The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  The end of the poem, from stanza 27 onwards, is a separate piece, not Gwion’s work, dating perhaps from the year 1210 when, in the reign of King Llewelyn ap Iowerth, King John of England invaded North Wales and temporarily conquered it.

  Dr. Ifor Williams has expressed surprise that in the middle of Gwion’s Câd Goddeu occurs the Triad:

  The three greatest tumults of the world –

  The Deluge, the Crucifixion, the Day of Judgement.

  This seems to be a variant text of the lines I have printed from Nash’s translation, and which occur twice in the poem:

  One of them relating

  The story of the Deluge

  And of the Cross of Christ

  And of the Day of Judgement near at hand.

  Dr. Williams’ s version makes perfect sense also in the Boibel-Loth story of Hercules riding on the flood in his golden cup – sacrificed on the mountain – judging and establishing. The Apostles’ Creed, indeed, is the same old story – ‘conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary – suffered, was sacrificed – shall come to judge the quick and the dead.’

  It is possible that the Apostles’ Creed, the earliest Latin version of which is quoted by the second-century Tertullian, was originally composed by some Gnostic Christian in Egypt and syncretically modelled on the Hercules formula. For ‘conceived by the Holy Ghost’, when read in the Gnostic light, has a direct reference to the Flood. In Gnostic theory – the Gnostics first appear as a sect in the first century BC – Jesus was conceived in the mind of God’s Holy Spirit, who was female in Hebrew and, according to Genesis I, 2, ‘moved on the face of the waters’. The Virgin Mary was the physical vessel in which this concept was incarnate and ‘Mary’ to the Gnostics meant ‘Of the Sea’. The male Holy Ghost is a product of Latin grammar – spiritus is masculine – and of early Christian mistrust of female deities or quasi-deities. Conception by a male principle is illogical and this is the only instance of its occurrence in all Latin literature. The masculinization of the Holy Spirit was assisted by a remark in the First Epistle of St. John, that Jesus would act as a paraclete or advocate for man with God the Father; in the Gospel of St John the same figure is put in Jesus’s own mouth in a promise that God will send them a paraclete (usually translated ‘comforter’) after he has gone; and this paraclete, a masculine noun, understood as a mystical emanation of Jesus, was wrongly identified with the archaic Spirit that moved on the face of the waters. The Gnostics, whose language was Greek, identified the Holy Spirit with Sophia, Wisdom; and Wisdom was female. In the early Christian Church the Creed was uttered only at baptism, which was a ceremony of initiation into the Christian mystery and at first reserved for adults; baptism was likewise a preliminary to participation in the Greek mysteries on which the Christian were modelled, as in the Druidic mysteries.

  The town of Eleusis, where the most famous mysteries of all took place, was said to be named after the Attic King Eleusis. Eleusis means ‘Advent’ and the word was adopted in the Christian mysteries to signify the arrival of the Divine Child; in English usage it comprises Christmas and the four preceding weeks. The mother of Eleusis was ‘Daeira, daughter of Oceanus’, ‘the Wise One of the Sea’, and was identified with Aphrodite the Minoan Dove-goddess who rose from the sea at Paphos in Cyprus every year with her virginity renewed. King Eleusis was another name for the Corn-Dionysus, whose life-story was celebrated at the Great Mysteries, a Harvest Thanksgiving festival in late September; and his father was sometimes said to be Ogygus, or Ogyges, the Theban king in whose reign the great flood took place which engulfed the corn-lands of Boeotia. At an early stage of the yearly Eleusinian Mysteries the Divine Child, son of the Wise One who came from the Sea, was produced by mystagogues, dressed as shepherds, for the adoration of the celebrants. He was seated in a liknos, or osier harvest-basket. To judge from the corresponding myths of Moses, Taliesin, Llew Llaw, and Romulus, the mystagogues declared that they found him on the river bank where he had landed after sailing over the flood in this same harvest-basket, caulked with sedge. It will shortly be mentioned that the liknos was used not only as harvest-basket, manger and cradle, but also as winnowing sieve; the method was to shovel up the corn and chaff together while the wind was blowing strong and sieve them through the osiers; the chaff was blown away and the corn fell in a heap. The Mysteries probably originated as a winnowing feast, for they took place some weeks after the wheat-harvest, and at the time of the equinoctial winds.

  An interesting survival of these winnowing-feast mysteries is the Majorcan xiurell or white clay whistle, decorated in red and green, and hand-made in the traditional shapes of mermaid, coiled serpent, bull-headed man, full-skirted woman with a round hat rocking a baby in her arms, or with a flower instead of a baby, the same with a moon-disk surmounted by cow’s horns, man with a tall peaked hat and arms upraised in adoration, and little man riding on a hornless, prick-eared, long-legged animal with a very short muzzle. It figures, with quince-boughs and boughs of the sorb-apple, in an ecclesiastical festival held at the village of Bonanova near Palma when the villagers perambulate a hill at night on the first Sunday after the 12th of September (the Feast of the Blessed Name of the Virgin Mary) which corresponds with the 23rd of September Old Style. The object of the whistle must originally have been to induce the North-East winnowing winds which, according to the local almanack, begin to blow at this season and which at the end of the month summon rain clouds from the Atlantic Ocean to soak the winter wheat planted earlier in the month. But this is forgotten: winnowing in Majorca is now done at any time after the harvest and not celebrated with any festivities. The mermaid, locally called a ‘siren’, evidently represents Daeira (Aphrodite) the moon-mother of Eleusis (the Corn-Dionysus who is shown with her in the woman-and-baby xiurell); the bull-headed man is Dionysus himself grown to manhood; the man in the hat is a Tutor, or gran mascara; the little rider is likely to be Dionysus again but the species of his tall mount is indeterminate. The quince-boughs, sorb-boughs, and the white clay are also in honour of the Goddess – now invoked as the Virgin Mary. The Serpent is the wind itself. Since this is the only time of the year when wind is welcomed by the Majorcans who, being largely arboricultural, fear the sirocco as they fear the Devil – the farmer’s purse, as they say, hangs on the bough of a tree – the sound of whistling is not heard in the island except in the xiurell season. The ploughman sings as he drives his mule and the schoolboy as he runs home from school; for the rest furbis, flabis, flebis – ‘whistle shrill, weep long’. More about the White Goddess and whistling for wind will be found in Chapter Twenty-four.

  King Ogygus’ is a name invented to explain why Eleusis was called ‘Ogygiades’. There was really no such king as Eleusis: Eleusis signified the Advent of the Divine Child. And the Child was not really a son of Ogygus: he was the son of the Queen of the Island of Ogygia, namely Calypso. And Calypso was Daeira, or Aphrodite, again – the Wise One of the Sea, the spirit who moved upon the face of the waters. The fact was that, like Taliesin and Merlin and Llew Llaw and probably in the original version Moses1 too, Eleusis had no father, only a virgin mother; he originated before the institution of fatherhood. To the patriarchal Greeks this seemed shameful and they therefore fathered him on either ‘Ogygus’ or Hermes – but more generally on Hermes because of the sacred phalluses displayed at the festival, heaped in the same useful liknos. The Vine-Dionysus once had no father, either. His nativity appears to have been that of an earlier Dionysus, the Toadstool-god; for the Greeks believed that mushrooms and toadstools were engendered by lightning – not sprung from seed like all other plants. When the tyrants of Athens, Corinth and Sicyon legalized Dionysus-worship in their cities, they limited the orgies, it seems, by substituting wine for toadstools; thus the myth of the Toadstool-Dionysus became attached to the Vine-Dionysus, who now figured as a son of Semele the Theban and Zeus, Lord of Lightning. Yet Semele was sister of Agave, who tore off her son Pentheus’ head in a Dionysiac frenzy. To the learned Gwion the Vine-D
ionysus and the Corn-Dionysus were both recognizably Christ, Son of Alpha – that is, son of the letter A:

  The wheat rich in grain,

  And red flowing wine

  Christ’s pure body make,

  Son of Alpha.

  According to the Talmudic Targum Yerushalmi on Genesis II, 7, Jehovah took dust from the centre of the earth and from all quarters of the earth and mingled it with waters of all the seas to create Adam. The angel Michael collected the dust. Since the Jewish rabbis preferred to alter rather than destroy ancient traditions which seemed damaging to their new cult of transcendent Jehovah, an original story may be postulated in which Michal (not Michael) of Hebron, the goddess from whom David derived his title of King by marriage with her priestess, was Adam’s creatrix. David married Michal at Hebron, and Hebron may be called the centre of the earth, from its position near the junction of two seas and the three ancient continents. This identification of Michal with Michael would seem forced, were it not that the name Michael occurs only in post-exilic writings, and is not therefore a part of ancient Jewish tradition, and that in A Discourse on Mary by Cyril of Jerusalem, printed by Budge in his Miscellaneous Coptic Texts, this passage occurs:

  It is written in the Gospel to the Hebrews [a lost gospel of the Ebionites, supposedly the original of St. Matthew] that when Christ wished to come upon earth to men, the Good Father called a mighty power in the Heavens which was called Michael and committed Christ to its care. And the power descended on earth and was called Mary, and Christ was in her womb seven months, after which she gave birth to him….

  The mystical Essene Ebionites of the first century AD believed in a female Holy Spirit; and those members of the sect who embraced Christianity and developed into the second-century Clementine Gnostics made the Virgin Mary the vessel of this Holy Spirit – whom they named Michael (‘Who is like God?’). According to the Clementines, whose religious theory is popularized in a novel called The Recognitions,1 the identity of true religion in all ages depends on a series of incarnations of the Wisdom of God, of which Adam was the first and Jesus the last. In this poem of Gwion’s, Adam has no soul after his creation until Eve animates him.

  But Caleb, according to the Hanes Taliesin riddle, conveyed the Holy Spirit to Hebron when, in the time of Joshua, he ousted the Anakim from the shrine of Machpelah. Machpelah, an oracular cave cut from the rock, was the sepulchre of Abraham, and Caleb went there to consult his shade. The priestly editor of Genesis describes it as the sepulchre also of Sarah and Jacob (Genesis XXIII, 19; XXV, 9; L, 13) and in XXXV, 29 implies that Isaac was buried there too. The statement about Jacob is contradicted in Genesis L, 11, where it is said that he was buried in Abel-Mizraim. Moreover, Isaac originally lived at Beer-Lahai-Roi (Genesis XXIV, 62; XXV, 11) where he probably had an oracular shrine at one time, for Beer-Lahai-Roi means ‘the Well of the Antelope’s Jawbone’ and if Isaac was a Boibalos, or Antelope-king, his prophetic jawbone – jawbones were the rule in oracular shrines, usually stored there, it seems, with the hero’s navel-string – would naturally give its name to the well; there was a sacred cave near by, which eventually became a Christian chapel. Thus it is likely that neither Isaac nor Jacob nor their ‘wives’ were at first associated with the cave. The story of its purchase from Ephron (a ‘Power’, as I suggest, of the Boibel-Loth) and the Children of Heth, usually regarded as Hittites, is told in Genesis XXIII. Though late and much edited, this chapter seems to record a friendly arrangement between the devotees of the Goddess Sarah, the Goddess of the tribe of Isaac, and their allies the devotees of the Goddess Heth (Hathor? Tethys?) who owned the shrine: Sarah was forced out of Beer-Lahai-Roi by another tribe and came to seek an asylum at near-by Hebron. Since Sarah was a Laughing Goddess and her progeny was destined to be ‘like the sand of the sea shore’ she was evidently a Sea-goddess of the Aphrodite type.

  All that is needed to clinch this argument in poetic logic is for Caleb in Jewish tradition to have married someone called Michal who was a representative of the local Sea-goddess. He did even better: he married Miriam.1 (The Talmudic tradition is that ‘she was neither beautiful nor in good health’). The equation that follows is: Miriam I = Holy Spirit = Michal = Michael = Miriam II. Michael, then, was regarded as the instrument chosen for the creation of the First Adam, and used Hebron dust and sea water; and Jesus was the Second Adam; and Michael, or Miriam (‘Sea-brine’) the Virgin Mary, was similarly the instrument of his creation.

  Jesus was also held to have fulfilled the prophecy in the 110th Psalm:

  Jehovah has sworn and will not repent: thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.

  This is enlarged upon in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews. Melchizedek (Genesis XIV, 18–20) the Sacred King of Salem who welcomed ‘Abraham’ to Canaan (‘Abraham’ being in this sense the far-travelled tribe that came down into Palestine from Armenia at the close of the third millennium BC) ‘had neither father nor mother’. ‘Salem’ is generally taken to mean Jerusalem and it is probable that Salem occurs in the Boibel-Loth as a compliment to Melchizedek, who was priest to the Supreme God. But J. N. Schofield in his Historical Background to the Bible notes that to this day the people of Hebron have not forgiven David for moving his capital to Jerusalem (‘Holy Salem’) which they refer to as ‘The New Jerusalem’ as though Hebron were the authentic one. There is a record in the Talmud of a heretical sect of Jews, called Melchizedekians, who frequented Hebron to worship the body (consult the spirit?) of Adam which was buried in the cave of Machpelah. If these Melchizedekians worshipped Adam, the only other character in the Bible who had neither father nor mother, they were doubtless identifying Melchizedek’s kingship with the autochthonous Adam’s. For Adam, ‘the red man’, seems to have been the original oracular hero of Machpelah; it is likely that Caleb consulted his shade not Abraham’s, unless Adam and Abraham are titles of the same hero. Elias Levita, the fifteenth-century Hebrew commentator, records the tradition that the teraphim which Rachel stole from her father Laban were mummified oracular heads and that the head of Adam was among them. If he was right, the Genesis narrative refers to a seizure of the oracular shrine of Hebron by Saul’s Benjamites from the Calebites.

  Caleb was an Edomite clan; which suggests the identification of Edom with Adam: they are the same word, meaning ‘red’. But if Adam was really Edom, one would expect to find a tradition that the head of Esau, the ancestor of the Edomites, was also buried at Hebron; and this is, in fact, supplied by the Talmud. The artificial explanation given there is that Esau and his sons opposed the burial of Jacob in the Cave of Machpelah on the ground that it was an Edomite possession; that Joseph, declaring that it had ceased to be Edomite when Jacob sold his birthright to Esau, sent to Egypt for the relevant documents; that a fight ensued in which the sons of Jacob were victorious and Esau was beheaded at one stroke by a dumb Danite; that Esau’s body was carried off for burial on Mount Seir by his sons; and that his head was buried at Hebron by Joseph.

  Melchizedek’s lack of a father is intelligible, but why should he have no mother? Perhaps the stories of Moses, Llew Llaw, Romulus and Cretan Zeus explain this. In every case the boy is removed from his mother as soon as born. Thus, in effect, he has no mother; usually a goat, a wolf or a pig suckles him and he passes under the care of tutors. It is the transitional stage from matriarchy to patriarchy. In the Eleusinian Mysteries the Divine Child was carried in by shepherds, not by his mother or by a nurse.

  The seventh and eighth stanzas of Yr Awdil Vraith are the strangest of all:

  Twice five, ten and eight,

  She was self-bearing,

  The mixed burden

  Of man-woman.

  And once, not hidden,

  She brought forth Abel,

  And Cain the solitary

  Homicide.

  This means, I suppose, that Eve bore twenty-eight children, acting as her own midwife, then Cain and Abel and the…A stanza has been suppressed: a stanza evidently containing the Sethian heresy,
a well-known development of the Clementine syncretic theory, in which Seth was viewed as an earlier incarnation of Jesus.1 It will be recalled that Rhea figures in the Hanes Taliesin riddle – Rhea as the mother both of Cretan Zeus and Romulus. The legend was that she bore a number of children, all of whom Saturn her lover ate, until finally she bore Zeus who escaped and eventually avenged his brothers on Saturn by castrating him. Gwion is hinting that Eve, whom he identifies with Rhea, brought forth thirty children in all – and then the Divine Child Seth. Thirty doubtless because the ‘reign of Saturn’ lasted thirty days and culminated with the midwinter feast which afterwards became Yule, or Christmas. The letter R (Riuben or Rhea or Reu in the Boibel-Loth, and Ruis in the Beth-Luis-Nion) is allotted to the last month of the year. The reign of Saturn therefore corresponds with the Christian period of Advent, preliminary to the Day of the birth of the Divine Child. Sir James Frazer gives details of this thirty-day period in the Golden Bough, in his account of the fourth-century martyr St. Dasius. The Clementines rejected the orthodox story of the Fall as derogatory to the dignity of Adam and Eve, and Gwion in his version similarly puts the blame for their expulsion wholly on Satan.

  The ‘twelve young men, four of them angels’ (i.e. evangels), are evidently the twelve tribes of Israel, four of whom – Joseph, Simeon (Simon), Judah (Jude) and Levi (Matthew) – gave their names to books in the early canon of the New Testament; and they perhaps represent the twelve signs of the Zodiac in Clementine syncretism.