The White Goddess (44 page)

(The rivalry mentioned in mediaeval English carols between holly and ivy is not, as one might expect, between the tree of murder and the tree of resurrection, between Typhon-Set and Dionysus-Osiris; instead it represents the domestic war of the sexes. The explanation seems to be that in parts of England the last harvest sheaf to be carted in any parish was bound around with Osirian ivy and called the Harvest May, the Harvest Bride, or the Ivy Girl: whichever farmer was latest with his harvesting was given the Ivy Girl as his penalty, an omen of ill luck until the following year. Thus the ivy came to mean a carline, or shrewish wife, a simile confirmed by the strangling of trees by ivy. But ivy and holly were both associated with the Saturnalia, holly being Saturn’s club, ivy being the nest of the Gold Crest Wren, his bird; on Yule morning, the last of his merry reign, the first foot over the threshold had to be that of Saturn’s representative, a dark man, called the Holly Boy, and elaborate precautions were taken to keep women out of the way. Thus Ivy Girl and Holly Boy became opposed; which gave rise to the Yule custom in which ‘holly boys’ and ‘ivy girls’ contended in a game of forfeits for precedence, and sang songs, mainly satirical, against each other.)

The ivy month extends from September 30th to October 27th.

The twelfth tree given in O’Flaherty’s list is Peith, the whitten, or guelder-rose, or water-elder, an appropriate introduction to the last month which is the true elder. But Peith is not the original letter; it is a Brythonic substitute for the original letter NG, which was of no literary use to the Brythons, or (for that matter) to the Goidels, but which formed part of the original series. The NG tree was the
Ngetal
,
or reed, which becomes ready for cutting in November. The canna-reed, which grows from a thick root like a tree, was an ancient symbol of royalty in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Pharaohs used reed sceptres (hence Egypt is satirized by the prophet Isaiah as a ‘bruised reed’) and a royal reed was put into Jesus’ s hand when he was attired in scarlet. It is the tree from which arrows were cut, and therefore appropriate to Pharaoh as a living Sun-god who shot off his arrows in every direction as a symbol of sovereignty. The number twelve has the sense of established power, confirmed by the Irish use of reeds in thatching: a house is not an established house until the roof is on. The month extends from October 28th to November 24th.

The thirteenth tree is the elder, a waterside tree associated with witches, which keeps its fruit well into December. It is an old British superstition that a child laid in an elderwood cradle will pine away or be pinched black and blue by the fairies – the traditional wood for cradles is the birch, the tree of inception, which drives away evil spirits. And in Ireland elder sticks, rather than ashen ones, are used by witches as magic horses. Although the flowers and inner bark of the elder have always been famous for their therapeutic qualities, the scent of an elder plantation was formerly held to cause death and disease. So unlucky is the elder that in Langland’s
Piers
Plowman
,
Judas is made to hang himself on an elder tree. Spenser couples the elder with the funereal cypress, and T. Scot writes in his
Philomythie
(1616):

King William Rufus was killed by an archer posted under an elder. The elder is also said to have been the Crucifixion tree, and the elder-leaf shape of the funerary flints in megalithic long-barrows suggest that its association with death is long-standing. In English folklore to burn logs of elder ‘brings the Devil into the house’. Its white flowers, which are at their best at midsummer, make the elder another aspect of the White Goddess; and the same is true of the rowan. The elder is the tree of doom – hence the continued unluckiness of the number thirteen – and the month extends from November 25th to the winter solstice of December 22nd.

*

But what of the extra day? It falls outside the thirteen-month year and is therefore not ruled by any of the Trees. I am assuming that its natural place is between the letter-months of R and B, in the day after the winter solstice when the hours of daylight begin to lengthen again: in fact, about Christmas Eve, the birthday of the Divine Child. The R.B. radicals recall
robur
,
the Latin for ‘oak’ and ‘strength’, and also the Celtic word ‘robin’. For at this point in the year, in British folklore, the Robin Red Breast as the Spirit of the New Year sets out with a birch-rod to kill his predecessor the Gold Crest Wren, the Spirit of the Old Year, whom he finds hiding in an ivy bush. Sir James Frazer has shown in his
Golden
Bough
that the Christmas Eve folk-custom of hunting the wren with birch rods, which still survives in Ireland and the Isle of Man, was at one time also practised in Rome and ancient Greece, where the Gold Crest was known as ‘the little king’. That the Gold Crest does frequent ivy bushes at Christmas time is ornithological fact. The robin is said to ‘murder its father’, which accounts for its red breast. There is a clear reference to the story in Gwion’s
Angar
Cyvyndawd
:
‘
Keing
ydd
ym
Eidduw
Bum
i
arweddaw
d
’,
(‘Concealed in the ivy bush, I have been carried about’). The wren-boys of Ireland sometimes use a holly-bush instead of an ivy-bush; the holly being the tree of the tanist, who killed the oak-king at midsummer. The wren is protected from injury at all other seasons of the year and it is very unlucky to take its eggs. One of the Devonshire names for the wren is ‘the cuddy vran’ – ‘Bran’s sparrow’ – and in Ireland it was linked with Bran’s crow, or raven, as a prophetic bird. R. I. Best has edited a collection of wren and raven omens in
Erin
VIII
(1916). Bran, it has been shown, was Saturn.

Perhaps the most ancient wren tradition is quoted by Pausanias in his
Description
of
Greece
:
he says that Triptolemus, the Eleusinian counterpart of Egyptian Osiris, was an Argive priest of mysteries named Trochilus who fled from Argos to Attica when Agenor seized the city. Trochilus means ‘wren’ and it also means ‘of the wheel’, presumably because the wren is hunted when the wheel of the year has gone full circle. The connexion of the wren with the wheel was retained until recently in Somersetshire. Swainson records in his
Birds
(1885): ‘It is customary on Twelfth Day to carry about a wren, termed the King, enclosed in a box with glass windows, surmounted by a wheel from which are appended various coloured ribbands.’ A later version makes Triptolemus a son of Picus (the woodpecker, another prophetic bird) and thus identifies him with Pan or Faunus. Pausanias’s story seems to refer to the expulsion from Argos by Syrian invaders of the priesthood of Cronos (Bran) to whom the wren was sacred.

As soon as one has mastered the elementary grammar and accidence of myth, and built up a small vocabulary, and learned to distinguish seasonal myths from historical and iconotropic myths, one is surprised how close to the surface lie the explanations, lost since pre-Homeric times, of legends that are still religiously conserved as part of our European cultural inheritance. For example, the various legends of the halcyon, or kingfisher which like the wren, is associated in Greek myth with the winter solstice. There were fourteen ‘halcyon days’ in every year, seven of which fell before the winter solstice, seven after: peaceful days when the sea was smooth as a pond and the hen-halcyon built a floating nest and hatched out her young. According to Plutarch and Aelian, she had another habit, of carrying her dead mate on her back over the sea and mourning him with a peculiarly plaintive cry.

The number fourteen is a moon-number, the days of the lucky first half of the month; so the legend (which has no foundation in natural history, because the halcyon does not build a nest at all but lays its eggs in holes by the waterside) evidently refers to the birth of the new sacred king, at the winter solstice – after his mother, the Moon-goddess, has conveyed the old king’s corpse to a sepulchral island. Naturally, the winter solstice does not always coincide with the same phase of the moon, so ‘every year’ must be understood as ‘every Great Year’, at the close of which solar and
lunar time were roughly synchronized and the sacred king’s term ended.

Homer connects the halcyon with Alcyone, a title of Meleager’s wife Cleopatra (
Iliad
,
IX
,
562) and with an earlier Alcyone who was daughter to Aegeale, ‘she who wards off the hurricane’, by Aeolus, the eponymous ancestor of the Aeolian Greeks. The word ‘halcyon’ cannot therefore mean
hal-cyon
,
‘sea-hound’, as is usually supposed, but must stand for
alcy-one
,
‘princess who averts evil’. This derivation is confirmed by the fable told by Apollodorus and Hyginus, and briefly mentioned by Homer, of the earlier Alcyone: how she and her husband Ceyx (‘sea-mew’) dared call themselves Hera and Zeus, and how the real Zeus punished them by drowning Ceyx, whereupon Alcyone also drowned herself. Ceyx was then metamorphosed into a sea-mew or, according to Alcman, into a razor-bill, and she into a halcyon. The sea-mew part of the legend need not be pressed, though the bird, which has a very plaintive cry, is sacred to the Sea-goddess Aphrodite; the historical basis seems to be that late in the second millennium
BC
the Aeolians, who had agreed to worship the pre-Hellenic Moon-goddess as their divine ancestress and protectress, became tributary to the Achaeans and were forced to accept the Olympian religion.

Pliny, who carefully describes the halcyon’s alleged nest – apparently the zoöphyte called
halcyoneum
by Linnaeus – reports that the halcyon is rarely seen and then only at the winter and summer solstices and at the setting of the Pleiads. This proves her to have originally been a manifestation of the Moon-goddess who was worshipped at the two solstices as the Goddess of alternatively Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life – and who early in November, when the Pleiads set, sent the sacred king his summons to death (as will be pointed out in Chapter Twelve). Still another Alcyone, daughter to Pleione, ‘Queen of Sailing’, by the oak-hero Atlas, was the mystical leader of the seven Pleiads. The heliacal rising of the Pleiads in May marked the beginning of the navigational year; their setting marked its end when (as Pliny notices in a passage about the halcyon) a remarkably cold North wind blows. The circumstances of Ceyx’s death show that the Aeolians, who were famous sailors, gave the goddess the title ‘Alcyone’ because as Sea-goddess she protected them from rocks and rough weather: for Zeus had wrecked him in defiance of Alcyone’s powers by hurling lightning at the ship. The halcyon continued for centuries to be credited with the magical power of allaying storms, and its body when dried was used as a talisman against Zeus’ lightning – supposedly on the ground that where once it strikes, it will not strike again. I have twice (with an interval of many years) seen a halcyon skimming the surface of the same Mediterranean bay, on both occasions about midsummer when the sea was without a ripple: its startlingly bright blue and white plumage made it an unforgettable symbol of the Goddess of calm seas.

The connexion made by Homer between Meleager’s wife Alcyone and the halcyon is that when her mother, Marpessa, was carried off by Apollo from Idas the Argonaut, her beloved husband, she mourned him as bitterly as the earlier Alcyone had mourned Ceyx and therefore gave her new-born daughter Cleopatra the surname ‘Alcyone’. This is nonsense. A priestess named Cleopatra whom the original Meleager married may well have borne the divine title ‘Alcyone’; but it is likely that Alcyone was called the Daughter of Marpessa (‘the snatcher’) because Marpessa was the White Goddess as the Old Sow who ruled mid-winter and because the halcyon days fall at mid-winter. This would, incidentally, explain why Pliny recommended dried and pulverized halcyon nests as a ‘wonderful cure’ for leprosy; sow’s milk was held to cause leprosy (the association of the White Goddess with leprosy is given in detail in Chapter Twenty-Four) and Alcyone as Marpessa’s benignant daughter would be immune against the infection. Apollo’s rape of Marpessa at Messene, like his rape of Daphne (‘the bloody one’) at Delphi, are events in early Greek tribal history: seizure of oracular shrines by the Achaean partisans of Apollo.