The White Goddess (82 page)

But this is a digression, and I will leave whatever Greek scholar may be interested to work out the rest of the charm, without troubling him with my own approximate solution.

*

Of the various objectives proposed in Chapter Eight one has not yet been attained: it still remains to find out the meaning of the letter-names of the Beth-Luis-Nion. We may assume them originally to have stood for something else than trees, for the Irish tree-names, with the exception of
Duir
and
Saille,
are not formed from roots common to the Greek, Latin and Slavonic languages, as one might have expected.

The meaning of the vowels in the
Boibel-Loth
proved to be a sequence of stages in the life of the Spirit of the Year, incarnate in the sacred king,
and the trees named in the vowels of the
Beth-Luis-Nion
similarly proved to form a seasonal sequence. Is it possible that the separation of the vowels from the consonants was a late development and that originally they were distributed among the consonants at regular intervals, as they are in the Greek and Latin alphabets? That A, the birth letter, rather than B, the letter of inception, really began the alphabet; and that the form ‘Ailm-Beth’ was even earlier than ‘Beth-Luis-Nion’? Since Irish legends about the alphabet particularize Greece as the place where it was invented and there is an obstinate countryside tradition in Ireland that the Tuatha de Danaan spoke Greek, why not put the Beth-Luis-Nion into ancient Greek and distribute the vowels in their seasonal order among the consonants, placing A at the winter solstice, O at the spring equinox, U at the summer solstice, E at the autumn equinox, I at the winter solstice again; and placing Straif at the beginning and Quert at the end of the summer flight of letters? Would they spell out another religious charm?

Thus:

Ailm
Beth
does not make a hopeful start until one recalls that
Ailm
(silver fir) is pronounced
Alv
or
Alph
in Irish. The root
alph
expresses both whiteness and produce: thus
alphos
is dull white leprosy (
albula
in Latin) and
alphe
is ‘gain’ and
alphiton
is pearl barley and
Alphito
is the White Grain-goddess or Pig-Demeter,
alias
Cerdo (which also means ‘gain’), whose connexion with Cerridwen the Welsh Pig-Demeter,
alias
the Old White One, has already been pointed out. The principal river in the Peloponnese is the Alpheus.
Beth
or
Beith
is the birch month and since the birch is
betulus
in Latin, we may transliterate it into Greek and write
Baitulus.
At once the words begin to make sense as an invocation. Alphito-Baitule, a compound word like Alphito-mantis (‘one who divines from pearl barley’) suggests a goddess of the same sort as ASHIMA BAETYL and ANATHA BAETYL, the two Goddess-wives of the Hebrew Jehovah in his fifth-century
BC
cult at Elephantine in Egypt. The meaning of Baitulos is a sacred stone in which a deity is resident; it seems to be connected with the Semitic
Bethel
(‘House of God’) but whether
Baitulos
is derived from
Bethel
or vice versa is not known. The Lion-goddess Anatha Baetyl was not originally Semitic, and was worshipped as Anaitis in Armenia.

Luis,
the next Beth-Luis-Nion letter, suggests
Lusios,
a divine title of many Greek deities, meaning ‘One who washes away guilt’. It is particularly applied to Dionysus, the Latin equivalent being
Liber.
But Dionysus in the Orphic Hymns is also called Luseios and Luseus, which suggests that the adjective is formed not directly from
louein,
‘to wash’, but from the city Lusi in Arcadia famous for its connexion with Dionysus. Lusi is
overshadowed by the enormous mountain Aroania, now Mount Chelmos, and lies close to the valleys of the Aroanius River, which flows into the Alpheus, and of the Styx which flows into the Crathis. The Styx (‘hateful’) was the death-river by which the Gods were said to swear, and which Demeter, the Barley Mother, cursed when Poseidon pursued her with his unwelcome attentions, presumably during the Achaean conquest of the Crathis valley.

Here is Pausanias’s account of Lusi and its neighbourhood:

Lycaon the Pelasgian, son of the Bear-goddess Callisto, practised cannibalism and must have been an oak-god, since he was killed by a flash of lightning. His clan used the wolf-totem and Lycaon as wolf-king (or werewolf) reigned until the ninth year. The choice of King was settled at a cannibalistic feast. His wife Nonacris was clearly the Ninefold Goddess, and he is described as the first man to civilize Arcadia.

This reads as if Homer had visited the place. Again he makes the Goddess Athene say: 

Melampus means ‘black foot’ and he was the son of Amythaon and the nymph Melanippe (‘black mare’). The story of how he purged the daughters of Proetus with black hellebore and pig-sacrifices, and afterwards washed away their madness in a stream, probably refers to the capture of this Danaan shrine by the Achaeans, though Melampus is reckoned as an Aeolian Minyan. He also conquered Argos, the centre of the Danaan cult. The three daughters were the Triple Goddess, the Demeter of the Styx, who must have been mare-headed, else a horse’s hoof would not have been proof against the poison of the water. But according to Philo of Heraclea and Aelian, the horn of a Scythian ass-unicorn was also proof against the poison; and Plutarch in his
Life
of
Alexander
says that an ass’s hoof makes the only safe vessel. Near by, at Stymphalus, was a triple sanctuary founded by Temenus (‘precinct’) the Pelasgian, in honour of the Goddess Hera as ‘girl, bride and widow’, a remarkable survival of the original triad. She was called ‘widow’, the Stymphalians told Pausanias, because she quarrelled with Zeus and retired to Stymphalus; this probably refers to a later revival of the primitive cult in defiance of Olympianism.

Sir James Frazer visited Lusi in 1895, and he has given a valuable account of it which allows us to read Nonacris as a name for the succession of nine precipices of Mount Aroania which overhang the gorge of the Styx. Even in the late summer there was still snow in the clefts of what he described as the most ‘awful line of precipices’ he had ever seen. The Styx
is formed by the melting snow and seems to run black down the cliff-side because of the dark incrustation of the rock behind, but afterwards bright blue because of the slatey rocks over which it flows in the gorge. The whole line of precipices is vertically streaked with red and black – both death colours in ancient Greece – and Frazer accounts for Hesiod’s description of the ‘silver pillars’ of the Styx by observing that in winter immense icicles overhang the gorge. He records that a chemical analysis of Styx water shows it to contain no poisonous substance, though it is extremely cold.

The next letter of the Beth-Luis-Nion being
Nion
we can continue the dactylic invocation:

Frazer found that the belief in the singing spotted fish still survived at Lusi – they recall the spotted poetic fish of Connla’s Well
1
and so did the tradition of the snakes that Demeter set to guard the Styx water. He visited the cave of the Daughters of Proetus which overlooks the chasm of the Styx, and found that it had a natural door and window formed by the action of water.

The next letter is
Onn.
A and O being so easily confused in all languages, we can continue with:

on the strength of the Pelasgian Goddess Anna, sister of Belus, whom the Italians called Anna Perenna or ‘Perennial Anna’. Ovid in his
Fasti
says that this Anna was regarded by some as the Moon-goddess Minerva, by others as Themis, or Io of Argos. He also connects her with barley cakes. Her festival fell on March 15th, which is just where
Onn
occurs in the Beth-Luis-Nion calendar. Anna probably means ‘queen’, or ‘Goddess-mother’; Sappho uses
Ana
for
Anassa
(queen). She appears in Irish mythology as the Danaan goddess Ana or Anan, who had two different
characters. The first was the beneficent Ana, a title of the Goddess Danu, mentioned in Cormac’s
Glossary
as equivalent to Buan-ann (glossed as ‘Good Mother’). She was the mother of the original three Danaan gods Brian, Iuchurba and Iuchar, and she suckled and nursed them so well that her name ‘Ana’ came to signify ‘plenty’; she was worshipped in Munster as a Goddess of Plenty. Two mountains in Kerry, ‘the Paps of Anu’, are named after her. She has also been identified by E. M. Hull with Aine of Knockaine, a Munster Moon-goddess who had charge of crops and cattle and is connected in legend with the meadow-sweet to which she gave its scent, and with the midsummer fire-festival. The maleficent Ana was the leading person of the Fate Trinity, Ana, Badb and Macha, together known as the Morrigan, or Great Queen. Badb, ‘boiling’, evidently refers to the Cauldron, and Macha is glossed in the
Book
of
Le
can
as meaning ‘raven’.

Ana occurs in British folklore as Black Annis of Leicester who had a bower in the Dane (Danaan?) Hills and used to devour children, whose skins she hung on an oak to dry. She was known as ‘Cat Anna’ but, according to E. M. Hull, Annis is a shortened form of Angness or Agnes, which would identify her with Yngona, ‘Anna of the Angles’, a well-known Danish goddess. Black Annis was concerned with a May-Eve hare-hunt, later transferred to Easter Monday, and must therefore have been nymph as well as hag. Yngona, certainly, was both Nanna (sharing her favours between Balder and his dark rival Holder) and Angurboda, the Hag of the Iron Wood, mother of Hel. But the chances are that the Hag had been in residence near Leicester long before the Danes occupied her part of Mercia, and that she was the Danaan Goddess Anu before she was Agnes. In Christian times she became a nun and there is a picture of her wearing nun’s habit in the vestry of the Swithland Church. She is the Blue Hag celebrated in Milton’s
Paradise
Lost
and
Comus
as sucking children’s blood by night disguised as a scritch-owl. The Irish Hag of Beare also became a nun; it was easy to Christianize a Death-goddess because her face was already veiled. In Chapter Three I mentioned that Beli was reckoned as the son of Danu; and the identity of Ana and Danu is made quite clearly in a pedigree in Jesus College Manuscript 20, supposed to be of the thirteenth century, where Beli the Great is a son of Anna, absurdly said to be a daughter of the Emperor of Rome. Elsewhere, the pedigree of Prince Owen, son of Howel the Good, is traced back to
Aballac filius
Amalechi
qui
fuit
Beli
M
agni
filius,
et
Anna
mater
ejus.
1
It is added, as absurdly,
quam
dicunt
esse
consobrinam
Mariae
Virginis,
Matris
Domini
nostri Jhesu
Christi.