See "The Leprachauns of Palestine" to understand why a commentary on the Tanach has a section on the Celts, though it will probably become obvious as you read on.
Separate pages on the origins of "King" Arthur, and on the Celts as a tribe, are in preparation.
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The notes that follow are still in process of preparation, and much need of merging, re-organising, structuring, further research....
The story goes, very briefly, as follows: Tegid Voel, a nobleman of Penllyn, had a wife named Caridwen (or Cerridwen), and two children. Creirwy was beautiful, but Afagddu very ugly. They inhabited an island in Lake Tegid. Cerridwen made Afagddu intelligent to compensate for his ugliness, using a recipe in the books of Vergil of Toledo (12th century); these included a cauldron of inspiration and knowledge, which had to simmer for a year and a day. Each season she added magical herbs gathered in their planetary hours.
While gathering the herbs, she set Gwion son of Gwreang of the parish of Lanfair in Caerinion to stir the cauldron. Near the end of the year three burning drops flew out and fell on his finger. He put it in his mouth and at once understood the meaning of all things past present and future, including the discovery that Cerridwen intended to kill him once the year and a day were up. He fled, but she pursued him like a black screaming hag. Using the powers he had gained from the cauldron he turned himself into a hare; she became a greyhound. He became a fish, she an otter. He a bird, she a hawk. He a grain of winnowed wheat on a barn floor; she a black hen, and ate him.
Returned to her own shape, she found herself pregnant by Gwion. She tied the baby in a bag and threw him into the sea, two days before May Day. The bag was washed into the weir of Gwyddno Garanhair near Dovey in Aberystwyth, in Cardigan Bay, and rescued by Prince Elphin, son of Gwyddno and nephew of King Maelgwyn of Gwynedd in north Cymru, who had come there to fish. Gwion named the child Taliesin.
Later Elphin was imprisoned by Maelgwyn at Dyganwy near Llandudno, Gwynedd's capital, and Taliesin rescued him by a display of wisdom in which he confounded all the bards (twenty-four of them) of the court, including chief bard Heinin. The prince was released after Taliesin set them a riddle that they couldn't answer, and a violent wind (which was the answer to the riddle) blew open the prison doors. A magic incantation released Elphin from his chains, and he was set free on the Day of the Divine Child, which back then was December 23rd, the Roman mid-winter festival of Saturnalia.
Phoroneus to the Beney Yisra-El was Ephron the Beney Chet (Hittite), who sold the Cave of Machpelah to Av-Raham. Cerdana is a harvest dance in the Pyrennees, where the best corn-land is named Cerdana. Thus the barley-goddess Cerridwen is in fact Albina or Alphito, and as such gives her name to Britain as Albion or Albany. The Romans worshipped her as Cardea and regarded the hawthorn as sacred to her. Janus the two-headed guardian of the door kept her out of houses where she sought children (Janus being a variant name of the oak-god Dianus, whose wife was Jana, a variant of Diana, and of biblical Dinah. This was itself a rustic form of Jupiter and Juno. Jupiter should thus be Dupiter or Pater Dan, father of the Dana'ans, and Juno Duno or Diana.
Erin = Éire was a pre-Celtic fate goddess linked to the Greek Erinyes = the 3 furies. Wouldn't it be hugely ironic if that was the ultuimate-original source of the name of that great land!
A full list of Cymry (Welsh) and other Celtic gods and goddesses can be found by clicking here.
In the Celtic world, the equivalent of the priest-kings and the Prophets were known as Druids, and they served as priests, as judges, as Elders, and sometimes as kings. Highly trained, Druidic colleges were founded in woods or groves; each of the sacred trees stood for a letter of the alphabet; poetry was built from these tree-letters, and much of it told the lives of the trees, but symbolically, mythologically.
Erin = Éire was a pre-Celtic fate goddess linked to the Greek Erinyes = the 3 furies. Wouldn't it be hugely ironic if that was the ultuimate-original source of the name of that great land!
A full list of Cymry (Welsh) and other Celtic gods and goddesses can be found by clicking here.
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To the ancient Éirish this alphabet was called Ogham; elsewhere it was known as the Beth-Luis-Nion (Birch-Rowan-Ash), from its first three letters (as we English call ours an alphabet because its first two letters are Alpha and Beta, and we Jews the same from Aleph and Bet). Writing tablets were made of beech wood; beech became a synonym for literature (in German the word buchstabe, meaning "letter" or "writing", came from the same root and is the sapling of the word "book" in English).
[Would Beth-Luis-Nion mean anything in its Yehudit equivalent: Bet-Lamed-Nun? No, there is no such root in Yehudit]
Of all the trees, none was more important to the druids than the one (in Europe anyway) with the capacity to live the longest, the oak-tree; and it is thought that the word Druid may actually mean "oak-seer". The link to EL and ELON as the oak-tree in the Yisra-Eli world is easy enough to make. More complex, but well worth the voyage, is the seeming link to the Dravidians, the earliest inhabitants of the Indian sub-continent of whom we have any detailedknowledge. You can explore who the Dravidians were as people here, the links between Jainism and the Celtic world here, and between Brahminism and the Celtic world here. Jones' "Common Source" transpires to be even more about culture than it is about language!
[Would Beth-Luis-Nion mean anything in its Yehudit equivalent: Bet-Lamed-Nun? No, there is no such root in Yehudit]
Of all the trees, none was more important to the druids than the one (in Europe anyway) with the capacity to live the longest, the oak-tree; and it is thought that the word Druid may actually mean "oak-seer". The link to EL and ELON as the oak-tree in the Yisra-Eli world is easy enough to make. More complex, but well worth the voyage, is the seeming link to the Dravidians, the earliest inhabitants of the Indian sub-continent of whom we have any detailedknowledge. You can explore who the Dravidians were as people here, the links between Jainism and the Celtic world here, and between Brahminism and the Celtic world here. Jones' "Common Source" transpires to be even more about culture than it is about language!
But the Celtic myths reflect far more than just the Dravidian; we have already witnessed Greek and Mycenaean and Yisra-Eli parallels, above, and we can wander through the Assyrian and Babylonian and find still more.
An early Cornish poem, for example, describes Merddin (an alternate/earlier form of the Arthurian Merlin; sometimes called Merddin Wyllt) going in the early morning with his black dog to see the glain, or magical snake's egg, probably a fossilised sea-urchin such as were put in iron age burial mounds, but the mythological significance is both Egyptian Ophic and Greek Ophionic, and both of them have their origins in the Babylonian Marduk, bifurcating the cosmic serpent in order to liberate the cosmic egg and enable it to hatch out the Cosmos. Merddin's purpose was to cull cresses and samolus from the top of an oak, both of them having medicinal properties. The Druids also used oak-twigs in their divination, whence the magic wand, which was really a Prophetic staff, identical to the shepherd's crooks found in almost every culture, including the Biblical Rod of Aaron, which budded in Numbers 17, having previously turned into yet another oracular serpent, in Exodus 4:1-5, 7:19 and 8:5-6).
The Cymry were a tribal aristocracy of Brythonic origin who suppressed a serf-class mixed of Goidels, Brythons and aboriginal Britons (Albions). They first settled in what is now Cumbria and Cumberland in the north-west of England, but moved south and west during the 5th century CE, probably because of the Saxon invasions. The Saxons called them Wal-ès, meaning "foreigners", or possibly "outcasts".
The ancestor of the Cymry was Hu Gadarn (the source of the name that we now spell Hugh?). In their tales it is the yew that predominates, rather than the oak. The yew was used for archers' bows and other weapons, especially the dagger; spears were made from ash, shields from poplar, clubs from the oak. There is no mention in the Celtic tales of the acacia however - that being the Biblical "shittim" wood, used to build the Ark (see Exodus 37) - nor of "gopher" wood, used to build the other Ark, No'ach's, in Genesis 6:14, and which was probably cypress.
In Norse legends Baldr was the sun god. Mistletoe was important to the Gallic Druids, and it was in Gaul that the Norse (Normans) and Celts (Gauls) first came together as a single culture.
In the Cad Goddeu (the text is at the link), "the Battle of the Trees", the other great work of Cymry literature, the flower goddess Blodeuwedd was conjured by the wizard Gwydion out of buds and blossoms - probably nine kinds - and her consort, the fruit man, was made of nine kinds of fruit. His castle, like the ladder that Ya'akov dreamed at Beit-El, is an allegory for the Milky Way. Blodeuwedd is another name for Olwen, the May-Queen, daughter of the Hawthorn or Whitethorn which is the May Tree. She is the Celtic equivalent of Aphrodite, Ester (Esther), Eshet (Isis) etc - the White Goddess. Goddeu means "trees" and was the Cymry name for Shropshire. Cad means "battle". Take a look at the text, and you should find yourself no longer puzzled by the strange transitions described in the tale of Tegid Voel and Caridwen, recounted at the top of this page.
Primroses are reckoned to be fairy flowers; the bean is associated with ghosts (Pliny the Elder said that dead souls reside in beans, though it is not obvious how he knew) The apple tree is a symbol of poetic immortality, probably a myth scrumpied from the Greek Garden of the Hesperides. A hundred-headed serpent watched over them; like the hundred clawed toad of Shakespeare (in "As You Like It" 2:1) it belonged to the toadstool mysteries. Gwion was an initiate. The South American toadstool god Tlaloc was represented as a toad with a serpent headdress. Tlaloc bears remarkable similarity to Dionysus.
Back to the "Cad Goddeu", where Annwn (somtimes Annwfn, or Annwfyn, in other Cymry texts) is the Underworld, whose king was Arawn. The Battle of the Trees involves a white roebuck and a whelp which Amathaon ap Don brought from Annwm, and over which he fought with Arawn (in the Taliesin legends, Amathaon is named Llew Llaw, which was the Brythonic title of Herakles). On one side a man fought, on the other a woman, who could not be defeated unless their name was known - again connections with Biblical Ya'akov, whose wrestling-match with the night spirit ended over precisely this question of naming, the one refusing to tell his, the other finding his changed (Genesis 32). Gwydion ap Don rightly guessed the name of the man as Bran. (Guessing a god's secret name always leads to his defeat, as, effectively, Ya'akov discovered: e.g. Alexander Jannaeus the Maccabbee summoned the Edomite ass-god of Dora near Chevron in this way). The woman was named Achren, which was also another Celtic name for the Underworld.
Mythologically, then, the Cad Goddeu is the story of a battle between two cults for dominance, the Tuatha de Danann or people of the Don, followers of the mother-goddess Danu, versus the armies of Arawn. In the "Romance of Pwyll, prince of Dyved", Arawn appears on a large pale horse, pursuing a stag with the help of a pack of hounds with red ears, who are clearly the Hounds of Hell - the connection here of Dyved with Arawn is a remarkable coincidence with King David purchasing the threshing-floor of Araunah as the site for the Yeru-Shala'im Temple in 2 Samuel 24:18-25.
Like Yah, who was later masculinised and absorbed into the Omnideistic cult of YHVH by the Yehudim, so the god Don was originally the goddess Danu, herself linked with both Danaë , Diana and the Yisra-Eli Dinah, and in the "Romance of Math the son of Mathonwy" she is the sister of King Math of Gwynedd, whose sons were Gwydion and Amathaon.
The Éirish "Book of Invasions" ("Lebor Gabála Érenn") tells that the Tuatha de Danann - the tribes or people of the goddess Danu - were driven north from Greece after an Assyrian invasion, reaching Éireland and northern England via Denmark in 1472 BCE (this is slightly earlier than the generally accepted date for the arrival of the Pelishtim or Philistines in Kena'an (Canaan), but the tribe of Dan, which was driven out by the Philistine invaders, is clearly associated). There was indeed such an Assyrian invasion, according to Herodotus - the capture by Phoenicians of the Danaan shrine of the White Goddess Io at Argos (Io was the sister-wife of Phoroneus, and they recur in Genesis as Ephron the Hittite sun-god and his sister the moon-goddess Yah, from whom Av-Raham purchased the Cave of Machpelah to bury Sarah), then the religious capital of the Peleponnese. The Cretans had colonised it about 1750 BCE. Likewise Herodotus tells of the emigration of Europa from Phoenicia to Crete before the sack of Knossos in 1400 BCE. This latter event is generally regarded as the reason for the arrival of the Pelishtim on the coast of Yisra-El.
Once settled, the Tuatha de Danann were soon enough unsettled once again, defeated in a battle by the Milesians, the legendary ancestors of Éireland who came by sea from the near east, via Spain, around 1000 BCE, and conquered the older Danaan inhabitants; these became "reduced" to the leprachauns or fairy-folk of legend, and are associated with the grave tumuli. Danus is also called Anu, as in the hills of County Kerry that are known as "The Paps of Anu". She is also Brigit, the goddess of knowledge, poetry and the arts. Her twin sisters - yet another version of the moon-triplet - were also called Brigit, one linked to leechcraft, the other to smithing. Her sacred fire at Kildaire is now attributed to a St Brigit, but all the "pagan" gods and goddesses are now Catholic saints; it is vestalled by nineteen priestesses, each one by compulsion a virgin.
Like Yah, who was later masculinised and absorbed into the Omnideistic cult of YHVH by the Yehudim, so the god Don was originally the goddess Danu, herself linked with both Danaë , Diana and the Yisra-Eli Dinah, and in the "Romance of Math the son of Mathonwy" she is the sister of King Math of Gwynedd, whose sons were Gwydion and Amathaon.
The Éirish "Book of Invasions" ("Lebor Gabála Érenn") tells that the Tuatha de Danann - the tribes or people of the goddess Danu - were driven north from Greece after an Assyrian invasion, reaching Éireland and northern England via Denmark in 1472 BCE (this is slightly earlier than the generally accepted date for the arrival of the Pelishtim or Philistines in Kena'an (Canaan), but the tribe of Dan, which was driven out by the Philistine invaders, is clearly associated). There was indeed such an Assyrian invasion, according to Herodotus - the capture by Phoenicians of the Danaan shrine of the White Goddess Io at Argos (Io was the sister-wife of Phoroneus, and they recur in Genesis as Ephron the Hittite sun-god and his sister the moon-goddess Yah, from whom Av-Raham purchased the Cave of Machpelah to bury Sarah), then the religious capital of the Peleponnese. The Cretans had colonised it about 1750 BCE. Likewise Herodotus tells of the emigration of Europa from Phoenicia to Crete before the sack of Knossos in 1400 BCE. This latter event is generally regarded as the reason for the arrival of the Pelishtim on the coast of Yisra-El.
The Venerable Bede notes a people from Thrace who hit Wexford Bay in about 1250 BCE, and fought with the Danaans before going on to north Britain (Albany). These were the Picts - the name means "tatooed men"; they practiced exogamy, totemism, public coition, cannibalism, tatooing, and had women warriors: remarkably similar to Thessaly before the Achaeans arrived. They spoke a non-Celtic language.
It is at this point that the Cymry and the Éirish begin to overlap, the Mabinogion in one, the Mac-ind-Oic in the other, but they are as close as the Book of Chronicles is to the Book of Kings. So we find ourselves reading about the same characters, but with variations, usually in a minor key.
Amathaon, for example, whose name the Éirish happily acknowledge comes from the Cymry for "a plough", or more likely "ploughmen". But before that - one more masculination to add to our sad list - there was an Aegean sea-goddess, thought to be of Egyptian origin though she may have come to Egypt from Sumer first, was named Amathaunta, and a tribe bearing the name established Amathus in Cyprus at about 2000 BCE; they were Hercules worshippers according to Robert Graves, which is an unusual slip on his behalf: they would have worshipped Greek Herakles, not Roman Hercules.
Amathaon is said to have taught Gwydion wizardry, and to have been Math's maternal nephew - the links are in the Cymry paragraphs, above. Math is also said to have taught Gwydion wizardry, so Math is probably Amathus himself. A Syrian town named Amathus sits on the Orontes river, and there is another at the junction of the Yarden (Jordan) and the Yavok (Jabbok), beneath the Golan Heights. Isaiah 37:13, Amos 6:2 and 2 Kings 25:21 render Amathus as Chamat (חֲמָת), and Genesis 10:18 has the Beney Chamat (Amathites, though most translations render it, equally incorrectly, as Hamathites) as sons of Kena'an (Canaan) with Beney Chavah (Hivites) and Girgashim (Girgasites). 2 Kings 17:30 has them establishing a colony in Shomron (Samaria) with a goddess named Ashima (אֲשִׁימָֽא).
Bran means Crow or Raven (Orev - עוֹרֵב - in Yehudit), but also the alder tree; the Éirish equivalent is Fearn, and that may itself have been a dialect variation of Greek Phoroneus, Yehudit Ephron. Fearn was the third of four sons of King Partholan the Milesian, an ancient king of Éireland – but naming him Milesian endorses the eastern European origins of these people.
Another word for alder is Gwern, and it is probably just a dialect variation of the same type that makes Bill out of William, and William out of Guilliam (Sarah and Sarai, Esther and Ishtar, the obvious equivalents in the Bible). Gwern was likewise a king of Éireland, and also the son of Bran's sister Branwen (D.H. Lawrence spells it Brangwen, emphasising the "gwen", which is the "white" part, "White Crow" the full meaning, like Guinevere; elsewhere she is Cordelia, the youngest daughter of King Lyr) - is it really just a coincidence that so many of these totem names are repeated amongst the aboriginal tribes of north and central America?
The Bran cult likewise came from eastern Europe, specifically the Aegean in its case, and he bears a remarkable similarity to the Pelasgian hero Aesculapius who was king of the Thessalian crow-totem tribe of Lapiths - our second reference to this people, whose battle with the Centaurs may well be the source for the battle of the trees itself. Another Thessalian king - Coronus meaning Crow - was killed by Herakles. By odd coincidence (they never are, but we have to say it) Aesculapius' mother was named Coronis, also meaning crow, though the name may have been a title of Athene, to whom the crow was sacred, in the same way that Hadassah became Ester (Esther) when she married Achashverosh, and Yedid-Yah became Shelomoh (Solomon) upon coronation (apologies for that digression, but I needed to make that very interesting connection between the crow-name as a queenly title and the word "coronation", the event at which the name change occurs).
In Éirish legend Midach (the name means "medicine man"), is killed after the second battle of Moytura by his father Dian Cécht (though in some versions he is himself named Dian Cécht), who was jealous of his ability to heal. Midach is clearly a composite of Aesculapius and Dian Cécht with Apollo. Aesculapius and Bran were both patrons of healing and resurrection. Aesculapius in one tale lay with fifty women in a night, Bran has a similar adventure on the Isle of Women, though in his case it is three times fifty. In art Aesculapius is represented with a dog beside him and a staff with oracular snakes in his hand – for which cf a certain Tarot card, the Caduceus pole, and the rods of both Mosheh (Moses) and Aharon (Aaron). Across the range of world cultures, the medicine god stood in the same relationship to the moon goddess: so, for example, Aesculapius to Athene, Thoth to Eshet (Isis), Eshmun to Ishtar, Dian Cécht to Brigit, Odin to Freya, Bran to Danu.
Thus the theft of the dog and roebuck from the underworld supports the view that the children of Danu came from Greece in the middle of the 2nd milennium BCE. Other legends take the speculation further. Herakles the oak-hero was ordered by Eurystheus of Mycenae to steal the dog Cerberus from Hades and the brass-shot white roebuck from the grove of Artemis at Ceryneia in Arcadia. Another time he stole her oracular tripod from Herophile - the priestess of Delphi whose father was Zeus disguised as a lapwing, and whose mother was Lamia the serpent-goddess (a rather useful story in helping us decode the mythological imagery of the Adam & Chavah tale as well). The Dog is a symbol of the Underworld: Egyptian Thoth has the Dog Anubis (who was also the guardian of the dead, where in the Greek version Cerberus, who guards the entrance to Hades, is himself a three-headed dog); Melkart the Phoenician Herakles is likewise accompanied by a dog. The Enariae were the dog-priests who attended the Great Goddess (and performed sodomitic rites for her, in the Dog Days at the rising of the Dog-Star Sirius). And of course Kalev (Caleb), the twelfth spy who was rewarded with the temporal kingship of Chevron (Hebron) - see particularly the story of Naval and his wife Avi-Gayil, whom David "rescued", in 1 Samuel 25 - means "dog". Was Dante also thinking of these legends when the two creatures encountered by him outside the entrance to the Inferno were a greyhound and a leopard?
Thus the theft of the dog and roebuck from the underworld supports the view that the children of Danu came from Greece in the middle of the 2nd milennium BCE. Other legends take the speculation further. Herakles the oak-hero was ordered by Eurystheus of Mycenae to steal the dog Cerberus from Hades and the brass-shot white roebuck from the grove of Artemis at Ceryneia in Arcadia. Another time he stole her oracular tripod from Herophile - the priestess of Delphi whose father was Zeus disguised as a lapwing, and whose mother was Lamia the serpent-goddess (a rather useful story in helping us decode the mythological imagery of the Adam & Chavah tale as well). The Dog is a symbol of the Underworld: Egyptian Thoth has the Dog Anubis (who was also the guardian of the dead, where in the Greek version Cerberus, who guards the entrance to Hades, is himself a three-headed dog); Melkart the Phoenician Herakles is likewise accompanied by a dog. The Enariae were the dog-priests who attended the Great Goddess (and performed sodomitic rites for her, in the Dog Days at the rising of the Dog-Star Sirius). And of course Kalev (Caleb), the twelfth spy who was rewarded with the temporal kingship of Chevron (Hebron) - see particularly the story of Naval and his wife Avi-Gayil, whom David "rescued", in 1 Samuel 25 - means "dog". Was Dante also thinking of these legends when the two creatures encountered by him outside the entrance to the Inferno were a greyhound and a leopard?
Leviticus 11:13-19 taboos the lapwing along with the eagle, griffon-vulture, ibis, cuckoo, swan, kite, raven, owl, goose, stork, heron and pelican. Most of these must have been of non-Semitic origin since they are not inhabitants of the region, but only migrate through it. The Qur'an (Surah 27) makes the lapwing "the repository of King Solomon's secrets" and a prophetic bird attending him - i.e. a totem-priest. Probably the original "Cad Goddeu" was a Greek story of how the Achaeans of Mycenae capture a Peloponnesian Danaan shrine - the story then coming with them to Britain, with regional alterations.
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2. Brythonic-Goidelic (British-Celtic) pre-History
Who, if anybody, lived on these islands at the hyperborean edge of the flat world, is unknown until about 6000 BCE, after which, and for the next three thousand years, all we can say is that it was the Stone Age, the English "countryside" was unbroken woodland, and they were hunter-gatherers, and there were not very many of them.
3. Unsorted notes
a) The poets (this should really go at the very top, before telling the tales from the epics)
A Celtic poet was a priest and judge, and sacrosanct of person - following the pattern we know from Orpheus and David. He was called in the Celtic language a "fili", which really means a Seer [need to check the Yehudit (Hebrew) for this, versus its "Navi" for prophet, "Shophet" for judge, Levi and Kohen for the two branches of the priesthood etc]. In the Welsh language he was called a Derwydd (pronounced Derwyth), which means an oak-seer, and gives us the word "Druid" [explain the oak-connection through Elon, and distinguish the oracle, such as Devorah, from the shaman, such as Shemu-El). One of his key jobs was to intercede between two sides in battle.
Ordinary poem-writers were called Gleemen, in Cymry Éirchiad. The master poet, or master-fili was called an Ollave, sat next to the king (his "right-hand" man, the Bin Yamin), and was highly privileged, allowed to wear six different colours in his clothing (like Yoseph's coat of many colours?!), as only the king and queen otherwise could [is this the origin of St Olav, who has many English churches named for him: a means of Christianising him?]. In Cymru he was slightly less important, called the Penkerdd (the double-d, as always, pronounced "th"), and only tenth in line, sitting left of the heir apparent, and next to the chief smith at the regal "round table". He followed Ogma the god of Eloquence, and Brigit the threefold Muse (equivalent of the Graces, and the daughters of al-Lah and King Leir: the three phases of the moon).
The Theme - the poetry identified with the Celtic Muse - has thirteen chapters and an epilogue: the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; his losing battle with the god of the waning year for love of the threefold goddess, who is bride first, then mother, finally layer-out. The Poet is himself the waxing year (cf King David in the Psalms); his rival is his "weird": the Adversary in early Biblical legends. Though even before it became Biblical, it was already pure Osher-Tammuz.
Gwion is the equivalent of Finn, the Éirish for Fionn, the hero of a tale that is very similar to Taliesin's. Fionn, son of Mairne, a chief Druid's daughter, was told to fish up and cook a salmon from the Royne; but not to taste it. Unfortunately the pan spilled and burned his thumb; he stuck his thumb in his mouth to cool it, and became inspired ("am I not a man of uncircumcised lips?" asked Mosheh in Exodus 6:12, and later the Prophet Yesha-Yahu - Isaiah 6:5 - had a similar experience).
The equivalent of Gwreang in this version is Freann, a variant of Fearn, the alder connnected to alder-god Bran. The equivalent of the hero Cuchulain ("the hound of Culain", another of our Dog-heroes) was named Setanta, a reincarnation of the old Lugh (Llew Llaw, also Llew Llaw Gyffes = Herakles; but Herakles is himself a variant of Shimshon/Samson). His bride was Blodeuwedd, also known as Twyll Huan, from Cymry Tylluan = "an owl", the bird into which she transformed herself (Athene's bird, in the Greek). Fionn was also called Deimne, which means "fair". Bran is also the giant Ogyr Vran, Guinevere's father (Olde Aenglish Ocur Vran, meaning "Vran the malign") whence the word "ogre". He is accredited with the invention of bardic art (the authors of the Vedas, the Psalms, the Homeric Odes, and others, might wish to quibble with this claim), and owned Cerridwen's cauldron from which the triple muse was born. Cerridwen was Gwion's mother.
b) Tribal origins
In the early Celtic times, migrations were ever westward from the east, just as original Homo Sapiens, millennia before, had migrated continuously eastwards from the west - and the culture is always taken in the luggage, which is why so much is so similar universally. So we can see the Hindu in the Celtic, the Bible in the Norse. So the Cymry claimed descent from Gomer ben Yaphet (interesting to explore the Biblical passage which mentions them, because it also mentions people whose names appear to yield other Celtic tribes, such as Scythians as Scots; for whom see below), but in fact claim their earlier origins in Taprobane (Ceylon, Sri Lanka), which was then Dravidian territory; they setled in Llydaw in northern Britain.
Cymbeline was really Cynvelyn.Tower Hill in London, where Duke Guilliam built his fortress, was originally White Hill, where the head of Bran was buried after his death; whence the White Tower. Eurystheus' head was likewise buried near Athens to protect an important pass, and Adam at the northern approach to Yeru-Shala'im. Arthur supposedly exhumed Bran's head.
Hu Gadarn (Hugh the Mighty), the leader of the Cymry, came from the east. With his plough-oxen he dragged the monster Avanc from the magic lake, causing it to overflow into the Flood. Hu was probably the same as Hou of the Channel Islands. The monster Avanc is a variation of the Chinese serpent Whiconh, wrapped around the egg it had laid and then sliced in half, gave birth to the Cosmos; the same legend that is told of Marduk, and eventually becomes all our dragon tales (Jason, Arthur, Frodo Baggins, Siegfried, Moby-Dick), as well as the serpent of the Garden of Eden.
Pre-Christian Glastonbury had a Gwyn cult based on The Hunter Gwyn who is called Ar Thur - though this may be Arddu, the Welsh name for Satan (remember that Ar Thur simply means "the god", or "the king", and yields the Scandinavian god Thor, who is the deity of Thursday.
In the Norman French traditions, it was Lludd who built London, though its Norman-French name was actually pronounced Lot - and it is probably this Lludd who became reduced to a mere historical character in the myth of the "striker" Ned Ludd. His father Bladud built Bath. However, the name London is probably more closely connected with the Celtic than the Norman, and the Norman may well be mere propaganda: an attempt to claim an ancestry as a way of derogating the defeated enemy (sadly this is Celtic history from the arrival of the first Angles onwards).
So, we also know that Deon was a king of Lochlin and Dublin (what does Lin mean - connected to Merlin? Yes indeed, but the Lin was originally a Din, and that can be followed back through both the Hebrew and the Arabic, as well as through the Greek and Phoenician, all the way to the "common source" of William Jones). Deon is a variant of Don/Danu. Lochlann, ruled by the god Tethra, was the undersea home (Avalon?) of the Fomorian invaders of Éireland who the Duanu defeated. The Éirish call the Scandinavians Lochlannach. The Scandinavians chief god is Odin, or Woden, later identified with Gwydion, and a variant of Wotan. Denmark also contains the name Danu, and Danaans claimed to have come to Britain via Denmark, presumably leaving behind their name in its name (see "The Leprachauns of Palestine"). Afaggdu son of Carridwen was also known as Morvran, which means "sea-raven".
Seekers after Arthur's court have as much trouble finding it as Eshet (Isis) did finding the body of Osher (Osiris), as Emperor Constantine's mother Helena did finding the site of Mount Sinai, and as seekers after the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, where Jesus was supposedly buried, have finding that location; and how curious that, in every case, the number of alleged sites turns out to be fourteen, the same number as the parts into which the god was cut up when killed by his wicked uncle disguised as a boar. Arthur, today, is mostly found (like Joseph of Arimathea, by no coincidence at all) at Glastonbury (Avalon) in Somerset, which was very convenient when English kings ruled in his name from Winchester, and issued their edicts (King Alfred's Danelaw the most famous example") from Wedmore, not five miles from Avalon (Glastonbury); or else he is found among the ancient Cornish legends at Tintagel, though most of those crossed the channel to Brittany when the Anglo-Saxons conquered, and Ar Thur there became King Gradlon (the Lon another regional dialect variant of Lin, and Don, Din).
But to the Cymry, in their versions (all mythologies are historicised to fit, or to create, the history of the people who adopt them) the burial-place of Ar Thur was at Caerleon - "after the Romans left", which is only out by between 1500 and 2500 years!
And it is the number 13, not 14, which dominates the Cymry versions of the romances...
Arianrhod means "silver wheel". She was the daughter of Don, and mother of the divine-fish child Dylan who, after kiling the wren, becomes Llew Llaw Gyffes ("the lion with the steady hand"), who is the sun-hero with a heavenly twin - the concept of Tanism, which was probably a sharing of the reign, six months each, rather than a crown prince-king relationship. Arianrhod becomes Blodeuwedd the flower-and love-goddess, who treacherously destroys Llew Llaw, and is then transformed into the Owl of Wisdom (identified with the goddess of two sacred cities, Yeru-Shala'im through Chochma and Athens through Athene) then the sea-goddess. Llew's body is eaten by her, but his soul becomes an eagle. Thus Arianrhod is another aspect of the White Goddess; her castle is purgatory.
To the Celts the sun was itself heaven. Purgatory was in "the land beyond the north wind", which the Greeks called Hyperborea and identified with Britain, and which Gaelic uses for the land of death (which is why Avalon is there, though the Greek linked it to the god Boreas).
Hyperborea was the birthplace of Latona, the mother of Apollo and Diana, and the mistress of Jupiter; so we can reasonably assume that the worship of Apollo existed in Briatin at that time.
Aelian says that Hyperborean priests regularly visited Apollo's shrine at Tempe. Cyprian, [though it is unclearfrom the sources whether this is Bishop Cyprian of Carthage or Bishop Cyprian of Antioch; same era, very different characters), tells us that he went there to be instructed for forty days by seven mystagogues of Mount Olympus, in order to learn the meanings of musical sounds and the natural sciences.
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| map based on one at (click here) http://www.inheritage.org/almanack/cumbria-england-forgotten-celtic-kingdom/ |
Who, if anybody, lived on these islands at the hyperborean edge of the flat world, is unknown until about 6000 BCE, after which, and for the next three thousand years, all we can say is that it was the Stone Age, the English "countryside" was unbroken woodland, and they were hunter-gatherers, and there were not very many of them.
Somewhere between 4000 and 2500 BCE primitive boats came ashore, at more or less the same spot where Guillaume of Normandie would land his conquering armada in 1066, on the south coast between what are now Eastbourne and Hastings. They brought with them polished axes and rough pots of a type sufficiently advanced that we now refer to them as "New Stone Age".
By 2300 BCE (recent archaeology has reset the date, now reckoning it may have been as early as 3700 BCE) they had established the earliest-known neolithic settlement in Britain, on Windmill Hill. Like 21st century Schengen immigrants, they came from the eastern Mediterranean, via Switzerland, France and Iberia, and settled mostly on the southern shores, establishing themselves as farmer-shepherds. They left behind earthwork enclosures, probably cattle corrals, of several concentric rings; also long barrows, 10 feet or more high, between 100 and 300 feet long, each containing six or more bodies.
What is highly unlikely is that these immigrants were all the same peoples, the movement of a single tribe; much more likely there was a general migration westwards, as has happened repeatedly in history since, and that each group was very small, perhaps a single family unit, perhaps even a single individual, so that the aboriginal origins of today's United Kingdom is a variant mix of hybrids from a hundred sources, unifiable only under the general label: human; though entirely, as it happens, white caucasian human.
Many of these were themselves from western Europe, long-headed farmers who cross-migrated the English Channel regularly, domesticating animals, flint-mining, ornamenting pottery. The Iberian migrants, on the other hand, originated in Libya, though probably Semitic rather than Hamitic, and came by way of Spain and Brittany, leaving behind the earliest of the Breton megaliths, especially the chambered tombs on the west coast of Brittany that are named Carnac, just like the ones of the same name in Egypt, and remarkably similar both to later collective-burial sites in Éireland, and even later - as much as a thousand years later - sites in Central America (Belize, Guatemala and Colombia all have them), and the even later Iron Age megaliths of India (200 BCE), which suggest that the words Druid and Dravidian are more than coincidentally homophonous.
So, somewhere between 3500 and 2000 BCE, we witness the start of the henge monuments: large circular banked enclosures with cremation sites. Brú na Bóinne, the woodhenge in Éireland, has six concentric ovals of post holes, hinting at a roofed building; in the centre of the ring the skeleton of an infant was found with its head cleft in.
The megalithic "giant graves" date from around 2500 BCE, when that "culture zone" reached the British Isles.) And on Salisbury Plain, adjacent to Windmill Hill, Stonehenge, c1900-1700 BCE, the apogee of the megalithic period, and so connectable not just with Carnac but also with Biblical Gil-Gal.
Migration, or invasion, had been and would remain a constant, right up until this very day, and whether the arrivals were the descendants of previous arrivals, who made the journey when word of the successful departees reached them, or others from the same source-land, or others from others parts, is simply unknowable; but probably all three. Between 2000 and 1500 BCE the ones who came were physically more broad-headed, and intellectually of a still more sophisticated culture, carrying bronze weapons, making beakers, introducing cremation, burying their unashed dead in round barrows, building avenues to separate their thatch-and-mud homes formally. These too arrived mostly from Spain, by way of western France, but they may well have come to Spain before they left from it; and as well as these broad-heads there were also many Baltic long-heads.
The epoch from 1500 to 600 BCE is known as the Bronze Age, and from its outset the archaeologists have found blue faience beads from Egypt, imported to Wiltshire somewhere between 1380 and 1350 (the time of Yoseph and of Mosheh?). With maritime culture now well established, cross-channel traffic was simply trade and commerce, not invasion, with multiple new settlements of iron-weaponed visitors from 800. It was at this time that North Britain was invaded by the people known collectively as the Picts. The multiple languages of these multiple immigrant peoples is now known as proto-Celtic.
Then, around 600 BCE, there came an invasion by a Goidelic people from the Baltic coast of Germany; they settled exclusively in the south-east of Britain, but their significance was national, because they brought with them the first tools of the Iron Age.
So we enter the beginnings of the history that most English people know (Scots, Éirish and Welsh people belong to all the previous, but for the English, the Big Bang place takes place now, and here, around 400 BCE, with the invasion of a Belgic people who were not yet the Angles or the Saxons, but certainly their immediate precursors. Their Iron Age culture is called "La Tène", and it is dated from 450-300 BCE. These people, genetically speaking, were a mixture of Teutons and Brythons; we now call them Proto-Celts, but is from these Brythons that the name Britain is applied, for these were the people who the invading Romans called Britons; Gaul, which in those days was Druid, was called La Tène.
Somewhere before 45 CE there followed a second Belic invasion; Atrebates from Artois, bearers of bead-rimmed bowls. They made their capital at Silchester in north Hampshire, and conquered all the way from East Surrey to Trowbridge in Wiltshire, including Stonehenge.
Is Cad Goddeu the story of their capture of Stonehenge? Or more likely Avebury? Stonehenge was probably Beli's seat: laid out as a sun-temple like Apollo's. Beli being the Brythonic form of Ba'al, and his story, which is the start of "British history", confirms the eastern European-to-Middle Eastern origins of the people, the cults, the language.
Is Cad Goddeu the story of their capture of Stonehenge? Or more likely Avebury? Stonehenge was probably Beli's seat: laid out as a sun-temple like Apollo's. Beli being the Brythonic form of Ba'al, and his story, which is the start of "British history", confirms the eastern European-to-Middle Eastern origins of the people, the cults, the language.
Geoffrey of Monmouth (whose main achievement was the reduction of ancient Celtic religion to mere English folk-tale, or at best false English history) tells of two brothers, Belinus and Brennius, who fought to rule Britain in the 4th century BCE; Brennius was beaten and forced north of the Humber. This is probably a Latinised form of the much more ancient myth of Bran and Beli, a conversion of myth into history such as we see throughout the first eight books of the Tanach; Beli being the father of Arianrhod, the sister of Gwydion and Amathaon. Beli was the supreme god of light, which connects him with middle Eastern Bel and Ba'al, just as Gwydion is clearly a form of Woden, Odin, Wotan. Amathaon takes over from Bran as the god of resurrection, and Gwydion from Annwm as the underworld god of divination and prophecy.
Caesar tells us, in his account of the Gallic Wars, that the Gallic Celts claimed descent from Dis and worshipped Minerva, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Mercury by Celtic names*; the Gallics went to Britain for their instruction, which suggests that Dis had his shrine in England. To the Romans Dis was the Underworld, therefore he must mean Annwm/Gwydion. In the Celtic mythologies, Dis was the Lord of the 7-day-week.
*[Mercury, just by the way, was the patron of dice-players and used dice for divination - this connects with the Urim and Tumim of the priestly breastplate, and also with the Tarot cards]
And right here we can also find the origins of what is now the Christmas Tree. Gwydion's horse, if he was Woden, would have been Askr Yggr-drasill, Ygdrasill being the ash tree, which is the World Tree, the Bodhi tree in India, the Tree of Life in the Tanach. Yggr is one of Woden's titles and must link to Merlin's Ygierne, wife of Uther Pendragon. The ash is therefore his sacred tree. Annwm's tree was the alder.
But the historicisation of mythology also runs alongside the mythologisation of history, and just as there are kings named for gods, so there are gods named for kings. When the Gauls invaded Greece in 279 BCE, they did so under a king who was named Brennus, and they sacked Apollo's shrine at Delphi.
The father of Danaus (this leads into my essay "The Leprachauns of Palestine"), according to Nennius, was Belus, who was really Bel the Babylonian earth-god (originally it was probably the mother of Danaë). The Sumerian white goddess was Belili, a goddess of trees as well as the moon, love and the underworld; she was also known as Geshtinnana and was later supplanted by Ishtar. Many words connect to her, including the Slavonic "beli" = "white", Latin "bellus" = "beautiful", Goidelic "bile" = "tree" and Latin "billa" = "branch" or "trunk" of a tree. Primarily she was a willow goddess, and of wells and springs. But in this we can see the first strong evidence that all of these various invading "proto-Celts" were of Middle Eastern origin, and brought with them myths and gods recognisable from both the Babylonian and the Biblical, as well as the Greek and the Egyptian.
The willow was key to YHWH worship in Yeru-Shalayim, especially at Sukot, a fire and water ceremony also called the Day of Willows (in Yehudit willow and alder are regarded as the same tree!). Purple osier was used in the lulav; quince and willow were carried during the feast. Alder was also used in the rites of Astarte and her son the fire-god, and therefore banned at Sukot. The lulav originated in Kena'ani (Canaanite) tabernacle ceremonies.
Bel defeated Belili and became the supreme lord of the universe, made patriarchy where matriarchy had previously ruled, made himself the god of light, the father of both the sun- and the moon-gods, and the creator-god: the original Omnideity, in short. Marduk later made the same claims, and the two became one, Bel taking on Marduk's godhood of spring and thunder as well. The Phoenicians took this god up and brought him to Europe. Beli was originally a willow god, but now added light. His "son" Amathaon invoked him to fight Bran the alder god; at the same time Gwydion of the ash supplanted Arawn of the unknown tree (but, if that connection with Yeru-Shala'im is correct, then obviously the willow).
In Mallory's "Morte D'Arthur", a very late and very much historicised version of the ancient mythology, the brothers Balin and Balan kill each other by mistake. Clearly this is Beli and Bran. Bran also appears as King Brendegore (Bran of Gower) who opposed Arthur with five thousand men; Sir Brandel who fights with Arthur was also known as Brandiles, or Bran of Wales. King Bam of Benweyk is a foreign enemy of Arthur; Ogyr Vran or Leodegrance is Arthur's father-in-law, and Uther Ben is Arthur's father - all of them variants of the original cosmological myths.
Caesar tells us, in his account of the Gallic Wars, that the Gallic Celts claimed descent from Dis and worshipped Minerva, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Mercury by Celtic names*; the Gallics went to Britain for their instruction, which suggests that Dis had his shrine in England. To the Romans Dis was the Underworld, therefore he must mean Annwm/Gwydion. In the Celtic mythologies, Dis was the Lord of the 7-day-week.
*[Mercury, just by the way, was the patron of dice-players and used dice for divination - this connects with the Urim and Tumim of the priestly breastplate, and also with the Tarot cards]
And right here we can also find the origins of what is now the Christmas Tree. Gwydion's horse, if he was Woden, would have been Askr Yggr-drasill, Ygdrasill being the ash tree, which is the World Tree, the Bodhi tree in India, the Tree of Life in the Tanach. Yggr is one of Woden's titles and must link to Merlin's Ygierne, wife of Uther Pendragon. The ash is therefore his sacred tree. Annwm's tree was the alder.
But the historicisation of mythology also runs alongside the mythologisation of history, and just as there are kings named for gods, so there are gods named for kings. When the Gauls invaded Greece in 279 BCE, they did so under a king who was named Brennus, and they sacked Apollo's shrine at Delphi.
The father of Danaus (this leads into my essay "The Leprachauns of Palestine"), according to Nennius, was Belus, who was really Bel the Babylonian earth-god (originally it was probably the mother of Danaë). The Sumerian white goddess was Belili, a goddess of trees as well as the moon, love and the underworld; she was also known as Geshtinnana and was later supplanted by Ishtar. Many words connect to her, including the Slavonic "beli" = "white", Latin "bellus" = "beautiful", Goidelic "bile" = "tree" and Latin "billa" = "branch" or "trunk" of a tree. Primarily she was a willow goddess, and of wells and springs. But in this we can see the first strong evidence that all of these various invading "proto-Celts" were of Middle Eastern origin, and brought with them myths and gods recognisable from both the Babylonian and the Biblical, as well as the Greek and the Egyptian.
The willow was key to YHWH worship in Yeru-Shalayim, especially at Sukot, a fire and water ceremony also called the Day of Willows (in Yehudit willow and alder are regarded as the same tree!). Purple osier was used in the lulav; quince and willow were carried during the feast. Alder was also used in the rites of Astarte and her son the fire-god, and therefore banned at Sukot. The lulav originated in Kena'ani (Canaanite) tabernacle ceremonies.
Bel defeated Belili and became the supreme lord of the universe, made patriarchy where matriarchy had previously ruled, made himself the god of light, the father of both the sun- and the moon-gods, and the creator-god: the original Omnideity, in short. Marduk later made the same claims, and the two became one, Bel taking on Marduk's godhood of spring and thunder as well. The Phoenicians took this god up and brought him to Europe. Beli was originally a willow god, but now added light. His "son" Amathaon invoked him to fight Bran the alder god; at the same time Gwydion of the ash supplanted Arawn of the unknown tree (but, if that connection with Yeru-Shala'im is correct, then obviously the willow).
In Mallory's "Morte D'Arthur", a very late and very much historicised version of the ancient mythology, the brothers Balin and Balan kill each other by mistake. Clearly this is Beli and Bran. Bran also appears as King Brendegore (Bran of Gower) who opposed Arthur with five thousand men; Sir Brandel who fights with Arthur was also known as Brandiles, or Bran of Wales. King Bam of Benweyk is a foreign enemy of Arthur; Ogyr Vran or Leodegrance is Arthur's father-in-law, and Uther Ben is Arthur's father - all of them variants of the original cosmological myths.
Before the adoption of the Latin alphabet (itself a migrant from the Phoenician-Hittite world, by way of the Jewish and the Greek!), the Brits used a Goidelic alphabet known as Ogham, supposedly invented by Ogma sun-face son of Breas, a Goidelic god, described by Lucian as being a kind of Hercules with club and lion-skin. The alphabet had 23 letters - 18 consonants and five vowels. Éirish tradition says it came from Greece (not Phoenicia, though in fact the Greek alphabet was the Phoenician, borrowed) and came to Britain via Spain, (not Gaul as one might expect). It was also known as the Tree Alphabet.
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3. Unsorted notes
a) The poets (this should really go at the very top, before telling the tales from the epics)
A Celtic poet was a priest and judge, and sacrosanct of person - following the pattern we know from Orpheus and David. He was called in the Celtic language a "fili", which really means a Seer [need to check the Yehudit (Hebrew) for this, versus its "Navi" for prophet, "Shophet" for judge, Levi and Kohen for the two branches of the priesthood etc]. In the Welsh language he was called a Derwydd (pronounced Derwyth), which means an oak-seer, and gives us the word "Druid" [explain the oak-connection through Elon, and distinguish the oracle, such as Devorah, from the shaman, such as Shemu-El). One of his key jobs was to intercede between two sides in battle.
Ordinary poem-writers were called Gleemen, in Cymry Éirchiad. The master poet, or master-fili was called an Ollave, sat next to the king (his "right-hand" man, the Bin Yamin), and was highly privileged, allowed to wear six different colours in his clothing (like Yoseph's coat of many colours?!), as only the king and queen otherwise could [is this the origin of St Olav, who has many English churches named for him: a means of Christianising him?]. In Cymru he was slightly less important, called the Penkerdd (the double-d, as always, pronounced "th"), and only tenth in line, sitting left of the heir apparent, and next to the chief smith at the regal "round table". He followed Ogma the god of Eloquence, and Brigit the threefold Muse (equivalent of the Graces, and the daughters of al-Lah and King Leir: the three phases of the moon).
The Theme - the poetry identified with the Celtic Muse - has thirteen chapters and an epilogue: the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; his losing battle with the god of the waning year for love of the threefold goddess, who is bride first, then mother, finally layer-out. The Poet is himself the waxing year (cf King David in the Psalms); his rival is his "weird": the Adversary in early Biblical legends. Though even before it became Biblical, it was already pure Osher-Tammuz.
Gwion is the equivalent of Finn, the Éirish for Fionn, the hero of a tale that is very similar to Taliesin's. Fionn, son of Mairne, a chief Druid's daughter, was told to fish up and cook a salmon from the Royne; but not to taste it. Unfortunately the pan spilled and burned his thumb; he stuck his thumb in his mouth to cool it, and became inspired ("am I not a man of uncircumcised lips?" asked Mosheh in Exodus 6:12, and later the Prophet Yesha-Yahu - Isaiah 6:5 - had a similar experience).
The equivalent of Gwreang in this version is Freann, a variant of Fearn, the alder connnected to alder-god Bran. The equivalent of the hero Cuchulain ("the hound of Culain", another of our Dog-heroes) was named Setanta, a reincarnation of the old Lugh (Llew Llaw, also Llew Llaw Gyffes = Herakles; but Herakles is himself a variant of Shimshon/Samson). His bride was Blodeuwedd, also known as Twyll Huan, from Cymry Tylluan = "an owl", the bird into which she transformed herself (Athene's bird, in the Greek). Fionn was also called Deimne, which means "fair". Bran is also the giant Ogyr Vran, Guinevere's father (Olde Aenglish Ocur Vran, meaning "Vran the malign") whence the word "ogre". He is accredited with the invention of bardic art (the authors of the Vedas, the Psalms, the Homeric Odes, and others, might wish to quibble with this claim), and owned Cerridwen's cauldron from which the triple muse was born. Cerridwen was Gwion's mother.
b) Tribal origins
In the early Celtic times, migrations were ever westward from the east, just as original Homo Sapiens, millennia before, had migrated continuously eastwards from the west - and the culture is always taken in the luggage, which is why so much is so similar universally. So we can see the Hindu in the Celtic, the Bible in the Norse. So the Cymry claimed descent from Gomer ben Yaphet (interesting to explore the Biblical passage which mentions them, because it also mentions people whose names appear to yield other Celtic tribes, such as Scythians as Scots; for whom see below), but in fact claim their earlier origins in Taprobane (Ceylon, Sri Lanka), which was then Dravidian territory; they setled in Llydaw in northern Britain.
Cymbeline was really Cynvelyn.Tower Hill in London, where Duke Guilliam built his fortress, was originally White Hill, where the head of Bran was buried after his death; whence the White Tower. Eurystheus' head was likewise buried near Athens to protect an important pass, and Adam at the northern approach to Yeru-Shala'im. Arthur supposedly exhumed Bran's head.
Hu Gadarn (Hugh the Mighty), the leader of the Cymry, came from the east. With his plough-oxen he dragged the monster Avanc from the magic lake, causing it to overflow into the Flood. Hu was probably the same as Hou of the Channel Islands. The monster Avanc is a variation of the Chinese serpent Whiconh, wrapped around the egg it had laid and then sliced in half, gave birth to the Cosmos; the same legend that is told of Marduk, and eventually becomes all our dragon tales (Jason, Arthur, Frodo Baggins, Siegfried, Moby-Dick), as well as the serpent of the Garden of Eden.
Pre-Christian Glastonbury had a Gwyn cult based on The Hunter Gwyn who is called Ar Thur - though this may be Arddu, the Welsh name for Satan (remember that Ar Thur simply means "the god", or "the king", and yields the Scandinavian god Thor, who is the deity of Thursday.
In the Norman French traditions, it was Lludd who built London, though its Norman-French name was actually pronounced Lot - and it is probably this Lludd who became reduced to a mere historical character in the myth of the "striker" Ned Ludd. His father Bladud built Bath. However, the name London is probably more closely connected with the Celtic than the Norman, and the Norman may well be mere propaganda: an attempt to claim an ancestry as a way of derogating the defeated enemy (sadly this is Celtic history from the arrival of the first Angles onwards).
So, we also know that Deon was a king of Lochlin and Dublin (what does Lin mean - connected to Merlin? Yes indeed, but the Lin was originally a Din, and that can be followed back through both the Hebrew and the Arabic, as well as through the Greek and Phoenician, all the way to the "common source" of William Jones). Deon is a variant of Don/Danu. Lochlann, ruled by the god Tethra, was the undersea home (Avalon?) of the Fomorian invaders of Éireland who the Duanu defeated. The Éirish call the Scandinavians Lochlannach. The Scandinavians chief god is Odin, or Woden, later identified with Gwydion, and a variant of Wotan. Denmark also contains the name Danu, and Danaans claimed to have come to Britain via Denmark, presumably leaving behind their name in its name (see "The Leprachauns of Palestine"). Afaggdu son of Carridwen was also known as Morvran, which means "sea-raven".
Seekers after Arthur's court have as much trouble finding it as Eshet (Isis) did finding the body of Osher (Osiris), as Emperor Constantine's mother Helena did finding the site of Mount Sinai, and as seekers after the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, where Jesus was supposedly buried, have finding that location; and how curious that, in every case, the number of alleged sites turns out to be fourteen, the same number as the parts into which the god was cut up when killed by his wicked uncle disguised as a boar. Arthur, today, is mostly found (like Joseph of Arimathea, by no coincidence at all) at Glastonbury (Avalon) in Somerset, which was very convenient when English kings ruled in his name from Winchester, and issued their edicts (King Alfred's Danelaw the most famous example") from Wedmore, not five miles from Avalon (Glastonbury); or else he is found among the ancient Cornish legends at Tintagel, though most of those crossed the channel to Brittany when the Anglo-Saxons conquered, and Ar Thur there became King Gradlon (the Lon another regional dialect variant of Lin, and Don, Din).
But to the Cymry, in their versions (all mythologies are historicised to fit, or to create, the history of the people who adopt them) the burial-place of Ar Thur was at Caerleon - "after the Romans left", which is only out by between 1500 and 2500 years!
And it is the number 13, not 14, which dominates the Cymry versions of the romances...
Arianrhod means "silver wheel". She was the daughter of Don, and mother of the divine-fish child Dylan who, after kiling the wren, becomes Llew Llaw Gyffes ("the lion with the steady hand"), who is the sun-hero with a heavenly twin - the concept of Tanism, which was probably a sharing of the reign, six months each, rather than a crown prince-king relationship. Arianrhod becomes Blodeuwedd the flower-and love-goddess, who treacherously destroys Llew Llaw, and is then transformed into the Owl of Wisdom (identified with the goddess of two sacred cities, Yeru-Shala'im through Chochma and Athens through Athene) then the sea-goddess. Llew's body is eaten by her, but his soul becomes an eagle. Thus Arianrhod is another aspect of the White Goddess; her castle is purgatory.
To the Celts the sun was itself heaven. Purgatory was in "the land beyond the north wind", which the Greeks called Hyperborea and identified with Britain, and which Gaelic uses for the land of death (which is why Avalon is there, though the Greek linked it to the god Boreas).
Hyperborea was the birthplace of Latona, the mother of Apollo and Diana, and the mistress of Jupiter; so we can reasonably assume that the worship of Apollo existed in Briatin at that time.
But only as one of many cults introduced by the variant migrant groups. At Salisbury Plain, for an initially surprising example, Egyptian beads from the time of Akhenaten have been found (the Tel Amarna period, circa 1350 BCE). But just like Latona, Abaris the teacher of Pythagoras was said to have come from Hyperborea, and there are certain oddities of British archaeological history connected with this. The stone circles that have been found in Cornwall, for example, known to have been erected as Belerium in honour of Beli, have nineteen posts, where the stone circles of the megalithic age, across the planet, all have twelve. Why 19, which is not a number that occurs in any of the world's mythologies, anywhere, ever? Yet it does have a central role in one place, the mathematical cosmology of... Pythagoras: The Greek great year in the Pythagorean calendrical system was the 19th, and logically so, scientifically so, because in it the solar and lunar cycles are equated and the constellations complete their revolutions.
Caer Arianrhod is a submerged island off Caernarvon; but the real meaning is probably Corona Borealis, the northern crown. (And in the Breton versions, that island is Atlant-Is, drowned among the currents off the French coast when Dahut stole the keys from Gradlon Meur and opened the protecting dykes).
Searching for the geographic origins of all these people, can we identify the Thracians of Marmara as a source, given that they were also a totem clan of the north wind? In their case they believed that their souls were taken by Hermes to a castle there, guarded by the star Alpheta (that first-letter Alph again!). [THE ORIGINAL TRIBES, AND THE LANDS FROM WHICH THEY CAME, ARE DEALT WITH IN A SEPARATE ESSAY: European Tribes 7 - The Celts]
Corona Borealis is also known as called the Cretan Crown, because the Cretans worshipped her as Ariadne, the wife of Dionysus (the same Ariadne who played Gretl to Theseus' Hansel, threading his route out of the labyrinth?). Tribes linked to her worship are those of Staphylus, Thoas, Oenopion and Tauropolus, these being the eponymous ancestors of several Pelasgian-Thracian clans and tribes from the islands of Lemnos and Chios. They called the goddess Ariadne, or Alphete from her first and last letters. Ariadne means "Most High" or "Most Holy", so yet again we have a person's supposed name which turns out in fact to be their title. She was the daughter of the Cretan moon-goddess Pasiphae, and a sister of the vine-hero Deucalion who survived the flood. Is Arianrhod a variant form of Ariadne? In both cases they were orgiastic goddesses worshipped with male sacrifices. Orpheus was one of her victims: torn in pieces by a pack of delirious women intoxicated by ivy and hallucinogenated by Dionysus' toadstool. Aeschylus claims they did it because he insisted on worshipping the sun not the moon. Orpheus was the leader of the Dionysus cult; after his death his head sang oracular prophecies, as did Bran's. To the Greeks the Underworld was Erebus and ruled by the White Goddess.
The shrines of the first magicians of Éireland - the Aes Sidhe - were fortresses and barrows. One at Brú na Bóinne, now called New Grange; others at Knowth and Dowth on the Boyne. New Grange was the home of The Dagda, the father of the gods, their equivalent to Roman Saturn, Greek Chronos; later it was occupied by his Apollo-like son Angus. The Dagda was a son of Brigit ("the High One", yet another title), though later legends say she was his daughter or wife - but this is true of all these god-relationships: cg Av-Raham and Sarah, Eshet and Osher, et al). Three descendants, Brian, Iuchar and Iuchurba, married three princesses named Eire, Fodhla and Banbha - those last two names sound rather less strange in Yehudit than they do in English!. His father was Eladu, possibly linked to Eilatos, an Achaean king of Cyllene, a mountain in Arcadia sacred to Demeter - but again a name that sounds perfectly familiar in Yehudit! Like him, Osher (Osiris), Adonis and Dionysus were all born from fir fathers and mothered by the moon-goddess: Eshet/Io/Hat-Hor.
At New Grange there are ten herm stones, but others - probably 2 others - are known to be lost. This shrine was probably the orginal Cauldron of Cerridwen to which Druids went for their inspiraton. Oracular serpents kept in the shrine were probably the ones St Patrick expelled. It is remarkably similar in design and practice to Delphi. (Silbury was the original spiral castle of England, an oracular shrine of Bran; as New Grange was to The Dagda.)
According to various sources Brutus, the grandson of Aenaeas, landed at Totnes in Devon in 1074, 109 years after the sack of Troy. I imagine that King Arthur was standing on the jetty, waiting to welcome him! His supposed burial on Tower Hill suggests yet another version of Bran.
The earliest invaders of Cymru were the Annwm of Pembroke - but see several references to Annwm above, which all take us into the realm of the dead, not the living. And then we read that their first rulers were named Pwyll and Pryderi, and that, at their deaths, they became Lords Of The Dead (just like Rhadamanthus of Crete, and even more so Osher of Egypt). Pryderi was the son of Rhiannon; Gwydion stole his sacred swine; Gwair did much the same to his god in company with Arthur, and was put in a prison called Oeth. Gwydion's prison was Anoethis; which is also the prison from which Arthur was rescued by his page Goreu, son of Custennin. Gwair is thus to Arthur as Perithous was to Theseus, and Goreu to Arthur as Herakles to Theseus. Legends have Goreu rescuing Arthur from three prisons, Oeth or Anoeth (presumably a variant of Uter), Pendragon ("Lord of Serpents") and the Dark Prison Under The Stone - all three symbols of the underworld, and all connecting Arthur's story with those of Orpheus and King David. Arthur's magic ship was called Prydwen. He left his sword with Llaminawg, who becomes Sir Bedivere in Mallory. Caer Wydr = "Glass Castle"= Glastonbury or Inis Gutrin (fans of D.H. Lawrence will enjoy discovering this link between Gutrin and Brangwen, in "Women and Love" especially, but also "The Rainbow". The names are obviously chosen deliberately, so why Ursula for her sister? Possibly the legend of St Ursula - click here.)
Was Ar Thur originally Gwyn or Gwydion, the white king to companion Guinevere, the white queen? As noted above, Ar Thur simply means "The King", or in the cosmological original "The God". Gwyn means "white", making a connection to the "White King" of the Mesopotamians unavoidable - Ya'akov's father-in-law, associated with Ha Lavanah, the white moon, Lavan (Laban).
In the earliest tales, Gwyn son of Llyr (or Lludd) was buried in a boat-shaped oak coffin. Gwyn of course links to Guinevere? The name becomes Win in many English towns (Wincanton, Winchester etc).
Glastonbury (Gleistonbury in its mediaeval spelling) was named after its founder Glasteing (one of the finest pieces of fictional historiography ever can be found at this link, Catholicising the original Glasteing into a pig-farmer), who came there with his twelve brothers (or apostles, disciples, sons, tribes, fellow amphictyony members... zodiacal constellations) from the north, some time before 600 CE. Glastonbury is also called Avalon ("land of the apple trees", a variant of the Greek Hesperides more than it is of Biblical Eden, which is a Pardes, and that usually means a citrus orchard - but it is also one of the two sources of the apple as the fruit of Eden in most European readings into the Genesis story; the other is the Latin word "malus", which sounds like it should mean "evil", but was actually their word for the apple). These isles of death were called "glass castles" because of the water surrounding them. The glass coffin of Snow White reflects this, as does Brunhild's in the Nibelungenlied, and it was in a glass coffin that Arthur was sent a-saiing by Guinevere to the Isle of Avalon after his death.
Arthur, like David, Jesus et al, was less a temporal than a cosmological ruler, the surrogate or representative of the chief of the gods on Earth. The sacred king is thus a sun-king, because the chief of the gods is always a sun-god, and he returns at death to the universal mother, who imprisons him in the extreme north (the one compass point the sun never reaches). The sun-god is born at midwinter, when the sun is at its weakest (Delilah having shorn its hair!) and has attained its most southerly station; he is killed at the summer solstice (the Yisra-Eli-Babylonian month of Tammuz) in his most northerly station (not Easter as in Christianity).
The oak coffin of Avalon derives from the eastern Mediterranean between 1600 and 1400 BCE, and is up to seven hundred years newer than other British oracular cults. Avalon is a barrow burial place on an island in the river or sea guarded by oracular orgiastic priestesses.
Shakespeare's "The Tempest" reflects the Cerridwen story; though, as Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux have pointed out in their splendid joint-work on the subject, the gods of that play are rather more Patagonian - Chile and Argentina, but aboriginally - than they are Celtic. Yet more evidence of the universal nomadism of these mythologies, the global extent of the common source.
Taliesin means "radiant brow" in Cymry, which was also an epithet of Apollo. He is linked even more to Herakles; e.g. Cretan Talus, the man of bronze who Medea killed, and who became, or perhaps originated as, Pelasgian Tantalus. The Éirish Tailltean Games are based on the Greek Olympic Games, which were originally a festival to honour an agricultural Herakles. In Greece, its equivalent was Atlas Telemon - Tal means "suffer". In Yehudit/Aramaic the letters Sheen (ש) and Tav (ת) alternate as in Tammuz/Shemesh. Are the names Shelomoh (Solomon), Av-Shalom (Absalom), Shalem and Yeru-Shalayim thus related to the cult of Tal/Herakles? It seems they must be. (Herakles' life in described in 5 stages: Birth, Initiation, Marriage, Rest Fom Labour, Death.)
The Druids were suppressed when the Anglesey groves were cut down by the Roman general Paulinus in 61 CE - the same man who defeated Boudica at what in now called King's Cross. Their synod at Dreux in France was broken up when Caesar defeated Vercingetorix the Gaul; from that time, like the post-Akeda Bible, animal victims were substituted for human.
Morgan Le Faye, from the Arthurian tales, is The Morrigan in Éirish, a name (a title) which mean "Great Queen"; she was a death goddess, and came in the form of a raven. "Le faye" means "fate", equivalent to the Norns of the Norse sagas.
Feniusa Farsa (sometimes Fénius Farsaid), the ancestor of the Éirish Milesians, is called a Scythian, and the grandson of Magog (himself a grandson of No'ach according to Genesis 10). Is Magog the root of Mac = son? The way his son is presented, as Og Magog, suggests an equivalent of Yehudit Ben, Arabic ibn, Aramaic Bar, which have always been the conventional method of naming in the Middle East: Og son of Og in this case.
Magog was a son of Yaphet (Iapetus the Titan, in the Greek version, was fathered by Uranus on Gaea, and was the sibling of Atlas, Prometheus, Epimetheus and Menoetius, making him a rather more significantly universal ancestor than just that of the Scythians). Yaphet ben No'ach also appears as Yiphtach/Jephtha in Judges 11, and Genesis 10:2 informs us that he was the brother of Gomer, Madai, Yavan, Tuval, Meshech and Tiras, which is to say the Cimmerians (Cymry?), Medeans (probably), Ionians, Tibarenians, Moschians and Tyrrhenians - about as comprehensive a list of the origins of the Celtic peoples as we are ever likely to find assemble (my page for Genesis 10 has a fuller map of the pre-Celtic world).
The Moschians and Tibarenians were iron-working tribes from the Black Sea regon; the Cimmerians almost certainly became the Cymry of "Wales"; the Ionians were orignially Aegeans from Phoenicia; the Tyrrhenians were likewise Aegeans from Lydia; the Medians were the Medes of Persia, descended from the Pelasgian goddess Medea. Gog = Gagi or Gogarene in Armenia, close to the lands of both the Moschians and the Tibarenians. Magog's grandfather being No'ach, who landed on Ararat in Armenia, is thus entirely logical, and Magog becomes a synonym for Armenia, and we can once again identify the "common source" as Hittite.
(which again has to be a late version, because it includes both Roman and Norse deities).
The honouring of the principal gods and goddesses of the Creation of the Cosmos, one day each, just as in the first version of Creation in the Book of Genesis. No surprise that, when Judaism replaced polytheism with monotheism, the names of the days were altered too, and in the Yisra-Eli calendar there is now simply Day 1, 2, etc (towards YHWH's day, which is Saturday, the Sabbath).The key festivals in early England (the United Kingdom of Greater England and its Celtic colonies and dominions) were Candlemas, Lady Day, May Day, Midsummer Day, Lammas, Michelmas, All Hallowe'en and what became renamed Christmas, not a single one of these originally Christian.
Candlemas, for example, which fell on February 2nd, was a ceremony of the quickening of the year, one of four cross-quarter days on which "witches" (the priestesses of the moon-goddess, probably Guinevere) held "sabbaths" (festival days), the others being May eve, Lammas eve, and All Hallows eve (now Hallowe'en), when the year died.
Lammas came between the hay and corn harvests in honour of the god Lugh or Llew. Originally it was loaf-mass (Olde Aenglish hlaf-mass), and was tied to the killing of the corn-king, who was sacrificed in effigy form as a guy faux (pronounced Guy Fawkes) or "artificial man". The sacred oak-king, on the other hand, was killed at midsummer and translated to corona borealis.
But elsewhere: Lugh Nasadh was originally the festival of Llew Llaw; it was changed by the Catholics to Llew Mass, and thence shortened to Lammas: conquest by language. It took place on the first Sunday in August with Good-Friday-like mourning. The Lancashire Wakes Week is all that is now left of it. The ancient Tailtean Games of Éireland, mentioned above, took place on Lammas day with chariot-races and sword play etc, plus marriages in honour of Llew and his bride. In Carmarthernshire the excuse for the wakes was "going up to bewail Jephthah's daughter on the mountain" which was the same excuse the post-exile Jews used for Tammuz mourning.
Whit Sunday was oiginally White Sunday, in honour of the mother-goddess, Guinevere.
Herakles' tenth labour (the Cattle of Geryon) reads like an account of the defeat of the Stone Age invaders of Brython (Partholan's and Nemed's people); thus Erytheia would be Devon (note the nature of the star in the Partholan link!). This according to Graves; for Llew Llaw's full story see Graves pp302ff.
Copyright © 2020 David Prashker
Searching for the geographic origins of all these people, can we identify the Thracians of Marmara as a source, given that they were also a totem clan of the north wind? In their case they believed that their souls were taken by Hermes to a castle there, guarded by the star Alpheta (that first-letter Alph again!). [THE ORIGINAL TRIBES, AND THE LANDS FROM WHICH THEY CAME, ARE DEALT WITH IN A SEPARATE ESSAY: European Tribes 7 - The Celts]
Corona Borealis is also known as called the Cretan Crown, because the Cretans worshipped her as Ariadne, the wife of Dionysus (the same Ariadne who played Gretl to Theseus' Hansel, threading his route out of the labyrinth?). Tribes linked to her worship are those of Staphylus, Thoas, Oenopion and Tauropolus, these being the eponymous ancestors of several Pelasgian-Thracian clans and tribes from the islands of Lemnos and Chios. They called the goddess Ariadne, or Alphete from her first and last letters. Ariadne means "Most High" or "Most Holy", so yet again we have a person's supposed name which turns out in fact to be their title. She was the daughter of the Cretan moon-goddess Pasiphae, and a sister of the vine-hero Deucalion who survived the flood. Is Arianrhod a variant form of Ariadne? In both cases they were orgiastic goddesses worshipped with male sacrifices. Orpheus was one of her victims: torn in pieces by a pack of delirious women intoxicated by ivy and hallucinogenated by Dionysus' toadstool. Aeschylus claims they did it because he insisted on worshipping the sun not the moon. Orpheus was the leader of the Dionysus cult; after his death his head sang oracular prophecies, as did Bran's. To the Greeks the Underworld was Erebus and ruled by the White Goddess.
The shrines of the first magicians of Éireland - the Aes Sidhe - were fortresses and barrows. One at Brú na Bóinne, now called New Grange; others at Knowth and Dowth on the Boyne. New Grange was the home of The Dagda, the father of the gods, their equivalent to Roman Saturn, Greek Chronos; later it was occupied by his Apollo-like son Angus. The Dagda was a son of Brigit ("the High One", yet another title), though later legends say she was his daughter or wife - but this is true of all these god-relationships: cg Av-Raham and Sarah, Eshet and Osher, et al). Three descendants, Brian, Iuchar and Iuchurba, married three princesses named Eire, Fodhla and Banbha - those last two names sound rather less strange in Yehudit than they do in English!. His father was Eladu, possibly linked to Eilatos, an Achaean king of Cyllene, a mountain in Arcadia sacred to Demeter - but again a name that sounds perfectly familiar in Yehudit! Like him, Osher (Osiris), Adonis and Dionysus were all born from fir fathers and mothered by the moon-goddess: Eshet/Io/Hat-Hor.
At New Grange there are ten herm stones, but others - probably 2 others - are known to be lost. This shrine was probably the orginal Cauldron of Cerridwen to which Druids went for their inspiraton. Oracular serpents kept in the shrine were probably the ones St Patrick expelled. It is remarkably similar in design and practice to Delphi. (Silbury was the original spiral castle of England, an oracular shrine of Bran; as New Grange was to The Dagda.)
According to various sources Brutus, the grandson of Aenaeas, landed at Totnes in Devon in 1074, 109 years after the sack of Troy. I imagine that King Arthur was standing on the jetty, waiting to welcome him! His supposed burial on Tower Hill suggests yet another version of Bran.
The earliest invaders of Cymru were the Annwm of Pembroke - but see several references to Annwm above, which all take us into the realm of the dead, not the living. And then we read that their first rulers were named Pwyll and Pryderi, and that, at their deaths, they became Lords Of The Dead (just like Rhadamanthus of Crete, and even more so Osher of Egypt). Pryderi was the son of Rhiannon; Gwydion stole his sacred swine; Gwair did much the same to his god in company with Arthur, and was put in a prison called Oeth. Gwydion's prison was Anoethis; which is also the prison from which Arthur was rescued by his page Goreu, son of Custennin. Gwair is thus to Arthur as Perithous was to Theseus, and Goreu to Arthur as Herakles to Theseus. Legends have Goreu rescuing Arthur from three prisons, Oeth or Anoeth (presumably a variant of Uter), Pendragon ("Lord of Serpents") and the Dark Prison Under The Stone - all three symbols of the underworld, and all connecting Arthur's story with those of Orpheus and King David. Arthur's magic ship was called Prydwen. He left his sword with Llaminawg, who becomes Sir Bedivere in Mallory. Caer Wydr = "Glass Castle"= Glastonbury or Inis Gutrin (fans of D.H. Lawrence will enjoy discovering this link between Gutrin and Brangwen, in "Women and Love" especially, but also "The Rainbow". The names are obviously chosen deliberately, so why Ursula for her sister? Possibly the legend of St Ursula - click here.)
Was Ar Thur originally Gwyn or Gwydion, the white king to companion Guinevere, the white queen? As noted above, Ar Thur simply means "The King", or in the cosmological original "The God". Gwyn means "white", making a connection to the "White King" of the Mesopotamians unavoidable - Ya'akov's father-in-law, associated with Ha Lavanah, the white moon, Lavan (Laban).
In the earliest tales, Gwyn son of Llyr (or Lludd) was buried in a boat-shaped oak coffin. Gwyn of course links to Guinevere? The name becomes Win in many English towns (Wincanton, Winchester etc).
Glastonbury (Gleistonbury in its mediaeval spelling) was named after its founder Glasteing (one of the finest pieces of fictional historiography ever can be found at this link, Catholicising the original Glasteing into a pig-farmer), who came there with his twelve brothers (or apostles, disciples, sons, tribes, fellow amphictyony members... zodiacal constellations) from the north, some time before 600 CE. Glastonbury is also called Avalon ("land of the apple trees", a variant of the Greek Hesperides more than it is of Biblical Eden, which is a Pardes, and that usually means a citrus orchard - but it is also one of the two sources of the apple as the fruit of Eden in most European readings into the Genesis story; the other is the Latin word "malus", which sounds like it should mean "evil", but was actually their word for the apple). These isles of death were called "glass castles" because of the water surrounding them. The glass coffin of Snow White reflects this, as does Brunhild's in the Nibelungenlied, and it was in a glass coffin that Arthur was sent a-saiing by Guinevere to the Isle of Avalon after his death.
Arthur, like David, Jesus et al, was less a temporal than a cosmological ruler, the surrogate or representative of the chief of the gods on Earth. The sacred king is thus a sun-king, because the chief of the gods is always a sun-god, and he returns at death to the universal mother, who imprisons him in the extreme north (the one compass point the sun never reaches). The sun-god is born at midwinter, when the sun is at its weakest (Delilah having shorn its hair!) and has attained its most southerly station; he is killed at the summer solstice (the Yisra-Eli-Babylonian month of Tammuz) in his most northerly station (not Easter as in Christianity).
The oak coffin of Avalon derives from the eastern Mediterranean between 1600 and 1400 BCE, and is up to seven hundred years newer than other British oracular cults. Avalon is a barrow burial place on an island in the river or sea guarded by oracular orgiastic priestesses.
Shakespeare's "The Tempest" reflects the Cerridwen story; though, as Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux have pointed out in their splendid joint-work on the subject, the gods of that play are rather more Patagonian - Chile and Argentina, but aboriginally - than they are Celtic. Yet more evidence of the universal nomadism of these mythologies, the global extent of the common source.
Taliesin means "radiant brow" in Cymry, which was also an epithet of Apollo. He is linked even more to Herakles; e.g. Cretan Talus, the man of bronze who Medea killed, and who became, or perhaps originated as, Pelasgian Tantalus. The Éirish Tailltean Games are based on the Greek Olympic Games, which were originally a festival to honour an agricultural Herakles. In Greece, its equivalent was Atlas Telemon - Tal means "suffer". In Yehudit/Aramaic the letters Sheen (ש) and Tav (ת) alternate as in Tammuz/Shemesh. Are the names Shelomoh (Solomon), Av-Shalom (Absalom), Shalem and Yeru-Shalayim thus related to the cult of Tal/Herakles? It seems they must be. (Herakles' life in described in 5 stages: Birth, Initiation, Marriage, Rest Fom Labour, Death.)
The Druids were suppressed when the Anglesey groves were cut down by the Roman general Paulinus in 61 CE - the same man who defeated Boudica at what in now called King's Cross. Their synod at Dreux in France was broken up when Caesar defeated Vercingetorix the Gaul; from that time, like the post-Akeda Bible, animal victims were substituted for human.
Morgan Le Faye, from the Arthurian tales, is The Morrigan in Éirish, a name (a title) which mean "Great Queen"; she was a death goddess, and came in the form of a raven. "Le faye" means "fate", equivalent to the Norns of the Norse sagas.
Feniusa Farsa (sometimes Fénius Farsaid), the ancestor of the Éirish Milesians, is called a Scythian, and the grandson of Magog (himself a grandson of No'ach according to Genesis 10). Is Magog the root of Mac = son? The way his son is presented, as Og Magog, suggests an equivalent of Yehudit Ben, Arabic ibn, Aramaic Bar, which have always been the conventional method of naming in the Middle East: Og son of Og in this case.
The Moschians and Tibarenians were iron-working tribes from the Black Sea regon; the Cimmerians almost certainly became the Cymry of "Wales"; the Ionians were orignially Aegeans from Phoenicia; the Tyrrhenians were likewise Aegeans from Lydia; the Medians were the Medes of Persia, descended from the Pelasgian goddess Medea. Gog = Gagi or Gogarene in Armenia, close to the lands of both the Moschians and the Tibarenians. Magog's grandfather being No'ach, who landed on Ararat in Armenia, is thus entirely logical, and Magog becomes a synonym for Armenia, and we can once again identify the "common source" as Hittite.
*
And lastly, the Celtic calendar, most of which remained in tact across the British isles until the late Middle Ages, much of which, in this version, must be a late amendment and not the original, unless the Celts were worshippers of Ishtar:
Celtic Days and Months
January = Giuli (Yule)
February = Solmonath
March = Hrertha
April = Eostre
May = Thrimilei
June/July = Litha
August = Weodmonath
September = Halegmonath
October = Wintirfyllith
November = Blotmonath
December = Giuli
Though evidence from the Middle Ages separates Early Yule (Giuli) from Late Yule, as two months; and isn't it odd that there was already a month seemingly named July before Julius Caesar got carried away by his own ego!
The year then was comprised of 10 months, as was the norm in the Latin world before Julius Caesar added his ego, and Augustus Caesar therefore obliged to do the same - thank Jupiter that Emperors who followed did not also feel the same compulsion, or we would be living in the month of Trumpember even now!
The year began on December 25th (those scholars who would like to claim that it "probably" began on December 21st in the pre-Gregorian, to coincide with the solstic, and then shifted four days when the Gregorian was introuced, simply need to look at the mediaeval almanacs, and multiple diaries that have endured from the period. The end of the Brumalia was December 25th, in the Julian calndar. Like the Greek "great year" mentioned above, new years in the pre-Christian world require a merging of sun and moon; Sol Invictus only honours the sun).
The year began on December 25th (those scholars who would like to claim that it "probably" began on December 21st in the pre-Gregorian, to coincide with the solstic, and then shifted four days when the Gregorian was introuced, simply need to look at the mediaeval almanacs, and multiple diaries that have endured from the period. The end of the Brumalia was December 25th, in the Julian calndar. Like the Greek "great year" mentioned above, new years in the pre-Christian world require a merging of sun and moon; Sol Invictus only honours the sun).
Sunnan
Monan
Tiwes
Wodnes
Thunres
Frige
Saetern
Candlemas, for example, which fell on February 2nd, was a ceremony of the quickening of the year, one of four cross-quarter days on which "witches" (the priestesses of the moon-goddess, probably Guinevere) held "sabbaths" (festival days), the others being May eve, Lammas eve, and All Hallows eve (now Hallowe'en), when the year died.
Lammas came between the hay and corn harvests in honour of the god Lugh or Llew. Originally it was loaf-mass (Olde Aenglish hlaf-mass), and was tied to the killing of the corn-king, who was sacrificed in effigy form as a guy faux (pronounced Guy Fawkes) or "artificial man". The sacred oak-king, on the other hand, was killed at midsummer and translated to corona borealis.
But elsewhere: Lugh Nasadh was originally the festival of Llew Llaw; it was changed by the Catholics to Llew Mass, and thence shortened to Lammas: conquest by language. It took place on the first Sunday in August with Good-Friday-like mourning. The Lancashire Wakes Week is all that is now left of it. The ancient Tailtean Games of Éireland, mentioned above, took place on Lammas day with chariot-races and sword play etc, plus marriages in honour of Llew and his bride. In Carmarthernshire the excuse for the wakes was "going up to bewail Jephthah's daughter on the mountain" which was the same excuse the post-exile Jews used for Tammuz mourning.
Whit Sunday was oiginally White Sunday, in honour of the mother-goddess, Guinevere.
Herakles' tenth labour (the Cattle of Geryon) reads like an account of the defeat of the Stone Age invaders of Brython (Partholan's and Nemed's people); thus Erytheia would be Devon (note the nature of the star in the Partholan link!). This according to Graves; for Llew Llaw's full story see Graves pp302ff.
The year consisted of 360 days on the principle of Babylonian sexigesimal mathematics, which is also why the circle has 360 degrees and the hour sixty minutes divided into sets of sixty seconds. The recognition that there are rather closer to 365 came later, and led to most cultures finding ways to add five more days, and then either lose the tiny discrepancy (which is about 0.2422 on average), or make leap years to accomodate it. The other five days in the Celtic calendar are feasts. The Egyptians said they were the days which Thoth won at Draughts from Eshet, and celebrated the birthdays of Osher, Hor, Set, Eshet and Nephthys on them, in that order; the only dispute over this claim is that it was probably Senet, not Draughts.
Copyright © 2020 David Prashker
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