The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Over them the famish’d Eagle screams on boney wings, and around Them howls the Wolf of famine; deep heaves the Ocean black, thundering…

  He comments: ‘Blake’s feelings and habits were those of the artisan, the handicraft worker. His point of view was that of the class whose peace and welfare were disastrously undermined by the introduction of machinery, and who were enslaved by the capitalization of industry. Recall how the imagery of wheels, forges, furnaces, smoke, “Satanic mills”, is associated in the Prophetic Books with misery and torment. Remember that the years of Blake’s life were also wears of incessant wars. It is obvious that the imagery of this passage, as of many others, is an upsurging from Blake’s subliminal consciousness of political passions. Albion as a mythical figure may typify Heaven knows what else besides, but that is neither here nor there. Note the imagery of war and mechanism…’

  It is the function of English popular critics to judge all poetry by gleeman standards. So the clear traditional imagery used by Blake is characteristically dismissed as ‘neither here nor there’ and he is charged with not knowing what he is writing about. The White Goddess’s Starry Wheel here multiplied into the twelve wheeling signs of the Zodiac, and the intellectual Furnaces of Los (Apollo), and the Tomb of Albion – alias Llew Llaw Gyffes, who also appears as the famished Eagle with his boney wings – are misread as dark, mechanistic images of capitalistic oppression. And the perfectly clear distinction between archaic Albion and modern England is disregarded. Blake had read contemporary treatises on Druidism.

  The bond that united the poets of the British Isles in pre-Christian days was the oath of secrecy, sworn by all members of the endowed poetic colleges, to hele, conceal and never reveal the college secrets. But once the Dog, Roebuck and Lapwing began to relax their vigilance and in the name of universal enlightenment permitted the secrets of the alphabet, the calendar and the abacus to be freely published, a learned age ended. Presently a sword like Alexander’s severed the Gordian master-knot,1 the colleges were dissolved, ecclesiasts claimed the sole right to declare and interpret religious myth, gleeman literature began to supersede the literature of learning, and poets who thereafter refused to become Court lackeys or Church lackeys or lackeys of the mob were forced out into the wilderness. There, with rare intermissions, they have resided ever since and though sometimes when they die pilgrimages are made to their oracular tombs, there they are likely to remain for as long as who cares?

  In the wilderness the temptation to monomaniac raving, paranoia and eccentric behaviour has been too much for many of the exiles. They have no Chief Poet or visiting ollave now to warn them sternly that the good name of poetry is dishonoured by their mopping and mowing. They rave on like Elizabethan Abraham-men, until raving becomes a professional affectation; until the bulk of modern poetry ceases to make poetic, prosaic or even pathological sense. A strange reversal of function: in ancient times the painters were supplied with their themes by the poets, though at liberty to indulge in as much decorative play as was decent within the limits of a given theme; later, the failure of the poets to keep their position at the head of affairs forced painters to paint whatever their patrons commissioned, or whatever came to hand, and finally to experiment in pure decoration; now affectations of madness in poets are condoned by false analogy with pictorial experiments in unrepresentational form and colour. So Sacheverell Sitwell wrote in Vogue (August, 1945):

  Once again we are leading Europe in the Arts…

  He lists the fashionable painters and sculptors and adds:

  The accompanying works of the poets are not hard to find…Dylan Thomas, whose texture is as abstract as that of any modern painter…There is even no necessity for him to explain his imagery, for it is only intended to be half understood.

  It is not as though most so-called surrealists, impressionists, expressionists and neo-romantics were concealing a grand secret by pretended folly, in the style of Gwion; they are concealing their unhappy lack of a secret. For there are no poetic secrets now, except of course the sort which the common people are debarred by their lack of poetic perception from understanding, and by their anti-poetic education (unless perhaps in wild Wales) from respecting. Such secrets, even the Work of the Chariot, may be safely revealed in any crowded restaurant or café without fear of the avenging lightning-stroke: the noise of the orchestra, the clatter of plates and the buzz of a hundred unrelated conversations will effectively drown the words – and, in any case, nobody will be listening.

  * * *

  If this were an ordinary book it would end here on a dying close, and having no wish to be tedious I tried at first to end it here; but the Devil was in it and would not give me peace until I had given him his due, as he put it. Among the poetic questions I had not answered was Donne’s ‘Who cleft the Devil’s foot?’ And the Devil, who knows his Scriptures well, taunted me with having skated too lightly over some of the elements in Ezekiel’s vision of the Chariot, and with having avoided any discussion of the only Mystery that is still regarded in the Western World with a certain awe. So back I had to go again, weary as I was, to the Chariot and its historical bearing on the Battle of the Trees and the poetic problems stated at the beginning of this book. It is a matter of poetic principle never to fob the Devil off with a half-answer or a lie.

  Ezekiel’s vision was of an Enthroned Man surrounded by a rainbow, its seven colours corresponding with the seven heavenly bodies that ruled the week. Four of these bodies were symbolized by the four spokes of the chariot-wheels: Ninib (Saturn) by the mid-winter spoke, Marduk (Jupiter) by the Spring equinox spoke, Nergal (Mars) by the mid-summer spoke, Nabu (Mercury) by the Autumn equinox spoke. But what of the three other heavenly bodies the Sun, the Moon and the planet Ishtar (Venus) – corresponding with the Capitoline Trinity and with the Trinity worshipped at Elephantine and at Hierapolis? It will be recalled that the metaphysical explanation of this type of Trinity, brought to Rome by the Orphics, was that Juno was physical nature (Ishtar), Jupiter was the impregnating or animating principle (the Sun) and Minerva was the directing wisdom behind the Universe (the Moon). This concept did not appeal to Ezekiel, because it limited Jehovah’s function to blind paternity; so though the Sun figures in his vision as the Eagle’s wings, neither the Moon nor Ishtar is present.

  The Devil was right. The vision cannot be fully explained without revealing the mystery of the Holy Trinity. It must be remembered that in ancient religions every ‘mystery’ implied a mystagogue who orally explained its logic to initiates: he may often have given a false or iconotropic explanation but it was at least a full one. As I read Origen’s second-century In Celsum, the early Church had certain mysteries explained only to a small circle of elders – Origen says in effect ‘Why should we not keep our mysteries to ourselves? You heathen do’ – and the logical explanation of the Trinity, whose seeming illogic ordinary members of the Church had to swallow by an act of faith, must have been the mystagogue’s most responsible task. The mystery itself is no secret – it is stated very precisely in the Athanasian Creed; nor is the mystery which derives from it, the redemption of the world by the incarnation of the Word as Jesus Christ. But unless the College of Cardinals has been remarkably discreet throughout all the intervening centuries, the original explanation of the mysteries has long been lost. Yet, I believe, not irrecoverably lost, since we may be sure that the doctrine developed from Judaeo-Greek mythology which is ultimately based on the single poetic Theme.

  The religious concept of free choice between good and evil, which is common to Pythagorean philosophy and prophetic Judaism, developed from a manipulation of the tree-alphabet. In the primitive cult of the Universal Goddess, to which the tree-alphabet is the guide, there was no room for choice: her devotees accepted the events, pleasurable and painful in turn, which she imposed on them as their destiny in the natural order of things. The change resulted from the Goddess’s displacement by the Universal God, and is historically related to the forcible removal of the consonants H an
d F from the Greek alphabet and their incorporation in the secret eight-letter name of this God: it seems clear that the Pythagorean mystics who instigated the change had adopted the Jewish Creation myth and regarded these two letters as peculiarly holy since uncontaminated with the errors of the material universe. For, though in the old mythology H and F had figured as the months sacred respectively to the harsh Hawthorn-goddess Cranaea and her doomed partner Cronos, in the new they represented the first and the last trees of the Sacred Grove, the first and the last days of Creation. On the first day nothing had been created except disembodied Light, and on the last nothing at all had been created. Thus the three consonants of the Logos, or ‘eightfold city of light’, were J, the letter of new life and sovereignty; H, the letter of the first Day of Creation, ‘Let there be Light’; and F, the letter of the last day of Creation, ‘Let there be Rest’, which appears as W in the JHWH Tetragrammaton. It is remarkable that these are the month-letters allotted to the three tribes of the Southern kingdom, Benjamin, Judah and Levi; and that the three jewels respectively assigned to them in the jewel-sequence – Amber, Fire-Garnet (‘the terrible crystal’), and Sapphire – are the three connected by Ezekiel with the radiance of God, and with his throne. The Enthroned Man is not God, as might be supposed: God lets nobody see his face and live. It is God’s likeness reflected in spiritual man. Thus, though Ezekiel retains the traditional imagery of the unchanging Sun-God who rules from the apex of a cone of light over the four regions of the round universe – the eagle poised above the four beasts – and of the ever-changing bull-calf, Celestial Hercules, he has withdrawn Jehovah from the old Trinity of Q’re (Sun), Ashima (Moon) and Anatha (Ishtar) and redefined him as the God who demands national perfection, whose similitude is a holy Being, half Judah, half Benjamin, seated on Levi’s throne. This explains Israel as a ‘peculiar people’ – the Deuteronomy text is of about the same date as Ezekiel’s vision – dedicated to a peculiarly holy god with a new name, derived from a new poetic formula which spells out Life, Light and Peace.

  I am suggesting, in fact, that the religious revolution which brought about the alphabetic changes in Greece and Britain was a Jewish one, initiated by Ezekiel (622–570 BC) which was taken up by the Greek-speaking Jews of Egypt and borrowed from them by the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras, who first came into prominence at Crotona in 529 BC, is credited by his biographers with having studied among the Jews as well as the Egyptians, and may have been the Greek who first internationalized the eight-letter Name. The Name must have come to Britain by way of Southern Gaul where the Pythagoreans were established early.

  The result of envisaging this god of pure meditation, the Universal Mind still premised by the most reputable modern philosophers, and enthroning him above Nature as essential Truth and Goodness was not an altogether happy one. Many of the Pythagoreans suffered, like the Jews, from a constant sense of guilt; and the ancient poetic Theme reasserted itself perversely. The new God claimed to be dominant as Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, pure Holiness, pure Good, pure Logic, able to exist without the aid of woman; but it was natural to identify him with one of the original rivals of the Theme and to ally the woman and the other rival permanently against him. The outcome was philosophical dualism with all the tragi-comic woes attendant on spiritual dichotomy. If the True God, the God of the Logos, was pure thought, pure good, whence came evil and error? Two separate creations had to be assumed: the true spiritual Creation and the false material Creation. In terms of the heavenly bodies, Sun and Saturn were now jointly opposed to Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. The five heavenly bodies in opposition made a strong partnership, with a woman at the beginning and a woman at the end. Jupiter and the Moon Goddess paired together as the rulers of the material World, the lovers Mars and Venus paired together as the lustful Flesh, and between the pairs stood Mercury who was the Devil, the Cosmocrator or author of the false creation. It was these five who composed the Pythagorean hyle, or grove, of the five material senses; and spiritually minded men, coming to regard them as sources of error, tried to rise superior to them by pure meditation. This policy was carried to extreme lengths by the God-fearing Essenes, who formed their monkish communities, within compounds topped by acacia hedges, from which all women were excluded; lived ascetically, cultivated a morbid disgust for their own natural functions and turned their eyes away from World, Flesh and Devil. Though they retained the Bull-calf myth, handed down from Solomon’s days, as emblematic of the spiritual life of mortal man and linked it to the seven-letter name of immortal God, it is clear that initiates of the highest Order cultivated the eight-letter name, or the enlarged name of seventy-two letters, and devoted themselves wholly to the meditative life: ruled by acacia and pomegranate, Sunday and Saturday, Illumination and Repose.

  War had now been declared in Heaven, Michael and the archangels fighting against the Devil, namely the Cosmocrator. For in the new dispensation, God could not afford to surrender the whole working week to the Devil, so he appointed archangels as his deputies, with a day for each, which were the archangels cultivated by the Essenes. Michael was given charge over Wednesday; so it fell to him not only to collect the dust for the true creation of Adam but to offer battle to the Devil who disputed that day with him. The Devil was Nabu, pictured as a winged Goat of Midsummer; so that the answer to Donne’s poetic question about the Devil’s foot is: ‘The prophet Ezekiel’. Michael’s victory must be read as a prophecy rather than as a record: a prophecy which Jesus tried to implement by preaching perfect obedience to God and continuous resistance to the World, Flesh and Devil. He reproached the Samaritan woman at Sychar, in a riddling talk which she may or may not have understood, for having had five husbands, the five material senses, and for having as present husband one who was not really her husband, namely the Cosmocrator, or Devil. He told her that salvation came, not from the Calf-god whom her fathers had idolatrously worshipped on near-by Ebal and Gerizim, but from the all-holy God of the Jews – the God, that is to say, of Judah, Benjamin and Levi. His faith was that if the whole nation repented of their erroneous devotion to the material universe, and refrained from all sexual and quasi-sexual acts, they would conquer death and live for a thousand years, at the end of which they would become one with the true God.

  The Jews were not yet ready to take this step, though many of them approved of it in theory; and a conservative minority, the Ophites, continued to reject the new faith, holding that the true God was the God of Wednesday, whom they pictured as a benign Serpent, not a goat, and that the God of the Logos was an impostor. Their case rested on the Menorah, a pre-Exilic instrument of worship, the seven branches of which issued from the central almond stem, typifying Wednesday; and indeed the revised view recorded in the Talmud, that the stem represented the Sabbath, made neither poetic nor historical sense. This Serpent had originally been Ophion with whom, according to the Orphic creation myth, the White Goddess had coupled in the form of a female serpent, and Mercury the Cosmocrator therefore used a wand of coupling serpents as his badge of office. It is now clear why Ezekiel disguised two of the four planetary beasts of his vision: recording eagle instead of eagle-winged goat and man instead of man-faced serpent. He was intent on keeping the Cosmocrator out of the picture, whether he came as Goat or Serpent. It may well have been Ezekiel who appended the iconotropic anecdote of the Serpent’s seduction of Adam and Eve to the Genesis Creation myth, and once it was approved as canonical, in the fourth century BC, the Ophite view became a heresy. It must be emphasized that the Genesis Seven Days of Creation narrative is based on the symbolism of the Menorah, a relic of the Egyptian sun-cult, not derived from the Babylonian Creation Epic, in which the Creator is the Thunder-god Marduk who defeats Tiamat the Sea-Monster and cuts her in half. Marduk – Bel in the earlier version of the story – was the God of Thursday, not Nabu the God of Wednesday nor Samas the God of Sunday. The resemblances between the two myths are superficial, though the Deluge incident in Genesis has been taken directly from
the Epic, and Ezekiel may have edited it.1

  In Rabbinical tradition the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, whose fruit the Serpent in the Genesis allegory gave Adam and Eve to eat, was a composite one. This means that though they were originally innocent and holy he introduced them to the pleasures of the material senses. Monday’s willow and Tuesday’s kerm-oak (or holly) do not supply human food, but they must have eaten Wednesday’s almonds (or hazelnuts), Thursday’s pistachios (or edible acorns), and Friday’s quinces (or wild apples). So God expelled them from the tree-paradise for fear that they might meddle with the Tree of Life – presumably Sunday’s acacia grafted with Saturday’s pomegranate – and thus immortalize their follies. This reading of the myth is supported by the ancient Irish legend, first published in Eriu IV, Part 2, of Trefuilngid Tre-eochair (‘the triple bearer of the triple key’ – apparently an Irish form of Hermes Trismegistos) a giant who appeared in Ireland early in the first century AD with immense splendour at a meeting of the great manor-council of Tara. He bore in his right hand a branch of wood from the Lebanon with three fruits on it – hazel-nuts, apples and edible acorns – which perpetually sustained him in food and drink. He told them that on enquiring what ailed the Sun that day in the East, he had found that it had not shone there because a man of great importance (Jesus) had been crucified. As the giant went off, some of the fruit dropped in Eastern Ireland and up sprang five trees – the five trees of the senses – which would fall only when Christianity triumphed. These trees have already been mentioned in the discussion of the tree-alphabet. The Great Tree of Mugna bred true to its parent branch with successive crops of apples, nuts and edible acorns. The others seem to be allegorical glosses, by some later poet. The Tree of Tortu and the Branching Tree of Dathi were ashes, presumably representing the false magic of the Brythonic and Danish ash-cults. The Tree of Ross was a Yew, representing death and destruction. I cannot find what the Ancient Tree of Usnech was: it is likely to have been a blackthorn, representing strife.