The White Goddess (92 page)

If the visitant is a Chimaera (‘She-goat’) for example, the poet will recognize her by the lion-head, goat-body and serpent-tail as a Carian Calendar-beast – another form of the winged goat, on which, according to Clement of Alexandria, Zeus flew up to Heaven. The Chimaera was a daughter of Typhon, the destructive storm god, and of Echidne, a winter Snake-goddess; the Hittites borrowed her from the Carians and carved her likeness on a temple at Carchemish on the Euphrates. Cerberus, a bitch miscalled a dog, is also likely to appear in the circle: a cognate beast, with the usual triad of heads – lioness, lynx and sow. The lynx is an autumn beast, apparently mentioned by Gwion in his
Can
Y
Meirch
, though he may be referring to the Palug Cat, the Anglesey Cat-Demeter: ‘I have been a spotted-headed cat on a forked tree.’

The unicorn may puzzle the poet. But the unicorn of Pliny’s description – which is embodied in the heraldic unicorn of the British Royal Arms, except that the horn is a straight white spiral – makes good calendar sense: it stands for the five-season solar year of the Boibel-Loth alphabet. The horn is centred in the Dog-days, and is the symbol of power: ‘I will
exalt your horn.’ It stands for the E season, then beginning; as the head of the deer stands for the I season, in which deer were hunted; the body of the horse for the A season, at the beginning of which the October Horse was sacrificed at Rome; the feet of the elephant for the O season, in which the earth puts out her greatest strength; the tail (Ura) of the lion for the U season. The beast of the horn was originally, it seems, the rhinoceros, which is the most formidable beast in the world – ‘and who would cross Tom Rhinoceros does what the Panther dares not’ – but owing to the difficulty of obtaining rhinoceros horn the long curved black horns of the oryx were in Pliny’s time fraudulently supplied by traders as ‘unicorn’s horn’. Pliny, who had the usual Roman dislike and mistrust of fabulous beasts and mentioned the unicorn as a genuine zoölogical specimen, must have seen such a horn. In Britain, however, the narwhal horn became the accepted type, because of
its white colour and superior hardness and because it is curved in the spiral of immortality, and because the variously named God of the Year always came out of the sea – as Gwion puts it in his
Angar
Cyvyndawd
:
‘From the Deep he came in the flesh.’ The narwhal is called the ‘sea-unicorn’ in consequence. However, a few British mythographers, such as the early seventeenth-century Thomas Boreman, accepted Pliny’s view, recording: ‘His horn is as hard as iron and as rough as any file, twisted and curled like a flaming sword; very straight, sharp and everywhere black, excepting the point.’ An interesting variety of the unicorn is the wild-ass unicorn, which Herodotus accepted as genuinely zoological; the wild ass is the beast of Set, whose fifth part of the year centres at midsummer and whose horn is thus exalted. But it must not be forgotten that the fifth-century
BC
historian, Ctesias, the first Greek to write about the unicorn, describes its horn, in his
Indica
,
as being coloured white, red and black. These are the colours of the Triple Moon-goddess, as has been shown in the mulberry-and-calf riddle quoted from Suidas near the close of Chapter Four, to whom the God of the Year was subject.

The unicorn probably had a spatial as well as a temporal meaning, though space has always been divided by four quarters of the horizon, not by five fifths. The square cross, whether plain or converted into a swastika or cross-crosslet, has from time immemorial represented the fullest extent of sovereignty; it was a prime symbol in Minoan Crete, either alone or enclosed in a circle, and was reserved for the Goddess and her royal son, the King. In parts of India where Kali is worshipped, with rites closely resembling those of the Cretan and Pelasgian Great Goddess, as the most potent of
a Pentad of
deities, namely Siva, Kali, Vishnu, Surya and the elephant-god Ganesa – roughly corresponding with the Egyptian pentad, namely Osiris, Horus, Isis, Set and Nephthys – five has a definite spatial sense. In the coronation ritual of an Indian king, the officiating priest as he invests the king with a sacred mantle called ‘the Womb’ in a ceremony of rebirth, gives him five dice and says: ‘Thou art the master; may these five
regions of thine fall to thy lot.’ The five regions are the four quarters of the earth, and the zenith.

Thus the unicorn’s single exalted horn represents ‘the upper pole’ which reaches from the king directly up to the zenith, to the hottest point attained by the sun. The unicorn’s horn in Egyptian architecture is the obelisk; which has a square base tapering to a pyramidical point: it expresses dominion over the four quarters of the world and the zenith. In squatter form it is the pyramid, and the dominion originally expressed was not that of the Sun-god, who never shines from the north, but that of the Triple Goddess whose white marble triangle encloses her royal son’s tomb from every side.

Kali, like her counterpart Minerva, has five as her sacred numeral. Thus her mystic, the poet Ram Prasad, addresses her as she dances madly on Siva’s prostrate body:

He is referring to the cults of the five deities, all of which are really cults of Kali. It will be recalled that both Dionysus and the sacred white cow, Io of Argos, who ultimately became the goddess Isis, are recorded to have paid visits to India.

In the Dionysian Mysteries the
hirco-cervus
,
goat-stag, was the symbol of resurrection, of man’s hope of immortality, and it seems that when the Hyperborean Druids visited Thessaly they recognized the goat stag, associated with apples, as their own immortal white hart or hind, which also was associated with apples. For the apple tree,
ut
dicitur
,
is the shelter of the white hind. It is from the goat-stag that the unicorn of heraldry and of mediaeval art derives its occasional beard; but among Christian mystics the Greek goat-unicorn of Daniel’s vision has contributed bellicosity to this once pacific beast.

In Britain and France, the white hart or hind was not ousted by the unicorn; it persisted in popular tradition and figured in the mediaeval romances as an emblem of mystery. King Richard II adopted ‘a white hart lodged’ as his personal badge; which is how the beast found its way to the sign-boards of British inns. It sometimes wore a cross between its antlers as it had appeared to St. Hubert, patron of huntsmen, who had been chasing it through the dense forest for weeks without rest and to St. Julian the Hospitaler. Thus the Unicorn of the desert and the White Hart of the forest have the same mystical sense; but during the Hermetic vogue of the early seventeenth century were distinguished as meaning respectively the spirit and the soul. The Hermetics were neo-Platonists who patched their philosophic cloaks with shreds of half-forgotten bardic lore. In the
Book
of
Lambspring
‚
a rare Hermetic tract, an engraving shows a deer and a unicorn standing together in a forest. The text is:

An anonymous beast may appear to the poet with deer’s head crowned with gold, horse’s body and serpent’s tail. He will be out of a Gaelic poem published by Carmichael in
Carmina
Gadelica
,
a dialogue between Bride and her unnamed son.

The son is evidently a god of the waning year, as the sequence of deer, horse and serpent shows.

Or a phoenix may fly into the circle. The phoenix, though literally believed in by the Romans – I suppose because its visits to On-Heliopolis were said to be so brief and far between that nobody could disprove its existence – was also a calendar beast. For the Egyptians had no leap-year: every year the fragment of a day which was left over at New Year was saved up, until finally after 1460 years, called a Sothic Year, the fragments amounted to a whole year; and the fixed festivals which had become more and more displaced as the centuries went by (with the same sort of attendant inconveniences as New Zealanders experience from their midsummer Christmas) fetched up again where they had originally stood; and a whole year could be intercalated in the annals. This was the occasion of much rejoicing, and at On-Heliopolis, the chief Sun Temple of Egypt, an eagle with painted wings was, it seems, burned alive with spices in a nest of palm branches to celebrate the event.

This eagle represented the Sun-god, and the palm was sacred to the Great Goddess his mother; the Sun had completed his great revolution and the old Sun-eagle was therefore returned to the nest for the inauguration of a new Phoenix Age. The legend was that from the ashes of the Phoenix a little worm was born which presently turned into a real Phoenix. This worm was the six hours and the few odd minutes which
were left over at the end of the Phoenix Year: in four years they would add up to a whole day, a Phoenix chick. From Herodotus’s muddled account of the Phoenix it seems that there was always a sacred eagle kept at On-Heliopolis, and that when it died it was embalmed in a round egg
of myrrh, which would preserve it indefinitely; then another eagle was consecrated. Presumably these eggs of myrrh were included in the final holocaust. That the Phoenix came flying from Arabia need mean no more than that, for the Egyptians, the sun rose from the Sinai desert. It is ironical that the early Christians continued to believe in a literal Phoenix, which they made a type of the resurrected Christ, long after the Phoenix had been killed. The Emperor Augustus unwittingly killed it in 30
BC
when he stabilized the Egyptian calendar.
1

Or a pack of tall, white Gabriel Hounds with red ears and pink noses may come streaming into view in pursuit of an unbaptised soul. Despite their spectral appearance and their sinister reputation in British myth, these animals are decently zoölogical. They are the ancient Egyptian hunting dogs, pictured in tomb paintings, which though extinct in Egypt are still bred in the Island of Ibiza, where they were originally brought by Carthaginian colonists. The breed may also have been introduced into Britain towards the close of the second millennium
BC
along with the blue Egyptian beads found in Salisbury Plain burials. They are larger and faster than greyhounds and hunt by smell as well as by sight; when in view of game they make the same yelping noise that migrating wild geese – especially the barnacle-goose – make when they fly far overhead at night: a sound taken in the North and West of England as an omen of approaching death. Anubis, the embalmer-god who conveyed the soul of Osiris to the Underworld, was originally a prowling jackal but came to be pictured as a noble-hearted hunting dog, only his bushy tail remaining as evidence of his jackal days.

Or the visitant may be a Cherub. The Cherub mentioned in the first chapter of
Ezekiel
is also clearly a beast of the calendar sort. It has four parts which represent the ‘four New Years’ of Jewish tradition: Lion for Spring; Eagle for Summer; Man for Autumn, the principal New Year; and Ox for Winter, the Judaean ploughing season. This Cherub is identified by Ezekiel with a fiery wheel, which is as plainly the wheel of the solar year as the God whom it serves is plainly the Sun of Righteousness, an emanation of the Ancient of Days. Moreover, each Cherub – there are four of them – is a wheel of this God’s chariot and rolls straight forward, without deflexion. Ezekiel’s summary: ‘And their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel’ has become proverbial
for its unintelligibility. But it makes simple calendar sense. Each wheel of God’s chariot is the annual cycle, or wheel, of the four seasons; and the chariot’s arrival inaugurated a cycle, or wheel, of four years. Every year, in fact, wheels within a four-year wheel from the beginning to he end of time: and the Eternal Charioteer is the God of Israel. By making the Cherub-wheels themselves provide the motive power of the chariot, Ezekiel avoided having to put an angelic horse between the shafts: he remembered that horse-drawn votive chariots set up by King Manasseh in the Temple of Jerusalem had been removed as idolatrous by Good King Josiah. But Ezekiel’s Eagle should really be a Ram or a Goat, and his Man a man-faced fiery Serpent; with eagle’s wings for each of the four beasts. His reasons for this misrepresentation will appear in my last chapter.