The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Now to examine Diodorus’s famous quotation from the historian Hecateus (sixth century BC):

  Hecateus, and some others, who treat of ancient histories or traditions, give the following account: ‘Opposite to the coast of Celtic Gaul there is an island in the ocean, not smaller than Sicily, lying to the North – which is inhabited by the Hyperboreans, who are so named because they dwell beyond the North Wind. This island is of a happy temperature, rich in soil and fruitful in everything, yielding its produce twice in the year. Tradition says that Latona was born there, and for that reason, the inhabitants venerate Apollo more than any other God. They are, in a manner, his priests, for they daily celebrate him with continual songs of praise and pay him abundant honours.

  ‘In this island, there is a magnificent grove (or precinct) of Apollo, and a remarkable temple, of a round form, adorned with many consecrated gifts. There is also a city, sacred to the same God, most of the inhabitants of which are harpers, who continually play upon their harps in the temple, and sing hymns to the God, extolling his actions. The Hyperboreans use a peculiar dialect, and have a remarkable attachment to the Greeks, especially to the Athenians and the Delians, deducing their friendship from remote periods. It is related that some Greeks formerly visited the Hyperboreans, with whom they left consecrated gifts of great value, and also that in ancient times Abaris, coming from the Hyperboreans into Greece, renewed their family intercourse with the Delians.

  ‘It is also said that in this island the moon appears very near to the earth, that certain eminences of a terrestrial form are plainly seen in it, that Apollo visits the island once in a course of nineteen years, in which period the stars complete their revolutions, and that for this reason the Greeks distinguish the cycle of nineteen years by the name of “the great year”. During the season of his appearance the God plays upon the harp and dances every night, from the vernal equinox until the rising of the Pleiads, pleased with his own successes. The supreme authority in that city and the sacred precinct is vested in those who are called Boreadae, being the descendants of Boreas, and their governments have been uninterruptedly transmitted in this line.’

  Hecateus apparently credited the pre-Belgic Hyperboreans with a knowledge of the 19-year cycle for equating solar and lunar time; which involves an intercalation of 7 months at the close. This cycle was not publicly adopted in Greece until about a century after Hecateus’s time. As a ‘golden number’, reconciling solar and lunar time, 19 can be deduced from the thirteen-month Beth-Luis-Nion calendar which contains fourteen solar stations (namely the first day of each month and the extra day) and five lunar stations. Probably it was in honour of this Apollo (Beli) that the major stone circles of the Penzance area in Cornwall consisted of 19 posts, and that Cornwall was called Belerium. There is evidently some basis for the story that Abaris the Hyperborean instructed Pythagoras in philosophy. It looks as if the Bronze Age people (who imported the Egyptian beads into Salisbury Plain from Akhenaton’s short-lived capital, the City of the Sun, at Tell Amarna about 1350 BC) had refined their astronomy on Salisbury Plain and even anticipated the invention of the telescope. Since, according to Pliny, the Celtic year began in his day in July (as the Athenian also did) the statement about the country producing two harvests, one at the beginning and one at the end of the year, is understandable. The hay harvest would fall in the old year, the corn harvest in the new.

  The Lord of the Seven-day Week was ‘Dis’, the transcendental god of the Hyperboreans, whose secret name was betrayed to Gwydion. Have we not already stumbled on the secret? Was the Name not spelt out by the seven vowels of the threshold, cut with three times nine holy nicks and read sunwise?

  Or in Roman letters: JIEVOAŌ

  If so, the link between Britain and Egypt is evident: Demetrius, the first-century BC Alexandrian philosopher, after discussing in his treatise On Style the elision of vowels and hiatus, and saying that ‘with elision the effect is duller and less melodious’, illustrates the advantage of hiatus with:

  In Egypt the priests sing hymns to the gods by uttering the seven vowels in succession, the sound of which produces as strong a musical impression on their hearers as if flute and lyre were used. To dispense with the hiatus would be to do away altogether with the melody and harmony of language. But perhaps I had better not enlarge of this theme in the present context.

  He does not say what priests they were or to what gods they addressed themselves, but it is safe to guess that they were the gods of the seven-day week, comprising a single transcendent deity, and that the hymn contained the seven vowels with which Simonides provided the Greek alphabet and was credited with a therapeutic effect.

  When the Name was revealed, Amathaon and Gwydion instituted a new religious system, and a new calendar, and new names of letters, and installed the Dog, Roebuck and Lapwing as guardians not of the old Name, which he had guessed, but of the new. The secret of the new Name seems to be connected with the substitution of the sacred numeral 7 by the sacred numeral 8, and with a taboo on the letters F and H in ordinary alphabetic use. Was it that the Name was given 8 letters instead of 7? We know from Hyginus’s account that Simonides added Omega (long O, and Eta (long E) to the original seven letters AOUEIFH, invented by the Fates, ‘or some say, by Mercury’, and that he also removed H aspirate from the alphabet by allotting its character to Eta. If he did this for religious reasons, the eight-fold Name of God, containing the Digamma F (V) and H aspirate – the Lofty Name which gave Gwion his sense of power and authority – was perhaps:

  JEHUOVAŌ

  but spelt, for security reasons, as:

  JEBUOTAŌ

  It certainly has an august ring, lacking to ‘Iahu’ and ‘Jahweh’, and if I have got it right, will be ‘the eight-fold City of Light’ in which the ‘Word’, which was Thoth, Hermes, Mercury and, for the Gnostics, Jesus Christ was said to dwell. But the Fates had first invented F and H; why?

  JIEVOAŌ, the earlier seven-letter form, recalls the many guesses at the ‘blessed Name of the Holy One of Israel’ made by scholars, priests and magicians in the old days. This was a name which only the High Priest was allowed to utter, once a year and under his breath, when he visited the Holy of Holies, and which might not be committed to writing. Then how in the world was the Name conveyed from one High Priest to another? Obviously by a description of the alphabetical process which yielded it. Josephus claimed to know the Name, though he could never have heard it spoken or seen it written. The Heads of the Pharisaic academies also claimed to know it. Clement of Alexandria did not know it, but he guessed an original IAOOUE – which is found in Jewish-Egyptian magical papyri, ‘Zeus, Thunderer, King Adonai, Lord Iaooue’ – also expanded to IAOUAI and IAOOUAI. The disguised official formula, JEHOWIH, or JEHOWAH, written JHWH for short, suggests that by the time of Jesus the Jews had adopted the revised Name. The Samaritans wrote it IAHW and pronounced it IABE. Clement’s guess is, of course, a very plausible one because I.A.O.OU.E is the name spelt out by the vowels of the five-season year if one begins in the early winter, the opening of the agricultural year.1 The Name taught in the Academies is likely to have been a complicated one of either 42 or 72 letters. Both forms are discussed by Dr. Robert Eisler in the Jubilee volume for the Grand Rabbi of France in La Revue des Études Juives. The calendar mystery of 72 has already been discussed; that of 42 belongs to the Beth-Luis-Nion system.2

  In Chapter Nine the first-century writer Aelian was quoted as having said that Hyperborean priests regularly visited Tempe. But if their business was with Apollo, why did they not go to the more important shrine of Delphi? Tempe, Apollo’s earlier home, lies in the valley of the Peneus between Mounts Ossa and Olympus and seems to have become the centre of a cult of a Pythagorean god who partook of the natures of all the Olympian deities. We know something about the mysteries of the cult because Cyprian, a third-century bishop of Antioch, was initiated into them as a youth of fifteen. As he records in his Confession, he was taken up on to Mount Olympus for forty days and th
ere seven mystagogues taught him the meaning of musical sounds and the causes of the birth and decay of herbs, trees and bodies. He had a vision of tree-trunks and magical herbs, saw the succession of seasons and their changing spiritual representatives, together with the retinues of various deities, and watched the dramatic performances of demons in conflict. In an Egyptian magical papyrus published by Parthey in 1866, a close connexion between this Druid-like instruction and Essene mysticism is made in the following lines:

  Come foremost angel of great Zeus IAO [Raphael]

  And thou too, Michael, who holdest Heaven [rules the planets],

  And Gabriel thou, the archangel from Olympus.

  Gabriel, it has been shown, was the Hebrew counterpart of Hermes, the official herald and mystagogue of Mount Olympus.

  Was Stonehenge the temple of Apollo the Hyperborean? The ground plan of Stonehenge suggests a round mirror with a handle – a round earthwork, entered by an avenue, with a circular stone temple enclosed. The outer ring of stones in the temple once formed a continuous circle of thirty arches, built of enormous dressed stones: thirty posts and thirty lintels. This circle enclosed an ellipse, broken at one end so that it resembled a horseshoe, consisting of five separate dolmens, each of two posts and a lintel, built of the same enormous stones. Sandwiched between the circle and the horseshoe stood a ring of thirty much smaller posts; and within the horseshoe, again, stood another horseshoe of fifteen similar small posts, arranged in five sets of three to correspond with the five dolmens.

  Perhaps ‘horseshoe’ is wrong: it may well have been an ass-shoe from its narrowness. If Stonehenge was Apollo’s temple and if Pindar, in his Tenth Pythian Ode, is referring to the same Hyperboreans as Hecateus it must have been an ass-shoe; for Pindar shows that Apollo was worshipped by the Hyperboreans in the style of Osiris or Dionysus, whose triumph over his enemy Set the ass-god was celebrated by the sacrifice of a hundred asses at a time. But it is clear that by the middle of the fifth century BC, the connexion between Greece and the Hyperboreans had long been broken, presumably by the seizure of the approaches to Britain by the Belgic tribes.

  Pindar is demonstrably wrong in his Third Olympian Ode when he makes Hercules go to the springs of the Ister to bring back wild olive to Olympia from the servants of Apollo, the Hyperboreans. We know from other sources that he fetched back the white poplar, not the olive which had been cultivated in Greece centuries before his time and which is not native to the upper Danube; the connexion of poplar with amber, which came from the Baltic by way of the Danube and Istria, and which was sacred to Apollo, has already been noted. Pindar’s mistake derives from a confusion of the Hercules who fetched the poplar from Epirus with the earlier Hercules who fetched the olive from Libya to Crete. He writes in the Tenth Pythian Ode:

  Neither by ships nor by land can you find the wonderful road to the trysting-place of the Hyperboreans.

  Yet in times past, Perseus the leader of his people partook of their banquet when he entered their homes and found them sacrificing glorious hecatombs of asses in honour of the God. In the banquets and hymns of that people Apollo chiefly rejoices and laughs as he looks upon the brute beasts in their ramping lewdness. Yet such are their ways that the Muse is not banished, but on every side the dances of the girls, the twanging of lyres and sound of flutes are continually circling, and with their hair crowned with golden bay-leaves they make merry…yet avoid divine jealousy by living aloof from labour and war. To that home of happy folk, then, went Danaë’s son [Perseus] of old, breathing courage, with Athena as his guide. And he slew the Gorgon and returned with her head.

  Pindar seems to be wrong about the Gorgon and about the bay-leaves, sacred to Apollo only in the South; and since he does not tell us at what season the sacrifice took place we cannot tell what leaves they were. If at mid-winter, they may have been elder-leaves; at any rate, asses are connected in European folk-lore, especially French, with the mid-winter Saturnalia, which took place in the elder month, and at the conclusion of which the ass-eared god, later the Christmas Fool, was killed by his rival. This explains the otherwise unaccountable connexion of asses and fools in Italy as well as in Northern Europe: for asses are more intelligent animals than horses. That there was an ass-cult in Italy in early times is suggested by the distinguished Roman clan-names Asina and Asellus, which were plebeian, not patrician; the patricians were an immigrant horse-worshipping aristocracy from the East who enslaved the plebeians. The use of holly at the Italian Saturnalia supports this theory: holly was the tree of the ass-god, as the oak was the tree of his wild-ox twin who became paramount in patrician Rome.

  Plutarch in his Isis and Osiris writes: ‘Every now and then at certain festivities they (the Egyptians) humiliate the broken power of Set, treating it despitefully, to the point of rolling men of Typhonic colouring in the mud and driving asses over a precipice.’ By ‘certain festivities’ he must mean the celebration of the divine child Harpocrates’s victory over Set, at the Egyptian Saturnalia. So Set, the red-haired ass, came to mean the bodily lusts, given full rein at the Saturnalia, which the purified initiate repudiated; indeed, the spirit as rider, and the body as ass, are now legitimate Christian concepts. The metamorphosis of Lucius Apuleius into an ass must be understood in this sense: it was his punishment for rejecting the good advice of his well-bred kinswoman Byrrhaena and deliberately meddling with the erotic witch cult of Thessaly. It was only after uttering his de profundis prayer to the White Goddess (quoted at the close of Chapter Four) that he was released from his shameful condition and accepted as an initiate of her pure Orphic mysteries. So also, when Charitë (‘Spiritual Love’) was riding home in chaste triumph on ass-back from the robbers’ den, Lucius had joked at this as an extraordinary event: namely, that a girl should triumph over her physical desires, despite all dangers and assaults. The Orphic degradation of the ass explains a passage in Aristophanes’s Frogs, which, as J. E. Harrison points out, is staged in a thoroughly Orphic Hell. Charon shouts out ‘Anyone here for the Plains of Lethe? Anyone here for the Ass Clippings? For Cerberus Park? Taenarus? Crow Station?’ Crow Station was evidently Set-Cronos’s infernal seat to which Greeks consigned their enemies in the imprecation ‘To the Crows with you!’; and the Ass Clippings was the place where criminals shaggy with sin were shorn to the quick. The horse was a pure animal for the Orphics, as the ass was impure, and the continuance of this tradition in Europe is shown most clearly in Spain where caballero ‘horseman’, means gentleman and where no gentleman’s son is allowed to ride an ass, even in an emergency, lest he lose caste. The ancient reverence of unchivalrous Spaniards for the ass appears perversely in the word carajo, the great mainstay of their swearing, which is used indiscriminately as noun, adjective, verb or adverb; its purpose is to avert the evil eye, or ill-luck, and the more often it can be introduced into an oath, the better. Touching the phallus, or an amulet in phallus form, is an established means of averting the evil eye, and carajo means ‘ass’s phallus’; the appeal is to the baleful God Set, whose starry phallus appears in the Constellation Orion, to restrain his anger.

  The great dolmens of Stonehenge, all of local stone, look as if they were erected to give importance to the smaller stones, which were placed in position shortly after they themselves were, and to the massive altar stone lying in the centre. It has been suggested that the smaller ones, which are known to have been transported all the way from the Prescelly Mountains in Pembrokeshire, were originally disposed in another order there and rearranged by the people who erected the larger ones. This is likely, and it is remarkable that these imported stones were not dressed until they were re-erected at Stonehenge itself. The altar stone has also been transported from the same region, probably from Milford Haven. Since this transportation was done over a thousand years before the Belgic invasion it is clear at least that Gwydion was not responsible for the building.

  The plan of the five dolmens corresponds exactly with the disc alphabet, since there is a broad gap between the two s
tanding nearest to the avenue (like the gap which contains the five holy days of the Egyptian, or Etruscan, year) and between the gap and the avenue stood a group of four smaller undressed stones, corresponding with the groups of three stones in the inner horseshoe, but with a gap in the middle; and far back, in the avenue itself, the huge undressed ‘Heel’ stone made a fifth and central one. This is not to assume that Stonehenge was built to conform with the disc-alphabet. The calendar may have anteceded the alphabet by some centuries. All that seems clear is that the Greek alphabetic formula which gives the Boibel-Loth its letter-names is at least a century or two earlier than 400 BC when the Battle of the Trees was fought in Britain.