The White Goddess (81 page)

‘Theseus, of course…’

‘And Coeranus too, and Taras and Phalanthus. The common people always prefer anecdote, however improbable, to myth, however simple: they see a prince pictured astride a dolphin and take this for literal truth and feel obliged to account for his strange choice of steed.’

‘But what you undertook to explain at the beginning of this conversation, and have not yet explained, is why the Goddess Athene has a male name as her principal title.’

‘She has become androgynous: there are many such deities. Sin, for example, the Moon-deity of the Semites, and the Phoenician Baalith, and the Persian Mithras. The Goddess is worshipped first and is all-powerful; presently a God enters into equal power with her, and either they become twins, as happened when Artemis agreed to share Delos with Apollo of Tempe, or else they are joined in a single bi-sexual being. Thus the Orphic hymn celebrates Zeus as both Father and Eternal Virgin. Your own Jupiter is in the same hermaphroditic tradition.’

‘Our own Jupiter? You surprise me.’

‘Yes, do you not know the couplet written by Quintus Valerius Soranus, whom Crassus praised as the most learned of all who wore the toga? No? It runs:

And Varro, his rival in learning, writing of the Capitoline Trinity, agreed that together they form a single god: Juno being Nature as matter, Jupiter being Nature as the creative impulse, and Minerva being Nature as the mind which directs the creative impulse. Minerva, as you know, often wields Jupiter’s thunderbolts; therefore if Jupiter is Eternal Virgin, Minerva is equally Eternal Father. And there we are again: Minerva is universally identified with Pallas Athene, who is the Goddess of Wisdom. Athene is to Pallas as Minerva is to Jupiter: his better half.’

‘I am getting confused in my mind between these various goddesses. Are they all the same person?’

‘Originally. She is older than all the gods. Perhaps her most archaic form is the Goddess Libya. If you read Apollonius recently you will recall that she appeared in triad by Lake Triton to Jason, wearing goatskins.’

‘A bi-sexual deity naturally remains chaste, or so I judge from Minerva’s case,’ Paulus commented.

‘Chaste as a fish.’

‘But when Jupiter began he was as unchaste as a sea-beast.’

‘Minerva reformed him.’

‘I daresay that is why she is called his daughter. My daughter Sergia reformed me. All daughters reform their fathers. Or try to. I was a leaping sea-beast as a young man.’

‘So was Apollo before his sister Artemis reformed him: he was a lusty dolphin once. But now chaste sacred fish are kept in his temples at Myra and Hierapolis.’

‘That reminds me of a question on which I am most anxious to be informed: what do you know of sea-beasts and fish in the Jewish religion? I understand that you have read their sacred books with some care.’

‘Not recently. But I remember that there is a partial taboo on fish in the Jewish Torah, or Law; which suggests Egyptian influence. But not on scaled fish, only on the unsealed, and that would point to their having once held sea-beasts, such as the porpoise and dolphin, in reverence. Moreover, their sacred Ark – now lost – was covered with sea-beast skins; that is important. The Jews were tributary once to the Philistines, whose God was a sea-beast of many changes named Dagon – the Philistines are originally immigrants of Cretan Stock, despite their Semitic language. As I remember the story, the Philistines conquered the Jews and laid up the Ark in Dagon’s temple before his phallic statue, but the God enclosed in
the Ark wrestled with Dagon and broke his statue into pieces. Yes, and the legendary hero who led the Jews into Judaea was called Jeshua, son of the Fish.’

‘Ha! That is exactly what I wanted to know. You see, a curious thing happened the other day. A written report reached me that a Jew named Barnabas was preaching some new mystical doctrine in a Jewish synagogue at the other end of the island; it was described by my informant, a Syrian Greek from Antioch with a Jewish mother, as a doctrine endangering the peace of the island. I sent for Barnabas and the other fellow and heard what both had to say. I forget his original name, but he had become a Roman citizen and asked my permission to call himself Paulus, to which I had weakly assented. I will not go into the story in detail: suffice it to say that Barnabas was preaching a new demigod, so far as I can make out a recent reincarnation of this heroic Jeshua. I did not know until you mentioned it just now that Jeshua was son of the Fish; perhaps this explains the mystery. At all events, my Oriental Secretary, a harmless little man called Manahem, took Barnabas’s part warmly, rather too warmly, and sent the other fellow about his business with a fierceness of which I should never have believed him capable.’

‘I know Manahem; he came to you from the Court of Antipas of Galilee, did he not?’

‘That’s the man. He is now away on leave in Alexandria. Well, when the case was settled and Barnabas and the other fellow had both been sent out of the island with a warning never to return, I called Manahem to my private room and gave him a piece of my mind. I am not naturally observant, but long experience as a magistrate has taught me to use my eyes in court, and I had caught Manahem surreptitiously signalling to Barnabas to leave the case in his hands. He was making a secret sign with his foot, the outline of a fish traced on the pavement. I gave Manahem the fright of his life – threatened to put him to the torture unless he explained that fish to me. He confessed at once, and begged me to forgive him. The fish sign, it appears, is the pass-word of Barnabas’s society which cultivates a sort of universal pacifism under the guidance of a demi-god named Jeshua – Jesus in Greek – who has the title of the Anointed One. The pass-word is for use among Greek-speaking Jews and stands, Manahem says, for
J
esus
Ch
ristos
Th
eos
which are, of course, the first letters of
ichthus,
fish. But there is more to it than that, I believe.’

‘I have heard of the society. They celebrate a weekly love-feast with fish, wine and bread, but tend to Pythagorean asceticism. You may be sure that Jeshua the Fish is of the chaster sort. The Jeshua who founded it was executed under Tiberius; and oddly enough his mother was a Temple Virgin at Jerusalem, and there was a mystery about his birth.’

‘Yes, Manahem revealed it under an oath of secrecy. You are right about this God’s chastity. Erotic religion is going out of fashion everywhere;
it is inconsistent with modern social stability, except of course among the peasantry. Do you know, Theophilus, a picture rises in my mind, almost a vision. I see the white-clad Vestal Virgins in their Temple grounds offering up little prayers to chaste Jupiter, Father and Virgin, whom they serve. I see them devoutly circling the fish-pool which the sacred fish also mystically circles – the cool, pale-faced fish, as chaste as they –’

* * *

Theophilus was wrong to suggest that the hero rescues the chained virgin from a male sea-beast. The sea-beast is female – the Goddess Tiamat or Rahab – and the God Bel or Marduk, who wounds her mortally and usurps her authority, has himself chained her in female form to the rock to keep her from mischief. When the myth reaches Greece, Bellerophon and Hercules are more chivalrously represented as rescuing her from the monster. It has even been suggested that in the original icon, the Goddess’s chains were really necklaces, bracelets and anklets, while the sea-beast was her emanation.

In Parry’s edition of Archbishop Ussher’s
Letters
–
Ussher was the learned Primate of Ireland in the reign of Charles I who dated the creation of Adam in the year 4004
BC
– appears a note that Langbaine the Irish antiquarian communicated to Ussher the following bardic tradition:

This obviously was a joke at the stupid Saxon’s expense, because the British bards had used an alphabet for centuries before the arrival of the Saxons. But what do these improvised letter-names mean? Since the stupid Saxon would have used the ABC Latin order of letters and was apparently unaware that any other order existed, let us try restoring the Alap-Braut-Curi to its BLFSN Ogham order. And since we can be pretty sure that Nemninus was showing off his superior learning – probably his
knowledge of Greek to tease the stupid Saxon who knew only a little monkish Latin – let us try writing out the letter-names in Greek, and see whether certain familiar combinations of words do not strike the eye. This is a difficult puzzle, because the extra words KENC, ELAU and ESTIAUL have been inserted without explanation among the letter-names and because the vowels have been mixed. (If E is OFR, OR is probably ER.) Nevertheless the DEXI-TRAUS-KAM-PARTH sequence is striking; we evidently have hit on an Egyptian Christian formula. With Clement of Alexandria’s specialized vocabulary in mind we read it as:

‘The spear will wound the Virgin Mother as she stands at his right hand.’ This neatly constructed pentameter is a reminiscence of
St.
Luke’s Gospel
(
II
,
35
).
Kamax
is both a spear and a vine-prop, and therefore a most appropriate word. The weapon mentioned by Luke is a sword; but the fulfilment of the prophecy, for Christian mystics, came with the spear that pierced the side of Jesus at the Crucifixion. And as I read the eight-lettered Holy Name sequence at the end, the Lintels of Heaven (OPHREA OURANEIA) are invited to raise a shout (IACHESTHAI) of ‘Shiloh’ (JEIL) since the love-fish (EROS ALABES) has neared (EGGIKEN) the land of On (AUNAN). Aunan, or On, known to the Greeks as Heliopolis and probably the oldest city in Egypt, was the centre of the Osiris cult and probably also of the Christ-as-Osiris cult. At ‘Aun’, according to Coptic tradition, the Virgin Mary washed the Infant Jesus’s swaddling clouts in the spring Ain-esh-Shems, formerly sacred to the Sun-god Ra. From the drops that dripped from the strings, up sprang the sacred Balsam-tree. It is probable that this legend was originally told of the Goddess Isis and the Infant Horus. Gwion is, I think, referring to it in the line: ‘I have been the strings of a child’s swaddling clout’ in the
Câd
Goddeu
and in ‘Whence is the sweetness of the balm?’ in the
Angar
Cyvyndawd.
The Alabes was worshipped at Aun, and was a Niloticcatfish.