The White Goddess (68 page)
Authors: Robert Graves
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Mythology, #Literature, #20th Century, #Britain, #Literary Studies, #Amazon.com, #Mysticism, #Retail
July
9-Aug.
5
– T –
truith,
starling;
temen,
dark-grey.
Why is the Starling in the next place?
Not hard. Amergin sang of this month: ‘I am a Spear that roars for blood.’ It is the warrior’s month, and the Starlings’ well-trained army will wheel swiftly and smoothly on a pivot, to the left or to the right, without a word of command or exhortation; thus battles are won, not by single feats and broken ranks. And Dark-grey is the colour of Iron, the warriors’ metal.
Aug.
6-Sept. 2
– C – [
corr,
crane];
cron,
brown.
Why is the Crane in the next place?
Not hard. This is the month of wisdom, and the wisdom of Manannan Mac Lir, namely the Beth-Luis-Nion, was wrapped in Crane-skin. And Brown are the nuts of the Hazel, tree of wisdom.
The
same
–
Q –
querc,
hen;
quiar,
mouse-coloured.
Why is the Hen joined with the Crane?
Not hard. When the harvest is carted, and the gleaners have gone, the Hen is turned into the cornfields to fatten on what she can find. And a Mouse-coloured little rival creeps around with her.
Sept.
2-Sept.
30
– M –
mintan,
titmouse;
mbracht,
variegated.
Why is the Titmouse in the next place?
Not hard. Amergin sang of this month: ‘I am a Hill of Poetry’; and this
is the month of the poet, who is the least easily abashed of men, as the Titmouse is the least easily abashed of birds. Both band together in companies in this month, and go on circuit in search of a liberal hand; and as the Titmouse climbs spirally up a tree, so the Poet also spirals to immortality. And Variegated is the colour of the Titmouse, and of the Master-poet’s dress.
Oct.
1-Oct.
29
– G –
géis,
mute swan;
gorm,
blue.
Why is the Mute Swan in the next place?
Not hard. In this month he prepares to follow his companion the Whistling Swan. And Blue is the haze on the hills, Blue the smoke of the burning weed, Blue the skies before the November rain.
Oct.
29-Nov.
25
– Ng –
ngéigh,
goose;
nglas,
glass-green. Why is the Goose in the next place?
Not hard. In this month the tame goose is brought in from misty pasture to be cooped and fattened for the mid-winter feast; and the wild goose mourns for him in the misty meadows. And Glassy-green is the wave that thuds against the cliff, a warning that the year must end.
Nov.
26-Dec.
22
;
–
R –
rócnar,
rook;
ruadh,
blood-red. Why is the Rook in the last place?
Not hard. He wears mourning for the year that dies in this month. And Blood-red are the rags of leaves on the elder-trees, a token of the slaughter.
* * *
The Pheasant was the best available bird for the B-month,
bran
the raven and
bunnan
the bittern being better suited to later months of the year. The author of the article on pheasants in the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
states that pheasants (sacred birds in Greece) are likely to have been indigenous to the British Isles and that the white, or ‘Bohemian’, variety often appears among pheasants of ordinary plumage.
It is possible that the original S-colour was
serind,
primrose, but that the primrose’s erotic reputation led to its replacement by the euphemism,
sodath.
The omission of
corr,
the Crane, for the C-month is intentional; the contents of the Crane-bag were a close secret and all reference to it was discouraged. And what of Dec. 23rd, the extra day of the year, on which the young King, or Spirit of the Year, was crowned and given eagle’s wings, and which was expressed by the semi-vowel J, written as double I? Its bird was naturally the Eagle,
iolar
in Irish, which has the right initial. The Irish poets were so chary of mentioning this day that we do not even know what its tree was; yet that they regarded the Eagle as its bird is proved by the use of the diminutive
illait,
Eaglet, for the letter I: that is to say that if the extra day, double-I, had not been secretly given the
cypher-equivalent
iolar,
there would be no need to express the preceding day, that of the Winter Solstice, namely single I, by
illait,
Eaglet – for E is not expressed by Cygnet, nor A by Lapwing-chick.
These cyphers were used to mystify and deceive all ordinary people who were not in the secret. For example, if one poet asked another in public: ‘When shall we two meet again?’ he would expect an answer in which elements of several cypher alphabets were used, and which was further disguised by being spelt backwards or put in a foreign language, or both. He might, for instance, be answered in a sentence built up from the Colour, Bird, Tree and Fortress oghams:
When
a
brown-plumage
d
rook
perches
on
the
fir
below
the
Fortress
of
Seolae.
That would spell out the Latin CRAS – ‘tomorrow’.
Besides the one hundred and fifty regular cypher-alphabets that the candidate for the ollaveship had to learn, there were countless other tricks for putting the uninitiated off the scent; for example, the use of the letter after, or before, the desired one. Often a synonym was used for the tree-cypher word – ‘the chief overseer of Nimrod’s Tower’ for
Beth,
birch; ‘activity of bees’ for
Saille,
willow; ‘pack of wolves’ for
Straif,
blackthorn, and so on.
In one of the cypher-alphabets,
Luis
is given as elm, not rowan, because the Irish word for elm,
lemh,
begins with an L;
Tinne
is given as elder because the Irish word for elder,
trom,
begins with a T; similarly,
Quert
is given as
quulend,
holly. This trick may account for
Ngetal,
reed, being so frequently read as broom, the Irish of which is
n
’gilcach;
but there is also a practical poetic reason for the change. The
Book
of
Bally
mote
gives broom the poetic name of ‘Physicians’ Strength’, presumably because its bitter shoots, being diuretic, were prized as ‘a remedy for surfeits and to all diseases arising therefrom’. (A decoction of broom-flowers was Henry VIII’s favourite medicine.) A medical tree suited the month of November, when the year was dying and the cold winds kept well-to-do people indoors with little diversion but eating and drinking.
1
Homer says that Pharos lies a full day’s sail from the river of Egypt. This has been absurdly taken to mean from the Nile; it can only mean from the River of Egypt (
J
oshua,
XV,
4
)
the southern boundary of Palestine, a stream well known to Achaean raiders of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries
BC
.
The same mistake has been made by a mediaeval editor of the
Kebra
Nagast
,
the Ethiopian Bible. He has misrepresented the flight of the men who stole the Ark from Jerusalem as miraculous, because they covered the distance between Gaza and the River of Egypt in only one day, whereas the caravan time-table reckoned it a thirteen days’ journey. The absence of prehistoric remains on the island itself suggests that all except the shore was a tree-planted sanctuary of Proteus, oracular hero and giver of winds.
1
Compare the equally mixed list given by Nonnus of Zagreus’s transformations: ‘Zeus in his goat-skin coat, Cronos making rain, an inspired youth, a lion, a horse, a horned snake, a tiger, a bull’. The transformations of Thetis before her marriage with Peleus were, according to various authors from Pindar to Tzetzes, fire, water, wind, a tree, a bird, a tiger, a lion, a serpent, a cuttlefish. The transformations of Tam Lin in the Scottish ballad were snake or newt, bear, lion, red-hot iron and a coal to be quenched in running water. The zoological elements common to these four versions of an original story, namely snake, lion, some other fierce beast (bear, bull, panther, or tiger) suggest a calendar sequence of three seasons corresponding with the Lion, Goat and Serpent of the Carian Chimaera; or the Bull, Lion and Serpent of the Babylonian
Sir-rush.
If this is so, fire and water would stand for the sun and moon which between them rule the year. It is possible, however, that the animals in Nonnus’s list, bull, lion, tiger, horse and snake, form a Thraco-Libyan calendar of five, not three, seasons.
1
Typhon’s counterpart in the Sanscrit
Rig-veda
,
composed not later than 1300
BC
, is Rudra, the prototype of the Hindu Siva, a malignant demon, father of the storm-demons; he is addressed as a ‘ruddy divine boar’.
1
The influence of Pythagoras on the mediaeval mystics of North-Western Europe was a strong one. Bernard of Morlaix (
circa
1140) author of the ecstatic poem
De
Contemptu
Mundi
,
wrote ‘Listen to an experienced man….Trees and stones will teach you more than you can learn from the mouth of a doctor of theology.’ Bernard was born in Brittany of English parents and his verse is in the Irish poetic tradition. His ecstatic vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem is prefaced by the line:
Ad
tua
munera
sit
via
doctora,
Pythagoraea.‘May our way to your Pythagorean blessings be an auspicious one.’
For he was not a nature worshipper, but held that the mythical qualities of chosen trees and chosen precious stones, as studied by the Pythagoreans, explained the Christian mysteries better than Saint Athanasius had ever been able to do.
1
Clement is very nearly right in another sense, which derives from the suppression in the Phoenician and early Hebrew alphabets of all the vowels, except
aleph,
occurring in the Greek alphabet with which they are linked. The introduction into Hebrew script of pure vowel signs in the form of dots is ascribed to Ezra who, with Nehemiah, established the New Law about the year 430. It is likely that the vowels had been suppressed at a time when the Holy Name of the deity who presided over the year consisted of vowels only; and the proof that Ezra did not invent them but merely established an inoffensive notation for a sacred series long fixed in oral tradition lies in the order which he used, namely I.Ē.E.U.O.A.OU.Ō. This is the Palamedan I.E.U.O.A. with the addition of three extra vowels to bring the number up to eight, the mystic numeral of increase. Since the dots with which he chose to represent them were not part of the alphabet and had no validity except when attached to consonants, they could be used without offence. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that the consonants which compose the Tetragrammaton, namely
yod,
he
and
vav
may cease to carry consonantal force when they have vowel signs attached to them; so that JHWH could be sounded IAŌOUĀ. This is a peculiarity that no other Hebrew consonant has, except
ain
, and
ain
not in all dialects of Hebrew. Clement got the last vowel wrong, E for Ā, perhaps because he knew that the letter H is known as
He
in Hebrew.
2
42 is the number of the children devoured by Elisha’s she-bears. This is apparently an iconotropic myth derived from a sacred picture of the Libyo-Thraco-Pelasgian ‘Brauronia’ ritual. The two she-bears were girls dressed in yellow dresses who pretended to be bears and rushed savagely at the boys who attended the festival. The ritual was in honour of Artemis Callisto, the Moon as Bear-Goddess, and since a goat was sacrificed seems to belong to the Midsummer festivities. 42 is the number of days from the beginning of the H month, which is the preparation for the midsummer marriage and death-orgy, to Midsummer Day. 42 is also the number of infernal jurymen who judged Osiris: the days between his midsummer death and the end of the T month, when he reached Calypso’s isle, though this is obscured in the priestly
Book
of
the
Dead.
According to Clement of Alexandria there were forty-two books of Hermetic mysteries.
1
The number occurs also in two royal brooches – ‘king’s wheels’ – found in 1945 in a Bronze Age ‘Iberian’ burial at Lluch in Majorca, the seat of a Black Virgin cult, and dated about 1500
BC
. The first is a disc of seven inches in diameter, made for pinning on a cloak and embossed with a nineteen-rayed sun. This sun is enclosed by two bands, the outer one containing thirteen separated leaves, of five different kinds, perhaps representing wild olive, alder, prickly-oak, ivy and rosemary, some turned clockwise, some counter-clockwise, and all but two of them with buds or rudimentary flowers joined to them half-way up their stalks. The inner band contains five roundels at regular intervals, the spaces between the roundels filled up with pairs of leaves of the same sort as those in the outer ring, except that the alder is not represented. The formula is: thirteen months, a pentad of goddesses-of-the-year, a nineteen-year reign.
The other, slightly smaller, royal disc found in the same burial has a border of nineteen semi-circles, a central sun with twenty-one detached rays and, between the sun and the border two intervening bands – the inner one containing forty-five small bosses, the outer twenty hearts. The head of the pin is shaped like a swan’s; as that of the other, which has perished, may have also been. Here the formula is: a nineteen-year reign, with a fresh victim (the twenty hearts) offered at the beginning of every year, the king himself being the twentieth. The White Swan, his Mother, will carry him off to her Hyperborean paradise. Twenty-one is the number of rays on Akhenaton’s sun. Forty-five is the pentad of goddesses-of-the-year, multiplied by the number nine to show that each is an aspect of the Moon-goddess.
So far as I know, the Bronze Age and early Iron Age smiths who, like the poets and physicians, came under the direct patronage of the Muse, never embellished their work with meaningless decoration. Every object they made – sword, spear-head, shield, dagger, scabbard, brooch, jug, harness-ring, tankard, bucket, mirror, or what not – had magical properties to which the shape and number of its various decorations testified. Few archaeologists lay any emphasis on magic, and this makes most museum-guides pretty dull reading. For example, in the
British
Museum
Guide
to
the
Antiquities
of
the
Early
Iron
Age
(1905), fig. 140 shows a beaded bronze collar from Lochar Moss, Dumfriesshire. The editorial comment is only on the melon-like shape of the beads which has, it is said, affinities with that of turquoise-coloured glass beads common on sites in Roman Britain. What needed to be pointed out was that there are thirteen of these beads in the collar, each with seven ribs, and that the design on the rigid crescent-shaped part is an interlace of nine S’s: a collar replete with lunar fate. Similarly, the open-work bronze disc (fig. 122) found in the Thames at Hammersmith is interesting because the sun which forms its centre has eight rays and is pierced with a Maltese cross; but the editor’s only comment is on its stylistic relation with open-work bronze horse-poitrels from a Gaulish chariot-burial at Somme Bionne (Plate III), one of which contains pierced crosses. This is irrelevant, unless attention is paid to the three swastikas in the poitrel and to the numbers nine and thirteen which characterize the horse head-stall ornaments shown in the same plate.