The White Goddess (41 page)

The third tree is the ash. In Greece the ash was sacred to Poseidon, the second god of the Achaean trinity, and the Mĕliai, or ash-spirits, were much cultivated; according to Hesiod, the Mĕliae sprang from the blood of Uranus when Cronos castrated him. In Ireland the Tree of Tortu, The Tree of Dathi, and the Branching Tree of Usnech, three of the Five Magic Trees whose fall in the year 665
AD
symbolized the triumph of Christianity over paganism, were ash-trees. A descendant of the Sacred Tree of Creevna, also an ash, was still standing at Killura in the nineteenth century; its wood was a charm against drowning, and emigrants to America after the Potato Famine carried it away with them piecemeal. In British folklore the ash is a tree of re-birth – Gilbert White describes in his
History
of Selborne
how naked children had formerly been passed through cleft pollard ashes before sunrise as a cure for rupture. The custom survived in remoter parts of England until 1830. The Druidical wand with a spiral decoration, part of a recent Anglesey find dating from the early first century
AD
, was of ash. The great ash Yygdrasill, sacred to Woden, or Wotan or Odin or Gwydion, has already been mentioned in the context of the Battle of the Trees; he used it as his steed. But he had taken the tree over from the Triple Goddess who, as the Three Norns of Scandinavian legend, dispensed justice under it. Poseidon retained his patronage of
horses but also became a god of seafarers when the Achaeans took to the sea; as Woden did when his people took to the sea. In ancient Wales and Ireland all oars and coracle-slats were made of ash; and so were the rods used for urging on horses, except where the deadly yew was preferred. The cruelty of the ash mentioned by Gwion lies in the harmfulness of its shade to grass or corn; the alder on the contrary is beneficial to crops grown in its shade. So also in Odin’s own Runic alphabet all the letters are formed from ash-twigs; as ash-roots strangle those of other forest trees. The ash is the tree of sea-power, or of the power resident in water; and the other name of Woden, ‘Yggr’, from which Ygdrasill is derived, is evidently connected with
hygra
,
the Greek for ‘sea’ (literally, ‘the wet element’). The third month is the month of floods and extends from February 18th to March 17th. In these first three months the nights are longer than the days, and the sun is regarded as still under the tutelage of Night. The Tyrrhenians on this account did not reckon them as part of the sacred year.

The fourth tree is the alder, the tree of Bran. In the Battle of the Trees the alder fought in the front line, which is an allusion to the letter F being one of the first five consonants of the Beth-Luis-Nion and the Boibel-Loth; and in the Irish Ossianic
Song
of
the
Forest
Trees
1
it is described as ‘the very battle-witch of all woods, tree that is hottest in the fight’. Though a poor fuel-tree, like the willow, poplar and chestnut, it is prized by charcoal-burners as yielding the best charcoal; its connexion with fire is shown in the
Romance
of
Branwen
when ‘Gwern’ (alder), Bran’s s
ister’s son, is burned in a bonfire; and in country districts of Ireland the crime of
felling a sacred alder is held to be visited with the burning down of one’s house. The alder is also proof against the corruptive power of water: its slightly gummy leaves resist the winter rains longer than those of any other deciduous tree and its timber resists decay indefinitely when used for water-conduits or piles. The Rialto at Venice is founded on alder piles, and so are several mediaeval cathedrals. The Roman architect Vitruvius mentions that alders were used as causeway piles in the Ravenna marshes.

The connexion of Bran with the alder in this sense is clearly brought out in the
Romance
of Branwen
where the swineherds (oracular priests) of King Matholwch of Ireland see a forest in the sea and cannot guess what it is. Branwen tells them that it is the fleet of Bran the Blessed come to avenge her. The ships are anchored off-shore and Bran wades through the shallows and brings his goods and people to land; afterwards he bridges the River Linon, though it has been protected with a magic charm, by lying down across the river and having hurdles laid over him. In other words, first a jetty, then a bridge was built on alder piles. It was said of Bran, ‘No house could contain him.’ The riddle ‘What can no house ever contain?’ has a simple answer: ‘The piles upon which it is built.’ For the earliest European houses were built on alder piles at the edge of lakes. In one sense the ‘singing head’ of Bran was the mummied, oracular head of a sacred king; in another it was the ‘head’ of the alder-tree – namely the topmost branch. Green alder-branches make good whistles and, according to my friend Ricardo Sicre y Cerda, the boys of Cerdaña in the Pyrenees have a traditional prayer in Catalan:

which is repeated while the bark is tapped with a piece of willow to loosen it from the wood. Berng (or Verng in the allied Majorcan language) is Bran again. The summons to Berng is made on behalf of the Goddess of the Willow. The use of the willow for tapping, instead of another piece of alder, suggests that such whistles were used by witches to conjure up destructive winds – especially from the North. But musical pipes with several stops can be made in the same way as the whistles, and the singing head of Bran in this sense will have been an alder-pipe. At Harlech, where the head sang for seven years, there is a mill-stream running past the Castle rock, a likely place for a sacred alder-grove. It is possible that Apollo’s legendary flaying of Marsyas the piper is reminiscent of the removal of the alder-bark from the wood in pipe-making.

The alder was also used in ancient Ireland for making milk pails and other dairy vessels: hence its poetical name in the
Book
of
Ballymote
,
Comet
lacht
a
–
‘guarding of milk’. This connexion of Bran-Cronos, the alder, with Rhea-Io, the white moon-cow is of importance. In Ireland, Io was called
Glas
Gabnach
,
‘the green stripper’, because though she yielded
milk in rivers she never had a calf. She had been stolen out of Spam by Gavida the flying dwarf-smith; made the circuit of all Ireland in one day, guarded by his seven sons (who presumably stood for the days of the week); and gave the name
Bothar-bó-finné
,
‘Track of the White Cow’, to the Galaxy. According to
The
Proceedings
of
the
Grand
Bardic
Academy
, she was killed by Guaire at the request of Seanchan Torpest’s wife, and according to Keating’ s
History
of
Ireland
,
was avenged in 528
AD
. King Diarmuid of All Ireland was killed by his eldest son for having murdered another sacred cow.

Bran’s connexion with the Western Ocean is proved by
Caer
Bran
,
the name of the most westerly hill in Britain, overlooking Land’s End.

Alder is rarely mentioned in Greek or Latin myth, having apparently been superseded as an oracular tree by the Delphic laurel. But the
Odyssey
and the
Aeneid
contain two important references to it. In the
Odyssey
, alder is the first named of the three trees of resurrection – white poplar and cypress are the two others – that formed the wood around the cave of Calypso, daughter of Atlas, in her Elysian island of Ogygia; in the wood nested chattering sea-crows (sacred to Bran in Britain) falcons and owls. This explains Virgil’s version of the metamorphosis of the sisters of the sun-hero Phaëthon: in the
Aeneid
he says that while bewailing their brother’s death they were converted, not into a poplar grove, as Euripides and Apollonius Rhodius relate, but into an alder thicket on the banks of the river Po – evidently this was another Elysian islet. The Greek word for alder,
clēthra,
is generally derived from
cleio,
‘I close’ or ‘I confine’. The explanation seems to be that the alder thickets confined the hero in the oracular island by growing around its shores; the oracular islands seem to have been originally river islands, not islands in the sea.

The alder was, and is, celebrated for yielding three fine dyes: red from its bark, green from its flowers, brown from its twigs: typifying fire, water and earth. In Cormac’s tenth-century
Glossary
of obsolete terms the alder is called
ro-eim
,
which is glossed as ‘that which reddens the face’; from which it may be deduced that the ‘crimson-stained heroes’ of the Welsh
Triads
,
who were sacred kings, were connected with Bran’s alder cult. One reason for the alder’s sanctity is that when it is felled the wood, at first white, seems to bleed crimson, as though it were a man. The green dye is associated in British folklore with fairies’ clothes: in so far as the fairies may be regarded as survivals of dispossessed early tribes, forced to take to hills and woods, the green of the clothes is explainable as protective colouring: foresters and outlaws also adopted it in mediaeval times. Its use seems to be very ancient. But principally the alder is the tree of fire, the power of fire to free the earth from water; and the alder-branch by which Bran was recognized at the
Câd
Goddeu
is a token of resurrection – its buds are set in a spiral. This spiral symbol is ante-diluvian: the earliest Sumerian shrines are ‘ghost-houses’, like those used in Uganda, and are
flanked by spiral posts.

The fourth month extends from March 18th, when the alder first blooms, to April 14th, and marks the drying up of the winter floods by the Spring Sun. It includes the Spring Equinox, when the days become longer than the nights and the Sun grows to manhood. As one can say poetically that the ash trees are the oars and coracle-slats that convey the Spirit of the Year through the floods to dry land, so one can say that the alders are the piles that lift his house out of the floods of winter. Fearn (Bran) appears in Greek mythology as King Phoroneus, ruler of the Peloponnese, who was worshipped as a hero at Argos which he is said to have founded. Hellanicus of Lesbos, a learned contemporary of Herodotus, makes him the father of Pelasgus, Iasus and Agenor, who divided his kingdom between them after his death: in other words, his worship at Argos was immemorially ancient. Pausanias, who went to Argos for his information, writes that Phoroneus was the husband of Cerdo (the White Goddess as Muse) and that the River-god Inachus fathered him on the nymph Melia (ash-tree). Since alder succeeds ash in the tree-calendar, and since alders grow by the riverside, this is a suitable pedigree. Pausanias clinches the identification of Phoroneus with Fearn by disregarding the Prometheus legend and making Phoroneus the inventor of fire. Hyginus gives his mother’s name as Argeia (‘dazzling white’), who is the White Goddess again. So Phoroneus, like Bran and all other sacred kings, was borne by, married to, and finally laid out by, the White Goddess: his layer-out was the Death-goddess Hera Argeia to whom he is said to have first offered sacrifices. Phoroneus, then, is Fearineus, the God of Spring to whom annual sacrifices were offered on the Cronian Mount at Olympia at the Spring equinox.
1
His singing head recalls that of Orpheus whose name is perhaps short for
Orephruoeis
‘growing on the river-bank’ i.e. ‘the alder’.

In parts of the Mediterranean the cornel or dogwood tree seems to have been used as a substitute for the alder. Its Latin name
cornus
comes from
cornix
, the crow sacred to Saturn or Bran which feeds on its red ‘cherries’; as according to Homer the swine of Circe also did. Ovid links it with the esculent oak as supplying men with food in the age of Saturn. Like the alder it yields a red dye, and was held sacred at Rome where the flight of
Romulus’s cornel-wood javelin determined the spot where the city was to be built. Its appropriateness to this month is that it is in white blossom by the middle of March.

The fifth tree is the willow, or osier, which in Greece was sacred to Hecate, Circe, Hera and Persephone, all Death aspects of the Triple Moon-goddess, and much worshipped by witches. As Culpeper says succinctly in his
Complete
Herbal
:
‘The Moon owns it.’ Its connexion with witches is so strong in Northern Europe that the words ‘witch’ and ‘wicked’ are derived from the same ancient word for ‘willow’, which also yields ‘wicker’. The ‘witch’s besom’ in the English countryside is still made of ash stake, birch twigs and osier binding: of birch twigs because at the expulsion of evil spirits some remain entangled in the besom; of ash stake as a protection against drowning – witches are made harmless if detached from their besoms and thrown into running water; of osier binding in honour of Hecate. The Druidical human sacrifices were offered at the full of the moon in wicker baskets, and funerary flints were knapped in willow-leaf shape. The willow (
helice
in Greek,
salix
in Latin) gave its name to Helicon, the abode of the Nine Muses, orgiastic priestesses of the Moon-goddess. It is likely that Poseidon preceded Apollo as the Leader of the Muses, as he did as guardian of the Delphic Oracle; for a Helicean Grove was still sacred to him in Classical times. According to Pliny, a willow tree grows outside the Cretan cave where Zeus was born; and, commenting on a series of coins from Cretan Gortyna, A. B. Cook in his
Zeus
suggests that Europë who is there shown seated in a willow tree, osier-basket in hand, and made love to by an eagle, is not only Eur-opë, she of the broad face’, i. e. the Full Moon, but Eu-rope, ‘she of the flourishing willow-withies’ – alias Helice, sister of Amalthea. The wearing of the willow in the hat as a sign of the rejected lover seems to be originally a charm against the Moon-goddess’s jealousy. The willow is sacred to her for many reasons: it is the tree that loves water most, and the Moon-goddess is the giver of dew and moisture generally; its leaves and bark, the source of salicylic acid, are sovereign against rheumatic cramps formerly thought to be caused by witchcraft. The Goddess’s prime ogiastic bird, the wryneck
1
, or snake bird, or cuckoo’s mate – a Spring
migrant which hisses like a snake, lies flat along a bough, erects its crest when angry, writhes its neck about, lays white eggs, eats ants, and has v-markings on its feathers like those on the scales of oracular serpents in Ancient Greece – always nests in willow-trees. Moreover, the
liknos
,
or basket-sieve anciently used for winnowing corn, was made from willow; it was in winnowing-sieves of this sort, ‘riddles’, that the North Berwick witches confessed to King James I that they went to sea on their witches’ sabbaths. A famous Greek picture by Polygnotus at Delphi represented Orpheus as receiving the gift of mystic eloquence by touching willow-trees in a grove of Persephone; compare the injunction in
The
Song
of
the
Forest
Trees
:
‘Burn not the willow, a tree sacred to poets.’ The willow is the tree of enchantment and is the fifth tree of the year; five (V) was the number sacred to the Roman Moon-goddess Minerva. The month extends from April 15th to May 12th, and May Day, famous for its orgiastic revels and its magic dew, falls in the middle. It is possible that the carrying of sallow-willow branches on Palm Sunday, a variable feast which usually falls early in April, is a custom that properly belongs to the beginning of the willow month.