The White Goddess by Robert Graves Page A

strengtheners? It took place at Jehovah-Nissi, close to the Mount of God, and the strengtheners were Aaron and Hur. So I could recompose the riddle as: ‘I strengthened Moses in the land of the Deity’. And the answer was: ‘Aaron and Hur’. If only one name was needed, it would probably be Hur because this is the only action recorded of him in the Pentateuch.
    Similarly, in line 25, ‘I have been with Mary Magdalene’ had to be separated from the misleading ‘in the firmament’ and the other part of the riddle looked for in another verse. I had already found it by studying the list of people present at the Crucifixion: St. Simon of Cyrene, St. John the Apostle, St. Veronica, Dysmas the good thief, Gestas the bad thief, the Centurion, the Virgin Mary, Mary Cleopas, Mary Magdalene….But I had not overlooked the woman who (according to the Proto-evangelium of St. James) was the first person ever to adore the child Jesus, the prime witness of his parthenogenesis, and his most faithful follower. She is mentioned in Mark XV, as standing beside Mary Magdalene. So: ‘I was with Mary Magdalene at the place of the Crucifixion of the merciful Son of God.’ The answer was: ‘Salome’.
    Who instructed Enoch? (Eli does not, apparently, belong to this riddle.) I agree with Charles, Burkitt, Oesterley, Box and other Biblical scholars that nobody can hope to understand the Sayings of Jesus who has not read the Book of Enoch ,omitted from the canon of the Apocrypha but closely studied by the primitive Christians. I happened to have been reading the book and knew that the answer was ‘Uriel’, and that Uriel instructed Enoch ‘on the fall of Lucifer into the depth of hell’. A curious historical point is that the verse about Uriel’s instruction of Enoch is not included in the fragments of the Greek Book of Enoch quoted by the ninth-century Byzantine historian Syncellus, nor in the Vatican MS. (1809), nor in the quotations from the Book of Enoch in the Epistle of St. Jude. It occurs only in the text dug up at Akhmim in Egypt in 1886, and in the Ethiopian translation of an earlier Greek text, which is the only version which we know to have been extant in the thirteenth century. Where did Gwion find the story? Was a knowledge of Ethiopian among his attainments? Or did he find a complete Greek manuscript in the library of some Irish abbey that had escaped the fury of the Vikings’ war against books? The passage in the First Book of Enoch, XVIII, 11 ,and XIX, 1, 2, 3, runs:
    And I saw a deep abyss and columns of heavenly fire, and among them I saw columns of fire falling, which were beyond measure alike upwards and down wards…. And Uriel said to me: ‘Here shall stand
the angels who have lain with women and whose spirits, assuming many different forms, defile mankind and lead them astray into demonolatry and sacrificing to demons: here shall they stand until the Day of Judgement…. And the women whom they seduced shall become Sirens.’ I, Enoch, alone saw this vision of the end of all things; no other shall see as far as I.
     
    This discovery took me a stage further, to line 7: ‘I have borne a banner before Alexander.’ Among the poems attributed to Taliesin in the Red Book of Hergest is a fragment called Y Gofeisws By d (‘A Sketch of the World’) which contains a short panegyric of the historical Alexander, and another Anrhyfeddonau Alexander ,‘The Not-wonders of Alexander’ – a joke at the expense of a thirteenth-century Spanish romance ascribing to Alexander adventures properly belonging to the myth of Merlin – which tells mockingly how he went beneath the sea and met ‘creatures of distinguished lineage among the fish….’ But neither of these poems gave me a clue to the riddle. If it must be taken literally I should perhaps have guessed the answer to be ‘Neoptolemus’, who was one of Alexander’s bodyguard and the first man to scale the walls of Gaza at the assault. But more probably the reference