The White Goddess (91 page)

1
This magical tradition survived in the Northern witch-cult. In 1673 Anne Armstrong the Northumbrian witch confessed at her trial to having been temporarily transformed into a mare by her mistress Ann Forster of Stockfield, who threw a bridle over her head and rode her to a meeting of five witch-covens at Riding Mill Bridge End.

1
Insufficient notice has yet been taken of the shape of flint arrow-heads as having a magical rather than a utilitarian origin. The tanged arrow-head of fir-tree shape, for example, needs explanation. It must have been very difficult to knap without breaking off either one of the tangs or the projecting stem between them, and has no obvious advantage in hunting over the simple willow-leaf or elder-leaf types. For though a narrow bronze arrow-head with four tangs cannot be easily drawn out through a wound, because the flesh closes up behind, the broad two-tanged flint one would not be more difficult to draw out than an elder-leaf or willow-leaf one shot into a beast with equal force. The fir-tree shape seems therefore to be magically intended: an appeal to Artemis Elate – Diana the Huntress, Goddess of the Firtree – to direct the aim. The point was probably smeared with a paralysant poison – a ‘merciful shaft’ of the sort with which the Goddess was credited. An Irish fir-tree arrow-head in my possession, taken from an Iron Age burial, cannot have been seriously intended for archery. The chip of white flint from which it has been knapped is awkwardly curved, and it has so large a ‘bulb of percussion’ and so short a stem as to prevent it from being spliced to admit an arrow-shaft: it is clearly for funerary use only.

1
The ancients were well aware of Apollo’s frequent changes of divine function. Cicero in his essay
On
the
Nature
of
the
Gods
distinguishes four Apollos in descending order of antiquity: the son of Hephaestos; the son of the Cretan Corybantes; the Arcadian Apollo who gave Arcadia its laws; and lastly the son of Latona and Zeus. He might have enlarged his list to twenty or thirty.

1
The fourteenth-century Swedish St. Brigid, or Birgit, who founded the Order of St. Brigid was not, of course, the original saint, though some houses of the Order reverted merrily to paganism.

1
The earliest spelling of the Virgin’s name in English is Marian – not Mariam which is the Greek form used in the Gospels.

2
She was the mother of Adonis; hence the Alexandrian grammarian Lycophron calls Byblos ‘The City of Myrrha’.

1
Yorkshire
Archaeological
Journal,
No. 141, 1944

1
This same word ‘morris’, as the prefix to ‘pike’, is first written ‘maris’: so it is likely that the morris-men were Mary’s men, not
moriscoes
or Moorish men, as is usually supposed. The innocent word ‘merry’, though often spelt ‘mary’, has deceived the editors of the
Oxford
English
Dictionary.
They trace it back to an Indo-Germanic root
murgjo
meaning ‘brief’, arguing that when one is merry, time flies; but without much confidence, for they are obliged to admit that
murgjo
does not take this course in any other language.

1
Cunning and art he did not lack

But aye her whistle would fetch him back. 

1
In the corresponding ancient British mysteries there seems to have been a formula in which the Goddess teasingly promised the initiate who performed a sacred marriage with her that he would not die ‘either on foot or on horseback, on water or on land, on the ground or in the air, outside a house or inside, shod or unshod, clothed or unclothed,’ and then, as a demonstration of her power, manoeuvred him into a position where the promise was no longer valid – as in the legend of Llew Llaw and Blodeuwedd, where a goat figures in the murder scene. Part of the formula survives in the Masonic initiation ritual. The apprentice ‘neither naked nor clothed, barefoot nor shod, deprived of all metals, hood winked, with a cable-tow about his neck is led to the door of the lodge in a halting moving posture.’

1
It is a strange paradox that Milton, though he had been the first Parliamentary author to defend the execution of Charles I and was the Thunder-god’s own Laureate, fell later under the spell of ‘the Northern Muse’, Christina of Sweden, and in his
Second
Defense
of
the
English
People
his flattery of her is not only as extravagant as anything that the Elizabethans wrote about Elizabeth, but seems wholly sincere.