The Alphabet

THE Three Fates or, some say, Io the sister of Phoroneus, invented 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 shape, because cranes fly in wedge formation, and carried the system Greece to Egypt. This was the Pelasgian alphabet, which Cadmus 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.

Other consonants have since then 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.

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.

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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 BC 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’.

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.

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:

Dec. 24            B          birch, or wild olive

Jan. 21             L          rowan

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

Aug. 5              C          nut; CC (Q), apple, sorb

Sept. 2             M         vine

Sept. 30           G         ivy

Oct. 28            Ng or Gn          reed, or guelder rose

Nov. 25           R          cider, or myrtle

About 400 BC, as the result of a religious revolution, the order changed as follows to correspond with a new calendar system: B, I. 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.

Each vowel represented a quarterly station of the year: O (greenweed) the Spring Equinox; U (heather) the Summer Solstice; E (poplar) Autumn Equinox; A (fir, or palm) the birth-tree, and I (yew) death-tree, shared the Winter Solstice between them. This order of letters is implicit in Greek and Latin myth and the sacral tradition of all Europe and, mutatis mutandis, Syria and Asia Minor. The goddess Carmenta 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.

Cranes were sacred to Hermes, 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) was the Carian counterpart of Egyptian god Thoth, inventor of letters, with his crane-like ibis. Hermes was Thoth’s early Hellenic counterpart. That Simonides and Epicharmus added new letters to the alphabet is history, not myth; though exactly why they did so remains doubtful. Two additions, xi and psi, were unnecessary, and the removal of the as (H) and digamma (F) impoverished the canon.

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

This complicated and important subject is discussed at length in White Goddess.

The vowels added by the priests of Apollo to his lyre were probably those mentioned by Demetrius, an Alexandrian philosopher of the first century BC, 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.