The White Goddess (56 page)

The historical sense of the Agenor myth is that towards the end of the third millennium
BC
, an Indo-European tribal confederacy – part of a huge horde from central Asia that overran the whole of Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and Northern Mesopotamia – marched down from Armenia into Syria, thence into Syria and Canaan, gathering allies as it went. Some tribes under rulers known to the Egyptians as the Hyksos broke into Egypt about 1800
BC
and were expelled with difficulty two centuries later. The flow and ebb of this mass-movement of tribes, which was complicated by Semitic invasions from across the Jordan, dislodged from Syria, Canaan and the Nile Delta numerous peoples that worshipped the Great Goddess under such titles as Belili, or Baalith, and Danaë, and the Bloody One (Phoenissa). One body whose chief religious emblem was the vine marched, or sailed, along the South Coast of Asia Minor, halted awhile in Milyas, the old name for Lycia, invaded Greece a little before the arrival there of the Indo-European Achaeans from the north, and occupied Argos in the Peloponnese, the chief shrine of the Horned Moon-goddess Io. The Cadmean invasion came later: it seems that a Canaanite tribe originally known as the Cadmeans, or Easterners, had occupied the mountainous district on the frontier of Ionia and Caria, which they called Cadmea; whence they crossed the Aegean and seized the coastal strip facing Euboea, excellent as a naval base, which was thereafter also called Cadmea.

In the Irish myth Caoith is described as a Hebrew. This must be a mistake: he was not one of the Habiru, as the Egyptians called the Hebrews, but probably a Pelasgian, a representative of the well-known priesthood of Samothrace, the Cabeiroi. The myth thus seems to refer to
an agreement about a common use of letters reached at Magnesia in Mycenaean times by the Achaeans, typified by Gadel, the invaders of Greece; Canaanite invaders, typified by Feniusa Farsa; and the Pelasgian natives of Greece, typified by Caoith – all of whom were joined in a common reverence for the vine. The figure seventy-two suggests a religious mystery bound up with the alphabet; it is a number closely connected both with the Beth-Luis-Nion and the Boibel-Loth and associated in both cases with the number five (the number of the dialects).

Now, the most famous school of Greek antiquity was kept by Cheiron the Centaur, on the slopes of Mount Pelion in Magnesia. Among his pupils were Achilles the Myrmidon, son of Thetis the Sea-goddess, Jason the Argonaut, Hercules, and all the other most distinguished heroes of the generation before the Trojan War. He was renowned for his skill in hunting, medicine, music, gymnastics and divination, his instructors being Apollo and Artemis, and was accidentally killed by Hercules; after which he became the Bowman of the Greek Zodiac. He was evidently the heir to the Cretan culture which had reached Thessaly by the sheltered port of Iolcos, and to the independent Helladic culture. He is called ‘the son of Cronos’.

Perhaps we can make another identification here: of Feniusa Farsa with ‘Amphictyon’ the founder of the Amphictyonic League, or the League of Neighbours. Magnesia was a member of this ancient federation of twelve tribes – Athens was the most powerful – representatives of which met every autumn at Anthela near the pass of Thermopylae and every Spring at Delphi. ‘Amphictyon’ was a son of Deucalion (‘sweet wine’), whose mother was Pasiphaë the Cretan Moon-goddess, and of Pyrrha (‘the red one’), the Noah and Noah’s wife of Greece. He was himself ‘the first man ever to mix wine with water’. In characteristic style he married the heiress of Attica, Cranë – already mentioned as an aspect of the White Goddess – expelled his predecessor, and set up altars to Phallic Dionysus and the Nymphs. We know that Amphictyon was not his real name, for the League was really founded in honour of the Barley-goddess Demeter, or Danaë, in her character of President of Neighbours (‘Amphictyonis’) and the sacrifice at the autumn meetings was made to her: but it was the usual habit in Classical Greece, as it was in Classical Britain and Ireland, to deny women the credit of inventing or initiating anything important. So ‘Amphictyon’ was the male surrogate of Amphictyonis, just as ‘Don King of Dublin and Lochlin’ was of the Irish Goddess Danu; and as, I believe, the Giant Samothes, after whom Britain had its earliest name ‘Samothea’, was of the White Goddess,
Samothea
– for Samothes is credited by early British historians, quoting from the Babylonian Berossus, with the invention of letters, astronomy and other sciences usually attributed to the White Goddess. And since Amphictyon ‘joined together’ the various states and was a wise man, we may call him
‘Foeneus’ – or ‘Dionysus’.

The most ancient Greek account of the creation of the vine that has been preserved is that given by Pausanias (X, 38): how in the time of Orestheus son of Deucalion a white bitch littered a stick which he planted and which grew into a vine. The white bitch is obviously the Triple Goddess again: Amphictyonis. Of the Amphictyonic League eight tribes Pelasgian and, according to Strabo, Callimachus and the Scholiast on Euripides’s
Orestes
,
it was originally regularized by Acrisius the grandfather of Perseus. But the composition of the League in Classical times was claimed to date from about 1103
BC
, and it included the Achaeans of Phthiotis, who were not there in Acrisius’s day. The inference is that four Pelasgian tribes were extruded in successive Greek invasions.

St. Paul quoted a Greek proverb: ‘All Cretans are liars’. They were called liars for the same reason that poets are: because they had a different way of looking at things. Particularly because they remained unmoved by Olympian propaganda, which for the previous thousand years or so had insisted on an Eternal, Almighty, Just Father Zeus – Zeus who had swept away with his thunderbolt all the wicked old gods and established his shining throne for ever on Mount Olympus. The True Cretans said: ‘Zeus is dead. His tomb is to be seen on one of our mountains.’ This was not spoken with bitterness. All that they meant was that ages before Zeus became an Eternal Almighty God in Greece, he had been a simple old-fashioned Sun-king, annually sacrificed, a servant of the Great Goddess, and that his remains were customarily buried in a tomb on Mount Juktas. They were not liars. There was no father God in Minoan Crete and their account squares with the archaeological finds recently made on that very mountain. The Pelasgians of Leros had much the same reputation as the Cretans, but seem to have been even more obdurate in their attachment to ancient tradition, to judge from the Greek epigram: ‘The Lerians are all bad, not merely some Lerians, but every one of them – except Procles, and of course he is a Lerian too.’

The early Welsh and Irish historians are also generally regarded as liars because their ancient records are dated to uncomfortably early dates and do not square either with conventional Biblical dates or with the obstinate theory that until Roman times the inhabitants of all the British Isles were howling savages who had no native art or literature at all and painted themselves blue. The Picts and Britons certainly tattooed themselves, as the Dacians, Thracians and Mosynoechians did, with pictorial devices. That they used woad for the purpose is a proof of advanced culture, for the extraction of blue dye from the woad-plant, which the ancient Irish also practised, is an extremely complicated chemical process; the blue colour perhaps sanctified them to the Goddess Anu.
1
I do not mean that
these records have not undergone a great deal of careless, pious, or dishonest editing at every stage of religious development; but at least they seem to be as trustworthy as the corresponding Greek Records, and rather more trustworthy than the Hebrew – if only because ancient Ireland suffered less from wars than Greece or Palestine. To dismiss the Irish and Welsh as incoherent children has one great advantage: it frees the historian of any obligation to add Old Goidelic and Old Welsh to his multifarious other studies.

In modern civilization almost the only place where a scholar can study at ease is a University. But at a University one has to be very careful indeed not to get out of step with one’s colleagues and especially not to publish any heterodox theories. Orthodox opinions are in general based on a theory of political and moral expediency, originally refined under Olympianism, which is the largest single gift of paganism to Christianity. Not only to Christianity. Twenty-five years ago, when I was Professor of English Literature at the Royal Egyptian University of Cairo, my colleague the blind Professor of Arabic Literature was imprudent enough to suggest in one of his lectures that the Koran contained certain pre-Mohammedan metrical compositions. This was blasphemy and a good excuse for his examination-funking students to go on strike. So the Rector called him to task and he was faced with the alternatives of losing his job and recantation. He recanted. In American Universities of the Bible Belt the same sort of thing often happens: some incautious junior professor suggests that perhaps the Whale did not really swallow Jonah and supports his view by quoting the opinions of eminent natural historians. He leaves at the end of the University year if not before. In England the case is not quite so bad, but bad enough. Sir James Frazer was able to keep his beautiful rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, until his death by carefully and methodically sailing all round his dangerous subject, as if charting the coastline of a forbidden island without actually committing himself to a declaration that it existed. What he was saying-not-saying was that Christian legend, dogma and ritual are the refinement of a great body of primitive and even barbarous beliefs, and that almost the only original element in Christianity is the personality of Jesus. Recent researches that I have made into Christian origins, the history of the American Revolution, and the private life of Milton, three dangerous topics, have 
astonished me. How calculatedly misleading the textbooks are! Dog, Lapwing and Roebuck have long ago entered the service of the new Olympians.

To return to Dr. Macalister, who does not account for the thirteen-consonant Irish alphabet and assumes that the Druids possessed no alphabet before they formed the BLFSN alphabet from the Formello-Cervetri one. He does not brush aside the question, why the common name for all Irish alphabets was ‘Beth-Luis-Nion’ – which means that the original sequence began with BLN, not BLF – but makes a complicated postulate for which he has no epigraphic evidence. He suggests that the Druids of Southern Gaul chose out from the Formello-Cervetri list the letters:

and that this, their first alphabet of any sort lasted just long enough to give the Irish alphabet its name. He also suggests (without epigraphic evidence) that an intermediate alphabet was devised by a clever phonetician as follows:

before the order was finally settled (in Ireland at least) as:

plus five ‘diphthongs’, as he rather misleadingly calls the allusive vowel-combinations referring to the foreign letters, for which characters were found in five of the six supernumerary letters of the Formello-Cervetri alphabet. He does not deny that Beth, Luis and Nion are tree-names, but holds that as cipher equivalents of the Formello-Cervetri letter names, which he says must have retained their original Semitic names as late as the fifth century
BC
, they were chosen merely as having the correct initial, and suggests that L,
Luis
the rowan, might just as well have been the larch.

This argument might pass muster were it not that the Druids were famous for their sacred groves and their tree-cult, and that the old sequence of tree-letters was evidently of such religious importance that the later B.L.F.S.N. alphabet, with its misplacement of N, could never wipe out its memory. Dr. Macalister may regard the Beth-Luis-Nion Tree-Ogham as an ‘artificiality’; but the trees in it are placed in a seasonal arrangement which has strong mythological backing, whereas the original sequence which he postulates makes no sense at all after the first five letters, which are in the accepted order. For my part I cannot believe in his postulate; oak and elder cannot change places; it is not easy to overlook the Latin proverb that ‘it is not from
every
tree that a statue of Mercury can be carved’; and only in joke does anyone gather nuts,
Coll
, and may,
Uavi
,
on a cold and frosty morning.

At some time, it seems, in the fifth century
BC
the
characters
of the Formello-Cervetri alphabet were borrowed by the Druids in Southern Gaul for the purpose of recording whatever was not protected by a taboo, and passed on by them into Britain and Ireland. The foreign letters which occur in it were added to an already existing secret alphabet, the Boibel-Loth, the letter-names of which formed a charm in honour of Canopic Hercules. But this does not prove that the Druids did not possess an earlier alphabet beginning with B.L.N., with entirely different letter-names bound up with the more barbaric religious cult commemorated in Amergin’s song and enshrined in a traditional tree-sequence of birch, rowan, ash, alder, willow, etc. Or that the historical tradition, at which Dr. Macalister indulgently smiles, that letters were known in Ireland many centuries before the Formello-Cervetri alphabet reached Italy, is a late fiction. If we can show that the BLFSN alphabet was a logical development from the BLNFS tree-alphabet and can connect it with a new religious dispensation, without having to invent intermediate forms for which there is no literary evidence, then everything will make poetic as well as prose sense. Religious necessity is always a far likelier explanation of changes in an alphabet than phonetic theory, to which alone Dr. Macalister attributes his hypothetic changes in the sequence of the Beth-Luis-Nion: for all right-minded people everywhere naturally oppose the attempts of scholarly phoneticians to improve their familiar ABC, the foundation of all learning and the first thing that they ever learned at school.