The White Goddess
Page 40
In my King Jesus I have tentatively reconstructed the hymn to Hercules Melkarth on which ‘Jacob’s Blessing’ seems to be based. It combines the words of the Blessing with the traditional meanings of the tribal names and begins with Hercules swaying to and fro in his golden cup. I take this opportunity of correcting my misplacement of the brothers Levi, Gad and Asher:
Reuben – B
SEE THE SON on the water tossed
In might and excellency of power,
Issachar – L
Resting at ease between two feats –
He has paid the shipman all his HIRE –
Zebulon – N
DWELLING secure in the hollow ship
Until by winds he is wafted home.
Judah – F
Hark, how he roars like a lion’s whelp,
Hark, how his brothers PRAISE his name…
Gad – S
Though A TROOP of raiders cast him down
He will cast them down in his own good time.
Levi – H
He is SET APART from all his brothers
And held in service to the shrine.
Asher – D
HAPPY is he; his bread is fat,
Royal dainties are on his plate, etc.
Here then, for what it is worth, is a list of the jewels of the months and of the tribes. (The breastplate was made entirely of gold in honour of the Sun: but if a sequence of five metals corresponded with the five vowels A.O.U.E.I. it was probably, to judge from the traditional planetary signs still attached to them: silver, gold, copper, tin, lead.)
B Dec. 24 Red Sard Reuben
L Jan.21 Yellow Chrysolite Issachar
N Feb. 18 Sea-green Beryl Zebulon
F March 18 Fire-Garnet Judah
S April 15 Blood-red Carbuncle Gad
H May 13 Lapis Lazuli Levi
D June 10 White Carnelian Asher
T July 8 Yellow Cairngorm Simeon
C Aug. 5 Banded Red Agate Ephraim
M Sept. 2 Amethyst Manasseh
G Sept. 30 Yellow Serpentine Dan
Ng Oct. 28 Clear Green Jasper Dinah
R Nov. 25 Dark Green Malachite Naphtali
For the extra day, Dec. 23rd, which belongs to Benjamin ‘Son of My Right Hand’, that is to say ‘The Ruler of the South’, (since the Sun reaches its most southerly stage in mid-winter) the jewel is amber, which Ezekiel makes the colour of the upper half of Jehovah’s body; the lower half being fire. Benjamin’s tree was either the hyssop, or wild caper, which grows green in walls and crannies and was the prime lustral tree in Hebrew use, or the holy loranthus, which preys on desert tamarisks.
1 In the North Country ballad of The Wife of Usher’s Well, the dead sons who return in the dead of winter to visit their mother, wear birch leaves in their hats. The author remarks that the tree from which they plucked the leaves grew at the entrance of the Paradise where their souls were housed, which is what one would expect. Presumably they wore birch as a token that they were not earth-bound evil spirits but blessed souls on compassionate leave.
1 Ninib, the Assyrian Saturn, was the god of the South, and therefore of the noon-day Sun, and also of mid-Winter when the Sun attains its most southerly point and halts for a day. In both these capacities he was the god of Repose, for noon is the time for rest in hot climates. That Jehovah was openly identified with Saturn-Ninib in Bethel before the Northern captivity is proved in Amos, V, 26 where the image and star of ‘Succoth-Chiun’ are mentioned as having been brought to the shrine; and that the same was done in Jerusalem before the Southern Captivity is proved by the vision of Ezekiel, VIII, 3, 5 where his image, ‘the image of jealousy’ was set up at the north gate of the Temple, so that devotees would face southwards while adoring him; and close by (verse 14) women were wailing for Adonis.
1 The cypress occurs in the riddling list of Ecclesiasticus XXIV, 13–17, (I quote the text as restored by Edersheim) where Wisdom describes herself as follows:
I was exalted like a cedar in Lebanon and like a cypress-tree on Mount Hermon.
I was exalted like a palm-tree in Engedi and as a rose-tree in Jericho, as an olive in the field, and as a plane-tree.
I exhaled sweet smell like cinnamon and aromatic asphalathus, I diffused a pleasant odour like the best myrrh, like galbanum, onyx and sweet storax, and like the fumes of frankincense.
Like an oleander [‘turpentine-tree’ in A.V.] I stretched out my branches which are branches of glory and beauty.
Like a vine I budded forth beauty and my flowers ripen into glory and riches.
Ecclesiasticus has mixed alphabetic trees with aphrodisiac perfumes and trees of another category; but H for cypress and M for vine suggests that the last-mentioned, or only, trees in verses 13, 14, 16 and 17, spell out Chokmah, the Hebrew word for Wisdom: Ched, Kaf, Mem, He. (In Hebrew, vowels are not written.) If this is so, the oleander is CH; and the plane is a surrogate for the almond, K, which as the tree of Wisdom herself cannot figure as a part of the tree-riddle of which it is the answer; in the time of Ecclesiasticus the plane had long been associated by the Greeks with the pursuit of wisdom. The four other trees, cedar, palm, rose and sweet olive, represent respectively sovereignty, motherhood, beauty and fruitfulness – Wisdom’s characteristics as a quasi-goddess.
1 The tradition of Nennius’s Seven Ages has survived in an English folk-saying which runs:
The lives of three wattles, the life of a hound;
The lives of three hounds, the life of a steed;
The lives of three steeds, the life of a man;
The lives of three men, the life of an eagle;
The lives of three eagles, the life of a yew;
The life of a yew, the length of a ridge;
Seven ridges from Creation to Doom.
A wattle (hurdle) lasts for three years: therefore a hound for 9, a horse for 27, a man for 81, an eagle for 243 and a yew for 729. ‘The length of a ridge’ is evidently a mistake, the saying being translated from monkish Latin aevum, age, miscopied as arvum, ridge. With the length of an Age averaging 729 years, the total length of the seven Ages is 5103, which corresponds well enough with Nennius’s account.
Chapter Sixteen
THE HOLY UNSPEAKABLE NAME OF GOD
The Ogham Craobh, which is printed in Ledwich’s Antiquities of Ireland and attested by an alphabetic inscription at Callen, County Clare, Ireland, ascribed to 295 AD, runs as follows:
B L N T S
B D T C Q
M G Ng Z R
This is the ordinary Ogham alphabet as given by Macalister; except that where one would expect F and H it has T and B – the very consonants which occur mysteriously in Hyginus’s account of the seven original letters invented by the Three Fates. There was evidently a taboo at Callen on the F and H – T and B had to be used instead; and it looks as if just the same thing had happened in the 15-consonant Greek alphabet known to Hyginus, and that he refrained from specifying Palamedes’s contribution of eleven consonants because he did not wish to call attention to the recurrence of B and T.
If so, the Palamedes alphabet can be reconstructed as follows in the Ogham order:
B L N F S
H D T C
M G [Ng] R
There is no warrant for Ng in Greek, so I have enclosed it in square brackets, but it must be remembered that the original Pelasgians talked a non-Greek Language. This had nearly died out by the fifth century BC but, according to Herodotus, survived in at least one of the oracles of Apollo, that of Apollo Ptous, which was in Boeotian territory. He records that a certain Mys, sent by the son-in-law of King Darius of Persia to consult the Greek oracles, was attended by three Boeotian priests with triangular writing tablets. The priestess made her reply in a barbarous tongue which Mys, snatching a tablet from one of the priests, copied down. It proved to be in the Carian dialect, which Mys understood, being a ‘European’, that is to say of Cretan extraction – Europë, daughter of Agenor, having ridden to Crete from Phoenicia on the back o
f a bull. If Cretan was, as is probable, a Hamitic language it may well have had Ng at place 14. Ng is not part of the Greek alphabet and Dr. Macalister points out that even in Old Goidelic no word began with Ng, and that such words as ngomair, and ngetal which occur in the Ogham alphabets as the names of the Ng letter are wholly artificial forms of gomair and getal. But in Hamitic languages the initial Ng is common, as a glance at the map of Africa will show.
The existence of this dubious Pelasgian letter Ng, which had not been borrowed by the makers of the Cadmean alphabet, may explain the uncertainty of ‘twelve, or some say thirteen letters’ ascribed by Diodorus Siculus to the Pelasgian alphabet; and may also explain why Ng in the middle of a word was in Greek spelt GG, as Aggelos for Angelos, G being the letter which immediately precedes Ng in the Beth-Luis-Nion. Yet from the analogy of the Beth-Luis-Nion it may be suspected that the Palamedes alphabet contained two secret letters which brought the number up to fifteen. The Latin alphabet at any rate was originally a 15-consonant one, with 5 vowels, and was probably arranged by ‘Carmenta’ as follows:
B L F S N
H D T C Q
M G Ng P R
For the Romans continued to use the Ng sound at the beginning of words in Republican times – they even spelt natus as gnatus, and navus (‘diligent’) as gnavus – and probably pronounced it like the gn in the middle of such French words as Catalogne and seigneur.
It looks as if Epicharmus was the Greek who invented the early form of the Cadmean alphabet mentioned by Diodorus as consisting of sixteen consonants, namely the thirteen of the Palamedes alphabet as given above, less the Ng; plus Zeta, and Pi as a substitute for Koppa (Q); plus Chi and Theta. But only two letters are ascribed to Epicharmus by Hyginus; and these are given in the most reputable MSS. as Chi and Theta. So Pi (or Koppa) and Zeta are likely to have been concealed letters of the Palamedes alphabet, as Quert and Straif are concealed letters of the Beth-Luis-Nion; not mentioned by Hyginus because they were merely doubled C and S.
We know that Simonides then removed the H aspirate and also the F, Digamma, which was replaced by Phi, and added Psi and Xi and two vowels – long E, Eta, to which he assigned the character of H aspirate, and long O, Omega; which brought the total number of letters up to twenty-four.
All these alphabets seem to be carefully designed sacred alphabets, not selective Greek transcriptions of the commercial Phoenician alphabet of twenty-six letters as scratched on the Formello-Cervetri vases. One virtue of the Epicharmian alphabet lay in its having sixteen consonants – sixteen being the number of increase – and twenty-one letters in all, twenty-one being a number sacred to the Sun since the time of the Pharaoh Akhenaton who introduced into Egypt about the year 1415 BC the monotheistic cult of the sun’s disc. Epicharmus, as an Asclepiad, was descended from the Sun.
It must be noted that Simonides’s new consonants were artificial ones – previously Xi had been spelt chi-sigma and Psi, pi-sigma – and that there was no real need for them compared, for instance, with the need of new letters to distinguish long from short A, and long from short I. I suspect Simonides of having composed a secret alphabetical charm consisting of the familiar letter-names of the Greek alphabet arranged with the vowels and consonants together, in three eight-letter parts, each letter suggesting a word of the charm; for example xi, psi might stand for xiphon psilon, ‘a naked sword’. Unfortunately the abbreviations of most of the Greek letter names are too short for this guess to be substantiated; it is only an occasional letter, like lambda, which seems to stand for lampada (‘torches’) and sigma, which seems to stand for sigmos (‘a hissing for silence’), that hints at the secret.
But can we guess why Simonides removed F and H from the alphabet? And why Hyginus the Spaniard and the author of the Irish Callen inscription used B and T as cipher disguises for these same two letters? We can begin by noting that the Etruscan calendar, which the Romans adopted during the Republic, was arranged in nundina, or eight-day periods, in Greek called ‘ogdoads’ and that the Roman Goddess of Wisdom, Minerva, had 5 (written V) as her sacred numeral. We can identify Minerva with Carmenta, because she was generally credited at Rome with the invention of the arts and sciences and because flower-decorated boats, probably made of alder wood, were sailed on her festival, the Quinquatria. ‘Quinquatrid’ means ‘the five halls’, presumably five seasons of the year, and was celebrated five days after the Spring New Year feast of the Calendar Goddess Anna Perenna; this suggests that the five days were those left over when the year had been divided into five seasons of 72 days each, the sanctity of the five and the seventy-two having been similarly established in the Beth-Luis-Nion system.
An alphabet-calendar arranged on this principle, with the vowels kept apart from the consonants, implies a 360-day year of five vowel-seasons, each of 72 days, with five days left over; each season being divided into three periods each consisting of twenty-four days. The 360-day year can also be divided, in honour of the Triple Goddess, into three 120-day seasons each containing five periods of equal length, namely twenty-four days – with the same five days over; and this is the year that was in public use in Egypt. The Egyptians said that the five days were those which the God Thoth (Hermes or Mercury) won at draughts from the Moon-goddess Isis, composed of the seventy-second parts of every day in the year; and the birthdays of Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis and Nephthys were celebrated on them in this order. The mythic sense of the legend is that a change of religion necessitated a change of calendar: that the old Moon-goddess year of 364 days with one day over was succeeded by a year of 360 days with five over, and that in the new system the first three periods of the year were allotted to Osiris, Horus and Set, and the last two to Isis and Nephthys. Though, under Assyrian influence, each of the three Egyptian seasons was divided into four periods of 30 days, not five of 24, the 72-day season occurs in the Egypto-Byblian myth that the Goddess Isis hid her child Horus, or Harpocrates, from the rage of the ass-eared Sun-god Set during the 72 hottest days of the year, namely the third of the five seasons, which was astronomically ruled by the Dog Sirius and the two Asses. (The hiding of the Child Horus seems to have been assisted by the Lapwing, a bird much used in the Etruscan science of augury which the Romans borrowed; at any rate, Pliny twice mentions in his Natural History that the Lapwing disappears completely between the rising of Sirius and its setting.)
But here the argument must be held up by a discussion of Set and his worship.
The Greek legend that the God Dionysus placed the Asses in the Sign of Cancer (‘the Crab’) suggests that the Dionysus who visited Egypt and was entertained by Proteus King of Pharos was Osiris, brother of the Hyksos god Typhon, alias Set. The Hyksos people, non-Semitic pastoralists, coming from Armenia or beyond, pressed down through Cappadocia, Syria and Palestine into Egypt about the year 1780 BC. That they managed so easily to establish themselves in Northern Egypt with their capital at Pelusium, on the Canopic arm of the Nile Delta, can be accounted for only by an alliance with the Byblians of Phoenicia. Byblos, a protectorate of Egypt from very early times, was the ‘Land of Negu’ (‘Trees’) from which the Egyptians imported timber, and a cylinder seal of the Old Empire shows Adonis, the God of Byblos, in company with the horned Moon-goddess Isis, or Hathor, or Astarte. The Byblians who, with the Cretans, managed the Egyptian carrying-trade – the Egyptians hated the sea – had trading stations at Pelusium and elsewhere in Lower Egypt from very early times. To judge from the Homeric legend of King Proteus, the earliest Pelasgian settlers in the Delta used Pharos, the lighthouse island off what afterwards became Alexandria, as their sacred oracular island. Proteus, the oracular Old Man of the Sea, who was King of Pharos and lived in a cave – where Menelaus consulted him – had the power of changing his shape, like Merddin, Dionysus, Atabyrius, Llew Llaw, Periclymenus and all Sun-heroes of the same sort. Evidently Pharos was his Isle of Avalon. That Apuleius connects the sistrum of Osiris, used to frighten away the God Set, with Pharos suggests that Proteus and Osiris were there regarded as th
e same person. Proteus, according to Virgil, had another sacred island, Carpathus, between Crete and Rhodes; but that was the Thessalian Proteus. Another Proteus, spelt Proetus, was an Arcadian.
It would be a great mistake to think of Pharos as a secluded sacred island inhabited only by the attendants of the oracle: when Menelaus came there with his ships he was entering the largest port in the Mediterranean.1 Gaston Jondet in his Les ports submergés de l’ancienne Île de Pharos (1916) has established the existence here even in pre-Hellenic times of a vast system of harbour-works, now submerged, exceeding in extent the island itself. They consisted of an inner basin covering 150 acres and an outer basin of about half that area, the massive sea-walls, jetties and quays being constructed of enormous stones, some of them weighing six tons. The work seems to have been carried out towards the end of the third millennium BC by Egyptian labour according to plans submitted to the local authorities by Cretan or Phoenician marine architects. The wide landing-quay at the entrance to the port consisted of rough blocks, some of them sixteen feet long, deeply grooved with a chequer-work of pentagons. Since pentagons are inconvenient figures for a chequer, compared with squares and hexagons, the number five must have had some important religious significance. Was Pharos the centre of a five-season calendar system?