The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Finally, the male twin, Apollo, proclaims himself the Eternal Sun, and the Nine Muses become his ladies-in-waiting. He delegates their functions to male gods who are himself in multiplication.

  (The legendary origin of Japanese poetry is in an encounter between the Moon-goddess and the Sun-god as they walked around the pillar of the world in opposite directions. The Moon-goddess spoke first, saying in verse:

  What joy beyond compare

  To see a man so fair!

  The Sun-god was angry that she had spoken out of turn in this unseemly fashion; he told her to return and come to meet him again. On this occasion he spoke first:

  To see a maid so fair –

  What joy beyond compare!

  This was the first verse ever composed. In other words, the Sun-god took over the control of poetry from the Muse, and pretended that he had originated it – a lie that did Japanese poets no good at all.)

  With that, poetry becomes academic and decays until the Muse chooses to reassert her power in what are called Romantic Revivals.

  *

  In mediaeval poetry the Virgin Mary was plainly identified with the Muse by being put in charge of the Cauldron of Cerridwen. D. W. Nash notes in his edition of the Taliesin poems:

  The Christian bards of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries repeatedly refer to the Virgin Mary herself as the cauldron or source of inspiration – to which they were led, as it seems, partly by a play on the word pair, a cauldron, and the secondary form of that word, on assuming the soft form of its initial mair, which also means Mary. Mary was Mair, the mother of Christ, the mystical receptacle of the Holy Spirit, and Pair was the cauldron or receptacle and fountain of Christian inspiration. Thus we have in a poem of Davydd Benfras in the thirteenth century:

  Crist mab Mair am Pair pur vonhedd.

  Christ, son of Mary, my cauldron of pure descent.

  In mediaeval Irish poetry Mary was equally plainly identified with Brigit the Goddess of Poetry: for St. Brigit, the Virgin as Muse, was popularly known as ‘Mary of the Gael’. Brigit as a Goddess had been a Triad: the Brigit of Poetry, the Brigit of Healing and the Brigit of Smithcraft. In Gaelic Scotland her symbol was the White Swan, and she was known as Bride of the Golden Hair, Bride of the White Hills, mother of the King of Glory. In the Hebrides she was the patroness of childbirth. Her Aegean prototype seems to have been Brizo of Delos, a moon-goddess to whom votive ships were offered, and whose name was derived by the Greeks from the word brizein, ‘to enchant’. Brigit was much cultivated in Gaul and Britain in Roman times, as numerous dedications to her attest, and in parts of Britain Saint Brigit retained her character of Muse until the Puritan Revolution, her healing powers being exercised largely through poetic incantation at sacred wells. Bridewell, the female penitentiary in London, was originally a nunnery of hers.1

  A Cornish invocation to the local Brigit Triad runs:

  Three Ladies came from the East,

  One with fire and two with frost.

  Out with thee, fire, and in with thee, frost.

  It is a charm against a scald. One dips nine bramble leaves in spring water and then applies them to the scald; the charm must be said three times to each leaf to be effective. For the bramble is sacred both to the Pentad and Triad of seasonal Goddesses, the number of leaves on a single stalk varying between three and five – so that in Brittany and parts of Wales there is a strong taboo on the eating of blackberries. In this charm the Goddesses are clearly seasonal, the Goddess of Summer bringing fire, her sisters bringing frost. A fourth rhyming line is usually added, as a sop to the clergy: In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

  The mediaeval Brigit shared the Muse-ship with another Mary, ‘Mary Gipsy’ or St. Mary of Egypt, in whose honour the oath ‘Marry’ or ‘Marry Gyp!’ was sworn. This charming Virgin with the blue robe and pearl necklace was the ancient pagan Sea-goddess Marian in transparent disguise – Marian,1 Miriam, Mariamne (‘Sea Lamb’) Myrrhine, Myrtea, Myrrha,2 Maria or Marina, patroness of poets and lovers and proud mother of the Archer of Love. Robin Hood, in the ballads, always swore by her. She was swarthy-faced, and in a mediaeval Book of the Saints she is recorded to have worked her passage to the Holy Land, where she was to live for years as a desert anchorite, by offering herself as a prostitute to the whole crew of the only vessel sailing there; so, once in Heaven, she showed particular indulgence to carnal sins.

  A familiar disguise of this same Marian is the merry-maid, as ‘mermaid’ was once written. The conventional figure of the mermaid – a beautiful woman with a round mirror, a golden comb and a fish-tail – expresses ‘The Love-goddess rises from the Sea’. Every initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were of Pelasgian origin, went through a love rite with her representative after taking a cauldron bath in Llew Llaw fashion. The round mirror, to match the comb, may be some bygone artist’s mistaken substitute for the quince, which Marian always held in her hand as a love-gift; but the mirror did also form part of the sacred furniture of the Mysteries, and probably stood for ‘know thyself’. The comb was originally a plectrum for plucking lyre-strings. The Greeks called her Aphrodite (‘risen from sea-foam’) and used the tunny, sturgeon, scallop and periwinkle, all sacred to her, as aphrodisiacs. Her most famous temples were built by the sea-side, so it is easy to understand her symbolic fishtail. She can be identified with the Moon-goddess Eurynome whose statue at Phigalia in Arcadia was a mermaid carved in wood. The myrtle, murex and myrrh tree were also everywhere sacred to her; with the palm-tree (which thrives on salt), the love-faithful dove, and the colours white, green, blue and scarlet. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is an exact icon of her cult. Tall, golden-haired, blue-eyed, pale-faced, the Love-goddess arrives in her scallop-shell at the myrtle-grove, and Earth, in a flowery robe, hastens to wrap her in a scarlet gold-fringed mantle. In English ballad-poetry the mermaid stands for the bitter-sweetness of love and for the danger run by susceptible mariners (once spelt ‘merriners’) in foreign ports: her mirror and comb stand for vanity and heartlessness.

  Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, officially abolished Mary-worship, but much of the ancient ritual survived within the Church: for example among the Collyridians, an Arabian sect who used to offer the same cake and liquor at her shrine as they had formerly offered to Ashtaroth. Myrrh, too, but this was more orthodox because St. Jerome had praised the Virgin as Stilla Maris, ‘Myrrh of the Sea’. St. Jerome was punning on the name ‘Mary’, connecting it with Hebrew words marah (brine) and mor (myrrh) and recalling the gifts of the Three Wise Men.

  When the Crusaders invaded the Holy Land, built castles and settled down, they found a number of heretical Christian sects living there under Moslem protection, who soon seduced them from orthodoxy. This was how the cult of Mary Gipsy came to England, brought through Compostella in Spain by poor pilgrims with palm-branches in their hands, copies of the Apocryphal Gospels in their wallets and Aphrodite’s scallop-shells stitched in their caps – the palmers, celebrated in Ophelia’s song in Hamlet. The lyre-plucking, red-stockinged troubadours, of whom King Richard Lion-Heart is the best remembered in Britain, ecstatically adopted the Marian cult. From their French songs derive the lyrics by ‘Anon’ which are the chief glory of early English poetry; as the prettiest carols derive from the Apocryphal Gospels, thanks to the palmers. The most memorable result of the Crusades was to introduce into Western Europe an idea of romantic love which, expressed in terms of the ancient Welsh minstrel tales, eventually transformed the loutish robber barons and their sluttish wives to a polished society of courtly lords and ladies. From the castle and court good manners and courtesy spread to the country folk; and this explains ‘Merry England’ as the country most engrossed with Mary-worship.

  In the English countryside Mary Gipsy was soon identified with the Love-goddess known to the Saxons as ‘The May Bride’ because of her ancient association with the may-tree cult brought to Britain by the Atrebates in the first century BC or AD. She paired off with Merddin, by this t
ime Christianized as ‘Robin Hood’, apparently a variant of Merddin’s Saxon name, Rof Breoht Woden, ‘Bright Strength of Woden,’ also known euphemistically as ‘Robin Good-fellow’. In French the word Robin, which is regarded as a diminutive of Robert but is probably pre-Teutonic, means a ram and also a devil. A robinet, or water-faucet, is so called because in rustic fountains it was shaped like a ram’s head. The two senses of ram and devil are combined in the illustration to a pamphlet published in London in 1639: Robin Goodfellow, his mad pranks and merry gests. Robin is depicted as an ithyphallic god of the witches with young ram’s horns sprouting from his forehead, ram’s legs, a witches’ besom over his left shoulder, a lighted candle in his right hand. Behind him in a ring dance a coven of men and women witches in Puritan costume, a black dog adores him, a musician plays a trumpet, an owl flies overhead. It will be recalled that the Somersetshire witches called their god Robin, and ‘Robin son of Art’ was the Devil of Dame Alice Kyteler, the famous early fourteenth-century witch of Kilkenny, and used sometimes to take the form of a black dog. For the Devil as ram the classical instance is the one whom, in 1303, the Bishop of Coventry honoured with a Black Mass and saluted with a posterior kiss. In Cornwall ‘Robin’ means phallus. ‘Robin Hood’ is a country name for red campion (‘campion’ means ‘champion’), perhaps because its cloven petal suggests a ram’s hoof, and because ‘Red Champion’ was a title of the Witch-god. It may be no more than a coincidence that ‘ram’ in Sanscrit is huda. ‘Robin’, meaning ‘a ram’, has become mythologically equated with Robin (latin: rubens), meaning the red-breast.

  Here the story becomes complicated. The merry exploits of one Robin Hood, the famous outlaw of Sherwood Forest – whom J. W. Walker1 has now proved to have been a historical character, born at Wakefield in Yorkshire between the years 1285 and 1295, and in the service of King Edward II in the years 1323 and 1324 – became closely associated with the May Day revels. Presumably this was because the outlaw happened to have been christened Robert by his father Adam Hood the forester, and because during the twenty-two years that he spent as a bandit in the greenwood he improved on this identification of himself with Robin by renaming his wife Matilda ‘Maid Marian’. To judge from the early ballad, The Banished Man, Matilda must have cut her hair and put on male dress in order to belong to the outlaw fraternity, as in Albania to this day young women join male hunting parties, dress as men and are so treated – Atalanta of Calydon who took part in the hunt of the Calydonian Boar was the prototype. The outlaw band then formed a coven of thirteen with Marian acting as the pucelle, or maiden of the coven; presumably she wore her proper clothes in the May Day orgies as Robin’s bride. By his successful defiance of the ecclesiastics Robin became such a popular hero that he was later regarded as the founder of the Robin Hood religion, and its primitive forms are difficult to recover. However, ‘Hood’ (or Hod or Hud) meant ‘log’ – the log put at the back of the fire – and it was in this log, cut from the sacred oak, that Robin had once been believed to reside. Hence ‘Robin Hood’s steed’, the wood-louse which ran out when the Yule log was burned. In the popular superstition Robin himself escaped up the chimney in the form of a Robin and, when Yule ended, went out as Belin against his rival Bran, or Saturn – who had been ‘Lord of Misrule’ at the Yule-tide revels. Bran hid from pursuit in the ivy-bush disguised as a Gold Crest Wren; but Robin always caught and hanged him. Hence the song:

  ‘Who’ll hunt the Wren?’ cries Robin the Bobbin.

  Since ‘Maid Marian’ had been acting as Lady of Misrule in the Yuletide revels and deserting Robin for his rival, it is easy to see how she earned a bad name for inconstancy. Thus ‘Maud Marian’ was often written for ‘Maid Marian’: ‘Maud’ is Mary Magdalene the penitent. In Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song she is Tom’s Muse – ‘Merry Mad Maud’.

  Christmas was merry in the middle ages, but May Day was still merrier. It was the time of beribboned Maypoles, of Collyridian cakes and ale, of wreaths and posies, of lovers’ gifts, of archery contests, of merritotters (see-saws) and merribowks (great vats of milk-punch). But particularly of mad-merry marriages ‘under the greenwood tree’, when the dancers from the Green went off, hand in hand, into the greenwood and built themselves little love-bowers and listened hopefully for the merry nightingale. ‘Mad Merry’ is another popular spelling of ‘Maid Marian’, and as an adjective became attached to the magician Merlin (the original ‘Old Moore’ of the popular almanacks) whose prophetic almanacks were hawked at fairs and merrimakes. Merlin was really Merddin, as Spenser explains in the Faerie Queene, but Robin Hood had taken his place as the May Bride’s lover, and he had become an old bearded prophet. The ‘merritotter’ is perhaps called after the scales (representing the Autumn equinox) in the hand of the Virgin in the Zodiac, who figured in the Mad Merry Merlin almanack: devoted readers naturally identified her with St. Mary Gipsy, for true-lovers’ fates tottered in her balance, see-sawing up and down.

  Many of these greenwood marriages, blessed by a renegade friar styled Friar Tuck, were afterwards formally confirmed in the church-porch. But very often ‘merrybegots’ were repudiated by their fathers. It is probably because each year, by old custom, the tallest and toughest village lad was chosen to be Little John (or ‘Jenkin’) Robin’s deputy in the Merry Men masque, that Johnson, Jackson and Jenkinson are now among the commonest English names – Little John’s merrybegots. But Robin did as merrily with Robson, Hobson, Dobson (all short for Robin), Robinson, Hodson, Hudson and Hood; Greenwood and Merriman were of doubtful paternity. The Christmas ‘merrimake’ (as Sir James Frazer mentions in The Golden Bough) also produced its crop of children. Who knows how many of the Morrises and Morrisons derive their patronymics from the amorous ‘morrice-men’1, Marian’s ‘merry-weathers’? Or how many ‘Princes’, ‘Lords’ and ‘Kings’ from the Christmas King, or Prince, or Lord, of Misrule?

  The Christmas merry-night play was an important part of the English Yule-tide festivities: seven or eight versions survive. The principal incidents are the beheading and restoration to life of the Christmas King, or Christmas Fool. This is one of the clearest survivals of the pre-Christian religion, and ultimately derives from ancient Crete. Firmicus Maternus in his On the Error of Profane Religion tells how Cretan Dionysus (Zagreus) was killed at Zeus’s orders, boiled in a cauldron and eaten by the Titans. The Cretans, he says, celebrated an annual funeral feast, in which they played out the drama of the boy’s sufferings – and his shape-shifting – eating a live bull as his surrogate. Yet he did not die for, according to Epimenides, quoted by St. Paul, Minos made a panegyric over him:

  Thou diest not, but to eternity thou livest and standest.

  St. Paul quoted a similar passage from the poet Aratus:

  In thee we live, move, and have our being.

  At Athens, the same festival, called the Lenaea, (‘Festival of the Wild Women’) was held at the winter solstice, and the death and rebirth of the harvest infant Dionysus were similarly dramatized. In the original myth it was not the Titans but the wild women, the nine representatives of the Moon-goddess Hera, who tore the child in pieces and ate him. And at the Lenaea it was a yearling kid, not a bull, that was eaten; when Apollodorus says that Dionysus was transformed into a kid, Eriphos, to save him from the wrath of Hera, this means that Hera once ate him as a human child, but that when men (the Titans or tutors) were admitted to the feast a kid was substituted as victim.

  The most ancient surviving record of European religious practice is an Aurignacian cave-painting at Cogul in North-Eastern Spain of the Old Stone Age Lenaea. A young Dionysus with huge genitals stands unarmed, alone and exhausted in the middle of a crescent of nine dancing women, who face him. He is naked, except for what appear to be a pair of close-fitting boots laced at the knee; they are fully clothed and wear small cone-shaped hats. These wild women, differentiated by their figures and details of their dress, grow progressively older as one looks clock-wise around the crescent. The row begins with three young girls, the first two
in long skirts, on the right and ends with two thin dark elderly women on the left and an emaciated crone on the far side; the crone has a face like the old moon and is dancing widdershins. In between are three vigorous golden-haired women, one of them in a short, bright party-frock. They clearly represent the New Moon, Old Moon and Full Moon triads – the crone being Atropos, the senior member of the Old Moon triad.

  In front of the senior member of the New Moon triad is an animal whose fore-quarters are concealed by her skirt – it seems to be a black pig. And in the foreground of the picture, bounding away behind the backs of the Full Moon triad, is the very creature that Oisin saw in his vision when being conveyed by Niamh of the Golden Hair to the Land of Youth: a hornless fawn. Balanced erect on the fawn’s neck, and facing backwards, is a boyish-looking imp or sprite, as clearly as anything the escaping soul of the doomed Dionysus. For the wild women are closing in on him and will presently tear him in bloody morsels and devour him. Though there is nothing in the painting to indicate the season, we can be sure that it was the winter solstice.

  So we get back once more to the dramatic romance of Gwion – the boy who was eaten by the wild hag Cerridwen and reborn as the miraculous child Taliesin – and to the dispute between Phylip Brydydd and the ‘vulgar rhymesters’ (see Chapter Five) as to who should first present a song to their prince on Christmas Day. The Romance of Taliesin is a sort of Christmas play, in which the sufferings of the shape-shifting child are riddlingly presented. This is the elder version, reflecting the religious theory of early European society where woman was the master of man’s destiny: pursued, was not pursued; raped, was not raped – as may be read in the faded legends of Dryope and Hylas, Venus and Adonis, Diana and Endymion, Circe and Ulysses. The danger of the various islands of women was that the male who ventured there might be sexually assaulted in the same murderous way as, according to B. Malinowski in The Sexual Life of Savages, men of North-Western Melanesia are punished for trespass against female privilege. At least one coven of nine wild women seems to have been active in South Wales during early mediaeval times: old St. Samson of Dol, travelling with a young companion, was unlucky enough to trespass in their precinct. A frightful shriek rang out suddenly and from a thicket darted a grey-haired, red-garmented hag with a bloody trident in her hand. St. Samson stood his ground; his companion fled, but was soon overtaken and stabbed to death. The hag refused to come to an accommodation with St. Samson when he reproached her, and informed him that she was one of the nine sisters who lived in those woods with their mother – apparently the Goddess Hecate. Perhaps if the younger sisters had reached the scene first, the young man would have been the victim of a concerted sexual assault. Nine murderous black-garbed women occur in the Icelandic saga of Thidrandi, who one night opened his door to a knock, though warned against the consequences, and saw them riding against him from the north. He resisted their attack with his sword for awhile, but fell mortally wounded.