Read Online The White Goddess by Robert Graves - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Robert Graves
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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 barnaclegoose 1 ), 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:
6000–3000 BC
Old Stone Age hunters, not numerous, maintained a few settlements in scattered places.
3000– 2 500 BC
Occasional and gradual immigration of New Stone Age hunters who brought polished stone axes with them and the art of making rough pots.
2500–2000 BC
Regular traffic across the English Channel and invasion by New StoneAge long-headed agriculturists, who domesticated animals, practised flint-mining on a large scale and made crude ornamented pottery which has affinities with the ware found in burials in the Baltic islands of Bornholm and Aland. They came from Libya, by way of Spain, Southern and Northern France, or by way of Spain, Portugal and Brittany; some of them went on from France to the Baltic, and then crossed over into Eastern England after trade contact with the Black Sea area. They introduced megalithic burials of the long-barrow
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 barnaclegoose 1 ), 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:
6000–3000 BC
Old Stone Age hunters, not numerous, maintained a few settlements in scattered places.
3000– 2 500 BC
Occasional and gradual immigration of New Stone Age hunters who brought polished stone axes with them and the art of making rough pots.
2500–2000 BC
Regular traffic across the English Channel and invasion by New StoneAge long-headed agriculturists, who domesticated animals, practised flint-mining on a large scale and made crude ornamented pottery which has affinities with the ware found in burials in the Baltic islands of Bornholm and Aland. They came from Libya, by way of Spain, Southern and Northern France, or by way of Spain, Portugal and Brittany; some of them went on from France to the Baltic, and then crossed over into Eastern England after trade contact with the Black Sea area. They introduced megalithic burials of the long-barrow
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