The White Goddess (17 page)

Geoffrey records that Bran and Beli (who, he says, gave his name to Billingsgate) were later reconciled, and together fought battles on the Continent. It is possible that troops from Britain served in the successful expedition of Gauls against Rome in 390
BC
. The Gaulish leader was Brennus – Celtic kings habitually took the name of their tribal gods – and Geoffrey’s confused account of subsequent Continental wars undertaken by Bran and Belin evidently refers to the Gaulish invasion of Thrace and Greece in 279
BC
when Delphi was plundered, the chief commander of the Gauls being another Brennus. At any rate, the alder remained a sacred tree in Britain for long after this
Câd
Goddeu
;
a King of Kent as late as the fifth century
AD
was named Gwerngen, ‘son of the Alder’. The answer to one of the riddles in the ‘Taliesin’ poem-medley called
Angar
Cyvyndawd
(‘Hostile Confederacy’), “Why is the alder of purplish colour?’, is doubtless: ‘Because Bran wore royal purple.’

The ultimate origin of the god Beli is uncertain, but if we identify the British Belin or Beli with Belus the father of Danäus (as Nennius does), then we can further identify him with Bel, the Babylonian Earth-god, one of a male trinity, who succeeded to the titles of a far more ancient Mesopotamian deity, the mother of Danaë as opposed to the father of Danäus. This was Belili, the Sumerian White Goddess, Ishtar’s predecessor, who was a goddess of trees as well as a Moon-goddess, Love-goddess and Underworld-goddess. She was sister and lover to Du’uzu, or Tammuz, the Corn-god and Pomegranate-god. From her name derives the familiar Biblical expression ‘Sons of Belial’ – the Jews having characteristically altered the non-Semitic name Belili into the Semitic Beliy ya’al (‘from which one comes not up again’, i.e. the Underworld) – meaning ‘Sons of Destruction’. The Slavonic word
beli
meaning ‘white’ and the Latin
bellus
meaning ‘beautiful’ are also ultimately connected with her name. Originally every tree was hers, and the Goidelic
bile
,
‘sacred tree’, the mediaeval Latin
bil
la
and
billus
, ‘branch, trunk of tree’, and the English
billet
are all recollections of her name. Above all, she was a Willow-goddess and goddess of wells and springs.

The willow was of great importance in the worship of Jehovah at Jerusalem, and the Great Day of the Feast of Tabernacles, a fire and water ceremony, was called the Day of Willows. Though alder and willow are not differentiated in Hebrew – they are of the same family – Tanaitic
tradition, dating from before the destruction of the Temple, prescribed that the red-twigged willow with lanceolate leaves, i.e. the purple osier, should be the sort used in the thyrsus of palm, quince and willow carried during the Feast; if none were obtainable, then the round-leaved willow, i.e. the sallow or ‘palm’, might be used, but the variety with toothed leaves, i.e. the alder, was forbidden – presumably because it was used in idolatrous rites in honour of Astarte and her son the Fire-god. Although the use of the thyrsus was obligatory, the Israelites having taken it over with the Canaanites’ Tabernacle ceremonies and incorporated it in the Mosaic Law, the willow (or osier) was mistrusted by the more intelligent Jews in later days. According to one
Hagadah
,
the willow in the thyrsus symbolized the ‘inferior and ignorant of Israel who have neither righteousness nor knowledge, as the willow has neither taste nor smell’: in fact, even the indifferent would be provided for by Jehovah. By his triumphant supersession of Queen Belili, Bel became the Supreme Lord of the Universe, father of the Sun-god and the Moon-god, and claimed to be the Creator: a claim later advanced by the upstart Babylonian god Marduk. Bel and Marduk were finally identified, and since Marduk had been a god of the Spring Sun and of thunder, Bel had similarly become a sort of Solar Zeus before his emigration to Europe from Phoenicia.

It seems then that Beli was originally a Willow-god, a divinatory son of Belili, but became the God of Light, and that in fourth-century
BC
Britain, at the
Câd
Goddeu,
his power was invoked by his son Amathaon as a means of supplanting Bran of the alder, whose counterpart had perhaps been similarly supplanted in Palestine. At the same time Gwydion of the ash supplanted Arawn, another divinatory god whose tree is not known. The implications of these peculiar interchanges of divine function will be discussed in a later chapter.

The author of the
Romance
of
Taliesin
evidently knew Amathaon as ‘Llew Llaw’, a Brythonic title of Hercules, since he says in the
Cerdd
am
Veib
Llyr
(‘Song Concerning the Sons of Llyr’):

The case is complicated by occasional bardic references to Beli and the sea which at first sight suggest that he is a Sea-god: the waves are his horses, the brine is his liquor. But this probably honours him as the tutelary deity of Britain, his ‘honey isle’ as it is called in a
Triad
–
no god can rule over an island unless he also commands the adjacent waters – with a hint also that as the Sun-god he ‘drinks the waters of the West’ every evening at sunset, and that white horses are traditionally sacred to the sun.

The last form in which the famous conflict between Beli and Bran occurs is the story of the brothers Balin and Balan in Malory’s
Morte
D
’Arthur,
who killed each other by mistake. But, as Charles Squire points
out in his
Celtic
Myth
and
Legend,
Bran appears in various other disguises in the same jumbled romance. As King Brandegore (Bran of Gower) he brings five thousand men to oppose King Arthur; but as Sir Brandel or Brandiles (Bran of Gwales) he fights valiantly on Arthur’s side. As King Ban of Benwyk (‘the square enclosure’, called ‘Caer Pedryvan’ in the poem
Preiddeu
Annwm
which will be examined in Chapter Six) he is a foreign ally of Arthur’s; as Leodegrance – in the Welsh, Ogyr Vran – he is Arthur’s father-in-law; and as Uther Ben (‘the wonderful head’), which is a reference to the story of the singing head buried on Tower Hill, he is Arthur’s father. The Norman-French
trovères
and Malory who collected and collated their Arthurian romances had no knowledge of, or interest in, the historical and religious meaning of the myths that they handled. They felt themselves free to improve the narrative in accordance with their new gospel of chivalry fetched from Provence – breaking up the old mythic patterns and taking liberties of every sort that the Welsh minstrels had never dared to take.

The modern licence claimed by novelists and short-story writers to use their imaginations as freely as they please prevents students of mythology from realizing that in North-Western Europe, where the post-Classical Greek novel was not in circulation, story-tellers did not invent their plots and characters but continually retold the same traditional tales, extemporizing only when their memory was at fault. Unless religious or social change forced a modification of the plot or a modernization of incident, the audience expected to hear the tales told in the accustomed way. Almost all were explanations of ritual or religious theory, overlaid with history: a body of instruction corresponding with the Hebrew Scriptures and having many elements in common with them.

Since the close connexion here suggested between ancient British, Greek, and Hebrew religion will not be easily accepted, I wish to make it immediately clear that I am not a British Israelite or anything of that sort. My reading of the case is that at different periods in the second millennium
BC
a confederacy of mercantile tribes, called in Egypt ‘the People of the Sea’, were displaced from the Aegean area by invaders from the north-east and south-east; that some of these wandered north, along already established trade-routes, and eventually reached Britain and Ireland; and that others wandered west, also along established trade-routes, some elements reaching Ireland by way of North Africa and Spain. Still others invaded Syria and Canaan, among them the Philistines, who captured the shrine of Hebron in southern Judaea from the Edomite clan of Caleb; but the Calebites (‘Dog-men’), allies of the Israelite tribe of Judah, recovered it about two hundred years later and took over a great part of the Philistine religion at the same time. These borrowings were eventually harmonized in the Pentateuch with a body of Semitic, Indo-European and Asianic myth which composed the religious traditions of the mixed Israelite confederacy. The connexion, then, between the early myths of the Hebrews, the Greeks and the Celts is that all three races were civilized by the same Aegean people whom they conquered and absorbed. And this is not of merely antiquarian interest, for the popular appeal of modern Catholicism, is, despite the patriarchal Trinity and the all-male priesthood, based rather on the Aegean Mother-and-Son religious tradition, to which it has slowly reverted, than on its Aramaean or Indo-European ‘warrior-god’ elements.

To write in greater historical detail about the Danaans. Danu, Danaë, or Dôn, appears in Roman records as Donnus, divine father of Cottius, the sacred King of the Cottians, a Ligurian confederacy that gave its name to the Cottian Alps. Cottys, Cotys, or Couttius is a widely distributed name. Cotys appears as a dynastic title in Thrace between the fourth century
BC
and the first century
AD
, and the Cattini and Attacoti of North
Britain and many interesting Catt- and Cott- tribes between there and Thrace are held to be of Cottian stock. There was also a Cotys dynasty in Paphlagonia on the southern shore of the Black Sea. All seem to take their name from the great Goddess Cotytto, or Cotys, who was worshipped orgiastically in Thrace, Corinth and Sicily. Her nocturnal orgies, the Cotyttia, were according to Strabo celebrated in much the same way as those of Demeter, the Barley-goddess of primitive Greece, and of Cybele, the Lion-and-Bee goddess of Phrygia in whose honour young men castrated themselves; in Sicily a feature of the Cotyttia was the carrying of boughs hung with fruit and barley-cakes. In Classical legend Cottys was the hundred-handed brother of the hundred-handed monsters Briareus and Gyes, allies of the God Zeus in his war against the Titans on the borders of Thrace and Thessaly. These monsters were called Hecatontocheiroi (‘the hundred-handed ones’).

The story of this war against the Titans is intelligible only in the light of early Greek history. The first Greeks to invade Greece were the Achaeans who broke into Thessaly about 1900
BC
; they were patriarchal herdsmen and worshipped an Indo-European male trinity of gods, originally perhaps Mitra, Varuna and Indra whom the Mitanni of Asia Minor still remembered in 1400
BC
, subsequently called Zeus, Poseidon and Hades. Little by little they conquered the whole of Greece and tried to destroy the semi-matriarchal Bronze Age civilization that they found there, but later compromised with it, accepted matrilinear succession and enrolled themselves as sons of the variously named Great Goddess. They became allies of the very mixed population of the mainland and islands, some of them long-headed, some broad-headed, whom they named ‘Pelasgians’, or seafarers. The Pelasgians claimed to be born from the teeth of the cosmic snake Ophion whom the Great Goddess in her character of Eurynome (‘wide rule’) had taken as her lover, thereby initiating the material Creation; but Ophion and Eurynome are Greek renderings of the original names. They may have called themselves Danaans after the same goddess in her character of Danaë, who presided over agriculture. At any rate the Achaeans who had occupied Argolis now also took the name of Danaans, and also became seafarers; while those who remained north of the isthmus of Corinth were known as Ionians, children of the Cow-goddess Io. Of the Pelasgians driven out of Argolis some founded cities in Lesbos, Chios and Cnidos; others escaped to Thrace, the Troad and the North Aegean islands. A few clans remained in Attica, Magnesia and elsewhere.

The most warlike of the remaining Pelasgians were the Centaurs of Magnesia, whose clan totems included the wryneck and mountain lion. They also worshipped the horse, probably not the Asiatic horse brought from the Caspian at the beginning of the second millennium
BC
, but an earlier, and inferior, European variety, a sort of Dartmoor pony. The
Centaurs under their sacred king Cheiron welcomed Achaean aid against their enemies the Lapiths, of Northern Thessaly. The word ‘Cheiron’ is apparently connected with the Greek
cheir
,
a hand, and ‘Centaurs’ with
centron,
a goat. In my essay
What
Food
the
Centaurs
Ate
,
I suggest that they intoxicated themselves by eating ‘fly-cap’ (
amanita
muscaria
),
the hundred-clawed toad, an example of which appears, carved on an Etruscan mirror, at the feet of their ancestor Ixion. Were the Hecatontocheiroi the Centaurs of mountainous Magnesia, whose friendship was strategically necessary to the Achaean pastoralists of Thessaly and Boeotia? The Centaurs’ mother goddess was called, in Greek, Leucothea, ‘the White Goddess’, but the Centaurs themselves called her Ino or Plastene, and her rock-cut image is still shown near the ancient pinnacle-town of Tantalus; she had also become the ‘mother’ of Melicertes, or Hercules Melkarth, the god of earlier semi-Semitic invaders.