The White Goddess (51 page)

This seems a later version, since the T-month is awarded a sword, not the traditional spear; and the original wording of the D-line is recalled in a gloss; and ‘Who but I knows the secrets of the unhewn dolmen?’ is omitted. Another change of importance is that the H-month is described in terms of navigation, not flowers. May 14th marked the beginning of the deep-sea fishing in ancient Ireland when the equinoctial gales had subsided and it was safe to put to sea in an ox-hide curragh; but the ascetic meaning of Hawthorn is a reminder of the ban against taking women on a fishing trip. The additions to the poem show, even more clearly than Macalister’s text, that it was preserved as a charm for successful fishing both in river and sea; the Druid being paid by the fishermen for repeating it and threatening the water with javelin-vengeance if a curagh were to be lost: –

The original five-lined pendant to the poem may have run something like this:

How or why this alphabet of thirteen consonants gave place to the alphabet of fifteen consonants is another question, the solution of which will be helped by a study of Latin and Greek alphabet legends.

*

That the first line of the
Song
of Amergin
has the variant readings ‘stag of seven tines’ and ‘ox of seven fights’ suggests that in Ireland during the Bronze Age, as in Crete and Greece, both stag and bull were sacred to the Great Goddess. In Minoan Crete the bull became dominant as the Minotaur, ‘Bull-Minos’, but there was also a
Minelaphos,
‘Stag-Minos’, who figured in the cult of the Moon-goddess Britomart, and a
Minotragos,
‘Goat-Minos’ cult. The antlers found in the burial at New Grange suggest that the stag was the royal beast of the Irish Danaans, and the stag figures prominently in Irish myth: an incident in
The
Cattle
Raid
of Cuailgne,
part of the Cuchulain saga, shows that a guild of deer-priests called ‘The Fair Lucky Harps’ had their headquarters at Assaroe in Donegal. Oisin was born of the deer-goddess Sadb and at the end of his life, when mounted on the fairy-steed of Niamh of the Golden Hair and sped by the wailing of the Fenians to her island paradise, he was shown a vision: a hornless fawn pursued over the waters of the sea by the red-eared white hounds of Hell. The fawn was himself. There is a parallel to
this in the
Romance
of
Pwyll
Prince
of
Dyfed:
Pwyll goes out hunting and meets Arawn King of Annwm mounted on a pale horse hunting a stag with his white, red-eared hounds. In recognition of Pwyll’s courtesy, Arawn, though sending him down to Annwm – for the stag is Pwyll’s soul – permits him to reign there in his stead. Another parallel is in the
Romance
of
Math
the
Son
of
Mathonwy
:
Llew Llaw in the company of the faithless Blodeuwedd sees a stag being baited to death: it is his soul, and almost immediately afterwards he is put to death by her lover Gronw.

The fate of the antlered king – of whom Cernunnos, ‘the horned one’ of Gaul, is a familiar example – is expressed in the early Greek myth of Actaeon whom Artemis metamorphosed into a stag and hunted to death with her dogs. She did this at her
anodos
,
or yearly reappearance, when she refreshed her virginity by bathing naked in a sacred fountain; after which she took another lover. The Irish
Garbh
Ogh
with her pack of hounds was the same goddess: her diet was venison and eagles’ breasts. This ancient myth of the betrayed stag-king survives curiously in the convention, which is British as well as Continental, that gives the cuckold a branching pair of antlers. The May-day stag-mummers of Abbot’s Bromley in Staffordshire are akin to the stag-mummers of Syracuse in ancient Sicily, and to judge from an epic fragment concerned with Dionysus, one of the mummers disguised as an Actaeon stag was originally chased and eaten. In
the Lycaean precinct of Arcadia the same tradition of the man dressed in deer skins who is chased and eaten survived in Pausanias’s day, though the chase was explained as a punishment for trespassing. From Sardinia comes a Bronze Age figurine of a man-stag with horns resembling the foliage of an oak, a short tail, an arrow in one hand and in the other a bow that has turned into a wriggling serpent. His mouth and eyes express an excusable terror at the sight; for the serpent is death. That the stag was part of the Elysian oracular cult is shown in the story of Brut the Trojan’s visit to the Island of Leogrecia, where the moon-oracle was given him while sleeping in the newly-flayed hide of a white hart whose blood had been poured on the sacrificial fire.

The stag-cult is far older than the Cretan
Minelaphos
:
he is shown in palaeolithic paintings in the Spanish caves of Altamira and in the
Caverne
des
Trois
Frères
at Ariège in the French Pyrenees, dating from at least 20,000
BC
. The Altamiran paintings are the work of the Aurignacian people, who have also left records of their ritual in the caves of Domboshawa, and elsewhere in Southern Rhodesia. At Domboshawa a ‘Bushman’ painting, containing scores of figures, shows the death of a king who wears an antelope mask and is tightly corseted; as he dies, with arms outflung and one knee upraised, he ejaculates and his seed seems to form a heap of corn. An old priestess lying naked beside a cauldron is either mimicking his agony, or perhaps inducing it by sympathetic magic. Close by, young priestesses dance beside a stream, surrounded by clouds of fruit and heaped baskets; beasts are led off laden with fruit; and a huge bison bull is pacified by a priestess accompanied by an erect python. The cults of stag and bull were evidently combined at Domoshawa; but the stag is likely to have been the more royal beast, since the dying king is given the greater prominence. The cults were also combined by the Aurignacians. In a Dordogne cave painting a bull-man is shown dancing and playing a musical instrument shaped like a bow.

The Minotragos goat-cult in Crete seems to have been intermediate between the cults of Minelaphos and Minotaur. Amalthea, the nurse of Cretan Zeus, was a goat. The Goddess Athene carried an
aegis
(‘goatskin’) shield, made it was said from Amalthea’s hide which had been previously used by her father Zeus as a prophylactic coat. The Goddess Libya appeared in triad to Jason on the shores of Lake Triton, Athene’s birthplace, when the
Argo
was landlocked there, and was clad in goatskins; she thereby identified herself with Aega, sister of Helice (‘willow branch’) and daughter of a king of Crete – Aega who was the human double of the goat Amalthea; and with Athene herself. The tradition of the Libyan origin of Athene is supported by a comparison of Greek and Roman methods of augury. In Libya the year begins in the autumn with the winter rains and the arrival of birds from the North; but in Northern Europe and the Black Sea area it begins in Spring with the arrival of birds from the South. In
most Greek states the year began in the autumn and the Greek augurs faced north when observing birds, presumably because they derived their tradition from the birth-place of Athene, patroness of augury. On the other hand, the Roman augurs faced south, presumably because the Dardanians (whose patrician descendants in the early Roman Republic were alone permitted to take auguries) had migrated from the Black Sea area where birds arrive from Palestine and Syria in the Spring. The Roman year began in the Spring.

The goat-Dionysus, or Pan, was a powerful deity in Palestine. He may have come there from Libya by way of Egypt or taken a roundabout northern route by way of Crete, Thrace, Asia Minor and Syria. The Day of Atonement scape-goat was a left-handed sacrifice to him under the name of Azazel, and the source of the Jordan was a grotto sacred to him as Baal Gad, the goat king, eponymous ancestor of the tribe of Gad. The prohibition in
Deuteronomy
XIV
against seething a kid in its mother’s milk is puzzling only if sentimentally read; it is clearly written in the severe style of the remainder of the chapter, which begins with a prohibition against self-disfigurement at funerals, and directed against a eucharistic rite no longer tolerated by the priesthood of Jehovah. The clue is to be found in the well-known Orphic formula:

which was a password for initiates when they reached Hades and were challenged by the guardians of the dead. They had become one with The Kid, that is to say the immortal Dionysus, originally Cretan Zagreus or Zeus, by partaking of his flesh, and with the Goat-goddess, his mother, in whose cauldron and milk he had been seethed.
1
A song about the birth of the gods on one of the recently discovered Ras Shamra tablets contains an express injunction to seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.

The prohibition in
Deuteronomy
explains the glib and obviously artificial myth of Esau, Jacob, Rebeccah and the blessing of Isaac, which is introduced into
Genesis
XXVII
to justify the usurpation by the Jacob tribe of priestly and royal prerogatives belonging to the Edomites. The religious picture iconotropically
2
advanced in support of the myth seems to have illustrated the kid-eating ceremony in Azazel’s honour. Two celebrants wearing goatskin disguises are shown at a seething cauldron
presided over by the priestess (Rebeccah), one of them with bow and quiver (Esau) the other (Jacob) being initiated into the mysteries by the old leader of the fraternity (Isaac) who whispers the secret formula into his ear, blesses him and hands him – a piece of the kid to eat. The ceremony probably included a mock-slaughter and resurrection of the initiate, and this would account for the passage at the close of the chapter where Esau murderously pursues Jacob, Rebeccah directs affairs and the orgiastic ‘daughters of Heth’ in Cretan costume stand by. The two kids are probably an error: the same kid is shown twice, first being taken from its mother, and then being plunged into the cauldron of milk.