The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  The prohibition in Deuteronomy explains the glib and obviously artificial myth of Esau, Jacob, Rebeccah and the blessing of Isaac, which is introduced into Genesis XXVII to justify the usurpation by the Jacob tribe of priestly and royal prerogatives belonging to the Edomites. The religious picture iconotropically2 advanced in support of the myth seems to have illustrated the kid-eating ceremony in Azazel’s honour. Two celebrants wearing goatskin disguises are shown at a seething cauldron presided over by the priestess (Rebeccah), one of them with bow and quiver (Esau) the other (Jacob) being initiated into the mysteries by the old leader of the fraternity (Isaac) who whispers the secret formula into his ear, blesses him and hands him – a piece of the kid to eat. The ceremony probably included a mock-slaughter and resurrection of the initiate, and this would account for the passage at the close of the chapter where Esau murderously pursues Jacob, Rebeccah directs affairs and the orgiastic ‘daughters of Heth’ in Cretan costume stand by. The two kids are probably an error: the same kid is shown twice, first being taken from its mother, and then being plunged into the cauldron of milk.

  Nonnus, the Orphic writer, explains the shift in Crete from the goat to the bull-sacrifice by saying that Zagreus, or Dionysus, was a horned infant who occupied the throne of Zeus for a day. The Titans tore him in pieces and ate him after he had raced through his changes of shape: Zeus with the goatskin coat, Cronos making rain, an inspired youth, a lion, a horse, a horned snake, a tiger, a bull. It was as a bull that the Titans ate him. The Persian Mithras was also eaten in bull form.

  There seems to have been a goat-cult in Ireland before the arrival of the Danaans and Milesians, for in a passage in the Book of the Dun Cow ‘goatheads’ are a sort of demon associated with leprechauns, pigmies, and the Fomorians, or African aborigines.1 But by the time of the Ulster hero Cuchulain, the traditional date of whose death is 2 AD, the royal bull-cult was well established. His destiny was bound up with that of a brown bull-calf, son of Queen Maeve’s famous Brown Bull. The Morrigan, the Fate-goddess, when she first met Cuchulain, warned him that only while the calf was still a yearling would he continue to live. The central episode in the Cuchulain saga is the War of the Bulls, fought between the armies of Maeve and her husband King Ailell as the result of an idle quarrel about two bulls. At the close of it, the Brown Bull, Cuchulain’s other self, kills his rival, the White-horned, which considering itself too noble to serve a woman, has deserted Maeve’s herd for the herd of Ailell; it then goes mad with pride, charges a rock and dashes out its brains. It is succeeded by its calf, and Cuchulain dies.

  The bull-cult was also established in Wales at an early date. In a Welsh poetic dialogue contained in the Black Book of Carmarthen, Gwyddno Garanhir, Elphin’s father, describes the hero Gwyn as: ‘A bull of conflict, quick to disperse an embattled host’, and ‘bull of conflict’ here and in later poems seems to have been a sacred title rather than a complimentary metaphor; as ‘hawk’ and ‘eagle’ also were.

  ***

  The War of the Bulls contains an instance of the intricate language of myth: the Brown Bull and the White-horned were really royal swine-herds who had the power of changing their shapes. It seems that in ancient times swine-herds had an altogether different standing from that conveyed in the parable of the Prodigal Son: to be a swine-herd was originally to be a priest in the service of the Death-goddess whose sacred beast was a pig.1 The War of the Bulls is introduced by the Proceedings of the Grand Bardic Academy, a seventh-century satire against the greed and arrogance of the ruling caste of bards, apparently composed by some member of an earlier oracular fraternity which had been dispossessed with the advent of Christianity. The leading character here is Marvan, royal swineherd to King Guaire of Connaught; he may be identified with Morvran (‘black raven’) son of the White Sow-goddess Cerridwen, who appears as Afagddu in the similar Welsh satire The Romance of Taliesin. In revenge for the loss of a magical white boar, at once his physician, music-maker and messenger, which the ruling bards have persuaded Guaire to slaughter, he routs them in a combat of wit and reduces them to silence and ignominy; Seanchan Torpest, the President of the Academy, addresses him as ‘Chief Prophet of Heaven and Earth’. There is a hint in the Romance of Branwen that the swine-herds of Matholwch King of Ireland were magicians, with a power of foreseeing the future. And this hint is expanded in Triad 56 which attributes to Coll ap Collfrewr, the magician, one of ‘the Three Powerful Swine-herds of the Isle of Britain’, the introduction into Britain of wheat and barley. But the credit was not really his. The name of the White Sow whom he tended at Dallwr in Cornwall and who went about Wales with gifts of grain, bees and her own young, was Hen Wen, ‘the Old White One’. Her gift to Maes Gwenith (‘Wheatfield’) in Gwent was three grains of wheat and three bees. She was, of course, the Goddess Cerridwen in beast disguise. (The story is contained in three series of Triads printed in the Myvyrian Archaiology.)

  The unpleasant side of her nature was shown by her gift to the people of Arvon of a savage kitten, which grew up to be one of the Three Plagues of Anglesey, ‘the Palug Cat’. Cerridwen then is a Cat-goddess as well as a Sow-goddess. This links her with the Cat-as-corn-spirit mentioned by Sir James Frazer as surviving in harvest festivals in north and north-eastern Germany, and in most parts of France and with the monster Chapalu of French Arthurian legend.

  There was also a Cat-cult in Ireland. A ‘Slender Black Cat reclining upon a chair of old silver’ had an oracular cave-shrine in Connaught at Clogh-magh-righ-cat, now Clough, before the coming of St. Patrick. This cat gave very vituperative answers to inquirers who tried to deceive her and was apparently an Irish equivalent of the Egyptian Cat-goddess Pasht. Egyptian cats were slender, black, long-legged and small-headed. Another seat of the Irish cat-cult was Knowth, a burial in Co. Meath of about the same date as New Grange. In The Proceedings of the Grand Bardic Academy the Knowth burial chamber is said to have been the home of the King-cat Irusan, who was as large as a plough-ox and once bore Seanchan Torpest, the chief-ollave of Ireland, away on its back in revenge for a satire. In his Poetic Astronomy, Hyginus identifies Pasht with the White Goddess by recording that when Typhon suddenly appeared in Greece – but whether he is referring to an invasion or to a volcanic eruption, such as destroyed most of the island of Thera, is not clear – the gods fled, disguised in bestial forms: ‘Mercury into an ibis, Apollo into a crane, a Thracian bird, Diana into a cat.’

  The Old White Sow’s gift to the people of Rhiwgyverthwch was a wolf cub which also became famous. The Wolf-as-corn-spirit survives in roughly the same area as the Cat-as-corn-spirit; and in the island of Rügen the woman who binds the last sheaf is called ‘The Wolf’ and must bite the lady of the house and the stewardess, who placate her with a large piece of meat. So Cerridwen was a Wolf-goddess too, like Artemis. It looks as if she came to Britain between 2500–2000 BC with the New Stone Age long-headed agriculturists from North Africa.

  Why the cat, pig, and wolf were considered particularly sacred to the Moon-goddess is not hard to discover. Wolves howl to the moon and feed on corpse-flesh, their eyes shine in the dark, and they haunt wooded mountains. Cats’ eyes similarly shine in the dark, they feed on mice (symbol of pestilence), mate openly and walk inaudibly, they are prolific but eat their own young, and their colours vary, like the moon, between white, reddish and black. Pigs also vary between white, reddish and black, feed on corpse-flesh, are prolific but eat their own young, and their tusks are crescent-shaped.

  1 Sir Thomas Browne generously remarked in his Urn Burial that ‘what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture’. According to Suetonius the guesses made by various scholars whom the Emperor Tiberius consulted on this point were ‘Cercysera’ on account of the distaff (kerkis) that Achilles wielded; ‘Issa’, on account of his swiftness (aissoi, I dart); ‘Pyrrha’ on account of his red hair. Hyginus gives his vote for Pyrrha. My conjecture is that Achilles called hi
mself Dacryoessa (‘the tearful one’) or, better, Drosoessa (‘the dewy one’), drosos being a poetic synonym for tears. According to Apollonius his original name Liguron (‘wailing’) was changed to Achilles by his tutor Cheiron. This is to suggest that the Achilles-cult came to Thessaly from Liguria. Homer punningly derives Achilles from achos (‘distress’), but Apollodorus from a ‘not’ and cheile ‘lips’, a derivation which Sir James Frazer calls absurd; though ‘Lipless’ is quite a likely name for an oracular hero.

  1 I find that I have been anticipated in this explanation by Maimonides (‘Rambam’), the twelfth-century Spanish Jew who reformed the Judaic religion and was, incidentally, Saladin’s physician-royal. In his Guide to the Erring he reads the text as an injunction against taking part in Ashtaroth worship.

  2 In the preface to my King Jesus I define iconotropy as a technique of deliberate misrepresentation by which ancient ritual icons are twisted in meaning in order to confirm a profound change of the existent religious system – usually a change from matriarchal to patriarchal – and the new meanings are embodied in myth. I adduce examples from the myths of Pasiphaë, Oedipus, and Lot.

  1 Demons and bogeys are invariably the reduced gods or priests of a superseded religion: for example the Empusae and Lamiae of Greece who in Aristophanes’s day were regarded as emissaries of the Triple Goddess Hecate. The Lamiae, beautiful women who used to seduce, enervate and suck the blood of travellers, had been the orgiastic priestesses of the Libyan Sea-goddess Lamia; and the Empusae, demons with one leg of brass and one ass’s leg were relics of the Set cult – the Lilim, or Children of Lilith, the devotees of the Hebrew Owl-goddess, who was Adam’s first wife, were ass-haunched.

  1 Evidence of a similar function in early Greece is the conventional epithet dios, ‘divine’ applied in the Odyssey to the swine-herd Eumaeus. Because of the horror in which swineherds were held by the Jews and Egyptians and the contempt in which, thanks to the Prodigal Son, they have long been held in Europe, the word is usually mistranslated ‘honest or worthy’ though admitted to be an hapax legomenon. It is true that except on one night of the year – the full moon that fell nearest to the winter solstice, when the pig was sacrificed to Isis and Osiris and its flesh eaten by every Egyptian – the taboo on any contact with pigs was so strong that swine-herds though full-blooded Egyptians (according to Herodotus) were avoided like the plague and forced to marry within their own caste; but this was a tribute to their sanctity rather than anything else. The public hangman is similarly avoided in France and England because he has courageously undertaken, in the interests of public morality, a peculiarly horrible and thankless trade.

  Chapter Thirteen

  PALAMEDES AND THE CRANES

  What interests me most in conducting this argument is the difference that is constantly appearing between the poetic and prosaic methods of thought. The prosaic method was invented by the Greeks of the Classical age as an insurance against the swamping of reason by mythographic fancy. It has now become the only legitimate means of transmitting useful knowledge. And in England, as in most other mercantile countries, the current popular view is that ‘music’ and old-fashioned diction are the only characteristics of poetry which distinguish it from prose: that every poem has, or should have, a precise single-strand prose equivalent. As a result, the poetic faculty is atrophied in every educated person who does not privately struggle to cultivate it: very much as the faculty of understanding pictures is atrophied in the Bedouin Arab. (T. E. Lawrence once showed a coloured crayon sketch of an Arab Sheikh to the Sheikh’s own clansmen. They passed it from hand to hand, but the nearest guess as to what it represented came from a man who took the sheikh’s foot to be the horn of a buffalo.) And from the inability to think poetically – to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine these on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense – derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless the images resident in words must be securely related if the passage is to have any bite. This simple need is forgotten, what passes for simple prose nowadays is a mechanical stringing together of stereotyped word-groups, without regard for the images contained in them. The mechanical style, which began in the counting-house, has now infiltrated into the university, some of its most zombiesque instances occurring in the works of eminent scholars and divines.

  Mythographic statements which are perfectly reasonable to the few poets who can still think and talk in poetic shorthand seem either nonsensical or childish to nearly all literary scholars. Such statements, I mean, as: ‘Mercury invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes’, or ‘Menw ab Teirgwaedd saw three rowan-rods growing out of the mouth of Einigan Fawr with every kind of knowledge and science written on them’.The best that the scholars have yet done for the poems of Gwion is ‘wild and sublime’; and they never question the assumption that he, his colleagues and his public were people of either stunted or undisciplined intelligence.

  The joke is that the more prose-minded the scholar the more capable he is supposed to be of interpreting ancient poetic meaning, and that no scholar dares to set himself up as an authority on more than one narrow subject for fear of incurring the dislike and suspicion of his colleagues. To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age). But that so many scholars are barbarians does not matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to keep civilization alive. The scholar is a quarryman, not a builder, and all that is required of him is that he should quarry cleanly. He is the poet’s insurance against factual error. It is easy enough for the poet in this hopelessly muddled and inaccurate modern world to be misled into false etymology, anachronism and mathematical absurdity by trying to be what he is not. His function is truth, whereas the scholar’s is fact. Fact is not to be gainsaid; one may put it in this way, that fact is a Tribune of the People with no legislative right, but only the right of veto. Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

  The story about Mercury and the cranes occurs in the Fables of Caius Julius Hyginus who, according to the well-informed Suetonius, was a native of Spain, a freedman of the Emperor Augustus, the Curator of the Palatine Library, and a friend of the poet Ovid. Like Ovid, Hyginus ended his life in Imperial disfavour. If he is the learned author of the Fables attributed to him, they have since been abbreviated and botched by unlearned editors; yet they are admitted to contain ancient mythological matter of great importance, not found elsewhere.

  In his last Fable (277) Hyginus records:

  1. That the Fates invented the seven letters: Alpha, [Omicron], Upsilon, Eta, Iota, Beta, and Tau.

  Or, alternatively, that Mercury invented them after watching the flights of cranes ‘which make letters as they fly’.

  2. that Palamedes, son of Nauplius, invented eleven others.

  3. that Epicharmus of Sicily added Theta and Chi (or Psi and Pi).

  4. that Simonides added Omega, Epsilon, Zeta and Psi (or Omega, Epsilon, Zeta and Phi).

  There is no word here about Cadmus the Phoenician, who is usually credited with the invention of the Greek alphabet, the characters of which are indisputably borrowed from the Phoenician alphabet. The statement about Epicharmus reads nonsensically, unless ‘of Sicily’ is a stupid editorial gloss that has intruded into the text. Simonides was a well-known sixth-century BC Greek poet who used the Cadmean Greek alphabet and did introduce certain new characters into his manuscripts, later a
dopted throughout Greece; and Epicharmus of Sicily, the well-known writer of comedies who lived not long afterwards and was a member of the family of Asclepiads at Cos, evidently seemed to the editor of the Fables a likely co-worker with Simonides. The original legend, however, probably refers to another, far earlier, Epicharmus, an ancestor of the writer of comedies. The Asclepiads traced their descent to Apollo’s son Asclepius, or Aesculapius, the physician god of Delphi and Cos, and claimed to inherit valuable therapeutic secrets from him. Two Asclepiads are mentioned in the Iliad as having been physicians to the Greeks in the siege of Troy.

  As for Palamedes, son of Nauplius, he is credited by Philostratus the Lemnian, and by the scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes, with the invention not only of the alphabet, but also of lighthouses, measures, scales, the disc, and the ‘art of posting sentinels’. He took part in the Trojan War as an ally of the Greeks and at his death was granted a hero-shrine on the Mysian coast of Asia Minor opposite Lesbos.

  The Three Fates are a divided form of the Triple Goddess, and in Greek legend appear also as the Three Grey Ones and the Three Muses.

  Thus, the first two statements made by Hyginus account for the ‘thirteen letters’ which, according to some authorities (Diodorus Siculus says) formed the ‘Pelasgian alphabet’ before Cadmus increased them to sixteen. Diodorus evidently means thirteen consonants, not thirteen letters in all, which would not have been sufficient. Other authorities held that there had been only twelve of them. Aristotle, at any rate gives the numbers of letters in the first Greek alphabet as thirteen consonants and five vowels and his list of letters corresponds exactly with the Beth-Luis-Nion, except that he gives Zeta for H-aspirate and Phi for F – but, in the case of Phi, at least, early epigraphic evidence is against him. This is not the only reference to the Pelasgian alphabet. Eustathius, the Byzantine grammarian, quotes an ancient scholiast on Iliad, II, 841 to the effect that the Pelasgians were called Dioi (‘divine’) because they along of all the Greeks preserved the use of letters after the Deluge – the Deluge meaning to the Greeks the one survived by Deucalion and Pyrrha. Pyrrha, ‘the red one’, is perhaps the Goddess-mother of the Puresati or Pulesati, the Philistines.