The White Goddess (63 page)

The
Ogham
Craobh,
which is printed in Ledwich’s
Antiquities
of
Ireland
and attested by an alphabetic inscription at Callen, County Clare, Ireland, ascribed to 295
AD
, runs as follows:

This is the ordinary Ogham alphabet as given by Macalister; except that where one would expect F and H it has T and B – the very consonants which occur mysteriously in Hyginus’s account of the seven original letters invented by the Three Fates. There was evidently a taboo at Callen on the F and H – T and B had to be used instead; and it looks as if just the same thing had happened in the 15-consonant Greek alphabet known to Hyginus, and that he refrained from specifying Palamedes’s contribution of eleven consonants because he did not wish to call attention to the recurrence of B and T.

If so, the Palamedes alphabet can be reconstructed as follows in the Ogham order:

There is no warrant for Ng in Greek, so I have enclosed it in square brackets, but it must be remembered that the original Pelasgians talked a non-Greek Language. This had nearly died out by the fifth century
BC
but, according to Herodotus, survived in at least one of the oracles of Apollo, that of Apollo Ptous, which was in Boeotian territory. He records that a certain Mys, sent by the son-in-law of King Darius of Persia to consult the Greek oracles, was attended by three Boeotian priests with triangular writing tablets. The priestess made her reply in a barbarous
tongue which Mys, snatching a tablet from one of the priests, copied down. It proved to be in the Carian dialect, which Mys understood, being a ‘European’, that is to say of Cretan extraction – Europë, daughter of Agenor, having ridden to Crete from Phoenicia on the back of a bull. If Cretan was, as is probable, a Hamitic language it may well have had Ng at place 14. Ng is not part of the Greek alphabet and Dr. Macalister points out that even in Old Goidelic no word began with Ng, and that such words as ngomair, and ngetal which occur in the Ogham alphabets as the names of the Ng letter are wholly artificial forms of gomair and getal. But in Hamitic languages the initial Ng is common, as a glance at the map of Africa will show.

The existence of this dubious Pelasgian letter Ng, which had not been borrowed by the makers of the Cadmean alphabet, may explain the uncertainty of ‘twelve, or some say thirteen letters’ ascribed by Diodorus Siculus to the Pelasgian alphabet; and may also explain why Ng in the middle of a word was in Greek spelt GG,
as
Aggelos
for
Angelos,
G being the letter which immediately precedes Ng in the Beth-Luis-Nion. Yet from the analogy of the Beth-Luis-Nion it may be suspected that the Palamedes alphabet contained two secret letters which brought the number up to fifteen. The Latin alphabet at any rate was originally a 15-consonant one, with 5 vowels, and was probably arranged by ‘Carmenta’ as follows:

For the Romans continued to use the Ng sound at the beginning of words in Republican times – they even spelt
natus
as gnatus,
and
navus
(‘diligent’) as
gnavus
– and probably pronounced it like the
gn
in the middle of such French words as
Catalogne
and
seigneur.

It looks as if Epicharmus was the Greek who invented the early form of the Cadmean alphabet mentioned by Diodorus as consisting of sixteen consonants, namely the thirteen of the Palamedes alphabet as given above, less the Ng; plus
Zeta,
and
Pi
as a substitute for
Koppa
(Q); plus
Chi
and
Theta.
But only two letters are ascribed to Epicharmus by Hyginus; and these are given in the most reputable MSS. as
Chi
and
Theta.
So
Pi
(or
Koppa
)
and
Zeta
are likely to have been concealed letters of the Palamedes alphabet, as
Quert
and
Straif are
concealed letters of the Beth-Luis-Nion; not mentioned by Hyginus because they were merely doubled C and S.

We know that Simonides then removed the H aspirate and also the F,
Digamma,
which was replaced by
Phi,
and added
Psi
and
Xi
and two vowels – long E,
Eta,
to which he assigned the character of H aspirate, and long O,
Omega
;
which brought the total number of letters up to twenty-four.

All these alphabets seem to be carefully designed sacred alphabets, not selective Greek transcriptions of the commercial Phoenician alphabet of twenty-six letters as scratched on the Formello-Cervetri vases. One virtue of the Epicharmian alphabet lay in its having sixteen consonants – sixteen being the number of increase – and twenty-one letters in all, twenty-one being a number sacred to the Sun since the time of the Pharaoh Akhenaton who introduced into Egypt about the year 1415
BC
the monotheistic cult of the sun’s disc. Epicharmus, as an Asclepiad, was descended from the Sun.

It must be noted that Simonides’s new consonants were artificial ones – previously
Xi
had been spelt
chi-sigma
and
Psi,
pi-sigma
– and that there was no real need for them compared, for instance, with the need of new letters to distinguish long from short A, and long from short I. I suspect Simonides of having composed a secret alphabetical charm consisting of the familiar letter-names of the Greek alphabet arranged with the vowels and consonants together, in three eight-letter parts, each letter suggesting a word of the charm; for example
xi,
psi
might stand for
xiphon
psilon,
‘a naked sword’. Unfortunately the abbreviations of most of the Greek letter names are too short for this guess to be substantiated; it is only an occasional letter, like
lambda,
which seems to stand for
lampada
(‘torches’) and
sigma,
which seems to stand for
sigmos
(‘a hissing for silence’), that hints at the secret.

But can we guess why Simonides removed F and H from the alphabet? And why Hyginus the Spaniard and the author of the Irish Callen inscription used B and T as cipher disguises for these same two letters? We can begin by noting that the Etruscan calendar, which the Romans adopted during the Republic, was arranged in
nundina,
or eight-day periods, in Greek called ‘ogdoads’ and that the Roman Goddess of Wisdom, Minerva, had 5 (written V) as her sacred numeral. We can identify Minerva with Carmenta, because she was generally credited at Rome with the invention of the arts and sciences and because flower-decorated boats, probably made of alder wood, were sailed on her festival, the
Quinquatria.
‘Quinquatrid’
means ‘the five halls’, presumably five seasons of the year, and was celebrated five days after the Spring New Year feast of the Calendar Goddess Anna Perenna; this suggests that the five days were those left over when the year had been divided into five seasons of 72 days each, the sanctity of the five and the seventy-two having been similarly established in the Beth-Luis-Nion system.

An alphabet-calendar arranged on this principle, with the vowels kept apart from the consonants, implies a 360-day year of five vowel-seasons, each of 72 days, with five days left over; each season being divided into three periods each consisting of twenty-four days. The 360-day year can also be divided, in honour of the Triple Goddess, into three 120-day seasons each containing five periods of equal length, namely twenty-four
days – with the same five days over; and this is the year that was in public use in Egypt. The Egyptians said that the five days were those which the God Thoth (Hermes or Mercury) won at draughts from the Moon-goddess Isis, composed of the seventy-second parts of every day in the year; and the birthdays of Osiris, Horus, Set, Isis and Nephthys were celebrated on them in this order. The mythic sense of the legend is that a change of religion necessitated a change of calendar: that the old Moon-goddess year of 364 days with one day over was succeeded by a year of 360 days with five over, and that in the new system the first three periods of the year were allotted to Osiris, Horus and Set, and the last two to Isis and Nephthys. Though, under Assyrian influence, each of the three Egyptian seasons was divided into four periods of 30 days, not five of 24, the 72-day season occurs in the Egypto-Byblian myth that the Goddess Isis hid her child Horus, or Harpocrates, from the rage of the ass-eared Sun-god Set during the 72 hottest days of the year, namely the third of the five seasons, which was astronomically ruled by the Dog Sirius and the two Asses. (The hiding of the Child Horus seems to have been assisted by the Lapwing, a bird much used in the Etruscan science of augury which the Romans borrowed; at any rate, Pliny twice mentions in his
Natural
History
that the Lapwing disappears completely between the rising of Sirius and its setting.)

But here the argument must be held up by a discussion of Set and his worship.

The Greek legend that the God Dionysus placed the Asses in the Sign of Cancer (‘the Crab’) suggests that the Dionysus who visited Egypt and was entertained by Proteus King of Pharos was Osiris, brother of the Hyksos god Typhon,
alias
Set. The Hyksos people, non-Semitic pastoralists, coming from Armenia or beyond, pressed down through Cappadocia, Syria and Palestine into Egypt about the year 1780
BC
. That they managed so easily to establish themselves in Northern Egypt with their capital at Pelusium, on the Canopic arm of the Nile Delta, can be accounted for only by an alliance with the Byblians of Phoenicia. Byblos, a protectorate of Egypt from very early times, was the ‘Land of Negu’ (‘Trees’) from which the Egyptians imported timber, and a cylinder seal of the Old Empire shows Adonis, the God of Byblos, in company with the horned Moon-goddess Isis, or Hathor, or Astarte. The Byblians who, with the Cretans, managed the Egyptian carrying-trade – the Egyptians hated the sea – had trading stations at Pelusium and elsewhere in Lower Egypt from very early times. To judge from the Homeric legend of King Proteus, the earliest Pelasgian settlers in the Delta used Pharos, the lighthouse island off what afterwards became Alexandria, as their sacred oracular island. Proteus, the oracular Old Man of the Sea, who was King of Pharos and lived in a cave – where Menelaus consulted him – had the power of changing his shape, like Merddin, Dionysus, Atabyrius, Llew Llaw,
Periclymenus and all Sun-heroes of the same sort. Evidently Pharos was his Isle of Avalon. That Apuleius connects the
sistrum
of Osiris, used to frighten away the God Set, with Pharos suggests that Proteus and Osiris were there regarded as the same person. Proteus, according to Virgil, had another sacred island, Carpathus, between Crete and Rhodes; but that was the Thessalian Proteus. Another Proteus, spelt Proetus, was an Arcadian.

It would be a great mistake to think of Pharos as a secluded sacred island inhabited only by the attendants of the oracle: when Menelaus came there with his ships he was entering the largest port in the Mediterranean.
1
Gaston Jondet in his
Les
ports
submergés
de l
’ancienne
Î
le
de
Pharos
(1916) has established the existence here even in pre-Hellenic times of a vast system of harbour-works, now submerged, exceeding in extent the island itself. They consisted of an inner basin covering 150 acres and an outer basin of about half that area, the massive sea-walls, jetties and quays being constructed of enormous stones, some of them weighing six tons. The work seems to have been carried out towards the end of the third millennium
BC
by Egyptian labour according to plans submitted to the local authorities by Cretan or Phoenician marine architects. The wide landing-quay at the entrance to the port consisted of rough blocks, some of them sixteen feet long, deeply grooved with a chequer-work of pentagons. Since pentagons are inconvenient figures for a chequer, compared with squares and hexagons, the number five must have had some important religious significance. Was Pharos the centre of a five-season calendar system?

The island was oddly connected with the numbers five and seventy-two at the beginning of the Christian era: the Jews of Alexandria used to visit the island for an annual (five-day?) festival, the excuse for which was that the Five Books of Moses had been miraculously translated there into Greek by seventy-two doctors of the Law (‘the Septuagint’) who had worked for seventy-two days on them, each apart from the rest, and agreed exactly in their renderings at the conclusion of their task. There is something behind this myth. All similar festivals in the ancient world commemorated some ancient tribal treaty or act of confederacy. What the occasion here was remains obscure, unless the Pharaoh who married Sarah, the goddess mother of the ‘Abraham’ tribe that visited
Egypt at the close of the third millennium, was the priest-king of Pharos. If so, the festival would be a record of the sacred marriage by which the ancestors of the Hebrews joined the great confederacy of the Peoples of the Sea, whose strongest base was Pharos. Hebrews seem to have been in continuous residence in Lower Egypt for the next two millennia, and the meaning of the festival would have been forgotten by the time that the Pentateuch was translated into Greek.