The White Goddess (94 page)

The Sirens are the Birds of Rhiannon who sang at Harlech in the myth of Bran.

But if the visitant to the magic circle is the old Nightmare…What follows is a poem, of which I will give the prose rendering:

If the visitant is the Nightmare, the poet will recognize her by the following signs. She will appear as a small mettlesome mare, not more than thirteen hands high, of the breed familiar from the Elgin marbles: cream-coloured, clean-limbed, with a long head, bluish eye, flowing mane and tail. Her nine-fold will be nine fillies closely resembling her, except that their hooves are of ordinary shape, whereas hers are divided into five toes like those of Julius Caesar’s charger. Around her neck hangs a shining poitrel of the sort known to archaeologists as
lunula
,
or little moon: a thin disc of Wicklow gold cut in crescent shape with the horns expanded and turned on edge, fastened together behind her arching neck with a braid of scarlet and white linen. As Gwion says of her in a passage from his
Song
of
the
Horses
‚
1
which had been included by mistake in the
Câd
Goddeu
(lines
206–209), and which is intended for the mouth of the White Goddess herself:

Her speed when she sets her ears back is indeed wonderful; no tall thoroughbred on earth can long keep her pace – proof of which is the pitiable condition in which hag-ridden horses used to be found at cockcrow in the stables from which they had been stolen for a midnight frolic – in a muck-sweat, panting like bellows, with bleeding sides and foam on their lips, nearly foundered.

Let the poet address her as Rhiannon, ‘Great Queen’, and avoid the discourtesy of Odin and St. Swithold, greeting her with as much affectionate respect as, say, Kemp Owyne showed the Laidley Worm in the ballad. She will respond with a sweet complaisance and take him the round of her nests.

One question I should myself like to ask her is a personal one: whether she ever offered herself as a human sacrifice to herself. I think her only answer would be a smiling shake of her head, meaning ‘not really’, for instances of the ritual murder of women are rare in European myth and most of them apparently refer to the desecration of the Goddess’s shrines by the Achaean invaders. That there were bloody massacres and rapes of priestesses is shown in the Tirynthian Hercules’s battles with the Amazons, with Hera herself (he wounded her in the breast), and with the nine-headed Hydra, a beast portrayed on Greek vases as a giant squid with heads at the end of each tentacle. As often as he cut off the Hydra’s heads they grew again, until he used fire to sear the stumps: in other words, Achaean attacks on the shrines, each of nine armed orgiastic priestesses, were ineffective until the sacred groves were burned down.
Hydrias
means a water-priestess with a
hydria
,
or ritual water-pot; and the squid was a fish which appears in works of art dedicated to the Goddess not only in Minoan Crete but in Breton sculptures of the Bronze Age.

Tales of princesses sacrificed for religious reasons, like Iphigeneia or Jephthah’s daughter, refer to the subsequent patriarchal era; and the fate supposedly intended for Andromeda, Hesionë, and all other princesses rescued by heroes in the nick of time, is probably due to iconotropic error. The princess is not the intended victim of the sea-serpent or wild beast; she is chained naked to the sea-cliff by Bel, Marduk, Perseus or Hercules after he has overcome the monster which is her emanation. Yet the taboo on the death of a priestess may have been lifted, in theory, on certain rare occasions; for example, at the close of every
saeculum
,
of 100 or 110 years, which was when the Carmenta priestess ended her life, according to
Dionysius Periergetes, and the calendar was revised.

The German folk-stories of
Sleeping
Beauty
and
Snow
White
seem to refer to this type of death. In the first story twelve wise women are invited to the princess’s birthday; eleven shower her with blessings, a thirteenth, called Held, who had not been invited because there were only twelve gold plates at the palace, curses her with death from a spindle-prick in her fifteenth year. The twelfth, however, converts this death into a century-long trance; from which the hero rescues her with a kiss after bursting through a terrible hedge of thorn, in which others have perished, the thorns turning into roses as he goes. Held is the Nordic counterpart of Hera; from whose name the word
hero
is derived, just as
held
means ‘hero’ in German. The thirteenth month is the death-month, ruled over by the Three Fates, or Spinners, so it must have been a yew spindle. Fifteen, as has been shown, is a number of completeness: three times five.

In the
Snow
White
story a jealous stepmother, the Goddess’s elder aspect, tries to murder a young princess. First she is taken off into the woods to be killed, but the huntsman brings back the lung and liver of a young wild boar instead; and so, according to one account, a doe was substituted for Iphigeneia at Aulis. Then the stepmother, who darkens her face to show that she is the Death-goddess, uses a constrictive girdle, a poisoned comb and, finally, a poisoned apple; and Snow White is laid as if dead in a glass coffin on top of a wooded hill; but presently is rescued by the prince. The seven dwarfs, her attendants, workers in precious metals who save her from the first attempts on her life and recall the Telchins, stand perhaps for the seven sacred trees of the grove, or the seven heavenly bodies. The glass coffin is the familiar glass-castle where heroes go to be entertained by the Goddess of Life-in-Death, and the comb, glass, girdle and apple which figure in the story are her well-known properties; the owl, raven and dove, who mourn for her, are her sacred birds. These deaths are therefore mock-deaths only – for the Goddess is plainly immortal – and are staged, perhaps during the period of intercalated days or hours at the end of the sacred
saeculum
,
with the sacrifice of a young pig or doe; but then the annual drama is resumed, with the amorous prince chafing, as usual, at the ascetic restrictions of the Hawthorn, but free to do as he pleases in the Oak-month, the month of the hedge-rose, when his bride consents to open her half-closed eyes and smile.

Poetry – meaning the aggregate of instances from which the idea of poetry is deduced by every new poet – has been increasingly enlarged for many centuries. The instances are as numerous, varied and contradictory as instances of love; but just as ‘love’ is a word of powerful enough magic to make the true lover forget all its baser and falser usages, so is ‘poetry’ for the true poet.

Originally, the poet was the leader of a totem-society of religious dancers. His verses –
versus
is a Latin word corresponding to the Greek
strophe
and means ‘a turning’ – were danced around an altar or in a sacred enclosure and each verse started a new turn or movement in the dance. The word ‘ballad’ has the same origin: it is a dance poem, from the Latin
ballare
,
to dance. All the totem-societies in ancient Europe were under the dominion of the Great Goddess, the Lady of the Wild Things; dances were seasonal and fitted into an annual pattern from which gradually emerges the single grand theme of poetry: the life, death and resurrection of the Spirit of the Year, the Goddess’s son and lover.

At this point it will be asked: ‘Then is Christianity a suitable religion for the poet? And if not, is there any alternative?’

Europe has been officially Christian for the past sixteen hundred years, and though the three main branches of the Catholic Church are disunited all claim to derive their divine mandate from Jesus as God. This seems, on the face of it, most unfair to Jesus who made clear disavowals of deity: ‘Why callest thou me good? None is good except the Father’, and ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ They have also renounced obedience to the Mosaic Law, as refined by Hillel and his fellow-Pharisees, which Jesus considered essential for salvation and, while retaining the Pharisaic ethical code, have incorporated into Christianity all the old pagan festivals commemorative of the Theme and worship Jesus as the ‘Incarnate Word of God’ in the pre-Christian Gnostic sense, and as the Sun of Righteousness – the crucified Man-god of prehistoric paganism.

Yet though Jesus denied the Theme by his unswerving loyalty to the only contemporary God who had cast off all association with goddesses, and by declaring war on the Female and all her works, the Christian cult can in great part be historically justified. Jesus came of royal stock, was secretly crowned King of Israel with the antique formula, preserved in the Second Psalm, that made him a titular Son of the Sun-god, and concluded that he was the destined Messiah. At the Last Supper, in the attempt to fulfil a paradoxical prophecy of Zechariah, he offered himself as a eucharistic sacrifice for his people, and ordered Judas to hasten the preparations for his death. In the event he was crucified like a harvest Tammuz, not transfixed with a sword as the Messiah was fated to be; and since Jehovah’s curse on a crucified man debarred him from participation in the Hebrew after-world, there is no reason why he should not now be worshipped as a Gentile god; and indeed many poets and saints, unaware of his uncompromising Judaism, have worshipped him as if he were another Tammuz, Dionysus, Zagreus, Orpheus, Hercules or Osiris.

ACHAIFA, OSSA, OURANIA, HESUCHIA and IACHEMA – the five seasonal stations through which the Spirit of the Year passed in the cult of Canopic Hercules – could be expressed in the formula:

This saying, quoted by Clement of Alexandria from the
Gospel
According
to
the
Hebrews
,
seems to be an adaptation of this formula to the needs of the Christian mystic:

Since the mystic, by being made one with the solar Jesus at the Sacrament, shared his triumph over death, the fifth station was excused him; Jesus was equated with HESUCHIA (repose), the fourth station when trees cast their leaves and rest until the first stirrings of Spring. It is likely that a formula conveyed by the mystagogues to pre-Christian initiates of Hercules went something like this: