The Celtic Creation Myth: Branwen, Matholwch, and Efnysien, or: Earth, Sky, and Rudra : Part 2 of 4

The Celtic Creation Myth: Branwen, Matholwch, and Efnysien, or: Earth, Sky, and Rudra

Part 2 of 4

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Efnysien, Guardian and Liberator

Let us look a bit closer now at Efnysien with the more esoteric role in mind as elucidated by Kramrisch’s reading of Rudra’s myth. Rudra is attempting to stop the Father, Father Sky of the Vedas or the “Prajapati” of the Brahmanas who carries the same Dyaus myth, from the sexual effusion that will begin the life of the world, that will bring on the Spring of the cycle. Kramrisch, perhaps influenced by the philosophy of the Brahmanas, interprets the state that Rudra is protecting in the myth as a true pre-cosmic phase, when all is undifferentiated and simultaneous, when Time does not yet exist. However, Rudra cannot stop the conjunction, his arrow reaches the Father “too late,” and the primal seed is made to spill, bringing forth the fire youths from the fiery seed, the ancestors of mankind. Rudra is thus the god whose power of destruction is aimed at the act of procreation. He was propitiated to spare both born and unborn children.14 The rudra incarnation Ashwatthama kills a camp of children. Rudra is also the yogi whose ascetic path would lead the mystic back to the state of inner unity, control of the senses and the sexual energies. As Kramrisch explains, semen retention and re-uptake are important parts of this Rudraic path, which repeat Rudra’s aiming at the procreative act of the Father and his threatening the lives of children:

Rudra, the guardian of the Uncreate, an indefinable transcendental plenum, avenged the infringement of that wholeness. He became the avenger of the descent of its substance, the semen, the ‘heavenly Soma,’ into the cosmos. The arrow in his hand threatened the coming into existence of life, and it disturbed the procreative act of the Father, the Lord of Generation, an act of incontinence sub specie aeternitatis. Rudra, the avenger, is the Lord of Yoga and of self-containment. (Kramrisch, 53-54)

The primordial discharge of Rudra’s arrow against the Father marked the direction of his operation in the cosmos. The arrow aimed at the act of generation. It flew in the opposite direction of the generative emission of the father. Its countermovement is consonant with that of yogic and tantric discipline, according to which the drawing up of the seed (ūrdhvaretas; cf. Sāyaṇa on TA.10.12; MBh.13.17.45) has its mystical psychosomatic equivalent in the upward flow of the sex power. Its phases are realized as it ascends through the subtle centers (cakras) of the body, including the highest center of mind, which it fecundates, being itself transubstantiated into the nectar that contributes to the state of samādhi, where integration, oneness is realized. The cosmic equivalent of the realization of this state of oneness is the Uncreate that was and is before the beginning of things. The arrow of Rudra was directed into the cosmic scene of the myth, while yoga is effected within the body of the yogi. Rudra-Śiva is the lord of yogis and the Lord of Yoga. (Kramrisch, 77-78)

As the Great Yogi, he is the consciousness and conscience of the Uncreate whole (Kramrisch, 54).

In Kramrisch’s reading, Rudra is trying to prevent the dissolution of the primal unity by the breech caused by the primordial coupling and the effusion of the Father. Thus he is the god who wants to maintain or reconstitute the integration of the primordial unity, and hence he is the meditating god. In calendrical terms, this primordial unity must correspond to the dead of Winter, and the act of generation perpetrated by Father Sky is the first event that begins the movement toward the new day of the cycle, the early Spring. Kramrisch connects this myth to the Vernal Equinox of March, the end of Winter and the beginning of Spring (Kramrisch, 98-100).

The tense moment in which Efnysien enters the house gifted by Matholwch, which would be the death of himself and his brother if Matholwch’s plan succeeded, may encode further esoteric material associated with the roles of the Rudraic god. Efnysien is the first to enter this house, and he immediately sniffs out the plot against them, calmly and silently going to each sack of grain and crushing the skulls of the warriors hidden within with his bare hands. When he does this he sings a brief engelyn, a magical poem:

Yssit yn y boly hwnn amryw ulawt,

Keimeit, kynniuyeit, disgynneit yn trin,

Rac kydwyr cad barawt.

There is in this bag a sort of flour, champions, warriors, attackers in

conflict, prepared for battle against battle-men. (Branwen, daughter of Llyr)

Alaric Hall notes of this poem, “That the one verse in Branwen (one of only five stanzas in the Four Branches, three of which occur together) should be in the mouth of a character who seems so similar to Odinn-heroes, in a story sharing much of its narrative with a fornaldarsaga, is unlikely to be pure coincidence” (Hall, “Gwŷr y Gogledd? Some Icelandic Analogues of Branwen Ferch Lŷr,” 47). Indeed, this is the only piece of verse in the tale, and only one of five stanzas of verse in the Four Branches, and thus its secret importance must be great. Kramrisch describes how, in the primal scene, after shooting his arrow, Rudra is named as Vastospati, the protector of the “house.” Vāstoṣpati is “Rudra” according to Taittiriya Samhita 3.4.10.3. This “house” that Vāstoṣpati protects, as Kramrisch explains, has the quadruple significance of the dwelling, of the sacred site of sacrifice, of the universe as the cosmic house, and finally of the poetic and artistic construction. Specifically, the form of Rudra as Vastospati emerges from a wild, sacred poem of the gods, a magical Rudraic incantation called a raudra brahman, and this is connected to his emergence as the lord of the poetic order as well as of the other “houses.” Kramrisch states:

[…] as Vāstoṣpati, guardian of the dwelling and guardian of sacred order (vratapā). In this shape he emerges from the poem of magic power, the brahman. Poetry in the sacred order of its meters is his domain. Therein the fire of the Wild Archer sustains the form. Vāstoṣpati, created by the gods, the celestial intelligence, is the guardian of his domain, the world of sacred order—a rhythmic structure that is art, a cosmos. These are vāstu, the house that he guards. (Kramrisch, 240)15

Efnysien is clearly the guardian of this dwelling that ends up as a site of sacrifice, and he enacts this role of guardian simultaneous with the singing of a rare sacred poem. Is this mere coincidence, once again? We recall also that other Rudraic gods, Fionn, Taliesin, Odinn, and Apollo, are chiefs of the poetic art in their respective branches, while Efnysien too is a poet, a rare and significant role in the Mabinogi.

Efnysien has attempted to stop the marriage of Branwen and Matholwch, but this has failed. He has only made the situation worse. His mutilation of the horses of Matholwch may be seen as an “inflammation” of tensions that leads directly to the violence done to Branwen, which would then be analogous to the moment when Rudra-Agni inflames the passion within Dyaus, leading him to rape his daughter. Efnysien has then thrown their offspring, their divine seed, the boy Gwern, into the fire, as Rudra’s arrow causes Dyaus’ fiery seed to fall to Earth and mark the place of the fire sacrifice. Gwern, the name of the boy, the product of the divine seed, means “Alder,” while the blood of Ouranos spawns the Ash-Tree nymphs the Meliae, who are the ancestors of the humans of the Bronze Age. The Giants, Gigantes, which also come from his blood, are ancestors of other human lineages, and he is also the father of the race of Titans. Meanwhile the Norse Odinn, along with his brothers, invests qualities into the first man, Askr, meaning “Ash,” who is also the ancestor of mankind, and Ymir is also called the father of the race of jotnar, the Norse “giants.” In each case, the violence to the father’s procreative act spawns a tree-named ancestral figure, although in the Welsh case the connection of Gwern to later generations is narratively cut. Instead, five pregnant Irish women escape the battle that follows just after the burning of Gwern, and these repopulate Ireland. Gwern is thrown in the fire, a battle happens, then the five pregnant women are found in a cave. Thus the Welsh myth too leads to the generation of the ancestral race. The destructive war/sacrifice in which the tree-named Gwern perishes is in this way also generative of the coming race of humans, the cause-effect relationship of these sequential events has merely been narratively obscured. As Gwern and the “seed” of future humanity are produced by Matholwch and Dyaus respectively, a son and daughter (whether human or jotunn is not soecified) also are said to be born from under Ymir’s armpit in Vafthrudnismal 33: “They say ‘neath the arms of the giant of ice/Grew man-child and maid together.” This description of the generation of the first male and female from the body of Ymir could then amount to the same thing as saying Askr and Embla washed up on a shore, which would be the shore of the lake of Ymir’s procreative fluids, these fluids being much more explicitly described in Greek and Vedic cases. Interpreters have often been confused by these seemingly contradictory narratives of the first couple, but from this perspective, if this son and daughter are the same pair, these narratives might be harmonized. The avenging Furies of the Greek myth, the Erinyes, also sprung from Ouranos’ seed, could perhaps be fragments manifesting out of the avenging nature of the Cosmic Cronus/Rudra as well, akin to the terrible hunter Pasupati or the cleanser of the house Vāstoṣpati who are given form by the gods from out of the manifest horror of the primal scene. Finally, in an act of remorse, Efnysien sacrifices himself to destroy the magical cauldron. But what does this enigmatic final act mean?

If we attempt to connect Efnysien’s self-sacrifice with certain parallels in the myths we have thus far brought together, we may approach an answer to the question of its meaning. Efnysien must play dead to be first thrown into the cauldron by the Irish who have it in their possession. For one thing, the human Rudraic mannerbund warriors of the koryos bands were believed to become the dead ancestors, to be sacrally bound to them in battle, and thus Efnysien becoming as-though dead could be an enactment of this Rudraic activity. Furthermore, the Rudraic self-sacrificial trials of other branches also often carry a symbolic, initiatic death as part of the myth. Odinn, most famously, sacrifices himself to himself, and in so doing can be said to undergo a death or at least a symbolic death. Fionn swims what we will call the “lake of fate” three times and comes out aged to an old man, so decrepit that no one recognizes him, and thus this can also be taken as a symbolic death. He must drink a special drink to return to the society of his men and regain his youth. Ashwatthama, incarnation of a rudra, sacrifices himself to Rudra in a fire on an altar that appears to him when he prays to Rudra. He emerges alive and empowered from this action, but stepping into a sacrificial fire can also be seen as a symbolic death even if we do not see Ashwatthama physically die. Efnysien, being thrown into the cauldron, actually does seem to die there, but bursts the cauldron apart first. Thus he completes his self-sacrifice to aid the battle effort of his kinsmen.

More specifically, however, Efnysien bursts his heart in this sacrificial act. In such a compressed story, layered with esoteric symbols, every word and symbol must be considered important. We have seen one other figure whose heart bursts in a physical act of atonement, and that is Corrgend, the Irish Prometheus.16 In that tale, the heart is the symbolic site of passion, and, like Prometheus’ liver, its bursting is the punishment fit to the crime of passion. If we know that Rudra is the god who aims his arrow at the passionate act of procreation, and we know that other parallels of Efnysien’s self-sacrifice involve acts of fasting and asceticism, we will be permitted to read the bursting of Efnysien’s own heart along the same lines. Thus the bursting of Efnysien’s heart, the site of passion, may be one more symbol of the extinguishment of passion in the ascetic self-sacrifice rather than simply a colorful way to narrate a death scene. We are required to imagine that this particular manner of death was told for a reason.

Furthermore, the object that Efnysien destroys with his final act is a cauldron of (re)generation. It is an item that causes a cyclical rebirth of warriors who live again and again, but can no longer speak. There is an almost inescapable gravity to the reading of this cauldron as symbolizing the cycle of rebirth under the sign of samsara: humans being born to live, suffer, fight, die, and be reborn again in a circle, cursed with the lack of “speech,” which perhaps here is a symbol of a link to higher divinity, considering the role of Vedic Vac, “speech,” as a primordial manifestation of the cosmic Word and the spiritual essence of the cosmos. Alternately, the cauldron could represent the metaphysical engine of a state which existed at first in the cosmos, in this early age of creation, a kind of earthly immortality that was yet lacking a bridge to the divine, a bridge that could only appear via the paradigmatic self-sacrifice, and Efnysien’s destruction of the cauldron could be an annihilation of this cursed and voiceless state by creating that bridge with his act. Let us recall that the Titans, who would be on a parallel with Efnysien himself (who is the same as the Titan Cronus), are trapped in Tartarus by Ouranos, which is in fact a kind of Hell deep in the Earth, before being liberated by Cronus’ actions. Thus the breaking of the cauldron could be an analogy for the freeing of all descendants of Father Sky from a Tartarus-like existence cut off from the divine upper region.

If a more plain explanation is sought, the salient accomplishment of the destruction of this cauldron is that it brings balance to the war. Furthermore, if the power of the cauldron remained, not only would Efnysien’s side be obliterated, but Matholwch’s people might overrun the world with future uncontrolled profusions of human life, their numbers unbounded by death, a threat we see repeatedly in myths of other cultures regarding the early phase of the cosmos just after creation. Like in parallel myths that we have analyzed previously, one side of the war having the power to resurrect the dead unbalances the world, causes disorder in nature, in multiple ways. In fact, the cauldron’s destruction, if read straightforwardly, balances life and death and instead brings about our natural manner of death by removing the useful but hellish magic of the cauldron. Rather than regeneration in the same body in a cursed state, the repairing of the process of natural death allows for humans to die fully, and for them then to either enter the celestial realms or be fully reborn in new bodies rather than being trapped in silent husks. Natural death furthermore ensures the neutralization of the profusion of numbers and the inevitable destruction of the world this would bring. Now the only paths are for humans to die and be taken to the Otherworld, or for a rebirth in a new body to take place. Either way, Efnysien brings balance to the sides of the war and brings the chance of a truer rebirth through the destruction of that which unbalances nature. Death and the regeneration of life from death, instead of eternal living-death, is made possible, by an act of the Destroyer god who destroys to heal.

Efnysien successively becoming as-if dead, extinguishing the passions by bursting his own heart, and then breaking the cauldron of regeneration which could be seen as a symbol of the cycle of regeneration, or of some other hellish living-death cut off from divinity, could point ultimately toward Efnysien being the model of a mystic state of which well-known post-Vedic and Buddhist concepts, such as the aforementioned samādhi, might offer general approximations. What state, indeed, does Odinn attain when he sacrifices himself to himself on the tree or when he becomes castrated as one of his epithets (Jalk/Jalg) implies? Is the state the Buddha gains in a similar meditative act under a tree different or the same as that which Odinn or Efnysien attain?17 Kramrisch notes that Rudra is a liberator who, having entered the world of Generation, becomes ferryman who then leads to the other shore, and this could well describe what Efnysien is doing in the scene of his self-sacrifice in the caldron of regeneration: forging a path back to the higher divine realm.

At certain spots [Rudra’s] presence is acutely felt. These are fords (tīrtha), and at them he is the ferryman. He ferries across to the other shore, into the far beyond of which he is the guardian. He is the liberator, but—paradoxically—he is also the ferryman from death to life. The fierce guardian of the Uncreate, at the inception of life on earth, having entered into the created world, is the ferryman who leads to the other shore. (Kramrisch, 169-170)

In myths found in various Vedic and post-Vedic texts, Rudra-Siva performs feats precisely in line with the destruction of the cauldron by Efnysien. Most importantly, Rudra-Siva is said to go into the waters when Brahma commands him to create sons subject to birth and death (Kramrisch, 260; KuP 1.10.36; VrP.21.6) and to castrate himself (Mahabharata 10.17.10-11, 21), as Efnysien bursts his own heart in the cauldron containing the remnant of divine liquid. Rudra refuses to create mortal sons (VaP 10.56-57; LP 1.70.316) and instead creates mind-born sons, rudras, who are not subject to death, and the power of his meditation in the waters generates vegetative life of its own force rather than by procreative act.18 He refuses the procreative act, refuses assent to the cycle of death and rebirth, and instead becomes the castrated and illuminated ascetic, symbol of the attained state of integral wholeness or samadhi, an example of this state of wholeness to all thereafter. As Kramrisch says of his withdrawal to the waters:

The motionless pillar is Śiva, the ascetic, in whom the fire of life burns upward inwardly while he stands still. This is the mystery of Sthāṇu (cf. MBh.17.173.92). He is motionless, like a log in which the potentiality of fire is latent (cf. ŚUp.1.13) and controlled. Sthāṇu is Śiva the yogi, an aeviternal, immovable presence, pillar of the world. (Kramrisch, 266)

‘Since Rudra stands burning upward, and since he stands and exists as the origin of life, and since the lihga is aeviternally erect, he is known as Sthāṇu’ (MBh.7.173.92). The Mahābhārata sees Sthāṇu not in his immutability as master over sexual power but as the immutability of that power itself—and as the origin of life. (Kramrisch, 266)

Keeping the semen drawn up, Sthāṇu stood still until the great deluge. Because he said: ‘Here I stand (sthitosmi).’ (Kramrisch, 264)19

Then Rudra withdrew into himself. He became Sthāṇu, motionless in aeviternal samādhi, ceaseless illumination, contained within himself, his seed withdrawn into himself (BP.1.2.9.88-89). In his pillar shape Rudra restores the unspent wholeness of the Uncreate. His seed and his breath are held. The fire seed of creation and the breath of life are held within his motionless shape. No mortals will ever be created by Rudra, but such things as knowledge, truth, asceticism, and illumination are in him, and he is in the gods, sages, and all beings; he is honored by all the gods (BP.1.2.9.89-92). The gods are ‘this side of creation’ (RV.10.129.6). Rudra at the beginning of things acted as the guardian of the Uncreate, and became its pillar in the myth of creation. (Kramrisch, 268)

Having refused to engender mortals and having ceased to create immortals, the Great God says of himself: ‘I stand as the destroyer. Because I stand like a pillar, so I am sthāṇu’ (SkP.7.2.9.13-14). His withdrawal from the world signals his destruction of the world. (Kramrisch, 269)

In another myth (MP 249.3-22), during a war of the devas and asuras in an early phase of the cosmos, Rudra-Siva is the one who swallows the poison that is released by the act of the churning of the sea of milk to gain the amrita, nectar of immortality. Thus he chooses to sacrifice himself, or to take on the deadly burden, to neutralize this poison in order that the gods may have immortality and escape death and rebirth. He is not killed, but is saved from the tortures of the poison, and is left with his characteristic blue throat. A clear pattern establishes itself in this Rudra-Siva body of myths of a god who desires to help open pathways around the cycle of death and rebirth rather than to participate in it, and who, like Efnysien, actively snuffs out his passion or performs some sort of self-sacrificial act to achieve this

However, in yet another myth (Mahabharata 12.248.13-14), humans are increasing without dying and are overcrowding the three worlds, and it is Rudra-Siva who instantiates the cycle of death and rebirth as an alleviation of the prospect of total extinction which would be brought on if this profusion of living beings were to go on indefinitely. Thus the relation of Rudra-Siva to the cycle of birth and death is reiterated here, but we see that it is somewhat ambivalent or multifaceted even in the Vedic tradition. As Kramrisch states:

Rudra allotted to death its position in the order of cyclical time. Death would be the open gate through which the current of time would take its course […] Rudra brought the cyclical sequence of time into the cosmos as a remedy; Brahma summoned Death from within himself to make the remedy effective, to keep intact the order of the cosmos […] The time that Rudra brought into the world is a lived time […] It came to be when Rudra was moved to pity by the imminence of total extinction. (Kramrisch, 278)

Perhaps then Efnysien, when he destroys the cauldron, is instantiating natural death and time in order to balance the order of the cosmos and avoid greater disaster, or perhaps he is making a path to a form of immortality possible. Possibly, though we may only speculate, he is doing both at once, rebalancing the cosmos by destroying the unnatural immortality of the cauldron that is a living hell and will bring extinction if continued, and then opening a pathway back to wholeness, the divine realm, and the overcoming of death in one action. From the destruction of the cauldron “such success as they had” follows as a consequence, as the Mabinogi tale states.

This interpretation of Efnysien’s heart as symbolic of passion should not seem frivolous. Cronus himself in the end of his myth, like Rudra-Siva, is castrated (Orphic Fragment 154) repeating the severing of the member of his father Ouranos, but with a different meaning, and this castration of Cronus should again be interpreted as the snuffing out of desire or passion in the god, as further parallels will make clear: “This therefore, takes place, and Saturn [Cronus] being bound is emasculated in the same manner as Heaven (Οὐρανός))” (Orphic Fragment 154, trans. Thomas Taylor)). Robert Graves (Graves, Hebrew Myths 21.4) cites another tradition for Cronus’ castration, from John Tzetzes, a Byzantine writer of the 12th century. Thus the castration of the Father, Ouranos, matches the disruption of the marriage of Branwen and Matholwch, the casting of their son into the fire, and the death of Matholwch in the war, while the castration of Cronus matches the bursting of Efnysien’s heart. Though it often goes unnoticed, Odinn too is castrated, for he is called Jalk/Jalg/Jalkr, “Gelded” (Grímnismál (49, 54), Óðins nöfn (7), Gylfaginning).20 This castration of Odinn then parallels and has the same meaning as that of Cronus and of Rudra-Siva, and parallels likewise the bursting of Efnysien’s heart.21

When Cronus is castrated he is in a death-like state, lulled to sleep by divine honey. This state then matches the as-if dead state that Efnysien is depicted in when entering the cauldron. Furthermore, the Orphic poets say of this honey of Cronus that,

Saturn [Cronus], being filled with honey, is intoxicated, his senses are darkened, as if from the effects of wine, and he sleeps […] the theologist obscurely signifying by this that divine natures become through pleasure bound, and drawn down into the realms of generation [compare the cauldron of Efnysien as the negative image of the cycle of generation, muted and cut off from the divine] […] the sweetness of honey signifies, with theologists, the same thing as the pleasure arising from generation, by which Saturn, being ensnared, was castrated. (Orphic Fragments, 154)

Thus the mutely reborn warriors could be like those bound by sensuality in the realms of generation, with no link to the divine, and Efnysien, entering this realm of generation in a sleep-like or death-like state, breaks this state of sleep asunder by the snuffing out of his own passion. The cosmic honey that Cronus is fed can make a clear parallel to the substance held in the cauldron, and these to the remainder of Dyaus’ seed in the Vedic tradition, the dangerous residue of the lake of sperm left on earth by Dyaus’ procreative outburst. All three of these, honey, cauldron, and lake of sperm, can be seen as forms of the heavenly liquid substance, one form of which is the soma or mead, which commonly appears in cauldrons or as honey. This self-sacrifice of Efnysien then opens a path to regaining the divine “voice,” Vac, which is elsewhere commonly identified with the waters of Saraswati/Cerridwen, and escaping the state of being “mutely” bound, the senses darkened by the honey of the senses, the residue of the sacred seed that is cut off from the divine realm. Notably, Gwion-Taliesin, a re-manifestation of the Welsh Rudra, is said in his own tale to drink of the liquid from the cauldron of Cerridwen (Saraswati), and from there to gain his divine voice and to remember that he has been in the many hosts of things that make up the cosmos (The Tale of Taliesin; “The Battle of the Trees”). Perhaps we may say that he rediscovers the primordial Rudra Efnysien’s path and remembers who he is.

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Part 3 >

Endnotes:

14. “(RV.4.3.6-7) Rudra’s piercing arrow is directed toward the seed, toward nascent life, which lies protected within the span of Viṣṇu’s three footsteps, from the earth to the empyrean (cf. RV.1.154.2-5; 1.155.3-5)” (Kramrisch, 84).

“His is the arrow (ŚB.2.6.2.3), the power of death. For this reason the tryambaka offerings belong to Rudra (1, 3). They consist of rice cakes. Tryambaka offerings were made to protect from Rudra’s arrows the descendants, born and unborn, of the sacrificer, one cake for each descendant and one more for the issue not yet born. The cakes would deliver each of the descendants from Rudra’s power” (Kramrisch, 84).

“The cake was buried and concealed, for an embryo is concealed. By this offering, the unborn descendants were delivered from the power of Rudra. Rudra’s arrow is directed toward the seed and the embryo. For the yet unborn a special offering was made, larger by Rudra’s part than the cakes offered for the welfare of the living descendants. Moreover, the cake for the embryo had to be buried in a mole hill and concealed—Rudra was given no part of it; instead, the mole became Rudra’s victim. The mole was Rudra’s share. Rudra would not claim the embryo, though Rudra is greedy like a jackal for embryo flesh (VāP.30.212)” (Kramrisch, 85).

15. “The Wild Hunter in the precosmic wilderness is Rudra. In the form of their poem, a magic creation (brahman), the gods give shape to him as Vāstoṣpati. The vāstu that he guards is the cosmos, the site that is his domain is the site of the sacrifice. The sacred order of the cosmos is enacted on the site of the sacrifice in the rhythm of rites and hymns. They are analogous to the rhythms that pervade the cosmos” (Kramrisch, 25).

“The dwelling that he guards and the sacred order that he guards are forms in which—in the poem by the gods—his presence arises out of and on the strength of his fierceness. Vāstoṣpati is the guardian of the sacred order of the cosmos; he watches over all rhythms and rites of life” (Kramrisch, 29-30).

“Here there are two forms of the unnamed god. One is the appalling Hunter who aims ‘against nature,’ against the

primordial act of Father Heaven that he as Agni had instigated, against procreation, by which mankind was to come

about.The other form is that of Vāstoṣpati, created by the gods, the celestial intelligence, the creativeness itself of

mind. The two forms imply the tension between life and its negation on the one side, the wild untamed world, the

wilderness in man and nature, and on the other side the world of art and cosmic order. Both are his domain. In the

one he acts as the Wild Hunter. In the other he manifests as guardian of the dwelling” (Kramrisch, 29).

“In rhythms and rites, the guardian of sacred order, Vratapā, surveys his domain” (Kramrisch, 30).

“the guardian of the site, the guardian of sacred rites, Vāstoṣpati” (Kramrisch, 33).

“In the Ṛg Veda myth of Rudra, the origin of mankind, beginning with the Aṇgirases, the mythic Fire-youths, is interwoven with the creation of poetry, the archetypal act of art in divinis” (Kramrisch, 31).

16. There are indeed strange echoes shared between the fire theft myths and the Father inseminating Earth myths. Hephaestus attempts to approach Athena sexually, is rebuffed, and ejaculates onto the earth, where the fire-seed is buried and even impregnates Gaia. The Vedic Father Sky rapes Earth or an unnamed daughter, and his fiery seed, prepared for him by Agni or Rudra-Agni, falls onto the Earth, giving rise to the fire youths. Corrgend and Efnysien’s hearts both burst in atonement, Corrgend after killing “Fire” and burying him in the ground and Efnysien after killing a boy, the equivalent of the Vedic fire-seed, by throwing him in a fire. The fall of the seed of Hephaestus the Fire God to earth is then of the same type as the primordial fertilization by the Father, but on a lower level of manifestation. It is an echo of the first fall of the fire seed, a specific case of a larger sacred paradigm, and the bursting of Corrgend’s heart similarly repeats the bursting of the similar but more primordial Efnysien. An Orphic fragment says, “through the theft of fire, and giving it to humans, Prometheus draws down the soul from the intelligible into generation” (Orphic Fragments, 143), and this comment supports the idea that the bringing down of fire to earth is a specific repetition of the primordial act that begins generation and the human lineage, the fall of the first fire-seed. The Celtic Coligny Calendar from Gaul calls the month of March Aedrinios or Edrinios, which Xavier Delmarre says can be compared to Irish Aed, “fire.” March, when the first fall of the fire seed occurs and the primordial fire sacrifice is enacted, is thus the Celtic month of Fire, and is also the time of the Vernal Equinox, the time commemorating the fall of the primordial seed of the Father. It seems possible that the echoes of this myth, the theft of fire as with Prometheus/Corrgend/Matarisvan and the second emission of the fire seed as with Hephaestus, could also have been seen to happen in this same month of Fire, manifestations of the same primordial event on lower levels of reality

17. Kramrisch’s interpretation of this state points toward the concepts of samādhi and moksa: “The Father had broken the state of wholeness that existed before the fall of the seed. This state is beyond words. It is indescribable and inaccessible to the senses. It is ‘neither nonbeing nor being’ (RV.10.129.1). But if that much can be said about it, it has also been said that it is ‘nonbeing and being’ (RV.10.5.7), and that out of nonbeing came being in the first age of the gods (RV.10.72.2). It is then that the indefinable wholeness of the total absence or the total presence of both nonbeing and being appears to recede and to set up the screen on which are seen the large figures of gods and their actions. This state of ‘neither nonbeing nor being,’ or simultaneously ‘nonbeing and being,’ is not within the range of thought. It is a plenum that defies definition, for it has no limits. Yet it is not chaos, the ‘darkness covered by darkness,’ said to have existed before the beginning of the ordered universe (RV.10.129.3). In its precosmic, preconscious totality, everything is contained, including consciousness and nothingness. Metaphysically, it did not cease when the cosmos came into existence, for it is not subject to time. Mythically, its wholeness had been injured. Mystically its nameless plenum is inaccessible except in the state of samādhi, the final stage of yoga leading to mokṣa, the total release from all contingencies. Words like plenum, totality, and wholeness are used here merely as symbols of the Uncreate.”

“The state before creation is beyond the polarity of opposites. It is as vast as chaos, but having no qualities whatsoever, it lacks disorder. It is known in later Indian mystical realization as brahman; it is realized through samādhi (at-onement) as mokṣa (release), nirvana (extinction of the flame of life), śūnyatā (emptiness). These names apply to an inner realization of that state beyond the last frontiers of thought (cf. RV.10.5.6-7). The archer, whose arrow hits the Father at the very moment when the Father is spending himself into creation, acts as avenging consciousness and guardian of the Uncreate in defense of its integrity. The arrow and the shot of the archer are decisive symbols in the myth, though they were only partly effectual in the course of its events. Indeed, the arrow hit just a fraction of a moment too late. Meant to prevent the act, the flowing of the seed, the shot failed to prevent its consequences. The failure in timing at the dawn of the world was due to time itself, for the latter had not set in as yet; it was just about to begin. The transition from an integer without dimension of space and time into existence is a danger zone between eternity and the passing moment. It lies between metaphysics and myth. Had the timing been perfect, the flying arrow of Rudra would have prevented the coming into existence of man and the flowing down on the earth of the substance of the Uncreate” (Kramrisch, 65).

A simpler concept could be “integral wholeness,” or simply that state in which a direct link to the divine is attained, the “voice,” the essence of the heavenly state, is recovered, even while existing with the cycle which has been set in motion. Samādhi indeed roughly means “total self-collectedness,” which expresses this idea of integral wholeness well, while also describing the paradigmatic Rudraic action, which is to draw generation back into himself, to collect himself totally and to become complete again and again. The state of samādhi has been described in terms curiously similar to those seen in the poems of the Rudraic poet Taliesin, the experience of consciousness expanding into identity with all things. Another analogy of what may be described in the myth of Efnysien, who seeks to return to the “Golden Age” before the rupture of Creation, is simply the regaining and reconstituting of the Golden Age within the self, despite existing within the cycle of Time. What this reconstituting process and final state of wholeness is precisely can be interpreted through numerous mystical terminologies.

In the language of twentieth century philosophy, Gilles Deleuze calls the pre-existential state of undifferentiation “the black nothingness,” and above this, “the white nothingness” of unconnected determinations: 1. “The undifferentiated abyss. The indeterminate animal in which everything is dissolved (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 28, 36); 2. “The white nothingness, the once more calm surface upon which float unconnected determinations like scattered members” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 28, 36). See Henry Somers-Hall, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, 22: “The first of these represents a space that has not been differenciated. Without difference, we cannot have anything other than pure abstract identity. Difference as a concept is what allows us to draw distinctions within this identity (‘this differs from that’). The second quotation brings out the second role of difference: difference is a relation, and therefore allows things to be related to one another.” Kramrisch similarly notes the “Abyss” of Nirrti to be an aspect of the pre-cosmic state (see Kramrisch, “Pusan,” p. 108: “Below the pit of danger and treasure lies the Lap of Nirrti (7.104.9), the lap of destruction with its endless pit (7.104.17) below all creation (7.104.6). This deep dark place is the Asat, the Non-existent, "The Rg Vedic Equivalent for Hell," as shown by W. Norman Brown, JAOS, vol. 61, pp. 76-80. This deep substratum of the ordered cosmos, of the Existent (sat), the abyss that yawns at the bottom of the pit, in the lap of Destruction (nirrti) is the necessary opposite in the first pair of contraries. There they are from the beginning of things prior to which neither of them existed. The Asat, the Non-existent below the pit, is the remainder ‘apud principium’ of the all engulfing darkness, ante principium”)

The Neoplatonist Plotinus describes the mythic creation in philosophical terms: “in order that Being may be brought about, the source must be no Being but Being's generator [compare the Uncreate], in what is to be thought of as the primal act of generation. Seeking nothing, possessing nothing, lacking nothing, the One is perfect and, in our metaphor, has overflowed, and its exuberance has produced the new: this product has turned again to its begetter and been filled and has become its contemplator and so an Intellectual-Principle [Cronus]” (Plotinus, Ennead 5.2.1).

18. In Plotinus, cosmic emanation proceeds naturally from the act of contemplation of the Intellectual-Principle [Cronus] as life proceeds from Shiva in meditation without his taking procreative action: “In the Intellectual-Principle, the Being is an Act and in the absence of any other object it must be self-directed; by this self-intellection it holds its Act within itself and upon itself; all that can emanate from it is produced by this self-centering and self-intention; first- self-gathered, it then gives itself or gives something in its likeness; fire must first be self-centered and be fire, true to fire's natural Act; then it may reproduce itself elsewhere” (Plotinus, Ennead 5.3.7).

19. “Rudra became Sthāṇu, a motionless pillar, a branchless stem. He stood in aeviternal illumination. Sthāṇu (from the root sthā, “to stand”), “a post,” is Rudra’s concrete symbol. Its upward direction shows his inflexible stance across the universe (cf. LP.1.86.139), as well as suggesting the upward withdrawal of his semen. The visual concept of Sthāṇu, the pillar, is the paradoxical negation of the erect phallus, which the pillar shape suggests” (Kramrisch, 265).

“Sthāṇu in the simplicity of its shape is the monument of Rudra’s paradoxical truth. Its dual significance comprises the irreducible nature of Rudra, the Fire, the origin of life, and Rudra, the Great Yogi, who, counter to nature, is master of the unspent life-giving power” (Kramrisch, 267).

20. My thanks to Anhaga for bringing this to my awareness. Additionally, the priests who followed the Phrygian Attis and Cybele (discussed below), the galli, castrated themselves, following the model of the castrated Attis who parallels Cronus and Odinn in his myth. Thus we could speculate that Odinn’s title Jalk/Jalg, “the Gelded One,” could also imply that he would command certain of his priests to overcome their own passions in order to follow his example via the ascetic or yogic overcoming of the passions, by various means.

21. Pandu of the Mahabharata is cursed to never again embrace his wife on pain of death after shooting a pair of mating deer in the woods who turn out to be a rishi and his wife. He ultimately forgets the injunction, embraces his wife romantically, and dies “lust-bewildered.” Although Pandu is an incarnation of Varuna, this could be a form of the same Rudraic myth which has been attached to him due to the frequent overlap between Rudra and Varuna that we have noted, with the mating deer as the primordial pair in conjunction. My thanks to Zagreides for pointing out this connection.