The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Why is the Titmouse in the next place?

  Not hard. Amergin sang of this month: ‘I am a Hill of Poetry’; and this is the month of the poet, who is the least easily abashed of men, as the Titmouse is the least easily abashed of birds. Both band together in companies in this month, and go on circuit in search of a liberal hand; and as the Titmouse climbs spirally up a tree, so the Poet also spirals to immortality. And Variegated is the colour of the Titmouse, and of the Master-poet’s dress.

  Oct. 1-Oct. 29 – G – géis, mute swan; gorm, blue.

  Why is the Mute Swan in the next place?

  Not hard. In this month he prepares to follow his companion the Whistling Swan. And Blue is the haze on the hills, Blue the smoke of the burning weed, Blue the skies before the November rain.

  Oct. 29-Nov. 25 – Ng – ngéigh, goose; nglas, glass-green. Why is the Goose in the next place?

  Not hard. In this month the tame goose is brought in from misty pasture to be cooped and fattened for the mid-winter feast; and the wild goose mourns for him in the misty meadows. And Glassy-green is the wave that thuds against the cliff, a warning that the year must end.

  Nov. 26-Dec. 22 ;– R – rócnar, rook; ruadh, blood-red. Why is the Rook in the last place?

  Not hard. He wears mourning for the year that dies in this month. And Blood-red are the rags of leaves on the elder-trees, a token of the slaughter.

  * * *

  The Pheasant was the best available bird for the B-month, bran the raven and bunnan the bittern being better suited to later months of the year. The author of the article on pheasants in the Encyclopaedia Britannica states that pheasants (sacred birds in Greece) are likely to have been indigenous to the British Isles and that the white, or ‘Bohemian’, variety often appears among pheasants of ordinary plumage.

  It is possible that the original S-colour was serind, primrose, but that the primrose’s erotic reputation led to its replacement by the euphemism, sodath.

  The omission of corr, the Crane, for the C-month is intentional; the contents of the Crane-bag were a close secret and all reference to it was discouraged. And what of Dec. 23rd, the extra day of the year, on which the young King, or Spirit of the Year, was crowned and given eagle’s wings, and which was expressed by the semi-vowel J, written as double I? Its bird was naturally the Eagle, iolar in Irish, which has the right initial. The Irish poets were so chary of mentioning this day that we do not even know what its tree was; yet that they regarded the Eagle as its bird is proved by the use of the diminutive illait, Eaglet, for the letter I: that is to say that if the extra day, double-I, had not been secretly given the cypher-equivalent iolar, there would be no need to express the preceding day, that of the Winter Solstice, namely single I, by illait, Eaglet – for E is not expressed by Cygnet, nor A by Lapwing-chick.

  These cyphers were used to mystify and deceive all ordinary people who were not in the secret. For example, if one poet asked another in public: ‘When shall we two meet again?’ he would expect an answer in which elements of several cypher alphabets were used, and which was further disguised by being spelt backwards or put in a foreign language, or both. He might, for instance, be answered in a sentence built up from the Colour, Bird, Tree and Fortress oghams:

  When a brown-plumaged rook perches on the fir below the Fortress of Seolae.

  That would spell out the Latin CRAS – ‘tomorrow’.

  Besides the one hundred and fifty regular cypher-alphabets that the candidate for the ollaveship had to learn, there were countless other tricks for putting the uninitiated off the scent; for example, the use of the letter after, or before, the desired one. Often a synonym was used for the tree-cypher word – ‘the chief overseer of Nimrod’s Tower’ for Beth, birch; ‘activity of bees’ for Saille, willow; ‘pack of wolves’ for Straif, blackthorn, and so on.

  In one of the cypher-alphabets, Luis is given as elm, not rowan, because the Irish word for elm, lemh, begins with an L; Tinne is given as elder because the Irish word for elder, trom, begins with a T; similarly, Quert is given as quulend, holly. This trick may account for Ngetal, reed, being so frequently read as broom, the Irish of which is n’gilcach; but there is also a practical poetic reason for the change. The Book of Ballymote gives broom the poetic name of ‘Physicians’ Strength’, presumably because its bitter shoots, being diuretic, were prized as ‘a remedy for surfeits and to all diseases arising therefrom’. (A decoction of broom-flowers was Henry VIII’s favourite medicine.) A medical tree suited the month of November, when the year was dying and the cold winds kept well-to-do people indoors with little diversion but eating and drinking.

  1 Homer says that Pharos lies a full day’s sail from the river of Egypt. This has been absurdly taken to mean from the Nile; it can only mean from the River of Egypt (Joshua, XV, 4) the southern boundary of Palestine, a stream well known to Achaean raiders of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC.

  The same mistake has been made by a mediaeval editor of the Kebra Nagast, the Ethiopian Bible. He has misrepresented the flight of the men who stole the Ark from Jerusalem as miraculous, because they covered the distance between Gaza and the River of Egypt in only one day, whereas the caravan time-table reckoned it a thirteen days’ journey. The absence of prehistoric remains on the island itself suggests that all except the shore was a tree-planted sanctuary of Proteus, oracular hero and giver of winds.

  1 Compare the equally mixed list given by Nonnus of Zagreus’s transformations: ‘Zeus in his goat-skin coat, Cronos making rain, an inspired youth, a lion, a horse, a horned snake, a tiger, a bull’. The transformations of Thetis before her marriage with Peleus were, according to various authors from Pindar to Tzetzes, fire, water, wind, a tree, a bird, a tiger, a lion, a serpent, a cuttlefish. The transformations of Tam Lin in the Scottish ballad were snake or newt, bear, lion, red-hot iron and a coal to be quenched in running water. The zoological elements common to these four versions of an original story, namely snake, lion, some other fierce beast (bear, bull, panther, or tiger) suggest a calendar sequence of three seasons corresponding with the Lion, Goat and Serpent of the Carian Chimaera; or the Bull, Lion and Serpent of the Babylonian Sir-rush. If this is so, fire and water would stand for the sun and moon which between them rule the year. It is possible, however, that the animals in Nonnus’s list, bull, lion, tiger, horse and snake, form a Thraco-Libyan calendar of five, not three, seasons.

  1 Typhon’s counterpart in the Sanscrit Rig-veda, composed not later than 1300 BC, is Rudra, the prototype of the Hindu Siva, a malignant demon, father of the storm-demons; he is addressed as a ‘ruddy divine boar’.

  1 The influence of Pythagoras on the mediaeval mystics of North-Western Europe was a strong one. Bernard of Morlaix (circa 1140) author of the ecstatic poem De Contemptu Mundi, wrote ‘Listen to an experienced man….Trees and stones will teach you more than you can learn from the mouth of a doctor of theology.’ Bernard was born in Brittany of English parents and his verse is in the Irish poetic tradition. His ecstatic vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem is prefaced by the line:

  Ad tua munera sit via doctora, Pythagoraea.

  ‘May our way to your Pythagorean blessings be an auspicious one.’

  For he was not a nature worshipper, but held that the mythical qualities of chosen trees and chosen precious stones, as studied by the Pythagoreans, explained the Christian mysteries better than Saint Athanasius had ever been able to do.

  1 Clement is very nearly right in another sense, which derives from the suppression in the Phoenician and early Hebrew alphabets of all the vowels, except aleph, occurring in the Greek alphabet with which they are linked. The introduction into Hebrew script of pure vowel signs in the form of dots is ascribed to Ezra who, with Nehemiah, established the New Law about the year 430. It is likely that the vowels had been suppressed at a time when the Holy Name of the deity who presided over the year consisted of vowels only; and the proof that Ezra did not invent them but merely established an inoffensive notation for a sacred
series long fixed in oral tradition lies in the order which he used, namely I.Ē.E.U.O.A.OU.Ō. This is the Palamedan I.E.U.O.A. with the addition of three extra vowels to bring the number up to eight, the mystic numeral of increase. Since the dots with which he chose to represent them were not part of the alphabet and had no validity except when attached to consonants, they could be used without offence. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that the consonants which compose the Tetragrammaton, namely yod, he and vav may cease to carry consonantal force when they have vowel signs attached to them; so that JHWH could be sounded IAŌOUĀ. This is a peculiarity that no other Hebrew consonant has, except ain, and ain not in all dialects of Hebrew. Clement got the last vowel wrong, E for Ā, perhaps because he knew that the letter H is known as He in Hebrew.

  2 42 is the number of the children devoured by Elisha’s she-bears. This is apparently an iconotropic myth derived from a sacred picture of the Libyo-Thraco-Pelasgian ‘Brauronia’ ritual. The two she-bears were girls dressed in yellow dresses who pretended to be bears and rushed savagely at the boys who attended the festival. The ritual was in honour of Artemis Callisto, the Moon as Bear-Goddess, and since a goat was sacrificed seems to belong to the Midsummer festivities. 42 is the number of days from the beginning of the H month, which is the preparation for the midsummer marriage and death-orgy, to Midsummer Day. 42 is also the number of infernal jurymen who judged Osiris: the days between his midsummer death and the end of the T month, when he reached Calypso’s isle, though this is obscured in the priestly Book of the Dead. According to Clement of Alexandria there were forty-two books of Hermetic mysteries.

  1 The number occurs also in two royal brooches – ‘king’s wheels’ – found in 1945 in a Bronze Age ‘Iberian’ burial at Lluch in Majorca, the seat of a Black Virgin cult, and dated about 1500 BC. The first is a disc of seven inches in diameter, made for pinning on a cloak and embossed with a nineteen-rayed sun. This sun is enclosed by two bands, the outer one containing thirteen separated leaves, of five different kinds, perhaps representing wild olive, alder, prickly-oak, ivy and rosemary, some turned clockwise, some counter-clockwise, and all but two of them with buds or rudimentary flowers joined to them half-way up their stalks. The inner band contains five roundels at regular intervals, the spaces between the roundels filled up with pairs of leaves of the same sort as those in the outer ring, except that the alder is not represented. The formula is: thirteen months, a pentad of goddesses-of-the-year, a nineteen-year reign.

  The other, slightly smaller, royal disc found in the same burial has a border of nineteen semi-circles, a central sun with twenty-one detached rays and, between the sun and the border two intervening bands – the inner one containing forty-five small bosses, the outer twenty hearts. The head of the pin is shaped like a swan’s; as that of the other, which has perished, may have also been. Here the formula is: a nineteen-year reign, with a fresh victim (the twenty hearts) offered at the beginning of every year, the king himself being the twentieth. The White Swan, his Mother, will carry him off to her Hyperborean paradise. Twenty-one is the number of rays on Akhenaton’s sun. Forty-five is the pentad of goddesses-of-the-year, multiplied by the number nine to show that each is an aspect of the Moon-goddess.

  So far as I know, the Bronze Age and early Iron Age smiths who, like the poets and physicians, came under the direct patronage of the Muse, never embellished their work with meaningless decoration. Every object they made – sword, spear-head, shield, dagger, scabbard, brooch, jug, harness-ring, tankard, bucket, mirror, or what not – had magical properties to which the shape and number of its various decorations testified. Few archaeologists lay any emphasis on magic, and this makes most museum-guides pretty dull reading. For example, in the British Museum Guide to the Antiquities of the Early Iron Age (1905), fig. 140 shows a beaded bronze collar from Lochar Moss, Dumfriesshire. The editorial comment is only on the melon-like shape of the beads which has, it is said, affinities with that of turquoise-coloured glass beads common on sites in Roman Britain. What needed to be pointed out was that there are thirteen of these beads in the collar, each with seven ribs, and that the design on the rigid crescent-shaped part is an interlace of nine S’s: a collar replete with lunar fate. Similarly, the open-work bronze disc (fig. 122) found in the Thames at Hammersmith is interesting because the sun which forms its centre has eight rays and is pierced with a Maltese cross; but the editor’s only comment is on its stylistic relation with open-work bronze horse-poitrels from a Gaulish chariot-burial at Somme Bionne (Plate III), one of which contains pierced crosses. This is irrelevant, unless attention is paid to the three swastikas in the poitrel and to the numbers nine and thirteen which characterize the horse head-stall ornaments shown in the same plate.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THE LION WITH THE STEADY HAND

  Llew Llaw Gyffes (‘the Lion with the Steady Hand’), a type of Dionysus or Celestial Hercules worshipped in ancient Britain, is generally identified with Lugh, the Goidelic Sun-god, who has given his name to the towns of Laon, Leyden, Lyons and Carlisle (Caer Lugubalion). The name ‘Lugh’ may be connected with the Latin lux (light) or lucus (a grove); it may even be derived from the Sumerian lug meaning ‘son’. ‘Llew’ is a different word, connected with leo (lion), an appellation of Lugh’s. In Ireland he was called ‘Lugh the Long-handed’, defeater of the Africans, the earliest settlers in Ireland; he possessed a magic spear which thirsted for blood and flashed fire or roared aloud in battle; and he was the first to use the horse in warfare. When he approached from the West, at the Battle of Moytura, Breas (Boreas?) Balor, the one-eyed King of the old Gods and later styled Lugh’s grandfather, cried out: ‘I wonder that the Sun has risen in the West today rather than in the East.’ His druids answered: ‘Would that it were no more than the Sun! It is the glowing face of Lugh the Long-handed’ – which nobody could gaze upon without being dazzled. Another account of his parentage quoted by H. d’Arbois de Joubainville in his monumental Cycle Mythologique Irlandaise makes him the son not of Balor’s daughter Ethne by one Cian, but of Clothru (who is apparently a single form of the Triple Goddess Eire, Fodhla and Banbha) by Balor’s three grandsons Brian, Iuchar and Iuchurba; a row of red circles on his neck and belly marking off the parts of his body that each father had begotten. His death on the first Sunday in August – called Lugh nasadh (‘Commemoration of Lugh’), later altered to ‘Lugh-mass’ or ‘Lammas’ – was until recently observed in Ireland with Good Friday-like mourning and kept as a feast of dead kinsfolk, the mourning procession being always led by a young man carrying a hooped wreath. Lammas was also observed as a mourning feast in most parts of England in mediaeval times; which accounts for the extraordinary popular demonstrations when William Rufus’s body was brought up from the New Forest for burial. The peasants were bewailing a mythical Lugh when along came the body of their own red-headed king laid on a harvest cart. Nowadays the only English Lammas celebrated is the Lancashire Wakes Week, the dismal meaning of which has been forgotten among the holiday distractions of Blackpool.

  The famous Tailltean Games of Ireland, originally funeral games in the Etruscan style, with chariot races and sword-play, take place at Lammas. The Irish tradition that they were held in memory of one Tailte, Lugh’s dead foster-mother, is late and misleading. The games, which in early mediaeval times were so well-frequented that the chariots occupied six miles of road, were marked by Tailtean (or Teltown) marriages in honour of Lugh and his capricious bride. These were trial marriages and lasted ‘for a year and a day’, that is, for 365 days, and could be dissolved only by an act of divorce performed in the place where they had been celebrated. Then the man and woman stood back to back in the centre of the Black Rath and walked apart, one to the north, the other to the south. Lugh was incarnate in the famous Ulster hero Cuchulain: he flew in at the mouth of Cuchulain’s mother Dechtire in the form of a may-fly. Cuchulain was so much of a sun-god that when he plunged into a cold bath the water hissed and began to boil. That Lugh’s magical weapon was
a spear suggests that he belongs to the earlier Bronze Age invaders of Ireland; the later ones were armed with swords. He may be identified with Geryon, King of the West, ‘with three bodies in one’, whom Hercules despoiled of his red cattle, guarded by a two-headed dog, and killed in Erytheia (red island).

  According to the mythographers, Hercules sailed to the West from Greece, with ships from Crete, and went by way of North Africa, the Straits of Gibraltar, Tartessus, and Gaul (where he fathered the Celts). This is the same course as the Milesians took, and the Tenth Labour of Hercules reads like one more account of the defeat of the New Stone Age invaders – Partholan’s and Nemed’s peoples – by Bronze Age men from Spain; but Erytheia is perhaps Devonshire, famous for its bright red soil and red cattle, which the Bronze Age men also conquered from New Stone Age people. It was during this Labour that Hercules borrowed the golden cup from the Sun, and became lotus-borne. Geryon appears to have been a Western version of the Vedic god Agni, the earliest Indian trinity, who had three births and three bodies. As born of water, Agni was a calf who yearly grew to ‘a bull that sharpens his horns’; as born of two sticks (the fire-drill), he was a glutton with a fiery tongue; as born in the highest heaven, he was an eagle. The Vedic hymns also celebrate him as a supporter of the sky, namely the pillar of cloud that rises up when fires are lighted in his honour, and as an omniscient immortal who has taken up his abode among mortals. Thus when Hercules killed Geryon and carried off his cattle he was, in fact, gaining a victory over one of his own selves.

  In some parts of Wales Lammas is still kept as a fair. Sir John Rhys records that in the 1850’s the hills of Fan Fach and South Barrule in Carmarthenshire were crowded with mourners for Llew Llaw on the first Sunday in August, their excuse being that they were ‘going up to bewail Jephthah’s daughter on the mountain’. This, oddly enough, was the very same excuse that the post-Exilic Jewish girls had used, after the Deuteronomic reforms, to disguise their mourning for Tammuz, Llew Llaw’s Palestinian counterpart. But with the Welsh Revival the practice was denounced as pagan and discontinued.