The White Goddess (65 page)
Authors: Robert Graves
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Mythology, #Literature, #20th Century, #Britain, #Literary Studies, #Amazon.com, #Mysticism, #Retail
Here is a neat problem in poetic logic: if the Dactyl Cyllenius is an
alias
of Hercules, and Hercules is the thumb, and Titias is the fool’s finger, it should be possible to find in the myth of Hercules and Titias the name of the intervening finger, the forefinger, to complete the triad used in the Phrygian blessing. Since the numerical sequence
Heis,
Duo,
Treis
,
‘one, two, three’, corresponds in Greek, Latin and Old Goidelic with the H.D.T. letter sequence represented by the top-joints of the Dactyls used in this blessing, it is likely that the missing name begins with D and has a reference to the use or religious associations of the finger. The answer seems to be ‘Dascylus’. According to Apollonius he was king of the Mariandynians, and presided at the games at which Hercules killed Titias. For the forefinger is the index-finger and Dascylus means ‘the little pointer’ Greek
didasco
,
Latin
disco.
Presidents at athletic contests use it for solemn warnings against foul play. The root
Da-
from which Dascylus is derived is also the root of the Indo-Germanic word for thunder, appropriate to D as the letter of the oak-and-thunder god. Dascylus was both father and son of Lycus (wolf); the wolf is closely connected with the oak-cult.
The argument can be taken farther. It has been mentioned in Chapter Four that Pythagoras was a Pelasgian from Samos who developed his doctrine of the Transmigration of Souls as the result of foreign travel. According to his biographer Porphyrius he went to Crete, the seat of the purest Orphic doctrine, for initiation by the Idaean Dactyls. They ritually purified him with a thunderbolt, that is to say they made a pretence of killing him with either a meteoric stone or a neolithic axe popularly
mistaken for a thunderbolt; after which he lay face-downwards on the sea shore all night covered with black lamb’s wool; then spent ‘three times nine hallowed days and nights in the Idaean Cave’; finally emerged for his initiation. Presumably he then drank the customary Orphic cup of goat’s milk and honey at dawn (the drink of Cretan Zeus who had been born in that very cave) and was garlanded with white flowers. Porphyrius does not record exactly when all this took place except that Pythagoras saw the throne annually decorated with flowers for Zeus; which suggests that the twenty-eight days that intervened between his thunderbolt death and his revival with milk and honey were the twenty-eight-day month R, the death-month ruled by the elder or myrtle; and that Pythagoras was reborn at the winter solstice festival as an incarnation of Zeus – a sort of Orphic Pope or Aga Khan – and went through the usual mimetic transformation: bull, hawk, woman, lion, fish, serpent, etc. This would account for the divine honours subsequently paid him at Crotona, where the Orphic cult was strongly established; and also for those paid to his successor Empedocles, who claimed to have been through these ritual transformations. The Dactyls here are plainly the Curetes, the dancing priests of the Rhea and Cronos cult, tutoring the infant Zeus in the Pelasgian calendar-alphabet, the Beth-Luis-Nion; the tree-sequence of which had been brought to Greece and the Aegean islands from Paphlagonia, by way of Bithynian Mariandynë and Phrygia, and there harmonized with the alphabetic principle originated in Crete by ‘Palamedes’. For climatic reasons the canon of trees taught by the Cretan Dactyls must have differed from that of Phrygia, Samothrace and Magnesia – Magnesia where the five Dactyls were remembered as a single character, and where the Pelasgian Cheiron (‘the Hand’) son of Cronos and Philyra (Rhea), successively tutored Hercules, Achilles, Jason the Orphic hero, with numerous other sacred kings.
It seems however that Pythagoras,
1
after mastering the Cretan Beth-Luis-Nion, found that the Boibel-Loth calendar, based on a year of 360 + 5 days, not on the Beth-Luis-Nion year of 364 + 1 days, was far better suited than the Beth-Luis-Nion to his deep philosophic speculations
about the holy
tetractys
,
the five senses and elements, the musical octave, and the Ogdoad.
But why was it necessary to alter the alphabet and calendar in order to make eight the important number, rather than seven? Simonides’s alphabet, it has been seen, was expanded to 3 × 8 letters; perhaps this was to fulfil the dark prophecy current in Classical Greece that Apollo was fated to castrate his father Zeus with the same sickle with which Zeus had castrated his father Cronos and which was laid up in a temple on the sickle-shaped island of Drepane (‘sickle’), now Corfu. In so far as the supreme god of the Druids was a Sun-god, the fulfilment of this prophecy was demonstrated every year at their ritual emasculation of the sacred oak by the lopping of the mistletoe, the procreative principle, with a golden sickle – gold being the metal sacred to the Sun. Seven was the sacred number of the week, governed by the Sun, the Moon and the five planets. But eight was sacred to the Sun in Babylonia, Egypt and Arabia, because 8 is the symbol of reduplication – 2 × 2 × 2. Hence the widely distributed royal sun-disc with an eight-armed cross on it, like a simplified version of Britannia’s shield; and hence the sacrificial barley-cakes baked in the same pattern.
Now to examine Diodorus’s famous quotation from the historian Hecateus (sixth century
BC
):
Hecateus, and some others, who treat of ancient histories or traditions, give the following account: ‘Opposite to the coast of Celtic Gaul there is an island in the ocean, not smaller than Sicily, lying to the North – which is inhabited by the Hyperboreans, who are so named because they dwell beyond the North Wind. This island is of a happy temperature, rich in soil and fruitful in everything, yielding its produce twice in the year. Tradition says that Latona was born there, and for that reason, the inhabitants venerate Apollo more than any other God. They are, in a manner, his priests, for they daily celebrate him with continual songs of praise and pay him abundant honours.
‘In this island, there is a magnificent grove (or precinct) of Apollo, and a remarkable temple, of a round form, adorned with many consecrated gifts. There is also a city, sacred to the same God, most of the inhabitants of which are harpers, who continually play upon their harps in the temple, and sing hymns to the God, extolling his actions. The Hyperboreans use a peculiar dialect, and have a remarkable attachment to the Greeks, especially to the Athenians and the Delians, deducing their friendship from remote periods. It is related that some Greeks formerly visited the Hyperboreans, with whom they left consecrated gifts of great value, and also that in ancient times Abaris, coming from the
Hyperboreans into Greece, renewed their family intercourse with the Delians.‘It is also said that in this island the moon appears very near to the earth, that certain eminences of a terrestrial form are plainly seen in it, that Apollo visits the island once in a course of nineteen years, in which period the stars complete their revolutions, and that for this reason the Greeks distinguish the cycle of nineteen years by the name of “the great year”. During the season of his appearance the God plays upon the harp and dances every night, from the vernal equinox until the rising of the Pleiads, pleased with his own successes. The supreme authority in that city and the sacred precinct is vested in those who are called Boreadae, being the descendants of Boreas, and their governments have been uninterruptedly transmitted in this line.’
Hecateus apparently credited the pre-Belgic Hyperboreans with a knowledge of the 19-year cycle for equating solar and lunar time; which involves an intercalation of 7 months at the close. This cycle was not publicly adopted in Greece until about a century after Hecateus’s time. As a ‘golden number’, reconciling solar and lunar time, 19 can be deduced from the thirteen-month Beth-Luis-Nion calendar which contains fourteen solar stations (namely the first day of each month and the extra day) and five lunar stations. Probably it was in honour of this Apollo (Beli) that the major stone circles of the Penzance area in Cornwall consisted of 19 posts, and that Cornwall was called Belerium. There is evidently some basis for the story that Abaris the Hyperborean instructed Pythagoras in philosophy. It looks as if the Bronze Age people (who imported the Egyptian beads into Salisbury Plain from Akhenaton’s short-lived capital, the City of the Sun, at Tell Amarna about 1350
BC
) had refined their astronomy on Salisbury Plain and even anticipated the invention of the telescope. Since, according to Pliny, the Celtic year began in his day in July (as the Athenian also did) the statement about the country producing two harvests, one at the beginning and one at the end of the year, is understandable. The hay harvest would fall in the old year, the corn harvest in the new.
The Lord of the Seven-day Week was ‘Dis’, the transcendental god of the Hyperboreans, whose secret name was betrayed to Gwydion. Have we not already stumbled on the secret? Was the Name not spelt out by the seven vowels of the threshold, cut with three times nine holy nicks and read sunwise?
Or in Roman letters: JIEVOA
Ō
If so, the link between Britain and Egypt is evident: Demetrius, the first-century
BC
Alexandrian philosopher, after discussing in his treatise
On
Style
the elision of vowels and hiatus, and saying that ‘with elision the effect is duller and less melodious’, illustrates the advantage of hiatus with:
In Egypt the priests sing hymns to the gods by uttering the seven vowels in succession, the sound of which produces as strong a musical impression on their hearers as if flute and lyre were used. To dispense with the hiatus would be to do away altogether with the melody and harmony of language. But perhaps I had better not enlarge of this theme in the present context.
He does not say what priests they were or to what gods they addressed themselves, but it is safe to guess that they were the gods of the seven-day week, comprising a single transcendent deity, and that the hymn contained the seven vowels with which Simonides provided the Greek alphabet and was credited with a therapeutic effect.
When the Name was revealed, Amathaon and Gwydion instituted a new religious system, and a new calendar, and new names of letters, and installed the Dog, Roebuck and Lapwing as guardians not of the old Name, which he had guessed, but of the new. The secret of the new Name seems to be connected with the substitution of the sacred numeral 7 by the sacred numeral 8, and with a taboo on the letters F and H in ordinary alphabetic use. Was it that the Name was given 8 letters instead of 7? We know from Hyginus’s account that Simonides added
Omega
(long O, and
Eta
(long E) to the original seven letters AOUEIFH, invented by the Fates, ‘or some say, by Mercury’, and that he also removed H aspirate from the alphabet by allotting its character to
Eta.
If he did this for religious reasons, the eight-fold Name of God, containing the Digamma F (V) and H aspirate – the Lofty Name which gave Gwion his sense of power and authority – was perhaps:
JEHUOVA
Ō
but spelt, for security reasons, as:
JEBUOTA
Ō
It certainly has an august ring, lacking to ‘Iahu’ and ‘Jahweh’, and if I have got it right, will be ‘the eight-fold City of Light’ in which the ‘Word’, which was Thoth, Hermes, Mercury and, for the Gnostics, Jesus Christ was said to dwell. But the Fates had first invented F and H; why?
JIEVOA
Ō
, the earlier seven-letter form, recalls the many guesses at the ‘blessed Name of the Holy One of Israel’ made by scholars, priests and magicians in the old days. This was a name which only the High Priest was allowed to utter, once a year and under his breath, when he visited the
Holy of Holies, and which might not be committed to writing. Then how in the world was the Name conveyed from one High Priest to another? Obviously by a description of the alphabetical process which yielded it. Josephus claimed to know the Name, though he could never have heard it spoken or seen it written. The Heads of the Pharisaic academies also claimed to know it. Clement of Alexandria did not know it, but he guessed an original IAOOUE – which is found in Jewish-Egyptian magical papyri, ‘Zeus, Thunderer, King Adonai, Lord Iaooue’ – also expanded to IAOUAI and IAOOUAI. The disguised official formula, JEHOWIH, or JEHOWAH, written JHWH for short, suggests that by the time of Jesus the Jews had adopted the revised Name. The Samaritans wrote it IAHW and pronounced it IABE. Clement’s guess is, of course, a very plausible one because I.A.O.OU.E is the name spelt out by the vowels of the five-season year if one begins in the early winter, the opening of the agricultural year.
1
The Name taught in the Academies is likely to have been a complicated one of either 42 or 72 letters. Both forms are discussed by Dr. Robert Eisler in the Jubilee volume for the Grand Rabbi of France in
La
Revue
des
Études
Juives.
The calendar mystery of 72 has already been discussed; that of 42 belongs to the Beth-Luis-Nion system.
2
