The White Goddess (45 page)

The vowels of the Beth-Luis-Nion make a complementary seasonal sequence, and like the vowels of the Boibel-Loth represent stations in the year. I take them to be the trees particularly sacred to the White Goddess, who presided over the year and to whom the number five was sacred; for Gwion in his poem
Kadeir
Taliesin
(‘The Chair of Taliesin’), which was the chair that he claimed as Chief Poet of Wales after his confounding of Heinin and the other bards, describes the Cauldron of Inspiration, Cerridwen’s cauldron, as:

In Crete, Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean in general sacred trees are formalised as pillars; so these five trees may be the same as the five pillars with vertical and spiral flutings which a man is shown adoring in a
Mycenaean cylinder seal.
1
In the newly-discovered Gnostic
Gospel
of
Thomas
,
five trees of Paradise are mentioned – but these are emblems of the five deathless Ones, namely Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Enoch and Elijah.

The first tree is the silver fir, a female tree with leaves closely resembling the yew’s, sacred in Greece to Artemis the Moon-goddess who presided over childbirth, and the prime birth-tree of Northern Europe, familiar in the Nativity context. In Orkney, according to Rogers’s
Social
Life
in
Scotland
,
mother and child are ‘sained’ soon after delivery with a flaming fir-candle whirled three times round the bed. It is remarkable that
ailm
,
in Old Irish, also stood for the palm, a tree not native to Ireland (though it grew well on my grandfather’s estate in Co. Kerry). The palm, the birth-tree of Egypt, Babylonia, Arabia and Phoenicia, gives its name phoenix (‘bloody’) to Phoenicia, which formerly covered the whole Eastern Mediterranean, and to the Phoenix which is born and reborn in a palm. Its poetic connexion with birth is that the sea is the Universal Mother and that the palm thrives close to the sea in sandy soil heavily charged with salt; without salt at its roots a young palm remains stunted. The palm is the Tree of Life in the Babylonian Garden of Eden story. Its Hebrew name is ‘Tamar’ – Tamar was the Hebrew equivalent of the Great Goddess Istar or Ashtaroth; and the Arabians adored the palm of Nejran as a goddess, annually draping it with women’s clothes and ornaments. Both Delian Apollo and Nabataean Dusares were born under a palm-tree. In modern Irish ‘ailm’ has come to mean elm, under the influence of the Latin Classics, for in Italy the elm,
ulmus
,
which is not native to the British Isles, was used for supporting the young vine and so became the
alma
mater
of the Wine-god. This interdependence of vine and elm
was sanctified by a reference in the early Christian book of revelation,
The
Shepherd
of
H
ermas.

But the silver fir, which also likes sandy soil and sea breezes, is as old a birth-tree as the palm, being the tree under which the God of Byblos was born: the prototype of the pre-dynastic Osiris of Egypt. The Greek for fir is
elate
, and Pausanias’s account of Elatos the Arcadian is interesting. He was ‘father of Ischys, the lover of Aesculapius’s mother’ and of Cyllen who gave his name to Mount Cyllene ‘until then nameless’, which became the birth-place of Hermes. Other mythographers convert Cyllen into ‘the Nymph Cyllene’, wife of Pelasgus who founded the Pelasgian race. It seems that originally Elatos was Elate ‘the lofty one’, a name transferred from Artemis to her sacred tree – an ivy-twined, fir-cone-tipped branch of which was waved in her honour at the Dionysian revels – and that Cyllene (
Cy
lle
Ana
)
‘the curved queen’ was another of her titles. The fir-tree of the Birth-goddess is similarly transferred to her son in the myth of Attis, son of Nana, the Phrygian Adonis. He is said to have been metamorphosed into a fir by the Goddess Cybele who loved him, when he lay dying from a wound dealt him by a boar sent by Zeus – or else dealt him by a Phrygian king whom he had emasculated and who emasculated him in return.

The Trojan horse, a peace-offering to the Goddess Athene, originally the same White Goddess, was made of silver-fir: a horse, because sacred to the moon. In the Museum of Newcastle-on-Tyne is a Roman-British altar dedicated to ‘the Mothers’
1
by one Julius Victor. It shows a triangle standing on its base with a fir-cone enclosed. Though Druantia, the name of the Gallic Fir-goddess, contains no reference to her own tree, it makes her ‘Queen of the Druids’ and therefore mother of the whole tree-calendar.

The silver fir has its station on the first day of the year, the birthday of the Divine Child, the extra day of the winter solstice. Thirteen weeks separate these stations and the last of each was a death week and demanded a blood-sacrifice.

The second tree is the furze, which with its golden flowers and prickles typifies the young Sun at the Spring equinox; the time when furze fires are lighted on the hills. The effect of burning away the old prickles is to make tender new ones sprout on the stock, which sheep eat greedily; and to encourage the growth of grass – ‘The furze but ill-behaved, Until he is subdued.’ The religious importance of furze, or gorse, which in Welsh folk-lore is ‘good against witches’, is enhanced by its flowers being frequented by the first bees of the year, as the ivy’s are by the last. The name
On-niona
,
a Goddess worshipped by the Gauls in ash-groves, is a compound of
Onn
and
Nion,
which supplies the date of her festival, namely the Spring equinox at the close of the Ash-month.

The third tree is the heather, sacred to the Roman and Sicilian love-goddess Venus Erycina; and in Egypt and Phoenicia to Isis whose brother Osiris was immured in a heather-tree at Byblos, where she went to seek him. The Isis legend quoted by Plutarch is late and artificial but hints at child-sacrifice in honour of Osiris.

The eighteenth-century antiquary Winslow took Dean Swift to Lough Crew to collect local legends of the Irish Triple Goddess. Among those collected was one of the death of the
Garbh
Ogh
,
an ancient ageless giantess, whose car was drawn by elks, whose diet was venison milk and eagles’ breasts and who hunted the mountain deer with a pack of seventy hounds with bird names. She gathered stones to heap herself a triple cairn and ‘set up her chair in a womb of the hills at the season of heather-bloom’; and then expired.

The Gallic Heather-goddess Uroica is attested by inscriptions in Roman Switzerland; her name is half-way between
Ura
,
and the Greek word for heather,
ereice.

The heather is the midsummer tree, red and passionate, and is associated with mountains and bees. The Goddess is herself a queen bee about whom male drones swarm in midsummer, and as Cybele is often so pictured; the ecstatic self-castration of her priests was a type of the emasculation of the drone by the queen bee in the nuptial act. Venus fatally courted Anchises on a mountain to the hum of bees. But white heather is lucky, being a protection against acts of passion. The Sicilian Mount Eryx is famous for the visit of Butes the bee-master, son of the North Wind, who was given a hero-shrine there by the nymphs of the Goddess Erycina. The reference in Gwion’s
Câd
Goddeu
to the heather comforting the battered poplars is to ‘heather-ale’, a favourite restorative in Wales.

The ancient popularity of lindens or lime-trees among love-poets of Germany and Northern France, suggests that they became a substitute, in flat regions, for mountain heather. Lindens flower from mid-May to mid-August. They do not rank as sacred trees in Britain where only a small-leaved variety seems to be indigenous. However, in Thessaly, Cheiron the Centaur’s Goddess-mother associated with the erotic wryneck, was called Philyra (‘linden’).

The fourth tree, the tree of the autumn equinox and of old age, is the shifting-leaved white poplar, or aspen, the shield-maker’s tree. According to Pausanias it was first introduced into Greece from Epirus by Hercules (but which?); and the Latin legend is that he bound his head in triumph with poplar after killing the giant Cacus (‘the evil one’) in his den on the Aventine Hill at Rome. The side of the leaves next to his brow were whitened by the radiant heat he gave out. Presumably the myth accounts for the difference in leaf and ritual use between the aspen and the black poplar which was a funereal tree sacred to Mother Earth in pre-Hellenic Greece. There is a reference in the
Casina
of Plautus to the divinatory use of black poplar and silver fir, the fir apparently standing for hope, the poplar for loss of hope
1
somewhat as in Pembrokeshire a girl gives a lover either a piece of birch as a sign of encouragement, ‘You may begin’, or a piece of hazel, called a
collen
,
‘Be wise and desist’. Hercules conquered death, and in ancient Ireland the
fé
or measuring-rod used by coffin-makers on corpses was of aspen, presumably as a reminder to the souls of the dead that this was not the end. Golden head-dresses of aspen leaves are found in Mesopotamian burials of 3000
BC
.

The fifth tree is the yew, the death-tree in all European countries, sacred to Hecate in Greece and Italy. At Rome, when black bulls were sacrificed to Hecate, so that the ghosts should lap their gushing blood, they were wreathed with yew. The yew is mentioned by Pausanias as the tree beside which Epaminondas found the bronze urn on Mount Ithome, containing on a tin scroll the secret mysteries of the Great Goddess. On the other side of the urn, appropriately, grew a myrtle, which (as will appear in Chapter Thirteen) was the Greek equivalent of the elder, the death-consonant R. That the scroll was made of tin is interesting; for the ancient Greeks imported their tin from Spain and Britain. In Ireland the yew was ‘the coffin of the vine’: wine barrels were made of yew staves. In the Irish romance of
Naoise
and
Deirdre
,
yew stakes were driven through the corpses of these lovers to keep them apart; but the stakes sprouted and became trees whose tops eventually embraced over Armagh Cathedral. In Brittany it is said that church-yard yews will spread a root to the mouth of each corpse. Yew makes the best bows – as the Romans learned from the Greeks – and the deadliness of the tree was thereby enhanced; it is likely that the Latin
taxus
,
yew, is connected with
toxon
,
Greek for bow, and with
toxicon
,
Greek for the poison with which arrows were smeared. The ancient Irish are said to have used a compound of yew-berry, hellebore and devil’s bit for poisoning their weapons. John Evelyn in his
Silva
(1662) points out that the yew does not deserve its reputation for poisonousness – ‘whatever Pliny reports concerning its shade, or the story of the air about Thasius, the fate of Cativulcus mentioned by Caesar, and the ill report which the fruit has vulgarly obtained in France, Spain and Arcadia.’ Cattle and horses nibble the leaves without ill-effect, he says; but later he suggests that the ‘true
taxus
’
is indeed ‘mortiferous’. Its use in the English witch-cult is recalled in
Macbeth
where Hecate’s cauldron contained:

Shakespeare elsewhere calls it the ‘double fatal yew’ and makes Hamlet’s uncle poison the King by pouring its juice (‘hebenon’) into his ear. It shares with the oak the reputation of taking longer than any other tree to come to maturity, but is longer lived even than the oak. When seasoned and polished its wood has an extraordinary power of resisting corruption.

One of the ‘Five Magical Trees of Ireland’ was a yew. This was the Tree of Ross, described as ‘a firm straight deity’ (the Irish yew differed from the British in being cone-shaped, with branches growing straight up, not horizontally), ‘the renown of Banbha’ (Banbha was the death aspect of the Irish Triple Goddess), ‘the Spell of Knowledge, and the King’s Wheel’ – that is to say the death-letter that makes the wheel of existence
come full circle; as a reminder of his destiny, every Irish king wore a brooch in the form of a wheel, which was entailed on his successor. I place the station of the yew on the last day of the year, the eve of the Winter Solstice. Ailm the Silver-fir of Birth and Idho the Yew of Death are sisters: they stand next to each other in the circle of the year and their foliage is almost identical. Fir is to yew as silver is to poisonous lead. The mediaeval alchemists, following ancient tradition, reckoned silver to the Moon as presiding over birth, and lead to Saturn as presiding over death; and extracted both metals from the same mixed ore.