The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Or a pack of tall, white Gabriel Hounds with red ears and pink noses may come streaming into view in pursuit of an unbaptised soul. Despite their spectral appearance and their sinister reputation in British myth, these animals are decently zoölogical. They are the ancient Egyptian hunting dogs, pictured in tomb paintings, which though extinct in Egypt are still bred in the Island of Ibiza, where they were originally brought by Carthaginian colonists. The breed may also have been introduced into Britain towards the close of the second millennium BC along with the blue Egyptian beads found in Salisbury Plain burials. They are larger and faster than greyhounds and hunt by smell as well as by sight; when in view of game they make the same yelping noise that migrating wild geese – especially the barnacle-goose – make when they fly far overhead at night: a sound taken in the North and West of England as an omen of approaching death. Anubis, the embalmer-god who conveyed the soul of Osiris to the Underworld, was originally a prowling jackal but came to be pictured as a noble-hearted hunting dog, only his bushy tail remaining as evidence of his jackal days.

  Or the visitant may be a Cherub. The Cherub mentioned in the first chapter of Ezekiel is also clearly a beast of the calendar sort. It has four parts which represent the ‘four New Years’ of Jewish tradition: Lion for Spring; Eagle for Summer; Man for Autumn, the principal New Year; and Ox for Winter, the Judaean ploughing season. This Cherub is identified by Ezekiel with a fiery wheel, which is as plainly the wheel of the solar year as the God whom it serves is plainly the Sun of Righteousness, an emanation of the Ancient of Days. Moreover, each Cherub – there are four of them – is a wheel of this God’s chariot and rolls straight forward, without deflexion. Ezekiel’s summary: ‘And their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel’ has become proverbial for its unintelligibility. But it makes simple calendar sense. Each wheel of God’s chariot is the annual cycle, or wheel, of the four seasons; and the chariot’s arrival inaugurated a cycle, or wheel, of four years. Every year, in fact, wheels within a four-year wheel from the beginning to he end of time: and the Eternal Charioteer is the God of Israel. By making the Cherub-wheels themselves provide the motive power of the chariot, Ezekiel avoided having to put an angelic horse between the shafts: he remembered that horse-drawn votive chariots set up by King Manasseh in the Temple of Jerusalem had been removed as idolatrous by Good King Josiah. But Ezekiel’s Eagle should really be a Ram or a Goat, and his Man a man-faced fiery Serpent; with eagle’s wings for each of the four beasts. His reasons for this misrepresentation will appear in my last chapter.

  The colour of these bright cloud-borne Cherubim was Apollonian amber, like that of the Man whom they served. They might well be ministers of Hyperborean Apollo the Sun-god, whose sacred jewel was amber. What is more, each golden spoke of the wheel ended in the leg of a calf; and the golden calf was the sacred beast of the god who, according to King Jeroboam, had brought Israel out of Egypt, as it also was of the God Dionysus, the changing part of the unchanging Apollo.

  This apparent identification of Jehovah with Apollo seems to have alarmed the Pharisees, though they did not dare reject the vision. It is recorded that a student who recognized the meaning of hashmal (amber -‘hashmal’ is modern Hebrew for electricity; ‘electricity’ is derived from the Greek word for amber) and discussed it imprudently was blasted by lightning (Haggada, 13.B). For this reason, according to the Mishnah, the Ma’aseh Merkabah (‘Work of the Chariot’) might not be taught to anyone unless he were not only wise but able to deduce knowledge through wisdom (‘gnosis’) of his own, and no one else might be present during the teaching. And ‘he who speaks of the things which are before, behind, above and below, it were better that he had never been born’. On the whole it was considered safest to leave the Merkabah alone, especially as it was prophesied that ‘in the fullness of time Ezekiel will come again and unlock for Israel the chambers of the Merkabah.’ (Cant. Rabbah, I, 4.)

  Thus only a few known Rabbis taught the mystery and only to the most select of their pupils; among them Rabbi Johanan ben Zadkai, Rabbi Joshua (Vice-President of the Sanhedrin under Gamaliel), Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Nehunia. Rabbi Zera said that even chapter headings of the Merkabah must not be communicated except to a person who was the head of an academy and was cautious in temperament. Rabbi Ammi said the doctrine might be entrusted only to one who possessed all the five qualities enumerated in Isaiah, III, 3: the captain of fifty, the honourable man, the counsellor, the skilled craftsman, the eloquent orator. The belief grew that expositions of the Merkabah mystery would cause Jehovah to appear. ‘Rabbi Johanan ben Zadkai was riding along the road upon his ass, while his pupil Eleazar ben Arak walked behind him. Said Rabbi Eleazar: “Master, teach me about the Work of the Chariot.” Rabbi Johanan declined. Rabbi Eleazar said again: “Am I permitted to repeat in your presence one thing which you have already taught me?” Rabbi Johanan assented, but dismounted from his ass, wrapped himself in his gown and seated himself upon a stone under an olive-tree. He declared that it was unseemly that he should be riding while his pupil was discoursing on so awful a mystery, and while the Shekinah (‘the Brightness’) and the Malache ha-Shareth (‘the Angels-in-Waiting’) were accompanying them. Immediately Rabbi Eleazar began his exposition, fire came down from Heaven and encircled them and the whole field. The angels assembled to listen, as the sons of man assemble to witness the festivities of a marriage; and there was a singing in the terebinth-trees: “Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons and all deeps, fruitful trees and all cedars, praise ye the Lord!” To which an angel answered from the fire, saying: “This is the Work of the Chariot!” When Eleazar had finished, Rabbi Johanan stood up and kissed him on the head. He said: “Praised be the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, for He has given our father Abraham a wise son who knows how to discourse on the glory of our Father in Heaven.”’

  Rabbi Jose ha-Kohen and Rabbi Joshua had similar experiences. And once Rabbi Ben Azzai was sitting in meditation on the Scriptures when suddenly a flame encircled him. His pupils ran to Rabbi Akiba, who came up and said to Azzai: ‘Art thou studying the mysteries of the Merkabah?’ The mystery was not monopolized by the Jews. According to Macrobius, the oracle of Colophon, one of the twelve Ionian cities of Asia Minor, gave the nature of the transcendent God Iao as fourfold. In the Winter he was Hades, or Cronos; in the Spring, Zeus; in the Summer, Helios (the Sun); in the Autumn Iao, or Dionysus. This lore must have been part of the instruction, mentioned in Chapter Fifteen, that was given to Cyprian of Antioch on Mount Olympus by his seven mystagogues. Iao in the Orphic religion was also known as the four-eyed Phanes (from phaino, ‘I appear’) first-born of the Gods. In the Orphic fragment 63, he is described as having golden wings, and the heads of ram, bull, snake and lion. Bull’s heads were fastened to his side to denote his principal nature and he wore a great snake as a head-dress, which ‘resembled every sort of wild beast’.

  Here we can make a bold identification of the Cherub with the turning wheel that guards the Paradises of Celtic legend: for according to Genesis, III, 24, Cherubs were stationed at the East Gate of Eden. They were armed with ‘the whirling sword of Jehovah’ – the one with which (according to Isaiah, XXVII, 1) he killed the Dragon, as Marduk had killed Tiamat – to prevent anyone from entering. The paradise of Ezekiel’s tradition (Chapter XXXVIII, 13–16) is a well-watered garden at the base of a hill which heroes, such as the King of Tyre, occasionally visit. It glitters with precious stones and is a place of drum and pipe. We have seen that Gwion placed it in the valley of Hebron. The Seraphs, or ‘fiery serpents’, associated with the Cherubs in their guardian duties, are evidently another way of expressing the sacred spirals carved as a warning on the gate of the sacred enclosure; the Cherubs, because distinguished from them, are likely to have been swastikas, or fire-wheels.

  The King of Tyre in Ezekiel’s account is easily recognized as the Canopic Hercules, originally an Aegean sun-hero, who became Semitized as Melkarth the chief god of Tyre. The islet off
Tyre is thought to have been the chief station used by the Peoples of the Sea during the second millennium BC in their trade with Syria; as Pharos was in their trade with Egypt. Ezekiel, cognisant of the original closeness of the cults of Jehovah and Melkarth, declares that no further religious understanding is possible between Jerusalem and Tyre, as in the time of Solomon and Hiram. King Hiram of Tyre, like Solomon whom he equalled and even surpassed in wisdom, was a priest of Melkarth, and Jehovah now admits through the mouth of Ezekiel: ‘Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.’ However, he charges the present King of Tyre with having committed the sin of claiming to be a god, Melkarth as an Immortal, and the punishment for his presumption is death. This is an indirect warning to Ezekiel’s own King, Zedekiah of Judah, a descendant of Solomon, not to be seduced by the Tyrian into similarly presuming to be Jehovah. (Zedekiah did not listen to the warning and ‘the profane, wicked Prince’ died blind and in chains at Riblah, the capital of his Cushite foes. He was the last King of Judah.) So Ezekiel utters a lament for Melkarth that, like Adam, he has been ousted from the Paradise by the Cherub, despite his original holiness and wisdom, and must now be burned to ashes. This was, of course, no more than Melkarth’s destiny: in the Greek account he went to the apple-grove of the West – the Garden of the Hesperides – but had to obey the herald Copreus and return from its delights; and ended in ashes on Mount Oeta.

  The poetic connexion of the Cherub with the burning to death of Hercules-Melkarth is that the pyre was kindled by a Cherub, that is to say, by a whirling round of the swastika-shaped fire-wheel, attached to a drill. This method of making fire by the drilling of an oak-plank survived until the eighteenth century in the Scottish highlands, but only in the kindling of the Beltane need-fire, to which miraculous virtue was ascribed. Hawthorn, the wood of chastity, was often used for the drilling. Sir James Frazer describes the need-fire ceremony at length in The Golden Bough and shows that it originally culminated in the sacrifice of a man representing the Oak-god. In some Scottish parishes the victim was even called ‘Baal’, which was Melkarth’s usual title.

  So we see that Ezekiel is a master of ambivalent statement. He has made the fate of Hercules a symbol of the approaching destruction of Tyre by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon; in punishment for the vice of pride which since the city rose to commercial prosperity (‘the multitude of thy merchandize, the iniquity of thy traffic’) has corrupted its rulers.

  * Not all composite beasts are calendar beasts. The Sphinx, for instance, with her woman’s face, lion’s body and eagle’s wings is Ura or Urania the goddess, with dominion over air and earth, who delegates sovereignty to her royal son, the King; and the Assyrian winged bull with his man’s face is the Sphinx’s patriarchal counterpart. It is likely that an iconotropic misinterpretation of the Assyrian winged bull accounts for the curious details of King Nebuchadnezzar’s madness in the Book of Daniel:

  ‘Father, what is that?’

  ‘It is an old statue, my son, representing King Nebuchadnezzar who carried our ancestors away captive, more than three hundred years ago, because they had angered the Lord God. Afterwards, they say, he lost his reason for forty-nine months and wandered about like a brute beast in his beautiful palace gardens.’

  ‘Did he really look like that?’

  ‘No, my son. That is a symbolical statue, meaning that he partook of the nature of the creatures which compose its body and limbs.’

  ‘Then did he eat grass like a bull and flap his arms like wings, and dig things up with his nails, and stay out in the rain all night and never have his hair cut?’

  ‘God has even stranger ways of showing his displeasure, my son.’

  The Egyptian Sphinx became masculine like the Assyrian winged bull; the Pharaonic cult being patriarchal, though also matrilinear. But the Pelasgian Sphinx remained female. ‘Sphinx’ means ‘throttler’ and in Etruscan ceramic art she is usually portrayed as seizing men, or standing on their prostrate figures, because she was fully revealed only at the close of the king’s reign when she choked his breath. After her supersession as Ruler of the Year by Zeus or Apollo, this art-convention led to her being associated in Greece with disease and death and being described as a daughter of Typhon, whose breath was the unhealthy sirocco. Apollo’s claim to be ruler of the year was supported by the sphinxes on his throne at Amyclae, and so was Zeus’s by those on his throne at Olympia – read as a trophy of his conquest of Typhon. But Athene still wore them on her helmet, for she had once been the Sphinx herself.

  *

  A flock of bird-winged Sirens may alight in the circle. Having already ventured, in Chapter Twelve, to guess ‘what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among the women, though a puzzling question not beyond all conjecture’, I feel a poetic compulsion to answer the other question that Sir Thomas Browne linked with it: ‘What song the Sirens sang.’ The Sirens (‘Entanglers’) were a Triad – perhaps originally an Ennead, since Pausanias records that they once unsuccessfully competed with the Nine Muses – living on an island in the Ionian Sea. According to Plato they were the daughters of Phorcus (i.e. Phorcis, the Sow-Demeter); according to others, of Calliope or some other of the Muses. Ovid and Hyginus connect them with the Sicilian myth of Demeter and Persephone. Their names are variously given as ‘Persuader’, ‘Bright-face’ and ‘Bewitcher’; or ‘Virgin-face’, ‘Shrill-voice’ and ‘The Whitened One’. Their wings were perhaps owl-wings, since Hesychius mentions a variety of owl called ‘the Siren’, and since owls, according to Homer, lived in Calypso’s alder-girt isle of Ogygia along with the oracular sea-crows. In classical times they still had a temple dedicated to them near Surrentum.

  All this amounts to their having been a college of nine orgiastic moon-priestesses, attendants of an oracular island shrine. Their song, of nine stanzas, may he reconstructed without recourse to Samuel Daniel’s vigorous Ulysses and the Siren, on the model of similar songs in ancient Irish literature: for instance ‘The Sea God’s Address to Bran’ in The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, and ‘Mider’s Call to Befind’ in The Wooing of Etain. Both poems are slightly Christianized versions of an ancient theme, the voyage of the alder-and-crow hero Bran (Cronos) to his island Elysium. In the first poem the speaker must originally have been the Island Queen, not the Sea God; in the second Befind and Mider have clearly changed parts, the original invitation being from princess to hero, not contrariwise. The Homeric story of the Danaan Odysseus and the Sirens suggests that Odysseus (‘angry’ according to Homer) was a title of Cronos and referred to his face artificially coloured crimson with the dye of the sacred alder. The origin of the story that Odysseus stopped his ears with wax and refused the Sirens’ summons is probably that in the late thirteenth century BC a sacred king of Ithaca, Cronos’s representative, refused to die at the end of his term of office. This would explain why he killed all the suitors for his wife Penelope’s hand, after disguising himself in dirt and rags during the usual temporary abdication.

  THE SIRENS’ WELCOME TO CRONOS

  Cronos Odysseus, steer your boat

  Toward Silver Island whence we sing:

  Here you shall pass your days.

  Through a thick-growing alder-wood

  We clearly see, but are not seen,

  Hid in a golden haze.

  Our hair the hue of barley sheaf,

  Our eyes the hue of blackbird’s egg,

  Our cheeks like asphodel.

  Here the wild apple blossoms yet,

  Wrens in the silver branches play

  And prophesy you well.

  Here nothing ill or harsh is found.

  Cronos Odysseus, steer your boat

  Across these placid straits.

  With each of us in turn to lie

  Taking your pleasure on young grass

  That for your coming waits.

  No grief nor gloom, sickness nor death,

  Disturbs our long tranquillity;

  No treachery, no greed.

  Compared with t
his, what are the plains

  Of Elis, where you ruled as king?

  A wilderness indeed.

  A starry crown awaits your head,

  A hero feast is spread for you:

  Swineflesh, milk and mead.

  The Sirens are the Birds of Rhiannon who sang at Harlech in the myth of Bran.

  But if the visitant to the magic circle is the old Nightmare…What follows is a poem, of which I will give the prose rendering:

  If the visitant is the Nightmare, the poet will recognize her by the following signs. She will appear as a small mettlesome mare, not more than thirteen hands high, of the breed familiar from the Elgin marbles: cream-coloured, clean-limbed, with a long head, bluish eye, flowing mane and tail. Her nine-fold will be nine fillies closely resembling her, except that their hooves are of ordinary shape, whereas hers are divided into five toes like those of Julius Caesar’s charger. Around her neck hangs a shining poitrel of the sort known to archaeologists as lunula, or little moon: a thin disc of Wicklow gold cut in crescent shape with the horns expanded and turned on edge, fastened together behind her arching neck with a braid of scarlet and white linen. As Gwion says of her in a passage from his Song of the Horses‚1 which had been included by mistake in the Câd Goddeu (lines 206–209), and which is intended for the mouth of the White Goddess herself: