SO JUST WHO - OR WHAT - WAS MYRDDIN/MERLIN?

THE BARD By Thomas Jones

In my chapter from THE  MYSTERIES OF AVALON (http://mistshadows.blogspot.com/2018/02/ive-been-asked-to-post-my-study-on.html), I tried to come to some conclusion as to whether Myrddin/Merlin was a disembodied spirit of a battle-slain warrior, perhaps a warrior who was a follower of the god Lleu, or whether he was actually the god himself, diminished yet not forgotten by Christian writers. The distinction can be blurred, as a man who was designated a sacrificial victim personified the dying-and-soon-to-be-reborn god himself.  A sacred king or queen, though mortal, partook of the divine quality of the god and goddess. In fact, it was by virtue of that divine quality that they were permitted or sanctioned to rule.  Hence, it is often difficult or impossible to distinguish between a divine warrior or chieftain and the god he was thought to embody.

In Welsh lore (the best example of which is the MABINOGION), entities who were originally gods are often portrayed as merely great heroes of the past.  This process is called euhemerism - when ancient gods are claimed by a much later generation to be merely deified heroes. It is also possible that a sort of reverse euhemerism could take place.  In other words, a human during the course of regular folklore development could take on characteristics that originally belonged to a divine figure.  Motifs belonging to the latter were merely transferred to the former. Disentangling one from another can be a major challenge.

Myrddin/Merlin may also be in part or in whole merely a literary creation.  This possibility cannot be discounted.

However, all these qualifying statements aside, I have come to one important conclusion: the relocation of his triple death [1] from a place very near Arderydd/Arthuret to the Tweed (see my previous work for the "Tweed" tributary of the Liddel) allows us to place that sacrifice back where it belongs - near the Willow Pool on the Esk next to Carwinley/Caer Gwenddolau (not on the Powsail or Willow Pool Burn at Drumelzier).

The idea that Myrddin fled from the battle in madness is not correct.  Instead, he was offered up by his own people to Lleu for victory over the Christian enemy Rhydderch.  This may seem an outlandish idea, but a similar hypothesis was floated by the authors of THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A DRUID PRINCE (Anne Ross and Don Robins).  The remains of a bog sacrificial victim they studied convinced them that the man had been subjected to a triple death and that, in all likelihood, such an important offering was meant to obtain divine assistance for the British against the invading Romans.

The so-called madness of Myrddin, as I showed in my earlier study, is in actuality an existence of a spectral kind.  In other words, Myrddin's body did not flee from the scene of the Battle of Arderydd.  Rather, his spirit did.   I will return to this concept in a moment.

The vitally important thing to realize about such a sacrifice is that the victim represented the god himself. This is, admittedly, a weird concept.  Yet we see it time and time again in the early sources.  One of the best examples is sacrifical hanging in ancient Norse religion.  There the human victim suspended from the gallows is indisputably a manifestation of Odin, who himself hung from the World Tree in exchange for occult knowledge.  So, in this sense the question I've often asked myself, namely whether Myrddin is a man or a god, is quite meaningless.  For in truth at the moment of his death he is both.  Or, looking at it another way, Myrddin becomes Lleu when he is sacrificially killed.

At the same time he becomes the brother of the goddess Gwenddydd. And he remains dead for a season, as Lleu does in the MABINOGION tale "Math son of Mathonwy."  In this last the dead god takes on the form of a putrefying eagle perched atop an oak tree.  This eagle in the sky-oak is not only emblematic of the sun during half of the year, but can perhaps be related to the Irish madmen who flit about from tree to tree in feathered form. Of course, the natural corollary to Lleu's death is his rebirth. When this occurs (on the eve of his slaying his twin and rival, Gronwy) his spectral form is left behind and he again assumes his normal physical semblance.

What happens to the human being in all this?  Well, it seems that once you have become the god, there's no going back.  Evidence of this permanent, altered condition can be found in poetic allusions within the early Myrddin poetry.  For example, Gwasawg ('Little servant', a Welsh rendering of Latin servuli, a term used in Jocelyn) is Kentigern.  We are told Gwasawg is the supporter of the Christian champion King Rhydderch.  This saint "pursues" Myrddin through the Scottish Lowlands, and the hounds that chase the unfortunate madman may be symbolic of Kentigern, whose name means 'Hound-lord.' Thus the saint is portrayed as traveling about the countryside stamping out Lleu-worship wherever he finds its last vestiges. Paganism is so called because it was especially popular among the pagenses, the dwellers of the countryside.  It would have been among these people that Lleu-worship persisted the longest. Christ eventually overthrew Lleu, of course, and the Celyddon Wood, once the final refuge of paganism, came to echo with the ringing of church bells.

In Welsh tradition, Myrddin is first and foremost a prophet.  How do we reconcile this fact with my idea that he is a human sacrifice victim who has been transformed into the god Lleu?  It goes without  saying that we are pretty much wholly ignorant of how prophecy worked among the ancient Celts.  The only real clues we can find in the Myrddin literature have to do with his reliance on his sister Gwenddydd as a medium and some obscure statements about spirits conveying information.  Other semi-divine figures like the great poet Taliesin are also brought into connection with Myrddin.  I would hazard a guess that as the spirits of Abercarw Mountain (Tinto Hill) told things to Myrddin, so did he "tell" things to sensitives who could "channel" divinities and who were gifted in the prophetic art.  In other words, a priestess who was the mortal embodiment of Gwenddydd might receive divine information from Lleu.  A poet such as Taliesin might receive inspiration from the same source.  

At least according to Geoffrey of Monmouth's THE LIFE OF MERLIN, which is heavily infused with Biblical and Classical motifs, Merlin undergoes periods of madness punctuated by sanity. This might suggest that the madness, to a degree, involved trance induction.  It would be while Merlin was in a trance state that he might be expected to utter prophecies. I'm highly suspicious of Geoffrey's account, however.  The playing of a harp to calm Merlin in his madness is lifted from the story of David and Saul in 1 Samuel. Instead of seeing this representation of Merlin's madness as revelatory, we should perhaps understand it within the context of Geoffrey's Christian learning and his creative intent.

Despite the claims of neoshamanists, I do not find it credible to equate Myrddin's spectral existence with a shaman sending his spirit forth to the Otherworld. This is fine as far as a romantic notion goes - and it certainly sells books and taps into New Age sentiment - but I really don't believe the material we have at our disposal supports such a contention.  Granted, shamanism could be employed to predict the future.  But while the shaman could undergo out-of-the-body shape-changing and make contact with various spiritual entities, he did not become one with the god. 

[1] The date of this triple sacrifice is probably fixed by those who meted out the death to Myrddin: shepherds. I've shown that the god Lleu's death in "Math Son of Mathonwy" almost certainly took place on Imbolc/Oimelc (February 1).  Lleu's wife Blodeuedd brings all the goats to the scene of his murder by Gronwy, and the god stands with one of his feet on the back of a goat. Imbolc was a festival of the birthing and milking of lambs and kids.  While sacred to the goddess Brighid, it was also manifestly a shepherds' festival. 

The death of Lailoken (Welsh Llallogan) may actually match that of Lleu even more spectacularly. For Lleu's goat and bathtub are Capricorn and Aquarius (the Water-Bearer), respectively, allowing for a fairly precise Imbolc date around the year 1200 A.D.  Lailoken ends up half in and half out of the water, and we are reminded of the form of Capricorn, i.e. half goat and half fish.   

From the first Lailoken fragment of British Library Cotton MS.Titus A xix:

"But since a thing predestined by the Lord cannot be left undone, but must occur, it

happened that on the same day, having been stoned and clubbed to death by certain shepherds of

king Meldred, he fell, when at the point of death, upon a very sharp stake which had been fixed in a

certain fish-pond (piscaria) beyond the steep mouth of the river Tweed, near the town of

Dunmeller, and was transfixed through the middle of his body, with his head hanging into the pool,

and [thus] he committed his spirit to the Lord, as he had prophesied.

The second fragment ends with this couplet:

Sude perfossus. Lapidem perpessus et vndam;

Merlinus triplicem fertur inisse necem.

Pierced by a stake, suffering stone and wave;

Merlin is said to have entered a triple death."