| In order to become an ollave one must study, learn and master one hundred and fifty cipher alphabets, like the “Thirteen Precious Things,” The “Thirteen Kingly Jewels,” “The Thirteen Wonders of Britain,” etc., which are all mentioned in the Mabinogion, the earliest prose stories of the literature of Britain compiled in the Middle Welsh period of the 12th through 14th centuries from earlier oral traditions. Graves has proposed a theory that these are likely to represent sets of cypher equivalents for the thirteen consonants of the British Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet. (60) According to Graves, the ollave in ancient Ireland had to: “…master one hundred and fifty Oghams, or verbal ciphers, which allowed him to converse with his fellow-poets over the heads of unlearned bystanders; to be able to repeat at a moment’s notice any one of three hundred and fifty long traditional histories and romances, together with the incidental poems they contained, with appropriate harp accompaniment; to have memorized an immense number of other poems of different sorts; to be learned in philosophy; to be a doctor of civil law; to understand the history of modern, middle and ancient Irish with the derivations and changes of meaning of every word; to be skilled in music, augury, divination, medicine, mathematics, geography, universal history, astronomy, rhetoric and foreign languages; and to be able to extemporize poetry in fifty or more complicated metres. That anyone at all should have been able to qualify as an ollave is surprising; yet families of ollaves tended to intermarry; and among the Maoris of New Zealand where a curiously similar system prevailed, the capacity of the ollave to memorize, comprehend, elucidate and extemporize staggered Governor Grey and other early British observers.” (61) With the conversion to orthodox Christianity, the Welsh poets had a prohibition of free speech imposed upon them, enforced through ecclesiastical discipline. The church had prohibited them from speaking “untruth” and were forced to modify all forms of expression of myth and allegory. Only prescribed and authorized metaphors were permitted. (62) (60) ibid, p. 101 (61) ibid, p. 457 (62) ibid, p. 18 |