The White Goddess (14 page)

Red was the most honourable colour for dress among the ancient Welsh, according to the twelfth-century poet Cynddelw; Gwion is contrasting it with the dismal dress of the monks. Of the Nine Hundred Tales he mentions only two, both of which are included in the
Red
Book
of
Hergest
:
the
Hunting
of
the
Twrch
Trwyth
(line 189) and the
Dream
of
Maxen
Wledig
(lines 162–3).

Lines 206 to 211 belong, it seems, to
Can
y
Meir
ch
,
‘The Song of the Horses’, another of the Gwion poems, which refers to a race between the horses of Elphin and Maelgwyn which is an incident in the Romance.

One most interesting sequence can be built up from lines 29–32, 36–37 and 234–237:

Since Gwion identifies himself with these bards, they are, I think, described as ‘indifferent’ by way of irony. The hundred-headed serpent watching over the jewelled Garden of the Hesperides, and the hundred-clawed toad wearing a precious jewel in his head (mentioned by Shakespeare’s Duke Senior) both belonged to the ancient toadstool mysteries, of which Gwion seems to have been an adept. The European mysteries are less fully explored than their Mexican counterpart; but Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Wasson and Professor Roger Heim have shown that the pre-Columbian Toadstool-god Tlalóc, represented as a toad with a serpent head-dress, has for thousands of years presided at the communal eating of the hallucigenic toadstool
psilocybe
:
a feast that gives visions of transcendental beauty. Tlalóc’s European counterpart, Dionysus, shares too many of his mythical attributes for coincidence: they must be versions of the same deity; though at what period the cultural contact took place between the Old World and the New is debatable.

In my foreword to a revised edition of
The
Greek
Myths
,
I suggest that a secret Dionysiac mushroom cult was borrowed from the native Pelasgians by the Achaeans of Argos. Dionysus’s Centaurs, Satyrs and Maenads, it seems, ritually ate a spotted toadstool called ‘fly-cap’ (
amanita
muscaria
),
which gave them enormous muscular strength, erotic power, delirious visions, and the gift of prophecy. Partakers in the Eleusinian, Orphic and other mysteries may also have known the
panaeolus
papil
ionaceus,
a small dung-mushroom still used by Portuguese witches, and similar in effect to mescalin. In lines 234–237, Gwion implies that a single gem can enlarge itself under the influence of ‘the toad’ or ‘the serpent’ into a whole treasury of jewels. His claim to be as learned as Math and to know myriads of secrets may also belong to the toad-serpent sequence; at any rate,
psilocybe
gives a sense of universal illumination, as I can attest from my own experience of it. ‘The light whose name is Splendour’ may refer to this brilliance of vision, rather than to the Sun.

The
Book
of
Taliesin
contains several similar medleys or poems awaiting resurrection: a most interesting task, but one that must wait until the texts are established and properly translated. The work that I have done here is not offered as in any sense final.