part0034

Notes

Editorial Introduction

Foreword

I . Poets and Gleemen

II . The Battle of the Trees

III . Dog, Roebuck and Lapwing

I’ th’ Islands of the Orcades.

(Butler’s Hudibras )

IV . The White Goddess

V . Gwion’s Riddle

VI . A Visit to Spiral Castle

2 . Caer Wydr (Glass Castle) is a learned pun of Gwion’s. The town of Glastonbury is said by William of Malmesbury to have been named after its secular founder Glasteing, who came there from the north with his twelve brothers at some time before 600. The Latin equivalent of Gutrin was vitrinus; and the Saxon was glas. This colour word covered any shade between deep blue and light-green – it could be applied equally to Celtic blue enamel and Roman bottle-glass. The ‘glass’ castles of Irish, Manx and Welsh legend are thus seen to be either island shrines, surrounded by glassy-green water, or star-prisons islanded in the dark-blue night sky; but in mediaeval legend they were made of glass, and their connexion with death and with the Moon-goddess has been preserved in the popular superstition that it is unlucky to see the Moon through glass.

VII . Gwion’s Riddle Solved

VIII . Hercules on the Lotus

B ull-calf in

L otus-cup

F erried, or

S waying

N ew-dressed,

H elpful

D ivider, in

T orment,

C onsumed beyond

Q uest,

M ete us out

G aiety,

Kn ightliest

J udge,

R unning west.

IX . Gwion’s Heresy

1 . But there may also have been a plainer meaning for the dance of trees. According to Apollonius Rhodius, the wild oak trees which Orpheus had led down from the Pierian mountain were still standing in ordered ranks in his day at Zonë in Thrace. If they were arranged as if for dancing that would mean not in a stiff geometrical pattern, such as a square, triangle or avenue, but in a curved one. Zonë (‘a woman’s girdle’) suggests a round dance in honour of the Goddess. Yet a circle of oaks, like a fastened girdle, would not seem to be dancing: the oaks would seem to be standing as sentinels around a dancing floor. The dance at Zonë was probably an orgiastic one of the ‘loosened girdle’: for zone in Greek also means marriage, or the sexual act, the disrobing of a woman. It is likely therefore that a broad girdle of oaks planted in a double rank was coiled in on itself so that they seemed to be dancing spirally to the centre and then out again.

4 . A similar marriage was that of Joshua to Rahab the Sea-goddess, who appears in the Bible as Rahab the Harlot. By this union, according to Sifre, the oldest Midrash, they had daughters only, from whom descended many prophets including Jeremiah; and Hannah, Samuel’s mother, was Rahab’s incarnation. The story of Samuel’s birth suggests that these ‘daughters of Rahab’ were a matrilinear college of prophetic priestesses by ritual marriage with whom Joshua secured his title to the Jericho valley. Since Rahab is also said to have married Salmon (and so to have become an ancestress of David and Jesus) it may well be that Salmon was the title that Joshua assumed at his marriage; for a royal marriage involved a ritual death and rebirth with a change of name, as when Jacob married Rachel the Dove-priestess and became Ish-Rachel or Israel – ‘Rachel’s man’.

5 . In the Ethiopian legends of Our Lady Mary, translated by Bridge, the Gnostic theory is clearly given. Hannah the ‘twenty-pillared tabernacle of Testimony’ who was the Virgin Mary’s mother, was one of a triad of sisters – of which the other two were another Mary and Sophia. ‘The Virgin first came down into the body of Seth, shining like a white pearl.’ Then successively entered Enos, Cainan … Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah … Abraham, Isaac, Jacob … David, Solomon … and Joachim. ‘And Joachim said to his wife Hannah: “I saw Heaven open and a white bird came therefrom and hovered over my head.” Now, this bird had its being in the days of old … It was the Spirit of Life in the form of a white bird and … became incarnate in Hannah’s womb when the pearl went forth from Joachim’s loins and … Hannah received it, namely the body of our Lady Mary. The white pearl is mentioned for its purity, and the white bird because Mary’s soul existed aforetime with the Ancient of Days … Thus bird and pearl are alike and equal.’ From the Body of Mary, the pearl, the white bird of the spirit thus entered into Jesus at the Baptism.

X . The Tree Alphabet (1)

1 . The magical connection of the Moon with menstruation is strong and widespread. The baleful moon-dew used by the witches of Thessaly was apparently a girl’s first menstrual blood, taken during an eclipse of the Moon. Pliny devotes a whole chapter of his Natural History to the subject and gives a long list of the powers for good and bad that a menstruating woman possesses. Her touch can blast vines, ivy and rue, fade purple cloth, blacken linen in the wash-tub, tarnish copper, make bees desert their hives, and cause abortions in mares; but she can also rid a field of pests by walking around it naked before sunrise, calm a storm at sea by exposing her genitals, and cure boils, erysipelas, hydrophobia and barrenness. In the Talmud it is said that if a menstruating woman passes between two men, one of them will die.

Oak-logs will warm you well

That are old and dry,

Logs of pine will sweetly smell

But the sparks will fly.

Birch-logs will burn too fast,

Chestnut scarce at all,

Hawthorn-logs are good to last -

Cut them in the fall.

Holly-logs will burn like wax,

You may burn them green;

Elm-logs like to smouldering flax,

No flame to be seen.

Beech-logs for winter time,

Yew-logs as well;

Green elder-logs it is a crime

For any man to sell.

Pear-logs and apple-logs,

They will scent your room,

Cherry-logs across the dogs

Smell like flower of broom.

Ash-logs, smooth and grey,

Burn them green or old,

Buy up all that come your way -

Worth their weight in gold.

XI . The Tree Alphabet (2)

The top dot represented position; the two dots below, extension; the three dots below those, surface; the four dots at the bottom, three-dimensional space. The pyramid, the most ancient emblem of the Triple Goddess, was philosophically interpreted as Beginning, Prime and End; and the central dot of this figure makes a five with each of the four dots of the sides. Five represented the colour and variety which nature gives to three-dimensional space, and which are apprehended by the five senses, technically called ‘the wood’ – a quincunx of five trees; this coloured various world was held to be formed by five elements – earth, air, fire, water and the quintessence or soul; and these elements in turn corresponded with seasons. Symbolic values were also given to the numerals from 6 to 10, which was the number of perfection. The tetractys could be interpreted in many other ways: for instance, as the three points of the triangle enclosing a hexagon of dots – six being the number of life – with a central dot increasing this to seven, technically known as ‘Athene’, the number of intelligence, health and light.

2 . To judge from a design on a glass dish of the Seleucid epoch, showing the façade of Solomon’s Temple as rebuilt by Zerubbabel on the original Phoenician model, the spirally fluted pillars correspond with Boaz, Solomon’s right-hand pillar dedicated to growth and the waxing sun; the vertically fluted with Jachin, his left-hand pillar dedicated to decay and the waning sun. The symbolism became confused when the Jews made their New Year correspond with the autumn vintage festival, for the pillars were then referred to as Jachin and Boaz, not Boaz and Jachin, but the tradition remained ‘Boaz is to Jachin as Gerizim is to Ebal – as blessing is to cursing’. Gerizim and Ebal were the twin peaks covering the Ephraimite shrine of Shechem. Gerizim was on the right-hand as one faced east from Shechem, Ebal on the left, and Shechem was a home of the terebinth cult. In Deuteronomy XI, 29 there is a prophecy attributed to Moses. ‘You shall put the blessing upon Gerizim and the curse upon Ebal … towards the entrance into Shechem where dwell the Canaanites in the towered house beside the sacred terebinth of Moreh.’

This was as it should have been. The terebinth, the hard-wooded Canaanite equivalent of Duir the oak, was naturally placed in the middle with Ebal on the unlucky left, Gerizim on the lucky right.

3 . At Arles, in Provence, the cult of the Goddess as a Triad or Pentad of Mothers has survived under Christian disguise until today, when her festival is celebrated from May 24th to May 28th, the middle of the Hawthorn, or Chastity, month, but now her devotees are largely gipsies. As a Triad she has become known as ‘The Three Maries of Provence’ or ‘The Three Maries of the Sea’; as a Pentad she has had Martha added to her company, and an apocryphal serving-girl called Sara. It seems that these were Christianizations of pre-Christian reliefs on the tombstones of the cemetery of Alyscamps at Arles, in which the Triad, or Pentad, was shown on one panel; and below, on another, the soul in resurrection. The scene was explained as the Raising of Lazarus. As late as the time of Dante the cemetery was used in the ancient style. The corpse was laid in a boat, with money in it, called drue de mourtilage and floated down the Rhône to the Alyscamps. The name Alyscamps has been explained as Campi Elysiani, ‘the Elysian Fields’, but it is as likely that Alys was the ancient name of the Goddess; it may even be that the Homeric adjective Elysian (the e is a long one) is derived from her name. Alys also appears as alise or alis in many French place-names. Dauzat’s Dictionnaire Etymologique, under alis, alise, meaning a ‘sheltered creek’, derives it from ‘the Gaulish word alisia, perhaps pre-Celtic, which is represented by numerous place-names, and which must also have provided the Spanish word for alder, alisa. ’ This makes good mythical sense, because Calypso’s sepulchral island of Ogygia was screened by alder thickets. Alys or Alis or Halys is the name of the biggest river of Asia Minor, and that it is pre-Hellenic is shown by the town of Aliassus (-assus is a Cretan termination) built on its banks just before it turns north to empty into the Southern Black Sea. There are also two Hales rivers, one in Ionia, the other in Lucania, which may be named after the same goddess. One name for the alder in German is else, corresponding with the Scandinavian word elle. The Danish Ellerkonge is the alder-king, Bran, who carries off children to the other world; but elle also means ‘elf which should be regarded as a clethrad, or alder-fairy. Thus in Goethe’s well-known ballad, based on his predecessor Herder’s Stimmen der Völker, Ellerkonge is correctly translated ‘Erlkönig’, the commoner German word for alder being erle.

6 . Another five-pointed leaf in sacral use was the cinquefoil, a chief ingredient in the flying ointment used by mediaeval French witches. An alternative in one formula is the poplar leaf, doubtless the five-pointed sort. Like the fleur-de-luce used in the same ointment – apparently because of its three-petalled flower and its red seeds contained in a triangular seed-box – it has no toxic effect, but seems to have been introduced in the Goddess’s honour (with a thickening of soot and oil, or infant’s fat) to enhance the effect of the other ingredients: namely, the abortificent parsley, bat’s blood to assist nocturnal flight, and the highly toxic aconite, belladonna, hemlock and cowbane. The formulas are quoted in Miss M. Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe. Mr. Trevor Furze has supplied me with two further formulas of English origin: (1) The fat of a newly-born infant; eleoselinum (wild celery, also called ‘smallage’, or ‘water-parsley’, a mediaeval remedy against cramps); skiwet (wild parsnip, the leaves of which were regarded as poisonous but used in poulticing); soot. (2) Bat’s blood, to be obtained at the wake of the new moon; pentphyllon (cinquefoil) poplar leaves; soot. Perhaps the ‘parsley’ in the French formula is really water-parsley, introduced to protect the witches against cramps when flying.

XII . The Song of Amergin

1 . Sir Thomas Browne generously remarked in his Urn Burial that ‘what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture’. According to Suetonius the guesses made by various scholars whom the Emperor Tiberius consulted on this point were ‘Cercysera’ on account of the distaff (kerkis ) that Achilles wielded; ‘Issa’, on account of his swiftness (aissoi, I dart); ‘Pyrrha’ on account of his red hair. Hyginus gives his vote for Pyrrha. My conjecture is that Achilles called himself Dacryoessa (‘the tearful one’) or, better, Drosoessa (‘the dewy one’), drosos being a poetic synonym for tears. According to Apollonius his original name Liguron (‘wailing’) was changed to Achilles by his tutor Cheiron. This is to suggest that the Achilles-cult came to Thessaly from Liguria. Homer punningly derives Achilles from achos (‘distress’), but Apollodorus from a ‘not’ and cheile ‘lips’, a derivation which Sir James Frazer calls absurd; though ‘Lipless’ is quite a likely name for an oracular hero.

5 . Evidence of a similar function in early Greece is the conventional epithet dios, ‘divine’ applied in the Odyssey to the swine-herd Eumaeus. Because of the horror in which swineherds were held by the Jews and Egyptians and the contempt in which, thanks to the Prodigal Son, they have long been held in Europe, the word is usually mistranslated ‘honest or worthy’ though admitted to be an hapax legomenon. It is true that except on one night of the year – the full moon that fell nearest to the winter solstice, when the pig was sacrificed to Isis and Osiris and its flesh eaten by every Egyptian – the taboo on any contact with pigs was so strong that swine-herds though full-blooded Egyptians (according to Herodotus) were avoided like the plague and forced to marry within their own caste; but this was a tribute to their sanctity rather than anything else. The public hangman is similarly avoided in France and England because he has courageously undertaken, in the interests of public morality, a peculiarly horrible and thankless trade.

XIII . Palamedes and the Cranes

XIV . The Roebuck in the Thicket

2 . The oracular Wheels of Fortune, worked by a rope, still found in a few early Continental churches, derive from the golden iynges (literally ‘wrynecks’) which were oracular wheels, originally sacred to the White Goddess, that decorated, among others, the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Philostratus in his Life of Apollonius connects them with similar wheels used by the Mages of Babylon, and they also occurred in Egyptian temples of the 3rd century BC . The celebrated Irish Druid Mogh Ruith of Kerry (according to the Cóir Anmann ) ‘derived his name, which signifies Magis Rotarum, “the wizard of the wheels”, from the wheels by which he used to make his magic observations’. In O’Grady’s Silva Gadelica there is an account of Mogh Ruith’s daughter who went with him to the East to learn magic, and there made a ‘rowing wheel’.

4 . In the Genesis story of Adam and Eve the iconotropic distortion is, nevertheless, very thorough. Clearly, Jehovah did not figure in the original myth. It is the Mother of all Living, conversing in triad, who casts Adam out of her fertile riverine dominions because he has usurped some prerogative of hers – whether caprifying fig-trees or planting grain is not clear – lest he should also usurp her prerogative of dispensing justice and uttering oracles. He is sent off to till the soil in some less bountiful region. This recalls what seems to be an intermediate version of the same myth: Triptolemus, a favourite of the Barley-goddess Demeter, is sent off from Eleusis in Attica with a bag of seed, to teach the whole world agriculture, and departs in a car drawn by serpents. The curse in Genesis on the woman, that she should be at enmity with the serpent, is obviously misplaced: it must refer to the ancient rivalry decreed between the sacred king Adam and the Serpent for the favours of the Goddess; Adam is fated to bruise the Serpent’s head, but the Serpent will sting Adam’s sacred heel, each in turn bringing the other to his annual death. That Eve, ‘the Mother of All Living’ was formed by God from Adam’s rib seems an anecdote based on a picture of the naked goddess Anatha of Ugarit watching while Aleyn, alias Baal, drives a curved knife under the fifth rib of his twin Mot: this murder has been iconotropically misread as Jehovah’s removal of a sixth rib, which turns into Eve. The twins, who fought for her favours, were gods of the Waxing and the Waning Year.

XV . The Seven Pillars

2 . Ninib, the Assyrian Saturn, was the god of the South, and therefore of the noon-day Sun, and also of mid-Winter when the Sun attains its most southerly point and halts for a day. In both these capacities he was the god of Repose, for noon is the time for rest in hot climates. That Jehovah was openly identified with Saturn-Ninib in Bethel before the Northern captivity is proved in Amos, V, 26 where the image and star of ‘Succoth-Chiun’ are mentioned as having been brought to the shrine; and that the same was done in Jerusalem before the Southern Captivity is proved by the vision of Ezekiel, VIII, 3, 5 where his image, ‘the image of jealousy’ was set up at the north gate of the Temple, so that devotees would face southwards while adoring him; and close by (verse 14 ) women were wailing for Adonis.

I was exalted like a cedar in Lebanon and like a cypress-tree on Mount Hermon.

I was exalted like a palm-tree in Engedi and as a rose-tree in Jericho, as an olive in the field, and as a plane-tree.

I exhaled sweet smell like cinnamon and aromatic asphalathus, I diffused a pleasant odour like the best myrrh, like galbanum, onyx and sweet storax, and like the fumes of frankincense.

Like an oleander [‘turpentine-tree’ in A.V.] I stretched out my branches which are branches of glory and beauty.

Like a vine I budded forth beauty and my flowers ripen into glory and riches.

Ecclesiasticus has mixed alphabetic trees with aphrodisiac perfumes and trees of another category; but H for cypress and M for vine suggests that the last-mentioned, or only, trees in verses 13, 14, 16 and 17, spell out Chokmah, the Hebrew word for Wisdom: Ched, Kaf, Mem, He. (In Hebrew, vowels are not written.) If this is so, the oleander is CH; and the plane is a surrogate for the almond, K, which as the tree of Wisdom herself cannot figure as a part of the tree-riddle of which it is the answer; in the time of Ecclesiasticus the plane had long been associated by the Greeks with the pursuit of wisdom. The four other trees, cedar, palm, rose and sweet olive, represent respectively sovereignty, motherhood, beauty and fruitfulness – Wisdom’s characteristics as a quasi-goddess.

The lives of three wattles, the life of a hound;

The lives of three hounds, the life of a steed;

The lives of three steeds, the life of a man;

The lives of three men, the life of an eagle;

The lives of three eagles, the life of a yew;

The life of a yew, the length of a ridge;

Seven ridges from Creation to Doom.

A wattle (hurdle) lasts for three years: therefore a hound for 9, a horse for 27, a man for 81, an eagle for 243 and a yew for 729. ‘The length of a ridge ’ is evidently a mistake, the saying being translated from monkish Latin aevum, age, miscopied as arvum, ridge. With the length of an Age averaging 729 years, the total length of the seven Ages is 5103, which corresponds well enough with Nennius’s account.

XVI . The Holy Unspeakable Name of God

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.

2 . 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.

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.

5 . 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.

6 . 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.

7 . 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.

XVIII . The Bull-footed God

3 . There may, however, have been an earlier introduction of the bullfight into Spain by the Iberian settlers of the third millennium BC , who had cultural affinities with Thrace. Archaeological evidence from Crete suggests that the fiesta originated as an annual display of the bull’s domination by acrobatic Moon-goddesses after he had been allowed to tire himself by chasing and killing men; and that the bull was a surrogate for the sacred king. However, in no Minoan painting or sculpture is there any picture of the final episode of the fiesta, in which the bull is despatched with a sword, and this may have been omitted in Crete, as in the Provencal bullfight. Even in Spain, where the bull is always killed and where the fiesta is a royal institution, a glorification of man’s courage (supposed to be resident in his testicles) for the benefit of the ladies seated near the President’s box – especially for the Queen, and Isabella II was not ashamed to accept the most famous bullfighter of her day as her lover – the tradition of the woman bullfighter persists obstinately. When Prince Charles went to Madrid in 1623 to court the Infanta he saw a woman-fighter despatch her bull with skill and grace, and there are still two or three women in the profession.

XIX . The Number of the Beast

XX . A Conversation at Paphos – 43 AD

3 . Aphrodite persists tenaciously at Paphos. In the village of Konklia, as it is now called after the sea-shell in which she rode ashore there, a rough aniconic stone, her original neolithic image, remains on the site of the early Greek sanctuary and is still held in awe by the local people. Close by is a Frankish church, re-built about 1450 as an ordinary Greek chapel, where the saint is a golden-haired beauty called Panagia Chrisopolitissa, ‘the all-holy golden woman of the town’ - a perfect figure of Aphrodite with the infant Eros in her arms. Mr Christopher Kininmonth who gives me these particulars, says that the beach is a particularly fine one and that the Romans, who substituted their massive and tasteless Temple of Venus for the earlier Greek building, did not despise the conical image but incorporated it in their shrine.

XXI . The Waters of Styx

1 . Pausanias had evidently come at the wrong time of year for in the mayfly season trout do utter a sort of dry squeak, when they throw themselves ecstatically out of the water and feel the air on their gills. The Irish legend of ‘singing trout’ apparently refers to an erotic Spring dance, in the White Goddess’s honour, of fish nymphs who mimicked the leaping, squeaking trout: for the Irish princess Dechtire conceived her son Cuchulain, a reincarnation of the God Lugh, as the result of swallowing a mayfly, and he was able to swim like a trout as soon as born. Cuchulain’s Greek counterpart was Euphemus (‘well-spoken’) the famous swimmer, son of the Moon-Goddess Europë, who was born by the Cephissus river in Phocis but had a hero-shrine at Taenarus, the main Peloponnesian entrance to the Underworld. Euphemus’s way of swimming was to leap out of the water like a fish and skim from wave to wave; and in Classical times Poseidon, God of Fishes, claimed to be his father.

3 . At the beginning of Chapter Eleven I described Attis son of Nana as the Phrygian Adonis; and at the beginning of Chapter Eighteen mentioned that Nana conceived him virginally as the result of swallowing either a ripe almond or else a pomegranate seed. The mythological distinction is important. The pomegranate was sacred to Attis as Adonis-Tammuz-Dionysus-Rimmon, and at Jerusalem, as has been shown, the pomegranate cult was assimilated to that of Jehovah. But the almond was also, it seems, sacred to Attis as Nabu -Mercury-Hermes-Thoth, whose cult was also assimilated to that of Jehovah; which explains the myth recorded by Euhemerus, the Sicilian sceptic, that Hermes so far from ordaining the courses of the stars was merely instructed in astronomy by Aphrodite – that is to say by his mother Nana who gave her name to the planet Venus. Thus Nana, as mother of Jehovah in two of his characters can be claimed as the paternal, as well as the maternal, grandmother of Jehovah’s Only Begotten Son.

4 . The complementary Aegean word to Salma seems to have been Tar, meaning the west, or the dying sun. Tartessus on the Atlantic was the most westerly Aegean trading station, as Salmydessus the most easterly. Tarraco was the port on the extreme west of the Mediterranean, and Tarrha the chief port of western Crete. The reduplication tar-tar, meaning ‘the far, far west, has evidently given Tartara, the land of the dead, its name. For though Homer in the Iliad places Tartara ‘as far below earth as Heaven is above it’, Hesiod makes it the abode of Cronos and the Titans, whom we know to have gone west after their defeat by Zeus. Taranis was a Gaulish deity mentioned by Lucan as being served by even more terrible rites than was Scythian Diana, meaning the Taurian Artemis, who loved human sacrifice. Though the Romans identified Taranis with Jupiter she was at first probably a Death-Goddess, namely Tar-Anis, Annis of the West.

The first lines of King John run:

KING JOHN :	Now say, Chatillon, what would France with us?
CHATILLON :	Thus, after greeting, speaks the King of France,
	In my behaviour, to the majesty,
	The borrowed majesty of England here.…

Fifteen years later, in the Tempest, after the opening scene which is almost wholly prose Miranda addresses Prospero:

If by your art, my dearest father, you have

Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them!

The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch

But that the sea, mounting to the welkin’s cheek

Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered.…

It has been suggested that Shakespeare was consciously working forward to a rhythmic prose. This seems to me a misreading of his intentions: after disruptive variations on the iambic ten-syllabled norm he always returned to it as a reminder that he was still writing verse; and could never have done otherwise. Here, for example, Miranda, after this first outburst of horror, finishes her speech with metrical sobriety.

XXII . The Triple Muse

2 . Insufficient notice has yet been taken of the shape of flint arrow-heads as having a magical rather than a utilitarian origin. The tanged arrow-head of fir-tree shape, for example, needs explanation. It must have been very difficult to knap without breaking off either one of the tangs or the projecting stem between them, and has no obvious advantage in hunting over the simple willow-leaf or elder-leaf types. For though a narrow bronze arrow-head with four tangs cannot be easily drawn out through a wound, because the flesh closes up behind, the broad two-tanged flint one would not be more difficult to draw out than an elder-leaf or willow-leaf one shot into a beast with equal force. The fir-tree shape seems therefore to be magically intended: an appeal to Artemis Elate – Diana the Huntress, Goddess of the Firtree – to direct the aim. The point was probably smeared with a paralysant poison – a ‘merciful shaft’ of the sort with which the Goddess was credited. An Irish fir-tree arrow-head in my possession, taken from an Iron Age burial, cannot have been seriously intended for archery. The chip of white flint from which it has been knapped is awkwardly curved, and it has so large a ‘bulb of percussion’ and so short a stem as to prevent it from being spliced to admit an arrow-shaft: it is clearly for funerary use only.

But aye her whistle would fetch him back.

O, I shall go into a hare

With sorrow and sighing and mickle care,

And I shall go in the Devil’s name

Aye, till I be fetchèd hame

– Hare, take heed of a bitch greyhound

Will harry thee all these fells around,

For here come l in Our Lady’s name

All but for to fetch thee hame.

Cunning and art, etc.

Yet I shall go into a trout

With sorrow and sighing and mickle doubt,

And show thee many a merry game

Ere that I be fetchèd hame.

– Trout, take heed of an otter lank

Will harry thee close from bank to bank,

For here come I in Our Lady’s name

All but for to fetch thee hame.

Cunning and art, etc.

Yet I shall go into a bee

With mickle horror and dread of thee,

And flit to hive in the Devil’s name

Ere that I be fetchèd hame.

– Bee, take heed of a swallow hen

Will harry thee close, both butt and ben,

For here come I in Our Lady’s name

All but for to fetch thee hame.

Cunning and art, etc

Yet I shall go into a mouse

And haste me unto the miller’s house,

There in his corn to have good game

Ere that I be fetchèd hame.

– Mouse, take heed of a white tib-cat

That never was baulked of mouse or rat,

For I’ll crack thy bones in Our Lady’s name:

Thus shalt thou be fetchèd hame.

Cunning and art, etc.

10 . In the corresponding ancient British mysteries there seems to have been a formula in which the Goddess teasingly promised the initiate who performed a sacred marriage with her that he would not die ‘either on foot or on horseback, on water or on land, on the ground or in the air, outside a house or inside, shod or unshod, clothed or unclothed,’ and then, as a demonstration of her power, manoeuvred him into a position where the promise was no longer valid – as in the legend of Llew Llaw and Blodeuwedd, where a goat figures in the murder scene. Part of the formula survives in the Masonic initiation ritual. The apprentice ‘neither naked nor clothed, barefoot nor shod, deprived of all metals, hood winked, with a cable-tow about his neck is led to the door of the lodge in a halting moving posture.’

XXIII . Fabulous Beasts

XXIV . The Single Poetic Theme

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 Knighthood ’; 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 angelus.

3 . 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.

4 . 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.

XXV . War in Heaven

So may some gentle Muse

With lucky words favour my destin’d urn

And, as he passes, turn

And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud.

However, this is a mere conceit. ‘Muse’ stands for ‘poet possessed by a Muse’: Milton had just traditionally addressed the female Muse with:

Begin, then, Sisters of the sacred well …

3 . Gordium was in Eastern Phrygia, and according to local tradition whoever untied the knot would become master of Asia. Alexander, who had not the learning, patience or ingenuity to perform the task decently, used his sword. It was a raw-hide knot on the ox-yoke which had belonged to a Phrygian peasant named Gordius, and Gordius had been divinely marked out for royalty when an eagle settled on the yoke; by marriage with the priestess of Telmissus he became a petty king and presently extended his dominion over all Phrygia. When he built the fortress of Gordium he dedicated the yoke to King Zeus, it is said, and laid it up in the citadel. Gordium commanded the main trade route across Asia Minor from the Bosphorus to Antioch, so that the manifest meaning of the prophecy was that nobody could rule Asia Minor who did not hold Gordium; and it was from Gordium that Alexander began his second Eastern campaign which culminated in the defeat of Darius at Issus. Now, Gordius was the father of Midas, who has already been mentioned as a devotee of the Orphic Dionysus, so the yoke must originally have been dedicated to King Dionysus, not to Father Zeus. And the secret of the knot must have been a religious one, for another widespread early means of recording messages, besides notching sticks and scratching letters on clay, was to tie knots in string or strips of raw-hide. The Gordian knot, in fact, should have been ‘untied’ by reading the message it contained, which was perhaps a divine name of Dionysus, the one contained in the vowels of the Beth-Luis-Nion. By cutting the knot Alexander ended an ancient religious dispensation, and since his act seemed to go unpunished – for he afterwards conquered the whole East as far as the Indus valley – it became a precedent for rating military power above religion or learning; just as the sword of Brennus the Gaul, thrown into the scales that measured out the agreed tribute of Roman gold, provided a precedent for rating military power above justice or honour.

4 . In the Babylonian Epic it was Ishtar, not any male God, who caused the Deluge. Gilgamesh (Noah) stocked an ark with beasts of every kind and gave a New Year’s feast to the builders with great outpouring of new wine; the New Year’s Feast being an autumnal one. The myth seems to be iconotropic, for the account of the great wine-drinking, which appears in the Genesis version as a moral story of Noah’s drunkenness and the bad behaviour of his son Canaan (Ham), recalls the myth of the wine-god Dionysus. When captured by Tyrrhenian pirates, Dionysus changed the masts of their ship into serpents, himself into a lion and the sailors into dolphins, and wreathed everything with ivy. The original Asianic icon from which both myths are presumably derived must have shown the god in a moon-ship at the Vintage Feast, going through his habitual New Year changes – bull, lion, snake and so on – which gave rise to the Babylonian story of the cargo of animals. The pirates’ ship is probably described as Tyrrhenian because it had a figure-head in the shape of a Telchin, or dog with fins for feet, an attendant of the Moon-goddess.