The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  The white bull with his gilded horns

  Opens the year.

  At the same time the tail of the Lion entered the Virgin’s place at the Summer solstice – hence apparently the Goddess’s subsequent title of ‘Oura’, the Lion’s Tail – and gradually the Lion’s body followed, after which for a time she became leonine with a Virgin’s head only. Similarly the Water-carrier succeeded the Fish at the Winter solstice – and provided the water to float the Spirit of the Year’s cradle ark.

  About 1800 BC the Bull was itself pushed out of the Spring House by the Ram. This may account for the refurbishing of the Zodiac myth in honour of Gilgamesh, a shepherd king of this period; he was the Ram who destroyed the Bull. The Crab similarly succeeded the Lion at the Summer solstice; so the Love-goddess became a marine deity with temples by the sea-shore. The He-goat also succeeded the Water-carrier at the Winter solstice; so the Spirit of the New Year was born of a She-goat. The Egyptian Greeks then called the Ram the ‘Golden Fleece’ and recast the Zodiac story as the voyage of the Argonauts.

  The disadvantage of the Zodiac is, indeed, its failure to be a perpetual calendar like the Beth-Luis-Nion tree-sequence which makes no attempt to relate the equinoxes and the solstices to the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. Perhaps the original Zodiac myth was based on the Roebuck story which is associated with a tree-sequence in the Song of Amergin; a supposed scientific improvement on it because a thirteen-month year with the equinox and solstice stations falling at irregular intervals is less easy to handle than a twelve-month year with exactly three months between each of the four stations. At any rate, the archetype of Gilgamesh the Zodiac hero was ‘Tammuz’, a tree-cult hero of many changes; and the thirteen-month tree-calendar seems more primitive than the twelve-month one.1 Certainly the story is more coherent than those of Gilgamesh or Jason, pure myth uncombined with history.

  It so happens that the tree-alphabet, with the Twins combined in a single sign, does coincide with the Zodiac as it stands at present, with the Fishes in the House of the Spring Equinox. (See the figure above.)

  But we have not yet answered the question: why are the Fates credited by Hyginus with the invention of the letters F and H?

  Hyginus’s attribution to Palamedes of the invention of the disc is a helpful clue, if Professor O. Richter is right in suggesting that the late Cyprian female figurines which hold discs of the same proportionate size as the Phaestos disc (seven inches in diameter) anticipate Athene and her aegis. We know from the legend of the infant Erichthonius that the aegis was a goat-skin bag, converted into a shield by a circular stiffening. Was it a bag-cover for a sacred disc, like the crane-bag which contained the Pelasgian letters of Palamedes’s Pelasgian alphabet, and with the warning Gorgon-mask similarly placed at the mouth? If so, it seems probable that the concealed disc was engraved spirally with her own Holy and Ineffable Name as the Libyao-Pelasgian Goddess of Wisdom; and if this Name was spelt in letters, not hieroglyphs, it may have been either the five-letter IEUOA, or the seven-letter JIEUOAŌ, formed by doubling the first and last letters of IEUOA. Or, since she was the triple Moon-goddess, namely the Three Fates who invented the five vowels, together with F and H, it may have been a nine-letter form JIEHUOV(F)AŌ, composed to contain not only the seven-letter Name but also the two consonants, representing the first and last days of her week, which revealed her as Wisdom, hewer-out of the Seven Pillars. If it was JIEHUOVAŌ, Simonides (or more likely his predecessor Pythagoras) showed little inventiveness in stabilizing the eight-letter form JEHUOVAŌ in honour of the Immortal Sun-god Apollo, by the omission of I, the death-vowel, while retaining Y, the semi-vowel of generation.

  1 Pausanias had evidently come at the wrong time of year for in the mayfly season trout do utter a sort of dry squeak, when they throw themselves ecstatically out of the water and feel the air on their gills. The Irish legend of ‘singing trout’ apparently refers to an erotic Spring dance, in the White Goddess’s honour, of fish nymphs who mimicked the leaping, squeaking trout: for the Irish princess Dechtire conceived her son Cuchulain, a reincarnation of the God Lugh, as the result of swallowing a mayfly, and he was able to swim like a trout as soon as born. Cuchulain’s Greek counterpart was Euphemus (‘well-spoken’) the famous swimmer, son of the Moon-Goddess Europë, who was born by the Cephissus river in Phocis but had a hero-shrine at Taenarus, the main Peloponnesian entrance to the Underworld. Euphemus’s way of swimming was to leap out of the water like a fish and skim from wave to wave; and in Classical times Poseidon, God of Fishes, claimed to be his father.

  1 This is queer. If it stands for Abimelech son of Amalek the son of Baal, and of Anatha, it commemorates a tradition that the family were formerly lords of Canaanite Shechem. When the Irsraelite tribe of Ephraim settled in Shechem, a city which the Song of Deborah shows to have originally belonged to the tribe of Amalek, a treaty marriage was celebrated between the Ephraimite Chieftain Gideon, who thereupon took the name Jerubbaal (‘Let Baal strive’), and the local heiress, presumably a priestess of the Lion-Goddess Anatha. Her son succeeded to the throne by mother-right after a massacre of his rivals and took the Canaanite title of Abimelech; establishing his position with the help of his mother’s kinsmen and the god Baalberith.

  1 At the beginning of Chapter Eleven I described Attis son of Nana as the Phrygian Adonis; and at the beginning of Chapter Eighteen mentioned that Nana conceived him virginally as the result of swallowing either a ripe almond or else a pomegranate seed. The mythological distinction is important. The pomegranate was sacred to Attis as Adonis-Tammuz-Dionysus-Rimmon, and at Jerusalem, as has been shown, the pomegranate cult was assimilated to that of Jehovah. But the almond was also, it seems, sacred to Attis as Nabu -Mercury-Hermes-Thoth, whose cult was also assimilated to that of Jehovah; which explains the myth recorded by Euhemerus, the Sicilian sceptic, that Hermes so far from ordaining the courses of the stars was merely instructed in astronomy by Aphrodite – that is to say by his mother Nana who gave her name to the planet Venus. Thus Nana, as mother of Jehovah in two of his characters can be claimed as the paternal, as well as the maternal, grandmother of Jehovah’s Only Begotten Son.

  1 The complementary Aegean word to Salma seems to have been Tar, meaning the west, or the dying sun. Tartessus on the Atlantic was the most westerly Aegean trading station, as Salmydessus the most easterly. Tarraco was the port on the extreme west of the Mediterranean, and Tarrha the chief port of western Crete. The reduplication tar-tar, meaning ‘the far, far west, has evidently given Tartara, the land of the dead, its name. For though Homer in the Iliad places Tartara ‘as far below earth as Heaven is above it’, Hesiod makes it the abode of Cronos and the Titans, whom we know to have gone west after their defeat by Zeus. Taranis was a Gaulish deity mentioned by Lucan as being served by even more terrible rites than was Scythian Diana, meaning the Taurian Artemis, who loved human sacrifice. Though the Romans identified Taranis with Jupiter she was at first probably a Death-Goddess, namely Tar-Anis, Annis of the West.

  1 The Anglo-Saxon grounding of English prevents the use of the Classical dactyl as the basic metrical foot. The dactylic or anapaestic poems attempted in the early and middle nineteenth century by Byron, Moore, Hood, Browning and others read over-exuberantly and even vulgarly; though school children enjoy them. What has gradually evolved as the characteristic English metre is a compromise between the iambic – borrowed from French and Italian, ultimately from the Greek – and the stress rhythm of Anglo-Saxon, based on the pull of the oar. Shakespeare’s gradual modification of the ten-foot iambic line that he took over from Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey is illuminating: The first lines of King John run:

  KING JOHN: Now say, Chatillon, what would France with us?

  CHATILLON: Thus, after greeting, speaks the King of France,

  In my behaviour, to the majesty,

  The borrowed majesty of England here….

  Fifteen years later, in the Tempest, after the opening scene which is almost wholly prose Miranda addres
ses Prospero:

  If by your art, my dearest father, you have

  Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them!

  The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch

  But that the sea, mounting to the welkin’s cheek

  Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered….

  It has been suggested that Shakespeare was consciously working forward to a rhythmic prose. This seems to me a misreading of his intentions: after disruptive variations on the iambic ten-syllabled norm he always returned to it as a reminder that he was still writing verse; and could never have done otherwise. Here, for example, Miranda, after this first outburst of horror, finishes her speech with metrical sobriety.

  1 That the Osirian year originally consisted of thirteen twenty-eight day months, with one day over, is suggested by the legendary length of Osiris’s reign, namely twenty-eight years – years in mythology often stand for days, and days for years – and by the number of pieces into which he was torn by Set, namely thirteen apart from his phallus which stood for the extra day. When Isis reassembled the pieces, the phallus had disappeared, eaten by a letos-flsh. This accounts for the priestly fish-taboo in Egypt, relaxed only one day in the year.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  THE TRIPLE MUSE

  Why do poets invoke the Muse?

  Milton in the opening lines of Paradise Lost briefly summarizes the Classical tradition, and states his intention, as a Christian, of transcending it:

  ‘Sing, heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top

  Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

  That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed

  In the beginning horn the Heav’ns and Earth

  Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion hill

  Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d

  Fast by the oracle of God: I thence

  Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song

  That with no middle flight intends to soar

  Above th’Aonian mount, while it pursues

  Things unattempted yet in prose or rhime.

  The Aonian Mount is Mount Helicon in Boeotia, a mountain a few miles to the east of Parnassus, and known in Classical times as ‘the seat of the Muses’. The adjective ‘Aonian’ is a reminiscence of a memorable line from Virgil’s Georgics:

  Aonio rediens deducam vertice Musas

  which is spoken by Apollo, the God of poetry, who by Virgil’s time was also recognized as the Sun-god. The line means ‘On my return I shall lead the Muses down from the top of Mount Helicon’. Apollo is referring to the transplanting of the worship of the Muses from Ascra, a town on a ridge of Helicon, to Delphi, on Mount Parnassus, a place which had become sacred to himself. On Helicon rose the spring named Hippocrene, ‘The Horse Well’, which was horse-shoe shaped. The legend was that it had been struck by the hoof of the horse Pegasus, whose name means ‘of the springs of water’. Poets were said to drink of Hippocrene for inspiration. Hence John Skelton’s lines (Against Garnesche):

  I gave him of the sugryd welle

  Of Eliconys waters crystallyne.

  But it may be supposed that Hippocrene and Aganippe were originally struck by the moon-shaped hoof of Leucippe (‘White Mare’), the Mare-headed Mother herself, and that the story of how Bellerophon son of Poseidon mastered Pegasus and then destroyed the triple-shaped Chimaera is really the story of an Achaean capture of the Goddess’s shrine: Pegasus, in fact, was originally called Aganippe. Aganos is a Homeric adjective applied to the shafts of Artemis and Apollo, meaning ‘giving a merciful death’; so Aganippe would mean: ‘The Mare who destroys mercifully.’ This supposition is strengthened by the Greek legend of the pursuit of Demeter, the Barley Mother, by the Achaean god Poseidon. Demeter, to escape his attentions, disguised herself as a mare and concealed herself among the horses of Oncios the Arcadian, but Poseidon became a stallion and covered her; her anger at this outrage was said to account for her statue at Onceum, called Demeter Erinnys – the Fury.

  Demeter as a Mare-goddess was widely worshipped under the name of Epona, or ‘the Three Eponae’, among the Gallic Celts, and there is a strange account in Giraldus Cambrensis’s Topography of Ireland which shows that relics of the same cult survived in Ireland until the twelfth century. It concerns the crowning of an Irish petty-king at Tyrconnell, a preliminary to which was his symbolic rebirth from a white mare. He crawled naked towards her on all fours as if he were her foal; she was then slaughtered, and her pieces boiled in a cauldron. He himself entered the cauldron and began sucking up the broth and eating the flesh. Afterwards he stood on an inauguration stone, was presented with a straight white wand, and turned about three times from left to right, and then three times from right to left – ‘in honour of the Trinity’. Originally no doubt in honour of the Triple White Goddess.

  The horse, or pony, has been a sacred animal in Britain from prehistoric times, not merely since the Bronze Age introduction of the stronger Asiatic breed. The only human figure represented in what survives of British Old Stone Age art is a man wearing a horse-mask, carved in bone, found in the Derbyshire Pin-hole Cave; a remote ancestor of the hobbyhorse mummers in the English ‘Christmas play’. The Saxons and Danes venerated the horse as much as did their Celtic predecessors, and the taboo on eating horse-flesh survives in Britain as a strong physical repugnance, despite attempts made during World War II to popularize hippophagism; but among the Bronze Age British the taboo must have been lifted at an annual October horse-feast, as among the Latins. In mediaeval Denmark the ecstatic three-day horse-feast, banned by the Church, survived among the heathenish serf-class; a circumstantial description is given by Johannes Jensen in his Fall of the King. He mentions that the priest first sprinkled bowls of the horse’s blood towards the South and East – which explains the horse as an incarnation of the Spirit of the solar year, son of the Mare-goddess.

  In the Romance of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed the Goddess appears as Rhiannon mother of Pryderi. Rhiannon is a corruption of Rigantona (‘Great Queen’) and Dyfed consisted of most of Carmarthen and the whole of Pembrokeshire and included St. David’s; its central point was called ‘The Dark Gate’, an entrance to the Underworld. When Pwyll (‘Prudence’) first sees Rhiannon and falls in love with her, he pursues her on his fastest horse but cannot overtake her; evidently in the original story she took the form of a white mare. When at last she consents to be overtaken, and marries him twelve months later, she bears him a son afterwards called Pryderi (‘Anxiety’) who disappears at birth; and her maids falsely accuse her of having devoured him, smearing her face with the blood of puppies. As a penance she is ordered to stand at a horse-block outside Pwyll’s palace, like a mare, ready to carry guests on her back.1 The life of her son Pryderi is closely connected with a magical foal which has been rescued from a harpy; all the previous foals of the same mare have been snatched off on May Eve and never seen again. Pryderi, a Divine Child of the sort that is taken away from its mother – like Llew Llaw, or Zeus, or Romulus – is later, as usual, given a name and arms by her, mounts the magical horse and eventually becomes a Lord of the Dead. Rhiannon is thus seen to be a Mare-goddess, but she is also a Muse-goddess, for the sirens that appear in the Triads, and also in the Romance of Branwen, singing with wonderful sweetness are called ‘The Birds of Rhiannon’. The story about the puppies recalls the Roman habit of sacrificing red puppies in the Spring to avert the baleful influence of the Dog-star on their grain; the sacrifice was really to the Barley-mother who had the Dog-star as her attendant. Rhiannon, in fact, is the Mare-Demeter, a successor of the Sow-Demeter Cerridwen. That the Mare-Demeter devoured children, like the Sow-Demeter, is proved by the myth of Leucippe (‘White Mare’) the Orchomenan, who with her two sisters ran wild and devoured her son Hippasus (‘foal’); and by the myth recorded by Pausanias, that when Rhea gave birth to Poseidon she offered her lover Cronos a foal to eat instead of the child, whom she gave secretly into the charge of the shepherds of Arcadian Arne.

  Mount Helicon wa
s not the earliest seat of the Muse Goddesses, as their title ‘The Pierians’ shows; the word Muse is now generally derived from the root mont, meaning a mountain. Their worship had been brought there in the Heroic Age during a migration of the Boeotian people from Mount Pieria in Northern Thessaly. But to make the transplanted Muses feel at home on Helicon, and so preserve the old magic, the Boeotians named the geographical features of the mountain – the springs, the peaks and grottoes – after the corresponding features of Pieria. The Muses were at this time three in number, an indivisible Trinity, as the mediaeval Catholics recognized when they built the church of their own Holy Trinity on the site of the deserted shrine of the Heliconian Muses. The appropriate names of the three Persons were Meditation, Memory and Song. The worship of the Muses on Helicon (and presumably also in Pieria) was concerned with incantatory cursing and incantatory blessing; Helicon was famous for the medicinal herbs which supplemented the incantations – especially for the nine-leaved black hellebore used by Melampus at Lusi as a cure for the Daughters of Proetus, which could either cause or cure insanity and which has a stimulative action on the heart like digitalis (fox-glove). It was famous also for the erotic fertility dances about a stone herm at Thespiae, a town at its foot, in which the women-votaries of the Muses took part. Spenser addresses the Muses as ‘Virgins of Helicon’; he might equally have called them ‘witches’, for the witches of his day worshipped the same White Goddess – in Macbeth called Hecate – performed the same fertility dances on their Sabbaths, and were similarly gifted in incantatory magic and knowledge of herbs.