The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  The Lycians of Asia Minor are described by Herodotus as having come from Crete; so are their neighbours the Carians, who claimed to be kin to the Lydians and Mysians and spoke much the same barbaric, that is to say, non-Greek language. The Carians, formerly members of the Minoan Empire, had dominated the Aegean between the fall of Cnossos in 1400 BC and the Dorian invasion of 1050 BC. Herodotus found the Lycians the least Grecianized of these four nations and recorded that they reckoned descent through the mother, not the father. Female independence of male tutelage and matrilinear descent were characteristic of all peoples of Cretan stock; and the same system survived in parts of Crete long after its conquest by the Greeks. Firmicus Maternus reported it in the fourth century AD.1 The Lydians retained another vestige of the system – girls habitually prostituted themselves before marriage, and then disposed of their earnings and their persons as they thought fit.

  Palamedes, then, ruled over the Mysians, who were of Cretan stock, but he had a Greek father; his name means perhaps ‘Mindful of the Ancient One’, and he assisted the Three Fates (the Three Muses) in the composition of the Greek alphabet. But it was well known to the ancients, as it is to us, that all the inventions credited to Palamedes originated in Crete. It follows that a Greek alphabet, based on a Cretan not a Phoenician model, was raised from five vowels and thirteen consonants to five vowels and fifteen consonants, by Epicharmus, an early Asclepiad.

  But why did Hyginus not specify the eleven consonants of Palamedes, as he specified the original seven letters and the additions by Epicharmus and Simonides? We must first find out why he quotes Beta and Tau as the two consonants invented by the Three Fates at the same time as the five vowels.

  Simonides, a native of Ceos, introduced into Athens, where he was domiciled, the double-consonants Psi and Xi, the distinction between the vowels Omicron and Omega (short and long O), and the distinction between the vowels Eta and Epsilon (long and short E). These changes were not, however, publicly adopted there until the archonship of Euclides (403 BC). To Eta, when thus distinguished from Epsilon, was allotted the character H, which had hitherto belonged to the aspirate H; and the aspirate H became merely a ‘rough breathing’, a miniature decrescent moon, while its absence in a word beginning with a vowel was denoted by a ‘smooth breathing’, a crescent moon. The Digamma F (which had a V sound) had disappeared as an Attic character long before the time of Simonides; and in many words was supplanted by the letter Phi, invented to represent the FF sound which had hitherto been spelt PH. But the Digamma was retained for some generations longer by the Aeolian Greeks and disappeared among the Dorians (the last to use it) during this same archonship of Euclides – at about the same time, in fact, as Gwydion and Amathaon won the Battle of the Trees in Britain.

  This is a queer business. Though it is possible that the V sound had altogether dropped out of ordinary Greek speech and that therefore the Digamma F was an unnecessary letter, this is by no means certain; and the aspirate H was certainly still an integral part of the language. Why then was the aspirate supplanted by Eta? Why was a new character not found for the Eta sound? Why were the unnecessary double-consonants Psi, previously written Pi-Sigma, and Xi, previously written Kappa-Sigma, introduced at the same time? Only religious doctrine can have accounted for this awkward change.

  One of the reasons is given in the same fable. Hyginus connects the four additional letters of Simonides with Apollo’s zither – Apollo in cithaera ceteras literas adjecit. This means, I think, that each of the seven strings of the zither, originally Cretan but brought from Asia Minor to Greece about 676 BC by Terpander of Lesbos, now had a letter allotted to it, and that twenty-four, the new number of letters in the alphabet, had a sacred significance in the therapeutic music with which Apollo and his son Aesculapius were honoured in their island shrines. Simonides, it must be noted, belonged to a Cean bardic guild in the service of Dionysus who, according to Plutarch, a priest of Delphian Apollo, was ‘also at home in Delphi’. Both Apollo and Dionysus, as we have seen, were gods of the solar year. So were Aesculapius and Hercules; and this was an age of religious amalgamation.

  Hyginus says that the original thirteen-consonant alphabet was taken by Mercury into Egypt, brought back by Cadmus into Greece, and thence taken by Evander the Arcadian into Italy, where his mother Carmenta (the Muse) adapted them to the Latin alphabet of fifteen letters. He describes this Mercury as the same one who invented athletic games: in other words, he was a Cretan, or of Cretan stock. And Mercury in Egypt was Thoth, the God whose symbol was a crane-like white ibis, who invented writing and who also reformed the calendar. The story begins to make good historical sense. Hyginus has perhaps drawn it from an Etruscan source: for the Etruscans, or Tyrrhenians, were of Cretan stock, and held the crane in reverence. Cranes fly in V-formation and the characters of all early alphabets, nicked with a knife on the rind of boughs – as Hesiod wrote his poems – or on clay tablets, were naturally angular.

  So Hyginus knew that the five vowels of the Arcadian alphabet belonged to an earlier religious system than the seven vowels of the Classical Greek alphabet, and that in Italy these seven vowels were sacred to the Goddess Carmenta; also that in Italy a six-consonant sacred alphabet was used some six centuries before the Greek twenty-four-letter ‘Dorian’ alphabet from which all Italian alphabets – Etruscan, Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan and Latin – are known to derive. In this, Hyginus is supported by Pliny who states positively in his Natural History that the first Latin alphabet was a Pelasgian one. He does not mention his authority but it was probably Gnaeus Gellius, the well-informed second-century BC historian, whom he quotes in the same passage as holding that Mercury first invented letters in Egypt and that Palamedes invented weights and measures. One must assume from the lack of inscriptional evidence in support of Hyginus’s record that this alphabet was confined, as the Beth-Luis-Nion originally was, to use in deaf-and-dumb signalling. About Carmenta we know from the historian Dionysus Periergetes that she gave oracles to Hercules and lived to the age of 110 years. 110 was a canonical number, the ideal age which every Egyptian wished to reach and the age at which, for example, the patriarch Joseph died. The 110 years were made up of twenty-two Etruscan lustra of five years each; and 110 years composed the ‘cycle’ taken over from the Etruscans by the Romans. At the end of each cycle they corrected irregularities in the solar calendar by intercalation and held Saecular Games. The secret sense of 22 – sacred numbers were never chosen haphazardly – is that it is the measure of the circumference of the circle when the diameter is 7. This proportion, now known as pi, is no longer a religious secret; and is used today only as a rule-of-thumb formula, the real mathematical value of pi being a decimal figure which no-one has yet been able to work out because it goes on without ever ending, as does, in a neat recurrent sequence. Seven lustra add up to thirty-five years, and thirty-five at Rome was the age at which a man was held to reach his prime and might be elected Consul. (The same age was fixed upon by a Classically-minded Convention as the earliest at which an American might be elected President of the United States.) The nymph Egeria, the oak-queen who instructed King Numa of Rome, was ‘the fourth Carmenta’. If the age of each Carmenta – or course of Sibylline priestesses – was 110 years, Numa reigned not earlier than 330 years after Evander’s arrival in Italy, the traditional date of which is some sixty years before the Fall of Troy, i.e., 1243 BC.

  Evander was banished from Arcadia because he had killed his father; and this implies the supersession of the Triple Goddess, Carmenta or Thetis, by Olympian Zeus. Thetis was the Aeolian Greek name for Carmenta, at whose prompting Evander had struck the blow; and for a king to kill his father (or kingly predecessor) at the prompting of his Goddess mother was common in Italy and Greece at that period. The traditional reason for Partholan’s Danaan invasion of Ireland and Brutus’s Dardanian invasion of Britain is the same: both were banished for parricide. The date, 1243 BC, corresponds with that given by the later Greeks for the Achaean invasion, namely 1250 BC. Th
is was not the original invasion but, apparently, a southward movement, under Dorian pressure, of Achaeans settled in North-western Greece. The story of Pelias and Neleus, sons of Poseidon who dispossessed the Minyans of Iolcos in Thessaly and Pylos in the Western Peloponnese, refers to this invasion which resulted in the institution of Olympianism.

  But has not the story of the invention of the pre-Cadmean alphabet of Palamedes, which was taken to Italy by Evander the Arcadian before the Dorian invasion of Greece, been lying concealed all this time in the confusingly iconotropic myth of Perseus and the Gorgon Medusa? Cannot the Palamedes story be recovered intact by the simple method of restoring the Perseus myth to iconographic form, and then re-interpreting the iconographs which compose it?

  The myth is that Perseus was sent to cut off the head of the snaky-locked Gorgon Medusa, a rival of the Goddess Athene, whose baleful look turned men into stone; and that he could not accomplish the task until he had gone to the three Graeae, ‘Grey Ones’, the three old sisters of the Gorgons who had only one eye and one tooth between them, and by stealing eye and tooth had blackmailed them into telling him where the grove of the three nymphs was to be found. From the three nymphs he then obtained winged sandals like those of Hermes, a bag to put the Gorgon’s head into, and a helmet of invisibility. Hermes also kindly gave him a sickle; and Athene gave him a mirror and showed him a picture of Medusa so that he would recognize her. He threw the tooth of the Three Grey Ones, and some say the eye also, into Lake Triton, to break their power, and flew on to Tartessus where the Gorgons lived in a grove on the borders of the ocean; there he cut off the sleeping Medusa’s head with the sickle, first looking into the mirror so that the petrifying charm should be broken, thrust the head into his bag, and flew home pursued by other Gorgons.

  The three Nymphs must be understood as the Three Graces, that is to say, the Triple Love-Goddess. The Graeae were also known as the Phorcides, which means the daughters of Phorcus, or Orcus, and according to the Scholiast on Aeschylus had the form of swans – which is probably an error for cranes, due to a misreading of a sacred picture, since cranes and swans, equally sacred birds, are alike in flying in V-formation. They were, in fact, the Three Fates. Phorcus, or Orcus, became a synonym for the Underworld; it is the same word as porcus, a pig, the beast sacred to the Death-goddess, and perhaps as Parcae, a title of the Three Fates, usually called Moirae, ‘the distributors’. Orc is ‘pig’ in Irish; hence the Orcades, or Orkneys, abodes of the Death-goddess. Phorcus was also reputedly the father of the Gorgon Medusa, whom the Argives in Pausanias’s day described as a beautiful Libyan queen decapitated by their ancestor Perseus after a battle with her armies, and who may therefore be identified with the Libyan snake-goddess Lamia (Neith) whom Zeus betrayed and who afterwards killed children.

  Imagine the pictures on a vase. First, a naked young man cautiously approaching three shrouded women of whom the central one presents him with an eye and a tooth; the other two point upwards to three cranes flying in a V-formation from right to left. Next, the same young man, wearing winged sandals and holding a sickle, stands pensively under a willow tree. (Willows are sacred to the Goddess, and cranes breed in willow groves.) Next, another group of three beautiful young women sit side by side in a grove with the same young man standing before them. Above them three cranes fly in the reverse direction. One presents him with winged sandals, another with a bag, the third with a winged helmet. Next, various sea-monsters are shown and a helmeted Sea-goddess, with a trident, holding a mirror in which a Gorgon’s face is reflected; and the young man is seen flying, bag and sickle in hand, towards a grove with his head turned to look at the mirror. From the bag peeps out the Gorgon’s head. The tooth and eye are painted, enlarged, on either side of him, so that he seems to have thrown them away. He is followed by three menacing winged women with Gorgon faces.

  This completes the pictures on the vase and one comes again to the first group.

  The myth in its familiar form, like that of Zeus’s betrayal of Lamia, is descriptive of the breaking of the Argive Triple Goddess’s power by the first wave of Achaeans, figured as Perseus, ‘the destroyer’. But the original meaning of the iconographs seems to be this: Mercury, or Hermes, or Car, or Palamedes, or Thoth, or whatever his original name was, is given poetic sight by the Shrouded Ones (his mother Carmenta, or Maia, or Danaë, or Phorcis, or Medusa, or whatever her original name was, in her prophetic aspect of the Three Fates) and the power to take omens from the flight of birds; also the power to understand the alphabetic secret represented by the cranes. The tooth was a divinatory instrument, like the one under which Fionn used to put his thumb – after eating the salmon of knowledge – whenever he needed magical counsel. Carmenta has invented the alphabet, but is assigning the thirteen consonants to her son, while keeping the five vowels sacred to herself. He goes off with his sickle, which is moon-shaped in her honour, like the sickle which the Gallic Arch-Druid subsequently used for cutting mistletoe; and will presently cut the first alphabet twig from the grove; in front of which the Goddess, unshrouded now, and playing the nymph not the crone, is discovered sitting in gracious trinity. She gives him as his regalia a winged helmet and winged sandals, symbolizing the swiftness of poetic thought, and a bag in which to keep his letters well hidden.

  Next, she is revealed as Athene, the Goddess of Wisdom, who was born on the shores of Lake Triton in Libya and seems to have been originally, before her monstrous rebirth from Father Zeus’s head, the Libyan Triple Goddess Neith, whom the Greeks called Lamia, or Libya. Peeping from his bag there is now a Gorgon’s head, which is merely an ugly mask assumed by priestesses on ceremonial occasions to frighten away trespassers; at the same time they made hissing noises, which accounts for Medusa’s snake locks. There never was a real Gorgon (as J. E. Harrison was the first to point out); there was only a prophylactic ugly face formalized into a mask. The ugly face at the mouth of the bag symbolizes that the secrets of the alphabet, which are the real contents, are not to be divulged or misused. A Gorgon’s mask was similarly put on the doors of all ovens and kilns in ancient Greece to frighten away the bogeys (and inquisitive children) who might spoil the baking. The winged ‘Gorgons’ in this picture are escorting, not pursuing, Mercury: they are the Triple Goddess again who, by wearing these ritual masks, is protecting him from profane eyes. She is also shown on the earth holding out her mirror with a Gorgon’s face reflected in it, to protect him in his poetic flight. He is taking the bag to Tartessus, the Aegean colony on the Guadalquivir; whence presumably the Milesians would carry it to Ireland. Gades, now Cadiz, the principal city of Tartessus, is said by the Augustan historian Velleius Paterculus to have been founded in 1100 BC, thirteen years before the foundation of Utica in North Africa. Perseus’ flight was displayed in gold and silver inlay on the Shield of Hercules, as extravagantly described by Hesiod; who places it between a scene of the Muses singing to a lyre near a dolphin-haunted sea, and one of the Three Fates standing outside a populous seven-gated city. If this city is his own seven-gated Thebes, then the icon which Hesiod has misread is a Boeotian variant of the Mercury myth, and the hero with the tasselled alphabet-bag and the attendant Gorgons is Cadmus the Theban.

  Mercury arrived safely at Tartessus, to judge from a cryptic remark by Pausanias (I, 35, 8) that ‘there is a tree at Gades that takes diverse forms’, which seems to refer to the tree-alphabet. Gades (Cadiz) is built on Leon, an island of Tartessus; the older city was on the western shore and included a famous temple of Cronos mentioned by Strabo. It is likely that the island was once, like Pharos, both a sepulchral island and a trading depôt. Pherecydes guessed that it was the original ‘Red Island’, Erytheia, over which three-bodied Geryon ruled, but on the insufficient ground that the pasture there was very rich and that Hercules had an ancient shrine on the eastern shore. Pausanias (X, 4, 6) records the more plausible legend that Leon was originally owned by the Giant Tityus who, as will be shown in Chapter Sixteen, was really Cronos – the god of the middle, or fo
ol’s finger, consigned to Tartarus by Zeus. (Titias whom Hercules killed and Tityus whom Zeus killed are doublets.)

  The shrine of Hercules seems to have been set up by the colonists of 1100 BC, some four hundred years before Phoenician colonists came there from Tyre, having been ordered by an oracle to settle near the Pillars of Hercules. The Phoenicians subsequently worshipped Cronos as Moloch and Hercules as Melkarth. Strabo quotes Poseidonius for holding that the Pillars of Hercules were not, as was vulgarly supposed, the two heights of Gibraltar and Ceuta, but two pillars set up before his shrine; and I have suggested in my King Jesus (Chapter XVI) that such columns were connected with the secret of the Pelasgian alphabet. So it is likely that the pre-Phoenician Hercules of Tartessus was Palamedes, or the lion-skinned God Ogmios: whom the Irish credited with the invention of the alphabet that they ‘had out of Spain’ and whom Gwion, in his Elegy on ‘Ercwlf’, celebrates as a planter of alphabetic pillars. The people of Tartessus were famous in Classical times for the respect they paid to old men, and Ogmios according to Lucian was represented as an aged Hercules. That the Gorgons lived in a grove at Tartessus can mean only that they had an alphabetic secret to guard. This Ogmian Hercules was also worshipped by the early Latins. King Juba II of Mauretania, who was also an honorary duumvir of Gades, is quoted by Plutarch (Roman Questions 59) as his authority for saying that Hercules and the Muses once shared an altar because he had taught Evander’s people the alphabet. This tallies with Hyginus’s account of how Carmenta, the Triple Muse, taught Evander, and Dionysus Periergetes’ account of how she ‘gave oracles to Hercules’.