The White Goddess (54 page)

Evander was banished from Arcadia because he had killed his father; and this implies the supersession of the Triple Goddess, Carmenta or Thetis, by Olympian Zeus. Thetis was the Aeolian Greek name for Carmenta, at whose prompting Evander had struck the blow; and for a king to kill his father (or kingly predecessor) at the prompting of his Goddess mother was common in Italy and Greece at that period. The traditional reason for Partholan’s Danaan invasion of Ireland and Brutus’s Dardanian invasion of Britain is the same: both were banished for parricide. The date, 1243
BC
, corresponds with that given by the later Greeks for the Achaean invasion, namely 1250
BC
. This was not the original invasion but, apparently, a southward movement, under Dorian pressure, of
Achaeans settled in North-western Greece. The story of Pelias and Neleus, sons of Poseidon who dispossessed the Minyans of Iolcos in Thessaly and Pylos in the Western Peloponnese, refers to this invasion which resulted in the institution of Olympianism.

But has not the story of the invention of the pre-Cadmean alphabet of Palamedes, which was taken to Italy by Evander the Arcadian before the Dorian invasion of Greece, been lying concealed all this time in the confusingly iconotropic myth of Perseus and the Gorgon Medusa? Cannot the Palamedes story be recovered intact by the simple method of restoring the Perseus myth to iconographic form, and then re-interpreting the iconographs which compose it?

The myth is that Perseus was sent to cut off the head of the snaky-locked Gorgon Medusa, a rival of the Goddess Athene, whose baleful look turned men into stone; and that he could not accomplish the task until he had gone to the three Graeae, ‘Grey Ones’, the three old sisters of the Gorgons who had only one eye and one tooth between them, and by stealing eye and tooth had blackmailed them into telling him where the grove of the three nymphs was to be found. From the three nymphs he then obtained winged sandals like those of Hermes, a bag to put the Gorgon’s head into, and a helmet of invisibility. Hermes also kindly gave him a sickle; and Athene gave him a mirror and showed him a picture of Medusa so that he would recognize her. He threw the tooth of the Three Grey Ones, and some say the eye also, into Lake Triton, to break their power, and flew on to Tartessus where the Gorgons lived in a grove on the borders of the ocean; there he cut off the sleeping Medusa’s head with the sickle, first looking into the mirror so that the petrifying charm should be broken, thrust the head into his bag, and flew home pursued by other Gorgons.

The three Nymphs must be understood as the Three Graces, that is to say, the Triple Love-Goddess. The Graeae were also known as the Phorcides, which means the daughters of Phorcus, or Orcus, and according to the Scholiast on Aeschylus had the form of swans – which is probably an error for cranes, due to a misreading of a sacred picture, since cranes and swans, equally sacred birds, are alike in flying in V-formation. They were, in fact, the Three Fates. Phorcus, or Orcus, became a synonym for the Underworld; it is the same word as
porcus
,
a pig, the beast sacred to the Death-goddess, and perhaps as
Parcae
,
a title of the Three Fates, usually called Moirae, ‘the distributors’.
Orc
is ‘pig’ in Irish; hence the
Or
cades
,
or
Orkneys
,
abodes of the Death-goddess. Phorcus was also reputedly the father of the Gorgon Medusa, whom the Argives in Pausanias’s day described as a beautiful Libyan queen decapitated by their ancestor Perseus after a battle with her armies, and who may therefore be identified with the Libyan snake-goddess Lamia (Neith) whom Zeus betrayed and who afterwards killed children.

Imagine the pictures on a vase. First, a naked young man cautiously approaching three shrouded women of whom the central one presents him with an eye and a tooth; the other two point upwards to three cranes flying in a V-formation from right to left. Next, the same young man, wearing winged sandals and holding a sickle, stands pensively under a willow tree. (Willows are sacred to the Goddess, and cranes breed in willow groves.) Next, another group of three beautiful young women sit side by side in a grove with the same young man standing before them. Above them three cranes fly in the reverse direction. One presents him with winged sandals, another with a bag, the third with a winged helmet. Next, various sea-monsters are shown and a helmeted Sea-goddess, with a trident, holding a mirror in which a Gorgon’s face is reflected; and the young man is seen flying, bag and sickle in hand, towards a grove with his head turned to look at the mirror. From the bag peeps out the Gorgon’s head. The tooth and eye are painted, enlarged, on either side of him, so that he seems to have thrown them away. He is followed by three menacing winged women with Gorgon faces.

This completes the pictures on the vase and one comes again to the first group.

The myth in its familiar form, like that of Zeus’s betrayal of Lamia, is descriptive of the breaking of the Argive Triple Goddess’s power by the first wave of Achaeans, figured as Perseus, ‘the destroyer’. But the original meaning of the iconographs seems to be this: Mercury, or Hermes, or Car, or Palamedes, or Thoth, or whatever his original name was, is given poetic sight by the Shrouded Ones (his mother Carmenta, or Maia, or Danaë, or Phorcis, or Medusa, or whatever her original name was, in her prophetic aspect of the Three Fates) and the power to take omens from the flight of birds; also the power to understand the alphabetic secret represented by the cranes. The tooth was a divinatory instrument, like the one under which Fionn used to put his thumb – after eating the salmon of knowledge – whenever he needed magical counsel. Carmenta has invented the alphabet, but is assigning the thirteen consonants to her son, while keeping the five vowels sacred to herself. He goes off with his sickle, which is moon-shaped in her honour, like the sickle which the Gallic Arch-Druid subsequently used for cutting mistletoe; and will presently cut the first alphabet twig from the grove; in front of which the Goddess, unshrouded now, and playing the nymph not the crone, is discovered sitting in gracious trinity. She gives him as his regalia a winged helmet and winged sandals, symbolizing the swiftness of poetic thought, and a bag in which to keep his letters well hidden.

Next, she is revealed as Athene, the Goddess of Wisdom, who was born on the shores of Lake Triton in Libya and seems to have been originally, before her monstrous rebirth from Father Zeus’s head, the Libyan Triple Goddess Neith, whom the Greeks called Lamia, or Libya. Peeping
from his bag there is now a Gorgon’s head, which is merely an ugly mask assumed by priestesses on ceremonial occasions to frighten away trespassers; at the same time they made hissing noises, which accounts for Medusa’s snake locks. There never was a real Gorgon (as J. E. Harrison was the first to point out); there was only a prophylactic ugly face formalized into a mask. The ugly face at the mouth of the bag symbolizes that the secrets of the alphabet, which are the real contents, are not to be divulged or misused. A Gorgon’s mask was similarly put on the doors of all ovens and kilns in ancient Greece to frighten away the bogeys (and inquisitive children) who might spoil the baking. The winged ‘Gorgons’ in this picture are escorting, not pursuing, Mercury: they are the Triple Goddess again who, by wearing these ritual masks, is protecting him from profane eyes. She is also shown on the earth holding out her mirror with a Gorgon’s face reflected in it, to protect him in his poetic flight. He is taking the bag to Tartessus, the Aegean colony on the Guadalquivir; whence presumably the Milesians would carry it to Ireland. Gades, now Cadiz, the principal city of Tartessus, is said by the Augustan historian Velleius Paterculus to have been founded in 1100
BC
, thirteen years before the foundation of Utica in North Africa. Perseus’ flight was displayed in gold and silver inlay on the Shield of Hercules, as extravagantly described by Hesiod; who places it between a scene of the Muses singing to a lyre near a dolphin-haunted sea, and one of the Three Fates standing outside a populous seven-gated city. If this city is his own seven-gated Thebes, then the icon which Hesiod has misread is a Boeotian variant of the Mercury myth, and the hero with the tasselled alphabet-bag and the attendant Gorgons is Cadmus the Theban.

Mercury arrived safely at Tartessus, to judge from a cryptic remark by Pausanias (
I
, 35, 8) that ‘there is a tree at Gades that takes diverse forms’, which seems to refer to the tree-alphabet. Gades (Cadiz) is built on Leon, an island of Tartessus; the older city was on the western shore and included a famous temple of Cronos mentioned by Strabo. It is likely that the island was once, like Pharos, both a sepulchral island and a trading depôt. Pherecydes guessed that it was the original ‘Red Island’, Erytheia, over which three-bodied Geryon ruled, but on the insufficient ground that the pasture there was very rich and that Hercules had an ancient shrine on the eastern shore. Pausanias (
X
,
4, 6) records the more plausible legend that Leon was originally owned by the Giant Tityus who, as will be shown in Chapter Sixteen, was really Cronos – the god of the middle, or fool’s finger, consigned to Tartarus by Zeus. (Titias whom Hercules killed and Tityus whom Zeus killed are doublets.)

The shrine of Hercules seems to have been set up by the colonists of 1100
BC
, some four hundred years before Phoenician colonists came there from Tyre, having been ordered by an oracle to settle near the Pillars of Hercules. The Phoenicians subsequently worshipped Cronos as Moloch
and Hercules as Melkarth. Strabo quotes Poseidonius for holding that the Pillars of Hercules were not, as was vulgarly supposed, the two heights of Gibraltar and Ceuta, but two pillars set up before his shrine; and I have suggested in my
King
Jesus
(Chapter XVI) that such columns were connected with the secret of the Pelasgian alphabet. So it is likely that the pre-Phoenician Hercules of Tartessus was Palamedes, or the lion-skinned God Ogmios: whom the Irish credited with the invention of the alphabet that they ‘had out of Spain’ and whom Gwion, in his Elegy on ‘Ercwlf’, celebrates as a planter of alphabetic pillars. The people of Tartessus were famous in Classical times for the respect they paid to old men, and Ogmios according to Lucian was represented as an aged Hercules. That the Gorgons lived in a grove at Tartessus can mean only that they had an alphabetic secret to guard. This Ogmian Hercules was also worshipped by the early Latins. King Juba II of Mauretania, who was also an honorary
duumvir
of Gades, is quoted by Plutarch (
Roman
Questions
59) as his authority for saying that Hercules and the Muses once shared an altar because he had taught Evander’s people the alphabet. This tallies with Hyginus’s account of how Carmenta, the Triple Muse, taught Evander, and Dionysus Periergetes’ account of how she ‘gave oracles to Hercules’.

Isidore, Archbishop of Seville, who died in 636
AD
, wrote an encyclopaedic work called
Twenty
Books
Concerning
Origins
or
Etymologies,
based on a wide, if uncritical, study of Christian and pagan literature, which is the most valuable repository of Iberian tradition extant. In it he treats of the invention of the alphabet. He does not present Palamedes or Hercules or Ogma or Mercury or Cadmus as the original benefactor, but the Goddess herself and names Greece as the land of origin: 

Inachus, a river-god and legendary king of Argos, was the father both of the Goddess Io, who became Isis when she reached Egypt, and of the hero Phoroneus, founder of the Pelasgian race, who has been already identified with the God Bran, alias Cronos. Isidore was a compatriot of Hyginus (who reported the legend of Mercury’s return to Greece from Egypt with the Pelasgian alphabet); he distinguishes the Egyptian alphabet both from the hieroglyphic and demotic scripts, and ascribes the invention of the ordinary Greek alphabet to the Phoenicians.

What material Mercury’s bag was made of, can be discovered in the parallel myth of Manannan, son of Lyr, a Goidelic Sun-hero, predecessor of Fionn and Cuchulain, who carried the Treasures of the Sea (i.e., the
alphabet secret of the Peoples of the Sea) in a bag made of the skin of a crane; and in the myth of Mider, a Goidelic Underworld-god, corresponding with the British Arawn (‘Eloquence’) King of Annwm, who lived in a castle in Manannan’s Isle of Man with three cranes at his gate whose duty was to warn off travellers, croaking out: ‘Do not enter – keep away – pass by!’ Perseus’s bag must have been a crane-bag, for the crane was sacred to Athene and to Artemis, her counterpart at Ephesus, as well as being the inspiration for Hermes’s invention of letters. The flying Gorgons, then, are cranes with Gorgon-faces,
1
and watch over the secrets of the crane-bag, itself protected by a Gorgon head. It is not known what sort of a dance the Crane Dance was that, according to Plutarch, Theseus introduced into Delos except that it was performed around a horned altar and represented the circles that coiled and uncoiled in the Labyrinth. My guess is that it imitated the fluttering love-dance of courting cranes, and that each movement consisted of nine steps and a leap. As Polwart says in his
Fly
ting
with
Montgomery
(1605):