50 BC–45AD

Second Belgic invasion. The principal tribesmen were the Atrebates who came from Artois, their settlements being identified by their bead-rimmed bowls. They had their capital at Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester) in North Hampshire, and their area of conquest extended from Western Surrey to the Vale of Trowbridge in Wiltshire, including Salisbury Plain.

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If the story of Câd Goddeu concerns the capture of the national necropolis on Salisbury Plain from its former holders, this is most likely to have happened during either the first or the second Belgic invasion. Neither the coming of the round-barrow men, nor the Goidelic seizure of South-Eastern Britain, nor the Claudian conquest, which was the last before the coming of the Saxons, corresponds with the story. But according to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s mediaeval History of the Britons two brothers named Belinus and Brennius fought for the mastery of Britain in the fourth century BC; Brennius was beaten and forced north of the Humber. Brennius and Belinus are generally acknowledged to be the gods Bran and Beli; and Beli in the Welsh Triads is described as the father of Arianrhod (‘Silver Wheel’), the sister of Gwydion and Amathaon. Amathaon evidently entered the Battle of the Trees as champion of his father Beli, the Supreme God of Light.

So the Câd Goddeu can perhaps be explained as the expulsion of a long-established Bronze Age priesthood from the national necropolis by an alliance of agricultural tribesmen, long settled in Britain and worshippers of the Danaan god Bel, Beli, Belus or Belinus, with an invading Brythonic tribe. The Amathaonians communicated to their Brythonic allies – Professor Sir John Rhys takes Gwydion for a mixed Teuton-Celt deity and equates him with Woden – a religious secret which enabled Amathaon to usurp the place of Bran, the God of Resurrection, a sort of Aesculapius, and Gwydion to usurp that of Arawn King of Annwm, a god of divination and prophecy, and both together to institute a new religious system in the place of the old. That it was Gwydion who usurped Arawn’ s place is suggested by the cognate myth in the Romance of Math the Son of Mathonwy where Gwydion stole the sacred swine from Pryderi, the King of the Pembrokeshire Annwm. Thus the high sprigs of Bran’s alder were humbled, and the Dog, Roebuck and Lapwing stolen from Arawn were installed as guardians of the new religious secret. The Amathaonians’ motive for betraying their kinsmen to the foreign invaders will be discussed in Chapter Eight.

It appears that Bran’s people did not retire, after their spiritual defeat, without offering armed resistance; for the tradition is that 71,000 men fell in battle after the secret was lost.

What sort of a secret? Caesar records that the Gallic Celts claimed descent from ‘Dis’ – that is to say, from a god of the dead corresponding to Dis in the Latin pantheon – and also worshipped deities corresponding with Minerva, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Mercury. Since he also records that the Gallic Druids came to Britain for instruction in religion, the principal seat of the Dis cult was evidently in Britain. The capture of this shrine by a continental tribe was an epoch-making event, for it is clear from Caesar’s account that the Druidic ‘Dis’ was a transcendent god who took precedence of Minerva, Apollo, Mars, Mercury, (to whom we may add Venus and Saturn, the Latin Crow-god, cognate with Aesculapius) and even of Jupiter. And Lucan, in his poem Pharsalia, written in Nero’s reign, expressly states that souls, according to the Druids, do not go down to the gloomy Underworld of the Latin Dis, but proceed elsewhere and that death ‘is but the mid-point of a long life’.

The British Dis, in fact, was no mere Pluto but a universal god corresponding closely with the Jehovah of the Hebrew prophets. Similarly, it can be argued that since the prime religious ritual of the Druids ‘in the service of God Himself, as Pliny records, was bound up with the mistletoe, ‘which they call all-heal in their language’ and ‘which falls from Heaven upon the oak’, the name of ‘Dis’ could not have been Bran, there being no mythic or botanical connexion between the alder and the mistletoe. Thus it is likely that the guessing of Bran’s name was merely a clue towards guessing that of the Supreme God: Gwydion did not become Dis, nor did Amathaon; but they together displaced Bran (Saturn) and Arawn (Mercury) in their service of Dis, and redefined his godhead as Beli. But if so, was Dis originally Donnus, in fact Danu?

It happens that we know the Norse name of Gwydion’ s horse, if Gwydion was indeed Woden, or Odin. It was Askr Yggr-drasill, or Ygdrasill, ‘the ash-tree that is the horse of Yggr’, Yggr being one of Woden’s titles. Ygdrasill was the enchanted ash, sacred to Woden, whose roots and branches in Scandinavian mythology extended through the Universe. If Bran had been clever enough at the Câd Goddeu he would have pronounced his englyn first, with:

The Battle of the Trees thus ended in a victory of the Ash-god and his ally over the Alder-god and his ally.

The pre-Celtic Annwm from which Gwydion is said to have stolen the sacred swine of King Pryderi, and over which Arawn reigned in the Romance of Pwyll Prince of Dyved, was in the Prescelly Mountains of Pembrokeshire. But it is likely that there were at least two Annwms, and that the ‘Battle of the Trees’ took place at the Annwm in Wiltshire before Gwydion’s people invaded South Wales. It would be fallacious to regard Stonehenge as Bran’s shrine, because it is an unsuitable site for the worship of an Alder-god. The older, larger, grander Avebury ring thirty miles to the north at the junction of the Kennet and a tributary, is the more likely site; and is proved by the débris removed from the ditch about it to have been in continuous use from the early Bronze Age to Roman times. All the available evidence points to Stonehenge as Beli’s seat, not Bran’s; it is laid out as a sun-temple in cultured Apollonian style which contrasts strangely with the archaic roughness of Avebury.

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 billa 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.