The White Goddess (98 page)
Authors: Robert Graves
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Mythology, #Literature, #20th Century, #Britain, #Literary Studies, #Amazon.com, #Mysticism, #Retail
At this point we can clear up one or two outstanding puzzles. If the Athenians worshipped the North Wind in very primitive times and had brought the cult with them from Libya, then the original Hyperboreans, the ‘back-of-the-North-wind people’, a priesthood concerned with a Northern other-world, were Libyans. This would explain Pindar’s mistaken notion that Hercules fetched the wild olive from the distant
north: he really fetched it from the south, perhaps from as far south as Egyptian Thebes where it still grew with oaks and persea-trees in the time of Pliny – just as the ‘Gorgon’ whom Perseus killed during his visit to the ass-sacrificing Hyperboreans was the southern Goddess Neith of Libya. This was not Hercules the oak-hero, but the other Hercules, the phallic thumb, leader of the five Dactyls, who according to the tradition that Pausanias found at Elis brought such an abundance of wild-olive from Hyperboraea that, after he had crowned the victor of the foot-race run by his brothers, they all slept on heaps of its fresh leaves. Pausanias, though he names the competitors, does not say who won; but it was obviously Paeonius the forefinger, which always comes in first when you run your fingers on the table and make them race, for the
paean
or
paeon
was the song of victory. Moreover, Pausanias says that Zeus wrestled with Cronos on this occasion, and beat him; Zeus is the god of the forefinger, and Cronos the god of the middle, or fool’s finger. The Dactyl who came in second in the race was evidently Epimedes, ‘he who thinks too late’, the fool; for Pausanias gives the names in this order: Hercules, Paeonius, Epimedes, Jasius and Idas.
The wild olive, then, was the crown of Paeonius the forefinger: which means that the vowel of the forefinger, namely O, which is expressed by the gorse
Onn
in the Beth-Luis-Nion, was expressed by the wild olive in the Greek tree alphabet. This explains the use of olive at the Spring festival in the ancient world, which continues in Spain at the ‘Ramos’ (boughs) festival; and Hercules’s olive-wood club – the Sun first arms himself at the Spring equinox; and the olive-leaf in the bill of Noah’s dove which symbolizes the drying up of the winter floods by the Spring Sun. It also explains Paeonius as a title of Apollo Helios the god of the young Sun, which however he seems to have derived from the Goddess Athene Paeonia who first brought the olive to Athens; and the name of the peony,
paeonia,
a Mediterranean wild flower which blooms only at the Spring solstice and quickly sheds its petals.
Spenser’s White Goddess is the Arthurian ‘Lady of the Lake’, also called ‘the White Serpent’, ‘Nimue’, and ‘Vivien’, whom Professor Rhys in his
Arthurian
Legend
identifies with Rhiannon. She is mistress of Merlin (Merddin) and treacherously entombs him in his magic cave when, as Llew Llaw to Blodeuwedd, or Samson to Delilah, or Curoi to Blathnat, he has revealed some of his secrets to her. However, in the earliest Welsh account, the
Dialogue
of Gwenddydd
and
Merddin,
she tells him to arise from his prison and ‘open the Books of Inspiration without fear’. In this dialogue she calls him ‘twin-brother’ which reveals her as Olwen, and she is also styled
Gwenddydd
wen
adlam
Cerddeu,
‘White Lady of Day, refuge of poems’, which proves her to be the Muse, Cardea-Cerridwen, who inspires
cerddeu,
‘poems’, in Greek,
cerdeia.
‘What is inspiration?’ is a question that is continually asked. The derivation of the word supplies two related answers. ‘Inspiration’ may be the breathing-in by the poet of fumes from an intoxicating cauldron, the
Awen
of the cauldron of Cerridwen, containing probably a mash of barley, acorns, honey, bull’s blood and such sacred herbs as ivy, hellebore
1
and laurel, or mephitic fumes from an underground vent as at Delphi, or the fumes that rise to the nostrils when toadstools are chewed. These fumes induce the paranoiac trance in which time is suspended, though the mind remains active and can relate its proleptic or analeptic apprehensions in verse. But ‘inspiration’ may also refer to the inducement of the same poetic condition by the act of listening to the wind, the messenger of the Goddess Cardea, in a sacred grove. At Dodona poetic oracles were listened for in the oak-grove, and the prophetic trance was perhaps induced in the black-dove priestesses who first controlled the oracle by the chewing of acorns; at any rate, a scholiast on Lucan notes that this method was used among the Gallic Druids. In Canaan the prime oracular tree was the acacia – the ‘burning bush’ discussed in Chapter Fifteen – and there is a reference to this sort of inspiration in
1
Chronicles,
XIV,
15:
When thou hearest the sound of marching in the tops of the mulberry trees, then bestir thyself.
Here, ‘mulberry trees’ should be ‘acacias’. Jehovah himself was in the wind, and the context – David’s assault on the Philistines from Gibeon to Gaza-shows that it blew from the North. This story dates from a time when Jehovah was not yet a transcendental God but lived, like Boreas, in a mountain to the far north; he was, in fact, the white bull-god Baal Zephon (‘Lord of the North’) who had borrowed his title from his Goddess Mother Baaltis Zapuna, a name attested in an inscription from Goshen where the tribe of Joseph was once settled. The Canaanites worshipped him as King of the Northern Otherworld and the Philistines of Ekron had taken over the cult; he was a god of prophecy and fertility. Another of his titles was Baal-Zebul, ‘the Lord of the Mansion [of the North]’ which named the tribe of Zebulon: they worshipped him on Mount Tabor. When King Ahaziah of Israel consulted his oracle at Ekron (
2
Kings, I, 1-4
)
he earned Elijah’s reproach for not consulting the native Israelite oracle, presumably on Tabor. I suspect that Baal Zabul was an autumnal Dionysus, whose devotees intoxicated themselves on
amanita
muscaria,
which still grows there; the Biblical name for these toadstools being either ‘ermrods’ or ‘little foxes’.
By the time of Jesus, who was accused of traffic with Beelzebub, the Kingdoms of Israel and Philistia had long been suppressed and the shrines
of Ekron and Tabor destroyed; and Baal-Zebul’s functions having been taken over by the archangel Gabriel, he had declined to a mere devil mockingly called Baal-Zebub, ‘Lord of Flies’. Yet the Levite butchers continued the old ritual of turning the victim’s head to the north when they sacrificed.
The acacia is still a sacred tree in Arabia Deserta and anyone who even breaks off a twig is expected to die within the year. The common Classical icon of the Muse whispering in a poet’s ear refers to tree-top inspiration: the Muse is the
dryad
(oak-fairy), or
mĕlia
(ash-fairy), or
mēlia
(quince-fairy), or
caryatid
(nut-fairy), or
hamadryad
(wood-fairy in general), or
heliconian
(fairy of Mount Helicon, which took its name as much from
helicë,
the willow-tree sacred to poets, as from the stream which spiralled round it).
Nowadays poets seldom use these artificial aids to inspiration, though the sound of wind in the willows or in a plantation of forest-trees still exercises a strangely potent influence on their minds; and ‘inspiration’ is therefore applied to any means whatsoever by which the poetic trance is induced. But a good many of the charlatans or weaklings resort to automatic writing and spiritism. The ancient Hebrew distinction between legitimate and illegitimate prophecy – ‘prophecy’ meaning inspired poetry, in which future events are not necessarily, but usually, foretold – has much to recommend it. If a prophet went into a trance and was afterwards unconscious of what he had been babbling, that was illegitimate; but if he remained in possession of his critical faculties throughout the trance and afterwards, that was legitimate. His powers were heightened by the ‘spirit of prophecy’, so that his words crystallized immense experience into a single poetic jewel; but he was, by the grace of God, the sturdy author and regulator of this achievement. The spiritistic medium, on the other hand, whose soul momentarily absented itself so that demonic principalities and powers might occupy his body and speak pipingly through his mouth was no prophet and was ‘cut off from the congregation’ if it was found that he had deliberately induced the trance. The ban was presumably extended to automatic writing.
1
The
Tempest
seems to be based on a vivid dream of extremely personal content, expressed in a jumble of ill-assorted literary reminiscences: not only of the
Romance
of Taliesin
but of the twenty-ninth chapter of
Isaiah
;
a Spanish romance by Ortunez de Calahorra called ‘
A
Mirror
of
Princely
Deeds
and
Knighthoo
d
’;
three accounts of recent voyages to the New World; various contemporary Huguenot and anti-Spanish pamphlets; a magical book called
Steganographia
written in Latin by a monk of Spanheim; and a German play, Ayrer’s
Von
der
schonen
Sidee.
Caliban is partly Afagddu in the
Romance
of Taliesin
;
partly Ravaillac, the Jesuit-prompted murderer of Henry IV; partly an Adriatic devil in Calahorra’s romance; partly a sea-monster, ‘in shape like a man’, seen off Bermuda during Admiral Sommers’ stay there; partly Shakespeare’s own
malus
ange
lus.
1
Probably April 28th 1819.
1
The late mediaeval legend of Ogier the Dane proves that Avalon was understood as an island of the dead by the Arthurian romance-writers. For Ogier is there said to have spent two hundred years in the ‘Castle of Avalon’, after early exploits in the East; then to have returned to France, in the days of King Philip I, with a firebrand in his hand on which his life depended -like that of Meleager the Argonaut. But King Philip reigned two hundred years after Charlemagne, Ogier’s liege-lord in the Carolingian cycle; in other words, the second Ogier was the reincarnation of the first. It was nothing new for Ogier le Danois to live in Avalon. The name is merely a debased form of ‘Ogyr Vran’ which, as has been suggested in Chapter Five, means ‘Bran the Malign’ or ‘Bran, God of the Dead’. His Norse counterpart Ogir (‘the Terrible’) was God of the Sea and of Death, and played the harp on an island where he lived with his nine daughters.
1
This Erichthonius,
alias
Erechtheus, figures in the complex and nonsensical myth of Procne, Philomela and the Thracian King Tereus of Daulis, which seems to have been invented by the Phocian Greeks to explain a set of Thraco-Pelasgian religious pictures which they found in a temple at Daulis and could not understand. The story is that Tereus married Procne daughter of King Pandion of Attica, begot a son, Itys, on her, then concealed her in the country in order to be able to marry her sister Philomela. He told her that Procne was dead, and when she learned the truth cut out her tongue so that she should not be able to tell anyone. But she embroidered some letters on a peplum, which enabled Procne to be found in time. Procne returned and in revenge for her ill-treatment killed her son Itys, whom she laid on a dish before Tereus. Tereus had meanwhile attended an oracle which told him that Itys would be murdered, and suspecting that his brother Dryas was the destined murderer, had killed him. The sisters then fled, Tereus caught up an axe, and the gods changed them all into birds: Procne became a swallow, Philomela a nightingale, Tereus a hoopoe. Procne and Philomela were survived by twin brothers, Erechthonius and Butes.
This iconotropic myth, when returned to pictorial form, makes a series of instructional scenes, each depicting a different method of taking oracles.
The scene of the cutting out of Philomela’s tongue shows a priestess who has induced a prophetic trance by chewing laurel leaves; her face is contorted with ecstasy, not pain, and the tongue that has been cut out is really a laurel leaf that an attendant is handing her to chew.
The scene of the letters sewn into the peplum shows a priestess who has cast a handful of oracular sticks on a white cloth, in Celtic fashion as described by Tacitus; they fall in the shape of letters, which she interprets.
The scene of the eating of Itys by Tereus shows a priest taking omens from the entrails of a sacrificed child.
The scene of Tereus and the oracle probably shows him sleeping on a sheep-skin in a temple and having a revelation in dream; the Greeks would not have mistaken this scene.
The scene of the killing of Dryas shows an oak-tree and priests taking omens under it, in Druidic fashion, from the way that a man falls when he dies.
The scene of Procne transformed into a swallow shows a priestess in swallow-disguise taking auguries from the flight of a swallow.
The scenes of Philomela transformed into a nightingale, and of Tereus transformed into a hoopoe have a similar sense.
Two further scenes show an oracular hero, depicted with snake’s tail for legs, being consulted with blood-sacrifices; and a young man consulting a bee-oracle. These are respectively Erechthonius, and Butes (the most famous bee-keeper of antiquity), the brothers of Procne and Philomela. Their mother was Zeuxippe (‘she who yokes horses’), evidently a mare-headed Demeter.
1
Traces of a Palestinian North Wind cult are found in
Isaiah,
XIV,
13,
Ezekiel,
I,
4,
Psalms,
XLVIII,
2
and
Job,
XXXVII,
29.
God’s mountain is placed in the far north and windy manifestations of his glory proceed from there. In the earliest assignment of parts of the heaven to deities, Bel had the north pole and Ea the south. Bel was Zeus-Jupiter, Thursday’s god, often identified with Jehovah; but had taken over the rule of the North from his mother Belili, the White Goddess.
1
This perhaps means
Helle-bora,
‘the food of the Goddess Helle’. Helle was the Pelasgian goddess who gave her name to the Hellespont.