One of the most uncompromising rejections of early Greek mythology was made by Socrates. Myths frightened or offended him; he preferred to turn his back on them and discipline his mind to think scientifically: ‘to investigate the reason of the being of everything – of everything as it is, not as it appears, and to reject all opinions of which no account can be given.’
Here is a typical passage from Plato’s Phaedrus, (Cary’s translation):
Phae. Tell me, Socrates, is not Boreas reported to have carried off Orithya from somewhere about this part of the Ilissus?
Socr. So it is said.
Phae. Must it not have been from this spot? for the water hereabouts appears beautiful, clear and transparent, and well suited for damsels to sport about.
Socr. No, but lower down, as much as two or three stadia, where we cross over to the temple of the Huntress, and where there is, on the very spot, a kind of altar sacred to Boreas.
Phae. I never noticed it. But tell me, by Jupiter, Socrates, do you believe that this fabulous account is true?
Socr. If I disbelieved it, as the wise do, I should not be guilty of any absurdity: then having recourse to subtleties, I should say that a blast of Boreas threw her down from the neighbouring cliffs, as she was sporting with Pharmacea, and that having thus met her death she was said to have been carried off by Boreas, or from Mars’ hill; for there is also another report that she was carried off from thence and not from this spot. But I, for my part, Phaedrus, consider such things as pretty enough, but as the province of a very curious, painstaking, and not very happy man, and for no other reason than that after this he must set us right as to the form of the Hippocentaurs, and then as to that of the Chimaera; besides, there pours in upon him a crowd of similar monsters, Gorgons and Pegasuses, and other monstrous creatures, incredible in number and absurdity, which if anyone were to disbelieve and endeavour to reconcile each with probability, employing for this purpose a kind of vulgar cleverness, he will stand in need of abundant leisure. But I have no leisure at all for such matters; and the cause of it, my friend, is this: I am not yet able, according to the Delphic precept, to know myself. But it appears to me to be ridiculous, while I am still ignorant of this, to busy myself about matters that do not concern me.
The fact was, that by Socrates’ time the sense of most myths belonging to the previous epoch was either forgotten or kept a close religious secret, though they were still preserved pictorially in religious art and still current as fairy-tales from which the poets quoted. When invited to believe in the Chimaera, the horse-centaurs, or the winged horse Pegasus, all of them straightforward Pelasgian cult-symbols, a philosopher felt bound to reject them as a-zoölogical improbabilities; and because he had no notion of the true identity of ‘the nymph Orithya’ or of the history of the ancient Athenian cult of Boreas, he could give only an inept naturalistic explanation of her rape at Mount Ilissus: ‘doubtless she was blown off one of the cliffs hereabouts and met her death at the foot.’
All the problems that Socrates mentions have been faced in this book and solved to my own satisfaction at least; but though ‘a very curious and painstaking person’ I cannot agree that I am any less happy than Socrates was, or that I have more leisure than he had, or that an understanding of the language of myth is irrelevant to self-knowledge. I deduce from the petulant tone of his phrase ‘vulgar cleverness’ that he had spent a long time worrying about the Chimaera, the horse-centaurs and the rest, but that the ‘reasons of their being’ had eluded him because he was no poet and mistrusted poets, and because, as he admitted to Phaedrus, he was a confirmed townsman who seldom visited the countryside: ‘fields and trees will not teach me anything, but men do.’ The study of mythology, as I shall show, is based squarely on tree-lore and seasonal observation of life in the fields.
Socrates, in turning his back on poetic myths, was really turning his back on the Moon-goddess who inspired them and who demanded that man should pay woman spiritual and sexual homage: what is called Platonic love, the philosopher’s escape from the power of the Goddess into intellectual homosexuality, was really Socratic love. He could not plead ignorance: Diotima Mantinice, the Arcadian prophetess who magically arrested the plague at Athens, had reminded him once that man’s love was properly directed towards women and that Moira, Ilithyia and Callone – Death, Birth and Beauty – formed a triad of Goddesses who presided over all acts of generation whatsoever: physical, spiritual or intellectual. In the passage of the Symposium where Plato reports Socrates’ account of Diotima’s wise words, the banquet is interrupted by Alcibiades, who comes in very drunk in search of a beautiful boy called Agathon and finds him reclining next to Socrates. Presently he tells everyone that he himself once encouraged Socrates, who was in love with him, to an act of sodomy from which, however, he philosophically abstained, remaining perfectly satisfied with night-long chaste embraces of his beloved’s beautiful body. Had Diotima been present to hear this she would have made a wry face and spat three times into her bosom: for though the Goddess as Cybele and Ishtar tolerated sodomy even in her own temple-courts, ideal homosexuality was a far more serious moral aberrancy – it was the male intellect trying to make itself spiritually self-sufficient. Her revenge on Socrates – if I may put it this way – for trying to know himself in the Apollonian style instead of leaving the task to a wife or mistress, was characteristic: she found him a shrew for a wife and made him fix his idealistic affections on this same Alcibiades, who disgraced him by growing up vicious, godless, treacherous and selfish – the ruin of Athens. She ended his life with a draught of the white-flowered, mousey-smelling hemlock, a plant sacred to herself as Hecate,1 prescribed him by his fellow-citizens in punishment for his corruption of youth. After his death his disciples made a martyr of him and under their influence myths fell into still greater disrepute, becoming at last the subject of street-corner witticisms or being ‘explained away’ by Euhemerus of Messenia and his successors as corruptions of history. The Euhemerist account of the Actaeon myth, for instance, is that he was an Arcadian gentleman who was so addicted to hunting that the expense of keeping a pack of hounds ate him up.
But even after Alexander the Great had cut the Gordian Knot – an act of far greater moral significance than is generally realized – the ancient language survived purely enough in the secret Mystery-cults of Eleusis, Corinth, Samothrace and elsewhere; and when these were suppressed by the early Christian Emperors it was still taught in the poetic colleges of Ireland and Wales, and in the witch-covens of Western Europe. As a popular religious tradition it all but flickered out at the close of the seventeenth century: and though poetry of a magical quality is still occasionally written, even in industrialized Europe, this always results from an inspired, almost pathological, reversion to the original language – a wild Pentecostal ‘speaking with tongues’ – rather than from a conscientious study of its grammar and vocabulary.
English poetic education should, really, begin not with the Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with the Song of Amergin, an ancient Celtic calendar-alphabet, found in several purposely garbled Irish and Welsh variants, which briefly summarizes the prime poetic myth. I have tentatively restored the text as follows:
I am a stag: of seven tines,
I am a flood: across a plain,
I am a wind: on a deep lake,
I am a tear: the Sun lets fall,
I am a hawk: above the cliff,
I am a thorn: beneath the nail,
I am a wonder: among flowers,
I am a wizard: who but I
Sets the cool head aflame with smoke?
I am a spear: that roars for blood,
I am a salmon: in a pool,
I am a lure: from paradise,
I am a hill: where poets walk,
I am a boar: ruthless and red,
I am a breaker: threatening doom,
I am a tide: that drags to death,
I am an infant: who but I
Pee
ps from the unhewn dolmen arch?
I am the womb: of every holt,
I am the blaze: on every hill,
I am the queen: of every hive,
I am the shield: for every head,
I am the tomb: of every hope.
It is unfortunate that, despite the strong mythical element in Christianity, ‘mythical’ has come to mean ‘fanciful, absurd, unhistorical’; for fancy played a negligible part in the development of the Greek, Latin and Palestinian myths, or of the Celtic myths until the Norman-French trovères worked them up into irresponsible romances of chivalry. They are all grave records of ancient religious customs or events, and reliable enough as history once their language is understood and allowance has been made for errors in transcription, misunderstandings of obsolete ritual, and deliberate changes introduced for moral or political reasons. Some myths of course have survived in a far purer form than others; for example, the Fables of Hyginus, the Library of Apollodorus and the earlier tales of the Welsh Mabinogion make easy reading compared with the deceptively simple chronicles of Genesis, Exodus, Judges and Samuel. Perhaps the greatest difficulty in solving complex mythological problems is that:
Conquering gods their titles take
From the foes they captive make,
and that to know the name of a deity at any given place or period, is far less important than to know the nature of the sacrifices that he or she was then offered. The powers of the gods were continuously being redefined. The Greek god Apollo, for instance, seems to have begun as the Demon of a Mouse-fraternity in pre-Aryan totemistic Europe: he gradually rose in divine rank by force of arms, blackmail and fraud until he became the patron of Music, Poetry and the Arts and finally, in some regions at least, ousted his ‘father’ Zeus from the Sovereignty of the Universe by identifying himself with Belinus the intellectual God of Light. Jehovah, the God of the Jews, has a still more complex history.
‘What is the use or function of poetry nowadays?’ is a question not the less poignant for being defiantly asked by so many stupid people or apologetically answered by so many silly people. The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites. But ‘nowadays’? Function and use remain the same: only the application has changed. This was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of the lady of the house; it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philosophy, science and industry, and brought ruin on himself and his family. ‘Nowadays’ is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonoured. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery; racehorse and greyhound to the betting ring; and the sacred grove to the saw-mill. In which the Moon is despised as a burned-out satellite of the Earth and woman reckoned as ‘auxiliary State personnel’. In which money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth-possessed poet.
Call me, if you like, the fox who has lost his brush; I am nobody’s servant and have chosen to live on the outskirts of a Majorcan mountain-village, Catholic but anti-ecclesiastical, where life is still ruled by the old agricultural cycle. Without my brush, namely my contact with urban civilization, all that I write must read perversely and irrelevantly to such of you as are still geared to the industrial machine, whether directly as workers, managers, traders or advertisers or indirectly as civil servants, publishers, journalists, schoolmasters or employees of a radio corporation. If you are poets, you will realize that acceptance of my historical thesis commits you to a confession of disloyalty which you will be loth to make; you chose your jobs because they promised to provide you with a steady income and leisure to render the Goddess whom you adore valuable part-time service. Who am I, you will ask, to warn you that she demands either whole-time service or none at all? And do I suggest that you should resign your jobs and for want of sufficient capital to set up as small-holders, turn romantic shepherds – as Don Quixote did after his failure to come to terms with the modern world – in remote unmechanized farms? No, my brushlessness debars me from offering any practical suggestion. I dare attempt only a historical statement of the problem; how you come to terms with the Goddess is no concern of mine. I do not even know that you are serious in your poetic profession.
R. G.
Deyá,
Mallorca,
Spain.
1 As Shakespeare knew. See Macbeth, IV, i, 25.
Chapter One
POETS AND GLEEMEN
Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which has sometimes won me the reputation of an eccentric. Prose has been my livelihood, but I have used it as a means of sharpening my sense of the altogether different nature of poetry, and the themes that I choose are always linked in my mind with outstanding poetic problems. At the age of sixty-five I am still amused at the paradox of poetry’s obstinate continuance in the present phase of civilization. Though recognized as a learned profession it is the only one for the study of which no academies are open and in which there is no yardstick, however crude, by which technical proficiency is considered measurable. ‘Poets are born, not made.’ The deduction that one is expected to draw from this is that the nature of poetry is too mysterious to bear examination: is, indeed, a greater mystery even than royalty, since kings can be made as well as born and the quoted utterances of a dead king carry little weight either in the pulpit or the public bar.
The paradox can be explained by the great official prestige that still somehow clings to the name of poet, as it does to the name of king, and by the feeling that poetry, since it defies scientific analysis, must be rooted in some sort of magic, and that magic is disreputable. European poetic lore is, indeed, ultimately based on magical principles, the rudiments of which formed a close religious secret for centuries but which were at last garbled, discredited and forgotten. Now it is only by rare accidents of spiritual regression that poets make their lines magically potent in the ancient sense. Otherwise, the contemporary practice of poem-writing recalls the mediaeval alchemist’s fantastic and foredoomed experiments in transmuting base metal into gold; except that the alchemist did at least recognize pure gold when he saw and handled it. The truth is that only gold ore can be turned into gold; only poetry into poems. This book is about the rediscovery of the lost rudiments, and about the active principles of poetic magic that govern them. My argument will be based on a detailed examination of two extraordinary Welsh minstrel poems of the thirteenth century, in which the clues to this ancient secret are ingeniously concealed.
By way of historical preface, a clear distinction must first be drawn between the court-bards and the wandering minstrels of ancient Wales. The Welsh bards, or master-poets, like the Irish, had a professional tradition, embodied in a corpus of poems which, literally memorized and carefully weighed, they passed on to the pupils who came to study under them. The English poets of to-day, whose language began as a despised late-mediaeval vernacular when Welsh poetry was already a hoary institution, may envy them in retrospect: the young poet was spared the curse of having doubtfully to build up his poetic lore for himself by haphazard reading, consultation with equally doubtful friends, and experimental writing. Latterly, however, it was only in Ireland that a master-poet was expected, or even permitted, to write in an original style. When the Welsh poets were converted to orthodox Christianity and subjected to ecclesiastical discipline – a process completed by the tenth century, as the contemporary Welsh Laws show – their tradition gradually ossified. Though a high degree of technical skill was still required of master-poets and though the Chair of Poetry was hotly contested in the various Courts, they were pledged to avoid what the Church called ‘untruth’, meaning the dangerous exercise of poetic imaginat
ion in myth or allegory. Only certain epithets and metaphors were authorized; themes were similarly restricted, metres fixed, and Cynghanedd, the repetitive use of consonantal sequences with variation of vowels,1 became a burdensome obsession. The master-poets had become court-officials, their first obligation being to praise God, their second to praise the king or prince who had provided a Chair for them at his royal table. Even after the fall of the Welsh princes in the late thirteenth century this barren poetic code was maintained by the family bards in noble houses.
T. Gwynn Jones writes in the Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1913–1914):
The few indications which may be gathered from the works of the bards, down to the fall of the Welsh princes, imply that the system detailed in the Laws was preserved, but probably with progressive modification. The Llyfr Cock Hergest metrical Code shows a still further development, which in the fifteenth century resulted in the Carmarthen Eisteddfod….The subject tradition recorded in this Code, practically restricting the bards to the writing of eulogies and elegies, and excluding the narrative, is proved to have been observed by the Gogynfeirdd [court-bards]. Their adherence to what they conceived to be historical truth was probably due to the early capture of their organization by ecclesiastics. They made practically no use of the traditional material contained in the popular Romances, and their knowledge of the names of mythical and quasi-historical characters was principally derived from the Triads….Nature poetry and love poetry are only incidental in their works, and they show practically no development during the period….References to nature in the poems of the court-bards are brief and casual, and mostly limited to its more rugged aspects – the conflict of sea and strand, the violence of winter storms, the burning of spring growths on the mountains. The characters of their heroes are only indicated in epithets; no incident is completely described; battles are dismissed in a line or two at most. Their theory of poetry, particularly in the eulogy, seems to have been that it should consist of epithets and allusions, resuming the bare facts of history, presumably known to their hearers. They never tell a story; they rarely even give anything approaching a coherent description of a single episode. Such, indeed, has been the character of most Welsh verse, outside the popular ballads, practically down to the present day.