The embodied spirit has a thousand heads,
A thousand eyes, a thousand feet, around
On every side, enveloping the earth,
Yet filling space no larger than a span.
He is himself this very universe;
He is whatever is, has been, and shall be;
He is the lord of immortality.[735]
It is difficult to conceive any filthiness or evil of the dove, yet the hagiologists mention “a foul dove or black culver,” which is said to have flown around the head of a certain holy Father named Nonnon.[736] We may connote this Nonnon with Nonna or Non, the reputed mother of St. David, for of St. David, we are told, his birth was heralded by angels thirty years before the event, and that among other miracles (such as restoring sight to the blind), doves settled on his shoulders. Dave or Davy is the same word as dove; in Welsh dof means gentle, and it is more probable that the gentle dove derived its title from this word than as officially surmised from the Anglo-Saxon dufan, “to plunge into”. According to Skeat, dove means literally diver, but doves neither dive nor plunge into anything: they have not even a diving flight. The Welsh are known familiarly as Taffys, and the Church of Llandaff is supposed to mean Church on the River Taff: it is more probable that Llandaff was a shrine of the Holy Dove, and that David with the doves upon his shoulder was a personification of the Holy Spirit or Wisdom. Non is the Latin for not, and the black dove associated with Nonnon or not not was no doubt a representation of that Negation, non-existence or inscrutable void, which existed before the world was, and is otherwise termed Chaos or Cause. That Wisdom or the Holy Spirit was conceived as the primal and inscrutable Darkness, is evident from the statement in The Wisdom of Solomon: “For God loveth none but him that dwelleth with Wisdom. For she is more beautiful than the sun, and above all the orders of stars: being compared with the light she is found before it.”
The Nonnon of whom “it seemed that a foul dove or black culver flew about him whilst he was at Mass at the alter” was said to be the Bishop of Heliopolis, i.e., the city of the Sun, and he comes under notice in connection with St. Pelagienne—“said of pelagus which is as much to say as the sea”. The interpretation further placed upon St. Pelagienne is that “she was the sea of iniquity, and the flood of sins, but she plunged after into the sea of tears and washed her in the flood of baptism”. That poor Pelagienne was the Water Mother of Mary Morgan is implied further by the fragment of autobiography—“I have been called from my birth Pelagienne, but for the pomp of my clothing men call me Margaret”:[737] we have seen that Pope Joanna of Engelheim was also called Margaret, whence it is to be suspected that although it is true that pelagus meant the sea St. Pelagienne was primarily the Bella or beautiful Jeanne, i.e., Mary Morgan or Morgiana.
