The White Goddess (80 page)

‘The usual one makes him a son of the nymph Dryope by Hermes.’

‘What does that convey to you?’

‘I have never considered. “Dryope” means a woodpecker of the sort that nests in oaks and makes an extraordinary noise with its bill in the cracks of trees, and climbs spirally up the trunk. It has a barbed tongue and portends rain, as the dolphin and porpoise portend storms by their frisking. And the nymph Dryope is connected with the cult of Hylas, a Phrygian form of Hercules who dies ceremonially every year. And Hermes – he’s the prime phallic god, and also the god of eloquence, and his erotic statues are usually carved from an oak.’

‘The tree of shepherds, the tree of Hercules, the tree of Zeus and Jupiter. But Pan, as the son of an oak-woodpecker, is hatched from an egg.’

‘Hold hard,’ said Paulus. ‘I remember something to the point. Our Latin god Faunus, who is identical with Pan, the god of shepherds, is said to have been a King of Latium who entertained Evander on his arrival. And Faunus was the son of Picus, which is Latin for woodpecker. Evidently another Pelopian tribe had reached Latium from the Black Sea before either Evander or Aeneas. Faunus is worshipped in sacred groves, where he gives oracles; chiefly by voices heard in sleep while the visitant lies on a sacred fleece.’

‘Which establishes the mythical connexion between Pan, the oak, the woodpecker, and sheep. I have read another legend of his birth, too. He is said to have been the son of Penelope, Ulysses’ wife, by Hermes who visited her in the form of a ram. A ram, not a goat. This is odd, because both Arcadian Pan and his Italian counterpart Faunus have goat legs and body. I think I see how that comes about. Pallas the Titan, the royal sea-beast, was the son of Crios (the Ram). This means that the Pelopian settlers from Enete formed an alliance with the primitive Arcadians who worshipped Hermes the Ram, and acknowledged him as the father of their sea-beast King Pallas. Likewise the Aegeans – the goat-tribe – formed an alliance with the same Arcadians and acknowledged Hermes as the father of their Goat-king, Pan, whose mother was Amalthea and who became the He-goat of the Zodiac.’

Paulus said smiling: ‘Neatly argued. That disposes of the other scandalous legend that Pan was the son of Penelope by
all
her suitors in the absence of Ulysses.’

‘Where did you get that version? It is extraordinarily interesting.’

‘I cannot remember. From some grammarian or other. It makes little sense to me.’

‘I knew that Pan was the son of Penelope, but your version is a great
improvement on it. Penelope, you see, is not really Ulysses’ wife except in a manner of speaking; she is a sacred bird, the
penelops
or purple-striped duck. So again, as in the Dryope version of his parentage, Pan is born from a bird – which explains the legend that he was perfectly developed from birth, as a hatched chicken is. Now to come to the suitors, by what I fear will be a longish argument. I postulate first of all that the Palladium is made from the bones of Pelops, that is to say from the ivory shoulder-blades of porpoises, a suitable and durable material, and that it is a phallic statue, not the statue of a goddess. I support my thesis by the existence, until a few years ago, of another sacred shoulder-blade of Pelops in the precinct which his great-grandson Hercules built in his honour at Olympia. Now, according to the myth, Pelops had only one sacred shoulder-blade, the right one; yet nobody has ever questioned the genuineness either of the relic at Olympia or of the Palladium. The history of the Olympian blade is this. During the siege of Troy the Greeks were told by an oracle that the only offensive counter-magic to the defensive magic of the Palladium preserved in the Citadel of Troy was the shoulder-blade of Pelops which a tribe of Pelopians had taken to Pisa in Italy. So Agamemnon sent for the thing, but the ship that was bringing it to him went down off the coast of Euboea. Generations later, a Euboean fisherman dragged it up in his net and recognized it for what it was – probably by some design carved on it. He brought it to Delphi and the Delphic Oracle awarded it to the people of Olympia, who made the fisherman its pensioned guardian. If the bone was the shoulder-blade of a sacred porpoise, not of a man, the difficulty of Pelops’s having had more than one right shoulder-blade disappears. So does the difficulty of believing that when boiled and eaten by the gods he came alive again – if the fact was that a new sacred porpoise was caught and eaten every year at Lusi by the devotees of Deo. Does all this sound reasonable?’

‘More reasonable, by far, than the usual fantastic story, though cannibalism in ancient Arcadia is not incredible. And that the Palladium is a phallic statue, rather than that of a goddess, may explain why such a mystery has been made of its appearance and why it is hidden out of sight in the Penus of the Temple of Vesta. Yes, though your thesis is startling and even, at first hearing, indecent, it has much to commend it.’

‘Thank you. To continue: you remember that two or three of the early Kings of Rome had no discoverable father?’

‘Yes. I have often wondered how that happened.’

‘You remember, too, that the Kingdom descended in the female line: a man was king only by virtue of marriage to a queen or of descent from a queen’s daughter. The heir to the Kingdom, in fact, was not the king’s son but the son of either his youngest daughter or his youngest sister – which explains the Latin word
nepos,
meaning both nephew and grandson. The focus of the community life was literally the
focus,
or hearth-fire, of the
royal house, which was tended by the princesses of the royal line, namely the Vestal Virgins. To them the Palladium was delivered for safe-keeping as the
fatale
pignus
imperii,
the pledge granted by the Fates for the permanency of the royal line.’

‘They still have it safe. But if you are right about the statue’s obscene nature, the Vestal Virgins seem rather an odd choice of guardians, because they are strictly forbidden to indulge in sexual intercourse!’

Theophilus laid his forefinger along his nose and said: ‘It is the commonplace paradox of religions that nothing is
nefas,
unlawful, that is not also
fas
, lawful, on particularly holy occasions. Among the Egyptians the pig is viewed with abhorrence and its very touch held to cause leprosy – indeed, the Egyptian pig as a scavenger and corpse-eater merits this abhorrence – yet the highest-born Egyptians eat its flesh with relish at their midwinter mysteries and fear no untoward consequence. The Jews, it is said, formerly did the same, if they do not do so now. Similarly, the Vestal Virgins cannot always have been debarred from the full natural privileges of their sex, for no barbarous religion enforces permanent sterility on nubile women. My view is that at midsummer during the Alban Holiday, which was a marriage feast of the Oak-queen – your Excellency’s charming nymph Egeria – with the Oak-king of the year, and the occasion of promiscuous love-making, the six Vestals, her kinswomen, coupled with six of the Oak-king’s twelve companions – you will recall Romulus’s twelve shepherds. But silently, in the darkness of a sacred cave so that nobody knew who lay with whom, nor who was the father of any child born. And did the same again with the six other companions at midwinter during the Saturnalia. Then, failing a son of the Oak-queen, the new king was chosen from a child born to a Vestal. So Penelope’s son by six suitors is explained. The Lusty God – call him Hercules or Hermes or Pan or Pallas or Pales or Mamurius or Neptune or Priapus or whatever you please – inspired the young men with erotic vigour when they had first danced around a blazing bonfire presided over by his obscene statue – the Palladium itself. Thus it happened that a king was said to be born of a virgin mother, and either to have no known father, or to be the son of the god.’

‘That is a still more startling notion than the other,’ protested Paulus, ‘and I cannot see either that you have any proof of it, or that you can explain how the Vestals ceased to be love-nymphs and became barren spinsters as now.’

‘The cessation of the royal love-orgies,’ said Theophilus, ‘follows logically on the historical course that we discussed yesterday – the extension of the kingship in ancient times from one year to four years; from four to eight; from eight to nineteen; until finally it became a life-tenure. Though popular love-orgies might continue – and at Rome continue still – to be held at midsummer and at the close of the year, they ceased to have any
significance as occasions for breeding new kings. As we know, children are often born of these holiday unions and are considered lucky and cheerfully legitimized; but they have no claim to the kingship, because their mothers are no longer princesses, as formerly. It seems to have been King Tarquin the Elder who first prescribed for the Vestals what amounts to perpetual virginity, his object being to prevent them from breeding claimants to the throne. It was certainly he who introduced burying alive as a punishment for any Vestal who broke the rule; but even now the prescribed virginity is not perpetual – for after thirty years a Vestal Virgin is, I understand, entitled to unsanctify herself, if she pleases, and marry.’

‘It happens very seldom; after thirty years of illustrious spinsterhood it is hard for a woman to win a husband of any worth, and she soon wearies of the world and usually dies of remorse.’

‘Now, as to the proof that the Virgins were once permitted occasional erotic delights: in the first place the novice, when initiated by the Chief Pontiff on behalf of the God, is addressed as “Amata”, beloved one, and given a head-dress bordered with pure purple,
1
a white woollen fillet and a white linen vestment – the royal marriage garments of the bride of the God. In the second, we know that Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus, was a Vestal Virgin of Alba Longa and unexpectedly became the bride of Mamurius or Mars, then a red-faced, erotic Shepherd-god; and was not buried alive as a Vestal would now be if she became pregnant – even though she claimed that a god had forced her.’

‘They drowned Silvia in the River Anio, at all events.’

‘Only in a manner of speaking, I think. After the birth of her twins, whom she laid in the ark of osier and sedge, which is a commonplace in nativity myths of this sort, and consigned to the mercy of the waves, she took much the same baptismal bath in renewal of her virginity as the Priestess of Aphrodite yearly takes here at Paphos
2
in the blue sea, and the nymph Dryope in her fountain at Pegae.’

‘The connexion between Rome and Arcadia is, I grant, very close. The Shepherd-god sends a wolf,
lycos,
to alarm Silvia and then overpowers her in a cave. And when the twins are born, a wolf and a woodpecker bring
them food. By the way, can you explain how Pan comes to have a wolf in his service, if he is a god of shepherds?’

‘It was probably a were-wolf. The Arcadian religious theory is that a man is sent as an envoy to the wolves. He becomes a were-wolf for eight years, and persuades the wolf-packs to leave man’s flocks and children alone during that time. Lycaon the Arcadian initiated the practice, they say, and it is likely that your ancient Guild of Lupercal priests originally provided Rome with her were-wolf too. But to speak again of Silvia. The God not only ravished her in a dark cave overshadowed by a sacred grove, but took advantage of a total eclipse of the sun. He was hiding his true shape, I suppose; which was that of a sea-beast.’

‘You seem to have the whole business worked out. Perhaps you can also explain why the hair of a Vestal is cut at marriage and never allowed to grow?’

‘That must have been King Tarquin’s prudent regulation. Women with their hair cut cannot perform magical spells. Doubtless he feared that they would revenge themselves on him for his severity towards them. Vestal Virgins were under the king’s sole charge in those days. It was he, not the Chief Pontiff, who had the privilege of scourging any Vestal who let the sacred fire go out, and scourging to death any Vestal who took a private lover.’

‘And can you also tell me why they use spring-water mixed with powdered and purified brine in their sacrifices?’

‘Tell me first what are the medical properties of water mixed with brine?’

‘It is a strong emetic and purge.’

‘Suitable for preparing celebrants for the midsummer and midwinter feasts? I had not thought of that supplementary use. What I am suggesting is that when the twelve young shepherds – the leaping priests of Mamurius or Pallas – performed their orgiastic dance for hour after hour around the blazing bonfires they must have sweated terribly and come near to fainting.’

‘I see what you mean. In the harvest-fields countrymen always refresh themselves with brine-water in preference to plain: it restores the salt that has been lost by sweating. Brine-water fetched by Vestals at the midsummer orgy must have restored the vigour of the shepherds like a charm. Still another question, in revenge for all those that you asked me: how does Triton come to be a son of Poseidon?’

‘In the same way as Proteus comes to be his herdsman. Originally Poseidon had nothing to do with the sea. The porpoise of the Crathis, the Delphic dolphin and the Phocian seal all belong to the earlier civilization. Poseidon won them as his own when he seized the Peloponnese and the opposite shores of the Gulf of Corinth and married the Sea-goddess Amphitrite. Triton must have been her son, probably by Hermes; perhaps
he ruled at “Lacedaemon of the Sea-beast”. At any rate, Poseidon becomes his foster-father by marrying the Sea-goddess Amphitrite – I take this to be one of Athene’s original titles. (By the way, the ancient Seal-king Phoceus, who gave his name to Phocis, was the son of Ornytion, which means Son of the Chicken – and the Chicken, I suppose, is Pan again who was hatched from a woodpecker’s egg or the egg of a penelope duck.) Of one thing I am sure: unless we recognize Triton and Pallas and Pelops as originally a sea-beast incarnate in a dynasty of ancient kings, we can hope to find no sense in the legends of heroes who rescued maidens from sea-beasts. The heroes are princes who challenge the sea-beast king to combat and kill him, and marry the royal heiress whom he has put under close restraint and reign in his stead by virtue of this marriage. The royal heiress is his daughter, but she is also an incarnation of the Moon; which explains why Homer’s Pallas was the Moon’s father. You find the same story in the marriage of Peleus to the Sea-goddess Thetis after his killing of Phocus, the Seal-king of Aegina. Peleus means “the muddy one” and may be a variant form of Pelops – as Pelias, the name of the king whose former territory Peleus annexed, certainly is. There was a sea-beast at Troy; Hercules, in company with the same Peleus, killed it and rescued the princess Hesionë and made himself master of the city. And clearly the many stories of princes who were saved by dolphins from drowning suggest sacred paintings of these princes riding on dolphin-back in proof of sovereignty. Arion and Icadius and Enalus…’