The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  But the silver fir, which also likes sandy soil and sea breezes, is as old a birth-tree as the palm, being the tree under which the God of Byblos was born: the prototype of the pre-dynastic Osiris of Egypt. The Greek for fir is elate, and Pausanias’s account of Elatos the Arcadian is interesting. He was ‘father of Ischys, the lover of Aesculapius’s mother’ and of Cyllen who gave his name to Mount Cyllene ‘until then nameless’, which became the birth-place of Hermes. Other mythographers convert Cyllen into ‘the Nymph Cyllene’, wife of Pelasgus who founded the Pelasgian race. It seems that originally Elatos was Elate ‘the lofty one’, a name transferred from Artemis to her sacred tree – an ivy-twined, fir-cone-tipped branch of which was waved in her honour at the Dionysian revels – and that Cyllene (Cylle Ana) ‘the curved queen’ was another of her titles. The fir-tree of the Birth-goddess is similarly transferred to her son in the myth of Attis, son of Nana, the Phrygian Adonis. He is said to have been metamorphosed into a fir by the Goddess Cybele who loved him, when he lay dying from a wound dealt him by a boar sent by Zeus – or else dealt him by a Phrygian king whom he had emasculated and who emasculated him in return.

  The Trojan horse, a peace-offering to the Goddess Athene, originally the same White Goddess, was made of silver-fir: a horse, because sacred to the moon. In the Museum of Newcastle-on-Tyne is a Roman-British altar dedicated to ‘the Mothers’1 by one Julius Victor. It shows a triangle standing on its base with a fir-cone enclosed. Though Druantia, the name of the Gallic Fir-goddess, contains no reference to her own tree, it makes her ‘Queen of the Druids’ and therefore mother of the whole tree-calendar.

  The silver fir has its station on the first day of the year, the birthday of the Divine Child, the extra day of the winter solstice. Thirteen weeks separate these stations and the last of each was a death week and demanded a blood-sacrifice.

  O FOR ONN

  The second tree is the furze, which with its golden flowers and prickles typifies the young Sun at the Spring equinox; the time when furze fires are lighted on the hills. The effect of burning away the old prickles is to make tender new ones sprout on the stock, which sheep eat greedily; and to encourage the growth of grass – ‘The furze but ill-behaved, Until he is subdued.’ The religious importance of furze, or gorse, which in Welsh folk-lore is ‘good against witches’, is enhanced by its flowers being frequented by the first bees of the year, as the ivy’s are by the last. The name On-niona, a Goddess worshipped by the Gauls in ash-groves, is a compound of Onn and Nion, which supplies the date of her festival, namely the Spring equinox at the close of the Ash-month.

  U FOR URA

  The third tree is the heather, sacred to the Roman and Sicilian love-goddess Venus Erycina; and in Egypt and Phoenicia to Isis whose brother Osiris was immured in a heather-tree at Byblos, where she went to seek him. The Isis legend quoted by Plutarch is late and artificial but hints at child-sacrifice in honour of Osiris.

  The eighteenth-century antiquary Winslow took Dean Swift to Lough Crew to collect local legends of the Irish Triple Goddess. Among those collected was one of the death of the Garbh Ogh, an ancient ageless giantess, whose car was drawn by elks, whose diet was venison milk and eagles’ breasts and who hunted the mountain deer with a pack of seventy hounds with bird names. She gathered stones to heap herself a triple cairn and ‘set up her chair in a womb of the hills at the season of heather-bloom’; and then expired.

  The Gallic Heather-goddess Uroica is attested by inscriptions in Roman Switzerland; her name is half-way between Ura, and the Greek word for heather, ereice.

  The heather is the midsummer tree, red and passionate, and is associated with mountains and bees. The Goddess is herself a queen bee about whom male drones swarm in midsummer, and as Cybele is often so pictured; the ecstatic self-castration of her priests was a type of the emasculation of the drone by the queen bee in the nuptial act. Venus fatally courted Anchises on a mountain to the hum of bees. But white heather is lucky, being a protection against acts of passion. The Sicilian Mount Eryx is famous for the visit of Butes the bee-master, son of the North Wind, who was given a hero-shrine there by the nymphs of the Goddess Erycina. The reference in Gwion’s Câd Goddeu to the heather comforting the battered poplars is to ‘heather-ale’, a favourite restorative in Wales.

  The ancient popularity of lindens or lime-trees among love-poets of Germany and Northern France, suggests that they became a substitute, in flat regions, for mountain heather. Lindens flower from mid-May to mid-August. They do not rank as sacred trees in Britain where only a small-leaved variety seems to be indigenous. However, in Thessaly, Cheiron the Centaur’s Goddess-mother associated with the erotic wryneck, was called Philyra (‘linden’).

  E FOR EADHA

  The fourth tree, the tree of the autumn equinox and of old age, is the shifting-leaved white poplar, or aspen, the shield-maker’s tree. According to Pausanias it was first introduced into Greece from Epirus by Hercules (but which?); and the Latin legend is that he bound his head in triumph with poplar after killing the giant Cacus (‘the evil one’) in his den on the Aventine Hill at Rome. The side of the leaves next to his brow were whitened by the radiant heat he gave out. Presumably the myth accounts for the difference in leaf and ritual use between the aspen and the black poplar which was a funereal tree sacred to Mother Earth in pre-Hellenic Greece. There is a reference in the Casina of Plautus to the divinatory use of black poplar and silver fir, the fir apparently standing for hope, the poplar for loss of hope1 somewhat as in Pembrokeshire a girl gives a lover either a piece of birch as a sign of encouragement, ‘You may begin’, or a piece of hazel, called a collen, ‘Be wise and desist’. Hercules conquered death, and in ancient Ireland the fé or measuring-rod used by coffin-makers on corpses was of aspen, presumably as a reminder to the souls of the dead that this was not the end. Golden head-dresses of aspen leaves are found in Mesopotamian burials of 3000 BC.

  I FOR IDHO

  The fifth tree is the yew, the death-tree in all European countries, sacred to Hecate in Greece and Italy. At Rome, when black bulls were sacrificed to Hecate, so that the ghosts should lap their gushing blood, they were wreathed with yew. The yew is mentioned by Pausanias as the tree beside which Epaminondas found the bronze urn on Mount Ithome, containing on a tin scroll the secret mysteries of the Great Goddess. On the other side of the urn, appropriately, grew a myrtle, which (as will appear in Chapter Thirteen) was the Greek equivalent of the elder, the death-consonant R. That the scroll was made of tin is interesting; for the ancient Greeks imported their tin from Spain and Britain. In Ireland the yew was ‘the coffin of the vine’: wine barrels were made of yew staves. In the Irish romance of Naoise and Deirdre, yew stakes were driven through the corpses of these lovers to keep them apart; but the stakes sprouted and became trees whose tops eventually embraced over Armagh Cathedral. In Brittany it is said that church-yard yews will spread a root to the mouth of each corpse. Yew makes the best bows – as the Romans learned from the Greeks – and the deadliness of the tree was thereby enhanced; it is likely that the Latin taxus, yew, is connected with toxon, Greek for bow, and with toxicon, Greek for the poison with which arrows were smeared. The ancient Irish are said to have used a compound of yew-berry, hellebore and devil’s bit for poisoning their weapons. John Evelyn in his Silva (1662) points out that the yew does not deserve its reputation for poisonousness – ‘whatever Pliny reports concerning its shade, or the story of the air about Thasius, the fate of Cativulcus mentioned by Caesar, and the ill report which the fruit has vulgarly obtained in France, Spain and Arcadia.’ Cattle and horses nibble the leaves without ill-effect, he says; but later he suggests that the ‘true taxus’ is indeed ‘mortiferous’. Its use in the English witch-cult is recalled in Macbeth where Hecate’s cauldron contained:

  …slips of yew

  Sliver’d in the Moon’s eclipse.

  Shakespeare elsewhere calls it the ‘double fatal yew’ and makes Hamlet’s uncle poison the King by pouring its juice (‘hebenon�
�) into his ear. It shares with the oak the reputation of taking longer than any other tree to come to maturity, but is longer lived even than the oak. When seasoned and polished its wood has an extraordinary power of resisting corruption.

  One of the ‘Five Magical Trees of Ireland’ was a yew. This was the Tree of Ross, described as ‘a firm straight deity’ (the Irish yew differed from the British in being cone-shaped, with branches growing straight up, not horizontally), ‘the renown of Banbha’ (Banbha was the death aspect of the Irish Triple Goddess), ‘the Spell of Knowledge, and the King’s Wheel’ – that is to say the death-letter that makes the wheel of existence come full circle; as a reminder of his destiny, every Irish king wore a brooch in the form of a wheel, which was entailed on his successor. I place the station of the yew on the last day of the year, the eve of the Winter Solstice. Ailm the Silver-fir of Birth and Idho the Yew of Death are sisters: they stand next to each other in the circle of the year and their foliage is almost identical. Fir is to yew as silver is to poisonous lead. The mediaeval alchemists, following ancient tradition, reckoned silver to the Moon as presiding over birth, and lead to Saturn as presiding over death; and extracted both metals from the same mixed ore.

  Fir, womb of silver pain,

  Yew, tomb of leaden grief –

  Viragoes of one vein,

  Alike in leaf –

  With arms up-flung

  Taunt us in the same tongue:

  ‘Here Jove’s own coffin-cradle swung.’

  An Assyrian sculpture published by Felix Lajard in his Sur la Culte de Mithra (1847), shows the year as a thirteen-branched tree. The tree has five bands around the trunk and the sceptre-like branches are arranged six on each side, one at the summit. Here evidently the Eastern Mediterranean agricultural year, beginning in the autumn, has been related to the solar year beginning at the Winter solstice. For there is a small ball, representing a new solar year, suspended above the last three branches; and of the two rampant goats which act as supporters to the tree device, the one on the right, which has turned his head so that his single horn forms a crescent moon, rests a forefoot on the uppermost of these last three branches; while the other goat, a she-goat turning her head in the opposite direction so that her horn forms a decrescent moon, is claiming the first three branches. She has a full udder, appropriate to this season, because the first kids are dropped about the winter solstice. A boat-like new moon swims above the tree, and a group of seven stars, the seventh very much brighter than the others, is placed beside the she-goat; which proves her to be Amalthea, mother of the horned Dionysus. The he-goat is an Assyrian counterpart of Azazel, the scape-goat sacrificed by the Hebrews at the beginning of the agricultural year. The five bands on the tree, of which one is at the base of the trunk, another at the top, are the five stations of the year; in a Babylonian tree of the year, published in the same book, they are symbolized by five fronds.

  In the light of this knowledge we can re-examine the diagram of the hand used as a signalling keyboard by the Druids and understand the puzzling traditional names of the four fingers – ‘fore-finger’, ‘fool’s finger’, ‘leech, or physic-finger’ and ‘auricular or ear-finger’ – in terms of the mythic value of the letters contained on them.

  The slight difference in order of letters between the Beth-Luis-Nion and the Boibel-Loth does not affect the argument; though I believe that the system was based on the tree meanings of the Beth-Luis-Nion, because in one of the ancient tales a really dark night is described by a poet as ‘one in which a man could not distinguish oak-leaf from hazel, nor study the five fingers of his own stretched-out hand’. The fore-finger has Duir on it, the oak-god who is the foremost of the trees, surmounted by Luis, the rowan, a charm against lightning; the fool’s-finger has Tinne on it, the holly-king, or green knight, who appears in the old English ‘Christmas Play’, a survival of the Saturnalia, as the Fool who is beheaded but rises up again unhurt; the leech-finger has Coll on it, the sage hazel, who is the master-physician; the ear-finger – in French doigt auriculaire – is based on the two death-letters Ruis and Idho and therefore has oracular power; as they still say in France of a person who gets information from a mysterious source: ‘Son petit doigt le lui dit.’ ‘Auricular finger’ is usually explained as ‘the finger most easily put into one’s ear-hole’, but the earliest sense of ‘auricular’ is ‘secretly whispered in the ear’. The auricular finger was probably used by the Gallic and British Druids for stopping the ear as an aid to inspiration. Its divinatory character was established early enough in Western Europe for it to appear in a number of folk tales concerning the loss of a little finger, or a little toe, by an ogre’s daughter; the hero of the story finds it and it enables him to win the ogre’s permission to marry the daughter. These stories occur in Brittany, Lorraine, the West Highlands, Viscaya in Spain, and Denmark. In the Romance of Taliesin it is the little finger of Elphin’s wife that is said to have been magically cut off.

  The ‘ring-finger’ is another name for the leech-finger. The Romans and Greeks used the thumb, sacred to Venus, for their seal-rings which were usually made of iron; these were prophylactic charms to maintain their virility, the thumb being a synonym for the phallus and iron a compliment to Venus’s husband, the Smith-god Vulcan. But for their wedding rings they used the fourth finger of the left hand. This custom was explained by Macrobius, who wrote in the fifth century AD, on two grounds: that this was the finger in least use of the ten and the least capable of individual movement, therefore the safest to wear precious jewels upon; and (here quoting the authority of the first-century writer Appian) that in this finger an artery runs direct to the heart. The artery to the heart is an astrological, rather than an anatomical, observation – though a small vein, which the ancients could not distinguish from an artery, does show at the bottom joint – because in the late Classical apportionment of the human body to planetary influences it is Apollo, Sun-god and healer, who rules the heart, as Venus rules the kidneys; Mercury, the lungs; Diana (Moon), the head – and so on. The fourth finger is thus used as the ring-finger because the prophylactic wedding-ring, made of gold in honour of Apollo, controls the heart which is the seat of enduring love. The artery legend is also quoted in a medical context by the sixteenth-century German humanist Levinus Lemnius who records that ‘the ancient physicians from whom this finger derives its name of “physic-finger” used to mix their medicaments and potions with it, on the theory that no poison can adhere even to its extreme tip without communicating itself directly to the heart.’

  Precisely the same system survives in popular cheiromancy, which is late Classical in origin. Palmists give the fore-finger to Jupiter the oak-god; the middle finger to Saturn the Christmas Fool; the fourth finger (in German also called the ‘gold finger’) to the Sun – Apollo the Sun-god having latterly become the patron of physicians and god of wisdom generally; and the little finger to Mercury in his aspect of Conductor of Dead Souls. The Moon has the heel of the palm, being the Underworld-goddess from whom Mercury derives his inspiration; Venus the thumb (as a phallic emblem); and Mars the centre of the hand, in which the weapon is gripped – his initial M is formed by the principal lines of the hand. A bronze votive hand from Phrygia dedicated to Zeus Sabazius – a rustic Jupiter – contains a little figure in Phrygian cap and breeches, with his feet resting on a ram’s head holding up thumb, fore-finger and middle finger in what is called the Latin Blessing – Venus’s thumb for increase, Jupiter’s fore-finger for fortunate guidance, Saturn’s middle finger for rain. He is imitating the posture of the hand in which he is held, and on the fore-finger is perched Jupiter’s eagle. It was not so much a blessing as a propitiatory gesture used before embarking on a speech or recital; Greek and Latin orators never omitted it. The Devil’s blessing, still used by the Frisian Islanders, consists in raising the fore-finger and ear-finger of the right hand, with the other fingers and the thumb folded against the palm. This is an invocation to the Horned God of the witches, with his lucky rig
ht horn and his unlucky left expressing his powers for good and evil.

  The Apollo-finger is connected with the poplar in the story of the sun-god Phaëthon whose sisters wept for him when he died: they were metamorphosed into poplars and their tears into amber, sacred to Apollo.

  The Saturn-finger is connected with the heather in the story of Osiris, the Egyptian Saturn. Osiris was enclosed in a heather tree, and the lowest consonant on the finger, the reed, was sacred to Osiris as King of Egypt. According to the well-informed fourteenth-century antiquarian Richard of Cirencester, rich Southern Britons of the third century AD wore gold rings on the fool’s finger; in the B.L.F. alphabet this finger belonged to Bran, whom they must by then have learned from the Romans to identify with Osiris. To wear a ring on the fool’s finger naturally expressed a hope of resurrection.

  The thumb of Venus is connected with the palm-tree by its sacredness to the orgiastic goddess Isis, Latona or Lat. Lat was the mother of Nabatean Dusares the vine-god, worshipped in Egypt, and the lowest consonant on the thumb was the vine.

  The Jupiter-finger is connected with the furze, or gorse, by the Spring gorse-fires burned in his honour as god of shepherds.

  The connexion of the Mercury-finger with the yew is made by Mercury’s conducting of souls to the place presided over by the death-goddess Hecate, alias his mother Maia, to whom the yew was sacred.

  It is fitting that the most sensitive part of the hand, the tip of the fore finger, should belong to Luis as the diviner. But all the finger-tip trees –Luis the rowan, Nion the ash, Fearn the alder and Saille the willow – were used in divination. This perhaps throws light on an Irish poetic rite called the Dichetal do Chennaib (‘recital from the finger-ends’), of which the ollave was required to be a master, and which Dr. Joyce describes as ‘the utterance of an extempore prophecy or poem that seems to have been accomplished with the aid of a mnemonic contrivance of some sort in which the fingers played a principal part’. St. Patrick, while abolishing two other prophetic rites, the Imbas Forasnai, ‘palm-knowledge of enlightenment’, and another like it, because they involved preliminary sacrifice to demons, permitted the ‘recital from the finger ends’ because it did not. In Cormac’s Glossary the Dichetal do Chennaib is explained: