The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  DEXITERAN TRAUSEI PARTHENOMETRA KAMAX

  ‘The spear will wound the Virgin Mother as she stands at his right hand.’ This neatly constructed pentameter is a reminiscence of St. Luke’s Gospel (II, 35). Kamax is both a spear and a vine-prop, and therefore a most appropriate word. The weapon mentioned by Luke is a sword; but the fulfilment of the prophecy, for Christian mystics, came with the spear that pierced the side of Jesus at the Crucifixion. And as I read the eight-lettered Holy Name sequence at the end, the Lintels of Heaven (OPHREA OURANEIA) are invited to raise a shout (IACHESTHAI) of ‘Shiloh’ (JEIL) since the love-fish (EROS ALABES) has neared (EGGIKEN) the land of On (AUNAN). Aunan, or On, known to the Greeks as Heliopolis and probably the oldest city in Egypt, was the centre of the Osiris cult and probably also of the Christ-as-Osiris cult. At ‘Aun’, according to Coptic tradition, the Virgin Mary washed the Infant Jesus’s swaddling clouts in the spring Ain-esh-Shems, formerly sacred to the Sun-god Ra. From the drops that dripped from the strings, up sprang the sacred Balsam-tree. It is probable that this legend was originally told of the Goddess Isis and the Infant Horus. Gwion is, I think, referring to it in the line: ‘I have been the strings of a child’s swaddling clout’ in the Câd Goddeu and in ‘Whence is the sweetness of the balm?’ in the Angar Cyvyndawd. The Alabes was worshipped at Aun, and was a Niloticcatfish.

  But this is a digression, and I will leave whatever Greek scholar may be interested to work out the rest of the charm, without troubling him with my own approximate solution.

  *

  Of the various objectives proposed in Chapter Eight one has not yet been attained: it still remains to find out the meaning of the letter-names of the Beth-Luis-Nion. We may assume them originally to have stood for something else than trees, for the Irish tree-names, with the exception of Duir and Saille, are not formed from roots common to the Greek, Latin and Slavonic languages, as one might have expected.

  The meaning of the vowels in the Boibel-Loth proved to be a sequence of stages in the life of the Spirit of the Year, incarnate in the sacred king, and the trees named in the vowels of the Beth-Luis-Nion similarly proved to form a seasonal sequence. Is it possible that the separation of the vowels from the consonants was a late development and that originally they were distributed among the consonants at regular intervals, as they are in the Greek and Latin alphabets? That A, the birth letter, rather than B, the letter of inception, really began the alphabet; and that the form ‘Ailm-Beth’ was even earlier than ‘Beth-Luis-Nion’? Since Irish legends about the alphabet particularize Greece as the place where it was invented and there is an obstinate countryside tradition in Ireland that the Tuatha de Danaan spoke Greek, why not put the Beth-Luis-Nion into ancient Greek and distribute the vowels in their seasonal order among the consonants, placing A at the winter solstice, O at the spring equinox, U at the summer solstice, E at the autumn equinox, I at the winter solstice again; and placing Straif at the beginning and Quert at the end of the summer flight of letters? Would they spell out another religious charm?

  Thus:

  Ailm, Beth, Luis, Nion, Onn, Fearn, Saille, Straif, Huath, Ura, Duir, Tinn, Coll, Quert, Eadha, Muin, Gort, Ngetal, Ruis, Idho.

  Ailm Beth does not make a hopeful start until one recalls that Ailm (silver fir) is pronounced Alv or Alph in Irish. The root alph expresses both whiteness and produce: thus alphos is dull white leprosy (albula in Latin) and alphe is ‘gain’ and alphiton is pearl barley and Alphito is the White Grain-goddess or Pig-Demeter, alias Cerdo (which also means ‘gain’), whose connexion with Cerridwen the Welsh Pig-Demeter, alias the Old White One, has already been pointed out. The principal river in the Peloponnese is the Alpheus. Beth or Beith is the birch month and since the birch is betulus in Latin, we may transliterate it into Greek and write Baitulus. At once the words begin to make sense as an invocation. Alphito-Baitule, a compound word like Alphito-mantis (‘one who divines from pearl barley’) suggests a goddess of the same sort as ASHIMA BAETYL and ANATHA BAETYL, the two Goddess-wives of the Hebrew Jehovah in his fifth-century BC cult at Elephantine in Egypt. The meaning of Baitulos is a sacred stone in which a deity is resident; it seems to be connected with the Semitic Bethel (‘House of God’) but whether Baitulos is derived from Bethel or vice versa is not known. The Lion-goddess Anatha Baetyl was not originally Semitic, and was worshipped as Anaitis in Armenia.

  Luis, the next Beth-Luis-Nion letter, suggests Lusios, a divine title of many Greek deities, meaning ‘One who washes away guilt’. It is particularly applied to Dionysus, the Latin equivalent being Liber. But Dionysus in the Orphic Hymns is also called Luseios and Luseus, which suggests that the adjective is formed not directly from louein, ‘to wash’, but from the city Lusi in Arcadia famous for its connexion with Dionysus. Lusi is overshadowed by the enormous mountain Aroania, now Mount Chelmos, and lies close to the valleys of the Aroanius River, which flows into the Alpheus, and of the Styx which flows into the Crathis. The Styx (‘hateful’) was the death-river by which the Gods were said to swear, and which Demeter, the Barley Mother, cursed when Poseidon pursued her with his unwelcome attentions, presumably during the Achaean conquest of the Crathis valley.

  ALPHITO-BAITULE LUSIA

  ‘White Barley Goddess, Deliveress from guilt’

  Here is Pausanias’s account of Lusi and its neighbourhood:

  As you go westward from Pheneus, the road to the left leads to the city of Clitor beside the channel which Hercules made for the river Aroanius….The city is on the river Clitor which falls into the Aroanius not more than seven furlongs away. Among the fish in the Aroanius are the spotted ones which are said to sing like thrushes. I saw some that had been caught but they did not utter a sound, though I stayed by the river till sunset when they are supposed to sing their best. The most famous shrines at Clitor are those of the Barley Mother, Aesculapius and the Goddess Ilithyia whom Olen the ancient Lycian poet, in a hymn which he composed for the Delians, calls ‘the deft spinner’ and so clearly identifies with the Fate Goddess.

  The road to the right leads to Nonacris and the waters of the Styx. Nonacris [‘nine heights’] was once an Arcadian city, named after the wife of Lycaon.

  Lycaon the Pelasgian, son of the Bear-goddess Callisto, practised cannibalism and must have been an oak-god, since he was killed by a flash of lightning. His clan used the wolf-totem and Lycaon as wolf-king (or werewolf) reigned until the ninth year. The choice of King was settled at a cannibalistic feast. His wife Nonacris was clearly the Ninefold Goddess, and he is described as the first man to civilize Arcadia.

  Not far from the ruins of Nonacris is the highest cliff I have ever seen or heard of, and the water that trickles down from it is called the Water of Styx….Homer puts a mention of the Styx into the mouth of Hera:

  Witness me now, Earth and broad Heaven above

  And the down-trickling Stygian stream!

  This reads as if Homer had visited the place. Again he makes the Goddess Athene say:

  Had I but known this in my wary mind

  When Zeus sent Hercules below to Hades

  To bring up Cerberus from his loathed home,

  Never would he have cheated Styx’s water

  Tumbling from high.

  The water which, tumbling from this cliff at Nonacris falls first on a high rock and afterwards into the river Crathis, is deadly to man and to every other living creature….It is remarkable too that a horse’s hoof alone is proof against its poison, for it will hold the water without being broken by it…as cups of glass, crystal, stone, earthenware, horn and bone are. The water also corrodes iron, bronze, lead, tin, silver, electrum and even gold, despite Sappho’s assurance that gold never corrodes. Whether or not Alexander the Great really died of the poison of this water I do not know: but the story is certainly current.

  Above Nonacris are the Aroanian mountains and in them is a cave to which the Daughters of Proetus are said to have run when madness overtook them. But Melampus by secret sacrifices and purificatory rites brought
them down to Lusi, a town near Clitor, of which not a vestige now remains. There he healed them of their madness in a sanctuary of the Goddess Artemis, whom the people of Clitor have ever since called ‘the Soother’.

  Melampus means ‘black foot’ and he was the son of Amythaon and the nymph Melanippe (‘black mare’). The story of how he purged the daughters of Proetus with black hellebore and pig-sacrifices, and afterwards washed away their madness in a stream, probably refers to the capture of this Danaan shrine by the Achaeans, though Melampus is reckoned as an Aeolian Minyan. He also conquered Argos, the centre of the Danaan cult. The three daughters were the Triple Goddess, the Demeter of the Styx, who must have been mare-headed, else a horse’s hoof would not have been proof against the poison of the water. But according to Philo of Heraclea and Aelian, the horn of a Scythian ass-unicorn was also proof against the poison; and Plutarch in his Life of Alexander says that an ass’s hoof makes the only safe vessel. Near by, at Stymphalus, was a triple sanctuary founded by Temenus (‘precinct’) the Pelasgian, in honour of the Goddess Hera as ‘girl, bride and widow’, a remarkable survival of the original triad. She was called ‘widow’, the Stymphalians told Pausanias, because she quarrelled with Zeus and retired to Stymphalus; this probably refers to a later revival of the primitive cult in defiance of Olympianism.

  Sir James Frazer visited Lusi in 1895, and he has given a valuable account of it which allows us to read Nonacris as a name for the succession of nine precipices of Mount Aroania which overhang the gorge of the Styx. Even in the late summer there was still snow in the clefts of what he described as the most ‘awful line of precipices’ he had ever seen. The Styx is formed by the melting snow and seems to run black down the cliff-side because of the dark incrustation of the rock behind, but afterwards bright blue because of the slatey rocks over which it flows in the gorge. The whole line of precipices is vertically streaked with red and black – both death colours in ancient Greece – and Frazer accounts for Hesiod’s description of the ‘silver pillars’ of the Styx by observing that in winter immense icicles overhang the gorge. He records that a chemical analysis of Styx water shows it to contain no poisonous substance, though it is extremely cold.

  The next letter of the Beth-Luis-Nion being Nion we can continue the dactylic invocation:

  ALPHITO-BAITULE LUSIA NONACRIS

  ‘White Barley Goddess, Deliveress from guilt,

  Lady of the Nine Heights’

  Frazer found that the belief in the singing spotted fish still survived at Lusi – they recall the spotted poetic fish of Connla’s Well1 and so did the tradition of the snakes that Demeter set to guard the Styx water. He visited the cave of the Daughters of Proetus which overlooks the chasm of the Styx, and found that it had a natural door and window formed by the action of water.

  The next letter is Onn. A and O being so easily confused in all languages, we can continue with:

  ANNA

  on the strength of the Pelasgian Goddess Anna, sister of Belus, whom the Italians called Anna Perenna or ‘Perennial Anna’. Ovid in his Fasti says that this Anna was regarded by some as the Moon-goddess Minerva, by others as Themis, or Io of Argos. He also connects her with barley cakes. Her festival fell on March 15th, which is just where Onn occurs in the Beth-Luis-Nion calendar. Anna probably means ‘queen’, or ‘Goddess-mother’; Sappho uses Ana for Anassa (queen). She appears in Irish mythology as the Danaan goddess Ana or Anan, who had two different characters. The first was the beneficent Ana, a title of the Goddess Danu, mentioned in Cormac’s Glossary as equivalent to Buan-ann (glossed as ‘Good Mother’). She was the mother of the original three Danaan gods Brian, Iuchurba and Iuchar, and she suckled and nursed them so well that her name ‘Ana’ came to signify ‘plenty’; she was worshipped in Munster as a Goddess of Plenty. Two mountains in Kerry, ‘the Paps of Anu’, are named after her. She has also been identified by E. M. Hull with Aine of Knockaine, a Munster Moon-goddess who had charge of crops and cattle and is connected in legend with the meadow-sweet to which she gave its scent, and with the midsummer fire-festival. The maleficent Ana was the leading person of the Fate Trinity, Ana, Badb and Macha, together known as the Morrigan, or Great Queen. Badb, ‘boiling’, evidently refers to the Cauldron, and Macha is glossed in the Book of Lecan as meaning ‘raven’.

  Ana occurs in British folklore as Black Annis of Leicester who had a bower in the Dane (Danaan?) Hills and used to devour children, whose skins she hung on an oak to dry. She was known as ‘Cat Anna’ but, according to E. M. Hull, Annis is a shortened form of Angness or Agnes, which would identify her with Yngona, ‘Anna of the Angles’, a well-known Danish goddess. Black Annis was concerned with a May-Eve hare-hunt, later transferred to Easter Monday, and must therefore have been nymph as well as hag. Yngona, certainly, was both Nanna (sharing her favours between Balder and his dark rival Holder) and Angurboda, the Hag of the Iron Wood, mother of Hel. But the chances are that the Hag had been in residence near Leicester long before the Danes occupied her part of Mercia, and that she was the Danaan Goddess Anu before she was Agnes. In Christian times she became a nun and there is a picture of her wearing nun’s habit in the vestry of the Swithland Church. She is the Blue Hag celebrated in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Comus as sucking children’s blood by night disguised as a scritch-owl. The Irish Hag of Beare also became a nun; it was easy to Christianize a Death-goddess because her face was already veiled. In Chapter Three I mentioned that Beli was reckoned as the son of Danu; and the identity of Ana and Danu is made quite clearly in a pedigree in Jesus College Manuscript 20, supposed to be of the thirteenth century, where Beli the Great is a son of Anna, absurdly said to be a daughter of the Emperor of Rome. Elsewhere, the pedigree of Prince Owen, son of Howel the Good, is traced back to Aballac filius Amalechi qui fuit Beli Magni filius, et Anna mater ejus.1 It is added, as absurdly, quam dicunt esse consobrinam Mariae Virginis, Matris Domini nostri Jhesu Christi.

  Ovid and Virgil knew their Goddess Anna Perenna to have been a sister of Belus, or Bel, who was a masculinization of the Sumerian Goddess Belili; so also the god Anu, of the Babylonian male trinity completed by Ea and Bel, was a masculinization of the Sumerian Goddess Anna-Nin, usually abbreviated to Nana.1 Bel’s wife was Belit, and Anu’s wife was Anatu. Ea’s wife, the third member of the Sumerian female trinity, was Dam-Kina; the first syllable of whose name shows her to have mothered the Danaans. Anna-Nin has further been identified by J. Przbuski in the Revue de l’Histoire des Religions (1933) with Ana-hita the Goddess of the Avesta, whom the Greeks called Anaitis and the Persians Ana-hid – the name that they gave to the planet Venus.

  Mr. E. M. Parr writes to me that An is Sumerian for ‘Heaven’ and that in his view the Goddess Athene was another Anna, namely Ath-enna, an inversion of Anatha, alias Neith of Libya; also that Ma is a shortening of the Sumerian Ama, ‘mother’, and that Ma-ri means ‘the fruitful mother’ from rim, ‘to bear a child’. Mari was the name of the goddess on whose account the Egyptians of 1000 BC called Cyprus ‘Ay-mari’, and who ruled at Mari on the Euphrates (a city sacked by Hammurabi in 1800 BC) and at Amari in Minoan Crete. So Ma-ri-enna is ‘the fruitful mother of Heaven’, alias Miriam, Marian of Mariandyne, the ‘leaping Myrrhine’ of Troy, and Mariamne: a word of triple power. But the basic word is Anna, which confers divinity on mere parturition and which also seems to form part of Arianrhod’s name. Arianrhod in fact may not be a debasement of Argentum and rota ‘silver, wheel’ but Ar-ri-an, ‘High fruitful mother’ who turns the wheel of heaven; if so, Arianrhod’s Cretan counterpart Ariadne would be Ar-ri-an-de, the de meaning barley, as in Demeter. The simple form Ana, or Anah, occurs as a Horite clan name in Genesis, XXXVI; though masculinized in two out of the three mentions of her, she is principally celebrated as the mother of Aholibamah (‘tabernacle of the high place’), the heiress whom Esau married on his arrival in the Seir pastures. (Ana’s alleged discovery of mules in the wilderness is due to a scribal error.) James Joyce playfully celebrates Anna’s universality in his An
na Livia Plurabelle. And indeed if one needs a single, simple, inclusive name for the Great Goddess, Anna is the best choice. To Christian mystics she is ‘God’s Grandmother’.

  The next letter, Fearn, explains Perenna as a corruption of Fearina, the adjective formed from Fear or eär, Spring. In Latin the word has kept its Digamma and is written ver. From this it follows that Bran’s Greek name Phoroneus – of which we have already noted the variant forms Vron, Berng and Ephron – was a variation of Fearineus and that he was originally the Spirit of the Year in his lusty, though foredoomed, Spring aspect. The Latin form seems to have been Veranus; which would account for the plebeian family name Veranius; and for the verb vernare, ‘to renew oneself in Spring’, which is supposed to be irregularly formed from ver, veris, but may be an abbreviation of veranare.

  ANNA FEARINA

  ‘Queen of the Spring’

  The next letter is Saille. We have seen that Saille is connected in the Boibel-Loth with Salmoneus, Salmaah and Salmon, and this suggests that the corresponding word in the charm is Salmone, another title of the Goddess. So:

  There were several places named after her in the Eastern Mediterranean including Cape Salmone in Crete, the city of Salmone in Elis, and Salmone, a village near Lusi. The title is apparently compounded of Salma and Onë as in Hesi-onë. Hesionë is said to mean ‘Lady of Asia’, and the meaning of Salma can be deduced from its occurrence in geographical names. It is an Aegean word of extraordinarily wide distribution and seems always to be connected with the notion of easterliness.1 Salma was a tribe in Southern Judaea living east of the Minoan colony of Gaza; also a station in Central Arabia on the caravan route from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Salmalassus was a station in Lesser Armenia on the caravan route from Trebizond to the Far East; Salmydessus was the most easterly city of Thrace, fronting the Black Sea; Salmone was the most easterly cape of Crete; Salamis the most easterly city of Cyprus; the island of Salamis lay east of the Cretan city of Corinth, and the mountain sacred to Salamanes (in Assyrian Salmanu) lay east of the great river-plain behind Antioch. As has already been pointed out Salma became a divine name in Palestine and Solomon, Salmon and Absalom are all variants of it. Salma was the deity to whom the hill of Jerusalem was originally sacred; the place is mentioned in the Egyptian Tell Amarna letters (1370 BC) as Uru-Salim, and in Assyrian monuments as Ur-Salimu. In 1400 BC it was held by a chieftain with the Semite name of Abd-Khiba, a vassal of Egypt, who like Melchizedek of Salem – Uru-Salim? – claimed to rule neither by father-right nor mother-right, but by the will of the God. Professor Sayce translates Uru-Salim as ‘City of the God Salim’. Josephus records that the first name of the city was Solyma. Salma, or Salim, was evidently the Semite god of the rising or renewed sun; Salmaone was the Aegean goddess from whom he took his titles, as did Salmoneus the Aeolian who opposed the later Achaean invaders and insisted on inducing thunder by rattling a brazen chariot – thereby infringing the prerogative of Olympian Zeus. But it is probable that Salma took his title as the demi-god of the renewed Sun from his Moon-bride Circe, or Belili, the Willow Mother, Sal-Ma, in whose honour willow-branches were waved at this season, and that the meaning of easterliness is a secondary one.