The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  The alder was also used in ancient Ireland for making milk pails and other dairy vessels: hence its poetical name in the Book of Ballymote, Comet lachta – ‘guarding of milk’. This connexion of Bran-Cronos, the alder, with Rhea-Io, the white moon-cow is of importance. In Ireland, Io was called Glas Gabnach, ‘the green stripper’, because though she yielded milk in rivers she never had a calf. She had been stolen out of Spam by Gavida the flying dwarf-smith; made the circuit of all Ireland in one day, guarded by his seven sons (who presumably stood for the days of the week); and gave the name Bothar-bó-finné, ‘Track of the White Cow’, to the Galaxy. According to The Proceedings of the Grand Bardic Academy, she was killed by Guaire at the request of Seanchan Torpest’s wife, and according to Keating’ s History of Ireland, was avenged in 528 AD. King Diarmuid of All Ireland was killed by his eldest son for having murdered another sacred cow.

  Bran’s connexion with the Western Ocean is proved by Caer Bran, the name of the most westerly hill in Britain, overlooking Land’s End.

  Alder is rarely mentioned in Greek or Latin myth, having apparently been superseded as an oracular tree by the Delphic laurel. But the Odyssey and the Aeneid contain two important references to it. In the Odyssey, alder is the first named of the three trees of resurrection – white poplar and cypress are the two others – that formed the wood around the cave of Calypso, daughter of Atlas, in her Elysian island of Ogygia; in the wood nested chattering sea-crows (sacred to Bran in Britain) falcons and owls. This explains Virgil’s version of the metamorphosis of the sisters of the sun-hero Phaëthon: in the Aeneid he says that while bewailing their brother’s death they were converted, not into a poplar grove, as Euripides and Apollonius Rhodius relate, but into an alder thicket on the banks of the river Po – evidently this was another Elysian islet. The Greek word for alder, clēthra, is generally derived from cleio, ‘I close’ or ‘I confine’. The explanation seems to be that the alder thickets confined the hero in the oracular island by growing around its shores; the oracular islands seem to have been originally river islands, not islands in the sea.

  The alder was, and is, celebrated for yielding three fine dyes: red from its bark, green from its flowers, brown from its twigs: typifying fire, water and earth. In Cormac’s tenth-century Glossary of obsolete terms the alder is called ro-eim, which is glossed as ‘that which reddens the face’; from which it may be deduced that the ‘crimson-stained heroes’ of the Welsh Triads, who were sacred kings, were connected with Bran’s alder cult. One reason for the alder’s sanctity is that when it is felled the wood, at first white, seems to bleed crimson, as though it were a man. The green dye is associated in British folklore with fairies’ clothes: in so far as the fairies may be regarded as survivals of dispossessed early tribes, forced to take to hills and woods, the green of the clothes is explainable as protective colouring: foresters and outlaws also adopted it in mediaeval times. Its use seems to be very ancient. But principally the alder is the tree of fire, the power of fire to free the earth from water; and the alder-branch by which Bran was recognized at the Câd Goddeu is a token of resurrection – its buds are set in a spiral. This spiral symbol is ante-diluvian: the earliest Sumerian shrines are ‘ghost-houses’, like those used in Uganda, and are flanked by spiral posts.

  The fourth month extends from March 18th, when the alder first blooms, to April 14th, and marks the drying up of the winter floods by the Spring Sun. It includes the Spring Equinox, when the days become longer than the nights and the Sun grows to manhood. As one can say poetically that the ash trees are the oars and coracle-slats that convey the Spirit of the Year through the floods to dry land, so one can say that the alders are the piles that lift his house out of the floods of winter. Fearn (Bran) appears in Greek mythology as King Phoroneus, ruler of the Peloponnese, who was worshipped as a hero at Argos which he is said to have founded. Hellanicus of Lesbos, a learned contemporary of Herodotus, makes him the father of Pelasgus, Iasus and Agenor, who divided his kingdom between them after his death: in other words, his worship at Argos was immemorially ancient. Pausanias, who went to Argos for his information, writes that Phoroneus was the husband of Cerdo (the White Goddess as Muse) and that the River-god Inachus fathered him on the nymph Melia (ash-tree). Since alder succeeds ash in the tree-calendar, and since alders grow by the riverside, this is a suitable pedigree. Pausanias clinches the identification of Phoroneus with Fearn by disregarding the Prometheus legend and making Phoroneus the inventor of fire. Hyginus gives his mother’s name as Argeia (‘dazzling white’), who is the White Goddess again. So Phoroneus, like Bran and all other sacred kings, was borne by, married to, and finally laid out by, the White Goddess: his layer-out was the Death-goddess Hera Argeia to whom he is said to have first offered sacrifices. Phoroneus, then, is Fearineus, the God of Spring to whom annual sacrifices were offered on the Cronian Mount at Olympia at the Spring equinox.1 His singing head recalls that of Orpheus whose name is perhaps short for Orephruoeis ‘growing on the river-bank’ i.e. ‘the alder’.

  In parts of the Mediterranean the cornel or dogwood tree seems to have been used as a substitute for the alder. Its Latin name cornus comes from cornix , the crow sacred to Saturn or Bran which feeds on its red ‘cherries’; as according to Homer the swine of Circe also did. Ovid links it with the esculent oak as supplying men with food in the age of Saturn. Like the alder it yields a red dye, and was held sacred at Rome where the flight of Romulus’s cornel-wood javelin determined the spot where the city was to be built. Its appropriateness to this month is that it is in white blossom by the middle of March.

  S FOR SAILLE

  The fifth tree is the willow, or osier, which in Greece was sacred to Hecate, Circe, Hera and Persephone, all Death aspects of the Triple Moon-goddess, and much worshipped by witches. As Culpeper says succinctly in his Complete Herbal: ‘The Moon owns it.’ Its connexion with witches is so strong in Northern Europe that the words ‘witch’ and ‘wicked’ are derived from the same ancient word for ‘willow’, which also yields ‘wicker’. The ‘witch’s besom’ in the English countryside is still made of ash stake, birch twigs and osier binding: of birch twigs because at the expulsion of evil spirits some remain entangled in the besom; of ash stake as a protection against drowning – witches are made harmless if detached from their besoms and thrown into running water; of osier binding in honour of Hecate. The Druidical human sacrifices were offered at the full of the moon in wicker baskets, and funerary flints were knapped in willow-leaf shape. The willow (helice in Greek, salix in Latin) gave its name to Helicon, the abode of the Nine Muses, orgiastic priestesses of the Moon-goddess. It is likely that Poseidon preceded Apollo as the Leader of the Muses, as he did as guardian of the Delphic Oracle; for a Helicean Grove was still sacred to him in Classical times. According to Pliny, a willow tree grows outside the Cretan cave where Zeus was born; and, commenting on a series of coins from Cretan Gortyna, A. B. Cook in his Zeus suggests that Europë who is there shown seated in a willow tree, osier-basket in hand, and made love to by an eagle, is not only Eur-opë, she of the broad face’, i. e. the Full Moon, but Eu-rope, ‘she of the flourishing willow-withies’ – alias Helice, sister of Amalthea. The wearing of the willow in the hat as a sign of the rejected lover seems to be originally a charm against the Moon-goddess’s jealousy. The willow is sacred to her for many reasons: it is the tree that loves water most, and the Moon-goddess is the giver of dew and moisture generally; its leaves and bark, the source of salicylic acid, are sovereign against rheumatic cramps formerly thought to be caused by witchcraft. The Goddess’s prime ogiastic bird, the wryneck1, or snake bird, or cuckoo’s mate – a Spring migrant which hisses like a snake, lies flat along a bough, erects its crest when angry, writhes its neck about, lays white eggs, eats ants, and has v-markings on its feathers like those on the scales of oracular serpents in Ancient Greece – always nests in willow-trees. Moreover, the liknos, or basket-sieve anciently used for winnowing corn, was made from willow; it was in winnowing-sieves of
this sort, ‘riddles’, that the North Berwick witches confessed to King James I that they went to sea on their witches’ sabbaths. A famous Greek picture by Polygnotus at Delphi represented Orpheus as receiving the gift of mystic eloquence by touching willow-trees in a grove of Persephone; compare the injunction in The Song of the Forest Trees: ‘Burn not the willow, a tree sacred to poets.’ The willow is the tree of enchantment and is the fifth tree of the year; five (V) was the number sacred to the Roman Moon-goddess Minerva. The month extends from April 15th to May 12th, and May Day, famous for its orgiastic revels and its magic dew, falls in the middle. It is possible that the carrying of sallow-willow branches on Palm Sunday, a variable feast which usually falls early in April, is a custom that properly belongs to the beginning of the willow month.

  H FOR UATH

  The sixth tree is the whitethorn or hawthorn or may, which takes its name from the month of May. It is, in general, an unlucky tree and the name under which it appears in the Irish Brehon Laws, sceith, is apparently connected with the Indo-Germanic root sceath or sceth, meaning harm; from which derive the English ‘scathe’ and the Greek a-scethes, scatheless. In ancient Greece, as in Britain, this was the month in which people went about in old clothes – a custom referred to in the proverb ‘Ne’er cast a clout ere May be out’, meaning ‘do not put on new clothes until the unlucky month is over’, and not necessarily referring to the variability of the English climate; the proverb is, in fact, also current in North-eastern Spain where, in general, settled hot weather has come by Easter. They also abstained from sexual intercourse – a custom which explains May as an unlucky month for marriage. In Greece and Rome, May was the month in which the temples were swept out and the images of gods washed: the month of preparation for the midsummer festival. The Greek Goddess Maia, though she is represented in English poetry as ‘ever fair and young’ took her name from maia, ‘grandmother’; she was a malevolent beldame whose son Hermes conducted souls to Hell. She was in fact the White Goddess, who under the name of Cardea, as has been noticed, cast spells with the hawthorn. The Greeks propitiated her at marriages – marriage being considered hateful to the Goddess – with five torches of hawthorn-wood and with hawthorn blossom before the unlucky month began.

  Plutarch in his Roman Questions asks: ‘Why do not the Romans marry in the month of May?’ and answers correctly: ‘Is not the reason that in this month they perform the greatest of purification ceremonies?’ He explains that this was the month in which puppets called argeioi (‘white men’) were thrown into the river as an offering to Saturn. Ovid in his Fasti tells of an oracle given him by the Priestess of Jupiter about the marriage of his daughter – ‘Until the Ides of June’ [the middle of the month] ‘there is no luck for brides and their husbands. Until the sweepings from the Temple of Vesta have been carried down to the sea by the yellow Tiber I must myself not comb my locks which I have cut in sign of mourning, nor pare my nails, nor cohabit with my husband though he is the Priest of Jupiter. Be not in haste. Your daughter will have better luck in marriage when Vesta’s fire burns on a cleansed hearth.’ The unlucky days came to an end on June 15. In Greece the unlucky month began and ended a little earlier. According to Sozomen of Gaza, the fifth-century ecclesiastical historian, the Terebinth Fair at Hebron was celebrated at the same time and with the same taboos on new clothes and sexuality, and with the same object – the washing and cleansing of the holy images.

  In Welsh mythology the hawthorn appears as the malevolent Chief of the Giants, Yspaddaden Penkawr, the father of Olwen (‘She of the White Track’), another name of the White Goddess. In the Romance of Kilwych and Olwen – Kilhwych was so called because he was found in a swine’s burrow – Giant Hawthorn puts all possible obstacles in the way of Kilhwych’s marriage to Olwen and demands a dowry of thirteen treasures, all apparently impossible to secure. The Giant lived in a castle guarded by nine porters and nine watch-dogs, proof of the strength of the taboo against marriage in the hawthorn month.

  The destruction of an ancient hawthorn tree is in Ireland attended with the greatest peril. Two nineteenth-century instances are quoted in E. M. Hull’s Folklore of the British Isles. The effect is the death of one’s cattle and children and loss of all one’s money. In his well-documented study, Historic Thorn Trees in the British Isles, Mr. Vaughan Cornish writes of the sacred hawthorns growing over wells in Goidelic provinces. He quotes the case of ‘St. Patrick’s Thorn’ at Tin’ahely in County Wicklow: ‘Devotees attended on the 4th of May, rounds were duly made about the well, and shreds torn off their garments and hung on the thorn.’ He adds: ‘This is St. Monica’s Day but I do not know of any association.’ Plainly, since St. Monica’s Day, New Style, corresponds with May 15th, Old Style, this was a ceremony in honour of the Hawthorn month, which had just begun. The rags were torn from the devotees’ clothes as a sign of mourning and propitiation.

  The hawthorn, then, is the tree of enforced chastity. The month begins on May 13th, when the may is first in flower, and ends on June 9th. The ascetic use of the thorn, which corresponds with the cult of the Goddess Cardea must, however, be distinguished from its later orgiastic use which corresponds with the cult of the Goddess Flora, and which accounts for the English mediaeval habit of riding out on May Morning to pluck flowering hawthorn boughs and dance around the maypole. Hawthorn blossom has, for many men, a strong scent of female sexuality; which is why the Turks use a flowering branch as an erotic symbol. Mr. Cornish proves that this Flora cult was introduced into the British Isles in the late first-century BC by the second Belgic invaders; further, that the Glastonbury Thorn which flowered on Old Christmas Day (January 5th, New Style) and was cut down by the Puritans at the Revolution was a sport of the common hawthorn. The monks of Glastonbury perpetuated it and sanctified it with an improving tale about Joseph of Arimathea’s staff and the Crown of Thorns as a means of discouraging the orgiastic use of hawthorn blossom, which normally did not appear until May Day (Old Style).

  It is likely that the Old Bush which had grown on the site of St. David’s Cathedral was an orgiastic hawthorn; for this would account for the legend of David’s mysterious birth.

  D FOR DUIR

  The seventh tree is the oak, the tree of Zeus, Jupiter, Hercules, The Dagda (the chief of the elder Irish gods), Thor, and all the other Thunder-gods, Jehovah in so far as he was ‘El’, and Allah. The royalty of the oak-tree needs no enlarging upon: most people are familiar with the argument of Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough, which concerns the human sacrifice of the oak-king of Nemi on Midsummer Day. The fuel of the midsummer fires is always oak, the fire of Vesta at Rome was fed with oak, and the need-fire is always kindled in an oak-log. When Gwion writes in the Câd Goddeu, ‘Stout Guardian of the door, His name in every tongue’, he is saying that doors are customarily made of oak as the strongest and toughest wood and that ‘Duir’, the Beth-Luis-Nion name for ‘Oak’, means ‘door’ in many European languages including Old Goidelic dorus, Latin foris, Greek thura, and German tür, all derived from the Sanskrit Dwr, and that Daleth, the Hebrew letter D, means ‘Door’ – the ‘I’ being originally an ‘r’. Midsummer is the flowering season of the oak, which is the tree of endurance and triumph, and like the ash is said to ‘court the lightning flash’. Its roots are believed to extend as deep underground as its branches rise in the air – Virgil mentions this – which makes it emblematic of a god whose law runs both in Heaven and in the Underworld. Poseidon the ash-god and Zeus the oak-god were both once armed with thunderbolts; but when the Achaeans humbled the Aeolians, Poseidon’s bolt was converted into a trident or fish-spear and Zeus reserved the sole right to wield the bolt. It has been suggested that oak oracles were introduced into Greece by the Achaeans: that they originally consulted the beech, as the Franks did, but finding no beeches in Greece transferred their allegiance to the oak with edible acorns, its nearest equivalent, to which they gave the name phegos – which, as has been mentioned, is the same word as fagus, the Latin for beech. At any rate, the
oracular oak at Dodona was a phegos, not a drus, and the oracular ship Argo was, according to Apollonius Rhodius, largely made of this timber. But it is more likely that the Dodona oracle was in existence centuries before the Achaeans came and that Herodotus was right in stating on the authority of the Egyptian priests that the black dove and oracular oak cults of Zeus at Ammon in the Libyan desert and of Zeus at Dodona were coeval. Professor Flinders Petrie postulates a sacred league between Libya and the Greek mainland well back into the third millennium BC. The Ammon oak was in the care of the tribe of Garamantes: the Greeks knew of their ancestor Garamas as ‘the first of men’. The Zeus of Ammon was a sort of Hercules with a ram’s head akin to ram-headed Osiris, and to Amen-Ra the ram-headed Sun-god of Egyptian Thebes from where Herodotus says that the black doves flew to Ammon and Dodona.

  The month, which takes its name from Jupiter the oak-god, begins on June 10th and ends on July 7th. Midway comes St. John’s Day, June 24th, the day on which the oak-king was sacrificially burned alive. The Celtic year was divided into two halves with the second half beginning in July, apparently after a seven-day wake, or funeral feast, in the oak-king’s honour.