The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  The transformations of Gwion run in strict seasonal order: hare in the autumn coursing season, fish in the rains of winter; bird in the spring when the migrants return, finally grain of corn in the summer harvest season. The Fury rushes after him in the form first of greyhound bitch, then of bitch-otter, then of falcon, finally overtakes him in the shape of a high-crested black hen – red comb and black feathers show her to be the Death Goddess. In this account the solar year ends in the winnowing season of early autumn, which points to an Eastern Mediterranean origin of the story. In Classical times the Cretan, Cyprian and Delphic years, and those of Asia Minor and Palestine, ended in September.

  However, when the victory of the patriarchal Indo-Europeans revolutionized the social system of the Eastern Mediterranean, the myth of the sexual chase was reversed. Greek and Latin mythology contains numerous anecdotes of the pursuit and rape of elusive goddesses or nymphs by gods in beast disguise: especially by the two senior gods, Zeus and Poseidon. Similarly in European folk-lore there are scores of variants on the ‘Two Magicians’ theme, in which the male magician, after a hot chase, outmagics the female and gains her maidenhead. In the English ballad of The Coal Black Smith, a convenient example of this altered form of chase, the correct seasonal order of events is broken because the original context has been forgotten. She becomes a fish, he an otter; she a hare, he a greyhound; she becomes a fly, he a spider and pulls her to his lair; finally she becomes a quilt on his bed, he a coverlet and the game is won. In a still more debased French variant, she falls sick, he becomes her doctor; she turns nun, he becomes her priest and confesses her night and day; she becomes a star, he a cloud and muffles her.

  In the British witch-cult the male sorcerer was dominant – though in parts of Scotland Hecate, alias the Queen of Elfin or Faerie, still ruled – and The Coal Black Smith is likely to have been the song sung at a dramatic performance of the chase at a witches’ Sabbath; the association of smiths and horned gods is as ancient as Tubal Cain, the Kenite Goat-god. The horned Devil of the Sabbath had sexual connexion with all his witch attendants, though he seems to have used an enormous artificial member, not his own. Anne Armstrong, the Northumbrian witch already mentioned, testified in 1673 that, at a well-attended Sabbath held at Allansford, one of her companions, Ann Baites of Morpeth, successively transformed herself into cat, hare, greyhound and bee, to let the Devil – ‘a long black man, their protector, whom they call their God’ – admire her facility in changes. At first I thought that he chased Ann Baites, who was apparently the Maiden, or female leader of the coven, around the ring of witches, and that she mimicked the gait and cry of these various creatures in turn while he pursued her, adapting his changes to hers. The formula in The Coal Black Smith is ‘he became a greyhound dog’, or ‘he became an otter brown’, ‘and fetched her home again’. ‘Home again’ is used here in the technical sense of ‘to her own shape’, for Isobel Gowdie of Auldearne at her trial in 1662, quoted the witch formula for turning oneself into a hare:

  I shall go into a hare

  With sorrow and sighing and mickle care,

  And I shall go in the Devil’s name

  Aye, till I come home again.

  It is clear from her subsequent account that there was no change of outward shape, but only of behaviour, and the verse suggests a dramatic dance. I see now that Ann Baites gave a solo performance, alternately mimicking the pursued and the pursuer, and that the Devil was content merely to applaud her. Probably the sequence was seasonal – hare and greyhound, trout and otter, bee and swallow, mouse and cat – and inherited from the earlier form of chase, with the pursuer as the black Cat-Demeter finally destroying the Sminthean mouse on the threshing-floor in the winnowing season. The whole song is easy to restore in its original version.1

  An intermediate form of the ‘Two Magicians’ myth, quoted by Diodorus Siculus, Callimachus in his Hymn to Artemis and Antoninus Liberalis, the second-century AD mythographer, in his Transformations, who all refer it to different regions, is that the Goddess Artemis, alias Aphaea, Dictynna, Britomart or Atergatis, is unsuccessfully pursued and finally escapes in fish form. Callimachus makes Minos of Crete the erotic pursuer and Britomart the chaste pursued, and relates that the pursuit lasted for nine months from the early flood season to the winnowing season. The myth is intended to explain the fish-tail in the statues of the goddess at Ascalon, Phigalia, Crabos, Aegina, Cephallenia, Mount Dictynnaeum in Crete and elsewhere, and to justify her local devotees in retaining their pre-Hellenic rites and marital customs. Fishermen figure prominently in the story – Dictynna means a net – and fishermen are notoriously conservative in their beliefs. In the Philistine version from Ascalon, quoted by Athenaeus, the Goddess was Derketo and the pursuer was one Moxus or Mopsus: perhaps this should be Moschus the ancestor of King Midas’s tribe who defeated the Hittites. Cognate with this myth is the fruitless attempt by Apollo on the maidenhead of the nymph Daphne.

  The love-chase is, unexpectedly, the basis of the Coventry legend of Lady Godiva. The clue is provided by a miserere-seat in Coventry Cathedral, paralleled elsewhere in Early English grotesque woodcarving, which shows what the guide-books call ‘a figure emblematic of lechery’: a long-haired woman wrapped in a net, riding sideways on a goat and preceded by a hare. Gaster in his stories from the Jewish Targum, collected all over Europe, tells of a woman who when given a love-test by her royal lover, namely to come to him ‘neither clothed nor unclothed, neither on foot nor on horseback, neither on water nor on dry land, neither with or without a gift’ arrived dressed in a net, mounted on a goat, with one foot trailing in the ditch, and releasing a hare. The same story with slight variations, was told by Saxo Grammaticus in his late twelfth-century History of Denmark. Aslog, the last of the Volsungs, Brynhild’s daughter by Sigurd, was living on a farm at Spangerejd in Norway, disguised as a sooty-faced kitchen-maid called Krake (raven). Even so, her beauty made such an impression on the followers of the hero Ragnar Lodbrog that he thought of marrying her, and as a test of her worthiness told her to come to him neither on foot nor riding, neither dressed nor naked, neither fasting nor feasting, neither attended nor alone. She arrived on goatback, one foot trailing on the ground, clothed only in her hair and a fishing-net, holding an onion to her lips, a hound by her side.

  If the two stories are combined into a picture, the ‘figure emblematic of lechery’ has a black face, long hair, a raven flying overhead, a hare running ahead, a hound at her side, a fruit to her lips, a net over her and a goat under her. She will now be easily recognized as the May-eve aspect of the Love-and-Death goddess Freya, alias Frigg, Holda, Held, Hilde, Goda, or Ostara. In neolithic or early Bronze Age times she went North from the Mediterranean, where she was known as Dictynna (from her net), Aegea (from her goat), Coronis (from her raven), also Rhea, Britomart, Artemis and so on, and brought the Maze Dance with her.

  The fruit at her lips is probably the apple of immortality and the raven denotes death and prophecy – Freya’s prophetic raven was borrowed from her by Odin, just as Bran borrowed Danu’s and Apollo Athene’s. The Goddess was established in Britain as Rhiannon, Arianrhod, Cerridwen, Blodeuwedd, Danu or Anna long before the Saxons, Angles and Danes brought very similar versions of her with them. Hilde was at home in the Milky Way, like Rhea in Crete and Blodeuwedd (Olwen) in Britain, both of whom were connected with goats; and in the Brocken May-eve ceremony a goat was sacrificed in her honour. As Holda she was mounted on a goat with a pack of twenty-four hounds, her daughters, running beside her – the twenty-four hours of May Eve – and was sometimes shown as piebald to represent her ambivalent character of black Earth-mother and corpse-like Death – Holda and Hel. As Ostara, the Saxon Goddess after whom Easter is named, she attended a May-eve Sabbath where a goat was sacrificed to her. The hare was her ritual animal: it still ‘lays’ Easter eggs. The goat spelt fertility of cattle; the hare, good hunting; the net, good fishing; the long hair, tall crops.

  The May-eve goat, as is clear from the Engli
sh witch ceremonies and from the Swedish May-play, ‘Bükkerwise’, was mated to the goddess, sacrificed and resurrected: that is to say, the Priestess had public connexion with the annual king dressed in goatskins, and either he was then killed and resurrected in the form of his successor, or else a goat was sacrificed in his stead and his reign prolonged. This fertility rite was the basis of the highly intellectualized ‘Lesser Mysteries’ of Eleusis, performed in February, representing the marriage of Goat-Dionysus to the Goddess Thyone, ‘the raving queen’, his death and resurrection.1 At Coventry, she evidently went to the ceremony riding on his back, to denote her domination of him – as Europa rode on the Minos bull, or Hera on her lion.

  The hare, as has been pointed out in Chapter Sixteen, was sacred both in Pelasgian Greece and Britain because it is swift, prolific and mates openly without embarrassment. I should have mentioned in this context that the early British tabu on hunting the hare, the penalty for a breach of which was to be struck with cowardice, was originally lifted on a single day in the year – May-eve – as the tabu on hunting the wren was lifted only on St. Stephen’s Day. (Boadicea let loose the hare during her battle with the Romans in the hope, presumably, that the Romans would strike at it with their swords and so lose courage.)

  The hare was ritually hunted on May-eve, and the miserere-seat ‘figure of lechery’ – which is a fair enough description of the Goddess on this occasion – is releasing the hare for her daughters to hunt. The folk-song If all those young men evidently belongs to these May-eve witch frolics:

  If all those young men were like hares on the mountain

  Then all those pretty maidens would get guns, go a-hunting.

  ‘Get guns’ is eighteenth-century; one should read ‘turn hounds’. There are other verses:

  If all those young men were like fish in the water

  Then all those pretty maidens would soon follow after.

  With nets? As we know from the story of Prince Elphin and Little Gwion, May-eve was the proper day for netting a weir, and the Goddess would not bring her net to the Sabbath for nothing.

  If all those young men were like rushes a-growing

  Then all those pretty maidens would get scythes go a-mowing.

  The love-chase again: the soul of the sacred king, ringed about by orgiastic women, tries to escape in the likeness of hare, or fish, or bee; but they pursue him relentlessly and in the end he is caught, torn in pieces and devoured. In one variant of the folk-song, the man is the pursuer, not the pursued:

  Young women they run like hares on the mountain

  If I were but a young man I’d soon go a-hunting.

  The story of Lady Godiva, as recorded by Roger of Wendover, a St. Albans chronicler, in the thirteenth century, is that shortly before the Norman Conquest the Saxon Lady Godiva (Godgifu) asked her husband Leofric Earl of Mercia to relieve the people of Coventry from oppressive tolls. He consented on condition that she rode naked through the crowded market on a fair-day; and she did so with a knight on either side, but preserved her modesty by covering herself with her hair, so that only her ‘very white legs’ showed underneath. The story, which is also told of the Countess of Hereford and ‘King John’ in connexion with the distribution of bread and cheese at St. Briavel’s in Gloucestershire, cannot be historically true, because Coventry in Lady Godiva’s day was a village without either tolls or fairs. But it is certain that in 1040 she persuaded Leofric to build and endow a Benedictine monastery at Coventry, and what seems to have happened is that after the Conquest the monks disguised a local May-eve procession of the Goddess Goda, during which all pious Christians were at first required to keep indoors, with an edifying anecdote about their benefactress Lady Godiva, modelling the story on Saxo’s. The fraud is given away by the ‘Lady Godiva’ procession of Southam (twelve miles south of Coventry and included in Leofric’s earldom), where two figures were carried, one white and one black – the Goddess as Holda and Hel, Love and Death. The story of Peeping Tom the Tailor is not mentioned by Roger of Wendover, but may be a genuine early tradition. The St. Briavel’s ceremony which took place, like the Southam and Coventry processions, on Corpus Christi, a date associated both at York and Coventry with mystery plays, is said to have commemorated the freeing of the people from a tax on the gathering of fire-wood in the neighbouring forest; Corpus Christi always falls on a Friday, the Goddess’s own day, and corresponds roughly with May Eve; thus, it seems that the mystery-play has its origin in the May Eve festivities, Bükkerwise, in honour of Goda, the Bona Dea. If there was a prohibition against men witnessing the procession, as there was at Rome in the Bona Dea ceremonies, and as there was in Celtic Germany according to Tacitus (Germania, chap. 40) against any man witnessing Hertha’s annual bath after her progress back to her sacred grove, and as there was in Greece in the days of Actaeon, when Diana took her woodland bath, Peeping Tom may record the memory of this.

  The British are a mixed race, but the non-Teutonic goddess-worshipping strains are the strongest. This explains why the poets’ poetry written in English remains obstinately pagan. The Biblical conception of the necessary supremacy of man over woman is alien to the British mind: among all Britons of sensibility the rule is ‘ladies first’ on all social occasions. The chivalrous man dies far more readily in the service of a queen than of a king: self-destruction is indeed the recognized proof of grand passion:

  And for bonnie Annie Laurie

  I wad lay me doon and dee.

  There is an unconscious hankering in Britain after goddesses, if not for a goddess so dominant as the aboriginal Triple Goddess, at least for a female softening of the all-maleness of the Christian Trinity. The male Trinity corresponds increasingly less with the British social system, in which woman, now that she has become a property owner and a voter, has nearly regained the position of respect which she enjoyed before the Puritan revolution. True, the male Trinity antedated the Puritan revolution but it was a theological not an emotional concept: as has been shown, the Queen of Heaven with her retinue of female saints had a far greater hold in the popular imagination between the Crusades and the Civil War than either the Father or the Son. And one of the results of Henry VIII’s breach with Rome was that when his daughter Queen Elizabeth became head of the Anglican Church she was popularly regarded as a sort of deity: poets not only made her their Muse but gave her titles – Phoebe, Virginia, Gloriana – which identified her with the Moon-goddess, and the extraordinary hold that she gained on the affections of her subjects was largely due to this cult.

  The temporary reinstatement of the Thunder-god in effective religious sovereignty during the Commonwealth is the most remarkable event in modern British history: the cause was a mental ferment induced by the King James Bible among the mercantile classes of the great towns and in parts of Scotland and England where Celtic blood ran thinnest. The first Civil War was fought largely between the chivalrous nobility with their retainers and the anti-chivalrous mercantile classes with their artisan supporters. The Anglo-Saxon-Danish south-east was solidly Parliamentarian and the Celtic north-west as solidly Royalist. It was therefore appropriate that at the Battle of Naseby, which decided the war, the rival battle cries were, for the Parliamentary army, ‘God our Strength’ and for the Royalist army ‘Queen Marie’. Queen Marie was a Catholic and her name evoked the Queen of Heaven and of Love. The Thunder-god won the day, and vented his spite not only on the Virgin and her retinue of saints, but on Maid Marian and her maypole retinue, and on the other Triple Goddess cult which still survived secretly in many parts of the British Isles – the witch cult. But his triumph was short-lived because after gaining the victory he had removed the King,1 his chief representative. He was therefore temporarily ousted at the Restoration and when he returned in 1688 with a Protestant King as his representative, his thunderous fury had been curbed. He gained a second access of strength in the enthusiastic religious revival, fostered by the merchant class, which accompanied the Industrial Revolution; but lost ground again at the begi
nning of the present century.

  Elizabeth was the last Queen to play the Muse. Victoria, like Queen Anne, preferred the part of War-goddess in inspiring her armies, and proved an effective substitute for the Thunder-god. In the reign of her grandson the 88th Carnatics of the Indian Army were still singing: