Theogony Botanica
Chapter VII In The White Goddess, one of Robert Graves' main arguments is based upon an ingenious interpretation of a Medieval Welsh poem, Cad Goddeu, 'The Battle of the Trees.' As we have mentioned, the trees refer to a thirteen-month calendar dramatized at the solstices, representing dual phases of growth and decay, Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, which I have connected to the story of the two trees in Eden, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, and shown how originally these two trees may have represented the two sacred toadstools, Amanita and Psilocybin, later the division between the agricultural seasons and the times of wild growth and winter: the Spring of the Barley God and the post-Harvest festival of autumnal mushrooms and the Thunder God. But this calendar is also a secret alphabet containing a religious mystery; or rather, multiple competing systems of thought, as much schools of philosophy as ...