The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Now that scientists are talking in this strain, Christianity has little chance of maintaining its hold on the governing classes unless the historical part of ecclesiastical doctrine can be separated from the mythical: that is to say, unless a distinction can be drawn between the historical concept ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’, and the equally valid mythical concepts ‘Christ’ and ‘Son of Man’ in terms of which alone the Virgin Birth, the Ascension and the miracles make unchallengeable sense. If this were to happen, Christianity would develop into a pure mystery-cult, with a Christ, divorced from his temporal history, paying the Virgin-Queen of Heaven a filial obedience that Jesus of Nazareth reserved for his Incomprehensible Father. Scientists would perhaps welcome the change as meeting the psychological needs of the masses, involving no anti-scientific absurdities, and having a settling effect on civilization; one of the reasons for the restlessness of Christendom has always been that the Gospel postulates an immediate end of time and therefore denies mankind a sense of spiritual security. Confusing the languages of prose and myth, its authors claimed that a final revelation had at last been delivered: everyone must repent, despise the world, and humble himself before God in expectation of the imminent Universal Judgement. A mystical Virgin-born Christ, detached from Jewish eschatology and unlocalized in first-century Palestine, might restore religion to contemporary self-respect.

  However, such a religious change is impossible under present conditions: any neo-Arian attempt to degrade Jesus from God to man would be opposed as lessening the authority of his ethical message of love and peace. Also, the Mother-and-Son myth is so closely linked with the natural year and its cycle of ever-recurring observed events in the vegetable and animal queendoms that it makes little emotional appeal to the confirmed townsman, who is informed of the passage of the seasons only by the fluctuations of his gas and electricity bills or by the weight of his underclothes. He is chivalrous to women but thinks only in prose; the one variety of religion acceptable to him is a logical, ethical, highly abstract sort which appeals to his intellectual pride and sense of detachment from wild nature. The Goddess is no towns woman: she is the Lady of the Wild Things, haunting the wooded hill-tops – Venus Cluacina, ‘she who purifies with myrtle’, not Venus Cloacina, ‘Patroness of the Sewage System’, as she first became at Rome; and though the townsman has now begun to insist that built-up areas should have a limit, and to discuss decentralization (the decanting of the big towns into small, independent communities, well spaced out), his intention is only to urbanize the country, not to ruralize the town. Agricultural life is rapidly becoming industrialized and in England, the world’s soberest social laboratory, the last vestiges of the ancient pagan celebrations of the Mother and Son are being obliterated, despite a loving insistence on Green Belts and parks and private gardens. It is only in backward parts of Southern and Western Europe that a lively sense still survives in the countryside of their continued worship.

  No: there seems no escape from our difficulties until the industrial system breaks down for some reason or other, as it nearly did in Europe during the Second World War, and nature reasserts herself with grass and trees among the ruins.

  The Protestant Churches are divided between liberal theology and fundamentalism, but the Vatican authorities have made up their minds how to face the problems of the day. They encourage two antinomous trends of thought to co-exist within the Church: the authoritarian, or paternal, or logical, as a means of securing the priest’s hold on his congregation and keeping them from free-thinking; the mythical, or maternal, or supralogical, as a concession to the Goddess, without whom the Protestant religion has lost its romantic glow. They recognize her as a lively, various, immemorial obsession, deeply fixed in the racial memory of the European countryman and impossible to exorcize; but are equally aware that this is an essentially urban civilization, therefore authoritarian, and therefore patriarchal. It is true that woman has of late become virtual head of the household in most parts of the Western world, and holds the purse-strings, and can take up almost any career or position she pleases; but she is unlikely to repudiate the present system, despite its patriarchal framework. With all its disadvantages, she enjoys greater liberty of action under it than man has retained for himself; and though she may know, intuitively, that the system is due for a revolutionary change, she does not care to hasten or anticipate this. It is easier for her to play man’s game a little while longer, until the situation grows too absurd and uncomfortable for complaisance. The Vatican waits watchfully.

  Meanwhile, Science itself is in difficulties. Scientific research has become so complicated and demands such enormous apparatus that only the State or immensely rich patrons can pay for it, which in practice means that a disinterested search for knowledge is cramped by the demand for results that will justify the expense: the scientist must turn showman. Also, a huge body of technical administrators is needed to implement his ideas, and these too rank as scientists; yet, as Professor Lancelot Hogben points out,1 (and he is exceptional in being an F.R.S. with sufficient knowledge of history and the humanities to be able to view science objectively) they are no more than ‘fellow-travellers’ – careerists, opportunists, and civil-service-minded authoritarians. A non-commercial benevolent institution like the Nuffield Foundation, he says, is as high-handed in its treatment of scientists as a Treasury-controlled Government department. In consequence, pure mathematics is almost the only free field of science left. Moreover, the corpus of scientific knowledge, like that of law, has grown so unwieldy that not only are most scientists ignorant of even the rudiments of more than one specialized study, but they cannot keep up with the publications in their own field, and are forced to take on trust findings which they should properly test by personal experiment. Apollo the Organizer, in fact, seated on Zeus’s throne, is beginning to find his ministers obstructive, his courtiers boring, his regalia tawdry, his quasi-royal responsibilities irksome, and the system of government breaking down from over-organization: he regrets having enlarged the realm to such absurd proportions and given his uncle Pluto and his half-brother Mercury a share in the Regency, yet dares not quarrel with these unreliable wretches for fear of worse to come, or even attempt to re-write the constitution with their help. The Goddess smiles grimly at his predicament.

  This is the ‘brave new world’ satirized by Aldous Huxley, an ex-poet turned philosopher. What has he to offer in its place? In his Perennial Philosophy he recommends a saintly mysticism of not-being in which woman figures only as an emblem of the soul’s surrender to the creative lust of God. The West, he says in effect, has failed because its religious feelings have been too long linked with political idealism or the pursuit of pleasure; it must now look to India for guidance in the rigorous discipline of asceticism. Little or nothing is, of course, known to the Indian mystics that was unknown to Honi the Circle-drawer and the other Essene therapeutics with whom Jesus had so close an affinity, or to the Mohammedan mystics; but talk of political reconciliation between Far East and Far West is in fashion and Mr. Huxley therefore prefers to style himself a devotee of Ramakrishna, the most famous Indian mystic of modern times.

  Ramakrishna’s case is an interesting one. He lived all his life in the grounds of the White Goddess Kali’s temple at Dakshineswar on the Ganges, and in 1842, at the age of six, had fallen in a faint at the beauty of a flock of cranes, her birds, flying across a background of storm clouds. At first he devoted himself to Kali-worship with true poetic ecstacy like his predecessor Ramprasad Sen (1718–1775); but, when he grew to manhood, allowed himself to be seduced: he was unexpectedly acclaimed by Hindu pundits as a re-incarnation of Krishna and Buddha, and persuaded by them into orthodox techniques of devotion. He became an ascetic saint of the familiar type with devoted disciples and a Gospel of ethics posthumously published, and was fortunate enough to marry a woman of the same mystic capacities as himself who, by agreeing to forgo physical consummation, helped him to illustrate the possibility of a purely spiritual
union of the sexes. Though he did not need to declare war on the Female, as Jesus had done, he set himself painfully to ‘dissolve his vision of the Goddess’ in order to achieve the ultimate bliss of samadhi, or communion with the Absolute; holding that the Goddess, who was both the entangler and the liberator of physical man, has no place in that remote esoteric Heaven. In later life he claimed to have proved by experiment that Christians and Mohammedans could also achieve the same bliss as himself; first, by turning Christian and devoting himself to the Catholic liturgy until he achieved a vision of Jesus Christ, and then Moslem until he achieved a vision of Mohammed – after each experience resuming samadhi.

  What, then, is samadhi? It is a psychopathic condition, a spiritual orgasm, indistinguishable from the ineffably beautiful moment, described by Dostoievsky, which precedes an epileptic fit. Indian mystics induce it at will by fasting and meditation, as the Essenes and early Christian and Mohammedan saints also did. Ramakrishna had, in fact, ceased to be a poet and become a morbid-psychologist and religious politician addicted to the most refined form of solitary vice imaginable. Ramprasad had never allowed himself to be thus tempted from his devotion to the Goddess by spiritual ambition. He had even rejected the orthodox hope of ‘not-being’, through mystic absorption in the Absolute, as irreconcilable with his sense of individual uniqueness as the Goddess’s child and lover:

  Sugar I like, yet I have no desire

  To become sugar,

  and faced the prospect of death with poetic pride:

  How can yon shrink from death,

  Child of the Mother of All Living?

  A snake, and you fear frogs?

  One Kalipuja Day he followed Kali’s image into the Ganges until the waters closed over his head.

  The story of Ramprasad’s devotion to Kali reads familiarly to the Western romantic; samadhi, the unchivalrous rejection of the Goddess, will not appeal even to the Western townsman. Nor are any other revivals of Father-god worship, whether ascetic or epicurean, autocratic or communist, liberal or fundamentalist, likely to solve our troubles; I foresee no change for the better until everything gets far worse. Only after a period of complete political and religious disorganization can the suppressed desire of the Western races, which is for some practical form of Goddess-worship, with her love not limited to maternal benevolence and her after-world not deprived of a sea, find satisfaction at last.

  How should she then be worshipped? Donne anticipated the problem in his early poem The Primrose. He knew that the primrose is sacred to the Muse and that the ‘mysterious number’ of its petals stands for women. Should he adore a six-petalled or a four-petalled freak, a Goddess that is either more, or less, than true woman? He chose five petals and proved by the science of numbers that woman, if she pleases, has complete domination of man. But it was said of the lotus-crowned Goddess in the Corinthian Mysteries, long before the phrase was applied to the ideally benign Father-god, ‘Her service is perfect freedom’;1 and, indeed, her habit has never been to coerce, but always to grant or withhold her favours according as her sons and lovers came to her with exactly the right gifts in their hands – gifts of their own choosing, not her dictation. She must be worshipped in her ancient quintuple person, whether by counting the petals of lotus or primrose: as Birth, Initiation, Consummation, Repose and Death.

  It will be objected that man has as valid a claim to divinity as woman. That is true only in a sense; he is divine not in his single person, but only in his twinhood. As Osiris, the Spirit of the Waxing Year he is always jealous of his weird, Set, the Spirit of the Waning Year, and vice-versa; he cannot be both of them at once except by an intellectual effort that destroys his humanity, and this is the fundamental defect of the Apollonian or Jehovistic cult. Man is a demi-god: he always has either one foot or the other in the grave; woman is divine because she can keep both her feet always in the same place, whether in the sky, in the underworld, or on this earth. Man envies her and tells himself lies about his own completeness, and thereby makes himself miserable; because if he is divine she is not even a demi-goddess – she is a mere nymph and his love for her turns to scorn and hate.

  Woman worships the male infant, not the grown man: it is evidence of her deity, of man’s dependence on her for life. She is passionately interested in grown men, however, because the love-hate that Osiris and Set feel for each other on her account is a tribute to her divinity. She tries to satisfy both, but can only do so by alternate murder, and man tries to regard this as evidence of her fundamental falsity, not of his own irreconcilable demands on her.

  There are frequent denials of her power, for example Allan Ramsay’s Goddess of the Slothful (from The Gentle Shepherd, 1725):

  O Godless of the Slothful, blind and vain,

  Who with foul hearts. Rites, foolish and profane,

  Altars and Temples hallowst to thy name!

  Temples? or Sanctuaries vile, said I?

  To protect Lewdness and Impiety,

  Under the Robe of the Divinity?

  And thou Base Goddess! that thy wickedness,

  When others do as bad, may seem the less,

  Givest them the reins to all lasciviousness.

  Rotter of soul and body, enemy

  Of reason, plotter of sweet thievery,

  The little and great world’s calamity.

  Reputed worthily the Ocean’s daughter:

  That treacherous monster, which with even water

  First soothes, but ruffles into storms soon after.

  Such minds of sighs, such Cataracts of tears,

  Such breaking waves of hopes, such gulfs of fears,

  Thou makest of men, such rocks of cold despairs.

  Tides of desire so headstrong, as would move

  The world to change thy name, when thou shalt prove

  Mother of Rage and Tempests, not of Love.

  Behold what sorrow now and discontent

  On a poor pair of Lovers thou hast sent!

  Go thou, that vaunt’st thyself Omnipotent.

  But the longer her hour is postponed, and therefore the more exhausted by man’s irreligious improvidence the natural resources of the soil and sea become, the less merciful will her five-fold mask be, and the narrower the scope of action that she grants to whichever demi-god she chooses to take as her temporary consort in godhead. Let us placate her in advance by assuming the cannibalistic worst:

  Under your Milky Way

  And slow-revolving Bear,

  Frogs from the alder-thicket pray

  In terror of the judgement day,

  Loud with repentance there.

  The log they crowned as king

  Grew sodden, lurched and sank.

  Dark waters bubble from the spring,

  An owl floats by on silent wing,

  They invoke you from each bank.

  At dawn you shall appear,

  A gaunt, red-wattled crane,

  She whom they know too well for fear,

  Lunging your beak down like a spear

  To fetch them home again.

  And we owe her a satire on the memory of the man who first tilted European civilization off balance, by enthroning the restless and arbitrary male will under the name of Zeus and dethroning the female sense of orderliness, Themis. The Greeks knew him as Pterseus the Destroyer, the Gorgon-slaying warrior-prince from Asia, remote ancestor of the destroyers Alexander, Pompey and Napoleon.

  Swordsman of the narrow lips,

  Narrow hips and murderous mind

  Fenced with chariots and ships,

  By your joculators hailed

  The mailed wonder of mankind,

  Far to westward you have sailed.

  You it was dared seize the throne

  Of a blown and amorous prince

  Destined to the Moon alone,

  A lame, golden-heeled decoy,

  Joy of hens that gape and wince

  Inarticulately coy.

  You who, capped with lunar gold

  Like an old
and savage dunce,

  Let the central hearth go cold,

  Grinned, and left us here your sword

  Warden of sick fields that once

  Sprouted of their own accord.

  Gusts of laughter the Moon stir

  That her Bassarids now bed

  With the unnoble usurer,

  While an ignorant pale priest

  Rides the beast with a man’s head

  To her long-omitted feast.

  1 The English word litter, derived from lectum, has the double sense of bed and bedding; and the Lord of the Manor of Oterarsee in Angevin times held his fief ‘by the service of finding litter for the King’s bed: in summer grass and herbs, and in winter straw’.

  1 February, 1949.

  1 The New Authoritarianism, Conway Memorial Lecture, 1949.