The White Goddess

by Robert Graves

  Well, I shall not repudiate the autobiographical facts of Good-bye To All That; indeed, I am now re-publishing the book. But I should be a triumphant vindication of Freud’s and Jung’s theories only if I did not know exactly what my poems were about – if I had to get them psycho-analysed in order to find out what ailed me. The truth is that I read Freud as long ago as 1917 – critically, too, and found him most unscientific. Freud, indeed, never realized to his dying day that he was projecting a private fantasy on the world, and then making it stick by insisting that his disciples must undergo prolonged psycho-analytic treatment until they surrendered and saw the light. Much the same goes for Jung. My world picture is not a psychological one, nor do I indulge in idle myth-making and award diplomas to my converts. It is enough for me to quote the myths and give them historical sense: tracing a certain ancient faith through its vicissitudes – from when it was paramount, to when it has been driven underground and preserved by witches, travelling minstrels, remote country-folk, and a few secret heretics to the newly established religion. Particularly by the endowed Irish poets and their humble colleagues, the Welsh travelling minstrels – descendants of the poets expelled by the Christian Cymry, and preservers of the pre-Christian Mabinogion myths.

  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 majority of scientists, however, are God-worshippers, if no more than metaphorically and for social convenience. The concept of a goddess was banned by Christian theologians nearly two thousand years ago, and by Jewish theologians long before that. The universities have naturally followed suit; though I can’t make out why a belief in a Father-god’s authorship of the universe, and its laws, should be considered any more scientific than a belief in the inspiration of this artificial system by a mother-goddess. In fact, granted the first metaphor, the second follows logically. If these are no more than metaphors. At all events, the scientists attached to universities continue to respect their theological colleagues. Protestant Doctors of Divinity in particular, who posit the literal existence of an all-powerful God and regard supernatural happenings (many of them scientifically ill-attested) as a proof of His existence. But they would raise their eyebrows at anyone who posited the literal existence of a goddess. Here they are, I admit, on safe political and sociological ground. Except in a few scattered, semi-civilized tribes, such as those of West Africa and Southern India, the Goddess is everywhere refused official recognition; nor are the times propitious for reviving her worship in a civilized world governed (or mis-governed) almost exclusively by the ambitious male intelligence. So when people write to me, as they often do – not only from what is called the ‘Screwy State’, but also from the hinterland of this highly intellectual Empire State – asking me to help them start an all-American Goddess cult, I reply discouragingly. I beg them not to mistake me for a Joseph Smith junior, a Mary Baker Eddy, or that sort of person.

  My task in writing The White Goddess was to provide a grammar of poetic myth for poets, not to plan witches’ Sabbaths, compose litanies and design vestments for a new orgiastic sect, nor yet to preach matriarchy over a radio network. Certainly, I hold that critical notice should be taken of the Goddess, if only because poetry which deeply affects readers – pierces them to the heart, sends shivers down their spine, and makes their scalp crawl – cannot be written by Apollo’s rhetoricians or scientists. Two outstanding scientists of the early nineteenth century – Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the mathematician, and Sir Humphry Davy, the chemist, tried their hands at poetry. Hamilton’s work was ludicrously sentimental; while Davy’s was pompously academic. But I am grateful to Davy for epitomizing the conflict of solar reason and lunar inspiration, in these defiant and egotistical stanzas:

  Like yon proud rock, amidst the sea of time,

  Superior, scorning all the billows’ rage,

  The living Sons of Genius stand sublime,

  The immortal children of another age.

  For those exist, whose pure ethereal minds

  Habiting portions of celestial day

  Scorn all terrestrial cares, all mean designs,

  As bright-eyed eagles scorn the lunar ray…

  [minds and designs, though, are a rather unacademic rhyme.]

  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 internal magic. Since the source of creative power in poetry is not scientific intelligence, but inspiration – however this may be scientifically accounted for – why not attribute inspiration to the Lunar Muse, the oldest and most convenient European term for the source in question?

  Let me be plainer still. It is a commonplace of history that what happens on earth gets reflected in theological dogma. When the Chief Priestess of a matriarchal state has been dethroned by patriarchal invaders, the event becomes recorded in the religious myth – as the Theban Sphinx-goddess is said to have committed suicide on Oedipus’s arrival from Corinth, where a Hittite Sun-cult had taken root; or as Jehovah (according to Isaiah) cut in two with his sword the Sea-serpent Rahab – the ancient Mediterranean Sea-and-Moon-goddess of Palestine whom the Jews banished from Jerusalem. And when a dozen small states, some with patrilinear, some with matrilinear, royal succession, form a federation for mutual convenience, this gets recorded in myth as a heavenly family of gods and goddesses – as happened in Greece during the second millennium BC. We can be pretty sure that the divine feastings which were said to have taken place on Mount Olympus reflected the feastings at Olympia in the Peloponnese – the sacred centre of the Confederation where the various state representatives met under the Zeus-like High King of Mycenae. And if a revolution breaks out within a matrilinear state, such as Athens, and descent is thereafter reckoned through the father, not the mother, the state goddess is said to have been re-born from the Father-god’s head – as happened to Athene at Athens.

  The progress of patriarchy in ancient Greece can be gauged by the fortunes of the divine Olympian family. The Achaean Zeus humbled Hera, the Goddess of Argolis, whom he denied all her former powers but that of prophecy; Athene declared that she was ‘All for the Father’; Apollo pushed his twin Artemis into the shade; Heracles was admitted to Heaven despite Hera’s protests; Hestia the Hearth-goddess vacated her seat on the Council in favour of Dionysus; and Aphrodite had become the butt of obscene jokes by the time The Odyssey was written. Only the Fertility-goddess Demeter kept her dignified position, and even she had to employ a male priesthood at the Eleusinian Mysteries, and allow the demi-god Dionysus his part in them – according to legend, the Athenians who tried to keep him out were ignominiously smitten with piles. These events recorded a steady deterioration in the general position of women – they were pushed out of trade, industry, justice, and local government; and the rise of Platonic philosophy, coupled with the homosexual cult, set them back still further.

  The divine honours presently given to world conquerors – a field in which no woman could compete – made women (always the outraged victims of this royal sport) seem of less account than ever. At last, military need forced the Roman Emperor Constantine to humour his predominantly Christian legionaries and junior officers and let them march behind the Cross. Thereupon the long discredited Olympians were banished for ever (apart from a brief come-back under the Emperor Julian) and superseded by the all-male Christian Trinity. Women then went down in status still further, since Christianity brought with it the Hebrew myth of Adam’s rib and Eve’s apple; and they could not even point to Sappho’s poems and say: ‘Well, at least a woman wrote these!’ – because the Church had been at great pains to hunt out and burn all the copies, on the untenable excuse that Sappho was a Lesbian in more senses than one. But the bottom of the trough had been reached, and women’s social position improved markedly about the eleventh century
AD. This change has been attributed to the abolition of slavery and to the continuous wars that followed the break-down of central government in the West; and particularly to the Crusades, which obliged the warrior-princes and nobles to leave their small and independent estates in the hands of their ladies while they were away. The ladies had to keep accounts, buy and sell, see that the fields were sown and the crops fetched in, watch the work of the castle artisans, manage the brewing, weaving, and other necessary crafts, educate the children, learn to be physicians and surgeons. In earlier days, these matters would have been attended to by a trusty slave or freedman.

  It was in this period (now called the Age of Chivalry) that Romantic poetry began, nourished on the ancient Arthurian myths of Wales and Brittany. King Arthur’s legend is partly historical, partly derived from the pre-Christian myth of the sacrificed King who is taken to the Apple-tree Fairyland by the White Goddess Morgan la Fée. Normans carried the Arthur legend to countries as distant as Scotland, Majorca and Sicily – since when the locals have claimed that King Arthur lies concealed under this hill or that in their own territory, waiting for his eventual resurrection. At the same time, the Virgin Mary, hitherto a dim figure – but for the few heretical sects of the Middle East who had secretly identified her with the dethroned Goddess – suddenly rose in theological esteem. She would have risen still further but for the check she received in certain vigorous male-minded Protestant regions, such as Southern and Eastern England (where the hatred of Mariolatry was a leading cause of the Roundhead Revolution), Eastern Germany, parts of the Low Countries, and New England. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church has given the Virgin many of the attributes that belonged to the ancient Triple Moon-goddess; and she can now legitimately be saluted as ‘the Queen of Heaven’ – the very title borne by Rahab (the Goddess Astarte), against whom the prophet Jeremiah declaimed in the name of his monotheistic Father-god Jehovah.

  While the present technological civilization, which is largely of Protestant impulse, maintains itself, with men holding the key positions in industry, law, trade, medicine, science, and government, the Virgin cannot rise beyond the rank conceded her. But if this system collapses – or if, instead, it reaches the stage of perfect nuclear automation, in which men do not need to work so hard as now to provide and distribute the necessities of life – then social changes may well follow: changes that will obviously be reflected in religious dogma. The new Heaven may house two gods and a goddess; or even, as in pre-Christian Rome, pre-Exilic Jerusalem, and pre-Roman Carthage, two goddesses, one of intuition, one of fertility, aided by a technological male god of the Vulcan type.

  I offer this merely as speculation. Yet the growing popularity of Muse-poets (as opposed to Apollonian poets who glorify male intelligence, male courage, male energy) and the growing mistrust of orthodox Christian dogma among the educated classes throughout the Western World, suggest that such a religious revolution may already be brewing. Meanwhile, in all Christian Churches, the Virgin is allowed no female characteristics which might threaten male supremacy; she is merciful, gentle, pure, patient, obedient – making no parade of wisdom and promoted to motherhood without having loved in ordinary female fashion. If wise, she modestly hides her wisdom, and though her bodily Assumption to Heaven is now dogma at Rome, she has no priestesses to perform her mysteries, but only priests of the triune male God. The Welsh minstrels dared, at one period, to identify the Virgin with their pagan Muse-goddess Caridwen; but this heresy could come to nothing, because Caridwen had been very far from being a nun. In fact, the White Goddess has never been monogamic and has never shown pity for the bad, the ineffective, the sterile, the perverted, the violent, or the diseased: though loving and just, she is ruthless. Her symbol is the double-axe – consisting of two moon-like blades, one crescent, one decrescent, set back to back and fitted with a haft. The crescent blade represents blessing, increase, joy; the decrescent blade represents cursing, plague and sorrow that punish human folly and disorder. The Muse-poets have always recognized these two blades: poetry proper is the constructive side of their profession, satire the destructive side.

  Mr Jarrell accuses me of a sort of schizophrenia in thinking so highly of women and cheerfully accepting the more disagreeable side of their nature, although, as he points out, I have been, in my day, a boxer, a full-back at football, and a fighting soldier. But is that so strange? Was it not the code of mediaeval chivalry, which the troubadour poets extolled in the Virgin’s name, to be a parfit gentle knight: a lion in battle, a lamb in the bower, however cruel one’s mistress? Have British soldiers fought less gloriously when they served under a queen rather than a king – Elizabeth, Anne, Victoria? It is a complete fallacy that the toughest fighter is the cave-man who knocks his women about. The most miraculous victory against odds in Classical times was won by the Epizephyrian Locrians of Calabria against their neighbours of Croton; and these Locrians were then the only people in Europe who still had a matrilineal constitution, with the women politically in the ascendant and a supreme Moon-goddess their sole deity.

  I am aware that the Protestant dogma reflects well enough the sociological set-up of, say, the United States Bible Belt, non-conformist Britain, and the Dutch Reformed Church in Holland and South Africa. Most of the devout Christian women in those Churches are perfectly content with their social position, and therefore with the Virgin Mary as a representative of womankind. They look up to their husbands, give in to them, take motherhood seriously, do not consider themselves the equal (let alone the superiors) of man, restrain their wayward passions, support good causes, neglect their own looks, and do not grudge men their monopoly of the priesthood. They sometimes even take a masochistic delight in being ill-treated, abused and betrayed by extravagantly swaggering he-men, while they pinch and scrape. They are not to be either praised or pitied – that’s how they come. But they cannot appreciate Muse-poetry. For them the Apollonian poet, even the fraudulent rhetorician, or the prosy hymn-writer, suffices. Yet it is a question how far Chaucer’s ‘Patient Griselda’, or Bunyan’s Christiana, or David Copperfield’s wife Agnes, are the results of domestic conditioning; whether they differ in circumstance, rather than in nature, from the numerous predatory women of our own day, born in unhappy homes and soured by the patriarchal system, who enjoy breaking up insecure marriages and making a living from male weakness and credulity.

  Some of you are looking queerly at me. Do I think that poets are literally inspired by the White Goddess? That is an improper question. What would you think, should I ask you if, in your opinion, the Hebrew prophets were literally inspired by God? Whether God is a metaphor or a fact cannot be reasonably argued; let us likewise be discreet on the subject of the Goddess. All we can know for sure is that the Ten Commandments, said to have been promulgated by Moses in the name of a Solar God, still carry religious force for those hereditarily prone to accept them; and that scores of poems written in the Muse-tradition still carry the authentic moon-magic for those hereditarily prone to accept that. Apostles of Solar Reason ‘scorning the lunar ray’ may reject such poems as idle or nonsensical; but respectable anthropologists (and anthropologists are scientists) now give de facto if not de jure recognition to all sorts of crazy deities, male and female – such as the Voodoo deities of Haiti (some of African origin; others renegade Catholic saints) – whose invocation causes ecstatic behaviour in their worshippers and produces if not miraculous, at least inexplicable, phenomena.

  By ancient religious theory the White Goddess becomes incarnate in her human representative – a priestess, a prophetess, a queen-mother. No Muse-poet can grow conscious of the Muse except by experience of some woman in whom the Muse-power is to some degree or other resident; just as no Apollonian poet can perform his function properly unless under a monarchy or a quasi-monarchy. (Under a republic he tends to turn seedy and philosophical.) A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse. In many cases the power of absolutely falling in love soon vanish
es; if only because the woman takes no trouble to preserve whatever glory she gets from the knowledge of her beauty and the power she exercises over her poet-lover. She grows embarrassed by this glory, repudiates it, and ends up either as a housewife or a tramp; he, in disillusion, turns to Apollo who, at any rate, can provide him with a livelihood and intelligent entertainment – and goes out of circulation before his middle twenties. But the real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet makes a distinction between the Goddess as revealed in the supreme power, glory, wisdom and love of woman, and the individual woman in whom the Goddess may take up residence for a month, a year, seven years, or even longer. The Goddess abides; and it may be that he will again have knowledge of her through his experience of another woman.

  Mr Jarrell, having read my autobiography, concludes that when the woman in whom the Goddess was once resident for me abdicated, I identified myself for all intents and purposes with the Goddess. He writes, very naughtily: ‘There is only one Goddess, and Graves is her prophet, and isn’t the prophet of the White Goddess the nearest thing to the White Goddess?’

  I flatly deny that, even though Mr Jarrell claims to have found general confirmation of his theory ‘in Volume Seven of Jung’s Collected Works – the second part of the essay entitled “The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious”.’ No, my autobiography was written nearly thirty years ago, and much has happened to me since, as he might well have deduced from my later poems. Being in love does not, and should not, blind the poet to the cruel side of woman’s nature – the decrescent axe-head – and many Muse-poems are written in helpless recognition of this by men whose love is no longer returned.