The White Goddess (47 page)

The finger alphabet was evidently used in the witch cult of mediaeval Britain, to judge from the Devil marks tattooed on the hands of witches. In Joseph Glanvil’s
Sadducismus
Triumphatus
(1681) a detailed account is given of two covens of Somersetshire witches, one of thirteen formed at Brewham, another at Wincanton, both places being about fourteen miles from Glastonbury. The British racial element, as opposed to the Saxon,
predominated in Somerset and popular reverence for Glastonbury as a principal seat of the Old Religion was still strong in the seventeenth century. From the confessions of the members of these covens at their trial in 1664 it appears that the chief, or god, of these witches was known as Robin and that he sealed initiates with a prick from a needle made between the upper and middle joints of the physic-finger. This is precisely the spot at which one would expect the prick, since the covens’ activities included both black and white magic: the upper joint belongs to Coll, the hazel, the tree of white magic and healing, the lower to Straif; the blackthorn which, as will be shown in Chapter Fourteen, was the tree of black magic and blasting. These witches used thorns for sticking into the wax images of their enemies under Robin’s direction.

In Scotland the fool’s-finger was used for the Devil’s mark, and though the precise location of the mark is not recorded, it was evidently low down, since Margaret McLevine of Bute complained that the Devil nearly cut this finger off her. The bottom joint of the fool’s-finger is Ura, the heather – a suitable tree for the initiation of Scottish witches who, according to Shakespeare, met on blasted heaths.

Two Northampton witches, Elinor Shaw and Mary Phillips, who were condemned to death in 1705, had been pricked at their fingers’ ends: unfortunately the finger is not specified, but perhaps it was the finger with Saille as its tip, the willow sacred to Hecate, mother of witches.
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Dr. Macalister gives little more importance to the Irish Tree-Ogham than to such other cypher systems recorded in the
Book
of
Bally
mote
as Pig-Ogham, Castle-Ogham and Fruit-Ogham. But that the name for the B.L.N. alphabet, which is admittedly earlier than the B.L.F. alphabet, begins with three trees proves that the original Ogham was a Tree-Ogham; and the mythological associations of the trees that comprise O’Flaherty’s list are so ancient, various and coherent, that it seems impossible to regard it as a late mediaeval invention, ‘pedantic and artificial’. It seems to be the original alphabet invented by Ogma Sun-Face. Dr. Macalister disparages the invention of Ogham as childish and unworthy of a god; but this is because he regards the Boibel-Loth as the only genuine Ogham alphabet and the Beth-Luis-Nion as an experimental approach to it and considers that both are cribbed from the Greek alphabet. He is not to be convinced that either has any virtue besides the obvious alphabetic one.

An objection against regarding the Beth-Luis-Nion as a complete alphabet is that it has only thirteen consonants, of which one, NG, is
useless, while two ancient letters, Q and Z, contained in the Boibel-Loth and known in Ogham as Quert and Straif, are omitted. Straif is the blackthorn and Quert is the wild apple tree: both mythologically important trees. If Ogma Sun-Face raised four pillars of equal length, the original system must have contained five vowels and three sets of five consonants. This objection will be fully met in Chapter Thirteen. It is enough to note meanwhile that O’Flaherty was not alone in recording a B.L.N. alphabet with only thirteen consonants. O’Sullivan’s Ogham, quoted in Ledwich’s
Antiquities
of
Ireland,
has the same number, and with a similar omission of Q and Z, though with NG for P; O’Sullivan adds some diphthongs and other mysterious symbols such as
eg,
feo
and
oai,
but the canon of the alphabet is the one discussed here.

Edward Davies considered that the Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet was so called because B.L.N. are the radical consonants of Belin the Celtic god of the solar year. This makes sense, since it suggests an identification of the thirteen consonants, months of the year, with various mythological companies of thirteen – for example with Arthur and his Twelve Knights of the Round Table; Balder and his twelve judges; Odysseus and his Twelve Companions; Romulus and his Twelve Shepherds; Roland and the Twelve Peers of France; Jacob and his Twelve Sons; Danish Hrolf and his twelve Berserks. Also, with the head and the twelve other parts of Osiris’s torn body which Isis in her boat recovered from the Nile – Osiris having originally been a tree-god. And we may also identify the five seasonal vowels with the mysterious pentads of British Goddesses, the
deae
matronae
, (
y
Mamau
),
which occur in inscriptions of Roman times; and with the various five-pointed leaves sacred to the White Goddess, especially the ivy, vine, bramble, fig and plane;
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and with the various five- petalled flowers sacred to her – the erotic briar-rose and primrose and the baleful blue
vincapervinca
,
or periwinkle, which the Italians call the ‘flower of death’ and with which, in mediaeval England, condemned men were garlanded on their way to the gallows.

But where did the Beth-Luis-Nion series originate? It will have been observed that all its trees are forest trees native to the British Isles, except the vine. That no orchard trees occur in the series suggests to me that it was brought in very early times from a thickly wooded northern region where the vine grew wild. The only region answering this condition, so far as I know, was the Paphlagonia-Pontus stretch of the Southern Black Sea coast. A Cretan origin is out of the question: the principal trees that appear in the very numerous sacred pictures and engravings recently excavated in Crete are the fig, olive, plane-tree, cypress, vine, pine and palm.

Dr. Macalister cannot be blamed for doubting the ancientness of O’Flaherty’s Beth-Luis-Nion, since several different systems of classifying trees were current in mediaeval Ireland. For example, under Brehon Law (IV, 147) trees were divided into four categories with a scale of fines for their unlawful felling that diminished in severity according to the category:

This law is much later than that commemorated in the
Triads
of
Ireland
under which the death penalty is apparently demanded for the unlawful felling of two of the chieftain trees, the hazel and the apple:

This may be explained by the seventh-century poem at the end of the
Crib
Gablach
in which the seven Chieftain trees are listed, but with alder, willow and birch instead of ash, yew and pine, the fine for the unlawful felling of them being one cow, or three for the whole grove. But I assume that the poem is later than the
Triads
,
though earlier than the Brehon Law, and that the death sentence for the felling of hazel and apple has here been commuted to a one-cow fine, as in the case of other trees.
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According to mediaeval glossarists,
Neimhead,
meaning ‘nobility’, or sacrosanctity, was applied to kings or chieftains, poets and groves; in its secondary sense of ‘worthiness’, to musicians, smiths, carpenters, cows and Church dignitaries.

The Commentator on the Brehon Law explains the ‘nobility’ of its seven Chieftain Trees in the following glosses:

The triumph of Gwydion’s ash over Bran’s alder at the
Câd
Goddeu
is incidentally demonstrated here: the ash, which was originally excluded
from the sacred grove, is now the only tree mentioned in connection with royalty, and the alder has been degraded to the status of peasant. The utilitarian assessment of nobility made by the glossarist denotes a profound religious change, and when the relative values of the trees can be expressed in terms of cash-compensation for their illegal felling, the sanctity of the grove is annulled and poetry itself declines. However, while this Law was in force the student for the Ollaveship of poetry had to memorize the following ancient catechism, recorded in Calder’s
Hearings
of
the
Scholars,
which contains still another classification of trees: