The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  The next type of Hercules is an agricultural as well as a pastoral king and specializes in the cultivation of barley, so that he is sometimes confused with Eleusinian Triptolemus, Syrian Tammuz or Egyptian Maneros. Early portraits of him, with lion skin, club and grain sprouting from his shoulders, have been found in Mesopotamian cities of the third millennium BC. In the Eastern Mediterranean he reigns alternatively with his twin, as in the double kingdoms of Argos, Lacedaemon, Corinth, Alba Longa, and Rome. Co-kings of this type are Iphiclus, twin to Tirynthian Hercules; Pollux, twin to Castor; Lynceus, twin to Idas; Calaïs, twin to Zetes; Remus, twin to Romulus; Demophoön, twin to Triptolemus; the Edomite Perez, twin to Zarah; Abel, twin to Cain; and many more. Hercules is now lover to fifty water-priestesses of the Mountain-goddess in whose honour he wears a lion’s skin. The twins’ joint reign is fixed at eight years, apparently because at every hundredth lunar month occurs a rough approximation of lunar and solar times. Llew Llaw Gyffes (‘the Lion with the Steady Hand’) is true to type when in the Romance of Math the Son of Mathonwy he takes Gwydion as his twin to visit his mother Arianrhod. For each year that the reign of this agricultural Hercules is prolonged he offers a child-victim in his stead; which explains the Greek legends of Hercules killing children by accident or in a fit of madness, and the destruction by fire, after a temporary investiture as king, of various unfortunate young princes, among them Gwern, nephew of Bran; Phaëthon, son of Helios; Icarus, son of Daedalus, who flew too near the sun; Demophoön, son of Celeus of Eleusis, whom Demeter was trying to immortalize; and Dionysus son of Cretan Zeus. It also explains the child-sacrifices of Phoenicia, including those offered to Jehovah Melkarth in the Valley of Hinnom (or Gehenna) the home of the undying serpent, where the sacrificial fire was never quenched.

  The custom of burning a child to death as an annual surrogate for the sacred king is well illustrated in the myth of Thetis, Peleus and Achilles. Peleus was an Achaean fratricide in exile from Aegina and became King of Iolcus with a co-king Acastus, in succession to the co-kings Pelias and Neleus. Thetis, a Thessalian Sea goddess, is described by the mythographers either as a daughter of Cheiron the Centaur, or as one of the fifty Nereids, from whom she was chosen to be a wife to Zeus. Zeus changed his mind because of an oracle and gave her in marriage to Peleus, to whom she bore seven children, six of whom she burned to death. The seventh, Achilles, was rescued by Peleus in the nick of time – like the infant Aesculapius. The first six had been given immortality by the burning process; with Achilles the process had not yet been completed – his heel was still vulnerable. Thetis fled and Peleus gave Achilles into the custody of Cheiron who tutored him; later Achilles ruled over the Myrmidons of Pthiotis and brought a contingent of them to fight at Troy. When offered the choice of a brief but glorious life or a long and undistinguished one, he chose the brief one.

  The myth has kept its main outlines pretty well despite the inability of later editors to understand the system of matrilinear succession. There was a shrine of the Moon-goddess Artemis, alias Nereis, or Thetis, at Iolcus, the chief port of Southern Thessaly, with an attached college of fifty priestesses. This Artemis was a patroness of fishermen and sailors. One of the priestesses was chosen every fiftieth month as representative of the Goddess; perhaps she was the winner of a race. She took a yearly consort who became the Oak-king, or Zeus, of the region and was sacrificed at the close of his term of office. By the time that the Achaeans had established the Olympian religion in Thessaly (it is recorded that all the gods and goddesses attended Peleus’s marriage to Thetis) the term had been extended to eight, or perhaps seven, years, and a child sacrificed every winter solstice until the term was complete. (Seven years instead of the Great Year of eight seems to be a blunder of the mythographers; but from the Scottish witch-ballad of True Thomas it appears that seven years was the normal term for the Queen of Elphame’s consort to reign, and the Scottish witch cult had close affinities with primitive Thessalian religion.)

  Achilles, the lucky seventh (or perhaps eighth) child who was saved because Peleus himself had to die, was apparently one of the Centaurs of near-by Pelion with whom the Nereids of Iolcus had ancient exogamic ties and from whom Peleus would naturally choose his child victims – they would not be his own sons by Thetis. When Achilles grew up he became king of the Myrmidons of Pthiotis: presumably by marriage with the tribal representative of the Goddess. He can hardly have inherited the title from Peleus. (Myrmidon means ‘ant’, so it is likely that the wryneck, which feeds on ants and nests in willow-trees, sacred to the Goddess, was the local totem-bird; Philyra, Cheiron’s mother, is traditionally associated with the wryneck.) It is established that there was an Achilles cult in Greece before the Trojan War was fought, so the brief but glorious life was probably that of a stay-at-home king with a sacred heel who won immortality at death by becoming an oracular hero. Thetis was credited with the power to change her appearance; she was, in fact, served by various colleges of priestesses each with a different totem beast or bird – mare, she-bear, crane, fish, wryneck and so on.

  The same myth has been twisted in a variety of ways. In some versions the emphasis is on the mock-marriage, which was an integral part of the coronation. The Argive myth of the fifty Danaids who were married to the fifty sons of Aegyptus and killed all but one on their common wedding night, and the Perso-Egypto-Greek myth of Tobit and Raguel’s daughter whose seven previous husbands had all been killed by the demon Asmodeus – in Persian, Aēshma Daēva – on their wedding night, are originally identical.

  The various contradictory versions of the Danaid myth help us to understand the ritual from which it originated. Pindar in his Fourth Pythian Ode says that the brides were pardoned, purified by Hermes and Athene and offered as prizes to the victors of public games. Later authorities, such as Ovid and Horace, say that they were not pardoned but condemned everlastingly to pour water into a vessel full of holes. Herodotus says that they brought the mysteries of Demeter to Argos and taught them to the Pelasgian women. Others say that four of them were worshipped at Argos because they provided the city with water. The real story seems to be that the Danaids were an Argive college of fifty priestesses of the Barley-goddess Danaë, who was interested in giving rain to the crops and was worshipped under four different divine titles; pouring water through a vessel with holes so that it looked like rain was their usual rain-bringing charm. Every four years at the fiftieth lunar month a contest was held as to who should become the Hercules, or Zeus, of the next four years and the lover of these fifty priestesses. This term was afterwards prolonged to eight years, with the usual yearly sacrifice of a child. Danaan Argos was captured by the Sons of Aegyptus who invaded the Peloponnese from Syria, and many of the Danaans who resisted them were driven northward out of Greece; as has already been mentioned.

  In the Book of Tobit, Tobit is the lucky eighth, the new Zeus bridegroom, who escapes his fate when the reigning Zeus has to die at the end of his term. Asmodeus is the Persian counterpart of Set, the yearly murderer of Osiris, but he is charmed away with the fish of immortality and flees to his southern deserts. Tobit’s dog is a helpful clue; he always accompanied Hercules Melkarth, or his Persian counterpart Sraosha, or the Greek Aesculapius, wherever he went.

  A typical set of taboos binding this Hercules is quoted by Sir James Frazer in his Golden Bough: they were applied to the Flamen Dialis, the successor of the Sacred King of Rome whose war-leadership passed to the twin Consuls at the foundation of the Republic.

  The Flamen Dialis might not ride or even touch a horse, nor see an army under arms, nor wear a ring which was not broken, nor have a knot in any part of his garments; no fire except a sacred one might be taken out of his house; he might not touch wheaten flour or leavened bread; he might not touch or even name a goat, a dog, raw meat, beans and ivy; he might not walk under a vine; the feet of his bed had to be daubed with mud; his hair could be cut only by a free man and with a bronze knife; and his hair and nails when cut had to be buried under a lucky t
ree; he might not touch a dead body nor enter a place where one was buried; he might not see work being done on holy days; he might not be uncovered in the open air; if a man in bonds were taken into his house, the captive had to be unbound and the cords had to be drawn up through a hole in the roof and so let down into the street.

  Frazer should have added that the Flamen owed his position to a sacred marriage with the Flaminica: Plutarch records in his Roman Questions (50) that he could not divorce her, and had to resign his office if she died.

  In Ireland this Hercules was named Cenn Cruaich, ‘the Lord of the Mound’, but after his supersession by a more benignant sacred king was remembered as Cromm Cruaich (‘the Bowed One of the Mound’). In a Christian poem occurring in the eleventh-century Book of Leinster he is thus described:

  Here once dwelt

  A high idol of many fights,

  The Cromm Cruaich by name,

  And deprived every tribe of peace.

  Without glory in his honour,

  They would sacrifice their wretched children

  With much lamentation and danger,

  Pouring their blood around Cromm Cruaich.

  Milk and corn

  They would urgently desire of him,

  In barter for one-third of their healthy offspring –

  Their horror of him was great.

  To him the noble Goidels

  Would prostrate themselves;

  From the bloody sacrifices offered him

  The plain is called ‘The Plain of Adoration’.

  They did evilly,

  Beat on their palms, thumped their bodies,

  Wailing to the monster who enslaved them,

  Their tears falling in showers.

  In a rank stand

  Twelve idols of stone;

  Bitterly to enchant the people

  The figure of the Cromm was of gold.

  From the reign of Heremon,

  The noble and graceful,

  Such worshipping of stones there was

  Until the coming of good Patrick of Macha.

  It is likely enough that this cult was introduced into Ireland in the reign of Heremon, the nineteenth King of All Ireland, the date of whose accession is traditionally given as 1267 BC, though Dr. Joyce, a reliable modern authority, makes it 1015 BC. Heremon, one of the invading Milesians from Spain, became sole monarch of Ireland by his victory over the armies of the North and put his enemies under heavy tribute.

  (The Milesians of Irish legend are said to have originated in Greece early in the second millennium BC and to have taken many generations to reach Ireland, after wandering about the Mediterranean. The Milesians of Greek legend claimed descent from Miletus, a son of Apollo, who emigrated from Crete to Caria in very early times, and built the city of Miletus; there was another city of the same name in Crete. The Irish Milesians similarly claimed to have visited Crete and to have gone thence to Syria, and thence by way of Carenia in Asia Minor to Gaetulia in North Africa, Baelduno or Baelo, a port near Cadiz, and Breagdun or Brigantium (now Compostella), in North-western Spain. Among their ancestors were Gadel – perhaps a deity of the river Gadylum on the southern coast of the Black Sea near Trebizond; ‘Niulus or Neolus of Argos’; Cecrops of Athens; and ‘Scota daughter of the king of Egypt’.

  If this account makes any sense it refers to a westward migration from the Aegean to Spain in the late thirteenth century BC when, as we have seen, a wave of Indo-Europeans from the north, among them the Dorian Greeks, was slowly displacing the Mycenaean ‘Peoples of the Sea’ from Greece, the Aegean Islands, and Asia Minor.

  Neleus (if this is the ‘Niulus or Neolus’ of the Irish legend) was a Minyan, an Aeolian Greek, who reigned over Pylos, a Peloponnese kingdom that traded extensively with the western Mediterranean. The Achaeans subdued him in a battle from which only his son Nestor (a garrulous old man at the time of the Trojan War) escaped. Neleus was reckoned a son of the Goddess Tyro, and she was mother also of Aeson the Minyan, who was rejuvenated in the Cauldron, and Amythaon – Amathaon again? Tyro was probably the Goddess of the Tyrrhenians who were expelled from Asia Minor and sailed to Italy a century or two later. These Tyrrhenians, usually known as Etruscans, dated their national existence from 967 BC. Cecrops appears in Greek legend as the first Greek king of Attica and the reputed originator of barley-cake offerings to Zeus. Scota, who has been confused in Irish legend with the ancestor of the Cottians, is apparently Scotia (‘The Dark One’), a well-known Greek title of the Sea-goddess of Cyprus. The Milesians would naturally have brought the cult of the Sea-goddess and of her son Hercules with them to Ireland, and found the necessary stone-altars already in position.)

  In the Peloponnese the Olympic Games were the occasion of this agricultural Hercules’s death and of the election of his successor. The legend is that they were founded in celebration of Zeus’s emasculation of Cronos; since the tomb of the early Achaean Oak-king Pelops was at Olympia, this means that the oak-cult was there superimposed on the Pelasgian barley-cult. The most ancient event in the Games was a race between fifty young priestesses of the Goddess Hera for the privilege of becoming the new Chief Priestess. Hercules was cut into pieces and eucharistically eaten as before, until perhaps the later Achaeans put an end to the practice, and for centuries after retained some of his oak-tree characteristics: he was known as the ‘green Zeus’. The sacrifice of the agricultural Hercules, or the victim offered in his stead, continued to take place within a stone-circle dedicated to the Barley Mother. At Hermion, near Corinth, the stone-circle was in ritual use until Christian times.

  Hercules of Canopus, or Celestial Hercules, is a fusion of the first two types of Hercules with Asclepius, or Aesculapius, the God of Healing, himself a fusion of the Barley-god with a Fire-god. Aesculapius is described by mythographers as a son of Apollo, partly because Apollo in Classical times was identified with the Sun-god Helios, partly because the priesthood of the Aesculapian cult, which was derived from that of Thoth, the Egyptian god of healing and inventor of letters, had been driven from Phoenicia (about the year 1400 BC?) and taken refuge in the islands of Cos, Thasos and Delos, where Apollo was by then the ruling deity. When in the fifth century BC Herodotus tried to extract information about Canopic Hercules from the Egyptian priests, they referred him to Phoenicia as the land of his origin. We know that the Phoenician Hercules, Melkarth (‘King of the City’), died yearly and that the quail was his bird of resurrection; which means that when the migrant quail arrives in Phoenicia early in March from the South, the oak begins to leaf and the new King celebrates his royal marriage. Melkarth was revived when Esmun (‘He whom we invoke’), the local Aesculapius, held a quail to his nose. The quail is notorious for its pugnacity and lechery. But at Canopus, in the Nile Delta, the cults of Melkarth and Esmun, or Hercules and Aesculapius, appear to have been fused by Egyptian philosophers: Hercules was worshipped both as the healer and as the healed. Apollo himself had reputedly been born on Ortygia (‘Quail Island’), the islet off Delos; so Canopic Hercules is Apollo, too, in a sense – is Apollo, Aesculapius (alias Cronos, Saturn or Bran), Thoth, Hermes (whom the Greeks identified with Thoth), Dionysus (who in the early legends is an alias of Hermes), and Melkarth, to whom King Solomon, as son-in-law to King Hiram, was priest, and who immolated himself on a pyre, like Hercules of Oeta. Hercules Melkarth was also worshipped at Corinth under the name of Melicertes, the son of the Pelasgian White Goddess Ino of Pelion.

  Hercules becomes more glorious still, as Celestial Hercules. The mythographers record that he borrowed the golden cup of the Sun, shaped like a water lily or lotus, for the homeward journey from one of his Labours. This was the cup in which the Sun, after sinking in the West, nightly floated round again to the East along the world-girdling Ocean stream. The lotus, which grows as the Nile rises, typified fertility, and so attached itself to the Egyptian sun-cult. ‘Hercules’ in Classical Greece became in fact another name for the Sun. Celestial Hercules was worshipped both as the undying Sun, and as the cont
inually dying and continually renewed Spirit of the Year – that is, both as a god and as a demi-god. This is the type of Hercules whom the Druids worshipped as Ogma Sun-face, the lion-skinned inventor of Letters,1 god of eloquence, god of healing, god of fertility, god of prophecy; and whom the Greeks worshipped as ‘assigner of titles’, as ruler of the Zodiac, as president of festivals, as founder of cities, as healer of the sick, as patron of archers and athletes.

  Hercules is represented in Greek art as a bull-necked champion, and may for all practical purposes be identified with the demi-god Dionysus of Delphi, whose totem was a white bull. Plutarch of Delphi, a priest of Apollo, in his essay On Isis and Osiris compares the rites of Osiris with those of Dionysus. He writes: