The White Goddess (97 page)

Anonymous English balladists constantly celebrate the Goddess’s beauty and terrible power.
Tom o
’
Bedlam’s
Song
is directly inspired by her:

So is the
Holy
Land
of Walsinghame:

The
Holy
Land
of
Walsinghame
recalls the tender description of the Goddess in the ancient Irish
Sickbed
of Cuchulain,
spoken by Laegh after visiting the rath of the Sidhe:

For though she loves only to destroy, the Goddess destroys only to quicken.

Coleridge’s mention of leprosy is strangely exact. The whiteness of the Goddess has always been an ambivalent concept. In one sense it is the pleasant whiteness of pearl-barley, or a woman’s body, or milk, or unsmutched snow; in another it is the horrifying whiteness of a corpse, or a spectre, or leprosy. Thus in
Leviticus
XIV,
10,
the leper’s thank-offering after his cure, originally paid to the Goddess Mother, was a measure of barley flour. Alphito, it has been shown, combined these senses: for
alphos
is white leprosy, the vitiliginous sort which attacks the face, and
alphiton
is barley, and Alphito lived on the cliff tops of Nonacris in perpetual snow. Pausanias connects leprosy, the meaning of which is ‘scaliness’, a characteristic of true leprosy, with the town of Lepreus, which lay close to the river Alpheus in the district of Triphylia (‘trefoil’), which was a leper-colony founded by a goddess called Leprea: it afterwards came under the protection of ‘Zeus of the White Poplar’, for another name for leprosy is
leuce
,
which also means ‘the white poplar’. This ties together several loose ends of argument. The white trefoils which spring up wherever
the Love-goddess Olwen treads can be described as ‘white as leprosy’. And we may assume that the leaves of the white poplar (the autumn tree of the Beth-Luis-Nion), which still grows in the Styx valley, were prophylactic against ail forms of leprosy: for
albus
and
albulus
in Latin have all the connotations of the Greek
alphos
.
When Evander came to Italy from Arcadia he brought the name of the River Alpheus with him:
Albula
was the old name for the Tiber, though its yellow waters would have earned it the name ‘Xanthos’, or ‘Flavus’, if the White Goddess had not sponsored the migration.

The priestesses of the White Goddess in ancient times are likely to have chalked their faces in imitation of the Moon’s white disc. It is possible that the island of Samothrace, famous for its Mysteries of the White Goddess, takes its name from scaly leprosy; for it is known that
Samo
means white and that the Old Goidelic word for this sort of leprosy was
Samothrusc.
Strabo gives a warrant for this suggestion in his
Georgics
: he quotes Artemidorus as writing that ‘there is an island near Britain where the same rites are performed in honour of Ceres and Persephone as in Samothrace.’

In the
Ancient
Mariner
,
when the Nightmare Life-in-Death has won her game of dice:

She whistles for the magical breeze that is presently to save the Mariner’s life. Here again Coleridge is beautifully exact. The White Goddess Cardea, as has been mentioned, was in charge of the four cardinal winds; mythologically the most important was the North Wind at the back of which she had her starry castle, close to the polar hinge of the Universe. This was the same wind that blew in answer to Gwion’s final riddle in the Romance and helped to liberate Elphin, and the wind which, according to Hecataeus, gave its name to the Hyperborean priesthood of Apollo. Whistling three times in honour of the White Goddess is the traditional witch way of raising the wind; hence the proverbial unluckiness of ‘a crowing hen and a whistling maid’. ‘I’ll give thee a wind.’ ‘And I another.’ – as the witches say in Macbeth….‘All the quarters that they know, I’ the Shipman’s card.’ The close connexion of winds with the Goddess is also shown in the widespread popular belief that only pigs and goats (both anciently sacred to her) can see the wind, and in the belief that mares can conceive merely by turning their hindquarters to the wind.

The earliest Classical reference to this belief about mares is found in the
Iliad
,
where Boreas grows amorous of the three thousand mares of Erichthonius the Dardanian; he finds them grazing on the plains about Troy, and impregnates twelve of them. Classical scholars have been content to read this merely as an allegory of the swiftness of the twelve
sacred horses born to Boreas; but the myth is far more complex than that. Boreas lived with his three brothers, the other cardinal winds, in a sacred cave on Mount Haemus in Thrace, which lies due north of Troy, but was also worshipped at Athens. The Athenians gave him the honourable title of ‘brother-in-law’ and their ancient respect for him was heightened by his sudden descent from Haemus during the Persian invasion of Greece, when he sank most of Xerxes’s fleet off Cape Sepias. Boreas was represented on the famous carved Chest of Cypselus as half man, half serpent – a reminder that winds were under the charge of the Death-goddess and came out of oracular caves or holes in the ground. He was shown in the act of carrying off the nymph Oreithuia, daughter of another Erichthonius,
1
the first King of Athens (who introduced four-horse chariots there) to his mountain home in Thrace.

This gives a clue to the provenience of the North Wind cult. The mares of Erichthonius were really the mares of Boreas himself, for Erichthonius was also half man, half serpent. Erichthonius, styled an autochthon, that is to say ‘one who springs from the earth’, was first said to be the son of Athene by Hephaestus the demiurge, but later, when Athene’s unblemished maidenhood was insisted upon by the Athenians as a matter of civic pride, he was made the son of Hephaestus and Ge, the Earth-goddess. The name of Oreithuia, the nymph whom he carried off, means ‘She who rages upon the mountain’ – evidently the Love-goddess of the divine triad in which Athene was the Death-goddess; which explains Boreas as her brother-in-law, and so the brother-in-law of all Athenians: whose ancient friendship with the Boreas priesthood of the Hyperboreans is mentioned by Hecataeus. But since North Winds cannot blow backwards, the story of Boreas’s rape of Oreithuia to Thrace must refer to the spread to Thrace of the Athenian orgiastic cult of the Triple Goat-goddess and her lover Erichthonius,
alias
Ophion, and its adaptation there, as at nearby Troy, to an orgiastic cult of the Triple Mare-goddess; the twelve sacred horses of Boreas provided her with three four-horse chariots. Since Erichthonius shortly after birth took refuge from his persecutors in the aegis of Athene – the bag made from the hide of the goat Amalthaea – he must have come from Libya with her. In Libya he would have been more beloved than in Greece; northerly breezes freshen the early morning along the whole Libyan coast throughout the summer – thus Hesiod calls Boreas the son of Astraeus (‘the starry one’) and Eos (‘dawn’). That Portuguese mares were fertilized by the zephyr – according to Varro, Pliny and Columella – is an obvious error derived from the extreme westerly position of Portugal. The philosopher Ptolemy rightly attributes only to the planet Zeus (Jupiter), which ruled the north, ‘winds that fertilize’, and Boraeus was one of Zeus’s titles.
1
Lactantius, the late third-century Christian Father, makes this fertilization of the mares an analogy of the mysterious impregnation of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit (literally ‘breath’): a comment which was not at the time regarded as in bad taste.

According to the
Odyssey,
the home of the winds, that is to say the centre of the cult of Boreas and his brothers, was not on Mount Haemus but in an Aeolian island; perhaps this was the Aegean island of Tenos
which lies immediately north of Delos, where a megalithic logan-stone was shown as the memorial raised by Hercules to Calaïs and Zetes, the heroic sons of Boreas and Oreithuia. But the cult of Boreas spread west as well as north from Athens – the Thurians of Italy are known to have worshipped him – and is likely to have reached Spain with other Greek colonists. In late Classical times Homer’s ‘Aeolian Isle’ was believed to be Lipari which had been colonized by Aeolians; Lipari bears due north from Sicily where the belief probably originated.

A slightly Christianized pagan Irish poem, printed in Vol. II of the
Ossianic
Society’s
Publications,
1855, gives the natal characteristics of the four cardinal winds. It not only shows the connexion of winds with Fate but presents the child who is born when the north wind blows as a type of Hercules.