The Greek Myths, Page 24

  7. Black poplar was sacred to the Death-goddess at Pagae, and Persephone had a black poplar grove in the Far West (Pausanias: x. 30. 3 and see 170. l).

  8. Amphilochus and Mopsus had killed each other, but their ghosts agreed to found a joint oracle (see 169. e).

  52

  THE ALPHABET

  THE Three Fates or, some say, Ιο the sister of Phoroneus, invented the five vowels of the first alphabet, and the consonants B and T; Palamedes, son of Nauplius, invented the remaining eleven consonants; and Hermes reduced these sounds to characters, using wedge shapes because cranes fly in wedge formation, and carried the system from Greece to Egypt. This was the Pelasgian alphabet, which Cadmus later brought back to Boeotia, and which Evander of Arcadia, a Pelasgian, introduced into Italy, where his mother Carmenta formed the familiar fifteen characters of the Latin alphabet.

  b. Other consonants have since been added to the Greek alphabet by Simonides of Samos, and Epicharmus of Sicily; and two vowels, long O and short E, by the priests of Apollo, so that his sacred lyre now has one vowel for each of its seven strings.

  c. Alpha was the first of the eighteen letters, because alphe means honour, and alphainein is to invent, and because the Alpheius is the most notable of rivers; moreover, Cadmus, though he changed the order of the letters, kept alpha in this place, because aleph, in the Phoenician tongue, means an ox, and because Boeotia is the land of oxen.1

  1. Hyginus: Fabula 277; Isidore of Seville: Origins viii. 2. 84; Philostratus: Heroica x. 3; Pliny: Natural History vii. 57; Scholiast on Homer’s Iliad xix. 593; Plutarch: Symposiacs ix. 3.

  1. The Greek alphabet was a simplification of the Cretan hieroglyphs. Scholars are now generally agreed that the first written alphabet developed in Egypt during the eighteenth century B.C. under Cretan influence; which corresponds with Aristides’s tradition, reported by Pliny, that an Egyptian called Menos (‘moon’) invented it ‘fifteen years before the reign of Phoroneus, King of Argos’.

  2. There is evidence, however, that before the introduction of the modified Phoenician alphabet into Greece an alphabet had existed there as a religious secret held by the priestesses of the Moon – Io, or the Three Fates: that it was closely linked with the calendar, and that its letters were represented not by written characters, but by twigs cut from different trees typical of the year’s sequent months.

  3. The ancient Irish alphabet, like that used by the Gallic druids of whom Caesar wrote, might not at first be written down, and all its letters were named after trees. It was called the Beth-luis-nion (‘birch-rowan-ash’) after its first three consonants; and its canon, which suggests a Phrygian provenience, corresponded with the Pelasgian and the Latin alphabets, namely thirteen consonants and five vowels. The original order was, A, B, L, N, O, F, S, H, U, D, T, C, E, M, G, Ng or Gn, R, I, which is likely also to have been the order used by Hermes. Irish ollaves made it into a deaf-and-dumb language, using finger-joints to represent the different letters, or one of verbal cyphers. Each consonant represented a twenty-eight-day month of a series of thirteen, beginning two days after the winter solstice; namely:

  1

  Dec. 24

  B

  birch, or wild olive

  2

  Jan. 21

  L

  rowan

  3

  Feb. 18

  N

  ash

  4

  March 18

  F

  alder, or cornel

  5

  April 15

  S

  willow; SS (Z), blackthorn

  6

  May 13

  H

  hawthorn, or wild pear

  7

  June 10

  D

  oak, or terebinth

  8

  July 8

  T

  holly, or prickly oak

  9

  Aug. 5

  C

  nut; CC (Q), apple, sorb or quince

  10

  Sept. 2

  M

  vine

  11

  Sept. 30

  G

  ivy

  12

  Oct. 28

  Ng or Gn

  reed, or guelder rose

  13

  Nov. 25

  R

  elder, or myrtle

  4. About 400 B.C., as the result of a religious revolution, the order was changed as follows to correspond with a new calendar system: B, L, F, S, N, H, D, T, C, Q, M, G, Ng, Z, R. This is the alphabet associated with Heracles Ogmius, or ‘Ogma Sunface’, as the earlier is with Phoroneus (see 132. 3).

  5. Each vowel represented a quarterly station of the year: O (gorse) the Spring Equinox; U (heather) the Summer Solstice; E (poplar) the Autumn Equinox. A (fir, or palm) the birth-tree, and I (yew) the death-tree, shared the Winter Solstice between them. This order of trees is implicit in Greek and Latin myth and the sacral tradition of all Europe and, mutatis mutandis, Syria and Asia Minor. The goddess Carmenta (see 86. 2 and 132. 6) invented B and T as well as the vowels, because each of these calendar-consonants introduced one half of her year, as divided between the sacred king and his tanist.

  6. Cranes were sacred to Hermes (see 17.3 and 36. 2), protector of poets before Apollo usurped his power; and the earliest alphabetic characters were wedge-shaped. Palamedes (‘ancient intelligence’), with his sacred crane (Martial: Epigrams xiii. 75) was the Carian counterpart of the Egyptian god Thoth, inventor of letters, with his crane-like ibis; and Hermes was Thoth’s early Hellenic counterpart (see 162. s). That Simonides and Epicharmus added new letters to the alphabet is history, not myth; though exactly why they did so remains doubtful. Two of the additions, xi and psi, were unnecessary, and the removal of the aspirate (H) and digamma (F) impoverished the canon.

  7. It can be shown that the names of the letters preserved in the Irish Beth-luis-nion, which are traditionally reported to have come from Greece and reached Ireland by way of Spain (see 132. 5), formed an archaic Greek charm in honour of the Arcadian White Goddess Alphito who, by Classical times, had degenerated into a mere nursery bogey. The Cadmean order of letters, perpetuated in the familiar ABC, seems to be a deliberate mis-arrangement by Phoenician merchants; they used the secret alphabet for trade purposes but feared to offend the goddess by revealing its true order.

  This complicated and important subject is discussed at length in The White Goddess (Chapters 1–15 and 21).

  8. The vowels added by the priests of Apollo to his lyre were probably those mentioned by Demetrius, an Alexandrian philosopher of the first century B.C., when he writes in his dissertation On Style:

  In Egypt the priests sing hymns to the Gods by uttering the seven vowels in succession, the sound of which produces as strong a musical impression on their hearers as if the flute and lyre were used… but perhaps I had better not enlarge on this theme.

  This suggests that the vowels were used in therapeutic lyre music at Apollo’s shrines.

  53

  THE DACTYLS

  SOME say that while Rhea was bearing Zeus, she pressed her fingers into the soil to ease her pangs and up sprang the Dactyls: five females from her left hand, and five males from her right. But it is generally held that they were living on Phrygian Mount Ida long before the birth of Zeus, and some say that the nymph Anchiale bore them in the Dictaean Cave near Oaxus. The male Dactyls were smiths and first discovered iron in near-by Mount Berecynthus; and their sisters, who settled in Samothrace, excited great wonder there by casting magic spells, and taught Orpheus the Goddess’s mysteries: their names are a well-guarded secret.1

  b. Others say that the males were the Curetes who protected Zeus’s cradle in Crete, and that they afterwards came to Elis and raised a temple to propitiate Cronus. Their names were Heracles, Paeonius, Epimedes, Iasius, and Acesidas. Heracles, having brought wild-olive from the Hyperboreans to Olympia, set his younger brothers to run a race there, and thus the Olympic Games originated. It is also said that
he crowned Paeonius, the victor, with a spray of wild-olive; and that, afterwards, they slept in beds made from its green leaves. But the truth is that wild-olive was not used for the victor’s crown until the seventh Olympiad, when the Delphic Oracle had ordered Iphitus to substitute it for the apple-spray hitherto awarded as the prize of victory.2

  c. Acmon, Damnameneus, and Celmis are titles of the three eldest Dactyls; some say that Celmis was turned to iron as a punishment for insulting Rhea.3

  1. Diodorus Siculus: v. 64; Sophocles: The Deaf Satyrs, quoted by Strabo: x. 3. 22; Apollonius Rhodius: 509 and 1130.

  2. Pausanias: v. 7. 4; Phlegon of Tralles: Fragmenta Historica Graeca iii. 604.

  3. Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius: i. 1129; Ovid: Metamorphoses iv. 281.

  1. The Dactyls personify the fingers, and Heracles’s Olympic race is a childish fable illustrated by drumming one’s fingers on a table, omitting the thumb – when the forefinger always wins the race. But Orphic secret lore was based on a calendar sequence of magical trees, each allotted a separate finger joint in the sign-language and a separate letter of the Orphic calendar-alphabet, which seems to have been Phrygian in origin (see 52. 3). Wild-olive belongs to the top-joint of the thumb, supposedly the seat of virility and therefore called Heracles. This Heracles was said to have had leaves growing from his body (Palaephatus: 37). The system is recalled in the popular Western finger-names: e.g. ‘fool’s finger’, which corresponds with Epimedes, the middle finger, and the ‘physic finger’, which corresponds with Iasius, the fourth; and in the finger-names of palmistry: e.g. Saturn of Epimedes – Saturn having shown himself slow-witted in his struggle with Zeus; and Apollo, god of healing, for Iasius. The forefinger is given to Jupiter, or Zeus, who won the race. The little finger, Mercury or Hermes, is the magical one. Throughout primitive Europe, metallurgy was accompanied by incantations, and the smiths therefore claimed the fingers of the right hand as their Dactyls, leaving the left to the sorceresses.

  2. The story of Acmon, Damnameneus, and Celmis, whose names refer to smithcraft, is another childish fable, illustrated by tapping the forefinger on the thumb, as a hammer on an anvil, and then slipping the tip of the middle finger between them, as though it were a piece of red-hot iron. Iron came to Crete through Phrygia from farther along the Southern Black Sea coast; and Celmis, being a personification of smelted iron, will have been obnoxious to the Great Goddess Rhea, patroness of smiths, whose religious decline began with the smelting of iron and the arrival of the iron-weaponed Dorians. She had recognized only gold, silver, copper, lead, and tin as terrestrial ores; though lumps of meteoric iron were highly prized because of their miraculous origin, and one may have fallen on Mount Berecynthus. An unworked lump was found in a neolithic deposit at Phaestus beside a squatting clay image of the goddess, sea-shells, and offering bowls. All early Egyptian iron is meteoric: it contains a high proportion of nickel and is nearly rust-proof. Celmis’s insult to Hera gave the middle finger its name: digita impudica.

  3. The Olympic games originated in a foot race, run by girls, for the privilege of becoming the priestess of the Moon-goddess Hera (Pausanias: v. 16. 2); and since this event took place in the month Parthenios, ‘of the maiden’, it seems to have been annual. When Zeus married Hera – when, that is, a new form of sacred kingship had been introduced into Greece by the Achaeans (see 12. 7) – a second foot race was run by young men for the dangerous privilege of becoming the priestess’s consort, Sun to her Moon, and thus King of Elis; just as Antaeus made his daughter’s suitors race for her (Pindar: Pythian Odes ix), following the example of Icarius (see 160. d) and Danaus (see 60. m).

  4. The Games were thereafter held every four years, instead of annually, the girls’ foot race being run at a separate festival, either a fortnight before, or a fortnight after the Olympian Games proper; and the sacred kingship, conferred on the victor of the foot race at his marriage to the new priestess, is recalled in the divine honours that the victory continued to bestow in Classical times. Having been wreathed with Heracles’s or Zeus’s olive, saluted as ‘King Heracles’, and pelted with leaves like a Jack o’ Green, he led the dance in a triumphal procession and ate sacrificial bull’s flesh in the Council Hall.

  5. The original prize, an apple, or an apple-spray, had been a promise of immortality when he was duly killed by his successor; for Plutarch (Symposiac Questions v. 2) mentions that though a foot race was the sole contest in the original Olympic Games, a single combat also took place, which ended only in the death of the vanquished. This combat is mythologically recorded in the story that the Olympic Games began with a wrestling match between Zeus and Cronus for the possession of Elis (Pausanias: v. 7), namely the midsummer combat between the king and his tanist; and the result was a foregone conclusion – the tanist came armed with a spear.

  6. A scholiast on Pindar (Olympian Odes iii. 33), quoting Comarchus, shows that the Elian New Year was reckoned from the full moon nearest to the winter solstice, and that a second New Year began at midsummer. Presumably therefore the new Zeus-Heracles, that is to say, the winner of the foot race, killed the Old Year tanist, Cronus-Iphicles, at midwinter. Hence Heracles first instituted the Games and named the sepulchral Hill of Cronus ‘at a season when the summit was wet with much snow’ (Pindar: Olympian Odes x. 49).

  7. In ancient times, Zeus-Heracles was pelted with oak-leaves and given the apple-spray at midsummer, just before being killed by his tanist; he had won the royal wild-olive branch at midwinter. The replacement of the apple by wild-olive, which is the tree that drives away evil spirits, implied the abolition of this death-combat, and the conversion of the single year, divided into two halves, into a Great Year. This began at midwinter, when solar and lunar time coincided favourably for a Sun-and-Moon marriage, and was divided into two Olympiads of four years apiece; the king and his tanist reigning successively or concurrently. Though by Classical times the solar chariot race – for which the mythological authority is Pelops’s contest with Oenomaus for Deidameia (see 109. 3) – had become the most important event in the Games, it was still thought somehow unlucky to be pelted with leaves after a victory in the foot race; and Pythagoras advised his friends to compete in this event but not to win it. The victory-ox, eaten at the Council Hall, was clearly a surrogate for the king, as at the Athenian Buphonia festival (see 21. 13).

  8. Olympia is not a Mycenaean site and the pre-Achaean myths are therefore unlikely to have been borrowed from Crete; they seem to be Pelasgian.

  54

  THE TELCHINES

  THE nine dog-headed, flipper-handed Telchines, Children of the Sea, originated in Rhodes, where they founded the cities of Cameirus, Ialysus, and Lindus; and migrating thence to Crete, became its first inhabitants. Rhea entrusted the infant Poseidon to their care, and they forged his trident but, long before this, had made for Cronus the toothed sickle with which he castrated his father Uranus; and were, moreover, the first to carve images of the gods.

  b. Yet Zeus resolved to destroy them by a flood, because they had been interfering with the weather, raising magic mists and blighting crops by means of sulphur and Stygian water. Warned by Artemis, they all fled overseas: some to Boeotia, where they built the temple of Athene at Teumessus; some to Sicyon, some to Lycia, others to Orchomenus, where they were the hounds that tore Actaeon to pieces. But Zeus destroyed the Teumessian Telchines with a flood; Apollo, disguised as a wolf, destroyed the Lycian ones, though they had tried to placate him with a new temple; and they are no longer to be found at Orchomenus. Rumour has it that some are still living in Sicyon.1

  1. Eustathius on Homer, p. 771–2; Ovid: Metamorphoses vii. 365–7; Diodorus Siculus: iii. 55. 2–3; Strabo: xiv. 2. 7; Callimachus: Hymn to Delos 31; Servius on Virgil’s Aeneid iv. 377.

  1. That the nine Telchines were Children of the Sea, acted as the hounds of Artemis, created magic mists, and founded the cities named after the three Danaids, Cameira, Ialysa, and Linda (see 60. d) suggests that they were originally emanations of the Moon
-goddess Danaë: each of her three persons in triad (see 60. 2). ‘Telchin’ was derived by the Greek grammarians from thelgein, ‘to enchant’. But, since women, dog and fish were likewise combined in pictures of Scylla the Tyrrhenian – who was also at home in Crete (see 91. 2) – and in the figure-heads of Tyrrhenian ships, the word may be a variant of ‘Tyrrhen’ or ‘Tyrsen’; l and r having been confused by the Libyans, and the next consonant being something between an aspirate and a sibilant. They were, it seems, worshipped by an early matriarchal people of Greece, Crete, Lydia, and the Aegean Islands, whom the invading patriarchal Hellenes persecuted; absorbed or forced to emigrate westward. Their origin may have been East African.

  2. Magic mists were raised by willow spells. Styx water (see 31. 4) was supposedly so holy that the least drop of it caused death, unless drunk from a cup made of a horse’s hoof, which proves it sacred to the Mare-headed goddess of Arcadia. Alexander the Great is said to have been poisoned by Styx water (Pausanias: viii. 18. 2). The Telchines’ magical use of it suggests that their devotees held near-by Mount Nonacris (‘nine peaks’), at one time the chief religious centre of Greece; even the Olympic gods swore their most solemn oath by the Styx.

  55

  THE EMPUSAE

  THE filthy demons called Empusae, children of Hecate, are asshaunched and wear brazen slippers – unless, as some declare, each has one ass’s leg and one brazen leg. Their habit is to frighten travellers, but they may be routed by insulting words, at the sound of which they flee shrieking. Empusae disguise themselves in the forms of bitches, cows, or beautiful maidens and, in the latter shape, will lie with men by night, or at the time of midday sleep, sucking their vital forces until they die.1