The White Goddess (61 page)

Thus the thyrsus contained three trees, each representing a flight of
five calendar letters, or one-third of the year; besides the palm which represented the extra day (or period of five days) on which the Sun-god was born. The number fifteen was therefore of prime importance in the Festival: the Levites sang the fifteen Songs of Ascent (attributed to King David) as they stood on the fifteen steps leading up from the Women’s Court to the Court of Israel. The number also figures in the architecture of Solomon’s ‘house of the Forest of Lebanon’ which was more than twice the size of the House of the Lord. It was built on three rows of cedar pillars, fifteen to a row, and was 50 cubits long by 30 high and wide; with an adjoining porch 30 cubits wide, 50 long, height not given – probably 10 cubits.

The Hebrew canon of the trees of the week, the seven pillars of Wisdom, is not difficult to establish. For the birch, which was not a Palestinian tree, the most likely substitute is the
retem
or wild broom, which was the tree under which the prophet Elijah rested on Mount Horeb (‘the mountain of glowing heat’) and seems to have been sacred to the Sun. Like the birch, it was used as a besom for the expulsion of evil spirits. Willow remains the same. For the holly, the kerm-oak, already mentioned in Chapter Ten as the tree from which the ancients obtained their royal scarlet dye. This ascription of the kerm-oak to Nergal or Mars, is confirmed by a characteristic passage in Frazer’s
Golden
Bough
:

The substitute for the hazel was the almond: this was the tree from which Aaron took his magic rod, and the
Menor
ah
the seven-branched candlestick in the Temple Sanctuary at Jerusalem had its sconces in the form of almonds and represented Aaron’s rod when it budded. It was this branch that Jeremiah (
Jeremiah
I, 11
)
was shown as a visionary token that God had granted him prophetic wisdom. The sconces stood for the seven heavenly bodies of the week, and the central sconce was the fourth, namely that dedicated to Wisdom, which gives its name to all the rest; its branch formed the shaft of the candlestick. For the oak, the terebinth sacred to Abraham. For the apple, the quince. For the alder, since we know that the alder was banned in Temple worship, the pomegranate which supplies a red dye as the alder does. The pomegranate was Saul’s sacred tree, and sacred to Rimmon, a name for Adonis from whose blood it is said to have sprung. Also, the Paschal victim was traditionally spitted on pomegranate wood. The pomegranate was the only fruit allowed to be brought inside the Holy of Holies – miniature pomegranates were sewn on
the High Priest’s robes when he made his yearly entry. Since the seventh day was sacred to Jehovah and Jehovah was a form of Bran, or Saturn, or Ninib,
1
everything points to the pomegranate as the tree of the seventh day. So:

The one doubtful tree here is the broom, or its Irish counterpart, the birch. The seven trees of the Irish grove all belong to the summer months except B, the birch, which has taken the place of H, the hawthorn: and has apparently been chosen because it is the leading letter of the first flight of five trees, as H is of the second. But, as will be shown in the next chapter, B was used as the cypher equivalent of H not only in Hyginus’s
Fable
271 but in the third century
AD
Ogham inscription on the Callen Stone. So it seems that Sunday’s original letter was not B, but H, of which the Hebrew tree, corresponding with the hawthorn, was the
Sant,
or wild acacia, the sort with golden flowers and sharp thorns, better known to readers of the Bible as ‘shittim’-wood, i.e. from Cyprus. It was from its water-proof timber that the arks of the Sun-hero Osiris and his counterparts Noah and Armenian Xisuthros were built; also the Ark of the Covenant, the recorded measurements of which proved it sacred to the Sun. This is a host-tree of the mistletoe-like loranthus, Jehovah’s oracular ‘burning bush’, and the source of manna.

The use of H for Sunday’s letter explains Lucan’s puzzling account of the sacred grove at Marseilles which Julius Caesar felled because it interfered with his fortification of the city. Marseilles was a Greek city, a centre of Pythagoreanism, and Caesar had to use an axe himself on one of the oaks before he could persuade anyone to begin the work of desecration. The grove, according to Lucan, contained holly-oak, Dodonian oak, and alder – T, D and F. He specifies none of the remaining trees except the
cypress, which the Massiliots had brought from their parent state of Phocis where it was sacred to Artemis. One would not have expected the cypress in the grove; but elsewhere in Greece, particularly at Corinth and Messene, it was sacred to Artemis Cranaë or Carnasia; which makes it an H tree, an evergreen substitute for the hawthorn also sacred to Cranaë or Carnea. Thus as the tree of Sunday, succeeding the alder of Saturday, it symbolized resurrection in the Orphic mysteries, the escape of the Sun-hero from Calypso’s alder-girt island, and became attached to the cult of Celestial Hercules. Cypress is still the prime resurrection symbol in Mediterranean church-yards.
1

There is a clear correspondence between this canon and that of the seven days of Creation as characterized in the first chapter of
Genesis.

The apparent illogic of the creation of Light, and even of Pasture and Trees, before that of the Heavenly Bodies and Seasons – though here it has been ingeniously suggested by Mr. Ernst Schiff that the Heavenly Bodies were not visible until the fourth day because of the ‘damp haze’ mentioned in verse 9 of the Creation story, and therefore not created in the sense of not being manifested – is accounted for by the powers proper
to the deities who rule over the planetary days of the week. The Sun-god rules over Light, the Moon over Water, Mars over Pasture and Trees, and Mercury is the God of Astronomy. Clearly the
Genesis
legend is subsequent to the fixing of the canon of planets, days and gods. The allocation of Sea-beasts and Birds to the fifth day is natural, because the god of the oak or terebinth cult is, in general, the son of a Sea-goddess to whom the Dove, the Eagle and all other birds are sacred, and himself takes the form of a sea-beast. The order to man and woman to couple and produce their kind, like the creatures over which they have dominion, is appropriate to the day of Venus. The pleasant sloth of Saturn – in whose golden day, according to the Classical poets, men ate honey and acorns in a Terrestrial Paradise and did not trouble to till the soil, or even to hunt, since the earth brought forth abundantly of her own bounty – explains the seventh day as one of repose. The Jewish apocalyptic prophecy (which Jesus took literally) of the Heavenly Kingdom of Jehovah referred to a restoration of this same golden age if only man would cease to busy himself with wars and labours; for Jehovah required rest on the seventh day. As has been already explained, the geographical situation of the former Terrestrial Paradise was variously given. The Babylonians placed it in the Delta of the Euphrates; the Greeks in Crete; the pre-Exilic Hebrews at Hebron in Southern Judaea.

It is of the highest theological importance that Jehovah announced himself to Moses as ‘I am that I am’ or (more literally) ‘I am whoever I choose to be’ from the acacia rather than from any other tree; because this constituted a definition of his godhead. Had he announced himself from the terebinth, as the earlier Jehovah had done at Hebron, this would have been to reveal himself as Bel, or Marduk, the god of Thursday and of the seventh month, the Aramaean Jupiter, the Paeonian Apollo. But from the acacia, the tree of the first day of the week, he revealed himself as the God of the Menorah, the transcendental Celestial God, the God who presently said: ‘Thou shalt have none other Gods but me…for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.’ The acacia is, indeed, a thorny, jealous, self-sufficient tree, needs very little water and, like Odin’s ash, strangles with its roots all other trees growing near it. Uath, the month dedicated to the acacia, was the one in which the annual Hebron Fair took place, and so holy that (as has been mentioned in Chapter Ten) all sexual congress and self-beautification was tabooed during it: it was the month of the annual purification of the temples in Greece, Italy and the Near East.

The not yet completed Ages of the World, quoted from Nennius by Gwion, are based on the same planetary canon:

The Rabbinical explanation of the Menorah, in terms of the creation of the world in seven days, is obviously faulty: the ascription of the central light to the Sabbath contradicts the ‘Let there be Lights’ text of the fourth day. The more ancient tradition preserved in the
Zohar
:
‘These lamps, like the seven planets above, receive their light from the Sun’, goes back to the pre-exilic Sun-cult. The Menorah was placed in the Sanctuary to face W.S.W., towards On-Heliopolis, as the original home of the Sun-god to whom Moses was priest.

Josephus (
Antiquities
v.
5
;
5
) writes of the three wonders of the Sanctuary, namely the lamps, the table of shew-bread, and the altar of incense: