The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  It will be observed that the seventh to eleventh letters of this alphabet, which follow the same sequence in the Boibel-Loth, are the letters H.D.T.C.Q. These letters, as Sir John Rhys has pointed out, form the initials of the Old Goidelic numerals, from one to five: a hoina, a duou, a ttri, a ccetuor, a qquenque, which correspond very nearly to the Latin mumerals unum, duo, tres, quattuor, quinque. This may explain why the inventors of the Boibel-Loth made H.D.T.C.Q. the central five letters of the alphabet and transferred Z to a position between NG and R. Yet the ancientness of the Old Goidelic numerals suggests that in the original Beth-Luis-Nion finger alphabet the first flight of consonants – the Spring months – numbered only five, not six, to allow H.D.T.C.Q. to form the second or Summer series, and that Z was therefore reckoned to the last series, the Winter series, as a premonitory ‘blackthorn winter’. Thus:

  Each series thus has its full five letters, the aggregate number of strokes in each case being fifteen.

  But though this is a logical arrangement, necessitated by the initials of the first five numerals in Latin and Old Goidelic, a sense of mathematical proportion demands that each side of the dolmen should have a single series cut upon it. This would involve a change of places between Z and Q, to make Apple and Willow, Hazel and Blackthorn, share months:

  This arrangement makes good seasonal sense, for the wild apple blossoms during the willow month and the sloe is ripe in the hazel month. Poetically it also makes good sense, for the Apple White Goddess is of happier omen than the Blackthorn White Goddess as introducing the summer; and the hostile blackthorn with its mouth-puckering sloe is complementary to the apple, in the nut-month, as representing the poet in his satiric capacity. I believe that both these arrangements were used in Ogham, the necessary ambivalence of poetic meaning being thus maintained: it is an axiom that the White Goddess is both lovely and cruel, ugly and kind.

  Now it will be noticed that there are two more unoccupied corner positions on the threshold of the dolmen which represents the extra day of the calendar year; and these can be assigned to J (pronounced Y) and to long O: Y as a reduplication of I, the death-vowel; long O as a reduplication of A, the birth-vowel. That only a single character served for both J and I in Latin and Greek is well known; and the close connexion between long O (Omega) and A appears both in Ionic Greek, where Omega was often written instead of Alpha – õristos for aristos (‘best’); and in Doric Greek where Alpha was often written for Omega – as prãtistos for prõtistos (‘first’).

  Omega (‘Great O’) seems to signify the world-egg of the Orphic mysteries which was split open by the Demiurge to make the universe: for the majuscular Greek character for Omega represents the world-egg laid on the anvil and the minuscular character shows it already split in halves. The majuscular Omicron (‘little O’) and the minuscular Omicron both show the egg of the year waiting to hatch out. The glain, or ‘red egg of the sea serpent’, which figured in the Druidical mysteries may be identified with the Orphic world-egg: for the creation of the world, according to the Orphics, resulted from the sexual act performed between the Great Goddess and the World-Snake Ophion. The Great Goddess herself took the form of a snake and coupled with Ophion; and the coupling of snakes in archaic Greece was consequently a forbidden sight – the man who witnessed it was struck with the ‘female disease’: he had to live like a woman for seven years, which was the same punishment as was permanently inflicted on the Scythians who sacked the Temple of the Great Goddess of Askalon. The caduceus of Hermes, his wand of office while conducting souls to Hell, was in the form of coupling snakes. The Goddess then laid the world-egg, which contained infinite potentiality but which was nothing in itself until it was split open by the Demiurge.

  The Demiurge was Helios, the Sun, with whom the Orphics identified their God Apollo – which was natural, because the Sun does hatch snakes’ eggs – and the hatching-out of the world was celebrated each year at the Spring festival of the Sun, to which the vowel Omicron is assigned in the alphabet. Since the cock was the Orphic bird of resurrection, sacred to Apollo’s son Aesculapius the healer, hens’ eggs took the place of snakes’ in the later Druidic mysteries and were coloured scarlet in the Sun’s honour; and became Easter eggs.

  But Little O is not Great O. Great O, Omega, must be regarded as an intensification of Alpha, and as symbolizing the birth of birth. Here then is the new dolmen figure:

  And at last we can complete our Beth-Luis-Nion calendar, with the proper tree accredited to each letter – for the doubled I, or J, letter-tree, the tree belonging to the Day of Liberation which stands apart from the 364 days of the thirteen months, is soon found. Put the requirements of the tree into a bardic riddle and there can be only one answer:

  The lay that is no lay calls for a tree

  That is no tree, of low yet lofty growth.

  When the pale queen of Autumn casts her leaves

  My leaves are freshly tufted on her boughs.

  When the wild apple drops her goodly fruit

  My all-heal fruit hangs ripening on her boughs.

  Look, the twin temple-posts of green and gold,

  The overshadowing lintel stone of white.

  For here with white and green and gold I shine –

  Graft me upon the King when his sap rises

  That I may bloom with him at the year’s prime,

  That I may blind him in his hour of joy.

  For the mistletoe, the berries of which were formerly prized both as an allheal and as an aphrodisiac, is not a tree in the sense that it grows in the earth; it subsists on other trees. There are two sorts of mistletoe, the mistletoe proper and the loranthus. The Greeks distinguished them as, respectively, hypear and ixos or ixias. The loranthus is found in Eastern Europe, but not in Western and, unlike mistletoe proper, grows on oaks. It also grows on tamarisks, and its flame-coloured leaves may have been the original ‘burning bush’ from which Jehovah appeared to Moses. Whether the loranthus was once native to Western Europe, or whether the Celtic Druids brought it with them from the Danube area where their religion was first formulated, or whether they grafted mistletoe proper from poplar, apple, or other host-trees, on their oaks, cannot be determined. It is most likely that they grafted it, to judge from the insistence in Norse myth on oak-mistletoe. Virgil notes that the mistletoe is the only tree that leafs freshly in wintry weather. Its colours are white, green and gold like the pillars and lintel shown to Herodotus in the ancient temple of Hercules at Tyre. On midsummer day, in ancient Europe, the Eye of the year was blinded with a mistletoe stake, all the other trees (according to the Norse legend) having refused to do so. The Church now admits holly and ivy as reputable church decorations at Christmas, but forbids the mistletoe as pagan. However, mistletoe cannot be ousted from its sovereignty of Midwinter, and the exchange of kisses forbidden at all other seasons is still permitted under its bough, if it has berries on it. Chemists have tried to learn how mistletoe won the name ‘all-heal’, by analyzing its alkaloids. They can find none of any curative virtue, though this is not final proof of the mistletoe’s medicinal valuelessness. Camomile, for example, has medicinal properties, but no extractable alkaloid. A plant is rarely awarded mystic virtue unless it has some property beneficial to man. Yet the spectacle of green leaves and white berries on an otherwise bare tree may have been sufficiently odd to invest mistletoe with supernatural powers. The wood, by the way, is extremely hard and tough, mistletoe being slow-growing; Haedur’s mistletoe spear which pierced Balder’s gentle breast in the legend was no poetic fancy – I once cut one for myself in Brittany.

  This calendar explains the reference in Gwion’s Preiddeu Annwm to the ‘ox with seven-score knobs on his collar’: the ox is the first flight of five months, consisting of 140 days; it is presumably followed by a lion of one hundred and twelve days, and a serpent of the same length, to justify the two texts already quoted (in Chapter Eight) from Euripides and the Welsh poet Cynddelw – both appealing to the God of the year to appear as a wild bull,
a fire-breathing lion and a many-headed snake. The griffon-eagle must be the creature of the extra day, since the god becomes immortal in this form. This year of Bull, Lion, Serpent and Eagle is Babylonian: the calendar beast, called Sir-rush on the Dragon Gate at Babylon having the body and horns of a bull, forelegs and mane of a lion, head scales and tail of a serpent, hindlegs and feet of an eagle. The calendar has several secret qualities. One is that the number of vowels is increased to seven, the Roebuck’s own number. Another is that II in Ogham makes a ten-stroke letter, and AA makes a two-stroke letter: thus the aggregate number of letter-strokes for the complete twenty-two letter alphabet is 72, a number constantly recurring in early myth and ritual; for 72 is the multiple of the nine, the number of lunar wisdom, and eight the number of solar increase.1 72, Mr. Clyde Stacey suggests, is also linked to the Goddess, astronomically, by the seventy-two-day season during which her planet Venus moves successively from maximum eastern elongation to inferior conjunction (closest approach to earth) and thence to maximum west elongation. A third quality is that the proportion of all the letters in the alphabet to the vowels is 22 to 7, which, as has already been mentioned, is the mathematical formula, once secret, for the relation of the circumference of the circle to the diameter.

  Before examining the fourth and, for our purpose, the most important quality of this calendar, the poetic relation between Hazel and Apple must be considered. It has now been established that the Roebuck, originally a White Hind, hides in the thicket, and that the thicket is composed of twenty-two sacred trees. The poet naturally asks a further question: ‘But where exactly is the beast lodged in the grove?’

  ‘Where?’ is the question that should always weigh most heavily with poets who are burdened with the single poetic Theme of life and death. As Professor Ifor Williams has pointed out, it is because the cuckoo utters its ‘Where?’ so constantly that it is represented in early Welsh poetry as a kill-joy: for ‘cw-cw’, pronounced ‘ku-ku’ means ‘where? where?’. It cries: ‘Where is my love gone? Where are my lost companions?’ Curiously enough, the same sentiment occurs in Omar Khayyam’s elegy where the ‘solitary ring-dove’ broods in the ruined palace crying: ‘Ku? Ku? Ku? Ku?’ – the Iranian for ‘where’ being the same as Welsh; and in Greek myth Tereus the hoopoe cries ‘Pou? Pou?’ for his lost brides. ‘Where’ in English is derived, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘from the interrogative stem qua’. Nearly all interrogatives in Indo-European languages begin with Q (except where Q has been, as in Greek, changed into a P or, as in German, into a W), and in Old Scots ‘where’ is spelt ‘Quhair’. Q, in fact, is the letter of perpetual question. Latin has a fine range of Q’s:

  Quare? Quis? Qua? Quid? Qualis? Qui? Quo? Quomodo? Quando? Quorsum? Quoties? Quantum? Quot?

  And the Serpent’s dangerous question Quidni? ‘Why not?’ ‘Where?’ is ‘Quă?’

  But the Muse’s promise to the poet is ‘Seek patiently, and you shall find’, so where else should the Wild Hind be hiding except under the Q tree, which is the Wild Apple?

  Valentin Iremonger, the poet, has confirmed this for me in the Hearings of the Scholars:

  Queirt dano is o chrand regainmnighead .i. abull ut dicitur clithar boascille .i. elit glet quert .i. aball.

  ‘The letter Q is from a tree named Quert, that is to say, an apple tree. As the saying is: “Quert is the shelter of the wild hind” – meaning that the apple tree is so.’ An interesting poetic gloss on ‘shelter of the wild hind’ occurs in the same book:

  .i. boscell .i. gelt basceall .i. is and tic a ciall do in tan degas a bas

  ‘that is to say, of the boscell, lunatic, the word being derived from basceall, “death-sense”, for a lunatic’s wits come to him when he goes to his death.’

  The comment means that love of the Goddess makes the poet mad: he goes to his death and in death is made wise.

  Quert is not only one of the ‘seven noble sacred trees of the grove’ but is recorded in the Trials of Ireland as being, with Coll, the Hazel, one of the only two sacred trees for the wanton felling of which death is exacted. The apple in European literature and folklore is the symbol of consummation, as the egg is of initiation. The 112 days of the Lion flight of months in the Beth-Luis-Nion run ab ovo usque ad malum, from egg to apple, from the end of Saille, the nesting month, to the end of Quert, the apple month. Thus when the Biblical legend of Adam and Eve reached North-Western Europe, the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was understood as an apple – not as a fig, despite the fig-leaf context. Adam had eaten from the forbidden tree of intelligence given him by Eve, ‘the Mother of All Living’, and the bards therefore translated ‘fruit’ as ‘apple’.

  The seven noble sacred trees of the grove particularized in a seventh-century poem appended to the ancient Irish Law Crith Gablach were: birch, alder, willow, oak, holly, hazel, apple. Except that Beth, the birch, the lucky tree of the birth-month, takes the place of Huath, the unlucky whitethorn, the trees run in a clear sequence from the Spring equinox to the end of the apple harvest. The Birch is mentioned as ‘very noble’ in Gwion’s Câd Goddeu, but the apple-tree was the noblest tree of all, being the tree of immortality. The poets of Wales have always been aware of its spiritual pre-eminence, and the lovely mediaeval Afalleneu:

  Sweet apple-tree crimson in hue

  Which grows concealed in Forest Celyddon….

  is not a poem about the orchard apple-tree but about the apple-tree of the sacred thicket, the tree that is the harbourage of the hind. As Gwion writes: ‘I fled as a roe to the entangled thicket.’

  Where did King Arthur go to be healed of his grievous wounds? To the Isle of Avalon, the secret ‘island of apple-trees’. With what talisman was Bran summoned by the White Goddess to enter the Land of Youth? With ‘a silver white-blossomed apple branch from Emain in which the bloom and branch were one’. The island of Emain, the Goidelic Elysium, is described thus in a poem by Ragnall, son of Godfrey, King of the Isles:

  An amaranthine place is faery Emain:

  Beauteous is the land where it is found,

  Lovely its rath above all other raths.

  Plentiful apple-trees grow from that ground.

  Oisin, when taken to the same Land of Youth by Niamh of the Golden Hair, sees his weird first as a hornless fawn pursued by a red-eared white hound, but then in his own shape royally dressed and mounted on a white horse in pursuit of a beautiful girl on a dark horse; in her hand is a golden apple. Both apparitions are skimming over the calm sea; he does not recognize their meaning and Niamh gently evades his questions about them. It has been suggested in a footnote to Chapter Twelve that the Goddess of the sepulchral island of Alyscamps, in the Rhône, was named Alys and that the alder, aliso in Spanish, was named after her. Dauzat in his Dictionnaire Étymologique connects alisier, the service-tree, with aliso, the alder which screened these sepulchral islands. The same resemblance is found between the Scandinavian and North-German els or elze (service-tree) and else (alder); and the name Alys seems to be recorded in the Ilse, the stream that runs from the Brocken to the Oker, where a princess Ilse was once drowned. Since the fruit of the service-tree (both the Mediterranean and Northern varieties) is a sort of sorb-apple, it is likely that this was the apple of immortality in pre-Christian France, Spain and Scandinavia. If so, the Elysian Fields, or Alyscamps, would have the same meaning as Avalon: apple-orchards. The sorb emblemizes ‘from corruption, sweetness’: it cannot be eaten until it has rotted to a corpse-like purple-brown. Perhaps this is why the tree is mentioned in The Hearings of the Scholars as a euphemism for yew, the death-tree; though the explanation there given is that both bore the name ‘oldest of woods’; ‘oldest’, as applied to the service-tree, could mean only ‘of most ancient fame’, because it is not particularly long-lived.

  Mr. Kenneth Dutfield in a recent letter to the Times Literary Supplement plausibly suggests that Avernus, the abode of the dead, which the Latins incorrectly derived from the Greek a-ornis, ‘birdless’, is the
same word as Avalon; which would identify the Elysian Fields with Avernus. Lake Avernus near Cumae apparently won on its nickname from the unhealthy airs of the surrounding marshes and from the near-by shrine of the Cumaean Sybil who conjured up the spirits of the dead.

  On August 13th, the pre-Christian feast of the Mother Goddess Diana, or Vesta, was once celebrated with cyder, a roasted kid spitted on hazel-twigs and apples hanging in clusters from a bough. Another name of this Goddess was Nemesis (from the Greek nemos, ‘grove’) which in Classical Greek connotes divine vengeance for breaches of taboo. In her statues she carries an apple-bough in one hand, and the fifth-century Christian poet Commodianus identifies her with Diana Nemorensis (‘of the grove’) whose followers ‘worship a cut branch and call a log Diana’. But both Nemesis and Diana Nemorensis are associated with the deer, not the goat, cult. Nemesis carries a wheel in her other hand to show that she is the goddess of the turning year, like Egyptian Isis and Latin Fortuna, but this has been generally understood as meaning that the wheel will one day come full circle and vengeance be exacted on the sinner.1 In Gaul she was Diana Nemetona, nemeton being a sacred grove; and was represented with an apple-bough, a cyder-bowl with Aethiopians on it, and a lion-eagle griffin to denote the season of her feast. This feast was converted in the Middle Ages into that of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin (August 15th) which, because of the seventeenth-century calendar changes (referred to in the hawthorn context), means August 6th, the beginning of Quert. The Virgin is believed to have died on August 13th, to have risen again and ascended to Heaven on the third day. Since the Virgin was closely associated by the early Church with Wisdom – with the Saint ‘Sophia’, or Holy Wisdom, of the Cathedral Church at Constantinople – the choice of this feast for the passing of Wisdom into Immortality was a happy one.