Free The White Goddess by Robert Graves Page A

of Arawn King of Annwm, a god of divination and prophecy, and both together to institute a new religious system in the place of the old. That it was Gwydion who usurped Arawn’ s place is suggested by the cognate myth in the Romance of Math the Son of Mathonwy where Gwydion stole the sacred swine from Pryderi, the King of the Pembrokeshire Annwm. Thus the high sprigs of Bran’s alder were humbled, and the Dog, Roebuck and Lapwing stolen from Arawn were installed as guardians of the new religious secret. The Amathaonians’ motive for betraying their kinsmen to the foreign invaders will be discussed in Chapter Eight.
    It appears that Bran’s people did not retire, after their spiritual defeat, without offering armed resistance; for the tradition is that 71,000 men fell in battle after the secret was lost.
    What sort of a secret? Caesar records that the Gallic Celts claimed descent from ‘Dis’ – that is to say, from a god of the dead correspondingto Dis in the Latin pantheon – and also worshipped deities corresponding with Minerva, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Mercury. Since he also records that the Gallic Druids came to Britain for instruction in religion, the principal seat of the Dis cult was evidently in Britain. The capture of this shrine by a continental tribe was an epoch-making event, for it is clear from Caesar’s account that the Druidic ‘Dis’ was a transcendent god who took precedence of Minerva, Apollo, Mars, Mercury, (to whom we may add Venus and Saturn, the Latin Crow-god, cognate with Aesculapius) and even of Jupiter. And Lucan, in his poem Pharsalia , written in Nero’s reign, expressly states that souls, according to the Druids, do not go down to the gloomy Underworld of the Latin Dis, but proceed elsewhere and that death ‘is but the mid-point of a long life’.
    The British Dis, in fact, was no mere Pluto but a universal god corresponding closely with the Jehovah of the Hebrew prophets. Similarly, it can be argued that since the prime religious ritual of the Druids ‘in the service of God Himself, as Pliny records, was bound up with the mistletoe, ‘which they call all-heal in their language’ and ‘which falls from Heaven upon the oak’, the name of ‘Dis’ could not have been Bran, there being no mythic or botanical connexion between the alder and the mistletoe. Thus it is likely that the guessing of Bran’s name was merely a clue towards guessing that of the Supreme God: Gwydion did not become Dis, nor did Amathaon; but they together displaced Bran (Saturn) and Arawn (Mercury) in their service of Dis, and redefined his godhead as Beli. But if so, was Dis originally Donnus, in fact Danu?
    It happens that we know the Norse name of Gwydion’ s horse, if Gwydion was indeed Woden, or Odin. It was Askr Yggr-drasill ,or Ygdrasill, ‘the ash-tree that is the horse of Yggr’, Yggr being one of Woden’s titles. Ygdrasill was the enchanted ash, sacred to Woden, whose roots and branches in Scandinavian mythology extended through the Universe. If Bran had been clever enough at the Câd Goddeu he would have pronounced his englyn first, with:
    Sure-hoofed is my steed in the day of battle.
The high sprigs of ash are in thy hand –
Woden thou art, by the branch thou bearest.
     
     
    The Battle of the Trees thus ended in a victory of the Ash-god and his ally over the Alder-god and his ally.
    The pre-Celtic Annwm from which Gwydion is said to have stolen the sacred swine of King Pryderi, and over which Arawn reigned in the Romance of Pwyll Prince of Dyved ,was in the Prescelly Mountains of Pembrokeshire. But it is likely that there were at least two Annwms, and that the ‘Battle of the Trees’ took place at the Annwm in Wiltshire before Gwydion’s people invaded South Wales. It would be fallacious to regard Stonehenge as Bran’s shrine, because it is an unsuitable site for theworship of an Alder-god. The older, larger, grander Avebury ring thirty miles to the north at the junction of the Kennet