part0024

The myth of Llew Llaw Gyffes has kept its original outlines pretty well, though carefully edited so as to give gods all the credit for magic feats which we know, by comparison with myths of the same type, were originally performed by goddesses. For example, the Divine Child Llew Llaw is born of a virgin, but by the wizardry of Math, and Arianrhod is not only unaware that she has brought forth a child, but righteously indignant that she is accused of being an unmarried mother; whereas in the Cuchulain version of the Llew story his mother Dechtire conceives by swallowing a may-fly without magical aid. And Nana, who is the Phrygian counterpart of Arianrhod and whose son Attis has much the same later history as Llew Llaw, conceives of her own free will by the magic use of an almond or, some mythographers say, a pomegranate; again, Blodeuwedd, Llew’s wife, is created by Gwydion from the blossoms of oak, broom, meadow-sweet and six other plants and trees; whereas in the older legend she is Cybele the Mother of All Living, and wholly independent of any male demiurge.

That Blodeuwedd’s fingers are ‘whiter than the ninth wave of the sea’ proves her connexion with the Moon; nine is the prime Moon-number, the Moon draws the tides, and the ninth wave is traditionally the largest. Thus Heimdall, Llew’s counterpart, porter of the Norse heaven and rival of Loki, was ‘the Son of the Wave’ by being born from nine waves by Odin’s (Gwydion’s) enchantment. After his fight with Loki, in which both of them dressed in seal-skins, Heimdall was given the apple of Life-in-death by Iduna, born of flowers, Blodeuwedd’s counterpart, and rode his horse ‘Golden-mane’ along the Milky Way which also occurs in the Llew Llaw story. But the Norse scalds have tampered with the myth, awarding Heimdall the victory and doubly disguising Loki’s seduction of Heimdall’s bride, Iduna.

When Blodeuwedd has betrayed Llew, she is punished by Gwydion who transmogrifies her into an Owl. This is further patriarchal interference. She had been an Owl thousands of years before Gwydion was born – the same Owl that occurs on the coins of Athens as the symbol of Athene, the Goddess of Wisdom, the same owl that gave its name to Adam’s first wife Lilith and as Annis the Blue Hag sucks the blood of children in primitive British folk-lore. There is a poem about Blodeuwedd the Owl by Davydd ap Gwilym, in which she swears by St. David that she is daughter of the Lord of Mona, equal in dignity to Meirchion himself. This is to call herself a ‘Daughter of Proteus’ – Meirchion could change his shape at will – and perhaps to identify herself with the old bloody Druidic religion suppressed by Paulinus in Anglesey in 68 AD . Davydd ap Gwilym, the most admired of all Welsh poets, was distressed by the contemporary attitude to women and did his best to persuade a nun whom he loved to break out of her cloister.

In the Romance, only the carrion-eating Sow of Maenawr Penardd is independent of the male magician’s rod. She is Cerridwen, the White Sow-goddess, in disguise. It will be seen that Arianrhod the Birth-goddess; and Arianrhod the Goddess of Initiation who gives a name and arms to Llew; and Blodeuwedd, the Love-goddess; and Blodeuwedd the Owl, Goddess of Wisdom; and Cerridwen, the Old Sow of Maenawr Penardd, form a pentad. They are the same goddess in her five seasonal aspects: for which Ailm, Onn, Ura, Eadha, and Idho are the corresponding vowels in the Beth-Luis-Nion calendar. Why the two Arianrhods and the two Blodeuwedds are not distinguished here is because the pentad can also be viewed as a triad: the author of the Romance, in order to keep a more intelligible narrative sequence, is story-telling in terms of a three-season year.

The story of his deception by Blodeuwedd recalls that of Gilgamesh’s deception by Ishtar, and Samson’s deception by Delilah. Samson was a Palestinian Sun-god who, becoming inappropriately included in the corpus of Jewish religious myth, was finally written down as an Israelite hero of the time of the Judges. That he belonged to an exogamic and therefore matrilinear society is proved by Delilah’s remaining with her own tribe after marriage; in patriarchal society the wife goes to her husband’s tribe. The name ‘Samson’ means ‘Of the Sun’ and ‘Dan’, his tribe, is an appellation of the Assyrian Sun-god. Samson, like Hercules, killed a lion with his bare hands, and his riddle about the bees swarming in the carcase of the lion which he had killed, if returned to iconographic form, shows Aristaeus the Pelasgian Hercules (father of Actaeon, the stag-cult king, and son of Cheiron the Centaur) killing a mountain lion on Mount Pelion, from the wound in whose flesh the first swarm of bees emerged. In the Cuchulain version of the same story, Blodeuwedd is named Blathnat and extracts from her husband King Curoi – the only man who ever gave Cuchulain a beating – the secret that his soul is hidden in an apple in the stomach of a salmon which appears once every seven years in a spring on the side of Slieve Mis (the mountain of Amergin’s dolmen). This apple can be cut only with his own sword. Her lover Cuchulain waits for seven years and obtains the apple. Blathnat then prepares a bath and ties her husband’s long hair to the bedposts and bedrail; takes his sword and gives it to her lover who cuts the apple in two. The husband loses his strength and cries out: ‘No secret to a woman, no jewel to slaves!’ Cuchulain cuts off his head. There is a reference to this story in one of Gwion’s poems. A Greek version of the same story is referred to Minoan times: Nisus King of Nisa – an ancient city near Megara destroyed by the Dorians – had his ‘purple’ lock plucked by his daughter Scylla who wished to kill him and marry Minos of Crete. The Greeks have given this story an unlikely moral ending, that Minos drowned Scylla as a parricide from the stern of his galley; at any rate, the genealogy of the Kings of Nisa makes it plain that the throne went by matrilinear succession. Still another version occurs in the Excidium Troiae, a mediaeval Latin summary of the Trojan War compiled from very early sources; here the secret of Achilles’s vulnerable heel is wormed from him by his wife Polyxena ‘since there is no secret that women cannot extract from men in proof of love’. It may be assumed that, in the original legend of Osiris, Isis was a willing accomplice in his yearly murder by Set; and that, in the original legend of Hercules, Deianeira was a willing accomplice in his yearly murder by Achelöus, or by Nessus the Centaur; and that each of these heroes was killed in a bath – as in the legends of Minos’s bath-murder by the priestess of Cocalus, at Daedalus’s instigation, and of Agamemnon’s bath-murder by Clytaemnestra at Aegisthus’s instigation – though in the popular version of the Osiris story it is a coffin, not a bath, into which he is decoyed. The Jackals, who were sacred in Egypt to Anubis, Guardian of the Dead, because they fed on corpse-flesh and had mysterious nocturnal habits, must have known all about the murder.

A Canaanite version of the same story appears in iconotropic form in the patently unhistorical Book of Judith, composed in Maccabean times. The Jews seem always to have based their religious anecdotes on an existing legend, or icon, never to have written fiction in the modern sense. Return the account of Judith, Manasses, Holofernes and Achior to pictorial form, and then re-arrange the incidents in their natural order. The Queen ties her royal husband’s hair to the bedpost to immobilize him, and beheads him with a sword (XIII, (6–8 ); an attendant brings it to the lover whom she has chosen to be the new king (XIV, 6 ); after mourning to appease the ghost of the old king, the Corn-Tammuz, who has died at the barley-harvest (VIII, 2–6 ), she purifies herself in running water and dresses as a bride (X, 3–4 ); presently the wedding procession forms up (X, 17–21 ); and the marriage is celebrated with much merriment (XII, 15–20 ), bonfires (XIII, 13 ), religious feasting (X VI, 20 ), dancing and waving of branches (XV, 12 ), many gifts (XV, 2 ), killing of victims (XV, 5 ), and the ritual circumcision of the bridegroom (XIV, 10 ). The Queen wears a crown of olive as an emblem of fruitfulness (XV, 13 ). The head of the old king is put up on the wall of the city as a prophylactic charm (XIV, 11 ); and the Goddess appears in triad, Hag, Bride and Maid (XVI, 23 ) to bless the union.

That the Goddess Frigga ordered a general mourning for Balder incriminates her in his death. She was really Nanna, Balder’s bride, seduced by his rival Holder; but like the Egyptian priests of Isis, the Norse scalds have altered the story in the interests of marital rectitude. In precisely what part of the heel or foot were Talus, Bran, Achilles, Mopsus, Cheiron, and the rest mortally wounded? The myths of Achilles and Llew Llaw give the clue. When Thetis picked up the child Achilles by the foot and plunged him into the cauldron of immortality, the part covered by her finger and thumb remained dry and therefore vulnerable. This was presumably the spot between the Achilles tendon and the anklebone where the nail was driven in to pin the foot of the crucified man to the side of the cross, in the Roman ritual borrowed from the Canaanite Carthaginians; for the victim of crucifixion was originally the annual sacred king. The child Llew Llaw’s exact aim was praised by his mother Arianrhod because as the New Year Robin, alias Belin, he transfixed his father the Wren, alias Bran to whom the wren was sacred, ‘between the sinew and the bone’ of his leg.

Gronw Pebyr, who figures as the lord of Penllyn – ‘Lord of the Lake’ – which was also the title of Tegid Voel, Cerridwen’s husband, is really Llew’s twin and tanist. Llew never lacks a twin; Gwydion is a surrogate for Gronw during the visit to the Castle of Arianrhod. Gronw reigns during the second half of the year, after Llew’s sacrificial murder; and the weary stag whom he kills and flays outside Llew’s castle stands for Llew himself (a ‘stag of seven fights’). This constant shift in symbolic values makes the allegory difficult for the prose-minded reader to follow, but to the poet who remembers the fate of the pastoral Hercules the sense is clear: after despatching Llew with the dart hurled at him from Bryn Kyvergyr, Gronw flays him, cuts him to pieces and distributes the pieces among his merry-men. The clue is given in the phrase ‘baiting his dogs’. Math had similarly made a stag of his rival Gilvaethwy, earlier in the story. It seems likely that Llew’s mediaeval successor, Red Robin Hood, was also once worshipped as a stag. His presence at the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance would be difficult to account for otherwise, and ‘stag’s horn’ moss is sometimes called ‘Robin Hood’s Hatband’. In May, the stag puts on his red summer coat.

The worship of the Divine Child was established in Minoan Crete, its most famous early home in Europe. In 1903, on the site of the temple of Dictaean Zeus – the Zeus who was yearly born in Rhea’s cave at Dicte near Cnossos, where Pythagoras spent ‘thrice nine hallowed days’ of his initiation – was found a Greek hymn which seems to preserve the original Minoan formula in which the gypsum-powdered, sword-dancing Curetes, or tutors, saluted the Child at his birthday feast. In it he is hailed as ‘the Cronian one’ who comes yearly to Dicte mounted on a sow and escorted by a spirit-throng, and begged for peace and plenty as a reward for their joyful leaps. The tradition preserved by Hyginus in his Poetic Astronomy that the constellation Capricorn 1 (‘He-goat’) was Zeus’s foster-brother Aegipan, the Kid of the Goat Amalthea whose horn Zeus also placed among the stars, shows that Zeus was born at mid-winter when the Sun entered the house of Capricorn. The date is confirmed by the alternative version of the myth, that he was suckled by a sow – evidently the one on whose back he yearly rode into Dicte – since in Egypt swine’s flesh and milk were permitted food only at the mid-winter festival. That the Sun-gods Dionysus, Apollo and Mithras were all also reputedly born at the Winter solstice is well known, and the Christian Church first fixed the Nativity feast of Jesus Christ at the same season, in the year 273 AD . St. Chrysostom, a century later, said that the intention was that ‘while the heathen were busied with their profane rites the Christians might perform their holy ones without disturbance’, but justified the date as suitable for one who was ‘the Sun of Righteousness’. Another confirmation of the date is that Zeus was the son of Cronos, whom we have securely identified with Fearn, or Bran, the god of the F month in the Beth-Luis-Nion. If one reckons back 280 days from the Winter Solstice, that is to say ten months of the Beth-Luis-Nion calendar, the normal period of human gestation, one comes to the first day of Fearn. (Similarly, reckoning 280 days forward from the Winter Solstice, one comes to the first day of the G month, Gort, sacred to Dionysus; Dionysus the vine and ivy-god, as opposed to the Sun-god, was son to Zeus.) Cuchulain was born as the result of his mother’s swallowing a may-fly; but in Ireland may-flies often appear in late March, so his birthday was probably the same.

Llew’s soul escapes in the form of an eagle, like the soul of Hercules, and perches on an oak. This apotheosis was in the ancient royal tradition. The souls of lesser men might fly off in the form of white birds or golden butterflies, but a sacred king’s soul had the wings of an eagle or royal gryphon. Lion-headed eagles appear on seals in Minoan Crete. It was of the highest political importance that when the Emperor Augustus died he should be translated to Heaven and become the prime deity of the Roman Empire; and a Roman knight who declared on oath that he had seen the Emperor’s soul rising from his pyre in the form of an eagle was therefore rewarded by Livia, Augustus’s widow, with a handsome present. Ganymede in the original legend was a Phrygian prince who rose to Heaven as an eagle; he was not carried off on an eagle’s back to be Zeus’s cup-bearer, as in the version dear to homosexuals. It is likely that, like Cretan Dionysus, son of Zeus; Icarus, son of Daedalus; Phaëthon, son of Apollo; Aesculapius, son of Apollo; Demophoön, son of Celeus; Melicertes, son of Athamas; Mermerus and Pheres, sons of Jason; Gwern, son of Matholwch; Isaac, son of Abraham, and many other unfortunate princes of the same sort, Ganymede son of Tros was invested with a single-day royalty and then burned to death. 2 As I showed in the case of Peleus, Thetis and Achilles, the Pelasgian sacred king of the Minos type could not continue in office beyond the hundred months allowed him by law, but he could become the successor of a son who was titular king for the one day that did not form part of the year. During the day of his son’s reign, to judge from the story of Athamas, the old king pretended to be dead, eating the foods reserved for the dead; immediately it ended he began a new reign by marriage to his widowed daughter-in-law, since the throne was conveyed by mother-right. When the statutory reign was lengthened to a hundred months the old king often lengthened it still further by abducting the nearest heiress, who was theoretically his own daughter, as in the case of King Cinyras of Cyprus. The stories of Sextus Tarquin and Lucretia, David and Bathsheba, Math and Arianrhod, are to be read in this sense.

The subsequent resurrection of Llew takes place in the dead of Winter, in the season of the Old Sow, the time of the annual Athenian pig-sacrifice to the Barley-goddess, her daughter Persephone and Zeus: ‘nine-score tempests’, that is to say 180 days, have elapsed since his murder at midsummer. The holed stone called Llech Gronw, ‘the stone of Gronw’, was perhaps one of the very common prehistoric holed stones, apparently representing the mouth of the baetylic Mother Goddess, through which spirits passed in the form of winds and entered the wombs of passing women. In other words, Gronw by interposing the stone between his body and Llew’s dart assured himself of regeneration.

Llew’s autumn name, omitted in the story, can be recovered by the logic of myth. That his rivalry with Gronw Lord of Penllyn for the love of Blodeuwedd is the same as that of Gwyn with Gwythyr ap Greidawl for the love of Creiddylad is proved by Triad 14, where Arianrhod is described as the mother of the twin heroes Gwengwyngwyn and Gwanat. Gwengwyngwyn is merely ‘The Thrice-white-one’, or Gwyn’s name three times repeated, and Gwyn’s duty, as we have seen, was to conduct souls to the Castle of Arianrhod, like Thrice-great Hermes; in fact, Gwyn, like Dylan and Llew, was Arianrhod’s son. But Dafydd ap Gwilym reports that the autumnal owl, Blodeuwedd in disguise, was sacred to Gwyn; it follows that when Llew who began the year as Dylan, reached goat-haunted Bryn Kyvergyr, the midsummer turning-point – and was killed by his rival ‘Victor, son of Scorcher’, he disappeared from view and presently became Gwyn the leader of the autumnal Wild Chase. Like the White Goddess, alternately Arianrhod of the silver wheel, Blodeuwedd of the white flowers, and Cerridwen the spectral white sow, he also was Thrice-white: alternately Dylan the silver fish, Llew the white stag, and Gwyn the white rider on the pale horse leading his white, red-eared pack. That Gwyn’s father was Nudd or Lludd, and Gwengwyngwyn’s was one Lliaws, does not spoil the argument. Hermes’s fatherhood was similarly disputed in Greece.

Mur-y-Castell, now called Tomen-y-Mur is a mediaeval British fort – a fair-sized artificial mound surmounted by a stockade – in the hills behind Ffestiniog in Merioneth. It has been constructed around the north gate of a Roman camp, and the considerable remains of the Roman baths, supplied by water from the river Cynfael, are still clearly visible near by. Apparently the Camp was occupied by the pagan Welsh when the Romans evacuated it in the fifth century, and then became the centre of a Llew Llaw cult – if it had not been so already, like the Roman camps of Laon, Lyons and Carlisle. The bath system lent itself to the story. The mound may be funerary, with the remains of a dead king buried in the ruins of the Roman gate around which it has been heaped.

The shoe-making business is odd, but it throws light on the mysterious twelfth-century French ballad of the Young Shoemaker.

The beautiful lady with the many lovers and a great square bed hung with white linen is unmistakably the Goddess, and the young shoemaker is Llew Llaw. The speaking parts have been interchanged. In stanza 2 ‘Elle a tant d’amouroux’ should be, for the rhyme’s sake ‘Elle a tant d’enamourés’. In stanza 4, ‘En la chaussant Il lui fit sa demande’ should be ‘Sur la chaussée Elle lui fit sa demande’. ‘La belle’ should be ‘Bel homme’ in stanza 5, ‘Roi’ should be ‘rei’ in stanza 9, and in the last stanza, ‘nous dormirions’ should be ‘vous dormiriez’. Those posies of periwinkles show that the ‘river’ (still a term for the sag furrowed in a mattress by love-making) where all the King’s horses could drink together, is the river of death, and that the shoemaker will never rise again from the bridal couch. His bride will bind him to the bedpost, and summon his rival to kill him. The periwinkle was the flower of death in French, Italian and British folklore. In mediaeval times a garland of periwinkles was placed on the heads of men bound for execution. The flower has five blue petals and is therefore sacred to the Goddess, and its tough green vines will have been the bonds she used on her victim. This can be deduced from its Latin name vincapervinca (‘bind all about’), though mediaeval grammarians connected it with vincere, ‘to conquer’, rather than vincire, ‘to bind’, and so ‘pervinke’ came to mean ‘the all-conquering’. But death is all-conquering; so it came to the same thing. Most likely that the custom of garlanding the criminal with periwinkle was taken over from the sacrifice ritual in honour of Llew Llaw the shoemaker. It is clear that the magical power of Arianrhod, like that of Math, rested in her feet and that once Llew had taken her foot in his hand as if to measure it for a shoe, he was able to make her do what he wished. Perhaps Perrault’s story of Cinderella’s slipper is a degenerate version of the same myth. Foot-fetishists are by no means rare even in modern times – the aberrants spend all their spare time buying or stealing women’s high-heeled shoes for the exaltation of spirit that the possession gives them. What is more, it is possible that foot-fetishism was an ancient cult in Ardudwy, the scene of this Romance, though I do not know whether the evidence has ever been officially recorded. A few miles from Mur-y-Castell, on the hills between Harlech (where I lived as a boy) and Llanfair, there is a Goidels’ Camp – a cluster of ruined round huts dating from perhaps the fourth century AD – and not far off, towards Llanfair, a woman’s footprint is sunk an inch or so deep in a large flat stone. It is locally called ‘the Virgin’s footprint’, and another mark near by is called the ‘Devil’s thumb print’. The stone is at the far left-hand corner of a field as one comes along the road from Harlech. Similar sacred footprints are still worshipped in Southern India.

Why ‘Cordovan’ leather? Probably because the Llew cult came to Britain from Spain, as it is known that the buskin did. At Uxama in Spain a dedication has been found to ‘the Lugoves’, i.e. the Lughs, by a guild of shoemakers. And why coloured and gilded shoes? Because such shoes were a symbol of royalty among the Celts. They used also to figure in the English Coronation ceremony, but dropped out after the reign of George II. Though officially styled ‘sandals’, they were gilded half-boots, like the purple buskins in which the Byzantine Emperors were crowned, with purple soles and wooden heels covered with scarlet leather. Scarlet was a product of the kerm-oak and doubtless the heels were oaken. In the Romance the colour of the shoes is not specified; which suggests a further connexion with Spain, where boszeguis de piel colorado does not mean ‘buskins of coloured leather’, but ‘buskins of scarlet leather’. Similar buskins are thought to have been used in the sanctification of the kings of Rome, since they were part of the sacred dress of the Triumphant General in Republican times, and this dress was of regal origin. Sandals also occur in the legends of the solar hero Theseus, whose Goddess mother gave him a pair at the same time as she gave him his arms and sent him out to slay monsters; of Perseus, another monster-slayer; and of Mercury.

The implication of this part of the story is that Llew Llaw kept the third pair of gold shoes for his own use. He was one of the Three Crimson-stained Ones of Britain, as we learn from Triad 24; another of these was King Arthur. To be ‘crimson-stained’ is to be a sacred king: at Rome the Triumphant General had his face and hands stained red as a sign of temporary royalty. Sacred kings, it seems, were not allowed to rest their heels on the ground but walked on their toes, like the Canaanite Agag. The cothurnus, or high-heeled buskin, of the God Dionysus can be explained only in this sense, though the reason was disguised in Greece by the observation that buskins gave an effect of height.

In Genesis, XXXII Jacob wrestles all night with an angel at Peniel and is lamed by him so that the sinew in the hollow of his thigh is shrunken. Jacob sustained an injury once common to wrestlers, the inward displacement of the hip first described by Hippocrates. The result of this dislocation, which is produced by forcing the legs too widely apart, is that the injured person finds his leg flexed, abducted and externally rotated: in other words he can only walk, if at all, with a lurching or swaggering gait and on his toes. The leg affected is lengthened by the peculiar position of the head of the femur, or at least looks longer than the other. The lengthening of the leg tightens the tendons in the thigh and the muscles go into spasm, which is presumably what is meant by the shrinking of the sinew in the hollow of the thigh. Since Jacob belongs to the mother-right age, and since he won his sacred name and inheritance, both of which could only be given him by a woman, on this same occasion, the story has evidently been censored by the patriarchal editors of Genesis. But the Arabic lexicographers agree that the result of Jacob’s injury was that he could walk only on the toes of his injured leg; and they should know.

While still in the womb Jacob supplants his twin Esau by catching at his heel, and so draining him of royal virtue. Hosea, XII, 4 connects this supplanting with the wrestling incident, which suggests that Jacob’s real name was Jah-aceb, ‘the heel-god’. Jacob is translated ‘the supplanter’ in the Authorised Version of the Bible and what does ‘supplant’ mean but to put one’s hand sub plantam alicujus, under someone’s foot, and trip him up? The Greek word pternizein, used by the Septuagint in this context, is still more accurate: it means ‘to trip up someone’s heel’ and is the first recorded use of the word in this sense. Jacob is the sacred king who has succeeded to office by tripping up a rival; but the penalty of his victory is that he must never again set his own sacred heel to the ground. The comment in Genesis on Jacob’s lameness is: ‘Therefore the Children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is in the hollow of the thigh, to this day.’ Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, also had a sacred thigh and in Genesis, XXIV, 2 he makes his servant put his hand under it when taking an oath, just as Jacob makes Joseph do in Genesis, XLVII, 29. Mrs. Hermione Ashton writes that several tribes of Southern Arabia kiss the thigh of their Emir in homage; she has seen this done herself by the Qateibi who live about a hundred miles north of Aden – one of the four tribes of the Amiri race who boast that they are the sons of Ma’in and the oldest race in the world.

Plutarch asks in his Greek Questions: ‘Why do the women of Elis summon Dionysus in their hymns to come among them with his bull-foot?’ It is a good question, but as J. E. Harrison has pointed out, Plutarch was always better at asking questions than at answering them. Well, why with his bull-foot? Why not with his bull-horns, bull-brow, bull-shoulders, bull-tail – all of which are more symbolic of the bull’s terrible power than its feet? And why foot, not feet? Plutarch does not even make a guess, but fortunately he quotes the ritual hymn used in the mystery to which he refers; from which it appears that the ‘women of Elis’ were dramatic representatives of the ‘Charites’, the Three Graces who at Elis shared an altar with Dionysus. The answer seems to be: ‘Because in ancient times the sacred king of the mystery drama who appeared in response to the invocation of the Three Graces really had a bull-foot.’ That is to say, the dislocation of his thigh made one of his feet resemble that of a bull, with the heel as the fetlock, and that he hurried among them with a rush and clatter of buskins. Plutarch should have remembered that in the Pelasgian island of Tenedos a sacred cow had once been ‘kept for Dionysus’ and when in calf had been treated like a woman during her confinement. If she bore a bull-calf it was put into buskins and despatched with a sacrificial axe, or labris, as if it were Zagreus, the infant Dionysus – which shows the ritual connexion of bulls’ feet with buskins; but Aelian, the authority for this ceremony, does not mention that the calf was robed, crowned or otherwise adorned. It is perhaps worth noting that in the Spanish bullfight, 3 brought from Thrace to Rome by the Emperor Claudius and thence introduced into Spain, the matador who kills his bull with outstanding heroism and grace is rewarded by the President with the pata, or foot.

The connexion of the buskin with sexuality is explained by Egyptian and Cypriot inscriptions. The name of the Goddess Mari of Cyprus is written with a ‘buckled post’ which stands for a reed-hut, meaning ‘dwelling in’, and a buskin; so she was resident in a buskin, like the Goddess Isis who in Egypt bore her name ‘Asht’ on her head, together with a buskin. In both cases some stick-like object protrudes from the mouth of the buskin, which Mr. E. M. Parr takes as a symbol of fertilization since the buskin hieroglyph is read as Ush, ‘the mother’. This throws new light on the second marriage of the Eleusinian Mysteries, after the performance of which it is known that the initiate said: ‘I have fitted what was in the drum to what was in the liknos. ’ We know what was in the liknos – a phallus – and on the analogy of the buskins ceremonially presented to the sacred king at his marriage, it may be concluded that the drum contained a buskin into which the phallus was inserted by the initiate as a symbol of coition.

An invocation corresponding with the Elian ritual mentioned by Plutarch is recorded in I Kings, XVIII, 26, where the priests of Baal dance at the altar and cry out ‘Baal, hear us!’: appealing to him to light the Spring bonfires and burn up the corpse of the old year. They leaped up and down, according to the Authorised Version; but the original Hebrew word is formed from the root PSCH which means ‘to dance with a limp’, and from which Pesach, the name of the Passover Feast, is derived. The Passover appears to have been a Canaanite Spring festival which the tribe of Joseph adopted and transformed into a commemoration of their escape from Egypt under Moses. At Carmel, the dance with a limp must have been sympathetic magic to encourage the appearance of the God with a bull’s foot who was armed, like Dionysus, with a torch. ‘Baal’ merely means ‘Lord’. The annalist refrains from mentioning his real name; but since the priests of Baal were Israelites it is likely to have been ‘Jah Aceb’ or ‘Jacob’ – the Heel-god. Jah Aceb seems to have been also worshipped at Beth-Hoglah – ‘The Shrine of the Hobbler’ – a place between Jericho and the Jordan south of Gilgal and identified by Epiphanius with the threshing floor of Atad, mentioned in Genesis, L, 11, as the place where Joseph mourned for Jacob. Jerome connects this place with a round dance, apparently performed in honour of Talus the Cretan Sun-hero – Hesychius says that Talus means ‘Sun’ – to whom the partridge was sacred. In Athenian legend Talus was thrown down by Daedalus from a height and transformed into a partridge while in the air by the Goddess Athene. The Arabic word for ‘hobble’ which gives its name to Beth-Hoglah is derived from the word for partridge; the deduction being that the dance was a hobbling one. The partridge is a Spring migrant, sacred to the Love-goddess because of its reputation for lasciviousness (mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny) and the dance must have mimicked the love dance of the cock-partridge which it carries out, like the wood-cock, on a regular dancing floor. It is a war dance, performed for a hen audience: the cocks flutter around in circles with a hobbling gait, one heel always held in readiness to strike at a rival’s head. The hens look on, quaking with excitement. The proverb quoted by Jeremiah: ‘The partridge gathers young that she has not brought forth’, means that Jewish men and women were attracted to these alien orgiastic rites. So also the understanding Titian gives us a glimpse of a partridge through the window of the room in which his naked Love-goddess is lasciviously meditating fresh conquests. 4

The connexion between the hobbling partridge and the lame king is confirmed by the mythographers Hyginus and Ovid, who identify the hero Perdix (‘partridge’) with Talus. Apollodorus and Diodorus Siculus make Perdix feminine, the mother of Talus, but this is as much as to say that Talus was virgin-born; because, according to Aristotle, Pliny and Aelian the hen-partridge can be impregnated by the sound of the cock-partridge’s voice or by his scent blown down the wind. Pliny says ‘in no other animal is there any such susceptibility in the sexual feelings’, and that when the female is sitting on her eggs the cocks relieve their emotions by practising sodomy – an observation which may have inspired the organized sodomy in the temples of the Syrian Moon-goddess, though dogs and doves, also associated with her worship, are credited with the same habit. The Aegean island most famous for its partridges was Anaphe, the Argonauts’ first landfall on their homeward voyage from Crete after Medea had killed Talus; where Radiant Apollo was worshipped with rites closely paralleling those of the Hebrew Tabernacles, though of an erotic cast. This Apollo was a Sun-god, not an Underworld one.

Partridges become so deeply absorbed in their dance that even if a man comes up close and kills some of the dancers the rest continue undeterred; a habit of which the ancients took full advantage. In the mating-season they used to put a decoy cock-partridge in a cage at the end of a long narrow winding brushwood tunnel and gave it corn to eat. Its lonely cry, combining the call to love with the call to food, attracted the hens along the tunnel, and when they reached the cage and it uttered its usual challenge call, other cocks would come running up, only to be knocked on the head with sticks by the waiting hunters as soon as they emerged from the tunnel. Thus in I Samuel, XXVI, 20 Saul is taunted for his unkingly behaviour in hunting David, who is not only as insignificant as a flea but as easily caught as a mountain partridge. The decoy partridge was one that had dislocated its leg in trying to escape from the horse-hair slip-knot in which it was snared. This lame, and therefore easily tamed, decoy was fattened in a cage like a sacred king in his palace – both honoured prisoners – and the more numerous its victims, the more gleeful its cry. In Ecclesiasticus (XI, 30 ) the caged partridge is an allegory of the proud man who rejoices at the disasters into which he has decoyed his neighbours. This form of sport is still practised in Mediterranean countries as far west as Majorca.

It seems, then, that in the pesach a bull-cult had been superimposed on a partridge cult; and that the Minotaur to whom youths and maidens ( from Athens and elsewhere) were sacrificed had once represented the decoy partridge in the middle of a brushwood maze, towards which the others were lured for their death dance. He was, in fact, the centre of a ritual performance, originally honouring the Moon-goddess, the lascivious hen-partridge, who at Athens and in parts of Crete was the mother and lover of the Sun-hero Talus. But the dance of the hobbling cock-partridge was later transformed into one honouring the Moon-goddess Pasiphaë, the cow in heat, mother and lover of the Sun-hero, the bull-headed Minos. Thus the spirally-danced Troy-game (called the ‘Crane Dance’ in Delos because it was adapted there to the cult of the Moon-goddess as Crane) had the same origin as the pesach. The case is proved by Homer who wrote:

Here some loose ends can be tied up. The maze pattern has been shown to represent ‘Spiral Castle’ or ‘Troy Town’, where the sacred Sun-king goes after death and from which, if lucky, he returns. The whole myth is plainly presented on an Etruscan wine-jar from Tragliatella, dated from the late seventh century BC . Two mounted heroes are shown; the leader carries a shield with a partridge device, and an ape-like demon perches behind him; his companion carries a spear and a shield with a duck device. They are riding away from a maze marked ‘TRUIA’ (‘Troy’). Apparently the sacred king, though due to die like the partridge in the brushwood maze, and be succeeded by his tanist, has escaped. How he escaped, another picture on the same vase shows: an unarmed king leads a sunwise procession, escorted by seven footmen each carrying three javelins and a huge shield with a boar device; the spear-armed tanist, whose badge this is, brings up the rear. These seven footmen evidently represent the tanist’s seven winter months which fall between the apple harvest and Easter. The king is being warned of his ritual death. The Moon-priestess has come to meet him: a terrible robed figure with one arm menacingly akimbo, as she offers an apple, his passport to Paradise. The javelins threaten death. Yet a diminutive female figure, robed like the priestess, guides the king – if the hero is Theseus, we may call her Ariadne – who has helped him to escape from the maze. And he boldly displays a counter-charm – namely an Easter-egg, the egg of resurrection. Easter was the season when Troy Town dances were performed on the turf-cut mazes of Britain; and of Etruria, too, where the famous Lars Porsena of Clusium built a labyrinth for his own tomb. (Similar labyrinth tombs existed in pre-Hellenic Greece: near Nauplia, on Samos, and on Lemnos.) An Etruscan egg of polished black trachite, found at Perugia, with an arrow in relief running around it, is the same holy egg. Against the spearmen on the vase is written MAIM; against the king, EKRAUN; against the priestess, MITHES. LUEI. If, as seems probable, these words are Western Greek, they mean respectively: ‘Winter’, ‘He reigned’, and ‘Having pronounced, she sets free’. The letters written against Ariadne are indecipherable.

But what evidence is there for any lameness in Dionysus? Why should the buskins not have been worn merely to add to his height, rather than as surgical boots to compensate for his deformity? The best evidence is his name, Dionysus, usually translated as ‘The Light God of Mount Nyse’ but more likely to mean ‘The Lame God of Light’. Nysos was a Syracusan word for ‘lame’ and therefore probably of Corinthian origin, for Syracuse was a colony of Corinth. Yet, as Mr. E. M. Parr has pointed out to me, Dionysus may really have taken his name from Nysë, Nyssa or Nysia, a name attached to various shrines in the area where the sacred lameness was cultivated. There are three Nyssas in Asia Minor, three Nysias in Thrace, a Nyza near Mosul, and a Nysia in Arabia where, according to Diodorus the Goddess Isis was born. This suggests that Nyse was a title of Isis, and that since Dionysus was a title of the Libyo-Thracian Harpocrates, her lame son, the Corinthian Greeks read Nysus, which was really his matronymic, as meaning ‘lame’. Mr. Parr writes: ‘There seem to be confusing results when an established divine title is retained in a new tongue. For instance: Apollo Agieueis of Athens is described as the leader of colonies, but is more likely to have been the Cyprian Apollo who wore a wreath (aga, agu ).’ Dionysus, who was regarded by the Greeks of the Classical age as a Thracian God, is said to have come there from Crete, as his counterpart, King Proteus, is said to have come from Pharos. In Crete he was not lame, neither was Velchanos, a Cretan Cock-demon who became Vulcan when his worship was introduced into Italy. But in Italy Vulcan was said to be lame and to walk with the help of high-heeled gold shoes, because he was identified with Hephaestus, 5 a Pelasgian deity from Lemnos, who like Talus was hurled down from a height – the tradition of sacred lameness seems to have been Danaan, not early Cretan. And, according to Homer, Hephaestus’s wife was Charis, whom he elsewhere calls Aphrodite. The Three Graces are thus explained as the Love-goddess Aphrodite in triad; and when they invoke Dionysus at Elis they are calling their lame buskined husband to perform the act of love with them.

Here we may reconsider another of Dionysus’s titles, ‘Merotraphes’, which is usually translated ‘thigh-nursling’ because of a silly Olympian fable about Dionysus having been sewn up in Jove’s thigh, while an infant, to hide him from the jealous anger of Hera; the simpler meaning is ‘one whose thigh is taken very good care of’. And what of Mercury’s winged sandals, and those of Theseus and Perseus? Mercury, or Hermes, is commonly represented as standing on tiptoe: was this because he could not put his heel to the ground? It is likely that the eagle-wings on his sandals were originally not a symbol of swiftness but a sign of the holiness of the heel, and so, paradoxically, a symbol of lameness. In the Hittite cylinder-seal reproduced as an illustration to my King Jesus, the king who is about to be crowned after mounting three steps of a throne has his sacred heel protected by a dog-demon. In Latin those sandals were called talaria from the word talus, meaning a heel: and dice were called tali because they were made from the heel-bones of the sheep or goats sacred to Hermes or Mercury, though those of the boibalis, the Libyan antelope, were more highly prized by the illuminated.

But was the sacred king chosen because he had accidentally suffered this injury, or was the injury inflicted on him after he had been chosen for better reasons? The answer is to be found in the otherwise meaningless story of Llew Llaw’s balancing between the rim of his sacred cauldron and the back of a buck. Llew was to become a sacred king by marriage with Blodeuwedd, the May Bride, a king of the delicately-treading golden-shoed or purple-buskined sort; but he was not properly equipped for his office until he had sustained Jacob’s injury which would prevent him from ever again putting his sacred heel on the ground, even by mistake. This injury was artificially produced by an ingenious incident in the coronation ritual. His bride made him stand with one foot on the rim of the bath, the other on the haunch of a sacred beast with his hair tied to an oak-branch above his head. And then a cruel trick was played on him. Messrs. Romanis and Mitchener in their Surgery put it in these words: ‘Such inward or anterior dislocations of the hip, produced by wide abduction of the thighs, may result when a person embarking in a boat remains undecided whether to get in or remain on land.’ As with quay and boat, so with cauldron and buck. The buck moved suddenly away from the cauldron. Llew could not save himself by throwing himself forward, because his head was fixed by the hair. The result was this anterior dislocation, but when he fell, his sacred heel did not touch the ground: because his hair held him up, which is exactly what happened to Absalom (‘Father Salm’) when the beast moved from under him in the oak-wood of Ephraim. I postulate as a main source of the anecdotal parts of the early books of the Bible a set of icons, captured by the Israelites at Hebron, illustrating the ritual fate of the sacred king; one part of the series becomes iconotropically reinterpreted as the story of Saul, another as that of Samson, another as that of Absalom, another as that of Samuel. A restoration of the icons is attempted in the King Adam chapter of my King Jesus.

It will be noticed that all these names look like corrupt forms of the same word Salma, or Salmon, a royal title among the Kenites, who were King David’s ancestors, among the Phoenicians (Selim), among the Assyrians (Salman), among the Danaans of Greece and late Minoan Crete (Salmoneus). Solomon adopted the title too. His original name seems to have been Jedidiah (2 Samuel XII, 25 ); if not, he would have had a less convincing right to the throne than Adonijah. Absalom’s original name is unknown, but that he was David’s favourite, not his son except by courtesy, is shown in 2 Samuel XII, 11, where he is described as David’s neighbour. The discrepancy between the account of his parentage in 2 Samuel III, 3 and 2 Samuel XIII, 37 suggests that his real name was Talmai, son of Ammihud, King of Geshur and one of David’s allies, and that he became Absalom only when he seized David’s throne and married the royal harem of heiresses at Hebron. As a god, Salma is identified with Reseph the Canaanite Osiris. Among these icons there may have been one showing Absalom with his hair tied to an oak-branch – really an incident in the marriage of the King. The assassination of the king on such an occasion was easy, but sanctification, not death, was the object of the trick; and if we can accept A. M. Hocart’s conclusion that the coronation ceremony throughout the ancient world typified the marriage of the Sun King to the Earth Queen, his death as a member of his former tribe and his re-birth with a new name into that of his Queen, then the ritual on which all these myths are based must have included a mock-assassination of the king in the course of the bath-ceremony; which is proved by the victims offered in the king’s stead in many forms of the ritual known to us. The confused elements in the myth of Hephaestus, who was married to the Love-goddess and deceived by her, and lamed by suddenly being thrown down from Olympus by the Goddess Hera, and mocked by the whole company of Heaven, compose another variant of the same ritual. Originally the king died violently as soon as he had coupled with the queen; as the drone dies after coupling with the queen-bee. Later, emasculation and laming were substituted for death; later still, circumcision was substituted for emasculation and the wearing of buskins for laming.

Once we know that the sacred king was ritually lamed in a way that obliged him to swagger or lurch on high heels, we understand at last two or three hitherto mysterious ancient icons. Tantalus, suspended over the water with a fruit-branch above his head and the water always slipping away is evidently being lamed in Llew Llaw fashion: originally his hair is tied to the branch, one foot is on the bank, the other rests on something in the water – perhaps a large boat-shaped basin – that slips away. Tantalus is a perfect type of Dionysus: he was married to Euryanassa (another form of Eurynome) a Moon-goddess; he was thrown down from Mount Sipylus, in Pelasgian Lydia, where he was afterwards buried and had a hero shrine; he was Pelops’s cannibalistic father; he helped to steal a Dog from a Cretan cave; and from his name derive three other Greek words meaning, like saleuein, from which saleuma is formed, ‘to swagger or lurch in one’s gait’: tantaloein, tantaleuein and, by a metathesis, talantoein.

Like Ixion and Salmoneus, Tantalus belonged to the old religion superseded by Olympianism, and the Olympian priests have deliberately misinterpreted the icons in favour of Father Zeus by presenting him as an odious criminal. Tantalus’s crime, the mythographers explain, was that, having been privileged to eat ambrosia, the food of the gods, with the Olympians, he later invited commoners to try it. Ambrosia was the name of Dionysus’s autumnal feast in which, I suggest, the intoxicant toadstool once supplied his votaries with a divine frenzy; and in my What Food the Centaurs Ate, I show that the ingredients given by Classical grammarians for ambrosia, nectar, and kekyon (Demeter’s drink at Eleusis) represent a food-ogham – their initial letters all spell out forms of a Greek word for ‘mushroom’. The story of Tantalus’s crime may have been told when wine displaced toadstools at the Maenad revels, and a toadstool – perhaps not amanita muscaria, but the milder, more entrancing panaeolus papilionaceus – was eaten by adepts at the Eleusinian, Samothracian and Cretan Mysteries, who became as gods by virtue of the transcendental visions it supplied.

However the dislocation may have been produced – and it is likely that still another method was practised on a hill-top, not beside a river – there was a taboo in Canaan on eating the flesh around the thigh-bone, as is expressly stated in Genesis in the story of Jacob’s wrestling at Peniel. Robertson-Smith rightly connects this taboo with the practice, common to all Mediterranean countries, of dedicating the thigh-bones of all sacrificial beasts, and the parts about them, to the gods: they were burned first and then the rest of the beast was eaten by the worshippers. But the anthropological rule ‘No taboo without its relaxation’ applies here. In primitive times the flesh-covered thighbone of the dead king must have been eaten by his comrades. This practice was until recently followed, as Mgr. Terhoorst, a Roman Catholic missionary records, by the younger warriors of the Central African Bantu tribe of Bagiushu among whom he worked. The flesh was eaten on the death of their Old Man, or when the chief of an enemy tribe was killed in battle. Mgr. Terhoorst states that this was done to inherit the courage of the dead man which was held to reside in the thigh, and that the rest of the body was not touched. The Bagiushu, who file their front teeth into a triangular shape, are not cannibalistic on other occasions.

In my King Jesus I suggest that the Hebrew tradition found in the Talmud Babli Sanhedrin and the Tol’ Doth Yeshu, that Jesus was lamed while attempting to fly, refers to a secret Coronation ceremony on Mount Tabor, where he became the new Israel after being ritually lamed in a wrestling match. This tradition is supported by Gospel evidence which I adduce, and by a remark of Jerome’s that Jesus was deformed. Mount Tabor was one of Jehovah’s chief shrines. Tabor is named after Atabyrius, the son of Eurynome and grandson of Proteus, as the Septuagint recognized, and we know a good deal about this god, who also had a shrine built to him on Mount Atabyria in Rhodes by one ‘Althaeamenes the Cretan’. Althaeamenes means ‘Mindful of the Goddess Althaea’ and Althaea (‘she who makes grow’) was another name for Atabyrius’s mother Eurynome, the Moon-goddess of the Orphics. The marshmallow – in Welsh hocys bendigaid the holy mallow – was Althaea’s flower, and she loved Dionysus the Vine-god. She became the mother by him of Deianeira, the same Deianeira who played the part of Blodeuwedd to Hercules of Oeta. Atabyrius, being one of the Cretan Telchines, had the power, like Dionysus or Proteus, to transform himself into any shape; and in his Rhodian shrine brazen bulls were dedicated to him which bellowed whenever anything extraordinary was about to happen – the same sort of brazen bull that was made by Daedalus for King Minos of Crete. And we know that Atabyrius was the god, worshipped as a golden calf, whom Israel credited with having brought them out of Egypt. But the byrius termination occurs in the royal title of Burna-buriash, one of the Third Dynasty Kassite (Indo-European) Kings of Babylon who reigned from 1750 to 1173 BC ; Atabyrius was clearly not a native Cretan, nor a Semite, but a Kassite god who entered Syria early in the second millennium. How and when his cult was carried to Thrace, Rhodes and Crete is not clear; but he is likely to have gone into Egypt with the Hyksos. He was also called Tesup.

This mythological rigmarole adds up to an identification of the Israelite Jehovah of Tabor, or Atabyrius, with Dionysus the Danaan White Bull-god: an identification which rests on respectable Classical authority. In Plutarch’s Convivial Questions one of the guests claims to be able to prove that the God of the Jews is really Dionysus Sabazius, the Barley-god of Thrace and Phrygia; and Tacitus similarly records in his History (v. 5) that ‘some maintain that the rites of the Jews were founded in honour of Dionysus’. Also, the historian Valerius Maximus records that about the year 139 BC the Praetor of Foreigners, C. Cornelius Hispallus, expelled from Rome certain Jews who were ‘trying to corrupt Roman morals by a pretended cult of Sabazian Jove’. The inference is that the Praetor did not expel them for a legitimate worship of this god, but because they foisted novelties on the Thracian cult – probably circumcision, which was regarded by the Romans as self-mutilation and a corruption of morals – for they admitted aliens to their Sabbaths. According to Leclercq’s Manual of Christian Archaeology, burials in the cemetery of Praetextatus at Rome confirm this cult of a Jewish Sabazius. That the Jews of the Dispersion may have used false etymology to equate ‘Sabazius’ with ‘Sabaoth’ – Jehovah was the Lord of the Sabbath, and also of Sabaoth, ‘of hosts’ – does not disprove the original identity of the two gods.

Sabazian Zeus and Sabazian Dionysus were different names of the same character, the Son of Rhea; which means that he was of Cretan origin. The Phrygians called him Attis and made him the son of Cybele, but this amounted to the same thing; and an inscription of Jewish origin has been found in Rome: ‘To Attis the Most High God who holds the Universe together.’ The serpent was sacred to Sabazius; and this recalls the Brazen Seraph Ne-esthan or Nehushtan, which Moses used as a standard and which is said to have been destroyed as idolatrous by Good King Hezekiah because incense was burned to it as to a god. 6 But the Jewish sect of Ophites, centred in Phrygia, revered the Serpent in early Christian times, holding that the post-exilic Jehovah was a mere demon who had usurped the Kingdom of the Wise Serpent, the Anointed One. Sabazian Dionysus was represented with bull’s horns because, as Diodorus Siculus records, he was the first to yoke oxen to the plough for agriculture: in other words to plant barley. Since Jehovah was pre-eminently a protector of barley – the Passover was a barley harvest-festival – Plutarch’s convivial guest would have had little trouble in proving his contention, especially since, according to the legend, Sabazius was torn by the Titans into seven pieces. Seven was Jehovah’s mystical number; so also was 42, the number of letters in his enlarged Name, and according to Cretan tradition, the number of pieces into which the Titans tore the bull-god Zagreus.

Dionysus Sabazius was the original Jehovah of the Passover; and Plutarch also identifies the Jehovah of the Feast of Tabernacles with Dionysus Liber, or Lusios (‘he who frees from guilt’), the Wine-god, by suggesting that the word ‘Levite’ is formed from Lusios; and he says that the Jews abstain from swine’s flesh because their Dionysus is also Adonis, who was killed by a boar. The rituals of Jehovah and Dionysus, as Plutarch pointed out, corresponded closely: mysteries of barley-sheaves and new wine, torch dances until cock-crow, libations, animal sacrifices, religious ecstasy. It also appears that the promiscuous love-making of the Canaanite rites, though severely punished at Jerusalem in post-exilic times, still survived among the peasantry who came up for the Tabernacles. The Temple priests in the time of Jesus admitted the original nature of the Feast, while declaring that its nature had changed, by announcing at the close: ‘Our forefathers in this place turned their backs on the Sanctuary of God and their faces to the East, adoring the Sun; but we turn to God.’ For the Sun represented the immortal part of Dionysus; the barley and the vine his mortal part.

There is even numismatic evidence for the identification of Jehovah and Dionysus: a silver coin of the fifth century BC , (which appears in G. F. Hill’s Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Palestine ) found near Gaza with on the obverse a bearded head of Dionysus type and on the reverse a bearded figure in a winged chariot, designated in Hebrew characters JHWH – Jehovah. This is not, of course, by any means the whole story of Jehovah, whose affinity with other gods, especially Cronos (Bran), has already been mentioned. It is easiest perhaps to write about him in terms of days of the week. His first pictorial appearance is at the copper-workings of Ras-Shamra in Sinai in a carving of about the sixteenth century BC . He is then Elath-Iahu a Kenite Smith-god, the God of Wednesday, presumably the lover of Baalith the local Aphrodite and Goddess of Friday. Later in his theophanies at Moreh, Hebron and Ophrah he is the terebinth-god Bel, the God of Thursday. The story of his defeat of the prophets of Carmel concerns the conquest of his Bel aspect by Cronos the God of Saturday in the person of Elijah. Bel and Cronos are always appearing in opposition, Bel being Beli and Cronos, Bran; as has been shown. ‘When Israel was in Egypt’, Jehovah was Set, the God of Sunday. At the Jerusalem feast of Tabernacles, on the Day of Willows, he was the God of Monday. His name El, connected with the scarlet oak, proves him to have been also the God of Tuesday. Thus the universality claimed for him by the Pharisees and typified by the Menorah, the seven-branched candlestick, rests on a solid enough mythological basis.

Further, the name Iahu is far older than the sixteenth century BC and of wide distribution. It occurs in Egypt during the Sixth Dynasty (middle of the third millennium BC ) as a title of the God Set: and is recorded in Deimel’s Akkadian-Sumerian Glossary as a name for Isis. It also seems to be the origin of the Greek name Iacchus, a title of the shape-shifting Dionysus Lusios in the Cretan mysteries. Thus although I.A.U. are the vowels of the three-season year of Birth, Consummation and Death – with Death put first because in the Eastern Mediterranean the agricultural year begins in the I season – they seem to be derived from a name that was in existence long before any alphabet was formed, the components of which are IA and HU. ‘la’ means ‘Exalted’ in Sumerian and ‘Hu’ means ‘Dove’; the Egyptian hieroglyph ‘Hu’ is also a dove. The Moon-goddess of Asianic Palestine was worshipped with doves, like her counterparts of Egyptian Thebes, Dodona, Hierapolis, Crete and Cyprus. But she was also worshipped as a long-horned cow; Hathor, or Isis, or Ashtaroth Karnaim. Isis is an onomatopoeic Asianic word, Ish-ish, meaning ‘She who weeps’, because the Moon was held to scatter dew and because Isis, the pre-Christian original of the Mater Dolorosa, mourned for Osiris when Set killed him. She was said to be the white, or, according to Moschus, the golden Moon-cow Io who had settled down in Egypt after long wanderings from Argos. The o in Io’s name is an omega, which is a common Greek variant of alpha.

Ia-Hu therefore seems to be a combination of Ia, ‘the Exalted One’, the Moon-goddess as Cow, and Hu, the same goddess as Dove. We know from Plutarch that at the mid-winter solstice mysteries Isis, as the golden Moon-cow, circled the coffin of Osiris seven times in commemoration of the seven months from solstice to solstice; and we know also that the climax of the orgiastic oak-cult with which the Dove-goddess was concerned came at the summer solstice. Thus Ia-Hu stands for the Moon-goddess as ruler of the whole course of the solar year. This was a proud title and Set seems to have claimed it for himself when his ass-eared sceptre became the Egyptian symbol of royalty. But the Child Horus, the reincarnation of Osiris, overcomes Set yearly and it is a commonplace that conquering kings their titles take from the foes they captive make. Thus Horus was Iahu also, and his counterparts the Cretan Dionysus and Canaanite Bel became respectively IACCHUS and (in an Egyptian record) IAHU-BEL. The Welsh god Hu Gadarn and the Guernsey god Hou, or Har Hou, are likely to be the same deity: that Hou was an Oak-god is suggested by the same formula having been used in his mediaeval rites as in those of the Basque Oak-god Janicot, who is Janus.

No mention has been made so far of the religious meaning of the cedar, which figures so prominently in the Old Testament as the loftiest and grandest of all trees: ‘even the cedars of Libanus which Thou hast planted.’ It was used by Solomon with the ‘choice fir’ in the building of the three contiguous temples which he raised in honour of a Trinity consisting of Jehovah and two Goddesses. The identity of the second of these temples is disguised by Pharisee editors as ‘the House of the Forest of Lebanon’, meaning the temple of the Mountain-goddess, the Love and Battle goddess of Midsummer; that of the third is disguised as ‘The House of Pharaoh’s daughter’, who is shown by the story of Moses to have been the Birth-goddess of the Winter Solstice. Since we know that the fir was sacred to the Birth-goddess and that the floor of the Temple was of fir planking, it follows that the cedar of the pillars and beams was sacred to the Love-and-Battle goddess of Mount Lebanon, Astarte or Anatha. Cedar stood, in fact, for the vowel U, of which the tree in Byblos and Western Europe was the Heather. The only other timber used in these Temples was olive, which as has been already mentioned in the context of Hercules and the Dactyls stood for the Spring Sun – Jehovah as Marduk, alias Paeonian Apollo.

Cedar is also coupled with hyssop (probably the wild-caper tree which grows very green in the crannies of rocks or walls, in Egypt and Palestine) in the two most primitive sacrifices of the Old Testament: the red heifer sacrifice of Numbers, XIX, 6 and the ‘sparrow’ sacrifice of Leviticus, XIV, 4, both originally offered to a goddess not a god. The hyssop was evidently a Canaanite equivalent of the mistletoe, the tree of the Day of Liberation, which it resembles by growing sometimes in the fissures of old trees where there is leaf mould to keep it alive; so that the mythological conjunction of cedar and hyssop means the whole course of the sun from its infancy at the winter solstice to its prime at the summer solstice, and back again. Thus when it is recorded in I Kings, IV, 33:

JHWH’s Massoretic title, supposedly the oldest, was Q’re Adonai (‘Lord Q’re’) – though some Hebrew scholars prefer to interpret the words as meaning: ‘Read Adonai’, i.e. ‘give the consonants of JHWH the same vowels as in “Adonai”.’ Q’re sounds Cretan. The Carians, Lydians and Mysians, who were of Cretan stock, had a common shrine of Zeus Carios at Mylassa in Caria, a god whom their cousins the Tyrrhenians took to Italy as Karu, and who is also Carys, the founder of Megara. The Quirites of Rome came from a Sabine town Qures, which apparently bore his name or that of his mother Juno Quiritis, mentioned by Plutarch; and the Curetes of Delos, Chalcis, Aetolia and Crete are perhaps also called after him, though to the Greeks, who could make nothing of the barbarous word Q’re, ‘Curetes’ meant boys who had sacrificed their hair-trimmings (Kourai ) to the god. These Curetes are identified by Pausanias with the Children of Anax, the ten-cubit-high Son of Uranus. Anax was a Carian who ruled Miletus before its conquest by the Milesians of Crete, gave it the name of Anactoria, and was the father of the ten-cubit-high Asterius. Pausanias connects Anax with the Pelasgian mysteries of Samothrace. The Children of Anax appear in the Bible as the tall people of Hebron whom Caleb expelled and who subsequently lived in Gaza and neighbouring cities. In other words, they were Asianic ‘People of the Sea’ who worshipped the God Q’re, or (as he was called in Syria in the time of Thothmes, a Pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom) ‘the Great God Ker’. His chief Carian title was Panemerios (‘of the live-long day’) – at least this was the Greek version of a Carian original -and he seems to have been a god of the solar year who, like Samson of Tyre or Nisus of Nisa (Megara), was annually shorn of his hair and power by the Moon-goddess; his male adorants dedicating their forelocks to him in mourning, at a festival called the Comyria. That Jehovah as Q’re continued to have hair sacrificed to him, as to his Carian counterpart, until the reformation of his religion during the Exile is indicated by the Deuteronomic injunction ‘Ye shall not make a baldness between your eyes for the dead’. The radical letters of his name – Q, apple, or quince or ethrog, and R, myrtle – were represented in the lulab, or thyrsus, used at the Feast of Tabernacles as a reminder of his annual death and translation to Elysium. This moon-festival, indeed, initiated the season of the year which runs from Q to R.

But Q’re probably derived his title from his Moon mother – later, in Greece, his twin-sister – the White Goddess Artemis Caryatis (‘of the nut-tree’) whose most famous temple was at Caryae in Laconia. She was the goddess of healing and inspiration, served by Caryatid priestesses and is to be identified with the nymph Phyllis 7 who, in the Thesean Age, was metamorphosed into an almond tree – Phyllis may be a Greek variant of Belili. At any rate, he became for a time Nabu the Wise God of Wednesday, represented by the almond-tree stem of the seven-branched Menorah; and it was particularly to him that Job referred his question, ‘Where shall Wisdom be found?’, on the ground that it was he who measured, weighed out and enunciated the powers controlled by his six fellow-deities; such as Sin, Monday’s Rain-god; Bel, Thursday’s god of Thunder and Lightning; and Ninib, Saturday’s god of Repose, controller of the Chthonian Winds. Artemis Caryatis may be identified with Carmenta, the Muse mother of Evander the Arcadian, who adapted the Pelasgian alphabet to the Latin. Her name, which Plutarch in his Roman Questions absurdly derives from carens mente, ‘out of her mind’ seems to be compounded of Car and Menta: the first syllable standing for Q’re, the second presumably for Mante ‘the revealer’. Pliny preserves the tradition that ‘Car, after whom Caria takes its name, invented augury’; this Car, evidently Thothmes’s Great God Ker, is mentioned by Herodotus as brother to Lydus and Mysus, the eponymous ancestors of the Lydians and Mysians. Another Car, the son of Phoroneus, and brother of Pelasgus, Europë and Agenor, is said by Pausanias to have been an early king of Megara after whom the acropolis of the city was named. Car’s sex seems to have been changed in both cases: for the Carians, Mysians and Lydians were matrilinear, and the Megarean acropolis must have been called after the White Goddess who ruled all important hills and mountains. The Goddess Car seems also to have given the river Inachus its original name, Carmanor, before Inachus the father of Phoroneus, as Plutarch reports, went mad and leapt into it.

At this point we can reconsider the Myvyrian account of the Battle of the Trees and suggest a textual emendation which makes better sense of it:

For it has already been shown that the Battle of the Trees was fought between the White Goddess (‘the woman’) for whose love the god of the waxing year and of the waning year were rivals, and ‘the man’, Immortal Apollo, or Beli, who challenged her power. In other words, the sacred name IEVOA, or JIEVOAO its enlargement, revealed by Amathaon to Gwydion and used as a means of routing Bran, was the name of the Five- fold Goddess Danu. This was a name in which Bran could claim to speak oracularly from her kingdom of Dis, as one who had had intimate experience of each of her five persons – by being born to her, initiated by her, becoming her lover, being lulled to sleep by her, and finally killed by her. The new name of eight letters which replaced it was Beli-Apollo’s own, not shared with the White Goddess, and it was therefore conveniently forgotten by later mythographers that the original one belonged to Bran, or Q’re, or Iahu, only by virtue of his birth, marriage and death under female auspices. Professor Sturtevant, expert on the Hittites, translates Q’re as Karimni which means merely ‘to the god’; but, as Mr. E. M. Parr points out, El is both the common word for ‘god’ in Syria and a proper name for the oak-god El. He holds that other forms of this same word are Horus, or Qouros, a god of the island of Thera – the Semitic form of Horus is Churu. The identity of Q’re is confused by the Gods Nergal and Marduk having also assumed the name (Qaru): Marduk’s Amorites called him Gish Qaru, ‘Q’re of trees and herbs’, to identify him with Nergal, the God of Tuesday on which trees and herbs were first created.