The Greek Myths, Volume 1 (42 page)

3
. Inspection of entrails seems to have been an Indo-European mantic device. Divination by the throw of four knucklebone dice was perhaps alphabetical in origin: since ‘signs’, not numbers, were said to be marked on the only four sides of each bone which could turn up. Twelve consonants and four vowels (as in the divinatory Irish Ogham called ‘O’Sullivan’s’) are the simplest form to which the Greek alphabet can be reduced. But, in Classical times, numbers only were marked – 1, 3, 4, and 6 on each knucklebone – and the meanings of all their possible combinations had been codified. Prophecy from dreams is a universal practice.

4
. Apollo’s priests exacted virginity from the Pythian priestesses at
Delphi, who were regarded as Apollo’s brides; but when one of them was scandalously seduced by a votary, they had thereafter to be at least fifty years old on installation, though still dressing as brides. Bull’s blood was thought to be highly poisonous, because of its magical potency (see 155.
a
): the blood of sacred bulls, sometimes used to consecrate a whole tribe, as in
Exodus
xxiv. 8, was mixed with great quantities of water before being sprinkled on the fields as a fertilizer. The priestess of Earth, however, could drink whatever Mother Earth herself drank.

5
. Hera, Pasiphaë, and Ino were all titles of the Triple-goddess, the interdependence of whose persons was symbolized by the tripod on which her priestess sat.

6
. The procedure at the oracle of Trophonius – which Pausanias himself visited – recalls Aeneas’s descent, mistletoe in hand, to Avernus, where he consulted his father Anchises, and Odysseus’s earlier consultation of Teiresias; it also shows the relevance of these myths to a common form of initiation rite in which the novice suffers a mock-death, receives mystical instruction from a pretending ghost, and is then reborn into a new clan, or secret society. Plutarch remarks that the Trophoniads – the mystagogues in the dark den – belong to the pre-Olympian age of Cronus, and correctly couples them with the Idaean Dactyls who performed the Samothracian Mysteries.

7
. Black poplar was sacred to the Death-goddess at Pagae, and Persephone had a black poplar grove in the Far West (Pausanias: x. 30. 3 and see 170.
l
).

8
. Amphilochus and Mopsus had killed each other, but their ghosts agreed to found a joint oracle (see 169.
e
).

52

THE ALPHABET

T
HE
Three Fates or, some say, Ιο the sister of Phoroneus, invented the five vowels of the first alphabet, and the consonants B and T; Palamedes, son of Nauplius, invented the remaining eleven consonants; and Hermes reduced these sounds to characters, using wedge shapes because cranes fly in wedge formation, and carried the system from Greece to Egypt. This was the Pelasgian alphabet, which Cadmus later brought back to Boeotia, and which Evander of Arcadia, a Pelasgian, introduced into Italy, where his mother Carmenta formed the familiar fifteen characters of the Latin alphabet.

b
. Other consonants have since been added to the Greek alphabet by Simonides of Samos, and Epicharmus of Sicily; and two vowels, long O and short E, by the priests of Apollo, so that his sacred lyre now has one vowel for each of its seven strings.

c
. Alpha was the first of the eighteen letters, because
alphe
means honour, and
alphainein
is to invent, and because the Alpheius is the most notable of rivers; moreover, Cadmus, though he changed the order of the letters, kept alpha in this place, because
aleph
, in the Phoenician tongue, means an ox, and because Boeotia is the land of oxen.
¹

1
. Hyginus:
Fabula
277; Isidore of Seville:
Origins
viii. 2. 84; Philostratus:
Heroica
x. 3; Pliny:
Natural History
vii. 57; Scholiast on Homer’s
Iliad
xix. 593; Plutarch:
Symposiacs
ix. 3.

1
. The Greek alphabet was a simplification of the Cretan hieroglyphs. Scholars are now generally agreed that the first written alphabet developed in Egypt during the eighteenth century
B
.
C
. under Cretan influence; which corresponds with Aristides’s tradition, reported by Pliny, that an Egyptian called Menos (‘moon’) invented it ‘fifteen years before the reign of Phoroneus, King of Argos’.

2
. There is evidence, however, that before the introduction of the modified Phoenician alphabet into Greece an alphabet had existed there as a religious secret held by the priestesses of the Moon – Io, or the Three Fates: that it was closely linked with the calendar, and that its letters were represented not by written characters, but by twigs cut from different trees typical of the year’s sequent months.

3
. The ancient Irish alphabet, like that used by the Gallic druids of whom Caesar wrote, might not at first be written down, and all its letters were named after trees. It was called the
Beth-luis-nion
(‘birch-rowan-ash’) after its first three consonants; and its canon, which suggests a Phrygian provenience, corresponded with the Pelasgian and the Latin alphabets, namely thirteen consonants and five vowels. The original order was, A, B, L, N, O, F, S, H, U, D, T, C, E, M, G, Ng or Gn, R, I, which is likely also to have been the order used by Hermes. Irish ollaves made it into a deaf-and-dumb language, using finger-joints to represent the different letters, or one of verbal cyphers. Each consonant represented a twenty-eight-day month of a series of thirteen, beginning two days after the winter solstice; namely:

4
. About 400
B
.
C
., as the result of a religious revolution, the order was changed as follows to correspond with a new calendar system: B, L, F, S, N, H, D, T, C, Q, M, G, Ng, Z, R. This is the alphabet associated with Heracles Ogmius, or ‘Ogma Sunface’, as the earlier is with Phoroneus (see 132.
3
).

5
. Each vowel represented a quarterly station of the year: O (gorse) the Spring Equinox; U (heather) the Summer Solstice; E (poplar) the Autumn Equinox. A (fir, or palm) the birth-tree, and I (yew) the death-tree, shared the Winter Solstice between them. This order of trees is implicit in Greek and Latin myth and the sacral tradition of all Europe and,
mutatis mutandis
, Syria and Asia Minor. The goddess Carmenta (see
86.
2
and 132.
6
) invented B and T as well as the vowels, because each of these calendar-consonants introduced one half of her year, as divided between the sacred king and his tanist.

6
. Cranes were sacred to Hermes (see
17.
3
and
36.
2
), protector of poets before Apollo usurped his power; and the earliest alphabetic characters were wedge-shaped. Palamedes (‘ancient intelligence’), with his sacred crane (Martial:
Epigrams
xiii. 75) was the Carian counterpart of the Egyptian god Thoth, inventor of letters, with his crane-like ibis; and Hermes was Thoth’s early Hellenic counterpart (see 162.
s
). That Simonides and Epicharmus added new letters to the alphabet is history, not myth; though exactly why they did so remains doubtful. Two of the additions,
xi
and
psi
, were unnecessary, and the removal of the aspirate (H) and
digamma
(F) impoverished the canon.

7
. It can be shown that the names of the letters preserved in the Irish
Beth-luis-nion
, which are traditionally reported to have come from Greece and reached Ireland by way of Spain (see 132.
5
), formed an archaic Greek charm in honour of the Arcadian White Goddess Alphito who, by Classical times, had degenerated into a mere nursery bogey. The Cadmean order of letters, perpetuated in the familiar ABC, seems to be a deliberate mis-arrangement by Phoenician merchants; they used the secret alphabet for trade purposes but feared to offend the goddess by revealing its true order.