The White Goddess (66 page)

In Chapter Nine the first-century writer Aelian was quoted as having said that Hyperborean priests regularly visited Tempe. But if their business was with Apollo, why did they not go to the more important shrine of Delphi? Tempe, Apollo’s earlier home, lies in the valley of the Peneus between Mounts Ossa and Olympus and seems to have become the centre of a cult of a Pythagorean god who partook of the natures of all the Olympian deities. We know something about the mysteries of the cult because Cyprian, a third-century bishop of Antioch, was initiated into them as a youth of fifteen. As he records in his
Confession,
he was taken up on to Mount Olympus for forty days and there seven mystagogues taught him the meaning of musical sounds and the causes of the birth and decay of herbs, trees and bodies. He had a vision of tree-trunks and magical herbs, saw the succession of seasons and their changing spiritual representatives, together with the retinues of various deities, and watched the dramatic performances of demons in conflict. In an Egyptian magical papyrus published by Parthey in 1866, a close connexion between this Druid-like instruction and Essene mysticism is made in the following lines: 

Gabriel, it has been shown, was the Hebrew counterpart of Hermes, the official herald and mystagogue of Mount Olympus.

Was Stonehenge the temple of Apollo the Hyperborean? The ground plan of Stonehenge suggests a round mirror with a handle – a round earthwork, entered by an avenue, with a circular stone temple enclosed. The outer ring of stones in the temple once formed a continuous circle of thirty arches, built of enormous dressed stones: thirty posts and thirty lintels. This circle enclosed an ellipse, broken at one end so that it resembled a horseshoe, consisting of five separate dolmens, each of two posts and a lintel, built of the same enormous stones. Sandwiched between the circle and the horseshoe stood a ring of thirty much smaller posts; and within the horseshoe, again, stood another horseshoe of fifteen similar small posts, arranged in five sets of three to correspond with the five dolmens.

Perhaps ‘horseshoe’ is wrong: it may well have been an ass-shoe from its narrowness. If Stonehenge was Apollo’s temple and if Pindar, in his
Tenth
Pythian
Ode
,
is referring to the same Hyperboreans as Hecateus it must have been an ass-shoe; for Pindar shows that Apollo was worshipped by the Hyperboreans in the style of Osiris or Dionysus, whose triumph over his enemy Set the ass-god was celebrated by the sacrifice of a hundred asses at a time. But it is clear that by the middle of the fifth century
BC
, the connexion between Greece and the Hyperboreans had long been broken, presumably by the seizure of the approaches to Britain
by the Belgic tribes.

Pindar is demonstrably wrong in his
Third
Olympian
Ode
when he makes Hercules go to the springs of the Ister to bring back wild olive to Olympia from the servants of Apollo, the Hyperboreans. We know from other sources that he fetched back the white poplar, not the olive which had been cultivated in Greece centuries before his time and which is not native to the upper Danube; the connexion of poplar with amber, which came from the Baltic by way of the Danube and Istria, and which was sacred to Apollo, has already been noted. Pindar’s mistake derives from a confusion of the Hercules who fetched the poplar from Epirus with the earlier Hercules who fetched the olive from Libya to Crete. He writes in the
Tenth
Pythian
Ode:

Pindar seems to be wrong about the Gorgon and about the bay-leaves, sacred to Apollo only in the South; and since he does not tell us at what season the sacrifice took place we cannot tell what leaves they were. If at mid-winter, they may have been elder-leaves; at any rate, asses are connected in European folk-lore, especially French, with the mid-winter Saturnalia, which took place in the elder month, and at the conclusion of which the ass-eared god, later the Christmas Fool, was killed by his rival. This explains the otherwise unaccountable connexion of asses and fools in Italy as well as in Northern Europe: for asses are more intelligent animals than horses. That there was an ass-cult in Italy in early times is suggested by the distinguished Roman clan-names Asina and Asellus, which were plebeian, not patrician; the patricians were an immigrant horse-worshipping aristocracy from the East who enslaved the plebeians. The use of holly at the Italian Saturnalia supports this theory: holly was the tree of the ass-god, as the oak was the tree of his wild-ox twin who became paramount in patrician Rome.

Plutarch in his
Isis
and
Osiris
writes: ‘Every now and then at certain
festivities they (the Egyptians) humiliate the broken power of Set, treating it despitefully, to the point of rolling men of Typhonic colouring in the mud and driving asses over a precipice.’ By ‘certain festivities’ he must mean the celebration of the divine child Harpocrates’s victory over Set, at the Egyptian Saturnalia. So Set, the red-haired ass, came to mean the bodily lusts, given full rein at the Saturnalia, which the purified initiate repudiated; indeed, the spirit as rider, and the body as ass, are now legitimate Christian concepts. The metamorphosis of Lucius Apuleius into an ass must be understood in this sense: it was his punishment for rejecting the good advice of his well-bred kinswoman Byrrhaena and deliberately meddling with the erotic witch cult of Thessaly. It was only after uttering his
de
profundis
prayer to the White Goddess (quoted at the close of Chapter Four) that he was released from his shameful condition and accepted as an initiate of her pure Orphic mysteries. So also, when Charitë (‘Spiritual Love’) was riding home in chaste triumph on ass-back from the robbers’ den, Lucius had joked at this as an extraordinary event: namely, that a girl should triumph over her physical desires, despite all dangers and assaults. The Orphic degradation of the ass explains a passage in Aristophanes’s
Frogs,
which, as J. E. Harrison points out, is staged in a thoroughly Orphic Hell. Charon shouts out ‘Anyone here for the Plains of Lethe? Anyone here for the Ass Clippings? For Cerberus Park? Taenarus? Crow Station?’ Crow Station was evidently Set-Cronos’s infernal seat to which Greeks consigned their enemies in the imprecation ‘To the Crows with you!’; and the Ass Clippings was the place where criminals shaggy with sin were shorn to the quick. The horse was a pure animal for the Orphics, as the ass was impure, and the continuance of this tradition in Europe is shown most clearly in Spain where
caballero
‘horseman’, means gentleman and where no gentleman’s son is allowed to ride an ass, even in an emergency, lest he lose caste. The ancient reverence of unchivalrous Spaniards for the ass appears perversely in the word
carajo,
the great mainstay of their swearing, which is used indiscriminately as noun, adjective, verb or adverb; its purpose is to avert the evil eye, or ill-luck, and the more often it can be introduced into an oath, the better. Touching the phallus, or an amulet in phallus form, is an established means of averting the evil eye, and
carajo
means ‘ass’s phallus’; the appeal is to the baleful God Set, whose starry phallus appears in the Constellation Orion, to restrain his anger.

The great dolmens of Stonehenge, all of local stone, look as if they were erected to give importance to the smaller stones, which were placed in position shortly after they themselves were, and to the massive altar stone lying in the centre. It has been suggested that the smaller ones, which are known to have been transported all the way from the Prescelly Mountains in Pembrokeshire, were originally disposed in another order there and rearranged by the people who erected the larger ones. This is likely, and it
is remarkable that these imported stones were not dressed until they were re-erected at Stonehenge itself. The altar stone has also been transported from the same region, probably from Milford Haven. Since this transportation was done over a thousand years before the Belgic invasion it is clear at least that Gwydion was not responsible for the building.

The plan of the five dolmens corresponds exactly with the disc alphabet, since there is a broad gap between the two standing nearest to the avenue (like the gap which contains the five holy days of the Egyptian, or Etruscan, year) and between the gap and the avenue stood a group of four smaller undressed stones, corresponding with the groups of three stones in the inner horseshoe, but with a gap in the middle; and far back, in the avenue itself, the huge undressed ‘Heel’ stone made a fifth and central one. This is not to assume that Stonehenge was built to conform with the disc-alphabet. The calendar may have anteceded the alphabet by some centuries. All that seems clear is that the Greek alphabetic formula which gives the Boibel-Loth its letter-names is at least a century or two earlier than 400
BC
when the Battle of the Trees was fought in Britain.

The formula is plain. The Sun-god of Stonehenge was the Lord of Days, and the thirty arches of the outer circle and the thirty posts of the inner circle stood for the days of the ordinary Egyptian month; but the secret enclosed by these circles was that the solar year was divided into five seasons, each in turn divided into three twenty-four-day periods, represented by the three stones of the dolmens, and each of these again into three ogdoads, represented by the three smaller posts in front of the dolmens. For the circle was so sited that at dawn of the summer solstice the sun rose exactly at the end of the avenue in dead line with the altar and the Heel stone; while, of the surviving pair of the four undressed stones, one marks the sun’s rising at the winter solstice, the other its setting at the summer solstice.

But why were the altar stone and the uprights transported all the way from South Wales? Presumably to break the religious power of the Pembrokeshire Death-goddess – the pre-Celtic Annwm, as we have seen, was in Pembroke – by removing her most sacred undressed stones and reerecting them, dressed, on the Plain. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, this was done by Merlin. Geoffrey, who mistakenly dates the event to the time of Hengist and Horsa, says that Merlin obtained the stones from Ireland, but the tradition perhaps refers to the Land of Erin – Erin, or Eire or Eriu, being a pre-Celtic Fate-goddess who gave her name to Ireland. ‘Erin’, usually explained as the dative case of Eriu’s name, may be the Greek Triple Fate-goddess ‘Erinnys’ whom we know as the Three Furies. The amber found in the barrows near Stonehenge is for the most part red, not golden; like that found on the Phoenician coast.

Seventy-two will have been the main canonical number at Stonehenge: the seventy-two days of the midsummer season. Seventy-two was the
Sun’s grandest number; eight, multiplied ninefold by the fertile Moon. The Moon was Latona, Hyperborean Apollo’s mother, and she determined the length of the sacred king’s reign. The approximate concurrence of solar and lunar time once every nineteen years – 19 revolutions of the Sun, 235 lunations of the Moon – ruled that Apollo should be newly married and crowned every nineteenth year at the Spring solstice, when he kept a seven months’ holiday in the Moon’s honour. The number 19 is commemorated at Stonehenge in nineteen socket-holes arranged in a semicircle on the South-east of the arched circle.
1
The fate of the old king was perhaps the hill-top fate of Aaron and of Moses, darkly hinted at in
Exodus,
and the fate of Dionysus at Delphi: to be disrobed and dismembered by his successor and, when the pieces were gathered together, to be secretly buried in a chest with the promise of an eventual glorious resurrection.

Stonehenge is now generally dated between 1700 and 1500
BC
and regarded as the work of broad-skulled Bronze-Age invaders. The stones are so neatly cut and jointed that one responsible archaeologist, G. F. Kendrick of the British Museum, suggests that they were not placed in position until Belgic times; but the more probable explanation is that the architects had studied in Egypt or Syria.

If then the God of Stonehenge was cousin to Jehovah of Tabor and Zion, one would expect to find the same taboos on the eating or killing of certain animals observed in Palestine and ancient Britain, taboos being far more easily observable than dogma. This proposition is simply tested by inquiring whether the edible but tabooed beasts in
Leviticus
which are native to both countries were ever tabooed in Britain. There are only two such beasts, the pig and the hare; for the ‘coney’ of
Leviticus
is not the British coney, or rabbit, but the hyrax, an animal peculiar to Syria and sacred to the Triple Goddess because of its triangular teeth and its litters of three. Both hare and pig were tabooed in ancient Britain: we know of the hare-taboo from Pliny; and that the hare was a royal animal is proved by the story of the hare taken by Boadicea into battle. The Kerry peasants still abominate hare-meat: they say that to eat it is to eat one’s grandmother. The hare was sacred, I suppose, because it is very swift, very prolific – even conceives, Herodotus notes, when already pregnant – and mates openly without embarrassment like the turtle-dove, the dog, the cat or the tattooed Pict. The position of the Hare constellation at the feet of Orion suggests that it was sacred in Pelasgian Greece too. The pig was also sacred in Britain, and the pig-taboo survived until recently in Wales and Scotland; but as in Egypt, and according to Isaiah among the Canaanites of Jerusalem, this taboo was broken once a year at mid-winter with a Pig-feast, the feast of the Boar’s Head. The fish-taboo, partial in
Leviticus,
was total in Britain and among the Egyptian priesthood and must have been most inconvenient. It survived in parts of Scotland until recent times. The bird-taboos, already mentioned in the lapwing context as common to Britain and Canaan, are numerous. The porpoise (mistranslated ‘badger’) whose skins made the covering for the Ark of the Covenant has always been one of the three royal ‘fish’ of Britain, the others being the whale – the first living thing created by Jehovah, and ‘whale’ includes the narwhal – and the sturgeon, which does not occur in the Jordan but was sacred in Pelasgian Greece and Scythia. According to Aelian, fishermen who caught a sturgeon garlanded themselves and their boats; according to Macrobius it was brought to table crowned with flowers and preceded by a piper.