DOG, ROEBUCK AND LAPWING

The fullest account of the original Battle of the Trees, though the Lapwing is not mentioned in it, is published in the Myvyrian Archaiology. This is a perfect example of mythographic shorthand and records what seems to have been the most important religious event in pre-Christian Britain:

The story of the guessing of Bran’s name is a familiar one to anthropologists. In ancient times, once a god’s secret name had been discovered, the enemies of his people could do destructive magic against them with it. The Romans made a regular practice of discovering the secret names of enemy gods and summoning them to Rome with seductive promises, a process technically known as elicio. Josephus in his Contra Apionem quotes an account of a magic ceremony of this sort carried out at Jerusalem in the second century AD at the instance of King Alexander Jannaeus the Maccabee; the god summoned was the Edomite Ass-god of Dora, near Hebron. Livy (v. 21) gives the formula used to summon the Juno of Veii to Rome, and Diodorus Siculus (xvii, 41) writes that the Tyrians used to chain up their statues as a precaution. Naturally the Romans, like the Jews, hid the secret name of their own guardian-deity with extraordinary care; nevertheless one Quintus Valerius Soranus, a Sabine, was put to death in late Republican times for divulging it irresponsibly. The tribes of Amathaon and Gwydion in the Câd Goddeu encounter were as intent on keeping the secret of Achren – presumably the trees, or letters, that spelt out the secret name of their own deity – as on discovering that of their opponents. The subject of this myth, then, is a battle for religious mastery between the armies of Dôn, the people who appear in Irish legend as the Tuatha dé Danaan, ‘the folk of the God whose mother is Danu’, and the armies of Arawn (‘Eloquence’), the King of Annwfn, or Annwm, which was the British Underworld or national necropolis. In the Romance of Pwyll, Prince of Dyved Arawn appears as a huntsman on a large pale horse, pursuing a stag with the help of a pack of white dogs with red ears – the Hounds of Hell familiar in Irish, Welsh, Highland and British folklore.

The Tuatha dé Danaan were a confederacy of tribes in which the kingship went by matrilinear succession, some of whom invaded Ireland from Britain in the middle Bronze Age. The Goddess Danu was eventually masculinized into Dôn, or Donnus, and regarded as the eponymous ancestor of the confederacy. But in the primitive Romance of Math the Son of Mathonwy she appears as sister to King Math of Gwynedd, and Gwydion and Amathaon are reckoned as her sons – that is to say, as tribal gods of the Danaan confederacy. According to an archaeologically plausible Irish tradition in the Book of Invasions, the Tuatha dé Danaan had been driven northward from Greece as a result of an invasion from Syria and eventually reached Ireland by way of Denmark, to which they gave their own name (‘The Kingdom of the Danaans’), and North Britain. The date of their arrival in Britain is recorded as 1472 BC – for what that is worth. The Syrian invasion of Greece which set them moving north is perhaps the one hinted at by Herodotus in the first paragraph of his History: the capture by ‘Phoenicians’ of the Danaan shrine of the White Goddess Io at Argos, then the religious capital of the Peloponnese; the Cretans had colonized it about the year 1750 BC. Herodotus does not date the event except by making it happen before the Argo expedition to Colchis, which the Greeks dated 1225 BC and before ‘Europa’ went from Phoenicia to Crete, a tribal emigration which probably took place some centuries earlier, prior to the sack of Cnossos in 1400 BC. In the Book of Invasions there is a record, confirmed in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, of another invasion of Ireland, which took place two hundred years after the arrival of the Tuatha dé Danaan. These people, sailing westwards from Thrace through the Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic, landed in Wexford Bay where they came in conflict with the Danaans; but were persuaded to pass on into Northern Britain, then called Albany. They were known as the Picts, or tattooed men, and had the same odd social habits – exogamy, totemism, public coition, cannibalism, tattooing, the participation of women in battle – that obtained in Thessaly before the coming of the Achaeans, and in Classical times among the primitive tribes of the Southern Black Sea coast, the Gulf of Sirté in Libya, Majorca (populated by Bronze Age Libyans) and North-West Galicia. Their descendants still kept their non–Celtic language in Bede’s day.

Amathaon, or Amaethon, is said to take his name from the Welsh word amaeth, a ploughman, but it may be the other way about: that ploughmen were under the patronage of the god Amathaon. Perhaps the tribe was originally mothered by Amathaounta, a well-known Aegean Sea-goddess; another tribe of the same name, whose ancestral hero was Hercules, migrated from Crete to Amathus in Cyprus towards the end of the second millennium BC. Amathaon is credited with having taught Gwydion the wizardry for which he was afterwards famous; and this suggests that Gwydion was a late-comer to Britain, perhaps a god of the Belgic tribes that invaded Britain about 400 BC, and was given honorary sonship of Danu some centuries after the first Danaan invasion. Amathaon was maternal nephew to Math Hen (‘Old Math’), alias Math the son of Mathonwy. ‘Math’ means ‘treasure’; but since Math is also credited with having taught Gwydion his magic, ‘Math son of Mathonwy’ may be a truncated version of ‘Amathus son of Amathaounta’. Part of the tribe seems to have emigrated to Syria where it founded the city of Amathus (Hamath) on the Orontes, and another part to Palestine where it founded Amathus in the angle between the Jordan and the Jabbok. In the Table of Nations in Genesis X the Amathites are reckoned late among the Sons of Canaan, along with Hivites, Gergasites and other non-Semitic tribes. According to II Kings y XVII, 24, some of the Amathites were planted as a colony in Samaria, where they continued to worship their Goddess under the name of Ashima.

Bran’s name was guessed by Gwydion from the sprigs of alder in his hand, because though ‘Bran’ and Gwern, the word for ‘alder’ used in the poem, do not sound similar, Gwydion knew that Bran, which meant ‘Crow’ or ‘Raven’, also meant ‘alder’ – the Irish is fearn, with the ‘f’ pronounced as ‘v’ – and that the alder was a sacred tree. The third of the four sons of King Partholan the Milesian, a legendary ruler of Ireland in the Bronze Age, had been called Fearn; there had also been young Gwern, King of Ireland, the son of Bran’s sister, Branwen (‘White Crow’). Various confirmations of Gwydion’s guess appear in the Romance of Branwen, as will be shown later. But the name spelt out by the trees, or the letters, ranged on the side of Amathaon and Gwydion remained unguessed.

The Bran cult seems also to have been imported from the Aegean. There are remarkable resemblances between him and the Pelasgian hero Aesculapius who, like the chieftain Coronus (‘crow’) killed by Hercules, was a king of the Thessalian crow-totem tribe of Lapiths. Aesculapius was a Crow on both sides of the family: his mother was Coronis (‘crow’), probably a title of the Goddess Athene to whom the crow was sacred. Tatian, the Church Father, in his Address to the Greeks, suggests a mother and son relationship between Athene and Aesculapius:

Aesculapius’s father was Apollo whose famous shrine of Tempe stood in Lapith territory and to whom the crow was also sacred; and Apollo is described as the father of another Coronus, King of Sicyon in Sicily. The legend of Aesculapius is that after a life devoted to healing, he raised Glaucus, son of Sisyphus the Corinthian, from the dead, and was burned to cinders by Zeus in a fit of jealousy; he had been rescued as a child from a bonfire in which his mother and her paramour Ischys (‘Strength’) perished. Bran was likewise destroyed by his jealous enemy Evnissyen, a comrade of Matholwch King of Ireland to whom he had given a magical cauldron for raising dead soldiers to life; but in the Welsh legend it is Bran’s nephew and namesake, the boy Gwern, who after being crowned King is immediately thrown into a bonfire and burned to death; Bran himself is wounded in the heel by a poisoned dart – like Achilles the Minyan, the Centaur Cheiron’s pupil, and Cheiron himself – then beheaded; his head continues to sing and prophesy. (In Irish legend Aesculapius figures as Midach, killed after the Second Battle of Moytura by his father Diancecht, the Apollo of Healing, who was jealous of his cures.) Aesculapius and Bran were both demi-gods with numerous shrines, and both were patrons of healing and resurrection. Another point of resemblance between them is their love-adventures: Aesculapius lay with fifty amorous girls in a night, and Bran had a similar jaunt in the Isle of Women, one of three times fifty that he visited on a famous voyage. Aesculapius is represented in Greek art with a dog beside him and a staff in his hand around which twine oracular snakes.

The theft of the Dog and the Roebuck from the Underworld by Amathaon supports the Irish view that the Children of Danu came from Greece in the middle of the second millennium BC, since there are several analogous Greek legends of Bronze Age origin. For example, that of Hercules, the oak-hero, who was ordered by his task-master King Eurystheus of Mycenae to steal the dog Cerberus from the King of the Underworld, and the brass-shod white roebuck from the Grove of the Goddess Artemis at Ceryneia in Arcadia. In another of his adventures Hercules snatched from Herophile – the priestess of Delphi whose father (according to Clement of Alexandria) was Zeus disguised as a lapwing, and whose mother was Lamia, the Serpent-goddess – the oracular tripod on which she was sitting, but was forced to restore it. Among the favourite subjects of Greek and Etruscan art are Hercules carrying off the Dog and his struggles with the guardian of the Lamian oracle at Delphi for the possession of the roebuck and of the tripod. To call this guardian Apollo is misleading because Apollo was not at that time a Sun-god, but an Underworld oracular hero. The sense of these myths seems to be that an attempt to substitute the cult of the oracular oak for that of the oracular laurel at Delphi failed, but that the shrines at Ceryneia in Arcadia and Cape Taenarum in Laconia, where most mythographers place the entrance to the Underworld visited by Hercules, were captured. Other mythographers say that the entrance was at Mariandynian Acherusia (now Heracli in Anatolia) and that where the saliva of Cerberus fell on the ground, up sprang the witch-flower aconite – which is a poison, a paralysant and a febrifuge; but this account refers to another historical event, the capture of a famous Bithynian shrine by the Henetians.

But why Dog? Why Roebuck? Why Lapwing?

The Dog with which Aesculapius is pictured, like the dog Anubis, the companion of Egyptian Thoth, and the dog which always attended Melkarth the Phoenician Hercules, is a symbol of the Underworld; also of the dog-priests, called Enariae, who attended the Great Goddess of the Eastern Mediterranean and indulged in sodomitic frenzies in the Dog days at the rising of the Dog-star, Sirius. But the poetic meaning of the Dog in the Câd Goddeu legend, as in all similar legends, is ‘Guard the Secret’, the prime secret on which the sovereignty of a sacred king depended. Evidently Amathaon had seduced some priest of Bran – whether it was a homosexual priesthood I do not pretend to know – and won from him a secret which enabled Gwydion to guess Bran’s name correctly. Hercules overcame the Dog Cerberus by a narcotic cake which relaxed its vigilance; what means Amathaon used is not recorded.

The Lapwing, as Cornelius Agrippa, the early sixteenth-century occult philosopher, reminds us in his Vanity and Uncertainty of the Arts and Sciences (translated by James Sanford in 1569): ‘seemeth to have some royal thing and weareth a crown.’ I do not know whether Agrippa seriously meant to include the lapwing among royal birds, but if he did his best authority was Leviticus XI, 19. The lapwing is there mentioned as an unclean, that is to say tabooed, bird in the distinguished company of the eagle, the griffon-vulture, the ibis, the cuckoo, the swan, the kite, the raven, owl and little owl, the solan-goose (here not gannet but barnacle goose1), the stork, the heron and the pious pelican. That these taboos were of non-Semitic origin is proved by their geographical distribution: several of the birds do not belong to the heat-belt which is the Semitic homeland, and every one of them was sacred in Greece or Italy, or both, to a major deity. Biblical scholars have been puzzled by the ‘uncleanness’ of the lapwing – and doubt whether the bird is a lapwing and not a hedgehog – but whenever uncleanness means sanctity the clue must be looked for in natural history. The Greeks called the lapwing polyplagktos, ‘luring on deceitfully’, and had a proverbial phrase ‘more beseechful than a lapwing’ which they used for artful beggars. In Wales as a boy I learned to respect the lapwing for the wonderful way in which she camouflages and conceals her eggs in an open field from any casual passer-by. At first I was fooled every time by her agonized peewit, peewit, screamed from the contrary direction to the one in which her eggs lay, and sometimes when she realized that I was a nest-robber, she would flap about along the ground, pretending to have a broken wing and inviting capture. But as soon as I had found one nest I could find many. The lapwing’s poetic meaning is ‘Disguise the Secret’ and it is her extraordinary discretion which gives her the claim to sanctity. According to the Koran she was the repository of King Solomon’s secrets and the most intelligent of the flock of prophetic birds that attended him.

As for the White Roebuck, how many kings in how many fairy tales have not chased this beast through enchanted forests and been cheated of their quarry? The Roebuck’s poetic meaning is ‘Hide the Secret’. So it seems that in the Câd Goddeu story elements of a Hercules myth, which in Greek legend describes how the Achaeans of Mycenae captured the most important tribal shrines in the Peloponnese from some other Greek tribe, probably the Danaans, are used to describe a similar capture in Britain many centuries later. Any attempt to date this event involves a brief summary of British pre-history. The generally accepted scheme of approximate dates derived from archaeological evidence is as follows: