part0027

This obviously was a joke at the stupid Saxon’s expense, because the British bards had used an alphabet for centuries before the arrival of the Saxons. But what do these improvised letter-names mean? Since the stupid Saxon would have used the ABC Latin order of letters and was apparently unaware that any other order existed, let us try restoring the Alap-Braut-Curi to its BLFSN Ogham order. And since we can be pretty sure that Nemninus was showing off his superior learning – probably his knowledge of Greek to tease the stupid Saxon who knew only a little monkish Latin – let us try writing out the letter-names in Greek, and see whether certain familiar combinations of words do not strike the eye. This is a difficult puzzle, because the extra words KENC, ELAU and ESTIAUL have been inserted without explanation among the letter-names and because the vowels have been mixed. (If E is OFR, OR is probably ER.) Nevertheless the DEXI-TRAUS-KAM-PARTH sequence is striking; we evidently have hit on an Egyptian Christian formula. With Clement of Alexandria’s specialized vocabulary in mind we read it as:

‘The spear will wound the Virgin Mother as she stands at his right hand.’ This neatly constructed pentameter is a reminiscence of St. Luke’s Gospel (II, 35 ). Kamax is both a spear and a vine-prop, and therefore a most appropriate word. The weapon mentioned by Luke is a sword; but the fulfilment of the prophecy, for Christian mystics, came with the spear that pierced the side of Jesus at the Crucifixion. And as I read the eight-lettered Holy Name sequence at the end, the Lintels of Heaven (OPHREA OURANEIA) are invited to raise a shout (IACHESTHAI) of ‘Shiloh’ (JEIL) since the love-fish (EROS ALABES) has neared (EGGIKEN) the land of On (AUNAN). Aunan, or On, known to the Greeks as Heliopolis and probably the oldest city in Egypt, was the centre of the Osiris cult and probably also of the Christ-as-Osiris cult. At ‘Aun’, according to Coptic tradition, the Virgin Mary washed the Infant Jesus’s swaddling clouts in the spring Ain-esh-Shems, formerly sacred to the Sun-god Ra. From the drops that dripped from the strings, up sprang the sacred Balsam-tree. It is probable that this legend was originally told of the Goddess Isis and the Infant Horus. Gwion is, I think, referring to it in the line: ‘I have been the strings of a child’s swaddling clout’ in the Câd Goddeu and in ‘Whence is the sweetness of the balm?’ in the Angar Cyvyndawd. The Alabes was worshipped at Aun, and was a Nilotic catfish.

The meaning of the vowels in the Boibel-Loth proved to be a sequence of stages in the life of the Spirit of the Year, incarnate in the sacred king, and the trees named in the vowels of the Beth-Luis-Nion similarly proved to form a seasonal sequence. Is it possible that the separation of the vowels from the consonants was a late development and that originally they were distributed among the consonants at regular intervals, as they are in the Greek and Latin alphabets? That A, the birth letter, rather than B, the letter of inception, really began the alphabet; and that the form ‘Ailm-Beth’ was even earlier than ‘Beth-Luis-Nion’? Since Irish legends about the alphabet particularize Greece as the place where it was invented and there is an obstinate countryside tradition in Ireland that the Tuatha de Danaan spoke Greek, why not put the Beth-Luis-Nion into ancient Greek and distribute the vowels in their seasonal order among the consonants, placing A at the winter solstice, O at the spring equinox, U at the summer solstice, E at the autumn equinox, I at the winter solstice again; and placing Straif at the beginning and Quert at the end of the summer flight of letters? Would they spell out another religious charm?

Ailm Beth does not make a hopeful start until one recalls that Ailm (silver fir) is pronounced Alv or Alph in Irish. The root alph expresses both whiteness and produce: thus alphos is dull white leprosy (albula in Latin) and alphe is ‘gain’ and alphiton is pearl barley and Alphito is the White Grain-goddess or Pig-Demeter, alias Cerdo (which also means ‘gain’), whose connexion with Cerridwen the Welsh Pig-Demeter, alias the Old White One, has already been pointed out. The principal river in the Peloponnese is the Alpheus. Beth or Beith is the birch month and since the birch is betulus in Latin, we may transliterate it into Greek and write Baitulus. At once the words begin to make sense as an invocation. Alphito-Baitule, a compound word like Alphito-mantis (‘one who divines from pearl barley’) suggests a goddess of the same sort as ASHIMA BAETYL and ANATHA BAETYL, the two Goddess-wives of the Hebrew Jehovah in his fifth-century BC cult at Elephantine in Egypt. The meaning of Baitulos is a sacred stone in which a deity is resident; it seems to be connected with the Semitic Bethel (‘House of God’) but whether Baitulos is derived from Bethel or vice versa is not known. The Lion-goddess Anatha Baetyl was not originally Semitic, and was worshipped as Anaitis in Armenia.

Luis, the next Beth-Luis-Nion letter, suggests Lusios, a divine title of many Greek deities, meaning ‘One who washes away guilt’. It is particularly applied to Dionysus, the Latin equivalent being Liber. But Dionysus in the Orphic Hymns is also called Luseios and Luseus, which suggests that the adjective is formed not directly from louein, ‘to wash’, but from the city Lusi in Arcadia famous for its connexion with Dionysus. Lusi is overshadowed by the enormous mountain Aroania, now Mount Chelmos, and lies close to the valleys of the Aroanius River, which flows into the Alpheus, and of the Styx which flows into the Crathis. The Styx (‘hateful’) was the death-river by which the Gods were said to swear, and which Demeter, the Barley Mother, cursed when Poseidon pursued her with his unwelcome attentions, presumably during the Achaean conquest of the Crathis valley.

Here is Pausanias’s account of Lusi and its neighbourhood:

As you go westward from Pheneus, the road to the left leads to the city of Clitor beside the channel which Hercules made for the river Aroanius.… The city is on the river Clitor which falls into the Aroanius not more than seven furlongs away. Among the fish in the Aroanius are the spotted ones which are said to sing like thrushes. I saw some that had been caught but they did not utter a sound, though I stayed by the river till sunset when they are supposed to sing their best. The most famous shrines at Clitor are those of the Barley Mother, Aesculapius and the Goddess Ilithyia whom Olen the ancient Lycian poet, in a hymn which he composed for the Delians, calls ‘the deft spinner’ and so clearly identifies with the Fate Goddess.

The water which, tumbling from this cliff at Nonacris falls first on a high rock and afterwards into the river Crathis, is deadly to man and to every other living creature.… It is remarkable too that a horse’s hoof alone is proof against its poison, for it will hold the water without being broken by it … as cups of glass, crystal, stone, earthenware, horn and bone are. The water also corrodes iron, bronze, lead, tin, silver, electrum and even gold, despite Sappho’s assurance that gold never corrodes. Whether or not Alexander the Great really died of the poison of this water I do not know: but the story is certainly current.

Melampus means ‘black foot’ and he was the son of Amythaon and the nymph Melanippe (‘black mare’). The story of how he purged the daughters of Proetus with black hellebore and pig-sacrifices, and afterwards washed away their madness in a stream, probably refers to the capture of this Danaan shrine by the Achaeans, though Melampus is reckoned as an Aeolian Minyan. He also conquered Argos, the centre of the Danaan cult. The three daughters were the Triple Goddess, the Demeter of the Styx, who must have been mare-headed, else a horse’s hoof would not have been proof against the poison of the water. But according to Philo of Heraclea and Aelian, the horn of a Scythian ass-unicorn was also proof against the poison; and Plutarch in his Life of Alexander says that an ass’s hoof makes the only safe vessel. Near by, at Stymphalus, was a triple sanctuary founded by Temenus (‘precinct’) the Pelasgian, in honour of the Goddess Hera as ‘girl, bride and widow’, a remarkable survival of the original triad. She was called ‘widow’, the Stymphalians told Pausanias, because she quarrelled with Zeus and retired to Stymphalus; this probably refers to a later revival of the primitive cult in defiance of Olympianism.

Sir James Frazer visited Lusi in 1895, and he has given a valuable account of it which allows us to read Nonacris as a name for the succession of nine precipices of Mount Aroania which overhang the gorge of the Styx. Even in the late summer there was still snow in the clefts of what he described as the most ‘awful line of precipices’ he had ever seen. The Styx is formed by the melting snow and seems to run black down the cliff-side because of the dark incrustation of the rock behind, but afterwards bright blue because of the slatey rocks over which it flows in the gorge. The whole line of precipices is vertically streaked with red and black – both death colours in ancient Greece – and Frazer accounts for Hesiod’s description of the ‘silver pillars’ of the Styx by observing that in winter immense icicles overhang the gorge. He records that a chemical analysis of Styx water shows it to contain no poisonous substance, though it is extremely cold.

on the strength of the Pelasgian Goddess Anna, sister of Belus, whom the Italians called Anna Perenna or ‘Perennial Anna’. Ovid in his Fasti says that this Anna was regarded by some as the Moon-goddess Minerva, by others as Themis, or Io of Argos. He also connects her with barley cakes. Her festival fell on March 15th, which is just where Onn occurs in the Beth-Luis-Nion calendar. Anna probably means ‘queen’, or ‘Goddess-mother’; Sappho uses Ana for Anassa (queen). She appears in Irish mythology as the Danaan goddess Ana or Anan, who had two different characters. The first was the beneficent Ana, a title of the Goddess Danu, mentioned in Cormac’s Glossary as equivalent to Buan-ann (glossed as ‘Good Mother’). She was the mother of the original three Danaan gods Brian, Iuchurba and Iuchar, and she suckled and nursed them so well that her name ‘Ana’ came to signify ‘plenty’; she was worshipped in Munster as a Goddess of Plenty. Two mountains in Kerry, ‘the Paps of Anu’, are named after her. She has also been identified by E. M. Hull with Aine of Knockaine, a Munster Moon-goddess who had charge of crops and cattle and is connected in legend with the meadow-sweet to which she gave its scent, and with the midsummer fire-festival. The maleficent Ana was the leading person of the Fate Trinity, Ana, Badb and Macha, together known as the Morrigan, or Great Queen. Badb, ‘boiling’, evidently refers to the Cauldron, and Macha is glossed in the Book of Lecan as meaning ‘raven’.

Ana occurs in British folklore as Black Annis of Leicester who had a bower in the Dane (Danaan?) Hills and used to devour children, whose skins she hung on an oak to dry. She was known as ‘Cat Anna’ but, according to E. M. Hull, Annis is a shortened form of Angness or Agnes, which would identify her with Yngona, ‘Anna of the Angles’, a well-known Danish goddess. Black Annis was concerned with a May-Eve hare-hunt, later transferred to Easter Monday, and must therefore have been nymph as well as hag. Yngona, certainly, was both Nanna (sharing her favours between Balder and his dark rival Holder) and Angurboda, the Hag of the Iron Wood, mother of Hel. But the chances are that the Hag had been in residence near Leicester long before the Danes occupied her part of Mercia, and that she was the Danaan Goddess Anu before she was Agnes. In Christian times she became a nun and there is a picture of her wearing nun’s habit in the vestry of the Swithland Church. She is the Blue Hag celebrated in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Comus as sucking children’s blood by night disguised as a scritch-owl. The Irish Hag of Beare also became a nun; it was easy to Christianize a Death-goddess because her face was already veiled. In Chapter Three I mentioned that Beli was reckoned as the son of Danu; and the identity of Ana and Danu is made quite clearly in a pedigree in Jesus College Manuscript 20, supposed to be of the thirteenth century, where Beli the Great is a son of Anna, absurdly said to be a daughter of the Emperor of Rome. Elsewhere, the pedigree of Prince Owen, son of Howel the Good, is traced back to Aballac filius Amalechi qui fuit Beli Magni filius, et Anna mater ejus. 2 It is added, as absurdly, quam dicunt esse consobrinam Mariae Virginis, Matris Domini nostri Jhesu Christi.

Ovid and Virgil knew their Goddess Anna Perenna to have been a sister of Belus, or Bel, who was a masculinization of the Sumerian Goddess Belili; so also the god Anu, of the Babylonian male trinity completed by Ea and Bel, was a masculinization of the Sumerian Goddess Anna-Nin, usually abbreviated to Nana. 3 Bel’s wife was Belit, and Anu’s wife was Anatu. Ea’s wife, the third member of the Sumerian female trinity, was Dam-Kina; the first syllable of whose name shows her to have mothered the Danaans. Anna-Nin has further been identified by J. Przbuski in the Revue de l’Histoire des Religions (1933) with Ana-hita the Goddess of the Avesta, whom the Greeks called Anaitis and the Persians Ana-hid – the name that they gave to the planet Venus.

Mr. E. M. Parr writes to me that An is Sumerian for ‘Heaven’ and that in his view the Goddess Athene was another Anna, namely Ath-enna, an inversion of Anatha, alias Neith of Libya; also that Ma is a shortening of the Sumerian Ama, ‘mother’, and that Ma-ri means ‘the fruitful mother’ from rim, ‘to bear a child’. Mari was the name of the goddess on whose account the Egyptians of 1000 BC called Cyprus ‘Ay-mari’, and who ruled at Mari on the Euphrates (a city sacked by Hammurabi in 1800 BC ) and at Amari in Minoan Crete. So Ma-ri-enna is ‘the fruitful mother of Heaven’, alias Miriam, Marian of Mariandyne, the ‘leaping Myrrhine’ of Troy, and Mariamne: a word of triple power. But the basic word is Anna, which confers divinity on mere parturition and which also seems to form part of Arianrhod’s name. Arianrhod in fact may not be a debasement of Argentum and rota ‘silver, wheel’ but Ar-ri-an, ‘High fruitful mother’ who turns the wheel of heaven; if so, Arianrhod’s Cretan counterpart Ariadne would be Ar-ri-an-de, the de meaning barley, as in Demeter. The simple form Ana, or Anah, occurs as a Horite clan name in Genesis, XXXVI; though masculinized in two out of the three mentions of her, she is principally celebrated as the mother of Aholibamah (‘tabernacle of the high place’), the heiress whom Esau married on his arrival in the Seir pastures. (Ana’ s alleged discovery of mules in the wilderness is due to a scribal error.) James Joyce playfully celebrates Anna’s universality in his Anna Livia Plurabelle. And indeed if one needs a single, simple, inclusive name for the Great Goddess, Anna is the best choice. To Christian mystics she is ‘God’s Grandmother’.

The next letter, Fearn, explains Perenna as a corruption of Fearina, the adjective formed from Fear or eär, Spring. In Latin the word has kept its Digamma and is written ver. From this it follows that Bran’s Greek name Phoroneus – of which we have already noted the variant forms Vron, Berng and Ephron – was a variation of Fearineus and that he was originally the Spirit of the Year in his lusty, though foredoomed, Spring aspect. The Latin form seems to have been Veranus; which would account for the plebeian family name Veranius; and for the verb vernare, ‘to renew oneself in Spring’, which is supposed to be irregularly formed from ver, veris, but may be an abbreviation of veranare.

There were several places named after her in the Eastern Mediterranean including Cape Salmone in Crete, the city of Salmone in Elis, and Salmone, a village near Lusi. The title is apparently compounded of Salma and Onë as in Hesi-onë. Hesionë is said to mean ‘Lady of Asia’, and the meaning of Salma can be deduced from its occurrence in geographical names. It is an Aegean word of extraordinarily wide distribution and seems always to be connected with the notion of easterliness. 4 Salma was a tribe in Southern Judaea living east of the Minoan colony of Gaza; also a station in Central Arabia on the caravan route from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. Salmalassus was a station in Lesser Armenia on the caravan route from Trebizond to the Far East; Salmydessus was the most easterly city of Thrace, fronting the Black Sea; Salmone was the most easterly cape of Crete; Salamis the most easterly city of Cyprus; the island of Salamis lay east of the Cretan city of Corinth, and the mountain sacred to Salamanes (in Assyrian Salmanu) lay east of the great river-plain behind Antioch. As has already been pointed out Salma became a divine name in Palestine and Solomon, Salmon and Absalom are all variants of it. Salma was the deity to whom the hill of Jerusalem was originally sacred; the place is mentioned in the Egyptian Tell Amarna letters (1370 BC ) as Uru-Salim, and in Assyrian monuments as Ur-Salimu. In 1400 BC it was held by a chieftain with the Semite name of Abd-Khiba, a vassal of Egypt, who like Melchizedek of Salem – Uru-Salim? – claimed to rule neither by father-right nor mother-right, but by the will of the God. Professor Sayce translates Uru-Salim as ‘City of the God Salim’. Josephus records that the first name of the city was Solyma. Salma, or Salim, was evidently the Semite god of the rising or renewed sun; Salmaone was the Aegean goddess from whom he took his titles, as did Salmoneus the Aeolian who opposed the later Achaean invaders and insisted on inducing thunder by rattling a brazen chariot – thereby infringing the prerogative of Olympian Zeus. But it is probable that Salma took his title as the demi-god of the renewed Sun from his Moon-bride Circe, or Belili, the Willow Mother, Sal-Ma, in whose honour willow-branches were waved at this season, and that the meaning of easterliness is a secondary one.

Next comes Huath. The u merely shows that the H is aspirated. We have no clue to the name of the person, or persons, whom the Goddess racks, presumably on Duir, the oak, but my guess is the Athaneatids, or Hathaneatids, members of one of the four original royal clans of Arcadia. It is likely that this word, like athanatoi, means ‘the not-mortal ones’, the Greek word thnētos (‘mortal’) being a shortened form of thaneãtos. The clan from which the sacred king, the victim of the story that is unfolding, was chosen would naturally be called ‘The Immortals’, because tbe king alone could win immortality by his sufferings, the lesser members of the nation being doomed to become twittering ghosts in Hell.

For Ura is the next letter of the alphabet, the midsummer letter, the letter of Venus Urania, the most violent aspect of the Triple Goddess. As has already been pointed out, Ura means Summer; it also means the tail of a lion or bear, expressive of its fury, and the word ouraios (‘uraeus’), the royal serpent of Egypt, is formed from the same root. ‘Uranus’, the father of the Titans according to Greek Classical mythology, is likely to have originally been their Mother – Ura-ana, Queen Ura. But we should not look for only one or even two meanings of the syllable ur; the more numerous the poetic meanings that could be concentrated in a sacred name, the greater was its power. The authors of the Irish Hearings of the Scholars connected the midsummer-letter Ur with ur, ‘earth’; and we are reminded that this is the root found in the Latin words area, ‘a plot of earth’, arvum, ‘a ploughed field’, and urvare, which means ‘to drive a plough ceremonially around the proposed site of a city’ – a sense also found in the Homeric Greek ouron, ‘a boundary marked by the plough’. Grammarians assume a primitive Greek word ĕra, ‘earth’ connected with this group of words; which suggests that Erana, or Arana, or Urana, was the Earth-goddess whose favour had to be asked when fields were ploughed or cities (urves or urbes ) founded, and marriage with whose local representative gave a chieftain the right to rule in her lands. If this is so, the uraeus in the royal head-dress stood both for the great sea-serpent that girdled the Earth and for the Goddess’s spotted oracular snakes. But her name could also carry three or four further meanings. It might stand for ‘Mountain-goddess’ (from the Homeric Greek ouros, a mountain) which would point her identity with Mousa, the Muse, a title of the same meaning; and for ‘Queen of the Winds’ (from the Homeric Greek ouros, a wind) which would explain the uraeus as symbolizing her power over the winds, all winds being snake-tailed and housed in a mountain-cave. Urana then is a multiple title: Mother Earth, Our Lady of Summer, Mountain Goddess, Queen of the Winds, Goddess of the Lion’s Tail. It might equally mean ‘Guardian Queen’ (ouros, ‘a guardian’); or, with reference to her aspect as a Moon-cow, ‘Ruler of Wild Oxen’ (ourus, Latin urus, ‘a wild ox’), like the Irish Goddess Buana. And we must not overlook the Sanscrit word varunas, meaning ‘the night firmament’, from the root var, ‘to cover’, from which Varuna, the third member of the Aryan Trinity, took his name. When the first wave of Achaeans entered Greece and were forced under the sovereignty of the Triple-goddess Ana, or De-Ana, or Ath-Ana, or Di-Ana, or Ur-Ana, who ruled the world of day as well as the world of night, varunas lost its specialized sense, was changed from varun- to uran-, in her honour, and came to mean the sky in general. Hence Ana’s classical title Urania, ‘The Heavenly One’.

Circe, ‘daughter of Hbr/ecate’ was the Goddess of Aeaea (‘wailing’), a sepulchral island in the Northern Adriatic. Her name means ‘she-falcon’, the falcon being a bird of omen, and is also connected with circos, a circle, from the circling of falcons and from the use of the magic circle in enchantment; the word is onomatopoeic, the cry of the falcon being ‘circ-circ’. She was said to turn men into swine, lions and wolves, and the Children of Circe are probably women dressed as sows participating in a full-moon festival held in her honour and in that of Dionysus. Herodotus describes this ritual as common to Greek and Egyptian practice. At the Persian orgies of Mithras, which had a common origin with those of Demeter and in which a bull was sacrificed and eaten raw, the men celebrants were called Leontes (lions) and the women celebrants Hyaenae (sows). Possibly Lion-men also took part in this kolabros as Children of Circe.

The last letters are Gort – Ngetal – Ra – dho. Here we are on very insecure ground. The only clue to Idho is that the Hebrew form of the word is iod, and the Cadmean is iota; and that the one Greek word beginning with gort is Gortys, the name of the reputed founder of Gortys, a city in Southern Arcadia, which stands on a tributary of the Alpheus, the Gortynios (otherwise called the Lusios). Gortyna, the name of a famous town in Crete, may be the word needed, and represent some title of the Goddess. But perhaps the abbreviation Gort should be Gorp. Gorgōpa, ‘fearful-faced’, an epithet of the Death Goddess Athene, makes good sense. To preserve the metre the word must be spelt Grogopa, as kirkos is often spelt krikos.

No Greek verse has survived of an early enough date to act as a check on the metre and verbal forms of this hypothetic song. But at least it built itself up logically against most of my original expectations of how it would turn out, so that I cannot regard it as of my own composition. The supersession of dactylic words ( – ˘ ) by anapaestic ( ˘˘– ) and iambic ( ˘– ) in the second half of the song happened naturally without my noticing its significance. The dactylic and trochaic feet in Greece originally expressed praise and blessing; but the anapaestic and iambic were originally confined to satires and curses; as the spondaic ( – – ) foot was to funerary chants. 5 (The use of the iambic was extended to tragedy because this was concerned with the working out of a divine curse; and to comedy because it was satiric in intention.) This song suggests a dance by twelve persons around a circle of twelve standing stones – there are twelve beats in each half of it – with each alternate beat marked by a dancer striking the stone nearest him with the flat of his hand or perhaps a pig’s bladder. In the middle of the circle the sacred king is corded to the lopped oak-tree in the five-fold bond of willow thongs, waiting for his bloody end.

According to some mythographers there were twelve Titans, male and female; and this canonical number was preserved in the number of the Olympian gods and goddesses who superseded them. Herodotus records that the Pelasgians did not worship gods and consented to the Olympian system only at the express command of the Dodona oracle – I suppose when the oracle, once the mouthpiece of the Pelopian woodland goddess Dionë, had been captured by the Achaeans. He is likely to be right: they worshipped only a Goddess and her semi-divine son of the king. In Arcadia, he seems to have worn antlers. A late Minoan gem in my possession – a banded white carnelian pendant – shows a roebuck crouched beside a wood, in the attitude heraldically called regardant. The ten tines of his antlers refer perhaps to the tenth month, M, the month of the vintage moon; a new moon rides above him. That these Titans figure in Greek myth as children of Uranus may mean no more than that they were companions to the Sacred King, who took his title from the Uranian Goddess. The other Titans, who number seven, rule the sacred Week.

In this table an even closer approximation to poetic truth is discovered than in the Irish bardic system of letter-numerals, given at the end of Chapter Sixteen, which is based on a different alphabetic order and denies any value either to H or U. Here, the dominant pentad of vowels hold the first and last places, as one would expect, also the fifth, the tenth (respectively ‘the grove of the senses’ and ‘perfection’ in the Pythagorean system), and the ecstatic fifteenth, the full-moon climax of the Song of Ascents at Jerusalem. The second, fourth, sixth and eighth places – even numbers are male in the Pythagorean system, odd are female – are held by B (inception), N (flood), F (fire), Z (angry passion), a sequence suggesting a rising tide of male lust which, after being checked by H, nine, the letter of pre-marital chastity enforced by the Nine-fold Goddess, finds its consummation at U, 10, where male and female principles unite. The intermediate letters are L, 3, the letter of torch-lit regeneration presided over by three-torched Hecate; 0, 5, the letter of initiation into the mysteries of love; S, 7, the letter of female enchantment (‘Athene’ in the Pythagorean system). The eleventh and twelfth places are held respectively by D and T, the twin leaders of the company of twelve (in the Irish system the order is reversed); the thirteenth by C, the letter of the Goddess’s sacrosanct swineherd magicians; and the nineteenth by R, the Death letter, appropriate to the close of the nineteen-year cycle. The numerical values of the remaining letters work out with equal facility. Since the charm taught by the Dactyls was an orgiastic one it appropriately contained twenty elements – as it were the fingers of the woman’s hands and those of her lover’s; but Pythagoras was content to speculate on the tetractys of his own ten fingers alone.

To sum up. This twenty-word Greek charm provided the letter-names of an alphabet which was used in late Minoan Arcadia until the second Achaean invasion, by descendants of the original invaders who had gone over to the worship of the White Goddess. Their cult involved the use of an artificial thirteen-month solar calendar, each month represented by a different tree, which had been invented independently of the alphabet and was in widespread use. Some of its seasonable elements can be shown to date from pre-dynastic times, and though the trees in the Irish version, the only one that survives complete, suggest a Pontine or Paphlagonian origin the calendar may have originated in the Aegean or Phoenicia or Libya with a somewhat different canon of trees. Nor is it likely that the alphabet arrived in Britain at the same time as the calendar. The calendar may have been introduced in the late third millennium BC by the New Stone Age people, who were in close touch with Aegean civilization, along with agriculture, apiculture, the maze-dance and other cultural benefits. The alphabet seems to have been introduced late in the second millennium BC by refugees from Greece.

When and where the Zodiac originated is not known, but it is believed to have gradually evolved in Babylonia from the twelve incidents in the life-story of the hero Gilgamesh – his killing of the Bull, his love-passage with the Virgin, his adventures with two Scorpion-men (the Scales later took the place of one of these) and the Deluge story (corresponding with the Water Carrier). Calendar tablets of the seventh century BC bear this out, but the Epic of Gilgamesh is not a really ancient one; Gilgamesh is thought to have been a Hyksos (Kassite) invader of Babylonia in the eighteenth century BC to whom the story of an earlier hero was transferred, a Tammuz of the familiar sort already connected with the Zodiac.

The original Zodiac, to judge from the out-of-date astronomical data quoted in a poem by Aratus, a Hellenistic Greek, was current in the late third millennium BC . But it is likely to have been first fixed at a time when the Sun rose in the Twins at the Spring equinox – the Shepherds’ festival; in the Virgin who was generally identified with Ishtar, the Love-goddess, at the Summer solstice; in the Archer, identified with Nergal (Mars) and later with Cheiron the Centaur, at the Autumn equinox, the traditional season of the chase; in the resurrective Fish at the Winter solstice, the time of most rain. (It will be recalled that the solar hero Llew Llaw’s transformations begin with a Fish at the Winter solstice.)

About 1800 BC the Bull was itself pushed out of the Spring House by the Ram. This may account for the refurbishing of the Zodiac myth in honour of Gilgamesh, a shepherd king of this period; he was the Ram who destroyed the Bull. The Crab similarly succeeded the Lion at the Summer solstice; so the Love-goddess became a marine deity with temples by the sea-shore. The He-goat also succeeded the Water-carrier at the Winter solstice; so the Spirit of the New Year was born of a She-goat. The Egyptian Greeks then called the Ram the ‘Golden Fleece’ and recast the Zodiac story as the voyage of the Argonauts.

The disadvantage of the Zodiac is, indeed, its failure to be a perpetual calendar like the Beth-Luis-Nion tree-sequence which makes no attempt to relate the equinoxes and the solstices to the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. Perhaps the original Zodiac myth was based on the Roebuck story which is associated with a tree-sequence in the Song of Amergin; a supposed scientific improvement on it because a thirteen-month year with the equinox and solstice stations falling at irregular intervals is less easy to handle than a twelve-month year with exactly three months between each of the four stations. At any rate, the archetype of Gilgamesh the Zodiac hero was ‘Tammuz’, a tree-cult hero of many changes; and the thirteen-month tree-calendar seems more primitive than the twelve-month one. 6 Certainly the story is more coherent than those of Gilgamesh or Jason, pure myth uncombined with history.

Hyginus’s attribution to Palamedes of the invention of the disc is a helpful clue, if Professor O. Richter is right in suggesting that the late Cyprian female figurines which hold discs of the same proportionate size as the Phaestos disc (seven inches in diameter) anticipate Athene and her aegis. We know from the legend of the infant Erichthonius that the aegis was a goat-skin bag, converted into a shield by a circular stiffening. Was it a bag-cover for a sacred disc, like the crane-bag which contained the Pelasgian letters of Palamedes’s Pelasgian alphabet, and with the warning Gorgon-mask similarly placed at the mouth? If so, it seems probable that the concealed disc was engraved spirally with her own Holy and Ineffable Name as the Libyao-Pelasgian Goddess of Wisdom; and if this Name was spelt in letters, not hieroglyphs, it may have been either the five-letter IEUOA, or the seven-letter JIEUOAŌ, formed by doubling the first and last letters of IEUOA. Or, since she was the triple Moon-goddess, namely the Three Fates who invented the five vowels, together with F and H, it may have been a nine-letter form JIEHUOV(F)AŌ, composed to contain not only the seven-letter Name but also the two consonants, representing the first and last days of her week, which revealed her as Wisdom, hewer-out of the Seven Pillars. If it was JIEHUOVAŌ, Simonides (or more likely his predecessor Pythagoras) showed little inventiveness in stabilizing the eight-letter form JEHUOVAŌ in honour of the Immortal Sun-god Apollo, by the omission of I, the death-vowel, while retaining Y, the semi-vowel of generation.

A – 1		D – 11
B – 2		T – 12
L – 3		C – 19
N – 4		Q – 14
O – 5		E – 15
F – 6		M – 16
S – 7		G – 17
Z – 8		Gn – 18
H – 9		R – 19
U – 10		I – 20