The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  The implication of this part of the story is that Llew Llaw kept the third pair of gold shoes for his own use. He was one of the Three Crimson-stained Ones of Britain, as we learn from Triad 24; another of these was King Arthur. To be ‘crimson-stained’ is to be a sacred king: at Rome the Triumphant General had his face and hands stained red as a sign of temporary royalty. Sacred kings, it seems, were not allowed to rest their heels on the ground but walked on their toes, like the Canaanite Agag. The cothurnus, or high-heeled buskin, of the God Dionysus can be explained only in this sense, though the reason was disguised in Greece by the observation that buskins gave an effect of height.

  In Genesis, XXXII Jacob wrestles all night with an angel at Peniel and is lamed by him so that the sinew in the hollow of his thigh is shrunken. Jacob sustained an injury once common to wrestlers, the inward displacement of the hip first described by Hippocrates. The result of this dislocation, which is produced by forcing the legs too widely apart, is that the injured person finds his leg flexed, abducted and externally rotated: in other words he can only walk, if at all, with a lurching or swaggering gait and on his toes. The leg affected is lengthened by the peculiar position of the head of the femur, or at least looks longer than the other. The lengthening of the leg tightens the tendons in the thigh and the muscles go into spasm, which is presumably what is meant by the shrinking of the sinew in the hollow of the thigh. Since Jacob belongs to the mother-right age, and since he won his sacred name and inheritance, both of which could only be given him by a woman, on this same occasion, the story has evidently been censored by the patriarchal editors of Genesis. But the Arabic lexicographers agree that the result of Jacob’s injury was that he could walk only on the toes of his injured leg; and they should know.

  While still in the womb Jacob supplants his twin Esau by catching at his heel, and so draining him of royal virtue. Hosea, XII, 4 connects this supplanting with the wrestling incident, which suggests that Jacob’s real name was Jah-aceb, ‘the heel-god’. Jacob is translated ‘the supplanter’ in the Authorised Version of the Bible and what does ‘supplant’ mean but to put one’s hand sub plantam alicujus, under someone’s foot, and trip him up? The Greek word pternizein, used by the Septuagint in this context, is still more accurate: it means ‘to trip up someone’s heel’ and is the first recorded use of the word in this sense. Jacob is the sacred king who has succeeded to office by tripping up a rival; but the penalty of his victory is that he must never again set his own sacred heel to the ground. The comment in Genesis on Jacob’s lameness is: ‘Therefore the Children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is in the hollow of the thigh, to this day.’ Jacob’s grandfather, Abraham, also had a sacred thigh and in Genesis, XXIV, 2 he makes his servant put his hand under it when taking an oath, just as Jacob makes Joseph do in Genesis, XLVII, 29. Mrs. Hermione Ashton writes that several tribes of Southern Arabia kiss the thigh of their Emir in homage; she has seen this done herself by the Qateibi who live about a hundred miles north of Aden – one of the four tribes of the Amiri race who boast that they are the sons of Ma’in and the oldest race in the world.

  The mincing or swaggering gait of sacred kings, either due to this dislocation or assumed in imitation of it, was used by tragic actors on the Greek stage who wore the cothurnus in honour of Dionysus. As an offstage affectation it was generally understood by the Greeks in an erotic sense: the letters SALM which occur in the names of several ancient kings suggest the word saleuma, an oscillation or waggling; with ‘of the buttocks’ added, or understood, this implied a deliberate flaunting of sexual charms. Greek prostitutes were called ‘Salmakides’. Isaiah, III, 16 chides the Daughters of Israel for walking in this lascivious style, rolling their eyes as they walk.

  Plutarch asks in his Greek Questions: ‘Why do the women of Elis summon Dionysus in their hymns to come among them with his bull-foot?’ It is a good question, but as J. E. Harrison has pointed out, Plutarch was always better at asking questions than at answering them. Well, why with his bull-foot? Why not with his bull-horns, bull-brow, bull-shoulders, bull-tail – all of which are more symbolic of the bull’s terrible power than its feet? And why foot, not feet? Plutarch does not even make a guess, but fortunately he quotes the ritual hymn used in the mystery to which he refers; from which it appears that the ‘women of Elis’ were dramatic representatives of the ‘Charites’, the Three Graces who at Elis shared an altar with Dionysus. The answer seems to be: ‘Because in ancient times the sacred king of the mystery drama who appeared in response to the invocation of the Three Graces really had a bull-foot.’ That is to say, the dislocation of his thigh made one of his feet resemble that of a bull, with the heel as the fetlock, and that he hurried among them with a rush and clatter of buskins. Plutarch should have remembered that in the Pelasgian island of Tenedos a sacred cow had once been ‘kept for Dionysus’ and when in calf had been treated like a woman during her confinement. If she bore a bull-calf it was put into buskins and despatched with a sacrificial axe, or labris, as if it were Zagreus, the infant Dionysus – which shows the ritual connexion of bulls’ feet with buskins; but Aelian, the authority for this ceremony, does not mention that the calf was robed, crowned or otherwise adorned. It is perhaps worth noting that in the Spanish bullfight,1 brought from Thrace to Rome by the Emperor Claudius and thence introduced into Spain, the matador who kills his bull with outstanding heroism and grace is rewarded by the President with the pata, or foot.

  The connexion of the buskin with sexuality is explained by Egyptian and Cypriot inscriptions. The name of the Goddess Mari of Cyprus is written with a ‘buckled post’ which stands for a reed-hut, meaning ‘dwelling in’, and a buskin; so she was resident in a buskin, like the Goddess Isis who in Egypt bore her name ‘Asht’ on her head, together with a buskin. In both cases some stick-like object protrudes from the mouth of the buskin, which Mr. E. M. Parr takes as a symbol of fertilization since the buskin hieroglyph is read as Ush, ‘the mother’. This throws new light on the second marriage of the Eleusinian Mysteries, after the performance of which it is known that the initiate said: ‘I have fitted what was in the drum to what was in the liknos.’ We know what was in the liknos – a phallus – and on the analogy of the buskins ceremonially presented to the sacred king at his marriage, it may be concluded that the drum contained a buskin into which the phallus was inserted by the initiate as a symbol of coition.

  An invocation corresponding with the Elian ritual mentioned by Plutarch is recorded in I Kings, XVIII, 26, where the priests of Baal dance at the altar and cry out ‘Baal, hear us!’: appealing to him to light the Spring bonfires and burn up the corpse of the old year. They leaped up and down, according to the Authorised Version; but the original Hebrew word is formed from the root PSCH which means ‘to dance with a limp’, and from which Pesach, the name of the Passover Feast, is derived. The Passover appears to have been a Canaanite Spring festival which the tribe of Joseph adopted and transformed into a commemoration of their escape from Egypt under Moses. At Carmel, the dance with a limp must have been sympathetic magic to encourage the appearance of the God with a bull’s foot who was armed, like Dionysus, with a torch. ‘Baal’ merely means ‘Lord’. The annalist refrains from mentioning his real name; but since the priests of Baal were Israelites it is likely to have been ‘Jah Aceb’ or ‘Jacob’ – the Heel-god. Jah Aceb seems to have been also worshipped at Beth-Hoglah – ‘The Shrine of the Hobbler’ – a place between Jericho and the Jordan south of Gilgal and identified by Epiphanius with the threshing floor of Atad, mentioned in Genesis, L, 11, as the place where Joseph mourned for Jacob. Jerome connects this place with a round dance, apparently performed in honour of Talus the Cretan Sun-hero – Hesychius says that Talus means ‘Sun’ – to whom the partridge was sacred. In Athenian legend Talus was thrown down by Daedalus from a height and transformed into a partridge while in the air by the Goddess Athene. The Arabic word for ‘hobble’ which gives its name to Beth-Hoglah is derived from the word for partridge;
the deduction being that the dance was a hobbling one. The partridge is a Spring migrant, sacred to the Love-goddess because of its reputation for lasciviousness (mentioned by Aristotle and Pliny) and the dance must have mimicked the love dance of the cock-partridge which it carries out, like the wood-cock, on a regular dancing floor. It is a war dance, performed for a hen audience: the cocks flutter around in circles with a hobbling gait, one heel always held in readiness to strike at a rival’s head. The hens look on, quaking with excitement. The proverb quoted by Jeremiah: ‘The partridge gathers young that she has not brought forth’, means that Jewish men and women were attracted to these alien orgiastic rites. So also the understanding Titian gives us a glimpse of a partridge through the window of the room in which his naked Love-goddess is lasciviously meditating fresh conquests.1

  The connexion between the hobbling partridge and the lame king is confirmed by the mythographers Hyginus and Ovid, who identify the hero Perdix (‘partridge’) with Talus. Apollodorus and Diodorus Siculus make Perdix feminine, the mother of Talus, but this is as much as to say that Talus was virgin-born; because, according to Aristotle, Pliny and Aelian the hen-partridge can be impregnated by the sound of the cock-partridge’s voice or by his scent blown down the wind. Pliny says ‘in no other animal is there any such susceptibility in the sexual feelings’, and that when the female is sitting on her eggs the cocks relieve their emotions by practising sodomy – an observation which may have inspired the organized sodomy in the temples of the Syrian Moon-goddess, though dogs and doves, also associated with her worship, are credited with the same habit. The Aegean island most famous for its partridges was Anaphe, the Argonauts’ first landfall on their homeward voyage from Crete after Medea had killed Talus; where Radiant Apollo was worshipped with rites closely paralleling those of the Hebrew Tabernacles, though of an erotic cast. This Apollo was a Sun-god, not an Underworld one.

  Partridges become so deeply absorbed in their dance that even if a man comes up close and kills some of the dancers the rest continue undeterred; a habit of which the ancients took full advantage. In the mating-season they used to put a decoy cock-partridge in a cage at the end of a long narrow winding brushwood tunnel and gave it corn to eat. Its lonely cry, combining the call to love with the call to food, attracted the hens along the tunnel, and when they reached the cage and it uttered its usual challenge call, other cocks would come running up, only to be knocked on the head with sticks by the waiting hunters as soon as they emerged from the tunnel. Thus in I Samuel, XXVI, 20 Saul is taunted for his unkingly behaviour in hunting David, who is not only as insignificant as a flea but as easily caught as a mountain partridge. The decoy partridge was one that had dislocated its leg in trying to escape from the horse-hair slip-knot in which it was snared. This lame, and therefore easily tamed, decoy was fattened in a cage like a sacred king in his palace – both honoured prisoners – and the more numerous its victims, the more gleeful its cry. In Ecclesiasticus (XI, 30) the caged partridge is an allegory of the proud man who rejoices at the disasters into which he has decoyed his neighbours. This form of sport is still practised in Mediterranean countries as far west as Majorca.

  It seems, then, that in the pesach a bull-cult had been superimposed on a partridge cult; and that the Minotaur to whom youths and maidens (from Athens and elsewhere) were sacrificed had once represented the decoy partridge in the middle of a brushwood maze, towards which the others were lured for their death dance. He was, in fact, the centre of a ritual performance, originally honouring the Moon-goddess, the lascivious hen-partridge, who at Athens and in parts of Crete was the mother and lover of the Sun-hero Talus. But the dance of the hobbling cock-partridge was later transformed into one honouring the Moon-goddess Pasiphaë, the cow in heat, mother and lover of the Sun-hero, the bull-headed Minos. Thus the spirally-danced Troy-game (called the ‘Crane Dance’ in Delos because it was adapted there to the cult of the Moon-goddess as Crane) had the same origin as the pesach. The case is proved by Homer who wrote:

  Daedalas in Cnossos once contrived

  A dancing-floor for fair-haired Ariadne

  – a verse which the scholiast explains as referring to the Labyrinth dance; and by Lucian who in his Concerning the Dance, a mine of mythological tradition, gives as the subjects of Cretan dances: ‘the myths of Europë, Pasiphaë, the two Bulls, the Labyrinth, Ariadne, Phaedra [daughter of Pasiphaë], Androgeus [son of Minos], Icarus, Glaucus [raised by Aesculapius from the dead], the magic of Polyidus, and of Talus the bronze man who did his sentry round in Crete.’ Polyidus means ‘the many-shaped’ and since the Corinthian hero of that name had no connexion with Crete, the dance was probably the shape-shifting dance of Zagreus at the Cretan Lenaea.

  Here some loose ends can be tied up. The maze pattern has been shown to represent ‘Spiral Castle’ or ‘Troy Town’, where the sacred Sun-king goes after death and from which, if lucky, he returns. The whole myth is plainly presented on an Etruscan wine-jar from Tragliatella, dated from the late seventh century BC. Two mounted heroes are shown; the leader carries a shield with a partridge device, and an ape-like demon perches behind him; his companion carries a spear and a shield with a duck device. They are riding away from a maze marked ‘TRUIA’ (‘Troy’). Apparently the sacred king, though due to die like the partridge in the brushwood maze, and be succeeded by his tanist, has escaped. How he escaped, another picture on the same vase shows: an unarmed king leads a sunwise procession, escorted by seven footmen each carrying three javelins and a huge shield with a boar device; the spear-armed tanist, whose badge this is, brings up the rear. These seven footmen evidently represent the tanist’s seven winter months which fall between the apple harvest and Easter. The king is being warned of his ritual death. The Moon-priestess has come to meet him: a terrible robed figure with one arm menacingly akimbo, as she offers an apple, his passport to Paradise. The javelins threaten death. Yet a diminutive female figure, robed like the priestess, guides the king – if the hero is Theseus, we may call her Ariadne – who has helped him to escape from the maze. And he boldly displays a counter-charm – namely an Easter-egg, the egg of resurrection. Easter was the season when Troy Town dances were performed on the turf-cut mazes of Britain; and of Etruria, too, where the famous Lars Porsena of Clusium built a labyrinth for his own tomb. (Similar labyrinth tombs existed in pre-Hellenic Greece: near Nauplia, on Samos, and on Lemnos.) An Etruscan egg of polished black trachite, found at Perugia, with an arrow in relief running around it, is the same holy egg. Against the spearmen on the vase is written MAIM; against the king, EKRAUN; against the priestess, MITHES. LUEI. If, as seems probable, these words are Western Greek, they mean respectively: ‘Winter’, ‘He reigned’, and ‘Having pronounced, she sets free’. The letters written against Ariadne are indecipherable.

  The lame King is frequently connected with the mysteries of smithcraft. Jacob was connected with the cult of the Kenite Smith-god; Talus in one account was son, or maternal nephew, to Smith Daedalus, in another was forged in the furnace of Smith Hephaestus. Dionysus, because of his titles pyrigenes and ignigena (‘engendered by fire’) – a reference to the autumnal Toadstool-Dionysus engendered by lightning – may have been equated with Talus in this sense. Wieland, the Scandinavian Smith-god, was lamed by a woman.

  But what evidence is there for any lameness in Dionysus? Why should the buskins not have been worn merely to add to his height, rather than as surgical boots to compensate for his deformity? The best evidence is his name, Dio-nysus, usually translated as ‘The Light God of Mount Nyse’ but more likely to mean ‘The Lame God of Light’. Nysos was a Syracusan word for ‘lame’ and therefore probably of Corinthian origin, for Syracuse was a colony of Corinth. Yet, as Mr. E. M. Parr has pointed out to me, Dionysus may really have taken his name from Nysë, Nyssa or Nysia, a name attached to various shrines in the area where the sacred lameness was cultivated. There are three Nyssas in Asia Minor, three Nysias in Thrace, a Nyza near Mosul, and a Nysia in Arabia where, according to Diodorus
the Goddess Isis was born. This suggests that Nyse was a title of Isis, and that since Dionysus was a title of the Libyo-Thracian Harpocrates, her lame son, the Corinthian Greeks read Nysus, which was really his matronymic, as meaning ‘lame’. Mr. Parr writes: ‘There seem to be confusing results when an established divine title is retained in a new tongue. For instance: Apollo Agieueis of Athens is described as the leader of colonies, but is more likely to have been the Cyprian Apollo who wore a wreath (aga, agu).’ Dionysus, who was regarded by the Greeks of the Classical age as a Thracian God, is said to have come there from Crete, as his counterpart, King Proteus, is said to have come from Pharos. In Crete he was not lame, neither was Velchanos, a Cretan Cock-demon who became Vulcan when his worship was introduced into Italy. But in Italy Vulcan was said to be lame and to walk with the help of high-heeled gold shoes, because he was identified with Hephaestus,1 a Pelasgian deity from Lemnos, who like Talus was hurled down from a height – the tradition of sacred lameness seems to have been Danaan, not early Cretan. And, according to Homer, Hephaestus’s wife was Charis, whom he elsewhere calls Aphrodite. The Three Graces are thus explained as the Love-goddess Aphrodite in triad; and when they invoke Dionysus at Elis they are calling their lame buskined husband to perform the act of love with them.