Secret_History

402 The Secret History of the World
His death on the first Sunday in August - called Lugh nasadh, later altered to Lughmass
or Lammas - was until recently observed in Ireland with Good Friday-like
mourning and kept as a feast of dead kinsfolk, the mourning procession being
always led by a young man carrying a hooped wreath. Lammas was also observed
as a mourning feast in most parts of England in mediaeval times…
In some parts of Wales, Lammas is still kept as a fair. Sir John Rhys records that in
the 1850’s the hills of Fan Fach and South Barrule in Carmarthenshire were
crowded with mourners for Llew Llaw on the first Sunday in August, their excuse
being that they were ‘going up to bewail Jephthah’s daughter on the mountain’.
This, oddly enough, was the very same excuse that the post-Exilic Jewish girls had
used, after the Deuteronomic reforms, to disguise their mourning for Tammuz,
Llew Llaw’s Palestianian counterpart. 282
The sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter is, thus, another instance where the new
view of women as explicated by Hesiod and his Bible writing counterparts was
being imposed on the Eastern Mediterranean world. It’s interesting to think about
Pandora’s “pithoi” from which troubles flowed with the clue of the shibboleth that
is included in the story of Jephthah:
12:4 Then Jephthah gathered together all the men of Gilead, and fought with
Ephraim: and the men of Gilead smote Ephraim, because they said, Ye Gileadites
are fugitives of Ephraim among the Ephraimites, and among the Manassites.
12:5 And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it
was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that
the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay;
12:6 Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he
could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the
passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two
thousand.
Another clue to the Eleusinian rites is that they were said to be celebrated by
women only throughout all Greece in the month of Pyanepsion (late October), their
characteristic feature being a pig sacrifice, the usual sacrifice to chthonic 283
deities.
The Greeks attributed special powers to pigs on account of their fertility, the
potency and abundance of their blood, and perhaps because of their uncanny
ability to unearth underground tubers and shoots. Experts suggest that it was
believed that mingling pig flesh with the seeds of grain would increase the
abundance of next year’s harvest. The scholars also tell us that the ceremonies
comprised fasting and purification, a ritualized descent into the underworld, and
the use of sympathetic magic to bring renewed life back out of the jaws of death.
282 Robert Graves, The White Goddess, (New York: Noonday Press 1948) pp. 302, 303.
283 “Dark, primitive and mysterious.”