The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  1 Borrowed by St. Augustine from Lucius’s address to Isis in Apuleius’s Golden Ass, and now part of the Protestant liturgy.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  POSTSCRIPT 1960

  People often ask me how I came to write The White Goddess. Here is the story.

  Though a poet by calling, I make my livelihood by prose – biographies, novels, translations from various languages, and so forth. My home has been in Majorca since 1929. Temporarily exiled because of the Spanish Civil War, I wandered around Europe and the United States; and the Second World War caught me in England, where I stayed until it ended and I could return to Majorca. In 1944, at the Devonshire village of Galmpton, I was working against time on a historical novel about the Argonauts, when a sudden overwhelming obsession interrupted me. It took the form of an unsolicited enlightenment on a subject which had meant little enough to me. I stopped marking across my big Admiralty chart of the Black Sea the course taken (the mythographers said) by the Argo from the Bosphorus to Baku and back. Instead, I began speculating on a mysterious ‘Battle of the Trees’, fought in pre-historic Britain, and my mind ran at such a furious rate all night, as well as all the next day, that it was difficult for my pen to keep pace with it. Three weeks later, I had written a seventy-thousand-word book, called The Roebuck in the Thicket.

  I am no mystic: I avoid participation in witchcraft, spiritualism, yoga, fortune-telling, automatic writing, and the like. I live a simple, normal, rustic life with my family and a wide circle of sane and intelligent friends. I belong to no religious cult, no secret society, no philosophical sect; nor do I trust my historical intuition any further than it can be factually checked.

  While engaged on my Argonaut book, I found the White Goddess of Pelion growing daily more important to the narrative. Now, I had in my work-room several small West African brass objects – bought from a London dealer – gold-dust weights, mostly in the shape of animals, among them a humpback playing a flute. I also had a small brass-box, with a lid, intended (so the dealer told me) to contain gold dust. I kept the humpback seated on the box. In fact, he is still seated there; but I knew nothing about him, or about the design on the box-lid, until ten years had gone by. Then I learned that the humpback was a herald in the service of the Queen-mother of some Akan State; and that every Akan Queen-mother (there are a few reigning even today) claims to be an incarnation of the Triple Moon-goddess Ngame. The design on the box-lid, a spiral, connected by a single stroke to the rectangular frame enclosing it – the frame having nine teeth on either side – means: ‘None greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess Ngame!’ These gold weights and the box were made before the British seizure of the Gold Coast, by craftsmen subservient to the Goddess, and regarded as highly magical.

  Very well: put it down to coincidence. Deny any connexion between the hump-backed herald on the box (proclaiming the sovereignty of the Akan Triple Moon-goddess, and set in a ring of brass animals representing Akan clan totems) and myself, who suddenly became obsessed by the European White Goddess, wrote about her clan totems in the Argonaut context, and now had thrust upon me ancient secrets of her cult in Wales, Ireland and elsewhere. I was altogether unaware that the box celebrated the Goddess Ngame, that the Helladic Greeks, including the primitive Athenians, were racially linked with Ngame’s people – Libyan Berbers, known as the Garamantians, who moved south from the Sahara to the Niger in the eleventh century AD, and there intermarried with negroes. Or that Ngame herself was a Moon-goddess, and that the White Goddess of Greece and Western Europe shared her attributes. I knew only that Herodotus recognized the Libyan Neith as Athene.

  On returning to Majorca soon after the War, I worked again at The Roebuck in the Thicket, now called The White Goddess, and wrote more particularly about the Sacred King as the Moon-goddess’s divine victim; holding that every Muse-poet must, in a sense, die for the Goddess whom he adores, just as the King died. Old Georg Schwarz, a German-Jewish collector, had bequeathed me five or six more Akan gold-weights, among them a mummy-like figurine with one large eye. It has since been identified by experts on West African art as the Akan King’s okrafo priest. I had suggested in my book that, in early Mediterranean society, the King fell a sacrifice at the end of his term. But later (to judge from Greek and Latin myths) he won executive power as the Queen’s chief minister and the privilege of sacrificing a surrogate. The same governmental change, I have since learned, took place after the matriarchal Akan arrived at the Gold Coast. In Bono, Asante, and other near-by states, the King’s surrogate victim was called the ‘okrafo priest’. Kjersmeier, the famous Danish expert on African art, who has handled ten thousand of these gold-weights, tells me that he never saw another like mine. Dismiss it as a coincidence, if you please, that the okrafo figurine lay beside the herald on the gold box, while I wrote about the Goddess’s victims.

  After The White Goddess had been published, a Barcelona antiquary read my Claudius novels and invited me to choose myself a stone for a seal-ring from a collection of Roman gems recently bought. Among them was a stranger, a banded carnelian seal of the Argonaut period, engraved with a royal stag galloping towards a thicket, and a crescent moon on its flank! Dismiss that as a coincidence, too, if you please.

  Chains of more-than-coincidence occur so often in my life that, if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, let me call them a habit. Not that I like the word ‘supernatural’; I find these happenings natural enough, though superlatively unscientific.

  In scientific terms, no god at all can be proved to exist, but only beliefs in gods, and the effects of such beliefs on worshippers. The concept of a creative goddess was banned by Christian theologians almost two thousand years ago, and by Jewish theologians long before that. Most scientists, for social convenience, are God-worshippers; though I cannot make out why a belief in a Father-god’s authorship of the universe, and its laws, seems any less unscientific than a belief in a Mother-goddess’s inspiration of this artificial system. Granted the first metaphor, the second follows logically – if these are no better than metaphors….

  True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than-coincidences, into a living entity – a poem that goes about on its own (for centuries after the author’s death, perhaps) affecting readers with its stored magic. Since the source of poetry’s creative power is not scientific intelligence, but inspiration – however this may be explained by scientists – one may surely attribute inspiration to the Lunar Muse, the oldest and most convenient European term for this source? By ancient tradition, the White Goddess becomes one with her human representative – a priestess, a prophetess, a queen-mother. No Muse-poet grows conscious of the Muse except by experience of a woman in whom the Goddess is to some degree resident; just as no Apollonian poet can perform his proper function unless he lives under a monarchy or a quasi-monarchy. A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse. As a rule, the power of absolutely falling in love soon vanishes; and, as a rule, because the woman feels embarrassed by the spell she exercises over her poet-lover and repudiates it; he, in disillusion, turns to Apollo who, at least, can provide him with a livelihood and intelligent entertainment, and reneges before his middle ’twenties. But the real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet distinguishes between the Goddess as manifest in the supreme power, glory, wisdom and love of woman, and the individual woman whom the Goddess may make her instrument for a month, a year, seven years, or even more. The Goddess abides; and perhaps he will again have knowledge of her through his experience of another woman.

  Being in love does not, and should not, blind the poet to the cruel side of woman’s nature – and many Muse-poems are written in helpless attestation of this by men whose love is no longer returned:

  ‘As ye came from the holy land

  Of Walsinghame,

  Met you not with my true love

  By the way as ye came?’

&nbs
p; ‘How should I know your true love,

  That have met many a one

  As I came from the holy land,

  That have come, that have gone?’

  ‘She is neither white nor brown,

  But as the heavens fair;

  There is none hath her divine form

  In the earth, in the air.’

  ‘Such a one did I meet, good sir,

  Such an angelic face,

  Who like a nymph, like a queen, did appear

  In her gait, in her grace.’

  ‘She hath left me here alone,

  All alone, as unknown,

  Who sometimes did me lead with herself

  And me loved as her own.’

  ‘What’s the cause that she leaves you alone

  And a new way doth take,

  That sometime did you love as her own,

  And her joy did you make?’

  ‘I have loved her all my youth,

  But now am old, as you see:

  Love likes not the falling fruit,

  Nor the withered tree.’

  It will be noticed that the poet who made this pilgrimage to Mary the Egyptian, at Walsinghame, the mediaeval patron saint of lovers, has adored one woman all his life, and is now old. Why is she not old, too? Because he is describing the Goddess, rather than the individual woman. Or take Wyatt’s

  They flee from me who sometime did me seek

  With naked foot stalking within my chamber...

  He writes: ‘They flee from me’, rather than ‘She flees from me’: namely, the women who were in turn illumined for Wyatt by the lunar ray that commanded his love – such as Anne Boleyn, later Henry VIII’s unfortunate queen.

  A prophet like Moses, or John the Baptist, or Mohammed, speaks in the name of a male deity, saying: ‘Thus saith the Lord!’ I am no prophet of the White Goddess, and would never presume to say: ‘Thus saith the Goddess!’ A simple loving declaration: ‘None greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess!’ has been made implicitly or explicitly by all true Muse-poets since poetry began.

  Appendix A

  TWO LETTERS TO THE PRESS

  Following publication of the first edition of The White Goddess in 1948, Robert Graves wrote two letters responding to reviews in the weekly press. The first appeared in The Spectator, 25 June 1948 (page 707):

  Sir, – Dr. Glyn E. Daniel, reviewing my White Goddess and misled by its unpedantic style into thinking that I have taken no trouble to check my facts, lists “among the fancies so extravagant and improbable as to cease to be amusing” the following: (1) “That the Danaans are middle Bronze Age Pelasgians.” I did not use the uncritical term “middle Bronze Age” which he ascribes to me, but adopted the perfectly orthodox view that Pelasgians means Sea-People, and the perfectly orthodox identification of the Danuna, who belonged to the sea-federation that invaded Syria about the year 1200 BC, with the Aegean Danaans. Since my book was in print Professor Garstang has published an account in The Times of a newly discovered Danuna city in Asia Minor, with inscriptions in what is thought to be the Canaanitish language, and connects the Danuna (as I do) with Danaus, the eponymous tribal hero of the Danaans who came from Africa by way of Palestine and Rhodes long before the Trojan War.

  (2) “That the Belgae invaded Britain in 400 BC, and that their god was the [Celto-Teutonic] Gwydion [alias Woden, or Odin] and that the ash [Ygdrasill] was sacred to him.” The first of these “fancies” is to be found in almost every modern text-book of British prehistory, though so late a date as 180 BC is sometimes postulated; the second has the weighty authority of Professor Sir John Rhys; the third, Dr. Daniel should have learned in the nursery.

  (3) “That Stonehenge is a sun-temple in cultured Apollonian style.” For this view The Druids, by Mr. T. D. Kendrick, the senior British Museum expert on British pre-history, may be cited.

  (4) “That Stonehenge was the seat of the God Beli.” Beli, or Belinus, was an early British Sun-god, as Dr. Daniel will not have the temerity to deny.

  (5) “That New Grange has Cretan ideograms on it.” I did not say this. I mentioned a single “symbol,” first recorded in Ledwich’s Antiquities of Ireland in 1803, and still visible, carved on one of the stones of the fence around this passage-grave burial, “which suggests a Cretan ideogram and apparently represents a ship with a high prow and stern and a single large sail.” For this information I thanked Mr. Christopher Hawkes, a learned colleague of Mr. Kendrick’s, who took some trouble to get it for me.

  (6) “That Silbury Hill contains a passage-grave decorated with spirals, and is the oracular shrine of the God Bran.” I did not say this. I said that Silbury Hill was the largest artificial mound in Europe and suggested that since it dominated the great Salisbury Plain necropolis it was Britain’s original “Spiral Castle” – which I had elsewhere defined as the oracular grave of the principal cult hero – as New Grange was Ireland’s. I gave my reasons for giving Bran, who has sacral affinities with Cronos, as a title of this cult hero.

  (7) “That Tomen y Mur covers the cist grave of Llew Llaw Gyffes.” Tomen y Mur in Merioneth is a typical kist-vaen burial mound and associated in the Mabinogion with the death of Llew Llaw Gyffes, a hero who was mourned annually at Lammas, the feast which is named after him. Since Celtic Kings often took the name of their tribal gods (e.g. Brennus [Bran] who sacked Rome and the later Brennus who seems to have sacked Delphi), my suggestion is reasonable enough.

  (8) “That there are phallus and scrotum shaped barrows near Avebury.” Let Dr. Daniel look at any large-scale contour map for the two burials near Silbury Hill to which I refer.

  (9) “That there are alphabet dolmens serving as calendars.” I suggested that the Beth-Luis-Nion, the earliest Irish alphabet, was also used as a calendar of the months, and showed that with its letters arranged in the form of a dolmen arch it was bound up with the cult mystery of the ever-reborn God of the Year and his pentad of tutelary goddesses. The argument is too long to be summarised here.

  Dr. Daniel describes my method as “fantastically uncritical,” but I should be sorry to think that even the least orthodox of my chapters contained as many inaccuracies as his brief and petulant review. –

  Yours, &c., ROBERT GRAVES

  Deyà, Mallorca, Spain.

  The second was in The Listener, 23 September 1948 (page 460):

  Sir, – The Listener of August 5 contained a somewhat misleading review of my White Goddess. The reviewer says that ‘this is a poet’s book, not a reviewer’s book’. He explains that I am ‘impatient of the careful accretion of facts’ by scholars and ‘oblivious to [sic] recent academic research’; that I make use of the ‘specious mode of argument adopted by those who read prophecies after the event in pyramids, or who find Bacon’s name concealed in Shakespeare’s sonnets’; and that I discover evidences of my ‘chimera’, the White Goddess, ‘in all the usual dangerous places: in the mists of antiquity, in the Apocalypse…and in the mazes of numerology’.

  Unfair to Graves! It is not at all that sort of book. I have not here concerned myself with ancient prophecies except in so far as they have affected subsequent religious theory; and my argument is perfectly un-Baconian and above-board, though I do, of course, attempt to dispel some of the thicker mists of antiquity. My criticism of scholars is not that they carefully collect facts but that the liaison between different branches of scholarship, for example between mythology, archaeology and theology, is so weak that many of the conclusions separately reached are logically irreconcilable; and that the system of concentrating religious research in University Faculties discourages intellectual honesty and restricts imaginative thinking. My only reference to the Apocalypse is to the ‘Number of the Beast’: I suggest that the scholars’ commonly accepted solution of the 666 cypher, the Graeco-Hebraic Neron Kesar, breaks down on philological grounds (bad liaison again) and that with a little imaginative thought they might have realised that the cypher is not Greek or Hebrew, but Latin – DCLXVI, which should be read as the
titulus or charge-sheet of the Anti-Christ, namely Domitianus Caesar Legatos Xti violenter interfecit. This is the only solution which makes historical sense and fits the context – or has your reviewer anything better to offer?

  Nor do I exploit the bogus science of numerology, though I suggest that the mythical values given to numbers by the Pythagoreans derive from a Pelasgian calendar-cult of the White Goddess; Pythagoras is said to have been a Pelasgian.

  It is not right to describe the White Goddess as a chimera; though the chimera is, I grant, a form of the White Goddess: ‘Lion before, snake behind, in the middle a goat’. In a chapter devoted to Fabulous Beasts I show that this composite monster, which occurs in Hittite sculpture as well as in popular Greek legend, is a pictorial formula derived from an early Carian calendar, in which the Goddess ruled over a three-season year, a beast for each season.

  Though I do not claim to have got her story right in every detail, I have everywhere respected historical facts.

  Yours, etc.,