The White Goddess (83 page)

Ovid and Virgil knew their Goddess Anna Perenna to have been a sister of Belus, or Bel, who was a masculinization of the Sumerian Goddess Belili; so also the god Anu, of the Babylonian male trinity completed by Ea and Bel, was a masculinization of the Sumerian Goddess Anna-Nin, usually abbreviated to Nana.
1
Bel’s wife was Belit, and Anu’s wife was Anatu. Ea’s wife, the third member of the Sumerian female trinity, was Dam-Kina; the first syllable of whose name shows her to have mothered the Danaans. Anna-Nin has further been identified by J. Przbuski in the
Revue
de
l’Histoire
des
Religions
(1933) with Ana-hita the Goddess of the Avesta, whom the Greeks called Anaitis and the Persians Ana-hid – the name that they gave to the planet Venus.

Mr. E. M. Parr writes to me that
An
is Sumerian for ‘Heaven’ and that in his view the Goddess Athene was another Anna, namely Ath-enna, an inversion of Anatha,
alias
Neith of Libya; also that
Ma
is a shortening of the Sumerian
Ama,
‘mother’, and that Ma-ri means ‘the fruitful mother’ from
rim
,
‘to bear a child’. Mari was the name of the goddess on whose account the Egyptians of 1000
BC
called Cyprus ‘Ay-mari’, and who ruled at Mari on the Euphrates (a city sacked by Hammurabi in 1800
BC
) and at Amari in Minoan Crete. So
Ma-ri-enna
is ‘the fruitful mother of Heaven’,
alias
Miriam, Marian of Mariandyne, the ‘leaping Myrrhine’ of Troy, and Mariamne: a word of triple power. But the basic word is
Anna,
which confers divinity on mere parturition and which also seems to form part of Arianrhod’s name.
Arianrhod
in fact may not be a debasement
of Argentum
and
rota
‘silver, wheel’ but
Ar-ri-an,
‘High fruitful mother’ who turns the wheel of heaven; if so, Arianrhod’s Cretan counterpart Ariadne would be Ar-ri-an-de, the
de
meaning barley, as in Demeter. The simple form Ana, or Anah, occurs as a Horite clan name in
Genesis,
XXXVI
;
though masculinized in two out of the three mentions of her, she is principally celebrated as the mother of Aholibamah (‘tabernacle of the high place’), the heiress whom Esau married on his arrival in the Seir pastures. (Ana’s
alleged discovery of mules in the wilderness is due to a scribal error.) James Joyce playfully celebrates Anna’s universality in his
Anna
Livia
Plurabelle.
And indeed if one needs a single, simple, inclusive name for the Great Goddess, Anna is the best choice. To Christian mystics she is ‘God’s Grandmother’.

The next letter,
F
earn,
explains Perenna as a corruption of
Fearina,
the adjective formed from
Fear
or
eär,
Spring. In Latin the word has kept its Digamma and is written
ver.
From this it follows that Bran’s Greek name Phoroneus – of which we have already noted the variant forms Vron, Berng and Ephron – was a variation of
Fearineus
and that he was originally the Spirit of the Year in his lusty, though foredoomed, Spring aspect. The Latin form seems to have been Veranus; which would account for the plebeian family name Veranius; and for the verb
vernare,
‘to renew oneself in Spring’, which is supposed to be irregularly formed from
ver,
veris,
but may be an abbreviation of
veranare.

The next letter is
Saille.
We have seen that Saille is connected in the Boibel-Loth with Salmoneus, Salmaah and Salmon, and this suggests that the corresponding word in the charm is Salmone, another title of the Goddess. So:

There were several places named after her in the Eastern Mediterranean including Cape Salmone in Crete, the city of Salmone in Elis, and Salmone, a village near Lusi. The title is apparently compounded of
Salma
and
Onë
as in Hesi-onë. Hesionë is said to mean ‘Lady of Asia’, and the meaning of Salma can be deduced from its occurrence in geographical names. It is an Aegean word of extraordinarily wide distribution and seems always to
be
connected with the notion of
easterliness
.
1
Salma was a tribe in Southern Judaea living east of the Minoan colony of Gaza; also a station in Central Arabia on the caravan route from the Mediterranean to
the Persian Gulf. Salmalassus was a station in Lesser Armenia on the caravan route from Trebizond to the Far East; Salmydessus was the most easterly city of Thrace, fronting the Black Sea; Salmone was the most easterly cape of Crete; Salamis the most easterly city of Cyprus; the island of Salamis lay east of the Cretan city of Corinth, and the mountain sacred to Salamanes (in Assyrian Salmanu) lay east of the great river-plain behind Antioch. As has already been pointed out Salma became a divine name in Palestine and Solomon, Salmon and Absalom are all variants of it. Salma was the deity to whom the hill of Jerusalem was originally sacred; the place is mentioned in the Egyptian Tell Amarna letters (1370
BC
) as Uru-Salim, and in Assyrian monuments as Ur-Salimu. In 1400
BC
it was held by a chieftain with the Semite name of Abd-Khiba, a vassal of Egypt, who like Melchizedek of Salem – Uru-Salim? – claimed to rule neither by father-right nor mother-right, but by the will of the God. Professor Sayce translates Uru-Salim as ‘City of the God Salim’. Josephus records that the first name of the city was Solyma. Salma, or Salim, was evidently the Semite god of the rising or renewed sun; Salmaone was the Aegean goddess from whom he took his titles, as did Salmoneus the Aeolian who opposed the later Achaean invaders and insisted on inducing thunder by rattling a brazen chariot – thereby infringing the prerogative of Olympian Zeus. But it is probable that Salma took his title as the demi-god of the renewed Sun from his Moon-bride Circe, or Belili, the Willow Mother, Sal-Ma, in whose honour willow-branches were waved at this season, and that the meaning of easterliness is a secondary one.

Straif
is the next letter. A main verb is called for, to begin the second flight of letters.
Strebloein,
or
strabloein,
formed from the verbal root
streph,
‘to twist’, means ‘to reeve with a windlass, to wrench, dislocate, put on the rack’, and gives
Straif,
the blackthorn, its necessarily cruel connotation.

Next comes
Huath.
The
u
merely shows that the H is aspirated. We have no clue to the name of the person, or persons, whom the Goddess racks, presumably on
Duir,
the oak, but my guess is the
Athaneatids,
or Hathaneatids, members of one of the four original royal clans of Arcadia. It is likely that this word, like
athanatoi,
means ‘the not-mortal ones’, the Greek word
thn
ē
tos
(‘mortal’) being a shortened form of
thaneãtos.
The clan from which the sacred king, the victim of the story that is unfolding, was chosen would naturally be called ‘The Immortals’, because the king alone could win immortality by his sufferings, the lesser members of the nation being doomed to become twittering ghosts in Hell.

For
Ura
is the next letter of the alphabet, the midsummer letter, the letter of Venus Urania, the most violent aspect of the Triple Goddess. As has already been pointed out, Ura means Summer; it also means the tail of a lion or bear, expressive of its fury, and the word
ouraios
(‘uraeus’), the royal serpent of Egypt, is formed from the same root. ‘Uranus’, the father of the Titans according to Greek Classical mythology, is likely to have originally been their Mother – Ura-ana, Queen Ura. But we should not look for only one or even two meanings of the syllable
ur,
the more numerous the poetic meanings that could be concentrated in a sacred name, the greater was its power. The authors of the Irish
Hearings
of
the
Scholars
connected the midsummer-letter
Ur
with
ur,
‘earth’; and we are reminded that this is the root found in the Latin words
area,
‘a plot of earth’,
arvum,
‘a ploughed field’, and
urvare,
which means ‘to drive a plough ceremonially around the proposed site of a city’ – a sense also found in the Homeric Greek
ouron
, ‘a boundary marked by the plough’. Grammarians assume a primitive Greek word
ē
ra,
‘earth’ connected with this group of words; which suggests that Erana, or Arana, or Urana, was the Earth-goddess whose favour had to be asked when fields were ploughed or cities (
urves
or
urbes
)
founded, and marriage with whose local representative gave a chieftain the right to rule in her lands. If this is so, the
uraeus
in the royal head-dress stood both for the great sea-serpent that girdled the Earth and for the Goddess’s spotted oracular snakes. But her name could also carry three or four further meanings. It might stand for ‘Mountain-goddess’ (from the Homeric Greek
ouros,
a mountain) which would point her identity with
Mousa,
the Muse, a title of the same meaning; and for ‘Queen of the Winds’ (from the Homeric Greek
ouros,
a wind) which would explain the
uraeus
as symbolizing her power over the winds, all winds being snake-tailed and housed in a mountain-cave. Urana then is a multiple title: Mother Earth, Our Lady of Summer, Mountain Goddess, Queen of the Winds, Goddess of the Lion’s Tail. It might equally mean ‘Guardian Queen’ (
ouros,
‘a guardian’); or, with reference to her aspect as a Moon-cow, ‘Ruler of Wild Oxen’ (
ourus,
Latin
urus,
‘a wild ox’), like the Irish Goddess Buana. And we must not overlook the Sanscrit word
varunas,
meaning ‘the night firmament’, from the root
var,
‘to cover’, from which Varuna, the third member of the Aryan Trinity, took his name. When the first wave of Achaeans entered Greece and were forced under the sovereignty of the Triple-goddess Ana, or De-Ana, or Ath-Ana, or Di-Ana, or Ur-Ana, who ruled the world of day as well as the world of night,
varunas
lost its specialized sense, was changed from
varun-
to
uran-,
in her honour, and came to mean the sky in general. Hence Ana’s classical title Urania, ‘The Heavenly One’.

The next word
Tinne,
or
Tann,
can be expanded to
Tanaous
‘stretched’, in memory of Hesiod’s derivation of the word
Titan
from
titainein,
‘to stretch’. He says that the Titans were so called because they stretched out their hands: but this explanation is perhaps intended to disguise the truth, that the Titans were men stretched, or racked, on the wheel, like Ixion. Frazer noted that the holly-oak, which is the tree of Tinne, grows nobly at Lusi, and that the valley of the Styx is full of the white poplar,
Eadha,
the tree sacred to Hercules.

The letter Coll completes the second flight of the alphabet.
Kolabreusthai
or
kolabrizein
is to dance a wild taunting Thracian dance, the
kolabros,
the sort that the Goddess Kali dances on the skulls of her foes: