The White Goddess (36 page)
Authors: Robert Graves
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Mythology, #Literature, #20th Century, #Britain, #Literary Studies, #Amazon.com, #Mysticism, #Retail
While the Christian Church of Teutonic England owed its existence, in the main, to the missionary enterprise of Rome, the much older Celtic Churches, and notably the Church of Ireland, were more closely connected with Gaul and the East. It was to Gaul that Ireland was mainly indebted for its original conversion, and the intercourse between the two countries remained close and unbroken. But the Church in the south of Gaul – and it was the south alone that preserved any considerable culture, or displayed any missionary activity, in the early Middle Ages – had from the very first been closely in touch with the Churches in the East. The great monastery of Lerins, in which St. Patrick is said to have studied, was founded from Egypt, and for many centuries the Egyptian Church continued to manifest a lively interest in Gallic matters. Indeed, not only Lerins, but Marseilles, Lyons, and other parts of Southern Gaul maintained a constant intercourse with both Egypt and Syria, with the natural result that many institutions of the Gallic Church, despite its increasing subjection to Rome, dating from the year 244, bore the impress of Oriental influences. Hence the close relations with Gaul maintained by the Irish churchmen and scholars necessarily brought them into contact with their Egyptian and Syrian brethren, and with the ideas and practices which prevailed in their respective Churches.
Nor was Ireland’s connection with the East confined to the intermediary of Gaul. Irish pilgrimages to Egypt continued until the end of the eighth century, and Dicuil records a topographical exploration of that country made by two Irishmen, Fidelis and his companion. Documentary evidence is yet extant, proving that even home-keeping Irishmen were not debarred from all acquaintance with the East. The
Saltair
na
Rann
contains an Irish version of the
Book
of
Adam
and
Eve,
a work written in Egypt in the fifth or sixth century, of which no mention outside of Ireland is known. Adamnain’s work,
De
Locis
Sanctis
,
contains an account of the monastery on Mount Tabor, which might stand for the description of an Irish monastic community of his day. Indeed, the whole system both of the anchoretic and coenobitic life in Ireland corresponds closely to that which prevailed in Egypt and Syria; the monastic communities, consisting of groups of detached huts or beehive cells, and of the other earliest examples of Irish ecclesiastical
architecture, all suggest Syrian origin; and Dr. G. T. Stokes holds that ‘the Irish schools were most probably modelled after the forms and rules of the Egyptian Lauras’.But it was not only Syrian and Egyptian influences to which Ireland was subjected by its intercourse with South Gaul. The civilization of that country was essentially Greek, and so remained for many centuries after the Christian era; and this circumstance no doubt contributed to the well-known survival of Greek learning in the Irish schools, long after it had almost perished in the rest of Western Europe. It is not to be supposed that this learning was characterised by accuracy of scholarship, or by a wide acquaintance with Classical literature; but neither was it always restricted to a mere smattering of the language or, to passages and quotations picked up at second-hand. Johannes Scotus Erigena translated the works of the pseudo-Areopagite; Dicuil and Firghil (Virgilius, Bishop of Salzburg), studied the Greek books of Science; Homer, Aristotle, and other Classical authors were known to some of the Irish writers; several of the Irish divines were acquainted with the Greek Fathers and other theological works. Nor were the Greeks in person unknown to Ireland. Many Greek clerics had taken refuge there during the Iconoclast persecution, and left traces which were recognizable in Archbishop Ussher’s day; and the old poem on the Fair of Carman makes mention of the Greek merchants who resorted thither.
It is thus apparent that the Irish writer possessed ample means of becoming acquainted with the traditions, both oral and written, of the Greek and Eastern Churches. The knowledge thus acquired extended to the Apocalyptic Visions, as is proved by internal evidence furnished by the Irish Visions, both by way of direct reference, and by the nature of their contents. It remains to see how far the predilection which the Irish writers manifested for this class of literature, and the special characteristics which it assumes in their hands, may have been determined by their familiarity with analogous ideas already existing in their national literature.
At the period in question, the traditional literature of Ireland would appear to have entered into the national life to no less a degree than in Greece itself. Indeed, in certain respects, it was still more closely interwoven with the habits of the people and the framework of society than in Greece, for the literary profession was provided for by a public endowment, something like that of an established National Church, and its professors constituted a body organised by law, and occupying a recognized position in the State.
The reiterated ‘I have been’ and ‘I was’ of Gwion’s
Hanes
Taliesin
riddle suggests that the Boibel-Loth alphabet, which is the solution, originally consisted of twenty mystical titles of a single Protean male deity, corresponding with his seasonal changes; and that these titles were kept secret, at first because of their invocatory power, later because they were regarded as heretical by the Christian Church. But why does the Boibel-Loth contain so many approximations to Biblical names, taken from
Genesis
and
Exodus
,
which in Christian times had lost their religious importance: Lot, Telmen, Jachin, Hur, Caleb, Ne-esthan – all names concerned with Sinai, Southern Judaea and the Edomite Dead Sea region?
This is the region in which the Essene communities were settled from about 150
BC
to 132
AD
. The Essenes appear to have been an offshoot of the Therapeutae, or Healers, an ascetic Jewish sect settled by Lake Mareotis in Egypt; Pliny described them as the strangest religious body in the world. Though Jews, and a sort of Pharisees at that, they believed in the Western Paradise – of which precisely the same account is given by Josephus when describing Essene beliefs as by Homer, Hesiod and Pindar – and, like the later Druids, in the return of pure souls to the Sun, whose rising they invoked every day. They also avoided animal sacrifices, wore linen garments, practised divination, meditated within magic circles, were expert in the virtues of plants and precious stones and are therefore generally supposed to have been under the philosophic influence of Pythagoras, the ascetic pupil of Abaris the Hyperborean. They refrained from worshipping at the Jerusalem Temple, perhaps because the custom of bowing to the East at dawn had been discontinued there, and exacted the penalty of death from anyone who blasphemed God or Moses.
Since among the Jerusalem Pharisees, Moses as a man could not be blasphemed, it follows that for the Essenes he had a sort of divinity. The story of Moses in the Pentateuch was the familiar one of Canopic Hercules – the God who was cradled in an ark on the River Nile, performed great feats, died mysteriously on a mountain-top, and afterwards became a hero and judge. But it is plain that the Essenes distinguished the historic Moses, who led the Israelites out of Egypt, from the demi-God Moses; just as the Greeks distinguished the historic Hercules, Prince of Tiryns, from Celestial Hercules. In Chapter Twenty-Five I shall give reasons for supposing that though the Essenes adapted the Greek formula of Celestial Hercules to their cult of Moses as demi-god, and though they seem to have been disciples of Pythagoras, it was from a sixth-century
BC
Jewish source that the Pythagoreans derived the new sacred name of God that the tribes of Amathaon and Gwydion established in Britain about the year 400
BC
.
The Essene initiates, according to Josephus, were sworn to keep secret the names of the Powers who ruled their universe under God. Were these powers the letters of the Boibel-Loth which, together, composed the life and death story of their demi-god Moses? ‘David’ may seem to belong to
a later context than the others, but it is found as a royal title in a sixteenth-century
BC
inscription; and the Pentateuch was not composed until long after David’s day. Moreover, David for the Essenes was the name of the promised Messiah.
If all the vowel names of the Boibel-Loth, not merely Jaichin, are preceded by a J, they become Jacab, Jose, Jura, Jesu, Jaichin – which are Jacob, Joseph, Jerah, Joshua and Jachin, all names of tribes mentioned in
Genesis.
The Essene series of letter-names, before Gwion in his riddle altered some of them to names taken from the New Testament, the
Book
of
Enoch
,
and Welsh and Latin mythology, may be reconstructed as follows:
| | Jacob | Babel | Hur | Moriah |
| | Joseph | Lot | David | Gad |
| | Jerah | Ephron | Telmen | Gomer |
| | Joshua | Kohath | Jethro | Salem |
| | Jachin | Ne-esthan | Caleb | Reu |
Of these, only four names are not those of clans or tribes, namely: Babel, the home of wisdom; Moriah, Jehovah’s holy mountain; Salem, his holy city; Ne-esthan, his sacred serpent. It seems possible, then, that the Essene version of the Boibel-Loth letter-names was brought to Ireland in early Christian times, by Alexandrian Gnostics who were the spiritual heirs of the Essenes after Hadrian had suppressed the Order in 132
AD
. Dr. Joyce in his
Social
History
of
Ancient
Ireland
records that in times of persecution Egyptian monks often fled to Ireland; and that one Palladius was sent from Rome to become a bishop of the Irish Christians long before the arrival of St. Patrick.
The alphabet itself was plainly not of Hebrew origin: it was a Canopic Greek calendar-formula taken over by Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt, who disguised it with the names of Scriptural characters and places. As I suggest in my
King
Jesus
,
it is likely that in Essene usage each letter became a Power attendant on the Son of Man – Moses as Celestial Hercules who was subservient to the Ancient of Days, Jehovah as the Transcendent God. It is recorded that the Essene novice wore a blue robe, the adept a white one. Was this because the novice was still ‘lotus-borne’, that is to say, not yet initiated? The Egyptian lotus was blue. I also suggest in
King
Jesus
that the two mysterious Orders of the Essenes, Sampsonians and Helicaeans, were adepts in the calendar mysteries and were named after Samson (the second s is a
ps
in some Greek texts) the sun-hero and the
Helix
or cosmic circle. (An Essene who wished to meditate would insulate himself from the world within a circle drawn around him on the sand.) The twenty Powers of the Babel-Lot will have been among those distastefully mentioned by St Paul in
Galatians
IV,
8-10
as ‘weak and cringing Elements
(stoicheia)’
.
The back-sliding Galatian Jews were now
again worshipping such Powers as gods, with careful observation of the calendar. In
I
Corinthians,
XV,
24–25
he claims that they have been vanquished by Jesus Christ who alone mediates with the Father. Paul’s influence was decisive: to the orthodox Church they soon became demons, not agents of the Divine Will. The Essenes invoked angels in their mysteries. Here is something odd: that the ‘Hounds of Herne the Hunter, or the ‘Dogs of Annwm’, which hunt souls across the sky are, in British folklore, also called ‘Gabriel ratches’ or ‘Gabriel hounds’. Why Gabriel? Was it because Gabriel, whose day is Monday, ran errands for Sheol (the Hebrew Hecate) and was sent to summon souls to Judgement? This was Hermes’s task, and Herne, a British oak-god whose memory survived in Windsor Forest until the eighteenth century, is generally identified with Hermes. Gabriel and Herne are equated in the early thirteenth-century carvings around the church door at Stoke Gabriel in South Devon. The angel Gabriel looks down from above, but on the right as one enters are carved the wild hunter, his teeth bared in a grin and a wisp of hair over his face, and a brace of his hounds close by. But Hermes in Egypt, though Thoth in one aspect, in another was the dog-headed god Anubis, son of Nepthys the Etian Hecate; so Apuleius pictures him in the pageant at the end of
The
Golden
Ass
as ‘his face sometimes black, sometimes fair, lifting up the head of the Dog Anubis. This makes the equation Gabriel = Herne = Hermes = Anubis. But was Gabriel ever equated with Anubis in ancient times? By a piece of good luck an Egyptian gem has been found showing Anubis with palm and pouch on the obverse, and on the reverse an archangel described as gabrier sabao, which means ‘Gabriel Sabaoth’, the Egyptians having, as usual, converted the L into an R. (This gem is described in de Haas’s
Bilder
atlas
.) Then is ‘Annwm’, which is a contracted form of ‘Annwfn’, a Celtic version of ‘Anubis’? The B of Anubis would naturally turn into an F in Welsh.
So much nonsense has been written about the Essenes by people who have not troubled to find out from Josephus, Pliny the Elder, Philo the Byblian and others, who they were and what they believed, that I should not bring them into this story if it were not for a poem of Gwion’s called
Yr
Awdil
Vraith
(‘Diversified Song’). The text in the
Peniardd
MSS
is incomplete, but in some stanzas preferable to that of the
Red
Book
of
Hergest
:
