The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Her lips were red, her looks were free,

  Her locks were yellow as gold,

  Her skin was white as leprosy.

  The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,

  Who thicks man’s blood with cold.

  Anonymous English balladists constantly celebrate the Goddess’s beauty and terrible power. Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song is directly inspired by her:

  The Moon’s my constant mistress

  And the lonely owl my marrow,

  The flaming drake

  And the night-crow make

  Me music to my sorrow.

  So is the Holy Land of Walsinghame:

  Such a one did I meet, good sir,

  Such an angelic face

  Who like a nymph, like a queen, did appear

  In her gait, in her grace.

  She hath left me here alone,

  All alone, as unknown,

  That sometime did me lead with herself

  And me loved as her own.

  The Holy Land of Walsinghame recalls the tender description of the Goddess in the ancient Irish Sickbed of Cuchulain, spoken by Laegh after visiting the rath of the Sidhe:

  There is a maiden in the noble house

  Surpassing all women of Ireland.

  She steps forward, with yellow hair,

  Beautiful and many-gifted.

  Her discourse with each man in turn

  Is beautiful, is marvellous,

  The heart of each one breaks

  With longing and love for her.

  For though she loves only to destroy, the Goddess destroys only to quicken.

  Coleridge’s mention of leprosy is strangely exact. The whiteness of the Goddess has always been an ambivalent concept. In one sense it is the pleasant whiteness of pearl-barley, or a woman’s body, or milk, or unsmutched snow; in another it is the horrifying whiteness of a corpse, or a spectre, or leprosy. Thus in Leviticus XIV, 10, the leper’s thank-offering after his cure, originally paid to the Goddess Mother, was a measure of barley flour. Alphito, it has been shown, combined these senses: for alphos is white leprosy, the vitiliginous sort which attacks the face, and alphiton is barley, and Alphito lived on the cliff tops of Nonacris in perpetual snow. Pausanias connects leprosy, the meaning of which is ‘scaliness’, a characteristic of true leprosy, with the town of Lepreus, which lay close to the river Alpheus in the district of Triphylia (‘trefoil’), which was a leper-colony founded by a goddess called Leprea: it afterwards came under the protection of ‘Zeus of the White Poplar’, for another name for leprosy is leuce, which also means ‘the white poplar’. This ties together several loose ends of argument. The white trefoils which spring up wherever the Love-goddess Olwen treads can be described as ‘white as leprosy’. And we may assume that the leaves of the white poplar (the autumn tree of the Beth-Luis-Nion), which still grows in the Styx valley, were prophylactic against ail forms of leprosy: for albus and albulus in Latin have all the connotations of the Greek alphos. When Evander came to Italy from Arcadia he brought the name of the River Alpheus with him: Albula was the old name for the Tiber, though its yellow waters would have earned it the name ‘Xanthos’, or ‘Flavus’, if the White Goddess had not sponsored the migration.

  The priestesses of the White Goddess in ancient times are likely to have chalked their faces in imitation of the Moon’s white disc. It is possible that the island of Samothrace, famous for its Mysteries of the White Goddess, takes its name from scaly leprosy; for it is known that Samo means white and that the Old Goidelic word for this sort of leprosy was Samothrusc. Strabo gives a warrant for this suggestion in his Georgics: he quotes Artemidorus as writing that ‘there is an island near Britain where the same rites are performed in honour of Ceres and Persephone as in Samothrace.’

  In the Ancient Mariner, when the Nightmare Life-in-Death has won her game of dice:

  ‘The game is done, I’ve won, I’ve won,’

  Quoth she and whistles thrice.

  She whistles for the magical breeze that is presently to save the Mariner’s life. Here again Coleridge is beautifully exact. The White Goddess Cardea, as has been mentioned, was in charge of the four cardinal winds; mythologically the most important was the North Wind at the back of which she had her starry castle, close to the polar hinge of the Universe. This was the same wind that blew in answer to Gwion’s final riddle in the Romance and helped to liberate Elphin, and the wind which, according to Hecataeus, gave its name to the Hyperborean priesthood of Apollo. Whistling three times in honour of the White Goddess is the traditional witch way of raising the wind; hence the proverbial unluckiness of ‘a crowing hen and a whistling maid’. ‘I’ll give thee a wind.’ ‘And I another.’ – as the witches say in Macbeth….‘All the quarters that they know, I’ the Shipman’s card.’ The close connexion of winds with the Goddess is also shown in the widespread popular belief that only pigs and goats (both anciently sacred to her) can see the wind, and in the belief that mares can conceive merely by turning their hindquarters to the wind.

  The earliest Classical reference to this belief about mares is found in the Iliad, where Boreas grows amorous of the three thousand mares of Erichthonius the Dardanian; he finds them grazing on the plains about Troy, and impregnates twelve of them. Classical scholars have been content to read this merely as an allegory of the swiftness of the twelve sacred horses born to Boreas; but the myth is far more complex than that. Boreas lived with his three brothers, the other cardinal winds, in a sacred cave on Mount Haemus in Thrace, which lies due north of Troy, but was also worshipped at Athens. The Athenians gave him the honourable title of ‘brother-in-law’ and their ancient respect for him was heightened by his sudden descent from Haemus during the Persian invasion of Greece, when he sank most of Xerxes’s fleet off Cape Sepias. Boreas was represented on the famous carved Chest of Cypselus as half man, half serpent – a reminder that winds were under the charge of the Death-goddess and came out of oracular caves or holes in the ground. He was shown in the act of carrying off the nymph Oreithuia, daughter of another Erichthonius,1 the first King of Athens (who introduced four-horse chariots there) to his mountain home in Thrace.

  This gives a clue to the provenience of the North Wind cult. The mares of Erichthonius were really the mares of Boreas himself, for Erichthonius was also half man, half serpent. Erichthonius, styled an autochthon, that is to say ‘one who springs from the earth’, was first said to be the son of Athene by Hephaestus the demiurge, but later, when Athene’s unblemished maidenhood was insisted upon by the Athenians as a matter of civic pride, he was made the son of Hephaestus and Ge, the Earth-goddess. The name of Oreithuia, the nymph whom he carried off, means ‘She who rages upon the mountain’ – evidently the Love-goddess of the divine triad in which Athene was the Death-goddess; which explains Boreas as her brother-in-law, and so the brother-in-law of all Athenians: whose ancient friendship with the Boreas priesthood of the Hyperboreans is mentioned by Hecataeus. But since North Winds cannot blow backwards, the story of Boreas’s rape of Oreithuia to Thrace must refer to the spread to Thrace of the Athenian orgiastic cult of the Triple Goat-goddess and her lover Erichthonius, alias Ophion, and its adaptation there, as at nearby Troy, to an orgiastic cult of the Triple Mare-goddess; the twelve sacred horses of Boreas provided her with three four-horse chariots. Since Erichthonius shortly after birth took refuge from his persecutors in the aegis of Athene – the bag made from the hide of the goat Amalthaea – he must have come from Libya with her. In Libya he would have been more beloved than in Greece; northerly breezes freshen the early morning along the whole Libyan coast throughout the summer – thus Hesiod calls Boreas the son of Astraeus (‘the starry one’) and Eos (‘dawn’). That Portuguese mares were fertilized by the zephyr – according to Varro, Pliny and Columella – is an obvious error derived from the extreme westerly position of Portugal. The philosopher Ptolemy rightly attributes only to the planet Zeus (Jupiter), which ruled the north, ‘winds that fertilize’, and Boraeus was one of Zeus’s tit
les.1 Lactantius, the late third-century Christian Father, makes this fertilization of the mares an analogy of the mysterious impregnation of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit (literally ‘breath’): a comment which was not at the time regarded as in bad taste.

  According to the Odyssey, the home of the winds, that is to say the centre of the cult of Boreas and his brothers, was not on Mount Haemus but in an Aeolian island; perhaps this was the Aegean island of Tenos which lies immediately north of Delos, where a megalithic logan-stone was shown as the memorial raised by Hercules to Calaïs and Zetes, the heroic sons of Boreas and Oreithuia. But the cult of Boreas spread west as well as north from Athens – the Thurians of Italy are known to have worshipped him – and is likely to have reached Spain with other Greek colonists. In late Classical times Homer’s ‘Aeolian Isle’ was believed to be Lipari which had been colonized by Aeolians; Lipari bears due north from Sicily where the belief probably originated.

  A slightly Christianized pagan Irish poem, printed in Vol. II of the Ossianic Society’s Publications, 1855, gives the natal characteristics of the four cardinal winds. It not only shows the connexion of winds with Fate but presents the child who is born when the north wind blows as a type of Hercules.

  WINDS OF FATE

  The boy who is born when the wind is from the west,

  He shall obtain clothing, food he shall obtain;

  He shall obtain from his lord, I say,

  No more than food and clothing.

  The boy who is born when the wind is from the north,

  He shall win victory but shall endure defeat.

  He shall be wounded, another shall he wound,

  Before he ascends to an angelic Heaven.

  The boy who is born when the wind is from the south,

  He shall get honey, fruit he shall get,

  In his house shall entertain

  Bishops and fine musicians.

  Laden with gold is the wind from the east,

  The best wind of all the four that blow;

  The boy who is born when that wind blows

  Want he shall never taste in all his life.

  Whensoever the wind does not blow

  Over the grass of the plain or mountain heather,

  Whosoever is then born,

  Whether boy or girl, a fool shall be.

  At this point we can clear up one or two outstanding puzzles. If the Athenians worshipped the North Wind in very primitive times and had brought the cult with them from Libya, then the original Hyperboreans, the ‘back-of-the-North-wind people’, a priesthood concerned with a Northern other-world, were Libyans. This would explain Pindar’s mistaken notion that Hercules fetched the wild olive from the distant north: he really fetched it from the south, perhaps from as far south as Egyptian Thebes where it still grew with oaks and persea-trees in the time of Pliny – just as the ‘Gorgon’ whom Perseus killed during his visit to the ass-sacrificing Hyperboreans was the southern Goddess Neith of Libya. This was not Hercules the oak-hero, but the other Hercules, the phallic thumb, leader of the five Dactyls, who according to the tradition that Pausanias found at Elis brought such an abundance of wild-olive from Hyperboraea that, after he had crowned the victor of the foot-race run by his brothers, they all slept on heaps of its fresh leaves. Pausanias, though he names the competitors, does not say who won; but it was obviously Paeonius the forefinger, which always comes in first when you run your fingers on the table and make them race, for the paean or paeon was the song of victory. Moreover, Pausanias says that Zeus wrestled with Cronos on this occasion, and beat him; Zeus is the god of the forefinger, and Cronos the god of the middle, or fool’s finger. The Dactyl who came in second in the race was evidently Epimedes, ‘he who thinks too late’, the fool; for Pausanias gives the names in this order: Hercules, Paeonius, Epimedes, Jasius and Idas.

  The wild olive, then, was the crown of Paeonius the forefinger: which means that the vowel of the forefinger, namely O, which is expressed by the gorse Onn in the Beth-Luis-Nion, was expressed by the wild olive in the Greek tree alphabet. This explains the use of olive at the Spring festival in the ancient world, which continues in Spain at the ‘Ramos’ (boughs) festival; and Hercules’s olive-wood club – the Sun first arms himself at the Spring equinox; and the olive-leaf in the bill of Noah’s dove which symbolizes the drying up of the winter floods by the Spring Sun. It also explains Paeonius as a title of Apollo Helios the god of the young Sun, which however he seems to have derived from the Goddess Athene Paeonia who first brought the olive to Athens; and the name of the peony, paeonia, a Mediterranean wild flower which blooms only at the Spring solstice and quickly sheds its petals.

  * Spenser’s White Goddess is the Arthurian ‘Lady of the Lake’, also called ‘the White Serpent’, ‘Nimue’, and ‘Vivien’, whom Professor Rhys in his Arthurian Legend identifies with Rhiannon. She is mistress of Merlin (Merddin) and treacherously entombs him in his magic cave when, as Llew Llaw to Blodeuwedd, or Samson to Delilah, or Curoi to Blathnat, he has revealed some of his secrets to her. However, in the earliest Welsh account, the Dialogue of Gwenddydd and Merddin, she tells him to arise from his prison and ‘open the Books of Inspiration without fear’. In this dialogue she calls him ‘twin-brother’ which reveals her as Olwen, and she is also styled Gwenddydd wen adlam Cerddeu, ‘White Lady of Day, refuge of poems’, which proves her to be the Muse, Cardea-Cerridwen, who inspires cerddeu, ‘poems’, in Greek, cerdeia.

  ‘What is inspiration?’ is a question that is continually asked. The derivation of the word supplies two related answers. ‘Inspiration’ may be the breathing-in by the poet of fumes from an intoxicating cauldron, the Awen of the cauldron of Cerridwen, containing probably a mash of barley, acorns, honey, bull’s blood and such sacred herbs as ivy, hellebore1 and laurel, or mephitic fumes from an underground vent as at Delphi, or the fumes that rise to the nostrils when toadstools are chewed. These fumes induce the paranoiac trance in which time is suspended, though the mind remains active and can relate its proleptic or analeptic apprehensions in verse. But ‘inspiration’ may also refer to the inducement of the same poetic condition by the act of listening to the wind, the messenger of the Goddess Cardea, in a sacred grove. At Dodona poetic oracles were listened for in the oak-grove, and the prophetic trance was perhaps induced in the black-dove priestesses who first controlled the oracle by the chewing of acorns; at any rate, a scholiast on Lucan notes that this method was used among the Gallic Druids. In Canaan the prime oracular tree was the acacia – the ‘burning bush’ discussed in Chapter Fifteen – and there is a reference to this sort of inspiration in 1 Chronicles, XIV, 15:

  When thou hearest the sound of marching in the tops of the mulberry trees, then bestir thyself.

  Here, ‘mulberry trees’ should be ‘acacias’. Jehovah himself was in the wind, and the context – David’s assault on the Philistines from Gibeon to Gaza-shows that it blew from the North. This story dates from a time when Jehovah was not yet a transcendental God but lived, like Boreas, in a mountain to the far north; he was, in fact, the white bull-god Baal Zephon (‘Lord of the North’) who had borrowed his title from his Goddess Mother Baaltis Zapuna, a name attested in an inscription from Goshen where the tribe of Joseph was once settled. The Canaanites worshipped him as King of the Northern Otherworld and the Philistines of Ekron had taken over the cult; he was a god of prophecy and fertility. Another of his titles was Baal-Zebul, ‘the Lord of the Mansion [of the North]’ which named the tribe of Zebulon: they worshipped him on Mount Tabor. When King Ahaziah of Israel consulted his oracle at Ekron (2 Kings, I, 1-4) he earned Elijah’s reproach for not consulting the native Israelite oracle, presumably on Tabor. I suspect that Baal Zabul was an autumnal Dionysus, whose devotees intoxicated themselves on amanita muscaria, which still grows there; the Biblical name for these toadstools being either ‘ermrods’ or ‘little foxes’.

  By the time of Jesus, who was accused of traffic with Beelzebub, the Kingdoms of Israel and Philistia had long been suppres
sed and the shrines of Ekron and Tabor destroyed; and Baal-Zebul’s functions having been taken over by the archangel Gabriel, he had declined to a mere devil mockingly called Baal-Zebub, ‘Lord of Flies’. Yet the Levite butchers continued the old ritual of turning the victim’s head to the north when they sacrificed.

  The acacia is still a sacred tree in Arabia Deserta and anyone who even breaks off a twig is expected to die within the year. The common Classical icon of the Muse whispering in a poet’s ear refers to tree-top inspiration: the Muse is the dryad (oak-fairy), or mĕlia (ash-fairy), or mēlia (quince-fairy), or caryatid (nut-fairy), or hamadryad (wood-fairy in general), or heliconian (fairy of Mount Helicon, which took its name as much from helicë, the willow-tree sacred to poets, as from the stream which spiralled round it).

  Nowadays poets seldom use these artificial aids to inspiration, though the sound of wind in the willows or in a plantation of forest-trees still exercises a strangely potent influence on their minds; and ‘inspiration’ is therefore applied to any means whatsoever by which the poetic trance is induced. But a good many of the charlatans or weaklings resort to automatic writing and spiritism. The ancient Hebrew distinction between legitimate and illegitimate prophecy – ‘prophecy’ meaning inspired poetry, in which future events are not necessarily, but usually, foretold – has much to recommend it. If a prophet went into a trance and was afterwards unconscious of what he had been babbling, that was illegitimate; but if he remained in possession of his critical faculties throughout the trance and afterwards, that was legitimate. His powers were heightened by the ‘spirit of prophecy’, so that his words crystallized immense experience into a single poetic jewel; but he was, by the grace of God, the sturdy author and regulator of this achievement. The spiritistic medium, on the other hand, whose soul momentarily absented itself so that demonic principalities and powers might occupy his body and speak pipingly through his mouth was no prophet and was ‘cut off from the congregation’ if it was found that he had deliberately induced the trance. The ban was presumably extended to automatic writing.