The White Goddess by Robert Graves Page B

was to Alexander as a re-incarnation of Moses. According to Josephus, when Alexander came to Jerusalem at the outset of his Eastern conquests, he refrained from sacking the Temple but bowed down and adored the Tetragrammaton on the High Priest’s golden frontlet. His astonished companion Parmenio asked why in the world he had behaved in this unkingly way. Alexander answered: ‘I did not adore the High Priest himself but the God who has honoured him with office. The case is this: that I saw this very person in a dream, dressed exactly as now, while I was at Dios in Macedonia. In my dream I was debating with myself how I might conquer Asia, and this man exhorted me not to delay. I was to pass boldly with my army across the narrow sea, for his God would march before me and help me to defeat the Persians. So I am now convinced that Jehovah is with me and will lead my armies to victory.’ The High Priest then further encouraged Alexander by showing him the prophecy in the Book of Daniel which promised him the dominion of the East; and he went up to the Temple, sacrificed to Jehovah and made a generous peace-treaty with the Jewish nation. The prophecy referred to Alexander as the ‘two-horned King’ and he subsequently pictured himself on his coins with two horns. He appears in the Koran as Dhul Karnain, ‘the two-horned’. Moses was also ‘two-horned’, and in Arabian legend ‘El Hidr, the ever-young prophet’, a former Sun-hero of Sinai, befriended both Moses and Alexander ‘at the meeting place of two seas’. To the learned Gwion, therefore, a banner borne before Alexander was equally a banner borne before Moses; and St. Jerome, or his Jewish mentors, had already made a poetic identification of Alexander’s horns with those ofMoses.
    The banner of Moses was ‘Nehushtan’, the Brazen Serpent, which he raised up to avert the plague in the wilderness. When he did so he became an ‘Alexander’, i.e. a ‘warder-off-of-evil-from-man’. So the answer of this riddle is ‘Nehushtan’ or, in the Greek Septuagint spelling, in which I imagine Gwion had read the story, ‘Ne-Esthan’. It should be remembered that this Brazen Serpent in the Gospel According to John, III, 14 and the apocryphal Epistle of Barnabas, XII, 7 is atype of Jesus Christ. Barnabas emphasizes that the Serpent ‘hung on a wooden thing’, i.e. the Cross, and had the power of making alive. In Numbers, XXI, 9 it is described as a ‘seraph’, a name given by Isaiah to the flying serpents that appeared in his vision as the attendants of the Living God and flew to him with a live coal from the altar.
    The next riddle I had to solve, a combination of lines 9 and 26, was: ‘I have been in the firmament, on the Galaxy.’ The Galaxy, or Milky Way, is said to have been formed when the milk of the Great Goddess Rhea of Crete spouted abundantly into the sky after the birth of the infant Zeus. But since the Great Goddess’s name varies from mythographer to mythographer – Hyginus, for example, debates whether to call her Juno or Ops (Wealth) – Gwion has considerately given us another clue: ‘When Roma was built’. He is correctly identifying a Cretan with a Roman goddess, and what is more surprising, recognizes Romulus as a Latin deity of the same religious system as Cretan Zeus. Romulus’s mother was also named Rhea, and if she had trouble with her milk when she was forced to wean her twins in order to conceal their birth, so had Cretan Rhea in the same circumstances. The main difference was that Romulus and Remus had a she-wolf for their foster-mother, whereas Zeus (and some say his foster-brother Goat Pan, too), was suckled by the she-goat Amalthea, whose hide he afterwards wore as a coat; or, as still others say, by a white sow. Both Romulus and Zeus were brought up by shepherds. So: ‘I have been in the firmament, on the Galaxy, when Roma was built.’ The answer is Rhea, though it was not Rhea herself but the spurt of her milk, rhea in Greek,