The tale of Branwen, in the Mabinogion, has so many esoteric episodes, that it is a veritable cornucopia for any aspiring alchemist. The key component to understanding this myth, upon which the entire Holy Grail corpus is based, lies in the very names of Bran and Branwen; brother and sister, god and goddess, black and white/black. Bran in Welsh, means crow or raven; black being the focus of the myth, while wen means white, so that Branwen means white raven, or effectively the whitening of the black.
In Hindu myth, it is Varuna who is god of water and the darkness. In Welsh, -v mutates as -f and -b, so that Bran is often spelt as Fran. This is effectively Vran as an Indo-European common ancestry shared with Varuna. Bran is son of the water god Llyr, so the water and darkness components of these Indo-European gods are inherent in their ancestry and common identity.
These days, most people view the darkness and watery cold as being the antithesis of congeniality and comfort, as indeed they frequently are, but to the alchemist or spiritual practitioner, they are the the ultimate source of the very light which those that seek enlightenment, must discover for themselves. The name Branwen as white darkness, reveals the truth of this concept, which is confirmed by the opening lines in the Book of Genesis, where God incarnates light from the darkness as the prime motif of the act of creation.
This is an eternal truth, just as in Handel's Messiah, those who live in the shadow of great darkness will, within a short period of time from now, witness a great light of the glory of the lord and a renewed Golden Age will spring from the darkness of an old corrupt Iron Age.
Bran, the god of darkness, must seek out his light in the darkness sister in Ireland. To do this, he must traverse the Irish Sea from Wales, but the text contains a mysterious time slip which covers several thousand years in time. The English translation of G and T Jones, is rendered '....and in those days the deep water was not wide. He went by wading. There were but two rivers, the Lli and the Archan were they called, but thereafter the deep water grew wide when the deep overflowed the kingdoms.'
There has only been one period in historical time when the Irish Sea could have been two rivers and that was in about 10,000BC, during the last Ice Age, when sea levels were sufficiently low enough to have made most of the Irish Sea dry land, with evidence, from Admiralty charts that, indeed, two rivers would have dominated this wide landscape. Indeed, the proposed drop in sea levels suggested by scientists, would agree with this proposition that most of the Irish Sea was dry land.
This ancient tradition, would have been passed down the generations for over 10,000 years, which would completely overturn the notion upheld by proponents, such as Ronald Hutton, who felt that such long term transmission of myth and history was not possible. In fact, there is a considerable body of evidence to support how reliable such long term transmission of tradition can be, and in this case, the naming of these two rivers, where Lli means flood, suggests that the importance of this history, never left the powerful memory of the Welsh consciousness. The number of coastal flood legends in Cardigan Bay and elsewhere, also support this case.
We are then left with some very strange conundrums in this passage of Bran across to Ireland. The text states that he 'sailed', but at the same time there is no sea to cross with ships, so that Ireland and Wales were only separated by a large river or two. This appears to suggest, that two separate traditions were incorporated into the text, or more to the point, that there was a conscious updating of the tradition which meant that both ways of crossing were true, both wading a river, as this giant god was able to do later in Ireland as he stretched to form a bridge over the River Liffey, and crossing the sea by boat.
I would stress here, that time and space bend and bend, to the point that what was true millenia in the past, is also true now.
But then only those who study Fulcanelli, Ripley and the ancient cosmologists, could possibly get there heads round that.
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