The ​White Goddess 1 csillagozás

This Artemis was a patroness of fishermen and sailors. One of the priestesses was chosen every fiftieth month as representative of the Goddess; perhaps she was the winner of a race. She took a yearly consort who became the Oak-king, or Zeus, of the region and was sacrificed at the close of his term of office. By the time that the Achaeans had established the Olympian religion in Thessaly (it is recorded that all the gods and goddesses attended Peleus's marriage to Thetis) the term had been extended to eight, or perhaps seven, years, and a child sacrificed every winter solstice until the term was complete. (Seven years instead of the Great Year of eight seems to be a blunder of the mythographers; but from the Scottish witch-ballad of True Thomas it appears that seven years was the normal term for the Queen of Elphame's consort to reign, and the Scottish witch cult had close affinities with primitive Thessalian religion.)

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

The real story seems to be that the Danaids were an Argive college of fifty priestesses of the Barley-goddess Danae, who was interested in giving rain to the crops and was worshipped under four different divine titles; pouring water through a vessel with holes so that it looked like rain was their usual rain-bringing charm.

In Ireland this Hercules was named Cenn Cruaich, 'the Lord of the Mound', but after his supersession by a more benignant sacred king was remembered as Cromm Cruaich ('the Bowed One of the Mound').

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

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

„In describing the manifold changes of Dionysus into winds, water, earth, stars and growing plants and animals, they use the riddling expressions 'render asunder' and 'tearing limb from limb'. And they call the god 'Dionysus' or 'Zagreus' ('the torn') or 'The Night Sun' or 'The Impartial Giver', and record various Destructions, Disappearances, Resurrections and Rebirths, which are their mythographic account of how those changes came about.”

Gwion is hinting to Heinin and the other court-bards that the true identity of the hero whom they thoughtlessly eulogize as King Arthur is Hercules-Dionysus, rex quondam, rex-que futurus ('King once and King again to be'), who at his second coming will be the immortal Hercules-Apollo. But they will not understand.

The mystical Essene Ebionites of the first century A.D. believed in a female Holy Spirit; and those members of the sect who embraced Christianity and developed into the second-century Clementine Gnostics made the Virgin Mary the vessel of this Holy Spirit—whom they named Michael ('Who is like God?'). According to the Clementines, whose religious theory is popularized in a novel called The Recognitions,1 the identity of true religion in all ages depends on a series of incarnations of the Wisdom of God, of which Adam was the first and Jesus the last. In this poem pf Gwion's, Adam has no soul after his creation until Eve animates him.

The eighteenth-century antiquary Winslow took Dean Swift to Lough Crew to collect local legends of the Irish Triple Goddess. Among those collected was one of the death of the Garbh Ogh, an ancient ageless giantess, whose car was drawn by elks, whose diet was venison milk and eagles' breasts and who hunted the mountain deer with a pack of seventy hounds with bird names. She gathered stones to heap herself a triple cairn and 'set up her chair in a womb of the hills at the season of heather-bloom'; and then expired.

In Ireland the yew was 'the coffin of the vine': wine barrels were made of yew staves. In the Irish romance of Naoise and Deirdre, yew stakes were driven through the corpses of these lovers to keep them apart; but the stakes sprouted and became trees whose tops eventually embraced over Armagh Cathedral.

Ariadne, on whom 'Arianrhod' seems to be modelled, was an orgiastic goddess, and it is evident from the legends of Lemnos, Chios, the Chersonese and the Crimea, that male human sacrifice was an integral part of her worship, as it was among the pre-Roman devotees of the White Goddess of Britain.