The White Goddess (85 page)

1
Pausanias had evidently come at the wrong time of year for in the mayfly season trout do utter a sort of dry squeak, when they throw themselves ecstatically out of the water and feel the air on their gills. The Irish legend of ‘singing trout’ apparently refers to an erotic Spring dance, in the White Goddess’s honour, of fish nymphs who mimicked the leaping, squeaking trout: for the Irish princess Dechtire conceived her son Cuchulain, a reincarnation of the God Lugh, as the result of swallowing a mayfly, and he was able to swim like a trout as soon as born. Cuchulain’s Greek counterpart was Euphemus (‘well-spoken’) the famous swimmer, son of the Moon-Goddess Europë, who was born by the Cephissus river in Phocis but had a hero-shrine at Taenarus, the main Peloponnesian entrance to the Underworld. Euphemus’s way of swimming was to leap out of the water like a fish and skim from wave to wave; and in Classical times Poseidon, God of Fishes, claimed to be his father.

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This is queer. If it stands for Abimelech son of Amalek the son of Baal, and of Anatha, it commemorates a tradition that the family were formerly lords of Canaanite Shechem. When the Irsraelite tribe of Ephraim settled in Shechem, a city which the
Song
of
Deborah
shows to have originally belonged to the tribe of Amalek, a treaty marriage was celebrated between the Ephraimite Chieftain Gideon, who thereupon took the name Jerubbaal (‘Let Baal strive’), and the local heiress, presumably a priestess of the Lion-Goddess Anatha. Her son succeeded to the throne by mother-right after a massacre of his rivals and took the Canaanite title of Abimelech; establishing his position with the help of his mother’s kinsmen and the god Baalberith.

1
At the beginning of Chapter Eleven I described Attis son of Nana as the Phrygian Adonis; and at the beginning of Chapter Eighteen mentioned that Nana conceived him virginally as the result of swallowing either a ripe almond or else a pomegranate seed. The mythological distinction is important. The pomegranate was sacred to Attis as Adonis-Tammuz-Dionysus-Rimmon, and at Jerusalem, as has been shown, the pomegranate cult was assimilated to that of Jehovah. But the almond was also, it seems, sacred to Attis as Nabu -Mercury-Hermes-Thoth, whose cult was also assimilated to that of Jehovah; which explains the myth recorded by Euhemerus, the Sicilian sceptic, that Hermes so far from ordaining the courses of the stars was merely instructed in astronomy by Aphrodite – that is to say by his mother Nana who gave her name to the planet Venus. Thus Nana, as mother of Jehovah in two of his characters can be claimed as the paternal, as well as the maternal, grandmother of Jehovah’s Only Begotten Son.

1
The complementary Aegean word to
Salma
seems to have been
Tar,
meaning the west, or the dying sun. Tartessus on the Atlantic was the most westerly Aegean trading station, as Salmydessus the most easterly. Tarraco was the port on the extreme west of the Mediterranean, and Tarrha the chief port of western Crete. The reduplication tar-tar, meaning ‘the far, far west, has evidently given Tartara, the land of the dead, its name. For though Homer in the
Iliad
places Tartara ‘as far below earth as Heaven is above it’, Hesiod makes it the abode of Cronos and the Titans, whom we know to have gone west after their defeat by Zeus. Taranis was a Gaulish deity mentioned by Lucan as being served by even more terrible rites than was Scythian Diana, meaning the Taurian Artemis, who loved human sacrifice. Though the Romans identified Taranis with Jupiter she was at first probably a Death-Goddess, namely Tar-Anis, Annis of the West.

1
The Anglo-Saxon grounding of English prevents the use of the Classical dactyl as the basic metrical foot. The dactylic or anapaestic poems attempted in the early and middle nineteenth century by Byron, Moore, Hood, Browning and others read over-exuberantly and even vulgarly; though school children enjoy them. What has gradually evolved as the characteristic English metre is a compromise between the iambic – borrowed from French and Italian, ultimately from the Greek – and the stress rhythm of Anglo-Saxon, based on the pull of the oar. Shakespeare’s gradual modification of the ten-foot iambic line that he took over from Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey is illuminating: The first lines of King John run: 

Fifteen years later, in the
Tempest,
after the opening scene which is almost wholly prose Miranda addresses Prospero: 

It has been suggested that Shakespeare was consciously working forward to a rhythmic prose. This seems to me a misreading of his intentions: after disruptive variations on the iambic ten-syllabled norm he always returned to it as a reminder that he was still writing verse; and could never have done otherwise. Here, for example, Miranda, after this first outburst of horror, finishes her speech with metrical sobriety.

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That the Osirian year originally consisted of thirteen twenty-eight day months, with one day over, is suggested by the legendary length of Osiris’s reign, namely twenty-eight years – years in mythology often stand for days, and days for years – and by the number of pieces into which he was torn by Set, namely thirteen apart from his phallus which stood for the extra day. When Isis reassembled the pieces, the phallus had disappeared, eaten by a letos-flsh. This accounts for the priestly fish-taboo in Egypt, relaxed only one day in the year.