Part VII
CELTIC MYTHOLOGY AND CHRISTIANITY, THE SANGREAL, AND THE ARTHURIAN CYCLES
There are some who say the Keltoi were incapable of human sacrifice. To them I say don’t be a bunch of sissies. Okay, that whole "burning criminals in a giant wicker man" thing might have been Julius Caesar’s propaganda, but hey, he wasn’t that prone to lying, right? These are the sort of people who want a nice, airy-fairy history for England and a nice magickal history to root themselves in in America. Remember, this people’s cousins were the Vikings. These are the people who produced Boudicca, who burned Londinium practically to the ground and slaughtered the Romans there.
Celtic Mythology
Mind you, almost everything we know about the Celts comes from secondary sources. Julius Caesar’s campaigns, the writings of Christian monks, the half remembered fragments of Gods and Goddesses turned to knights and ladies in the Mabinogion, the great welsh epic cycles, the Irish tales of the Ulstermen and CuChulainn. The Celts had no writings, and very little artwork. Their tales were oral, sung, and learned by bards in their colleges. What evidence we have of their culture is in their goldwork. Frightening, staring-eyed faces; stylised animals like the White Horse of Uffington, a far cry from the anatomical correctness of the Greeks and Romans, gods part animal, with mouths sprouting trees and severed heads. The head was sacred to the Celts, you see, and there are a few stories about magical heads. In fact one of the stories about the god Bran the Blessed is that after he died, his head continued to talk on it’s own, and guided his men to the site of London where it is apparently buried beneath the white tower (the tower of London).
About the otherworld, the world of the dead. The spirits of the ancestors and the fae wasn’t underground, or overhead for the Celts. The Kingdom of Arawn was over the hill, through the hidden door, under the surface of the murky pool, behind the waterfall, beyond the seventh wave. It was the otherworld, not the underworld, existing in the same space and time as this one. At Samhain (Halloween) when the veil between the worlds became thin, the residents of the otherworld could wander over to visit their families, or the people who they watched over. The line between a genius loci, a hearth spirit, the spirit of an ancestor, and a faery is a thin one.
The Fae could be one of several things. Before the Celts migrated to the British Isles, there is evidence of another people, small, dark haired and thin. The Celts had a habit of moving into a place, and adopting the local customs, living alongside the local people. It’s been suggested that the Fae (also known as the Tuatha de Danaan, the Sidhe) could have been a race memory of this people. The Irish legend says that when the Milesians (the name for the Celts) came to Ireland from beyond the seventh wave, they ousted the Tuatha de Danaan (people of the goddess Dana), who then fled under the Earth and across the sea to the Land of Tir Na Nogh. This is apparently where Fendegist went. He probably just died, though.
But back to the human sacrifice, the idea of the King (Chapter 13) being the one chosen to go into the underworld to bring back the fertility of the land is an old one, and appears in many cultures. In Western Asia and spreading later to Greece and Rome, the young god Attis/Tammuz/Dumuzi dies each year and goes to the land of the underworld goddess Cybele/Ereshkigal beneath the earth to fertilise the crops. It also appears in a legend of the Celts, where a king refuses to sleep with an old woman, who represents the goddess of his land, which then becomes barren, until he agrees, at which point she turns into a beautiful maiden, and the fertility returns.
In Part I, I mentioned a conversation with Rik in Bramhall Park, location of Bramall Hall. It is there one can find a sculpture of the Green Man. Earlier, I mentioned the foliate heads. They appear on many churches, and other municipal buildings. The head of a man, covered in leaves, often oak leaves, possibly with branches sprouting from his mouth. This images was the badge of the Foresters Guild, who cared for the woodlands of England. It has been suggested, however, that the foliate head may have an older significance.
Back in the eighties, on the western edge of the town of Wilmslow, Cheshire in the northwest of England, Lindow Common was being excavated. The area itself is a mystical one, but only since the nineteenth century really. Alderley Edge is a long backed hill that marks the edge of the Pennines, the hills that form the backbone of England. There are old copper mines riddling the Edge. I’ve been down them, it’s spooky, but then caves always scare me. They represent the womb of mother earth, and I’m not quite ready to be reborn! I would suggest reading Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath. His writing is very typical Celtic, but marries in the Norse and Anglo-saxon, like Tolkien. He fills the Edge with Svartalfar (Swarthy Elves): horrible goblins; Dokkalfar (Dark Elves): dwarves (yes, the Nibelungen/Hikari-No); and Ljosalfar (Light Elves): the thinner, brighter Fae.
Back to Lindow. I didn’t realise why the discovery in the excavation site on the common frightened me so much as a child. I didn’t know that it was llyn ddu in Cymraeg: the Black Lake.
Good Lord, I’m being melodramatic. Hehe, this is fun.
Lindow Common is an area of peat bog, like those of Ireland, and up until recently the haunt of gypsies and peat burners. The corpses of long drowned trees, salty and full of nitrates make up a peat bog. Peat burns slow and long, and all through the winter. It’s a valuable commodity. It’s also an excellent preserver of flesh. When the giant yellow digger bit into the earth, it brought up more than dead trees, it brought up the body of a man, preserved by the nitrates in the peat: Lindow Man.
Analysis of Lindow man found that he was young, maybe in his late twenties. The contents of his stomach showed his last meal had contained white mistletoe berries, a poison and the sacred herb of the druids (probably from the welsh Drwydd, meaning Oak tree, upon which mistletoe loves to grow). His body also showed that he had been executed, probably with an axe, and buried in the peat bog, and more importantly, his skin had been painted green with copper pigments, probably from the nearby mines. I think.
Now imagine this: a face, green, sinking amidst leaves, into the black waters of the otherworld.
There’s an image to stick in the race memory.
ED. NOTE: Lindow Man was Carbon-14 dated to sometime between 2BC and AD119; he's most noted for the "triple death" overkill he suffered. The killing is supposed to have begun with three blows to the head, followed by one incision into his throat. Lastly, a knotted cord fitted tightly to the neck and twisted, was found around his neck. Then, of course, he was sunk into the peat bog. Did you know when they dug him up, local journalists called him Pete Marsh?
Romano-Celtic Christianity
But on to less nasty matters. When Fendegist came to Ireland, he found Christians, much to his dismay. They had been there a lot longer than he knew. The legends about the coming of Christianity to the British Isles mostly centre around The Isle of Glastonbury. It’s not strictly an island any more, more a hill with a dip surrounding it where there used to be a lake. Joseph of Arimathea, Jesus’ uncle was supposed to have brought him to visit there, during the lost years of Jesus’ ministry, at which point he planted his staff in the ground, and it grew into the Holy Thorn, which remains to this day. He is also supposed to have later returned and left the Holy Grail, but more on that later.
The monastery at Glastonbury is certainly very old. However, it is far more likely that Christianity came to England during the Roman occupation. When Constantine the Great became Emperor, and changed the official religion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, and the Christians were free to spread the word, there was nothing to stop them from reaching the conquered Celtic slaves of England.
This, remember, was an older Christianity. It did not have the entrenched dogma and rigidly enforced Hebrew-based and Paulite laws of the Roman church. The Roman church had not sprung from the ashes of the empire. It was a gentler religion, a religion closer to the teachings of Jesus himself, loving and peaceful. The concept of a God who loved the people of the Earth like children and was willing to give up his only son to redeem them and bring them to a place of eternal light was an entirely new and beautiful thing to the Celts. Back then, this religion, fervent in it’s purity, was spreading across the known world like wildfire. It was easy to convert to this new religion, a gentle Jesus. The Celts already had a solar logos god, Lugh, and dying and rising gods. These are old themes, and it was easy to transfer them to Jesus. I once saw a Celtic carving of Jesus, and it is the only image of him that has ever frightened me. The same wide, frightening eyes stared back at me I had seen on the severed heads and rearing horses, the same stark lines on the halo around his head. It had a Celtic wildness about it that you don’t see in the serene Renaissance paintings of a pale Christ gazing down from the cross, or the Patrician features: stern but peaceful looks and strong jaws and hair of the Eastern, Greek and Russian Orthodox church’s ikons.
When the empire fell, the Christian Romano-Celts that were left (a lot of interbreeding occurred) held onto their faith. Those not taken as slaves by the invading Angles, Saxons and Jutes fled west into the mountains of Cymru and from there west to Ireland. Rosemary Sutcliffe’s books, such as Dawn Wind, or The Eagle of the Ninth are good to read for the feel of this time (plus, she shares my name ^-^, we’re both Halifax-area lasses), and so is Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. They brought the religion to their wild cousins across the water. The invaders never came that far west, at least not till the Norsemen centuries later. And so Christianity flourished, beyond the Ninth Wave, and became the Celtic Church. The mad Bishop Patricius (or St Patrick, as everyone else knows him) kicked out the snakes (or the druid priests as everyone else knows them) from Ireland round about now, and probably gave his famous illustration of the Trinity that Miriam mentions, as a three-leaved clover or trefoil: three leaves, but one plant.
It was about this time that the Monastery on the Island of Lindisfarne was founded, and produced stunning works of celto-biblical art like the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells. From here, missionaries came to the Angles and Saxons ruling England. Close cousins to the Celts, remember? No longer warring over land, but settling and farming, they needed a new god, for a new style of civilisation. They soon followed their kin and converted.
And so, when the first missionaries of the Roman Church came to England, they found the people there practising a far older, and purer form of their religion. They didn’t like this. There was a fight, mostly over how one should calculate when Easter was celebrated. The peaceful and poetic Celtic Church lost and vanished.
The SanGreal and the Arthurian Cycles
Ah, but I’ve left someone out: Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon... probably because at this point we slip out of history and into myth and legend. The current theory is that Arthur was a Romano-Celtic general, probably a Dux Bellorum (War Leader) who fought against the invading Saxons using Roman methods, possibly a descendant of some commander of the Roman legions, possibly named 'Artorius' (a word which has meanings including 'greatness' and 'strength of the bear'). There are other Arthurs, which suggest he was the memory of some hero god, a Celtic Herakles/Hercules. The Arthur of the Mabinogion is a giant, able to pull whole ships.
The King Arthur we know, however, is the product of french Balladeers and Troubadours, who probably collected and embellished older tales from England. The story was certainly written down in the form we know it as Thomas de Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. Queen Gwenhwyfar becomes Guinevere, his adopted brother Kai becomes Sir Kay and adoptive father Ectorius becomes Sir Ector. Myrddin becomes Merlin. Jon, when referred to as "Sir Lancelot" is insulted, because in the romances, Lancelot du Lac (Lancelot of the Lake, but Lancelot could be from a saxon word for 'elf arrow' or 'speed of an elf') betrayed the King by committing the sin of adultery with Guinevere. Mind you, Arthur had already had a kid with his half sister, Morgaine le Fay (Morgan the faery, Morgan possibly from the War Goddess Morrighan). The child, Mordred, was to slay his father, who was then ferried to the Island of Avalon (Avalon meaning something to do with apples--several sites have been named for the Isle, including, yes, Glastonbury again). But of course, he will return from the dead to save Britain from mortal peril...
*taps watch* You already missed the Second World War, we could have done with your help... any time now, Rex Quondam et Futurus
Mind you, we could have missed him. Everyone’s heard the joke about Christ having returned in the seventies and been indistinguishable from all the other blokes with beards. Anyway, I promised to tell you about the Grail, didn’t I, as discovered by Lancelot’s son, the pure of heart Sir Galahad? Now seems like a good time. First, let me give you the Grail’s two beginnings, the two Holy Regalia, Celtic and Christian and how the two married together in the European psyche.
The first is the cup that Christ used at the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood of the dying Jesus. You may remember it from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It, along with the Spear of Longinus, and the True Cross are some of the most sought after relics in Christendom. I don’t know there truly ever was such a cup, if it was brought to Glastonbury by Joseph of Arimathea (gosh, he did like to pop back and forth, reckon he had cousins here?), or if it was lost in the dishwasher by Mary and Martha. It is a cup, and a Christian cup. It confers immortality on anyone who drinks from it, due to power.
The second is the Holy Regalia of the British Isles, the Four Treasures of Ireland. Alan Garner’s wonderful book Elidor features these. The Stone of Fal, The Sword of Nuada (Nuada of the Silver Hand, god of smiths and artificers), The Spear of Lugh (God of Light, see Solar Logos Gods, and note the spear motif again.) and the Cauldron of the Dagda (The father God of Ireland. In Wales, the Cauldron is Cerridwen’s, the Goddess of Death, but the myth remains the same). The Cauldron’s power was to bring life to whatever was put in it. The Dagda placed his dead soldiers into it and they came out alive again.
The Legends of the Immortality Cauldron and the Grail probably combined to give the Grail Legend we know today. Actually, I’ve always suspected that the Christ Cup Grail is just a nice new set of Christian clothes for the Cauldron Grail, but that’s just me.
On a side note, I really ought to give you the semi-conspiracy theories concerning the Grail. I first found out about this from the White Wolf book, the Hunter Apocrypha, and was astonished to find that some books actually professed it as true. I included it in the Book of Fluids originally as a play on words, a little joke, but it seemed to gain deeper meaning. The Norman French (remember Malory? The story as we know it was written for a French medieval audience, hence the pointy hats and chivalry) for Holy Grail is San Greal. However, if you shuffle the letters around a tiny bit, you get Sang Real, or Holy Blood. Some of your Templar-Freemason-Aliens-Ilk conspiracy theorists put about that the Holy Grail is in fact a metaphor for an ancient bloodline. In the high and far off days (as Kipling says), Gods interbred with men (back to the Nephilim) and produced heroes such as Arthur and Herakles. These people carried on breeding, as ye do, and now their bloodline is lurking in various places around the world. As they say in the English national lottery it could be you. Sang Real y’see. Royal Blood, the blood of Kings. If there was a limit on capital letters in this thing, I’d be buggered. Um, anyway, the White Wolf book made out that Hunters had loads of the royal blood. The conspiracy theorist think it’s the Illuminati and that lot that have the Royal Blood. I reckon if it was around, it’d be all us people who don’t think like the rest of the herd that have it, but I would say that. Anyway, I put it in, because Jon is a knight, and I was making Holy Grail references, and Vinny healed him with blood, and I thought "Hey, opportunity to make the old play-on-words Sang Real-San Greal joke," and it turned out to fit really well. Damn it.
Some call me... Tim?
The Fisher King
I’ll end this section by explaining the Fisher King references, for example, when Vinny says "I just knew you were thirsty."
If you haven’t seen the movie, the Fisher King is one of the "King makes the land barren" myths I was telling you about. It reflects the tie that binds a king to his land and the fertility of his land. The reasons for the name the Fisher King have been suggested to relate to the 'fisher of men' phrase of Jesus, or the Norman French 'Poissoneur' which is close to the word for 'poisoned'. It could be the Poisoned King. Either way, he gets it in the neck, or rather the leg (a metaphor for loss of sexual power or fertility, I’m told, is a leg wound; jokes on a postcard).
There was once a King, probably of one of the Celtic Tribes. When he was young, he went out to seek the Grail. He fell from his horse and injured his leg badly, failing in his quest. Ashamed by his failure in prowess and arms, he trained hard, and became hard, the best warrior he could be. By the time he was a young man, he was a stern, and upright king, the strongest king he could be. He ruled alone from his castle. He continued alone like this. And as he reached old age, his wound began to grow worse, all his court deserted him and his land fell into barrenness, until finally he was alone, and dying of his wound in a dead land. As he lay in bed, a fool came to his castle. The king called out for water, and the fool found and cup and filled it with water, and gave it to the king. He was instantly healed, and when he looked upon the cup, he saw it was the grail, and it had been there right next to him the whole time. He asked the fool "How did you know where this was?" And the fool said "I didn’t. I only knew that you were thirsty."
The Green Maiden of Aber Dyfi
"I wonder how Oscar is?"
"The angel?" Nevin asked. Jon nodded. Nevin appeared to listen to his right shoulder. "Noo... you’re joking," he said. Jon looked confused. "The Green Maiden of Aber Dyfi? He’s an angel, not a white cow called Snowflake."
"Oh, do stop talking Welsh nonsense," Miriam said.
Nevin spat some unpronounceable swearwords at the wall, since he couldn’t look at Miriam. "The angel’s fine," He said, "Not a cow, even if they are similar in colour. Cows don’t have feathers see, and angels don’t live underwater."
"Does he gibber like this all the time?" Kreuz asked.
Okay, so there's this lake in Wales near the town of Aberdovey that was supposed to be inhabited by a fairy woman who was totally green all over and had a magical trumpet with which she called her hundred pure-white fairy cows.
The lake's not that big, goodness knows how she fit them all in. Probably that "door to the otherworld" thing. Anyway, one of 'em got lost. Its name was Snowflake and was picked up by a nasty farmer. He was about to slaughter it for meat when two kids saved it. As a reward (and since the calf didn't want to come back) the green maiden gave them the calf, but not after turning it black as night first, making it mortal. Thus we get the sturdy black Welsh cattle. No, it wasn't selective breeding so they stood out on the hillside. It was the fairies.
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