HERCULES ON THE LOTUS

To sum up the historical argument.

‘Gwion’, a North Welsh cleric of the late thirteenth century, whose true name is not known but who championed the popular minstrels against the Court bards, wrote (or rewrote) a romance about a miraculous Child who possessed a secret doctrine that nobody could guess; this doctrine is incorporated in a series of mystical poems which belong to the romance. The romance is based on a more primitive original, of the ninth century AD, in which Creirwy and Afagddu, the children of Tegid Voel and Caridwen, probably played a more important part than in Gwion’s version. (This original has been lost though, strangely enough, the same dramatis personae occur in Shakespeare’s Tempest: Prospero, who like Tegid Voel lived on a magic island; the black screaming hag Sycorax, ‘Pig Raven’, mother of Caliban the ugliest man alive; Prosperous daughter Miranda the most beautiful woman, whom Caliban tries to rape; Ariel the miraculous Child whom Sycorax imprisons. Perhaps Shakespeare heard the story from his Welsh schoolmaster at Stratford, the original of Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor.)

The miraculous Child set a riddle, based on a knowledge not only of British and Irish mythology, but of the Greek New Testament and Septuagint, the Hebrew Scriptures and Apocrypha, and Latin and Greek mythology. The answer to the riddle is a list of names which correspond closely with a list that Roderick O’Flaherty, the seventeenth-century confidant of the learned Irish antiquary Duald Mac Firbis, claimed to be the original letter-names of the Ogham alphabet, which is found in numerous inscriptions in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England and the Isle of Man, some of them pre-Christian. Its invention is ascribed by Irish tradition to the Goidelic god Ogma Sun-Face, who according to the account given by Lucian of Samosata, who wrote in the second century AD, was represented in Celtic art as a mixture of the gods Cronos, Hercules and Apollo. A connexion between the Ogham found in inscriptions and a fifth-century BC Greek alphabet from Etruria, the Formello- Cervetri, has been proved; nevertheless there is evidence that an earlier form of Ogham, with a slightly different order of letters, was current in Ireland before the Druids of Gaul came into contact with the Formello-Cervetri alphabet. It may also have been current in Britain where, according to Julius Caesar, the Druids of Gaul went for their university training in secret doctrine.

I first suspected that an alphabet was contained in Gwion’s conundrum when I began to restore the purposely jumbled text of his Battle of the Trees, which refers to a primitive British tradition of the capture of an oracular shrine by the guessing of a god’s name. This capture seems to have taken place early in the fourth century BC when the Belgic Brythons, worshippers of the Ash-god Gwydion, with the help of an agricultural tribe already settled in Britain, seized the national shrine, perhaps Avebury, from the reigning priesthood, two of whose gods were Arawn and Bran. Bran is the Celtic name for the ancient Crow-god, variously known as Apollo, Saturn, Cronos and Aesculapius, who was also a god of healing and whose worship had been combined with that of a Thunder-god, pictured as a ram or bull, known variously as Zeus, Tantalus, Jupiter, Telamon and Hercules. The letter-names of Gwion’s alphabet apparently conceal the Name of the transcendent God, whom Caesar calls Dis, worshipped in Britain and Gaul. It may be inferred that the earlier alphabet, containing a pre-Belgic religious secret, had a different series of letter-names from those contained in Gwion’s conundrum, that the alphabetical order began with B.L.N., not B.L.F., and that after the capture of the shrine the Divine Name was altered.

It now remains to be discovered:

Gwion gives us the first point in our renewed chase of the Roebuck by introducing into his Romance an Elegy on Hercules, which I will quote presently; but ‘Hercules’ is a word of very many meanings. Cicero distinguishes six different legendary figures named Hercules; Varro, forty-four. His name, in Greek Heracles, means ‘Glory of Hera’, and Hera was an early Greek name for the Death-goddess who had charge of the souls of sacred kings and made oracular heroes of them. He is, in fact, a composite deity consisting of a great many oracular heroes of different nations at different stages of religious development; some of whom became real gods while some remained heroes. This makes him the most perplexing character in Classical mythology; for the semi-historical Pelopid prince of the generation before the Trojan War has been confused with various heroes and deities called Hercules, and these with one another.

Hercules first appears in legend as a pastoral sacred king and, perhaps because shepherds welcome the birth of twin lambs, is a twin himself. His characteristics and history can be deduced from a mass of legends, folk customs and megalithic monuments. He is the rain-maker of his tribe and a sort of human thunder-storm. Legends connect him with Libya and the Atlas Mountains; he may well have originated thereabouts in Palaeolithic times. The priests of Egyptian Thebes, who called him ‘Shu’, dated his origin as ‘17,000 years before the reign of King Amasis’. He carries an oak-club, because the oak provides his beasts and his people with mast and because it attracts lightning more than any other tree. His symbols are the acorn; the rock–dove, which nests in oaks as well as in clefts of rock; the mistletoe, or loranthus; and the serpent. All these are sexual emblems. The dove was sacred to the Love-goddess of Greece and Syria; the serpent was the most ancient of phallic totem-beasts; the cupped acorn stood for the glans penis in both Greek and Latin; the mistletoe was an all-heal and its names viscus (Latin) and ixias (Greek) are connected with vis and ischus (strength) – probably because of the spermal viscosity of its berries, sperm being the vehicle of life. This Hercules is male leader of all orgiastic rites and has twelve archer companions, including his spear-armed twin, who is his tanist or deputy. He performs an annual green-wood marriage with a queen of the woods, a sort of Maid Marian. He is a mighty hunter and makes rain, when it is needed, by rattling an oak-club thunderously in a hollow oak and stirring a pool with an oak branch – alternatively, by rattling pebbles inside a sacred colocinth-gourd or, later, by rolling black meteoric stones inside a wooden chest – and so attracting thunderstorms by sympathetic magic.

The manner of his death can be reconstructed from a variety of legends, folk customs and other religious survivals. At mid-summer, at the end of a half-year reign, Hercules is made drunk with mead and led into the middle of a circle of twelve stones arranged around an oak, in front of which stands an altar-stone; the oak has been lopped until it is T-shaped. He is bound to it with willow thongs in the ‘five-fold bond’ which joins wrists, neck and ankles together, beaten by his comrades till he faints, then flayed, blinded, castrated, impaled with a mistletoe stake, and finally hacked into joints on the altar-stone.1 His blood is caught in a basin and used for sprinkling the whole tribe to make them vigorous and fruitful. The joints are roasted at twin fires of oak-loppings, kindled with sacred fire preserved from a lightning-blasted oak or made by twirling an alder-or cornel-wood fire-drill in an oak log. The trunk is then uprooted and split into faggots which are added to the flames. The twelve merry-men rush in a wild figure-of-eight dance around the fires, singing ecstatically and tearing at the flesh with their teeth. The bloody remains are burnt in the fire, all except the genitals and the head. These are put into an alder-wood boat and floated down a river to an islet; though the head is sometimes cured with smoke and preserved for oracular use. His tanist succeeds him and reigns for the remainder of the year, when he is sacrificially killed by a new Hercules.

To this type of Hercules belong such diverse characters as Hercules of Oeta, Orion the Hunter of Crete, Polyphemus the Cyclops, Samson the Danite, Cuchulain of Muirthemne the Irish Sun-hero, Ixion the Lapith – who is always depicted stretched in a ‘five-fold bond’ around a Sunwheel – Agag the Amalekite, Romulus of Rome, Zeus, Janus, Anchises, The Dagda and Hermes. This Hercules is the leader of his people in war and hunting and his twelve chieftains are pledged to respect his authority; but his name commemorates his subservience to the Goddess, the Queen of the Woods, whose priestess is the tribal law-giver and disposer of all the amenities of life. The health of the people is bound up with his and he is burdened with numerous royal taboos.

In the Classical myth which authorizes his sovereignty he is a miraculous child born in a shower of gold; strangles a serpent in his cradle, which is also a boat, and is credited (like Zeus) with causing the spurt of milk that made the Milky Way; as a young man he is the undefeated monster-slayer of his age; kills and dismembers a monstrous boar; begets countless sons but no daughters – title is still, in fact, matrilinearly conveyed; willingly undertakes the world-burden of the giant Atlas; does wonderful feats with his oak-club and his arrows; masters the wild horse Arion and brings up the Dog Cerberus from the Underworld; is betrayed by his lovely bride; flays himself by tearing off his poisoned shirt; climbs in agony to the top of Mount Oeta; fells and splits an oak for his own pyre; is consumed; flies up to heaven on the smoke of the pyre in the form of an eagle, and is introduced by the Goddess of Wisdom into the company of the Immortals.

The divine names Bran, Saturn, Cronos must also be referred to this primitive religious system. They are applied to the ghost of Hercules that floats off in the alder-wood boat after his midsummer sacrifice. His tanist, or other self, appearing in Greek legend as Poeas who lighted Hercules’ pyre and inherited his arrows, succeeds him for the second half of the year; having acquired royal virtue by marriage with the queen, the representative of the White Goddess, and by eating some royal part of the dead man’s body – heart, shoulder or thigh-flesh. He is in turn succeeded by the New Year Hercules, a reincarnation of the murdered man, who beheads him and, apparently, eats his head. This alternate eucharistic  sacrifice made royalty continuous, each king being in turn the Sun-god beloved of the reigning Moon-goddess.

But when these cannibalistic rites were abandoned and the system was gradually modified until a single king reigned for a term of years, Saturn-Cronos-Bran became a mere Old Year ghost, permanently overthrown by Jupiter-Zeus-Belin though yearly conjured up for placation at the Saturnalia or Yule feast. Here at last we can guess the political motive behind Amathaon’s betrayal of his cousin Bran’s name at the Battle of the Trees for the benefit of his friend Gwydion: did the Bronze Age Amathaonians, who worshipped the Immortal Beli in his Stonehenge temple, find that they had less in common with their White-Goddess-worshipping overlords than with the invading Iron Age Belgic tribes whose god Odin (Gwydion) had emancipated himself from the tutelage of the White Goddess Freya? Once the Bran priesthood was banished from Salisbury Plain and driven up North, they would be free to institute a permanent kingship over all Southern Britain under the patronage of Belin; and this is exactly what they seem to have done, after an amicable arrangement with the priesthood of Odin, to whom they gave the control of the national oracle as a reward for their help in the battle.

The next type of Hercules is an agricultural as well as a pastoral king and specializes in the cultivation of barley, so that he is sometimes confused with Eleusinian Triptolemus, Syrian Tammuz or Egyptian Maneros. Early portraits of him, with lion skin, club and grain sprouting from his shoulders, have been found in Mesopotamian cities of the third millennium BC. In the Eastern Mediterranean he reigns alternatively with his twin, as in the double kingdoms of Argos, Lacedaemon, Corinth, Alba Longa, and Rome. Co-kings of this type are Iphiclus, twin to Tirynthian Hercules; Pollux, twin to Castor; Lynceus, twin to Idas; Calaïs, twin to Zetes; Remus, twin to Romulus; Demophoön, twin to Triptolemus; the Edomite Perez, twin to Zarah; Abel, twin to Cain; and many more. Hercules is now lover to fifty water-priestesses of the Mountain-goddess in whose honour he wears a lion’s skin. The twins’ joint reign is fixed at eight years, apparently because at every hundredth lunar month occurs a rough approximation of lunar and solar times. Llew Llaw Gyffes (‘the Lion with the Steady Hand’) is true to type when in the Romance of Math the Son of Mathonwy he takes Gwydion as his twin to visit his mother Arianrhod. For each year that the reign of this agricultural Hercules is prolonged he offers a child-victim in his stead; which explains the Greek legends of Hercules killing children by accident or in a fit of madness, and the destruction by fire, after a temporary investiture as king, of various unfortunate young princes, among them Gwern, nephew of Bran; Phaëthon, son of Helios; Icarus, son of Daedalus, who flew too near the sun; Demophoön, son of Celeus of Eleusis, whom Demeter was trying to immortalize; and Dionysus son of Cretan Zeus. It also explains the child-sacrifices of Phoenicia, including those offered to Jehovah Melkarth in the Valley of Hinnom (or Gehenna) the home of the undying serpent, where the sacrificial fire was never quenched.

The custom of burning a child to death as an annual surrogate for the sacred king is well illustrated in the myth of Thetis, Peleus and Achilles. Peleus was an Achaean fratricide in exile from Aegina and became King of Iolcus with a co-king Acastus, in succession to the co-kings Pelias and Neleus. Thetis, a Thessalian Sea goddess, is described by the mythographers either as a daughter of Cheiron the Centaur, or as one of the fifty Nereids, from whom she was chosen to be a wife to Zeus. Zeus changed his mind because of an oracle and gave her in marriage to Peleus, to whom she bore seven children, six of whom she burned to death. The seventh, Achilles, was rescued by Peleus in the nick of time – like the infant Aesculapius. The first six had been given immortality by the burning process; with Achilles the process had not yet been completed – his heel was still vulnerable. Thetis fled and Peleus gave Achilles into the custody of Cheiron who tutored him; later Achilles ruled over the Myrmidons of Pthiotis and brought a contingent of them to fight at Troy. When offered the choice of a brief but glorious life or a long and undistinguished one, he chose the brief one.

The myth has kept its main outlines pretty well despite the inability of later editors to understand the system of matrilinear succession. There was a shrine of the Moon-goddess Artemis, alias Nereis, or Thetis, at Iolcus, the chief port of Southern Thessaly, with an attached college of fifty priestesses. This Artemis was a patroness of fishermen and sailors. One of the priestesses was chosen every fiftieth month as representative of the Goddess; perhaps she was the winner of a race. She took a yearly consort who became the Oak-king, or Zeus, of the region and was sacrificed at the close of his term of office. By the time that the Achaeans had established the Olympian religion in Thessaly (it is recorded that all the gods and goddesses attended Peleus’s marriage to Thetis) the term had been extended to eight, or perhaps seven, years, and a child sacrificed every winter solstice until the term was complete. (Seven years instead of the Great Year of eight seems to be a blunder of the mythographers; but from the Scottish witch-ballad of True Thomas it appears that seven years was the normal term for the Queen of Elphame’s consort to reign, and the Scottish witch cult had close affinities with primitive Thessalian religion.)

Achilles, the lucky seventh (or perhaps eighth) child who was saved because Peleus himself had to die, was apparently one of the Centaurs of near-by Pelion with whom the Nereids of Iolcus had ancient exogamic ties and from whom Peleus would naturally choose his child victims – they would not be his own sons by Thetis. When Achilles grew up he became king of the Myrmidons of Pthiotis: presumably by marriage with the tribal representative of the Goddess. He can hardly have inherited the title from Peleus. (Myrmidon means ‘ant’, so it is likely that the wryneck, which feeds on ants and nests in willow-trees, sacred to the Goddess, was the local totem-bird; Philyra, Cheiron’s mother, is traditionally associated with the wryneck.) It is established that there was an Achilles cult in Greece before the Trojan War was fought, so the brief but glorious life was probably that of a stay-at-home king with a sacred heel who won immortality at death by becoming an oracular hero. Thetis was credited with the power to change her appearance; she was, in fact, served by various colleges of priestesses each with a different totem beast or bird – mare, she-bear, crane, fish, wryneck and so on.

The same myth has been twisted in a variety of ways. In some versions the emphasis is on the mock-marriage, which was an integral part of the coronation. The Argive myth of the fifty Danaids who were married to the fifty sons of Aegyptus and killed all but one on their common wedding night, and the Perso-Egypto-Greek myth of Tobit and Raguel’s daughter whose seven previous husbands had all been killed by the demon Asmodeus – in Persian, Aēshma Daēva – on their wedding night, are originally identical.

The various contradictory versions of the Danaid myth help us to understand the ritual from which it originated. Pindar in his Fourth Pythian Ode says that the brides were pardoned, purified by Hermes and Athene and offered as prizes to the victors of public games. Later authorities, such as Ovid and Horace, say that they were not pardoned but condemned everlastingly to pour water into a vessel full of holes. Herodotus says that they brought the mysteries of Demeter to Argos and taught them to the Pelasgian women. Others say that four of them were worshipped at Argos because they provided the city with water. The real story seems to be that the Danaids were an Argive college of fifty priestesses of the Barley-goddess Danaë, who was interested in giving rain to the crops and was worshipped under four different divine titles; pouring water through a vessel with holes so that it looked like rain was their usual rain-bringing charm. Every four years at the fiftieth lunar month a contest was held as to who should become the Hercules, or Zeus, of the next four years and the lover of these fifty priestesses. This term was afterwards prolonged to eight years, with the usual yearly sacrifice of a child. Danaan Argos was captured by the Sons of Aegyptus who invaded the Peloponnese from Syria, and many of the Danaans who resisted them were driven northward out of Greece; as has already been mentioned.

In the Book of Tobit, Tobit is the lucky eighth, the new Zeus bridegroom, who escapes his fate when the reigning Zeus has to die at the end of his term. Asmodeus is the Persian counterpart of Set, the yearly murderer of Osiris, but he is charmed away with the fish of immortality and flees to his southern deserts. Tobit’s dog is a helpful clue; he always accompanied Hercules Melkarth, or his Persian counterpart Sraosha, or the Greek Aesculapius, wherever he went.

A typical set of taboos binding this Hercules is quoted by Sir James Frazer in his Golden Bough: they were applied to the Flamen Dialis, the successor of the Sacred King of Rome whose war-leadership passed to the twin Consuls at the foundation of the Republic.

Frazer should have added that the Flamen owed his position to a sacred marriage with the Flaminica: Plutarch records in his Roman Questions (50) that he could not divorce her, and had to resign his office if she died.

In Ireland this Hercules was named Cenn Cruaich, ‘the Lord of the Mound’, but after his supersession by a more benignant sacred king was remembered as Cromm Cruaich (‘the Bowed One of the Mound’). In a Christian poem occurring in the eleventh-century Book of Leinster he is thus described:

It is likely enough that this cult was introduced into Ireland in the reign of Heremon, the nineteenth King of All Ireland, the date of whose accession is traditionally given as 1267 BC, though Dr. Joyce, a reliable modern authority, makes it 1015 BC. Heremon, one of the invading Milesians from Spain, became sole monarch of Ireland by his victory over the armies of the North and put his enemies under heavy tribute.

(The Milesians of Irish legend are said to have originated in Greece early in the second millennium BC and to have taken many generations to reach Ireland, after wandering about the Mediterranean. The Milesians of Greek legend claimed descent from Miletus, a son of Apollo, who emigrated from Crete to Caria in very early times, and built the city of Miletus; there was another city of the same name in Crete. The Irish Milesians similarly claimed to have visited Crete and to have gone thence to Syria, and thence by way of Carenia in Asia Minor to Gaetulia in North Africa, Baelduno or Baelo, a port near Cadiz, and Breagdun or Brigantium (now Compostella), in North-western Spain. Among their ancestors were Gadel – perhaps a deity of the river Gadylum on the southern coast of the Black Sea near Trebizond; ‘Niulus or Neolus of Argos’; Cecrops of Athens; and ‘Scota daughter of the king of Egypt’.

If this account makes any sense it refers to a westward migration from the Aegean to Spain in the late thirteenth century BC when, as we have seen, a wave of Indo-Europeans from the north, among them the Dorian Greeks, was slowly displacing the Mycenaean ‘Peoples of the Sea’ from Greece, the Aegean Islands, and Asia Minor.

Neleus (if this is the ‘Niulus or Neolus’ of the Irish legend) was a Minyan, an Aeolian Greek, who reigned over Pylos, a Peloponnese kingdom that traded extensively with the western Mediterranean. The Achaeans subdued him in a battle from which only his son Nestor (a garrulous old man at the time of the Trojan War) escaped. Neleus was reckoned a son of the Goddess Tyro, and she was mother also of Aeson the Minyan, who was rejuvenated in the Cauldron, and Amythaon – Amathaon again? Tyro was probably the Goddess of the Tyrrhenians who were expelled from Asia Minor and sailed to Italy a century or two later. These Tyrrhenians, usually known as Etruscans, dated their national existence from 967 BC. Cecrops appears in Greek legend as the first Greek king of Attica and the reputed originator of barley-cake offerings to Zeus. Scota, who has been confused in Irish legend with the ancestor of the Cottians, is apparently Scotia (‘The Dark One’), a well-known Greek title of the Sea-goddess of Cyprus. The Milesians would naturally have brought the cult of the Sea-goddess and of her son Hercules with them to Ireland, and found the necessary stone-altars already in position.)

In the Peloponnese the Olympic Games were the occasion of this agricultural Hercules’s death and of the election of his successor. The legend is that they were founded in celebration of Zeus’s emasculation of Cronos; since the tomb of the early Achaean Oak-king Pelops was at Olympia, this means that the oak-cult was there superimposed on the Pelasgian barley-cult. The most ancient event in the Games was a race between fifty young priestesses of the Goddess Hera for the privilege of becoming the new Chief Priestess. Hercules was cut into pieces and eucharistically eaten as before, until perhaps the later Achaeans put an end to the practice, and for centuries after retained some of his oak-tree characteristics: he was known as the ‘green Zeus’. The sacrifice of the agricultural Hercules, or the victim offered in his stead, continued to take place within a stone-circle dedicated to the Barley Mother. At Hermion, near Corinth, the stone-circle was in ritual use until Christian times.

Hercules of Canopus, or Celestial Hercules, is a fusion of the first two types of Hercules with Asclepius, or Aesculapius, the God of Healing, himself a fusion of the Barley-god with a Fire-god. Aesculapius is described by mythographers as a son of Apollo, partly because Apollo in Classical times was identified with the Sun-god Helios, partly because the priesthood of the Aesculapian cult, which was derived from that of Thoth, the Egyptian god of healing and inventor of letters, had been driven from Phoenicia (about the year 1400 BC?) and taken refuge in the islands of Cos, Thasos and Delos, where Apollo was by then the ruling deity. When in the fifth century BC Herodotus tried to extract information about Canopic Hercules from the Egyptian priests, they referred him to Phoenicia as the land of his origin. We know that the Phoenician Hercules, Melkarth (‘King of the City’), died yearly and that the quail was his bird of resurrection; which means that when the migrant quail arrives in Phoenicia early in March from the South, the oak begins to leaf and the new King celebrates his royal marriage. Melkarth was revived when Esmun (‘He whom we invoke’), the local Aesculapius, held a quail to his nose. The quail is notorious for its pugnacity and lechery. But at Canopus, in the Nile Delta, the cults of Melkarth and Esmun, or Hercules and Aesculapius, appear to have been fused by Egyptian philosophers: Hercules was worshipped both as the healer and as the healed. Apollo himself had reputedly been born on Ortygia (‘Quail Island’), the islet off Delos; so Canopic Hercules is Apollo, too, in a sense – is Apollo, Aesculapius (alias Cronos, Saturn or Bran), Thoth, Hermes (whom the Greeks identified with Thoth), Dionysus (who in the early legends is an alias of Hermes), and Melkarth, to whom King Solomon, as son-in-law to King Hiram, was priest, and who immolated himself on a pyre, like Hercules of Oeta. Hercules Melkarth was also worshipped at Corinth under the name of Melicertes, the son of the Pelasgian White Goddess Ino of Pelion.

Hercules becomes more glorious still, as Celestial Hercules. The mythographers record that he borrowed the golden cup of the Sun, shaped like a water lily or lotus, for the homeward journey from one of his Labours. This was the cup in which the Sun, after sinking in the West, nightly floated round again to the East along the world-girdling Ocean stream. The lotus, which grows as the Nile rises, typified fertility, and so attached itself to the Egyptian sun-cult. ‘Hercules’ in Classical Greece became in fact another name for the Sun. Celestial Hercules was worshipped both as the undying Sun, and as the continually dying and continually renewed Spirit of the Year – that is, both as a god and as a demi-god. This is the type of Hercules whom the Druids worshipped as Ogma Sun-face, the lion-skinned inventor of Letters,1 god of eloquence, god of healing, god of fertility, god of prophecy; and whom the Greeks worshipped as ‘assigner of titles’, as ruler of the Zodiac, as president of festivals, as founder of cities, as healer of the sick, as patron of archers and athletes.

Hercules is represented in Greek art as a bull-necked champion, and may for all practical purposes be identified with the demi-god Dionysus of Delphi, whose totem was a white bull. Plutarch of Delphi, a priest of Apollo, in his essay On Isis and Osiris compares the rites of Osiris with those of Dionysus. He writes:

Thus ‘Hercules’ is seen to be also another name for Osiris whose yearly death is still celebrated in Egypt, even after thirteen centuries of Mohammedanism. Rubber is now used for the traditional fertility symbol; prodigiously inflated, it still excites the same cries of laughter and grief as in the days of Joseph the Patriarch and Joseph the Carpenter.

Plutarch carefully distinguishes Apollo (Hercules as god) from Dionysus (Hercules as demi-god). This Apollo never dies, never changes his shape; he is eternally young, strong and beautiful. Dionysus perpetually changes, like Proteus the Pelasgian god, or Periclymenus the Minyan, son of Neleus, or the ancient Irish Uath Mac Immomuin (‘Horror son of Terror’), into an infinity of shapes. So Pentheus in the Bacchae of Euripides charges him to appear ‘as a wild bull, as a many-headed snake, or as a fire-breathing lion’ – whichever he pleases: almost exactly in the words of the Welsh bard Cynddelw, a contemporary of Gruffudd ap Kynan’s: Yn rith llew rac llyw goradein, yn rith dreic rac dragon prydein.

Thus in Britain, Amathaon was Hercules as Dionysus; his father Beli was Hercules as Apollo.

Plutarch writes, in his essay On the Ei at Delphi, revealing as much Orphic secret doctrine as he dares:

That Gwion knew Hercules to be another name for Ogma Sun-face, the inventor of the Ogham alphabet, is made perfectly clear in his Elegy on ‘Ercwlf’ where the alphabet figures as the four pillars, of five letters each, that support the whole edifice of literature:

‘The shield of Mordei’ is a reference to the famous Battle of Catterick Bridge in the late sixth century AD: 

The ‘he’ is a British hero named Erthgi, presumably a reincarnation of Ercwlf, who ‘went to Catterick in the dawn with the aspect of a prince in the shield-guarded battle-field’. The reference to Hercules as ‘Chief of Baptism’ identifies him with St. John the Baptist, in whose honour Hercules’s midsummer fires were lighted in Gwion’s day. As Sir James Frazer points out, Midsummer Day was always a water as well as a fire festival. ‘May the Trinity give thee a merciful day of judgement’ is Gwion’s view of Hercules as resident ‘in limbo patrum’ – in the abode of the just who had died before Jesus Christ’s advent. Baptism was not, of course, invented by the Christians. They had it from St. John, and he had it from the Hemero-baptists, a mysterious Hebrew sect usually regarded as a branch of the Pythagorean Essenes, who worshipped Jehovah in his Sun-god aspect. It should be observed that the devotees of the Thracian goddess Cotytto, the mother of the Cottians, had employed mystagogues called ‘Baptists’ – whether this was because they baptized the devotee before the orgies, or because they were charged with the ritual dipping (dyeing) of clothes or hair, is disputed – and that both the ancient Irish and ancient British used baptism before the Christians came. This is recorded in the Irish tales of Conall Derg and Conall Kernach, and the Welsh tale of Gwri of the Golden Hair.

Taliesin’s name in Welsh means ‘radiant brow’, a characteristic of Apollo’s, but the ‘Tal’ syllable is often present in the primitive names of Hercules. In Crete he was Talus, the man of bronze, whom Medea killed. In Pelasgia he was the tortured Tan-talus, from whose name the word ‘tantalize’ derives. The Irish Tailltean Games are probably called after an agricultural Hercules the first syllable of whose name was Tal. In Syria he was Telmen. In Greece he was Atlas Telamon, and ‘Atlas’, like ‘Telamon’, was derived from the root Tla or Tal which contains the senses ‘take upon oneself’, ‘dare’, and ‘suffer’. Dr. MacCulloch suggests that ‘Taliesin’ is also a divine name and that the swallowing of the grain of corn by the black hen in the Romance of Taliesin proves Taliesin to have been a Barley-god.

The time has now come to draw closely around the thicket where the Roebuck is known to be harboured. And here is a hunting song from Gwion’s poem, Angar Cyvyndawd: 

But we must transpose the lines of the couplet, because logically the axe comes first, then the tree is cut down, and one cannot put the oak-stump into one’s shovel unless it has been reduced to ashes – which are afterwards used to fertilize the fields. So:

If one looks carefully again at the names of the fifteen consonants of the Boibel-Loth, or the Babel-Lota, one notices clear correspondences with Greek legend. Not only ‘Taliesin’ with ‘Talus’, and ‘Teilmon’ with ‘Telamon’, but ‘Moiria’ with the ‘Moirae’, the Three Fates; and ‘Cailep’ with ‘Calypso’, daughter of Atlas, whose island of Ogygia – placed by Plutarch in the Irish Seas – was protected by the very same enchantment as Morgan le Faye’s Avalon, Cerridwen’s Caer Sidi, or Niamh of the Golden Hair’s ‘Land of Youth’. Put the whole series of letter-names into the nearest Greek words that make any sort of sense, using Latin characters and allowing for the difference between Greek and Irish vowels (the ancillary I in Irish is used as a sign of a long vowel) and for transposition of letters. Retain the digamma (F or V) in words in which it originally occurred, such as ACHAIVA and DAVIZO, and use the Aeolic A for long E, in FORĒMENOS, NE-ĒGATOS, GĒTHEO.

The consonants spell out the familiar story of Hercules in three chapters of five words each:

The vowels do not spell out a story but they characterize the progress of Hercules through the five stations of the year, typified by the five petals of the Lotus-cup – Birth, Initiation, Marriage, Rest from Labour, and Death:

The boibalis or boibalus (also boubalis or boubalus) is the ferocious Libyan white antelope-ox or leucoryx, from which according to Herodotus the Phoenicians made the curved sides of their lyres – with which they celebrated Hercules Melkarth.

Gwion’s version of the alphabet, with Rhea for Riuben, is older than O’Flaherty’s if O’Flaherty’s ‘Riuben’ stands for Rymbonao, ‘I swing about again’ – a word first used in the second century AD; the difference between Gwion’s ‘Salome’, and O’Flaherty’s ‘Salia’ also suggests that Gwion had an older version. That he has altered ‘Telamon’ to ‘Taliesin’ suggests that he is offering Talasinoös, ‘he that dares to suffer’, as an alternative to ‘Telamon’, which has the same meaning. Ne-esthan, the Greek Septuagint transliteration of ‘Nehushtan’ (2 Kings, XVIII, 4) as an equivalent of ne-ãgaton is puzzling. But since Nehushtan was a name of contempt, meaning ‘a piece of brass’, said to have been given by King Hezekiah to the therapeutic Serpent or Seraph when idolatrously worshipped by his subjects, it is possible that Gwion read the original holy name as the Greek Neo-sthenios, or Neo-sthenaros, ‘with new strength’, of which ‘Nehushtan’ was a Hebrew parody. This would imply that a Jew of Hellenistic times, not Hezekiah, invented the parody name; which is historically more plausible than the Biblical account. For it is incredible that Hezekiah took exception to idolatry: the Jews attempted to dispense with idols only in post-Exilic times.

But though we have learned the secret story of the Spirit of the Year, the Name of the transcendent God still remains hidden. The obvious place to look for it is among the vowels, which are separated from the Hercules story told by the consonants; but Dog, Lapwing, and Roebuck must have learned wisdom after the Battle of the Trees and hidden their secret more deeply even than before.

Gwion evidently knew the Name, and it was this knowledge that gave him his authority at Maelgwn’s Court. He says in the Cyst Wy’r Beirdd (‘Reproof of the Bards’):

The best hope of guessing it lies in finding out first what the Name was that Gwydion succeeded in discovering with Amathaon’s aid, and then what refinement he made on his discovery.