Page:Folklore1919.djvu/682

316 wells of Mnemosyne and Lethe seemed to give a parallel to the earthly wells beneath their sacred trees, found in so many temples of so many cults. The inspired mantic head of the murdered Orpheus recalled the inspired head of Brân in the Welsh myth, become now the ghostly head of modern Glastonbury tradtion. The worship of Dionysos is so plainly a Life Cult, with its tree-worship, its sacred ritual meal, and its frenzied women corresponding to the wailers for Tammuz and the weeping maidens of the Grail.

I would now make one last suggestion.

Sir John Rhys equates with the Grail all those cauldrons, cups, baskets and dishes of Welsh, Irish and Gaelic folk and fairy-lore. He mentions especially the Cauldron of Pwyll Head of Hades, whose rim was surrounded by pearls, and which was kept boiling by the breath of nine maidens. Nine maidens also kept the skerry-quern of Amloði, or Avallach, which seems to have been also a property of the Life Cults, and Miss Harrison connects the Nine Muses with the Maenads and Bacchantes, representing the women of the Tammuz and Adonis rituals and the Maidens of our own Grail rites. I wish to make what must remain a tentative suggestion, that Glastonbury has unconsciously and unexpectedly provided us with a tangible link with the days when the Life Cults were celebrated there. The wonderful Lake Village discovered outside the town is now famous, and equally famous is the most beautiful of the many objects unearthed there, the "Glastonbury Bowl." This is a fair-sized bronze bowl of perfect workmanship, surrounded by a ring of bosses in which, at regular intervals, a triangle occurs. There are three triangles, and three bosses to each, so that the complete number of balls to the triangles makes nine—the number of the women who watched the Cauldron of Pwyll, of the women who guarded Amloði's Quern, of the Muses and Maenads, The bowl had been cracked and mended before discovery, and it was found in what had evidently been a workshop, with flakes and fragments of bronze lying round it, suggesting that it was newly repaired at the time of the disaster which overwhelmed the village. Its discoverers suggested that it was an object of great value that had been