A VISIT TO SPIRAL CASTLE

My suggested answers to the riddles of the Hanes Taliesin were as follows:

This was as far as I could go without adopting the method of the crossword puzzler, which is to use the answers already secured as clues to the solution of the more difficult riddles that remain, but I made some progress with the riddle: ‘I have been three periods in the Castle of Arianrhod.’

Arianrhod (‘Silver wheel’) appears in the 107th Triad as the ‘Silver-circled daughter of Dôn’, and is a leading character in the Romance of Math the Son of Mathonwy. No one familiar with the profuse variants of the same legend in every body of European myth can have doubts about her identity. She is the mother of the usual Divine Fish-Child Dylan who, after killing the usual Wren (as the New Year Robin does on St. Stephen’s day) becomes Llew Llaw Gyffes (‘the Lion with the Steady Hand’), the usual handsome and accomplished Sun-hero with the usual Heavenly Twin at his side. Arianrhod then adopts the form of Blodeuwedd, the usual Love-goddess, treacherously (as usual) destroys Llew Llaw – the story is at least as old as the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic – and is then transformed first into the usual Owl of Wisdom and then into the usual Old-Sow-who-eats-her-farrow; so feeds on Llew’s dead flesh. But Llew, whose soul has taken the form of the usual eagle, is then, as usual, restored to life. The story is given in full in Chapter Seventeen.

In other words Arianrhod is one more aspect of Caridwen, or Cerridwen, the White Goddess of Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life; and to be in the Castle of Arianrhod is to be in a royal purgatory awaiting resurrection. For in primitive European belief it was only kings, chieftains and poets, or magicians, who were privileged to be reborn. Countless other less distinguished souls wandered disconsolately in the icy grounds of the Castle, as yet uncheered by the Christian hope of universal resurrection. Gwion makes this clear in his Marwnad y Milveib (‘Elegy on the Thousand Children’).

Where was this purgatory situated? It must be distinguished from the Celtic Heaven, which was the Sun itself – a blaze of light (as we know from Armorican tradition) caused by the shining together of myriads of pure souls. Well, where should one expect to find it? In a quarter from which the Sun never shines. Where is that? In the cold North. How far to the North? Beyond the source of Boreas, the North Wind; for ‘at the back of the North Wind’ – a phrase used by Pindar to locate the land of the Hyperboreans – is still a popular Gaelic synonym for the Land of Death. But precisely where beyond the source of the North wind? Only a poet would be persistent enough to ask this last question. The poet is the unsatisfied child who dares to ask the difficult question which arises from the schoolmaster’s answer to his simple question, and then the still more difficult question which arises from that. Surprisingly enough there is, on this occasion, a ready answer. Caer Arianrhod (not the submerged town off the coast of Caernarvon, but the real Caer Arianrhod) is, according to Dr. Owen of the Welsh Dictionary, the constellation called ‘Corona Borealis’. Not Corona Septentrionalis, ‘the Northern Crown’, but Corona Borealis, ‘the Crown of the North Wind’. Perhaps we have the answer here to the question which puzzled Herodotus: ‘Who are the Hyperboreans?’ Were the Hyperboreans, the ‘back-of-the-North-Wind-men’, members of a North Wind cult, as the Thracians of the Sea of Marmara were? Did they believe that when they died their souls were taken off by Hermes, conductor of souls, to the calm silver-circled castle at the back of the North Wind, of which the bright star Alpheta was the guardian?

I should not venture to make such a fanciful suggestion if it were not for the mention of Oenopion and Tauropolus by the Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica. This Corona Borealis, which is also called ‘the Cretan Crown’, was in ancient times sacred to a Cretan Goddess, wife to the God Dionysus, and according to this Scholiast the mother of – that is, worshipped by – Staphylus, Thoas, Oenopion, Tauropolus and others. These men were the eponymous ancestors of Pelasgo-Thracian clans or tribes settled in the Aegean islands of Chios and Lemnos, on the Thracian Chersonese, and in the Crimea, and culturally connected with North-Western Europe. The Goddess was Ariadne, (‘Most Holy’,) alias Alpheta – alpha and eta being the first and last letters of her name. She was the daughter, or younger self, of the ancient Cretan Moon-Goddess Pasiphaë, ‘She who shines for all’, and the Greeks made her a sister of their ancient vine-hero Deucalion, who survived the Great Flood. Ariadne, on whom ‘Arianrhod’ seems to be modelled, was an orgiastic goddess, and it is evident from the legends of Lemnos, Chios, the Chersonese and the Crimea, that male human sacrifice was an integral part of her worship, as it was among the pre-Roman devotees of the White Goddess of Britain. Orpheus himself, who lived ‘among the savage Cauconians’ close to Oenopion’s home, was a sacred victim of her fury. He was torn in pieces by a pack of delirious women intoxicated by ivy and also, it seems, by the toadstool sacred to Dionysus. Eratosthenes of Alexandria, quoting Aeschylus’s Bassarides, records that Orpheus refused to conform to local religion but ‘believed the sun, whom he named Apollo, to be the greatest of the gods. Rising up in the night he ascended before dawn to the mountain called Pangaeum that he might see the sun first. At which Dionysus, being enraged, sent against him the Bassarids, who tore him in pieces….’ That is a dishonest way of telling the story. Proclus in his commentary on Plato is more to the point: ‘Orpheus, because he was the leader in the Dionysian rites, is said to have suffered the same fate as the god.’ But the head of Orpheus continued to sing and prophesy, like that of the God Bran. Orpheus, according to Pausanias, was worshipped by the Pelasgians, and the termination eus is always a proof of antiquity in a Greek name. ‘Orpheus’, like ‘Erebus’, the name of the Underworld over which the White Goddess ruled, is derived by grammarians from the root ereph, which means ‘to cover or conceal’. It was the Moon-goddess, not the Sun-god, who originally inspired Orpheus.

The clearest sign that in Arianrhod we have the old matriarchal Triple Goddess, or White Goddess, lies in her giving her son Llew Llaw a name and a set of arms. In patriarchal society it is always the father who gives both. Llew Llaw has no father at all, in the Romance, and must remain anonymous until his mother is tricked into making a man of him.

I thought at first that Gwion’s riddle about Caer Arianrhod was to be completed with ‘and the whirling round without motion between three elements’. The three elements are clearly fire, air and water, and the Corona Borealis revolves in a very small space compared with the southern constellations. But Gwion must have been taught that Arianrhod’s Castle does not lie within ‘the Arctic Circle’, which includes the two Bears and the Bear-Warden, and that when the Sun rises in the House of the Crab, it begins to dip over the Northern horizon and does not free itself until the summer is over. To describe it as whirling round without motion would have been inaccurate; only the Little Bear does so, pivoted on the Pole-star. (As I show in Chapter Ten, the whirling-round is part of the riddle to which the answer is Rhea; but I will not anticipate the argument at this point.)

Yet, even if I knew the meaning of ‘a period in the Castle of Arianrhod’, could I answer the riddle? Who spent three periods there?

The sequences of ‘I have been’ or ‘I am’ – the earliest of them indisputably pre-Christian – which occur in so many bardic poems of Wales and Ireland seem to have several different though related senses. The primitive belief is plainly not in individual metempsychosis of the vulgar Indian sort – at one time a bluebottle, at the next a flower, at the next perhaps a Brahmini bull or a woman, according to one’s merit. The ‘I’ is the Apollo-like god on whose behalf the inspired poet sings, not the poet himself. Sometimes the god may be referring mythically to his daily cycle as the Sun from dawn to dawn; sometimes to his yearly cycle from winter solstice to winter solstice with the months as stations of his progress; perhaps sometimes even to his grand cycle of 25,800 years around the Zodiac. All these cycles are types of one another; as we still speak either of the ‘evening’ or ‘autumn’ of our lives when we mean old age.

The commonest ‘I have been’ reference is to the yearly cycle, and to examine these seasonal ‘I have been’s (though for reasons of discretion the order has always been deliberately confused) is usually to find that they contain a complete series of round-the-year symbols.

Though the Pythagorean theory of metempsychosis, imported from the Greek colonies in Southern France, has been suspected in the Irish legend of Tuan MacCairill, one of the royal immigrants from Spain, who went through the successive metamorphoses of stag, boar, hawk and salmon before being born as a man, this is unlikely: the four beasts are all seasonal symbols, as will be shown.

The poetic language of myth and symbol used in ancient Europe was not, in principle, a difficult one but became confused, with the passage of time, by frequent modifications due to religious, social and linguistic change, and by the tendency of history to taint the purity of myth – that is to say, the accidental events in the life of a king who bore a divine name were often incorporated in the seasonal myth which gave him the title to royalty. A further complication was that anciently a large part of poetic education, to judge from the Irish Book of Ballymote, which contains a manual of cryptography, was concerned with making the language as difficult as possible in order to keep the secret close; in the first three years of his educational course, the Irish student for the Ollaveship had to master one hundred and fifty cypher-alphabets.1

What is the relation of Caer Sidi to Caer Arianrhod? Were they the same place? I think not, because Caer Sidi has been identified with Puffin Island off the coast of Anglesey and with Lundy Island in the Severn: both of them island Elysiums of the usual type. A clue to the problem is that though Caer Sidi, or Caer Sidin, means ‘Revolving Castle’ in Welsh, and though revolving islands are common in Welsh and Irish legend, the word ‘Sidi’ is apparently a translation of the Goidelic word Sidhe, a round barrow fortress belonging to the Aes Sidhe (Sidhe for short), the prime magicians of Ireland. There are several ‘Fortresses of the Sidhe’ in Ireland, the most remarkable ones being Brugh-na-Boyne (now called ‘New Grange’), Knowth and Dowth, on the northern banks of the River Boyne. Their date and religious use must be considered in detail.

New Grange is the largest, and is said to have been originally occupied by The Dagda himself, the Tuatha dé Danaan Father-god who corresponds with the Roman Saturn, but afterwards by his Apollo-like son Angus who won it from him by a legal quibble. The Dagda on his first arrival in Ireland was evidently a son of the Triple Goddess Brigit (‘the High One’); but the myth has been tampered with by successive editors. First, he is said to have married the Triple Goddess. Then he is said to have had only one wife with three names, Breg, Meng and Meabel (‘Lie, Guile and Disgrace’), who bore him three daughters all called Brigit. Then it is said that not he but three of his descendants, Brian, Iuchar and Iuchurba married three princesses who together owned Ireland – Eire, Fodhla and Banbha. He was the son of ‘Eladu’ which the Irish glossarists explain as ‘Science or Knowledge’ but which may be a form of the Greek Elate (‘fir-tree’); Elatos (‘fir-man’) was an early Achaean King of Cyllene, a mountain in Arcadia sacred to Demeter and later renowned for its college of learned and sacrosanct heralds. The Dagda and Elatos may thus both be equated with Osiris, or Adonis, or Dionysus, who was born from a fir and mothered by the horned Moon-goddess Isis, or Io, or Hathor.

New Grange is a flat-topped round barrow, about a quarter of a mile in circumference and fifty feet high. But it is built of heaped stones, some 50,000 tons of them, not of earth, and was originally covered with white quartz pebbles: a Bronze Age sepulchral practice in honour of the White Goddess which may account in part for the legends of Kings housed after death in glass castles. Ten enormous stone herms, weighing eight or ten tons apiece stand in a semi-circle around the southern base of the barrow, and one formerly stood at the summit. It is not known how many more have been removed from the semi-circle but the gaps suggest an original set of twelve. A hedge of about a hundred long flat stones, set edge to edge, rings the base around. Deep inside the barrow is a pre-Celtic passage-burial cave built with great slabs of stone, several of them measuring as much as seven feet by four.

The ground plan is the shape of a Celtic cross; one enters by a dolmen door at the base of the shaft. The shaft consists of a narrow passage, sixty feet long, through which one has to crawl on hands and knees. It leads to a small circular chamber, with a bee-hive corbelled vault twenty feet high; and there are three recesses which make the arms of the cross. When this cave was re-discovered in 1699 it contained three large empty boat-shaped stone basins, the sides engraved with stripes; two complete skeletons lying beside a central altar, stags’ antlers, bones, and nothing else. Roman gold coins of the fourth century AD, gold torques and remains of iron weapons were later found on the site of the fort, not in the cave. The fort was sacked by the Danes but there is nothing to show whether they, or earlier invaders, rifled the chamber of its other funerary furniture. Slabs of the doorway and of the interior are decorated with spiral patterns and there is forked lightning carved on one lintel. Since the old poets record that each rath was presided over by an enchantress and since, as will be shown, the Sidhe were such skilful poets that even the Druids were obliged to go to them for the spells that they needed, it seems likely that the original Caer Sidi, where the Cauldron of Inspiration was housed, was a barrow of the New Grange sort. For these barrows were fortresses above and tombs below. The Irish ‘Banshee’ fairy is a Bean-Sidhe (‘Woman of the Hill’); as priestess of the great dead she wails in prophetic anticipation whenever anyone of royal blood is about to die. From an incident in the Irish romance of Fionn’s Boyhood, it appears that the entrances to these burial caves were left open at Samhain, All Souls’ Eve, which was also celebrated as a feast of the Dead in Ancient Greece, to allow the spirits of the heroes to come out for an airing; and that the interiors were illuminated until cock-crow the next morning.

On the east side of the mound, diametrically opposite the entrance, a stone was discovered in 1901 which has three suns carved on it, two of them with their rays enclosed in a circle as if in prison, the other free. Above them is a much rougher, unenclosed sun and above that, notched across a straight line, the Ogham letters B and I – which, as will be explained presently, are the first and last letters of the ancient Irish alphabet, dedicated respectively to Inception and Death. The case is pretty plain: the sacred kings of Bronze Age Ireland, who were solar kings of a most primitive type, to judge by the taboos which bound them and by the reputed effect of their behaviour on crops and hunting, were buried beneath these barrows; but their spirits went to ‘Caer Sidi’, the Castle of Ariadne, namely Corona Borealis. Thus the pagan Irish could call New Grange ‘Spiral Castle’ and, revolving a fore-finger in explanation, could say, ‘Our king has gone to Spiral Castle’: in other words, ‘he is dead’. A revolving wheel before the door of a castle is common in Goidelic legend. According to Keating, the magic fortress of the enchantress Blanaid, in the Isle of Man, was protected by one – nobody could enter until it was still. In front of the doorway of New Grange there is a broad slab carved with spirals, which forms part of the stone hedge. The spirals are double ones: follow the lines with your finger from outside to inside and when you reach the centre, there is the head of another spiral coiled in the reverse direction to take you out of the maze again. So the pattern typifies death and rebirth; though, according to Gwion’s poem Preiddeu Annwm, ‘only seven ever returned from Caer Sidi’. It may well be that oracular serpents were once kept in these sepulchral caves, and that these were the serpents which St. Patrick expelled, though perhaps only metaphorically. Delphi, the home of Apollo, was once an oracular tomb of this same sort, with a spiralled python and a prophetic priestess of the Earth Goddess, and the ‘omphalos’ or ‘navel shrine’ where the python was originally housed, was built underground in the same beehive style, which derives originally from the African masabo, or ghost-house. The antlers at New Grange were probably part of the sacred king’s head-dress, like the antlers worn by the Gaulish god Cernunnos, and the horns of Moses, and those of Dionysus and King Alexander shown on coins.

The provenience of the bee-hive tomb with a passage entrance and lateral niches is no mystery. It came to Ireland from the Eastern Mediterranean by way of Spain and Portugal at the close of the third millennium BC: the corbelled roof of New Grange occurs also at Tirbradden, Dowth and Seefin. But the eight double-spirals at the entrance, which are merely juxtaposed, not cunningly wreathed together in the Cretan style, are paralleled in Mycenaean Greece; and this suggests that the carvings were made by the Danaans when they took over the shrine from the previous occupants, who in Irish history appear as the tribes of Partholan and Nemed that invaded the country in the years 2048 and 1718 BC, coming from Greece by way of Spain. If so, this would account for the legend of the usurpation of the shrine by the god Angus from his father The Dagda. The arrival of the Danaans in Ireland, as was mentioned in Chapter III, is dated in the Book of Invasions at the middle of the fifteenth century BC. This is plausible: they will have been late-comers of the round-barrow tribes that first reached Ireland from Britain about 1700 BC. That they propitiated the heroes of the previous cult is well established: their food-vessels are found in passage-grave burials.

Dr. R. S. Macalister in his Ancient Ireland (1935) takes an original view of New Grange. He holds that it was built by the Milesians, whom he dates about 1000 BC and supposes to have come from Britain, not Spain, on the ground that it incorporates a number of ornamental stones in the passage and chamber, one of them with its pattern broken, apparently arranged haphazard, and that on some of these the carving has been defaced by pick-surfacing like that found on the trilithons of Stonehenge. This is to suggest that it is a mock-antique in the style of several hundred years before; a theory to which no other archaeologist of repute seems to have subscribed. But his observations do suggest that the Milesians took over the oracular shrine from the Danaans and patched it, where it showed signs of decay, with ornamental stones borrowed from other burials. Another suggestion of his carries greater conviction: that Angus’ Brugh (‘palace’) was not New Grange but a huge circular enclosure not far off in a bend of the Boyne, which may have been an amphitheatre for funerary games in connexion with all the many burials of the neighbourhood.

Most Irish archaeologists are now, I find, agreed that New Grange was built by a matriarchal passage-grave-making people that first reached Ireland about the year 2100 BC, but not until they had become well-established some five hundred years later and were able to command the enormous labour necessary for the task. The spirals, though paralleled in Mycenaean shaft-burials of 1600 BC, may be far earlier since examples of unknown date occur also at Malta. On one of the outer stones a symbol is carved which suggests a Cretan ideogram and apparently represents a ship with a high prow and stern and a single large sail; beside it are vertical scratches and a small circle. Christopher Hawkes, my principal informant on this subject, has written to me that not only are the skeletons and antlers unlikely to be co-eval with the building but that there may have been many successive despoilments of the burial before they were put there. The original funerary furniture cannot be guessed at, since no virgin passage-grave of this type has been opened in recent years; we must wait until the Cairn of Queen Maeve is opened. This overlooks Sligo Bay; it is built of some 40,000 tons of stone and the entrance is lost. We may have to wait a long time, because the Sligo people are superstitious and would consider a desecration of the tomb unlucky: Maeve is Mab, the Queen of Faery.

What the basins contained may be inferred from Exodus, XXIV (verses 4-8). Moses, having set up twelve stone herms, or posts, at the foot of a sacred hill, offered bull-sacrifices and sprinkled half the blood on a thirteenth herm in the middle of the circle, or semi-circle; the rest of the blood he put into basins, which must have been of considerable size. Then he and his colleague Aaron, with seventy-two companions, went up to feast on the roasted flesh. On this occasion, the blood in the basins was sprinkled on the people as a charm of sanctification; but its use in the oracular shrine was always to feed the ghost of the dead hero and to encourage him to return from Caer Sidi or Caer Arianrhod to answer questions of importance.

The visit of Aeneas, mistletoe-bough in hand, to the Underworld to cross-examine his father Anchises must be read in this sense. Aeneas sacrificed a bull and let the blood gush into a trough, and the ghost of Anchises (who had married the Love-goddess Venus Erycina, and been killed by lightning and was, in fact, a sacred king of the usual Herculean type), drank the blood and obligingly prophesied about the glories of Rome. Of course, the ghost did not really lap the blood, but a lapping sound was heard in the dark; what happened was that the Sibyl, who conducted Aeneas below, drank the blood and it produced in her the desired prophetic ecstasy. That Sibyls acted so is known from the case of the Priestess of Mother Earth at Aegira (‘Black Poplar’, a tree sacred to heroes) in Achaea, The peeping and muttering of ghosts on such occasions is understandable: two or three Biblical texts refer to the queer bat-like voices in which demons, or familiars, speak through the mouths of prophets or prophetesses. Bull’s blood was most potent magic and was used, diluted with enormous quantities of water, to fertilize fruit-trees in Crete and Greece. Taken neat it was regarded as a poison deadly to anyone but a Sibyl or a priest of Mother Earth; Jason’s father and mother died from a draught of it. So did ass-eared King Midas of Gordium.

That bull’s blood was used for divination in ancient Ireland is not mere supposition. A rite called ‘The Bull Feast’ is mentioned in the Book of the Dun Cow:

The white bull recalls the sacred white bulls of the Gaulish mistletoe rite; the white bull on which the Thracian Dionysus rode; the white bulls sacrificed on the Alban Mount and at the Roman Capitol; and the white bull representing the true seed of Israel in the apocalyptic Book of Enoch.

Now we begin to understand the mysterious Preiddeu Annwm (‘the Spoils of Annwm’) in which – between Gwion’s interpolative taunts at the ignorance of Heinin and the other court-bards – one Gwair ap Geirion laments that he cannot escape from Caer Sidi. The refrain is: ‘Except seven none returned from Caer Sidi.’ We know at least two who did return: Theseus and Daedalus, both Attic Sun-heroes. The stories of Theseus’s expedition to the Underworld and of his adventure in the Cretan labyrinth of Cnossos are really two parts of a single confused myth. Theseus (‘he who disposes’) goes naked, except for his lion-skin, to the centre of the maze, there kills the bull-headed monster of the double-axe – the labris from which the word ‘labyrinth’ is derived – and returns safely: and the goddess who enables him to do so is the Goddess Ariadne whom the Welsh called Arianrhod. In the second part of the myth he fails in his Underworld expedition: he has to be rescued by Hercules, and his companion Peirithous remains behind like Gwair, perpetually sighing for deliverance. The myth of the hero who defeats Death was combined by the Greek mythographers with a historical event: the sack of the labyrinthine palace of Cnossos by Danaan raiders from Greece about 1400 BC and the defeat of King Minos, the Bull-king. Daedalus (‘the bright one’) similarly escapes from the Cretan labyrinth, guided by the Moon-goddess Pasiphaë, but without using violence; he was a Sun-hero of the Aegean colonists of Cumae, and of the Sardinians, as well as of the Athenians.

Caer Sidi in the Preiddeu Annwm is given a new synonym in each of the seven stanzas. It appears as Caer Rigor (‘the royal castle’) with a pun maybe on the Latin rigor mortis; Caer Colur (‘the gloomy castle’); Caer Pedryvan (‘four-cornered castle’), four times revolving; Caer Vediwid (‘the castle of the perfect ones’); Caer Ochren (‘the castle of the shelving side’ – i.e. entered from the side of a slope); Caer Vandwy (‘the castle on high’).

I do not know who the canonical seven were, but among those eligible for the honour were Theseus, Hercules, Amathaon, Arthur, Gwydion, Harpocrates, Kay, Owain, Daedalus, Orpheus and Cuchulain. (When Cuchulain, mentioned by Gwion in a poem, harrowed Hell, he brought back three cows and a magic cauldron.) Aeneas is unlikely to have been one of the seven. He did not die as the others did; he merely visited an oracular cave, just as King Saul had done at Endor, or Caleb at Machpelah. The castle that they entered – revolving, remote, royal, gloomy, lofty, cold, the abode of the Perfect Ones, with four corners, entered by a dark door on the shelving side of a hill -was the castle of death or the Tomb, the Dark Tower to which Childe Roland came in the ballad. This description fits the New Grange burial cave, but ‘four-cornered’ refers, I think, to the kist-vaen method of burial which was invented by the pre-Greek inhabitants of Northern Greece and the islands about Delos and thence conveyed to Western Europe by Bronze Age immigrants, the round-barrow men: the kist being a small rectangular stone box in which the dead body was laid in a crouched position. Odysseus may be said to have been ‘three periods in the castle of Arianrhod’ because he entered with twelve companions into the Cyclops’ cave, but escaped; was detained by Calypso on Ogygia, but escaped; and by the enchantress Circe on Aeaea – another sepulchral island – but escaped. Yet it is unlikely that Odysseus is intended: I think that Gwion is referring to Jesus Christ, whom the twelfth-century poet Dafydd Benfras makes visit a Celtic Annwm, and who escaped from the gloomy cave in the hillside in which he had been laid by Joseph of Arimathea. But how was Jesus ‘three periods in the Castle of Arianrhod’? I take this for a heresy making Jesus, as the Second Adam, a reincarnation of Adam, and, as the Davidic Messiah, a reincarnation also of David. The Age of Adam and the Age of David are particularized in Gwion’s Divregwawd Taliesin. Jesus is pictured there as still waiting in the heavens for the dawn of the Seventh Age: ‘Was it not to Heaven he went when he departed hence? And at the Day of Judgement he will come to us here. For the fifth age was the blessed one of David the Prophet. The sixth age is the age of Jesus, which shall last till the Day of Judgement.’ In the Seventh Age he would be called Taliesin.

Pwyll and Pryderi were successive rulers of the ‘Africans’ of Annwm in Pembroke, the earliest invaders of Wales; at their death, like Minos and Rhadamanthus of Crete, they became Lords of the Dead. It was from Pryderi, son of Rhiannon, that Gwydion stole the sacred swine and Gwair seems to have gone on a similar marauding expedition in the company of Arthur; for his prison called, in Triad 61, the Castle of Oeth and Anoeth is also the prison from which, according to Triad 50, Arthur was rescued by his page Goreu, son of Custennin; Gwair is thus to Arthur as Peirithoüs was to Theseus, and Goreu is to Arthur as Hercules was to Theseus. Possibly Gwion in the Romance is counting on the court-bards to guess ‘Arthur’, not ‘Jesus’, as the answer to ‘I was three periods in the Castle of Arianrhod’, since in Triad 50 Arthur is said to have been rescued by this same Goreu from three prisons – the Castle of Oeth and Anoeth; the Castle of Pendragon (‘Lord of Serpents’); the Dark Prison under the Stone – all of them death-prisons. Or is he covertly presenting Jesus as an incarnation of Arthur?

Prydwen was King Arthur’s magic ship; Llaminawg, in whose hands Arthur left the flashing sword, appears in the Morte D’Arthur as ‘Sir Bedivere’. Caer Wydr is Glastonbury, or Inis Gutrin, thought of as the glass castle1 in which Arthur’s soul was housed after death; Glastonbury is also the Isle of Avalon (Appletees) to which his dead body was conveyed by Morgan le Faye. The heavy blue chain is the water around the Island of Death. The myth of Cwy, like that of Gwair and Arthur, is no longer extant, but the ‘animal with the silver head’ is perhaps the White Roebuck of which we are in search, and the name of the Ox’s headband is one of the prime bardic secrets which Gwion in his Cyst Wy’r Beirdd (‘Reproof of the Bards’) taunts Heinin with not possessing:

About a hundred years before Gwion wrote this, the Glastonbury monks had dug up an oak coffin, sixteen feet underground, which they claimed to be Arthur’s, and faked a Gothic inscription on a leaden cross a foot long, said to have been found inside, which Giraldus Cambrensis saw and believed authentic. I think Gwion is here saying – ‘You bards think that Arthur’s end was in that oak coffin at Glastonbury. I know better.’ The inscription ran: ‘Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur with Guenevere his second wife in the Isle of Avalon.’

The joke is that the monks had really, it seems, discovered the body of Arthur, or Gwyn, or whatever the original name of the Avalon hero was. Christopher Hawkes describes in his Prehistoric Foundations of Europe this form of burial:

The nine damsels of the cauldron recall the nine virgins of the Isle of Sein in Western Brittany in the early fifth century AD, described by Pomponius Mela. They were possessed of magical powers and might be approached by those who sailed to consult them.1

The sacred king, then, is a Sun-king and returns at death to the Universal Mother, the White Moon Goddess, who imprisons him in the extreme north. Why the north? Because that is the quarter from which the Sun never shines, from which the wind brings snow; only dead suns are to be found in the cold polar north. The Sun-god is born at mid-winter when the Sun is weakest and has attained his most southerly station; therefore his representative, the Sun-king, is killed at the summer solstice when the Sun attains his most northerly station. The relation between Caer Sidi and Caer Arianrhod seems to be that the burial place of the dead king was a barrow on an island, either in the river or the sea, where his spirit lived under charge of oracular and orgiastic priestesses; but his soul went to the stars and there hopefully awaited rebirth in another king. And the evidence of the oak coffin at the Isle of Avalon points plainly to the derivation of the Arthur cult from the Eastern Mediterranean by way of the Amber Route, the Baltic and Denmark, between 1600 and 1400 BC; though the cult of other oracular heroes in Britain and Ireland is likely to be seven or eight centuries older.

In Britain the tradition of Spiral Castle survives in the Easter Maze dance of country villages, the mazes being called ‘Troy Town’ in England and in Wales ‘Caer-droia’. The Romans probably named them after the Troy Game, a labyrinthine dance of Asia Minor, performed by young noblemen at Rome under the Early Empire in memory of their Trojan origin; but Pliny records that Latin children performed it too. In Delos it was called the Crane Dance and was said to record the escape of Theseus from the Labyrinth. The maze dance seems to have come to Britain from the Eastern Mediterranean with the New Stone Age invaders of the third millennium BC, since ancient rough stone mazes of the same pattern as the English are found in Scandinavia and North-eastern Russia. On a rock slab near Bosinney in Cornwall, two mazes are carved; and another is carved on a massive granite block from the Wicklow Hills, now in the Dublin National Museum. These mazes have the same pattern, too: the Labyrinth of Daedalus shown on Cretan coins, and in ecclesiastical mazes of South-eastern Europe used for penitential purposes.