The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Here, then, is Taliesin’s grand conundrum, taken to pieces and reassembled in orderly form, with the answer attached to each riddle:

  I was the tower of the work of which Nimrod was overseer. Babel.

  I saw the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lota.

  I was at the Court of Dôn before the birth of Gwydion; my head was at the White Hill in the Hall of Cymbeline; and it is not known whether my body is flesh or fish. Vran.

  I stood with Mary Magdalene at the place of Crucifixion of the Merciful Son of God. Salome.

  I was the banner carried before Alexander. Ne-esthan.

  I strengthened Moses in the land of the Deity. Hur.

  I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain; I am winged with the genius of the splendid crozier. David.

  A primary chief bard am I to Elphin who was in stocks and fetters for a year and a day. At first I was little Gwion and obtained my inspiration from the cauldron of the hag Cerridwen. Then for nine months almost I was in Cerridwen’s belly. At length I became Taliesin. ‘Joannes’ I was called, and Merlin the Diviner, and Elias, but at length every King shall call me Taliesin. I am able to instruct the whole Universe. Taliesin.

  First I was with my Lord in the Highest Sphere and then I was in his buttery. Kai.

  I conveyed the Divine Spirit across Jordan to the level of the Vale of Hebron. Caleb.

  I was the Throne of the Distributor; I was minstrel to the Danes of Lochlin. Moriah.

  I was fostered in the Ark and have been teacher to all intelligences. Hu Gardarn.

  Once I was in India and Asia. I have now come here to the remnant of Troy. Gomer.

  I have sat in an uneasy chair; I know the names of the stars from North to South; my original country is the land of the Cherubim, the region of the summer stars. Idris.

  I was in the firmament of the Galaxy when Rome was built, and whirled around motionless between three elements. Rhea.

  I was loquacious before I was given speech; I am Alpha Tetragrammaton. Acab.

  I was with my King in the manger of the Ass. Jose.

  On the fall of Lucifer to the lowest depth of Hell, I was instructor to Enoch and Noah; I was on the horse’s crupper of Enoch and Elias. I was also at Caer Bedion. Uriel.

  I suffered hunger with the Son of the Virgin; I was on the High Cross in the land of the Trinity; I was three periods in the Castle of Arianrhod, above the Castle of the Sidhe. Jesus.

  I am a wonder whose origin is not known. I shall remain until the Day of Doom upon the face of the earth. Jachin.

  So it seems that the answer to the conundrum is a bardic alphabet, closely resembling O’Flaherty’s, but with Morvran for Moiria, Ne-esthan for Neiagadon, Rhea for Riuben, Salome for Salia,1 Gadarn for Gath, Uriel for Uria, and Taliesin for Teilmon.

  This may seem an anticlimax. Beyond establishing that the Boibel-Loth is at any rate as old as the thirteenth-century Red Book of Hergest in which the Hanes Taliesin occurs, and not a mere pedantry or artificiality of O’Flaherty’s, what has been learned?

  Well: by the time that O’Flaherty published the alphabet, the secret of its meaning had evidently been lost and there seemed to be no reason for further concealment of the letter-names. It had indeed been published long before in a tenth-century bardic primer. But we may be sure that Gwion with his Dog, Roebuck and Lapwing would never have gone to such extravagant lengths in confusing the elements of their conundrum unless the answer had been something really secret, something of immensely greater importance than a mere ABC. But the only hope of getting any further in the chase lies in discovering what meaning the letters of the alphabet have apart from the proper names which are attached to them in the riddle. Do they perhaps spell out a secret religious formula?

  * * *

  Since solving this grand conundrum I realize that I misread the riddle: ‘I was chief overseer of the work of the Tower of Nimrod’, though I gave the correct answer. It refers to a passage in The Hearings of the Scholars, where ‘The Work of the Tower of Nimrod’ is explained as the linguistic researches carried on there (see Chapter Thirteen) by Feniusa Farsa and his seventy-two assistants. The tower is said to have been built of nine different materials:

  Clay, water, wool and blood

  Wood, lime, and flax-thread a full twist,

  Acacia, bitumen with virtue –

  The nine materials of Nimrod’ s Tower.

  and these nine materials are poetically explained as:

  Noun, pronoun, [adjective], verb,

  Adverb, participle, [preposition],

  Conjunction, interjection.

  The twenty-five noblest of the seventy-two assistants who worked on the language are said to have given their names to the Ogham letters. The names are as follows:

  BABEL MURIATH

  LOTH GOTLI

  FORAIND GOMERS

  SALIATH STRU

  NABGADON RUBEN

  HIRUAD ACHAB

  DABHID OISE

  TALAMON URITH

  CAE ESSU

  KALIAP IACHIM

  ETHROCIUS, UIMELICUS, IUDONIUS, AFFRIM, ORDINES.

  It will be noticed that the list is a somewhat degenerate one, with Hiruad (Herod) for Hur, and Nabgadon (Nebuchadnezzar) for Neesthan. The five last names represent the ‘foreign letters’ absent from the original canon. The ‘chief overseer’ of the riddle is not, as one would suspect, Feniusa Farsa, nor either of his two leading assistants, Gadel and Caoith, but Babel; for it is explained in the same section of the book that Babel is the letter B, that the birch is its tree and that ‘on a switch of Birch was written the first Ogham inscription made in Ireland, namely seven B’s, as a warning to Lug son of Ethliu, to wit, “Thy wife will be seven times overseer.”’ Lug realized that the seven B’s represented birch seven times repeated but, to make sense of the message, he had to convert the seven B’s, represented by single nicks, into two other letters of the same flight, namely S and F (four nicks and three nicks) the initials of the operative Irish words sid and ferand.

  This riddle is conclusive proof, if any doubt remains, of Gwion’s acquaintance with contemporary Irish bardic lore.

  [* pronounced V]

  [† pronounced F]

  1 Perhaps originally an emblem of destruction borrowed from the Moon-goddess to whom, as we know from the Biblical stories of Rahab and Tamar, the scarlet thread was sacred, for three locusts and a scarlet thread are mentioned in the Ethiopian Kebra Nagast as the magical properties with which the Daughter of Pharoah seduced King Solomon. The myth of Tithonus and Aurora is likely to be derived from a mistaken reading of a sacred picture in which the Moon-goddess is shown hand in hand with Adonis, beside a rising sun as emblem of his youth, and a locust as emblem of the destruction that awaits him.

  1 I find that the manuscript version of the Hearings of the Scholars in the Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh, gives Salamon as the name of this letter.

  Chapter Eight

  HERCULES ON THE LOTUS

  To sum up the historical argument.

  ‘Gwion’, a North Welsh cleric of the late thirteenth century, whose true name is not known but who championed the popular minstrels against the Court bards, wrote (or rewrote) a romance about a miraculous Child who possessed a secret doctrine that nobody could guess; this doctrine is incorporated in a series of mystical poems which belong to the romance. The romance is based on a more primitive original, of the ninth century AD, in which Creirwy and Afagddu, the children of Tegid Voel and Caridwen, probably played a more important part than in Gwion’s version. (This original has been lost though, strangely enough, the same dramatis personae occur in Shakespeare’s Tempest: Prospero, who like Tegid Voel lived on a magic island; the black screaming hag Sycorax, ‘Pig Raven’, mother of Caliban the ugliest man alive; Prosperous daughter Miranda the most beautiful woman, whom Caliban tries to rape; Ariel the miraculous Child whom Sycorax imprisons. Perhaps Shakespeare heard the story from his Welsh schoolmaster at Stratford, the original of Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wiv
es of Windsor.)

  The miraculous Child set a riddle, based on a knowledge not only of British and Irish mythology, but of the Greek New Testament and Septuagint, the Hebrew Scriptures and Apocrypha, and Latin and Greek mythology. The answer to the riddle is a list of names which correspond closely with a list that Roderick O’Flaherty, the seventeenth-century confidant of the learned Irish antiquary Duald Mac Firbis, claimed to be the original letter-names of the Ogham alphabet, which is found in numerous inscriptions in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England and the Isle of Man, some of them pre-Christian. Its invention is ascribed by Irish tradition to the Goidelic god Ogma Sun-Face, who according to the account given by Lucian of Samosata, who wrote in the second century AD, was represented in Celtic art as a mixture of the gods Cronos, Hercules and Apollo. A connexion between the Ogham found in inscriptions and a fifth-century BC Greek alphabet from Etruria, the Formello- Cervetri, has been proved; nevertheless there is evidence that an earlier form of Ogham, with a slightly different order of letters, was current in Ireland before the Druids of Gaul came into contact with the Formello-Cervetri alphabet. It may also have been current in Britain where, according to Julius Caesar, the Druids of Gaul went for their university training in secret doctrine.

  I first suspected that an alphabet was contained in Gwion’s conundrum when I began to restore the purposely jumbled text of his Battle of the Trees, which refers to a primitive British tradition of the capture of an oracular shrine by the guessing of a god’s name. This capture seems to have taken place early in the fourth century BC when the Belgic Brythons, worshippers of the Ash-god Gwydion, with the help of an agricultural tribe already settled in Britain, seized the national shrine, perhaps Avebury, from the reigning priesthood, two of whose gods were Arawn and Bran. Bran is the Celtic name for the ancient Crow-god, variously known as Apollo, Saturn, Cronos and Aesculapius, who was also a god of healing and whose worship had been combined with that of a Thunder-god, pictured as a ram or bull, known variously as Zeus, Tantalus, Jupiter, Telamon and Hercules. The letter-names of Gwion’s alphabet apparently conceal the Name of the transcendent God, whom Caesar calls Dis, worshipped in Britain and Gaul. It may be inferred that the earlier alphabet, containing a pre-Belgic religious secret, had a different series of letter-names from those contained in Gwion’s conundrum, that the alphabetical order began with B.L.N., not B.L.F., and that after the capture of the shrine the Divine Name was altered.

  It now remains to be discovered:

  (1) What the letter-names in Gwion’s alphabet, the Boibel-Loth, meant.

  (2) What Divine Name was concealed in them.

  (3) What were the original names of the letters in the tree-alphabet, the Beth-Luis-Nion.

  (4) What they meant.

  (5) What Divine Name was concealed in them.

  Gwion gives us the first point in our renewed chase of the Roebuck by introducing into his Romance an Elegy on Hercules, which I will quote presently; but ‘Hercules’ is a word of very many meanings. Cicero distinguishes six different legendary figures named Hercules; Varro, forty-four. His name, in Greek Heracles, means ‘Glory of Hera’, and Hera was an early Greek name for the Death-goddess who had charge of the souls of sacred kings and made oracular heroes of them. He is, in fact, a composite deity consisting of a great many oracular heroes of different nations at different stages of religious development; some of whom became real gods while some remained heroes. This makes him the most perplexing character in Classical mythology; for the semi-historical Pelopid prince of the generation before the Trojan War has been confused with various heroes and deities called Hercules, and these with one another.

  Hercules first appears in legend as a pastoral sacred king and, perhaps because shepherds welcome the birth of twin lambs, is a twin himself. His characteristics and history can be deduced from a mass of legends, folk customs and megalithic monuments. He is the rain-maker of his tribe and a sort of human thunder-storm. Legends connect him with Libya and the Atlas Mountains; he may well have originated thereabouts in Palaeolithic times. The priests of Egyptian Thebes, who called him ‘Shu’, dated his origin as ‘17,000 years before the reign of King Amasis’. He carries an oak-club, because the oak provides his beasts and his people with mast and because it attracts lightning more than any other tree. His symbols are the acorn; the rock–dove, which nests in oaks as well as in clefts of rock; the mistletoe, or loranthus; and the serpent. All these are sexual emblems. The dove was sacred to the Love-goddess of Greece and Syria; the serpent was the most ancient of phallic totem-beasts; the cupped acorn stood for the glans penis in both Greek and Latin; the mistletoe was an all-heal and its names viscus (Latin) and ixias (Greek) are connected with vis and ischus (strength) – probably because of the spermal viscosity of its berries, sperm being the vehicle of life. This Hercules is male leader of all orgiastic rites and has twelve archer companions, including his spear-armed twin, who is his tanist or deputy. He performs an annual green-wood marriage with a queen of the woods, a sort of Maid Marian. He is a mighty hunter and makes rain, when it is needed, by rattling an oak-club thunderously in a hollow oak and stirring a pool with an oak branch – alternatively, by rattling pebbles inside a sacred colocinth-gourd or, later, by rolling black meteoric stones inside a wooden chest – and so attracting thunderstorms by sympathetic magic.

  The manner of his death can be reconstructed from a variety of legends, folk customs and other religious survivals. At mid-summer, at the end of a half-year reign, Hercules is made drunk with mead and led into the middle of a circle of twelve stones arranged around an oak, in front of which stands an altar-stone; the oak has been lopped until it is T-shaped. He is bound to it with willow thongs in the ‘five-fold bond’ which joins wrists, neck and ankles together, beaten by his comrades till he faints, then flayed, blinded, castrated, impaled with a mistletoe stake, and finally hacked into joints on the altar-stone.1 His blood is caught in a basin and used for sprinkling the whole tribe to make them vigorous and fruitful. The joints are roasted at twin fires of oak-loppings, kindled with sacred fire preserved from a lightning-blasted oak or made by twirling an alder-or cornel-wood fire-drill in an oak log. The trunk is then uprooted and split into faggots which are added to the flames. The twelve merry-men rush in a wild figure-of-eight dance around the fires, singing ecstatically and tearing at the flesh with their teeth. The bloody remains are burnt in the fire, all except the genitals and the head. These are put into an alder-wood boat and floated down a river to an islet; though the head is sometimes cured with smoke and preserved for oracular use. His tanist succeeds him and reigns for the remainder of the year, when he is sacrificially killed by a new Hercules.

  To this type of Hercules belong such diverse characters as Hercules of Oeta, Orion the Hunter of Crete, Polyphemus the Cyclops, Samson the Danite, Cuchulain of Muirthemne the Irish Sun-hero, Ixion the Lapith – who is always depicted stretched in a ‘five-fold bond’ around a Sunwheel – Agag the Amalekite, Romulus of Rome, Zeus, Janus, Anchises, The Dagda and Hermes. This Hercules is the leader of his people in war and hunting and his twelve chieftains are pledged to respect his authority; but his name commemorates his subservience to the Goddess, the Queen of the Woods, whose priestess is the tribal law-giver and disposer of all the amenities of life. The health of the people is bound up with his and he is burdened with numerous royal taboos.

  In the Classical myth which authorizes his sovereignty he is a miraculous child born in a shower of gold; strangles a serpent in his cradle, which is also a boat, and is credited (like Zeus) with causing the spurt of milk that made the Milky Way; as a young man he is the undefeated monster-slayer of his age; kills and dismembers a monstrous boar; begets countless sons but no daughters – title is still, in fact, matrilinearly conveyed; willingly undertakes the world-burden of the giant Atlas; does wonderful feats with his oak-club and his arrows; masters the wild horse Arion and brings up the Dog Cerberus from the Underworld; is betrayed by his lovely bride; flays himself by tearing off hi
s poisoned shirt; climbs in agony to the top of Mount Oeta; fells and splits an oak for his own pyre; is consumed; flies up to heaven on the smoke of the pyre in the form of an eagle, and is introduced by the Goddess of Wisdom into the company of the Immortals.

  The divine names Bran, Saturn, Cronos must also be referred to this primitive religious system. They are applied to the ghost of Hercules that floats off in the alder-wood boat after his midsummer sacrifice. His tanist, or other self, appearing in Greek legend as Poeas who lighted Hercules’ pyre and inherited his arrows, succeeds him for the second half of the year; having acquired royal virtue by marriage with the queen, the representative of the White Goddess, and by eating some royal part of the dead man’s body – heart, shoulder or thigh-flesh. He is in turn succeeded by the New Year Hercules, a reincarnation of the murdered man, who beheads him and, apparently, eats his head. This alternate eucharistic sacrifice made royalty continuous, each king being in turn the Sun-god beloved of the reigning Moon-goddess.

  But when these cannibalistic rites were abandoned and the system was gradually modified until a single king reigned for a term of years, Saturn-Cronos-Bran became a mere Old Year ghost, permanently overthrown by Jupiter-Zeus-Belin though yearly conjured up for placation at the Saturnalia or Yule feast. Here at last we can guess the political motive behind Amathaon’s betrayal of his cousin Bran’s name at the Battle of the Trees for the benefit of his friend Gwydion: did the Bronze Age Amathaonians, who worshipped the Immortal Beli in his Stonehenge temple, find that they had less in common with their White-Goddess-worshipping overlords than with the invading Iron Age Belgic tribes whose god Odin (Gwydion) had emancipated himself from the tutelage of the White Goddess Freya? Once the Bran priesthood was banished from Salisbury Plain and driven up North, they would be free to institute a permanent kingship over all Southern Britain under the patronage of Belin; and this is exactly what they seem to have done, after an amicable arrangement with the priesthood of Odin, to whom they gave the control of the national oracle as a reward for their help in the battle.