The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Handsome is the yellow horse,

  But a hundred times better

  Is my cream-coloured one

  Swift as a sea-mew…

  Her speed when she sets her ears back is indeed wonderful; no tall thoroughbred on earth can long keep her pace – proof of which is the pitiable condition in which hag-ridden horses used to be found at cockcrow in the stables from which they had been stolen for a midnight frolic – in a muck-sweat, panting like bellows, with bleeding sides and foam on their lips, nearly foundered.

  Let the poet address her as Rhiannon, ‘Great Queen’, and avoid the discourtesy of Odin and St. Swithold, greeting her with as much affectionate respect as, say, Kemp Owyne showed the Laidley Worm in the ballad. She will respond with a sweet complaisance and take him the round of her nests.

  One question I should myself like to ask her is a personal one: whether she ever offered herself as a human sacrifice to herself. I think her only answer would be a smiling shake of her head, meaning ‘not really’, for instances of the ritual murder of women are rare in European myth and most of them apparently refer to the desecration of the Goddess’s shrines by the Achaean invaders. That there were bloody massacres and rapes of priestesses is shown in the Tirynthian Hercules’s battles with the Amazons, with Hera herself (he wounded her in the breast), and with the nine-headed Hydra, a beast portrayed on Greek vases as a giant squid with heads at the end of each tentacle. As often as he cut off the Hydra’s heads they grew again, until he used fire to sear the stumps: in other words, Achaean attacks on the shrines, each of nine armed orgiastic priestesses, were ineffective until the sacred groves were burned down. Hydrias means a water-priestess with a hydria, or ritual water-pot; and the squid was a fish which appears in works of art dedicated to the Goddess not only in Minoan Crete but in Breton sculptures of the Bronze Age.

  Tales of princesses sacrificed for religious reasons, like Iphigeneia or Jephthah’s daughter, refer to the subsequent patriarchal era; and the fate supposedly intended for Andromeda, Hesionë, and all other princesses rescued by heroes in the nick of time, is probably due to iconotropic error. The princess is not the intended victim of the sea-serpent or wild beast; she is chained naked to the sea-cliff by Bel, Marduk, Perseus or Hercules after he has overcome the monster which is her emanation. Yet the taboo on the death of a priestess may have been lifted, in theory, on certain rare occasions; for example, at the close of every saeculum, of 100 or 110 years, which was when the Carmenta priestess ended her life, according to Dionysius Periergetes, and the calendar was revised.

  The German folk-stories of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White seem to refer to this type of death. In the first story twelve wise women are invited to the princess’s birthday; eleven shower her with blessings, a thirteenth, called Held, who had not been invited because there were only twelve gold plates at the palace, curses her with death from a spindle-prick in her fifteenth year. The twelfth, however, converts this death into a century-long trance; from which the hero rescues her with a kiss after bursting through a terrible hedge of thorn, in which others have perished, the thorns turning into roses as he goes. Held is the Nordic counterpart of Hera; from whose name the word hero is derived, just as held means ‘hero’ in German. The thirteenth month is the death-month, ruled over by the Three Fates, or Spinners, so it must have been a yew spindle. Fifteen, as has been shown, is a number of completeness: three times five.

  In the Snow White story a jealous stepmother, the Goddess’s elder aspect, tries to murder a young princess. First she is taken off into the woods to be killed, but the huntsman brings back the lung and liver of a young wild boar instead; and so, according to one account, a doe was substituted for Iphigeneia at Aulis. Then the stepmother, who darkens her face to show that she is the Death-goddess, uses a constrictive girdle, a poisoned comb and, finally, a poisoned apple; and Snow White is laid as if dead in a glass coffin on top of a wooded hill; but presently is rescued by the prince. The seven dwarfs, her attendants, workers in precious metals who save her from the first attempts on her life and recall the Telchins, stand perhaps for the seven sacred trees of the grove, or the seven heavenly bodies. The glass coffin is the familiar glass-castle where heroes go to be entertained by the Goddess of Life-in-Death, and the comb, glass, girdle and apple which figure in the story are her well-known properties; the owl, raven and dove, who mourn for her, are her sacred birds. These deaths are therefore mock-deaths only – for the Goddess is plainly immortal – and are staged, perhaps during the period of intercalated days or hours at the end of the sacred saeculum, with the sacrifice of a young pig or doe; but then the annual drama is resumed, with the amorous prince chafing, as usual, at the ascetic restrictions of the Hawthorn, but free to do as he pleases in the Oak-month, the month of the hedge-rose, when his bride consents to open her half-closed eyes and smile.

  1 King Ptolemy Euergetes (‘the well-doer’) had sentenced the Phoenix to death in 264 BC; but the priests disregarded this order to reform the calendar, so Augustus has the notoriety of being its murderer.

  1 This song belongs to the account of the horse-race at the close of the Story of Taliesin when Taliesin helps Elphin’s jockey to beat the twenty-four race horses of King Maelgwn on the plain of Rhiannon, by charring twenty-four holly-twigs with which to strike the haunch of each horse as he overtook it, until he had passed them all. The horses represent the last twenty-four hours of the Old Year, ruled over by the Holly King, which (with the help of destructive magic) the Divine Child puts behind him one by one. It will be recalled that the main action of the Story of Taliesin takes place at the winter solstice.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  THE SINGLE POETIC THEME

  Poetry – meaning the aggregate of instances from which the idea of poetry is deduced by every new poet – has been increasingly enlarged for many centuries. The instances are as numerous, varied and contradictory as instances of love; but just as ‘love’ is a word of powerful enough magic to make the true lover forget all its baser and falser usages, so is ‘poetry’ for the true poet.

  Originally, the poet was the leader of a totem-society of religious dancers. His verses – versus is a Latin word corresponding to the Greek strophe and means ‘a turning’ – were danced around an altar or in a sacred enclosure and each verse started a new turn or movement in the dance. The word ‘ballad’ has the same origin: it is a dance poem, from the Latin ballare, to dance. All the totem-societies in ancient Europe were under the dominion of the Great Goddess, the Lady of the Wild Things; dances were seasonal and fitted into an annual pattern from which gradually emerges the single grand theme of poetry: the life, death and resurrection of the Spirit of the Year, the Goddess’s son and lover.

  At this point it will be asked: ‘Then is Christianity a suitable religion for the poet? And if not, is there any alternative?’

  Europe has been officially Christian for the past sixteen hundred years, and though the three main branches of the Catholic Church are disunited all claim to derive their divine mandate from Jesus as God. This seems, on the face of it, most unfair to Jesus who made clear disavowals of deity: ‘Why callest thou me good? None is good except the Father’, and ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ They have also renounced obedience to the Mosaic Law, as refined by Hillel and his fellow-Pharisees, which Jesus considered essential for salvation and, while retaining the Pharisaic ethical code, have incorporated into Christianity all the old pagan festivals commemorative of the Theme and worship Jesus as the ‘Incarnate Word of God’ in the pre-Christian Gnostic sense, and as the Sun of Righteousness – the crucified Man-god of prehistoric paganism.

  Yet though Jesus denied the Theme by his unswerving loyalty to the only contemporary God who had cast off all association with goddesses, and by declaring war on the Female and all her works, the Christian cult can in great part be historically justified. Jesus came of royal stock, was secretly crowned King of Israel with the antique formula, preserved in the Second Psalm, that made
him a titular Son of the Sun-god, and concluded that he was the destined Messiah. At the Last Supper, in the attempt to fulfil a paradoxical prophecy of Zechariah, he offered himself as a eucharistic sacrifice for his people, and ordered Judas to hasten the preparations for his death. In the event he was crucified like a harvest Tammuz, not transfixed with a sword as the Messiah was fated to be; and since Jehovah’s curse on a crucified man debarred him from participation in the Hebrew after-world, there is no reason why he should not now be worshipped as a Gentile god; and indeed many poets and saints, unaware of his uncompromising Judaism, have worshipped him as if he were another Tammuz, Dionysus, Zagreus, Orpheus, Hercules or Osiris.

  ACHAIFA, OSSA, OURANIA, HESUCHIA and IACHEMA – the five seasonal stations through which the Spirit of the Year passed in the cult of Canopic Hercules – could be expressed in the formula:

  He shall be found.

  He shall do wonders.

  He shall reign.

  He shall rest.

  He shall depart.

  This saying, quoted by Clement of Alexandria from the Gospel According to the Hebrews, seems to be an adaptation of this formula to the needs of the Christian mystic:

  Let him who seeks continue until he find.

  When he has found, he shall wonder.

  When he has wondered, he shall reign.

  When he has reigned, he shall rest.

  Since the mystic, by being made one with the solar Jesus at the Sacrament, shared his triumph over death, the fifth station was excused him; Jesus was equated with HESUCHIA (repose), the fourth station when trees cast their leaves and rest until the first stirrings of Spring. It is likely that a formula conveyed by the mystagogues to pre-Christian initiates of Hercules went something like this:

  Seek the Lord, the beloved of the Great Goddess.

  When he is borne ashore, you shall find him.

  When he performs great feats, you shall wonder.

  When he reigns, you shall share his glory.

  When he rests, you shall have repose.

  When he departs, you shall go with him

  To the Western Isle, paradise of the blest.

  In this lost Gospel According to the Hebrews occurs a passage which has been preserved by Origen:

  Even now my mother the Holy Spirit took me by the hair and carried me up to the great mountain Tabor.

  Tabor, as has been shown, was an ancient centre of Golden Calf worship, the Golden Calf being Atabyrius, the Spirit of the Year, son of the Goddess Io, Hathor, Isis, Althaea, Deborah, or whatever one cares to call her. Thus the connexion between Graeco-Syrian Christianity and the single poetic theme was very close in the early second century; though later the Gospel of the Hebrews was suppressed as heretical, apparently because it left the door open for a return to orgiastic religion.

  Christianity is now the sole European faith of any consequence. Judaism is for the Jews alone, and Ludendorff s abortive revival of the primitive Teutonic religion was a matter merely of German domestic politics. Graeco-Roman paganism was dead before the end of the first millennium AD and the paganism of North-Western Europe, which was still vigorous in the early seventeenth century and had even taken root in New England, yielded to the Puritan revolution. The eventual triumph of Christianity had been assured as soon as the Emperor Constantine had made it the State religion of the Roman world. He did this grudgingly under pressure from his army, recruited among the servile masses that had responded to the Church’s welcome for sinners and outcasts, and from his Civil Service which admired the energy and discipline of Church organization. The ascetic doctrine which was the main element of primitive Christianity lost power only gradually, and it was not until the eleventh century that the old Virgin Goddess Rhea – mother of Zeus and now identified with the mother of Jesus – began to be honoured with all her old titles and attributes and restored to the queenship of Heaven; the restoration was not complete until the twentieth century, though it had been anticipated by the fifth-century Emperor Zeno who re-dedicated the Temple of Rhea at Byzantium to the Virgin Mary.

  The Puritan Revolution was a reaction against Virgin-worship, which in many districts of Great Britain had taken on a mad-merry orgiastic character. Though committed to the mystical doctrine of the Virgin Birth, the Puritans regarded Mary as a wholly human character, whose religious importance ended at the birth-stool, and anathematized any Church ritual or doctrine that was borrowed from paganism rather than from Judaism. The iconoclastic wantonness, the sin-laden gloom and Sabbatarian misery that Puritanism brought with it shocked the Catholics beyond expression. It was a warning to them to strengthen rather than weaken the festal side of their cult, to cling to the Blessed Virgin as the chief source of their religious happiness, and to emphasize as little as possible the orthodox Judaism of Jesus. Though the ‘divided household’ of Faith and Truth, that is to say the attempt to believe what one knows to be historically untrue, has been condemned by recent Popes, educated Catholics do in practice avert their eyes from the historical Jesus and Mary and fix them devoutly on the Christ and the Blessed Virgin: they are content to suppose that Jesus was speaking of himself, rather than prophesying in Jehovah’s name, when he said: ‘I am the Good Shepherd’, or ‘I am the Truth’, and prophesied eternal life to whoever believed in him. Nevertheless, they have long put their house in order; though many of the mediaeval clergy not only connived at popular paganism but actively embraced it, the Queen of Heaven and her Son are now decisively quit of the orgiastic rites once performed in their honour. And though the Son is still officially believed to have harrowed Hell like Hercules, Orpheus and Theseus, and though the mystic marriage of the Lamb to a White Princess identified with the Church remains orthodox doctrine in every Christian profession, the Samson and Delilah incident is not admitted into the myth, and the Goat-footed Devil, his mortal enemy, is no longer represented as his twin. The old religion was dualistic: in an ivory relief of the fourteenth century BC found at Ras Shamra the Goddess is shown in Minoan dress, with a sheaf of three heads of barley in either hand, dividing her favours between a man-faced ram on her left, god of the waxing year, and a goat on her right, god of the waning year. The goat is bleating in protest that the Goddess’s head is turned away and insists that it is now his turn to be cosseted. In Christianity the sheep are permanently favoured at the expense of the goats, and the Theme is mutilated: ecclesiastic discipline becomes anti-poetic. The cruel, capricious, incontinent White Goddess and the mild, steadfast, chaste Virgin are not to be reconciled except in the Nativity context.

  The rift now separating Christianity and poetry is, indeed, the same that divided Judaism and Ashtaroth-worship after the post-Exilic religious reformation. Various attempts at bridging it by the Clementines, Collyridians, Manichees and other early Christian heretics and by the Virgin-worshipping palmers and troubadours of Crusading times have left their mark on Church ritual and doctrine, but have always been succeeded by a strong puritanical reaction. It has become impossible to combine the once identical functions of priest and poet without doing violence to one calling or the other, as may be seen in the works of Englishmen who have continued to write poetry after their ordination: John Skelton, John Donne, William Crashaw, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Jonathan Swift, George Crabbe, Charles Kingsley, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poet survived in easy vigour only where the priest was shown the door; as when Skelton, to signalize his independence of Church discipline, wore the Muse-name ‘Calliope’ embroidered on his cassock in silk and gold, or when Herrick proved his devotion to poetic myth by pouring libations of Devonshire barley-ale from a silver cup to a pampered white pig. With Donne, Crashaw and Hopkins the war between poet and priest was fought on a high mystical level; but can Donne’s Divine Poems, written after the death of Ann More, his only Muse, be preferred to his amorous Songs and Sonnets? or can the self-tortured Hopkins be commended for humbly submitting his poetic ecstasies to the confession-box?

  I remarked in the first chapter that poets can be
well judged by the accuracy of their portrayal of the White Goddess. Shakespeare knew and feared her. One must not be misled by the playful silliness of the love-passages in his early Venus and Adonis, or the extraordinary mythographic jumble in his Midsummer-Night’s Dream, where Theseus appears as a witty Elizabethan gallant; the Three Fates – from whose name the word ‘fay’ derives – as the whimsical fairies, Peaseblossom, Cobweb and Mustard-seed; Hercules as a mischievous Robin Goodfellow; the Lion with the Steady Hand as Snug the Joiner; and, most monstrous of all, the Wild Ass Set-Dionysus and the star-diademed Queen of Heaven as ass-eared Bottom and tinselled Titania. He shows her with greater sincerity in Macbeth as the Triple Hecate presiding over the witches’ cauldron, for it is her spirit that takes possession of Lady Macbeth and inspires her to murder King Duncan; and as the magnificent and wanton Cleopatra by love of whom Antony is destroyed. Her last appearance in the plays is as the ‘damned witch Sycorax’ in the Tempest.1 Shakespeare in the person of Prospero claims to have dominated her by his magic books, broken her power and enslaved her monstrous son Caliban – though not before extracting his secrets from him under colour of kindness. Yet he cannot disguise Caliban’s title to the island nor the original blueness of Sycorax’s eyes, though ‘blue-eyed’ in Elizabethan slang also meant ‘blue-rimmed with debauch’. Sycorax, whose connexion with Cerridwen has been pointed out early in Chapter Eight, came to the island with Caliban in a boat, as Danaë came to Seriphos from Argos with the infant Perseus; or as Latona came to Delos with the unborn Apollo. She was a goddess with the power to control the visible Moon – ‘make ebbs and flows and deal in her command’. Shakespeare says that she was banished from Argiers (was this really Argos?) for her witchcrafts. But he is poetically just to Caliban, putting the truest poetry of the play into his mouth: