The White Goddess (31 page)

It now remains to be discovered:

Gwion gives us the first point in our renewed chase of the Roebuck by introducing into his Romance an
Elegy
on
Hercules
,
which I will quote presently; but ‘Hercules’ is a word of very many meanings. Cicero distinguishes six different legendary figures named Hercules; Varro, forty-four. His name, in Greek
Heracles
,
means ‘Glory of Hera’, and Hera was an early Greek name for the Death-goddess who had charge of the souls of sacred kings and made oracular heroes of them. He is, in fact, a composite deity consisting of a great many oracular heroes of different nations at different stages of religious development; some of whom became real gods while some remained heroes. This makes him the most perplexing character
in Classical mythology; for the semi-historical Pelopid prince of the generation before the Trojan War has been confused with various heroes and deities called Hercules, and these with one another.

Hercules first appears in legend as a pastoral sacred king and, perhaps because shepherds welcome the birth of twin lambs, is a twin himself. His characteristics and history can be deduced from a mass of legends, folk customs and megalithic monuments. He is the rain-maker of his tribe and a sort of human thunder-storm. Legends connect him with Libya and the Atlas Mountains; he may well have originated thereabouts in Palaeolithic times. The priests of Egyptian Thebes, who called him ‘Shu’, dated his origin as ‘17,000 years before the reign of King Amasis’. He carries an oak-club, because the oak provides his beasts and his people with mast and because it attracts lightning more than any other tree. His symbols are the acorn; the rock–dove, which nests in oaks as well as in clefts of rock; the mistletoe, or loranthus; and the serpent. All these are sexual emblems. The dove was sacred to the Love-goddess of Greece and Syria; the serpent was the most ancient of phallic totem-beasts; the cupped acorn stood for the
glans
penis
in both Greek and Latin; the mistletoe was an all-heal and its names
viscus
(Latin) and
ixias
(Greek) are connected with
vis
and
ischus
(strength) – probably because of the spermal viscosity of its berries, sperm being the vehicle of life. This Hercules is male leader of all orgiastic rites and has twelve archer companions, including his spear-armed twin, who is his
tanist
or deputy. He performs an annual green-wood marriage with a queen of the woods, a sort of Maid Marian. He is a mighty hunter and makes rain, when it is needed, by rattling an oak-club thunderously in a hollow oak and stirring a pool with an oak branch – alternatively, by rattling pebbles inside a sacred colocinth-gourd or, later, by rolling black meteoric stones inside a wooden chest – and so attracting thunderstorms by sympathetic magic.

The manner of his death can be reconstructed from a variety of legends, folk customs and other religious survivals. At mid-summer, at the end of a half-year reign, Hercules is made drunk with mead and led into the middle of a circle of twelve stones arranged around an oak, in front of which stands an altar-stone; the oak has been lopped until it is T-shaped. He is bound to it with willow thongs in the ‘five-fold bond’ which joins wrists, neck and ankles together, beaten by his comrades till he faints, then flayed, blinded, castrated, impaled with a mistletoe stake, and finally hacked into joints on the altar-stone.
1
His blood is caught in a basin and used for sprinkling the whole tribe to make them vigorous and
fruitful. The joints are roasted at twin fires of oak-loppings, kindled with sacred fire preserved from a lightning-blasted oak or made by twirling an alder-or cornel-wood fire-drill in an oak log. The trunk is then uprooted and split into faggots which are added to the flames. The twelve merry-men rush in a wild figure-of-eight dance around the fires, singing ecstatically and tearing at the flesh with their teeth. The bloody remains are burnt in the fire, all except the genitals and the head. These are put into an alder-wood boat and floated down a river to an islet; though the head is sometimes cured with smoke and preserved for oracular use. His tanist succeeds him and reigns for the remainder of the year, when he is sacrificially killed by a new Hercules.

To this type of Hercules belong such diverse characters as Hercules of Oeta, Orion the Hunter of Crete, Polyphemus the Cyclops, Samson the Danite, Cuchulain of Muirthemne the Irish Sun-hero, Ixion the Lapith – who is always depicted stretched in a ‘five-fold bond’ around a Sunwheel – Agag the Amalekite, Romulus of Rome, Zeus, Janus, Anchises, The Dagda and Hermes. This Hercules is the leader of his people in war and hunting and his twelve chieftains are pledged to respect his authority; but his name commemorates his subservience to the Goddess, the Queen of the Woods, whose priestess is the tribal law-giver and disposer of all the amenities of life. The health of the people is bound up with his and he is burdened with numerous royal taboos.

In the Classical myth which authorizes his sovereignty he is a miraculous child born in a shower of gold; strangles a serpent in his cradle, which is also a boat, and is credited (like Zeus) with causing the spurt of milk that made the Milky Way; as a young man he is the undefeated monster-slayer of his age; kills and dismembers a monstrous boar; begets countless sons but no daughters – title is still, in fact, matrilinearly conveyed; willingly undertakes the world-burden of the giant Atlas; does wonderful feats with his oak-club and his arrows; masters the wild horse Arion and brings up the Dog Cerberus from the Underworld; is betrayed by his lovely bride; flays himself by tearing off his poisoned shirt; climbs in agony to the top of Mount Oeta; fells and splits an oak for his own pyre; is consumed; flies up to heaven on the smoke of the pyre in the form of an eagle, and is introduced by the Goddess of Wisdom into the company of the Immortals.

The divine names Bran, Saturn, Cronos must also be referred to this primitive religious system. They are applied to the ghost of Hercules that floats off in the alder-wood boat after his midsummer sacrifice. His tanist, or other self, appearing in Greek legend as Poeas who lighted Hercules’ pyre and inherited his arrows, succeeds him for the second half of the year; having acquired royal virtue by marriage with the queen, the representative of the White Goddess, and by eating some royal part of the dead man’s body – heart, shoulder or thigh-flesh. He is in turn succeeded by the New Year Hercules, a reincarnation of the murdered man, who
beheads him and, apparently, eats his head. This alternate eucharistic  sacrifice made royalty continuous, each king being in turn the Sun-god beloved of the reigning Moon-goddess.

But when these cannibalistic rites were abandoned and the system was gradually modified until a single king reigned for a term of years, Saturn-Cronos-Bran became a mere Old Year ghost, permanently overthrown by Jupiter-Zeus-Belin though yearly conjured up for placation at the Saturnalia or Yule feast. Here at last we can guess the political motive behind Amathaon’s betrayal of his cousin Bran’s name at the Battle of the Trees for the benefit of his friend Gwydion: did the Bronze Age Amathaonians, who worshipped the Immortal Beli in his Stonehenge temple, find that they had less in common with their White-Goddess-worshipping overlords than with the invading Iron Age Belgic tribes whose god Odin (Gwydion) had emancipated himself from the tutelage of the White Goddess Freya? Once the Bran priesthood was banished from Salisbury Plain and driven up North, they would be free to institute a permanent kingship over all Southern Britain under the patronage of Belin; and this is exactly what they seem to have done, after an amicable arrangement with the priesthood of Odin, to whom they gave the control of the national oracle as a reward for their help in the battle.

The next type of Hercules is an agricultural as well as a pastoral king and specializes in the cultivation of barley, so that he is sometimes confused with Eleusinian Triptolemus, Syrian Tammuz or Egyptian Maneros. Early portraits of him, with lion skin, club and grain sprouting from his shoulders, have been found in Mesopotamian cities of the third millennium
BC
. In the Eastern Mediterranean he reigns alternatively with his twin, as in the double kingdoms of Argos, Lacedaemon, Corinth, Alba Longa, and Rome. Co-kings of this type are Iphiclus, twin to Tirynthian Hercules; Pollux, twin to Castor; Lynceus, twin to Idas; Calaïs, twin to Zetes; Remus, twin to Romulus; Demophoön, twin to Triptolemus; the Edomite Perez, twin to Zarah; Abel, twin to Cain; and many more. Hercules is now lover to fifty water-priestesses of the Mountain-goddess in whose honour he wears a lion’s skin. The twins’ joint reign is fixed at eight years, apparently because at every hundredth lunar month occurs a rough approximation of lunar and solar times. Llew Llaw Gyffes (‘the Lion with the Steady Hand’) is true to type when in the
Romance
of
Math
the
Son
of
Mathonwy
he takes Gwydion as his twin to visit his mother Arianrhod. For each year that the reign of this agricultural Hercules is prolonged he offers a child-victim in his stead; which explains the Greek legends of Hercules killing children by accident or in a fit of madness, and the destruction by fire, after a temporary investiture as king, of various unfortunate young princes, among them Gwern, nephew of Bran; Phaëthon, son of Helios; Icarus, son of Daedalus, who flew too near the sun; Demophoön, son of Celeus of Eleusis, whom Demeter was trying to
immortalize; and Dionysus son of Cretan Zeus. It also explains the child-sacrifices of Phoenicia, including those offered to Jehovah Melkarth in the Valley of Hinnom (or Gehenna) the home of the undying serpent, where the sacrificial fire was never quenched.

The custom of burning a child to death as an annual surrogate for the sacred king is well illustrated in the myth of Thetis, Peleus and Achilles. Peleus was an Achaean fratricide in exile from Aegina and became King of Iolcus with a co-king Acastus, in succession to the co-kings Pelias and Neleus. Thetis, a Thessalian Sea goddess, is described by the mythographers either as a daughter of Cheiron the Centaur, or as one of the fifty Nereids, from whom she was chosen to be a wife to Zeus. Zeus changed his mind because of an oracle and gave her in marriage to Peleus, to whom she bore seven children, six of whom she burned to death. The seventh, Achilles, was rescued by Peleus in the nick of time – like the infant Aesculapius. The first six had been given immortality by the burning process; with Achilles the process had not yet been completed – his heel was still vulnerable. Thetis fled and Peleus gave Achilles into the custody of Cheiron who tutored him; later Achilles ruled over the Myrmidons of Pthiotis and brought a contingent of them to fight at Troy. When offered the choice of a brief but glorious life or a long and undistinguished one, he chose the brief one.

The myth has kept its main outlines pretty well despite the inability of later editors to understand the system of matrilinear succession. There was a shrine of the Moon-goddess Artemis, alias Nereis, or Thetis, at Iolcus, the chief port of Southern Thessaly, with an attached college of fifty priestesses. This Artemis was a patroness of fishermen and sailors. One of the priestesses was chosen every fiftieth month as representative of the Goddess; perhaps she was the winner of a race. She took a yearly consort who became the Oak-king, or Zeus, of the region and was sacrificed at the close of his term of office. By the time that the Achaeans had established the Olympian religion in Thessaly (it is recorded that all the gods and goddesses attended Peleus’s marriage to Thetis) the term had been extended to eight, or perhaps seven, years, and a child sacrificed every winter solstice until the term was complete. (Seven years instead of the Great Year of eight seems to be a blunder of the mythographers; but from the Scottish witch-ballad of
True
Thomas
it appears that seven years was the normal term for the Queen of Elphame’s consort to reign, and the Scottish witch cult had close affinities with primitive Thessalian religion.)

Achilles, the lucky seventh (or perhaps eighth) child who was saved because Peleus himself had to die, was apparently one of the Centaurs of near-by Pelion with whom the Nereids of Iolcus had ancient exogamic ties and from whom Peleus would naturally choose his child victims – they would not be his own sons by Thetis. When Achilles grew up he became king of the Myrmidons of Pthiotis: presumably by marriage with the tribal
representative of the Goddess. He can hardly have inherited the title from Peleus. (Myrmidon means ‘ant’, so it is likely that the wryneck, which feeds on ants and nests in willow-trees, sacred to the Goddess, was the local totem-bird; Philyra, Cheiron’s mother, is traditionally associated with the wryneck.) It is established that there was an Achilles cult in Greece before the Trojan War was fought, so the brief but glorious life was probably that of a stay-at-home king with a sacred heel who won immortality at death by becoming an oracular hero. Thetis was credited with the power to change her appearance; she was, in fact, served by various colleges of priestesses each with a different totem beast or bird – mare, she-bear, crane, fish, wryneck and so on.

The same myth has been twisted in a variety of ways. In some versions the emphasis is on the mock-marriage, which was an integral part of the coronation. The Argive myth of the fifty Danaids who were married to the fifty sons of Aegyptus and killed all but one on their common wedding night, and the Perso-Egypto-Greek myth of Tobit and Raguel’s daughter whose seven previous husbands had all been killed by the demon Asmodeus – in Persian, Aēshma Daēva – on their wedding night, are originally identical.