The White Goddess

 

Red Resonant Moon – sometime in 2013 – Algarve

 

It is a full moon this evening, and it seemed a good idea to go and visit the local Goddess site here in the Central Algarve, which is called Alcalar.

 

It is a full five thousand years old, and in a pretty good state of repair considering.

 

I took some photos, for some reason I forgot to meditate. It made me wonder, naturally, about a people who spent so much time and effort building this thing that would stand for several thousand years. Why?  What was the point?

 

Come to think of it, what is the point of everything, or anything? Take modern British Society for example. What exaclty are we trying to achieve?

 

I asked my dear mother the same question recently. It seems, for example, that the Victorians had a pretty clear idea of where they were going and what the point of their society was, but I’m not sure us moderns have any real idea what it is we are doing here, either collectively or individually, besides accumulating possessions or experiences.

 

Once upon a time, I thought I stumbled upon the answer in a fairly huge book by Robert Graves, called The White Goddess.

 

Cover of White Goddess

I found a recommendation for it in the pages of a book by Robert Anton Wilson, who vouched-safe that he had read it several times, and enjoyed it each time, with its heady mix of mythology and re-constructive surgery on current culture and its dim and distant origins.

 

One thing that I grasped out of all this was that true art was Divinely Inspired, and its purpose was to provide proof of the Divine within our mundane lives, thus giving us poor sinners meaning in an otherwise unintelligible world.

 

It is difficult to put exactly into words what I mean. I was concentrating chiefly on the power of lyrics in songs.  I wondered what it was that made a song great, and if there was somehow some power inherent in the right combination of words that would galvanise a band into making something groovy out of it, when another song would just fall flat.  I was searching for a magic formula.

 

Robert  Graves traces the history of the Bardic tradition from the pitifully few extant fragments we have coming down to us through the ages. He focuses particularly on Gwion’s Riddle.

 

This riddle, he asserts, is the work of a full master of the Bardic craft, someone so steeped in arcane lore that they are able to make a riddle that carefully avoids any overt heresy, and thus the censorship of the church, but which, nonetheless, encodes the true philosophy of the Bards, the one true religion, and preserves it like a fly in amber.

 

The reason he was able to do this, Graves tells us, is that he was schooled in the tradition that had links to Egypt and all across Europe, encompassing the wisdom of countless tribal mythologies, all of which tell the same story.

 

The reason Gwion had to do this was because of a little gathering of lovely Catholics called the Synod of Whitby.  The main relevant thrust of this particular Synod, from a Bardic perspective, was the flowering of Art and Music and Culture that was happening in the British Isles, as a result of the merging of the teachings of the Christian Church, and the old ways of the Celtic Shamen or Bards.

New Haven, Connecticut, USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to the Bards, the Word was true.  The Good News was indeed Good.   God had sent his only begotten son into the world to save mankind, and this was generally a wonderful event.  It was in fact, just the latest flowering of a cosmic phenomenon that gave the Bards their raison d’etre, their joie de vivre, their inspiration and their faith.  It was this great cosmic wonder that the Bards were the guardians of, and it was their job to compose music and stories to allow the regular populace to glimpse the Grand Design behind everything.  At each of the stations of the Agricultural year the people got together to celebrate on or other specific aspect of the same timeless Divine story, and the Bards were on hand with the correct song and the pertinent story to remind everyone why they did what they did, and why all was safe in the hands of the Divine Author.

 

Now, the goodly folk who attended the Synod of Whitby decided amongst themselves, no doubt with some gentle urging from Rome, that this flowering, however beautiful and sublime it might have been, was the work of the Devil, and was, in fact heresy.

 

The Bards knew, you see, that Jesus was just the latest in a long line of incarnations of the Divine Avatar.  His names are many and various and they are writ large on the walls of the temples from here to Memphis and beyond. This is the story of the Sun, the Son, the male principle, and his exemplary life, which always has certain key features.

 

His names, as I said are many and varied.  Dionysus, Zeus, Hercules, Adonis, Osiris, Gilgamesh, Moses, Shiva, Krishna, Alexander, Rameses, Theseus, Perseus, Lugh Long-handed, Cuchulain, Bran, Dylan, the list really does go on and on.

 

His origin is always Divine, and if there is not always, a Virgin Birth, there is always some wonderful confusion regarding the birth of the holy child.  There is a life of wonders, labours, miracles, with teaching of men and the bringing of great gifts.  There is a journey to the Underworld, or to the land of the Dead, beyond the veil, and there is resurrection and, ultimately, deification as the Avatar takes their place amongst the immortals from whose seed he originally sprung.

 

The Bards were more than happy to put Jesus in there as the latest and perhaps greatest of these paragons of humanity, but they tended to want to tell his story within the context of the unbroken chain of God-beings that stretched back into eternity.  He will return, they said, because he always does.

 

However, the Synod decided that this was heresy, and that the official line was thus:  There was only one of him, and his name was Jesus Christ, our priests are his sole representatives, and we will tell you when and if he pops his head up again.  All reference to these other pagan idols was quite against the grain and must be stamped out at all costs.

 

So, this was the need for the secrecy for the all-but-impenetrable riddling in Gwion’s riddle.  If he was caught espousing the ancient philosophy then there would be trouble, but his credo would simply not allow him to tow the party line – his heritage was part of all humankind’s heritage, and he was not going to allow the Flame Eternal to be casually stamped out by a bunch of philistines to whom the Word was the Latin verbum a word much more closely related to words for punishment and torture than the Greek logos,  or the Latin ratio – words which are so rich in beauty and meaning as to actually be the very etymon of those things – God itself.

 

Hot stuff, eh?  Well, that’s all for now folks – to be continued.  Here’s a pick from inside the great womb of Alcalar, the holy Necropolis of Europe’s southern Atlantic coast. A site sacred to the Goddess, we assume, since it is mounds and hollows, rather than uprights.  We will get into her role in the story of the incarnate male principle in due course.  Let’s just say this – he doesn’t quite just pop out of nowhere, this Divine Child, and he tends to have a little help here and there from a certain someone as he makes his way through history, righting wrongs and generally giving everyone a reason to live.

 

 

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