The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Now, the most famous school of Greek antiquity was kept by Cheiron the Centaur, on the slopes of Mount Pelion in Magnesia. Among his pupils were Achilles the Myrmidon, son of Thetis the Sea-goddess, Jason the Argonaut, Hercules, and all the other most distinguished heroes of the generation before the Trojan War. He was renowned for his skill in hunting, medicine, music, gymnastics and divination, his instructors being Apollo and Artemis, and was accidentally killed by Hercules; after which he became the Bowman of the Greek Zodiac. He was evidently the heir to the Cretan culture which had reached Thessaly by the sheltered port of Iolcos, and to the independent Helladic culture. He is called ‘the son of Cronos’.

  Perhaps we can make another identification here: of Feniusa Farsa with ‘Amphictyon’ the founder of the Amphictyonic League, or the League of Neighbours. Magnesia was a member of this ancient federation of twelve tribes – Athens was the most powerful – representatives of which met every autumn at Anthela near the pass of Thermopylae and every Spring at Delphi. ‘Amphictyon’ was a son of Deucalion (‘sweet wine’), whose mother was Pasiphaë the Cretan Moon-goddess, and of Pyrrha (‘the red one’), the Noah and Noah’s wife of Greece. He was himself ‘the first man ever to mix wine with water’. In characteristic style he married the heiress of Attica, Cranë – already mentioned as an aspect of the White Goddess – expelled his predecessor, and set up altars to Phallic Dionysus and the Nymphs. We know that Amphictyon was not his real name, for the League was really founded in honour of the Barley-goddess Demeter, or Danaë, in her character of President of Neighbours (‘Amphictyonis’) and the sacrifice at the autumn meetings was made to her: but it was the usual habit in Classical Greece, as it was in Classical Britain and Ireland, to deny women the credit of inventing or initiating anything important. So ‘Amphictyon’ was the male surrogate of Amphictyonis, just as ‘Don King of Dublin and Lochlin’ was of the Irish Goddess Danu; and as, I believe, the Giant Samothes, after whom Britain had its earliest name ‘Samothea’, was of the White Goddess, Samothea – for Samothes is credited by early British historians, quoting from the Babylonian Berossus, with the invention of letters, astronomy and other sciences usually attributed to the White Goddess. And since Amphictyon ‘joined together’ the various states and was a wise man, we may call him ‘Foeneus’ – or ‘Dionysus’.

  The most ancient Greek account of the creation of the vine that has been preserved is that given by Pausanias (X, 38): how in the time of Orestheus son of Deucalion a white bitch littered a stick which he planted and which grew into a vine. The white bitch is obviously the Triple Goddess again: Amphictyonis. Of the Amphictyonic League eight tribes Pelasgian and, according to Strabo, Callimachus and the Scholiast on Euripides’s Orestes, it was originally regularized by Acrisius the grandfather of Perseus. But the composition of the League in Classical times was claimed to date from about 1103 BC, and it included the Achaeans of Phthiotis, who were not there in Acrisius’s day. The inference is that four Pelasgian tribes were extruded in successive Greek invasions.

  St. Paul quoted a Greek proverb: ‘All Cretans are liars’. They were called liars for the same reason that poets are: because they had a different way of looking at things. Particularly because they remained unmoved by Olympian propaganda, which for the previous thousand years or so had insisted on an Eternal, Almighty, Just Father Zeus – Zeus who had swept away with his thunderbolt all the wicked old gods and established his shining throne for ever on Mount Olympus. The True Cretans said: ‘Zeus is dead. His tomb is to be seen on one of our mountains.’ This was not spoken with bitterness. All that they meant was that ages before Zeus became an Eternal Almighty God in Greece, he had been a simple old-fashioned Sun-king, annually sacrificed, a servant of the Great Goddess, and that his remains were customarily buried in a tomb on Mount Juktas. They were not liars. There was no father God in Minoan Crete and their account squares with the archaeological finds recently made on that very mountain. The Pelasgians of Leros had much the same reputation as the Cretans, but seem to have been even more obdurate in their attachment to ancient tradition, to judge from the Greek epigram: ‘The Lerians are all bad, not merely some Lerians, but every one of them – except Procles, and of course he is a Lerian too.’

  The early Welsh and Irish historians are also generally regarded as liars because their ancient records are dated to uncomfortably early dates and do not square either with conventional Biblical dates or with the obstinate theory that until Roman times the inhabitants of all the British Isles were howling savages who had no native art or literature at all and painted themselves blue. The Picts and Britons certainly tattooed themselves, as the Dacians, Thracians and Mosynoechians did, with pictorial devices. That they used woad for the purpose is a proof of advanced culture, for the extraction of blue dye from the woad-plant, which the ancient Irish also practised, is an extremely complicated chemical process; the blue colour perhaps sanctified them to the Goddess Anu.1 I do not mean that these records have not undergone a great deal of careless, pious, or dishonest editing at every stage of religious development; but at least they seem to be as trustworthy as the corresponding Greek Records, and rather more trustworthy than the Hebrew – if only because ancient Ireland suffered less from wars than Greece or Palestine. To dismiss the Irish and Welsh as incoherent children has one great advantage: it frees the historian of any obligation to add Old Goidelic and Old Welsh to his multifarious other studies.

  In modern civilization almost the only place where a scholar can study at ease is a University. But at a University one has to be very careful indeed not to get out of step with one’s colleagues and especially not to publish any heterodox theories. Orthodox opinions are in general based on a theory of political and moral expediency, originally refined under Olympianism, which is the largest single gift of paganism to Christianity. Not only to Christianity. Twenty-five years ago, when I was Professor of English Literature at the Royal Egyptian University of Cairo, my colleague the blind Professor of Arabic Literature was imprudent enough to suggest in one of his lectures that the Koran contained certain pre-Mohammedan metrical compositions. This was blasphemy and a good excuse for his examination-funking students to go on strike. So the Rector called him to task and he was faced with the alternatives of losing his job and recantation. He recanted. In American Universities of the Bible Belt the same sort of thing often happens: some incautious junior professor suggests that perhaps the Whale did not really swallow Jonah and supports his view by quoting the opinions of eminent natural historians. He leaves at the end of the University year if not before. In England the case is not quite so bad, but bad enough. Sir James Frazer was able to keep his beautiful rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, until his death by carefully and methodically sailing all round his dangerous subject, as if charting the coastline of a forbidden island without actually committing himself to a declaration that it existed. What he was saying-not-saying was that Christian legend, dogma and ritual are the refinement of a great body of primitive and even barbarous beliefs, and that almost the only original element in Christianity is the personality of Jesus. Recent researches that I have made into Christian origins, the history of the American Revolution, and the private life of Milton, three dangerous topics, have astonished me. How calculatedly misleading the textbooks are! Dog, Lapwing and Roebuck have long ago entered the service of the new Olympians.

  To return to Dr. Macalister, who does not account for the thirteen-consonant Irish alphabet and assumes that the Druids possessed no alphabet before they formed the BLFSN alphabet from the Formello-Cervetri one. He does not brush aside the question, why the common name for all Irish alphabets was ‘Beth-Luis-Nion’ – which means that the original sequence began with BLN, not BLF – but makes a complicated postulate for which he has no epigraphic evidence. He suggests that the Druids of Southern Gaul chose out from the Formello-Cervetri list the letters:

  B.L.N.F.S., M.Z.R.G.NG., H.C.Q.D.T., A.E.I.O.U.

  and that this, their first alphabet of any sort
lasted just long enough to give the Irish alphabet its name. He also suggests (without epigraphic evidence) that an intermediate alphabet was devised by a clever phonetician as follows:

  B.F.S.L.N., M.G.NG.Z.R., H.D.T.C.Q, A.O.U.E.I.

  before the order was finally settled (in Ireland at least) as:

  B.L.F.S.N., H.D.T.C.Q., M.G.NG.Z.R., A.O.U.E.I.

  plus five ‘diphthongs’, as he rather misleadingly calls the allusive vowel-combinations referring to the foreign letters, for which characters were found in five of the six supernumerary letters of the Formello-Cervetri alphabet. He does not deny that Beth, Luis and Nion are tree-names, but holds that as cipher equivalents of the Formello-Cervetri letter names, which he says must have retained their original Semitic names as late as the fifth century BC, they were chosen merely as having the correct initial, and suggests that L, Luis the rowan, might just as well have been the larch.

  This argument might pass muster were it not that the Druids were famous for their sacred groves and their tree-cult, and that the old sequence of tree-letters was evidently of such religious importance that the later B.L.F.S.N. alphabet, with its misplacement of N, could never wipe out its memory. Dr. Macalister may regard the Beth-Luis-Nion Tree-Ogham as an ‘artificiality’; but the trees in it are placed in a seasonal arrangement which has strong mythological backing, whereas the original sequence which he postulates makes no sense at all after the first five letters, which are in the accepted order. For my part I cannot believe in his postulate; oak and elder cannot change places; it is not easy to overlook the Latin proverb that ‘it is not from every tree that a statue of Mercury can be carved’; and only in joke does anyone gather nuts, Coll, and may, Uavi, on a cold and frosty morning.

  At some time, it seems, in the fifth century BC the characters of the Formello-Cervetri alphabet were borrowed by the Druids in Southern Gaul for the purpose of recording whatever was not protected by a taboo, and passed on by them into Britain and Ireland. The foreign letters which occur in it were added to an already existing secret alphabet, the Boibel-Loth, the letter-names of which formed a charm in honour of Canopic Hercules. But this does not prove that the Druids did not possess an earlier alphabet beginning with B.L.N., with entirely different letter-names bound up with the more barbaric religious cult commemorated in Amergin’s song and enshrined in a traditional tree-sequence of birch, rowan, ash, alder, willow, etc. Or that the historical tradition, at which Dr. Macalister indulgently smiles, that letters were known in Ireland many centuries before the Formello-Cervetri alphabet reached Italy, is a late fiction. If we can show that the BLFSN alphabet was a logical development from the BLNFS tree-alphabet and can connect it with a new religious dispensation, without having to invent intermediate forms for which there is no literary evidence, then everything will make poetic as well as prose sense. Religious necessity is always a far likelier explanation of changes in an alphabet than phonetic theory, to which alone Dr. Macalister attributes his hypothetic changes in the sequence of the Beth-Luis-Nion: for all right-minded people everywhere naturally oppose the attempts of scholarly phoneticians to improve their familiar ABC, the foundation of all learning and the first thing that they ever learned at school.

  But is not the answer to our question to be found in The Battle of the Trees? What distinguishes the BLFSN from the BLNFS is that the letter N, Nion the ash, the sacred tree of the God Gwydion, has been taken out of the dead period of the year, where it is still in black bud, and put two months ahead to where it is in leaf, while Fearn the alder, the sacred tree of the God Bran, which marks the emergence of the solar year from the tutelage of Night, has been thrust back into Nion’s place. The BLFSN is the trophy raised by Gwydion over Bran. And is it not strange that a few years before the Battle of the Trees was fought in Britain and the letter F humbled, the Greeks had made a dead set against their F, only retaining it as a numerical sign for 6? More than this happened when the order of letters changed; Gwydion’s ash, N, took the place of the fifth consonant, Saille the willow, S, which was naturally sacred to Mercury, or Arawn; and Gwydion thereupon became an oracular god. Also, Amathaon who had evidently been a willow-god, S, took Bran’s place at F and became a fire-god in the service of his father Beli, God of Light. It only remained in this General Post for Bran to take over the maritime ash that Gwydion had relinquished and sail away on his famous voyage to one hundred and fifty islands; yet sailing was no novelty to him, the tradition preserved by Virgil being that the first boats that ever took to the water were alder-trunks.

  1 In Crete today a pre-marital love-affair has only two possible results: a knife between the lover’s shoulders, or immediate marriage. The German Panzer Grenadiers stationed in Crete during World War II had to go on leave to Mount Athos if they wanted sexual diversion.

  1 And probably with female breasts, as in a Middle Minoan seal-type from Zakro, published in Sir Arthur Evans’ Palace of Minos.

  1 It seems to have been in her honour as Goddess of the dark-blue night sky and the dark-blue sea that the matrons and girls of Britain, according to Pliny, stained themselves all over with woad, for ‘certain rites’, until they were as swarthy as Ethiopians, then went about naked. An incident in the mediaeval Life of St. Ciaran proves that in Ireland woad-dying was a female mystery which no male was allowed to witness. If this was also the rule in Thrace and the Northern Aegean, it would account for the nasty stench which, according to Apollodorus, clung to the Lemnian women, and made the men quit their company; for the extraction and use of the dye is such a smelly business that the woad-dying families of Lincolnshire have always been obliged to inter-marry.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE ROEBUCK IN THE THICKET

  The omission from O’Flaherty’s and O’Sullivan’s Beth-Luis-Nion of the mythically important trees, Quert, apple, and Straif, blackthorn, must be accounted for. The explanation seems to be that though the Beth-Luis-Nion calendar is a solar one, in so far as it expresses a year’s course of the sun, it is ruled by the White Moon-goddess whose sacred number is thirteen in so far as her courses coincide with the solar year, but fifteen in so far as the full moon falls on the fifteenth day of each lunation. Fifteen is also the multiple of three and five: three expressing the three phases of the moon and the Goddess’s three aspects of maiden, nymph and hag, and five expressing the five stations of her year: Birth, Initiation, Consummation, Repose and Death. Thus because fifteen letters are needed to present the Goddess as both a triad and a pentad, and to express the days in a month up to full moon, and since only thirteen 28-day months can be fitted into a year, two of the months must be shared between pairs of trees.

  Since Q was sometimes written CC by the Irish ollaves – as in O’Flaherty’s alphabet – we may conclude that Z was similarly written SS, as it was in Latin during the greater part of the Republic. This is to say that Quert the wild apple shared a month with Coll the hazel, because the apple and nut harvest coincide, and that Straif the blackthorn shared a month with Saille the willow, because the White Goddess has to make an appearance in tree form in the Spring – in France the blackthorn is called La Mère du Bois (‘the Mother of the Wood’).

  The blackthorn (bellicum in Latin) is an unlucky tree; villagers in Galmpton and Dittisham, South Devon, still fear ‘the black rod’ carried as a walking stick by local witches, which has the effect of causing miscarriages. When Major Weir, the Covenanter and self-confessed witch, was burned at Edinburgh in April 1670, a blackthorn staff was burned with him as the chief instrument of his sorceries. Blackthorn is also the traditional timber with which bellicose Irish tinkers fight at fairs (though the shillelagh, contrary to popular belief, is an oak club), and the words ‘strife’ and ‘strive’, modelled on the old Northern French estrif and estriver, may be the same word Straif, derived from the Breton; at least, no other plausible derivation has been suggested. Gilbert White remarks in his Selborne: ‘Blackthorn usually blossoms when cold N.E. winds blow; so that the harsh rugged weather obtaining at this
season is called by the country people “blackthorn winter”.’ The blackthorn is also called the sloe, after its fruit; and the words ‘sloe’ and ‘slay’ are closely connected in early English. Since Good Friday falls in this month, the Crown of Thorns was sometimes said to have been made of blackthorn; and this was the explanation that the monks gave for the unluckiness of the tree. It is said that whitethorn, tree of chastity, will destroy any blackthorn growing near by.

  That Coll and Quert share a month between them is appropriate. The hazel is the poet’s tree, and the apple’s power as the salvation of poets is brought out in the Welsh legend of Sion Kent (a verse of whose I quote in Chapter Nine) whom the Prince of the Air tried to carry off: Kent won permission to ‘sip an apple’ first, then caught hold of the apple tree, a sanctuary from which he could not be removed. Therefore ‘being too sinful for Heaven yet safe from Hell he haunts the earth like a will o’ the wisp’. In other words, he secured poetic immortality. Quert and Coll are also associated in the Dinnoschencas with the oak, the King of Trees: the Great Tree of Mugna contained in itself the virtues of apple, hazel and oak, ‘bearing every year one crop each of goodly apples, blood-red nuts and ridgy acorns: its crown was as broad as the whole plain, its girth thirty cubits, its height three hundred cubits.’ It fell with the advent of Christianity.

  There is a reference in Amergin’s song to the ‘secrets of the unhewn dolmen’. It will be seen that there is room for an extra letter at each corner of the dolmen arch which I constructed to elucidate the reference: the Oghams being nicked on the edges, not painted on the face, of the stones.