Authors: Robert Graves
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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
seekWith
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
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., R
OBERT
G
RAVESDey
à,
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.,
R
OBERT
G
RAVESMallorca, Spain
Appendix B
A
Talk
for
the
Y.M.H.A.
Centre,
New
York,
February
9,
1957
Ladies and gentlemen,
I shall tell you frankly how the White Goddess affair started for me, how it continued, and what I really think about it all.
Though a poet by profession, I make my living by writing prose – biographies, historical novels, translations from various languages, critical studies, ordinary novels, and so forth. My home has been in Majorca since 1929. When temporarily exiled because of the Spanish Civil War, I wandered around Europe and the United States; and the World War found me in England, where I stayed until it ended; then I returned to Majorca.
In 1944, at a Devonshire village called Galmpton, I was working against time on a historical novel about the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece, when a sudden overwhelming obsession interrupted me. It took the form of an unsolicited enlightenment on a subject I knew almost nothing of. I stopped marking across my big Admiralty chart of the Black Sea the course which (according to the mythographers) the
Argo
had taken from the Bosphorus to Baku and back. Instead, I began speculating on a mysterious ‘Battle of the Trees’, allegedly fought in pre-historic Britain, and my mind worked at such a furious rate all night, as well as all the next day, that my pen found it difficult to keep pace with the flow of thought.
The obsession resembled one that overtook Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz, the chemist, one day in 1859, when he had a vision of serpents waltzing around, tail to mouth, in a ring. Somehow he
knew
what they meant; so he sat down, and furiously wrote out his ‘closed ring’ theory of the constituents of benzene. This, fortunately for my argument, is everywhere admitted to be the most brilliant piece of prediction – for though Kekule
knew,
he had no proof – in the whole range of organic chemistry. ‘Fortunately’, because I can now mention Kekule (who thought he was going crazy) in self justification. If a chemist may be granted a practical vision, why not a poet? Well, within three weeks, I had
written a 70,000-word book about the ancient Mediterranean Moon-goddess whom Homer invoked in the
Iliad,
and whom one of his sons, or (as some prefer to think) one of his daughters, invoked in the
Odyssey:
and to whom most traditional poets ever since have paid at any rate lip-service.
The other day I came across the manuscript of my book, which has since swelled to four times the original size; and the uncanny excitement that held me throughout those critical weeks flooded back. I had called it
The
Roebuck
in
the
Thicket,
after one of the leading emblems in the Goddess’s cult – a white stag (or roebuck) in Wales, Greece and Ireland, an antelope in Libya; I likened my historical hunt to the chase of that enigmatic beast.
The enlightenment began one morning while I was rereading Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of
The
Mabinogion,
a book of ancient Welsh legends, and came across a hitherto despised minstrel poem called
The
Song
of Taliesin.
I suddenly knew (don’t ask me how) that the lines of the poem, which has always been dismissed as deliberate nonsense, formed a series of early mediaeval riddles, and that I knew the answer to them all – although I was neither a Welsh scholar, nor a mediaevalist, and although many of the lines had been deliberately transposed by the author (or his successors) for security reasons.
I knew also (don’t ask me how) that the answer must in some way be linked with an ancient Welsh poetic tradition of a ‘Battle of Trees’ – mentioned in Lady Charlotte Guest’s notes to
The
Mabinogion
–
which was occasioned by a lapwing, a dog, and a white roebuck from the other world, and won by a certain god who guessed the name of his divine opponent to be Vron, or ‘Alder’. Nobody had ever tried to explain this nonsense. Further, that both these texts would make sense only in the light of ancient Irish religious and poetic tradition. I am not an Irish scholar, either.