The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  The stanza:

  Solomon obtained,

  In Babel’s tower,

  All the sciences

  Of Asia’s land.

  needs careful examination. ‘The confusion of languages after the fall of Babel’ was taken by Babylonian Jews to refer to the fall of the famous ziggorath, ‘the hanging gardens’, of Babylon. But the ziggorath, unlike the Tower of Babel, was completed. It is much more likely that the myth originates in the linguistic confusion caused by the Indo-Germanic conquest of Byblos, the Egyptianized metropolis of the People of the Sea, at the beginning of the second millennium BC. Doubtless there was a ‘babble oftongues’ in Babylon, but it was not caused by any sudden catastrophe, and the babblers could at least communicate with one another in the official Assyrian language. Whether or not the Byblians had begun work on a gigantic Egyptian temple at the time that the City was stormed and were unable to complete it, I do not know; but if they had done so their misfortune would naturally have been ascribed to divine jealousy at the innovation.

  Moreover, ‘Asia’ was the name of the mother by Iapetus, who appears in Genesis as Japhet, Noah’s son, of the ‘Pelasgians’ Atlas and Prometheus; thus the ‘Land of Asia’ in stanzas 6 and 24 is a synonym for the Eastern Mediterranean, though more properly it meant Southern Asia Minor. King Solomon who reigned about a thousand years after the original fall of Byblos – it had fallen and risen several times meanwhile – may well have learned his religious secrets from Byblos, which the Jews knew as Gebal, for the Byblians helped him to build his Temple. This is mentioned in 1 Kings, V, 18, though in the Authorised Version ‘the men of Gebal’ is mistranslated ‘stone-squarers’.

  And Solomon’s builders and Hiram’s builders did hew the stones, and the men of Gebal; so they prepared timber and stones to build the house.

  ‘Gebal’ means ‘mountain-height’. The deep wisdom of Byblos – from which the Greek word for ‘book’ (and the English word Bible) derives – is compared by Ezekiel, the prophet to whom the Essenes seem to have owed most, to that of Hiram’s Tyre (Ezekiel, XXVII, 8-9); Tyre was an early Cretan trading centre. Solomon certainly built his temple in Aegean style, closely resembling that of the Great Goddess at Hierapolis described by Lucian in his De De a Syria. There was a Danaan colony close to Byblos, dating from the fourteenth century BC.

  It is possible that though the Calebites interpreted ‘Adam’ as the Semitic word Edom (‘red’) the original hero at Hebron was the Danaan Adamos or Adamas or Adamastos, ‘the Unconquerable’, or ‘the Inexorable’, a Homeric epithet of Hades, borrowed from the Death Goddess his mother.

  1 But there may also have been a plainer meaning for the dance of trees. According to Apollonius Rhodius, the wild oak trees which Orpheus had led down from the Pierian mountain were still standing in ordered ranks in his day at Zonë in Thrace. If they were arranged as if for dancing that would mean not in a stiff geometrical pattern, such as a square, triangle or avenue, but in a curved one. Zonë (‘a woman’s girdle’) suggests a round dance in honour of the Goddess. Yet a circle of oaks, like a fastened girdle, would not seem to be dancing: the oaks would seem to be standing as sentinels around a dancing floor. The dance at Zonë was probably an orgiastic one of the loosened girdle’: for zone in Greek also means marriage, or the sexual act, the disrobing of a woman. It is likely therefore that a broad girdle of oaks planted in a double rank was coiled in on itself so that they seemed to be dancing spirally to the centre and then out again.

  1 Sir Flinders Petrie holds that Moses is an Egyptian word meaning ‘unfathered son of a princess’.

  1 Voltaire modelled his Candide on it and it has the distinction of appearing in the select list of books in Milton’s Areopagitica, along with John Skelton’s Poems, as deserving of permanent suppression.

  1 A similar marriage was that of Joshua to Rahab the Sea-goddess, who appears in the Bible as Rahab the Harlot. By this union, according to Sifre, the oldest Midrash, they had daughters only, from whom descended many prophets including Jeremiah; and Hannah, Samuel’s mother, was Rahab’s incarnation. The story of Samuel’s birth suggests that these ‘daughters of Rahab’ were a matrilinear college of prophetic priestesses by ritual marriage with whom Joshua secured his title to the Jericho valley. Since Rahab is also said to have married Salmon (and so to have become an ancestress of David and Jesus) it may well be that Salmon was the title that Joshua assumed at his marriage; for a royal marriage involved a ritual death and rebirth with a change of name, as when Jacob married Rachel the Dove-priestess and became Ish-Rachel or Israel – ‘Rachel’s man’.

  1 In the Ethiopian legends of Our Lady Mary, translated by Bridge, the Gnostic theory is clearly given. Hannah the ‘twenty-pillared tabernacle of Testimony’ who was the Virgin Mary’s mother, was one of a triad of sisters – of which the other two were another Mary and Sophia. ‘The Virgin first came down into the body of Seth, shining like a white pearl.’ Then successively entered Enos, Cainan…Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah…Abraham, Isaac, Jacob…David, Solomon…and Joachim. ‘And Joachim said to his wife Hannah: “I saw Heaven open and a white bird came therefrom and hovered over my head.” Now, this bird had its being in the days of old…It was the Spirit of Life in the form of a white bird and…became incarnate in Hannah’s womb when the pearl went forth from Joachim’s loins and…Hannah received it, namely the body of our Lady Mary. The white pearl is mentioned for its purity, and the white bird because Mary’s soul existed aforetime with the Ancient of Days…Thus bird and pearl are alike and equal.’ From the Body of Mary, the pearl, the white bird of the spirit thus entered into Jesus at the Baptism.

  Chapter Ten

  THE TREE ALPHABET (1)

  I first found the Beth-Luis-Nion tree-alphabet in Roderick O’Flaherty’s Ogygia; he presents it, with the Boibel-Loth, as a genuine relic of Druidism orally transmitted down the centuries. It is said to have been latterly used for divination only and consists of five vowels and thirteen consonants. Each letter is named after the tree or shrub of which it is the initial:

  Beth B Birch

  Luis L Rowan

  Nion N Ash

  Fearn F Alder

  Saille S Willow

  Uath H Hawthorn

  Duir D Oak

  Tinne T Holly

  Coll C Hazel

  Muin M Vine

  Gort G Ivy

  Pethboc P Dwarf Elder

  Ruis R Elder

  Ailm A Silver Fir

  Onn O Furze

  Ur U Heather

  Eadha E White Poplar

  Idho I Yew

  The names of the letters in the modern Irish alphabet are also those of trees, and most of them correspond with O’Flaherty’s list though T has become gorse; O, broom; and A, elm.

  I noticed almost at once that the consonants of this alphabet form a calendar of seasonal tree-magic, and that all the trees figure prominently in European folklore.

  B FOR BETH

  The first tree of the series is the self-propagating birch. Birch twigs are used throughout Europe in the beating of bounds and the flogging of delinquents – and formerly lunatics – with the object of expelling evil spirits. When Gwion writes in the Câd Goddeu that the birch ‘armed himself but late’ he means that birch twigs do not toughen until late in the year. (He makes the same remark about the willow and the rowan whose twigs were similarly put to ceremonial use.) Birch rods are also used in rustic ritual for driving out the spirit of the old year. The Roman lictors carried birch rods during the installation of the Consuls at this very same season; each Consul had twelve lictors, making a company of thirteen. The birch is the tree of inception. It is indeed the earliest forest tree, with the exception of the mysterious elder, to put out new leaves (April 1st in England, the beginning of the financial year), and in Scandinavia its leafing marks the beginning of the agricultural year, because farmers use it as a directory for sowing their Spring wheat. The first month begins immediately after the winter solstice, when the days af
ter shortening to the extreme limit begin to lengthen again.

  Since there are thirteen consonants in the alphabet, it is reasonable to regard the tree month as the British common-law ‘lunar’ month of twenty-eight days defined by Blackstone. As has already been pointed out, there are thirteen such months in a solar year, with one day left over. Caesar and Pliny both record that the Druidic year was reckoned by lunar months, but neither defines a lunar month, and there is nothing to prove that it was a ‘lunation’ of roughly twenty-nine and a half days – of which there are twelve in a year with ten and three-quarter days left over. For the first-century BC ‘Coligny Calendar’, which is one of lunations, is no longer regarded as Druidic; it is engraved in Roman letters on a brass tablet and is now thought to be part of the Romanizing of native religion attempted under the early Empire. Moreover, twenty-eight is a true lunar month not only in the astronomical sense of the moon’s revolutions in relation to the sun, but in the mystic sense that the Moon, being a woman, has a woman’s normal menstrual period (‘menstruation’ is connected with the word ‘moon’)1 of twenty-eight days.1 The Coligny system was probably brought into Britain by the Romans of the Claudian conquest and memories of its intercalated days are said by Professor T. Glynn Jones to survive in Welsh folklore. But that in both Irish and Welsh myths of the highest antiquity ‘a year and a day’ is a term constantly used suggests that the Beth-Luis-Nion Calendar is one of 364 days plus one. We can therefore regard the Birch month as extending from December 24th to January 20th.

  L FOR LUIS

  The second tree is the quickbeam (‘tree of life’), otherwise known as the quicken, rowan or mountain ash. Its round wattles, spread with newly-flayed bull’s hides, were used by the Druids as a last extremity for compelling demons to answer difficult questions – hence the Irish proverbial expression ‘to go on the wattles of knowledge’, meaning to do one’s utmost to get information. The quickbeam is also the tree most widely used in the British Isles as a prophylactic against lightning and witches’ charms of all sorts: for example, bewitched horses can be controlled only with a rowan whip. In ancient Ireland, fires of rowan were kindled by the Druids of opposing armies and incantations spoken over them, summoning spirits to take part in the fight. The berries of the magical rowan in the Irish romance of Fraoth, guarded by a dragon, had the sustaining virtue of nine meals; they also healed the wounded and added a year to a man’s life. In the romance of Diarmuid and Grainne, the rowan berry, with the apple and the red nut, is described as the food of the gods. ‘Food of the gods’ suggests that the taboo on eating anything red was an extension of the commoners’ taboo on eating scarlet toadstools – for toadstools, according to a Greek proverb which Nero quoted, were ‘the food of the gods’. In ancient Greece all red foods such as lobster, bacon, red mullet, crayfish and scarlet berries and fruit were tabooed except at feasts in honour of the dead. (Red was the colour of death in Greece and Britain during the Bronze Age – red ochre has been found in megalithic burials both in the Prescelly Mountains and on Salisbury Plain.) The quickbeam is the tree of quickening. Its botanical name Fraxinus, or Pyrus, Aucuparia, conveys its divinatory uses. Another of its names is ‘the witch’; and the witch-wand, formerly used for metal divining, was made of rowan. Since it was the tree of quickening it could also be used in a contrary sense. In Danaan Ireland a rowan-stake hammered through a corpse immobilized its ghost; and in the Cuchulain saga three hags spitted a dog, Cuchulain’s sacred animal, on rowan twigs to procure his death.

  The oracular use of the rowan explains the unexpected presence of great rowan thickets in Rügen and the other Baltic amber-islands, formerly used as oracular places, and the frequent occurrence of rowan, noted by John Lightfoot in his Flora Scotica, 1777, in the neighbourhood of ancient stone circles. The second month extends from January 21st to February 17th. The important Celtic feast of Candlemas fell in the middle of it (February 2nd). It was held to mark the quickening of the year, and was the first of the four ‘cross-quarter days’ on which British witches celebrated their Sabbaths, the others being May Eve, Lammas (August 2nd) and All Hallow E’en, when the year died. These days correspond with the four great Irish fire-feasts mentioned by Cormac the tenth-century Archbishop of Cashel. In Ireland and the Highlands February 2nd is, very properly, the day of St. Brigit, formerly the White Goddess, the quickening Triple Muse. The connexion of rowan with the Candlemas fire-feast is shown by Morann Mac Main’s Ogham in the Book of Ballymote: he gives the poetic name for rowan as ‘Delight of the Eye, namely Luisiu, flame.’

  N FOR NION

  The third tree is the ash. In Greece the ash was sacred to Poseidon, the second god of the Achaean trinity, and the Mĕliai, or ash-spirits, were much cultivated; according to Hesiod, the Mĕliae sprang from the blood of Uranus when Cronos castrated him. In Ireland the Tree of Tortu, The Tree of Dathi, and the Branching Tree of Usnech, three of the Five Magic Trees whose fall in the year 665 AD symbolized the triumph of Christianity over paganism, were ash-trees. A descendant of the Sacred Tree of Creevna, also an ash, was still standing at Killura in the nineteenth century; its wood was a charm against drowning, and emigrants to America after the Potato Famine carried it away with them piecemeal. In British folklore the ash is a tree of re-birth – Gilbert White describes in his History of Selborne how naked children had formerly been passed through cleft pollard ashes before sunrise as a cure for rupture. The custom survived in remoter parts of England until 1830. The Druidical wand with a spiral decoration, part of a recent Anglesey find dating from the early first century AD, was of ash. The great ash Yygdrasill, sacred to Woden, or Wotan or Odin or Gwydion, has already been mentioned in the context of the Battle of the Trees; he used it as his steed. But he had taken the tree over from the Triple Goddess who, as the Three Norns of Scandinavian legend, dispensed justice under it. Poseidon retained his patronage of horses but also became a god of seafarers when the Achaeans took to the sea; as Woden did when his people took to the sea. In ancient Wales and Ireland all oars and coracle-slats were made of ash; and so were the rods used for urging on horses, except where the deadly yew was preferred. The cruelty of the ash mentioned by Gwion lies in the harmfulness of its shade to grass or corn; the alder on the contrary is beneficial to crops grown in its shade. So also in Odin’s own Runic alphabet all the letters are formed from ash-twigs; as ash-roots strangle those of other forest trees. The ash is the tree of sea-power, or of the power resident in water; and the other name of Woden, ‘Yggr’, from which Ygdrasill is derived, is evidently connected with hygra, the Greek for ‘sea’ (literally, ‘the wet element’). The third month is the month of floods and extends from February 18th to March 17th. In these first three months the nights are longer than the days, and the sun is regarded as still under the tutelage of Night. The Tyrrhenians on this account did not reckon them as part of the sacred year.

  F FOR FEARN

  The fourth tree is the alder, the tree of Bran. In the Battle of the Trees the alder fought in the front line, which is an allusion to the letter F being one of the first five consonants of the Beth-Luis-Nion and the Boibel-Loth; and in the Irish Ossianic Song of the Forest Trees1 it is described as ‘the very battle-witch of all woods, tree that is hottest in the fight’. Though a poor fuel-tree, like the willow, poplar and chestnut, it is prized by charcoal-burners as yielding the best charcoal; its connexion with fire is shown in the Romance of Branwen when ‘Gwern’ (alder), Bran’s s ister’s son, is burned in a bonfire; and in country districts of Ireland the crime of felling a sacred alder is held to be visited with the burning down of one’s house. The alder is also proof against the corruptive power of water: its slightly gummy leaves resist the winter rains longer than those of any other deciduous tree and its timber resists decay indefinitely when used for water-conduits or piles. The Rialto at Venice is founded on alder piles, and so are several mediaeval cathedrals. The Roman architect Vitruvius mentions that alders were used as causeway piles in the Ravenna marshes.

  The
connexion of Bran with the alder in this sense is clearly brought out in the Romance of Branwen where the swineherds (oracular priests) of King Matholwch of Ireland see a forest in the sea and cannot guess what it is. Branwen tells them that it is the fleet of Bran the Blessed come to avenge her. The ships are anchored off-shore and Bran wades through the shallows and brings his goods and people to land; afterwards he bridges the River Linon, though it has been protected with a magic charm, by lying down across the river and having hurdles laid over him. In other words, first a jetty, then a bridge was built on alder piles. It was said of Bran, ‘No house could contain him.’ The riddle ‘What can no house ever contain?’ has a simple answer: ‘The piles upon which it is built.’ For the earliest European houses were built on alder piles at the edge of lakes. In one sense the ‘singing head’ of Bran was the mummied, oracular head of a sacred king; in another it was the ‘head’ of the alder-tree – namely the topmost branch. Green alder-branches make good whistles and, according to my friend Ricardo Sicre y Cerda, the boys of Cerdaña in the Pyrenees have a traditional prayer in Catalan:

  Berng, Berng, come out of your skin

  And I will make you whistle sweetly.

  which is repeated while the bark is tapped with a piece of willow to loosen it from the wood. Berng (or Verng in the allied Majorcan language) is Bran again. The summons to Berng is made on behalf of the Goddess of the Willow. The use of the willow for tapping, instead of another piece of alder, suggests that such whistles were used by witches to conjure up destructive winds – especially from the North. But musical pipes with several stops can be made in the same way as the whistles, and the singing head of Bran in this sense will have been an alder-pipe. At Harlech, where the head sang for seven years, there is a mill-stream running past the Castle rock, a likely place for a sacred alder-grove. It is possible that Apollo’s legendary flaying of Marsyas the piper is reminiscent of the removal of the alder-bark from the wood in pipe-making.