The White Goddess (32 page)

The various contradictory versions of the Danaid myth help us to understand the ritual from which it originated. Pindar in his
Fourth
Pythian
Ode
says that the brides were pardoned, purified by Hermes and Athene and offered as prizes to the victors of public games. Later authorities, such as Ovid and Horace, say that they were not pardoned but condemned everlastingly to pour water into a vessel full of holes. Herodotus says that they brought the mysteries of Demeter to Argos and taught them to the Pelasgian women. Others say that four of them were worshipped at Argos because they provided the city with water. The real story seems to be that the Danaids were an Argive college of fifty priestesses of the Barley-goddess Danaë, who was interested in giving rain to the crops and was worshipped under four different divine titles; pouring water through a vessel with holes so that it looked like rain was their usual rain-bringing charm. Every four years at the fiftieth lunar month a contest was held as to who should become the Hercules, or Zeus, of the next four years and the lover of these fifty priestesses. This term was afterwards prolonged to eight years, with the usual yearly sacrifice of a child. Danaan Argos was captured by the Sons of Aegyptus who invaded the Peloponnese from Syria, and many of the Danaans who resisted them were driven northward out of Greece; as has already been mentioned.

In the
Book
of
Tobit
,
Tobit is the lucky eighth, the new Zeus bridegroom, who escapes his fate when the reigning Zeus has to die at the end of his term. Asmodeus is the Persian counterpart of Set, the yearly murderer of Osiris, but he is charmed away with the fish of immortality and flees to his southern deserts. Tobit’s dog is a helpful clue; he always
accompanied Hercules Melkarth, or his Persian counterpart Sraosha, or the Greek Aesculapius, wherever he went.

A typical set of taboos binding this Hercules is quoted by Sir James Frazer in his
Golden
Bough
:
they were applied to the Flamen Dialis, the successor of the Sacred King of Rome whose war-leadership passed to the twin Consuls at the foundation of the Republic.

Frazer should have added that the Flamen owed his position to a sacred marriage with the Flaminica: Plutarch records in his
Roman
Questions
(50) that he could not divorce her, and had to resign his office if she died.

In Ireland this Hercules was named
Cenn
Cruaich
,
‘the Lord of the Mound’, but after his supersession by a more benignant sacred king was remembered as
Cromm
Cruaich
(‘the Bowed One of the Mound’). In a Christian poem occurring in the eleventh-century
Book
of
Leinster
he is thus described:

It is likely enough that this cult was introduced into Ireland in the reign of Heremon, the nineteenth King of All Ireland, the date of whose accession is traditionally given as 1267
BC
, though Dr. Joyce, a reliable modern authority, makes it 1015
BC
. Heremon, one of the invading Milesians from Spain, became sole monarch of Ireland by his victory over the armies of the North and put his enemies under heavy tribute.

(The Milesians of Irish legend are said to have originated in Greece early in the second millennium
BC
and to have taken many generations to reach Ireland, after wandering about the Mediterranean. The Milesians of Greek legend claimed descent from Miletus, a son of Apollo, who emigrated from Crete to Caria in very early times, and built the city of Miletus; there was another city of the same name in Crete. The Irish Milesians similarly claimed to have visited Crete and to have gone thence to Syria, and thence by way of Carenia in Asia Minor to Gaetulia in North Africa, Baelduno or Baelo, a port near Cadiz, and Breagdun or Brigantium (now Compostella), in North-western Spain. Among their ancestors were Gadel – perhaps a deity of the river Gadylum on the southern coast of the Black Sea near Trebizond; ‘Niulus or Neolus of Argos’; Cecrops of Athens; and ‘Scota daughter of the king of Egypt’.

If this account makes any sense it refers to a westward migration from the Aegean to Spain in the late thirteenth century
BC
when, as we have seen, a wave of Indo-Europeans from the north, among them the Dorian Greeks, was slowly displacing the Mycenaean ‘Peoples of the Sea’ from Greece, the Aegean Islands, and Asia Minor.

Neleus (if this is the ‘Niulus or Neolus’ of the Irish legend) was a Minyan, an Aeolian Greek, who reigned over Pylos, a Peloponnese
kingdom that traded extensively with the western Mediterranean. The Achaeans subdued him in a battle from which only his son Nestor (a garrulous old man at the time of the Trojan War) escaped. Neleus was reckoned a son of the Goddess Tyro, and she was mother also of Aeson the Minyan, who was rejuvenated in the Cauldron, and Amythaon – Amathaon again? Tyro was probably the Goddess of the Tyrrhenians who were expelled from Asia Minor and sailed to Italy a century or two later. These Tyrrhenians, usually known as Etruscans, dated their national existence from 967
BC
. Cecrops appears in Greek legend as the first Greek king of Attica and the reputed originator of barley-cake offerings to Zeus. Scota, who has been confused in Irish legend with the ancestor of the Cottians, is apparently Scotia (‘The Dark One’), a well-known Greek title of the Sea-goddess of Cyprus. The Milesians would naturally have brought the cult of the Sea-goddess and of her son Hercules with them to Ireland, and found the necessary stone-altars already in position.)

In the Peloponnese the Olympic Games were the occasion of this agricultural Hercules’s death and of the election of his successor. The legend is that they were founded in celebration of Zeus’s emasculation of Cronos; since the tomb of the early Achaean Oak-king Pelops was at Olympia, this means that the oak-cult was there superimposed on the Pelasgian barley-cult. The most ancient event in the Games was a race between fifty young priestesses of the Goddess Hera for the privilege of becoming the new Chief Priestess. Hercules was cut into pieces and eucharistically eaten as before, until perhaps the later Achaeans put an end to the practice, and for centuries after retained some of his oak-tree characteristics: he was known as the ‘green Zeus’. The sacrifice of the agricultural Hercules, or the victim offered in his stead, continued to take place within a stone-circle dedicated to the Barley Mother. At Hermion, near Corinth, the stone-circle was in ritual use until Christian times.

Hercules of Canopus, or Celestial Hercules, is a fusion of the first two types of Hercules with Asclepius, or Aesculapius, the God of Healing, himself a fusion of the Barley-god with a Fire-god. Aesculapius is described by mythographers as a son of Apollo, partly because Apollo in Classical times was identified with the Sun-god Helios, partly because the priesthood of the Aesculapian cult, which was derived from that of Thoth, the Egyptian god of healing and inventor of letters, had been driven from Phoenicia (about the year 1400
BC
?) and taken refuge in the islands of Cos, Thasos and Delos, where Apollo was by then the ruling deity. When in the fifth century
BC
Herodotus tried to extract information about Canopic Hercules from the Egyptian priests, they referred him to Phoenicia as the land of his origin. We know that the Phoenician Hercules, Melkarth (‘King of the City’), died yearly and that the quail was his bird of resurrection; which means that when the migrant quail arrives in Phoenicia early in March from the South, the oak begins to leaf and the new King
celebrates his royal marriage. Melkarth was revived when Esmun (‘He whom we invoke’), the local Aesculapius, held a quail to his nose. The quail is notorious for its pugnacity and lechery. But at Canopus, in the Nile Delta, the cults of Melkarth and Esmun, or Hercules and Aesculapius, appear to have been fused by Egyptian philosophers: Hercules was worshipped both as the healer and as the healed. Apollo himself had reputedly been born on Ortygia (‘Quail Island’), the islet off Delos; so Canopic Hercules is Apollo, too, in a sense – is Apollo, Aesculapius (
alias
Cronos, Saturn or Bran), Thoth, Hermes (whom the Greeks identified with Thoth), Dionysus (who in the early legends is an alias of Hermes), and Melkarth, to whom King Solomon, as son-in-law to King Hiram, was priest, and who immolated himself on a pyre, like Hercules of Oeta. Hercules Melkarth was also worshipped at Corinth under the name of Melicertes, the son of the Pelasgian White Goddess Ino of Pelion.