The White Goddess (104 page)

I am suggesting, in fact, that the religious revolution which brought about the alphabetic changes in Greece and Britain was a Jewish one, initiated by Ezekiel (622–570
BC
) which was taken up by the Greek-speaking Jews of Egypt and borrowed from them by the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras, who first came into prominence at Crotona in 529
BC
, is credited by his biographers with having studied among the Jews as well as the Egyptians, and may have been the Greek who first internationalized the eight-letter Name. The Name must have come to Britain by way of Southern Gaul where the Pythagoreans were established early.

The result of envisaging this god of pure meditation, the Universal Mind still premised by the most reputable modern philosophers, and enthroning him above Nature as essential Truth and Goodness was not an
altogether happy one. Many of the Pythagoreans suffered, like the Jews, from a constant sense of guilt; and the ancient poetic Theme reasserted itself perversely. The new God claimed to be dominant as Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, pure Holiness, pure Good, pure Logic, able to exist without the aid of woman; but it was natural to identify him with one of the original rivals of the Theme and to ally the woman and the other rival permanently against him. The outcome was philosophical dualism with all the tragi-comic woes attendant on spiritual dichotomy. If the True God, the God of the Logos, was pure thought, pure good, whence came evil and error? Two separate creations had to be assumed: the true spiritual Creation and the false material Creation. In terms of the heavenly bodies, Sun and Saturn were now jointly opposed to Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. The five heavenly bodies in opposition made a strong partnership, with a woman at the beginning and a woman at the end. Jupiter and the Moon Goddess paired together as the rulers of the material World, the lovers Mars and Venus paired together as the lustful Flesh, and between the pairs stood Mercury who was the Devil, the Cosmocrator or author of the false creation. It was these five who composed the Pythagorean
hyle
, or grove, of the five material senses; and spiritually minded men, coming to regard them as sources of error, tried to rise superior to them by pure meditation. This policy was carried to extreme lengths by the God-fearing Essenes, who formed their monkish communities, within compounds topped by acacia hedges, from which all women were excluded; lived ascetically, cultivated a morbid disgust for their own natural functions and turned their eyes away from World, Flesh and Devil. Though they retained the Bull-calf myth, handed down from Solomon’s days, as emblematic of the spiritual life of mortal man and linked it to the seven-letter name of immortal God, it is clear that initiates of the highest Order cultivated the eight-letter name, or the enlarged name of seventy-two letters, and devoted themselves wholly to the meditative life: ruled by acacia and pomegranate, Sunday and Saturday, Illumination and Repose.

War had now been declared in Heaven, Michael and the archangels fighting against the Devil, namely the Cosmocrator. For in the new dispensation, God could not afford to surrender the whole working week to the Devil, so he appointed archangels as his deputies, with a day for each, which were the archangels cultivated by the Essenes. Michael was given charge over Wednesday; so it fell to him not only to collect the dust for the true creation of Adam but to offer battle to the Devil who disputed that day with him. The Devil was Nabu, pictured as a winged Goat of Midsummer; so that the answer to Donne’s poetic question about the Devil’s foot is: ‘The prophet Ezekiel’. Michael’s victory must be read as a prophecy rather than as a record: a prophecy which Jesus tried to implement by preaching perfect obedience to God and continuous resistance to
the World, Flesh and Devil. He reproached the Samaritan woman at Sychar, in a riddling talk which she may or may not have understood, for having had five husbands, the five material senses, and for having as present husband one who was not really her husband, namely the Cosmocrator, or Devil. He told her that salvation came, not from the Calf-god whom her fathers had idolatrously worshipped on near-by Ebal and Gerizim, but from the all-holy God of the Jews – the God, that is to say, of Judah, Benjamin and Levi. His faith was that if the whole nation repented of their erroneous devotion to the material universe, and refrained from all sexual and quasi-sexual acts, they would conquer death and live for a thousand years, at the end of which they would become one with the true God.

The Jews were not yet ready to take this step, though many of them approved of it in theory; and a conservative minority, the Ophites, continued to reject the new faith, holding that the true God was the God of Wednesday, whom they pictured as a benign Serpent, not a goat, and that the God of the Logos was an impostor. Their case rested on the Menorah, a pre-Exilic instrument of worship, the seven branches of which issued from the central almond stem, typifying Wednesday; and indeed the revised view recorded in the Talmud, that the stem represented the Sabbath, made neither poetic nor historical sense. This Serpent had originally been Ophion with whom, according to the Orphic creation myth, the White Goddess had coupled in the form of a female serpent, and Mercury the Cosmocrator therefore used a wand of coupling serpents as his badge of office. It is now clear why Ezekiel disguised two of the four planetary beasts of his vision: recording eagle instead of eagle-winged goat and man instead of man-faced serpent. He was intent on keeping the Cosmocrator out of the picture, whether he came as Goat or Serpent. It may well have been Ezekiel who appended the iconotropic anecdote of the Serpent’s seduction of Adam and Eve to the
Genesis
Creation myth, and once it was approved as canonical, in the fourth century
BC
, the Ophite view became a heresy. It must be emphasized that the
Genesis
Seven Days of Creation narrative is based on the symbolism of the Menorah, a relic of the Egyptian sun-cult, not derived from the Babylonian Creation Epic, in which the Creator is the Thunder-god Marduk who defeats Tiamat the Sea-Monster and cuts her in half. Marduk – Bel in the earlier version of the story – was the God of Thursday, not Nabu the God of Wednesday nor Samas the God of Sunday. The resemblances between the two myths are superficial, though the Deluge incident in
Genesis
has been taken directly from the Epic, and Ezekiel may have edited it.
1

In Rabbinical tradition the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, whose fruit the Serpent in the Genesis allegory gave Adam and Eve to eat, was a composite one. This means that though they were originally innocent and holy he introduced them to the pleasures of the material senses. Monday’s willow and Tuesday’s kerm-oak (or holly) do not supply human food, but they must have eaten Wednesday’s almonds (or hazelnuts), Thursday’s pistachios (or edible acorns), and Friday’s quinces (or wild apples). So God expelled them from the tree-paradise for fear that they might meddle with the Tree of Life – presumably Sunday’s acacia grafted with Saturday’s pomegranate – and thus immortalize their follies. This reading of the myth is supported by the ancient Irish legend, first published in
Eriu
IV,
Part 2, of Trefuilngid Tre-eochair (‘the triple bearer of the triple key’ – apparently an Irish form of Hermes Trismegistos) a giant who appeared in Ireland early in the first century
AD
with immense splendour at a meeting of the great manor-council of Tara. He bore in his right hand a branch of wood from the Lebanon with three fruits on it – hazel-nuts, apples and edible acorns – which perpetually sustained him in food and drink. He told them that on enquiring what ailed the Sun that day in the East, he had found that it had not shone there because a man of great importance (Jesus) had been crucified. As the giant went off, some of the fruit dropped in Eastern Ireland and up sprang five trees – the five trees of the senses – which would fall only when Christianity triumphed. These trees have already been mentioned in the discussion of the tree-alphabet. The Great Tree of Mugna bred true to its parent branch with successive crops of apples, nuts and edible acorns. The others seem to be allegorical glosses, by some later poet. The Tree of Tortu and the Branching Tree of Dathi were ashes, presumably representing the false magic of the Brythonic and Danish ash-cults. The Tree of Ross was a Yew, representing death and destruction. I cannot find what the Ancient Tree of Usnech was: it is likely to have been a blackthorn, representing strife.

The Holy Trinity doctrine was pre-Christian, founded on Ezekiel’s vision, the Trinity consisting of the three main elements of the Tetragrammaton. The First person was the true Creator, the All-Father,
‘Let there be Light’, represented by the letter H, the acacia, the tree of Sunday, the tree of Levi, the lapis lazuli symbolizing the blue sky as yet untenanted by the heavenly bodies; he was identified by the Jewish apocalyptics with the ‘Ancient of Days’ in the Vision of Daniel, a later and inferior prophecy which dates from the Seleucid epoch. The Second Person was comprised in Ezekiel’s Enthroned Man – spiritual man as God’s image, man who abstained in perfect peace from the dangerous pleasures of the false creation and was destined to reign on earth everlastingly; he was represented by F, the fire-garnet, the pomegranate, the tree of the Sabbath and of Judah. The apocalyptics identified him with the Son of Man in Daniel’s vision. But only the lower half of the Man’s body was fire-garnet: the male part. The upper half was amber: the royal part, linking him with the Third Person. For the Third Person comprised the remaining six letters of the name, six being the Number of Life in the Pythagorean philosophy. These letters were the original White-goddess vowels, A O U E I, representing the spirit that moved on the face of the waters in the
Genesis
narrative: but with the death vowel I replaced by the royal consonant J, amber, Benjamin’s letter, the letter of the Divine Child born on the Day of Liberation; and with the ‘birth of birth’ vowel
omega
supplementing the birth vowel
alpha.
The Third Person was thus androgynous: ‘virgin with child’, a concept which apparently accounts for the reduplication of the letter H in the J H W H Tetragrammaton. The second H is the Shekinah, the Brightness of God, the mystic female emanation of H, the male First Person; with no existence apart from him, but identified with Wisdom, the brightness of his meditation, who has ‘hewn out her Seven Pillars’ of the true Creation and from which the ‘Peace that passeth understanding’ derives when Light is linked with Life. The sense of this mystery is conveyed in the Blessing of Aaron
(Numbers,
VI,
22-27
)
,
which only priests were authorized to utter:

This fourfold blessing, which was certainly not composed earlier than the time of Ezekiel, is explained in the last verse of the chapter as a formula embodying the Tetragrammaton:

The first two blessings are really one, together representing the Third Person, Life and the Brightness, J H; the third blessing represents the First person, Light, H; the fourth blessing represents the Second Person, Peace, W. This Trinity is one indivisible God, because if a single letter is
omitted the Name loses its power, and because the three concepts are interdependent. The Second Person is ‘begotten by the Father before all the world’ in the sense that ‘the World’ is a false Creation which he preceded. This interpretation of J H W H as ‘Light and the Glory, Life and Peace’ further explains why the priests sometimes enlarged it to 42 letters. In the Pythagorean system, 7, written as H aspirate, was the numeral of Light and 6, written as Digamma F (W in Hebrew), was that of Life. But 6 also stood for the Glory, and 7 for Peace as the seventh day of the week; so six times seven, namely 42, expressed Light, the Glory and Peace multiplied by Life. Though the Jews used the Phoenician notation of numeral letters for public purposes, it is likely that they used the early Greek in their mysteries, just as they used the Greek ‘Boibalos’ calendar-alphabet.

The Menorah symbolized the fullness of Jehovah’s Creation, yet it did not contain the first of the four letters of the Tetragrammaton; and its lights recalled his seven-letter Name, but not the eight-letter one. However, at the Feast of Illumination, or ‘The Feast of Lights’, (mentioned in
John,
X,
22
and Josephus’s
Antiquities,
XII,
7.7
)
,
the ancient Hebrew Winter Solstice Feast, an eight-branched candlestick was used, as it still is in Jewish synagogues, known as the Chanukah candlestick. The rabbinical account is that this eight-day festival which begins on the twenty-fifth day of the month Kislev, was instituted by Judas Maccabeus and that it celebrates a miracle: at the Maccabean consecration of the Temple a small cruse of sacred oil was found, hidden by a former High Priest, which lasted for eight days. By this legend the authors of the Talmud hoped to conceal the antiquity of the feast, which was originally Jehovah’s birthday as the Sun-god and had been celebrated at least as early as the time of Nehemiah (
II
Maccabees,
I, 18
)
.
Antiochus Epiphanes had sacrificed to Olympian Zeus, three years before Judas’s re-institution of the festival, at the same place and on the same day: Zeus’s birthday fell at the winter solstice too – as did that of Mithras the Persian Sun-god whose cult had greatly impressed the Jews in the time of their protector Cyrus. According to rabbinical custom one light of the candlestick was kindled each day of the festival until all eight were alight; the earlier tradition had been to begin with eight lights and extinguish one each day until all were out.