The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  The affair about the Titans and the Night of Accomplishment corresponds with what are called ‘Tearings to pieces’, ‘Resurrections’ and ‘Regenerations’ in the rites of Osiris. The same applies to burial rites. There are burial chests of Osiris in many Egyptian cities; similarly we claim at Delphi that the remains of Dionysus are buried near the place of the Oracle. And our consecrated priests perform a secret sacrifice in Apollo’s sanctuary at the time of the awakening of the Divine Child by the Thyiades.

  Thus ‘Hercules’ is seen to be also another name for Osiris whose yearly death is still celebrated in Egypt, even after thirteen centuries of Mohammedanism. Rubber is now used for the traditional fertility symbol; prodigiously inflated, it still excites the same cries of laughter and grief as in the days of Joseph the Patriarch and Joseph the Carpenter.

  Plutarch carefully distinguishes Apollo (Hercules as god) from Dionysus (Hercules as demi-god). This Apollo never dies, never changes his shape; he is eternally young, strong and beautiful. Dionysus perpetually changes, like Proteus the Pelasgian god, or Periclymenus the Minyan, son of Neleus, or the ancient Irish Uath Mac Immomuin (‘Horror son of Terror’), into an infinity of shapes. So Pentheus in the Bacchae of Euripides charges him to appear ‘as a wild bull, as a many-headed snake, or as a fire-breathing lion’ – whichever he pleases: almost exactly in the words of the Welsh bard Cynddelw, a contemporary of Gruffudd ap Kynan’s: Yn rith llew rac llyw goradein, yn rith dreic rac dragon prydein.

  Thus in Britain, Amathaon was Hercules as Dionysus; his father Beli was Hercules as Apollo.

  Plutarch writes, in his essay On the Ei at Delphi, revealing as much Orphic secret doctrine as he dares:

  In describing the manifold changes of Dionysus into winds, water, earth, stars and growing plants and animals, they use the riddling expressions ‘render asunder’ and ‘tearing limb from limb’. And they call the god ‘Dionysus’ or ‘Zagreus’ (‘the torn’) or ‘The Night Sun’ or ‘The Impartial Giver’, and record various Destructions, Disappearances, Resurrections and Rebirths, which are their mythographic account of how those changes came about.

  That Gwion knew Hercules to be another name for Ogma Sun-face, the inventor of the Ogham alphabet, is made perfectly clear in his Elegy on ‘Ercwlf’ where the alphabet figures as the four pillars, of five letters each, that support the whole edifice of literature:

  MARWNAD ERCWLF

  The earth turns,

  So night follows day.

  When lived the renowned

  Ercwlf, chief of baptism?

  Ercwlf said

  He did not take account of death.

  The shield of Mordei

  By him was broken.

  Ercwlf placed in order,

  Impetuous, frantic,

  Four columns of equal height,

  Red gold upon them,

  A work not easily to be believed,

  Easily believed it will not be.

  The heat of the sun did not vex him;

  None went nearer heaven

  Than he went.

  Ercwlf the wall-breaker,

  Thou art beneath the sand;

  May the Trinity give thee

  A merciful day of judgement.

  ‘The shield of Mordei’ is a reference to the famous Battle of Catterick Bridge in the late sixth century AD:

  Ym Mordei ystyngeo dyledawr.

  ‘In Mordei he laid low the mighty.’

  The ‘he’ is a British hero named Erthgi, presumably a reincarnation of Ercwlf, who ‘went to Catterick in the dawn with the aspect of a prince in the shield-guarded battle-field’. The reference to Hercules as ‘Chief of Baptism’ identifies him with St. John the Baptist, in whose honour Hercules’s midsummer fires were lighted in Gwion’s day. As Sir James Frazer points out, Midsummer Day was always a water as well as a fire festival. ‘May the Trinity give thee a merciful day of judgement’ is Gwion’s view of Hercules as resident ‘in limbo patrum’ – in the abode of the just who had died before Jesus Christ’s advent. Baptism was not, of course, invented by the Christians. They had it from St. John, and he had it from the Hemero-baptists, a mysterious Hebrew sect usually regarded as a branch of the Pythagorean Essenes, who worshipped Jehovah in his Sun-god aspect. It should be observed that the devotees of the Thracian goddess Cotytto, the mother of the Cottians, had employed mystagogues called ‘Baptists’ – whether this was because they baptized the devotee before the orgies, or because they were charged with the ritual dipping (dyeing) of clothes or hair, is disputed – and that both the ancient Irish and ancient British used baptism before the Christians came. This is recorded in the Irish tales of Conall Derg and Conall Kernach, and the Welsh tale of Gwri of the Golden Hair.

  Taliesin’s name in Welsh means ‘radiant brow’, a characteristic of Apollo’s, but the ‘Tal’ syllable is often present in the primitive names of Hercules. In Crete he was Talus, the man of bronze, whom Medea killed. In Pelasgia he was the tortured Tan-talus, from whose name the word ‘tantalize’ derives. The Irish Tailltean Games are probably called after an agricultural Hercules the first syllable of whose name was Tal. In Syria he was Telmen. In Greece he was Atlas Telamon, and ‘Atlas’, like ‘Telamon’, was derived from the root Tla or Tal which contains the senses ‘take upon oneself’, ‘dare’, and ‘suffer’. Dr. MacCulloch suggests that ‘Taliesin’ is also a divine name and that the swallowing of the grain of corn by the black hen in the Romance of Taliesin proves Taliesin to have been a Barley-god.

  The time has now come to draw closely around the thicket where the Roebuck is known to be harboured. And here is a hunting song from Gwion’s poem, Angar Cyvyndawd:

  Bum Twrch ym Mynydd

  Bum cyff mewn rhaw

  Bum bwvall yn llaw.

  I have been a roebuck on the mountain,

  I have been a tree stump in a shovel,

  I have been an axe in the hand.

  But we must transpose the lines of the couplet, because logically the axe comes first, then the tree is cut down, and one cannot put the oak-stump into one’s shovel unless it has been reduced to ashes – which are afterwards used to fertilize the fields. So:

  I have been a roebuck on the mountain,

  I have been an axe in the hand,

  I have been a tree stump in a shovel.

  If one looks carefully again at the names of the fifteen consonants of the Boibel-Loth, or the Babel-Lota, one notices clear correspondences with Greek legend. Not only ‘Taliesin’ with ‘Talus’, and ‘Teilmon’ with ‘Telamon’, but ‘Moiria’ with the ‘Moirae’, the Three Fates; and ‘Cailep’ with ‘Calypso’, daughter of Atlas, whose island of Ogygia – placed by Plutarch in the Irish Seas – was protected by the very same enchantment as Morgan le Faye’s Avalon, Cerridwen’s Caer Sidi, or Niamh of the Golden Hair’s ‘Land of Youth’. Put the whole series of letter-names into the nearest Greek words that make any sort of sense, using Latin characters and allowing for the difference between Greek and Irish vowels (the ancillary I in Irish is used as a sign of a long vowel) and for transposition of letters. Retain the digamma (F or V) in words in which it originally occurred, such as ACHAIVA and DAVIZO, and use the Aeolic A for long E, in FORĒMENOS, NE-ĒGATOS, GĒTHEO.

  The consonants spell out the familiar story of Hercules in three chapters of five words each:

  BOIBEL B BOIBALION I, the Roebuck fawn (or Antelope-bull calf)

  LOTH L LŌTO- On the Lotus

  FORANN F FORĀMENON Ferried

  SALIA S SALOÖMAI Lurch to and Fro

  NEIAGADON N NE-ĀGATON New-born

  UIRIA H ŪRIOS I, the Guardian of Boundaries (or, the Benignant One)

  DAIBHEATH B DAVIZŌ Cleave wood.

  TEILMON T TELAMON or TLĀMŌN I, the Suffering One

  CAOI C CAIOMAI Am consumed by fire,

  CAILEP CC CALYPTOMAI Vanish.

  MOIRIA M MOIRAŌ I distribute,

  GATH G GĀTHEŌ I rejoice,

  NGOIMAR NG GNŌRIMOS I, the famous one,

 
; IDRA Y IDRYOMAI Establish,

  RHEA R RHEŌ I flow away.1

  The vowels do not spell out a story but they characterize the progress of Hercules through the five stations of the year, typified by the five petals of the Lotus-cup – Birth, Initiation, Marriage, Rest from Labour, and Death:

  ACHAIVA The Spinner – a title of Demeter, the White Goddess. (Compare also Acca in the Roman Hercules myth, and Acco the Greek bug-bear who devoured new-born children.)

  OSSA Fame. (Also the name of a sacred mountain in Magnesia, and a sacred hill at Olympia.)

  URANIA The Queen of Heaven. The word is perhaps derived from ouros, a mountain, and ana, queen. But Ura (oura) means the tail of a lion (sacred to Anatha, the Mountain-goddess, Queen of Heaven) and since the lion expresses anger with its tail the word may mean ‘The Queen with the Lion Tail’; certainly the Greek name for the Asp-Crown of Egypt which the Pharaohs wore by mother-right was ‘Uraeus’, meaning ‘of the Lion Tail’, the Asp being sacred to the same Goddess.

  (H)ESUCHIA Repose. The word is probably shortened in honour of the Celtic God Esus, who is shown in a Gaulish bas-relief plucking festal branches, with a left hand where his right should be.

  IACHEMA Shrieking, or Hissing.

  The boibalis or boibalus (also boubalis or boubalus) is the ferocious Libyan white antelope-ox or leucoryx, from which according to Herodotus the Phoenicians made the curved sides of their lyres – with which they celebrated Hercules Melkarth.

  Gwion’s version of the alphabet, with Rhea for Riuben, is older than O’Flaherty’s if O’Flaherty’s ‘Riuben’ stands for Rymbonao, ‘I swing about again’ – a word first used in the second century AD; the difference between Gwion’s ‘Salome’, and O’Flaherty’s ‘Salia’ also suggests that Gwion had an older version. That he has altered ‘Telamon’ to ‘Taliesin’ suggests that he is offering Talasinoös, ‘he that dares to suffer’, as an alternative to ‘Telamon’, which has the same meaning. Ne-esthan, the Greek Septuagint transliteration of ‘Nehushtan’ (2 Kings, XVIII, 4) as an equivalent of ne-ãgaton is puzzling. But since Nehushtan was a name of contempt, meaning ‘a piece of brass’, said to have been given by King Hezekiah to the therapeutic Serpent or Seraph when idolatrously worshipped by his subjects, it is possible that Gwion read the original holy name as the Greek Neo-sthenios, or Neo-sthenaros, ‘with new strength’, of which ‘Nehushtan’ was a Hebrew parody. This would imply that a Jew of Hellenistic times, not Hezekiah, invented the parody name; which is historically more plausible than the Biblical account. For it is incredible that Hezekiah took exception to idolatry: the Jews attempted to dispense with idols only in post-Exilic times.

  But though we have learned the secret story of the Spirit of the Year, the Name of the transcendent God still remains hidden. The obvious place to look for it is among the vowels, which are separated from the Hercules story told by the consonants; but Dog, Lapwing, and Roebuck must have learned wisdom after the Battle of the Trees and hidden their secret more deeply even than before.

  Gwion evidently knew the Name, and it was this knowledge that gave him his authority at Maelgwn’s Court. He says in the Cyst Wy’r Beirdd (‘Reproof of the Bards’):

  Unless you are acquainted with the powerful Name,

  Be silent, Heinin!

  As to the lofty Name

  And the powerful Name….

  The best hope of guessing it lies in finding out first what the Name was that Gwydion succeeded in discovering with Amathaon’s aid, and then what refinement he made on his discovery.

  1 The five-fold bond was reported from China by the Arab merchant Suleyman in 851 AD. He writes that ‘when the man condemned to death has been trussed up in this fashion, and beaten with a fixed number of blows, his body, still faintly breathing, is given over to those who must devour it’.

  1 The ape, the sacred animal which identified this Hercules with Thoth the inventor of Letters, does not seem to have become acclimatized in Western Europe. In Egypt, Thoth was sometimes portrayed as an ape, in Asia Minor he merely led one; the tradition apparently originates in India.

  1 As an alphabetic invocation it goes readily into English rhyme, with Kn standing for NG and J for Y:

  B ull-calf in

  L otus-cup

  F erried, or

  S waying

  N ew-dressed,

  H elpful

  D ivider, in

  T orment,

  C onsumed beyond

  Q uest,

  M ete us out

  G aiety,

  Kn ightliest

  J udge,

  R unning west.

  Chapter Nine

  GWION’S HERESY

  The concentrated essence of Druidic, as of Orphic Greek, philosophy was Rheo, ‘I flow away’, Gwion’s letter-name for R: – ‘Panta Rhei’, ‘all things flow’. The main problem of paganism is contained in Riuben, the alternative name for R, if this stands for Rymbonao: – ‘Must all things swing round again for ever? Or how can one escape from the Wheel?’ This was the problem of the blinded Sun-hero Samson when he was harnessed to the corn-mill of Gaza; and it should be noted that the term ‘corn-mill’ was applied in Greek philosophy to the revolving heavens. Samson resolved the problem magnificently by pulling down both posts of the temple so that the roof collapsed upon everyone. The Orphics had another, quieter solution and engraved it in cypher on gold tablets tied around the necks of their beloved dead. It was: not to forget, to refuse to drink the water of cypress-shaded Lethe however thirsty one might be, to accept water only from the sacred (hazel-shaded?) pool of Persephone, and thus to become immortal Lords of the Dead, excused further Tearings-to-Pieces, Destructions, Resurrections and Rebirths. The cypress was sacred to Hercules, who had himself planted the famous cypress grove at Daphne, and typified rebirth – and the word ‘cypress’ is derived from Cyprus, which was called after Cyprian Aphrodite, his mother. The cult of the sacred cypress is Minoan in origin and must have been brought to Cyprus from Crete.

  The Hercules-god of the Orphic mystics was Apollo the Hyperborean; and in the first century AD Aelian, the Roman historian, records that Hyperborean priests visited Tempe in Northern Greece regularly to worship Apollo. Diodorus Siculus in his quotation from Hecataeus makes it clear that in the sixth century BC the ‘land of the Hyperboreans’, where Apollo’s mother Latona was born, and where Apollo was honoured above all other gods, was Britain. This does not contradict Herodotus’s account of an altogether different Hyperborean priesthood, probably Albanian, living near the Caspian Sea; or the view that in Aelian’s time, Ireland, which lay outside the Roman Empire, may have been ‘the Land of the Hyperboreans’; or the view, which I propose later in this book, that the original Hyperboreans were Libyans.

  Edward Davies was justified in regarding these British priests as a sort of Orphics: dress, dogma, ritual and diet correspond closely. And since Câd Goddeu proves to have been a battle of letters rather than a battle of trees, his suggestion that the fabulous dance of trees to Orpheus’s lyre was, rather, a dance of letters, makes good historical and poetic sense.1 Orpheus is recorded by Diodorus to have used the Pelasgian alphabet. That Gwion identified the Celestial Hercules of the Boibel-Loth with the Orphic Apollo is plain from this perfectly clear passage embedded in the riddling mazes of Câd Goddeu:

  It is long since I was a herdsman.

  I travelled over the earth

  Before I became a learned person.

  I have travelled,

  I have made a circuit,

  I have slept in a hundred islands,

  I have dwelt in a hundred cities.

  Learned Druids,

  Prophesy ye of Arthur?

  Or is it me they celebrate?

  Only Apollo can be the ‘I’ of this passage. He was herdsman to Admetus, the Minyan king of Pherae in Thessaly, several centuries before he set up at Delphi as the Leader of the Muses. And as a pre-Greek oracular hero he had been laid to rest in a hundred sacred islands. Once the Greeks had found it
convenient to adopt him as their god of healing and music, hundreds of cities came to honour him and by Classical times he was making his daily and yearly circuit as the visible sun. Gwion is hinting to Heinin and the other court-bards that the true identity of the hero whom they thoughtlessly eulogize as King Arthur is Hercules-Dionysus, rex quondam, rex-que futurus (‘King once and King again to be’), who at his second coming will be the immortal Hercules-Apollo. But they will not understand. ‘It is long since I was a herdsman’ will convey nothing to them but a memory of Triad 85, where the Three Tribe Herdsmen of Britain are given as Gwydion who kept the herd of the tribe of Gwynedd, Bennren who kept the herd of Caradoc son of Bran consisting of 21,000 milch kine, and Llawnrodded Varvawc who kept the equally numerous herd of Nudd Hael. Gwion had fetched his learning from Ireland, and perhaps from Egypt, but re-grafted it on a British stock. For though Druidism as an organized religion had been dead in Wales for hundreds of years, reliques of Druidic lore were contained in the traditional corpus of minstrel poetry, and in popular religious ritual. The primitive Druidic cult, which involved ritual cannibalism after omens had been taken from the victim’s death struggle, had been suppressed by the Roman general Paulinus in 61 AD when he conquered Anglesey and cut down the sacred groves; the continental Druidism already adopted by the rest of Britain south of the Clyde was respectable Belin, or Apollo, worship of Celto-Thracian type.