THE TRIPLE SACRIFICE OF MERLIN/LLALLOGAN AND THE GOD LLEU

The Sacrifice of Lleu

A friend of mine recently wrote to me and confessed that she was somewhat troubled by the claim that the sacrifice of the god Lleu in the MABINOGION was mirrored by that of Merlin as Lailoken (Llallogan).  To her, there seemed to be some key differences in the two accounts of sacrificial ritual.

She pointed out the following, which I'm choosing to represent in tabulated form:

LLEU                                                   LAILOKEN

Goat                                                     Stoned by Shepherds

Goronwy's spear                                  Stake

Bathtub                                                Fishpond

Llallogan/Merlin is said to be stoned by shepherds in such a way that he fell off the bank of the river into a fishpond, where he was impaled on a stake (presumably of a fish weir).  As he was hanging upside down, the upper half of his body was under the water and hence he drowned.

Lleu, on the other hand, is said to stand with one foot on a goat's back, another on the rim of a bathtub, and to have been speared while in that position by Goronwy Pefr.

How are we to reconcile these two accounts?

Well, as I demonstrated in my book THE MYSTERIES OF AVALON,

"... the triple sacrifice of Lleu would have been enacted every year.  Lleu’s annual death occurred originally at February 1 or Imbolc, if calculated around 1200 A.D.: the goat and bathtub of Lleu’s death scene represent, respectively, the goat of Capricorn and the water-bearer of Aquarius. In 3000 BCE, the sun was between these two signs on the Winter Solstice."

This was a clever interpretation of Lleu's death-scene, but did not really tell the whole story.

Originally, the goat would have butted or bucked off the god so that he fell into the bathtub at the moment he was transfixed by the spear.  The goat is the animal of shepherds, and I believe what we have in this case is not a example of Dumezil's Tripartite mythological theory of social stratification, but a division of the cosmos into the three levels.

Goat/shepherds - Earth

Spear/stake - Heaven (as the god's spear is a lightning spear, something proven when Lleu's own

weapon pierces a great stone Goronwy later attemtps to use as a shield)

Bathtub/fishpond - the watery underworld, or at least the watery entrance to the Otherworld

The idea, of course, is quite profound: the god cannot be killed unless he is in all three places at once.  Or, to look at it another way, his death exists only at the point where all three realms of the universe converge, if ever so fleetingly.

Granted, there is an apparent contradiction between hanging upon a stake and simply being run through by a spear.  But we need to remember that with the Celtic god Esus, as well as the Germanic god Odin, hanging and spearing were conjoined actions, with the tree being emblematic of the sky.  When Lleu is killed, he perches as a putrefying eagle in an oak tree that symbolizes the heavens.  Thus the stake, standing like a tree, performs both the function of the lightning-spear and that of the gallows-tree.