The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  In my day it is by the ends of his finger-bones that the poet accomplishes the rite in this manner: ‘When he sees the person or thing before him he makes a verse at once with his finger ends, or in his mind without studying, and composes and repeats at the same time.’

  It is less likely that a mnemonic trick involving the use of the finger alphabet was used than that the poets induced a poetic trance by treating their finger-tips as oracular agents; since the Dichetal do Chennaib is always mentioned with the other two divinatory rites as of the same general nature.

  [At this point my own finger-tips began to itch and when I gave them a pen to hold they reconstructed the original incantation as follows:

  Tree powers, finger tips,

  First pentad of the four,

  Discover all your poet asks

  Drumming on his brow.

  Birch peg, throbbing thumb,

  By power of divination,

  Birch, bring him news of love;

  Loud the heart knocks.

  Rowan rod, foreigner,

  By power of divination

  Unriddle him a riddle;

  The key’s cast away.

  Ash, middle finger,

  By power of divination

  Weatherwise, fool otherwise,

  Mete him out the winds.

  Alder, physic finger,

  By power of divination

  Diagnose all maladies

  Of a doubtful mind.

  Willow wand, ear finger,

  By power of divination

  Force confessions from the mouth

  Of a mouldering corpse.

  Finger-ends, five twigs,

  Trees, true-divining trees,

  Discover all your poet asks

  Drumming on his brow.]

  The finger alphabet was evidently used in the witch cult of mediaeval Britain, to judge from the Devil marks tattooed on the hands of witches. In Joseph Glanvil’s Sadducismus Triumphatus (1681) a detailed account is given of two covens of Somersetshire witches, one of thirteen formed at Brewham, another at Wincanton, both places being about fourteen miles from Glastonbury. The British racial element, as opposed to the Saxon, predominated in Somerset and popular reverence for Glastonbury as a principal seat of the Old Religion was still strong in the seventeenth century. From the confessions of the members of these covens at their trial in 1664 it appears that the chief, or god, of these witches was known as Robin and that he sealed initiates with a prick from a needle made between the upper and middle joints of the physic-finger. This is precisely the spot at which one would expect the prick, since the covens’ activities included both black and white magic: the upper joint belongs to Coll, the hazel, the tree of white magic and healing, the lower to Straif; the blackthorn which, as will be shown in Chapter Fourteen, was the tree of black magic and blasting. These witches used thorns for sticking into the wax images of their enemies under Robin’s direction.

  In Scotland the fool’s-finger was used for the Devil’s mark, and though the precise location of the mark is not recorded, it was evidently low down, since Margaret McLevine of Bute complained that the Devil nearly cut this finger off her. The bottom joint of the fool’s-finger is Ura, the heather – a suitable tree for the initiation of Scottish witches who, according to Shakespeare, met on blasted heaths.

  Two Northampton witches, Elinor Shaw and Mary Phillips, who were condemned to death in 1705, had been pricked at their fingers’ ends: unfortunately the finger is not specified, but perhaps it was the finger with Saille as its tip, the willow sacred to Hecate, mother of witches.1

  Dr. Macalister gives little more importance to the Irish Tree-Ogham than to such other cypher systems recorded in the Book of Ballymote as Pig-Ogham, Castle-Ogham and Fruit-Ogham. But that the name for the B.L.N. alphabet, which is admittedly earlier than the B.L.F. alphabet, begins with three trees proves that the original Ogham was a Tree-Ogham; and the mythological associations of the trees that comprise O’Flaherty’s list are so ancient, various and coherent, that it seems impossible to regard it as a late mediaeval invention, ‘pedantic and artificial’. It seems to be the original alphabet invented by Ogma Sun-Face. Dr. Macalister disparages the invention of Ogham as childish and unworthy of a god; but this is because he regards the Boibel-Loth as the only genuine Ogham alphabet and the Beth-Luis-Nion as an experimental approach to it and considers that both are cribbed from the Greek alphabet. He is not to be convinced that either has any virtue besides the obvious alphabetic one.

  An objection against regarding the Beth-Luis-Nion as a complete alphabet is that it has only thirteen consonants, of which one, NG, is useless, while two ancient letters, Q and Z, contained in the Boibel-Loth and known in Ogham as Quert and Straif, are omitted. Straif is the blackthorn and Quert is the wild apple tree: both mythologically important trees. If Ogma Sun-Face raised four pillars of equal length, the original system must have contained five vowels and three sets of five consonants. This objection will be fully met in Chapter Thirteen. It is enough to note meanwhile that O’Flaherty was not alone in recording a B.L.N. alphabet with only thirteen consonants. O’Sullivan’s Ogham, quoted in Ledwich’s Antiquities of Ireland, has the same number, and with a similar omission of Q and Z, though with NG for P; O’Sullivan adds some diphthongs and other mysterious symbols such as eg, feo and oai, but the canon of the alphabet is the one discussed here.

  Edward Davies considered that the Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet was so called because B.L.N. are the radical consonants of Belin the Celtic god of the solar year. This makes sense, since it suggests an identification of the thirteen consonants, months of the year, with various mythological companies of thirteen – for example with Arthur and his Twelve Knights of the Round Table; Balder and his twelve judges; Odysseus and his Twelve Companions; Romulus and his Twelve Shepherds; Roland and the Twelve Peers of France; Jacob and his Twelve Sons; Danish Hrolf and his twelve Berserks. Also, with the head and the twelve other parts of Osiris’s torn body which Isis in her boat recovered from the Nile – Osiris having originally been a tree-god. And we may also identify the five seasonal vowels with the mysterious pentads of British Goddesses, the deae matronae, (y Mamau), which occur in inscriptions of Roman times; and with the various five-pointed leaves sacred to the White Goddess, especially the ivy, vine, bramble, fig and plane;1 and with the various five- petalled flowers sacred to her – the erotic briar-rose and primrose and the baleful blue vincapervinca, or periwinkle, which the Italians call the ‘flower of death’ and with which, in mediaeval England, condemned men were garlanded on their way to the gallows.

  But where did the Beth-Luis-Nion series originate? It will have been observed that all its trees are forest trees native to the British Isles, except the vine. That no orchard trees occur in the series suggests to me that it was brought in very early times from a thickly wooded northern region where the vine grew wild. The only region answering this condition, so far as I know, was the Paphlagonia-Pontus stretch of the Southern Black Sea coast. A Cretan origin is out of the question: the principal trees that appear in the very numerous sacred pictures and engravings recently excavated in Crete are the fig, olive, plane-tree, cypress, vine, pine and palm.

  Dr. Macalister cannot be blamed for doubting the ancientness of O’Flaherty’s Beth-Luis-Nion, since several different systems of classifying trees were current in mediaeval Ireland. For example, under Brehon Law (IV, 147) trees were divided into four categories with a scale of fines for their unlawful felling that diminished in severity according to the category:

  (1) Seven Chieftain Trees

  Oak dair

  Hazel coll

  Holly cuileann

  Yew ibur

  Ash iundius

  Pine ochtach

  Apple aball

  (2) Seven Peasant Trees

  Alder fernn

  Willow sail

  Hawthorn scieth

  Rowan caerthann

  Birch beithe

  Elm leam

  ? idhar />
  (3) Seven Shrub Trees

  Blackthorn draidean

  Elder trom

  White hazel fincoll

  White poplar crithach

  Arbutus caithne

  ? feorus

  ? crann-fir

  (4) Eight Bramble Trees

  Fern raith

  Bog-myrtle rait

  Furze aiteand

  Briar dris

  Heath fraech

  Ivy eideand

  Broom gilcoch

  Gooseberry spin

  This law is much later than that commemorated in the Triads of Ireland under which the death penalty is apparently demanded for the unlawful felling of two of the chieftain trees, the hazel and the apple:

  Three unbreathing things paid for only with breathing things:

  An apple tree, a hazel bush, a sacred grove.

  This may be explained by the seventh-century poem at the end of the Crib Gablach in which the seven Chieftain trees are listed, but with alder, willow and birch instead of ash, yew and pine, the fine for the unlawful felling of them being one cow, or three for the whole grove. But I assume that the poem is later than the Triads, though earlier than the Brehon Law, and that the death sentence for the felling of hazel and apple has here been commuted to a one-cow fine, as in the case of other trees.1 According to mediaeval glossarists, Neimhead, meaning ‘nobility’, or sacrosanctity, was applied to kings or chieftains, poets and groves; in its secondary sense of ‘worthiness’, to musicians, smiths, carpenters, cows and Church dignitaries.

  The Commentator on the Brehon Law explains the ‘nobility’ of its seven Chieftain Trees in the following glosses:

  Oak: its size, handsomeness, and its pig-fattening acorns.

  Hazel: its nuts and wattles.

  Apple: its fruit, and bark suitable for tanning.

  Yew: its timber, used for household vessels, breast-plates, etc.

  Holly: its timber, used for chariot shafts.

  Ash: its timber, used for supporting the King’s thigh (i.e. for making regal thrones) and for the shafts of weapons.

  Pine: its timber, used for making puncheons.

  The triumph of Gwydion’s ash over Bran’s alder at the Câd Goddeu is incidentally demonstrated here: the ash, which was originally excluded from the sacred grove, is now the only tree mentioned in connection with royalty, and the alder has been degraded to the status of peasant. The utilitarian assessment of nobility made by the glossarist denotes a profound religious change, and when the relative values of the trees can be expressed in terms of cash-compensation for their illegal felling, the sanctity of the grove is annulled and poetry itself declines. However, while this Law was in force the student for the Ollaveship of poetry had to memorize the following ancient catechism, recorded in Calder’s Hearings of the Scholars, which contains still another classification of trees:

  Cis lir aicme Ogaim? A iii .i. viii n-airigh

  How many groups of Ogham? Answer three, namely: 8 chieftain

  fedha & viii n-athaigh & viii fidlosa. Ocht n-airigh

  trees and 8 peasant-trees and 8 shrub trees. 8 chieftain trees

  cetus fernn, dur, coll, muin, gort, straif, onn, or.

  first alder, oak, hazel, vine, ivy, blackthorn, furze, heath.

  Ocht n-athaig .i. bethi, luis, sail, nin, huath,

  8 peasant-trees, namely: birch, rowan, willow, ash, whitethorn,

  tinne, quert. Ar chuit a feda is athaig

  whin,1 appletree. As to their letters, all other shrubs

  feda fidlosa olchema.

  are shrub trees.

  Here the trees are those of O’Flaherty’s Beth-Luis-Nion, without the intrusion of arbutus, elm, white-hazel and the rest. The unnamed ‘shrub trees’ evidently include the elder, reed or water-elder, broom and woodbine. This arrangement according to nobility is eccentric – the apple-tree and holly being excluded from chieftainship – and is possibly connected with the Greek 24-letter alphabet rather than with the Ogham 20-letter one or its 25-letter expansion.

  The subject is very difficult, and the Irish ollaves had no interest in making it plain to outsiders.

  1 It is likely that Gwion was also aware of the value given to the number Five by the Pythagoreans and their successors. The Pythagoreans swore their oaths on the ‘holy tetractys’, a figure consisting of ten dots arranged in a pyramid, thus:

  The top dot represented position; the two dots below, extension; the three dots below those, surface; the four dots at the bottom, three-dimensional space. The pyramid, the most ancient emblem of the Triple Goddess, was philosophically interpreted as Beginning, Prime and End; and the central dot of this figure makes a five with each of the four dots of the sides. Five represented the colour and variety which nature gives to three-dimensional space, and which are apprehended by the five senses, technically called ‘the wood’ – a quincunx of five trees; this coloured various world was held to be formed by five elements – earth, air, fire, water and the quintessence or soul; and these elements in turn corresponded with seasons. Symbolic values were also given to the numerals from 6 to 10, which was the number of perfection. The tetractys could be interpreted in many other ways: for instance, as the three points of the triangle enclosing a hexagon of dots – six being the number of life – with a central dot increasing this to seven, technically known as ‘Athene’, the number of intelligence, health and light.

  1 To judge from a design on a glass dish of the Seleucid epoch, showing the façade of Solomon’s Temple as rebuilt by Zerubbabel on the original Phoenician model, the spirally fluted pillars correspond with Boaz, Solomon’s right-hand pillar dedicated to growth and the waxing sun; the vertically fluted with Jachin, his left-hand pillar dedicated to decay and the waning sun. The symbolism became confused when the Jews made their New Year correspond with the autumn vintage festival, for the pillars were then referred to as Jachin and Boaz, not Boaz and Jachin, but the tradition remained ‘Boaz is to Jachin as Gerizim is to Ebal – as blessing is to cursing’. Gerizim and Ebal were the twin peaks covering the Ephraimite shrine of Shechem. Gerizim was on the right-hand as one faced east from Shechem, Ebal on the left, and Shechem was a home of the terebinth cult. In Deuteronomy XI, 29 there is a prophecy attributed to Moses. ‘You shall put the blessing upon Gerizim and the curse upon Ebal …towards the entrance into Shechem where dwell the Canaanites in the towered house beside the sacred terebinth of Moreh.’

  This was as it should have been. The terebinth, the hard-wooded Canaanite equivalent of Duir the oak, was naturally placed in the middle with Ebal on the unlucky left, Gerizim on the lucky right.

  1 At Arles, in Provence, the cult of the Goddess as a Triad or Pentad of Mothers has survived under Christian disguise until today, when her festival is celebrated from May 24th to May 28th, the middle of the Hawthorn, or Chastity, month, but now her devotees are largely gipsies. As a Triad she has become known as ‘The Three Maries of Provence’ or ‘The Three Maries of the Sea’; as a Pentad she has had Martha added to her company, and an apocryphal serving-girl called Sara. It seems that these were Christianizations of pre-Christian reliefs on the tombstones of the cemetery of Alyscamps at Arles, in which the Triad, or Pentad, was shown on one panel; and below, on another, the soul in resurrection. The scene was explained as the Raising of Lazarus. As late as the time of Dante the cemetery was used in the ancient style. The corpse was laid in a boat, with money in it, called drue de mourtilage and floated down the Rhône to the Alyscamps. The name Alyscamps has been explained as Campi Elysiani, ‘the Elysian Fields’, but it is as likely that Alys was the ancient name of the Goddess; it may even be that the Homeric adjective Elysian (the e is a long one) is derived from her name. Alys also appears as alise or alis in many French place-names. Dauzat’s Dictionnaire Etymologique, under alis, alise, meaning a ‘sheltered creek’, derives it from ‘the Gaulish word alisia, perhaps pre-Celtic, which is represented by numerous place-names, and which must also have provided the Spanish word for alder, alisa.’ This
makes good mythical sense, because Calypso’s sepulchral island of Ogygia was screened by alder thickets. Alys or Alis or Halys is the name of the biggest river of Asia Minor, and that it is pre-Hellenic is shown by the town of Aliassus (-assus is a Cretan termination) built on its banks just before it turns north to empty into the Southern Black Sea. There are also two Hales rivers, one in Ionia, the other in Lucania, which may be named after the same goddess. One name for the alder in German is else, corresponding with the Scandinavian word elle. The Danish Ellerkonge is the alder-king, Bran, who carries off children to the other world; but elle also means ‘elf’ which should be regarded as a clethrad, or alder-fairy. Thus in Goethe’s well-known ballad, based on his predecessor Herder’s Stimmen der Völker, Ellerkonge is correctly translated ‘Erlkönig’, the commoner German word for alder being erle.