The White Goddess (46 page)

An Assyrian sculpture published by Felix Lajard in his
Sur
la
Culte
de
Mithra
(1847), shows the year as a thirteen-branched tree. The tree has five bands around the trunk and the sceptre-like branches are arranged six on each side, one at the summit. Here evidently the Eastern Mediterranean agricultural year, beginning in the autumn, has been related to the solar year beginning at the Winter solstice. For there is a small ball, representing a new solar year, suspended above the last three branches; and of the two rampant goats which act as supporters to the tree device, the one on the right, which has turned his head so that his single horn forms a crescent moon, rests a forefoot on the uppermost of these last three branches; while the other goat, a she-goat turning her head in the opposite direction so that her horn forms a decrescent moon, is claiming the first three branches. She has a full udder, appropriate to this season, because the first kids are dropped about the winter solstice. A boat-like new moon swims above the tree, and a group of seven stars, the seventh very much brighter than the others, is placed beside the she-goat; which proves her to be Amalthea, mother of the horned Dionysus. The he-goat is an Assyrian counterpart of Azazel, the scape-goat sacrificed by the Hebrews at the beginning of the agricultural year. The five bands on the tree, of which one is at the base of the trunk, another at the top, are the five stations of the year; in a Babylonian tree of the year, published in the same book, they are symbolized by five fronds.

In the light of this knowledge we can re-examine the diagram of the hand used as a signalling keyboard by the Druids and understand the puzzling traditional names of the four fingers – ‘fore-finger’, ‘fool’s finger’, ‘leech, or physic-finger’ and ‘auricular or ear-finger’ – in terms of the mythic value of the letters contained on them.

 

The slight difference in order of letters between the Beth-Luis-Nion and the Boibel-Loth does not affect the argument; though I believe that the system was based on the tree meanings of the Beth-Luis-Nion, because in one of the ancient tales a really dark night is described by a poet as ‘one in which a man could not distinguish oak-leaf from hazel, nor study the five fingers of his own stretched-out hand’. The fore-finger has Duir on it, the oak-god who is the foremost of the trees, surmounted by Luis, the rowan, a charm against lightning; the fool’s-finger has Tinne on it, the holly-king, or green knight, who appears in the old English ‘Christmas Play’, a survival of the Saturnalia, as the Fool who is beheaded but rises up again unhurt; the leech-finger has Coll on it, the sage hazel, who is the master-physician; the ear-finger – in French
doigt
auriculaire
– is based on the two death-letters Ruis and Idho and therefore has oracular power; as they still say in France of a person who gets information from a mysterious source:
‘Son
petit
doigt
le
lui
dit.’
‘Auricular finger’ is usually explained as ‘the finger most easily put into one’s ear-hole’, but the earliest sense of ‘auricular’ is ‘secretly whispered in the ear’. The auricular finger was probably used by the Gallic and British Druids for stopping the ear as an aid to inspiration. Its divinatory character was established early enough in Western Europe for it to appear in a number of folk tales concerning the loss of a little finger, or a little toe, by an ogre’s daughter; the hero of the story finds it and it enables him to win the ogre’s permission to marry the daughter. These stories occur in Brittany, Lorraine, the West Highlands, Viscaya in Spain, and Denmark. In the
Romance
of
Taliesin
it is the little finger of Elphin’s wife that is said to have been magically cut off.

The ‘ring-finger’ is another name for the leech-finger. The Romans and Greeks used the thumb, sacred to Venus, for their seal-rings which
were usually made of iron; these were prophylactic charms to maintain their virility, the thumb being a synonym for the phallus and iron a compliment to Venus’s husband, the Smith-god Vulcan. But for their wedding rings they used the fourth finger of the left hand. This custom was explained by Macrobius, who wrote in the fifth century
AD
, on two grounds: that this was the finger in least use of the ten and the least capable of individual movement, therefore the safest to wear precious jewels upon; and (here quoting the authority of the first-century writer Appian) that in this finger an artery runs direct to the heart. The artery to the heart is an astrological, rather than an anatomical, observation – though a small vein, which the ancients could not distinguish from an artery, does show at the bottom joint – because in the late Classical apportionment of the human body to planetary influences it is Apollo, Sun-god and healer, who rules the heart, as Venus rules the kidneys; Mercury, the lungs; Diana (Moon), the head – and so on. The fourth finger is thus used as the ring-finger because the prophylactic wedding-ring, made of gold in honour of Apollo, controls the heart which is the seat of enduring love. The artery legend is also quoted in a medical context by the sixteenth-century German humanist Levinus Lemnius who records that ‘the ancient physicians from whom this finger derives its name of “physic-finger” used to mix their medicaments and potions with it, on the theory that no poison can adhere even to its extreme tip without communicating itself directly to the heart.’

Precisely the same system survives in popular cheiromancy, which is late Classical in origin. Palmists give the fore-finger to Jupiter the oak-god; the middle finger to Saturn the Christmas Fool; the fourth finger (in German also called the ‘gold finger’) to the Sun – Apollo the Sun-god having latterly become the patron of physicians and god of wisdom generally; and the little finger to Mercury in his aspect of Conductor of Dead Souls. The Moon has the heel of the palm, being the Underworld-goddess from whom Mercury derives his inspiration; Venus the thumb (as a phallic emblem); and Mars the centre of the hand, in which the weapon is gripped – his initial M is formed by the principal lines of the hand. A bronze votive hand from Phrygia dedicated to Zeus Sabazius – a rustic Jupiter – contains a little figure in Phrygian cap and breeches, with his feet resting on a ram’s head holding up thumb, fore-finger and middle finger in what is called the Latin Blessing – Venus’s thumb for increase, Jupiter’s fore-finger for fortunate guidance, Saturn’s middle finger for rain. He is imitating the posture of the hand in which he is held, and on the fore-finger is perched Jupiter’s eagle. It was not so much a blessing as a propitiatory gesture used before embarking on a speech or recital; Greek and Latin orators never omitted it. The Devil’s blessing, still used by the Frisian Islanders, consists in raising the fore-finger and ear-finger of the right hand, with the other fingers and the thumb folded against the palm.
This is an invocation to the Horned God of the witches, with his lucky right horn and his unlucky left expressing his powers for good and evil.

The Apollo-finger is connected with the poplar in the story of the sun-god Phaëthon whose sisters wept for him when he died: they were metamorphosed into poplars and their tears into amber, sacred to Apollo.

The Saturn-finger is connected with the heather in the story of Osiris, the Egyptian Saturn. Osiris was enclosed in a heather tree, and the lowest consonant on the finger, the reed, was sacred to Osiris as King of Egypt. According to the well-informed fourteenth-century antiquarian Richard of Cirencester, rich Southern Britons of the third century
AD
wore gold rings on the fool’s finger; in the B.L.F. alphabet this finger belonged to Bran, whom they must by then have learned from the Romans to identify with Osiris. To wear a ring on the fool’s finger naturally expressed a hope of resurrection.

The thumb of Venus is connected with the palm-tree by its sacredness to the orgiastic goddess Isis, Latona or Lat. Lat was the mother of Nabatean Dusares the vine-god, worshipped in Egypt, and the lowest consonant on the thumb was the vine.

The Jupiter-finger is connected with the furze, or gorse, by the Spring gorse-fires burned in his honour as god of shepherds.

The connexion of the Mercury-finger with the yew is made by Mercury’s conducting of souls to the place presided over by the death-goddess Hecate,
alias
his mother Maia, to whom the yew was sacred.

It is fitting that the most sensitive part of the hand, the tip of the fore finger, should belong to Luis as the diviner. But all the finger-tip trees –Luis the rowan, Nion the ash, Fearn the alder and Saille the willow – were used in divination. This perhaps throws light on an Irish poetic rite called the
Dichetal
do
Chennaib
(‘recital from the finger-ends’), of which the ollave was required to be a master, and which Dr. Joyce describes as ‘the utterance of an extempore prophecy or poem that seems to have been accomplished with the aid of a mnemonic contrivance of some sort in which the fingers played a principal part’. St. Patrick, while abolishing two other prophetic rites, the
Imbas
Forasnai
,
‘palm-knowledge of enlightenment’, and another like it, because they involved preliminary sacrifice to demons, permitted the ‘recital from the finger ends’ because it did not. In Cormac’s
Glossary
the
Dichetal
do
Chennaib
is explained:

It is less likely that a mnemonic trick involving the use of the finger
alphabet was used than that the poets induced a poetic trance by treating their finger-tips as oracular agents; since the
Dichetal
do
Chennaib
is always mentioned with the other two divinatory rites as of the same general nature.

[At this point my own finger-tips began to itch and when I gave them a pen to hold they reconstructed the original incantation as follows: