VLVL2(8) Thickets of Alders II

[pfm2]

"The White Goddess" cntd.....

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superseded as an oracular tree by the Delphic Laurel.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 te 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 Phaethon: 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, clethra, 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 origianlly
river islands, not islands in the sea.

The alder was, and is, celebrated for yielding three fine dies: 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 seems white, seems to bleed crimson as
though it were a man. The green dye is associated in British folklore
with faeries' cloths: in so far as the faeries may be regarded as
survivals of dispossessed early tribes, forced to take to the hills and
woods, the green of the cloths 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 recognised at the 'Cad 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 18th March, 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 corracle slats that convey the
Spirit of the Year through the floods to the 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 immeroriably ancient. Pausanius, who went to Argos
for his information, writes that Phoroneus was the husband of Cerdo (the
White Godess 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.
Pausanius 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 whomhe is
sais to have first offered sacrifices. Phoroneus, then, is Fearineus,
the God of Spring to whom annual sacrifices were offered on the Cronion
Mount at Olympia at the Spring equinox. 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 Mediterranian 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
'cheries'; 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 in 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.