The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  ANNA FEARINA SALMAONA

  ‘Queen of Spring, Mother of the Willow’

  Straif is the next letter. A main verb is called for, to begin the second flight of letters. Strebloein, or strabloein, formed from the verbal root streph, ‘to twist’, means ‘to reeve with a windlass, to wrench, dislocate, put on the rack’, and gives Straif, the blackthorn, its necessarily cruel connotation.

  Next comes Huath. The u merely shows that the H is aspirated. We have no clue to the name of the person, or persons, whom the Goddess racks, presumably on Duir, the oak, but my guess is the Athaneatids, or Hathaneatids, members of one of the four original royal clans of Arcadia. It is likely that this word, like athanatoi, means ‘the not-mortal ones’, the Greek word thnētos (‘mortal’) being a shortened form of thaneãtos. The clan from which the sacred king, the victim of the story that is unfolding, was chosen would naturally be called ‘The Immortals’, because the king alone could win immortality by his sufferings, the lesser members of the nation being doomed to become twittering ghosts in Hell.

  STRABLOE [H]ATHANEATIDAS URA

  For Ura is the next letter of the alphabet, the midsummer letter, the letter of Venus Urania, the most violent aspect of the Triple Goddess. As has already been pointed out, Ura means Summer; it also means the tail of a lion or bear, expressive of its fury, and the word ouraios (‘uraeus’), the royal serpent of Egypt, is formed from the same root. ‘Uranus’, the father of the Titans according to Greek Classical mythology, is likely to have originally been their Mother – Ura-ana, Queen Ura. But we should not look for only one or even two meanings of the syllable ur, the more numerous the poetic meanings that could be concentrated in a sacred name, the greater was its power. The authors of the Irish Hearings of the Scholars connected the midsummer-letter Ur with ur, ‘earth’; and we are reminded that this is the root found in the Latin words area, ‘a plot of earth’, arvum, ‘a ploughed field’, and urvare, which means ‘to drive a plough ceremonially around the proposed site of a city’ – a sense also found in the Homeric Greek ouron, ‘a boundary marked by the plough’. Grammarians assume a primitive Greek word ēra, ‘earth’ connected with this group of words; which suggests that Erana, or Arana, or Urana, was the Earth-goddess whose favour had to be asked when fields were ploughed or cities (urves or urbes) founded, and marriage with whose local representative gave a chieftain the right to rule in her lands. If this is so, the uraeus in the royal head-dress stood both for the great sea-serpent that girdled the Earth and for the Goddess’s spotted oracular snakes. But her name could also carry three or four further meanings. It might stand for ‘Mountain-goddess’ (from the Homeric Greek ouros, a mountain) which would point her identity with Mousa, the Muse, a title of the same meaning; and for ‘Queen of the Winds’ (from the Homeric Greek ouros, a wind) which would explain the uraeus as symbolizing her power over the winds, all winds being snake-tailed and housed in a mountain-cave. Urana then is a multiple title: Mother Earth, Our Lady of Summer, Mountain Goddess, Queen of the Winds, Goddess of the Lion’s Tail. It might equally mean ‘Guardian Queen’ (ouros, ‘a guardian’); or, with reference to her aspect as a Moon-cow, ‘Ruler of Wild Oxen’ (ourus, Latin urus, ‘a wild ox’), like the Irish Goddess Buana. And we must not overlook the Sanscrit word varunas, meaning ‘the night firmament’, from the root var, ‘to cover’, from which Varuna, the third member of the Aryan Trinity, took his name. When the first wave of Achaeans entered Greece and were forced under the sovereignty of the Triple-goddess Ana, or De-Ana, or Ath-Ana, or Di-Ana, or Ur-Ana, who ruled the world of day as well as the world of night, varunas lost its specialized sense, was changed from varun-to uran-, in her honour, and came to mean the sky in general. Hence Ana’s classical title Urania, ‘The Heavenly One’.

  STRABLOE ATHANEATIDAS URA DRUEI

  ‘Ura, reeve the Immortal ones to your oak tree’

  The next word Tinne, or Tann, can be expanded to Tanaous ‘stretched’, in memory of Hesiod’s derivation of the word Titan from titainein, ‘to stretch’. He says that the Titans were so called because they stretched out their hands: but this explanation is perhaps intended to disguise the truth, that the Titans were men stretched, or racked, on the wheel, like Ixion. Frazer noted that the holly-oak, which is the tree of Tinne, grows nobly at Lusi, and that the valley of the Styx is full of the white poplar, Eadha, the tree sacred to Hercules.

  The letter Coll completes the second flight of the alphabet. Kolabreusthai or kolabrizein is to dance a wild taunting Thracian dance, the kolabros, the sort that the Goddess Kali dances on the skulls of her foes:

  ‘Stretched out, ready to taunt them in your wild dance’

  The dance was evidently concerned with pigs, since kolabros also meant a young pig. In ancient Irish poetry the skulls of men freshly killed were called ‘the mast of the Morrigan’, that is to say of the Fate Goddess Anna in the guise of a sow. As will be noted, a young pig figures in the dance of the nine moon-women in the Old Stone Age cave-painting at Cogul.

  The next words are Quert, also spelt Kirt, Eadha, and Muin. My guess is:

  KIRKOTOKOUS ATHROIZE TE MANI

  ‘And gather the Children of Circe together to the Moon’

  Circe, ‘daughter of Hecate’ was the Goddess of Aeaea (‘wailing’), a sepulchral island in the Northern Adriatic. Her name means ‘she-falcon’, the falcon being a bird of omen, and is also connected with circos, a circle, from the circling of falcons and from the use of the magic circle in enchantment; the word is onomatopoeic, the cry of the falcon being ‘circ-circ’. She was said to turn men into swine, lions and wolves, and the Children of Circe are probably women dressed as sows participating in a full-moon festival held in her honour and in that of Dionysus. Herodotus describes this ritual as common to Greek and Egyptian practice. At the Persian orgies of Mithras, which had a common origin with those of Demeter and in which a bull was sacrificed and eaten raw, the men celebrants were called Leontes (lions) and the women celebrants Hyaenae (sows). Possibly Lion-men also took part in this kolabros as Children of Circe.

  The last letters are Gort – Ngetal – Ra – dho. Here we are on very insecure ground. The only clue to Idho is that the Hebrew form of the word is iod, and the Cadmean is iota; and that the one Greek word beginning with gort is Gortys, the name of the reputed founder of Gortys, a city in Southern Arcadia, which stands on a tributary of the Alpheus, the Gortynios (otherwise called the Lusios). Gortyna, the name of a famous town in Crete, may be the word needed, and represent some title of the Goddess. But perhaps the abbreviation Gort should be Gorp. GorgŌpa, ‘fearful-faced’, an epithet of the Death Goddess Athene, makes good sense. To preserve the metre the word must be spelt Grogopa, as kirkos is often spelt krikos.

  ‘As the fearful-faced Goddess of Destiny you will make a snarling noise with your chops’

  Iotes (Aeolic Iotãs) is a Homeric word meaning Divine Will or Behest; it may have supplied this personification of the Goddess of Destiny, like Anagke (Necessity) the first syllable of which is probably Ana or Anan, and like Themis (Law), both of which are likewise feminine in gender. Euripides calls Anagke the most powerful of all deities, and it was from Themis that Zeus derived his juridical authority: according to Homer, Themis was the mother of the Fates and convened the assemblies of the Olympians. Ovid’s identification of her with Anna has just been mentioned.

  So:

  ‘White Barley Goddess, Deliveress from guilt, Lady of the Nine Heights, Queen of Spring, Mother of the Willow,

  ‘Ura, reeve the Immortal Ones stretched out to your oak, taunt them in your wild dance,

  ‘And gather the Children of Circe under the Moon; as the fearful-faced Goddess of Destiny you will make a snarling noise with your chops.’

  The Goddess may have appeared as the Triple-headed Bitch, Hecuba or Hecate, on this occasion, for ruzein was used mostly of dogs; but since Cerridwen is usually in at the death of the Sun-hero, perhaps the noise intended was the whining grunt of the corpse-eating Old Sow of
Maenawr Penardd, to whom ‘skulls are mast’.

  No Greek verse has survived of an early enough date to act as a check on the metre and verbal forms of this hypothetic song. But at least it built itself up logically against most of my original expectations of how it would turn out, so that I cannot regard it as of my own composition. The supersession of dactylic words ( – ˘ ) by anapaestic ( ˘˘– ) and iambic ( ˘– ) in the second half of the song happened naturally without my noticing its significance. The dactylic and trochaic feet in Greece originally expressed praise and blessing; but the anapaestic and iambic were originally confined to satires and curses; as the spondaic ( – – ) foot was to funerary chants.1 (The use of the iambic was extended to tragedy because this was concerned with the working out of a divine curse; and to comedy because it was satiric in intention.) This song suggests a dance by twelve persons around a circle of twelve standing stones – there are twelve beats in each half of it – with each alternate beat marked by a dancer striking the stone nearest him with the flat of his hand or perhaps a pig’s bladder. In the middle of the circle the sacred king is corded to the lopped oak-tree in the five-fold bond of willow thongs, waiting for his bloody end.

  According to some mythographers there were twelve Titans, male and female; and this canonical number was preserved in the number of the Olympian gods and goddesses who superseded them. Herodotus records that the Pelasgians did not worship gods and consented to the Olympian system only at the express command of the Dodona oracle – I suppose when the oracle, once the mouthpiece of the Pelopian woodland goddess Dionë, had been captured by the Achaeans. He is likely to be right: they worshipped only a Goddess and her semi-divine son of the king. In Arcadia, he seems to have worn antlers. A late Minoan gem in my possession – a banded white carnelian pendant – shows a roebuck crouched beside a wood, in the attitude heraldically called regardant. The ten tines of his antlers refer perhaps to the tenth month, M, the month of the vintage moon; a new moon rides above him. That these Titans figure in Greek myth as children of Uranus may mean no more than that they were companions to the Sacred King, who took his title from the Uranian Goddess. The other Titans, who number seven, rule the sacred Week.

  If, as it has been suggested, Pythagoras was initiated into this alphabetic mystery by the Dactyls, it is possible that he derived from them his theory of the mystical connotations of number; and the possibility turns to probability when the initial letters of the charm are numbered from one to twenty:

  A – 1 D – 11

  B – 2 T – 12

  L – 3 C –19

  N – 4 Q – 14

  O – 5 E – 15

  F – 6 M – 16

  S – 7 G – 17

  Z – 8 Gn – 18

  H – 9 R – 19

  U – 10 I – 20

  In this table an even closer approximation to poetic truth is discovered than in the Irish bardic system of letter-numerals, given at the end of Chapter Sixteen, which is based on a different alphabetic order and denies any value either to H or U. Here, the dominant pentad of vowels hold the first and last places, as one would expect, also the fifth, the tenth (respectively ‘the grove of the senses’ and ‘perfection’ in the Pythagorean system), and the ecstatic fifteenth, the full-moon climax of the Song of Ascents at Jerusalem. The second, fourth, sixth and eighth places – even numbers are male in the Pythagorean system, odd are female – are held by B (inception), N (flood), F (fire), Z (angry passion), a sequence suggesting a rising tide of male lust which, after being checked by H, nine, the letter of pre-marital chastity enforced by the Nine-fold Goddess, finds its consummation at U, 10, where male and female principles unite. The intermediate letters are L, 3, the letter of torch-lit regeneration presided over by three-torched Hecate; 0, 5, the letter of initiation into the mysteries of love; S, 7, the letter of female enchantment (‘Athene’ in the Pythagorean system). The eleventh and twelfth places are held respectively by D and T, the twin leaders of the company of twelve (in the Irish system the order is reversed); the thirteenth by C, the letter of the Goddess’s sacrosanct swineherd magicians; and the nineteenth by R, the Death letter, appropriate to the close of the nineteen-year cycle. The numerical values of the remaining letters work out with equal facility. Since the charm taught by the Dactyls was an orgiastic one it appropriately contained twenty elements – as it were the fingers of the woman’s hands and those of her lover’s; but Pythagoras was content to speculate on the tetractys of his own ten fingers alone.

  To sum up. This twenty-word Greek charm provided the letter-names of an alphabet which was used in late Minoan Arcadia until the second Achaean invasion, by descendants of the original invaders who had gone over to the worship of the White Goddess. Their cult involved the use of an artificial thirteen-month solar calendar, each month represented by a different tree, which had been invented independently of the alphabet and was in widespread use. Some of its seasonable elements can be shown to date from pre-dynastic times, and though the trees in the Irish version, the only one that survives complete, suggest a Pontine or Paphlagonian origin the calendar may have originated in the Aegean or Phoenicia or Libya with a somewhat different canon of trees. Nor is it likely that the alphabet arrived in Britain at the same time as the calendar. The calendar may have been introduced in the late third millennium BC by the New Stone Age people, who were in close touch with Aegean civilization, along with agriculture, apiculture, the maze-dance and other cultural benefits. The alphabet seems to have been introduced late in the second millennium BC by refugees from Greece.

  *

  Since there were always twelve stones in the gilgal, or stone-circle, used for sacrificial purposes, the next jaunt is to chase the White Roebuck speculatively around the twelve houses of the Zodiac.

  When and where the Zodiac originated is not known, but it is believed to have gradually evolved in Babylonia from the twelve incidents in the life-story of the hero Gilgamesh – his killing of the Bull, his love-passage with the Virgin, his adventures with two Scorpion-men (the Scales later took the place of one of these) and the Deluge story (corresponding with the Water Carrier). Calendar tablets of the seventh century BC bear this out, but the Epic of Gilgamesh is not a really ancient one; Gilgamesh is thought to have been a Hyksos (Kassite) invader of Babylonia in the eighteenth century BC to whom the story of an earlier hero was transferred, a Tammuz of the familiar sort already connected with the Zodiac.

  The original Zodiac, to judge from the out-of-date astronomical data quoted in a poem by Aratus, a Hellenistic Greek, was current in the late third millennium BC. But it is likely to have been first fixed at a time when the Sun rose in the Twins at the Spring equinox – the Shepherds’ festival; in the Virgin who was generally identified with Ishtar, the Love-goddess, at the Summer solstice; in the Archer, identified with Nergal (Mars) and later with Cheiron the Centaur, at the Autumn equinox, the traditional season of the chase; in the resurrective Fish at the Winter solstice, the time of most rain. (It will be recalled that the solar hero Llew Llaw’s transformations begin with a Fish at the Winter solstice.)

  The Zodiac signs were borrowed by the Egyptians at least as early as the sixteenth century BC, with certain alterations – Scarab for Crab, Serpent for Scorpion, Mirror for He-goat, etc., – but by that time the phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes had already spoilt the original story. About every 2000 years the Sun rises in an earlier sign; so in 3800 BC the Bull began to push the Twins out of the House of the Spring equinox, and initiated a period recalled by Virgil in his account of the Birth of Man: