The White Goddess (43 page)

Here at last I can complete my argument about Arianrhod’s Castle and the ‘whirling round without motion between three elements’. The sacred oak-king was killed at midsummer and translated to the Corona Borealis, presided over by the White Goddess, which was then just dipping over the Northern horizon. But from the song ascribed by Apollonius Rhodius to Orpheus, we know that the Queen of the Circling Universe, Eurynome,
alias
Cardea, was identical with Rhea of Crete; thus Rhea lived at the axle of the mill, whirling around without motion, as well as on the Galaxy. This suggests that in a later mythological tradition the sacred king went to serve her at the Mill, not in the Castle; for Samson after his blinding and enervation turned a mill in Delilah’s prison-house.

Another name for the Goddess of the Mill was Artemis Calliste, or Callisto (‘Most Beautiful’), to whom the she-bear was sacred in Arcadia; and in Athens at the festival of Artemis Brauronia, a girl of ten years old and a girl of five, dressed in saffron-yellow robes in honour of the moon, played the part of sacred bears. The Great She-bear and Little She-bear are still the names of the two constellations that turn the mill around. In Greek the Great Bear Callisto was also called
Helice
,
which means both ‘that which turns’ and ‘willow-branch’ – a reminder that the willow was sacred to the same Goddess.

The evidence, given in the Gwyn context at the close of Chapter Six, for supposing that the oak-cult came to Britain from the Baltic between 1600 and 1400
BC
suggests that the Beth-Luis-Nion sequence, in which Duir is the principal tree, was at any rate not elaborated before 1600
BC
, though the rowan, willow, elder and alder were perhaps already in sacral use. Gwyn, ‘the White One’, son of Llyr or Lludd was buried in a boat-shaped oak-coffin in his father’s honour: he was a sort of Osiris (his rival ‘Victor son of Scorcher’ being a sort of Set) and came to be identified with King Arthur. His name supplies the prefix Win of many ancient towns in Britain.

The eighth tree is the holly, which flowers in July. The holly appears in the originally Irish
Romance
of Gawain
and
the
Green
Knight.
The Green Knight is an immortal giant whose club is a holly-bush. He and Sir Gawain, who appears in the Irish version as Cuchulain, a typical Hercules, make a compact to behead one another at alternate New Years – meaning midsummer and midwinter – but, in effect, the Holly Knight spares the Oak Knight. In
Sir
Gawain
s
Marriage
,
a Robin Hood ballad, King Arthur, who has his seat at Carlisle, says:

This lady, whose name is not mentioned, will have been the goddess Creiddylad for whom, in Welsh myth, the Oak Knight and Holly Knight fought every first of May until Doomsday. Since in mediaeval practice St. John the Baptist, who lost his head on St. John’s Day, took over the oak-king’s titles and customs, it was natural to let Jesus, as John’s merciful successor, take over the holly-king’s. The holly was thus glorified beyond the oak. For example, in the
Holly-Tree
Carol
:

–
a sentiment that derives from the
Song
of
the
Forest
Trees
:
‘Of all trees whatsoever the critically best is holly.’ In each stanza of the carol, with its apt chorus about ‘the rising of the Sun, the running of the deer’, some property of the tree is equated with the birth or passion of Jesus: the whiteness of the flower, the redness of the berry, the sharpness of the prickles, the bitterness of the bark. ‘Holly’ means ‘holy’. Yet the holly which is native to the British Isles is unlikely to be the original tree of the alphabet: it has probably displaced the evergreen scarlet-oak with which it has much in common, including the same botanical name
ilex
,
and which was not introduced into the British Isles until the sixteenth century. The scarlet-oak, or kerm-oak, or holly-oak, is the evergreen twin of the ordinary oak and its Classical Greek names
prinos
and
hysge
are also used for holly in modern Greek. It has prickly leaves and nourishes the kerm, a scarlet insect not unlike the holly-berry (and once thought to be a berry), from which the ancients made their royal scarlet dye and an aphrodisiac elixir. In the Authorised Version of the Bible the word ‘oak’ is sometimes translated ‘terebinth’ and sometimes ‘scarlet-oak’, and these trees make a sacred pair in Palestinian religion. Jesus wore kerm-scarlet when attired as King of the Jews (
Matthew
XXVII,
28
).

We may regard the letters D and T as twins: ‘the lily white boys clothed all in green o!’ of the mediaeval
Green
Rushes
song. D is the oak which rules the waxing part of the year – the sacred Druidic oak, the oak of the
Golden
Bough.
T is the evergreen oak which rules the waning part, the bloody oak: thus an evergreen oak-grove near the Corinthian Asopus was sacred to the Furies.
Dann
or
Tann
,
the equivalent of
Tinne
,
is a Celtic word for any sacred tree. In Gaul and Brittany it meant ‘oak’, in Celtic Germany it meant ‘fir’; in Cornwall the compound
glas-tann
(‘green sacred tree’) meant evergreen holm-oak, and the English word ‘to tan’ comes from the use of its bark in tanning. However, in ancient Italy it was
the holly, not the evergreen oak, which the husbandmen used in their midwinter Saturnalia. Tannus was the name of the Gaulish Thunder-god, and Tina that of the Thunder-god, armed with a triple thunder-bolt, whom the Etruscans took over from the Goidelic tribes among whom they settled.

The identification of the pacific Jesus with the holly or holly-oak must be viewed as poetically inept, except in so far as he declared that he had come to bring not peace, but the sword. The tanist was originally his twin’s executioner; it was the oak-king, not the holly-king, who was crucified on a T-shaped cross. Lucian in his
Trial
in
the
Court
of
Vowels
(about 160
AD
) is explicit:

And in a Gnostic
Gospel
of
Thomas
,
composed at about the same date, the same theme recurs in a dispute between Jesus and his schoolmaster about the letter T. The schoolmaster strikes Jesus on the head and prophesies the crucifixion. In Jesus’s time the Hebrew character
Tav
,
the last letter of the alphabet, was shaped like the Greek
Tau
.

The holly rules the eighth month, and eight as the number of increase is well suited to the month of the barley harvest, which extends from July 8th to August 4th.

The ninth tree is the hazel, in the nutting season. The nut in Celtic legend is always an emblem of concentrated wisdom: something sweet, compact and sustaining enclosed in a small hard shell – as we say: ‘this is the matter in a nut-shell.’ The Rennes
Dinnshenchas
, an important early Irish topographical treatise, describes a beautiful fountain called Connla’s Well, near Tipperary, over which hung the nine hazels of poetic art which produced flowers and fruit (i.e. beauty and wisdom) simultaneously. As the nuts dropped into the well they fed the salmon swimming in it, and whatever number of nuts any of them swallowed, so many bright spots appeared on its body. All the knowledge of the arts and sciences was bound up with the eating of these nuts, as has already been noted in the story of Fionn, whose name Gwion adopted. In England a forked hazel-
stick was used until the seventeenth century for divining not only buried treasure and hidden water, as now, but guilty persons in cases of murder and theft. And in the
Book
of
St.
Albans
(1496 edition) a recipe is given for making oneself as invisible as if one had eaten fern-seed, merely by carrying a hazel-rod, a fathom and a half long with a green hazel-twig inserted in it.

The letter Coll was used as the Bardic numeral nine – because nine is the number sacred to the Muses and because the hazel fruits after nine years. The hazel was the
Bile
Ratha
,
‘the venerated tree of the rath’ – the rath in which the poetic
Aes
Sidhe
lived. It gave its name also to a god named Mac Coll or Mac Cool (‘son of the Hazel’) who according to Keating’s
History
of
Ireland
was one of the three earliest rulers of Ireland, his two brothers being Mac Ceacht (‘son of the Plough’) and Mac Greine (‘son of the Sun’). They celebrated a triple marriage with the Triple Goddess of Ireland, Eire, Fodhla and Banbha. This legend appears at first sight to record the overthrow of the matriarchal system by patriarchal invaders; but since Greine, the Sun, was a Goddess not a God and since both agriculture and wisdom were presided over by the Triple Goddess, the invaders were doubtless Goddess-worshippers themselves and merely transferred their filial allegiance to the Triple Goddess of the land.

In the Fenian legend of the Ancient Dripping Hazel, the hazel appears as a tree of wisdom that can be put to destructive uses. It dripped a poisonous milk, had no leaves and was the abode of vultures and ravens, birds of divination. It split in two when the head of the God Balor was placed in its fork after his death, and when Fionn used its wood as a shield in battle its noxious vapours killed thousands of the enemy. Fionn’s hazel shield is an emblem of the satiric poem that carries a curse. It was as the Druidic heralds’ tree that the ‘hazel was arbiter’ in Gwion’s
Câd
Goddeu
;
ancient Irish heralds carried white hazel wands. The hazel is the tree of wisdom and the month extends from August 5th to September 1st.

The tenth tree is the vine in the vintage season. The vine, though not native to Britain, is an important motif in British Bronze Age art; so probably the Danaans carried the tree itself northward with them as well as the emblem. It fruited well there on a few sheltered Southern slopes. But since it could not be established as a wild tree, they will have used the bramble as a substitute: the fruiting season, the colour of the berries, and the shape of the leaf correspond, and blackberry wine is a heady drink. (In all Celtic countries there is a taboo against eating the blackberry though it is a wholesome and nourishing fruit; in Brittany the reason given is ‘
a
cause
des
fées
’,
‘because of the fairies’. In Majorca the explanation is different: the bramble was the bush chosen for the Crown of Thorns and
the berries are Christ’s blood. In North Wales as a child I was warned merely that they were poisonous. In Devonshire the taboo is only on eating blackberries after the last day of September, when ‘the Devil enters into them’; which substantiates my theory that the blackberry was a popular substitute for Muin in the West Country.) The vine was sacred to the Thracian Dionysus, and to Osiris, and a golden vine was one of the principal ornaments of the Temple of Jerusalem. It is the tree of joy, exhilaration and wrath. The month extends from September 2nd to September 29th and includes the autumn equinox.

The eleventh tree is the ivy in its flowering season. October was the season of the Bacchanal revels of Thrace and Thessaly in which the intoxicated Bassarids rushed wildly about on the mountains, waving the fir-branches of Queen Artemis (or Ariadne) spirally wreathed with ivy – the yellow-berried sort – in honour of Dionysus (the autumnal Dionysus, who must be distinguished from the Dionysus of the Winter Solstice who is really a Hercules), and with a roebuck tattooed on their right arms above the elbow. They tore fawns, kids, children and even men to pieces in their ecstasy. The ivy was sacred to Osiris as well as to Dionysus. Vine and ivy come next to each other at the turn of the year, and are jointly dedicated to resurrection, presumably because they are the only two trees in the Beth-Luis-Nion that grow spirally. The vine also symbolizes resurrection because its strength is preserved in the wine. In England the ivy-bush has always been the sign of the wine-tavern; hence the proverb ‘Good wine needs no bush’, and ivy-ale, a highly intoxicating mediaeval drink, is still brewed at Trinity College, Oxford, in memory of a Trinity student murdered by Balliol men. It is likely that the Bassarids’ tipple was ‘spruce-ale’, brewed from the sap of silver-fir and laced with ivy; they may also have chewed ivy-leaves for their toxic effect. Yet the main Maenad intoxicant will have been
amanita
muscaria,
the red toadstool with white spots, that alone could supply the necessary muscular strength. Here we may reconsider Phoroneus, the Spring-Dionysus, inventor of fire. He built the city of Argos, the emblem of which, according to Apollodorus, was a toad; and Mycenae, the main fortress of Argolis, was so called, according to Pausanias, because Perseus, a convert to Dionysus worship, found a toadstool growing on the site. Dionysus had two feasts – the Spring
Anthesterion,
or ‘Flower-uprising’; and the autumn
Mysterion
, which probably means ‘uprising of toadstools’ (
mykosterion
)
known as
Ambrosia
(‘food of the gods’). Was Phoroneus also the discoverer of a divine fire resident in the toadstool, and therefore Phryneus (‘toad being’) as well as Fearinus (‘Spring being’)? The
amanita
muscaria
,
though not a tree, grows under a tree: always a birch northward from Thrace and Celtic
countries to the Arctic Circle; but under a fir or pine southward from Greece and Palestine to the Equator. In the North it is scarlet; in the South, fox-coloured. And does this explain the precedence given to the silver-fir among the vowels as A, and the birch among the consonants as B? Does it add a further note to ‘Christ son of Alpha’?