The White Goddess (39 page)

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 Moses
1
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
Tar
gum
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: