The White Goddess (64 page)

In the
Odyssey
,
which is a popular romance not at all to be depended on for mythical detail, Proteus’s transformations are described as lion, serpent, panther, boar, water, fire and leafy tree. This is a mixed list,
1
reminding one of Gwion’s deliberately muddled ‘I have been’s’. The boar is the symbol of the G month; lion and serpent are seasonal symbols; the panther is a mythical beast half-leopard, half-lion, sacred to Dionysus. It is a pity that Homer does not particularize the leafy tree; its association here with water and fire suggests the alder, or cornel-tree, as sacred to Proteus, a god of the Bran type – though in the story Proteus is degraded to a mere herdsman of seals in the service of the Ash-god Poseidon.

The Nile is called Ogygian by Aeschylus, and Eustathius the Byzantine grammarian says that Ogygia was the earliest name for Egypt. This suggests that the Island of Ogygia ruled over by Calypso daughter of Atlas, was really Pharos where Proteus,
alias
Atlas or ‘The Sufferer’, had an oracular shrine. Pharos commanded the mouth of the Nile, and Greek sailors would talk of ‘sailing to Ogygia’ rather than ‘sailing to Egypt’; it often happens that a small island used as a trading depot gives its name to a whole province – Bombay is a useful example. The waters of Styx are also called Ogygian by Hesiod; not (as Liddell and Scott suggest) because Ogygian meant vaguely ‘primeval’, but because the head-waters were at Lusi, the seat of the three oracular daughters of Proetus, who is apparently the same cult-character as Proteus.

When the Byblians first brought their Syrian Tempest-god to Egypt, the one who, disguised as a boar, yearly killed his brother Adonis, the god always born under a fir-tree, they identified him with Set, the ancient
Egyptian god of the desert whose sacred beast was the wild ass, and who yearly destroyed his brother Osiris, the god of the Nile vegetation. This must be what Sanchthoniatho the Phoenician, in a fragment preserved by Philo, means when he says that the mysteries of Phoenicia were brought to Egypt. He reports that the two first inventors of the human race, Upsouranios and his brother Ousous consecrated two pillars, to fire and wind – presumably the Jachin and Boaz pillars representing Adonis, god of the waxing year and the new-born sun, and Typhon, god of the waning year and of destructive winds. The Hyksos Kings under Byblian influence, similarly converted their Tempest-god into Set, and his new brother, the Hyksos Osiris,
alias
Adonis, alias Dionysus, paid a courtesy call on his Pelasgian counterpart, Proteus King of Pharos.

In pre-dynastic times Set must have been the chief of all the gods of Egypt, since the sign of royalty which all the dynastic gods carried was Set’s ass-eared reed sceptre. But he had declined in importance before the Hyksos revived his worship at Pelusium, and reverted to obscurity after they were thrown out of Egypt about two hundred years later by the Pharaohs of the 18th Dynasty.
1
The Egyptians identified him with the long-eared constellation Orion, ‘Lord of the Chambers of the South’, and ‘the Breath of Set’ was the South wind from the deserts which, then as now, caused a wave of criminal violence in Egypt, Libya and Southern Europe whenever it blew. The cult of ass-eared Set in Southern Judaea is proved by Apion’s account of the golden ass-mask of Edomite Dora, captured by King Alexander Jannaeus and cleverly stolen back again from Jerusalem by one Zabidus. The ass occurs in many of the more obviously iconotropic anecdotes of
Genesis
and the early historical books of the Bible: Saul chosen as king when in search of Kish’s lost asses; the ass that was with Abraham when he was about to sacrifice Isaac; the ass whose jawbone Samson used against the Philistines; the ass of Balaam with its human voice. Moreover, Jacob’s uncle Ishmael son of Hagar with his twelve sons is described in
Genesis,
XVI,
12
as a wild ass among men: this suggests a religious confederacy of thirteen goddess-worshipping tribes of the Southern desert, under the leadership of a tribe dedicated to Set. Ishmael perhaps means ‘the beloved man’, the Goddess’s favourite.

The legend of Midas the Phrygian and the ass’s ears confirms this association of Dionysus and Set, for Midas, son of the Mother Goddess, was a devotee of Dionysus. The legend is plainly an iconotropic one and Midas has been confidently identified with Mita, King of the Moschians, or Mushki, a people from Thrace – originally from Pontus – who broke the power of the Hittites about the year 1200
BC
when they captured Pteria
the Hittite capital. Mita was a dynastic name and is said to have meant ‘seed’ in the Orphic language; Herodotus mentions certain rose-gardens of Midas on Mount Bermios in Macedonia, planted before the Moschian invasion of Asia Minor. It is likely that their Greek name
Moschoi
, ‘calf-men’, refers to their cult of the Spirit of the Year as a bull-calf: a golden calf like that which the Israelites claimed to have brought them safely out of Egypt.

That no record has survived in Egypt of a five-season year concurrent with the three-season one, is no proof that it was not in popular use among the devotees of Osiris. For that matter absolutely no official Pharaonic record has been found in Egypt of the construction, or even the existence, of the port of Pharos though it commanded the mouths of the Nile, controlled the South-Eastern terminus of the Mediterranean sea-routes, and was in active use for at least a thousand years. Osiris worship was the popular religion in the Delta from pre-dynastic times, but it had no official standing. Egyptian texts and pictorial records are notorious for their suppression or distortion of popular beliefs. Even the
Book
of
the
Dead
, which passes for popular, seldom expresses the true beliefs of the Osirian masses: the aristocratic priests of the Established Church had begun to tamper with the popular myth as early as 2800
BC
. One of the most important elements in Osirianism, tree-worship, was not officialized until about 300
BC
, under the Macedonian Ptolemies. In the
Book
of
the
Dead
many primitive beliefs have been iconotropically suppressed. For instance, at the close of the Twelfth Hour of Darkness, when Osiris’ sun-boat approaches the last gateway of the Otherworld before its reemergence into the light of day, the god is pictured bent backwards in the form of a hoop with his hands raised and his toes touching the back of his head. This is explained as ‘Osiris whose circuit is the Otherworld’: which means that by adopting this acrobatic posture he is defining the Otherworld as a circular region behind the ring of mountains that surround the ordinary world, and thus making the Twelve Hours analogous with the Twelve Signs of the Zodiac. Here an ingenious priestly notion has clearly been superimposed on an earlier popular icon: Osiris captured by his rival Set and tied, like Ixion or Cuchulain, in the five-fold bond that joined wrists, neck and ankles together. ‘Osiris whose circuit is the Otherworld’ is also the economical way of identifying the god with the snake Ophion, coiled around the habitable earth, a symbol of universal fertility out of death.

Gwion’s ‘Ercwlf’ (Hercules) evidently used the three-season year when he laid his ‘four pillars of equal height’, the Boibel-Loth, in order [see overleaf]. The vowels represent the five extra days, the entrance to the year, and the lintel and two pillars each represent 120 days. But Q and Z have no months of their own in the Beth-Luis-Nion and their occurrence as twenty-four day periods in the second part of the Boibel-Loth
year makes Tinne, not Duir as in the Beth-Luis-Nion, the central, that is the ruling, letter. Tinnus, or Tannus, becomes the chief god, as in Etruria and Druidic Gaul. From this figure the transition to the disc arrangement is simple:

 

 

As 8 is the sacred numeral of Tinne’s month – and in the Imperial Roman Calendar also the ruling month was the eighth, called Sebastos (‘Holy’) or Augustus – so the eight-day period rules the calendar. In fact, Tannus displaces his oak-twin Durus and seems to be doing him a great kindness – the same kindness celestial Hercules did for Atlas – in relieving him of his traditional burden. The twins were already connected with the numeral 8 because of their eight-year reign, which was fixed (as we have seen) by the approximation at every hundredth lunation of lunar and solar time. That a calendar of this sort was in use in ancient Ireland is suggested by numerous ancient Circles of the Sun, consisting of five stones
surrounding a central altar; and by the ancient division of the land into five provinces – Ulster, the two Munsters, Leinster and Connaught – meeting at a central point in what is now West Meath, marked by a Stone of Divisions. (The two Munsters had already coalesced by the time of King Tuathal the Acceptable, who reigned from 130–160
AD
; he took off a piece of all four provinces to form his central demesne of Meath.) And there is a clear reference to this calendar system in the tenth-century
AD
Irish
Saltair
na
Rann
where a Heavenly City is described, with fifteen ramparts, eight gates, and seventy-two different kinds of fruit in the gardens enclosed.

*

Now, it has been shown that the God Bran possessed an alphabetic secret before Gwydion, with Amathaon’s help, stole it from him at the Battle of the Trees in the course of the first Belgic invasion of Britain; that close religious ties existed between Pelasgia and Bronze Age Britain; and that the Pelasgians used an alphabet of the same sort as the British tree-alphabet, the trees of which came from the north of Asia Minor.

As might be expected, the myth connecting Cronos, Bran’s counterpart, with an alphabetic secret survives in many versions. It concerns the Dactyls (fingers), five beings created by the White Goddess Rhea, ‘while Zeus was still an infant in the Dictaean Cave’, as attendants on her lover Cronos. Cronos became the first king of Elis, where the Dactyls were worshipped, according to Pausanias, under the names of Heracles, Paeonius, Epimedes, Jasius and Idas, or Aces-Idas. They were also worshipped in Phrygia, Samothrace, Cyprus, Crete and at Ephesus. Diodorus quotes Cretan historians to the effect that the Dactyls made magical incantations which caused a great stir in Samothrace, and that Orpheus (who used the Pelasgian alphabet) was their disciple. They are called the fathers of the Cabeiroi of Samothrace, and their original seat is said to have been either Phrygia or Crete. They are also associated with the mysteries of smith-craft, and Diodorus identifies them with the Curetes, tutors of the infant Zeus and founders of Cnossos. Their names at Elis correspond exactly with the fingers. Heracles is the phallic thumb; Paeonius (‘deliverer from evil’) is the lucky fore-finger; Epimedes (‘he who thinks too late’) is the middle, or fool’s, finger; Jasius (‘healer’) is the physic finger; Idas (‘he of Mount Ida’ – Rhea’s seat) is the oracular little finger. The syllable
Aces
means that he averted ill-luck, and the Orphic willow tree, the tree belonging to the little finger-tip, grew just outside the Dictaean Cave which was, perhaps for that reason, also called the Idaean Cave.

The Alexandrian scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius gives the names of three of the Dactyls as Acmon (‘anvil’) Damnameneus (‘hammer’) and Celmis (‘smelter’). These are probably names of the thumb and first two fingers, used in the Phrygian (or ‘Latin’) blessing: for walnuts are cracked
between thumb and forefinger; and the middle finger based on U, the vowel of sexuality, still retains its ancient obscene reputation as the smelter of female passion. In mediaeval times it was called
digitus
impu
dicus
or
obscenus
because, according to the seventeenth-century physician Isbrand de Diemerbroek, it used to be ‘pointed at men in infamy or derision’ – as a sign that they had failed to keep their wives’ affection. Apollonius had mentioned only two Dactyls by name: Titias and Cyllenius. I have shown that Cyllen (or Cyllenius) was son of Elate, ‘Artemis of the fir tree’; so the Dactyl Cyllenius must have been the thumb, which is based on the fir-letter A. And Titias was king of Mariandynë in Bithynia, from where Hercules stole the Dog, and was killed by Hercules at a funeral games. Some mythographers make Titias the father of Mariandynus, founder of the town. Since Hercules was the god of the waxing year which begins with A, the thumb, it follows that Titias was the god of the waning year, which begins with U, the fool’s finger – the fool killed by Hercules at the winter-solstice. The name ‘Titias’ is apparently a reduplication of the letter T, which belongs to the fool’s finger, and identical with the Giant Tityus whom Zeus killed and consigned to Tartarus.