The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Cooch parwani

  Good time coming!

  Queen Victoria

  Very good man!

  Rise up early

  In the morning.

  Britons never, never

  Shall be slave….

  But Victoria expected the women of England to reverence their husbands as she had reverenced hers and displayed none of the sexual coquetry or interest in love-poetry and scholarship that serve to make a queen into a Muse for poets. Queen Anne and Queen Victoria both gave their names to well-known periods of English poetry, but the name of Queen Anne connotes passionless decorum in writing, and that of Victoria didacticism and rococo ornament.

  The British love of Queens does not seem to be based merely on the historical commonplace that ‘Britain is never so prosperous as when a Queen is on the Throne’: it reflects, rather, a stubborn conviction that this is a Mother Country not a Father Land – a peculiarity that the Classical Greeks also noted about Crete – and that the King’s prime function is to be the Queen’s consort. Such national apprehensions or convictions or obsessions are the ultimate source of all religion, myth and poetry, and cannot be eradicated either by conquest or education.

  1 This magical tradition survived in the Northern witch-cult. In 1673 Anne Armstrong the Northumbrian witch confessed at her trial to having been temporarily transformed into a mare by her mistress Ann Forster of Stockfield, who threw a bridle over her head and rode her to a meeting of five witch-covens at Riding Mill Bridge End.

  1 Insufficient notice has yet been taken of the shape of flint arrow-heads as having a magical rather than a utilitarian origin. The tanged arrow-head of fir-tree shape, for example, needs explanation. It must have been very difficult to knap without breaking off either one of the tangs or the projecting stem between them, and has no obvious advantage in hunting over the simple willow-leaf or elder-leaf types. For though a narrow bronze arrow-head with four tangs cannot be easily drawn out through a wound, because the flesh closes up behind, the broad two-tanged flint one would not be more difficult to draw out than an elder-leaf or willow-leaf one shot into a beast with equal force. The fir-tree shape seems therefore to be magically intended: an appeal to Artemis Elate – Diana the Huntress, Goddess of the Firtree – to direct the aim. The point was probably smeared with a paralysant poison – a ‘merciful shaft’ of the sort with which the Goddess was credited. An Irish fir-tree arrow-head in my possession, taken from an Iron Age burial, cannot have been seriously intended for archery. The chip of white flint from which it has been knapped is awkwardly curved, and it has so large a ‘bulb of percussion’ and so short a stem as to prevent it from being spliced to admit an arrow-shaft: it is clearly for funerary use only.

  1 The ancients were well aware of Apollo’s frequent changes of divine function. Cicero in his essay On the Nature of the Gods distinguishes four Apollos in descending order of antiquity: the son of Hephaestos; the son of the Cretan Corybantes; the Arcadian Apollo who gave Arcadia its laws; and lastly the son of Latona and Zeus. He might have enlarged his list to twenty or thirty.

  1 The fourteenth-century Swedish St. Brigid, or Birgit, who founded the Order of St. Brigid was not, of course, the original saint, though some houses of the Order reverted merrily to paganism.

  1 The earliest spelling of the Virgin’s name in English is Marian – not Mariam which is the Greek form used in the Gospels.

  2 She was the mother of Adonis; hence the Alexandrian grammarian Lycophron calls Byblos ‘The City of Myrrha’.

  1 Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, No. 141, 1944

  1 This same word ‘morris’, as the prefix to ‘pike’, is first written ‘maris’: so it is likely that the morris-men were Mary’s men, not moriscoes or Moorish men, as is usually supposed. The innocent word ‘merry’, though often spelt ‘mary’, has deceived the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary. They trace it back to an Indo-Germanic root murgjo meaning ‘brief’, arguing that when one is merry, time flies; but without much confidence, for they are obliged to admit that murgjo does not take this course in any other language.

  1 Cunning and art he did not lack

  But aye her whistle would fetch him back.

  O, I shall go into a hare

  With sorrow and sighing and mickle care,

  And l shall go in the Devil’s name

  Aye, till I be fetchèd hame

  – Hare, take heed of a bitch greyhound

  Will harry thee all these fells around,

  For here come l in Our Lady’s name

  All but for to fetch thee hame.

  Cunning and art, etc.

  Yet I shall go into a trout

  With sorrow and sighing and mickle doubt,

  And show thee many a merry game

  Ere that I be fetchèd hame.

  – Trout, take heed of an otter lank

  Will harry thee close from bank to bank,

  For here come I in Our Lady’s name

  All but for to fetch thee hame.

  Cunning and art, etc.

  Yet I shall go into a bee

  With mickle horror and dread of thee,

  And flit to hive in the Devil’s name

  Ere that I be fetchèd hame.

  – Bee, take heed of a swallow hen

  Will harry thee close, both butt and ben,

  For here come I in Our Lady’s name

  All but for to fetch thee hame.

  Cunning and art, etc

  Yet I shall go into a mouse

  And haste me unto the miller’s house,

  There in his corn to have good game

  Ere that I be fetchèd hame.

  – Mouse, take heed of a white tib-cat

  That never was baulked of mouse or rat,

  For I’ll crack thy bones in Our Lady’s name:

  Thus shalt thou be fetchèd hame.

  Cunning and art, etc.

  1 In the corresponding ancient British mysteries there seems to have been a formula in which the Goddess teasingly promised the initiate who performed a sacred marriage with her that he would not die ‘either on foot or on horseback, on water or on land, on the ground or in the air, outside a house or inside, shod or unshod, clothed or unclothed,’ and then, as a demonstration of her power, manoeuvred him into a position where the promise was no longer valid – as in the legend of Llew Llaw and Blodeuwedd, where a goat figures in the murder scene. Part of the formula survives in the Masonic initiation ritual. The apprentice ‘neither naked nor clothed, barefoot nor shod, deprived of all metals, hood winked, with a cable-tow about his neck is led to the door of the lodge in a halting moving posture.’

  1 It is a strange paradox that Milton, though he had been the first Parliamentary author to defend the execution of Charles I and was the Thunder-god’s own Laureate, fell later under the spell of ‘the Northern Muse’, Christina of Sweden, and in his Second Defense of the English People his flattery of her is not only as extravagant as anything that the Elizabethans wrote about Elizabeth, but seems wholly sincere.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  FABULOUS BEASTS

  Indian mystics hold that to think with perfect clarity in a religious sense one must first eliminate all physical desire, even the desire to continue living; but this is not at all the case with poetic thinking, since poetry is rooted in love, and love in desire, and desire in hope of continued existence. However, to think with perfect clarity in a poetic sense one must first rid oneself of a great deal of intellectual encumbrance, including all dogmatic doctrinal prepossessions: membership of any political party or religious sect or literary school deforms the poetic sense – as it were, introduces something irrelevant and destructive into the magic circle, drawn with a rowan, hazel or willow rod, within which the poet insulates himself for the poetic act. He must achieve social and spiritual independence at whatever cost, learn to think mythically as well as rationally, and never be surprised at the weirdly azoölogical beasts which walk into the circle; they come to be questioned, not
to alarm.

  If the visitant is a Chimaera (‘She-goat’) for example, the poet will recognize her by the lion-head, goat-body and serpent-tail as a Carian Calendar-beast – another form of the winged goat, on which, according to Clement of Alexandria, Zeus flew up to Heaven. The Chimaera was a daughter of Typhon, the destructive storm god, and of Echidne, a winter Snake-goddess; the Hittites borrowed her from the Carians and carved her likeness on a temple at Carchemish on the Euphrates. Cerberus, a bitch miscalled a dog, is also likely to appear in the circle: a cognate beast, with the usual triad of heads – lioness, lynx and sow. The lynx is an autumn beast, apparently mentioned by Gwion in his Can Y Meirch, though he may be referring to the Palug Cat, the Anglesey Cat-Demeter: ‘I have been a spotted-headed cat on a forked tree.’

  The unicorn may puzzle the poet. But the unicorn of Pliny’s description – which is embodied in the heraldic unicorn of the British Royal Arms, except that the horn is a straight white spiral – makes good calendar sense: it stands for the five-season solar year of the Boibel-Loth alphabet. The horn is centred in the Dog-days, and is the symbol of power: ‘I will exalt your horn.’ It stands for the E season, then beginning; as the head of the deer stands for the I season, in which deer were hunted; the body of the horse for the A season, at the beginning of which the October Horse was sacrificed at Rome; the feet of the elephant for the O season, in which the earth puts out her greatest strength; the tail (Ura) of the lion for the U season. The beast of the horn was originally, it seems, the rhinoceros, which is the most formidable beast in the world – ‘and who would cross Tom Rhinoceros does what the Panther dares not’ – but owing to the difficulty of obtaining rhinoceros horn the long curved black horns of the oryx were in Pliny’s time fraudulently supplied by traders as ‘unicorn’s horn’. Pliny, who had the usual Roman dislike and mistrust of fabulous beasts and mentioned the unicorn as a genuine zoölogical specimen, must have seen such a horn. In Britain, however, the narwhal horn became the accepted type, because of its white colour and superior hardness and because it is curved in the spiral of immortality, and because the variously named God of the Year always came out of the sea – as Gwion puts it in his Angar Cyvyndawd: ‘From the Deep he came in the flesh.’ The narwhal is called the ‘sea-unicorn’ in consequence. However, a few British mythographers, such as the early seventeenth-century Thomas Boreman, accepted Pliny’s view, recording: ‘His horn is as hard as iron and as rough as any file, twisted and curled like a flaming sword; very straight, sharp and everywhere black, excepting the point.’ An interesting variety of the unicorn is the wild-ass unicorn, which Herodotus accepted as genuinely zoological; the wild ass is the beast of Set, whose fifth part of the year centres at midsummer and whose horn is thus exalted. But it must not be forgotten that the fifth-century BC historian, Ctesias, the first Greek to write about the unicorn, describes its horn, in his Indica, as being coloured white, red and black. These are the colours of the Triple Moon-goddess, as has been shown in the mulberry-and-calf riddle quoted from Suidas near the close of Chapter Four, to whom the God of the Year was subject.

  The unicorn probably had a spatial as well as a temporal meaning, though space has always been divided by four quarters of the horizon, not by five fifths. The square cross, whether plain or converted into a swastika or cross-crosslet, has from time immemorial represented the fullest extent of sovereignty; it was a prime symbol in Minoan Crete, either alone or enclosed in a circle, and was reserved for the Goddess and her royal son, the King. In parts of India where Kali is worshipped, with rites closely resembling those of the Cretan and Pelasgian Great Goddess, as the most potent of a Pentad of deities, namely Siva, Kali, Vishnu, Surya and the elephant-god Ganesa – roughly corresponding with the Egyptian pentad, namely Osiris, Horus, Isis, Set and Nephthys – five has a definite spatial sense. In the coronation ritual of an Indian king, the officiating priest as he invests the king with a sacred mantle called ‘the Womb’ in a ceremony of rebirth, gives him five dice and says: ‘Thou art the master; may these five regions of thine fall to thy lot.’ The five regions are the four quarters of the earth, and the zenith.

  Thus the unicorn’s single exalted horn represents ‘the upper pole’ which reaches from the king directly up to the zenith, to the hottest point attained by the sun. The unicorn’s horn in Egyptian architecture is the obelisk; which has a square base tapering to a pyramidical point: it expresses dominion over the four quarters of the world and the zenith. In squatter form it is the pyramid, and the dominion originally expressed was not that of the Sun-god, who never shines from the north, but that of the Triple Goddess whose white marble triangle encloses her royal son’s tomb from every side.

  Kali, like her counterpart Minerva, has five as her sacred numeral. Thus her mystic, the poet Ram Prasad, addresses her as she dances madly on Siva’s prostrate body:

  My heart is five lotuses. You building these five into one, dance and swell in my mind.

  He is referring to the cults of the five deities, all of which are really cults of Kali. It will be recalled that both Dionysus and the sacred white cow, Io of Argos, who ultimately became the goddess Isis, are recorded to have paid visits to India.

  In the Dionysian Mysteries the hirco-cervus, goat-stag, was the symbol of resurrection, of man’s hope of immortality, and it seems that when the Hyperborean Druids visited Thessaly they recognized the goat stag, associated with apples, as their own immortal white hart or hind, which also was associated with apples. For the apple tree, ut dicitur, is the shelter of the white hind. It is from the goat-stag that the unicorn of heraldry and of mediaeval art derives its occasional beard; but among Christian mystics the Greek goat-unicorn of Daniel’s vision has contributed bellicosity to this once pacific beast.

  In Britain and France, the white hart or hind was not ousted by the unicorn; it persisted in popular tradition and figured in the mediaeval romances as an emblem of mystery. King Richard II adopted ‘a white hart lodged’ as his personal badge; which is how the beast found its way to the sign-boards of British inns. It sometimes wore a cross between its antlers as it had appeared to St. Hubert, patron of huntsmen, who had been chasing it through the dense forest for weeks without rest and to St. Julian the Hospitaler. Thus the Unicorn of the desert and the White Hart of the forest have the same mystical sense; but during the Hermetic vogue of the early seventeenth century were distinguished as meaning respectively the spirit and the soul. The Hermetics were neo-Platonists who patched their philosophic cloaks with shreds of half-forgotten bardic lore. In the Book of Lambspring‚ a rare Hermetic tract, an engraving shows a deer and a unicorn standing together in a forest. The text is:

  The Sages say truly that two animals are in this forest: one glorious, beautiful and swift, a great and strong deer; the other an unicorn….If we apply the parable of our art, we shall call the forest the body….The Unicorn will be the spirit at all times. The deer desires no other name but that of the soul….He that knows how to tame and master them by art, to couple them together, and to lead them in and out of the forest, may justly be called a Master.

  An anonymous beast may appear to the poet with deer’s head crowned with gold, horse’s body and serpent’s tail. He will be out of a Gaelic poem published by Carmichael in Carmina Gadelica, a dialogue between Bride and her unnamed son.

  BRIDE: Black the town yonder,

  Black those that are in it;

  I am the White Swan,

  Queen of them all.

  SON: I will voyage in God’s name

  In likeness of deer,

  In likeness of horse,

  In likeness of serpent, in likeness of king.

  More powerful will it be with me than with all others.

  The son is evidently a god of the waning year, as the sequence of deer, horse and serpent shows.

  Or a phoenix may fly into the circle. The phoenix, though literally believed in by the Romans – I suppose because its visits to On-Heliopolis were said to be so brief and far between that
nobody could disprove its existence – was also a calendar beast. For the Egyptians had no leap-year: every year the fragment of a day which was left over at New Year was saved up, until finally after 1460 years, called a Sothic Year, the fragments amounted to a whole year; and the fixed festivals which had become more and more displaced as the centuries went by (with the same sort of attendant inconveniences as New Zealanders experience from their midsummer Christmas) fetched up again where they had originally stood; and a whole year could be intercalated in the annals. This was the occasion of much rejoicing, and at On-Heliopolis, the chief Sun Temple of Egypt, an eagle with painted wings was, it seems, burned alive with spices in a nest of palm branches to celebrate the event.

  This eagle represented the Sun-god, and the palm was sacred to the Great Goddess his mother; the Sun had completed his great revolution and the old Sun-eagle was therefore returned to the nest for the inauguration of a new Phoenix Age. The legend was that from the ashes of the Phoenix a little worm was born which presently turned into a real Phoenix. This worm was the six hours and the few odd minutes which were left over at the end of the Phoenix Year: in four years they would add up to a whole day, a Phoenix chick. From Herodotus’s muddled account of the Phoenix it seems that there was always a sacred eagle kept at On-Heliopolis, and that when it died it was embalmed in a round egg of myrrh, which would preserve it indefinitely; then another eagle was consecrated. Presumably these eggs of myrrh were included in the final holocaust. That the Phoenix came flying from Arabia need mean no more than that, for the Egyptians, the sun rose from the Sinai desert. It is ironical that the early Christians continued to believe in a literal Phoenix, which they made a type of the resurrected Christ, long after the Phoenix had been killed. The Emperor Augustus unwittingly killed it in 30 BC when he stabilized the Egyptian calendar.1