The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  The island was oddly connected with the numbers five and seventy-two at the beginning of the Christian era: the Jews of Alexandria used to visit the island for an annual (five-day?) festival, the excuse for which was that the Five Books of Moses had been miraculously translated there into Greek by seventy-two doctors of the Law (‘the Septuagint’) who had worked for seventy-two days on them, each apart from the rest, and agreed exactly in their renderings at the conclusion of their task. There is something behind this myth. All similar festivals in the ancient world commemorated some ancient tribal treaty or act of confederacy. What the occasion here was remains obscure, unless the Pharaoh who married Sarah, the goddess mother of the ‘Abraham’ tribe that visited Egypt at the close of the third millennium, was the priest-king of Pharos. If so, the festival would be a record of the sacred marriage by which the ancestors of the Hebrews joined the great confederacy of the Peoples of the Sea, whose strongest base was Pharos. Hebrews seem to have been in continuous residence in Lower Egypt for the next two millennia, and the meaning of the festival would have been forgotten by the time that the Pentateuch was translated into Greek.

  In the Odyssey, which is a popular romance not at all to be depended on for mythical detail, Proteus’s transformations are described as lion, serpent, panther, boar, water, fire and leafy tree. This is a mixed list,1 reminding one of Gwion’s deliberately muddled ‘I have been’s’. The boar is the symbol of the G month; lion and serpent are seasonal symbols; the panther is a mythical beast half-leopard, half-lion, sacred to Dionysus. It is a pity that Homer does not particularize the leafy tree; its association here with water and fire suggests the alder, or cornel-tree, as sacred to Proteus, a god of the Bran type – though in the story Proteus is degraded to a mere herdsman of seals in the service of the Ash-god Poseidon.

  The Nile is called Ogygian by Aeschylus, and Eustathius the Byzantine grammarian says that Ogygia was the earliest name for Egypt. This suggests that the Island of Ogygia ruled over by Calypso daughter of Atlas, was really Pharos where Proteus, alias Atlas or ‘The Sufferer’, had an oracular shrine. Pharos commanded the mouth of the Nile, and Greek sailors would talk of ‘sailing to Ogygia’ rather than ‘sailing to Egypt’; it often happens that a small island used as a trading depot gives its name to a whole province – Bombay is a useful example. The waters of Styx are also called Ogygian by Hesiod; not (as Liddell and Scott suggest) because Ogygian meant vaguely ‘primeval’, but because the head-waters were at Lusi, the seat of the three oracular daughters of Proetus, who is apparently the same cult-character as Proteus.

  When the Byblians first brought their Syrian Tempest-god to Egypt, the one who, disguised as a boar, yearly killed his brother Adonis, the god always born under a fir-tree, they identified him with Set, the ancient Egyptian god of the desert whose sacred beast was the wild ass, and who yearly destroyed his brother Osiris, the god of the Nile vegetation. This must be what Sanchthoniatho the Phoenician, in a fragment preserved by Philo, means when he says that the mysteries of Phoenicia were brought to Egypt. He reports that the two first inventors of the human race, Upsouranios and his brother Ousous consecrated two pillars, to fire and wind – presumably the Jachin and Boaz pillars representing Adonis, god of the waxing year and the new-born sun, and Typhon, god of the waning year and of destructive winds. The Hyksos Kings under Byblian influence, similarly converted their Tempest-god into Set, and his new brother, the Hyksos Osiris, alias Adonis, alias Dionysus, paid a courtesy call on his Pelasgian counterpart, Proteus King of Pharos.

  In pre-dynastic times Set must have been the chief of all the gods of Egypt, since the sign of royalty which all the dynastic gods carried was Set’s ass-eared reed sceptre. But he had declined in importance before the Hyksos revived his worship at Pelusium, and reverted to obscurity after they were thrown out of Egypt about two hundred years later by the Pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty.1 The Egyptians identified him with the long-eared constellation Orion, ‘Lord of the Chambers of the South’, and ‘the Breath of Set’ was the South wind from the deserts which, then as now, caused a wave of criminal violence in Egypt, Libya and Southern Europe whenever it blew. The cult of ass-eared Set in Southern Judaea is proved by Apion’s account of the golden ass-mask of Edomite Dora, captured by King Alexander Jannaeus and cleverly stolen back again from Jerusalem by one Zabidus. The ass occurs in many of the more obviously iconotropic anecdotes of Genesis and the early historical books of the Bible: Saul chosen as king when in search of Kish’s lost asses; the ass that was with Abraham when he was about to sacrifice Isaac; the ass whose jawbone Samson used against the Philistines; the ass of Balaam with its human voice. Moreover, Jacob’s uncle Ishmael son of Hagar with his twelve sons is described in Genesis, XVI, 12 as a wild ass among men: this suggests a religious confederacy of thirteen goddess-worshipping tribes of the Southern desert, under the leadership of a tribe dedicated to Set. Ishmael perhaps means ‘the beloved man’, the Goddess’s favourite.

  The legend of Midas the Phrygian and the ass’s ears confirms this association of Dionysus and Set, for Midas, son of the Mother Goddess, was a devotee of Dionysus. The legend is plainly an iconotropic one and Midas has been confidently identified with Mita, King of the Moschians, or Mushki, a people from Thrace – originally from Pontus – who broke the power of the Hittites about the year 1200 BC when they captured Pteria the Hittite capital. Mita was a dynastic name and is said to have meant ‘seed’ in the Orphic language; Herodotus mentions certain rose-gardens of Midas on Mount Bermios in Macedonia, planted before the Moschian invasion of Asia Minor. It is likely that their Greek name Moschoi, ‘calf-men’, refers to their cult of the Spirit of the Year as a bull-calf: a golden calf like that which the Israelites claimed to have brought them safely out of Egypt.

  That no record has survived in Egypt of a five-season year concurrent with the three-season one, is no proof that it was not in popular use among the devotees of Osiris. For that matter absolutely no official Pharaonic record has been found in Egypt of the construction, or even the existence, of the port of Pharos though it commanded the mouths of the Nile, controlled the South-Eastern terminus of the Mediterranean sea-routes, and was in active use for at least a thousand years. Osiris worship was the popular religion in the Delta from pre-dynastic times, but it had no official standing. Egyptian texts and pictorial records are notorious for their suppression or distortion of popular beliefs. Even the Book of the Dead, which passes for popular, seldom expresses the true beliefs of the Osirian masses: the aristocratic priests of the Established Church had begun to tamper with the popular myth as early as 2800 BC. One of the most important elements in Osirianism, tree-worship, was not officialized until about 300 BC, under the Macedonian Ptolemies. In the Book of the Dead many primitive beliefs have been iconotropically suppressed. For instance, at the close of the Twelfth Hour of Darkness, when Osiris’ sun-boat approaches the last gateway of the Otherworld before its reemergence into the light of day, the god is pictured bent backwards in the form of a hoop with his hands raised and his toes touching the back of his head. This is explained as ‘Osiris whose circuit is the Otherworld’: which means that by adopting this acrobatic posture he is defining the Otherworld as a circular region behind the ring of mountains that surround the ordinary world, and thus making the Twelve Hours analogous with the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac. Here an ingenious priestly notion has clearly been superimposed on an earlier popular icon: Osiris captured by his rival Set and tied, like Ixion or Cuchulain, in the five-fold bond that joined wrists, neck and ankles together. ‘Osiris whose circuit is the Otherworld’ is also the economical way of identifying the god with the snake Ophion, coiled around the habitable earth, a symbol of universal fertility out of death.

  Gwion’s ‘Ercwlf’ (Hercules) evidently used the three-season year when he laid his ‘four pillars of equal height’, the Boibel-Loth, in order [see overleaf]. The vowels represent the five extra days, the entrance to the year, and the lintel and two pillars each represent 120 days.
But Q and Z have no months of their own in the Beth-Luis-Nion and their occurrence as twenty-four day periods in the second part of the Boibel-Loth year makes Tinne, not Duir as in the Beth-Luis-Nion, the central, that is the ruling, letter. Tinnus, or Tannus, becomes the chief god, as in Etruria and Druidic Gaul. From this figure the transition to the disc arrangement is simple:

  As 8 is the sacred numeral of Tinne’s month – and in the Imperial Roman Calendar also the ruling month was the eighth, called Sebastos (‘Holy’) or Augustus – so the eight-day period rules the calendar. In fact, Tannus displaces his oak-twin Durus and seems to be doing him a great kindness – the same kindness celestial Hercules did for Atlas – in relieving him of his traditional burden. The twins were already connected with the numeral 8 because of their eight-year reign, which was fixed (as we have seen) by the approximation at every hundredth lunation of lunar and solar time. That a calendar of this sort was in use in ancient Ireland is suggested by numerous ancient Circles of the Sun, consisting of five stones surrounding a central altar; and by the ancient division of the land into five provinces – Ulster, the two Munsters, Leinster and Connaught – meeting at a central point in what is now West Meath, marked by a Stone of Divisions. (The two Munsters had already coalesced by the time of King Tuathal the Acceptable, who reigned from 130–160 AD; he took off a piece of all four provinces to form his central demesne of Meath.) And there is a clear reference to this calendar system in the tenth-century AD Irish Saltair na Rann where a Heavenly City is described, with fifteen ramparts, eight gates, and seventy-two different kinds of fruit in the gardens enclosed.

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  Now, it has been shown that the God Bran possessed an alphabetic secret before Gwydion, with Amathaon’s help, stole it from him at the Battle of the Trees in the course of the first Belgic invasion of Britain; that close religious ties existed between Pelasgia and Bronze Age Britain; and that the Pelasgians used an alphabet of the same sort as the British tree-alphabet, the trees of which came from the north of Asia Minor.

  As might be expected, the myth connecting Cronos, Bran’s counterpart, with an alphabetic secret survives in many versions. It concerns the Dactyls (fingers), five beings created by the White Goddess Rhea, ‘while Zeus was still an infant in the Dictaean Cave’, as attendants on her lover Cronos. Cronos became the first king of Elis, where the Dactyls were worshipped, according to Pausanias, under the names of Heracles, Paeonius, Epimedes, Jasius and Idas, or Aces-Idas. They were also worshipped in Phrygia, Samothrace, Cyprus, Crete and at Ephesus. Diodorus quotes Cretan historians to the effect that the Dactyls made magical incantations which caused a great stir in Samothrace, and that Orpheus (who used the Pelasgian alphabet) was their disciple. They are called the fathers of the Cabeiroi of Samothrace, and their original seat is said to have been either Phrygia or Crete. They are also associated with the mysteries of smith-craft, and Diodorus identifies them with the Curetes, tutors of the infant Zeus and founders of Cnossos. Their names at Elis correspond exactly with the fingers. Heracles is the phallic thumb; Paeonius (‘deliverer from evil’) is the lucky fore-finger; Epimedes (‘he who thinks too late’) is the middle, or fool’s, finger; Jasius (‘healer’) is the physic finger; Idas (‘he of Mount Ida’ – Rhea’s seat) is the oracular little finger. The syllable Aces means that he averted ill-luck, and the Orphic willow tree, the tree belonging to the little finger-tip, grew just outside the Dictaean Cave which was, perhaps for that reason, also called the Idaean Cave.

  The Alexandrian scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius gives the names of three of the Dactyls as Acmon (‘anvil’) Damnameneus (‘hammer’) and Celmis (‘smelter’). These are probably names of the thumb and first two fingers, used in the Phrygian (or ‘Latin’) blessing: for walnuts are cracked between thumb and forefinger; and the middle finger based on U, the vowel of sexuality, still retains its ancient obscene reputation as the smelter of female passion. In mediaeval times it was called digitus impudicus or obscenus because, according to the seventeenth-century physician Isbrand de Diemerbroek, it used to be ‘pointed at men in infamy or derision’ – as a sign that they had failed to keep their wives’ affection. Apollonius had mentioned only two Dactyls by name: Titias and Cyllenius. I have shown that Cyllen (or Cyllenius) was son of Elate, ‘Artemis of the fir tree’; so the Dactyl Cyllenius must have been the thumb, which is based on the fir-letter A. And Titias was king of Mariandynë in Bithynia, from where Hercules stole the Dog, and was killed by Hercules at a funeral games. Some mythographers make Titias the father of Mariandynus, founder of the town. Since Hercules was the god of the waxing year which begins with A, the thumb, it follows that Titias was the god of the waning year, which begins with U, the fool’s finger – the fool killed by Hercules at the winter-solstice. The name ‘Titias’ is apparently a reduplication of the letter T, which belongs to the fool’s finger, and identical with the Giant Tityus whom Zeus killed and consigned to Tartarus.

  Here is a neat problem in poetic logic: if the Dactyl Cyllenius is an alias of Hercules, and Hercules is the thumb, and Titias is the fool’s finger, it should be possible to find in the myth of Hercules and Titias the name of the intervening finger, the forefinger, to complete the triad used in the Phrygian blessing. Since the numerical sequence Heis, Duo, Treis, ‘one, two, three’, corresponds in Greek, Latin and Old Goidelic with the H.D.T. letter sequence represented by the top-joints of the Dactyls used in this blessing, it is likely that the missing name begins with D and has a reference to the use or religious associations of the finger. The answer seems to be ‘Dascylus’. According to Apollonius he was king of the Mariandynians, and presided at the games at which Hercules killed Titias. For the forefinger is the index-finger and Dascylus means ‘the little pointer’ Greek didasco, Latin disco. Presidents at athletic contests use it for solemn warnings against foul play. The root Da- from which Dascylus is derived is also the root of the Indo-Germanic word for thunder, appropriate to D as the letter of the oak-and-thunder god. Dascylus was both father and son of Lycus (wolf); the wolf is closely connected with the oak-cult.

  The argument can be taken farther. It has been mentioned in Chapter Four that Pythagoras was a Pelasgian from Samos who developed his doctrine of the Transmigration of Souls as the result of foreign travel. According to his biographer Porphyrius he went to Crete, the seat of the purest Orphic doctrine, for initiation by the Idaean Dactyls. They ritually purified him with a thunderbolt, that is to say they made a pretence of killing him with either a meteoric stone or a neolithic axe popularly mistaken for a thunderbolt; after which he lay face-downwards on the sea shore all night covered with black lamb’s wool; then spent ‘three times nine hallowed days and nights in the Idaean Cave’; finally emerged for his initiation. Presumably he then drank the customary Orphic cup of goat’s milk and honey at dawn (the drink of Cretan Zeus who had been born in that very cave) and was garlanded with white flowers. Porphyrius does not record exactly when all this took place except that Pythagoras saw the throne annually decorated with flowers for Zeus; which suggests that the twenty-eight days that intervened between his thunderbolt death and his revival with milk and honey were the twenty-eight-day month R, the death-month ruled by the elder or myrtle; and that Pythagoras was reborn at the winter solstice festival as an incarnation of Zeus – a sort of Orphic Pope or Aga Khan – and went through the usual mimetic transformation: bull, hawk, woman, lion, fish, serpent, etc. This would account for the divine honours subsequently paid him at Crotona, where the Orphic cult was strongly established; and also for those paid to his successor Empedocles, who claimed to have been through these ritual transformations. The Dactyls here are plainly the Curetes, the dancing priests of the Rhea and Cronos cult, tutoring the infant Zeus in the Pelasgian calendar-alphabet, the Beth-Luis-Nion; the tree-sequence of which had been brought to Greece and the Aegean islands from Paphlagonia, by way of Bithynian Mariandynë and Phrygia, and there harmonized with the alphabetic principle originated in Crete by ‘Palamedes’. For climatic reasons t
he canon of trees taught by the Cretan Dactyls must have differed from that of Phrygia, Samothrace and Magnesia – Magnesia where the five Dactyls were remembered as a single character, and where the Pelasgian Cheiron (‘the Hand’) son of Cronos and Philyra (Rhea), successively tutored Hercules, Achilles, Jason the Orphic hero, with numerous other sacred kings.

  It seems however that Pythagoras,1 after mastering the Cretan Beth-Luis-Nion, found that the Boibel-Loth calendar, based on a year of 360 + 5 days, not on the Beth-Luis-Nion year of 364 + 1 days, was far better suited than the Beth-Luis-Nion to his deep philosophic speculations about the holy tetractys, the five senses and elements, the musical octave, and the Ogdoad.

  But why was it necessary to alter the alphabet and calendar in order to make eight the important number, rather than seven? Simonides’s alphabet, it has been seen, was expanded to 3 × 8 letters; perhaps this was to fulfil the dark prophecy current in Classical Greece that Apollo was fated to castrate his father Zeus with the same sickle with which Zeus had castrated his father Cronos and which was laid up in a temple on the sickle-shaped island of Drepane (‘sickle’), now Corfu. In so far as the supreme god of the Druids was a Sun-god, the fulfilment of this prophecy was demonstrated every year at their ritual emasculation of the sacred oak by the lopping of the mistletoe, the procreative principle, with a golden sickle – gold being the metal sacred to the Sun. Seven was the sacred number of the week, governed by the Sun, the Moon and the five planets. But eight was sacred to the Sun in Babylonia, Egypt and Arabia, because 8 is the symbol of reduplication – 2 × 2 × 2. Hence the widely distributed royal sun-disc with an eight-armed cross on it, like a simplified version of Britannia’s shield; and hence the sacrificial barley-cakes baked in the same pattern.