The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Here we may reconsider another of Dionysus’s titles, ‘Merotraphes’, which is usually translated ‘thigh-nursling’ because of a silly Olympian fable about Dionysus having been sewn up in Jove’s thigh, while an infant, to hide him from the jealous anger of Hera; the simpler meaning is ‘one whose thigh is taken very good care of’. And what of Mercury’s winged sandals, and those of Theseus and Perseus? Mercury, or Hermes, is commonly represented as standing on tiptoe: was this because he could not put his heel to the ground? It is likely that the eagle-wings on his sandals were originally not a symbol of swiftness but a sign of the holiness of the heel, and so, paradoxically, a symbol of lameness. In the Hittite cylinder-seal reproduced as an illustration to my King Jesus, the king who is about to be crowned after mounting three steps of a throne has his sacred heel protected by a dog-demon. In Latin those sandals were called talaria from the word talus, meaning a heel: and dice were called tali because they were made from the heel-bones of the sheep or goats sacred to Hermes or Mercury, though those of the boibalis, the Libyan antelope, were more highly prized by the illuminated.

  Mercury was not only patron of dice-players but prophesied from dice. He used five dice with four markings on each, in honour of his Mother, precisely like those given an Indian King at his coronation in honour of the Mother; and if, as I suppose, he used them for alphabetic divination he had his own alphabet of fifteen consonants and five vowels. The game of hucklebones is still played in Great Britain with the traditional set of five. In the case of six-sided dice, however, three made a set in ancient times; these would provide the diviner with eighteen letters of the alphabet, as in the thirteen-consonant Beth-Luis-Nion.

  But was the sacred king chosen because he had accidentally suffered this injury, or was the injury inflicted on him after he had been chosen for better reasons? The answer is to be found in the otherwise meaningless story of Llew Llaw’s balancing between the rim of his sacred cauldron and the back of a buck. Llew was to become a sacred king by marriage with Blodeuwedd, the May Bride, a king of the delicately-treading golden-shoed or purple-buskined sort; but he was not properly equipped for his office until he had sustained Jacob’s injury which would prevent him from ever again putting his sacred heel on the ground, even by mistake. This injury was artificially produced by an ingenious incident in the coronation ritual. His bride made him stand with one foot on the rim of the bath, the other on the haunch of a sacred beast with his hair tied to an oak-branch above his head. And then a cruel trick was played on him. Messrs. Romanis and Mitchener in their Surgery put it in these words: ‘Such inward or anterior dislocations of the hip, produced by wide abduction of the thighs, may result when a person embarking in a boat remains undecided whether to get in or remain on land.’ As with quay and boat, so with cauldron and buck. The buck moved suddenly away from the cauldron. Llew could not save himself by throwing himself forward, because his head was fixed by the hair. The result was this anterior dislocation, but when he fell, his sacred heel did not touch the ground: because his hair held him up, which is exactly what happened to Absalom (‘Father Salm’) when the beast moved from under him in the oak-wood of Ephraim. I postulate as a main source of the anecdotal parts of the early books of the Bible a set of icons, captured by the Israelites at Hebron, illustrating the ritual fate of the sacred king; one part of the series becomes iconotropically reinterpreted as the story of Saul, another as that of Samson, another as that of Absalom, another as that of Samuel. A restoration of the icons is attempted in the King Adam chapter of my King Jesus.

  It will be noticed that all these names look like corrupt forms of the same word Salma, or Salmon, a royal title among the Kenites, who were King David’s ancestors, among the Phoenicians (Selim), among the Assyrians (Salman), among the Danaans of Greece and late Minoan Crete (Salmoneus). Solomon adopted the title too. His original name seems to have been Jedidiah (2 Samuel XII, 25); if not, he would have had a less convincing right to the throne than Adonijah. Absalom’s original name is unknown, but that he was David’s favourite, not his son except by courtesy, is shown in 2 Samuel XII‚ 11, where he is described as David’s neighbour. The discrepancy between the account of his parentage in 2 Samuel III, 3 and 2 Samuel XIII, 37 suggests that his real name was Talmai, son of Ammihud, King of Geshur and one of David’s allies, and that he became Absalom only when he seized David’s throne and married the royal harem of heiresses at Hebron. As a god, Salma is identified with Reseph the Canaanite Osiris. Among these icons there may have been one showing Absalom with his hair tied to an oak-branch – really an incident in the marriage of the King. The assassination of the king on such an occasion was easy, but sanctification, not death, was the object of the trick; and if we can accept A. M. Hocart’s conclusion that the coronation ceremony throughout the ancient world typified the marriage of the Sun King to the Earth Queen, his death as a member of his former tribe and his re-birth with a new name into that of his Queen, then the ritual on which all these myths are based must have included a mock-assassination of the king in the course of the bath-ceremony; which is proved by the victims offered in the king’s stead in many forms of the ritual known to us. The confused elements in the myth of Hephaestus, who was married to the Love-goddess and deceived by her, and lamed by suddenly being thrown down from Olympus by the Goddess Hera, and mocked by the whole company of Heaven, compose another variant of the same ritual. Originally the king died violently as soon as he had coupled with the queen; as the drone dies after coupling with the queen-bee. Later, emasculation and laming were substituted for death; later still, circumcision was substituted for emasculation and the wearing of buskins for laming.

  Once we know that the sacred king was ritually lamed in a way that obliged him to swagger or lurch on high heels, we understand at last two or three hitherto mysterious ancient icons. Tantalus, suspended over the water with a fruit-branch above his head and the water always slipping away is evidently being lamed in Llew Llaw fashion: originally his hair is tied to the branch, one foot is on the bank, the other rests on something in the water – perhaps a large boat-shaped basin – that slips away. Tantalus is a perfect type of Dionysus: he was married to Euryanassa (another form of Eurynome) a Moon-goddess; he was thrown down from Mount Sipylus, in Pelasgian Lydia, where he was afterwards buried and had a hero shrine; he was Pelops’s cannibalistic father; he helped to steal a Dog from a Cretan cave; and from his name derive three other Greek words meaning, like saleuein, from which saleuma is formed, ‘to swagger or lurch in one’s gait’: tantaloein, tantaleuein and, by a metathesis, talantoein.

  Like Ixion and Salmoneus, Tantalus belonged to the old religion superseded by Olympianism, and the Olympian priests have deliberately misinterpreted the icons in favour of Father Zeus by presenting him as an odious criminal. Tantalus’s crime, the mythographers explain, was that, having been privileged to eat ambrosia, the food of the gods, with the Olympians, he later invited commoners to try it. Ambrosia was the name of Dionysus’s autumnal feast in which, I suggest, the intoxicant toadstool once supplied his votaries with a divine frenzy; and in my What Food the Centaurs Ate, I show that the ingredients given by Classical grammarians for ambrosia, nectar, and kekyon (Demeter’s drink at Eleusis) represent a food-ogham – their initial letters all spell out forms of a Greek word for ‘mushroom’. The story of Tantalus’s crime may have been told when wine displaced toadstools at the Maenad revels, and a toadstool – perhaps not amanita muscaria, but the milder, more entrancing panaeolus papilionaceus – was eaten by adepts at the Eleusinian, Samothracian and Cretan Mysteries, who became as gods by virtue of the transcendental visions it supplied.

  However the dislocation may have been produced – and it is likely that still another method was practised on a hill-top, not beside a river – there was a taboo in Canaan on eating the flesh around the thigh-bone, as is expressly stated in Genesis in the story of Jacob’s wrestling at Peniel. Robertson-Smith rightly connects this taboo with the practice, common to all Mediterranea
n countries, of dedicating the thigh-bones of all sacrificial beasts, and the parts about them, to the gods: they were burned first and then the rest of the beast was eaten by the worshippers. But the anthropological rule ‘No taboo without its relaxation’ applies here. In primitive times the flesh-covered thighbone of the dead king must have been eaten by his comrades. This practice was until recently followed, as Mgr. Terhoorst, a Roman Catholic missionary records, by the younger warriors of the Central African Bantu tribe of Bagiushu among whom he worked. The flesh was eaten on the death of their Old Man, or when the chief of an enemy tribe was killed in battle. Mgr. Terhoorst states that this was done to inherit the courage of the dead man which was held to reside in the thigh, and that the rest of the body was not touched. The Bagiushu, who file their front teeth into a triangular shape, are not cannibalistic on other occasions.

  In my King Jesus I suggest that the Hebrew tradition found in the Talmud Babli Sanhedrin and the Tol’ Doth Yeshu, that Jesus was lamed while attempting to fly, refers to a secret Coronation ceremony on Mount Tabor, where he became the new Israel after being ritually lamed in a wrestling match. This tradition is supported by Gospel evidence which I adduce, and by a remark of Jerome’s that Jesus was deformed. Mount Tabor was one of Jehovah’s chief shrines. Tabor is named after Atabyrius, the son of Eurynome and grandson of Proteus, as the Septuagint recognized, and we know a good deal about this god, who also had a shrine built to him on Mount Atabyria in Rhodes by one ‘Althaeamenes the Cretan’. Althaeamenes means ‘Mindful of the Goddess Althaea’ and Althaea (‘she who makes grow’) was another name for Atabyrius’s mother Eurynome, the Moon-goddess of the Orphics. The marshmallow – in Welsh hocys bendigaid the holy mallow – was Althaea’s flower, and she loved Dionysus the Vine-god. She became the mother by him of Deianeira, the same Deianeira who played the part of Blodeuwedd to Hercules of Oeta. Atabyrius, being one of the Cretan Telchines, had the power, like Dionysus or Proteus, to transform himself into any shape; and in his Rhodian shrine brazen bulls were dedicated to him which bellowed whenever anything extraordinary was about to happen – the same sort of brazen bull that was made by Daedalus for King Minos of Crete. And we know that Atabyrius was the god, worshipped as a golden calf, whom Israel credited with having brought them out of Egypt. But the byrius termination occurs in the royal title of Burna-buriash, one of the Third Dynasty Kassite (Indo-European) Kings of Babylon who reigned from 1750 to 1173 BC; Atabyrius was clearly not a native Cretan, nor a Semite, but a Kassite god who entered Syria early in the second millennium. How and when his cult was carried to Thrace, Rhodes and Crete is not clear; but he is likely to have gone into Egypt with the Hyksos. He was also called Tesup.

  This mythological rigmarole adds up to an identification of the Israelite Jehovah of Tabor, or Atabyrius, with Dionysus the Danaan White Bull-god: an identification which rests on respectable Classical authority. In Plutarch’s Convivial Questions one of the guests claims to be able to prove that the God of the Jews is really Dionysus Sabazius, the Barley-god of Thrace and Phrygia; and Tacitus similarly records in his History (v. 5) that ‘some maintain that the rites of the Jews were founded in honour of Dionysus’. Also, the historian Valerius Maximus records that about the year 139 BC the Praetor of Foreigners, C. Cornelius Hispallus, expelled from Rome certain Jews who were ‘trying to corrupt Roman morals by a pretended cult of Sabazian Jove’. The inference is that the Praetor did not expel them for a legitimate worship of this god, but because they foisted novelties on the Thracian cult – probably circumcision, which was regarded by the Romans as self-mutilation and a corruption of morals – for they admitted aliens to their Sabbaths. According to Leclercq’s Manual of Christian Archaeology, burials in the cemetery of Praetextatus at Rome confirm this cult of a Jewish Sabazius. That the Jews of the Dispersion may have used false etymology to equate ‘Sabazius’ with ‘Sabaoth’ – Jehovah was the Lord of the Sabbath, and also of Sabaoth, ‘of hosts’ – does not disprove the original identity of the two gods.

  Sabazian Zeus and Sabazian Dionysus were different names of the same character, the Son of Rhea; which means that he was of Cretan origin. The Phrygians called him Attis and made him the son of Cybele, but this amounted to the same thing; and an inscription of Jewish origin has been found in Rome: ‘To Attis the Most High God who holds the Universe together.’ The serpent was sacred to Sabazius; and this recalls the Brazen Seraph Ne-esthan or Nehushtan, which Moses used as a standard and which is said to have been destroyed as idolatrous by Good King Hezekiah because incense was burned to it as to a god.1 But the Jewish sect of Ophites, centred in Phrygia, revered the Serpent in early Christian times, holding that the post-exilic Jehovah was a mere demon who had usurped the Kingdom of the Wise Serpent, the Anointed One. Sabazian Dionysus was represented with bull’s horns because, as Diodorus Siculus records, he was the first to yoke oxen to the plough for agriculture: in other words to plant barley. Since Jehovah was pre-eminently a protector of barley – the Passover was a barley harvest-festival – Plutarch’s convivial guest would have had little trouble in proving his contention, especially since, according to the legend, Sabazius was torn by the Titans into seven pieces. Seven was Jehovah’s mystical number; so also was 42, the number of letters in his enlarged Name, and according to Cretan tradition, the number of pieces into which the Titans tore the bull-god Zagreus.

  Dionysus Sabazius was the original Jehovah of the Passover; and Plutarch also identifies the Jehovah of the Feast of Tabernacles with Dionysus Liber, or Lusios (‘he who frees from guilt’), the Wine-god, by suggesting that the word ‘Levite’ is formed from Lusios; and he says that the Jews abstain from swine’s flesh because their Dionysus is also Adonis, who was killed by a boar. The rituals of Jehovah and Dionysus, as Plutarch pointed out, corresponded closely: mysteries of barley-sheaves and new wine, torch dances until cock-crow, libations, animal sacrifices, religious ecstasy. It also appears that the promiscuous love-making of the Canaanite rites, though severely punished at Jerusalem in post-exilic times, still survived among the peasantry who came up for the Tabernacles. The Temple priests in the time of Jesus admitted the original nature of the Feast, while declaring that its nature had changed, by announcing at the close: ‘Our forefathers in this place turned their backs on the Sanctuary of God and their faces to the East, adoring the Sun; but we turn to God.’ For the Sun represented the immortal part of Dionysus; the barley and the vine his mortal part.

  There is even numismatic evidence for the identification of Jehovah and Dionysus: a silver coin of the fifth century BC, (which appears in G. F. Hill’s Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Palestine) found near Gaza with on the obverse a bearded head of Dionysus type and on the reverse a bearded figure in a winged chariot, designated in Hebrew characters JHWH – Jehovah. This is not, of course, by any means the whole story of Jehovah, whose affinity with other gods, especially Cronos (Bran), has already been mentioned. It is easiest perhaps to write about him in terms of days of the week. His first pictorial appearance is at the copper-workings of Ras-Shamra in Sinai in a carving of about the sixteenth century BC. He is then Elath-Iahu a Kenite Smith-god, the God of Wednesday, presumably the lover of Baalith the local Aphrodite and Goddess of Friday. Later in his theophanies at Moreh, Hebron and Ophrah he is the terebinth-god Bel, the God of Thursday. The story of his defeat of the prophets of Carmel concerns the conquest of his Bel aspect by Cronos the God of Saturday in the person of Elijah. Bel and Cronos are always appearing in opposition, Bel being Beli and Cronos, Bran; as has been shown. ‘When Israel was in Egypt’, Jehovah was Set, the God of Sunday. At the Jerusalem feast of Tabernacles, on the Day of Willows, he was the God of Monday. His name El, connected with the scarlet oak, proves him to have been also the God of Tuesday. Thus the universality claimed for him by the Pharisees and typified by the Menorah, the seven-branched candlestick, rests on a solid enough mythological basis.

  Further, the name Iahu is far older than the sixteenth century BC and of wide distribution. It oc
curs in Egypt during the Sixth Dynasty (middle of the third millennium BC) as a title of the God Set: and is recorded in Deimel’s Akkadian-Sumerian Glossary as a name for Isis. It also seems to be the origin of the Greek name Iacchus, a title of the shape-shifting Dionysus Lusios in the Cretan mysteries. Thus although I.A.U. are the vowels of the three-season year of Birth, Consummation and Death – with Death put first because in the Eastern Mediterranean the agricultural year begins in the I season – they seem to be derived from a name that was in existence long before any alphabet was formed, the components of which are IA and HU. ‘la’ means ‘Exalted’ in Sumerian and ‘Hu’ means ‘Dove’; the Egyptian hieroglyph ‘Hu’ is also a dove. The Moon-goddess of Asianic Palestine was worshipped with doves, like her counterparts of Egyptian Thebes, Dodona, Hierapolis, Crete and Cyprus. But she was also worshipped as a long-horned cow; Hathor, or Isis, or Ashtaroth Karnaim. Isis is an onomatopoeic Asianic word, Ish-ish, meaning ‘She who weeps’, because the Moon was held to scatter dew and because Isis, the pre-Christian original of the Mater Dolorosa, mourned for Osiris when Set killed him. She was said to be the white, or, according to Moschus, the golden Moon-cow Io who had settled down in Egypt after long wanderings from Argos. The o in Io’s name is an omega, which is a common Greek variant of alpha.

  Ia-Hu therefore seems to be a combination of Ia, ‘the Exalted One’, the Moon-goddess as Cow, and Hu, the same goddess as Dove. We know from Plutarch that at the mid-winter solstice mysteries Isis, as the golden Moon-cow, circled the coffin of Osiris seven times in commemoration of the seven months from solstice to solstice; and we know also that the climax of the orgiastic oak-cult with which the Dove-goddess was concerned came at the summer solstice. Thus Ia-Hu stands for the Moon-goddess as ruler of the whole course of the solar year. This was a proud title and Set seems to have claimed it for himself when his ass-eared sceptre became the Egyptian symbol of royalty. But the Child Horus, the reincarnation of Osiris, overcomes Set yearly and it is a commonplace that conquering kings their titles take from the foes they captive make. Thus Horus was Iahu also, and his counterparts the Cretan Dionysus and Canaanite Bel became respectively IACCHUS and (in an Egyptian record) IAHU-BEL. The Welsh god Hu Gadarn and the Guernsey god Hou, or Har Hou, are likely to be the same deity: that Hou was an Oak-god is suggested by the same formula having been used in his mediaeval rites as in those of the Basque Oak-god Janicot, who is Janus.