The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  1 The Tempest seems to be based on a vivid dream of extremely personal content, expressed in a jumble of ill-assorted literary reminiscences: not only of the Romance of Taliesin but of the twenty-ninth chapter of Isaiah; a Spanish romance by Ortunez de Calahorra called ‘A Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood’; three accounts of recent voyages to the New World; various contemporary Huguenot and anti-Spanish pamphlets; a magical book called Steganographia written in Latin by a monk of Spanheim; and a German play, Ayrer’s Von der schonen Sidee. Caliban is partly Afagddu in the Romance of Taliesin; partly Ravaillac, the Jesuit-prompted murderer of Henry IV; partly an Adriatic devil in Calahorra’s romance; partly a sea-monster, ‘in shape like a man’, seen off Bermuda during Admiral Sommers’ stay there; partly Shakespeare’s own malus angelus.

  1 Probably April 28th 1819.

  1 The late mediaeval legend of Ogier the Dane proves that Avalon was understood as an island of the dead by the Arthurian romance-writers. For Ogier is there said to have spent two hundred years in the ‘Castle of Avalon’, after early exploits in the East; then to have returned to France, in the days of King Philip I, with a firebrand in his hand on which his life depended -like that of Meleager the Argonaut. But King Philip reigned two hundred years after Charlemagne, Ogier’s liege-lord in the Carolingian cycle; in other words, the second Ogier was the reincarnation of the first. It was nothing new for Ogier le Danois to live in Avalon. The name is merely a debased form of ‘Ogyr Vran’ which, as has been suggested in Chapter Five, means ‘Bran the Malign’ or ‘Bran, God of the Dead’. His Norse counterpart Ogir (‘the Terrible’) was God of the Sea and of Death, and played the harp on an island where he lived with his nine daughters.

  1 This Erichthonius, alias Erechtheus, figures in the complex and nonsensical myth of Procne, Philomela and the Thracian King Tereus of Daulis, which seems to have been invented by the Phocian Greeks to explain a set of Thraco-Pelasgian religious pictures which they found in a temple at Daulis and could not understand. The story is that Tereus married Procne daughter of King Pandion of Attica, begot a son, Itys, on her, then concealed her in the country in order to be able to marry her sister Philomela. He told her that Procne was dead, and when she learned the truth cut out her tongue so that she should not be able to tell anyone. But she embroidered some letters on a peplum, which enabled Procne to be found in time. Procne returned and in revenge for her ill-treatment killed her son Itys, whom she laid on a dish before Tereus. Tereus had meanwhile attended an oracle which told him that Itys would be murdered, and suspecting that his brother Dryas was the destined murderer, had killed him. The sisters then fled, Tereus caught up an axe, and the gods changed them all into birds: Procne became a swallow, Philomela a nightingale, Tereus a hoopoe. Procne and Philomela were survived by twin brothers, Erechthonius and Butes.

  This iconotropic myth, when returned to pictorial form, makes a series of instructional scenes, each depicting a different method of taking oracles.

  The scene of the cutting out of Philomela’s tongue shows a priestess who has induced a prophetic trance by chewing laurel leaves; her face is contorted with ecstasy, not pain, and the tongue that has been cut out is really a laurel leaf that an attendant is handing her to chew.

  The scene of the letters sewn into the peplum shows a priestess who has cast a handful of oracular sticks on a white cloth, in Celtic fashion as described by Tacitus; they fall in the shape of letters, which she interprets.

  The scene of the eating of Itys by Tereus shows a priest taking omens from the entrails of a sacrificed child.

  The scene of Tereus and the oracle probably shows him sleeping on a sheep-skin in a temple and having a revelation in dream; the Greeks would not have mistaken this scene.

  The scene of the killing of Dryas shows an oak-tree and priests taking omens under it, in Druidic fashion, from the way that a man falls when he dies.

  The scene of Procne transformed into a swallow shows a priestess in swallow-disguise taking auguries from the flight of a swallow.

  The scenes of Philomela transformed into a nightingale, and of Tereus transformed into a hoopoe have a similar sense.

  Two further scenes show an oracular hero, depicted with snake’s tail for legs, being consulted with blood-sacrifices; and a young man consulting a bee-oracle. These are respectively Erechthonius, and Butes (the most famous bee-keeper of antiquity), the brothers of Procne and Philomela. Their mother was Zeuxippe (‘she who yokes horses’), evidently a mare-headed Demeter.

  1 Traces of a Palestinian North Wind cult are found in Isaiah, XIV, 13, Ezekiel, I, 4, Psalms, XLVIII, 2 and Job, XXXVII, 29. God’s mountain is placed in the far north and windy manifestations of his glory proceed from there. In the earliest assignment of parts of the heaven to deities, Bel had the north pole and Ea the south. Bel was Zeus-Jupiter, Thursday’s god, often identified with Jehovah; but had taken over the rule of the North from his mother Belili, the White Goddess.

  1 This perhaps means Helle-bora, ‘the food of the Goddess Helle’. Helle was the Pelasgian goddess who gave her name to the Hellespont.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  WAR IN HEAVEN

  Must poetry necessarily be original? According to the Apollonian, or Classical, theory it need not be, since the test of a good poet is his ability to express time-proved sentiments in time-honoured forms with greater fluency, charm, sonorousness and learning than his rivals; these, at least, are the qualities that win a man a bardic Chair. Apollonian poetry is essentially court-poetry, written to uphold the authority delegated to poets by the King (regarded as a Roi Soleil, Apollo’s vice-regent) on the understanding that they celebrate and perpetuate his magnificence and terror. They therefore use old-fashioned diction, formal ornament, and regular, sober, well-polished metre, as a means of upholding the dignity of their office; and make frequent eulogistic references to ancestral events and institutions. There is an extraordinary sameness in their eulogies: the Aztecs flattered their patriarchal Inca as ‘a well-fed hawk, always ready for war’ which was a phrase worked to death by the early mediaeval Welsh bards.

  A Classical technique such as was perfected by these bards, or by the French poets of the Louis XIV period, or by the English poets of the early eighteenth-century Augustan Age is a sure sign of political stability based on force of arms; and to be original in such an age is to be either a disloyal subject or a vagrant.

  The Augustan Age was so called because the poets were celebrating the same renewal of firm central government after the troubles leading to the execution of one king and the banishment of another, as the Latin poets (under orders from Maecenas, Minister of Propaganda and the Arts) had celebrated after Augustus’s triumph at the close of the Roman Civil Wars. The new poetic technique was based partly on contemporary French practice – the ‘Golden Age’ of French literature had just begun – partly on that of the ‘Golden Age’ of Latin. The fashionable ten-or-twelve-syllabled iambic couplet, well-balanced and heavily packed with antithetical wit, was French. The use of ‘poetical periphrasis’ as a formal ornament was Latin: the poet was expected to refer, for instance, to the sea as the ‘briny deep’ or ‘the fishy kingdom’ and to fire as the ‘devouring element’. The original reason for this convention was forgotten; it had grown out of the old religious taboo against direct mention of dangerous, powerful or unlucky things. (This taboo survived until recently in the Cornish tin-mines, where fear of the pixies made the miner refrain from speaking of ‘owls, foxes, hares, cats or rats save in Tinner’s language,’ and in Scotland and North-Eastern England among fishermen who had a similar fear of annoying the pixies by un-periphrastic mention of pigs, cats or priests.) Because the Latin poets also had a poetic diction, with vocabulary and syntax forbidden to prose-writers, which they found useful in helping them to accommodate Latin to the Greek convention of hexameter and elegiac couplet, the English Augustans gradually developed a similar diction which they found useful in resolving awkward metrical problems.

  The fa
nciful use of periphrasis was extended in the period of mid-Victorian Classicism. Lewis Carroll aptly parodied the poets of his time in Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur (1860–63).

  ‘Next, when you are describing

  A shape, or sound, or tint

  Don’t state the matter plainly

  But put it in a hint;

  And learn to look at all things

  With a sort of mental squint.’

  ‘For instance, if I wished, Sir,

  Of mutton-pies to tell

  Should I say “dreams of fleecy flocks

  Pent in a wheaten cell”?’

  ‘Why, yes, ’the old man said: ‘that phrase

  Would answer very well.’

  And the Romantic Revival had brought a highly archaic diction into fashion. It was considered improper to write:

  But where the west winds blow,

  You care not, sweet, to know.

  The correct language was:

  Yet whitherward the Zephyrs fare

  To ken thou listest not, O maid most rare.

  and if ‘wind’ was used it had to rhyme with ‘mind’ not with ‘sinned’. But Victorian Classicism was tainted with the ideal of progress. The dull, secure Augustan ‘rocking-horse’ alexandrine and heroic couplet had been abandoned since Keats’s attack on them and a poet was encouraged to experiment in a variety of metres and to take his themes from anywhere he pleased. The change marked the instability of the social system: Chartism threatened, the monarchy was unpopular, and the preserves of the old landed nobility were being daily encroached upon by the captains of industry and the East India Company Nabobs. Originality came to be prized as a virtue: to be original in the mid-Victorian sense implied the ‘mental squint’ which enlarged the field of poetry by weaving poetic spells over such useful but vulgar things as steam-boats, mutton-pies, trade exhibitions and gas lamps. It also implied borrowing themes from Persian, Arabic or Indian literature, and acclimatizing the sapphic, alcaic, rondel and triolet as English metrical forms.

  The true poet must always be original, but in a simpler sense: he must address only the Muse – not the King or Chief Bard or the people in general – and tell her the truth about himself and her in his own passionate and peculiar words. The Muse is a deity, but she is also a woman, and if her celebrant makes love to her with the second-hand phrases and ingenious verbal tricks that he uses to flatter her son Apollo she rejects him more decisively even than she rejects the tongue-tied or cowardly bungler. Not that the Muse is ever completely satisfied. Laura Riding has spoken on her behalf in three memorable lines:

  Forgive me, giver, if I destroy the gift:

  It is so nearly what would please me

  I cannot but perfect it.

  A poet cannot continue to be a poet if he feels that he has made a permanent conquest of the Muse, that she is always his for the asking.

  The Irish and Welsh distinguished carefully between poets and satirists: the poet’s task was creative or curative, that of the satirist was destructive or noxious. An Irish poet could compose an aer, or satire, which would blight crops, dry up milk, raise blotches on his victim’s face and ruin his character for ever. According to The Hearings of the Scholars, one synonym for satire was ‘Brimón smetrach’‚ that is, word-feat-ear-tweaking:

  A brotherly trick used to be played by poets when they recited satire, namely to tweak the ear-lobe of their victim who, since there is no bone there, could claim no compensation for loss of honour

  – as he would have been able to do if the poet had tweaked his nose. Nor might he forcibly resist, since the poet was sacrosanct; however, if he was satirized undeservedly, the blotches would rise on the poet’s own face and kill him at once, as happened to the poets who lampooned the blameless Luan and Cacir. Edmund Spenser in his View of the Present State of Ireland writes of the Irish poets of his own day:

  None dare displease them for feare to runne into reproach thorough their offence, and to be made infamous in the mouthes of men.

  And Shakespeare mentions their power of ‘rhyming rats to death’, having somewhere heard of the seventh-century Seanchan Torpest, the master-ollave of Ireland who, one day finding that rats had eaten his dinner, uttered the vindictive aer:

  Rats have sharp snouts

  Yet are poor fighters…

  which killed ten of them on the spot.

  In Greece the metres allotted to the satirist were the poetic metres in reverse. Satire can be called left-handed poetry. The Moon travels from left to right, the same way as the Sun, but as she grows older and weaker rises every night a little farther to the left; then, since the rate of plant growth under a waxing moon is greater than under a waning moon, the right hand has always been associated with growth and strength but the left with weakness and decay. Thus the word ‘left’ itself means, in Old Germanic, ‘weak, old, palsied’. Lucky dances by devotees of the Moon were therefore made right-handed or clockwise, to induce prosperity; unlucky ones to cause damage or death were made left-handed, or ‘widdershins’. Similarly, the right-handed fire-wheel, or swastika, was lucky; the left-handed (adopted by the Nazis) unlucky. There are two sides to the worship of the Indian Goddess Kali: her right side as benefactress and universal mother, her left side as fury and ogress. The word ‘sinister’ has come to mean more than left-handed because in Classical augury birds seen on the left hand portended ill-luck.

  The word ‘curse’ derives from the Latin cursus, ‘a running’ – especially circular running as in a chariot race – and is short for cursus contra solem. Thus Margaret Balfour, accused as a witch in sixteenth-century Scotland, was charged with dancing widdershins nine times around men’s houses, stark naked; and my friend A. K. Smith (late of the I.C.S.) once accidentally saw a naked Indian witch do the very same thing in Southern India as a ceremony of cursing. The Muse-priestesses of Helicon and Pieria, in a sinister mood, must have danced nine times about the object of their curse, or an emblem of it.

  Most English poets have occasionally indulged in left-handed satire, Skelton, Donne, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Blake among them; those who have built up their reputation principally on satire, or parody – such as Samuel Butler, Pope, Swift, Calverley – are only grudgingly allowed the title of poet. But there is nothing in the language to match the Irish poets in vindictiveness, except what has been written by the Anglo-Irish. The technique of parody is the same as that employed by Russian witches: they walk quietly behind their victim, exactly mimicking his gait; then when in perfect sympathy with him suddenly stumble and fall, taking care to fall soft while he falls hard. Skilful parody of a poem upsets its dignity, sometimes permanently as in the case of the school-anthology poems parodied by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland.

  The purpose of satire is to destroy whatever is overblown, faded and dull, and clear the soil for a new sowing. So the Cypriots understood the mystery of the God of the Year by describing him as amphidexios, which includes the sense of ‘ambidextrous’, ‘ambiguous’, and ‘ambivalent’, and putting a weapon in each of his hands. He is himself and his other self at the same time, king and supplanter, victim and murderer, poet and satirist – and his right hand does not know what his left hand does. In Mesopotamia, as Nergal, he was both the Sower who brought wealth to the fields and the Reaper, the God of the Dead; but elsewhere, in order to simplify the myth, he was represented as twins. This simplification has led, through dualistic theology, to the theory that death, evil, decay and destruction are erroneous concepts which God, the Good, the Right Hand, will one day disprove. Ascetic theologians try to paralyze or lop off the left hand in honour of the right; but poets are aware that each twin must conquer in turn, in an agelong and chivalrous war fought for the favours of the White Goddess, as the heroes Gwyn and Greidawl fought for the favours of Creiddylad, or the heroes Mot and Aleyn for those of Anatha of Ugarit. The war between Good and Evil has been waged in indecent and painful way during the past two millennia because the theologians, not being poets, have forbidden the Goddess t
o umpire it, and made God impose on the Devil impossible terms of unconditional surrender.

  That woman must not be excluded from the company of poets was one of the wise rules at the Devil Tavern in Fleet Street, just before the Puritan Revolution, when Ben Jonson laid down the laws of poetry for his young contemporaries. He knew the risk run by Apollonians who try to be wholly independent of women: they fall into sentimental homosexuality. Once poetic fashions begin to be set by the homosexual, and ‘Platonic love’ – homosexual idealism – is introduced, the Goddess takes vengeance. Socrates, remember, would have banished poets from his dreary Republic. The alternative evasion of woman-love is monastic asceticism, the results of which are tragic rather than comic. However, woman is not a poet: she is either a Muse or she is nothing.1 This is not to say that a woman should refrain from writing poems; only, that she should write as a woman, not as if she were an honorary man. The poet was originally the mystes, or ecstatic devotee of the Muse; the women who took part in her rites were her representatives, like the nine dancers in the Cogul cave-painting, or the nine women who warmed the cauldron of Cerridwen with their breaths in Gwion’s Preiddeu Annwm. Poetry in its archaic setting, in fact, was either the moral and religious law laid down for man by the nine-fold Muse, or the ecstatic utterance of man in furtherance of this law and in glorification of the Muse. It is the imitation of male poetry that causes the false ring in the work of almost all women poets. A woman who concerns herself with poetry should, I believe, either be a silent Muse and inspire the poets by her womanly presence, as Queen Elizabeth and the Countess of Derby did, or she should be the Muse in a complete sense: she should be in turn Arianrhod, Blodeuwedd and the Old Sow of Maenawr Penardd who eats her farrow, and should write in each of these capacities with antique authority. She should be the visible moon: impartial, loving, severe, wise.