The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

Sceptre in fist, sandals on feet,

  We shall return across the sand

  From loyal Jackal-land

  To gorge five nights and days on ass ’s meat.

  A Canaanite version of the same story appears in iconotropic form in the patently unhistorical Book of Judith, composed in Maccabean times. The Jews seem always to have based their religious anecdotes on an existing legend, or icon, never to have written fiction in the modern sense. Return the account of Judith, Manasses, Holofernes and Achior to pictorial form, and then re-arrange the incidents in their natural order. The Queen ties her royal husband’s hair to the bedpost to immobilize him, and beheads him with a sword (XIII, (6–8); an attendant brings it to the lover whom she has chosen to be the new king (XIV, 6); after mourning to appease the ghost of the old king, the Corn-Tammuz, who has died at the barley-harvest (VIII, 2–6), she purifies herself in running water and dresses as a bride (X, 3–4); presently the wedding procession forms up (X, 17–21); and the marriage is celebrated with much merriment (XII, 15–20), bonfires (XIII, 13), religious feasting (XVI, 20), dancing and waving of branches (XV, 12), many gifts (XV, 2), killing of victims (XV, 5), and the ritual circumcision of the bridegroom (XIV, 10). The Queen wears a crown of olive as an emblem of fruitfulness (XV, 13). The head of the old king is put up on the wall of the city as a prophylactic charm (XIV, 11); and the Goddess appears in triad, Hag, Bride and Maid (XVI, 23) to bless the union.

  That the Goddess Frigga ordered a general mourning for Balder incriminates her in his death. She was really Nanna, Balder’s bride, seduced by his rival Holder; but like the Egyptian priests of Isis, the Norse scalds have altered the story in the interests of marital rectitude. In precisely what part of the heel or foot were Talus, Bran, Achilles, Mopsus, Cheiron, and the rest mortally wounded? The myths of Achilles and Llew Llaw give the clue. When Thetis picked up the child Achilles by the foot and plunged him into the cauldron of immortality, the part covered by her finger and thumb remained dry and therefore vulnerable. This was presumably the spot between the Achilles tendon and the anklebone where the nail was driven in to pin the foot of the crucified man to the side of the cross, in the Roman ritual borrowed from the Canaanite Carthaginians; for the victim of crucifixion was originally the annual sacred king. The child Llew Llaw’s exact aim was praised by his mother Arianrhod because as the New Year Robin, alias Belin, he transfixed his father the Wren, alias Bran to whom the wren was sacred, ‘between the sinew and the bone’ of his leg.

  Arianrhod’s giving of arms to her son is common Celtic form; that women had this prerogative is mentioned by Tacitus in his work on the Germans-the Germany of his day being Celtic Germany, not yet invaded by the patriarchal square-heads whom we call Germans nowadays.

  Gronw Pebyr, who figures as the lord of Penllyn – ‘Lord of the Lake’ – which was also the title of Tegid Voel, Cerridwen’s husband, is really Llew’s twin and tanist. Llew never lacks a twin; Gwydion is a surrogate for Gronw during the visit to the Castle of Arianrhod. Gronw reigns during the second half of the year, after Llew’s sacrificial murder; and the weary stag whom he kills and flays outside Llew’s castle stands for Llew himself (a ‘stag of seven fights’). This constant shift in symbolic values makes the allegory difficult for the prose-minded reader to follow, but to the poet who remembers the fate of the pastoral Hercules the sense is clear: after despatching Llew with the dart hurled at him from Bryn Kyvergyr, Gronw flays him, cuts him to pieces and distributes the pieces among his merry-men. The clue is given in the phrase ‘baiting his dogs’. Math had similarly made a stag of his rival Gilvaethwy, earlier in the story. It seems likely that Llew’s mediaeval successor, Red Robin Hood, was also once worshipped as a stag. His presence at the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance would be difficult to account for otherwise, and ‘stag’s horn’ moss is sometimes called ‘Robin Hood’s Hatband’. In May, the stag puts on his red summer coat.

  Llew visits the Castle of Arianrhod in a coracle of weed and sedge. The coracle is the same old harvest basket in which nearly every antique Sun-god makes his New Year voyage; and the virgin princess, his mother, is always waiting to greet him on the bank. As has already been mentioned, the Delphians worshipped Dionysus once a year as the new-born child, Liknites, ‘the Child in the Harvest Basket’, which was a shovel-shaped basket of rush and osier used as a harvest basket, a cradle, a manger, and a winnowing-fan for tossing the grain up into the air against the wind, to separate it from the chaff.

  The worship of the Divine Child was established in Minoan Crete, its most famous early home in Europe. In 1903, on the site of the temple of Dictaean Zeus – the Zeus who was yearly born in Rhea’s cave at Dicte near Cnossos, where Pythagoras spent ‘thrice nine hallowed days’ of his initiation – was found a Greek hymn which seems to preserve the original Minoan formula in which the gypsum-powdered, sword-dancing Curetes, or tutors, saluted the Child at his birthday feast. In it he is hailed as ‘the Cronian one’ who comes yearly to Dicte mounted on a sow and escorted by a spirit-throng, and begged for peace and plenty as a reward for their joyful leaps. The tradition preserved by Hyginus in his Poetic Astronomy that the constellation Capricorn1 (‘He-goat’) was Zeus’s foster-brother Aegipan, the Kid of the Goat Amalthea whose horn Zeus also placed among the stars, shows that Zeus was born at mid-winter when the Sun entered the house of Capricorn. The date is confirmed by the alternative version of the myth, that he was suckled by a sow – evidently the one on whose back he yearly rode into Dicte – since in Egypt swine’s flesh and milk were permitted food only at the mid-winter festival. That the Sun-gods Dionysus, Apollo and Mithras were all also reputedly born at the Winter solstice is well known, and the Christian Church first fixed the Nativity feast of Jesus Christ at the same season, in the year 273 AD. St. Chrysostom, a century later, said that the intention was that ‘while the heathen were busied with their profane rites the Christians might perform their holy ones without disturbance’, but justified the date as suitable for one who was ‘the Sun of Righteousness’. Another confirmation of the date is that Zeus was the son of Cronos, whom we have securely identified with Fearn, or Bran, the god of the F month in the Beth-Luis-Nion. If one reckons back 280 days from the Winter Solstice, that is to say ten months of the Beth-Luis-Nion calendar, the normal period of human gestation, one comes to the first day of Fearn. (Similarly, reckoning 280 days forward from the Winter Solstice, one comes to the first day of the G month, Gort, sacred to Dionysus; Dionysus the vine and ivy-god, as opposed to the Sun-god, was son to Zeus.) Cuchulain was born as the result of his mother’s swallowing a may-fly; but in Ireland may-flies often appear in late March, so his birthday was probably the same.

  Llew’s soul escapes in the form of an eagle, like the soul of Hercules, and perches on an oak. This apotheosis was in the ancient royal tradition. The souls of lesser men might fly off in the form of white birds or golden butterflies, but a sacred king’s soul had the wings of an eagle or royal gryphon. Lion-headed eagles appear on seals in Minoan Crete. It was of the highest political importance that when the Emperor Augustus died he should be translated to Heaven and become the prime deity of the Roman Empire; and a Roman knight who declared on oath that he had seen the Emperor’s soul rising from his pyre in the form of an eagle was therefore rewarded by Livia, Augustus’s widow, with a handsome present. Ganymede in the original legend was a Phrygian prince who rose to Heaven as an eagle; he was not carried off on an eagle’s back to be Zeus’s cup-bearer, as in the version dear to homosexuals. It is likely that, like Cretan Dionysus, son of Zeus; Icarus, son of Daedalus; Phaëthon, son of Apollo; Aesculapius, son of Apollo; Demophoön, son of Celeus; Melicertes, son of Athamas; Mermerus and Pheres, sons of Jason; Gwern, son of Matholwch; Isaac, son of Abraham, and many other unfortunate princes of the same sort, Ganymede son of Tros was invested with a single-day royalty and then burned to death.1 As I showed in the case of Peleus, Thetis and Achilles, the Pelasgian sacred king of the Minos type could not continue in office beyond the hundred mo
nths allowed him by law, but he could become the successor of a son who was titular king for the one day that did not form part of the year. During the day of his son’s reign, to judge from the story of Athamas, the old king pretended to be dead, eating the foods reserved for the dead; immediately it ended he began a new reign by marriage to his widowed daughter-in-law, since the throne was conveyed by mother-right. When the statutory reign was lengthened to a hundred months the old king often lengthened it still further by abducting the nearest heiress, who was theoretically his own daughter, as in the case of King Cinyras of Cyprus. The stories of Sextus Tarquin and Lucretia, David and Bathsheba, Math and Arianrhod, are to be read in this sense.

  The subsequent resurrection of Llew takes place in the dead of Winter, in the season of the Old Sow, the time of the annual Athenian pig-sacrifice to the Barley-goddess, her daughter Persephone and Zeus: ‘nine-score tempests’, that is to say 180 days, have elapsed since his murder at midsummer. The holed stone called Llech Gronw, ‘the stone of Gronw’, was perhaps one of the very common prehistoric holed stones, apparently representing the mouth of the baetylic Mother Goddess, through which spirits passed in the form of winds and entered the wombs of passing women. In other words, Gronw by interposing the stone between his body and Llew’s dart assured himself of regeneration.

  The death of Blodeuwedd’s maidens in the lake refers, it seems, to the conquest of the priestesses of the old religion by the new Apollo priesthood – and so recalls the story of how Melampus cured the mad daughters of Proetus and washed away their madness in a spring at Lusi. But there is a clearer parallel than this: the death of the fifty Pallantid priestesses of Athens who leaped into the sea rather than submit to the new patriarchal religion.

  The Romance ends with the killing of Gronw by the re-born Llew Llaw, who reigns again over Gwynedd. This is the natural close of the story, except that Llew Llaw should really have another name when he kills Gronw: for Gronw corresponds with the god Set who kills Osiris and tears him in pieces, also with the Greek Typhon and the Irish Finn Mac Coll, all gods of the same sort. Osiris dies, but is re-born as Harpocrates (‘the Child Horus’) and takes his revenge on Set just as Wali avenges Holdur’s murder of Balder; thus the Egyptian Pharaohs were honoured with the name of Horus and spoken of as ‘suckled by Isis’.

  Llew’s autumn name, omitted in the story, can be recovered by the logic of myth. That his rivalry with Gronw Lord of Penllyn for the love of Blodeuwedd is the same as that of Gwyn with Gwythyr ap Greidawl for the love of Creiddylad is proved by Triad 14, where Arianrhod is described as the mother of the twin heroes Gwengwyngwyn and Gwanat. Gwengwyngwyn is merely ‘The Thrice-white-one’, or Gwyn’s name three times repeated, and Gwyn’s duty, as we have seen, was to conduct souls to the Castle of Arianrhod, like Thrice-great Hermes; in fact, Gwyn, like Dylan and Llew, was Arianrhod’s son. But Dafydd ap Gwilym reports that the autumnal owl, Blodeuwedd in disguise, was sacred to Gwyn; it follows that when Llew who began the year as Dylan, reached goat-haunted Bryn Kyvergyr, the midsummer turning-point – and was killed by his rival ‘Victor, son of Scorcher’, he disappeared from view and presently became Gwyn the leader of the autumnal Wild Chase. Like the White Goddess, alternately Arianrhod of the silver wheel, Blodeuwedd of the white flowers, and Cerridwen the spectral white sow, he also was Thrice-white: alternately Dylan the silver fish, Llew the white stag, and Gwyn the white rider on the pale horse leading his white, red-eared pack. That Gwyn’s father was Nudd or Lludd, and Gwengwyngwyn’s was one Lliaws, does not spoil the argument. Hermes’s fatherhood was similarly disputed in Greece.

  The chest in which Llew is laid by Gwydion is an ambivalent symbol. It is in one sense the chest of re-birth, of the sort in which dead Cretans were laid. In another it is the ark in which the Virgin and Child – Danaë and Perseus is the most familiar of several instances – are customarily set adrift by their enemies; this is the same acacia-wood ark in which Isis and her child Harpocrates sailed over the waters of the flooded Delta seeking the scattered fragments of Osiris. In this case, however, Arianrhod is not in the chest with Llew. The author is doing his best to keep the Goddess, in her maternal aspect, out of the story; she does not even suckle Llew.

  Mur-y-Castell, now called Tomen-y-Mur is a mediaeval British fort – a fair-sized artificial mound surmounted by a stockade – in the hills behind Ffestiniog in Merioneth. It has been constructed around the north gate of a Roman camp, and the considerable remains of the Roman baths, supplied by water from the river Cynfael, are still clearly visible near by. Apparently the Camp was occupied by the pagan Welsh when the Romans evacuated it in the fifth century, and then became the centre of a Llew Llaw cult – if it had not been so already, like the Roman camps of Laon, Lyons and Carlisle. The bath system lent itself to the story. The mound may be funerary, with the remains of a dead king buried in the ruins of the Roman gate around which it has been heaped.

  The bath in the story of Llew’s murder is, as I have said, familiar. Sacred kings often meet their end in that way: for example, Minos the Cretan Sun-god at Agrigentum in Sicily at the hands of the priestess of Cocalus and her lover Daedalus; and Agamemnon, the sacred king of Mycenae, at the hands of Clytaemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus. It is a lustral bath of the sort that kings take at their coronation: for Llew Llaw anoints himself while in it. The merry-men in attendance are usually depicted as goat-legged satyrs. In the Romance of Llew Llaw, too, they are summoned as goats to assist in the sacrifice of their master.

  The shoe-making business is odd, but it throws light on the mysterious twelfth-century French ballad of the Young Shoemaker.

  Sur les marches du palais

  L’est une tant belle femme

  Elle a tant d’amouroux

  Qu’elle ne sait lequel prendre.

  C’est le p’tit cordonnier

  Qu’a eu la preférence.

  Un jour en la chaussant

  Il lui fit sa demande:

  ‘La belle si vous l’vouliez,

  Nous dormirons ensemble.

  ‘Dans un grand lit carré.

  Orné de têle blanche,

  ‘Et aux quatre coins du lit

  Un bouquet de pervenches.

  ‘Et au mitan du lit

  La rivière est si grande

  ‘Que les chevaux du Roi

  Pourroient y boire ensemble

  ‘Et là nous dormirions

  Jusqu’ a la fin du monde.’

  The beautiful lady with the many lovers and a great square bed hung with white linen is unmistakably the Goddess, and the young shoemaker is Llew Llaw. The speaking parts have been interchanged. In stanza 2 ‘Elle a tant d’amouroux’ should be, for the rhyme’s sake ‘Elle a tant d’enamourés’. In stanza 4, ‘En la chaussant Il lui fit sa demande’ should be ‘Sur la chaussée Elle lui fit sa demande’. ‘La belle’ should be ‘Bel homme’ in stanza 5, ‘Roi’ should be ‘rei’ in stanza 9, and in the last stanza, ‘nous dormirions’ should be ‘vous dormiriez’. Those posies of periwinkles show that the ‘river’ (still a term for the sag furrowed in a mattress by love-making) where all the King’s horses could drink together, is the river of death, and that the shoemaker will never rise again from the bridal couch. His bride will bind him to the bedpost, and summon his rival to kill him. The periwinkle was the flower of death in French, Italian and British folklore. In mediaeval times a garland of periwinkles was placed on the heads of men bound for execution. The flower has five blue petals and is therefore sacred to the Goddess, and its tough green vines will have been the bonds she used on her victim. This can be deduced from its Latin name vincapervinca (‘bind all about’), though mediaeval grammarians connected it with vincere, ‘to conquer’, rather than vincire, ‘to bind’, and so ‘pervinke’ came to mean ‘the all-conquering’. But death is all-conquering; so it came to the same thing. Most likely that the custom of garlanding the criminal with periwinkle was taken over from the sacrifice ritual in honour of Llew Llaw the shoemaker. It is clear that the ma
gical power of Arianrhod, like that of Math, rested in her feet and that once Llew had taken her foot in his hand as if to measure it for a shoe, he was able to make her do what he wished. Perhaps Perrault’s story of Cinderella’s slipper is a degenerate version of the same myth. Foot-fetishists are by no means rare even in modern times – the aberrants spend all their spare time buying or stealing women’s high-heeled shoes for the exaltation of spirit that the possession gives them. What is more, it is possible that foot-fetishism was an ancient cult in Ardudwy, the scene of this Romance, though I do not know whether the evidence has ever been officially recorded. A few miles from Mur-y-Castell, on the hills between Harlech (where I lived as a boy) and Llanfair, there is a Goidels’ Camp – a cluster of ruined round huts dating from perhaps the fourth century AD – and not far off, towards Llanfair, a woman’s footprint is sunk an inch or so deep in a large flat stone. It is locally called ‘the Virgin’s footprint’, and another mark near by is called the ‘Devil’s thumb print’. The stone is at the far left-hand corner of a field as one comes along the road from Harlech. Similar sacred footprints are still worshipped in Southern India.

  Why ‘Cordovan’ leather? Probably because the Llew cult came to Britain from Spain, as it is known that the buskin did. At Uxama in Spain a dedication has been found to ‘the Lugoves’, i.e. the Lughs, by a guild of shoemakers. And why coloured and gilded shoes? Because such shoes were a symbol of royalty among the Celts. They used also to figure in the English Coronation ceremony, but dropped out after the reign of George II. Though officially styled ‘sandals’, they were gilded half-boots, like the purple buskins in which the Byzantine Emperors were crowned, with purple soles and wooden heels covered with scarlet leather. Scarlet was a product of the kerm-oak and doubtless the heels were oaken. In the Romance the colour of the shoes is not specified; which suggests a further connexion with Spain, where boszeguis de piel colorado does not mean ‘buskins of coloured leather’, but ‘buskins of scarlet leather’. Similar buskins are thought to have been used in the sanctification of the kings of Rome, since they were part of the sacred dress of the Triumphant General in Republican times, and this dress was of regal origin. Sandals also occur in the legends of the solar hero Theseus, whose Goddess mother gave him a pair at the same time as she gave him his arms and sent him out to slay monsters; of Perseus, another monster-slayer; and of Mercury.