THE SEVEN PILLARS

Since the seven pillars of Wisdom are identified by Hebrew mystics with the seven days of Creation and with the seven days of the week, one suspects that the astrological system which links each day of the week to one of the heavenly bodies has an arboreal counterpart. The astrological system is so ancient, widespread and consistent in its values that it is worth noting in its various forms. Its origin is probably, but not necessarily, Babylonian. The second list shown here is that of the Sabians of Harran, who took part in the Sea-people’s invasion of Northern Syria about 1200 BC; it makes the connexion between the Babylonian and the Western lists. 

In Aristotle’s list, Wednesday’s planet is ascribed alternatively to Hermes or Apollo, Apollo having by that time exceeded Hermes in his reputation for wisdom; Tuesday’s alternatively to Hercules or Ares (Mars), Hercules being a deity of better omen than Ares; Friday’s alternatively to Aphrodite or Hera, Hera corresponding more closely than Aphrodite with the Babylonian Queen of Heaven, Ishtar.

The seven sacred trees of the Irish grove were, as has already been mentioned: birch, willow, holly, hazel, oak, apple and alder. This sequence also holds good for the days of the week, since we can confidently assign the alder to Saturn (Bran); the apple to the Love-goddess Venus or Freia; the oak to the Thunder-god Jupiter or Thor; the willow to the Moon (Circe or Hecate); the holly to Mars, the scarlet-faced War-god; and the birch naturally begins the week as it begins the solar year.1 The tree of Wednesday, sacred to the God of Eloquence, one would expect to be Woden’s ash; but with the ancient Irish the tree of eloquence and wisdom was the hazel, not the ash, the Belgic god Odin or Woden having been a latecomer to Ireland. So these are the seven trees, with their planets, days and letters:

It is easy to reconstruct the appropriate formula in Classical Latin for the daily dedication to the Lord of the Heavens of the devotee’s heart: 

And the Greek, which had lost its Q.(Koppa) and F (Digamma) must content itself with a second C (Kappa) and a Ph (Phi):

So the poetic answer to Job’s poetic question: ‘Where shall wisdom be found and where is the place of understanding?’ which his respect for Jehovah the All-wise prevented him from facing is: ‘Under an apple-tree, by pure meditation, on a Friday evening, in the season of apples, when the moon is full.’ But the finder will be Wednesday’s child.

The sacred grove is perhaps referred to in Ezekiel, XLVII (a passage quoted in the Gnostic Epistle to Barnabas, XI, 10). Ezekiel in a vision sees the holy waters of a river issuing eastward from under the threshold of the House of God, full of fish, with trees on both sides of the river ‘whose leaves shall not fade nor their fruit be consumed. Each shall bring forth new fruit according to their months, the fruit for meat and the leaves for medicine: and this shall be the border whereby you shall inherit the land according to the tribes of Israel, and Joseph shall have two portions.’ The reference to thirteen tribes, not twelve, and to the ‘months’ of the trees, suggests that the same calendar is being used. Moreover, the theme of roe and apple-tree occurs in the Canticles.

The Canticles, though apparently no more than a collection of village love-songs, were officially interpreted by the Pharisee sages of Jesus’s day as the mystical essence of King Solomon’s wisdom, and as referring to the love of Jehovah for Israel; which is why in the Anglican Bible they are interpreted as ‘Christ’s love for his Church’. The fact is that originally they celebrated the mysteries of an annual sacred marriage between Salmaah the King of the year and the Flower Queen, and their Hellenistic influence is patent.

The second chapter of the Canticles runs:

The ‘lilies’ are the red anemones that sprang up from the drops of blood which fell from Adonis’s side when the wild boar killed him. The apple is the Sidonian (i.e. Cretan) apple, or quince, sacred to Aphrodite the Love-goddess, and first cultivated in Europe by the Cretans. The true apple was not known in Biblical Palestine and it is only recently that varieties have been introduced there that yield marketable fruit. But the apple grew wild in ancient times on the Southern shores of the Black Sea, the provenience of the other trees of the series, and around Trebizond still occasionally forms small woods. It also occurred in Macedonia – the original home of the Muses – and in Euboea where Hercules received the injury that sent him to the pyre on Mount Oeta; but in both these cases may have been an early importation.

There seems to be a strong connexion between the tree-calendar and the ritual at the Feast of the Tabernacles at Jerusalem, already mentioned in connexion with the willow and alder. The worshippers carried in their right hand an ethrog, a sort of citron, and in their left a lulab, or thyrsus, consisting of the intertwined boughs of palm, willow and myrtle. The ethrog was not the original fruit, having been introduced from India after the Captivity, and is thought to have displaced the quince because of the quince’s erotic connotations. In the reformation of religion which took place during the Exile the Jews broke as far as possible all the ties which bound them to orgiastic religion. The ritual of Tabernacles was taken over by the Hebrews with other rites in honour of the Moon-goddess, and the ordinances for its observance were fathered on Moses, as part of the great recension of the Law ascribed to King Josiah but probably made during the Exile. I have already mentioned the disparaging Haggadah on the willow; the meaning of the myrtle was also changed from the shadow of death to the pleasant shade of summer, on the authority of Isaiah who had praised the tree (Isaiah, XLI, 19; LV, 13).

The feast began on the first new moon of the year, and in the quince season. Both willow and apple have 5 – the number especially sacred to the Moon-goddess – as the number of their letter-strokes in the Ogham finger-alphabet. The myrtle does not occur in the Beth-Luis-Nion, but may well be the Greek equivalent of the remaining consonant in the Beth-Luis-Nion that has 5 as its number of strokes – the elder. The myrtle was sacred to the Love-goddess Aphrodite all over the Mediterranean, partly because it grows best near the sea shore, partly because of its fragrance; nevertheless, it was the tree of death. Myrto, or Myrtea, or Myrtoessa was a title of hers and the pictures of her sitting with Adonis in the myrtle-shade were deliberately misunderstood by the Classical poets. She was not vulgarly courting him, as they pretended, but was promising him Life-in-Death; for myrtle was evergreen and was a token of the resurrection of the dead King of the year. The myrtle is connected in Greek myth with the death of kings: Myrtilus, son of Hermes (Mercury) who was charioteer to Oenomaus the King of Elis, pulled the linch-pins from the wheels of his master’s chariot and so caused his death. Pelops, who then married Oenomaus’s widow, ungratefully threw Myrtilus into the sea. Myrtilus cursed the House of Pelops with his dying breath and thereafter every Pelopid monarch was dogged by his ghost. The ‘wheel’ was the life of the King; R, the last consonant of the alphabet ‘pulls out the pin’ at the last month of his reign. Pelops’s dynasty obtained the throne of Elis, but all his successors similarly met their end in the R month. (Myrtilus became the northern constellation Auriga, the  charioteer.) The myrtle resembles the elder in the medicinal qualities attributed to its leaves and berries; the berries are ripe in December, the R month. Myrtle boughs were carried by Greek emigrants when they intended to found a new colony, as if to say: ‘The old cycle is ended; we hope to start a new one with the favour of the Love-goddess, who rules the sea.’

Thus the thyrsus contained three trees, each representing a flight of five calendar letters, or one-third of the year; besides the palm which represented the extra day (or period of five days) on which the Sun-god was born. The number fifteen was therefore of prime importance in the Festival: the Levites sang the fifteen Songs of Ascent (attributed to King David) as they stood on the fifteen steps leading up from the Women’s Court to the Court of Israel. The number also figures in the architecture of Solomon’s ‘house of the Forest of Lebanon’ which was more than twice the size of the House of the Lord. It was built on three rows of cedar pillars, fifteen to a row, and was 50 cubits long by 30 high and wide; with an adjoining porch 30 cubits wide, 50 long, height not given – probably 10 cubits.

The Hebrew canon of the trees of the week, the seven pillars of Wisdom, is not difficult to establish. For the birch, which was not a Palestinian tree, the most likely substitute is the retem or wild broom, which was the tree under which the prophet Elijah rested on Mount Horeb (‘the mountain of glowing heat’) and seems to have been sacred to the Sun. Like the birch, it was used as a besom for the expulsion of evil spirits. Willow remains the same. For the holly, the kerm-oak, already mentioned in Chapter Ten as the tree from which the ancients obtained their royal scarlet dye. This ascription of the kerm-oak to Nergal or Mars, is confirmed by a characteristic passage in Frazer’s Golden Bough:

The substitute for the hazel was the almond: this was the tree from which Aaron took his magic rod, and the Menorah the seven-branched candlestick in the Temple Sanctuary at Jerusalem had its sconces in the form of almonds and represented Aaron’s rod when it budded. It was this branch that Jeremiah (Jeremiah I, 11) was shown as a visionary token that God had granted him prophetic wisdom. The sconces stood for the seven heavenly bodies of the week, and the central sconce was the fourth, namely that dedicated to Wisdom, which gives its name to all the rest; its branch formed the shaft of the candlestick. For the oak, the terebinth sacred to Abraham. For the apple, the quince. For the alder, since we know that the alder was banned in Temple worship, the pomegranate which supplies a red dye as the alder does. The pomegranate was Saul’s sacred tree, and sacred to Rimmon, a name for Adonis from whose blood it is said to have sprung. Also, the Paschal victim was traditionally spitted on pomegranate wood. The pomegranate was the only fruit allowed to be brought inside the Holy of Holies – miniature pomegranates were sewn on the High Priest’s robes when he made his yearly entry. Since the seventh day was sacred to Jehovah and Jehovah was a form of Bran, or Saturn, or Ninib,1 everything points to the pomegranate as the tree of the seventh day. So:

The one doubtful tree here is the broom, or its Irish counterpart, the birch. The seven trees of the Irish grove all belong to the summer months except B, the birch, which has taken the place of H, the hawthorn: and has apparently been chosen because it is the leading letter of the first flight of five trees, as H is of the second. But, as will be shown in the next chapter, B was used as the cypher equivalent of H not only in Hyginus’s Fable 271 but in the third century AD Ogham inscription on the Callen Stone. So it seems that Sunday’s original letter was not B, but H, of which the Hebrew tree, corresponding with the hawthorn, was the Sant, or wild acacia, the sort with golden flowers and sharp thorns, better known to readers of the Bible as ‘shittim’-wood, i.e. from Cyprus. It was from its water-proof timber that the arks of the Sun-hero Osiris and his counterparts Noah and Armenian Xisuthros were built; also the Ark of the Covenant, the recorded measurements of which proved it sacred to the Sun. This is a host-tree of the mistletoe-like loranthus, Jehovah’s oracular ‘burning bush’, and the source of manna.

The use of H for Sunday’s letter explains Lucan’s puzzling account of the sacred grove at Marseilles which Julius Caesar felled because it interfered with his fortification of the city. Marseilles was a Greek city, a centre of Pythagoreanism, and Caesar had to use an axe himself on one of the oaks before he could persuade anyone to begin the work of desecration. The grove, according to Lucan, contained holly-oak, Dodonian oak, and alder – T, D and F. He specifies none of the remaining trees except the cypress, which the Massiliots had brought from their parent state of Phocis where it was sacred to Artemis. One would not have expected the cypress in the grove; but elsewhere in Greece, particularly at Corinth and Messene, it was sacred to Artemis Cranaë or Carnasia; which makes it an H tree, an evergreen substitute for the hawthorn also sacred to Cranaë or Carnea. Thus as the tree of Sunday, succeeding the alder of Saturday, it symbolized resurrection in the Orphic mysteries, the escape of the Sun-hero from Calypso’s alder-girt island, and became attached to the cult of Celestial Hercules. Cypress is still the prime resurrection symbol in Mediterranean church-yards.1

There is a clear correspondence between this canon and that of the seven days of Creation as characterized in the first chapter of Genesis.

The apparent illogic of the creation of Light, and even of Pasture and Trees, before that of the Heavenly Bodies and Seasons – though here it has been ingeniously suggested by Mr. Ernst Schiff that the Heavenly Bodies were not visible until the fourth day because of the ‘damp haze’ mentioned in verse 9 of the Creation story, and therefore not created in the sense of not being manifested – is accounted for by the powers proper to the deities who rule over the planetary days of the week. The Sun-god rules over Light, the Moon over Water, Mars over Pasture and Trees, and Mercury is the God of Astronomy. Clearly the Genesis legend is subsequent to the fixing of the canon of planets, days and gods. The allocation of Sea-beasts and Birds to the fifth day is natural, because the god of the oak or terebinth cult is, in general, the son of a Sea-goddess to whom the Dove, the Eagle and all other birds are sacred, and himself takes the form of a sea-beast. The order to man and woman to couple and produce their kind, like the creatures over which they have dominion, is appropriate to the day of Venus. The pleasant sloth of Saturn – in whose golden day, according to the Classical poets, men ate honey and acorns in a Terrestrial Paradise and did not trouble to till the soil, or even to hunt, since the earth brought forth abundantly of her own bounty – explains the seventh day as one of repose. The Jewish apocalyptic prophecy (which Jesus took literally) of the Heavenly Kingdom of Jehovah referred to a restoration of this same golden age if only man would cease to busy himself with wars and labours; for Jehovah required rest on the seventh day. As has been already explained, the geographical situation of the former Terrestrial Paradise was variously given. The Babylonians placed it in the Delta of the Euphrates; the Greeks in Crete; the pre-Exilic Hebrews at Hebron in Southern Judaea.

It is of the highest theological importance that Jehovah announced himself to Moses as ‘I am that I am’ or (more literally) ‘I am whoever I choose to be’ from the acacia rather than from any other tree; because this constituted a definition of his godhead. Had he announced himself from the terebinth, as the earlier Jehovah had done at Hebron, this would have been to reveal himself as Bel, or Marduk, the god of Thursday and of the seventh month, the Aramaean Jupiter, the Paeonian Apollo. But from the acacia, the tree of the first day of the week, he revealed himself as the God of the Menorah, the transcendental Celestial God, the God who presently said: ‘Thou shalt have none other Gods but me…for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.’ The acacia is, indeed, a thorny, jealous, self-sufficient tree, needs very little water and, like Odin’s ash, strangles with its roots all other trees growing near it. Uath, the month dedicated to the acacia, was the one in which the annual Hebron Fair took place, and so holy that (as has been mentioned in Chapter Ten) all sexual congress and self-beautification was tabooed during it: it was the month of the annual purification of the temples in Greece, Italy and the Near East.

The not yet completed Ages of the World, quoted from Nennius by Gwion, are based on the same planetary canon:

The Rabbinical explanation of the Menorah, in terms of the creation of the world in seven days, is obviously faulty: the ascription of the central light to the Sabbath contradicts the ‘Let there be Lights’ text of the fourth day. The more ancient tradition preserved in the Zohar: ‘These lamps, like the seven planets above, receive their light from the Sun’, goes back to the pre-exilic Sun-cult. The Menorah was placed in the Sanctuary to face W.S.W., towards On-Heliopolis, as the original home of the Sun-god to whom Moses was priest.

Josephus (Antiquities v. 5; 5) writes of the three wonders of the Sanctuary, namely the lamps, the table of shew-bread, and the altar of incense:

These thirteen (rather than four) spices must belong to an early secret tradition not mentioned in the Law, coeval with the instructions in Numbers XXIX, 13 for the sacrifice of thirteen bullocks on the first day of the Feast of Tabernacles. (Incidentally, the total number of bullocks to be sacrificed from the inauguration of the critical seventh month to the end of the seven days of the Feast was the sacred seventy-two again. The sacrifice of a single bullock on the eighth day was a separate matter.) Josephus is hinting that the number thirteen refers to Rahab, the prophetic Goddess of the Sea, Guardian of Sheol (‘the uninhabitable parts of the world’) where God also, however, claims suzerainty.

What appears to have been a jewel-sequence corresponding with Ezekiel’s tree-sequence was arrayed in three rows on the golden breast-plate worn by the High Priest, called in Greek the logion or ‘little word-giver’ (Exodus XXVIII, 15). It was made by Egyptian craftsmen; and the King of Tyre wore a similar one in honour of Hercules Melkarth (Ezekiel XXVIII, 13). The jewels, which gave oracular responses by lighting up in the dark of the Sanctuary, were probably hollow-cut with a revolving drum behind them on which was a small strip of phosphorus: when the drum was revolved the message was spelt out in ouija style as the strip of phosphorus came to rest behind different letters in turn.

The account of the breastplate given in Exodus mentions twelve precious stones, inscribed with the names of the Twelve Tribes, set in a gold plaque eight inches square. But there is a thirteenth stone which is given such importance elsewhere in the Bible, for example in Isaiah, LIV, 12, that we may assume it to have been part of the original series. This is the kadkod, mistranslated in the Authorised Version as ‘agate’, probably the red carbuncle, and we may assign it to the tribe of Gad which disappeared early in Israelite history. All the jewels are mistranslated in the Authorised Version, and a slightly different set appears, in Revelation, XXI, 19, as forming the foundations of the New Jerusalem. The breastplate was still in existence in the time of Josephus, though it no longer lighted up, and probably contained all the original stones except the kadkod. We can build up our jewel-sequence from it, relying on J. I. Myers’ solid scholarship to identify the jewels and then re-arranging them in a likely seasonal order. For we may assume that the order given in the Bible, like the order of the elements in the Song of Amergin, has been purposely confused for reasons of security.

We know that amethyst, ahlamah, is the wine stone – its Greek name means ‘charm against drunkenness’ – and can be assigned to M, the vine month. Similarly, yellow serpentine, tarsis, naturally belongs to G, the yellow-berried ivy month. The banded red agate, sebo, belongs to C, the month before the vintage, when the grapes are still red. The white carnelian, yahalem, and the yellow cairngorm, lesem, may belong to the glaring hot D and T months; the blood-red carbuncle, kadkod, to S, the month of the razzia or raiding party; and the lapis lazuli, sappur, to H, the first month of summer, since it typifies the dark blue sky. Sappur is translated ‘sapphire’ in the Authorised Version, and Ezekiel mentions it as the colour of the Throne of God. The light green jasper, yàsepheh, and the dark green malachite, soham, suit NG and R, the winter rain-months of Palestine. Nophek, the bright red fire-garnet, or pyrope, is likely to be F, the month of the Spring equinox. The rusty-red Edomite sard, odem, comes first in the year in honour of Adam, the red man – for ‘Edom’, ‘Adam’ and ‘Odem’ are all variants of the same word meaning rust-red: odem belongs to the month B. The remaining two stones corresponding with L, the month of Hercules’s golden cup, and N, the month of his sea-voyage, are pitdan, clear yellow chrysolite, and bareketh, green beryl – the name beryl meaning, in Greek, the sea-jewel.

We can go further: with the help of the names given to the tribes by their mothers in Genesis XXIX and XXX, and of the prophetic blessings or curses bestowed on them by Jacob in Genesis XLVIII and XLIX, we can assign a letter and month to each tribe. To Ephraim (‘fruitful’) and Manasseh (‘forgetfulness’), the two sons of Joseph who was a ‘fruitful vine’ we can assign the months C and M; and B to Reuben the first-born, who had Edomite connections. To Reuben’s four full-brothers, Gad (‘a robber band’) Levi (‘set apart’) Asher (‘royal dainties are on his plate’) and Simeon (‘the bloody brother whose anger is fierce’), the months of S, H, D and T. Gad has the month of the razzia when the corn is invitingly ripe; Levi has the H month because it is the month of peculiar holiness; Asher has the important royal D month because his name is connected with the Ashera, the terebinth groves of the midsummer sacrifice; Simeon has T, the murderous month when the sun is at its fiercest. To Issachar, ‘the strong ass between two burdens’, we can assign L, the month of rest between sowing and harvest. To Zebulon, ‘among the ships’, belongs the sea-voyage month of N; to Judah (‘lion’s whelp’), the Spring solstice month of F; to Naphta’i, ‘he strove’, the ploughing month, R. And to ‘Little Benjamin their ruler’ belongs New Year’s Day, the day of the Divine Child. When we have assigned to Dan, ‘like a serpent’, the serpentine month of G, we naturally fill the Ng month, which alone remains vacant, with the tribe of Dinah: for Dinah, the female twin of Dan, was another tribe that disappeared early (see Genesis XXXIV), and since the Ng month marks the beginning of the rains and the resumption of the seasonal cycle of growth, a woman naturally belongs there.

In my King Jesus I have tentatively reconstructed the hymn to Hercules Melkarth on which ‘Jacob’s Blessing’ seems to be based. It combines the words of the Blessing with the traditional meanings of the tribal names and begins with Hercules swaying to and fro in his golden cup. I take this opportunity of correcting my misplacement of the brothers Levi, Gad and Asher:

Here then, for what it is worth, is a list of the jewels of the months and of the tribes. (The breastplate was made entirely of gold in honour of the Sun: but if a sequence of five metals corresponded with the five vowels A.O.U.E.I. it was probably, to judge from the traditional planetary signs still attached to them: silver, gold, copper, tin, lead.)

For the extra day, Dec. 23rd, which belongs to Benjamin ‘Son of My Right Hand’, that is to say ‘The Ruler of the South’, (since the Sun reaches its most southerly stage in mid-winter) the jewel is amber, which Ezekiel makes the colour of the upper half of Jehovah’s body; the lower half being fire. Benjamin’s tree was either the hyssop, or wild caper, which grows green in walls and crannies and was the prime lustral tree in Hebrew use, or the holy loranthus, which preys on desert tamarisks.