ROBERT GRAVES
Mallorca, Spain
Appendix B
THE WHITE GODDESS
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.
Since there has never been any lunatic streak in my family, I could not believe that I was going crazy. More likely, I was just being inspired. So I decided to check up on the subject with the help of a shelf-ful of learned books on Celtic literature which I found in my father’s library (mainly inherited from my grandfather, an Irish antiquarian) but which I had never read.
To cut a long story short, my answer to the riddle, namely the letter-names of an ancient Druidic alphabet, fitted the not-so-nonsensical Song of Taliesin with almost frightening exactitude; and The Battle of the Trees proved to be a not-so-nonsensical way of describing a struggle between two rival priesthoods in Celtic Britain for control of the national learning. You see, I had found out that the word ‘trees’ means ‘learning’ in all the Celtic languages; and since the alphabet is the basis of all learning, and since (as I remembered from Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars) the Druidic alphabet was a jealously guarded secret in Gaul and Britain – indeed, its eighteen letter-names were not divulged for nearly a thousand years – well, the possession of this secret must have been something worth struggling about. I had also found out that the alphabet in Caesar’s day was called the Boibel-Loth, because it began with the letters B.L.; and that as a result of the Battle of the Trees, the Boibel-Loth had displaced an earlier, very similar, and equally secret Celtic alphabet, the Beth-Luis-Nion, whose eighteen letters were explained as referring to a sequence of forest trees – including the Alder. This sequence, I found, served a dual purpose: as an alphabet and as a sacred calendar – the tree-consonants standing for the months of which their trees were characteristic; the tree-vowels standing for quarterly stations of the Sun, its equinoxes and solstices. It is a calendar which can be proved, by a study of the festal use of trees throughout Europe, to have been observed in the Bronze Age (and earlier) from Palestine to Ireland, and to have been associated everywhere with the worship of the pre-Aryan Triple Moon-goddess – sometimes called Leucothea, the White Goddess.
Then I found that the eighteen-letter Celtic tree-alphabet could, for various reasons, be regarded as a Celtic counterpart of the eighteen-letter Greek Orphic alphabet, associated with moving trees; the Orphic alphabet is known to have preceded the Classical Greek alphabet, the characters of which betray its Phoenician origin. Also, I found that the Triple Moon-goddess Brigit, or Bride, of ancient Ireland and Scotland (patroness of poetry, smithcraft and medicine) whose counterpart in Wales was the powerful Ninefold Muse-goddess Caridwen, could be identified with the Triple (or Ninefold) Muse-goddess of Greece; and again with the Italian Goddess Carmenta (who is said to have invented the Latin alphabet); and with the Nine Scandinavian Norns, who dispensed their runes under the World Tree Yggdrasil. All these cults seemed to have been basically the same.
My conclusions have not been condemned at universities; but then neither have they been approved. Scholars blush and turn their heads away when they are mooted. Of course, this should have been a subject for wide and deep research by university teams of specialists; and to show that I was merely a single, ignorant poet, I did not write in scholarly language, nor even provide an apparatus criticus. But I had at least marked out a new field of investigation, in case any university folk might one day feel inclined to exploit it. All that has happened so far is that dozens of intelligent strangers – students in Celtic literature, in botany, arboriculture, archaeology, anthropology, and so forth, but none of them holding university chairs – have helped me to amend and enlarge the book; and that I have incorporated their findings in the latest edition.
Don’t mistake this for a grievance. Poets neither compete with professional scholars, nor do they solicit sympathy from them. Granted, I seem to have stumbled on the central secret of neolithic and Bronze Age religious faith, which makes sense of many otherwise inexplicable myths and religious customs; but this discovery is not essential to my central theme – namely the persistent survival of this faith among what are loosely called ‘romantic poets’. Their imagery, I have shown, is drawn either consciously or unconsciously from the cult of the White Goddess, and the magic their poems exert largely depends on its closeness to her mysteries.
The most important single fact in the early history of Western religion and sociology was undoubtedly the gradual suppression of the Lunar Mother-goddess’s inspiratory cult, and its supersession not by the perfunctory cult of a Sky-god, the god of illiterate cattle-raising Aryan immigrants, but by the busy, rational cult of the Solar God Apollo, who rejected the Orphic tree-alphabet in favour of the commercial Phoenician alphabet – the familiar ABC – and initiated European literature and science. It is no secret that, towards the end of the second millennium BC, Apollo’s people captured the Moon-goddess’s most revered shrines and oracles, including Tempe, Delphi and Delos; and so limited her worship that the great raging Ninefold Mountain-mother of Parnassus was at last converted into a choir, or ballet, or troupe, of nine tame little Nymphs, ‘the Muses’, with Apollo as their art-director and manager. Apollo also triumphed over the Italian Goddesses Minerva and Carmenta, when the Romans went all Greek under the late Republic.
Much the same thing happened elsewhere among other European nations. Early in the sixth century AD, certain muscular Christians from Strathclyde marched south into Wales, and dispossessed the Muse-goddess Caridwen, who had hitherto been served there by highly educated poet-magicians: supplanting these with untrained scalds and hymn-writers. In Ireland, Christianity also triumphed, but only as the result of slow, peaceful penetration, not of war; and the ancient poetic traditions, closely allied with those of the ancient Welsh, survived until mediaeval times outside the English settlements. Brigit, the Goddess of Poetry, who may be the same as the Greek Goddess Brizo of Delos (there were strong cultural connexions between Bronze Age Greece and Ireland) became Christianized as St Bridget, and her ancient fire still burned at Kildare until the reign of King Henry VIII.
This general view led me to differentiate between Muse poetry and Apollonian poetry: written respectively by those who rely on inspiration, checked by commonsense, and those who rely on intellectual verse decorated by the artificial flowers of fancy. Before pursuing this subject, I must make four rather odd disclosures.
Now, I am no mystic: I studiously avoid witchcraft, spiritualism, yoga, fortune-telling, automatic writing, and so on. I live a simple, normal, rustic life with my wife, my children, and a wide circle of sane and intelligent friends. I belong to no religious cult, no secret society, no philosophical sect; but I do value my historical intuition, which I trust up to the point where it can be factually checked. There’s nothing so strange about that, surely?
Every good businessman in the service of the mercantile god Hermes knows what a ‘hunch’ is, and will always explore its possibilities with statistical care. Moreover, every great mathematic or scientific discovery has begun as pure hunch: substantiated later by careful calculation.
I have told you about the sudden obsession that overcame me at Galmpton. The fact is, while working on my Argonaut book, I found the figure of the White Goddess of Pelion growing daily more powerful, until she dominated the story. Listen to this: I had in my work-room several small brass objects from the Gold Coast – bought from a dealer in London – gold-dust weights, mostly in the shape of animals, among them a hump-backed man playing a flute. I also had a small brass box, with a lid, originally used (so the dealer told me) to contain the gold-dust itself. I kept the humpback seated on the box. In fact, he is still seated on the same box; but I knew nothing about him, or about the design on the box-lid, until ten years later. Then I learned that the humpback represented a herald in the service of the Queen-mother of an Akan State, probably Asante; and that every Akan Queen-mother (there are some still reigning today) claims to be a direct incarnation of the Triple Moon-goddess Ngame. The design on the box-lid is a spiral connected by a single line to the rectangular frame enclosing it – the frame having nine teeth on either side – and means: ‘There is none greater – in the world – than the Triple Goddess Ngame.’ These gold weights and the boxes for containing the gold dust were made before the British conquest of the Gold Coast, by craftsmen subservient to the Goddess, and regarded as highly magical.
Very well: put it down to coincidence. Deny that there was any connexion at all between the hump-backed herald on the box (proclaiming the magnitude of the Triple Moon-goddess of West Africa and surrounded by brass animals representing Akan clan totems) and myself, who suddenly became obsessed by the White Goddess of Europe, wrote of her clan totems in the Argonaut context, and now had thrust upon me ancient secrets belonging to her cult in Wales, Ireland and elsewhere. Please, believe me: I was wholly unaware that the box celebrated the Goddess Ngame. Or that the Helladic Greeks, including the early 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 shared all her attributes with the White Goddess of Greece and Western Europe. I knew only that, according to Herodotus, the Greek Athene was the same goddess as Libyan Neith.
A second disclosure. I completed The White Goddess in 1946, when I returned to Majorca soon after the War, and there 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, my next-door neighbour – a German-Jewish antiquary – had meanwhile passed away and bequeathed me five or six more gold weights of the same provenience. These included a small, mummy-like figurine with one large eye. It has now been identified by experts on West African art as the Akan King’s okrafo priest. I had suggested in my book that the King in primitive Mediterranean society was, to begin with, merely the ruling Queen’s handsome young consort, and doomed to be sacrificed at the end of his term. But, by early historical times (to judge from Greek and Latin myths) he had won executive power as the Queen’s representative, or King, and the privilege of sacrificing a substitute. The same governmental change, I have since learned, took place among the matriarchal Akan, after their southern migration. In Bono, Asante, and other states similarly constituted, the King’s victim was called the ‘okrafo priest’. This particular gold weight happened to be early and unique; the famous Danish expert on African native art, Kjersmeier, who has handled ten thousand gold weights, tells me that he never saw another like it. Dismiss it as a coincidence, if you like, that the okrafo figurine lay beside the herald on the gold box, while I was writing about the Goddess’s victims.
A third disclosure. After The White Goddess had been written, a friend in Barcelona, who knew nothing about the book, asked me to choose myself a gem for a seal-ring, from a collection of Roman gems he had bought. Among them I found a stranger – a banded carnelian seal of the Greek Argonaut period – and the design was a royal stag with a moon on its flank, galloping towards a thicket! It is now set in the ring which I am wearing today. Dismiss that as a coincidence, too, if you like.
This reminds me of a cross-examination by Sir Edward Marshall Hall, the celebrated K.C., of a witness in a London murder trial:
MARSHALL HALL: What would you call it if you were walking along a street one Monday morning, and as you passed a certain house a brick fell on your head?
WITNESS: I should call it an accident.
MARSHALL HALL: Very well. And if you walked along the same street on the Tuesday, at the same time of day, and as you passed the same house another brick fell on your head? What would you call that?
WITNESS: I should call it a coincidence.
MARSHALL HALL: Very well. But if it happened a third time? You walked along the same street on the Wednesday, at the same time of day, and as you passed the same house a third brick fell on your head. What would you call that?
WITNESS: I should call it a habit.
Chains of more than coincidence happen so often in my life that if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, I must call them a habit. Not that I like the word ‘supernatural’; I find these happenings natural enough, however superlatively unscient
ific. The avowed purpose of science is to banish all lunar superstitions and bask in the pure light of solar reason. Superstitions are magical beliefs which (as the word conveys) survive from some banned faith – being so deeply rooted that to challenge them gives one a most uncomfortable feeling. Usually, the new faith incorporates old superstitions in its religious dogma. I think it is foolish to defy any superstition unless one feels very strongly about either its inconvenience or its irrationality – like a Scottish atheist I knew, who had suffered so much from a rigidly Puritan upbringing that he would strop his razor every morning on the leather-bound family Bible. Myself, I wouldn’t do that for a thousand dollars. Also I hate sitting down thirteen to table. The Church refers this superstition to the Last Supper, as a result of which Judas, the thirteenth guest, hanged himself; but it is far older than that. In fact, it refers to the ancient British calendar-alphabet where the tree of the thirteenth month, the tree of death, with its ragged leaves and corpse-like smell was the Elder – the elder on which, according to British mediaeval legend, Judas hanged himself (though, of course, elders do not grow in Palestine). Nor do I ever fail to bow to the new moon, disregarding the scientific presumption that the moon is merely a dead satellite of Earth; for the moon moves the tides, influences growth, rules the festal calendar of Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and possesses other unaccountable magic properties, known to every lover and poet.
Let me get this straight. Mr Randall Jarrell, the American poet accredited this year to the Library of Congress, has generously declared that I write good poems; but holds that what I say about the White Goddess is grotesque nonsense, a personal fantasy of my own. If he had said that my poems were bad, I should not contradict him, because everyone is entitled to his likes and dislikes and, anyway, no poem is absolutely good. Yet I venture to suggest that, despite my superstitions (inherited from an Irish father) and despite my habit of noting more-than-coincidences, Mr Jarrell cannot accuse me of inventing the White Goddess, or any facts about her worship in ancient days. He views me as a triumphant vindication of Freud’s and Jung’s psychological theories; and bases his analysis on Good-bye To All That, an autobiography which I wrote twenty-eight years ago. ‘Few poets have made better pathological sense,’ he reports – adding that my world picture is a projection of my unconscious on the universe.