The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Isidore, Archbishop of Seville, who died in 636 AD, wrote an encyclopaedic work called Twenty Books Concerning Origins or Etymologies, based on a wide, if uncritical, study of Christian and pagan literature, which is the most valuable repository of Iberian tradition extant. In it he treats of the invention of the alphabet. He does not present Palamedes or Hercules or Ogma or Mercury or Cadmus as the original benefactor, but the Goddess herself and names Greece as the land of origin:

  Aegyptiorum litter as Isis regina, Inachis [sic] regis filia, de Graecia veniens in Aegyptum repperit et Aegyptis tradidit.

  As for the Egyptian alphabet, Queen Isis, daughter of King Inachus, coming from Greece to Egypt brought them with her and gave them to the Egyptians.

  Originum I, iii (4–10).

  Inachus, a river-god and legendary king of Argos, was the father both of the Goddess Io, who became Isis when she reached Egypt, and of the hero Phoroneus, founder of the Pelasgian race, who has been already identified with the God Bran, alias Cronos. Isidore was a compatriot of Hyginus (who reported the legend of Mercury’s return to Greece from Egypt with the Pelasgian alphabet); he distinguishes the Egyptian alphabet both from the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts, and ascribes the invention of the ordinary Greek alphabet to the Phoenicians.

  What material Mercury’s bag was made of, can be discovered in the parallel myth of Manannan, son of Lyr, a Goidelic Sun-hero, predecessor of Fionn and Cuchulain, who carried the Treasures of the Sea (i.e., the alphabet secret of the Peoples of the Sea) in a bag made of the skin of a crane; and in the myth of Mider, a Goidelic Underworld-god, corresponding with the British Arawn (‘Eloquence’) King of Annwm, who lived in a castle in Manannan’s Isle of Man with three cranes at his gate whose duty was to warn off travellers, croaking out: ‘Do not enter – keep away – pass by!’ Perseus’s bag must have been a crane-bag, for the crane was sacred to Athene and to Artemis, her counterpart at Ephesus, as well as being the inspiration for Hermes’s invention of letters. The flying Gorgons, then, are cranes with Gorgon-faces,1 and watch over the secrets of the crane-bag, itself protected by a Gorgon head. It is not known what sort of a dance the Crane Dance was that, according to Plutarch, Theseus introduced into Delos except that it was performed around a horned altar and represented the circles that coiled and uncoiled in the Labyrinth. My guess is that it imitated the fluttering love-dance of courting cranes, and that each movement consisted of nine steps and a leap. As Polwart says in his Flyting with Montgomery (1605):

  The crane must aye

  Take nine steps ere shee flie.

  The nine steps prove her sacred to the Triple Goddess; and so does her neck, feathered white and black with reddish skin showing through, or (in the case of the Numidian, or Balearic, crane) with red wattles. Cranes make their spectacular migrations from the Tropic of Cancer to the Arctic Circle and back twice yearly, flying in chevron formation with loud trumpetings at an enormous height; and this must have attached them to the Hyperborean cult as messengers flying to the other world which lies at the back of the North Wind. But Thoth who invented hieroglyphs, was symbolized by the ibis, another wader also sacred to the moon; and the Greeks identified Thoth with Hermes, conductor of souls and messenger of the gods, whom Pherecydes addressed as ‘ibis-shaped’. So Hermes is credited with having invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes, and the crane takes on the scholarly attributes of the ibis, which did not visit Greece.

  A peculiarity of wading birds such as the crane and heron is that, when they have speared a quantity of small fish in a river ready to take home to their young, they arrange them on the bank with the tails set together in the form of a wheel, which was formerly the symbol of the sun, and of the king’s life. This must have astonished the ancients as it astonished me as a boy when I saw a heron doing it in the Nantcoll River in North Wales: but naturalists explain the arrangement as merely intended to make the fish more easily picked up and carried home. In ancient Ireland the association of the crane with literary secrets is suggested by the augury given by its sudden appearance: a cessation of war; for one of the poet’s main functions was to part combatants, and he himself took no part in battle. In Greece the crane was associated with poets not only in the story of Apollo’s metamorphosis into ‘a crane, a Thracian bird’ – meaning the red-wattled Numidian crane which visited the Northern Aegean – but in the story of Ibycus, the sixth-century BC Greek erotic poet who, having spent the best part of his life in the island of Samos, was one day set upon by bandits in a lonely place near Corinth and mortally wounded. He called upon a passing flock of cranes to avenge his death and soon afterwards the cranes hovered over the heads of the audience in the Corinthian open-air theatre; whereupon one of the murderers, who was present, cried out: ‘Look, the avengers of Ibycus!’ He was arrested and made a full confession.

  To sum up the historical argument. A Greek alphabet which consisted of thirteen, and later fifteen, consonants and five vowels sacred to the Goddess, and which was ultimately derived from Crete, was current in the Peloponnese before the Trojan War. It was taken to Egypt – though perhaps only to the port of Pharos – and there adapted to Semitic use by Phoenician traders who brought it back into Greece some centuries later when the Dorians had all but destroyed the Mycenaean culture. The characters with their Semitic names were then adapted to the existing Epicharmian system contained in the so-called Pelasgian characters and usually called Cadmean, perhaps because they were current in Boeotian Cadmea. Later, Simonides, a devotee of Dionysus, modified the Cadmean alphabet in conformity with some obscure religious theory.

  This is a plausible account. The history of the Greek alphabet has come to light in the last few years. It is now known to have originated in Cretan hieroglyphs, which by late Minoan times had been reduced to something between an alphabet and a syllabary of fifty-four signs: only four more than the Sanskrit system allegedly invented by the Goddess Kali, each letter of which was one of the skulls in her necklace. The Mycenaeans borrowed this Cretan system and did their best to adapt it to the needs of Greek. Messrs Ventris and Chadwick, who in 1953 solved the secret of the Mycenaean Linear Script B (1450–1400 BC) found it to consist of about eighty-eight different phonetic signs. It had also been introduced in earlier, more cumbrous, forms into Cyprus, Caria and Lycia. (In the Iliad, VI, 168 ff. occurs the story of how Bellerophon left Argos and handed the King of the Lycians a tablet covered with signs.) From the sixteenth century BC onward three or four attempts were made to simplify the various syllabaries then current in the near East into pure alphabets. The most successful of these was the Phoenician, from which the ‘Cadmean’ Greek characters derive. The Semitic princes of Syria wrote Assyrian cuneiform in their correspondence with the Pharaohs of Egypt until the twelfth century BC, but their merchants had long before been using the Phoenician alphabet, in which one third of the characters was borrowed from the Cretan system – though whether directly from Crete or indirectly through Greece or Asia Minor is doubtful – the remainder from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  There is nothing to show that the Phoenicians invented the principle of reducing a syllabary to letters; and according to Professor Eustace Glotz’s Aegean Civilization the names of such Phoenician characters as are not Semitic names for the objects represented in the corresponding Egyptian hieroglyphs cannot be explained in terms of any Semitic language, while their forms are clearly derived from the Cretan lineal script. The Semites, though good business men, were not an inventive people, and the unexplained names of the letters are therefore likely to be Greek. The Danaan Greeks probably simplified the Cretan syllabary into a sacred alphabet and passed it on to the Phoenicians – though confiding only the abbreviations of the letter-names to them and altering the order of letters so as not to give away the secret religious formula that they spelt out. The earliest Phoenician inscription is on a potsherd found at Bethshemeth in Palestine dating from the sixteenth century BC. The Palaio-Sinaitic and Ras Shamra alphabets may have been composed in emul
ation of the Phoenician; they were based on cuneiform, not on Cretan or Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Egyptians had been working towards an alphabet concurrently with the Cretans and it is difficult to say who first achieved the task; it was probably the Egyptians.

  Now it is remarkable that the names of several letters in the Irish Beth-Luis-Nion correspond more exactly with their counterparts in the Hebrew alphabet, which is Phoenician, than with their Classical Greek counterparts.

  Greek Hebrew Irish

  alpha aleph ailm (pronounced ‘alev’)

  iota jod idho (originally ‘ioda’)

  rho resh ruis

  beta beth beith

  nu nun nion or nin

  eta heth eadha (‘dh’ pronounced ‘th’)

  mu mim muin

  o(micron) ain onn

  On the other hand the remaining Greek letters correspond closely enough with their Hebrew counterparts, while the Irish letters are wholly different.

  Greek Hebrew Irish

  lambda lamed luis

  delta daleth duir

  gamma gimmel gort

  tau tav tinne

  sigma samech saille

  zeta tzaddi straif

  kappa koph quert

  It looks as if the Irish alphabet was formed before the Classical Greek, and that its letter-names correspond with those of the Epicharmian alphabet which Evander brought to Italy from Danaan Greece. It may even have kept the original order of letters.

  An ancient Irish tradition supplementing that of Ogma Sunface’s invention of the Ogham alphabet is recorded in Keating’s History of Ireland:

  Feniusa Fana, a grandson of Magog and King of Scythia, desirous of mastering the seventy-two languages created at the confusion of Babel, sent seventy-two persons to learn them. He established a University at Magh Seanair near Athens, over which he and Gadel and Caoith presided. These formed the Greek, Latin and Hebrew letters. Gadel digested the Irish (Goidelic) into five dialects: the Fenian for the soldiers; the poetic and historic for the senachies and bards respectively; the medical for physicians; and the common idiom for the vulgar.

  Though at first sight this is a nonsense story, cooked up from scraps of monkish tradition (such as the miraculous translation of the Hebrew Scriptures by seventy-two scholars, each working separately for seventy-two days on the Isle of Pharos and all producing identically the same version) the closer one looks at it the more interestingly it reads. ‘Magh Seanair near Athens’ suggests that the mention of Babel has led some monk to amend an obscure text by making the event take place on the Magh Seanair, ‘Plain of Shinar’, in Mesopotamia and assuming that another Athens lay near. That the alphabet was invented in Greece (Achaea) is insisted upon in The Hearings of the Scholars, though Achaea has been corrupted to ‘Accad’ in some manuscripts and to ‘Dacia’ in others, and the whole account is given a very monkish twist. The original, I think, was ‘Magnesia near Athens’ meaning Magnesia in Southern Thessaly. It was described as ‘near Athens’ presumably to distinguish it from other Pelasgian Magnesias – the Carian one on the Meander River, and the Lydian one on the Hermus, connected with the myth of the Titan Tityos, from which in ancient times Hercules sent a colony to Gades in Spain. The three persons in the story, Gadel, Caoith and Feniusa Farsa are perhaps recognizable in Greek translation. Caoith as Coieus the Hyperborean grandfather of Delphic Apollo; Gadel as a tribe from the river Gadilum, or Gazelle, in Paphlagonia from which Pelops the Achaean began his travels; Feniusa Farsa as Foenus ho Farsas (‘the vine-man who joins together’) or Foeneus father of Atalanta, the first man to plant a vineyard in Greece. According to Greek legend, this Foeneus, or ‘Oeneus’ when he lost his initial digamma, was a son of Aegyptus and came from Arabia, which perhaps means Southern Judaea; exactly the same account is given by the Irish bards of Feniusa Farsa, who was turned out of Egypt ‘for refusing to persecute the Children of Israel’, wandered in the wilderness for forty-two years and then passed northward to the ‘Altars of the Philistines by the Lake of Willows’ – presumably Hebron in Southern Judaea, celebrated for its fish-pools and stone altars – thence into Syria, after which he appears in Greece. Foeneus’s queen was Althaea, the Birth-goddess associated with Dionysus; and it is known that foinos, wine, is a word of Cretan origin.

  Why is Feniusa Fars – who was an ancestor of the Irish Milesians – described as a Scythian, a grandson of Magog, and founder of the Milesian race? Gog and Magog are closely connected names. ‘Gogmagog’, Gog the Son of Gog – was the name of the giant whom ‘Brut the Trojan’ is said to have defeated at Totnes in Devonshire in his invasion of Britain at the close of the second millennium. But from where did Gog mac Gog originate? The answer is to be found in Genesis, X, 2 where Magog is described as a son of Japhet (who figures in Greek myth as Iapetus the Titan, the father by the goddess Asis of Atlas, Prometheus and Epimetheus) and as a brother of Gomer, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech and Tiras – who are generally agreed to have been the Cimmerians, the Medians, the Ionians, the Tiberenians, the Moschians and the Tyrrhenians. The Moschians and the iron-working Tibarenians were tribes of the south-eastern Black Sea region; the wandering Black Sea tribe of Cimmerians eventually became the Cymry; the Ionians ranked as Greeks in historical times but were perhaps Aegean immigrants into Greece from Phoenicia; the Tyrrhenians were an Aegean tribe some of whom emigrated from Lydia to Etruria, others to Tarsus (St. Paul’s city) and Tartessus in Spain; the Medians claimed descent from the Pelasgian goddess Medea. Gog is identified with the northern tribe of Gagi mentioned in an inscription of Amenhotep III, and ‘Gogarene’, in Strabo’s day, was the name of a part of Armenia lying to the east of the territory of the Moschians and Tibarenians. Magog’s grandfather was Noah, and Noah’s Ararat was in Armenia, so that Magog is usually held to stand for Armenia; though Josephus interprets the word as meaning ‘the Scythians’, which was an inclusive name for all the Black Sea tribes of his day. The ‘King Gog of Meshech and Tubal’ mentioned in Ezekiel, XXXVIII, 17 is now generally identified with Mithradates VI of Pontus, whose kingdom included the country of the Moschians and Tibarenians.

  The history of Foeneus is concerned with certain mass emigrations from Canaan. Canaanites are referred to in the Greek myth of ‘Agenor, or Chnas, King of Phoenicia’, brother of Pelasgus, Iasus and Belus, and father of Aegyptus and Danäus; Agenor invaded Greece and became King of Argos. His was probably the invasion that drove the Tuatha dé Danaan out of Greece. Agenor had other sons, or affiliated tribes, besides Foeneus, Aegyptus and Danäus. These were Cadmus (a Semitic word meaning ‘of the East’), who seized part of what afterwards became Boeotia; Cylix, who gave his name to Cilicia; Phoenix, who remained in Phoenicia and became completely Semitized; Thasus, who emigrated to the island of Thasos, near Samothrace; and Phineus, who emigrated to Thynia, near Constantinople, where the Argonauts are said to have found him preyed on by Harpies. The Amorites, a part of whom lived in Judaea, were also Canaanites, according to Genesis, X, and in the time of the Hebrew Prophets kept up the old Aegean customs of mouse-feasts, king-crucifixion, snake-oracles, the baking of barley-cakes in honour of the Queen of Heaven, and pre-marital prostitution; but they had early become Semitized in language. In Genesis the original Canaanite empire is described as extending as far south as Sodom and Gomorrah at the extreme end of the Dead Sea. This must be a very early legend, for according to Genesis, XIV the Canaanites were expelled from their southern territory by the Elamites – an invasion that can be dated to about 2300 BC

  The historical sense of the Agenor myth is that towards the end of the third millennium BC, an Indo-European tribal confederacy – part of a huge horde from central Asia that overran the whole of Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and Northern Mesopotamia – marched down from Armenia into Syria, thence into Syria and Canaan, gathering allies as it went. Some tribes under rulers known to the Egyptians as the Hyksos broke into Egypt about 1800 BC and were expelled with difficulty two centuries later. The flow and ebb of this mass-movement of tribes, which was complicated
by Semitic invasions from across the Jordan, dislodged from Syria, Canaan and the Nile Delta numerous peoples that worshipped the Great Goddess under such titles as Belili, or Baalith, and Danaë, and the Bloody One (Phoenissa). One body whose chief religious emblem was the vine marched, or sailed, along the South Coast of Asia Minor, halted awhile in Milyas, the old name for Lycia, invaded Greece a little before the arrival there of the Indo-European Achaeans from the north, and occupied Argos in the Peloponnese, the chief shrine of the Horned Moon-goddess Io. The Cadmean invasion came later: it seems that a Canaanite tribe originally known as the Cadmeans, or Easterners, had occupied the mountainous district on the frontier of Ionia and Caria, which they called Cadmea; whence they crossed the Aegean and seized the coastal strip facing Euboea, excellent as a naval base, which was thereafter also called Cadmea.

  In the Irish myth Caoith is described as a Hebrew. This must be a mistake: he was not one of the Habiru, as the Egyptians called the Hebrews, but probably a Pelasgian, a representative of the well-known priesthood of Samothrace, the Cabeiroi. The myth thus seems to refer to an agreement about a common use of letters reached at Magnesia in Mycenaean times by the Achaeans, typified by Gadel, the invaders of Greece; Canaanite invaders, typified by Feniusa Farsa; and the Pelasgian natives of Greece, typified by Caoith – all of whom were joined in a common reverence for the vine. The figure seventy-two suggests a religious mystery bound up with the alphabet; it is a number closely connected both with the Beth-Luis-Nion and the Boibel-Loth and associated in both cases with the number five (the number of the dialects).