The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  ‘That is a still more startling notion than the other,’ protested Paulus, ‘and I cannot see either that you have any proof of it, or that you can explain how the Vestals ceased to be love-nymphs and became barren spinsters as now.’

  ‘The cessation of the royal love-orgies,’ said Theophilus, ‘follows logically on the historical course that we discussed yesterday – the extension of the kingship in ancient times from one year to four years; from four to eight; from eight to nineteen; until finally it became a life-tenure. Though popular love-orgies might continue – and at Rome continue still – to be held at midsummer and at the close of the year, they ceased to have any significance as occasions for breeding new kings. As we know, children are often born of these holiday unions and are considered lucky and cheerfully legitimized; but they have no claim to the kingship, because their mothers are no longer princesses, as formerly. It seems to have been King Tarquin the Elder who first prescribed for the Vestals what amounts to perpetual virginity, his object being to prevent them from breeding claimants to the throne. It was certainly he who introduced burying alive as a punishment for any Vestal who broke the rule; but even now the prescribed virginity is not perpetual – for after thirty years a Vestal Virgin is, I understand, entitled to unsanctify herself, if she pleases, and marry.’

  ‘It happens very seldom; after thirty years of illustrious spinsterhood it is hard for a woman to win a husband of any worth, and she soon wearies of the world and usually dies of remorse.’

  ‘Now, as to the proof that the Virgins were once permitted occasional erotic delights: in the first place the novice, when initiated by the Chief Pontiff on behalf of the God, is addressed as “Amata”, beloved one, and given a head-dress bordered with pure purple,1 a white woollen fillet and a white linen vestment – the royal marriage garments of the bride of the God. In the second, we know that Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus, was a Vestal Virgin of Alba Longa and unexpectedly became the bride of Mamurius or Mars, then a red-faced, erotic Shepherd-god; and was not buried alive as a Vestal would now be if she became pregnant – even though she claimed that a god had forced her.’

  ‘They drowned Silvia in the River Anio, at all events.’

  ‘Only in a manner of speaking, I think. After the birth of her twins, whom she laid in the ark of osier and sedge, which is a commonplace in nativity myths of this sort, and consigned to the mercy of the waves, she took much the same baptismal bath in renewal of her virginity as the Priestess of Aphrodite yearly takes here at Paphos2 in the blue sea, and the nymph Dryope in her fountain at Pegae.’

  ‘The connexion between Rome and Arcadia is, I grant, very close. The Shepherd-god sends a wolf, lycos, to alarm Silvia and then overpowers her in a cave. And when the twins are born, a wolf and a woodpecker bring them food. By the way, can you explain how Pan comes to have a wolf in his service, if he is a god of shepherds?’

  ‘It was probably a were-wolf. The Arcadian religious theory is that a man is sent as an envoy to the wolves. He becomes a were-wolf for eight years, and persuades the wolf-packs to leave man’s flocks and children alone during that time. Lycaon the Arcadian initiated the practice, they say, and it is likely that your ancient Guild of Lupercal priests originally provided Rome with her were-wolf too. But to speak again of Silvia. The God not only ravished her in a dark cave overshadowed by a sacred grove, but took advantage of a total eclipse of the sun. He was hiding his true shape, I suppose; which was that of a sea-beast.’

  ‘You seem to have the whole business worked out. Perhaps you can also explain why the hair of a Vestal is cut at marriage and never allowed to grow?’

  ‘That must have been King Tarquin’s prudent regulation. Women with their hair cut cannot perform magical spells. Doubtless he feared that they would revenge themselves on him for his severity towards them. Vestal Virgins were under the king’s sole charge in those days. It was he, not the Chief Pontiff, who had the privilege of scourging any Vestal who let the sacred fire go out, and scourging to death any Vestal who took a private lover.’

  ‘And can you also tell me why they use spring-water mixed with powdered and purified brine in their sacrifices?’

  ‘Tell me first what are the medical properties of water mixed with brine?’

  ‘It is a strong emetic and purge.’

  ‘Suitable for preparing celebrants for the midsummer and midwinter feasts? I had not thought of that supplementary use. What I am suggesting is that when the twelve young shepherds – the leaping priests of Mamurius or Pallas – performed their orgiastic dance for hour after hour around the blazing bonfires they must have sweated terribly and come near to fainting.’

  ‘I see what you mean. In the harvest-fields countrymen always refresh themselves with brine-water in preference to plain: it restores the salt that has been lost by sweating. Brine-water fetched by Vestals at the midsummer orgy must have restored the vigour of the shepherds like a charm. Still another question, in revenge for all those that you asked me: how does Triton come to be a son of Poseidon?’

  ‘In the same way as Proteus comes to be his herdsman. Originally Poseidon had nothing to do with the sea. The porpoise of the Crathis, the Delphic dolphin and the Phocian seal all belong to the earlier civilization. Poseidon won them as his own when he seized the Peloponnese and the opposite shores of the Gulf of Corinth and married the Sea-goddess Amphitrite. Triton must have been her son, probably by Hermes; perhaps he ruled at “Lacedaemon of the Sea-beast”. At any rate, Poseidon becomes his foster-father by marrying the Sea-goddess Amphitrite – I take this to be one of Athene’s original titles. (By the way, the ancient Seal-king Phoceus, who gave his name to Phocis, was the son of Ornytion, which means Son of the Chicken – and the Chicken, I suppose, is Pan again who was hatched from a woodpecker’s egg or the egg of a penelope duck.) Of one thing I am sure: unless we recognize Triton and Pallas and Pelops as originally a sea-beast incarnate in a dynasty of ancient kings, we can hope to find no sense in the legends of heroes who rescued maidens from sea-beasts. The heroes are princes who challenge the sea-beast king to combat and kill him, and marry the royal heiress whom he has put under close restraint and reign in his stead by virtue of this marriage. The royal heiress is his daughter, but she is also an incarnation of the Moon; which explains why Homer’s Pallas was the Moon’s father. You find the same story in the marriage of Peleus to the Sea-goddess Thetis after his killing of Phocus, the Seal-king of Aegina. Peleus means “the muddy one” and may be a variant form of Pelops – as Pelias, the name of the king whose former territory Peleus annexed, certainly is. There was a sea-beast at Troy; Hercules, in company with the same Peleus, killed it and rescued the princess Hesionë and made himself master of the city. And clearly the many stories of princes who were saved by dolphins from drowning suggest sacred paintings of these princes riding on dolphin-back in proof of sovereignty. Arion and Icadius and Enalus…’

  ‘Theseus, of course…’

  ‘And Coeranus too, and Taras and Phalanthus. The common people always prefer anecdote, however improbable, to myth, however simple: they see a prince pictured astride a dolphin and take this for literal truth and feel obliged to account for his strange choice of steed.’

  ‘But what you undertook to explain at the beginning of this conversation, and have not yet explained, is why the Goddess Athene has a male name as her principal title.’

  ‘She has become androgynous: there are many such deities. Sin, for example, the Moon-deity of the Semites, and the Phoenician Baalith, and the Persian Mithras. The Goddess is worshipped first and is all-powerful; presently a God enters into equal power with her, and either they become twins, as happened when Artemis agreed to share Delos with Apollo of Tempe, or else they are joined in a single bi-sexual being. Thus the Orphic hymn celebrates Zeus as both Father and Eternal Virgin. Your own Jupiter is in the same hermaphroditic tradition.’

  ‘Our own Jupiter? You surprise me.’

  ‘Yes, do you not know the couplet written by Quin
tus Valerius Soranus, whom Crassus praised as the most learned of all who wore the toga? No? It runs:

  Jupiter Omnipotens, rerum regum-que repertor,

  Progenitor genetrix-que Deum, Deus unus et idem.

  All kings, all things, entire

  From Jove the Almighty came –

  Of Gods both dam and sire

  Yet God the sole and same.

  And Varro, his rival in learning, writing of the Capitoline Trinity, agreed that together they form a single god: Juno being Nature as matter, Jupiter being Nature as the creative impulse, and Minerva being Nature as the mind which directs the creative impulse. Minerva, as you know, often wields Jupiter’s thunderbolts; therefore if Jupiter is Eternal Virgin, Minerva is equally Eternal Father. And there we are again: Minerva is universally identified with Pallas Athene, who is the Goddess of Wisdom. Athene is to Pallas as Minerva is to Jupiter: his better half.’

  ‘I am getting confused in my mind between these various goddesses. Are they all the same person?’

  ‘Originally. She is older than all the gods. Perhaps her most archaic form is the Goddess Libya. If you read Apollonius recently you will recall that she appeared in triad by Lake Triton to Jason, wearing goatskins.’

  ‘A bi-sexual deity naturally remains chaste, or so I judge from Minerva’s case,’ Paulus commented.

  ‘Chaste as a fish.’

  ‘But when Jupiter began he was as unchaste as a sea-beast.’

  ‘Minerva reformed him.’

  ‘I daresay that is why she is called his daughter. My daughter Sergia reformed me. All daughters reform their fathers. Or try to. I was a leaping sea-beast as a young man.’

  ‘So was Apollo before his sister Artemis reformed him: he was a lusty dolphin once. But now chaste sacred fish are kept in his temples at Myra and Hierapolis.’

  ‘That reminds me of a question on which I am most anxious to be informed: what do you know of sea-beasts and fish in the Jewish religion? I understand that you have read their sacred books with some care.’

  ‘Not recently. But I remember that there is a partial taboo on fish in the Jewish Torah, or Law; which suggests Egyptian influence. But not on scaled fish, only on the unsealed, and that would point to their having once held sea-beasts, such as the porpoise and dolphin, in reverence. Moreover, their sacred Ark – now lost – was covered with sea-beast skins; that is important. The Jews were tributary once to the Philistines, whose God was a sea-beast of many changes named Dagon – the Philistines are originally immigrants of Cretan Stock, despite their Semitic language. As I remember the story, the Philistines conquered the Jews and laid up the Ark in Dagon’s temple before his phallic statue, but the God enclosed in the Ark wrestled with Dagon and broke his statue into pieces. Yes, and the legendary hero who led the Jews into Judaea was called Jeshua, son of the Fish.’

  ‘Ha! That is exactly what I wanted to know. You see, a curious thing happened the other day. A written report reached me that a Jew named Barnabas was preaching some new mystical doctrine in a Jewish synagogue at the other end of the island; it was described by my informant, a Syrian Greek from Antioch with a Jewish mother, as a doctrine endangering the peace of the island. I sent for Barnabas and the other fellow and heard what both had to say. I forget his original name, but he had become a Roman citizen and asked my permission to call himself Paulus, to which I had weakly assented. I will not go into the story in detail: suffice it to say that Barnabas was preaching a new demigod, so far as I can make out a recent reincarnation of this heroic Jeshua. I did not know until you mentioned it just now that Jeshua was son of the Fish; perhaps this explains the mystery. At all events, my Oriental Secretary, a harmless little man called Manahem, took Barnabas’s part warmly, rather too warmly, and sent the other fellow about his business with a fierceness of which I should never have believed him capable.’

  ‘I know Manahem; he came to you from the Court of Antipas of Galilee, did he not?’

  ‘That’s the man. He is now away on leave in Alexandria. Well, when the case was settled and Barnabas and the other fellow had both been sent out of the island with a warning never to return, I called Manahem to my private room and gave him a piece of my mind. I am not naturally observant, but long experience as a magistrate has taught me to use my eyes in court, and I had caught Manahem surreptitiously signalling to Barnabas to leave the case in his hands. He was making a secret sign with his foot, the outline of a fish traced on the pavement. I gave Manahem the fright of his life – threatened to put him to the torture unless he explained that fish to me. He confessed at once, and begged me to forgive him. The fish sign, it appears, is the pass-word of Barnabas’s society which cultivates a sort of universal pacifism under the guidance of a demi-god named Jeshua – Jesus in Greek – who has the title of the Anointed One. The pass-word is for use among Greek-speaking Jews and stands, Manahem says, for Jesus Christos Theos which are, of course, the first letters of ichthus, fish. But there is more to it than that, I believe.’

  ‘I have heard of the society. They celebrate a weekly love-feast with fish, wine and bread, but tend to Pythagorean asceticism. You may be sure that Jeshua the Fish is of the chaster sort. The Jeshua who founded it was executed under Tiberius; and oddly enough his mother was a Temple Virgin at Jerusalem, and there was a mystery about his birth.’

  ‘Yes, Manahem revealed it under an oath of secrecy. You are right about this God’s chastity. Erotic religion is going out of fashion everywhere; it is inconsistent with modern social stability, except of course among the peasantry. Do you know, Theophilus, a picture rises in my mind, almost a vision. I see the white-clad Vestal Virgins in their Temple grounds offering up little prayers to chaste Jupiter, Father and Virgin, whom they serve. I see them devoutly circling the fish-pool which the sacred fish also mystically circles – the cool, pale-faced fish, as chaste as they –’

  Theophilus interrupted: ‘ – Who was dark-faced and hot in Silvia’s day,’ ‘And in his pool drowns each unspoken wish,’ Paulus agreed.

  * * *

  Theophilus was wrong to suggest that the hero rescues the chained virgin from a male sea-beast. The sea-beast is female – the Goddess Tiamat or Rahab – and the God Bel or Marduk, who wounds her mortally and usurps her authority, has himself chained her in female form to the rock to keep her from mischief. When the myth reaches Greece, Bellerophon and Hercules are more chivalrously represented as rescuing her from the monster. It has even been suggested that in the original icon, the Goddess’s chains were really necklaces, bracelets and anklets, while the sea-beast was her emanation.

  1 ‘Proetus’ is the earlier spelling of the word, which means ‘the early man’, formed from the adverb proi or pro.

  1 Purpureus is a reduplication of purus, ‘very, very pure.’

  2 Aphrodite persists tenaciously at Paphos. In the village of Konklia, as it is now called after the sea-shell in which she rode ashore there, a rough aniconic stone, her original neolithic image, remains on the site of the early Greek sanctuary and is still held in awe by the local people. Close by is a Frankish church, re-built about 1450 as an ordinary Greek chapel, where the saint is a golden-haired beauty called Panagia Chrisopolitissa, ‘the all-holy golden woman of the town’ – a perfect figure of Aphrodite with the infant Eros in her arms. Mr Christopher Kininmonth who gives me these particulars, says that the beach is a particularly fine one and that the Romans, who substituted their massive and tasteless Temple of Venus for the earlier Greek building, did not despise the conical image but incorporated it in their shrine.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  THE WATERS OF STYX

  In Parry’s edition of Archbishop Ussher’s Letters – Ussher was the learned Primate of Ireland in the reign of Charles I who dated the creation of Adam in the year 4004 BC – appears a note that Langbaine the Irish antiquarian communicated to Ussher the following bardic tradition:

  Nemninus being upbraided by a Saxon scholar as a Briton and therefore ignorant of the rudiments of learning
, invented these letters by an improvisation, to clear his nation of the charge of dullness and ignorance.

  ALAP A PARTH P

  BRAUT B QUITH Q

  CURI C RAT R

  DEXI D TRAUS T

  EGIN E SUNG S

  FICH F UIR U

  GUIDIR G JEIL X

  HUIL H OFR E

  JECHUIT I ZEIRC Z

  KAM K AIUN AE

  LOUBER L ESTIAUL ET

  MUIN M EGUI EU

  NIHN N AUR AU

  OR O EMC EI

  KENC ELAU

  This obviously was a joke at the stupid Saxon’s expense, because the British bards had used an alphabet for centuries before the arrival of the Saxons. But what do these improvised letter-names mean? Since the stupid Saxon would have used the ABC Latin order of letters and was apparently unaware that any other order existed, let us try restoring the Alap-Braut-Curi to its BLFSN Ogham order. And since we can be pretty sure that Nemninus was showing off his superior learning – probably his knowledge of Greek to tease the stupid Saxon who knew only a little monkish Latin – let us try writing out the letter-names in Greek, and see whether certain familiar combinations of words do not strike the eye. This is a difficult puzzle, because the extra words KENC, ELAU and ESTIAUL have been inserted without explanation among the letter-names and because the vowels have been mixed. (If E is OFR, OR is probably ER.) Nevertheless the DEXI-TRAUS-KAM-PARTH sequence is striking; we evidently have hit on an Egyptian Christian formula. With Clement of Alexandria’s specialized vocabulary in mind we read it as: