The White Goddess by Robert Graves Page B
Authors: Robert Graves
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spur;
The high sprigs of alder are on thy shield;
Bran art thou called, of the glittering branches.
Sure-hoofed is my steed in the day of battle:
The high sprigs of elder are in thy hand:
Bran thou art, by the branch thou bearest –
Amathaon the Good has prevailed .’
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 theMaccabee; 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
The high sprigs of alder are on thy shield;
Bran art thou called, of the glittering branches.
Sure-hoofed is my steed in the day of battle:
The high sprigs of elder are in thy hand:
Bran thou art, by the branch thou bearest –
Amathaon the Good has prevailed .’
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 theMaccabee; 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
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