THE TREE ALPHABET (1)

I first found the Beth-Luis-Nion tree-alphabet in Roderick O’Flaherty’s Ogygia; he presents it, with the Boibel-Loth, as a genuine relic of Druidism orally transmitted down the centuries. It is said to have been latterly used for divination only and consists of five vowels and thirteen consonants. Each letter is named after the tree or shrub of which it is the initial:

The names of the letters in the modern Irish alphabet are also those of trees, and most of them correspond with O’Flaherty’s list though T has become gorse; O, broom; and A, elm.

I noticed almost at once that the consonants of this alphabet form a calendar of seasonal tree-magic, and that all the trees figure prominently in European folklore.

B FOR BETH

The first tree of the series is the self-propagating birch. Birch twigs are used throughout Europe in the beating of bounds and the flogging of delinquents – and formerly lunatics – with the object of expelling evil spirits. When Gwion writes in the Câd Goddeu that the birch ‘armed himself but late’ he means that birch twigs do not toughen until late in the year. (He makes the same remark about the willow and the rowan whose twigs were similarly put to ceremonial use.) Birch rods are also used in rustic ritual for driving out the spirit of the old year. The Roman lictors carried birch rods during the installation of the Consuls at this very same season; each Consul had twelve lictors, making a company of thirteen. The birch is the tree of inception. It is indeed the earliest forest tree, with the exception of the mysterious elder, to put out new leaves (April 1st in England, the beginning of the financial year), and in Scandinavia its leafing marks the beginning of the agricultural year, because farmers use it as a directory for sowing their Spring wheat. The first month begins immediately after the winter solstice, when the days after shortening to the extreme limit begin to lengthen again.

Since there are thirteen consonants in the alphabet, it is reasonable to regard the tree month as the British common-law ‘lunar’ month of twenty-eight days defined by Blackstone. As has already been pointed out, there are thirteen such months in a solar year, with one day left over. Caesar and Pliny both record that the Druidic year was reckoned by lunar months, but neither defines a lunar month, and there is nothing to prove that it was a ‘lunation’ of roughly twenty-nine and a half days – of which there are twelve in a year with ten and three-quarter days left over. For the first-century BC ‘Coligny Calendar’, which is one of lunations, is no longer regarded as Druidic; it is engraved in Roman letters on a brass tablet and is now thought to be part of the Romanizing of native religion attempted under the early Empire. Moreover, twenty-eight is a true lunar month not only in the astronomical sense of the moon’s revolutions in relation to the sun, but in the mystic sense that the Moon, being a woman, has a woman’s normal menstrual period (‘menstruation’ is connected with the word ‘moon’)1 of twenty-eight days.1 The Coligny system was probably brought into Britain by the Romans of the Claudian conquest and memories of its intercalated days are said by Professor T. Glynn Jones to survive in Welsh folklore. But that in both Irish and Welsh myths of the highest antiquity ‘a year and a day’ is a term constantly used suggests that the Beth-Luis-Nion Calendar is one of 364 days plus one. We can therefore regard the Birch month as extending from December 24th to January 20th.

L FOR LUIS

The second tree is the quickbeam (‘tree of life’), otherwise known as the quicken, rowan or mountain ash. Its round wattles, spread with newly-flayed bull’s hides, were used by the Druids as a last extremity for compelling demons to answer difficult questions – hence the Irish proverbial expression ‘to go on the wattles of knowledge’, meaning to do one’s utmost to get information. The quickbeam is also the tree most widely used in the British Isles as a prophylactic against lightning and witches’ charms of all sorts: for example, bewitched horses can be controlled only with a rowan whip. In ancient Ireland, fires of rowan were kindled by the Druids of opposing armies and incantations spoken over them, summoning spirits to take part in the fight. The berries of the magical rowan in the Irish romance of Fraoth, guarded by a dragon, had the sustaining virtue of nine meals; they also healed the wounded and added a year to a man’s life. In the romance of Diarmuid and Grainne, the rowan berry, with the apple and the red nut, is described as the food of the gods. ‘Food of the gods’ suggests that the taboo on eating anything red was an extension of the commoners’ taboo on eating scarlet toadstools – for toadstools, according to a Greek proverb which Nero quoted, were ‘the food of the gods’. In ancient Greece all red foods such as lobster, bacon, red mullet, crayfish and scarlet berries and fruit were tabooed except at feasts in honour of the dead. (Red was the colour of death in Greece and Britain during the Bronze Age – red ochre has been found in megalithic burials both in the Prescelly Mountains and on Salisbury Plain.) The quickbeam is the tree of quickening. Its botanical name Fraxinus, or Pyrus, Aucuparia, conveys its divinatory uses. Another of its names is ‘the witch’; and the witch-wand, formerly used for metal divining, was made of rowan. Since it was the tree of quickening it could also be used in a contrary sense. In Danaan Ireland a rowan-stake hammered through a corpse immobilized its ghost; and in the Cuchulain saga three hags spitted a dog, Cuchulain’s sacred animal, on rowan twigs to procure his death.

The oracular use of the rowan explains the unexpected presence of great rowan thickets in Rügen and the other Baltic amber-islands, formerly used as oracular places, and the frequent occurrence of rowan, noted by John Lightfoot in his Flora Scotica, 1777, in the neighbourhood of ancient stone circles. The second month extends from January 21st to February 17th. The important Celtic feast of Candlemas fell in the middle of it (February 2nd). It was held to mark the quickening of the year, and was the first of the four ‘cross-quarter days’ on which British witches celebrated their Sabbaths, the others being May Eve, Lammas (August 2nd) and All Hallow E’en, when the year died. These days correspond with the four great Irish fire-feasts mentioned by Cormac the tenth-century Archbishop of Cashel. In Ireland and the Highlands February 2nd is, very properly, the day of St. Brigit, formerly the White Goddess, the quickening Triple Muse. The connexion of rowan with the Candlemas fire-feast is shown by Morann Mac Main’s Ogham in the Book of Ballymote: he gives the poetic name for rowan as ‘Delight of the Eye, namely Luisiu, flame.’

N FOR NION

The third tree is the ash. In Greece the ash was sacred to Poseidon, the second god of the Achaean trinity, and the Mĕliai, or ash-spirits, were much cultivated; according to Hesiod, the Mĕliae sprang from the blood of Uranus when Cronos castrated him. In Ireland the Tree of Tortu, The Tree of Dathi, and the Branching Tree of Usnech, three of the Five Magic Trees whose fall in the year 665 AD symbolized the triumph of Christianity over paganism, were ash-trees. A descendant of the Sacred Tree of Creevna, also an ash, was still standing at Killura in the nineteenth century; its wood was a charm against drowning, and emigrants to America after the Potato Famine carried it away with them piecemeal. In British folklore the ash is a tree of re-birth – Gilbert White describes in his History of Selborne how naked children had formerly been passed through cleft pollard ashes before sunrise as a cure for rupture. The custom survived in remoter parts of England until 1830. The Druidical wand with a spiral decoration, part of a recent Anglesey find dating from the early first century AD, was of ash. The great ash Yygdrasill, sacred to Woden, or Wotan or Odin or Gwydion, has already been mentioned in the context of the Battle of the Trees; he used it as his steed. But he had taken the tree over from the Triple Goddess who, as the Three Norns of Scandinavian legend, dispensed justice under it. Poseidon retained his patronage of horses but also became a god of seafarers when the Achaeans took to the sea; as Woden did when his people took to the sea. In ancient Wales and Ireland all oars and coracle-slats were made of ash; and so were the rods used for urging on horses, except where the deadly yew was preferred. The cruelty of the ash mentioned by Gwion lies in the harmfulness of its shade to grass or corn; the alder on the contrary is beneficial to crops grown in its shade. So also in Odin’s own Runic alphabet all the letters are formed from ash-twigs; as ash-roots strangle those of other forest trees. The ash is the tree of sea-power, or of the power resident in water; and the other name of Woden, ‘Yggr’, from which Ygdrasill is derived, is evidently connected with hygra, the Greek for ‘sea’ (literally, ‘the wet element’). The third month is the month of floods and extends from February 18th to March 17th. In these first three months the nights are longer than the days, and the sun is regarded as still under the tutelage of Night. The Tyrrhenians on this account did not reckon them as part of the sacred year.

F FOR FEARN

The fourth tree is the alder, the tree of Bran. In the Battle of the Trees the alder fought in the front line, which is an allusion to the letter F being one of the first five consonants of the Beth-Luis-Nion and the Boibel-Loth; and in the Irish Ossianic Song of the Forest Trees1 it is described as ‘the very battle-witch of all woods, tree that is hottest in the fight’. Though a poor fuel-tree, like the willow, poplar and chestnut, it is prized by charcoal-burners as yielding the best charcoal; its connexion with fire is shown in the Romance of Branwen when ‘Gwern’ (alder), Bran’s s ister’s son, is burned in a bonfire; and in country districts of Ireland the crime of felling a sacred alder is held to be visited with the burning down of one’s house. The alder is also proof against the corruptive power of water: its slightly gummy leaves resist the winter rains longer than those of any other deciduous tree and its timber resists decay indefinitely when used for water-conduits or piles. The Rialto at Venice is founded on alder piles, and so are several mediaeval cathedrals. The Roman architect Vitruvius mentions that alders were used as causeway piles in the Ravenna marshes.

The connexion of Bran with the alder in this sense is clearly brought out in the Romance of Branwen where the swineherds (oracular priests) of King Matholwch of Ireland see a forest in the sea and cannot guess what it is. Branwen tells them that it is the fleet of Bran the Blessed come to avenge her. The ships are anchored off-shore and Bran wades through the shallows and brings his goods and people to land; afterwards he bridges the River Linon, though it has been protected with a magic charm, by lying down across the river and having hurdles laid over him. In other words, first a jetty, then a bridge was built on alder piles. It was said of Bran, ‘No house could contain him.’ The riddle ‘What can no house ever contain?’ has a simple answer: ‘The piles upon which it is built.’ For the earliest European houses were built on alder piles at the edge of lakes. In one sense the ‘singing head’ of Bran was the mummied, oracular head of a sacred king; in another it was the ‘head’ of the alder-tree – namely the topmost branch. Green alder-branches make good whistles and, according to my friend Ricardo Sicre y Cerda, the boys of Cerdaña in the Pyrenees have a traditional prayer in Catalan:

which is repeated while the bark is tapped with a piece of willow to loosen it from the wood. Berng (or Verng in the allied Majorcan language) is Bran again. The summons to Berng is made on behalf of the Goddess of the Willow. The use of the willow for tapping, instead of another piece of alder, suggests that such whistles were used by witches to conjure up destructive winds – especially from the North. But musical pipes with several stops can be made in the same way as the whistles, and the singing head of Bran in this sense will have been an alder-pipe. At Harlech, where the head sang for seven years, there is a mill-stream running past the Castle rock, a likely place for a sacred alder-grove. It is possible that Apollo’s legendary flaying of Marsyas the piper is reminiscent of the removal of the alder-bark from the wood in pipe-making.

The alder was also used in ancient Ireland for making milk pails and other dairy vessels: hence its poetical name in the Book of Ballymote, Comet lachta – ‘guarding of milk’. This connexion of Bran-Cronos, the alder, with Rhea-Io, the white moon-cow is of importance. In Ireland, Io was called Glas Gabnach, ‘the green stripper’, because though she yielded milk in rivers she never had a calf. She had been stolen out of Spam by Gavida the flying dwarf-smith; made the circuit of all Ireland in one day, guarded by his seven sons (who presumably stood for the days of the week); and gave the name Bothar-bó-finné, ‘Track of the White Cow’, to the Galaxy. According to The Proceedings of the Grand Bardic Academy, she was killed by Guaire at the request of Seanchan Torpest’s wife, and according to Keating’ s History of Ireland, was avenged in 528 AD. King Diarmuid of All Ireland was killed by his eldest son for having murdered another sacred cow.

Bran’s connexion with the Western Ocean is proved by Caer Bran, the name of the most westerly hill in Britain, overlooking Land’s End.

Alder is rarely mentioned in Greek or Latin myth, having apparently been superseded as an oracular tree by the Delphic laurel. But the Odyssey and the Aeneid contain two important references to it. In the Odyssey, alder is the first named of the three trees of resurrection – white poplar and cypress are the two others – that formed the wood around the cave of Calypso, daughter of Atlas, in her Elysian island of Ogygia; in the wood nested chattering sea-crows (sacred to Bran in Britain) falcons and owls. This explains Virgil’s version of the metamorphosis of the sisters of the sun-hero Phaëthon: in the Aeneid he says that while bewailing their brother’s death they were converted, not into a poplar grove, as Euripides and Apollonius Rhodius relate, but into an alder thicket on the banks of the river Po – evidently this was another Elysian islet. The Greek word for alder, clēthra, is generally derived from cleio, ‘I close’ or ‘I confine’. The explanation seems to be that the alder thickets confined the hero in the oracular island by growing around its shores; the oracular islands seem to have been originally river islands, not islands in the sea.

The alder was, and is, celebrated for yielding three fine dyes: red from its bark, green from its flowers, brown from its twigs: typifying fire, water and earth. In Cormac’s tenth-century Glossary of obsolete terms the alder is called ro-eim, which is glossed as ‘that which reddens the face’; from which it may be deduced that the ‘crimson-stained heroes’ of the Welsh Triads, who were sacred kings, were connected with Bran’s alder cult. One reason for the alder’s sanctity is that when it is felled the wood, at first white, seems to bleed crimson, as though it were a man. The green dye is associated in British folklore with fairies’ clothes: in so far as the fairies may be regarded as survivals of dispossessed early tribes, forced to take to hills and woods, the green of the clothes is explainable as protective colouring: foresters and outlaws also adopted it in mediaeval times. Its use seems to be very ancient. But principally the alder is the tree of fire, the power of fire to free the earth from water; and the alder-branch by which Bran was recognized at the Câd Goddeu is a token of resurrection – its buds are set in a spiral. This spiral symbol is ante-diluvian: the earliest Sumerian shrines are ‘ghost-houses’, like those used in Uganda, and are flanked by spiral posts.

The fourth month extends from March 18th, when the alder first blooms, to April 14th, and marks the drying up of the winter floods by the Spring Sun. It includes the Spring Equinox, when the days become longer than the nights and the Sun grows to manhood. As one can say poetically that the ash trees are the oars and coracle-slats that convey the Spirit of the Year through the floods to dry land, so one can say that the alders are the piles that lift his house out of the floods of winter. Fearn (Bran) appears in Greek mythology as King Phoroneus, ruler of the Peloponnese, who was worshipped as a hero at Argos which he is said to have founded. Hellanicus of Lesbos, a learned contemporary of Herodotus, makes him the father of Pelasgus, Iasus and Agenor, who divided his kingdom between them after his death: in other words, his worship at Argos was immemorially ancient. Pausanias, who went to Argos for his information, writes that Phoroneus was the husband of Cerdo (the White Goddess as Muse) and that the River-god Inachus fathered him on the nymph Melia (ash-tree). Since alder succeeds ash in the tree-calendar, and since alders grow by the riverside, this is a suitable pedigree. Pausanias clinches the identification of Phoroneus with Fearn by disregarding the Prometheus legend and making Phoroneus the inventor of fire. Hyginus gives his mother’s name as Argeia (‘dazzling white’), who is the White Goddess again. So Phoroneus, like Bran and all other sacred kings, was borne by, married to, and finally laid out by, the White Goddess: his layer-out was the Death-goddess Hera Argeia to whom he is said to have first offered sacrifices. Phoroneus, then, is Fearineus, the God of Spring to whom annual sacrifices were offered on the Cronian Mount at Olympia at the Spring equinox.1 His singing head recalls that of Orpheus whose name is perhaps short for Orephruoeis ‘growing on the river-bank’ i.e. ‘the alder’.

In parts of the Mediterranean the cornel or dogwood tree seems to have been used as a substitute for the alder. Its Latin name cornus comes from cornix , the crow sacred to Saturn or Bran which feeds on its red ‘cherries’; as according to Homer the swine of Circe also did. Ovid links it with the esculent oak as supplying men with food in the age of Saturn. Like the alder it yields a red dye, and was held sacred at Rome where the flight of Romulus’s cornel-wood javelin determined the spot where the city was to be built. Its appropriateness to this month is that it is in white blossom by the middle of March.

S FOR SAILLE

The fifth tree is the willow, or osier, which in Greece was sacred to Hecate, Circe, Hera and Persephone, all Death aspects of the Triple Moon-goddess, and much worshipped by witches. As Culpeper says succinctly in his Complete Herbal: ‘The Moon owns it.’ Its connexion with witches is so strong in Northern Europe that the words ‘witch’ and ‘wicked’ are derived from the same ancient word for ‘willow’, which also yields ‘wicker’. The ‘witch’s besom’ in the English countryside is still made of ash stake, birch twigs and osier binding: of birch twigs because at the expulsion of evil spirits some remain entangled in the besom; of ash stake as a protection against drowning – witches are made harmless if detached from their besoms and thrown into running water; of osier binding in honour of Hecate. The Druidical human sacrifices were offered at the full of the moon in wicker baskets, and funerary flints were knapped in willow-leaf shape. The willow (helice in Greek, salix in Latin) gave its name to Helicon, the abode of the Nine Muses, orgiastic priestesses of the Moon-goddess. It is likely that Poseidon preceded Apollo as the Leader of the Muses, as he did as guardian of the Delphic Oracle; for a Helicean Grove was still sacred to him in Classical times. According to Pliny, a willow tree grows outside the Cretan cave where Zeus was born; and, commenting on a series of coins from Cretan Gortyna, A. B. Cook in his Zeus suggests that Europë who is there shown seated in a willow tree, osier-basket in hand, and made love to by an eagle, is not only Eur-opë, she of the broad face’, i. e. the Full Moon, but Eu-rope, ‘she of the flourishing willow-withies’ – alias Helice, sister of Amalthea. The wearing of the willow in the hat as a sign of the rejected lover seems to be originally a charm against the Moon-goddess’s jealousy. The willow is sacred to her for many reasons: it is the tree that loves water most, and the Moon-goddess is the giver of dew and moisture generally; its leaves and bark, the source of salicylic acid, are sovereign against rheumatic cramps formerly thought to be caused by witchcraft. The Goddess’s prime ogiastic bird, the wryneck1, or snake bird, or cuckoo’s mate – a Spring migrant which hisses like a snake, lies flat along a bough, erects its crest when angry, writhes its neck about, lays white eggs, eats ants, and has v-markings on its feathers like those on the scales of oracular serpents in Ancient Greece – always nests in willow-trees. Moreover, the liknos, or basket-sieve anciently used for winnowing corn, was made from willow; it was in winnowing-sieves of this sort, ‘riddles’, that the North Berwick witches confessed to King James I that they went to sea on their witches’ sabbaths. A famous Greek picture by Polygnotus at Delphi represented Orpheus as receiving the gift of mystic eloquence by touching willow-trees in a grove of Persephone; compare the injunction in The Song of the Forest Trees: ‘Burn not the willow, a tree sacred to poets.’ The willow is the tree of enchantment and is the fifth tree of the year; five (V) was the number sacred to the Roman Moon-goddess Minerva. The month extends from April 15th to May 12th, and May Day, famous for its orgiastic revels and its magic dew, falls in the middle. It is possible that the carrying of sallow-willow branches on Palm Sunday, a variable feast which usually falls early in April, is a custom that properly belongs to the beginning of the willow month.

H FOR UATH

The sixth tree is the whitethorn or hawthorn or may, which takes its name from the month of May. It is, in general, an unlucky tree and the name under which it appears in the Irish Brehon Laws, sceith, is apparently connected with the Indo-Germanic root sceath or sceth, meaning harm; from which derive the English ‘scathe’ and the Greek a-scethes, scatheless. In ancient Greece, as in Britain, this was the month in which people went about in old clothes – a custom referred to in the proverb ‘Ne’er cast a clout ere May be out’, meaning ‘do not put on new clothes until the unlucky month is over’, and not necessarily referring to the variability of the English climate; the proverb is, in fact, also current in North-eastern Spain where, in general, settled hot weather has come by Easter. They also abstained from sexual intercourse – a custom which explains May as an unlucky month for marriage. In Greece and Rome, May was the month in which the temples were swept out and the images of gods washed: the month of preparation for the midsummer festival. The Greek Goddess Maia, though she is represented in English poetry as ‘ever fair and young’ took her name from maia, ‘grandmother’; she was a malevolent beldame whose son Hermes conducted souls to Hell. She was in fact the White Goddess, who under the name of Cardea, as has been noticed, cast spells with the hawthorn. The Greeks propitiated her at marriages – marriage being considered hateful to the Goddess – with five torches of hawthorn-wood and with hawthorn blossom before the unlucky month began.

Plutarch in his Roman Questions asks: ‘Why do not the Romans marry in the month of May?’ and answers correctly: ‘Is not the reason that in this month they perform the greatest of purification ceremonies?’ He explains that this was the month in which puppets called argeioi (‘white men’) were thrown into the river as an offering to Saturn. Ovid in his Fasti tells of an oracle given him by the Priestess of Jupiter about the marriage of his daughter – ‘Until the Ides of June’ [the middle of the month] ‘there is no luck for brides and their husbands. Until the sweepings from the Temple of Vesta have been carried down to the sea by the yellow Tiber I must myself not comb my locks which I have cut in sign of mourning, nor pare my nails, nor cohabit with my husband though he is the Priest of Jupiter. Be not in haste. Your daughter will have better luck in marriage when Vesta’s fire burns on a cleansed hearth.’ The unlucky days came to an end on June 15. In Greece the unlucky month began and ended a little earlier. According to Sozomen of Gaza, the fifth-century ecclesiastical historian, the Terebinth Fair at Hebron was celebrated at the same time and with the same taboos on new clothes and sexuality, and with the same object – the washing and cleansing of the holy images.

In Welsh mythology the hawthorn appears as the malevolent Chief of the Giants, Yspaddaden Penkawr, the father of Olwen (‘She of the White Track’), another name of the White Goddess. In the Romance of Kilwych and Olwen – Kilhwych was so called because he was found in a swine’s burrow – Giant Hawthorn puts all possible obstacles in the way of Kilhwych’s marriage to Olwen and demands a dowry of thirteen treasures, all apparently impossible to secure. The Giant lived in a castle guarded by nine porters and nine watch-dogs, proof of the strength of the taboo against marriage in the hawthorn month.

The destruction of an ancient hawthorn tree is in Ireland attended with the greatest peril. Two nineteenth-century instances are quoted in E. M. Hull’s Folklore of the British Isles. The effect is the death of one’s cattle and children and loss of all one’s money. In his well-documented study, Historic Thorn Trees in the British Isles, Mr. Vaughan Cornish writes of the sacred hawthorns growing over wells in Goidelic provinces. He quotes the case of ‘St. Patrick’s Thorn’ at Tin’ahely in County Wicklow: ‘Devotees attended on the 4th of May, rounds were duly made about the well, and shreds torn off their garments and hung on the thorn.’ He adds: ‘This is St. Monica’s Day but I do not know of any association.’ Plainly, since St. Monica’s Day, New Style, corresponds with May 15th, Old Style, this was a ceremony in honour of the Hawthorn month, which had just begun. The rags were torn from the devotees’ clothes as a sign of mourning and propitiation.

The hawthorn, then, is the tree of enforced chastity. The month begins on May 13th, when the may is first in flower, and ends on June 9th. The ascetic use of the thorn, which corresponds with the cult of the Goddess Cardea must, however, be distinguished from its later orgiastic use which corresponds with the cult of the Goddess Flora, and which accounts for the English mediaeval habit of riding out on May Morning to pluck flowering hawthorn boughs and dance around the maypole. Hawthorn blossom has, for many men, a strong scent of female sexuality; which is why the Turks use a flowering branch as an erotic symbol. Mr. Cornish proves that this Flora cult was introduced into the British Isles in the late first-century BC by the second Belgic invaders; further, that the Glastonbury Thorn which flowered on Old Christmas Day (January 5th, New Style) and was cut down by the Puritans at the Revolution was a sport of the common hawthorn. The monks of Glastonbury perpetuated it and sanctified it with an improving tale about Joseph of Arimathea’s staff and the Crown of Thorns as a means of discouraging the orgiastic use of hawthorn blossom, which normally did not appear until May Day (Old Style).

It is likely that the Old Bush which had grown on the site of St. David’s Cathedral was an orgiastic hawthorn; for this would account for the legend of David’s mysterious birth.

D FOR DUIR

The seventh tree is the oak, the tree of Zeus, Jupiter, Hercules, The Dagda (the chief of the elder Irish gods), Thor, and all the other Thunder-gods, Jehovah in so far as he was ‘El’, and Allah. The royalty of the oak-tree needs no enlarging upon: most people are familiar with the argument of Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough, which concerns the human sacrifice of the oak-king of Nemi on Midsummer Day. The fuel of the midsummer fires is always oak, the fire of Vesta at Rome was fed with oak, and the need-fire is always kindled in an oak-log. When Gwion writes in the Câd Goddeu, ‘Stout Guardian of the door, His name in every tongue’, he is saying that doors are customarily made of oak as the strongest and toughest wood and that ‘Duir’, the Beth-Luis-Nion name for ‘Oak’, means ‘door’ in many European languages including Old Goidelic dorus, Latin foris, Greek thura, and German tür, all derived from the Sanskrit Dwr, and that Daleth, the Hebrew letter D, means ‘Door’ – the ‘I’ being originally an ‘r’. Midsummer is the flowering season of the oak, which is the tree of endurance and triumph, and like the ash is said to ‘court the lightning flash’. Its roots are believed to extend as deep underground as its branches rise in the air – Virgil mentions this – which makes it emblematic of a god whose law runs both in Heaven and in the Underworld. Poseidon the ash-god and Zeus the oak-god were both once armed with thunderbolts; but when the Achaeans humbled the Aeolians, Poseidon’s bolt was converted into a trident or fish-spear and Zeus reserved the sole right to wield the bolt. It has been suggested that oak oracles were introduced into Greece by the Achaeans: that they originally consulted the beech, as the Franks did, but finding no beeches in Greece transferred their allegiance to the oak with edible acorns, its nearest equivalent, to which they gave the name phegos – which, as has been mentioned, is the same word as fagus, the Latin for beech. At any rate, the oracular oak at Dodona was a phegos, not a drus, and the oracular ship Argo was, according to Apollonius Rhodius, largely made of this timber. But it is more likely that the Dodona oracle was in existence centuries before the Achaeans came and that Herodotus was right in stating on the authority of the Egyptian priests that the black dove and oracular oak cults of Zeus at Ammon in the Libyan desert and of Zeus at Dodona were coeval. Professor Flinders Petrie postulates a sacred league between Libya and the Greek mainland well back into the third millennium BC. The Ammon oak was in the care of the tribe of Garamantes: the Greeks knew of their ancestor Garamas as ‘the first of men’. The Zeus of Ammon was a sort of Hercules with a ram’s head akin to ram-headed Osiris, and to Amen-Ra the ram-headed Sun-god of Egyptian Thebes from where Herodotus says that the black doves flew to Ammon and Dodona.

The month, which takes its name from Jupiter the oak-god, begins on June 10th and ends on July 7th. Midway comes St. John’s Day, June 24th, the day on which the oak-king was sacrificially burned alive. The Celtic year was divided into two halves with the second half beginning in July, apparently after a seven-day wake, or funeral feast, in the oak-king’s honour.

Sir James Frazer, like Gwion, has pointed out the similarity of ‘door’ words in all Indo-European languages and shown Janus to be a ‘stout guardian of the door’ with his head pointing in both directions. As usual, however, he does not press his argument far enough. Duir as the god of the oak month looks both ways because his post is at the turn of the year; which identifies him with the Oak-god Hercules who became the doorkeeper of the Gods after his death. He is probably also to be identified with the British god Llyr or Lludd or Nudd, a god of the sea – i.e. a god of a sea-faring Bronze Age people – who was the ‘father’ of Creiddylad (Cordelia) an aspect of the White Goddess; for according to Geoffrey of Monmouth the grave of Llyr at Leicester was in a vault built in honour of Janus. Geoffrey writes:

Since Llyr was a pre-Roman God this amounts to saying that he was two-headed, like Janus, and the patron of the New Year; but the Celtic year began in the summer, not in the winter. Geoffrey does not date the mourning festival but it is likely to have originally taken place at the end of June.

The old ‘Wakes’, the hiring-fairs of the English countryside came to be held at various dates between March and October according to the date of the local saint’s day. (‘At Bunbury Wakes rye-grass and clover should be ready to cut. At Wrenbury Wakes early apples are ripe.’ English Dialect Dictionary.) But originally they must all have taken place at Lammas between the hay harvest and the corn harvest. That the Wakes were mourning for the dead King is confirmed in Chapter Seventeen. The Anglo-Saxon form of Lughomass, mass in honour of the God Lugh or Llew, was hlaf-mass, ‘loaf-mass’, with reference to the corn-harvest and the killing of the Corn-king.

What I take for a reference to Llyr as Janus occurs in the closing paragraph of Merlin’s prophecy to the heathen King Vortigern and his Druids, recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth:

In other words, the ancient Druidic religion based on the oak-cult will be swept away by Christianity and the door – the god Llyr – will languish forgotten in the Castle of Arianrhod, the Corona Borealis.

This helps us to understand the relationship at Rome of Janus and the White Goddess Cardea who is mentioned at the end of Chapter Four as the Goddess of Hinges who came to Rome from Alba Longa. She was the hinge on which the year swung – the ancient Latin, not the Etruscan year – and her importance as such is recorded in the Latin adjective cardinalis – as we say in English ‘of cardinal importance’ – which was also applied to the four main winds, for winds were considered as under the sole direction of the Great Goddess until Classical times. As Cardea she ruled over the Celestial Hinge at the back of the North Wind around which, as Varro explains in his De Re Rustica, the mill-stone of the Universe revolves. This conception appears most plainly in the Norse Edda, where the giantesses Fenja and Menja, who turn the monstrous mill-stone Grotte in the cold polar night, stand for the White Goddess in her complementary moods of creation and destruction. Elsewhere in Norse mythology the Goddess is nine-fold: the nine giantesses who were joint-mothers of the hero Rig, alias Heimdall, the inventor of the Norse social system, similarly turned the cosmic mill. Janus was perhaps not originally double-headed: he may have borrowed this peculiarity from the Goddess herself who at the Carmentalia, the Carmenta Festival in early January, was addressed by her celebrants as ‘Postvorta and Antevorta’ – ‘she who looks both back and forward’. However, a Janus with long hair and wings appears on an early stater of Mallos, a Cretan colony in Cilicia. He is identified with the solar hero Talus, and a bull’s head appears on the same coin. On similar coins of the late fifth century BC he holds an eight-rayed disc in his hand and has a spiral of immortality sprouting from his double head.

Here at last I can complete my argument about Arianrhod’s Castle and the ‘whirling round without motion between three elements’. The sacred oak-king was killed at midsummer and translated to the Corona Borealis, presided over by the White Goddess, which was then just dipping over the Northern horizon. But from the song ascribed by Apollonius Rhodius to Orpheus, we know that the Queen of the Circling Universe, Eurynome, alias Cardea, was identical with Rhea of Crete; thus Rhea lived at the axle of the mill, whirling around without motion, as well as on the Galaxy. This suggests that in a later mythological tradition the sacred king went to serve her at the Mill, not in the Castle; for Samson after his blinding and enervation turned a mill in Delilah’s prison-house.

Another name for the Goddess of the Mill was Artemis Calliste, or Callisto (‘Most Beautiful’), to whom the she-bear was sacred in Arcadia; and in Athens at the festival of Artemis Brauronia, a girl of ten years old and a girl of five, dressed in saffron-yellow robes in honour of the moon, played the part of sacred bears. The Great She-bear and Little She-bear are still the names of the two constellations that turn the mill around. In Greek the Great Bear Callisto was also called Helice, which means both ‘that which turns’ and ‘willow-branch’ – a reminder that the willow was sacred to the same Goddess.

The evidence, given in the Gwyn context at the close of Chapter Six, for supposing that the oak-cult came to Britain from the Baltic between 1600 and 1400 BC suggests that the Beth-Luis-Nion sequence, in which Duir is the principal tree, was at any rate not elaborated before 1600 BC, though the rowan, willow, elder and alder were perhaps already in sacral use. Gwyn, ‘the White One’, son of Llyr or Lludd was buried in a boat-shaped oak-coffin in his father’s honour: he was a sort of Osiris (his rival ‘Victor son of Scorcher’ being a sort of Set) and came to be identified with King Arthur. His name supplies the prefix Win of many ancient towns in Britain.

T FOR TINNE

The eighth tree is the holly, which flowers in July. The holly appears in the originally Irish Romance of Gawain and the Green Knight. The Green Knight is an immortal giant whose club is a holly-bush. He and Sir Gawain, who appears in the Irish version as Cuchulain, a typical Hercules, make a compact to behead one another at alternate New Years – meaning midsummer and midwinter – but, in effect, the Holly Knight spares the Oak Knight. In Sir Gawain s Marriage, a Robin Hood ballad, King Arthur, who has his seat at Carlisle, says:

This lady, whose name is not mentioned, will have been the goddess Creiddylad for whom, in Welsh myth, the Oak Knight and Holly Knight fought every first of May until Doomsday. Since in mediaeval practice St. John the Baptist, who lost his head on St. John’s Day, took over the oak-king’s titles and customs, it was natural to let Jesus, as John’s merciful successor, take over the holly-king’s. The holly was thus glorified beyond the oak. For example, in the Holly-Tree Carol:

– a sentiment that derives from the Song of the Forest Trees: ‘Of all trees whatsoever the critically best is holly.’ In each stanza of the carol, with its apt chorus about ‘the rising of the Sun, the running of the deer’, some property of the tree is equated with the birth or passion of Jesus: the whiteness of the flower, the redness of the berry, the sharpness of the prickles, the bitterness of the bark. ‘Holly’ means ‘holy’. Yet the holly which is native to the British Isles is unlikely to be the original tree of the alphabet: it has probably displaced the evergreen scarlet-oak with which it has much in common, including the same botanical name ilex, and which was not introduced into the British Isles until the sixteenth century. The scarlet-oak, or kerm-oak, or holly-oak, is the evergreen twin of the ordinary oak and its Classical Greek names prinos and hysge are also used for holly in modern Greek. It has prickly leaves and nourishes the kerm, a scarlet insect not unlike the holly-berry (and once thought to be a berry), from which the ancients made their royal scarlet dye and an aphrodisiac elixir. In the Authorised Version of the Bible the word ‘oak’ is sometimes translated ‘terebinth’ and sometimes ‘scarlet-oak’, and these trees make a sacred pair in Palestinian religion. Jesus wore kerm-scarlet when attired as King of the Jews (Matthew XXVII, 28).

We may regard the letters D and T as twins: ‘the lily white boys clothed all in green o!’ of the mediaeval Green Rushes song. D is the oak which rules the waxing part of the year – the sacred Druidic oak, the oak of the Golden Bough. T is the evergreen oak which rules the waning part, the bloody oak: thus an evergreen oak-grove near the Corinthian Asopus was sacred to the Furies. Dann or Tann, the equivalent of Tinne, is a Celtic word for any sacred tree. In Gaul and Brittany it meant ‘oak’, in Celtic Germany it meant ‘fir’; in Cornwall the compound glas-tann (‘green sacred tree’) meant evergreen holm-oak, and the English word ‘to tan’ comes from the use of its bark in tanning. However, in ancient Italy it was the holly, not the evergreen oak, which the husbandmen used in their midwinter Saturnalia. Tannus was the name of the Gaulish Thunder-god, and Tina that of the Thunder-god, armed with a triple thunder-bolt, whom the Etruscans took over from the Goidelic tribes among whom they settled.

The identification of the pacific Jesus with the holly or holly-oak must be viewed as poetically inept, except in so far as he declared that he had come to bring not peace, but the sword. The tanist was originally his twin’s executioner; it was the oak-king, not the holly-king, who was crucified on a T-shaped cross. Lucian in his Trial in the Court of Vowels (about 160 AD) is explicit:

And in a Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, composed at about the same date, the same theme recurs in a dispute between Jesus and his schoolmaster about the letter T. The schoolmaster strikes Jesus on the head and prophesies the crucifixion. In Jesus’s time the Hebrew character Tav, the last letter of the alphabet, was shaped like the Greek Tau.

The holly rules the eighth month, and eight as the number of increase is well suited to the month of the barley harvest, which extends from July 8th to August 4th.

C FOR COLL

The ninth tree is the hazel, in the nutting season. The nut in Celtic legend is always an emblem of concentrated wisdom: something sweet, compact and sustaining enclosed in a small hard shell – as we say: ‘this is the matter in a nut-shell.’ The Rennes Dinnshenchas, an important early Irish topographical treatise, describes a beautiful fountain called Connla’s Well, near Tipperary, over which hung the nine hazels of poetic art which produced flowers and fruit (i.e. beauty and wisdom) simultaneously. As the nuts dropped into the well they fed the salmon swimming in it, and whatever number of nuts any of them swallowed, so many bright spots appeared on its body. All the knowledge of the arts and sciences was bound up with the eating of these nuts, as has already been noted in the story of Fionn, whose name Gwion adopted. In England a forked hazel-stick was used until the seventeenth century for divining not only buried treasure and hidden water, as now, but guilty persons in cases of murder and theft. And in the Book of St. Albans (1496 edition) a recipe is given for making oneself as invisible as if one had eaten fern-seed, merely by carrying a hazel-rod, a fathom and a half long with a green hazel-twig inserted in it.

The letter Coll was used as the Bardic numeral nine – because nine is the number sacred to the Muses and because the hazel fruits after nine years. The hazel was the Bile Ratha, ‘the venerated tree of the rath’ – the rath in which the poetic Aes Sidhe lived. It gave its name also to a god named Mac Coll or Mac Cool (‘son of the Hazel’) who according to Keating’s History of Ireland was one of the three earliest rulers of Ireland, his two brothers being Mac Ceacht (‘son of the Plough’) and Mac Greine (‘son of the Sun’). They celebrated a triple marriage with the Triple Goddess of Ireland, Eire, Fodhla and Banbha. This legend appears at first sight to record the overthrow of the matriarchal system by patriarchal invaders; but since Greine, the Sun, was a Goddess not a God and since both agriculture and wisdom were presided over by the Triple Goddess, the invaders were doubtless Goddess-worshippers themselves and merely transferred their filial allegiance to the Triple Goddess of the land.

In the Fenian legend of the Ancient Dripping Hazel, the hazel appears as a tree of wisdom that can be put to destructive uses. It dripped a poisonous milk, had no leaves and was the abode of vultures and ravens, birds of divination. It split in two when the head of the God Balor was placed in its fork after his death, and when Fionn used its wood as a shield in battle its noxious vapours killed thousands of the enemy. Fionn’s hazel shield is an emblem of the satiric poem that carries a curse. It was as the Druidic heralds’ tree that the ‘hazel was arbiter’ in Gwion’s Câd Goddeu; ancient Irish heralds carried white hazel wands. The hazel is the tree of wisdom and the month extends from August 5th to September 1st.

M FOR MUIN

The tenth tree is the vine in the vintage season. The vine, though not native to Britain, is an important motif in British Bronze Age art; so probably the Danaans carried the tree itself northward with them as well as the emblem. It fruited well there on a few sheltered Southern slopes. But since it could not be established as a wild tree, they will have used the bramble as a substitute: the fruiting season, the colour of the berries, and the shape of the leaf correspond, and blackberry wine is a heady drink. (In all Celtic countries there is a taboo against eating the blackberry though it is a wholesome and nourishing fruit; in Brittany the reason given is ‘a cause des fées’, ‘because of the fairies’. In Majorca the explanation is different: the bramble was the bush chosen for the Crown of Thorns and the berries are Christ’s blood. In North Wales as a child I was warned merely that they were poisonous. In Devonshire the taboo is only on eating blackberries after the last day of September, when ‘the Devil enters into them’; which substantiates my theory that the blackberry was a popular substitute for Muin in the West Country.) The vine was sacred to the Thracian Dionysus, and to Osiris, and a golden vine was one of the principal ornaments of the Temple of Jerusalem. It is the tree of joy, exhilaration and wrath. The month extends from September 2nd to September 29th and includes the autumn equinox.

G FOR GORT

The eleventh tree is the ivy in its flowering season. October was the season of the Bacchanal revels of Thrace and Thessaly in which the intoxicated Bassarids rushed wildly about on the mountains, waving the fir-branches of Queen Artemis (or Ariadne) spirally wreathed with ivy – the yellow-berried sort – in honour of Dionysus (the autumnal Dionysus, who must be distinguished from the Dionysus of the Winter Solstice who is really a Hercules), and with a roebuck tattooed on their right arms above the elbow. They tore fawns, kids, children and even men to pieces in their ecstasy. The ivy was sacred to Osiris as well as to Dionysus. Vine and ivy come next to each other at the turn of the year, and are jointly dedicated to resurrection, presumably because they are the only two trees in the Beth-Luis-Nion that grow spirally. The vine also symbolizes resurrection because its strength is preserved in the wine. In England the ivy-bush has always been the sign of the wine-tavern; hence the proverb ‘Good wine needs no bush’, and ivy-ale, a highly intoxicating mediaeval drink, is still brewed at Trinity College, Oxford, in memory of a Trinity student murdered by Balliol men. It is likely that the Bassarids’ tipple was ‘spruce-ale’, brewed from the sap of silver-fir and laced with ivy; they may also have chewed ivy-leaves for their toxic effect. Yet the main Maenad intoxicant will have been amanita muscaria, the red toadstool with white spots, that alone could supply the necessary muscular strength. Here we may reconsider Phoroneus, the Spring-Dionysus, inventor of fire. He built the city of Argos, the emblem of which, according to Apollodorus, was a toad; and Mycenae, the main fortress of Argolis, was so called, according to Pausanias, because Perseus, a convert to Dionysus worship, found a toadstool growing on the site. Dionysus had two feasts – the Spring Anthesterion, or ‘Flower-uprising’; and the autumn Mysterion, which probably means ‘uprising of toadstools’ (mykosterion) known as Ambrosia (‘food of the gods’). Was Phoroneus also the discoverer of a divine fire resident in the toadstool, and therefore Phryneus (‘toad being’) as well as Fearinus (‘Spring being’)? The amanita muscaria, though not a tree, grows under a tree: always a birch northward from Thrace and Celtic countries to the Arctic Circle; but under a fir or pine southward from Greece and Palestine to the Equator. In the North it is scarlet; in the South, fox-coloured. And does this explain the precedence given to the silver-fir among the vowels as A, and the birch among the consonants as B? Does it add a further note to ‘Christ son of Alpha’?

(The rivalry mentioned in mediaeval English carols between holly and ivy is not, as one might expect, between the tree of murder and the tree of resurrection, between Typhon-Set and Dionysus-Osiris; instead it represents the domestic war of the sexes. The explanation seems to be that in parts of England the last harvest sheaf to be carted in any parish was bound around with Osirian ivy and called the Harvest May, the Harvest Bride, or the Ivy Girl: whichever farmer was latest with his harvesting was given the Ivy Girl as his penalty, an omen of ill luck until the following year. Thus the ivy came to mean a carline, or shrewish wife, a simile confirmed by the strangling of trees by ivy. But ivy and holly were both associated with the Saturnalia, holly being Saturn’s club, ivy being the nest of the Gold Crest Wren, his bird; on Yule morning, the last of his merry reign, the first foot over the threshold had to be that of Saturn’s representative, a dark man, called the Holly Boy, and elaborate precautions were taken to keep women out of the way. Thus Ivy Girl and Holly Boy became opposed; which gave rise to the Yule custom in which ‘holly boys’ and ‘ivy girls’ contended in a game of forfeits for precedence, and sang songs, mainly satirical, against each other.)

The ivy month extends from September 30th to October 27th.

P FOR PEITH, OR NG FOR NGETAL

The twelfth tree given in O’Flaherty’s list is Peith, the whitten, or guelder-rose, or water-elder, an appropriate introduction to the last month which is the true elder. But Peith is not the original letter; it is a Brythonic substitute for the original letter NG, which was of no literary use to the Brythons, or (for that matter) to the Goidels, but which formed part of the original series. The NG tree was the Ngetal, or reed, which becomes ready for cutting in November. The canna-reed, which grows from a thick root like a tree, was an ancient symbol of royalty in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Pharaohs used reed sceptres (hence Egypt is satirized by the prophet Isaiah as a ‘bruised reed’) and a royal reed was put into Jesus’ s hand when he was attired in scarlet. It is the tree from which arrows were cut, and therefore appropriate to Pharaoh as a living Sun-god who shot off his arrows in every direction as a symbol of sovereignty. The number twelve has the sense of established power, confirmed by the Irish use of reeds in thatching: a house is not an established house until the roof is on. The month extends from October 28th to November 24th.

R FOR RUIS

The thirteenth tree is the elder, a waterside tree associated with witches, which keeps its fruit well into December. It is an old British superstition that a child laid in an elderwood cradle will pine away or be pinched black and blue by the fairies – the traditional wood for cradles is the birch, the tree of inception, which drives away evil spirits. And in Ireland elder sticks, rather than ashen ones, are used by witches as magic horses. Although the flowers and inner bark of the elder have always been famous for their therapeutic qualities, the scent of an elder plantation was formerly held to cause death and disease. So unlucky is the elder that in Langland’s Piers Plowman, Judas is made to hang himself on an elder tree. Spenser couples the elder with the funereal cypress, and T. Scot writes in his Philomythie (1616):

King William Rufus was killed by an archer posted under an elder. The elder is also said to have been the Crucifixion tree, and the elder-leaf shape of the funerary flints in megalithic long-barrows suggest that its association with death is long-standing. In English folklore to burn logs of elder ‘brings the Devil into the house’. Its white flowers, which are at their best at midsummer, make the elder another aspect of the White Goddess; and the same is true of the rowan. The elder is the tree of doom – hence the continued unluckiness of the number thirteen – and the month extends from November 25th to the winter solstice of December 22nd.

*

But what of the extra day? It falls outside the thirteen-month year and is therefore not ruled by any of the Trees. I am assuming that its natural place is between the letter-months of R and B, in the day after the winter solstice when the hours of daylight begin to lengthen again: in fact, about Christmas Eve, the birthday of the Divine Child. The R.B. radicals recall robur, the Latin for ‘oak’ and ‘strength’, and also the Celtic word ‘robin’. For at this point in the year, in British folklore, the Robin Red Breast as the Spirit of the New Year sets out with a birch-rod to kill his predecessor the Gold Crest Wren, the Spirit of the Old Year, whom he finds hiding in an ivy bush. Sir James Frazer has shown in his Golden Bough that the Christmas Eve folk-custom of hunting the wren with birch rods, which still survives in Ireland and the Isle of Man, was at one time also practised in Rome and ancient Greece, where the Gold Crest was known as ‘the little king’. That the Gold Crest does frequent ivy bushes at Christmas time is ornithological fact. The robin is said to ‘murder its father’, which accounts for its red breast. There is a clear reference to the story in Gwion’s Angar Cyvyndawd: ‘Keing ydd ym Eidduw Bum i arweddawd’, (‘Concealed in the ivy bush, I have been carried about’). The wren-boys of Ireland sometimes use a holly-bush instead of an ivy-bush; the holly being the tree of the tanist, who killed the oak-king at midsummer. The wren is protected from injury at all other seasons of the year and it is very unlucky to take its eggs. One of the Devonshire names for the wren is ‘the cuddy vran’ – ‘Bran’s sparrow’ – and in Ireland it was linked with Bran’s crow, or raven, as a prophetic bird. R. I. Best has edited a collection of wren and raven omens in Erin VIII (1916). Bran, it has been shown, was Saturn.

Perhaps the most ancient wren tradition is quoted by Pausanias in his Description of Greece: he says that Triptolemus, the Eleusinian counterpart of Egyptian Osiris, was an Argive priest of mysteries named Trochilus who fled from Argos to Attica when Agenor seized the city. Trochilus means ‘wren’ and it also means ‘of the wheel’, presumably because the wren is hunted when the wheel of the year has gone full circle. The connexion of the wren with the wheel was retained until recently in Somersetshire. Swainson records in his Birds (1885): ‘It is customary on Twelfth Day to carry about a wren, termed the King, enclosed in a box with glass windows, surmounted by a wheel from which are appended various coloured ribbands.’ A later version makes Triptolemus a son of Picus (the woodpecker, another prophetic bird) and thus identifies him with Pan or Faunus. Pausanias’s story seems to refer to the expulsion from Argos by Syrian invaders of the priesthood of Cronos (Bran) to whom the wren was sacred.

As soon as one has mastered the elementary grammar and accidence of myth, and built up a small vocabulary, and learned to distinguish seasonal myths from historical and iconotropic myths, one is surprised how close to the surface lie the explanations, lost since pre-Homeric times, of legends that are still religiously conserved as part of our European cultural inheritance. For example, the various legends of the halcyon, or kingfisher which like the wren, is associated in Greek myth with the winter solstice. There were fourteen ‘halcyon days’ in every year, seven of which fell before the winter solstice, seven after: peaceful days when the sea was smooth as a pond and the hen-halcyon built a floating nest and hatched out her young. According to Plutarch and Aelian, she had another habit, of carrying her dead mate on her back over the sea and mourning him with a peculiarly plaintive cry.

The number fourteen is a moon-number, the days of the lucky first half of the month; so the legend (which has no foundation in natural history, because the halcyon does not build a nest at all but lays its eggs in holes by the waterside) evidently refers to the birth of the new sacred king, at the winter solstice – after his mother, the Moon-goddess, has conveyed the old king’s corpse to a sepulchral island. Naturally, the winter solstice does not always coincide with the same phase of the moon, so ‘every year’ must be understood as ‘every Great Year’, at the close of which solar and lunar time were roughly synchronized and the sacred king’s term ended.

Homer connects the halcyon with Alcyone, a title of Meleager’s wife Cleopatra (Iliad, IX, 562) and with an earlier Alcyone who was daughter to Aegeale, ‘she who wards off the hurricane’, by Aeolus, the eponymous ancestor of the Aeolian Greeks. The word ‘halcyon’ cannot therefore mean hal-cyon, ‘sea-hound’, as is usually supposed, but must stand for alcy-one, ‘princess who averts evil’. This derivation is confirmed by the fable told by Apollodorus and Hyginus, and briefly mentioned by Homer, of the earlier Alcyone: how she and her husband Ceyx (‘sea-mew’) dared call themselves Hera and Zeus, and how the real Zeus punished them by drowning Ceyx, whereupon Alcyone also drowned herself. Ceyx was then metamorphosed into a sea-mew or, according to Alcman, into a razor-bill, and she into a halcyon. The sea-mew part of the legend need not be pressed, though the bird, which has a very plaintive cry, is sacred to the Sea-goddess Aphrodite; the historical basis seems to be that late in the second millennium BC the Aeolians, who had agreed to worship the pre-Hellenic Moon-goddess as their divine ancestress and protectress, became tributary to the Achaeans and were forced to accept the Olympian religion.

Pliny, who carefully describes the halcyon’s alleged nest – apparently the zoöphyte called halcyoneum by Linnaeus – reports that the halcyon is rarely seen and then only at the winter and summer solstices and at the setting of the Pleiads. This proves her to have originally been a manifestation of the Moon-goddess who was worshipped at the two solstices as the Goddess of alternatively Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life – and who early in November, when the Pleiads set, sent the sacred king his summons to death (as will be pointed out in Chapter Twelve). Still another Alcyone, daughter to Pleione, ‘Queen of Sailing’, by the oak-hero Atlas, was the mystical leader of the seven Pleiads. The heliacal rising of the Pleiads in May marked the beginning of the navigational year; their setting marked its end when (as Pliny notices in a passage about the halcyon) a remarkably cold North wind blows. The circumstances of Ceyx’s death show that the Aeolians, who were famous sailors, gave the goddess the title ‘Alcyone’ because as Sea-goddess she protected them from rocks and rough weather: for Zeus had wrecked him in defiance of Alcyone’s powers by hurling lightning at the ship. The halcyon continued for centuries to be credited with the magical power of allaying storms, and its body when dried was used as a talisman against Zeus’ lightning – supposedly on the ground that where once it strikes, it will not strike again. I have twice (with an interval of many years) seen a halcyon skimming the surface of the same Mediterranean bay, on both occasions about midsummer when the sea was without a ripple: its startlingly bright blue and white plumage made it an unforgettable symbol of the Goddess of calm seas.

The connexion made by Homer between Meleager’s wife Alcyone and the halcyon is that when her mother, Marpessa, was carried off by Apollo from Idas the Argonaut, her beloved husband, she mourned him as bitterly as the earlier Alcyone had mourned Ceyx and therefore gave her new-born daughter Cleopatra the surname ‘Alcyone’. This is nonsense. A priestess named Cleopatra whom the original Meleager married may well have borne the divine title ‘Alcyone’; but it is likely that Alcyone was called the Daughter of Marpessa (‘the snatcher’) because Marpessa was the White Goddess as the Old Sow who ruled mid-winter and because the halcyon days fall at mid-winter. This would, incidentally, explain why Pliny recommended dried and pulverized halcyon nests as a ‘wonderful cure’ for leprosy; sow’s milk was held to cause leprosy (the association of the White Goddess with leprosy is given in detail in Chapter Twenty-Four) and Alcyone as Marpessa’s benignant daughter would be immune against the infection. Apollo’s rape of Marpessa at Messene, like his rape of Daphne (‘the bloody one’) at Delphi, are events in early Greek tribal history: seizure of oracular shrines by the Achaean partisans of Apollo.