The White Goddess (86 page)

The Aonian Mount is Mount Helicon in Boeotia, a mountain a few miles to the east of Parnassus, and known in Classical times as ‘the seat of the Muses’. The adjective ‘Aonian’ is a reminiscence of a memorable line from Virgil’s
Georgics:

which is spoken by Apollo, the God of poetry, who by Virgil’s time was also recognized as the Sun-god. The line means ‘On my return I shall lead the Muses down from the top of Mount Helicon’. Apollo is referring to the transplanting of the worship of the Muses from Ascra, a town on a ridge of Helicon, to Delphi, on Mount Parnassus, a place which had become sacred to himself. On Helicon rose the spring named Hippocrene, ‘The Horse Well’, which was horse-shoe shaped. The legend was that it had been struck by the hoof of the horse Pegasus, whose name means ‘of the springs of water’. Poets were said to drink of Hippocrene for inspiration.
Hence John Skelton’s lines (
Against
Garnesche
):

But it may be supposed that Hippocrene and Aganippe were originally struck by the moon-shaped hoof of Leucippe (‘White Mare’), the Mare-headed Mother herself, and that the story of how Bellerophon son of Poseidon mastered Pegasus and then destroyed the triple-shaped Chimaera is really the story of an Achaean capture of the Goddess’s shrine: Pegasus, in fact, was originally called Aganippe.
Aganos
is a Homeric adjective applied to the shafts of Artemis and Apollo, meaning ‘giving a merciful death’; so Aganippe would mean: ‘The Mare who destroys mercifully.’ This supposition is strengthened by the Greek legend of the pursuit of Demeter, the Barley Mother, by the Achaean god Poseidon. Demeter, to escape his attentions, disguised herself as a mare and concealed herself among the horses of Oncios the Arcadian, but Poseidon became a stallion and covered her; her anger at this outrage was said to account for her statue at Onceum, called Demeter Erinnys – the Fury.

Demeter as a Mare-goddess was widely worshipped under the name of Epona, or ‘the Three Eponae’, among the Gallic Celts, and there is a strange account in Giraldus Cambrensis’s
Topography
of
Ireland
which shows that relics of the same cult survived in Ireland until the twelfth century. It concerns the crowning of an Irish petty-king at Tyrconnell, a preliminary to which was his symbolic rebirth from a white mare. He crawled naked towards her on all fours as if he were her foal; she was then slaughtered, and her pieces boiled in a cauldron. He himself entered the cauldron and began sucking up the broth and eating the flesh. Afterwards he stood on an inauguration stone, was presented with a straight white wand, and turned about three times from left to right, and then three times from right to left – ‘in honour of the Trinity’. Originally no doubt in honour of the Triple White Goddess.

The horse, or pony, has been a sacred animal in Britain from prehistoric times, not merely since the Bronze Age introduction of the stronger Asiatic breed. The only human figure represented in what survives of British Old Stone Age art is a man wearing a horse-mask, carved in bone, found in the Derbyshire Pin-hole Cave; a remote ancestor of the hobbyhorse mummers in the English ‘Christmas play’. The Saxons and Danes venerated the horse as much as did their Celtic predecessors, and the taboo on eating horse-flesh survives in Britain as a strong physical repugnance, despite attempts made during World War II to popularize hippophagism; but among the Bronze Age British the taboo must have been lifted at an annual October horse-feast, as among the Latins. In mediaeval Denmark the ecstatic three-day horse-feast, banned by the
Church, survived among the heathenish serf-class; a circumstantial description is given by Johannes Jensen in his
Fall
of
the
King.
He mentions that the priest first sprinkled bowls of the horse’s blood towards the South and East – which explains the horse as an incarnation of the Spirit of the solar year, son of the Mare-goddess.

In the Romance of
Pwyll,
Prince
of
Dyfed
the Goddess appears as Rhiannon mother of Pryderi. Rhiannon is a corruption of Rigantona (‘Great Queen’) and Dyfed consisted of most of Carmarthen and the whole of Pembrokeshire and included St. David’s; its central point was called ‘The Dark Gate’, an entrance to the Underworld. When Pwyll (‘Prudence’) first sees Rhiannon and falls in love with her, he pursues her on his fastest horse but cannot overtake her; evidently in the original story she took the form of a white mare. When at last she consents to be overtaken, and marries him twelve months later, she bears him a son afterwards called Pryderi (‘Anxiety’) who disappears at birth; and her maids falsely accuse her of having devoured him, smearing her face with the blood of puppies. As a penance she is ordered to stand at a horse-block outside Pwyll’s palace, like a mare, ready to carry guests on her back.
1
The life of her son Pryderi is closely connected with a magical foal which has been rescued from a harpy; all the previous foals of the same mare have been snatched off on May Eve and never seen again. Pryderi, a Divine Child of the sort that is taken away from its mother – like Llew Llaw, or Zeus, or Romulus – is later, as usual, given a name and arms by her, mounts the magical horse and eventually becomes a Lord of the Dead. Rhiannon is thus seen to be a Mare-goddess, but she is also a Muse-goddess, for the sirens that appear in the
Triads,
and also in the
Romance
of
Branwen,
singing with wonderful sweetness are called ‘The Birds of Rhiannon’. The story about the puppies recalls the Roman habit of sacrificing red puppies in the Spring to avert the baleful influence of the Dog-star on their grain; the sacrifice was really to the Barley-mother who had the Dog-star as her attendant. Rhiannon, in fact, is the Mare-Demeter, a successor of the Sow-Demeter Cerridwen. That the Mare-Demeter devoured children, like the Sow-Demeter, is proved by the myth of Leucippe (‘White Mare’) the Orchomenan, who with her two sisters ran wild and devoured her son Hippasus (‘foal’); and by the myth recorded by Pausanias, that when Rhea gave birth to Poseidon she offered her lover Cronos a foal to eat instead of the child, whom she gave secretly into the charge of the shepherds of Arcadian Arne.

Mount Helicon was not the earliest seat of the Muse Goddesses, as
their title ‘The Pierians’ shows; the word Muse is now generally derived from the root
mont,
meaning a mountain. Their worship had been brought there in the Heroic Age during a migration of the Boeotian people from Mount Pieria in Northern Thessaly. But to make the transplanted Muses feel at home on Helicon, and so preserve the old magic, the Boeotians named the geographical features of the mountain – the springs, the peaks and grottoes – after the corresponding features of Pieria. The Muses were at this time three in number, an indivisible Trinity, as the mediaeval Catholics recognized when they built the church of their own Holy Trinity on the site of the deserted shrine of the Heliconian Muses. The appropriate names of the three Persons were Meditation, Memory and Song. The worship of the Muses on Helicon (and presumably also in Pieria) was concerned with incantatory cursing and incantatory blessing; Helicon was famous for the medicinal herbs which supplemented the incantations – especially for the nine-leaved black hellebore used by Melampus at Lusi as a cure for the Daughters of Proetus, which could either cause or cure insanity and which has a stimulative action on the heart like
digitalis
(fox-glove). It was famous also for the erotic fertility dances about a stone herm at Thespiae, a town at its foot, in which the women-votaries of the Muses took part. Spenser addresses the Muses as ‘Virgins of Helicon’; he might equally have called them ‘witches’, for the witches of his day worshipped the same White Goddess – in
Macbeth
called Hecate – performed the same fertility dances on their Sabbaths, and were similarly gifted in incantatory magic and knowledge of herbs.

The Muse priestesses of Helicon presumably used two products of the horse to stimulate their ecstasies: the slimy vaginal issue of a mare in heat and the black membrane, or
hippomanes,
cut from the forehead of a newborn colt, which the mare (according to Aristotle) normally eats as a means of increasing her mother-love. Dido in the
Aeneid
used this
hippo
manes
in her love-potion.

Skelton in his
Garland
of Laurell
thus describes the Triple Goddess in her three characters as Goddess of the Sky, Earth and Underworld:

As Goddess of the Underworld she was concerned with Birth, Procreation and Death. As Goddess of the Earth she was concerned with the three seasons of Spring, Summer and Winter: she animated trees and plants and ruled all living creatures. As Goddess of the Sky she was the Moon, in her three phases of New Moon, Full Moon, and Waning Moon. This explains why from a triad she was so often enlarged to an ennead. But it must never be forgotten that the Triple Goddess, as worshipped for example at Stymphalus, was a personification of primitive woman – woman the
creatress and destructress. As the New Moon or Spring she was girl; as the Full Moon or Summer she was woman; as the Old Moon or Winter she was hag.

In a Gallo-Roman ‘
allée
couverte
’
burial at Tressé near St. Malo in Brittany two pairs of girls’ breasts are sculptured on one megalithic upright, two maternal pairs of breasts on another; the top of a third upright has been broken off, but V. C. C. Collum who excavated the burial suggests that it pictured a third pair – probably the shrunken breasts of the Hag. A very interesting find in this same burial, which can be dated by a bronze coin of Domitian to the end of the first century
AD
, was a flint arrow-head of the usual willow-leaf shape with an incised decoration of half-moons. The willow, as we have seen, was sacred to the Moon, and in the Beth-Luis-Nion is
S
aille
,
the letter S. The most primitive character of the Greek letter S is C, which is borrowed from the Cretan linear script. Sir Arthur Evans in his
Palace
of
Minos
gives a table showing the gradual development of the Cretan characters from ideograms, and the sign C is there explained as a waning moon – the Moon-goddess as hag. The arrow-head, which in Roman Brittany was as completely out of date, except for ritual uses, as the Queen’s sword of state, or the Archbishop’s crozier is now, will have been an offering to the third person of the female Trinity.
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V. C. C. Collum took the trouble to have an analysis made of the charcoal found under the uprights, apparently the remains of the funerary pyre on which the dead man had been cremated. It was willow, oak and hazel charcoal, expressive of the sequence: enchantment, royalty, wisdom.

In Europe there were at first no male gods contemporary with the Goddess to challenge her prestige or power, but she had a lover who was alternatively the beneficent Serpent of Wisdom, and the beneficent Star of Life, her son. The Son was incarnate in the male demons of the various totem societies ruled by her, who assisted in the erotic dances held in her
honour. The Serpent, incarnate in the sacred serpents which were the ghosts of the dead, sent the winds. The Son, who was also called Lucifer or Phosphorus (‘bringer of light’) because as evening-star he led in the light of the Moon, was reborn every year, grew up as the year advanced, destroyed the Serpent, and won the Goddess’s love. Her love destroyed him, but from his ashes was born another Serpent which, at Easter, laid the glain or red egg which she ate; so that the Son was reborn to her as a child once more. Osiris was a Star-son, and though after his death he looped himself around the world like a serpent, yet when his fifty-yard long phallus was carried in procession it was topped with a golden star; this stood for himself renewed as the Child Horus, son of Isis, who had been both his bride and his layer-out and was now his mother once again. Her absolute power was proved by a yearly holocaust in her honour as ‘Lady of the Wild Things’, in which the totem bird or beast of each society was burned alive.

The most familiar icon of Aegean religion is therefore a Moon-woman, a Star-son and a wise spotted Serpent grouped under a fruit-tree – Artemis, Hercules and Erechtheus. Star-son and Serpent are at war; one succeeds the other in the Moon-woman’s favour, as summer succeeds winter, and winter succeeds summer; as death succeeds birth and birth succeeds death. The Sun grows weaker or stronger as the year takes its course, the branches of the tree are now loaded and now bare, but the light of the Moon is invariable. She is impartial: she destroys or creates with equal passion. The conflict between the twins is given an ingenious turn in the Romance of Kilhwych and Olwen: Gwyn (‘White’) and his rival Gwythur ap Greidawl (‘Victor, son of Scorcher’) waged perpetual war for Creiddylad (
alias
Cordelia), daughter of Lludd (
alias
Llyr,
alias
Lear,
alias
Nudd,
alias
Nuada,
alias
Nodens), each in turn stealing her from the other, until the matter was referred to King Arthur. He gave the ironical decision that Creiddylad should be returned to her father and that the twins should ‘fight for her every first of May, until the day of doom’, and that whichever of them should then be conqueror should keep her.