Michael Dames, in his book ‘Merlin and Wales: a magician’s landscape‘ Thames and Hudson:2002, on pages 39 and 40, quotes a text purportedly from the mouth of St Kentigern [Mungo]. Presumably a medieval Saints Lives composition. It reads, ‘Merlin saw a fearful vision in the heavens and heard a voice that accused him of inaugurating the violence that occurred during the Battle of Arfderydd. ‘I heard a great thunder in the heavens and a voice, calling my name. When I turned my face towards the voice I saw a splendour so great that human nature could not endure it …’. It was so bright, it would seem, he was unable to look directly at it. Only for a short time. It is specifically an extremely bright apparition in the sky. Innumerable troops in the air were glowing like the flashing of lightning …’ [a meteor shower it might be said]. ‘fiery lances and shining darts, shaking them cruelly at me ….’. Merlin says, he was ‘driven out of his senses and so glaring and tumultuous was the slaughter, the shield, was battered and perforated in excess and excess, as they came beyond and beyond …’. ‘A host of flying darts, raining with blood, spattered the plain [or battlefield], a host of wounded warriors ….’. ‘A great fog of sweat and dust is reported to lay over Arfderydd.’
It seems to me this is a description of an airburst event amidst a raining down of meteors. The main event being a large meteor exploding low in the atmosphere. Interestingly, Patrick McCafferty and Mike Baillie, in their book ‘Celtic Gods: Comets in Irish mythology‘ Tempus:2005, pages 183-7 and 197-204, have something to say about Merlin and his madness that drove him to retreat into the wilderness. Merlin, they thought, was a comet, or a fragmented comet, and the fiery darts the dust and debris of its tail. The assumption being that Earth passed through the tail of a comet – such as Halley. However, the Earth could just as easily have passed through one of the meteor streams that the Earth encounters every year. Perforce, a meteor stream that was still dense and possessed some big lumps that would have continued to fragment in subsequent years. It was considered a special event, hence the memory of it was kept alive. McCafferty and Baillie worked on the assumption that it occurred during the 5th or 6th centuries AD. However, it was also mythological and for this reason academics have shied away from accepting these events as real life occurrences. Dismissing them and concentrating only on the idea of a battle between two human armies. Merlin, in that view, would have been nothing more than a druid. A druid that became deranged – if he was not already. Hence, the battle was provided with a date, around AD573. It is regarded by historians as a real event that involved, on one side, King Rhydderch of Strathclyde. This kingdom did not just embrace south west Scotland but included Cumbria, the mountainous zone south of Carlisle. As it involved a plain, it is thought, the general area around Carlisle is a favourite location. It’s whereabouts is unknown. However, mainstream has set their minds on a particular location, as these things have to be compartmentalised. Academics don’t like to admit they do not know. However, looking at the story again, as Dames, and McCafferty and Baillie have noted, the events have their parallel in Irish myth – and the figure of Suibne [Sweeney]. He was involved in a similar battle in AD637, and he also went mad and retreated into obscurity. The battle here is known as that of Magh Rath. The Scots had a similar person, and he too went mad, Lailoken. In fact, one might say the mythic feature in the story was widespread on the western side of Britain, and overspilling into Ireland. In the converse view, the 5th century AD involved a lot of Irish migration into Wales and all along the Celtic west, from Cornwall to Scotland. In other words, the battle could have occurred anywhere in the British Isles – or as it involved the sky, was seen in many places in the British Isles [and no doubt elsewhere]. You can put Battle of Arfderydd into your search engine and you’ll get a lot of the mainstream point of view. Not so much that on the periphery. The same goes for the various characters such as Suibne, Merlin, and Lailoken etc. In dismissing the fantastical element of a heavy meteor shower mainstream historians do a disservice to attempts by others to get at the truth. The same applies to the Black Death. Not many books on that subject mention sky phenomena but there were reports of strange goings on in the sky preceding the outbreak of plague – and right through the late 13th into the 14th century AD. The same applies to the Little Ice Age in the 16th and 17th centuries AD. The mainstream view is that volcanoes were responsible – but heavy meteoric activity can produce a similar effect.
Dames comes out with a novel idea for why Arfderydd occurred. He thought it might be a clash between a pagan king and a newly Christianised king. No evidence of course but it fits into his neo-pagan leanings. Out of date nowadays, but once quite popular amongst students and the like. McCafferty and Baillie, on the other hand, are quite happy with their identification of major figures of Irish mythology with comets and phenomena in the sky. That might even include unusual aurora. Obviously, all this took place over a long period of time – or at least going back as far as the third or fourth millennium BC. The Irish even have a timeline for when each event occurred. However, as they were influenced by the Bible when druids became priests of the new religion, we may suppose they adopted the timescale in the Biblical narrative. There were some four major invasions of Ireland [or in the skies above Ireland} which would have to include the most fierce events, beginning in around 4000BC when the first farmers arrived. The same level of preserved mythology does not occur in Britain as Christianity arrived in the Roman period. We do have a few stories brought in by pagan Anglo Saxons, such as Beowulf, that McCafferty and Baillie also see as a cometary phenomenon. Beowulf at some point metamorphised into St George, who had a similar storyline, and the tale, popular with the lower orders, was preserved that way. Even in the time of Henry VIII and the Protestant revolution that involved the dissolution of monasteries and abbeys. However, good king Henry kept the zealots at bay, choosing a middle of the road line. He was followed by his elder daughter Mary which resulted in a semi revival of the Roman church in Britain. She in turn was succeeded by his daughter by Ann Boleyn, Elizabeth I, and she was adamant. She would not allow the puritans to gain ascendancy and steered a middle road between Rome and the Protestant cause. It was only during the Civil War, a bit later, that the Puritans had their hand on the full force of power. In that brief time they rigorously expunged anything that smacked of paganism. In so doing England lost most of its myth and folk history. The same goes for Scotland, and to a certain extent, even Wales – but not entirely so. In Ireland there was a direct succession from druid to priest of the new religion and the saints lives seem to preserve some knowledge of what went before the church in Rome took ascendancy there. It is therefore a unique knowledge base. If McCafferty and Baillie are right, and there is no reason why not, they have preserved in the written word some of the extraordinary catastrophic events in the sky that one can glean from hints in the Biblical Narrative and other ancient texts such as those of the Persians and India. The problem has always been that academics have viewed them as fantastical and imaginary rather than echoes of a violent past.
Dames, on page 55, also mentions that Merlin had a sister, Gwendydd. She is described as white in hue. Dames calls it a sacred whiteness as it is an attribute of various other gods and goddesses. White is the colour of light at night – as in the moon and stars, and comets. In essence, Gwendydd was very much like Guinevere, the consort of Arthur. She was also a white goddess, and survived amongst the underclass as the White Lady – which was apparently acceptable in mainstream Protestant circles [but not in Puritan]. Dames even describes the pallor of Merlin as similar to that of his sister – an earthly reflection of what was seen in the sky. Here he sticks rigidly to the idea Merlin was a human and therefore earthbound. The goddess concept has an origin in the flowing mane, or long hair as seen in some comets. One only has to look at a catalogue of the different shapes that comets took on their appearances to visualise how this came about. It is not confined to Europe either as the Chinese have the best catalogue of comet apparitions. Worth an eyefull. One might even see the Snow White fairy tale as a survival of the ancient goddess and the seven dwarfs as the seven stars of the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus. The Taurid meteor streams seem to emerge out of Taurus, hence the name, but of course the stars are far away and the meteors are caught in an orbit within the inner solar system. The Pleiades appear in myth around the world, even in Aboriginal dream time stories from Australia. The Cinderella fairy stories, slightly different in the various parts of the world where they have been recorded, seem to have preserved the goddess as cinders are obviously associated with fire and ella is etymologically associated with bright light. Cinderella is often depicted clearing out the grate and relighting the household fire, and is generally a sort of nondescript figure until she is transformed into a beautiful woman fit only for a prince.