The White Goddess (29 page)

This is the inscriptional form of the alphabet as given by Macalister:

 

Besides these twenty letters, five combinations of vowels were used in the deaf-and-dumb language to represent five foreign sounds. These were:

which represented respectively:

In inscriptions these letters were given elaborate characters entirely different from the other letters. Kh had a St. Andrew’s cross, Th had a
lozenge, P a piece of lattice work, Ph a spiral, and X a portcullis.

I take this to have been the finger key-board, with the vowels conveniently grouped in the centre:

 

Julius Caesar records in his Gallic War that the Druids of Gaul used ‘Greek letters’ for their public records and private correspondence but did not consign their sacred doctrine to writing ‘lest it should become vulgarized and lest, also, the memory of scholars should become impaired.’ Dr. Macalister suggests that the Ogham alphabet, when complete with the extra letters, corresponds fairly closely with an early, still somewhat Semitic, form of the Greek alphabet, known as the Formello-Cervetri which is scratched on two vases, one from Caere and the other from Veii in Italy, dated about the fifth century
BC
. The letters are written Semitically from right to left and begin with A.B.G.D.E. He assumes that the ‘Greek letters’ used by the Druids were this alphabet of twenty-six letters, four more than the Classical Greek, though they discarded one as unnecessary; and I think that he has proved his case.

But did the Druids invent their finger-language before they learned this Greek alphabet? Dr. Macalister thinks that they did not, and I should agree with him but for two main considerations. (1) The order of letters in the Ogham is altogether different from the Greek: one would have expected the Druids to follow the original order closely if this was their first experience of alphabetic spelling. (2) If the five foreign letters were an original part of the Ogham alphabet why were they not integrated with the rest in its inscriptional form? It would have been simple to allot them nicks as follows:

 

And why in the finger-alphabet were they not spelt out with the nearest equivalent combinations of consonants – CH for Kh, CS for X, and so on -instead of being expressed allusively in vowel combinations?

That the vowel combinations are allusive is easily understood from the finger diagram above. In order to express the
Kh
sound of the Greek letter
chi
,
the Druids used the Latin combination of C and H, but expressed this allusively as Ea, by reference to the fourth finger, the E digit, on which the letter C occurs, and to the thumb, the A digit, on which the letter H occurs. Similarly for X, pronounced ‘CS’, they used the E digit, on which both C and S occur, but introduced this with the A digit on which H occurs; H being a silent and merely ancillary letter in Celtic languages, and its use here being merely to form a two-vowel combination of A and E. Th is written Oi and Ph is written Ui because Th is a shrill variety of D (as
theos
in Greek corresponds with the Latin
deus
‘god’), and because Ph is a shrill variety of F (as
phegos
in Greek corresponds with the Latin
fagus
‘beech-tree’). D occurs on the O digit and F on the U digit; so to differentiate Th from D and Ph from F, the I is made the combination vowel of O in one case and U in the other – I in Irish being used as an indication of shrillness of sound. Finally P is written la, because B which was originally pronounced P in the Celtic languages (the Welsh still habitually confound the two sounds), occurs on the A digit; the I is an indication that P is distinguished from B in foreign languages.

I conclude that the twenty letters of the Ogham alphabet were in existence long before the Formello-Cervetri alphabet was brought to Italy from Greece and that the Gallic Druids added the five foreign letters to them with such disdain as virtually to deny them any part in the system. What complicates the case is that the ancient Irish word for ‘alphabet’ is ‘Beth-Luis-Nion’ which suggests that the order of letters in the Ogham alphabet was originally B.L.N., though it had become B.L.F. before the ban on inscriptions was lifted. Besides, the accepted Irish tradition was that the alphabet originated in Greece, not Phoenicia, and was brought to Ireland by way of Spain, not Gaul. Spenser records this in his
View
of
the
Present
State
of
Ireland
(1596): ‘it seemeth that they had them [the letters] from the nation that came out of Spaine.’

The names of the letters of the B.L.F. alphabet are given by Roderick O’Flaherty in his seventeenth-century
Ogygia
,
on the authority of Duald Mac Firbis, a family bard of the O’Briens who had access to the old records, as follows: 

When recently I wrote on this subject to Dr. Macalister, as the best living authority on Oghams, he replied that I must not take O’Flaherty’s alphabets seriously: ‘They all seem to me to be late artificialities, or rather pedantries, of little more importance than the affectations of Sir Piercie Shafton and his kind.’ I pass on this caution in all fairness, for my argument depends on O’Flaherty’s alphabet, and Dr. Macalister’s is a very broad back for anyone to shelter behind who thinks that I am writing nonsense. But the argument of this book began with the assumption that Gwion was concealing an alphabetic secret in his riddling poem. And the answers to the riddles if I have not got them wrong – though ‘Morvran’ and ‘Moiria’, ‘Ne-esthan’ and ‘Neiagadon’, ‘Rhea’ and ‘Riuben’ do not seem to match very well – approximate so closely to the ‘Boibel Loth’ that I feel justified in supposing that O’Flaherty was recording a genuine tradition at least as old as the thirteenth century
AD
and that the answers to the so-far unsolved riddles will be found in the Boibel-Loth letter-names not yet accounted for.

We can begin our secondary process of unravelling Gwion’s riddles by putting Idris at place 14 as an equivalent of Idra; and removing the J from Jose (Joseph) and Jesu (Jesus), neither of which names – as Gwion the Hebrew scholar may have known – originally began with J; and transposing Uriel and Hur – for the mediaeval Irish had long lost their aspirated H, so that Hur and Uria easily got confused. Then if the answers to our unsolved riddles are to be found in the unused letters of the Boibel-Loth, this leaves us with ACAB and JAICHIM; and with five unsolved riddles:

‘Moiria’, the Boibel-Loth equivalent of ‘Morvran’, suggests ‘Moreh’, or ‘Moriah’, at both of which places Jehovah, in
Genesis,
makes a covenant with Abraham and allots a dominion to him and to his seed for ever.
Another name for Moriah is Mount Zion, and in
Isaiah,
XVIII
Mount Zion is mentioned as the Throne of the Lord of Hosts who ‘scatters, distributes and treads underfoot’. ‘Moiria’ also suggests the Greek word
moira
, a share, lot or distribution. If Moriah’ is the answer to the first of these five unsolved riddles, it must be linked with ‘I have been bard of the harp to Deon of Lochlin’; and we must credit the scholarly Gwion with interpreting the word as meaning Mor-Iah, or Mor-Jah, ‘the god of the sea’, the word ‘Mor’ being the Welsh equivalent of the Hebrew ‘Marah’ (the salt sea). He is in fact identifying Jah, the Hebrew God, with Bran who was a grain-god as well as a god of the alder. The identification is justified. One of the early gods worshipped at Jerusalem and later included in the synthetic cult of Jehovah was the harvest god Tammuz for whom first-fruits of grain were yearly brought from Bethlehem (‘the house of bread’). The natives of Jerusalem were still wailing for him at the Feast of Unleavened Bread in Isaiah’s day and according to Jerome he had a sacred grove at Bethlehem. It will be remembered that the Temple was built on the ‘threshing floor of Araunah’, which sounds uncannily like Arawn. Moreover, Bran’s crow was equally sacred to Jehovah. Still more conclusive is Jehovah’s claim to the seventh day as sacred to himself. In the contemporary astrological system the week was divided between the sun, moon and seven planets, and the Sabians of Harran in Mesopotamia, who were of Aegean origin, put the days under the rule of seven deities, in the order still current in Europe: Sun, Moon, Nergal (Mars), Nabu (Mercury), Bel (Jupiter), Beltis (Venus), Cronos (Saturn). Thus Jehovah, the god whose holiest day is Saturday, must be identified with Cronos or Saturn, who is Bran. We should credit Gwion with understanding this, and also with knowing that Uriel and Uriah are the same word, El and Jah being interchangeable names of the Hebrew God.

The divine name of Alpha written in four letters turns out to be ‘Acab’ in O’Flaherty’s list of letter-names; which suggests Achab (Ahab) King of Israel, a name borne also by the prophet who appears in the
Acts
of
the
Apostles
as ‘Agabus’. It is the name ‘Agabus’ which explains the secondary riddle ‘I have been loquacious before I was gifted with speech’, for Agabus (who according to the pseudo-Dorotheus was one of the Seventy Disciples) is mentioned twice in the
Acts
of
the
Apostles.
In the first mention (
Acts
XI
)
he
signified
by
the
Spirit
that there would be a famine. Gwion pretends to understand from
signified
that Agabus made signs, prophesied in dumb show, on that occasion, whereas in
Acts
XXI
he spoke aloud with: ‘Thus saith the Holy Ghost.’ But Achab is not a divine name: in Hebrew it means merely ‘Father’s brother’. However,
Ac
ab
is the Hebrew word for ‘locust’, and the golden locust was among the Greeks of Asia Minor a divine emblem of Apollo, the Sun-god.
1
Gwion in another of
the poems in the Romance, called
Divregwawd
Taliesin
,
styles Jesus ‘Son of Alpha’. Since
Acab
is the equivalent in this alphabet of
Alpha
in the Greek, this is to make Jesus the son of Acab; and, since Jesus was the Son of God, to make Acab a synonym of God.