BLACK BILE ON FIRE

Black Bile on Fire

A most intriguing explanation for the importance of the figures of Arcadian shepherds in the Renaissance relates to the occult philosophy of the period. It must first be realised that there was at that time a necessity of finding a sanction within the traditions of the then dominant religion – Christianity – for reclamation of the beautiful treasures of the culture of pagan Greco-Roman Antiquity that were coming to light. If a validation for elements of that culture could be found of sufficient elegance, brilliance, and superhuman interconnectivity, it would seem to have divine support. Such an idea was found, still potent enough to fill the body with shivers, and I shall do my best to explain it as well as I can here.
A text named Aristotle's Problem XXX was considered until the 17th century to have been written by Aristotle himself. It was next assigned to the non-specific authorship of a “Pseudo-Aristotle”, and more recently it has been thought by some to be the work of Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor. Working from the idea expressed in Plato’s Phaedrus that “frenzy, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings”, the “Artistotle” text described how the humor of melancholy could become this kind of frenzy. This idea was taken on by Marsilio Ficino, founder of the Platonic Academy of Renaissance Florence, who wrote, in De vita triplica, that there is a type of melancholy that ignites and burns in a spiritual way. This melancholy ignited into a fiery ecstasy, incidentally, was the explicitly stated aim of the song Feel So Sad by the retro indo-rock band Spiritualised, and although Jason Pierce did not, in the interview, reference Ficino, the song provides a clear experiential understanding of the state Ficino was talking about. But what has this to do with the Shepherds of Arcadia?

Shepherds of Arcadia I

Virgil : New Ager

The concept of inspired melancholy was taken on by Henricus Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, and expressed in his De Occulta Philosophia. Developping Ficino’s ideas, he spoke of three types of gift-giving melancholy. “The humor melancholius, when it takes fire and glows, generates the frenzy which leads to wisdom and revelation, especially when it is combined with a heavenly influence, above all with that of Saturn.” We are told how through this inspired melancholy people have become, variously, prophetic Sybils, poets, and other types of genius. The first type of melancholy was said to attract Earth spirits, i.e. elementals, or faeries, resulting in “wonderful instruction in the manual arts; thus we see a quite unskilled man suddenly become a painter or architect.” The second type involves different types of spirits, and results in skills of philosophy and oratory, we are told, while the third kind attracts beings from the angelic realms and results in inspired spiritual wisdom. In this model all three types involve prophesy, and it is the type of philosophy that comes through in the third type that is of interest with regard to the Shepherds of Arcadia. This type of prophesy could show us “approaching prodigies, wonders, a prophet to come, or the emergence of a new religion, just as the Sybil prophesied Jesus Christ long before he appeared,” according to the text.

This was a direct reference to Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, which was believed to refer to a prophesy of the coming of Christ. I’m using here the rendering into English prose by Lonsdale and Lee first published in 1871.

“Now has come the latest age of the Cumaean hymn,” wrote Virgil, referring to the Italian oracular sibyl of Cumae, “the mighty line of cycles begins its round anew. Now to the maiden Astraea returns.” Astraea is the personification of justice; it was said that she had left the Earth and gone into the stars as the constellation of Virgo holding Libra, the Scales of Justice. The return to Earth represents a return of justice, of good men rewarded. Virgil continues: “The reign of Saturn returns.” Saturn was said to have ruled during the ancient Golden Age; the age before bronze and iron – before weapons and warfare, in other words. The people of Arcadia, the oldest and most aboriginal of people, were thought to have maintained their simple culture from that time. “Now a new generation of men is sent down from heaven,” continues Virgil. “Only be thou gracious, Lucina,” (the Roman goddess of childbirth), “to the birth of the child, beneath whom the iron race shall begin to fail, and the golden race to arise in the world.”

Shepherds of Arcadia II

But these vague connections between a figure who shares divine child symbolism with Christ and a people loosely associated with Arcadia are just the beginning of the complex, beautiful Renaissance idea of which I am speaking. The key idea of which to take note is that the Arcadian Academy of Rome saw it as particularly significant that shepherds watching their flocks in the fields had been the first to hear word from the angel of the birth of Christ. Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue is just that - one of the Eclogues - pastoral poems sung by shepherds in rustic settings. Hearing word of the coming birth of Chirst, as when the shepherds received word from the angel Gabriel, is, in fact, prophetic insight. Furthermore, pastoral poems were traditionally melancholic in nature, the most obvious theme being yearning for love, and in Virgil the shepherds display a poetic skill seemingly more civilized than their general way of life, and the influence for this could easily be ascribed to the nymphs, the elementals of the Earth. In the earliest known examples of the genre, by Theokritus, the shepherd Daphnis actually died for love. Their simple lifestyle is of the type that goes back to the age before bronze and iron, back to the age of Saturn, who in the Renaissance view was their obvious ruling planet anyway, as they were inspired melancholics. The people of Arcadia were held to be the most skilled in the playing of country music, and this again could be seen as being a result of this same type of inspiration. And so we move on to the big BINGO moment.

Jerome in his Cell

Poussin: New Ager



How does this connect in particular to Poussin and his own depiction of the Shepherds of Arcadia? It has been observed that for the figure of the kneeling bearded shepherd in The Shepherds of Arcadia II, Poussin simply borrowed a figure from another of his paintings as the model. But wait ‘til you hear which figure he used - that of a shepherd kneeling in adoration of the new born Jesus in his painting of the Adoration of the Shepherds! Here then is an Arcadian shepherd who is also one of the shepherd-prophets of Christ. But what of the skull on the tomb in his earlier Shepherds of Arcadia I?



This skull in fact simply confirms that the painting relates to the tradition of inspired melancholy, for it goes back to Dürer’s engraving St Jerome in His Cell, which was sold as part of a pair with his engraving Melancholy I.



St Jerome in His Cell shows the melancholy genius at work, with a skull prominently displayed on the window sill, a memento mori, by this time a symbol of a melancholic contemplation of the shortness of our stay in this realm.




So the Shepherds of Arcadia are divinely inspired melancholic prophets of a coming Golden Age. But what then of the river god who pours out water from a jar in The Shepherds of Arcadia I? The simplest reading of the symbolism is that the coming age is not that of Pisces, which was already three quarters through in Poussin’s time, but of the Age of Aquarius, making Poussin or his commissioners the earliest of the New Agers looking forward to the Age of Aquarius.




The poetic products of the Arcadian Academy of post-Renaissance Rome are not judged to be any match for the works of, for example, Virgil, but that is not really the point. The real value of the brilliant Renaissance Arcadia idea is that it allowed elements of the beautiful culture of Classical Antiquity, vessels of the European Dreamtime, to be sanctioned and thus continued even during the dominance of the anti-pagan Christian religion, like the ark allowing the animals and plants to sail over the flood and plant themselves now in less restricted and contrived forms in these more liberal times, at the end of what astrologers call the Age of Pisces.

Dionysiac Double Solomon Seal

first the pics, for the lazyites:

Roman theatre and its essential construction geometry, as described by Vitruvius

The Greek Theatre, with geometry based on four squares

The Greek Theatre, with geometry based on interlocking triangles and a geometrically interrelated square

Then the extract from Amazement Arcadia [last part of chapter 2]:

Let us follow a different lead. We’ve seen how Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne depicts the Boötes constellation, and have mentioned that, as observed by Phillip Coppens, Poussin’s Shepherds of Arcadia II also depicts Boötes, as well as the nearby figure of Hercules. We know that another name for the Boötes constellation was Ikarios, who is the archetypal Dionysian initiate in that he is raised from the tomb, and passes on the Dionysian gifts and celebrations, perhaps also the accompanying Mysteires. We may note that it was not Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds paintings that first carried the phrase Et In Arcadia Ego, but a painting by Guercino. This same painter also painted a raising of Lazarus that is strongly suggestive of the raising of the initiate in the Third Degree of Freemasonry. In this Masonic initiation the candidates are raised from the tomb; are asked to consider their mortality, and also the rising of their spirit from the grave to shine eternally like the stars. This, of course, is what happens to Ikarios when he rises up as the Boötes constellation. Could it be that this Freemasonic raising goes back to Dionysian initiation? Well funnily enough, there is a Freemasonic tradition which claims that the proto-Freemasons of ancient times were a group called the Dionysiac Artificers. These were said to be a group with Greek roots who lived in the Phoenician city of Tyre in the Lebanon, and who were employed by Solomon in the construction of the Temple of Solomon. Their chief architect was said to be a figure called Hiram Abiff, who suffered a fate similar to Ikarios, even being buried at the foot of a tree, as Ikarios was. So those masons at work in the Temple of Solomon were Phoenicians from Tyre, according to the Masonic tradition, and as it happens the ancient novel Leucippe and Clitophon by Tatius provides us with a version of this very Ikarios story that is set in Tyre. Paraphrasing from the recent translation by Tim Whitmarsh (Oxford World's Classics):- The inhabitants of Tyre consider Dionysos to be a local god.... They say they were the first to receive the gift of wine...the original mother of wines had her birth there. They tell a story of a local hospitable shepherd who they claim to be an equivalent of the Athenian figure of Ikarios. Dionysos visited this herdsman, who gave him gifts of all the pastoral produce he possessed. Dionysos thanked him, and gave him a cup of wine out of gratitude. He drank it and went into a rapture of ecstasy at the taste, asking what it was."This is Autumn's Liquid," replied the god. "This is the blood of the grape cluster." What could a group of artisans devoted to Dionysos have had to do with the Temple of Solomon? We may recall here that over the years Solomon has come to be associated with a particular geometric figure – the Seal of Solomon, also known as the hexagram made from interlocking equilateral triangles. We shall see soon that this geometry does in fact link into the heart of the traditions of the Artisans of Dionysos in Antiquity. Freemasonry evolved amongst guilds of stonemasons. Turning our attention to the guilds present in the earlier period in Athens, we note that they could have their own Mysteries. So, for example, the Praxiergidai who carried out some secret ceremony during the festival in which a sacred statue of Athena on the Acropolis in Athens was given a new robe were probably an ancient guild, according to R.J.Hopper in The Acropolis, p.65. Turning our attention to the Greek stonemasons, there are some myths that seem to have been particularly favoured by them. The Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs was carved in many places: onto the Parthenon on the Acropolis, the Hephaestum temple in the Agora in Athens (formerly called the Theseum perhaps for this reason, since Theseus is a prominent figure in the story), and also the Athenian Treasury of Delphi, all of which might not seem so strange with Theseus being a legendary figure important to the Athenians. However the myth is not set in Athens, but in Thessaly, and scholars have long puzzled over the question of why this same myth should also have been carved onto the Temple of Apollo in Bassae and to have pride of place also on the pediment of so important a building as the Temple of Zeus in Olympia, especially since it is a myth which received very little attention from those who put pen to paper rather than lifting chisel to stone, and was certainly not as famous as others of Theseus’ exploits. Perhaps it should cause us some interest that versions of the story feature the figures of Boötes and his daughter, like the Ikarios myth, and that it is in fact a version of that same myth, namely of figures who became drunk and abusive when misusing the gift of wine. In this version Daidamia a daughter of Boötes is marrying Perithouos, best friend of Theseus. The centaurs are sat with various others of the guests in a cave. The motif of the Thessalian cave normally crops up in connection with the Centaur Cheiron, and sometimes in the context of Mystery Initiation, as with Aristaeus. When the wine is brought round the Centaurs overdo it, drinking it unmixed, and then run riot, and Theseus leaps into the fray to drive them off. Robert Graves couldn’t accept that such a story would be used on so many temples unless it was connected to some ceremony. He imagined a coronation dance in which the new king danced in mock battle with silenus-figures representing the Centaurs. For me, the connection is through the Ikarios myth, and through that to the Dionysiac Artificers of Tyre since that city had its own version of the Ikarios myth. Considering this and the way that the Lapiths and Centaurs story seems to have been a stock myth of the temple builders, I being to wonder whether the story was in fact part of a Mystery Initiation of a temple-builder guild. It is best to imagine that the purpose of this initiation was the opening of the Sight and through that the understanding of the initiate to the beauty of the Realm of Forms, this being perception and knowledge which must be possessed by any architect engaged in classical design. “Temples were built to access the laws of perfection in higher worlds and to imprint these laws in the minds of the people.” Alchemy of Nine Dimensions, Barbara Hand-Clow Socrates’ as mentioned in Chapter 1 is thought to have come from a family of stonemasons, and I suggest again that this was one possible origin for his philosophy of Forms, which does not in this case have to contradict the theory that he received the knowledge from priests and priestesses, since such figures could, and did, preside over the guilds. So then we may perhaps imagine the initiate in the cave undergoing a symbolic mock death at the hands of the horse-totem figures in Silenus costumes representing the Centaurs; a raising would follow and somewhere would be included the sight of figures of the fixed constellation animals placed onto the cave walls as in the Persian initiations described by Porphyry, and the Simile of the Cave in The Republic, presumably also depicting the Boötes region connected with this myth. Through this they would hopefully sense the subtle light of the totemic Akashic Records, M-fields, the Realm of the Eternal, and activation of this perception would then become the continual purpose underlying all their architectural activities, “keeping the Eternal in mind and using it as the model of the form of their productions” as Timaeus advises – great advice for stone masons. So it would have been practical knowledge for the stonemason, the least speculative type of initiation. We just noted that the myth had its counterpart in Tyre, and so a variant of the initiation was probably carried out there, rather as with the Freemasonic traditions of the Dionysiac Artificers of Tyre. So let me get more to the point, for in fact there really were guilds in antiquity with this name, Dionysou Technitai, “Artisans of Dionysos”. These guilds were companies of artists and musicians who worked in and for the theatres from at least the 3rd century BC. It is intriguing that each of these guilds of Dionysos was headed by a priest of Dionysos, for this tells us that there must have been some kind of ceremonial, cultic, initiatory element to membership. As students of music they may well have learnt about harmony and proportion. In Geometry and the Liberal Arts by Dan Pedoe, who was a professor of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota, we read how Vitruvius, the Roman architect of Augustus who studied in Athens, said that an architect “should be skilful with his pencil, instructed in geometry, conversant with history, should have followed the philosophers with attention, should understand music…and be acquainted with astronomy and the theory of the heavens.” We can reasonably connect the Dionysou Technitai, surely, directly to the architecture of these theatres, which was formal and geometric as I mentioned briefly in the last chapter. Vitruvius recorded the standard geometry underlying the Roman theatre. It was, we read in Pedoe’s book, based on a dodecahedral structure formed from four equilateral triangles. The connection with the Zodiac is implicit in the geometry, and Vitruvius made it explicit in his description. “In the [main] circle, inscribe four equilateral triangles at equal distances apart, as the astrologers do when constructing the Zodiac,” wrote the ancient architect.

Already we may note that this pattern is simply made of a double Seal of Solomon, with four equilateral triangles rather than the simple two. This is rather interesting, for here we have an architectural structure deriving from the real, historical Artisans of Dionysos yet relating geometrically to that same pattern with which their legendary equivalents are associated in Freemasonic tradition. Put another way, the theatres of Dionysos were in a sense temples of the Seal of Solomon. The Greek theatre was similar to the later Roman in its sacred geometry, being again based on dodecahedral geometry, but with features that indicate the presence of a square within the underlying pattern. Dan Pedoe has the Greek theatre geometry as being formed from three squares rather than four triangles.

However, there is in fact an interesting way in which the square relates to the same pattern made of the four equilateral triangles described by Vitruvius, as shown below. [actually above]

And this too is intriguing, for it leads us back to Poussin, and his Shepherd’s of Arcadia. There is a book called The Tomb of God which concerned the part played by Poussin’s paintings in the “Rennes-le-Chateaux” mystery. Its ultimate conclusion was a big leap from its initial detective work. The conclusion had to do with interpretations along the lines of a map indicating the location of the tomb of Jesus in the South of France. Here we are concerned only with the initial detective work, for the presence of this geometry in the “discovered” parchments can hardly be denied. It was geometry the writers Andrews and Schellenberger also found in Poussin’s two Shepherds paintings. Does this indicate that the link between those paintings and the old Dionysian Mysteries was not just astronomical, but also geometric? If so, the evidence for continuity of those Mystery Traditions in some form is certainly beginning to mount up. In the final chapter we shall return to these French Mysteries of the Seal of Solomon.

For the moment, before we go on to the next chapter, perhaps we may also reasonably connect the Dionysou Technitai, the artisans who worked in the theatres, with the skene, the large paintings that often formed the backdrop for the plays. This is of interest as these paintings may well be the origin of the ekphrasis-based novelistic Mysteries we examined in the first chapter, which fits with the hypothesis we had begun to form at the end of that chapter, namely that those Mysteries of constellation-based ekphrasis had been passed on in the Dionysian Mysteries. Rather more confident about this, we proceed now to Chapter 3.

Scott Creightonesque treatment of massive Thornbourh henges

Long Man comparisons

Comparisons with animated Was-bearing ankhs from a piece in Tut's tomb treasures, and with the Egyptian serpent-wand bearing Hekka in a ceiling image

Marlow Thameside Floodplain Round Barrows : Telescopic Image of Orion's Belt

The three round barrows are located on a floodplain just north of the Thames, just west of Marlow, Bucks, UK, Archaeologists say they would originally have been surrounded for much of the year by water. They now only show up as crop marks in aerial photos because they were ploughed flat by a farmer. In terms of size, configuration, and comparison with a telescopic photo they bring to mind Orion's Belt, which then further brings to mind the Giza Orion correlation, those 'burial mounds' also being next to a river. Then we recall Thornborough, same configuration (bigger scale), on floodplan next to a large river in North Yorkshire.

FROGS COMEDY FIRST PART ABRIDGED

It’s a midwinter evening in 393 A.H. (After Homer), and we’re sitting about midway up, somewhat to the left in the audience of the Theatre of Dionysos in Athens, awaiting the start of Aristophanes’ new play, The Frogs.

Two figures come on stage. One has a Dionysos mask, but seems to have thrown a Hercules costume over his clothes – he wears what looks like a lion-skin and he carries a club. The other follows behind riding a donkey and carrying a lot of luggage on his back. This second character speaks to the first:-

“Dionysos, Sir, I’ve just remembered a gag that suits our present situation.”
“Oh dear Heaven, what’s coming now?”
“It’s a good one.”
“Really? Are you sure it’s not just the one where you shift your bags around on your back and then complain that you really need to dump your load?”
“No, no, it’s completely different to that.”
“Which one is it then?”
“It’s the one where I ask for someone to take over the task for me, except I use the phrase ‘relieve me.’ ‘Won’t somebody relieve me?’ you see, then I can say ‘before I relieve myself.’”
“Er…right well Xanthus I’ll tell you what: if at any point it suddenly becomes necessary for me to vomit, I’ll get you to do that gag.”
“Hmm. Well you’re not suggesting I go to the trouble of carrying these props without even getting a joke out of it? There’s an amusing baggage scene in every comedy these days.”
“Yes, well there’s not going to be one in this play. Let’s leave all that frightfully witty stuff to those other playwrights, shall we? Anyway, what’s the problem – the donkey is doing the hard work.”
“What? I’m the one carrying the bags!”
“How can someone be the bearer of something, if something else is bearing them?”
“Well that sounds a bit too philosophomological to me, all I know is we’ll have to stop.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to dump my load.”
“Ah, here we are anyway, at Hercules’ house.”

Dionysos knocks on the door of a house façade on stage. Hercules answers it.
“My word,” says Hercules with a chuckle, “what on Earth are you doing dressed as me?”
“I want to emulate one of your feats, I need to go down into the Underworld and bring someone back. So I need your advice.”
“Who do you want to fetch back?”
“Well the other day I was sitting on deck, reading the script of Euripides’ Andromeda, when I thought to myself what a shame we haven’t got any classy poets like that alive in Athens any more. I had a craving.”
“A craving?”
“Yes. How can I put this in terms you’ll understand? You know that feeling when you really want a big bowl of pea soup?”
“Yes.”
“Well it feels like that, except I want some decent poetry. So first of all tell me, how do I get down to the Underworld?”
“There are many ways. Here’s one.”
“Just a minute, let me make a note of this.”
“You go straight up the road.”
“…up road.”
“Left into Potter’s Row.”
“….Potter’s, yup.”
“Climb up the tower.”
“…..up tower, got it.”
“Then jump off.”
“Then jump…hang on! No that’s not for me. I’ve always hated minced brains. What way down did you take?”
“I crossed the bottomless lake. There is an aged ferryman. Xanthus will have to go the long way round though, no slaves on board I’m afraid.”
“You mean I’ve got to carry these bags all that way?” says Xanthus.
Suddenly a funeral procession comes across the stage, with a corpse being carried. Xanthus has an idea.
“Why don’t we get that stiff to take them across – he’s going that way anyway. I say, excuse me, could you take these bags down to the Underworld with you?”
The corpse sits upright: “I might, for two drachmas.”
“You’re joking,” says Dionysos.
“Onward!” says the corpse to his bearers.
“How about for nine obols?” Dionysos suggests.
“Nine obols! Frankly, I’d rather live. Onward!” He lies down again.
“Pah, to Hell with him then!” says Xanthus. “I’ll take the bags myself.”
Opening scene of The Frogs, Aristophanes, abridged

EAVESDROPPIN' AT THE FESTIVAL OF THE VINTAGE

Athenian girl being pushed on a swing

Now it is the day of the Festival of the Vintage and we are in a small town a few miles outside Athens. (We’re back in Ancient Greece, later in the same year of 393 A.H. (After Homer). Aristophanes’ Frogs was so well received at its first showing in the Lenaia festival that it was performed a second time, at the Great Dionysia.) Girls are being pushed on swings and libations poured to the shepherd Ikarios, first to receive the gift of wine. Nearby we hear a young boy who is standing holding his grandmother’s hand and watching his sister being pushed on a swing. “Yeya, when was the first Festival of the Vintage?” he asks the benevolent old woman. “That was when King Aristaeus (“The Best”) came back to his kingdom on Ceos from the Oracle at Delphi having consulted his father Apollo. He came back and found the three herdsman from Attica who had killed Ikarios, and he brought them to justice, then he raised a shrine to Ikarios to honour him for sharing the gift of wine, and then he organised the first Festival of the Vintage.” “When will I taste wine, Yeya?” “Today, little one!” “But Yeya, who was King Aristaeus?” “Well, little one, they say his mother was a water nymph called Cyrene. But when he was just a little child, younger even than you, Aristaeus was given into the care of a group of myrtle nymphs and he was fed on nectar and ambrosia by Mother Earth. These fairies of the myrtle bushes taught young Aristaeus useful arts such as how to make cheese from milk, to keep bees and to cultivate the olive, but winemaking was still unknown.”

“And, why did the three herdsman kill Ikarios?”

Dionysos and Ikarios

“Well, Ikarios received from Dionysos the wonderful gift of wine. But it has to be used sensibly. Moderation in all things. Ikarios used to ride around the countryside of Attica carrying wine skins to share the drink with the people, and teach them the Dionysian dances. But this was before people had learnt to mix neat wine with water, and there were some shepherds who drank much too much, which is never a good thing, little one. Some friends of these drunken shepherds met them and did not understand what was happening, and thought they had been poisoned, and attacked Ikarios who, unfortunately, died as a result. Don’t act rashly because appearances can be deceptive. When the drunken shepherds sobered up the killers realised what they had done, and they buried the body under a certain pine tree and left the scene of the crime hoping not to be found out. But no crimes go hidden from the eyes of the Furies, as you shall hear in a moment. Seeing what had happened to his friend, Dionysos arranged with Zeus for the image of Ikarios to be set into the stars as Boötes, the Ideal Shepherd, and put Ikarios’ daughter Erigone next to him as Virgo, and raised their dog Maira into the stars also as Canis Minor, honouring her for having found the place where the shepherd was buried. Ikarios was reborn at the same time at the foot of the pine tree as a vine that wound its way up around the trees' trunk in true Dionysian fashion.”
“Oh. But why did Dionysos chose to give the gift of wine to Ikarios?”
“Well, as I said before, King Aristaeus shared with people the arts he had learnt from the myrtle nymphs, but these didn’t include making wine. Aristaeus was initiated into the Mysteries of Chiron the wise centaur in his mountain cave. Whether it was because of the wisdom he learnt from Chiron, or because his father was an immortal, when he grew to manhood Aristaeus became king of the island of Ceos. He married Autonoe and together they had a daughter called Macris, a nymph like her grandmother.”
“Cyrene.”
“Kala! Well done little one, that’s right. So, when Macris was old enough she joined a group of nymphs called the Hyades, and they were to receive an amazing child into their care, for the great god Dionysos had decided to have an incarnation in Greece.”

“The plant realm rejoiced when this child was born, and he was brought up in a cave by these nurses, and fed on honey. As the child grew up along came a jolly fellow with more than a little horse blood in his veins, who became Dionysos' mentor. His name was Silenus and he rode on a mule. His chops were often bespattered with the juice of myrtles and others of the berries of the hedgerow upon which he loved to feast.

“Before long Dionysos decided it was time to present the gift of wine to mortals, and so he waited to meet a worthy recipient. One day he was walking in the countryside of Attica outside Athens when he met the shepherd called Ikarios out looking after his sheep and goats. The shepherd was very friendly and hospitable, and gave Dionysos gifts of many kinds - milk, honey, different types of fruit. Aha, thought Dionysos, here’s just the sort of fellow who would really appreciate my gift. So Dionysos thanked him warmly and then told him that he had a gift of his own by which to reciprocate the shepherd's generosity. So don’t forget, Dionysos loves the countryside with its hillsides covered with thyme echoing to the rattle of the bells of the flocks and the din of the cicadas as much as he loves the city with its theatres dinner parties, and he likes honest country folk from the hills as much as sophisticated poets from in town. So, this is when Dionysos gave Ikarios a cup of wine, and the good shepherd was sent into rapture as the exquisite taste flowed over his tongue. Dionysos shared also the art of making this beverage, even the cultivation of the vine, and from this time on Ikarios would ride around the hills of Greece in his cart carrying wineskins and introducing the populace to this wonderful drink and to the winemaking process he had also learnt, together with the sacred ceremonies and festivals that went with it.”
“So Ikarios did all the hard work then, while Dionysos was relaxing on the cloud-pillows up in Olympus?”
“Heavens, don’t say such a thing! No, Dionysos went all the way to India and back via Egypt as well, spreading the arts of vine growing and winemaking. He picked up quite a following as he travelled. As well as his mentor Silenus who still travelled with him on his mule there was also the goat-legged Aegipan, "Goat Pan" and a group of satyrs, and also serpent-bearing women called Maenads who picked up in India the idea of clashing little cymbals as they followed behind the god. Even though the closest thing this band had to a weapon was the Dionysian staff wound with ivy or vine and topped with a pine-cone, the grape conquered all India, and then they turned for home, Dionysos leading the band of revellers in a chariot drawn by two leopards, followed by the serpent bearers, the satyrs, Silenus and the rest of the band. The train stopped a while in Persia where Dionysos grew his beard long and learned to wear it in the pointed Persian style. Then the went to Egypt and the maenads added the tambourine to their list of instruments. They almost got into trouble in Egypt when they got thirsty in the desert, but a ram appeared and lead them to the river in Thebes.”
“Where is India, Yeya?”
“Oh, it’s a long, long, long way away, little one.”
“But not if you are a god, though!”
“Well, maybe so, but it wasn’t plain sailing for Dionysos either. Shortly after he had arrived back in the Mediterranean he was wandering down on a beach when a band of pirates captured him and sailed off intending to sell him as a slave, not realizing he was a god. We must be hospitable to strangers, as Ikarios was, but also a little wary, especially little ones like you. But the story also shows how crime doesn’t pay. Dionysos made wild flute music sound in the air and wine flow on the deck, and he made a vine wind up around the mast and ivy twine into the rigging, and he made a roaring lion appear on the deck, causing the pirates to jump ship realising in mid leap that he was, after all, a god, and as they hit the water Dionysos felt compassion and turned them into dolphins so that at least they would not drown. Kidnapping someone to sell them as a slave is one of the most horrible crimes, but we may even feel some compassion for the worst of criminals, little one. Dionysos then took this ship with a vine wound around the mast as his own, and sailed to the island of Naxos.”
“I’ve seen a statue of him there!”
“Yes you have, that’s right. You were there with your father last autumn. And can you remember what happened when Dionysos arrived on Naxos?”
The little boy contorted his face in concentration.
“I can’t remember.”
“Well, a princess from Crete was wandering alone on a beach. Dionysos decided to approach her. At first she just heard the music in the woods inland, the flutes, cymbals and tambourines. She gazed into the dappled shade of the woodland and began to feel the presence of the arriving god. Then the foliage next to the beach began to shudder and suddenly there appeared the young wine god, ivy wreathing his temples, standing on the chariot drawn by the two leopards with the distinctive train of revellers following behind. Dionysos asked her to marry him, but she said she was already married. Don’t you know, said Dionysos, that a lot of mortals have two spouses, one from the land of mortals, and one from the landing of the Shining Ones?
“So she spoke to her family and everyone agreed it would do the island no harm to have this kind of affiliation with a god. And that is why we too, in Athens, have a special day every year when the wife of the Holy King of the city gets married to Dionysos as a second husband.”

THE BRITISH DIONYSOS

An Examination of Romano-British Material Locked Up
in the Taliesin Tradition of Wales

The Taliesin tradition has been imagined romantically to be a repository of pre-Roman druidic ‘shamanism’. It would be nice if it were so. Others have attempted to show off a harder nosed and more cynical approach by imaging Taliesin to be simply a medieval and Renaissance invention. My intention here is to show that by far the greater part of the tradition has its origins in neither of these periods, but in the agricultural and wine cults of Roman Britain, the Mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus.

Before we look at the details, here in the broadest terms are just a few of the correspondences between Taliesin and Dionysos that cause me to suspect very strongly that the Romano-British element of the Taliesin tradition has been drastically underestimated. Both traditions have:-

· the chase of the infant by an angry goddess and
· animal transformation as disguise to escape this goddess,
· the going back into the belly of the goddess and being born a second time from her,
· the identity as child in the winnow basket and as fermented liquor,
· the common motif of the newly reborn child being sewn in the leather sack
· the floating adrift on the sea followed by the finding of the infant in bag or box,
· the identity as teacher of the art of fermentation,
· the etymology of the name,
· the common motif of inspiration derived from the liquor,
· the rebirth followed by concealment in ivy.
. the rescue of the god's favorite from a prison in which he has been imprisonned by a king, by summoning a tempest to destroy the prison

Taliesin is the centre of an intriguing body of Welsh literature. The consensus of the various sources places Taliesin in Wales somewhere around the beginning of the 6th century AD, that is to say not long after the official Roman withdrawal, and in a region into which the Anglo-Saxons had not moved. Commentators on the material do not yet seem to have acknowledged the source of the majority of the motifs of the tradition. Identifying this source leads to one of the strongest and to my mind most fascinating cases of comparative mythology I have ever seen, and proves direct rather than vague connections. The certainty of these connections we shall now examine, and it is worth doing because it sheds much new light and grants a fascinating new perspective on the Mysteries behind the Taliesin material, one that in no way undermines its Britishness.

The earliest written reference known is in the Historia of the monk Nennius, writing in the 9th century, and he says that Taliesin was ‘famed in British verse’ at the time of the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons, along with other figures similarly famed such as Talhearn and Aneirin. A major source of Taliesin material is the book of seventy-seven poems written down in the 14th century and known as The Book of Taliesin. In the 16th century a version of the Story of Taliesin, named as such, was written down from oral sources by a Welsh writer named Llewellyn Sion, then subsequently variant traditions were recorded by Owen Jones and Lewis Morris. Many of the poems are revealed as things Taliesin will have said at particular stages of dramatizations of this story, though the known sources of the story are later than the poems. And as John Mathews notes in his book Taliesin : Shamanism and the Bardic Mysteries in Britain and Ireland p.20, in agreement with scholars such as J.Wood in an article ‘Versions of the Hanes Taliesin’, there are also enough differences in the spellings of personal names between the manuscripts to tell us that the work was ‘widely diversified’ through various oral traditions by the time these versions were recorded.

To comprehend the material, one can only first approach via the myth itself, which deals with the birth, or rather births of Taliesin, together with an interesting subsequent life story that is believed to have been tacked on the end later on. Taliesin in his myth transforms into various animals while fleeing from an angry goddess, Ceridwen, who opposes his arrival because she favors her own son. In the poetry many of these transformations are mentioned - more than in the core myth - and they include bull and goat. We wouldn’t need to make much of the fact that Dionysos also took the forms of bull and goat if it wasn’t for a further curious similarity: in his myth he was turned into a goat to disguise him from an angry goddess, Hera, who opposes his arrival, because he is not her own son, but the son of Zeus by another mother, sometimes called Semele. So in both myths there is the disguise in animal form to escape the angry goddess, and the names Hera and Ceridwen clearly have a similarity.

At Hera’s behest, Dionysos was killed, but only seemed to die. From his heart a drink was made; this was given to Semele, and she became pregnant from it, and subsequently gave birth to him, so that he was born a second time, earning his name of the Twice-Born. Similarly, Taliesin, having finally turned into a grain of corn, is swallowed by Ceridwen, ‘the Harvester’, on one level certainly a symbol of the Earth taking the grain within herself then giving rebirth to the plant, for similarly she then gave him second birth, there now being less animosity between them since he is born from her he is her own son. But the seed was also used as a symbol for matter suitable for poetry, for Ceridwen is called ‘the goddess of many seeds, the seeds of poetic harmony’ in the Taliesin poem Cuhelyn’s Song. These two interpretations work synergistically to give the image of beautiful foreign matter that is reworked until it becomes resonant with the local land, and so may be accepted into the national cultural canon. I call this the Hera Bypass, since Hera stands for local cultural integrity in opposition to the exotic interests of Zeus. Ceridwen had a son for whom she intended the gift of bardic inspiration, but he was ugly, and the gift went instead by fortuitous accident to the beautiful arrival, Taliesin. It seems from this metaphor that the bards of Druidic accepted some foreign mythology as suitable matter for their poetry because it was too beautiful to shun. How did it arrive? Who brought it?


In the poetry this seed was found in a place where grain was being toasted to release its essence, in other words it was to be used for making beer, just as the drink Semele drank was obviously either wine from the grape or ale from grain, since the killing of Dionysos is actually the harvesting and cutting back of the vine. Taliesin says in The Hostile Confederacy:
“I rested nine months as a child in her belly
I have been matured
I have been offered to a king.”

Here, like Dionysos, he is the fermented drink. In fact, in the poetry Taliesin actually describes himself, after the rebirth from Ceridwen, as having been ‘created a second time’, in other words Twice-Born, just like Dionysos. Dionysos as an infant was sometimes called Liknites after the basket in which he was carried, and this seems to have been a basket used for sieving wheat, similar to a winnow, and Dionysos was the child in the winnow, (Virgil tells us of the “Mystic Winnow Fan of Iacchos”, the infant Dionysos). This is of course directly equivalent to Taliesin becoming a grain and, in the poetry, (The Consolation of Elfin) saying he was ‘small in his basket’.

After he was reborn from Ceridwen, Taliesin was tied up in a leather bag, and in this set adrift. Similarly, the traditions of Dionysos make mention of the leather sack, which was in fact a container called a korykos in which wine or mead was fermented. A rite of mead fermentation was carried out in Crete in a cave called the Korykos Antron, ‘the Cave of the Leather Sack’, we learn in Kerenyi’s Dionysos.

So a leather sack as a container for the god is another motif common to both the Dionysos and Taliesin traditions, and since on Crete Zeus was a bull god (e.g. the Europa story) the ‘thy of Zeus’ into which Dionysos was sewn is revealed as the bull-skin sack. In the Taliesin story this bag was set adrift upon the sea, and even this feature is similar to one present in a Greek version of the arrival of Dionysos, which comes from Pausanias. Here the young Dionysos, yet to find a nurse, was washed ashore in a chest at Prasiai in the Peleponnese.

Dionysos was of course the wine god, the inventor of the wine making process, one of his gifts to humanity. Similarly, in the version of the Taliesin story told by Lewis Morris Taliesin arrives on the shore of Wales and teaches two witches how to ‘boil liquor without heat’, in other words the art of fermentation. Anyone who has ever tried home brewing will know of the furious riot of bubbles that manifests seemingly out of nowhere.

Taliesin himself, in the myth, became inspired after drinking liquor from a cauldron, which reminds us of the Greek Dionysian initiation known as the Kraterzein, in which initiates drank wine from a crater as part of the preparation for the Mysteries. (Kerenyi, Dionysos p.363) The name of Taliesin is given in Latin as Telesinus by Lewis Morris, and this form, I suggest, was the original one, with the Welsh Taliesin, ‘Shining Brow’ or ‘Fine Value’, being a later version. The word teleo is a Latin and Greek word used to mean ‘to initiate’, and was used as a part of Greek names used for one ‘initiated’ into the Mysteries. Taliesin repeatedly refers to himself as initiated. What of the second part of the name, -sinus? Here a Latin scholar is required, but I notice there was a type of Roman drinking vessel called a sinum. Interpreting the name as he who was inspired from the chalice would make sense within the context of the myth of Taliesin. (There was a Roman consul in the time of Nero named Telesinus; he is mentioned in the novel Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus.)

In Greece a type of song was sung in honour of Dionysos in which the most common theme was the birth of the god. This song was called the dithyramb, and wine was revered as its inspiration. For example, the earliest known composer of dithyrambs is Archilochus, who said that he had first been inspired to do this “when the wine shook his mind with its lightning”. This refers to the birth of Dionysos from Semele after she was burnt up by the light of Zeus, the god of lightning. It shows that Archilochus sought inspiration from wine, while also linking to the Orphic variant in which it was the drink given to Semele which caused her to become pregnant with the god. In other examples the labor pains of Semele were performed by the singer. This is ‘male’ pregnancy – the fertilizing of the mind by the god in the liquor leading to creative incubation and poetic birthing. So poets of Dionysos in Greece claimed their inspiration came from the wine, just as the Taliesin material repeatedly honors the liquor in the cauldron as a source of inspiration.

As just mentioned, in the most common version of the birth of Dionysos, Semele, pregnant with the god, asked to see Zeus, the father of her child, in his full splendor, but in doing so she was burnt up by his light. Zeus rescued the infant from her womb and protected him from his light with a covering of ivy. And in the Taliesin poem The Hostile Confederacy, translated by D.W. Nash, the bard says ‘I have been dead, I have been alive, I have been hidden in the ivy bush.’ On top of all the correspondences we have looked at, this reference not in the Dionsysos but in the Taliesin material to rebirth and concealment within ivy must be taken as a total confirmation. Taliesin or Telesinus is a Romano-British Dionysos; his song of his origins could even be called a Welsh dithyramb. According to Jenifer Laing in her book Art and Society in Roman Britain the Bacchus cult became very popular in Britain, and one of the artefacts she discusses has, as well as Bacchus himself, figures of the group associated with Dionysiac initiation: panther, maenad, satyr and Silenus on his mule.

The nine maidens who kindle the cauldron of inspiration in the Welsh poem attributed to Taliesin, The Spoils of Annwwn, are almost uniformly referred to by modern commentators as the Celtic Muses, yet the full ramifications of the fact that this Roman idea (it was the Romans not the Greeks who made the Muses nine in number) is so central to the Taliesin tradition has perhaps not hit home. Rather as in myth the Twice-Born is hidden in the covering of ivy, so too has he, historically, been concealed within the body of Welsh myth, his true identity as the beautiful Old World plant god of wine, pleasure and ecstatic creativity being largely unrecognized. If part of the reason for this has been a desire for him to have been the product solely of native creativity, then this is surely misplaced, for the Twice-Born is no less Welsh than he was ever Greek, arriving too as he did in Greece from elsewhere. The Twice-Born is characteristically the arriving god, the god who navigates past the opposition of the goddess of indigenousness because he is so beautiful, so naturally an augmentation of her treasures. Greece does not claim his origin, yet none would deny that as Dionysos he became Greek.

For the Greeks it was Hera who was the goddess of that which is indigenous to Greece, the true wife of Zeus, making her the only possible choice of opposition to his arrival. Similarly the Roman Hera, called Juno, opposes the arrival in Italy of the Trojans in the Aenead unless they will not obliterate the native Italian culture and way of life; only if Jupiter (Zeus) agrees to this will she consent to the arrival. So too had it been Hera who was opposed to the affair between Trojan Paris and Greek Helen.

The Romans brought the vine to Britain, so it is logical that they would also have brought its cult, which they had themselves adopted from Greece as well as, quite possibly, from the heavily Hellenized Etruscans, but the Romans themselves were inventors of neither wine nor the cult. Resentment about the Roman ‘conquest’ of Britain may have helped to conceal Taliesin’s origins, but the idenity of the agents of his arrival have little to do with the nature of an idea that was Greek long before it was Roman and Egyptian long before it was Greek. ‘I carried the banner before Alexander’, says Taliesin in his poetry, and ‘I know who fills the river in the Land of the Pharaohs’. Taliesin’s poetic boasts about having been in such places as Ancient Greece and Egypt take on a whole a new light.

The Dionysian cult involved initiations where the candidate was raised from a mock death, an ascension associated with the rise after sunset of Dionysos in his lion-drawn chariot, that is to say Boötes, ‘He who drives the cart’ lead by Leo and Leo Minor, for these were, and still are, the stars of the rebirth of the plants, since these constellations are high in the evening skies during the greening of spring. He is followed by, as Lucius wrote, “the Maeanads, serpent-wreathed” (the Serpent-Bearer constellation), half-horse half-man Silenus on his mule (half-horse Sagittarius), and “Goat-Pan, shaggy in the underpinnings” (Capricorn). Virgil writes in the Georgics that Liber and Ceres (Dionysos and Demeter) are the brightest of the luminaries that guide the sky through the year, referring to Boötes and the adjacent Virgo, who ride high, like the crops of the fields, in the evening skies of summer. Taliesin for his part sings “My home country is in the region of the summer stars” in his poem Primary Chief Bard in the translation of J.Mathews (following Idrisson), and chastises uninitiated bards for not having made the journey of ascension into the stars.

The rebirth initiation featured strongly in the Dionysian cult that made its way into the Roman world, and this fits with the importance of initiation in the Taliesin poems. The initiation is to the status of poet, and there are several explicit references to this. For example, in Culhelyn’s Song, this Culhelyn is described as having ‘the exalted speech of the initiated poet’ (Mathews’ translation). Ceridwen herself in The Chair of Ceridwen sings “I am an initiate of the court of Don. I and Euronwy and Pryderi.” In Taliesin’s Bardic Law Taliesin sings “I have been with the initiates, with Math and the smiths.” Some sort of initiation to a bardic degree was clearly going on in ancient Wales. It is also clear that Satyr was a degree of initiation within the thiasos or Dionysian group, at least by Roman times, and this fits with another detail mentioned in Lewis Morris’ account of the Taliesin story, for he says that a contemporary of Taliesin in Wales at the time was a figure called ‘Aneurin the Satyr’. Initiates believed they would join the great Dionysian thiasos in the sky after death, the men identified with Dionysos as Boötes and the women as Ariadne who wears the Corona Borealis as her wreath, the two riding together in their chariot. And sure enough we find a similar funerary element in the Taliesin material: “Those who read my bardic books will find sanctuary in the Otherworld”, sings Taliesin in Taliesin’s Bardic Law.

To sum up the theory put forward here, I would simply say that the Taliesin tradition takes as its primary source neither pre- nor post-Roman matter, but Roman matter itself. Another connection to the Romans in the Taliesin material comes from the mentions of Virgil as Fferyllt, but one of these can only be of medieval origin. This is a Taliesin poem Cad Goddeu which makes reference to Christ and then immediately after says that Taliesin will be bedecked in gold because of the prophesy of Virgil. By this time Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue with its talk of the coming of a divine child and an age of peace according to some prophecy of the Cumaean sibyl had been interpreted as a prophesy of Christ. The Eclogue concerns the return of Astraea (“Justice”) from the stars (where she ascended as Virgo) back onto the Earth, in other words the return of the Golden Age. If Taliesin says he will be bedecked in the gold of this coming age then he presumably implies that by then his time will have come, his genius justly recognized, or something along those lines.

The second mention of Virgil in the Taliesin material is in the Hanes, the Story of Taliesin. Here Ceridwen “resolved to boil a Cauldron of Inspiration according to the books of Virgil, and the method of it was this: she must first gather certain herbs on certain days and hours, and put them in the Cauldron.” This might cause us to wonder exactly which book of Virgil is referred to. It is The Georgics which describe in poetry how the farmer times his activities to movements of the seasons, stars and heavenly bodies. “The Moon herself has appointed some days in one degree, some in another, as lucky for work. The fifth day eschew…The seventh is lucky to plant a vine….Observe the months and stars of heaven; noting wither the cold planet Saturn retires; into what circles of Heaven the fiery Mercury wanders.” So we are told in Part I of The Georgics. Also in this part is a passage about activities that may be done as one “sits by the late fire of wintry night, watching the hours through” while “the goodman’s wife with song beguiles her labour long…over Vulcan’s fire boiling down the sweet must, and scums with leaves the water of the bubbling boiling kettle.”

The Georgics could have been read in Britain at any time ranging from the Roman occupation, through the Dark Ages and into the Middle Ages. Further proof that these poems in particular were a strong influence comes from the fact that a passage from Part II turns up in a Taliesin poem. In both of these passages the respective poet asks about the cause of the swelling of the sea and of the darkness of night.


Virgil:
“May the lovely Muses…they whose Mysteries I bear…show me …what force it is by which the deep seas learn to swell and burst their barriers, and again of themselves sink back into their place; why winter suns make so much haste to dip in Ocean, or what obstacle it is that clogs the course of the lingering nights.”
(Georgic Part II)


Taliesin:
“Whence comes night and day?
Why is the eagle grey?
Why is night dark?
Why is the linnet green?
Why does the sea swell?”
(Taliesin’s Bardic Lore)


The resemblance is far too close to be coincidental. It is interesting that both the Virgil passage and the Taliesin poem in question, Taliesin’s Bardic Lore, also commend the invocation of the Muses. Both claim initiation into the Mysteries of the Muses. The burning question is whether or not Taliesin made this claim simply in emulation, or whether some such initiation actually took place in Britain. The frequency of references to deriving inspiration from the cauldron as well as the cultic feel of the myth of Taliesin’s flight and transformations both suggest to me the latter.

The claim of initation into the Mysteries of the Muses itself is also highly reminiscent of a verse by that other great Roman poet, Horace, in Ode III.1 :-

I shun and keep removed the uninitiate crowd.

I require silence: I am the Muses' priest,

And sing for maidens and boys

Songs never heard before.

Though by Horace, that verse would sit perfectly comfortably in the Taliesin material. In Taliesin's Bardic Lore, for example, we read:-

Common men do not receive my knowledge....

I am a bard. I do not vouchsafe

My secrets to slaves.

Some have assumed that the later part of the Taliesin story, the events after Elffin has found the magical child, are a later addition, and that the earliest core of the myth is the series of magical animal transformations. I wonder, however, whether the reverse may be true. Elffin went to the court of Maelgwn Gwynedd and boasted that Taliesin was a better bard than any there. Elffin was thrown into prison, but released when Taliesin, knowing these things at a distance, summoned a tempest to shake down the prison. This parralels similar events in Euripides' The Bacchantes. A stranger, a priest of Dionysos, arrived in Thebes, and was imprisonned by king Pentheus. Dionysos, however, shook the prison to the ground and freed the stranger. Since this would appear to be another reference to Taliesin’s real identity as Dionysos, a pagan god, it seems easier to image these elements being composes in Late Antiquity, around the time of the end of the Romano-British period, than it is to imagine it during the fully Christian, even the Renaissance.

Another direct parralel is to be found in a late version by Iolo Morganwg, 1747-1826. Taliesin was out fishing off the Welsh coast when he was captured by Irish pirates. He escaped and floated ashore into Elffin's salmon wier. Iolo was surely drawing on one of the most famous stories of Dionysos - his capture by and escape from the Tyrhenian pirates.

As regards the series of transformations into various animals, a direct parralel to this is to be found within the Arabian Nights. This is curious. The actual animals are not the same, but the overall motif is. Are both based on some earlier protoype? The Arabian Nights were not published in Europe until much later than versions of the Taliesin tradition containing thus motif. Possibly the motif had been heard by visitors to the Holy Land, being brought back to Late Medieval Wales. A passing similarity - Taliesin changing to hare, Ceredwen to greyhound - may then have been observed and developped using the newly acquired motif. Why do I suppose that these to animals - the hare and the hound - were already part of the story?

This is part of a final argument for the classical origin of the Taliesin tradition, comiong from the connection to the stars. The first animal that Taliesin turns into when fleeing Ceridwen is a hare, and when he does this Ceridwen takes the form of a black greyhound, and chases him. The constellation of Canis Major has Sirius as its bright eye, with its long snout pointing westwards. It strains eagerly towards the West, and of course moves west over the course of the winter on the southern horizon, and over the course of the night if you stay up watching for long enough. Just to the west of it in the sky, the neighboring constellation is Lepus, the Hare. These are very suitable for mythologizing in Britain, for at this latitude they are not too far above the horizon when they pass to the south, so that they can be seen to be running over the hills.

Another of the southern constellations is Crater, which in Greece was seen as a wine-mixing jar. In fact this can be said to be the neighboring constellation of Canis on the eastern side, (with Lepus on the western). This of course corresponds very closely with the cauldron in the Taliesin story, for it was indeed used for mixing the liquor. In it Ceridwen was mixing the beverage with various flowers and herbs. It was because Taliesin had drunk from it that Ceridwen chased him, and he changed to a hare to flee from her. The constellation next to the wine-mixing crater is Corvus, the crow, and the name of Ceridwen’s ugly son, for whom she had intended the beverage in the cauldron, is Morfran, which Celtic seer/scholar John Mathews says means ‘Great Crow’. In fact in the Welsh dictionary morfran, literally ‘sea crow’, is a cormorant, but Morfran as the Corvus constellation next to the Cauldron is not an unhappy placement. While running as a hare Taliesin came to a river, and dived into it, becoming a fish. The constellation towards which Lepus the Hare is running is Eridanus, the River. So there is great potential for a painting of this scene, with Corvus, Crater, Canis Major, Lepus and Eridanus all in their respective places.
Corvus, Crater, Canis Major, Lepus and Eridanus

Old drawings of the Cauldron of Ceridwen and the Taliesin Hare being chased by the Ceridwen Greyhound

The image of Canis chasing Lepus is also found in Ancient Greek art, as in the detail above, on a dish painted by Nikosthenes, on which Corvus, Hyrda and Scorpio can also be seen.

Another Greek image of this scene is more interesting still, for it was uncovered from Highdown Hill near Worthing in Sussex. Again it shows the Hare being chased by the Hound. It has a Greek inscription, and the glass vessel is believed to have been made in Alexandria in Egypt, which again argues for a classical origin for this part of the myth.


The Hare and Hound Vase in the Worthing Museum, with transcribed image, right

Vegetarianism and the Elixir of Life : The Persian Prophecy

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Sacrifice of ox, with Crater containing the elixir

A recent study showed that the life-span statistics for vegetarians taken en mass is longer than that for meat eaters en mass. How will such statistics affect our culinary choices? A Zoroastrian text, the Greater Bundahisn (34) prophesied that “in the millennium of Aushedar-mah, the strength of appetite will so diminish that men…will desist from meat food, and will eat vegetables and drink the milk of animals”.

However, this same part of the Greater Bundahisn also prophesied that a figure called Soshyant would in this future time sacrifice an ox, and from some of the constituents of its body he would be able to make a drink which would confer immortality upon the drinker. The people would drink this and cease to age. Roman Mithraism took up this theme: the Mithraic temples, such as the one unearthed in London and which in fact dotted the Roman Empire, had depictions of the sacrifice of the bull in the primeval cave and the sacred meal, and after purification with fire the initiates held feasts within the temples.

It might seem strange that beef should be stated as the source of a life-enhancing elixir, after all we are usually told that if we want to be healthy we should cut down on red meat and increase our intake of fish, fruit and vegetables, particularly those high in antioxidants. The fats that come with red meat, on the other had, increase oxidative stress and clog up the arteries. We may be aware that such meat contains energy-releasing chemicals, but we don’t tend to associate them with anti-aging, and certainly few people at the moment think of red meat as a rich source of a particularly useful antioxidant.

However, there is in fact an elixir which has been described as “one of the superstars of alternative anti-aging medicine”, namely acetyl-l-carnitine (ALCAR) plus Alpha Lipoic Acid (ALA). This combination is already sold in health food shops. It featured recently in an article in the New Scientist on life extension. Carnitine is so-named from Latin “carnus” flesh, because it was from red meat that it was first isolated, and this is the richest natural source. Generally speaking, the redder the meat, the higher the levels of carnitine. ALCAR has been shown to reverse symptoms associated with mental decline in the elderly. It appears to reverse some of the age-related damage to mitochondria. It also increases energy levels, making people feel younger. It assists in making fatty acids available to cells to be burnt for energy. This burning, however, is oxidization, and this is where the ALA comes in. Alpha Lipoic Acid is an antioxidant, but it is different from the others because it is both fat and water-soluble and so is easily absorbed and transported across cell membranes. This enables it to protect against free radicals inside as well as outside the cell, which allows it to clean up after the ALCAR, as it were. This Persian prophesy said that there would be a fire which for some would feel like molten lead but for others nothing more harmful than warm milk. Could this be the fire in the body – the burning of fatty acids for energy in the cells?

And red meat is a rich natural source not only of carnitine, but also of alpha lipoic acid. Just as Soshyant made the elixir out of some of the constituents of the ox, these two chemicals are both found in high levels in red meat, and when isolated from the more harmful fat of the meat, and used as high dose supplements, they form an anti-aging formulation. This does not mean of course that meat has to be the source of the supplements, but it is enough in a sense to validate this part of the ancient Persian prophesy.