The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Frazer, an authority on Greek religion, must have known that the Salvationist obsession of the Greek Orphics was Thraco-Libyan, not Oriental, and that long before the Jews of the Dispersal had introduced to the Greek world their Pharisaic doctrine of oneness with God, city-state idealism had been destroyed from within. Once speculative philosophy had made sceptics of all educated Greeks who were not Orphics or members of some other mystical fraternity, public as well as private faith was undermined and, despite the prodigious conquests of Alexander, Greece was easily defeated by the semi-barbarous Romans, who combined religious conservatism with national esprit de corps. The Roman nobles then put themselves to school under the Greeks, and caught the philosophical infection; their own idealism crumbled and only the regimental esprit de corps of the untutored legions, combined with Emperor-worship on the Oriental model, staved off political collapse. Finally, in the fourth century AD, they found the pressure of the barbarians against their frontiers so strong that it was only by recourse to the still vigorous faith of Christianity that they could save what remained of the Empire.

  Hitler’s remark, which was not original, referred to the alleged economic oppression of Europe by the Jews. He was being unfair: under Christianity the Jews had for centuries been forbidden to hold land or become members of ordinary craft-guilds, and obliged to live on their wits. They became jewellers, physicians, money-lenders and bankers, and started such new, highly skilled industries as the manufacture of optical glass and drugs; England’s sudden commercial expansion in the seventeenth century was caused by Cromwell’s welcome to the Dutch Jews, who brought their modern banking-system to London. If Europeans dislike the results of unlimited capitalism and industrial progress, they have only themselves to blame: the Jews originally invoked the power of money as a bulwark against Gentile oppression. They were forbidden by the Mosaic Law either to lend money at interest among themselves or to let loans run on indefinitely – every seventh year the debtor had to be released from his bond – and it is not their fault that money, ceasing to be a practical means of exchanging goods and services, has achieved irresponsible divinity in the Gentile world.

  Yet neither Fraser nor Hitler were far from the truth, which was that the early Gentile Christian borrowed from the Hebrew prophets the two religious concepts, hitherto unknown in the West, which have become the prime causes of our unrest: that of a patriarchal God, who refuses to have any truck with Goddesses and claims to be self-sufficient and all-wise; and that of a theocratic society, disdainful of the pomps and glories of the world, in which everyone who rightly performs his civic duties is a ‘son of God’ and entitled to salvation, whatever his rank or fortune, by virtue of direct communion with the Father.

  Both these concepts have since been vigorously contested within the Church itself. However deeply Westerners may admire Jesus’s single-minded devotion to the remote, all-holy, Universal God of the Hebrew prophets, few of them have ever accepted whole-heartedly the antagonism between flesh and spirit implied in his cult. And though the new God-head seemed philosophically incontrovertible, once the warlike and petulant Zeus-Jupiter, with his indiscreet amours and quarrelsome Olympian family, had ceased to command the respect of intelligent people, the early Church Fathers soon found that man was not yet ready for ideal anarchy: the All-Father, a purely meditative patriarch who did not intervene personally in mundane affairs, had to resume his thunderbolt in order to command respect. Even the communistic principle, for a breach of which Ananias and Sapphira had been struck dead, was abandoned as unpractical. As soon as the Papal power was acknowledged superior to that of kings, the Popes assumed magnificent temporal pomp, took part in power-politics, waged wars, rewarded the rich and well-born with indulgences for sin in this world and promises of preferential treatment in the next, and anathematized the equalitarian principles of their simple predecessors. And not only has Hebrew monotheism been modified at Rome by the gradual introduction of Virgin-worship, but the ordinary Catholic layman has long been cut off from direct communication with God: he must confess his sins and acquaint himself with the meaning of God’s word, only through the mediation of a priest.

  Protestantism was a vigorous reassertion of the two rejected concepts, which the Jews themselves had never abandoned, and to which the Mohammedans had been almost equally faithful. The Civil Wars in England were won by the fighting qualities of the Virgin-hating Puritan Independents, who envisaged an ideal theocratic society in which all priestly and episcopal pomp should be abolished, and every man should be entitled to read and interpret the Scriptures as he pleased, with direct access to God the Father. Puritanism took root and flourished in America, and the doctrine of religious equalitarianism, which carried with it the right to independent thinking, turned into social equalitarianism, or democracy, a theory which has since dominated Western civilization. We are now at the stage where the common people of Christendom, spurred on by their demagogues, have grown so proud that they are no longer content to be the hands and feet and trunk of the body politic, but demand to be the intellect as well – or, as much intellect as is needed to satisfy their simple appetites. As a result, all but a very few have discarded their religious idealism, Roman Catholics as well as Protestants, and come to the private conclusion that money, though the root of all evil, is the sole practical means of expressing value or of determining social precedence; that science is the only accurate means of describing phenomena; and that a morality of common honesty is not relevant either to love, war, business or politics. Yet they feel guilty about their backsliding, send their children to Sunday School, maintain the Churches, and look with alarm towards the East, where a younger and more fanatic faith threatens.

  What ails Christianity today is that it is not a religion squarely based on a single myth; it is a complex of juridical decisions made under political pressure in an ancient law-suit about religious rights between adherents of the Mother-goddess who was once supreme in the West, and those of the usurping Father-god. Different ecclesiastical courts have given different decisions, and there is no longer a supreme judicature. Now that even the Jews have been seduced into evading the Mosaic Law and whoring after false gods, the Christians have drifted farther away than ever from the ascetic holiness to which Ezekiel, his Essene successors, and Jesus, the last of the Hebrew prophets, hoped to draw the world. Though the West is still nominally Christian, we have come to be governed, in practice, by the unholy triumdivate of Pluto god of wealth, Apollo god of science, and Mercury god of thieves. To make matters worse, dissension and jealousy rage openly between these three, with Mercury and Pluto blackguarding each other, while Apollo wields the atomic bomb as if it were a thunderbolt; for since the Age of Reason was heralded by his eighteenth-century philosophers, he has seated himself on the vacant throne of Zeus (temporarily indisposed) as Triumdival Regent.

  The propaganda services of the West perpetually announce that the only way out of our present troubles is a return to religion, but assume that religion ought not to be defined in any precise sense: that no good can come from publicizing either the contradictions between the main revealed religions and their mutually hostile sects, or the factual mis-statements contained in their doctrines, or the shameful actions which they have all, at one time or another, been used to cloak. What is really being urged is an improvement in national and international ethics, not everyone’s sudden return to the beliefs of his childhood – which, if undertaken with true religious enthusiasm, would obviously lead to a renewal of religious wars: only since belief weakened all round have the priests of rival religions consented to adopt a good-neighbourly policy. Then why not say ethics, since it is apparent that the writers and speakers, with few exceptions, have no strong religious convictions themselves? Because ethics are held to derive from revealed religion, notably the Ten Commandments, and therefore the seemingly unethical behaviour of communists is attributed to their total repudiation of religion; and because the co-existence of contradictory confessions within a State
is held by non-communists to be a proof of political health; and because a crusade against Communism can be launched only in the name of religion.

  Communism is a faith, not a religion. It is simple, social equalitarianism, generous and unnationalistic in original intention, the exponents of which, however, have been forced, as the early Christians were, to postpone their hopes of an immediate millennium and adopt a pragmatic policy that will at least guarantee their own survival in a hostile world.

  Since, then, the Communistic faith, however fanatically held, is not a religion, and since all contemporary religions contradict one another, however politely, in their articles of faith, can any definition of the word religion be made that is practically relevant to a solution of the present political problems?

  The dictionaries give its etymology as ‘doubtful’. Cicero connected it with relegere, ‘to read duly’ – hence ‘to pore upon, or study’ divine lore. Some four-and-a-half centuries later, Saint Augustine derived it from religare, ‘to bind back’ and supposed that it implied a pious obligation to obey divine law; and this is the sense in which religion has been understood ever since. Augustine’s guess, like Cicero’s (though Cicero came nearer the truth), did not take into account the length of the first syllable of religio in Lucretius’s early De Rerum Natura, or the alternative spelling relligio. Relligio can be formed only from the phrase rem legere, ‘to choose, or pick, the right thing’, and religion for the primitive Greeks and Romans was not obedience to laws but a means of protecting the tribe against evil by active counter-measures of good. It was in the hands of a magically-minded priesthood, whose duty was to suggest what action would please the gods on peculiarly auspicious or inauspicious occasions. When, for example, a bottomless chasm suddenly opened in the Roman Forum, they read it as a sign that the gods demanded a sacrifice of Rome’s best; one Mettus Curtius felt called upon to save the situation by choosing the right thing, and leaped into the chasm on horseback, fully armed. On another occasion a woodpecker appeared in the Forum where the City Praetor, Aelius Tubero, was dispensing justice, perched on his head and allowed him to take it in his hand. Since the woodpecker was sacred to Mars, its unnatural tameness alarmed the augurs, who pronounced that, if it were released, disaster would overcome Rome; if killed, the Praetor would die for his act of sacrilege. Aelius Tubero patriotically wrung its neck, and afterwards came to a violent end. These unhistorical anecdotes seem to have been invented by the College of Augurs as examples of how signs should be read and how Romans should act in response to them.

  The case of Aelius Tubero is a useful illustration not only of relligio but of the difference between taboo and law. The theory of taboo is that certain things are prophetically announced by a priest or priestess to be harmful to certain people at certain times – though not necessarily to other people at the same time, or to the same people at other times; and the primitive punishment for the breach of a taboo is ordained not by the judges of the tribe but by the transgressor himself, who realizes his error and either dies of shame and grief or flees to another tribe and changes his identity. It was understood at Rome that a woodpecker, as the bird of Mars, might not be killed by anybody except the King, or his ritual successor under the Republic, and only on a single occasion in the year, as an expiatory sacrifice to the Goddess. In a less primitive society Tubero would have been publicly tried, under such-and-such a law, for killing a protected sacred bird, and either executed, fined or imprisoned; as it was, his breach of taboo was left to his own sense of divine vengeance.

  Primitive religion at Rome was bound up with the sacred monarchy: the King was restrained by a great number of taboos designed to please the various-titled Goddess of Wisdom whom he served, and the members of her divine family. It seems that the duty of his twelve priestly companions, one for every month of the year, called the lictores, or ‘choosers’, was to protect him against ill-luck or profanation and pay careful attention to his needs. Among their tasks must have been the relictio, or ‘careful reading’, of signs, omens, prodigies and auguries; and the selectio of his weapons, his clothes, his food and the grasses and leaves of his lectum or bed.1 On the extinction of the monarchy, the purely religious functions of the King were invested in the Priest of Jove, and the executive functions passed to the Consuls; the lictors became their guard of honour. The word lictor then became popularly connected with the word religare, ‘to bind’, because it was a lictorial function to bind those who rebelled against the power of the Consuls. Originally there had been no Twelve Tables, nor any other Roman code of laws; there had only been oral tradition, based on instinctive good principles and particular magical announcements. Mettus Curtius and Aelius Tubero are not represented as having been under any legal obligation to do what they did; they made an individual choice for moral reasons.

  It must be explained that the word lex, ‘law’, began with the sense of a ‘chosen word’, or magical pronouncement, and that, like lictor, it was later given a false derivation from ligare. Law in Rome grew out of religion: occasional pronouncements developed proverbial force and became legal principles. But as soon as religion in its primitive sense is interpreted as social obligation and defined by tabulated laws – as soon as Apollo the Organizer, God of Science, usurps the power of his Mother the Goddess of inspired truth, wisdom and poetry, and tries to bind her devotees by laws – inspired magic goes, and what remains is theology, ecclesiastical ritual, and negatively ethical behaviour.

  If, therefore, it is wished to avoid disharmony, dullness and oppression in all social (and all literary) contexts, each problem must be regarded as unique, to be settled by right choice based on instinctive good principle, not by reference to a code or summary of precedents; and, granted that the only way out of our political troubles is a return to religion, this must somehow be freed of its theological accretions. Positive right choosing based on moral principle must supersede negative respect for the Law which, though backed by force, has grown so hopelessly inflated and complex that not even a trained lawyer can hope to be conversant with more than a single branch of it. Willingness to do right can be inculcated in most people if they are caught early enough, but so few have the capacity to make a proper moral choice between circumstances or actions which at first sight are equally valid, that the main religious problem of the Western world, is briefly, how to exchange demagogracy, disguised as democracy, for a non-hereditary aristocracy whose leaders will be inspired to choose rightly on every occasion, instead of blindly following authoritarian procedure. The Russian Communist Party has confused the issue by presenting itself as such an aristocracy and claiming to be inspired in its choice of policy.

  * * *

  There are two distinct and complementary languages: the ancient, intuitive language of poetry, and the more modern, rational language or prose, universally current. Myth and religion are clothed in poetic language; science, ethics, philosophy and statistics in prose. A stage in history has now been reached when it is generally conceded that the two languages should not be combined into a single formula, though Dr. Barnes, the liberal Bishop of Birmingham, complains1 that a majority of reactionary bishops would like to insist on a literal belief even in the stories of Noah’s Ark and Jonah’s Whale. The Bishop is right to deplore the way in which these venerable religious symbols have been misinterpreted for didactic reasons; and to deplore still more the Church’s perpetuation of fables as literal truth. The story of the Ark is probably derived from an Asianic icon in which the Spirit of the Solar Year is shown in a moon-ship, going through his habitual New Year changes – bull, lion, snake and so on; and the story of the Whale from a similar icon showing the same Spirit being swallowed at the end of the year by the Moon-and-Sea-goddess, represented as a sea-monster, to be presently re-born as a New Year fish, or finned goat. The she-monster Tiamat who, in early Babylonian mythology, swallowed the Sun-god Marduk (but whom he later claimed to have killed with his sword) was used by the author of the Book of Jonah to symbolize the power of the wi
cked city, mother of harlots, that swallowed and then spewed up the Jews. The icon, a familiar one on the Eastern Mediterranean, survived in Orphic art, where it represented a ritual ceremony of initiation: the initiate was swallowed by the Universal Mother, the sea-monster, and re-born as an incarnation of the Sun-god. (On one Greek vase the Jonah-like figure is named Jason, because the history of his voyage in the Argo had by that time been attached to the signs of the Zodiac around which the Sun makes its annual voyage.) The Hebrew prophets knew Tiamat as the Moon-and-Sea-goddess Rahab, but rejected her as the mistress of all fleshly corruptions; which is why in the ascetic Apocalypse the faithful are promised ‘No more sea’.

  Dr. Barnes was quoting the stories of the Whale and Ark as obvious absurdities, but at the same time warning his fellow-bishops that few educated persons believe literally even in Jesus’s miracles. The merely agnostic attitude, ‘He may have risen to Heaven; we have no evidence for or against this claim’, has now given place in the back-rooms to the positively hostile: ‘Scientifically, it does not add up.’ A New Zealand atomic scientist assured me the other day that Christianity had received its heaviest blow in 1945: a fundamental tenet of the Church, namely that Jesus’s material body was immaterialized at the Ascension had, he said, been spectacularly disproved at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – anyone with the least scientific perception must realize that any such break-down of matter would have caused an explosion large enough to wreck the entire Middle East.