The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Sir James Frazer, like Gwion, has pointed out the similarity of ‘door’ words in all Indo-European languages and shown Janus to be a ‘stout guardian of the door’ with his head pointing in both directions. As usual, however, he does not press his argument far enough. Duir as the god of the oak month looks both ways because his post is at the turn of the year; which identifies him with the Oak-god Hercules who became the doorkeeper of the Gods after his death. He is probably also to be identified with the British god Llyr or Lludd or Nudd, a god of the sea – i.e. a god of a sea-faring Bronze Age people – who was the ‘father’ of Creiddylad (Cordelia) an aspect of the White Goddess; for according to Geoffrey of Monmouth the grave of Llyr at Leicester was in a vault built in honour of Janus. Geoffrey writes:

  ‘Cordelia obtaining the government of the Kingdom buried her father in a certain vault which she ordered to be made for him under the river Sore in Leicester (Leircestre) and which had been built originally under the ground in honour of the god Janus. And here all the workmen of the city, upon the anniversary solemnity of that festival, used to begin their yearly labours.’

  Since Llyr was a pre-Roman God this amounts to saying that he was two-headed, like Janus, and the patron of the New Year; but the Celtic year began in the summer, not in the winter. Geoffrey does not date the mourning festival but it is likely to have originally taken place at the end of June.

  The old ‘Wakes’, the hiring-fairs of the English countryside came to be held at various dates between March and October according to the date of the local saint’s day. (‘At Bunbury Wakes rye-grass and clover should be ready to cut. At Wrenbury Wakes early apples are ripe.’ English Dialect Dictionary.) But originally they must all have taken place at Lammas between the hay harvest and the corn harvest. That the Wakes were mourning for the dead King is confirmed in Chapter Seventeen. The Anglo-Saxon form of Lughomass, mass in honour of the God Lugh or Llew, was hlaf-mass, ‘loaf-mass’, with reference to the corn-harvest and the killing of the Corn-king.

  What I take for a reference to Llyr as Janus occurs in the closing paragraph of Merlin’s prophecy to the heathen King Vortigern and his Druids, recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth:

  After this Janus shall never have priests again. His door will be shut and remain concealed in Ariadne’s crannies.

  In other words, the ancient Druidic religion based on the oak-cult will be swept away by Christianity and the door – the god Llyr – will languish forgotten in the Castle of Arianrhod, the Corona Borealis.

  This helps us to understand the relationship at Rome of Janus and the White Goddess Cardea who is mentioned at the end of Chapter Four as the Goddess of Hinges who came to Rome from Alba Longa. She was the hinge on which the year swung – the ancient Latin, not the Etruscan year – and her importance as such is recorded in the Latin adjective cardinalis – as we say in English ‘of cardinal importance’ – which was also applied to the four main winds, for winds were considered as under the sole direction of the Great Goddess until Classical times. As Cardea she ruled over the Celestial Hinge at the back of the North Wind around which, as Varro explains in his De Re Rustica, the mill-stone of the Universe revolves. This conception appears most plainly in the Norse Edda, where the giantesses Fenja and Menja, who turn the monstrous mill-stone Grotte in the cold polar night, stand for the White Goddess in her complementary moods of creation and destruction. Elsewhere in Norse mythology the Goddess is nine-fold: the nine giantesses who were joint-mothers of the hero Rig, alias Heimdall, the inventor of the Norse social system, similarly turned the cosmic mill. Janus was perhaps not originally double-headed: he may have borrowed this peculiarity from the Goddess herself who at the Carmentalia, the Carmenta Festival in early January, was addressed by her celebrants as ‘Postvorta and Antevorta’ – ‘she who looks both back and forward’. However, a Janus with long hair and wings appears on an early stater of Mallos, a Cretan colony in Cilicia. He is identified with the solar hero Talus, and a bull’s head appears on the same coin. On similar coins of the late fifth century BC he holds an eight-rayed disc in his hand and has a spiral of immortality sprouting from his double head.

  Here at last I can complete my argument about Arianrhod’s Castle and the ‘whirling round without motion between three elements’. The sacred oak-king was killed at midsummer and translated to the Corona Borealis, presided over by the White Goddess, which was then just dipping over the Northern horizon. But from the song ascribed by Apollonius Rhodius to Orpheus, we know that the Queen of the Circling Universe, Eurynome, alias Cardea, was identical with Rhea of Crete; thus Rhea lived at the axle of the mill, whirling around without motion, as well as on the Galaxy. This suggests that in a later mythological tradition the sacred king went to serve her at the Mill, not in the Castle; for Samson after his blinding and enervation turned a mill in Delilah’s prison-house.

  Another name for the Goddess of the Mill was Artemis Calliste, or Callisto (‘Most Beautiful’), to whom the she-bear was sacred in Arcadia; and in Athens at the festival of Artemis Brauronia, a girl of ten years old and a girl of five, dressed in saffron-yellow robes in honour of the moon, played the part of sacred bears. The Great She-bear and Little She-bear are still the names of the two constellations that turn the mill around. In Greek the Great Bear Callisto was also called Helice, which means both ‘that which turns’ and ‘willow-branch’ – a reminder that the willow was sacred to the same Goddess.

  The evidence, given in the Gwyn context at the close of Chapter Six, for supposing that the oak-cult came to Britain from the Baltic between 1600 and 1400 BC suggests that the Beth-Luis-Nion sequence, in which Duir is the principal tree, was at any rate not elaborated before 1600 BC, though the rowan, willow, elder and alder were perhaps already in sacral use. Gwyn, ‘the White One’, son of Llyr or Lludd was buried in a boat-shaped oak-coffin in his father’s honour: he was a sort of Osiris (his rival ‘Victor son of Scorcher’ being a sort of Set) and came to be identified with King Arthur. His name supplies the prefix Win of many ancient towns in Britain.

  T FOR TINNE

  The eighth tree is the holly, which flowers in July. The holly appears in the originally Irish Romance of Gawain and the Green Knight. The Green Knight is an immortal giant whose club is a holly-bush. He and Sir Gawain, who appears in the Irish version as Cuchulain, a typical Hercules, make a compact to behead one another at alternate New Years – meaning midsummer and midwinter – but, in effect, the Holly Knight spares the Oak Knight. In Sir Gawain s Marriage, a Robin Hood ballad, King Arthur, who has his seat at Carlisle, says:

  – as I came over a moor,

  I see a lady where she sate

  Between and oak and a green hollén.

  She was clad in red scarlét.

  This lady, whose name is not mentioned, will have been the goddess Creiddylad for whom, in Welsh myth, the Oak Knight and Holly Knight fought every first of May until Doomsday. Since in mediaeval practice St. John the Baptist, who lost his head on St. John’s Day, took over the oak-king’s titles and customs, it was natural to let Jesus, as John’s merciful successor, take over the holly-king’s. The holly was thus glorified beyond the oak. For example, in the Holly-Tree Carol:

  Of all the trees that are in the wood

  The Holly bears the crown

  – a sentiment that derives from the Song of the Forest Trees: ‘Of all trees whatsoever the critically best is holly.’ In each stanza of the carol, with its apt chorus about ‘the rising of the Sun, the running of the deer’, some property of the tree is equated with the birth or passion of Jesus: the whiteness of the flower, the redness of the berry, the sharpness of the prickles, the bitterness of the bark. ‘Holly’ means ‘holy’. Yet the holly which is native to the British Isles is unlikely to be the original tree of the alphabet: it has probably displaced the evergreen scarlet-oak with which it has much in common, including the same botanical name ilex, and which was not introduced into the British Isles until the sixteenth century. The scarlet-oak, or kerm-oak, or hol
ly-oak, is the evergreen twin of the ordinary oak and its Classical Greek names prinos and hysge are also used for holly in modern Greek. It has prickly leaves and nourishes the kerm, a scarlet insect not unlike the holly-berry (and once thought to be a berry), from which the ancients made their royal scarlet dye and an aphrodisiac elixir. In the Authorised Version of the Bible the word ‘oak’ is sometimes translated ‘terebinth’ and sometimes ‘scarlet-oak’, and these trees make a sacred pair in Palestinian religion. Jesus wore kerm-scarlet when attired as King of the Jews (Matthew XXVII, 28).

  We may regard the letters D and T as twins: ‘the lily white boys clothed all in green o!’ of the mediaeval Green Rushes song. D is the oak which rules the waxing part of the year – the sacred Druidic oak, the oak of the Golden Bough. T is the evergreen oak which rules the waning part, the bloody oak: thus an evergreen oak-grove near the Corinthian Asopus was sacred to the Furies. Dann or Tann, the equivalent of Tinne, is a Celtic word for any sacred tree. In Gaul and Brittany it meant ‘oak’, in Celtic Germany it meant ‘fir’; in Cornwall the compound glas-tann (‘green sacred tree’) meant evergreen holm-oak, and the English word ‘to tan’ comes from the use of its bark in tanning. However, in ancient Italy it was the holly, not the evergreen oak, which the husbandmen used in their midwinter Saturnalia. Tannus was the name of the Gaulish Thunder-god, and Tina that of the Thunder-god, armed with a triple thunder-bolt, whom the Etruscans took over from the Goidelic tribes among whom they settled.

  The identification of the pacific Jesus with the holly or holly-oak must be viewed as poetically inept, except in so far as he declared that he had come to bring not peace, but the sword. The tanist was originally his twin’s executioner; it was the oak-king, not the holly-king, who was crucified on a T-shaped cross. Lucian in his Trial in the Court of Vowels (about 160 AD) is explicit:

  Men weep, and bewail their lot, and curse Cadmus with many curses for introducing Tau into the family of letters; they say it was his body that tyrants took for a model, his shape that they imitated, when they set up the erections on which men are crucified. Stauros the vile engine is called, and it derives its vile name from him. Now, with all these crimes upon him, does he not deserve death, nay, many deaths? For my part I know none bad enough but that supplied by his own shape – that shape which he gave to the gibbet named Stauros after him by men.

  And in a Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, composed at about the same date, the same theme recurs in a dispute between Jesus and his schoolmaster about the letter T. The schoolmaster strikes Jesus on the head and prophesies the crucifixion. In Jesus’s time the Hebrew character Tav, the last letter of the alphabet, was shaped like the Greek Tau.

  The holly rules the eighth month, and eight as the number of increase is well suited to the month of the barley harvest, which extends from July 8th to August 4th.

  C FOR COLL

  The ninth tree is the hazel, in the nutting season. The nut in Celtic legend is always an emblem of concentrated wisdom: something sweet, compact and sustaining enclosed in a small hard shell – as we say: ‘this is the matter in a nut-shell.’ The Rennes Dinnshenchas, an important early Irish topographical treatise, describes a beautiful fountain called Connla’s Well, near Tipperary, over which hung the nine hazels of poetic art which produced flowers and fruit (i.e. beauty and wisdom) simultaneously. As the nuts dropped into the well they fed the salmon swimming in it, and whatever number of nuts any of them swallowed, so many bright spots appeared on its body. All the knowledge of the arts and sciences was bound up with the eating of these nuts, as has already been noted in the story of Fionn, whose name Gwion adopted. In England a forked hazel-stick was used until the seventeenth century for divining not only buried treasure and hidden water, as now, but guilty persons in cases of murder and theft. And in the Book of St. Albans (1496 edition) a recipe is given for making oneself as invisible as if one had eaten fern-seed, merely by carrying a hazel-rod, a fathom and a half long with a green hazel-twig inserted in it.

  The letter Coll was used as the Bardic numeral nine – because nine is the number sacred to the Muses and because the hazel fruits after nine years. The hazel was the Bile Ratha, ‘the venerated tree of the rath’ – the rath in which the poetic Aes Sidhe lived. It gave its name also to a god named Mac Coll or Mac Cool (‘son of the Hazel’) who according to Keating’s History of Ireland was one of the three earliest rulers of Ireland, his two brothers being Mac Ceacht (‘son of the Plough’) and Mac Greine (‘son of the Sun’). They celebrated a triple marriage with the Triple Goddess of Ireland, Eire, Fodhla and Banbha. This legend appears at first sight to record the overthrow of the matriarchal system by patriarchal invaders; but since Greine, the Sun, was a Goddess not a God and since both agriculture and wisdom were presided over by the Triple Goddess, the invaders were doubtless Goddess-worshippers themselves and merely transferred their filial allegiance to the Triple Goddess of the land.

  In the Fenian legend of the Ancient Dripping Hazel, the hazel appears as a tree of wisdom that can be put to destructive uses. It dripped a poisonous milk, had no leaves and was the abode of vultures and ravens, birds of divination. It split in two when the head of the God Balor was placed in its fork after his death, and when Fionn used its wood as a shield in battle its noxious vapours killed thousands of the enemy. Fionn’s hazel shield is an emblem of the satiric poem that carries a curse. It was as the Druidic heralds’ tree that the ‘hazel was arbiter’ in Gwion’s Câd Goddeu; ancient Irish heralds carried white hazel wands. The hazel is the tree of wisdom and the month extends from August 5th to September 1st.

  M FOR MUIN

  The tenth tree is the vine in the vintage season. The vine, though not native to Britain, is an important motif in British Bronze Age art; so probably the Danaans carried the tree itself northward with them as well as the emblem. It fruited well there on a few sheltered Southern slopes. But since it could not be established as a wild tree, they will have used the bramble as a substitute: the fruiting season, the colour of the berries, and the shape of the leaf correspond, and blackberry wine is a heady drink. (In all Celtic countries there is a taboo against eating the blackberry though it is a wholesome and nourishing fruit; in Brittany the reason given is ‘a cause des fées’, ‘because of the fairies’. In Majorca the explanation is different: the bramble was the bush chosen for the Crown of Thorns and the berries are Christ’s blood. In North Wales as a child I was warned merely that they were poisonous. In Devonshire the taboo is only on eating blackberries after the last day of September, when ‘the Devil enters into them’; which substantiates my theory that the blackberry was a popular substitute for Muin in the West Country.) The vine was sacred to the Thracian Dionysus, and to Osiris, and a golden vine was one of the principal ornaments of the Temple of Jerusalem. It is the tree of joy, exhilaration and wrath. The month extends from September 2nd to September 29th and includes the autumn equinox.

  G FOR GORT

  The eleventh tree is the ivy in its flowering season. October was the season of the Bacchanal revels of Thrace and Thessaly in which the intoxicated Bassarids rushed wildly about on the mountains, waving the fir-branches of Queen Artemis (or Ariadne) spirally wreathed with ivy – the yellow-berried sort – in honour of Dionysus (the autumnal Dionysus, who must be distinguished from the Dionysus of the Winter Solstice who is really a Hercules), and with a roebuck tattooed on their right arms above the elbow. They tore fawns, kids, children and even men to pieces in their ecstasy. The ivy was sacred to Osiris as well as to Dionysus. Vine and ivy come next to each other at the turn of the year, and are jointly dedicated to resurrection, presumably because they are the only two trees in the Beth-Luis-Nion that grow spirally. The vine also symbolizes resurrection because its strength is preserved in the wine. In England the ivy-bush has always been the sign of the wine-tavern; hence the proverb ‘Good wine needs no bush’, and ivy-ale, a highly intoxicating mediaeval drink, is still brewed at Trinity College, Oxford, in memory of a Trinity student murdered by Balliol
men. It is likely that the Bassarids’ tipple was ‘spruce-ale’, brewed from the sap of silver-fir and laced with ivy; they may also have chewed ivy-leaves for their toxic effect. Yet the main Maenad intoxicant will have been amanita muscaria, the red toadstool with white spots, that alone could supply the necessary muscular strength. Here we may reconsider Phoroneus, the Spring-Dionysus, inventor of fire. He built the city of Argos, the emblem of which, according to Apollodorus, was a toad; and Mycenae, the main fortress of Argolis, was so called, according to Pausanias, because Perseus, a convert to Dionysus worship, found a toadstool growing on the site. Dionysus had two feasts – the Spring Anthesterion, or ‘Flower-uprising’; and the autumn Mysterion, which probably means ‘uprising of toadstools’ (mykosterion) known as Ambrosia (‘food of the gods’). Was Phoroneus also the discoverer of a divine fire resident in the toadstool, and therefore Phryneus (‘toad being’) as well as Fearinus (‘Spring being’)? The amanita muscaria, though not a tree, grows under a tree: always a birch northward from Thrace and Celtic countries to the Arctic Circle; but under a fir or pine southward from Greece and Palestine to the Equator. In the North it is scarlet; in the South, fox-coloured. And does this explain the precedence given to the silver-fir among the vowels as A, and the birch among the consonants as B? Does it add a further note to ‘Christ son of Alpha’?

  (The rivalry mentioned in mediaeval English carols between holly and ivy is not, as one might expect, between the tree of murder and the tree of resurrection, between Typhon-Set and Dionysus-Osiris; instead it represents the domestic war of the sexes. The explanation seems to be that in parts of England the last harvest sheaf to be carted in any parish was bound around with Osirian ivy and called the Harvest May, the Harvest Bride, or the Ivy Girl: whichever farmer was latest with his harvesting was given the Ivy Girl as his penalty, an omen of ill luck until the following year. Thus the ivy came to mean a carline, or shrewish wife, a simile confirmed by the strangling of trees by ivy. But ivy and holly were both associated with the Saturnalia, holly being Saturn’s club, ivy being the nest of the Gold Crest Wren, his bird; on Yule morning, the last of his merry reign, the first foot over the threshold had to be that of Saturn’s representative, a dark man, called the Holly Boy, and elaborate precautions were taken to keep women out of the way. Thus Ivy Girl and Holly Boy became opposed; which gave rise to the Yule custom in which ‘holly boys’ and ‘ivy girls’ contended in a game of forfeits for precedence, and sang songs, mainly satirical, against each other.)