(critique of Ellis)
Ross G Caldwell said:
I think Peter Berresford Ellis has done a marvellous job...
I had thought to spare y'all, but your appraisal has stoked my (good-humored) peevish side. And thank you VERY much for the link to
Ogygia though I am at present unable to access it with my limited grasp of the technology. (If anyone can help, feel free, as I have wanted this opportunity for three decades now.)
Quotes are from:
The Fabrication of 'Celtic' Astrology
by Peter Berresford Ellis
(a website at:
http://cura.free.fr/xv/13ellis2.html )
“There is even much in
The White Goddess that is praiseworthy,” sayeth he, but other than that, I seem to see mostly jealousy and the academic technique of aloof dismissal, and very little solidity.
He introduces himself – “In two recent lectures... I simply demonstrated the astrological practices the Celts really used. I hoped this would be enough to show people how bogus the 'tree zodiac' idea was” – immediately illustrating his lack of scholarly restraint ('I simply demonstrated the x the y
really used' as opposed to '...we have evidence of y using'). Implied is that if they used one practice they could not have used another: if any people tended not to be monolithic, ‘twere the Kelts.
What he states categorically about Iolo Morganwg is not an unchallenged verdict. Iolo’s compilation
Barddas merely happens to be highly uneven, as any compilation of what various self-styled ‘bards’ have to say would naturally be – I’ve read most of it (in English).
He rightly bristles at Graves’s obsession with constellations rather than signs, as do I. But most of what he says concerning the 13, and the 18 versus 20, and 20 versus 25, and so on falls into error and, in addition, does not give Graves even his due (Graves, after all,
shows us the 25, the 20, the 18, and so on). For example, he says: “That would make 13 months. He ignored that this would mean the addition of a small fraction as well.” On the contrary, Graves talks much about the ‘extra day’, since that is all that’s left over from thirteen 28-day months, and even discusses calendar forms that had five extra days every four years and so on. And: “If Robert could find a means of placing his 13 chosen trees in some sort of seasonal order, he could have a tree calendar'. It was that simple.” This is pure demagogic sophistry: Graves simply showed how O’Flaherty’s order – only one transposition different from the ogham order used for millennia (in the form of ogam consaine) – already
was seasonal order. “Soon the tree names, according to Graves’ acolytes, became the names of the constellations of the zodiac signs...” leads me to ask: what in the world are ‘the constellations of the zodiac signs’?
Ellis puts “ ‘I noticed almost at once,’ boasts Robert proudly, ‘that the consonants of the alphabet form a calendar of seasonal tree magic ...’
(p165)” in a context implying – nay saying – that Graves exclaimed this after somehow juggling letter-order. Not true.
He makes a supposedly earthshaking point in showing Graves admitted basing things on O’Flaherty (who while controversial is certainly not wholly discredited) and admitted that he (Graves) had been warned against doing so. Hence I’m still waiting for confirmation of the implication of dishonesty contained in his opening paragraphs.
“If Robert Graves thought the tree alphabet tradition only went back to the thirteenth century AD... how is he conjuring its use and claiming it as a mystical druidic calendar used in pre-Christian times?” I believe that’s what we call a theory, if I’m not mistaken. Oh, and my goodness Graves contradicted his own grandfather: what a naughty, naughty boy. It certainly seems possible to me that Graves might have seen himself as undoing or atoning for a grandfather’s (well-meant?) narrowing of or adding blinders to Keltic philology’s field of vision that contributed to its being cut off from a less xenophobic mapping of cross-cultural influences that may have stirred Britain's
and Ireland’s (not just Ireland’s) ‘pot’. He now switches to Graves’s background, as if he has shown the flaw and would look for its cause: what did I miss? (Still, the biographical tidbits were interesting.)
“In 1876, Dr Charles Graves contributed a paper... [that]
pointed out [emphasis mine] that surviving Ogham inscriptions had been written at the beginning of the Christian period and 'the extreme pagan theory could no longer be maintained'.” This is just ignorance: ogam consaine inscriptions go back thousands of years. He (Ellis) should study up on epigraphy. (I would expect Ellis to be of the school that says, 'If an ancient inscription’s spelling violates postulated laws of linguistic development, it must not exist.' “How he [O'Flaherty] arrived at a form of Ogham with five vowels and only thirteen consonants is open to question.” Or, one could simply note that the bethluisnion omits Q and ‘Z’ (z/s – tzaddi is its Hebrew equivalent, by my analysis) because they duplicate K and S – possibly because Irish Q-Kelts got the bethluisnion from P-Kelts, Britons, who had no Q. The numbers Graves (and I presume O’Flaherty) assigned the letters in
Irish literature finds confirmation in
Barddas, where one of Iolo’s sources actually gave the Welsh bardic alphabet in what is numerical order by the ‘Irish’ scheme. Ellis is here implying that WITH the two left-out letters Graves’s argument falls apart: has he even READ
The White Goddess? For nothing could be further from the truth. And his means of implying it is actually quite underhanded and non-scholarly: he should be ashamed.
“A later fifth group of five was included in manuscript tradition but did not form part of the original nucleus and these
forfeda ‘extra characters’ were designed to accommodate Greek and Latin characters not already accommodated by the existing twenty characters,” after earlier (erroneously) implying that Graves’s ignoring of these five muddied his view of the older tradition. Then stuff about letters missing from the older ogham inscriptions is presented as if Graves had overlooked the missing P, F, and H when this absence of F and H is the subject with which Graves opened chapter 16: Ellis is, on the contrary, showing his own ignorance by calling them late additions, since they are NOT missing in ogam consaine, which predates Irish inscriptions by at least two millennia. Graves held the view that they were proscribed by taboo and links this to Greek suppression of vau and heta to make digamma and eta: is this not the more perceptive view?
Ellis finally gets around to discussing individual letter-names, but acts almost as if giving them meanings automatically precludes them having other meanings. Some of these alternate meanings Graves himself mentions. Graves was not quite the complete boob at linguistics he is here painted (even if perhaps not ‘up to snuff’ in Keltic). And some of these meanings could have been idiomatic connotations derived from the trees. To prove the negative here would require more delving into related languages and cultures than Ellis, sounding somewhat Irish-chauvinist, would have a taste for. “The famous identification of the two forms of Celtic is P in Brythonic and Q in Goidelic. At least Graves was mindful of his Ps and Qs! But how could he fit P =
Pethoc into his thesis?” By, oh, I don’t know, admitting there may have been some actual TRUCK between P-Kelts and Q-Kelts? What pedantry.
Now for the capper. In that very set of detailed refutations of tree-meanings for many of O’Flaherty’s letter-names with which he sought to deliver the coup de grace is found further evidence for said meanings. Ellis writes:
“L =
Luis (claimed as a rowan) either comes from
luise (flame, blaze) or
lus (plant, herb)... N =
Nion or
nin (claimed as ash) is a fork or loft. H =
Uath (claimed as hawthorn) means horror or fear. T =
Tinne (claimed as ash and sometimes holly) means a bar, rod of metal, ingot etc. M =
Muin (claimed as vine) means neck or throat. G =
Gort (claimed as ivy) means a field. R =
Ruis (claimed as elder) is from the word for red.
“As for the consonant: M =
muin, the vine was not native to Ireland anyway, and when it was introduced, the Old Irish was
finchí, a loan word from the Latin
vin. The word
muin was, as stated, neck or throat, which is still found in modern Irish
muineál.”
Rowan’s nickname 'quicken' suggests ‘flame, blaze’, and rowan’s ability to shelter young of other species from the elements suggests ‘plant, herb’. A ‘fork’ is the symbol of the ash god Neptune-Poseidon, and ash makes a better ‘loft’ than oak as oak attracts lightning. Graves already connected Uath’s meaning ‘horror’ or ‘fear’ to hawthorn poetically, and can we really dismiss so facilely a name that is so close to our word haw? The OED does not say our word
luck came from Keltic
Lugh, but that does not mean it did not: after all, where did the Dutch root come from? You think the seafaring Dutch (Frisians) never came in contact with the seafaring Gaels? T’s (tinne’s) poetic meaning is crystal clear when one puts the many evidences together: a phalanx of little thorns (individuals) turned into a big thorn (phalanx), meaning martial discipline – the principle that causes water from a hose to increase its pressure when pinched. And ‘bar, rod of metal, ingot etc.’ seems pretty consistent with that as well, metallurgy being what arms a phalanx. ‘Neck or throat’ is not so far from vine-wine-grape: M symbolizes sweetness, duh. Sometimes scholars simply do not perceive what is right in front of them. The name muin is obviously related TO the Latin (a proto-Welsh borrowing?) and draws attention to Britons’ habitual confusion of M and V (U) – which may even have caused them to morph 5th-century AMBROSIUS AVRELIENUS into MERLINUS AMBROSIUS (later confused by some with 6th-century Myrddin). Concerning
gort being ‘field’, I can at this point only offer that runic G (‘gift’)’s being X-shaped points to Greek chi, linking cord-like ivy (runes’ derivation from tree-letters being fairly obvious) to Greek
chorda and thus perhaps to the cord sectioning a ‘field’ (I would not press this without more data). And when one takes into account the folk-tradition that to burn elder brings in the devil, ‘red’ for
ruis no longer seems so far-fetched (unless Ellis wishes to claim the devil to be a Christian invention). Ngetal for gedal, ‘broom’, merely shows Graves may have passed on a rather loose translation someone gave him (or that he found), but there isn’t
that much difference between reed and broom: both are tied into bundles, for thatch and besom respectively. Its ogam consaine form – three parallel lines crossed by a line, suggestive of a bundle – was evidently retained in Phoenician samekh (Greek xi) so that the symbolic connection might not be completely obscured by phonetic difference. As for vowels, “A =
AiIm (claimed as pine or silver fir)... is not attested in any form.” This is ridiculous: runic A is a picture of a fir tree! “U = Ur (claimed as heather or even blackthorn) means earth, clay or soil and sometimes as a green branch... U = fráech is our word for heather.” A heath is also a type of earth in a sense: heather is the marriage bed, a ‘green branch’ to lie down on. “I = Idho (claimed as yew)... unattested,” ridiculous: the rune is named ‘yew tree’. “E = Edad would give us aspen” and is close to Eadha. I should conclude this tack by asking: could not a culture with close ties to trees (the felling of some demanding the death penalty) have had multiple names for them? We do ourselves, if botanical names count.
While I am pleased to learn the Coligny calendar is related to the Vedic calendar, does this preclude existence of the other (13-month) system, for which Graves presents extensive argument far beyond what he got from O’Flaherty? When he says “Why is there a need to invent an astrological system for the ancient Celts when there is such ample evidence of a real one?” and concludes “The White Goddess (perhaps unintentionally) supplied them with... a quick fix, albeit presenting... a fruit not merely flawed but which was a complete fabrication,” he overstates his case.
A quote which I think more than any other reveals what we have in Mr. Ellis: “Robert Graves relied on 19th Century translations, and often very bad translations as well as texts that were quite counterfeit. Indeed, texts which were simply mere inventions. He was inclined to late 18th and 19th Century Welsh romantics ('gentlemen antiquarians)' rather than reliable scholars.” This, rather than indicting Graves, shows Ellis’s bias against antiquarians of the past. Two examples illustrate how misguided it is to do so. The 20th century saw rejection of the 19th-century theory of the Phoenician letters’ derivation from Egyptian hieratic, yet this remains (with minimal tweaking) the only coherent theory ever presented (since both shape and sound match fairly closely): what superceded it has had nearly a century to prove itself but instead has kind of seeped into the ground out of sheer embarrassment, having nothing new (and little overall) to show. And the 20th-century dogma that man’s modern form was a recent invention has led to complete ignoring of evidence to the contrary unearthed in the 19th, interpretation of 20th-century discoveries themselves being quite ‘forced’ at times. It is a disgrace what snobbishness towards the past and ‘peer review’ in the present have done to make much of what academia espouses an irrelevant and muddied backwater as polluted by the dogmatic and corrupted by ‘political correctness’ as any school of the Middle Ages. And as a perfect example of this, consider his “Note on Ogham Script,” which begins: “Ogham inscriptions are not found outside the British Isles.” I rest my case.
Ellis has puffed himself up as a scholar here yet failed to bring into serious question whether O’Flaherty’s could have been a genuine tradition, even if NOT one from ‘properly credentialed scholars’. Remember, O’Flaherty thought he was preserving a genuine tradition, and I take it he was a man of substance, not fly-by-night. I just do not find Ellis’s argument the least bit convincing, although naturally I wish to explore the underlying linguistics a bit more. In the end, Ellis does not even mention the two 'hidden' letters Graves hypothesized, increasing them to 22: has he read it?
PS. To those interested in my attempt at exposition of a profound scientific knowledge ‘hiding in plain sight’ in the Tarot de Marseilles: Ellis says, “Critical negativity is never the best way for scholarship to proceed but I do think it is necessary, at least at this point in time, for the modern astrological world to be warned against the proponents of the 'tree zodiac' myth.” I say fine, let him have the astrologers (no offense): I’m more interested in future scientists, those who will make all the sudden headway once the old Darwin-Einstein-Gamov (or at least Einstein-Gamov) monolith has been cut down... by plasma cosmology, I predict. What is needed here is perhaps a healthy dose of XVI LaMaisonDieu.
