Sethor . ethor . othor . sele . dele . dreng gerce
Mec gerlusce . ger ger . dír dír issed moainmse.
Sethor-Ethor-Othor-Sele-Dele-Dreng gerce
Son of Gerlusce ger-ger-dír-dír, that is my name.
The story goes on to say that Atherne neither saw his meal any more nor succeeded in making a satire on the name of the stranger, who accordingly got away unscathed. It was surmised, we are told, that he was an angel come from God to teach the poet better manners. This comic story brings us back to the importance of the name, as it implies that the cursing poet, had he been able to seize it and duly work it into his satire, could not have failed to bring about the intruder’s discomfiture. The magician and folklore philosopher, far from asking with Juliet, ‘What’s in a name?’ would have rather put it the other way, ‘What’s not in a name?’ At any rate the ancients believed that there was a great deal in a name, and traces of the importance which they gave it are to be found in modern speech: witness the article on name or its equivalent in a big dictionary of any language possessed of a great literature.
It has been seen that it is from the point of view of magic that the full importance of one’s name was most keenly realized by our ancient Celts; that is, of magic more especially in that stage of its history when it claimed as its own a certain degree of skill in the art of verse-making. Perhaps, indeed, it would be more accurate to suppose that verse-making appertained from the outset to magic, and that it was magicians, medicine-men, or seers, who, for their own use, first invented the aids of rhythm and metre. The subject, however, of magic and its accessories is far too vast to be treated here: it has been touched upon here and there in some of the previous chapters, and I may add that wizardry and magic form the machinery, so to say, of the stories called in Welsh the ‘Four Branches of the Mabinogi’ namely those of Pwyỻ, Branwen, Manawyđan, and Math. Now these four, together with the adventure of Ỻûđ and Ỻevelys, and, in a somewhat qualified sense, the story of Kulhwch and Olwen, represent in a Brythonicized form the otherwise lost legends of the Welsh Goidels; and, like those of the Irish Goidels, they are remarkable for their wizardry. Nor is that all, for in the former the kings are mostly the greatest magicians of their time: or shall I rather put it the other way, and say that in them the greatest magicians function as kings? Witness Math son of Mathonwy king of Gwyneđ, and his sister’s son, Gwydion ab Dôn, to whom as his successor he duly taught his magic; then come the arch-enchanter Arawn, king of Annwn, and Caswaỻon ab Beli, represented as winning his kingdom by the sheer force of magic. To these might be added other members of the kingly families whose story shows them playing the rôle of magicians, such as Rhiannon, who by her magic arts foiled her powerful suitor, Gwawl ab Clûd, and secured as her consort the man of her choice, Pwyỻ prince of Dyfed. Here also, perhaps, one might mention Manawyđan ab Ỻyr, who, as Manannán mac Lir, figures in the stories of the Goidels of Erin and Man as a consummate wizard and first king of the Manx people: see p. 314 above. In the Mabinogi, however, no act of magic is ascribed to Manawyđan, though he is represented successfully checkmating the most formidable wizard arrayed against him and his friends, to wit, Ỻwyd ab Kilcoed. Not only does one get the impression that the ruling class in these stories of the Welsh Goidels had their magic handed down from generation to generation according to a fixed rule of maternal succession (pp. 326, 503, 505), but it supplies the complete answer to and full explanation of questions as to the meaning of the terms already mentioned, Tuatha Dé ocus Andé, and Lucht Cumachtai, together with its antithesis. Within the magic-wielding class exercising dominion over the shepherds and tillers of the soil of the country, it is but natural to suppose that the first king was the first magician or greatest medicine-man, as in the case of Manannán in the Isle of Man. This must of course be understood to apply to the early history of the Goidelic race, or, perhaps more correctly speaking, to one of the races which had contributed to its composition: to the aborigines, let us say, by whatsoever name or names you may choose to call them, whether Picts or Ivernians. It is significant, among other things, that our traditions should connect the potency of ancient wizardry with descent in the female line of succession, and, in any case, one cannot be wrong in assuming magic to have begun very low down in the scale of social progress, probably lower than religion, with which it is essentially in antagonism. As the crude and infantile pack of notions, collectively termed sympathetic magic—beginning with the belief that any effect may be produced by imitating the action of the cause of it, or even doing anything that would recall it[36]—grew into the panoply of the magician, he came to regard himself, and to be regarded by others, as able for his own benefit and that of his friends to coerce all possible opponents, whether men or demons, heroes or gods. This left no room for the attitude of prayer and worship: religion in that sense could only come later.
[1] See Mr. Gomme’s presidential address to the Folk-Lore Society, printed in Folk-Lore for 1892, pp. 6–7. [↑]
[2] See Sale’s preliminary discourse to his translation of the Koran, § iv. [↑]
[3] Perhaps we may regard this as the more Goidelic account of Blodeuweđ’s origin: at any rate, traces of a different one have been noticed in a note at p. 439 above. [↑]