THE TREE ALPHABET (2)

The vowels of the Beth-Luis-Nion make a complementary seasonal sequence, and like the vowels of the Boibel-Loth represent stations in the year. I take them to be the trees particularly sacred to the White Goddess, who presided over the year and to whom the number five was sacred; for Gwion in his poem Kadeir Taliesin (‘The Chair of Taliesin’), which was the chair that he claimed as Chief Poet of Wales after his confounding of Heinin and the other bards, describes the Cauldron of Inspiration, Cerridwen’s cauldron, as:

In Crete, Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean in general sacred trees are formalised as pillars; so these five trees may be the same as the five pillars with vertical and spiral flutings which a man is shown adoring in a Mycenaean cylinder seal.1 In the newly-discovered Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, five trees of Paradise are mentioned – but these are emblems of the five deathless Ones, namely Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Enoch and Elijah.

A FOR AILM

The first tree is the silver fir, a female tree with leaves closely resembling the yew’s, sacred in Greece to Artemis the Moon-goddess who presided over childbirth, and the prime birth-tree of Northern Europe, familiar in the Nativity context. In Orkney, according to Rogers’s Social Life in Scotland, mother and child are ‘sained’ soon after delivery with a flaming fir-candle whirled three times round the bed. It is remarkable that ailm, in Old Irish, also stood for the palm, a tree not native to Ireland (though it grew well on my grandfather’s estate in Co. Kerry). The palm, the birth-tree of Egypt, Babylonia, Arabia and Phoenicia, gives its name phoenix (‘bloody’) to Phoenicia, which formerly covered the whole Eastern Mediterranean, and to the Phoenix which is born and reborn in a palm. Its poetic connexion with birth is that the sea is the Universal Mother and that the palm thrives close to the sea in sandy soil heavily charged with salt; without salt at its roots a young palm remains stunted. The palm is the Tree of Life in the Babylonian Garden of Eden story. Its Hebrew name is ‘Tamar’ – Tamar was the Hebrew equivalent of the Great Goddess Istar or Ashtaroth; and the Arabians adored the palm of Nejran as a goddess, annually draping it with women’s clothes and ornaments. Both Delian Apollo and Nabataean Dusares were born under a palm-tree. In modern Irish ‘ailm’ has come to mean elm, under the influence of the Latin Classics, for in Italy the elm, ulmus, which is not native to the British Isles, was used for supporting the young vine and so became the alma mater of the Wine-god. This interdependence of vine and elm was sanctified by a reference in the early Christian book of revelation, The Shepherd of Hermas.

But the silver fir, which also likes sandy soil and sea breezes, is as old a birth-tree as the palm, being the tree under which the God of Byblos was born: the prototype of the pre-dynastic Osiris of Egypt. The Greek for fir is elate, and Pausanias’s account of Elatos the Arcadian is interesting. He was ‘father of Ischys, the lover of Aesculapius’s mother’ and of Cyllen who gave his name to Mount Cyllene ‘until then nameless’, which became the birth-place of Hermes. Other mythographers convert Cyllen into ‘the Nymph Cyllene’, wife of Pelasgus who founded the Pelasgian race. It seems that originally Elatos was Elate ‘the lofty one’, a name transferred from Artemis to her sacred tree – an ivy-twined, fir-cone-tipped branch of which was waved in her honour at the Dionysian revels – and that Cyllene (Cylle Ana) ‘the curved queen’ was another of her titles. The fir-tree of the Birth-goddess is similarly transferred to her son in the myth of Attis, son of Nana, the Phrygian Adonis. He is said to have been metamorphosed into a fir by the Goddess Cybele who loved him, when he lay dying from a wound dealt him by a boar sent by Zeus – or else dealt him by a Phrygian king whom he had emasculated and who emasculated him in return.

The Trojan horse, a peace-offering to the Goddess Athene, originally the same White Goddess, was made of silver-fir: a horse, because sacred to the moon. In the Museum of Newcastle-on-Tyne is a Roman-British altar dedicated to ‘the Mothers’1 by one Julius Victor. It shows a triangle standing on its base with a fir-cone enclosed. Though Druantia, the name of the Gallic Fir-goddess, contains no reference to her own tree, it makes her ‘Queen of the Druids’ and therefore mother of the whole tree-calendar.

The silver fir has its station on the first day of the year, the birthday of the Divine Child, the extra day of the winter solstice. Thirteen weeks separate these stations and the last of each was a death week and demanded a blood-sacrifice.

O FOR ONN

The second tree is the furze, which with its golden flowers and prickles typifies the young Sun at the Spring equinox; the time when furze fires are lighted on the hills. The effect of burning away the old prickles is to make tender new ones sprout on the stock, which sheep eat greedily; and to encourage the growth of grass – ‘The furze but ill-behaved, Until he is subdued.’ The religious importance of furze, or gorse, which in Welsh folk-lore is ‘good against witches’, is enhanced by its flowers being frequented by the first bees of the year, as the ivy’s are by the last. The name On-niona, a Goddess worshipped by the Gauls in ash-groves, is a compound of Onn and Nion, which supplies the date of her festival, namely the Spring equinox at the close of the Ash-month.

U FOR URA

The third tree is the heather, sacred to the Roman and Sicilian love-goddess Venus Erycina; and in Egypt and Phoenicia to Isis whose brother Osiris was immured in a heather-tree at Byblos, where she went to seek him. The Isis legend quoted by Plutarch is late and artificial but hints at child-sacrifice in honour of Osiris.

The eighteenth-century antiquary Winslow took Dean Swift to Lough Crew to collect local legends of the Irish Triple Goddess. Among those collected was one of the death of the Garbh Ogh, an ancient ageless giantess, whose car was drawn by elks, whose diet was venison milk and eagles’ breasts and who hunted the mountain deer with a pack of seventy hounds with bird names. She gathered stones to heap herself a triple cairn and ‘set up her chair in a womb of the hills at the season of heather-bloom’; and then expired.

The Gallic Heather-goddess Uroica is attested by inscriptions in Roman Switzerland; her name is half-way between Ura, and the Greek word for heather, ereice.

The heather is the midsummer tree, red and passionate, and is associated with mountains and bees. The Goddess is herself a queen bee about whom male drones swarm in midsummer, and as Cybele is often so pictured; the ecstatic self-castration of her priests was a type of the emasculation of the drone by the queen bee in the nuptial act. Venus fatally courted Anchises on a mountain to the hum of bees. But white heather is lucky, being a protection against acts of passion. The Sicilian Mount Eryx is famous for the visit of Butes the bee-master, son of the North Wind, who was given a hero-shrine there by the nymphs of the Goddess Erycina. The reference in Gwion’s Câd Goddeu to the heather comforting the battered poplars is to ‘heather-ale’, a favourite restorative in Wales.

The ancient popularity of lindens or lime-trees among love-poets of Germany and Northern France, suggests that they became a substitute, in flat regions, for mountain heather. Lindens flower from mid-May to mid-August. They do not rank as sacred trees in Britain where only a small-leaved variety seems to be indigenous. However, in Thessaly, Cheiron the Centaur’s Goddess-mother associated with the erotic wryneck, was called Philyra (‘linden’).

E FOR EADHA

The fourth tree, the tree of the autumn equinox and of old age, is the shifting-leaved white poplar, or aspen, the shield-maker’s tree. According to Pausanias it was first introduced into Greece from Epirus by Hercules (but which?); and the Latin legend is that he bound his head in triumph with poplar after killing the giant Cacus (‘the evil one’) in his den on the Aventine Hill at Rome. The side of the leaves next to his brow were whitened by the radiant heat he gave out. Presumably the myth accounts for the difference in leaf and ritual use between the aspen and the black poplar which was a funereal tree sacred to Mother Earth in pre-Hellenic Greece. There is a reference in the Casina of Plautus to the divinatory use of black poplar and silver fir, the fir apparently standing for hope, the poplar for loss of hope1 somewhat as in Pembrokeshire a girl gives a lover either a piece of birch as a sign of encouragement, ‘You may begin’, or a piece of hazel, called a collen, ‘Be wise and desist’. Hercules conquered death, and in ancient Ireland the fé or measuring-rod used by coffin-makers on corpses was of aspen, presumably as a reminder to the souls of the dead that this was not the end. Golden head-dresses of aspen leaves are found in Mesopotamian burials of 3000 BC.

I FOR IDHO

The fifth tree is the yew, the death-tree in all European countries, sacred to Hecate in Greece and Italy. At Rome, when black bulls were sacrificed to Hecate, so that the ghosts should lap their gushing blood, they were wreathed with yew. The yew is mentioned by Pausanias as the tree beside which Epaminondas found the bronze urn on Mount Ithome, containing on a tin scroll the secret mysteries of the Great Goddess. On the other side of the urn, appropriately, grew a myrtle, which (as will appear in Chapter Thirteen) was the Greek equivalent of the elder, the death-consonant R. That the scroll was made of tin is interesting; for the ancient Greeks imported their tin from Spain and Britain. In Ireland the yew was ‘the coffin of the vine’: wine barrels were made of yew staves. In the Irish romance of Naoise and Deirdre, yew stakes were driven through the corpses of these lovers to keep them apart; but the stakes sprouted and became trees whose tops eventually embraced over Armagh Cathedral. In Brittany it is said that church-yard yews will spread a root to the mouth of each corpse. Yew makes the best bows – as the Romans learned from the Greeks – and the deadliness of the tree was thereby enhanced; it is likely that the Latin taxus, yew, is connected with toxon, Greek for bow, and with toxicon, Greek for the poison with which arrows were smeared. The ancient Irish are said to have used a compound of yew-berry, hellebore and devil’s bit for poisoning their weapons. John Evelyn in his Silva (1662) points out that the yew does not deserve its reputation for poisonousness – ‘whatever Pliny reports concerning its shade, or the story of the air about Thasius, the fate of Cativulcus mentioned by Caesar, and the ill report which the fruit has vulgarly obtained in France, Spain and Arcadia.’ Cattle and horses nibble the leaves without ill-effect, he says; but later he suggests that the ‘true taxus’ is indeed ‘mortiferous’. Its use in the English witch-cult is recalled in Macbeth where Hecate’s cauldron contained:

Shakespeare elsewhere calls it the ‘double fatal yew’ and makes Hamlet’s uncle poison the King by pouring its juice (‘hebenon’) into his ear. It shares with the oak the reputation of taking longer than any other tree to come to maturity, but is longer lived even than the oak. When seasoned and polished its wood has an extraordinary power of resisting corruption.

One of the ‘Five Magical Trees of Ireland’ was a yew. This was the Tree of Ross, described as ‘a firm straight deity’ (the Irish yew differed from the British in being cone-shaped, with branches growing straight up, not horizontally), ‘the renown of Banbha’ (Banbha was the death aspect of the Irish Triple Goddess), ‘the Spell of Knowledge, and the King’s Wheel’ – that is to say the death-letter that makes the wheel of existence come full circle; as a reminder of his destiny, every Irish king wore a brooch in the form of a wheel, which was entailed on his successor. I place the station of the yew on the last day of the year, the eve of the Winter Solstice. Ailm the Silver-fir of Birth and Idho the Yew of Death are sisters: they stand next to each other in the circle of the year and their foliage is almost identical. Fir is to yew as silver is to poisonous lead. The mediaeval alchemists, following ancient tradition, reckoned silver to the Moon as presiding over birth, and lead to Saturn as presiding over death; and extracted both metals from the same mixed ore.

An Assyrian sculpture published by Felix Lajard in his Sur la Culte de Mithra (1847), shows the year as a thirteen-branched tree. The tree has five bands around the trunk and the sceptre-like branches are arranged six on each side, one at the summit. Here evidently the Eastern Mediterranean agricultural year, beginning in the autumn, has been related to the solar year beginning at the Winter solstice. For there is a small ball, representing a new solar year, suspended above the last three branches; and of the two rampant goats which act as supporters to the tree device, the one on the right, which has turned his head so that his single horn forms a crescent moon, rests a forefoot on the uppermost of these last three branches; while the other goat, a she-goat turning her head in the opposite direction so that her horn forms a decrescent moon, is claiming the first three branches. She has a full udder, appropriate to this season, because the first kids are dropped about the winter solstice. A boat-like new moon swims above the tree, and a group of seven stars, the seventh very much brighter than the others, is placed beside the she-goat; which proves her to be Amalthea, mother of the horned Dionysus. The he-goat is an Assyrian counterpart of Azazel, the scape-goat sacrificed by the Hebrews at the beginning of the agricultural year. The five bands on the tree, of which one is at the base of the trunk, another at the top, are the five stations of the year; in a Babylonian tree of the year, published in the same book, they are symbolized by five fronds.

In the light of this knowledge we can re-examine the diagram of the hand used as a signalling keyboard by the Druids and understand the puzzling traditional names of the four fingers – ‘fore-finger’, ‘fool’s finger’, ‘leech, or physic-finger’ and ‘auricular or ear-finger’ – in terms of the mythic value of the letters contained on them.

 

The slight difference in order of letters between the Beth-Luis-Nion and the Boibel-Loth does not affect the argument; though I believe that the system was based on the tree meanings of the Beth-Luis-Nion, because in one of the ancient tales a really dark night is described by a poet as ‘one in which a man could not distinguish oak-leaf from hazel, nor study the five fingers of his own stretched-out hand’. The fore-finger has Duir on it, the oak-god who is the foremost of the trees, surmounted by Luis, the rowan, a charm against lightning; the fool’s-finger has Tinne on it, the holly-king, or green knight, who appears in the old English ‘Christmas Play’, a survival of the Saturnalia, as the Fool who is beheaded but rises up again unhurt; the leech-finger has Coll on it, the sage hazel, who is the master-physician; the ear-finger – in French doigt auriculaire – is based on the two death-letters Ruis and Idho and therefore has oracular power; as they still say in France of a person who gets information from a mysterious source: ‘Son petit doigt le lui dit.’ ‘Auricular finger’ is usually explained as ‘the finger most easily put into one’s ear-hole’, but the earliest sense of ‘auricular’ is ‘secretly whispered in the ear’. The auricular finger was probably used by the Gallic and British Druids for stopping the ear as an aid to inspiration. Its divinatory character was established early enough in Western Europe for it to appear in a number of folk tales concerning the loss of a little finger, or a little toe, by an ogre’s daughter; the hero of the story finds it and it enables him to win the ogre’s permission to marry the daughter. These stories occur in Brittany, Lorraine, the West Highlands, Viscaya in Spain, and Denmark. In the Romance of Taliesin it is the little finger of Elphin’s wife that is said to have been magically cut off.

The ‘ring-finger’ is another name for the leech-finger. The Romans and Greeks used the thumb, sacred to Venus, for their seal-rings which were usually made of iron; these were prophylactic charms to maintain their virility, the thumb being a synonym for the phallus and iron a compliment to Venus’s husband, the Smith-god Vulcan. But for their wedding rings they used the fourth finger of the left hand. This custom was explained by Macrobius, who wrote in the fifth century AD, on two grounds: that this was the finger in least use of the ten and the least capable of individual movement, therefore the safest to wear precious jewels upon; and (here quoting the authority of the first-century writer Appian) that in this finger an artery runs direct to the heart. The artery to the heart is an astrological, rather than an anatomical, observation – though a small vein, which the ancients could not distinguish from an artery, does show at the bottom joint – because in the late Classical apportionment of the human body to planetary influences it is Apollo, Sun-god and healer, who rules the heart, as Venus rules the kidneys; Mercury, the lungs; Diana (Moon), the head – and so on. The fourth finger is thus used as the ring-finger because the prophylactic wedding-ring, made of gold in honour of Apollo, controls the heart which is the seat of enduring love. The artery legend is also quoted in a medical context by the sixteenth-century German humanist Levinus Lemnius who records that ‘the ancient physicians from whom this finger derives its name of “physic-finger” used to mix their medicaments and potions with it, on the theory that no poison can adhere even to its extreme tip without communicating itself directly to the heart.’

Precisely the same system survives in popular cheiromancy, which is late Classical in origin. Palmists give the fore-finger to Jupiter the oak-god; the middle finger to Saturn the Christmas Fool; the fourth finger (in German also called the ‘gold finger’) to the Sun – Apollo the Sun-god having latterly become the patron of physicians and god of wisdom generally; and the little finger to Mercury in his aspect of Conductor of Dead Souls. The Moon has the heel of the palm, being the Underworld-goddess from whom Mercury derives his inspiration; Venus the thumb (as a phallic emblem); and Mars the centre of the hand, in which the weapon is gripped – his initial M is formed by the principal lines of the hand. A bronze votive hand from Phrygia dedicated to Zeus Sabazius – a rustic Jupiter – contains a little figure in Phrygian cap and breeches, with his feet resting on a ram’s head holding up thumb, fore-finger and middle finger in what is called the Latin Blessing – Venus’s thumb for increase, Jupiter’s fore-finger for fortunate guidance, Saturn’s middle finger for rain. He is imitating the posture of the hand in which he is held, and on the fore-finger is perched Jupiter’s eagle. It was not so much a blessing as a propitiatory gesture used before embarking on a speech or recital; Greek and Latin orators never omitted it. The Devil’s blessing, still used by the Frisian Islanders, consists in raising the fore-finger and ear-finger of the right hand, with the other fingers and the thumb folded against the palm. This is an invocation to the Horned God of the witches, with his lucky right horn and his unlucky left expressing his powers for good and evil.

The Apollo-finger is connected with the poplar in the story of the sun-god Phaëthon whose sisters wept for him when he died: they were metamorphosed into poplars and their tears into amber, sacred to Apollo.

The Saturn-finger is connected with the heather in the story of Osiris, the Egyptian Saturn. Osiris was enclosed in a heather tree, and the lowest consonant on the finger, the reed, was sacred to Osiris as King of Egypt. According to the well-informed fourteenth-century antiquarian Richard of Cirencester, rich Southern Britons of the third century AD wore gold rings on the fool’s finger; in the B.L.F. alphabet this finger belonged to Bran, whom they must by then have learned from the Romans to identify with Osiris. To wear a ring on the fool’s finger naturally expressed a hope of resurrection.

The thumb of Venus is connected with the palm-tree by its sacredness to the orgiastic goddess Isis, Latona or Lat. Lat was the mother of Nabatean Dusares the vine-god, worshipped in Egypt, and the lowest consonant on the thumb was the vine.

The Jupiter-finger is connected with the furze, or gorse, by the Spring gorse-fires burned in his honour as god of shepherds.

The connexion of the Mercury-finger with the yew is made by Mercury’s conducting of souls to the place presided over by the death-goddess Hecate, alias his mother Maia, to whom the yew was sacred.

It is fitting that the most sensitive part of the hand, the tip of the fore finger, should belong to Luis as the diviner. But all the finger-tip trees –Luis the rowan, Nion the ash, Fearn the alder and Saille the willow – were used in divination. This perhaps throws light on an Irish poetic rite called the Dichetal do Chennaib (‘recital from the finger-ends’), of which the ollave was required to be a master, and which Dr. Joyce describes as ‘the utterance of an extempore prophecy or poem that seems to have been accomplished with the aid of a mnemonic contrivance of some sort in which the fingers played a principal part’. St. Patrick, while abolishing two other prophetic rites, the Imbas Forasnai, ‘palm-knowledge of enlightenment’, and another like it, because they involved preliminary sacrifice to demons, permitted the ‘recital from the finger ends’ because it did not. In Cormac’s Glossary the Dichetal do Chennaib is explained:

It is less likely that a mnemonic trick involving the use of the finger alphabet was used than that the poets induced a poetic trance by treating their finger-tips as oracular agents; since the Dichetal do Chennaib is always mentioned with the other two divinatory rites as of the same general nature.

[At this point my own finger-tips began to itch and when I gave them a pen to hold they reconstructed the original incantation as follows:

The finger alphabet was evidently used in the witch cult of mediaeval Britain, to judge from the Devil marks tattooed on the hands of witches. In Joseph Glanvil’s Sadducismus Triumphatus (1681) a detailed account is given of two covens of Somersetshire witches, one of thirteen formed at Brewham, another at Wincanton, both places being about fourteen miles from Glastonbury. The British racial element, as opposed to the Saxon, predominated in Somerset and popular reverence for Glastonbury as a principal seat of the Old Religion was still strong in the seventeenth century. From the confessions of the members of these covens at their trial in 1664 it appears that the chief, or god, of these witches was known as Robin and that he sealed initiates with a prick from a needle made between the upper and middle joints of the physic-finger. This is precisely the spot at which one would expect the prick, since the covens’ activities included both black and white magic: the upper joint belongs to Coll, the hazel, the tree of white magic and healing, the lower to Straif; the blackthorn which, as will be shown in Chapter Fourteen, was the tree of black magic and blasting. These witches used thorns for sticking into the wax images of their enemies under Robin’s direction.

In Scotland the fool’s-finger was used for the Devil’s mark, and though the precise location of the mark is not recorded, it was evidently low down, since Margaret McLevine of Bute complained that the Devil nearly cut this finger off her. The bottom joint of the fool’s-finger is Ura, the heather – a suitable tree for the initiation of Scottish witches who, according to Shakespeare, met on blasted heaths.

Two Northampton witches, Elinor Shaw and Mary Phillips, who were condemned to death in 1705, had been pricked at their fingers’ ends: unfortunately the finger is not specified, but perhaps it was the finger with Saille as its tip, the willow sacred to Hecate, mother of witches.1

Dr. Macalister gives little more importance to the Irish Tree-Ogham than to such other cypher systems recorded in the Book of Ballymote as Pig-Ogham, Castle-Ogham and Fruit-Ogham. But that the name for the B.L.N. alphabet, which is admittedly earlier than the B.L.F. alphabet, begins with three trees proves that the original Ogham was a Tree-Ogham; and the mythological associations of the trees that comprise O’Flaherty’s list are so ancient, various and coherent, that it seems impossible to regard it as a late mediaeval invention, ‘pedantic and artificial’. It seems to be the original alphabet invented by Ogma Sun-Face. Dr. Macalister disparages the invention of Ogham as childish and unworthy of a god; but this is because he regards the Boibel-Loth as the only genuine Ogham alphabet and the Beth-Luis-Nion as an experimental approach to it and considers that both are cribbed from the Greek alphabet. He is not to be convinced that either has any virtue besides the obvious alphabetic one.

An objection against regarding the Beth-Luis-Nion as a complete alphabet is that it has only thirteen consonants, of which one, NG, is useless, while two ancient letters, Q and Z, contained in the Boibel-Loth and known in Ogham as Quert and Straif, are omitted. Straif is the blackthorn and Quert is the wild apple tree: both mythologically important trees. If Ogma Sun-Face raised four pillars of equal length, the original system must have contained five vowels and three sets of five consonants. This objection will be fully met in Chapter Thirteen. It is enough to note meanwhile that O’Flaherty was not alone in recording a B.L.N. alphabet with only thirteen consonants. O’Sullivan’s Ogham, quoted in Ledwich’s Antiquities of Ireland, has the same number, and with a similar omission of Q and Z, though with NG for P; O’Sullivan adds some diphthongs and other mysterious symbols such as eg, feo and oai, but the canon of the alphabet is the one discussed here.

Edward Davies considered that the Beth-Luis-Nion alphabet was so called because B.L.N. are the radical consonants of Belin the Celtic god of the solar year. This makes sense, since it suggests an identification of the thirteen consonants, months of the year, with various mythological companies of thirteen – for example with Arthur and his Twelve Knights of the Round Table; Balder and his twelve judges; Odysseus and his Twelve Companions; Romulus and his Twelve Shepherds; Roland and the Twelve Peers of France; Jacob and his Twelve Sons; Danish Hrolf and his twelve Berserks. Also, with the head and the twelve other parts of Osiris’s torn body which Isis in her boat recovered from the Nile – Osiris having originally been a tree-god. And we may also identify the five seasonal vowels with the mysterious pentads of British Goddesses, the deae matronae, (y Mamau), which occur in inscriptions of Roman times; and with the various five-pointed leaves sacred to the White Goddess, especially the ivy, vine, bramble, fig and plane;1 and with the various five- petalled flowers sacred to her – the erotic briar-rose and primrose and the baleful blue vincapervinca, or periwinkle, which the Italians call the ‘flower of death’ and with which, in mediaeval England, condemned men were garlanded on their way to the gallows.

But where did the Beth-Luis-Nion series originate? It will have been observed that all its trees are forest trees native to the British Isles, except the vine. That no orchard trees occur in the series suggests to me that it was brought in very early times from a thickly wooded northern region where the vine grew wild. The only region answering this condition, so far as I know, was the Paphlagonia-Pontus stretch of the Southern Black Sea coast. A Cretan origin is out of the question: the principal trees that appear in the very numerous sacred pictures and engravings recently excavated in Crete are the fig, olive, plane-tree, cypress, vine, pine and palm.

Dr. Macalister cannot be blamed for doubting the ancientness of O’Flaherty’s Beth-Luis-Nion, since several different systems of classifying trees were current in mediaeval Ireland. For example, under Brehon Law (IV, 147) trees were divided into four categories with a scale of fines for their unlawful felling that diminished in severity according to the category:

This law is much later than that commemorated in the Triads of Ireland under which the death penalty is apparently demanded for the unlawful felling of two of the chieftain trees, the hazel and the apple:

This may be explained by the seventh-century poem at the end of the Crib Gablach in which the seven Chieftain trees are listed, but with alder, willow and birch instead of ash, yew and pine, the fine for the unlawful felling of them being one cow, or three for the whole grove. But I assume that the poem is later than the Triads, though earlier than the Brehon Law, and that the death sentence for the felling of hazel and apple has here been commuted to a one-cow fine, as in the case of other trees.1 According to mediaeval glossarists, Neimhead, meaning ‘nobility’, or sacrosanctity, was applied to kings or chieftains, poets and groves; in its secondary sense of ‘worthiness’, to musicians, smiths, carpenters, cows and Church dignitaries.

The Commentator on the Brehon Law explains the ‘nobility’ of its seven Chieftain Trees in the following glosses:

The triumph of Gwydion’s ash over Bran’s alder at the Câd Goddeu is incidentally demonstrated here: the ash, which was originally excluded from the sacred grove, is now the only tree mentioned in connection with royalty, and the alder has been degraded to the status of peasant. The utilitarian assessment of nobility made by the glossarist denotes a profound religious change, and when the relative values of the trees can be expressed in terms of cash-compensation for their illegal felling, the sanctity of the grove is annulled and poetry itself declines. However, while this Law was in force the student for the Ollaveship of poetry had to memorize the following ancient catechism, recorded in Calder’s Hearings of the Scholars, which contains still another classification of trees:

Here the trees are those of O’Flaherty’s Beth-Luis-Nion, without the intrusion of arbutus, elm, white-hazel and the rest. The unnamed ‘shrub trees’ evidently include the elder, reed or water-elder, broom and woodbine. This arrangement according to nobility is eccentric – the apple-tree and holly being excluded from chieftainship – and is possibly connected with the Greek 24-letter alphabet rather than with the Ogham 20-letter one or its 25-letter expansion.

The subject is very difficult, and the Irish ollaves had no interest in making it plain to outsiders.

1 It is likely that Gwion was also aware of the value given to the number Five by the Pythagoreans and their successors. The Pythagoreans swore their oaths on the ‘holy tetractys’, a figure consisting of ten dots arranged in a pyramid, thus:

 

The top dot represented position; the two dots below, extension; the three dots below those, surface; the four dots at the bottom, three-dimensional space. The pyramid, the most ancient emblem of the Triple Goddess, was philosophically interpreted as Beginning, Prime and End; and the central dot of this figure makes a five with each of the four dots of the sides. Five represented the colour and variety which nature gives to three-dimensional space, and which are apprehended by the five senses, technically called ‘the wood’ – a quincunx of five trees; this coloured various world was held to be formed by five elements – earth, air, fire, water and the quintessence or soul; and these elements in turn corresponded with seasons. Symbolic values were also given to the numerals from 6 to 10, which was the number of perfection. The tetractys could be interpreted in many other ways: for instance, as the three points of the triangle enclosing a hexagon of dots – six being the number of life – with a central dot increasing this to seven, technically known as ‘Athene’, the number of intelligence, health and light.

1 To judge from a design on a glass dish of the Seleucid epoch, showing the façade of Solomon’s Temple as rebuilt by Zerubbabel on the original Phoenician model, the spirally fluted pillars correspond with Boaz, Solomon’s right-hand pillar dedicated to growth and the waxing sun; the vertically fluted with Jachin, his left-hand pillar dedicated to decay and the waning sun. The symbolism became confused when the Jews made their New Year correspond with the autumn vintage festival, for the pillars were then referred to as Jachin and Boaz, not Boaz and Jachin, but the tradition remained ‘Boaz is to Jachin as Gerizim is to Ebal – as blessing is to cursing’. Gerizim and Ebal were the twin peaks covering the Ephraimite shrine of Shechem. Gerizim was on the right-hand as one faced east from Shechem, Ebal on the left, and Shechem was a home of the terebinth cult. In Deuteronomy XI, 29 there is a prophecy attributed to Moses. ‘You shall put the blessing upon Gerizim and the curse upon Ebal …towards the entrance into Shechem where dwell the Canaanites in the towered house beside the sacred terebinth of Moreh.’

This was as it should have been. The terebinth, the hard-wooded Canaanite equivalent of Duir the oak, was naturally placed in the middle with Ebal on the unlucky left, Gerizim on the lucky right.

1 At Arles, in Provence, the cult of the Goddess as a Triad or Pentad of Mothers has survived under Christian disguise until today, when her festival is celebrated from May 24th to May 28th, the middle of the Hawthorn, or Chastity, month, but now her devotees are largely gipsies. As a Triad she has become known as ‘The Three Maries of Provence’ or ‘The Three Maries of the Sea’; as a Pentad she has had Martha added to her company, and an apocryphal serving-girl called Sara. It seems that these were Christianizations of pre-Christian reliefs on the tombstones of the cemetery of Alyscamps at Arles, in which the Triad, or Pentad, was shown on one panel; and below, on another, the soul in resurrection. The scene was explained as the Raising of Lazarus. As late as the time of Dante the cemetery was used in the ancient style. The corpse was laid in a boat, with money in it, called drue de mourtilage and floated down the Rhône to the Alyscamps. The name Alyscamps has been explained as Campi Elysiani, ‘the Elysian Fields’, but it is as likely that Alys was the ancient name of the Goddess; it may even be that the Homeric adjective Elysian (the e is a long one) is derived from her name. Alys also appears as alise or alis in many French place-names. Dauzat’s Dictionnaire Etymologique, under alis, alise, meaning a ‘sheltered creek’, derives it from ‘the Gaulish word alisia, perhaps pre-Celtic, which is represented by numerous place-names, and which must also have provided the Spanish word for alder, alisa.’ This makes good mythical sense, because Calypso’s sepulchral island of Ogygia was screened by alder thickets. Alys or Alis or Halys is the name of the biggest river of Asia Minor, and that it is pre-Hellenic is shown by the town of Aliassus (-assus is a Cretan termination) built on its banks just before it turns north to empty into the Southern Black Sea. There are also two Hales rivers, one in Ionia, the other in Lucania, which may be named after the same goddess. One name for the alder in German is else, corresponding with the Scandinavian word elle. The Danish Ellerkonge is the alder-king, Bran, who carries off children to the other world; but elle also means ‘elf’ which should be regarded as a clethrad, or alder-fairy. Thus in Goethe’s well-known ballad, based on his predecessor Herder’s Stimmen der Völker, Ellerkonge is correctly translated ‘Erlkönig’, the commoner German word for alder being erle.

1 Sed manendum, tum ista aut populina fors aut abiegina est tua. (Act II.)

1 British sailors used always to be tattooed with a star in the hollow of the hand between the thumb and fore-finger, and the custom survives in some ports. This is originally a plea to Venus as Goddess of the Sea and Jupiter as God of the Air to bring the sailor safe ashore, the star being the symbol of hope and guidance.

1 Another five-pointed leaf in sacral use was the cinquefoil, a chief ingredient in the flying ointment used by mediaeval French witches. An alternative in one formula is the poplar leaf, doubtless the five-pointed sort. Like the fleur-de-luce used in the same ointment – apparently because of its three-petalled flower and its red seeds contained in a triangular seed-box – it has no toxic effect, but seems to have been introduced in the Goddess’s honour (with a thickening of soot and oil, or infant’s fat) to enhance the effect of the other ingredients: namely, the abortificent parsley, bat’s blood to assist nocturnal flight, and the highly toxic aconite, belladonna, hemlock and cowbane. The formulas are quoted in Miss M. Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe. Mr. Trevor Furze has supplied me with two further formulas of English origin: (1) The fat of a newly-born infant; eleoselinum (wild celery, also called ‘smallage’, or ‘water-parsley’, a mediaeval remedy against cramps); skiwet (wild parsnip, the leaves of which were regarded as poisonous but used in poulticing); soot. (2) Bat’s blood, to be obtained at the wake of the new moon; pentphyllon (cinquefoil) poplar leaves; soot. Perhaps the ‘parsley’ in the French formula is really water-parsley, introduced to protect the witches against cramps when flying.

1 At Rome in the second century BC a sacred grove could be felled at an even cheaper rate: the sacrifice of a single pig. Cato the Censor in his De Re Rustica quotes the prayer of placation that the timber-hungry farmer must offer to the deity concerned.

1 Evidently a mistake for holly.