The White Goddess (42 page)

The sixth tree is the whitethorn or hawthorn or may, which takes its name from the month of May. It is, in general, an unlucky tree and the name under which it appears in the Irish Brehon Laws,
sceith
,
is apparently connected with the Indo-Germanic root
sceath
or
sceth
,
meaning harm; from which derive the English ‘scathe’ and the Greek
a-scethes
,
scatheless. In ancient Greece, as in Britain, this was the month in which people went about in old clothes – a custom referred to in the proverb ‘Ne’er cast a clout ere May be out’, meaning ‘do not put on new clothes until the unlucky month is over’, and not necessarily referring to the variability of the English climate; the proverb is, in fact, also current in North-eastern Spain where, in general, settled hot weather has come by Easter. They also abstained from sexual intercourse – a custom which explains May as an unlucky month for marriage. In Greece and Rome, May was the month in which the temples were swept out and the images of gods washed: the month of preparation for the midsummer festival. The Greek Goddess Maia, though she is represented in English poetry as ‘ever fair and young’ took her name from
maia
,
‘grandmother’; she was a malevolent beldame whose son Hermes conducted souls to Hell. She was in fact the White Goddess, who under the name of Cardea, as has been noticed, cast spells with the hawthorn. The Greeks propitiated her at marriages – marriage being considered hateful to the Goddess – with five torches of hawthorn-wood and with hawthorn blossom before the unlucky month began.

Plutarch in his
Roman
Questions
asks: ‘Why do not the Romans marry
in the month of May?’ and answers correctly: ‘Is not the reason that in this month they perform the greatest of purification ceremonies?’ He explains that this was the month in which puppets called
argeioi
(‘white men’) were thrown into the river as an offering to Saturn. Ovid in his
Fasti
tells of an oracle given him by the Priestess of Jupiter about the marriage of his daughter – ‘Until the Ides of June’ [the middle of the month] ‘there is no luck for brides and their husbands. Until the sweepings from the Temple of Vesta have been carried down to the sea by the yellow Tiber I must myself not comb my locks which I have cut in sign of mourning, nor pare my nails, nor cohabit with my husband though he is the Priest of Jupiter. Be not in haste. Your daughter will have better luck in marriage when Vesta’s fire burns on a cleansed hearth.’ The unlucky days came to an end on June 15. In Greece the unlucky month began and ended a little earlier. According to Sozomen of Gaza, the fifth-century ecclesiastical historian, the Terebinth Fair at Hebron was celebrated at the same time and with the same taboos on new clothes and sexuality, and with the same object – the washing and cleansing of the holy images.

In Welsh mythology the hawthorn appears as the malevolent Chief of the Giants, Yspaddaden Penkawr, the father of Olwen (‘She of the White Track’), another name of the White Goddess. In the
Romance
of Kilwych
and
Olwen
– Kilhwych was so called because he was found in a swine’s burrow – Giant Hawthorn puts all possible obstacles in the way of Kilhwych’s marriage to Olwen and demands a dowry of thirteen treasures, all apparently impossible to secure. The Giant lived in a castle guarded by nine porters and nine watch-dogs, proof of the strength of the taboo against marriage in the hawthorn month.

The destruction of an ancient hawthorn tree is in Ireland attended with the greatest peril. Two nineteenth-century instances are quoted in E. M. Hull’s
Folklore
of
the
British
Isles.
The effect is the death of one’s cattle and children and loss of all one’s money. In his well-documented study,
Historic
Thorn
Trees
in
the
British
Isles
,
Mr. Vaughan Cornish writes of the sacred hawthorns growing over wells in Goidelic provinces. He quotes the case of ‘St. Patrick’s Thorn’ at Tin’ahely in County Wicklow: ‘Devotees attended on the 4th of May, rounds were duly made about the well, and shreds torn off their garments and hung on the thorn.’ He adds: ‘This is St. Monica’s Day but I do not know of any association.’ Plainly, since St. Monica’s Day, New Style, corresponds with May 15th, Old Style, this was a ceremony in honour of the Hawthorn month, which had just begun. The rags were torn from the devotees’ clothes as a sign of mourning and propitiation.

The hawthorn, then, is the tree of enforced chastity. The month begins on May 13th, when the may is first in flower, and ends on June 9th. The ascetic use of the thorn, which corresponds with the cult of the Goddess Cardea must, however, be distinguished from its later orgiastic use which
corresponds with the cult of the Goddess Flora, and which accounts for the English mediaeval habit of riding out on May Morning to pluck flowering hawthorn boughs and dance around the maypole. Hawthorn blossom has, for many men, a strong scent of female sexuality; which is why the Turks use a flowering branch as an erotic symbol. Mr. Cornish proves that this Flora cult was introduced into the British Isles in the late first-century
BC
by the second Belgic invaders; further, that the Glastonbury Thorn which flowered on Old Christmas Day (January 5th, New Style) and was cut down by the Puritans at the Revolution was a sport of the common hawthorn. The monks of Glastonbury perpetuated it and sanctified it with an improving tale about Joseph of Arimathea’s staff and the Crown of Thorns as a means of discouraging the orgiastic use of hawthorn blossom, which normally did not appear until May Day (Old Style).

It is likely that the Old Bush which had grown on the site of St. David’s Cathedral was an orgiastic hawthorn; for this would account for the legend of David’s mysterious birth.

The seventh tree is the oak, the tree of Zeus, Jupiter, Hercules, The Dagda (the chief of the elder Irish gods), Thor, and all the other Thunder-gods, Jehovah in so far as he was ‘El’, and Allah. The royalty of the oak-tree needs no enlarging upon: most people are familiar with the argument of Sir James Frazer’s
Golden
Bough
,
which concerns the human sacrifice of the oak-king of Nemi on Midsummer Day. The fuel of the midsummer fires is always oak, the fire of Vesta at Rome was fed with oak, and the need-fire is always kindled in an oak-log. When Gwion writes in the
Câd
Goddeu
,
‘Stout Guardian of the door, His name in every tongue’, he is saying that doors are customarily made of oak as the strongest and toughest wood and that ‘Duir’, the Beth-Luis-Nion name for ‘Oak’, means ‘door’ in many European languages including Old Goidelic
dorus
, Latin
foris
,
Greek
thura
,
and German
tür
,
all derived from the Sanskrit
Dwr
,
and that
Daleth
,
the Hebrew letter D, means ‘Door’ – the ‘I’ being originally an ‘r’. Midsummer is the flowering season of the oak, which is the tree of endurance and triumph, and like the ash is said to ‘court the lightning flash’. Its roots are believed to extend as deep underground as its branches rise in the air – Virgil mentions this – which makes it emblematic of a god whose law runs both in Heaven and in the Underworld. Poseidon the ash-god and Zeus the oak-god were both once armed with thunderbolts; but when the Achaeans humbled the Aeolians, Poseidon’s bolt was converted into a trident or fish-spear and Zeus reserved the sole right to wield the bolt. It has been suggested that oak oracles were introduced into Greece by the Achaeans: that they originally consulted the
beech, as the Franks did, but finding no beeches in Greece transferred their allegiance to the oak with edible acorns, its nearest equivalent, to which they gave the name
phegos
– which, as has been mentioned, is the same word
as fagus
,
the Latin for beech. At any rate, the oracular oak at Dodona was
a
phegos
,
not a
drus
,
and the oracular ship
Argo
was, according to Apollonius Rhodius, largely made of this timber. But it is more likely that the Dodona oracle was in existence centuries before the Achaeans came and that Herodotus was right in stating on the authority of the Egyptian priests that the black dove and oracular oak cults of Zeus at Ammon in the Libyan desert and of Zeus at Dodona were coeval. Professor Flinders Petrie postulates a sacred league between Libya and the Greek mainland well back into the third millennium
BC
. The Ammon oak was in the care of the tribe of Garamantes: the Greeks knew of their ancestor Garamas as ‘the first of men’. The Zeus of Ammon was a sort of Hercules with a ram’s head akin to ram-headed Osiris, and to Amen-Ra the ram-headed Sun-god of Egyptian Thebes from where Herodotus says that the black doves flew to Ammon and Dodona.

The month, which takes its name from Jupiter the oak-god, begins on June 10th and ends on July 7th. Midway comes St. John’s Day, June 24th, the day on which the oak-king was sacrificially burned alive. The Celtic year was divided into two halves with the second half beginning in July, apparently after a seven-day wake, or funeral feast, in the oak-king’s honour.

Sir James Frazer, like Gwion, has pointed out the similarity of ‘door’ words in all Indo-European languages and shown Janus to be a ‘stout guardian of the door’ with his head pointing in both directions. As usual, however, he does not press his argument far enough. Duir as the god of the oak month looks both ways because his post is at the turn of the year; which identifies him with the Oak-god Hercules who became the doorkeeper of the Gods after his death. He is probably also to be identified with the British god Llyr or Lludd or Nudd, a god of the sea – i.e. a god of a sea-faring Bronze Age people – who was the ‘father’ of Creiddylad (Cordelia) an aspect of the White Goddess; for according to Geoffrey of Monmouth the grave of Llyr at Leicester was in a vault built in honour of Janus. Geoffrey writes:

Since Llyr was a pre-Roman God this amounts to saying that he was two-headed, like Janus, and the patron of the New Year; but the Celtic year
began in the summer, not in the winter. Geoffrey does not date the mourning festival but it is likely to have originally taken place at the end of June.

The old ‘Wakes’, the hiring-fairs of the English countryside came to be held at various dates between March and October according to the date of the local saint’s day. (‘At Bunbury Wakes rye-grass and clover should be ready to cut. At Wrenbury Wakes early apples are ripe.’
English
Dialect
Dictionary
.) But originally they must all have taken place at Lammas between the hay harvest and the corn harvest. That the Wakes were mourning for the dead King is confirmed in Chapter Seventeen. The Anglo-Saxon form of
Lughomass
,
mass in honour of the God Lugh or Llew, was
hlaf-mass
, ‘loaf-mass’, with reference to the corn-harvest and the killing of the Corn-king.

What I take for a reference to Llyr as Janus occurs in the closing paragraph of Merlin’s prophecy to the heathen King Vortigern and his Druids, recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth:

In other words, the ancient Druidic religion based on the oak-cult will be swept away by Christianity and the door – the god Llyr – will languish forgotten in the Castle of Arianrhod, the
Corona
Borealis.

This helps us to understand the relationship at Rome of Janus and the White Goddess Cardea who is mentioned at the end of Chapter Four as the Goddess of Hinges who came to Rome from Alba Longa. She was the hinge on which the year swung – the ancient Latin, not the Etruscan year – and her importance as such is recorded in the Latin adjective
cardinalis
– as we say in English ‘of cardinal importance’ – which was also applied to the four main winds, for winds were considered as under the sole direction of the Great Goddess until Classical times. As Cardea she ruled over the Celestial Hinge at the back of the North Wind around which, as Varro explains in his
De
Re
Rustica
,
the mill-stone of the Universe revolves. This conception appears most plainly in the Norse
Edda
,
where the giantesses Fenja and Menja, who turn the monstrous mill-stone Grotte in the cold polar night, stand for the White Goddess in her complementary moods of creation and destruction. Elsewhere in Norse mythology the Goddess is nine-fold: the nine giantesses who were joint-mothers of the hero Rig, alias Heimdall, the inventor of the Norse social system, similarly turned the cosmic mill. Janus was perhaps not originally double-headed: he may have borrowed this peculiarity from the Goddess herself who at the Carmentalia, the Carmenta Festival in early January, was addressed by her celebrants as ‘Postvorta and Antevorta’ – ‘she who looks both back and forward’. However, a Janus with long hair and wings appears on an early stater of Mallos, a Cretan colony in Cilicia. He is identified with the solar
hero Talus, and a bull’s head appears on the same coin. On similar coins of the late fifth century
BC
he holds an eight-rayed disc in his hand and has a spiral of immortality sprouting from his double head.