The White Goddess (76 page)

Dionysus Sabazius was the original Jehovah of the Passover; and Plutarch also identifies the Jehovah of the Feast of Tabernacles with Dionysus Liber, or Lusios (‘he who frees from guilt’), the Wine-god, by suggesting that the word ‘Levite’ is formed from
Lusios
;
and he says that the Jews abstain from swine’s flesh because their Dionysus is also Adonis, who was killed by a boar. The rituals of Jehovah and Dionysus, as Plutarch pointed out, corresponded closely: mysteries of barley-sheaves and new wine, torch dances until cock-crow, libations, animal sacrifices, religious ecstasy. It also appears that the promiscuous love-making of the Canaanite rites, though severely punished at Jerusalem in post-exilic times, still survived among the peasantry who came up for the Tabernacles. The Temple priests in the time of Jesus admitted the original nature of the Feast, while declaring that its nature had changed, by announcing at the close: ‘Our forefathers in this place turned their backs on the Sanctuary of God and their faces to the East, adoring the Sun; but we turn to God.’ For the Sun represented the immortal part of Dionysus; the barley and the vine his mortal part.

There is even numismatic evidence for the identification of Jehovah and Dionysus: a silver coin of the fifth century
BC
, (which appears in G. F. Hill’s
Catalogue
of
the
Greek
Coins
of
Palestine
)
found near Gaza with on the obverse a bearded head of Dionysus type and on the reverse a bearded figure in a winged chariot, designated in Hebrew characters JHWH – Jehovah. This is not, of course, by any means the whole story of Jehovah, whose affinity with other gods, especially Cronos (Bran), has already been mentioned. It is easiest perhaps to write about him in terms of days of the week. His first pictorial appearance is at the copper-workings of Ras-Shamra in Sinai in a carving of about the sixteenth century
BC
. He is then Elath-Iahu a Kenite Smith-god, the God of Wednesday, presumably the lover of Baalith the local Aphrodite and Goddess of Friday. Later in his theophanies at Moreh, Hebron and Ophrah he is the terebinth-god Bel, the God of Thursday. The story of his defeat of the prophets of Carmel concerns the conquest of his Bel aspect by Cronos the God of Saturday in the person of Elijah. Bel and Cronos are always appearing in opposition, Bel being Beli and Cronos, Bran; as has been shown. ‘When Israel was in Egypt’, Jehovah was Set, the God of Sunday. At the
Jerusalem feast of Tabernacles, on the Day of Willows, he was the God of Monday. His name El, connected with the scarlet oak, proves him to have been also the God of Tuesday. Thus the universality claimed for him by the Pharisees and typified by the Menorah, the seven-branched candlestick, rests on a solid enough mythological basis.

Further, the name Iahu is far older than the sixteenth century
BC
and of wide distribution. It occurs in Egypt during the Sixth Dynasty (middle of the third millennium
BC
) as a title of the God Set: and is recorded in Deimel’s Akkadian-Sumerian Glossary as a name for Isis. It also seems to be the origin of the Greek name Iacchus, a title of the shape-shifting Dionysus Lusios in the Cretan mysteries. Thus although I.A.U. are the vowels of the three-season year of Birth, Consummation and Death – with Death put first because in the Eastern Mediterranean the agricultural year begins in the I season – they seem to be derived from a name that was in existence long before any alphabet was formed, the components of which are IA and HU. ‘la’ means ‘Exalted’ in Sumerian and ‘Hu’ means ‘Dove’; the Egyptian hieroglyph ‘Hu’ is also a dove. The Moon-goddess of Asianic Palestine was worshipped with doves, like her counterparts of Egyptian Thebes, Dodona, Hierapolis, Crete and Cyprus. But she was also worshipped as a long-horned cow; Hathor, or Isis, or Ashtaroth Karnaim. Isis is an onomatopoeic Asianic word,
Ish-ish,
meaning ‘She who weeps’, because the Moon was held to scatter dew and because Isis, the pre-Christian original of the
Mater
Dolorosa,
mourned for Osiris when Set killed him. She was said to be the white, or, according to Moschus, the golden Moon-cow Io who had settled down in Egypt after long wanderings from Argos. The
o
in Io’s name is an
omega,
which is a common Greek variant of
alpha.

Ia-Hu therefore seems to be a combination of
Ia,
‘the Exalted One’, the Moon-goddess as Cow, and
Hu,
the same goddess as Dove. We know from Plutarch that at the mid-winter solstice mysteries Isis, as the golden Moon-cow, circled the coffin of Osiris seven times in commemoration of the seven months from solstice to solstice; and we know also that the climax of the orgiastic oak-cult with which the Dove-goddess was concerned came at the summer solstice. Thus Ia-Hu stands for the Moon-goddess as ruler of the whole course of the solar year. This was a proud title and Set seems to have claimed it for himself when his ass-eared sceptre became the Egyptian symbol of royalty. But the Child Horus, the reincarnation of Osiris, overcomes Set yearly and it is a commonplace that conquering kings their titles take from the foes they captive make. Thus Horus was Iahu also, and his counterparts the Cretan Dionysus and Canaanite Bel became respectively IACCHUS and (in an Egyptian record) IAHU-BEL. The Welsh god Hu Gadarn and the Guernsey god Hou, or Har Hou, are likely to be the same deity: that Hou was an Oak-god is suggested by the same formula having been used in his mediaeval
rites as in those of the Basque Oak-god Janicot, who is Janus.

Iahu as a title of Jehovah similarly marks him out as a ruler of the solar year, probably a transcendental combination of Set, Osiris and Horus (alias Egli-Iahu, the Calf Iahu). But the Hu syllable of his name has come to have great importance in Christianity: for when at Jesus’s lustration by John the Baptist the Coronation Psalm was chanted and a Dove descended, this must be read as the
ka,
or royal double, that descended on him in a stream of light from his father Iahu – as it descended on the Pharaohs at their coronation from their father the Sun-god Ra, in the form of a hawk.

No mention has been made so far of the religious meaning of the cedar, which figures so prominently in the Old Testament as the loftiest and grandest of all trees: ‘even the cedars of Libanus which Thou hast planted.’ It was used by Solomon with the ‘choice fir’ in the building of the three contiguous temples which he raised in honour of a Trinity consisting of Jehovah and two Goddesses. The identity of the second of these temples is disguised by Pharisee editors as ‘the House of the Forest of Lebanon’, meaning the temple of the Mountain-goddess, the Love and Battle goddess of Midsummer; that of the third is disguised as ‘The House of Pharaoh’s daughter’, who is shown by the story of Moses to have been the Birth-goddess of the Winter Solstice. Since we know that the fir was sacred to the Birth-goddess and that the floor of the Temple was of fir planking, it follows that the cedar of the pillars and beams was sacred to the Love-and-Battle goddess of Mount Lebanon, Astarte or Anatha. Cedar stood, in fact, for the vowel U, of which the tree in Byblos and Western Europe was the Heather. The only other timber used in these Temples was olive, which as has been already mentioned in the context of Hercules and the Dactyls stood for the Spring Sun – Jehovah as Marduk,
alias
Paeonian Apollo.

Cedar is also coupled with hyssop (probably the wild-caper tree which grows very green in the crannies of rocks or walls, in Egypt and Palestine) in the two most primitive sacrifices of the Old Testament: the red heifer sacrifice of
Numbers,
XIX,
6
and the ‘sparrow’ sacrifice of
Leviticus,
XIV,
4,
both originally offered to a goddess not a god. The hyssop was evidently a Canaanite equivalent of the mistletoe, the tree of the Day of Liberation, which it resembles by growing sometimes in the fissures of old trees where there is leaf mould to keep it alive; so that the mythological conjunction of cedar and hyssop means the whole course of the sun from its infancy at the winter solstice to its prime at the summer solstice, and back again. Thus when it is recorded in
I Kings,
IV,
33
:

this is as much as to say that he knew all the mystic lore of the tree-alphabet. But hyssop was the tree of the winter solstice, IA: and the cedar was the tree of the summer solstice, HU; so Solomon is credited with knowing the Divine Name of which IAHU was the permissible synonym.

JHWH’s Massoretic title, supposedly the oldest, was Q’re Adonai (‘Lord Q’re’) – though some Hebrew scholars prefer to interpret the words as meaning: ‘Read Adonai’, i.e. ‘give the consonants of JHWH the same vowels as in “Adonai”.’ Q’re sounds Cretan. The Carians, Lydians and Mysians, who were of Cretan stock, had a common shrine of Zeus Carios at Mylassa in Caria, a god whom their cousins the Tyrrhenians took to Italy as Karu, and who is also Carys, the founder of Megara. The Quirites of Rome came from a Sabine town Qures, which apparently bore his name or that of his mother Juno Quiritis, mentioned by Plutarch; and the Curetes of Delos, Chalcis, Aetolia and Crete are perhaps also called after him, though to the Greeks, who could make nothing of the barbarous word
Q’re,
‘Curetes’ meant boys who had sacrificed their hair-trimmings (
Kourai
)
to the god. These Curetes are identified by Pausanias with the Children of Anax, the ten-cubit-high Son of Uranus. Anax was a Carian who ruled Miletus before its conquest by the Milesians of Crete, gave it the name of Anactoria, and was the father of the ten-cubit-high Asterius. Pausanias connects Anax with the Pelasgian mysteries of Samothrace. The Children of Anax appear in the Bible as the tall people of Hebron whom Caleb expelled and who subsequently lived in Gaza and neighbouring cities. In other words, they were Asianic ‘People of the Sea’ who worshipped the God Q’re, or (as he was called in Syria in the time of Thothmes, a Pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom) ‘the Great God Ker’. His chief Carian title was Panemerios (‘of the live-long day’) – at least this was the Greek version of a Carian original -and he seems to have been a god of the solar year who, like Samson of Tyre or Nisus of Nisa (Megara), was annually shorn of his hair and power by the Moon-goddess; his male adorants dedicating their forelocks to him in mourning, at a festival called the Comyria. That Jehovah as
Q’re
continued to have hair sacrificed to him, as to his Carian counterpart, until the reformation of his religion during the Exile is indicated by the Deuteronomic injunction ‘Ye shall not make a baldness between your eyes for the dead’. The radical letters of his name – Q, apple, or quince or
ethrog,
and R, myrtle – were represented in the
lulab,
or thyrsus, used at the Feast of Tabernacles as a reminder of his annual death and translation to Elysium. This moon-festival, indeed, initiated the season of the year which runs from Q to R.

But Q’re probably derived his title from his Moon mother – later, in Greece, his twin-sister – the White Goddess Artemis Caryatis (‘of the nut-tree’) whose most famous temple was at Caryae in Laconia. She was the goddess of healing and inspiration, served by Caryatid priestesses and
is to be identified with the nymph Phyllis
1
who, in the Thesean Age, was metamorphosed into an almond tree – Phyllis may be a Greek variant of Belili. At any rate, he became for a time Nabu the Wise God of Wednesday, represented by the almond-tree stem of the seven-branched
Menorah
;
and it was particularly to him that Job referred his question, ‘Where shall Wisdom be found?’, on the ground that it was he who measured, weighed out and enunciated the powers controlled by his six fellow-deities; such as Sin, Monday’s Rain-god; Bel, Thursday’s god of Thunder and Lightning; and Ninib, Saturday’s god of Repose, controller of the Chthonian Winds. Artemis Caryatis may be identified with Carmenta, the Muse mother of Evander the Arcadian, who adapted the Pelasgian alphabet to the Latin. Her name, which Plutarch in his
Roman
Questions
absurdly derives from
car
ens
mente,
‘out of her mind’ seems to be compounded of
Car
and
Menta
:
the first syllable standing for Q’re, the second presumably for
Mante
‘the revealer’. Pliny preserves the tradition that ‘Car, after whom Caria takes its name, invented augury’; this Car, evidently Thothmes’s Great God Ker, is mentioned by Herodotus as brother to Lydus and Mysus, the eponymous ancestors of the Lydians and Mysians. Another Car, the son of Phoroneus, and brother of Pelasgus, Europë and Agenor, is said by Pausanias to have been an early king of Megara after whom the acropolis of the city was named. Car’s sex seems to have been changed in both cases: for the Carians, Mysians and Lydians were matrilinear, and the Megarean acropolis must have been called after the White Goddess who ruled all important hills and mountains. The Goddess Car seems also to have given the river Inachus its original name, Carmanor, before Inachus the father of Phoroneus, as Plutarch reports, went mad and leapt into it.

At this point we can reconsider the Myvyrian account of the
Battle
of
the
Trees
and suggest a textual emendation which makes better sense of it: