The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  The Litany of the Blessed Virgin contains the prayer Sedes sapientiae, ora pro nobis, ‘Seat of Wisdom, pray for us!’ For St. Peter Chrysologos in his Sermon on the Annunciation had represented the Virgin as the seven-pillared temple which Wisdom (according to Proverbs, IX, 10) had built for herself. So the meaning of the mediaeval allegory about the milk-white unicorn which could be captured only with the assistance of a pure virgin is now easily read. The Unicorn is the Roe in the Thicket. It lodges under an apple-tree, the tree of immortality-through-wisdom. It can be captured only by a pure virgin – Wisdom herself. The purity of the virgin stands for spiritual integrity. The unicorn lays its head on her lap and weeps for joy. But the Provençal version of the story is that the beast nuzzles to her breasts and attempts other familiarities, whereupon the virgin gently grasps him by the horn and leads him away to the hunters: here he is, in fact, a type of profane love rejected by spiritual love.

  The unicorn’s wildness and untameability had become proverbial in early Christian times because of the text in Job, XXXIX, 9:

  Will the unicorn be able to serve thee or abide by thy crib?

  and this Biblical unicorn, (a mistranslation by the Septuagint1 of rem, the Judaean aurochs or wild ox) became identified with the goat-stag, the hirco-cervus of Dionysian mysteries, which was another wild untameable animal. Charles Doughty in his Arabia Deserta suggests that the rem is not the aurochs but a large, very dangerous antelope called wothyhi or ‘wild ox’ by the Arabs. He is likely to be right; and I take the wothyhi to be the boubalis or boibalis, ‘an oryx the size of an ox’, mentioned by Herodotus (Melpomene, 192), and also by Martial, as a fierce beast used in the Roman amphitheatre. Doughty writes: ‘Her horns are such slender rods as from our childhood we have seen pictured “the horns of the unicorn”. We read in Balaam’s parable: “El brought them out of Egypt; He hath as it were the strength of the reem”; and in Moses’s blessing of the tribes Joseph’s horns are the two horns of reems.’ Doughty illustrates this with a sketch of a wothyhi’s horn, nearly two feet long and somewhat curved, with raised rings at the base. He adds: ‘It was a monkish darkness in natural knowledge to ascribe a single horn to a double forehead.’ This is unfair on the monks: it was the pre-Christian Septuagint who had first given the rem a single horn. And it is possible that they translated rem as ‘unicorn’ from a misunderstanding of an icon in the margin of an illustrated Hebrew Pentateuch – such there were. In the context of Moses’s blessing, Joseph ‘with the horns of a rem’ would naturally have been depicted in the persons of his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, jointly called ‘Joseph’, as twin rems with only one horn apiece. The single horn, emphasized by its double occurrence, would suggest to the translators the beast described by Ctesias in his Indica. The horn was a cure-all and especially good against poison.

  The connexion of the apple-tree with immortality is ancient and widespread in Europe. What does ‘apple’ mean? According to the Oxford English Dictionary its etymology is unknown, but the word runs Northwestward across Europe all the way from the Balkans to Ireland in a form approximating in most languages to Apol.

  It is clear that the ancient icon of the Three Goddesses, the apple and the young shepherd of Ida, which has been iconotropically interpreted by some early enemy of women in the story of the ‘Apple of Discord’ (how Paris adjudicated the apple to the Love-goddess) had an entirely different meaning. To award an apple to the Love-goddess would have been an impertinence on the Shepherd’s part. All apples were hers. Did Merddin present Olwen with the apple orchard? Did Adam give the Mother of All Living an apple?1 Obviously the three Goddesses are, as usual, the three persons of the ancient Triple Goddess, not jealous rivals, and obviously the Love-goddess is giving the apple to the Shepherd (or goatherd), not receiving it from him. It is the apple of immortality and he is the young Dionysus – the god commemorated by the kid stuffed with apples; for according to Hesychius and Stephanus of Byzantium one of Dionysus’s titles was Eriphos, ‘the Kid’. Virgil has expressed the wrong notion in his Georgics: he says that the kid spitted on hazel is sacrificed to Dionysus because the goat and the hazel-tree are both inimical to the vine. Whether the word Apol is a chance approximation to Apollo, who is the immortal part of Dionysus, or whether the apple is named after him, is a doubtful point. But it is remarkable that in Greece the words for ‘goat’ (or sheep) and ‘apple’ are identical (mēlŏn) – the Latin is mãlum. Hercules, who combined Dionysus and Apollo in a single person, was called Mēlon because apples were offered to him by his worshippers; and because he was given the bough with the golden apples by the Three Daughters of the West – the Triple Goddess again; it was these apples that made him immortal. The conclusion of the story of the Apple of Discord, that the Shepherd won Helen as a reward for his judgement, evidently derives from a companion icon to the ‘Judgement’, showing a young Shepherd hand in hand with Helen. But Helen was not a mortal woman; she was Helle, or Persephone, a Goddess of Death and Resurrection. Hercules, Theseus, Castor and Pollux, were all depicted in her company in archaic works of art.

  Though the apple was the most palatable of wild fruits growing on trees, why should it have been given such immense mythic importance? The clue is to be found in the legend of Curoi’s soul that was hidden in an apple; when the apple was cut across by Cuchulain’s sword ‘night fell upon Curoi’. For if an apple is halved cross-wise each half shows a five-pointed star in the centre, emblem of immortality, which represents the Goddess in her five stations from birth to death and back to birth again. It also represents the planet of Venus – Venus to whom the apple was sacred – adored as Hesper the evening star on one half of the apple, and as Lucifer Son of the Morning on the other.

  The apple of the Thracian Orphic cult seems to have been the sorb rather than the quince, the crab, or the true apple, because Orpheus, whose name and singing head identify him with Bran the alder-god, is called the son of Oeagrius; Oea Agria means ‘the wild service-tree’.

  1 The obsession of the Orphic mystics, from whom the Pythagoreans derived their main doctrines, with sacred numbers is remarked upon by Iamblichus in his life of Pythagoras: ‘Orpheus said that the eternal essence of number is the most providential principle of the universe, of heaven, of earth, and of the nature intermediate to these; and more, that it is the basis of the permanency of divine natures, gods and demons.’ The Pythagoreans had a proverb ‘all things are assimilated to number’, and Pythagoras is quoted by Iamblichus as having laid down in his Sacred Discourse that ‘number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons’. The numbers 8 and 9 were favourite objects of Pythagorean adoration.

  1 The oracular Wheels of Fortune, worked by a rope, still found in a few early Continental churches, derive from the golden iynges (literally ‘wrynecks’) which were oracular wheels, originally sacred to the White Goddess, that decorated, among others, the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius connects them with similar wheels used by the Mages of Babylon, and they also occurred in Egyptian temples of the 3rd century BC. The celebrated Irish Druid Mogh Ruith of Kerry (according to the Cóir Anmann) ‘derived his name, which signifies Magis Rotarum, “the wizard of the wheels”, from the wheels by which he used to make his magic observations’. In O’Grady’s Silva Gadelica there is an account of Mogh Ruith’s daughter who went with him to the East to learn magic, and there made a ‘rowing wheel’.

  1 Seventy-two (not seventy) Alexandrian Jews.

  1 In the Genesis story of Adam and Eve the iconotropic distortion is, nevertheless, very thorough. Clearly, Jehovah did not figure in the original myth. It is the Mother of all Living, conversing in triad, who casts Adam out of her fertile riverine dominions because he has usurped some prerogative of hers – whether caprifying fig-trees or planting grain is not clear – lest he should also usurp her prerogative of dispensing justice and uttering oracles. He is sent off to till the soil in some less bountiful region. This recalls what seems to be an intermediate
version of the same myth: Triptolemus, a favourite of the Barley-goddess Demeter, is sent off from Eleusis in Attica with a bag of seed, to teach the whole world agriculture, and departs in a car drawn by serpents. The curse in Genesis on the woman, that she should be at enmity with the serpent, is obviously misplaced: it must refer to the ancient rivalry decreed between the sacred king Adam and the Serpent for the favours of the Goddess; Adam is fated to bruise the Serpent’s head, but the Serpent will sting Adam’s sacred heel, each in turn bringing the other to his annual death. That Eve, ‘the Mother of All Living’ was formed by God from Adam’s rib seems an anecdote based on a picture of the naked goddess Anatha of Ugarit watching while Aleyn, alias Baal, drives a curved knife under the fifth rib of his twin Mot: this murder has been iconotropically misread as Jehovah’s removal of a sixth rib, which turns into Eve. The twins, who fought for her favours, were gods of the Waxing and the Waning Year.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE SEVEN PILLARS

  Since the seven pillars of Wisdom are identified by Hebrew mystics with the seven days of Creation and with the seven days of the week, one suspects that the astrological system which links each day of the week to one of the heavenly bodies has an arboreal counterpart. The astrological system is so ancient, widespread and consistent in its values that it is worth noting in its various forms. Its origin is probably, but not necessarily, Babylonian. The second list shown here is that of the Sabians of Harran, who took part in the Sea-people’s invasion of Northern Syria about 1200 BC; it makes the connexion between the Babylonian and the Western lists.

  Planet Babylonian Sabian Latin French German English

  Sun Samas Samas Sol Dominus Sun Sun

  Moon Sin Sin Luna Luna Moon Moon

  Mars Nergal Nergal Mars Mars Zivis Zio

  Mercury Nabu Mercurius Mercurius Mercurius Wotan Woden

  Jupiter Marduk Bel Jupiter Jupiter Thor Thor

  Venus Ishtar Beltis Venus Venus Freia Frigg

  Saturn Ninib Cronos Saturnus Saturn Saturn Saturn

  In Aristotle’s list, Wednesday’s planet is ascribed alternatively to Hermes or Apollo, Apollo having by that time exceeded Hermes in his reputation for wisdom; Tuesday’s alternatively to Hercules or Ares (Mars), Hercules being a deity of better omen than Ares; Friday’s alternatively to Aphrodite or Hera, Hera corresponding more closely than Aphrodite with the Babylonian Queen of Heaven, Ishtar.

  The seven sacred trees of the Irish grove were, as has already been mentioned: birch, willow, holly, hazel, oak, apple and alder. This sequence also holds good for the days of the week, since we can confidently assign the alder to Saturn (Bran); the apple to the Love-goddess Venus or Freia; the oak to the Thunder-god Jupiter or Thor; the willow to the Moon (Circe or Hecate); the holly to Mars, the scarlet-faced War-god; and the birch naturally begins the week as it begins the solar year.1 The tree of Wednesday, sacred to the God of Eloquence, one would expect to be Woden’s ash; but with the ancient Irish the tree of eloquence and wisdom was the hazel, not the ash, the Belgic god Odin or Woden having been a latecomer to Ireland. So these are the seven trees, with their planets, days and letters:

  Sun Sunday Birch B

  Moon Monday Willow S

  Mars Tuesday Holly T

  Mercury Wednesday Hazel (or ash) C

  Jupiter Thursday Oak D

  Venus Friday Apple Q

  Saturn Saturday Alder F

  It is easy to reconstruct the appropriate formula in Classical Latin for the daily dedication to the Lord of the Heavens of the devotee’s heart:

  Benignissime, Solo Tibi Cordis Devotionem Quotidianam Facio.

  (‘Most Gracious One to Thee alone I make a daily devotion of my heart.’)

  And the Greek, which had lost its Q.(Koppa) and F (Digamma) must content itself with a second C (Kappa) and a Ph (Phi):

  Beltiste Soi Tēn Cardiān Didōmi Cathēmeriōs Phylaxomenēn.

  (‘Best One, every day I give my heart into Thy Keeping.’)

  So the poetic answer to Job’s poetic question: ‘Where shall wisdom be found and where is the place of understanding?’ which his respect for Jehovah the All-wise prevented him from facing is: ‘Under an apple-tree, by pure meditation, on a Friday evening, in the season of apples, when the moon is full.’ But the finder will be Wednesday’s child.

  The sacred grove is perhaps referred to in Ezekiel, XLVII (a passage quoted in the Gnostic Epistle to Barnabas, XI, 10). Ezekiel in a vision sees the holy waters of a river issuing eastward from under the threshold of the House of God, full of fish, with trees on both sides of the river ‘whose leaves shall not fade nor their fruit be consumed. Each shall bring forth new fruit according to their months, the fruit for meat and the leaves for medicine: and this shall be the border whereby you shall inherit the land according to the tribes of Israel, and Joseph shall have two portions.’ The reference to thirteen tribes, not twelve, and to the ‘months’ of the trees, suggests that the same calendar is being used. Moreover, the theme of roe and apple-tree occurs in the Canticles.

  The Canticles, though apparently no more than a collection of village love-songs, were officially interpreted by the Pharisee sages of Jesus’s day as the mystical essence of King Solomon’s wisdom, and as referring to the love of Jehovah for Israel; which is why in the Anglican Bible they are interpreted as ‘Christ’s love for his Church’. The fact is that originally they celebrated the mysteries of an annual sacred marriage between Salmaah the King of the year and the Flower Queen, and their Hellenistic influence is patent.

  The second chapter of the Canticles runs:

  I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valleys.

  As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

  As the apple tree among the trees of the grove, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

  He brought me to the banquet-house and his banner over me was love. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.

  His left hand is under my head, his right hand doth embrace me.

  I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem by the roes and by the hinds of the field that ye stir not up, nor wake my love till he please.

  The voice of my beloved! Behold he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.

  My beloved is like a roe or a wild hart….

  My beloved is mine, I am his, he feedeth among the lilies.

  The ‘lilies’ are the red anemones that sprang up from the drops of blood which fell from Adonis’s side when the wild boar killed him. The apple is the Sidonian (i.e. Cretan) apple, or quince, sacred to Aphrodite the Love-goddess, and first cultivated in Europe by the Cretans. The true apple was not known in Biblical Palestine and it is only recently that varieties have been introduced there that yield marketable fruit. But the apple grew wild in ancient times on the Southern shores of the Black Sea, the provenience of the other trees of the series, and around Trebizond still occasionally forms small woods. It also occurred in Macedonia – the original home of the Muses – and in Euboea where Hercules received the injury that sent him to the pyre on Mount Oeta; but in both these cases may have been an early importation.

  There seems to be a strong connexion between the tree-calendar and the ritual at the Feast of the Tabernacles at Jerusalem, already mentioned in connexion with the willow and alder. The worshippers carried in their right hand an ethrog, a sort of citron, and in their left a lulab, or thyrsus, consisting of the intertwined boughs of palm, willow and myrtle. The ethrog was not the original fruit, having been introduced from India after the Captivity, and is thought to have displaced the quince because of the quince’s erotic connotations. In the reformation of religion which took place during the Exile the Jews broke as far as possible all the ties which bound them to orgiastic religion. The ritual of Tabernacles was taken over by the Hebrews with other rites in honour of the Moon-goddess, and the ordinances for its observance were fathered on
Moses, as part of the great recension of the Law ascribed to King Josiah but probably made during the Exile. I have already mentioned the disparaging Haggadah on the willow; the meaning of the myrtle was also changed from the shadow of death to the pleasant shade of summer, on the authority of Isaiah who had praised the tree (Isaiah, XLI, 19; LV, 13).

  The feast began on the first new moon of the year, and in the quince season. Both willow and apple have 5 – the number especially sacred to the Moon-goddess – as the number of their letter-strokes in the Ogham finger-alphabet. The myrtle does not occur in the Beth-Luis-Nion, but may well be the Greek equivalent of the remaining consonant in the Beth-Luis-Nion that has 5 as its number of strokes – the elder. The myrtle was sacred to the Love-goddess Aphrodite all over the Mediterranean, partly because it grows best near the sea shore, partly because of its fragrance; nevertheless, it was the tree of death. Myrto, or Myrtea, or Myrtoessa was a title of hers and the pictures of her sitting with Adonis in the myrtle-shade were deliberately misunderstood by the Classical poets. She was not vulgarly courting him, as they pretended, but was promising him Life-in-Death; for myrtle was evergreen and was a token of the resurrection of the dead King of the year. The myrtle is connected in Greek myth with the death of kings: Myrtilus, son of Hermes (Mercury) who was charioteer to Oenomaus the King of Elis, pulled the linch-pins from the wheels of his master’s chariot and so caused his death. Pelops, who then married Oenomaus’s widow, ungratefully threw Myrtilus into the sea. Myrtilus cursed the House of Pelops with his dying breath and thereafter every Pelopid monarch was dogged by his ghost. The ‘wheel’ was the life of the King; R, the last consonant of the alphabet ‘pulls out the pin’ at the last month of his reign. Pelops’s dynasty obtained the throne of Elis, but all his successors similarly met their end in the R month. (Myrtilus became the northern constellation Auriga, the charioteer.) The myrtle resembles the elder in the medicinal qualities attributed to its leaves and berries; the berries are ripe in December, the R month. Myrtle boughs were carried by Greek emigrants when they intended to found a new colony, as if to say: ‘The old cycle is ended; we hope to start a new one with the favour of the Love-goddess, who rules the sea.’