The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Iahu as a title of Jehovah similarly marks him out as a ruler of the solar year, probably a transcendental combination of Set, Osiris and Horus (alias Egli-Iahu, the Calf Iahu). But the Hu syllable of his name has come to have great importance in Christianity: for when at Jesus’s lustration by John the Baptist the Coronation Psalm was chanted and a Dove descended, this must be read as the ka, or royal double, that descended on him in a stream of light from his father Iahu – as it descended on the Pharaohs at their coronation from their father the Sun-god Ra, in the form of a hawk.

  No mention has been made so far of the religious meaning of the cedar, which figures so prominently in the Old Testament as the loftiest and grandest of all trees: ‘even the cedars of Libanus which Thou hast planted.’ It was used by Solomon with the ‘choice fir’ in the building of the three contiguous temples which he raised in honour of a Trinity consisting of Jehovah and two Goddesses. The identity of the second of these temples is disguised by Pharisee editors as ‘the House of the Forest of Lebanon’, meaning the temple of the Mountain-goddess, the Love and Battle goddess of Midsummer; that of the third is disguised as ‘The House of Pharaoh’s daughter’, who is shown by the story of Moses to have been the Birth-goddess of the Winter Solstice. Since we know that the fir was sacred to the Birth-goddess and that the floor of the Temple was of fir planking, it follows that the cedar of the pillars and beams was sacred to the Love-and-Battle goddess of Mount Lebanon, Astarte or Anatha. Cedar stood, in fact, for the vowel U, of which the tree in Byblos and Western Europe was the Heather. The only other timber used in these Temples was olive, which as has been already mentioned in the context of Hercules and the Dactyls stood for the Spring Sun – Jehovah as Marduk, alias Paeonian Apollo.

  Cedar is also coupled with hyssop (probably the wild-caper tree which grows very green in the crannies of rocks or walls, in Egypt and Palestine) in the two most primitive sacrifices of the Old Testament: the red heifer sacrifice of Numbers, XIX, 6 and the ‘sparrow’ sacrifice of Leviticus, XIV, 4, both originally offered to a goddess not a god. The hyssop was evidently a Canaanite equivalent of the mistletoe, the tree of the Day of Liberation, which it resembles by growing sometimes in the fissures of old trees where there is leaf mould to keep it alive; so that the mythological conjunction of cedar and hyssop means the whole course of the sun from its infancy at the winter solstice to its prime at the summer solstice, and back again. Thus when it is recorded in I Kings, IV, 33:

  And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding exceeding much…and he spake of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that is upon the wall,

  this is as much as to say that he knew all the mystic lore of the tree-alphabet. But hyssop was the tree of the winter solstice, IA: and the cedar was the tree of the summer solstice, HU; so Solomon is credited with knowing the Divine Name of which IAHU was the permissible synonym.

  JHWH’s Massoretic title, supposedly the oldest, was Q’re Adonai (‘Lord Q’re’) – though some Hebrew scholars prefer to interpret the words as meaning: ‘Read Adonai’, i.e. ‘give the consonants of JHWH the same vowels as in “Adonai”.’ Q’re sounds Cretan. The Carians, Lydians and Mysians, who were of Cretan stock, had a common shrine of Zeus Carios at Mylassa in Caria, a god whom their cousins the Tyrrhenians took to Italy as Karu, and who is also Carys, the founder of Megara. The Quirites of Rome came from a Sabine town Qures, which apparently bore his name or that of his mother Juno Quiritis, mentioned by Plutarch; and the Curetes of Delos, Chalcis, Aetolia and Crete are perhaps also called after him, though to the Greeks, who could make nothing of the barbarous word Q’re, ‘Curetes’ meant boys who had sacrificed their hair-trimmings (Kourai) to the god. These Curetes are identified by Pausanias with the Children of Anax, the ten-cubit-high Son of Uranus. Anax was a Carian who ruled Miletus before its conquest by the Milesians of Crete, gave it the name of Anactoria, and was the father of the ten-cubit-high Asterius. Pausanias connects Anax with the Pelasgian mysteries of Samothrace. The Children of Anax appear in the Bible as the tall people of Hebron whom Caleb expelled and who subsequently lived in Gaza and neighbouring cities. In other words, they were Asianic ‘People of the Sea’ who worshipped the God Q’re, or (as he was called in Syria in the time of Thothmes, a Pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom) ‘the Great God Ker’. His chief Carian title was Panemerios (‘of the live-long day’) – at least this was the Greek version of a Carian original -and he seems to have been a god of the solar year who, like Samson of Tyre or Nisus of Nisa (Megara), was annually shorn of his hair and power by the Moon-goddess; his male adorants dedicating their forelocks to him in mourning, at a festival called the Comyria. That Jehovah as Q’re continued to have hair sacrificed to him, as to his Carian counterpart, until the reformation of his religion during the Exile is indicated by the Deuteronomic injunction ‘Ye shall not make a baldness between your eyes for the dead’. The radical letters of his name – Q, apple, or quince or ethrog, and R, myrtle – were represented in the lulab, or thyrsus, used at the Feast of Tabernacles as a reminder of his annual death and translation to Elysium. This moon-festival, indeed, initiated the season of the year which runs from Q to R.

  But Q’re probably derived his title from his Moon mother – later, in Greece, his twin-sister – the White Goddess Artemis Caryatis (‘of the nut-tree’) whose most famous temple was at Caryae in Laconia. She was the goddess of healing and inspiration, served by Caryatid priestesses and is to be identified with the nymph Phyllis1 who, in the Thesean Age, was metamorphosed into an almond tree – Phyllis may be a Greek variant of Belili. At any rate, he became for a time Nabu the Wise God of Wednesday, represented by the almond-tree stem of the seven-branched Menorah; and it was particularly to him that Job referred his question, ‘Where shall Wisdom be found?’, on the ground that it was he who measured, weighed out and enunciated the powers controlled by his six fellow-deities; such as Sin, Monday’s Rain-god; Bel, Thursday’s god of Thunder and Lightning; and Ninib, Saturday’s god of Repose, controller of the Chthonian Winds. Artemis Caryatis may be identified with Carmenta, the Muse mother of Evander the Arcadian, who adapted the Pelasgian alphabet to the Latin. Her name, which Plutarch in his Roman Questions absurdly derives from carens mente, ‘out of her mind’ seems to be compounded of Car and Menta: the first syllable standing for Q’re, the second presumably for Mante ‘the revealer’. Pliny preserves the tradition that ‘Car, after whom Caria takes its name, invented augury’; this Car, evidently Thothmes’s Great God Ker, is mentioned by Herodotus as brother to Lydus and Mysus, the eponymous ancestors of the Lydians and Mysians. Another Car, the son of Phoroneus, and brother of Pelasgus, Europë and Agenor, is said by Pausanias to have been an early king of Megara after whom the acropolis of the city was named. Car’s sex seems to have been changed in both cases: for the Carians, Mysians and Lydians were matrilinear, and the Megarean acropolis must have been called after the White Goddess who ruled all important hills and mountains. The Goddess Car seems also to have given the river Inachus its original name, Carmanor, before Inachus the father of Phoroneus, as Plutarch reports, went mad and leapt into it.

  At this point we can reconsider the Myvyrian account of the Battle of the Trees and suggest a textual emendation which makes better sense of it:

  There was a man in that battle who unless his name were known could not be overcome, and there was on the other side a woman called Achren (‘Trees’), and unless her name were known her party could not be overcome. And Gwydion ap Don, instructed by his brother Amathaon, guessed the name of the woman….

  For it has already been shown that the Battle of the Trees was fought between the White Goddess (‘the woman’) for whose love the god of the waxing year and of the waning year were rivals, and ‘the man’, Immortal Apollo, or Beli, who challenged her power. In other words, the sacred name IEVOA, or JIEVOAO its enlargement, revealed by Amathaon to Gwydion and used as a means of routing Bran, was the name of the Fivefold Goddess Danu. This was a name in which Bran could c
laim to speak oracularly from her kingdom of Dis, as one who had had intimate experience of each of her five persons – by being born to her, initiated by her, becoming her lover, being lulled to sleep by her, and finally killed by her. The new name of eight letters which replaced it was Beli-Apollo’s own, not shared with the White Goddess, and it was therefore conveniently forgotten by later mythographers that the original one belonged to Bran, or Q’re, or Iahu, only by virtue of his birth, marriage and death under female auspices. Professor Sturtevant, expert on the Hittites, translates Q’re as Karimni which means merely ‘to the god’; but, as Mr. E. M. Parr points out, El is both the common word for ‘god’ in Syria and a proper name for the oak-god El. He holds that other forms of this same word are Horus, or Qouros, a god of the island of Thera – the Semitic form of Horus is Churu. The identity of Q’re is confused by the Gods Nergal and Marduk having also assumed the name (Qaru): Marduk’s Amorites called him Gish Qaru, ‘Q’re of trees and herbs’, to identify him with Nergal, the God of Tuesday on which trees and herbs were first created.

  1 In the Egyptian Zodiac he is shown with a fish tail, which aligns him with the Water-carrier and the Fishes as a Sign of the three months of Flood. But the Egyptian floods come in the summer with the melting of the Abyssinian snows, so that the Zodiac must have been an importation from some other region.

  1 Dr. Raphael Patai suggests in his Hebrew Installation Rites (Cincinnati, 1947), that the attempted murder by Saul of his son Jonathan (I Samuel, XIV, 15) which was avoided only by the provision of a surrogate, and the burning by fire from Heaven of two sons of Aaron on the day of his coronation (Leviticus, X, 1–2), were both ritual sacrifices. If he is right about Aaron, the story has been telescoped: one of his ‘sons’ must have been burned at the close of each year of office, not both at his first installation.

  1 There may, however, have been an earlier introduction of the bullfight into Spain by the lberian settlers of the third millennium BC, who had cultural affinities with Thrace. Archaeological evidence from Crete suggests that the fiesta originated as an annual display of the bull’s domination by acrobatic Moon-goddesses after he had been allowed to tire himself by chasing and killing men; and that the bull was a surrogate for the sacred king. However, in no Minoan painting or sculpture is there any picture of the final episode of the fiesta, in which the bull is despatched with a sword, and this may have been omitted in Crete, as in the Provencal bullfight. Even in Spain, where the bull is always killed and where the fiesta is a royal institution, a glorification of man’s courage (supposed to be resident in his testicles) for the benefit of the ladies seated near the President’s box – especially for the Queen, and Isabella II was not ashamed to accept the most famous bullfighter of her day as her lover – the tradition of the woman bullfighter persists obstinately. When Prince Charles went to Madrid in 1623 to court the Infanta he saw a woman-fighter despatch her bull with skill and grace, and there are still two or three women in the profession.

  1 The quail, sacred to Delian Apollo and Hercules Melkarth, was decoyed in the same way and had a similar erotic reputation. The moral of the flock of migrating quails that invaded the Israelites’ camp in the Wilderness is carefully pointed in Numbers (XI, 33, 34). Whereas in Exodus (XVI, 13), the earlier version of the story, the Israelites apparently eat without evil consequences according to the Lord’s promise, the author of Numbers does not let them so much as chew a morsel; but records that God smote them with a great plague and that the place was called Kibroth-Hattavah, ‘the grave of lust’. He is allegorically warning his post-exilic audience against having anything to do with Melkarth worship.

  1 Hephaestus, according to Hesiod, was the parthogenous son of Hera – in other words, he belonged to the pre-Hellenic civilization – and not even Homer’s authority for the view that Zeus was his father carried any weight with subsequent Greek and Latin mythographers. Servius makes this clear in his comment on Aeneid, VIII, 454.

  1 J. N. Schofield in his Historical Background to the Bible suggests that he destroyed it for political reasons – the Serpent cult being Egyptian, and Hezekiah wishing to signalize his return to Assyrian vassalage.

  1 Gower derives the word ‘filbert’ from this Phyllis, though the orthodox explanation is that filberts are first ripe on St. Philebert’s Day (August 22nd, Old Style).

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

  Little Gwion forced himself on me pleasantly but importunately, as children do, at a time when I was too busy with another book to think of anything else. He refused to be shaken off, though I protested that I had not the least intention of breaking into the field of bardic myth and no scholarly equipment for doing so. Despite my present appearance of easy familiarity with Celtic literature I could not at the time have answered a single question in the Hanes Taliesin puzzle (which at first sight recalled the ‘lovely riddle – all in poetry – all about fishes’ that the White Queen asked Alice at the final banquet in Looking-Glass Land) if I had not known most of the answers beforehand by poetic intuition. Really, all that I needed to do was to verify them textually; and though I had no more than one or two of the necessary books in my very small library the rest were soon sent, unasked for, by poet friends or tumbled down into my hands from the shelves of a second-hand sea-side bookshop. I drafted this whole volume at about one-half of its present length, in six weeks, then returned to the other book; but spent six years polishing the draft.

  The train of coincidences that made my task possible was of a sort familiar to poets. What after all does ‘coincidence’ mean? What did it mean to Euclid? It meant, for example, that if in certain circumstances you applied the triangle Alpha-Beta-Gamma to the triangle Delta-Epsilon-Zeta then Gamma and Zeta would be more or less identically situated. Similarly, since I knew in advance the answers to Gwion’s riddles, this presupposed the necessary book-knowledge as extant and accessible and therefore the books subsequently coincided with my needs. Zeta and Gamma gently kissed, and I could dress up in reasonable form an arrangement of thought arrived at by unreason.

  One day William Rowan Hamilton, whose portrait occurs on the centenary stamps of Eire issued in 1943, was crossing Phoenix Park in Dublin, when the foreknowledge came to him of an order of mathematics, which he called ‘quaternions’, so far in advance of contemporary mathematic development that the gap has only recently been bridged by a long succession of intervening mathematicians. All outstanding mathematicians have this power of making a prodigious mental leap into the dark and landing firmly on both feet. Clerk Maxwell is the best known case, and he gave away the secret of his unscientific methods of thought by being such a poor accountant: he could arrive at the correct formula but had to rely on his colleagues to justify the result by pedestrian calculation.

  Most outstanding physicians diagnose the nature of a disease by the same means, though afterwards they may justify their diagnoses by a logical examination of the symptoms. In fact, it is not too much to say that all original discoveries and inventions and musical and poetical compositions are the result of proleptic thought – the anticipation, by means of a suspension of time, of a result that could not have been arrived at by inductive reasoning – and of what may be called analeptic thought, the recovery of lost events by the same suspension.

  This need mean no more than that time, though a most useful convention of thought, has no greater intrinsic value than, say, money. To think in temporal terms is a very complicated and unnatural way of thinking, too; many children master foreign languages and mathematic theory long before they have developed any sense of time or accepted the easily disproved thesis that cause precedes effect.

  I wrote about the Muse some years ago in a poem:

  If strange things happen where she is

  So that men say that graves open

  And the dead walk, or that futurity

  Becomes a womb, and the unborn are shed –

  Such portents are not to be wondered at

  Being to
urbillions in Time made

  By the strong pulling of her bladed mind

  Through that ever-reluctant element.

  Poets will be able to confirm this from their own experience. And because since I wrote this poem J. W. Dunne’s Experiment with Time has prosaicized the notion that time is not the stable moving-staircase that prose men have for centuries pretended it to be, but an unaccountable wibble-wobble, the prose men too will easily see what I am driving at. In the poetic act, time is suspended and details of future experience often become incorporated in the poem, as they do in dreams. This explains why the first Muse of the Greek triad was named Mnemosyne, ‘Memory’: one can have memory of the future as well as of the past. Memory of the future is usually called instinct in animals, intuition in human beings.