is the only instance of its occurrence in all Latin literature. The masculinization of the Holy Spirit was assisted by a remark in the First Epistle of St. John, that Jesus would act as a paraclete or advocate for man with God the Father; in the Gospel of St John the same figure is put in Jesus’s own mouth in a promise that God will send them a paraclete (usually translated ‘comforter’) after he has gone; and this paraclete, a masculine noun, understood as a mystical emanation of Jesus, was wrongly identified with the archaic Spirit that moved on the face of the waters. The Gnostics, whose language was Greek, identified the Holy Spirit with Sophia, Wisdom; and Wisdom was female. In the early Christian Church the Creed was uttered only at baptism, which was a ceremony of initiation into the Christian mystery and at first reserved for adults; baptism was likewise a preliminary to participation in the Greek mysteries on which the Christian were modelled, as in the Druidic mysteries.

The town of Eleusis, where the most famous mysteries of all took place, was said to be named after the Attic King Eleusis. Eleusis means ‘Advent’ and the word was adopted in the Christian mysteries to signify the arrival of the Divine Child; in English usage it comprises Christmas and the four preceding weeks. The mother of Eleusis was ‘Daeira, daughter of Oceanus’, ‘the Wise One of the Sea’, and was identified with Aphrodite the Minoan Dove-goddess who rose from the sea at Paphos in Cyprus every year with her virginity renewed. King Eleusis was another name for the Corn-Dionysus, whose life-story was celebrated at the Great Mysteries, a Harvest Thanksgiving festival in late September; and his father was sometimes said to be Ogygus, or Ogyges, the Theban king in whose reign the great flood took place which engulfed the corn-lands of Boeotia. At an early stage of the yearly Eleusinian Mysteries the Divine Child, son of the Wise One who came from the Sea, was produced by mystagogues, dressed as shepherds, for the adoration of the celebrants. He was seated in a liknos, or osier harvest-basket. To judge from the corresponding myths of Moses, Taliesin, Llew Llaw, and Romulus, the mystagogues declared that they found him on the river bank where he had landed after sailing over the flood in this same harvest-basket, caulked with sedge. It will shortly be mentioned that the liknos was used not only as harvest-basket, manger and cradle, but also as winnowing sieve; the method was to shovel up the corn and chaff together while the wind was blowing strong and sieve them through the osiers; the chaff was blown away and the corn fell in a heap. The Mysteries probably originated as a winnowing feast, for they took place some weeks after the wheat-harvest, and at the time of the equinoctial winds.

An interesting survival of these winnowing-feast mysteries is the Majorcan xiurell or white clay whistle, decorated in red and green, and hand-made in the traditional shapes of mermaid, coiled serpent, bull-headed man, full-skirted woman with a round hat rocking a baby in her arms, or with a flower instead of a baby, the same with a moon-disk surmounted by cow’s horns, man with a tall peaked hat and arms upraised in adoration, and little man riding on a hornless, prick-eared, long-legged animal with a very short muzzle. It figures, with quince-boughs and boughs of the sorb-apple, in an ecclesiastical festival held at the village of Bonanova near Palma when the villagers perambulate a hill at night on the first Sunday after the 12th of September (the Feast of the Blessed Name of the Virgin Mary) which corresponds with the 23rd of September Old Style. The object of the whistle must originally have been to induce the North-East winnowing winds which, according to the local almanack, begin to blow at this season and which at the end of the month summon rain clouds from the Atlantic Ocean to soak the winter wheat planted earlier in the month. But this is forgotten: winnowing in Majorca is now done at any time after the harvest and not celebrated with any festivities. The mermaid, locally called a ‘siren’, evidently represents Daeira (Aphrodite) the moon-mother of Eleusis (the Corn-Dionysus who is shown with her in the woman-and-baby xiurell); the bull-headed man is Dionysus himself grown to manhood; the man in the hat is a Tutor, or gran mascara; the little rider is likely to be Dionysus again but the species of his tall mount is indeterminate. The quince-boughs, sorb-boughs, and the white clay are also in honour of the Goddess – now invoked as the Virgin Mary. The Serpent is the wind itself. Since this is the only time of the year when wind is welcomed by the Majorcans who, being largely arboricultural, fear the sirocco as they fear the Devil – the farmer’s purse, as they say, hangs on the bough of a tree – the sound of whistling is not heard in the island except in the xiurell season. The ploughman sings as he drives his mule and the schoolboy as he runs home from school; for the rest furbis, flabis, flebis – ‘whistle shrill, weep long’. More about the White Goddess and whistling for wind will be found in Chapter Twenty-four.

King Ogygus’ is a name invented to explain why Eleusis was called ‘Ogygiades’. There was really no such king as Eleusis: Eleusis signified the Advent of the Divine Child. And the Child was not really a son of Ogygus: he was the son of the Queen of the Island of Ogygia, namely Calypso. And Calypso was Daeira, or Aphrodite, again – the Wise One of the Sea, the spirit who moved upon the face of the waters. The fact was that, like Taliesin and Merlin and Llew Llaw and probably in the original version Moses1 too, Eleusis had no father, only a virgin mother; he originated before the institution of fatherhood. To the patriarchal Greeks this seemed shameful and they therefore fathered him on either ‘Ogygus’ or Hermes – but more generally on Hermes because of the sacred phalluses displayed at the festival, heaped in the same useful liknos. The Vine-Dionysus once had no father, either. His nativity appears to have been that of an earlier Dionysus, the Toadstool-god; for the Greeks believed that mushrooms and toadstools were engendered by lightning – not sprung from seed like all other plants. When the tyrants of Athens, Corinth and Sicyon legalized Dionysus-worship in their cities, they limited the orgies, it seems, by substituting wine for toadstools; thus the myth of the Toadstool-Dionysus became attached to the Vine-Dionysus, who now figured as a son of Semele the Theban and Zeus, Lord of Lightning. Yet Semele was sister of Agave, who tore off her son Pentheus’ head in a Dionysiac frenzy. To the learned Gwion the Vine-Dionysus and the Corn-Dionysus were both recognizably Christ, Son of Alpha – that is, son of the letter A:

According to the Talmudic Targum Yerushalmi on Genesis II, 7, Jehovah took dust from the centre of the earth and from all quarters of the earth and mingled it with waters of all the seas to create Adam. The angel Michael collected the dust. Since the Jewish rabbis preferred to alter rather than destroy ancient traditions which seemed damaging to their new cult of transcendent Jehovah, an original story may be postulated in which Michal (not Michael) of Hebron, the goddess from whom David derived his title of King by marriage with her priestess, was Adam’s creatrix. David married Michal at Hebron, and Hebron may be called the centre of the earth, from its position near the junction of two seas and the three ancient continents. This identification of Michal with Michael would seem forced, were it not that the name Michael occurs only in post-exilic writings, and is not therefore a part of ancient Jewish tradition, and that in A Discourse on Mary by Cyril of Jerusalem, printed by Budge in his Miscellaneous Coptic Texts, this passage occurs:

The mystical Essene Ebionites of the first century AD believed in a female Holy Spirit; and those members of the sect who embraced Christianity and developed into the second-century Clementine Gnostics made the Virgin Mary the vessel of this Holy Spirit – whom they named Michael (‘Who is like God?’). According to the Clementines, whose religious theory is popularized in a novel called The Recognitions,1 the identity of true religion in all ages depends on a series of incarnations of the Wisdom of God, of which Adam was the first and Jesus the last. In this poem of Gwion’s, Adam has no soul after his creation until Eve animates him.

But Caleb, according to the Hanes Taliesin riddle, conveyed the Holy Spirit to Hebron when, in the time of Joshua, he ousted the Anakim from the shrine of Machpelah. Machpelah, an oracular cave cut from the rock, was the sepulchre of Abraham, and Caleb went there to consult his shade. The priestly editor of Genesis describes it as the sepulchre also of Sarah and Jacob (Genesis XXIII, 19; XXV, 9; L, 13) and in XXXV, 29 implies that Isaac was buried there too. The statement about Jacob is contradicted in Genesis L, 11, where it is said that he was buried in Abel-Mizraim. Moreover, Isaac originally lived at Beer-Lahai-Roi (Genesis XXIV, 62; XXV, 11) where he probably had an oracular shrine at one time, for Beer-Lahai-Roi means ‘the Well of the Antelope’s Jawbone’ and if Isaac was a Boibalos, or Antelope-king, his prophetic jawbone – jawbones were the rule in oracular shrines, usually stored there, it seems, with the hero’s navel-string – would naturally give its name to the well; there was a sacred cave near by, which eventually became a Christian chapel. Thus it is likely that neither Isaac nor Jacob nor their ‘wives’ were at first associated with the cave. The story of its purchase from Ephron (a ‘Power’, as I suggest, of the Boibel-Loth) and the Children of Heth, usually regarded as Hittites, is told in Genesis XXIII. Though late and much edited, this chapter seems to record a friendly arrangement between the devotees of the Goddess Sarah, the Goddess of the tribe of Isaac, and their allies the devotees of the Goddess Heth (Hathor? Tethys?) who owned the shrine: Sarah was forced out of Beer-Lahai-Roi by another tribe and came to seek an asylum at near-by Hebron. Since Sarah was a Laughing Goddess and her progeny was destined to be ‘like the sand of the sea shore’ she was evidently a Sea-goddess of the Aphrodite type.

All that is needed to clinch this argument in poetic logic is for Caleb in Jewish tradition to have married someone called Michal who was a representative of the local Sea-goddess. He did even better: he married Miriam.1 (The Talmudic tradition is that ‘she was neither beautiful nor in good health’). The equation that follows is: Miriam I = Holy Spirit = Michal = Michael = Miriam II. Michael, then, was regarded as the instrument chosen for the creation of the First Adam, and used Hebron dust and sea water; and Jesus was the Second Adam; and Michael, or Miriam (‘Sea-brine’) the Virgin Mary, was similarly the instrument of his creation.

Jesus was also held to have fulfilled the prophecy in the 110th Psalm:

This is enlarged upon in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews. Melchizedek (Genesis XIV, 18–20) the Sacred King of Salem who welcomed ‘Abraham’ to Canaan (‘Abraham’ being in this sense the far-travelled tribe that came down into Palestine from Armenia at the close of the third millennium BC) ‘had neither father nor mother’. ‘Salem’ is generally taken to mean Jerusalem and it is probable that Salem occurs in the Boibel-Loth as a compliment to Melchizedek, who was priest to the Supreme God. But J. N. Schofield in his Historical Background to the Bible notes that to this day the people of Hebron have not forgiven David for moving his capital to Jerusalem (‘Holy Salem’) which they refer to as ‘The New Jerusalem’ as though Hebron were the authentic one. There is a record in the Talmud of a heretical sect of Jews, called Melchizedekians, who frequented Hebron to worship the body (consult the spirit?) of Adam which was buried in the cave of Machpelah. If these Melchizedekians worshipped Adam, the only other character in the Bible who had neither father nor mother, they were doubtless identifying Melchizedek’s kingship with the autochthonous Adam’s. For Adam, ‘the red man’, seems to have been the original oracular hero of Machpelah; it is likely that Caleb consulted his shade not Abraham’s, unless Adam and Abraham are titles of the same hero. Elias Levita, the fifteenth-century Hebrew commentator, records the tradition that the teraphim which Rachel stole from her father Laban were mummified oracular heads and that the head of Adam was among them. If he was right, the Genesis narrative refers to a seizure of the oracular shrine of Hebron by Saul’s Benjamites from the Calebites.

Caleb was an Edomite clan; which suggests the identification of Edom with Adam: they are the same word, meaning ‘red’. But if Adam was really Edom, one would expect to find a tradition that the head of Esau, the ancestor of the Edomites, was also buried at Hebron; and this is, in fact, supplied by the Talmud. The artificial explanation given there is that Esau and his sons opposed the burial of Jacob in the Cave of Machpelah on the ground that it was an Edomite possession; that Joseph, declaring that it had ceased to be Edomite when Jacob sold his birthright to Esau, sent to Egypt for the relevant documents; that a fight ensued in which the sons of Jacob were victorious and Esau was beheaded at one stroke by a dumb Danite; that Esau’s body was carried off for burial on Mount Seir by his sons; and that his head was buried at Hebron by Joseph.

Melchizedek’s lack of a father is intelligible, but why should he have no mother? Perhaps the stories of Moses, Llew Llaw, Romulus and Cretan Zeus explain this. In every case the boy is removed from his mother as soon as born. Thus, in effect, he has no mother; usually a goat, a wolf or a pig suckles him and he passes under the care of tutors. It is the transitional stage from matriarchy to patriarchy. In the Eleusinian Mysteries the Divine Child was carried in by shepherds, not by his mother or by a nurse.

The seventh and eighth stanzas of Yr Awdil Vraith are the strangest of all:

This means, I suppose, that Eve bore twenty-eight children, acting as her own midwife, then Cain and Abel and the…A stanza has been suppressed: a stanza evidently containing the Sethian heresy, a well-known development of the Clementine syncretic theory, in which Seth was viewed as an earlier incarnation of Jesus.1 It will be recalled that Rhea figures in the Hanes Taliesin riddle – Rhea as the mother both of Cretan Zeus and Romulus. The legend was that she bore a number of children, all of whom Saturn her lover ate, until finally she bore Zeus who escaped and eventually avenged his brothers on Saturn by castrating him. Gwion is hinting that Eve, whom he identifies with Rhea, brought forth thirty children in all – and then the Divine Child Seth. Thirty doubtless because the ‘reign of Saturn’ lasted thirty days and culminated with the midwinter feast which afterwards became Yule, or Christmas. The letter R (Riuben or Rhea or Reu in the Boibel-Loth, and Ruis in the Beth-Luis-Nion) is allotted to the last month of the year. The reign of Saturn therefore corresponds with the Christian period of Advent, preliminary to the Day of the birth of the Divine Child. Sir James Frazer gives details of this thirty-day period in the Golden Bough, in his account of the fourth-century martyr St. Dasius. The Clementines rejected the orthodox story of the Fall as derogatory to the dignity of Adam and Eve, and Gwion in his version similarly puts the blame for their expulsion wholly on Satan.

The ‘twelve young men, four of them angels’ (i.e. evangels), are evidently the twelve tribes of Israel, four of whom – Joseph, Simeon (Simon), Judah (Jude) and Levi (Matthew) – gave their names to books in the early canon of the New Testament; and they perhaps represent the twelve signs of the Zodiac in Clementine syncretism.

The stanza:

needs careful examination. ‘The confusion of languages after the fall of Babel’ was taken by Babylonian Jews to refer to the fall of the famous ziggorath, ‘the hanging gardens’, of Babylon. But the ziggorath, unlike the Tower of Babel, was completed. It is much more likely that the myth originates in the linguistic confusion caused by the Indo-Germanic conquest of Byblos, the Egyptianized metropolis of the People of the Sea, at the beginning of the second millennium BC. Doubtless there was a ‘babble oftongues’ in Babylon, but it was not caused by any sudden catastrophe, and the babblers could at least communicate with one another in the official Assyrian language. Whether or not the Byblians had begun work on a gigantic Egyptian temple at the time that the City was stormed and were unable to complete it, I do not know; but if they had done so their misfortune would naturally have been ascribed to divine jealousy at the innovation.

Moreover, ‘Asia’ was the name of the mother by Iapetus, who appears in Genesis as Japhet, Noah’s son, of the ‘Pelasgians’ Atlas and Prometheus; thus the ‘Land of Asia’ in stanzas 6 and 24 is a synonym for the Eastern Mediterranean, though more properly it meant Southern Asia Minor. King Solomon who reigned about a thousand years after the original fall of Byblos – it had fallen and risen several times meanwhile – may well have learned his religious secrets from Byblos, which the Jews knew as Gebal, for the Byblians helped him to build his Temple. This is mentioned in 1 Kings, V, 18, though in the Authorised Version ‘the men of Gebal’ is mistranslated ‘stone-squarers’.

‘Gebal’ means ‘mountain-height’. The deep wisdom of Byblos – from which the Greek word for ‘book’ (and the English word Bible) derives – is compared by Ezekiel, the prophet to whom the Essenes seem to have owed most, to that of Hiram’s Tyre (Ezekiel, XXVII, 8-9); Tyre was an early Cretan trading centre. Solomon certainly built his temple in Aegean style, closely resembling that of the Great Goddess at Hierapolis described by Lucian in his De De a Syria. There was a Danaan colony close to Byblos, dating from the fourteenth century BC.

It is possible that though the Calebites interpreted ‘Adam’ as the Semitic word Edom (‘red’) the original hero at Hebron was the Danaan Adamos or Adamas or Adamastos, ‘the Unconquerable’, or ‘the Inexorable’, a Homeric epithet of Hades, borrowed from the Death Goddess his mother.