The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  ‘You must mean the Palladium, most learned Socrates,’ answered Paulus in ironically academic tones, ‘on the safety of which the fate of Troy once depended; and the fate of Rome depends now.’

  ‘And what, honoured Alcibiades, is the Palladium?’

  ‘A venerable statue of Pallas Athene.’

  ‘Ah, but who is she?’

  ‘You suggested this morning, during our visit to the wrestling-school, that she was originally a Sea-goddess like our local Cyprian deity; and mythographers record that she was born by the Lake of Triton in Libya.’

  ‘So she was. And who or what is Triton, besides being the name of a once extensive lake which is now shrinking into salt marsh?’

  ‘Triton is a marine deity with a fish’s body who accompanies Poseidon the Sea-god and his wife Amphitrite the Sea-goddess, and blows a conch in their honour. He is said to be their son.’

  ‘You give me the most helpful answers. But what does Pallas mean?’

  ‘How long is this cross-examination to last? Would you send me back to school again? Pallas is one of Athene’s titles. I have never accepted Plato’s derivation of the word from pallein, to brandish; he says, you know, that she is called Pallas because she brandishes her aegis, or shield. Plato’s etymology is always suspect. What puzzles me is that Pallas is a man’s name, not a woman’s.’

  ‘I hope to be able to explain the paradox. But, first, what do you know about men called Pallas?’

  ‘Pallas? Pallas? There have been many men of the name, from the legendary Pallas the Titan to our present egregious Secretary of State. The Emperor made the Senate snigger the other day by declaring that the Secretary was of the famous Pallas family that gave its name to the Palatine Hill.’

  ‘I doubt whether the remark was as absurd as it must have sounded. Claudius, for all his eccentric habits, is no mean historian, and as Chief Pontiff has access to ancient religious records denied to others. Come, your Excellency, let us go together through the list of ancient Pallases. There was, as you say, Pallas the Titan, who was brother to Astraeus (“the Starlike”) and Perses (“the Destroyer”) and who married – whatever that means – the River Styx in Arcadia. He was the father of Zelos (“Zeal”), Cratos (“Strength”), Bia (“Force”) and Nicë (“Victory”). Does that not convey his mystical nature to you?’

  ‘I regret to admit that it does not. Pity me as a stupid, legalistic and practical Roman.’

  ‘If your Excellency is not careful I shall begin praising your elegiac poem on the Nymph Egeria, a copy of which was lately sent me from Rome by one of our mutual friends. Well, next comes Homer’s Pallas, whom he calls the father of the Moon. And next another Titan, the Pallas who was flayed by Athene; it was this Pallas from whom she is said to have taken her name.’

  ‘I never heard that story.’

  ‘It rests on good authority. And then comes Pallas, the founder of Pallantium in Arcadia, a Pelasgian son of the Aegeus who gave his name to the Aegean Sea; now, he is of interest to us because his grandson Evander emigrated to Rome sixty years before the Trojan war and brought your sacred alphabet with him. It was he who founded a new city of Pallantium on the Palatine Hill at Rome, long since incorporated in the City. He also introduced the worship of Nicë, Neptune, (now identified with Poseidon), Pan of Lycos, Demeter and Hercules. Evander had a son named Pallas, and two daughters, Romë (“Strength”) and Dynë (“Power”). And I had almost forgotten still another Pallas, brother of Aegeus and Lycos, and therefore uncle to Evander’s grandfather Pallas.’

  ‘A fine crop of Pallases. But I am still in the dark.’

  ‘Well, I do not blame your Excellency. And I hardly know where to shine the lantern. But I appeal to you for patience. Tell me, of what is the Palladium made?’

  Paulus considered. ‘I am rather rusty on mythology, my dear Theophilus, but I seem to remember that it is made of the bones of Pelops.’

  Theophilus congratulated him. ‘And who was Pelops? What does his name mean?’

  ‘I was reading Apollonius Rhodius the other day. He says that Pelops came to Phrygia from Enete in Paphlagonia and that the Paphlagonians still call themselves Pelopians. Apollonius was curator of the great Alexandrian Library and his ancient history is as reliable as anyone’s. As for the name “Pelops”, it means dusky-faced. The body of Pelops was served up as a stew by Tantalus, his father, for the Gods; they discovered that it was forbidden food just in time. Only the shoulder had been eaten – by Demeter, was it not? – but some say Rhea, and restitution was made with an ivory shoulder. Pelops was brought back to life.’

  ‘What do you make of this cannibalistic myth?’

  ‘Nothing at all, except that we now seem to have traced the Dardanians back to the Black Sea, if the sacred Palladium was made of the bones of their ancestor from Enete.’

  ‘If I suggest to you that Pelops and Pallas are different titles of Kings of the same early Greek dynasty, will that help your Excellency?’

  ‘Not in the least. Pray, give me a hand out of this quaking bog.’

  ‘Allow me to ask you a riddle: What is it with a dusky face and an ivory shoulder that comes rushing victoriously up a river, as if to a wedding, full of Zeal, Force and Strength, and whose hide is well worth the flaying?’

  ‘I am good at riddles, though bad at myths. A fish of sorts. I guess the porpoise. The porpoise is not an ordinary fish, for it couples, male with female: and how royally it charges into a river-mouth from the sea! It is pale below and dark above, with a blunt, dusky muzzle. And it has a fine white shoulder-blade – broad like a paddle; and porpoise leather makes the best-wearing shoes procurable.’

  ‘It is not a fish at all. It is a warm-blooded creature, a cetos, a sea-beast with lungs, not an ichthus, a fish with gills and cold blood. To the sea-beast family, according to Aristotle’s system, belong all whales, seals, porpoises, grampuses and dolphins. Unfortunately in Greece we use the same word delphis indiscriminately for both the beaked dolphin and the blunt-muzzled porpoise; and though Arion’s musical mount is likely to have been a true dolphin, it is uncertain whether Delphi was originally named after the dolphin or the porpoise. “Pallas” in Greek once meant a lusty young man, and I suppose that it became the royal title of Peloponnesian kings, whose sacred beast was the lusty porpoise, when the tribe of Pelops came down into Greece from the Black Sea. Do you remember Homer’s much disputed epithet for Lacedaemon – Cetoessa, which literally means “Of the Sea-beast”?’

  ‘I will try to think along the lines you lay out for me,’ said Paulus. ‘The Peloponnese is, of course, sometimes called the Land of Poseidon, who is the Achaean god of all sea-beasts and fishes. Arcadia is the centre of the Peloponnese, and Pallas the Sea-beast-god reigned there, and in Lacedaemon too. Let me work this out for myself – yes – Pallas is married to the River Styx, meaning that the porpoise comes rushing up the Crathis towards the Styx in his mating season. (At the mouth of the Crathis is Aegae – I once served in that part of Greece – which explains the connexion with Aegeus. Opposite Aegae, across the Gulf of Corinth, stands Delphi, sacred to Apollo the Dolphin-god or Porpoise-god.) Later, Evander a grandson of Pallas, and with a son of the same name, is driven out of Arcadia, about the time of the great Achaean invasion, and comes to Rome. There he forms an alliance with the people of Aeneas, claiming kinship with them in virtue of a common descent from Pelops. Is that how you read the story?’

  ‘Exactly. And Evander was probably a Pallas too, but changed his name, after killing his father, to throw the avenging Furies off the scent.’

  ‘Very well. He introduces the worship of the Sea-god Neptune; of Nicë, the daughter of the original Pallas; of Hercules – why Hercules?’

  ‘His sexual lustiness commended him, and he was not only a great-grandson of Pelops but an ally of the Enetians, the original Pelopians.’

  ‘And why Demeter?’

  ‘To rescue her from Poseidon the god of the Achaeans who, it is said, had raped her. You remember perhaps that she
retreated from him up the Crathis to the Styx and there cursed the water. Demeter was old Deo, the barley-planting Mother-goddess of the Danaan Arcadians. That some mythographers call her Rhea proves her Cretan origin. Her famous mare-headed statue at Phigalia, by the River Neda in Western Arcadia, held a porpoise in one hand and in the other a sacred black dove of the sort that is used at the oak-oracle of Dodona.’

  ‘Why mare-headed?’

  ‘The horse was sacred to her, and when the Pelopians intermarried with the original Arcadians, this was recorded in myth as a marriage between Pelops and Hippodameia, “the Horse-tamer”, who is also called Danais by some mythographers. And among their children were Chrysippos, “Golden Horse”; Hippalcmos, “Bold Horse”; Nicippe, “Victorious Mare” – new clan-names.’

  ‘I see. It is not so nonsensical as it sounds. Well, now I can fill out the story. The Mother-goddess was served by the so-called Daughters of Proetus or Proteus,1 who lived in a cave at Lusi, by the headwaters of the Styx. Her priestesses had a right to the shoulder-blade of the sacred porpoise at a sacrificial feast. Porpoise beef makes very good eating, especially when it has been well hung. And Proteus, according to Homer, became herdsman to Poseidon and tended his sea-beasts. That must have been after Poseidon’s conquest of the Goddess, which he celebrated by calling himself the Mare-tamer. I take Proteus to be another name for Pallas, the Sea-beast: the Achaeans, in fact, enslaved the Pelopians, who were now also styled Danaans, and Poseidon took over the prerogatives and titles of Pallas.’

  ‘I congratulate your Excellency. You evidently agree with me in dismissing as mistaken the view that Pelops was an Achaean – unless perhaps an earlier Achaean horde had entered Greece many centuries before with the Aeolians; I suppose that the mistake arose from the knowledge that Pelops was once worshipped in the northern province of the Peloponnese now called Achaea. For the enslavement of the Pelopians by the Achaeans is confirmed in another, rather frivolous myth: Poseidon is said to have fallen in love with Pelops, as Zeus with Ganymede, and to have carried him off to be his cup-bearer. Neptune, who emigrated to Italy was, you will agree, also Pallas and must not be identified with Poseidon as the custom is. But I should guess Proteus to be a general name of the god who is the son, lover and victim of the old Mother Goddess; and assumes a variety of shapes. He is not only Pallas, the sea-beast, but Salmoneus the human oak-king, Chrysippos the golden horse, and so forth.’

  ‘But Pan of Lycos? What had Evander to do with him?’

  ‘His ancestor Pelops probably brought him from the River Lycos, which flows into the Black Sea not far from Enete. Another lusty god. You will recall that he danced for joy when Pelops was fitted out with his new white shoulder. By the way, do you recall the various stories of Pan’s parentage?’

  ‘The usual one makes him a son of the nymph Dryope by Hermes.’

  ‘What does that convey to you?’

  ‘I have never considered. “Dryope” means a woodpecker of the sort that nests in oaks and makes an extraordinary noise with its bill in the cracks of trees, and climbs spirally up the trunk. It has a barbed tongue and portends rain, as the dolphin and porpoise portend storms by their frisking. And the nymph Dryope is connected with the cult of Hylas, a Phrygian form of Hercules who dies ceremonially every year. And Hermes – he’s the prime phallic god, and also the god of eloquence, and his erotic statues are usually carved from an oak.’

  ‘The tree of shepherds, the tree of Hercules, the tree of Zeus and Jupiter. But Pan, as the son of an oak-woodpecker, is hatched from an egg.’

  ‘Hold hard,’ said Paulus. ‘I remember something to the point. Our Latin god Faunus, who is identical with Pan, the god of shepherds, is said to have been a King of Latium who entertained Evander on his arrival. And Faunus was the son of Picus, which is Latin for woodpecker. Evidently another Pelopian tribe had reached Latium from the Black Sea before either Evander or Aeneas. Faunus is worshipped in sacred groves, where he gives oracles; chiefly by voices heard in sleep while the visitant lies on a sacred fleece.’

  ‘Which establishes the mythical connexion between Pan, the oak, the woodpecker, and sheep. I have read another legend of his birth, too. He is said to have been the son of Penelope, Ulysses’ wife, by Hermes who visited her in the form of a ram. A ram, not a goat. This is odd, because both Arcadian Pan and his Italian counterpart Faunus have goat legs and body. I think I see how that comes about. Pallas the Titan, the royal sea-beast, was the son of Crios (the Ram). This means that the Pelopian settlers from Enete formed an alliance with the primitive Arcadians who worshipped Hermes the Ram, and acknowledged him as the father of their sea-beast King Pallas. Likewise the Aegeans – the goat-tribe – formed an alliance with the same Arcadians and acknowledged Hermes as the father of their Goat-king, Pan, whose mother was Amalthea and who became the He-goat of the Zodiac.’

  Paulus said smiling: ‘Neatly argued. That disposes of the other scandalous legend that Pan was the son of Penelope by all her suitors in the absence of Ulysses.’

  ‘Where did you get that version? It is extraordinarily interesting.’

  ‘I cannot remember. From some grammarian or other. It makes little sense to me.’

  ‘I knew that Pan was the son of Penelope, but your version is a great improvement on it. Penelope, you see, is not really Ulysses’ wife except in a manner of speaking; she is a sacred bird, the penelops or purple-striped duck. So again, as in the Dryope version of his parentage, Pan is born from a bird – which explains the legend that he was perfectly developed from birth, as a hatched chicken is. Now to come to the suitors, by what I fear will be a longish argument. I postulate first of all that the Palladium is made from the bones of Pelops, that is to say from the ivory shoulder-blades of porpoises, a suitable and durable material, and that it is a phallic statue, not the statue of a goddess. I support my thesis by the existence, until a few years ago, of another sacred shoulder-blade of Pelops in the precinct which his great-grandson Hercules built in his honour at Olympia. Now, according to the myth, Pelops had only one sacred shoulder-blade, the right one; yet nobody has ever questioned the genuineness either of the relic at Olympia or of the Palladium. The history of the Olympian blade is this. During the siege of Troy the Greeks were told by an oracle that the only offensive counter-magic to the defensive magic of the Palladium preserved in the Citadel of Troy was the shoulder-blade of Pelops which a tribe of Pelopians had taken to Pisa in Italy. So Agamemnon sent for the thing, but the ship that was bringing it to him went down off the coast of Euboea. Generations later, a Euboean fisherman dragged it up in his net and recognized it for what it was – probably by some design carved on it. He brought it to Delphi and the Delphic Oracle awarded it to the people of Olympia, who made the fisherman its pensioned guardian. If the bone was the shoulder-blade of a sacred porpoise, not of a man, the difficulty of Pelops’s having had more than one right shoulder-blade disappears. So does the difficulty of believing that when boiled and eaten by the gods he came alive again – if the fact was that a new sacred porpoise was caught and eaten every year at Lusi by the devotees of Deo. Does all this sound reasonable?’

  ‘More reasonable, by far, than the usual fantastic story, though cannibalism in ancient Arcadia is not incredible. And that the Palladium is a phallic statue, rather than that of a goddess, may explain why such a mystery has been made of its appearance and why it is hidden out of sight in the Penus of the Temple of Vesta. Yes, though your thesis is startling and even, at first hearing, indecent, it has much to commend it.’

  ‘Thank you. To continue: you remember that two or three of the early Kings of Rome had no discoverable father?’

  ‘Yes. I have often wondered how that happened.’

  ‘You remember, too, that the Kingdom descended in the female line: a man was king only by virtue of marriage to a queen or of descent from a queen’s daughter. The heir to the Kingdom, in fact, was not the king’s son but the son of either his youngest daughter or his youngest sister – which explains th
e Latin word nepos, meaning both nephew and grandson. The focus of the community life was literally the focus, or hearth-fire, of the royal house, which was tended by the princesses of the royal line, namely the Vestal Virgins. To them the Palladium was delivered for safe-keeping as the fatale pignus imperii, the pledge granted by the Fates for the permanency of the royal line.’

  ‘They still have it safe. But if you are right about the statue’s obscene nature, the Vestal Virgins seem rather an odd choice of guardians, because they are strictly forbidden to indulge in sexual intercourse!’

  Theophilus laid his forefinger along his nose and said: ‘It is the commonplace paradox of religions that nothing is nefas, unlawful, that is not also fas, lawful, on particularly holy occasions. Among the Egyptians the pig is viewed with abhorrence and its very touch held to cause leprosy – indeed, the Egyptian pig as a scavenger and corpse-eater merits this abhorrence – yet the highest-born Egyptians eat its flesh with relish at their midwinter mysteries and fear no untoward consequence. The Jews, it is said, formerly did the same, if they do not do so now. Similarly, the Vestal Virgins cannot always have been debarred from the full natural privileges of their sex, for no barbarous religion enforces permanent sterility on nubile women. My view is that at midsummer during the Alban Holiday, which was a marriage feast of the Oak-queen – your Excellency’s charming nymph Egeria – with the Oak-king of the year, and the occasion of promiscuous love-making, the six Vestals, her kinswomen, coupled with six of the Oak-king’s twelve companions – you will recall Romulus’s twelve shepherds. But silently, in the darkness of a sacred cave so that nobody knew who lay with whom, nor who was the father of any child born. And did the same again with the six other companions at midwinter during the Saturnalia. Then, failing a son of the Oak-queen, the new king was chosen from a child born to a Vestal. So Penelope’s son by six suitors is explained. The Lusty God – call him Hercules or Hermes or Pan or Pallas or Pales or Mamurius or Neptune or Priapus or whatever you please – inspired the young men with erotic vigour when they had first danced around a blazing bonfire presided over by his obscene statue – the Palladium itself. Thus it happened that a king was said to be born of a virgin mother, and either to have no known father, or to be the son of the god.’