The White Goddess (59 page)

The seven noble sacred trees of the grove particularized in a seventh-century poem appended to the ancient Irish Law
Crith
G
ab
lac
h
were: birch, alder, willow, oak, holly, hazel, apple. Except that
Beth,
the birch, the lucky tree of the birth-month, takes the place of
Huath,
the unlucky whitethorn, the trees run in a clear sequence from the Spring equinox to the end of the apple harvest. The Birch is mentioned as ‘very noble’ in Gwion’s
Câd
Goddeu,
but the apple-tree was the noblest tree of all, being the tree of immortality. The poets of Wales have always been aware of its spiritual pre-eminence, and the lovely mediaeval
Afalleneu
:

is not a poem about the orchard apple-tree but about the apple-tree of the sacred thicket, the tree that is the harbourage of the hind. As Gwion writes: ‘I fled as a roe to the entangled thicket.’

Where did King Arthur go to be healed of his grievous wounds? To the Isle of Avalon, the secret ‘island of apple-trees’. With what talisman was Bran summoned by the White Goddess to enter the Land of Youth? With ‘a silver white-blossomed apple branch from Emain in which the bloom and branch were one’. The island of Emain, the Goidelic Elysium, is described thus in a poem by Ragnall, son of Godfrey, King of the Isles:

Oisin, when taken to the same Land of Youth by Niamh of the Golden Hair, sees his weird first as a hornless fawn pursued by a red-eared white hound, but then in his own shape royally dressed and mounted on a white
horse in pursuit of a beautiful girl on a dark horse; in her hand is a golden apple. Both apparitions are skimming over the calm sea; he does not recognize their meaning and Niamh gently evades his questions about them. It has been suggested in a footnote to Chapter Twelve that the Goddess of the sepulchral island of Alyscamps, in the Rhône, was named Alys and that the alder,
aliso
in Spanish, was named after her. Dauzat in his
Dictionnaire
Étymologique
connects
alisier,
the service-tree, with
aliso,
the alder which screened these sepulchral islands. The same resemblance is found between the Scandinavian and North-German
els
or
elze
(service-tree) and
else
(alder); and the name Alys seems to be recorded in the Ilse, the stream that runs from the Brocken to the Oker, where a princess Ilse was once drowned. Since the fruit of the service-tree (both the Mediterranean and Northern varieties) is a sort of sorb-apple, it is likely that this was the apple of immortality in pre-Christian France, Spain and Scandinavia. If so, the Elysian Fields, or Alyscamps, would have the same meaning as Avalon: apple-orchards. The sorb emblemizes ‘from corruption, sweetness’: it cannot be eaten until it has rotted to a corpse-like purple-brown. Perhaps this is why the tree is mentioned in
The
Hearings
of
the
Scholars
as a euphemism for yew, the death-tree; though the explanation there given is that both bore the name ‘oldest of woods’; ‘oldest’, as applied to the service-tree, could mean only ‘of most ancient fame’, because it is not particularly long-lived.

Mr. Kenneth Dutfield in a recent letter to the
Times
Literary
Supplement
plausibly suggests that
Avernus
,
the abode of the dead, which the Latins incorrectly derived from the Greek
a-ornis
,
‘birdless’, is the same word as
Avalon
;
which would identify the Elysian Fields with Avernus. Lake Avernus near Cumae apparently won on its nickname from the unhealthy airs of the surrounding marshes and from the near-by shrine of the Cumaean Sybil who conjured up the spirits of the dead.

On August 13th, the pre-Christian feast of the Mother Goddess Diana, or Vesta, was once celebrated with cyder, a roasted kid spitted on hazel-twigs and apples hanging in clusters from a bough. Another name of this Goddess was Nemesis (from the Greek
nemos
,
‘grove’) which in Classical Greek connotes divine vengeance for breaches of taboo. In her statues she carries an apple-bough in one hand, and the fifth-century Christian poet Commodianus identifies her with Diana Nemorensis (‘of the grove’) whose followers ‘worship a cut branch and call a log Diana’. But both Nemesis and Diana Nemorensis are associated with the deer, not the goat, cult. Nemesis carries a wheel in her other hand to show that she is the goddess of the turning year, like Egyptian Isis and Latin Fortuna, but this has been generally understood as meaning that the wheel will one day come full circle and vengeance be exacted on the sinner.
1
In Gaul she
was Diana Nemetona,
nemeton
being a sacred grove; and was represented with an apple-bough, a cyder-bowl with Aethiopians on it, and a lion-eagle griffin to denote the season of her feast. This feast was converted in the Middle Ages into that of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin (August 15th) which, because of the seventeenth-century calendar changes (referred to in the hawthorn context), means August 6th, the beginning of
Quert.
The Virgin is believed to have died on August 13th, to have risen again and ascended to Heaven on the third day. Since the Virgin was closely associated by the early Church with Wisdom – with the Saint ‘Sophia’, or Holy Wisdom, of the Cathedral Church at Constantinople – the choice of this feast for the passing of Wisdom into Immortality was a happy one.

The
Litany
of
the
Blessed
Virgin
contains the prayer
Sedes
sapientiae,
ora
pro
nobis
,
‘Seat of Wisdom, pray for us!’ For St. Peter Chrysologos in his
Sermon
on
the
Annunciation
had represented the Virgin as the seven-pillared temple which Wisdom (according to
Proverbs,
IX,
10)
had built for herself. So the meaning of the mediaeval allegory about the milk-white unicorn which could be captured only with the assistance of a pure virgin is now easily read. The Unicorn is the Roe in the Thicket. It lodges under an apple-tree, the tree of immortality-through-wisdom. It can be captured only by a pure virgin – Wisdom herself. The purity of the virgin stands for spiritual integrity. The unicorn lays its head on her lap and weeps for joy. But the Provençal version of the story is that the beast nuzzles to her breasts and attempts other familiarities, whereupon the virgin gently grasps him by the horn and leads him away to the hunters: here he is, in fact, a type of profane love rejected by spiritual love.

The unicorn’s wildness and untameability had become proverbial in early Christian times because of the text in
J
ob,
XXXIX,
9:

and this Biblical unicorn, (a mistranslation by the Septuagint
1
of
rem,
the Judaean aurochs or wild ox) became identified with the goat-stag, the
hirco-cervus
of Dionysian mysteries, which was another wild untameable animal. Charles Doughty in
his
Arabia
Deserta
suggests that the
rem
is not the aurochs but a large, very dangerous antelope called
wothyhi
or ‘wild
ox’ by the Arabs. He is likely to be right; and I take the
wothyhi
to be the
boubalis
or
boibalis,
‘an oryx the size of an ox’, mentioned by Herodotus (
Melpomene,
192
)
,
and also by Martial, as a fierce beast used in the Roman amphitheatre. Doughty writes: ‘Her horns are such slender rods as from our childhood we have seen pictured “the horns of the unicorn”. We read in Balaam’s parable: “El brought them out of Egypt; He hath as it were the strength of the
reem
”;
and in Moses’s blessing of the tribes Joseph’s horns are the two horns of reems.’ Doughty illustrates this with a sketch of a
wothyhi’s
horn, nearly two feet long and somewhat curved, with raised rings at the base. He adds: ‘It was a monkish darkness in natural knowledge to ascribe a single horn to a double forehead.’ This is unfair on the monks: it was the pre-Christian Septuagint who had first given the
rem
a single horn. And it is possible that they translated
rem
as ‘unicorn’ from a misunderstanding of an icon in the margin of an illustrated Hebrew Pentateuch – such there were. In the context of Moses’s blessing, Joseph ‘with the horns of a
rem’
would naturally have been depicted in the persons of his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, jointly called ‘Joseph’, as twin
rems
with only one horn apiece. The single horn, emphasized by its double occurrence, would suggest to the translators the beast described by Ctesias in his
Indica.
The horn was a cure-all and especially good against poison.

The connexion of the apple-tree with immortality is ancient and widespread in Europe. What does ‘apple’ mean? According to the
Oxford
English
Dictionary
its etymology is unknown, but the word runs Northwestward across Europe all the way from the Balkans to Ireland in a form approximating in most languages to
Apol.

It is clear that the ancient icon of the Three Goddesses, the apple and the young shepherd of Ida, which has been iconotropically interpreted by some early enemy of women in the story of the ‘Apple of Discord’ (how Paris adjudicated the apple to the Love-goddess) had an entirely different meaning. To award an apple to the Love-goddess would have been an impertinence on the Shepherd’s part. All apples were hers. Did Merddin present Olwen with the apple orchard? Did Adam give the Mother of All Living an apple?
1
Obviously the three Goddesses are, as usual, the three
persons of the ancient Triple Goddess, not jealous rivals, and obviously the Love-goddess is giving the apple to the Shepherd (or goatherd), not receiving it from him. It is the apple of immortality and he is the young Dionysus – the god commemorated by the kid stuffed with apples; for according to Hesychius and Stephanus of Byzantium one of Dionysus’s titles was Eriphos, ‘the Kid’. Virgil has expressed the wrong notion in his
Georgics
:
he says that the kid spitted on hazel is sacrificed to Dionysus because the goat and the hazel-tree are both inimical to the vine. Whether the word
Apol
is a chance approximation to Apollo, who is the immortal part of Dionysus, or whether the apple is named after him, is a doubtful point. But it is remarkable that in Greece the words for ‘goat’ (or sheep) and ‘apple’ are identical (
m
ē
l
ŏ
n
)
– the Latin is
mãlum.
Hercules, who combined Dionysus and Apollo in a single person, was called M
ē
lon because apples were offered to him by his worshippers; and because he was given the bough with the golden apples by the Three Daughters of the West – the Triple Goddess again; it was these apples that made him immortal. The conclusion of the story of the Apple of Discord, that the Shepherd won Helen as a reward for his judgement, evidently derives from a companion icon to the ‘Judgement’, showing a young Shepherd hand in hand with Helen. But Helen was not a mortal woman; she was Helle, or Persephone, a Goddess of Death and Resurrection. Hercules, Theseus, Castor and Pollux, were all depicted in her company in archaic works of art.

Though the apple was the most palatable of wild fruits growing on trees, why should it have been given such immense mythic importance? The clue is to be found in the legend of Curoi’s soul that was hidden in an apple; when the apple was cut across by Cuchulain’s sword ‘night fell upon Curoi’. For if an apple is halved cross-wise each half shows a five-pointed star in the centre, emblem of immortality, which represents the Goddess in her five stations from birth to death and back to birth again. It also represents the planet of Venus – Venus to whom the apple was sacred – adored as Hesper the evening star on one half of the apple, and as Lucifer Son of the Morning on the other.

The apple of the Thracian Orphic cult seems to have been the sorb rather than the quince, the crab, or the true apple, because Orpheus, whose name and singing head identify him with Bran the alder-god, is called the son of Oeagrius;
Oea
Agria
means ‘the wild service-tree’.