The White Goddess
Page 28
The ivy month extends from September 30th to October 27th.
P FOR PEITH, OR NG FOR NGETAL
The twelfth tree given in O’Flaherty’s list is Peith, the whitten, or guelder-rose, or water-elder, an appropriate introduction to the last month which is the true elder. But Peith is not the original letter; it is a Brythonic substitute for the original letter NG, which was of no literary use to the Brythons, or (for that matter) to the Goidels, but which formed part of the original series. The NG tree was the Ngetal, or reed, which becomes ready for cutting in November. The canna-reed, which grows from a thick root like a tree, was an ancient symbol of royalty in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Pharaohs used reed sceptres (hence Egypt is satirized by the prophet Isaiah as a ‘bruised reed’) and a royal reed was put into Jesus’ s hand when he was attired in scarlet. It is the tree from which arrows were cut, and therefore appropriate to Pharaoh as a living Sun-god who shot off his arrows in every direction as a symbol of sovereignty. The number twelve has the sense of established power, confirmed by the Irish use of reeds in thatching: a house is not an established house until the roof is on. The month extends from October 28th to November 24th.
R FOR RUIS
The thirteenth tree is the elder, a waterside tree associated with witches, which keeps its fruit well into December. It is an old British superstition that a child laid in an elderwood cradle will pine away or be pinched black and blue by the fairies – the traditional wood for cradles is the birch, the tree of inception, which drives away evil spirits. And in Ireland elder sticks, rather than ashen ones, are used by witches as magic horses. Although the flowers and inner bark of the elder have always been famous for their therapeutic qualities, the scent of an elder plantation was formerly held to cause death and disease. So unlucky is the elder that in Langland’s Piers Plowman, Judas is made to hang himself on an elder tree. Spenser couples the elder with the funereal cypress, and T. Scot writes in his Philomythie (1616):
The cursèd elder and the fatal yew
With witch [rowan] and nightshade in their shadows grew.
King William Rufus was killed by an archer posted under an elder. The elder is also said to have been the Crucifixion tree, and the elder-leaf shape of the funerary flints in megalithic long-barrows suggest that its association with death is long-standing. In English folklore to burn logs of elder ‘brings the Devil into the house’. Its white flowers, which are at their best at midsummer, make the elder another aspect of the White Goddess; and the same is true of the rowan. The elder is the tree of doom – hence the continued unluckiness of the number thirteen – and the month extends from November 25th to the winter solstice of December 22nd.
*
But what of the extra day? It falls outside the thirteen-month year and is therefore not ruled by any of the Trees. I am assuming that its natural place is between the letter-months of R and B, in the day after the winter solstice when the hours of daylight begin to lengthen again: in fact, about Christmas Eve, the birthday of the Divine Child. The R.B. radicals recall robur, the Latin for ‘oak’ and ‘strength’, and also the Celtic word ‘robin’. For at this point in the year, in British folklore, the Robin Red Breast as the Spirit of the New Year sets out with a birch-rod to kill his predecessor the Gold Crest Wren, the Spirit of the Old Year, whom he finds hiding in an ivy bush. Sir James Frazer has shown in his Golden Bough that the Christmas Eve folk-custom of hunting the wren with birch rods, which still survives in Ireland and the Isle of Man, was at one time also practised in Rome and ancient Greece, where the Gold Crest was known as ‘the little king’. That the Gold Crest does frequent ivy bushes at Christmas time is ornithological fact. The robin is said to ‘murder its father’, which accounts for its red breast. There is a clear reference to the story in Gwion’s Angar Cyvyndawd: ‘Keing ydd ym Eidduw Bum i arweddawd’, (‘Concealed in the ivy bush, I have been carried about’). The wren-boys of Ireland sometimes use a holly-bush instead of an ivy-bush; the holly being the tree of the tanist, who killed the oak-king at midsummer. The wren is protected from injury at all other seasons of the year and it is very unlucky to take its eggs. One of the Devonshire names for the wren is ‘the cuddy vran’ – ‘Bran’s sparrow’ – and in Ireland it was linked with Bran’s crow, or raven, as a prophetic bird. R. I. Best has edited a collection of wren and raven omens in Erin VIII (1916). Bran, it has been shown, was Saturn.
Perhaps the most ancient wren tradition is quoted by Pausanias in his Description of Greece: he says that Triptolemus, the Eleusinian counterpart of Egyptian Osiris, was an Argive priest of mysteries named Trochilus who fled from Argos to Attica when Agenor seized the city. Trochilus means ‘wren’ and it also means ‘of the wheel’, presumably because the wren is hunted when the wheel of the year has gone full circle. The connexion of the wren with the wheel was retained until recently in Somersetshire. Swainson records in his Birds (1885): ‘It is customary on Twelfth Day to carry about a wren, termed the King, enclosed in a box with glass windows, surmounted by a wheel from which are appended various coloured ribbands.’ A later version makes Triptolemus a son of Picus (the woodpecker, another prophetic bird) and thus identifies him with Pan or Faunus. Pausanias’s story seems to refer to the expulsion from Argos by Syrian invaders of the priesthood of Cronos (Bran) to whom the wren was sacred.
As soon as one has mastered the elementary grammar and accidence of myth, and built up a small vocabulary, and learned to distinguish seasonal myths from historical and iconotropic myths, one is surprised how close to the surface lie the explanations, lost since pre-Homeric times, of legends that are still religiously conserved as part of our European cultural inheritance. For example, the various legends of the halcyon, or kingfisher which like the wren, is associated in Greek myth with the winter solstice. There were fourteen ‘halcyon days’ in every year, seven of which fell before the winter solstice, seven after: peaceful days when the sea was smooth as a pond and the hen-halcyon built a floating nest and hatched out her young. According to Plutarch and Aelian, she had another habit, of carrying her dead mate on her back over the sea and mourning him with a peculiarly plaintive cry.
The number fourteen is a moon-number, the days of the lucky first half of the month; so the legend (which has no foundation in natural history, because the halcyon does not build a nest at all but lays its eggs in holes by the waterside) evidently refers to the birth of the new sacred king, at the winter solstice – after his mother, the Moon-goddess, has conveyed the old king’s corpse to a sepulchral island. Naturally, the winter solstice does not always coincide with the same phase of the moon, so ‘every year’ must be understood as ‘every Great Year’, at the close of which solar and lunar time were roughly synchronized and the sacred king’s term ended.
Homer connects the halcyon with Alcyone, a title of Meleager’s wife Cleopatra (Iliad, IX, 562) and with an earlier Alcyone who was daughter to Aegeale, ‘she who wards off the hurricane’, by Aeolus, the eponymous ancestor of the Aeolian Greeks. The word ‘halcyon’ cannot therefore mean hal-cyon, ‘sea-hound’, as is usually supposed, but must stand for alcy-one, ‘princess who averts evil’. This derivation is confirmed by the fable told by Apollodorus and Hyginus, and briefly mentioned by Homer, of the earlier Alcyone: how she and her husband Ceyx (‘sea-mew’) dared call themselves Hera and Zeus, and how the real Zeus punished them by drowning Ceyx, whereupon Alcyone also drowned herself. Ceyx was then metamorphosed into a sea-mew or, according to Alcman, into a razor-bill, and she into a halcyon. The sea-mew part of the legend need not be pressed, though the bird, which has a very plaintive cry, is sacred to the Sea-goddess Aphrodite; the historical basis seems to be that late in the second millennium BC the Aeolians, who had agreed to worship the pre-Hellenic Moon-goddess as their divine ancestress and protectress, became tributary to the Achaeans and were forced to accept the Olympian religion.
Pliny, who carefully describes the halcyon’s alleged nest – apparently the zoöphyte called halcyoneum by Linnaeus – reports
that the halcyon is rarely seen and then only at the winter and summer solstices and at the setting of the Pleiads. This proves her to have originally been a manifestation of the Moon-goddess who was worshipped at the two solstices as the Goddess of alternatively Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life – and who early in November, when the Pleiads set, sent the sacred king his summons to death (as will be pointed out in Chapter Twelve). Still another Alcyone, daughter to Pleione, ‘Queen of Sailing’, by the oak-hero Atlas, was the mystical leader of the seven Pleiads. The heliacal rising of the Pleiads in May marked the beginning of the navigational year; their setting marked its end when (as Pliny notices in a passage about the halcyon) a remarkably cold North wind blows. The circumstances of Ceyx’s death show that the Aeolians, who were famous sailors, gave the goddess the title ‘Alcyone’ because as Sea-goddess she protected them from rocks and rough weather: for Zeus had wrecked him in defiance of Alcyone’s powers by hurling lightning at the ship. The halcyon continued for centuries to be credited with the magical power of allaying storms, and its body when dried was used as a talisman against Zeus’ lightning – supposedly on the ground that where once it strikes, it will not strike again. I have twice (with an interval of many years) seen a halcyon skimming the surface of the same Mediterranean bay, on both occasions about midsummer when the sea was without a ripple: its startlingly bright blue and white plumage made it an unforgettable symbol of the Goddess of calm seas.
The connexion made by Homer between Meleager’s wife Alcyone and the halcyon is that when her mother, Marpessa, was carried off by Apollo from Idas the Argonaut, her beloved husband, she mourned him as bitterly as the earlier Alcyone had mourned Ceyx and therefore gave her new-born daughter Cleopatra the surname ‘Alcyone’. This is nonsense. A priestess named Cleopatra whom the original Meleager married may well have borne the divine title ‘Alcyone’; but it is likely that Alcyone was called the Daughter of Marpessa (‘the snatcher’) because Marpessa was the White Goddess as the Old Sow who ruled mid-winter and because the halcyon days fall at mid-winter. This would, incidentally, explain why Pliny recommended dried and pulverized halcyon nests as a ‘wonderful cure’ for leprosy; sow’s milk was held to cause leprosy (the association of the White Goddess with leprosy is given in detail in Chapter Twenty-Four) and Alcyone as Marpessa’s benignant daughter would be immune against the infection. Apollo’s rape of Marpessa at Messene, like his rape of Daphne (‘the bloody one’) at Delphi, are events in early Greek tribal history: seizure of oracular shrines by the Achaean partisans of Apollo.
1 The magical connection of the Moon with menstruation is strong and widespread. The baleful moon-dew used by the witches of Thessaly was apparently a girl’s first menstrual blood, taken during an eclipse of the Moon. Pliny devotes a whole chapter of his Natural History to the subject and gives a long list of the powers for good and bad that a menstruating woman possesses. Her touch can blast vines, ivy and rue, fade purple cloth, blacken linen in the wash-tub, tarnish copper, make bees desert their hives, and cause abortions in mares; but she can also rid a field of pests by walking around it naked before sunrise, calm a storm at sea by exposing her genitals, and cure boils, erysipelas, hydrophobia and barrenness. In the Talmud it is said that if a menstruating woman passes between two men, one of them will die.
1 Even in healthy women there is greater variation in the length of time elapsing between periods than is generally supposed: it may be anything from twenty-one to thirty-five days.
1 To be found in Standish O’Grady‘s translation in E. M. Hull’s Poem Book of the Gael. A charming, though emasculated version of the same poem is current on Dartmoor. It tells which trees to burn and which not to burn as follows:
Oak-logs will warm you well
That are old and dry,
Logs of pine will sweetly smell
But the sparks will fly
Beech-logs for winter time,
Yew-logs as well;
Green elder-logs it is a crime
For any man to sell.
Birch-logs will burn too fast,
Chestnut scarce at all,
Hawthorn-logs are good to last –
Cut them in the fall.
Pear-logs and apple-logs,
They will scent your room,
Cherry-logs across the dogs
Smell like flower of broom.
Holly-logs will burn like wax,
You may burn them green;
Elm-logs like to smouldering flax,
No flame to be seen.
Ash-logs, smooth and grey,
Burn them green or old,
Buy up all that come your way –
Worth their weight in gold.
1 The Athenians, however, celebrated their Cronos festival early in July in the month of Cronion or Hecatombeion (‘a hundred dead’) originally also called Nekusion (corpse-month) by the Cretans, and Hyacinthion by the Sicilians, after Cronos’ counterpart Hyacinth. The barley harvest fell in July, and at Athens Cronos was Sabazius, ‘John Barleycorn’, who first appeared above the soil at the Spring equinox and whose multiple death they celebrated cheerfully at their harvest-home. He had long lost his connexion with the alder, though he still shared a temple at Athens with Rhea, the lion-guarded Queen of the Year, who was his midsummer bride and to whom the oak was sacred in Greece.
1 Dionysus was called Iyngies, ‘of the wryneck’, because of the use of the wryneck in an ancient erotic charm. The wryneck is said by the third century BC poet Callimachus to have been the messenger of Io which attracted Zeus to her arms; and his contemporary Nicander of Colophon records that nine Pierian maidens who vied with the Muses were transformed into birds, of which one was the wryneck – which means that the wryneck was sacred to the original Moon-goddess of Mount Pieria in Northern Thessaly (see Chapter Twenty-one). It was also sacred in Egypt and Assyria.
Chapter Eleven
THE TREE ALPHABET (2)
The vowels of the Beth-Luis-Nion make a complementary seasonal sequence, and like the vowels of the Boibel-Loth represent stations in the year. I take them to be the trees particularly sacred to the White Goddess, who presided over the year and to whom the number five was sacred; for Gwion in his poem Kadeir Taliesin (‘The Chair of Taliesin’), which was the chair that he claimed as Chief Poet of Wales after his confounding of Heinin and the other bards, describes the Cauldron of Inspiration, Cerridwen’s cauldron, as:
Sweet cauldron of the Five Trees.1
In Crete, Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean in general sacred trees are formalised as pillars; so these five trees may be the same as the five pillars with vertical and spiral flutings which a man is shown adoring in a Mycenaean cylinder seal.1 In the newly-discovered Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, five trees of Paradise are mentioned – but these are emblems of the five deathless Ones, namely Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Enoch and Elijah.
A FOR AILM
The first tree is the silver fir, a female tree with leaves closely resembling the yew’s, sacred in Greece to Artemis the Moon-goddess who presided over childbirth, and the prime birth-tree of Northern Europe, familiar in the Nativity context. In Orkney, according to Rogers’s Social Life in Scotland, mother and child are ‘sained’ soon after delivery with a flaming fir-candle whirled three times round the bed. It is remarkable that ailm, in Old Irish, also stood for the palm, a tree not native to Ireland (though it grew well on my grandfather’s estate in Co. Kerry). The palm, the birth-tree of Egypt, Babylonia, Arabia and Phoenicia, gives its name phoenix (‘bloody’) to Phoenicia, which formerly covered the whole Eastern Mediterranean, and to the Phoenix which is born and reborn in a palm. Its poetic connexion with birth is that the sea is the Universal Mother and that the palm thrives close to the sea in sandy soil heavily charged with salt; without salt at its roots a young palm remains stunted. The palm is the Tree of Life in the Babylonian Garden of Eden story. Its Hebrew name is ‘Tamar’ – Tamar was the Hebrew equivalent of the Great Goddess Istar or Ashtaroth; and the Arabians adored the palm of
Nejran as a goddess, annually draping it with women’s clothes and ornaments. Both Delian Apollo and Nabataean Dusares were born under a palm-tree. In modern Irish ‘ailm’ has come to mean elm, under the influence of the Latin Classics, for in Italy the elm, ulmus, which is not native to the British Isles, was used for supporting the young vine and so became the alma mater of the Wine-god. This interdependence of vine and elm was sanctified by a reference in the early Christian book of revelation, The Shepherd of Hermas.