The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  An obvious difference between poems and dreams is that in poems one is (or should be) in critical control of the situation; in dreams one is a paranoiac, a mere spectator of mythographic event. But in poems as in dreams there is a suspension of temporal criteria; and when the Irish poets wrote of enchanted islands where three hundred years went by as if they were a day, and put these islands under the sovereignty of the Muse, they were defining this suspension. The sudden shock of a return to the familiar temporal mode of thought is typified in the myths by the breaking of the saddle girth when the young hero rides back home on a visit from the Island. His foot touches the ground and the charm is broken: ‘then the troubles of old age and sickness fell suddenly upon him.’

  A sense of the equivocal nature of time is constantly with poets, rules out hope or anxiety about the future, concentrates interest detachedly in the present. I wrote about this with proleptic detail in 1934, in a poem ‘The Fallen Tower of Siloam’, which began:

  Should the building totter, spring for an archway!

  We were there already…

  But an interesting feature of prolepsis and analepsis is that the coincidence of the concept and the reality is never quite exact: Gamma coincides with Zeta, but not so closely that either loses its identity. The coincidence is as close, you may say, as between the notes B natural and C flat which, for economy’s sake, are given only a single string on a pianoforte: they have slightly different vibration lengths, but only a remarkably true ear can distinguish one from the other. Or, as close as between the values 22/7 and pi: if you wish to calculate, say, how much binding you will need for the bottom of a bell-tent three yards in diameter, 22/7 will be an adequate formula.

  In September 1943, when I could not stop my mind from running all day and all night in chase of the Roebuck, so rapidly that my pen could not keep up with it, I tried to preserve a critical detachment. I said to myself: ‘I am not particularly enjoying this jaunt. I am not greatly interested in the strange country through which my broom-stick mind is flying me, and not at all sure whether I should trouble to chart it.’ Then I addressed myself schizophrenically: ‘I’ll tell you what, Robert. I’ll propound a simple, well-known, hitherto unsolved riddle and if you can make sense of that, very well, I’ll pay attention to your other discoveries.’

  The riddle that I propounded was the last verse of the thirteenth chapter of the Apocalypse:

  Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the Beast: for it is the number of a man and his number is 666.

  I vaguely remembered, from my school days, the two traditional solutions of St. John’s cryptogram. They are both based on the assumption that, since letters of the alphabet were used to express numerals in Greek and Hebrew alike, 666 was a sum arrived at by adding together the letters that spelt out the Beast’s name. The earliest solution, that of the second-century bishop Irenaeus, is LATEINOS, meaning ‘The Latin One’ and so denoting the race of the Beast; the most widely accepted modern solution – I forgot whose – is NERON KESAR, namely the Emperor Nero regarded as Antichrist.1 Neither solution is quite satisfactory. ‘The Latin One’ is too vague a characterization of Beast 666, and KAISAR, not KESAR, was the ordinary Greek way of writing ‘Caesar’. Besides, the possible combinations of letter-values which add up to 666, and the possible anagrammatic arrangements of each of these sets of letter-values, are so numerous that the aggregate of possibility approaches as near to infinity as anyone could wish.

  The Apocalypse was written in Greek, but my analeptic self, when thus addressed, stubbornly insisted on thinking in Latin; and I saw in a sort of vision the Roman numerals flashed across the wall of the room I was in. They made a placard:

  D.C.L.X.

  V.I.

  When they steadied, I looked at them slantwise. Poets will know what I mean by slantwise: it is a way of looking through a difficult word or phrase to discover the meaning lurking behind the letters. I saw that the placard was a titulus, the Roman superscription nailed above the heads of criminals at the place of execution, explaining their crime. I found myself reading out:

  DOMITIANUS CAESAR LEGATOS XTI

  VILITER INTERFECIT

  ‘Domitian Caesar basely killed the Envoys of Christ.’ I.N.R.I. was the titulus of Christ; D.C.L.X. V.I. was the titulus of Antichrist.

  The only word I stumbled at was VILITER; it had a blurred look.

  The persecution of the Church under Nero and Domitian had never greatly interested me, and the test that I had set my mind was therefore a routine one – just as I might have tested myself with the routine formula: ‘The Leith police dismisseth us,’ if I had suspected myself of being drunk. No historical prejudice was involved, and my clinical observations on the case are therefore to be trusted.

  In the first place I had been aware that the Apocalypse was referred by most Biblical scholars to the reign of Nero (54–67 AD), not to that of Domitian (81–96 AD), the whole trend of the visions being anti-Neronic. And yet my eye read ‘Domitianus’. In the second, I was aware that viliter, in the Silver Age of Latin, means ‘cheaply,’ and that its derived sense of ‘basely’ implies worthlessness, not wickedness. And yet my eye read ‘viliter’.

  It was some weeks before I began to understand this paradox. It seemed to me that the work which my analeptic self had done was sound enough: D.C.L.X.V.I, was the correct text, and the solution was correct. But my eye, under the influence of my reasonable self, had evidently been at fault: it had misread, as it frequently misreads letters and newspaper headings when I am not quite awake in the morning. The text had really been:

  DOMITIUS CAESAR LEGATOS XTI

  VIOLENTER INTERFECIT

  But since ‘Domitius Caesar’ meant nothing to my reasonable self – indeed, there was no person of that name – it had officiously corrected the mistake by reading ‘Domitianus’. Now I remembered that Domitius was Nero’s original name before the Emperor Claudius adopted him into the Imperial family and changed his name to Nero Claudius Caesar Drusus Germanicus, and that he hated to be reminded of his plebeian origin. (I think it is Suetonius who mentions this sensitivity of Nero’s.) Nero’s criminal father, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, when congratulated on the child’s birth, replied coolly that any offspring of himself and his wife Agrippinilla could bring only ruin on the State. So ‘Domitius Caesar’ was a suitable taunt for the cryptogram – as anti-Hitlerians in 1933 made political capital out of ‘Chancellor Schickelgruber’. St. John the Divine would naturally not have respected Nero’s feelings when composing it, and the use of D.C. for N.C. would have served to protect the secret.

  Violenter means something more than ‘roughly’ or ‘impetuously’: it contains the sense of sacrilegious fury and outrage. So it seemed that my amending eye had brought up the EN from VIOLENTER into the word written just above it, to form DOMITIENUS, which came near enough to ‘Domitianus’ to make no odds; and that the meaningless word VIOLTER which remained below was a blur which I stumblingly read as VILITER, recognizing it as a word of condemnation.

  (I do not claim more for this reading than that it makes historical sense. Who can say whether the sense was put there by St. John, as it were for my benefit, or by myself, as it were for St. John’s benefit? All I know is that I read the words off just about as easily and unthinkingly as, say, the censor of soldiers’ mail reads the cryptogram at the close of a letter to a wife: ‘X.X.X – W.I.W.R.D.D.Y?’ as ‘Kiss-kiss-kiss – wish it was real, darling, don’t you?’)

  This is not all. When I came to scrutinize the Apocalypse text, I found in the margin a cross-reference to Chapter XV, verse 2, which runs:

  And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire and them that had gotten the victory over the Beast, and over his image, and over his mark, and over the number of his name, standing on the sea of glass, having the harps of God.

  The ‘image’ is the one mentioned in the previous context: apparently the meaning is that Christians were martyred who loyally refused to worshi
p Nero’s statue. So ‘them that had gotten the victory over the Beast and over his image and over his mark and over the number of his name’ were the Envoys of Christ who refused to be terrorized into Emperor worship, and who when sacrilegiously slain were carried straight up into Paradise.

  Now the question arose: why had my eye read ‘Domitianus’ when the text was ‘Domitius’? That had to be answered, for my eye had been convinced that Domitian, not Nero, was meant, and had rapidly amended the text to prove its point. Perhaps my eye had been a servant of my crazy analeptic self after all. Perhaps both Domitius and Domitian were meant. I mean, perhaps the Apocalypse was originally written in the time of Nero’s persecutions, but expanded and brought up-to-date in the reign of Domitian, who revived the Neronic persecutions and whose name means ‘of Domitius’s kind’. What about the verses:

  I saw one of the Beast’s heads as it were wounded to death, and his deadly wound was healed and all the world wondered at the Beast.

  And they…worshipped the Beast saying: ‘Who is like unto the Beast? Who is able to make war with him?’

  And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies and power was given unto him to continue forty-and-two months….

  And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them.

  The reference is clearly to the well-known contemporary belief that Nero would come again, surviving his deadly sword-wound, and to the natural Christian supposition that he was reincarnate in Domitian.

  [Excellent: I now find that this is the conclusion of Dr. T. W. Crafer in his recent work on the Apocalypse.]

  Forty-two is the number of years (54–96 AD) between the accession of Nero the seventh Caesar and the death, by the sword, of Domitian the twelfth and last Caesar. In this sort of prophetic writing years are usually expressed as months, and months as days. The sentence ‘and power was given unto him to continue forty-and-two months’ seems to be an interpolated gloss on the original prophecy that Domitian, who blasphemously called himself Lord and God, would come to a violent end. The Church had a comparatively peaceful time under Domitian’s successor, Nerva. That some MSS. read 616, not 666, does not spoil my argument; it merely cuts out the L for legatos. DCXVI means that, in St. Paul’s words, the Beast ‘crucified the Son of God afresh’.

  The result of the test satisfied me, and I hope will satisfy others, that I had not slid into certifiable paranoia.

  I should add, however, that since the eleventh chapter of the Apocalypse predicts the preservation of the Temple, the original version of the book must have been written after the death of Nero, but before the destruction of the Temple and at a time when rumours of his reappearance in the flesh were widely current. Also that the Hebrew letters TRJVN, which add up to 666 (Tav = 400; Resh = 200; Yod = 10; Vav = 6; Nun =50), form the common cypher-disguise in Talmudic literature for Nero (trijon means ‘little beast’) and that the authors of the Talmud are most unlikely to have borrowed from the Gentile Christians. It is possible, then, that the first version of the Apocalypse was a Jewish nationalist tract, written in Aramaic before AD 70, in which 666 was a cypher meaning ‘Little Beast’, which pointed to Nero; but that it was re-written in Greek and expanded for Christian readers at the close of the first century, by which time the Pauline converts, who knew no Hebrew, were at pains to prove that Jesus had rejected the Law of Moses and transferred Jehovah’s blessing from the Jews to themselves. And that in this second version, with its many interpolations and uncritical retention of out-of-date material, the cypher 666 was given a new solution, and one that any intelligent person could understand without recourse to Hebrew: namely DCLXVI. If this is so, the legend was never Domitius Caesar etc., yet my analeptic eye was right to recognize that since the original Hebrew meaning of the cypher was TRIJON; the beastly spirit of Domitius was latent in Domitianus.

  The proleptic or analeptic method of thought, though necessary to poets, physicians, historians and the rest, is so easily confused with mere guessing, or deduction from insufficient data, that few of them own to using it. However securely I buttress the argument of this book with quotations, citations and footnotes, the admission that I have made here of how it first came to me will debar it from consideration by orthodox scholars: though they cannot refute it, they dare not accept it.

  1 The solution is based on the Hebrew. Nun = 50; Resh = 200; Vav = 6; Nun = 50 = Neron. Koph = 100; Samech = 60; Resh = 200 = Kesar. But Nero in Latin remains Nero when written in Hebrew, and Kaisar (which meant ‘a head of hair’ in Latin and ‘a crown’ in Hebrew – perhaps both words were borrowed from a common Aegean original) should be spelt with a Kaph (= 20), not a Koph, which makes the sum add up to only 626.

  Chapter Twenty

  A CONVERSATION AT PAPHOS – 43 AD

  Circling the circlings of their fish,

  Nuns walk in white and pray;

  For he is chaste as they….

  These lines will serve as a text to demonstrate the peculiar workings of poetic thought. They came to me, from nowhere in particular, as the first three lines of a rhyming stanza, in the epigrammatic style of the Welsh englyn, which required two more to complete it. Their manifest meaning is that the white nuns walk in silent prayer in their convent garden, circling the fish pool and circling their rosaries in chaste prayer; the fish swims around inside. The fish, like the nuns, is proverbial for his sexual indifference, and the Mother Superior permits him as a convent pet because he cannot possibly awake any lascivious thoughts in her charges.

  A neat piece of observation, but not yet a poem; the truth, but not the whole truth. To tell the whole truth, I had to consider first the phenomenon of nuns, who voluntarily forgo the pleasures of carnal love and motherhood in order to become the Vestal brides of Christ, and then the phenomenon of sacred fish of all sorts and sizes, from the great fish that swallowed Jonah to the little spotted fish in wishing wells that still grant lovers or babies to peasant women in remote parishes; not forgetting the ‘mighty and stainless Fish from the Fountain whom a pure virgin grasped’ in the epitaph of the late second-century bishop Aviricius of the Phrygian Pentapolis. Only when I had asked and answered some scores of teasing questions would the fourth and fifth lines be found, to complete the poem with a simple concentration of difficult meaning.

  I began by noting the strange continuance in Christianity of the original pagan title of Chief Pontiff, which the Bishop of Rome, the successor of St. Peter the Fisherman, assumed two centuries after Christianity had become the Roman state religion. For the Chief Pontiff, in Republican and early Imperial times, was personally responsible to the Capitoline Trinity (Jupiter, Juno and Minerva), for the chaste behaviour of the Vestals, as his successor now is to the Christian Trinity for that of Roman Catholic nuns. Then I threw my mind back in an analeptic trance. I found myself listening to a conversation in Latin, helped out with Greek, which I understood perfectly. Presently I began to distinguish the voices as those of Theophilus, a well-known Syrian-Greek historian and Lucius Sergius Paulus, a Roman Governor-General of Cyprus under the Emperor Claudius.

  Paulus was saying rather heavily ‘My learned friend, a festal system of such complexity cannot have been conveyed from country to country among the bales of merchandize that traders carry in barter. It may have been imposed by conquest, yet had there ever been an Empire of Europe which included all the distant parts you mention –’

  ‘I should also have included Portugal among them,’ interjected Theophilus.

  ‘– doubtless we should have heard of it. But Alexander’s conquests were all in the East: he dared not challenge the power of Republican Rome.’

  Theophilus said: ‘What I mean is this. I postulate a constant emigration, in ancient times, of tribes inhabiting the Southern coast of the Black Sea, a process that has indeed ceased only in the last century or two. The climate was healthy, the people vigorous and well organized, but the coastal strip narrow. Every hundred years or so, as I suppose, the land grew over-
populated, and one tribe or another was necessarily sent away to seek its fortune and make room for the rest. Or it may be that they were forced to move by pressure from the East, when wandering hordes from the plains of Asia broke through the Caspian Gates of the Caucasus mountains. Of these tribes, some took the route southward across Asia Minor and ventured through Syria and as far as Egypt – we have the authority of Herodotus for this; some took the route westward across the Bosphorus and Thrace and into Greece, Italy and Gaul and even, as I say, to Spain and Portugal. Some struggled south-eastward into Chaldaea across the Taurus mountains; some moved northward up the Western shore of the Black Sea and then followed the Danube to Istria, continuing their march across Europe until they reached the north-westerly tip of Gaul; whence, it is said, some crossed over into Britain, and from Britain into Ireland. They took the festal system with them.’

  ‘Yours is a very daring theory,’ said Paulus, ‘but I can recall no authentic tradition that supports it.’

  Theophilus smiled. ‘Your Excellency is a true Roman – “no truth unless hallowed by a tradition.” Well, then: tell me, from what land did your hero Aeneas come?’

  ‘He was a King of Dardanus on the Bosphorus before he settled in Troy.’

  ‘Good: Dardanus is three-quarters of the way back from Rome to the Black Sea. And, tell me, what was the priceless possession that Aeneas brought with him from Troy? Pray forgive the dialectical method.’