The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

The clue to the arrangement of this alphabet is found in Amergin’s reference to the dolmen; it is an alphabet that best explains itself when built up as a dolmen of consonants with a threshold of vowels. Dolmens are closely connected with the calendar in the legend of the flight of Grainne and Diarmuid from Finn Mac Cool. The flight lasted for a year and a day, and the lovers bedded together beside a fresh dolmen every night. Numerous ‘Beds of Diarmuid and Grainne’ are shown in Cork, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary and the West, each of them marked by a dolmen. So this alphabet dolmen will also serve as a calendar, with one post for Spring, the other for Autumn, the lintel for Summer, the threshold for New Year’s Day. Thus:

  At once one sees the reference to S as a hawk, or griffon, on the cliff; and to M as the hill of poetry or inspiration – a hill rooted in the death letters R and I and surmounted by the C of wisdom. So the text of the first part of Amergin’s song may be expanded as follows:

  God speaks and says:

  I am a stag of seven tines.

  Over the flooded world

  I am borne by the wind.

  I descend in tears like dew, I lie glittering,

  I fly aloft like a griffon to my nest on the cliff,

  I bloom among the loveliest flowers,

  I am both the oak and the lightning that blasts it.

  I embolden the spearman,

  I teach the councillors their wisdom,

  I inspire the poets,

  I rove the hills like a conquering boar,

  I roar like the winter sea,

  I return like the receding wave.

  Who but I can unfold the secrets of the unhewn dolmen?

  For if the poem really consists of two stanzas, each of two triads, ending with a single authoritative statement, then the first ‘Who but I?’ (which does not match the other five) is the conclusion of the second stanza, and is uttered by the New Year God. This Child is represented by the sacred threshold of the dolmen, the central triad of vowels, namely O.U.E. But one must read O.U.E. backwards, the way of the sun, to make sense of it. It is the sacred name of Dionysus, EUO, which in English is usually written ‘EVOE’.

  It is clear that ‘God’ is Celestial Hercules again, and that the child-poet Taliesin is a more appropriate person to utter the song than Amergin, the leader of the Milesians, unless Amergin is speaking as a mouth-piece of Hercules.

  There is a mystery connected with the line ‘I am a shining tear of the sun’, because Deorgreine, ‘tear of the Sun’, is the name of Niamh of the Golden Hair, the lovely goddess mentioned in the myth of Laegaire mac Crimthainne. Celestial Hercules when he passes into the month F, the month of Bran’s alder, becomes a maiden. This recalls the stories of such sun-heroes as Achilles1, Hercules and Dionysus who lived for a time disguised as girls in the women’s quarters of a palace and plied the distaff. It also explains the ‘I have been a maiden’, in a series corresponding with the Amergin cycle, ascribed to Empedocles the fifth-century BC. mystical philosopher. The sense is that the Sun is still under female tutelage for half of this month – Cretan boys not yet old enough to bear arms were called Scotioi, members of the women’s quarters – then, like Achilles, he is given arms and flies off royally like a griffon or hawk to its nest.

  But why a dolmen? A dolmen is a burial chamber, a ‘womb of Earth’, consisting of a cap-stone supported on two or more uprights, in which a dead hero is buried in a crouched position like a foetus in the womb, awaiting rebirth. In spiral Castle (passage-burial), the entrance to the inner chamber is always narrow and low in representation of the entrance to the womb. But dolmens are used in Melanesia (according to Prof. W. H. R. Rivers) as sacred doors through which the totem-clan initiate crawls in a ceremony of rebirth; if, as seems likely, they were used for the same purpose in ancient Britain, Gwion is both recounting the phases of his past existence and announcing the phases of his future existence. There is a regular row of dolmens on Slieve Mis. They stand between two baetyls with Ogham markings, traditionally sacred to the Milesian Goddess Scota who is said to be buried there; alternatively, in the account preserved by Borlase in his Dolmens of Ireland, to ‘Bera a queen who came from Spain’. But Bera and Scota seem to be the same person, since the Milesians came from Spain. Bera is otherwise known as the Hag Of Beara.

  The five remaining questions correspond with the five vowels, yet they are not uttered by the Five-fold Goddess of the white ivy-leaf, as one would expect. They must have been substituted for an original text telling of Birth, Initiation, Love, Repose, Death, and can be assigned to a later bardic period. In fact, they correspond closely with the envoi to the first section of the tenth-century Irish Saltair No Rann, which seems to be a Christianized version of a pagan epigram.

  For each day five items of knowledge

  Are required of every understanding person –

  From everyone, without appearance of boasting,

  Who is in holy orders.

  The day of the solar month; the age of the moon;

  The state of the sea-tide, without error;

  The day of the week; the calendar of the feasts of the perfect saints

  In just clarity with their variations.

  For ‘perfect saints’ read ‘blessed deities’ and no further alteration is needed. Compare this with Amergin’s:

  Who but myself knows where the sun shall set?

  Who foretells the ages of the moon?

  Who brings the cattle from the house of Tethra and segregates them?

  On whom do the cattle of Tethra smile?

  Who shapes weapons from hill to hill, wave to wave,

  letter to letter, point to point?

  The first two questions in the Song of Amergin, about the day of the solar month and the ages of the moon, coincide with the first two items of knowledge in the Saltair: ‘Who knows when the Sun shall set?’ means both ‘who knows the length of the hours of daylight at any given day of the year?’ – a problem worked out in exhaustive detail by the author of The Book of Enoch – and ‘Who knows on any given day how long the particular solar month in which it occurs will last?’

  The third question is ‘Who brings the cattle of Tethra (the heavenly bodies) out of the ocean and puts each in his due place?’ This assumes a knowledge: of the five planets, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, which, with the Sun and Moon, had days of the week allotted to them in Babylonian astronomy, and still keep them in all European languages. Thus it corresponds with ‘the day of the week’.

  The fourth question, as the glossarist explains, amounts to ‘Who is lucky in fishing?’ This corresponds with ‘the state of the sea tide’; for a fisherman who does not know what tide to expect will have no fishing luck.

  The fifth question, read in the light of its gloss, amounts to: ‘Who orders the calendar from the advancing wave B to the receding wave R; from one calendar month to the next; from one season of the year to the next?’ (The three seasons of Spring, Summer and Autumn are separated by points, or angles, of the dolmen.) So it corresponds with ‘the calendar of the feasts of the perfect saints.’

  Another version of the poem found in The Book of Leacon and The Book of the O’Clerys, runs as follows when restored to its proper order. The glosses are similar in both books, though the O’Clerys’ are the more verbose.

  B I am seven battalions or I am an ox in strength – for strength

  L I am a flood on a plain – for extent

  N I am a wind on the sea – for depth

  F I am a ray of the sun – for purity

  S I am a bird of prey on a cliff – for cunning

  H I am a shrewd navigator –

  D I am gods in the power of transformation – I am a god, a druid, and a man who creates fire from magical smoke for the destruction of all, and makes magic on the tops of hills

  T I am a giant with a sharp sword, hewing down an army – in taking vengeance

  C I am a salmon in a river or pool – for power

  G I am a fierce boar – for powers of chieftain-lik
e valour

  NG I am the roaring of the sea – for terror

  R I am a wave of the sea – for might

  This seems a later version, since the T-month is awarded a sword, not the traditional spear; and the original wording of the D-line is recalled in a gloss; and ‘Who but I knows the secrets of the unhewn dolmen?’ is omitted. Another change of importance is that the H-month is described in terms of navigation, not flowers. May 14th marked the beginning of the deep-sea fishing in ancient Ireland when the equinoctial gales had subsided and it was safe to put to sea in an ox-hide curragh; but the ascetic meaning of Hawthorn is a reminder of the ban against taking women on a fishing trip. The additions to the poem show, even more clearly than Macalister’s text, that it was preserved as a charm for successful fishing both in river and sea; the Druid being paid by the fishermen for repeating it and threatening the water with javelin-vengeance if a curagh were to be lost: –

  Whither shall we go? Shall we debate in valley or on peak?

  Where shall we dwell? In what nobler land than the isle of Sunset?

  Where else shall we walk in peace, to and fro, on fertile ground?

  Who but I can take you to where the stream runs, or falls, clearest?

  Who but I tell you the age of the moon?

  Who but I can bring you Tethra’s cattle from the recesses of the sea?

  Who but I can draw Tethra’s cattle shoreward?

  Who can change the hills, mountains or promontories as I can?

  I am a cunning poet who invokes prophecy at the entreaty of seafarers.

  Javelins shall be wielded to revenge the loss of our ships.

  I sing praises, I prophesy victory.

  In closing my poem I desire other preferments, and shall obtain them.

  The original five-lined pendant to the poem may have run something like this:

  A I am the womb of every holt,

  O I am the blaze on every hill,

  U I am the queen of every hive,

  E I am the shield to every head,

  I I am the tomb to every hope.

  How or why this alphabet of thirteen consonants gave place to the alphabet of fifteen consonants is another question, the solution of which will be helped by a study of Latin and Greek alphabet legends.

  *

  That the first line of the Song of Amergin has the variant readings ‘stag of seven tines’ and ‘ox of seven fights’ suggests that in Ireland during the Bronze Age, as in Crete and Greece, both stag and bull were sacred to the Great Goddess. In Minoan Crete the bull became dominant as the Minotaur, ‘Bull-Minos’, but there was also a Minelaphos, ‘Stag-Minos’, who figured in the cult of the Moon-goddess Britomart, and a Minotragos, ‘Goat-Minos’ cult. The antlers found in the burial at New Grange suggest that the stag was the royal beast of the Irish Danaans, and the stag figures prominently in Irish myth: an incident in The Cattle Raid of Cuailgne, part of the Cuchulain saga, shows that a guild of deer-priests called ‘The Fair Lucky Harps’ had their headquarters at Assaroe in Donegal. Oisin was born of the deer-goddess Sadb and at the end of his life, when mounted on the fairy-steed of Niamh of the Golden Hair and sped by the wailing of the Fenians to her island paradise, he was shown a vision: a hornless fawn pursued over the waters of the sea by the red-eared white hounds of Hell. The fawn was himself. There is a parallel to this in the Romance of Pwyll Prince of Dyfed: Pwyll goes out hunting and meets Arawn King of Annwm mounted on a pale horse hunting a stag with his white, red-eared hounds. In recognition of Pwyll’s courtesy, Arawn, though sending him down to Annwm – for the stag is Pwyll’s soul – permits him to reign there in his stead. Another parallel is in the Romance of Math the Son of Mathonwy: Llew Llaw in the company of the faithless Blodeuwedd sees a stag being baited to death: it is his soul, and almost immediately afterwards he is put to death by her lover Gronw.

  The fate of the antlered king – of whom Cernunnos, ‘the horned one’ of Gaul, is a familiar example – is expressed in the early Greek myth of Actaeon whom Artemis metamorphosed into a stag and hunted to death with her dogs. She did this at her anodos, or yearly reappearance, when she refreshed her virginity by bathing naked in a sacred fountain; after which she took another lover. The Irish Garbh Ogh with her pack of hounds was the same goddess: her diet was venison and eagles’ breasts. This ancient myth of the betrayed stag-king survives curiously in the convention, which is British as well as Continental, that gives the cuckold a branching pair of antlers. The May-day stag-mummers of Abbot’s Bromley in Staffordshire are akin to the stag-mummers of Syracuse in ancient Sicily, and to judge from an epic fragment concerned with Dionysus, one of the mummers disguised as an Actaeon stag was originally chased and eaten. In the Lycaean precinct of Arcadia the same tradition of the man dressed in deer skins who is chased and eaten survived in Pausanias’s day, though the chase was explained as a punishment for trespassing. From Sardinia comes a Bronze Age figurine of a man-stag with horns resembling the foliage of an oak, a short tail, an arrow in one hand and in the other a bow that has turned into a wriggling serpent. His mouth and eyes express an excusable terror at the sight; for the serpent is death. That the stag was part of the Elysian oracular cult is shown in the story of Brut the Trojan’s visit to the Island of Leogrecia, where the moon-oracle was given him while sleeping in the newly-flayed hide of a white hart whose blood had been poured on the sacrificial fire.

  The stag-cult is far older than the Cretan Minelaphos: he is shown in palaeolithic paintings in the Spanish caves of Altamira and in the Caverne des Trois Frères at Ariège in the French Pyrenees, dating from at least 20,000 BC. The Altamiran paintings are the work of the Aurignacian people, who have also left records of their ritual in the caves of Domboshawa, and elsewhere in Southern Rhodesia. At Domboshawa a ‘Bushman’ painting, containing scores of figures, shows the death of a king who wears an antelope mask and is tightly corseted; as he dies, with arms outflung and one knee upraised, he ejaculates and his seed seems to form a heap of corn. An old priestess lying naked beside a cauldron is either mimicking his agony, or perhaps inducing it by sympathetic magic. Close by, young priestesses dance beside a stream, surrounded by clouds of fruit and heaped baskets; beasts are led off laden with fruit; and a huge bison bull is pacified by a priestess accompanied by an erect python. The cults of stag and bull were evidently combined at Domoshawa; but the stag is likely to have been the more royal beast, since the dying king is given the greater prominence. The cults were also combined by the Aurignacians. In a Dordogne cave painting a bull-man is shown dancing and playing a musical instrument shaped like a bow.

  The Minotragos goat-cult in Crete seems to have been intermediate between the cults of Minelaphos and Minotaur. Amalthea, the nurse of Cretan Zeus, was a goat. The Goddess Athene carried an aegis (‘goatskin’) shield, made it was said from Amalthea’s hide which had been previously used by her father Zeus as a prophylactic coat. The Goddess Libya appeared in triad to Jason on the shores of Lake Triton, Athene’s birthplace, when the Argo was landlocked there, and was clad in goatskins; she thereby identified herself with Aega, sister of Helice (‘willow branch’) and daughter of a king of Crete – Aega who was the human double of the goat Amalthea; and with Athene herself. The tradition of the Libyan origin of Athene is supported by a comparison of Greek and Roman methods of augury. In Libya the year begins in the autumn with the winter rains and the arrival of birds from the North; but in Northern Europe and the Black Sea area it begins in Spring with the arrival of birds from the South. In most Greek states the year began in the autumn and the Greek augurs faced north when observing birds, presumably because they derived their tradition from the birth-place of Athene, patroness of augury. On the other hand, the Roman augurs faced south, presumably because the Dardanians (whose patrician descendants in the early Roman Republic were alone permitted to take auguries) had migrated from the Black Sea area where birds arrive from Palestine and Syria in the Spring. The Roman year began in the Spring.

  The goat-Diony
sus, or Pan, was a powerful deity in Palestine. He may have come there from Libya by way of Egypt or taken a roundabout northern route by way of Crete, Thrace, Asia Minor and Syria. The Day of Atonement scape-goat was a left-handed sacrifice to him under the name of Azazel, and the source of the Jordan was a grotto sacred to him as Baal Gad, the goat king, eponymous ancestor of the tribe of Gad. The prohibition in Deuteronomy XIV against seething a kid in its mother’s milk is puzzling only if sentimentally read; it is clearly written in the severe style of the remainder of the chapter, which begins with a prohibition against self-disfigurement at funerals, and directed against a eucharistic rite no longer tolerated by the priesthood of Jehovah. The clue is to be found in the well-known Orphic formula:

  Like a kid I have fallen into milk

  which was a password for initiates when they reached Hades and were challenged by the guardians of the dead. They had become one with The Kid, that is to say the immortal Dionysus, originally Cretan Zagreus or Zeus, by partaking of his flesh, and with the Goat-goddess, his mother, in whose cauldron and milk he had been seethed.1 A song about the birth of the gods on one of the recently discovered Ras Shamra tablets contains an express injunction to seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.