The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  1 Sed manendum, tum ista aut populina fors aut abiegina est tua. (Act II.)

  1 British sailors used always to be tattooed with a star in the hollow of the hand between the thumb and fore-finger, and the custom survives in some ports. This is originally a plea to Venus as Goddess of the Sea and Jupiter as God of the Air to bring the sailor safe ashore, the star being the symbol of hope and guidance.

  1 Another five-pointed leaf in sacral use was the cinquefoil, a chief ingredient in the flying ointment used by mediaeval French witches. An alternative in one formula is the poplar leaf, doubtless the five-pointed sort. Like the fleur-de-luce used in the same ointment – apparently because of its three-petalled flower and its red seeds contained in a triangular seed-box – it has no toxic effect, but seems to have been introduced in the Goddess’s honour (with a thickening of soot and oil, or infant’s fat) to enhance the effect of the other ingredients: namely, the abortificent parsley, bat’s blood to assist nocturnal flight, and the highly toxic aconite, belladonna, hemlock and cowbane. The formulas are quoted in Miss M. Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe. Mr. Trevor Furze has supplied me with two further formulas of English origin: (1) The fat of a newly-born infant; eleoselinum (wild celery, also called ‘smallage’, or ‘water-parsley’, a mediaeval remedy against cramps); skiwet (wild parsnip, the leaves of which were regarded as poisonous but used in poulticing); soot. (2) Bat’s blood, to be obtained at the wake of the new moon; pentphyllon (cinquefoil) poplar leaves; soot. Perhaps the ‘parsley’ in the French formula is really water-parsley, introduced to protect the witches against cramps when flying.

  1 At Rome in the second century BC a sacred grove could be felled at an even cheaper rate: the sacrifice of a single pig. Cato the Censor in his De Re Rustica quotes the prayer of placation that the timber-hungry farmer must offer to the deity concerned.

  1 Evidently a mistake for holly.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE SONG OF AMERGIN

  I suggest in the first part of this argument that the ‘I am’ and ‘I have been’ sequences frequent in ancient Welsh and Irish poetry are all variants of the same calendar theme. Here, for instance, is the ‘Song of Amergin’ (or Amorgen) said to have been chanted by the chief bard of the Milesian invaders, as he set his foot on the soil of Ireland, in the year of the world 2736 (1268 BC). Unfortunately the version which survives is only a translation into colloquial Irish from the Old Goidelic. Dr. Macalister pronounces it ‘a pantheistic conception of a Universe where godhead is everywhere and omnipotent’ and suggests that it was a liturgical hymn of as wide a currency as, say, the opening chapters of the Koran, or the Apostles’ Creed. He writes: ‘Was it of this hymn, or of what he had been told of the contents of this hymn, that Caesar was thinking when he wrote: “The Druids teach of the stars and their motions, the world, the size of lands, natural philosophy and the nature of the gods”?’ He notes that the same piece ‘in a garbled form’ is put into the mouth of the Child-bard Taliesin when narrating his transformations in previous existences. Sir John Rhys pointed out in his Hibbert Lectures that many of Gwion’s ‘I have been’s’ imply ‘not actual transformation but mere likeness, through a primitive formation of a predicate without the aid of a particle corresponding to such a word as “like”.’

  The Song of Amergin begins with thirteen statements, provided with mediaeval glosses. The thirteen statements are followed by six questions, also provided with glosses. These are followed in Professor John MacNeill’s version by an envoie in which the Druid advises the People of the Sea to invoke the poet of the sacred rath to give them a poem. He himself will supply the poet with the necessary material, and together they will compose an incantation.

  THE SONG OF AMERGIN

  God speaks and says: Glosses

  I am a wind of the sea, for depth

  I am a wave of the sea, for weight

  I am a sound of the sea, for horror

  I am an ox of seven fights, for strength

  or I am stag of seven tines,

  I am a griffon on a cliff, for deftness

  or I am a hawk on a cliff,

  I am a tear of the sun, ‘a dew-drop’ – for clearness

  I am fair among flowers,

  I am a boar, for valour

  I am a salmon in a pool, ‘the pools of knowledge’

  I am a lake on a plain, for extent

  I am a hill of poetry, ‘and knowledge’

  I am a battle-waging spear,

  I am a god who forms fire for a head. [i.e. ‘gives inspiration: Macalister]

  or I am a god who forms smoke from sacred fire for a head. ‘to slay therewith’

  ***

  1. Who makes clear the ruggedness of the mountains?

  or Who but myself knows the assemblies of the dolmen-house on the mountain of Slieve Mis? ‘Who but myself will resolve every question?’

  2. Who but myself knows where the sun shall set?

  3. Who foretells the ages of the moon?

  4. Who brings the cattle from the House of Tethra and segregates them? [i.e. ‘the fish’, Macalister, i.e. ‘the stars’, MacNeill]

  5. On whom do the cattle of Tethra smile?

  or For whom but me will the fish of the

  laughing ocean be making welcome?

  6. Who shapes weapons from hill to hill? ‘wave to wave, letter to letter, point to point’

  ***

  Invoke, People of the Sea, invoke the poet, that he may compose a spell for you.

  For I, the Druid, who set out letters in Ogham,

  I, who part combatants,

  I will approach the rath of the Sidhe to seek a cunning poet that together we may concoct incantations.

  I am a wind of the sea.

  Tethra was the king of the Undersea-land from which the People of the Sea were later supposed to have originated. He is perhaps a masculinization of Tethys, the Pelasgian Sea-goddess, also known as Thetis, whom, Doge-like, Peleus the Achaean married at Iolcus in Thessaly. The Sidhe are now popularly regarded as fairies: but in early Irish poetry they appear as a real people – a highly cultured and dwindling nation of warriors and poets living in the raths, or round stockaded forts, of which New Grange on the Boyne is the most celebrated. All had blue eyes, pale faces and long curly yellow hair. The men carried white shields, and were organized in military companies of fifty. They were ruled over by two virgin-born kings and were sexually promiscuous but ‘without blame or shame’. They were, in fact, Picts (tattooed men) and all that can be learned about them corresponds with Xenophon’s observations in his Anabasis on the primitive Mosynoechians (‘wooden-castle dwellers’) of the Black Sea coast. The Mosynoechians were skilfully tattooed, carried long spears and ivy-leaf shields made from white ox-hide, were forest dwellers, and performed the sexual act in public. They lived in the stockaded forts from which they took their name, and in Xenophon’s time occupied the territory assigned in early Greek legend to the matriarchal Amazons. The ‘blue eyes’ of the Sidhe I take to be blue interlocking rings tattooed around the eyes, for which the Thracians were known in Classical times. Their pallor was also perhaps artificial – white ‘war-paint’ of chalk or powdered gypsum, in honour of the White Goddess, such as we know, from a scene in Aristophanes’s Clouds where Socrates whitens Strepsiades, was used in Orphic rites of initiation.

  Slieve Mis is a mountain in Kerry.

  ‘Of seven tines’ probably means of seven points on each horn, fourteen in all: which make a ‘royal stag’. But royalty is also conceded to a stag of twelve points, and since a stag must be seven years old before it can have twelve points, ‘seven fights’ may refer to the years.

  It is most unlikely that this poem was allowed to reveal its esoteric meaning to all and sundry; it would have been ‘pied’, as Gwion pied his poems, for reasons of security. So let us rearrange the order of statements in a thirteen-month calendar form, on the lines of the Beth-Luis-Nion, profiting from what we have learned about the mythic meaning of each letter-mo
nth:

  God speaks and says: Trees of the month

  Dec. 24-Jan. 20 B I am a stag of seven tines, or an ox of seven fights, Birch Beth

  Jan. 21-Feb. 17 L I am a wide flood on a plain, Quick-beam (Rowan) Luis

  Feb. 18-Mar. 17 N I am a wind on the deep waters, Ash Nion

  Mar. 18-Apr. 14 F I am a shining tear of the sun, Alder Fearn

  Apr. 15-May 12 S I am a hawk on a cliff, Willow Saille

  May 13-Jun. 9 H I am fair among flowers, Hawthorn Uath

  Jun. 10-July 7 D I am a god who sets the head afire with smoke, Oak Duir

  July 8-Aug. 4 T I am a battle-waging spear, Holly Tinne

  Aug. 5-Sept. 1 C I am a salmon in the pool, Hazel Coll

  Sept. 2-Sept. 29 M I am a hill of poetry, Vine Muin

  Sept. 30-Oct. 27 G I am a ruthless boar, Ivy Gort

  Oct. 28-Nov. 24 NG I am a threatening noise, Reed Ngetal

  Nov. 25-Dec. 22 R I am a wave of the sea, Elder Ruis

  Dec. 23 Who but I knows the secrets of the unhewn dolmen?

  There can be little doubt as to the appropriateness of this arrangement. B is the Hercules stag (or wild bull) which begins the year. The seven fights, or seven tines of his antlers, are months in prospect and in retrospect: for Beth is the seventh month after Duir the oak-month, and the seventh month from Beth is Duir again. The ‘Boibalos’ of the Hercules charm contained in the Boibel-Loth was an antelope-bull. The Orphic ‘ox of seven fights’ is hinted at in Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris, where he describes how at the Winter solstice they carry the golden cow of Isis, enveloped in black cloth, seven times around the shrine of Osiris, whom he identifies with Dionysus. ‘The circuit is called “The Seeking for Osiris”, for in winter the Goddess longs for the water of the Sun. And she goes around seven times because he completes his passing from the winter to the summer solstice in the seventh month.’ Plutarch must be reckoning in months of 28 days, not 30, else the passage would be completed in the sixth of them.

  L is February Fill-Dyke, season of floods.

  N is centred in early March, which ‘comes in like a lion’ with winds that dry the floods.

  F is explained by the sentiment of the well-known mediaeval carol:

  He came all so still

  Where his mother was,

  Like dew in April

  That falleth on grass.

  For this is the true beginning of the sacred year, when the deer and wild cow drop their young, and when the Child Hercules is born who was begotten at the mid-summer orgies. Hitherto he has been sailing in his coracle over the floods; now he lies glistening on the grass.

  S is the month when birds nest. In Gwion’s Can y Meirch (‘Song of the Horses’), a partial series of ‘I have been’s’ occurs as an interpolation. One of them is: ‘I have been a crane on a wall, a wondrous sight.’ The crane was sacred to Delian Apollo and, before Apollo, to the Sun-hero Theseus. It also appears, in triad, in a Gaulish bas-relief at Paris, and in another at Trèves, in association with the god Esus and a bull. Crane, hawk, or vulture? That is an important question because the provenience of the poem depends on the answer. The hawk, if not the royal hawk of Egyptian Horus, will have been the kite sacred to Boreas the North Wind; in Greek legend his Thracian sons Calaïs and Zetes wore kite-feathers in his honour and had the power of transforming themselves into kites. These two birds are mythologically linked in the Egyptian hieroglyph for the North Wind, which is a hawk. In Welsh the word is barcut, and in Iranian the word is barqut, which supports Pliny’s suggestion (Natural History XXX, 13) of a strong connexion between the Persian and British sun-cults. Another mark of close similarity is that Mithras, the Persian Sun-god whose birthday was celebrated at the Winter solstice, was worshipped as a bull of seven fights: his initiates having to go through seven grades before they were sealed on the brow as ‘tried soldiers of Mithras’. Mithraism was a favourite cult of the Roman legionaries in Imperial times, but they never reached Ireland, and the Song of Amergin is evidently far older than the Claudian invasion of Britain. The vulture will have been the griffon-vulture sacred to Osiris, a bird also of great importance to the Etruscan augurs and with a wider wing-span than the golden eagle. In the Song of Moses (Deuteronomy XXXII, 11) Jehovah is identified with this bird, which is a proof that its ‘uncleanness’ in the Levitical list means sanctity, not foulness. The heraldic griffin is a lion with griffon-vultures’ wings and claws and represents the Sun-god as King of the earth and air. The ordinary Welsh word for hawk is Gwalch, akin to the Latin falco, falcon, and the court-bards always likened their royal patrons to it. The mystical names Gwalchmai (‘hawk of May’); Gwalchaved (‘hawk of summer’) better known as Sir Galahad; and Gwalchgwyn (‘white hawk’) better known as Sir Gawain, are best understood in terms of this calendar formula.

  H, which starts in the second half of May, is the season of flowers, and the hawthorn, or may-tree, rules it. Olwen, the daughter of ‘Giant Hawthorn’, has already been mentioned. Her hair was yellow as the broom, her fingers pale as wood-anemones, her cheeks the colour of roses and from her footprints white trefoil sprang up – trefoil to show that she was the summer aspect of the old triple Goddess. This peculiarity gave her the name of Olwen – ‘She of the White Track’. Trefoil, by the way, was celebrated by the Welsh bards with praise out of all proportion to its beauty. Homer called it ‘the lotus’ and mentioned it as a rich fodder for horses.

  D is ruled by the midsummer oak. The meaning is, I think, that the painful smoke of green oak gives inspiration to those who dance between the twin sacrificial fires lighted on Midsummer Eve. Compare the Song of the Forest Trees:

  Fiercest heat-giver of all timber is green oak;

  From him none may escape unhurt.

  By love of him the head is set an-aching,

  By his acrid embers the eye is made sore.

  T is the spear month, the month of the tanist; the bardic character T was shaped like a barbed spear.

  C is the nut month. The salmon was, and still is, the King of the river-fish, and the difficulty of capturing him, once he is lodged in a pool, makes him a useful emblem of philosophical retirement. Thus Loki, the Norse God of cunning, disguised himself from his fellow-gods as a salmon and was drawn from his pool only with a special net of his own design. The connexion of salmon with nuts and with wisdom has already been explained.

  M is the initial of Minerva, Latin goddess of wisdom and inventor of numbers; of Mnemosyne, the Mother of the Greek Muses; and of the Muses themselves; and of the Moirae, or Fates, who are credited by some mythographers with the first invention of the alphabet. The vine, the prime tree of Dionysus, is everywhere associated with poetic inspiration. Wine is the poets’ proper drink, as Ben Jonson knew well when he asked for his fee as Poet Laureate to be paid in sack. The base Colley Cibber asked for a cash payment in lieu of wine, and no Poet Laureate since has been poet enough to demand a return to the old system of payment.

  G, the ivy month, is also the month of the boar. Set, the Egyptian Sun-god, disguised as a boar, kills Osiris of the ivy, the lover of the Goddess Isis. Apollo the Greek Sun-god, disguised as a boar, kills Adonis, or Tammuz, the Syrian, the lover of the Goddess Aphrodite. Finn Mac Cool, disguised as a boar, kills Diarmuid, the lover of the Irish Goddess Grainne (Greine). An unknown god disguised as a boar kills Ancaeus the Arcadian King, a devotee of Artemis, in his vineyard at Tegea and, according to the Nestorian Gannat Busamé (‘Garden of Delights’), Cretan Zeus was similarly killed. October was the boar-hunting season, as it was also the revelry season of the ivy-wreathed Bassarids. The boar is the beast of death and the ‘fall’ of the year begins in the month of the boar.

  NG is the month when the terrible roar of breakers and the snarling noise of pebbles on the Atlantic seaboard fill the heart with terror, and when the wind whistles dismally through the reed-beds of the rivers. In Ireland the roaring of the sea was held to be prophetic of a king’s death. The warning also came with the harsh cry of the scritch-owl. Owls are most vo
cal on moonlight nights in November and then remain silent until February. It is this habit, with their silent flight, the carrion-smell of their nests, their diet of mice, and the shining of their eyes in the dark, which makes owls messengers of the Death-goddess Hecate, or Athene, or Persephone: from whom, as the supreme source of prophecy, they derive their reputation for wisdom.

  R is the month when the wave returns to the sea, and the end of the year to its watery beginning. A wave of the sea in Irish and Welsh poetry is a ‘sea-stag’: so that the year begins and ends with the white roebuck. In Irish legend such gods of the year as Cuchulain and Fionn fight the waves with sword and spear.

  The corresponding text in the Romance of Taliesin is scattered rather than garbled.

  B I have been a fierce bull and a yellow buck.

  L I have been a boat on the sea.

  N I fled vehemently…on the foam of water.

  F I have been a drop in the air.

  S I journeyed as an eagle.

  H God made me of blossom.

  D I have been a tree-stump in a shovel.

  T I fled as a spear-head of woe to such as wish for woe.

  C I have been a blue salmon.

  M I have been a spotted snake on a hill.

  G I fled as a bristly boar seen in a ravine.

  NG I have been a wave breaking on the beach.

  R On a boundless sea I was set adrift.