The White Goddess (77 page)

For it has already been shown that the Battle of the Trees was fought between the White Goddess (‘the woman’) for whose love the god of the waxing year and of the waning year were rivals, and ‘the man’, Immortal Apollo, or Beli, who challenged her power. In other words, the sacred name IEVOA, or JIEVOAO its enlargement, revealed by Amathaon to Gwydion and used as a means of routing Bran, was the name of the Fivefold
Goddess Danu. This was a name in which Bran could claim to speak oracularly from her kingdom of Dis, as one who had had intimate experience of each of her five persons – by being born to her, initiated by her, becoming her lover, being lulled to sleep by her, and finally killed by her. The new name of eight letters which replaced it was Beli-Apollo’s own, not shared with the White Goddess, and it was therefore conveniently forgotten by later mythographers that the original one belonged to Bran, or Q’re, or Iahu, only by virtue of his birth, marriage and death under female auspices. Professor Sturtevant, expert on the Hittites, translates Q’re as
Karimni
which means merely ‘to the god’; but, as Mr. E. M. Parr points out, El is both the common word for ‘god’ in Syria and a proper name for the oak-god El. He holds that other forms of this same word are Horus, or Qouros, a god of the island of Thera – the Semitic form of Horus is Churu. The identity of Q’re is confused by the Gods Nergal and Marduk having also assumed the name (Qaru): Marduk’s Amorites called him Gish Qaru, ‘Q’re of trees and herbs’, to identify him with Nergal, the God of Tuesday on which trees and herbs were first created.

Little Gwion forced himself on me pleasantly but importunately, as children do, at a time when I was too busy with another book to think of anything else. He refused to be shaken off, though I protested that I had not the least intention of breaking into the field of bardic myth and no scholarly equipment for doing so. Despite my present appearance of easy familiarity with Celtic literature I could not at the time have answered a single question in the
Hanes
Taliesin
puzzle (which at first sight recalled the ‘lovely riddle – all in poetry – all about fishes’ that the White Queen asked Alice at the final banquet in Looking-Glass Land) if I had not known most of the answers beforehand by poetic intuition. Really, all that I needed to do was to verify them textually; and though I had no more than one or two of the necessary books in my very small library the rest were soon sent, unasked for, by poet friends or tumbled down into my hands from the shelves of a second-hand sea-side bookshop. I drafted this whole volume at about one-half of its present length, in six weeks, then returned to the other book; but spent six years polishing the draft.

The train of coincidences that made my task possible was of a sort familiar to poets. What after all does ‘coincidence’ mean? What did it mean to Euclid? It meant, for example, that if in certain circumstances you applied the triangle Alpha-Beta-Gamma to the triangle Delta-Epsilon-Zeta then Gamma and Zeta would be more or less identically situated. Similarly, since I knew in advance the answers to Gwion’s riddles, this presupposed the necessary book-knowledge as extant and accessible and therefore the books subsequently coincided with my needs. Zeta and Gamma gently kissed, and I could dress up in reasonable form an arrangement of thought arrived at by unreason.

One day William Rowan Hamilton, whose portrait occurs on the centenary stamps of Eire issued in 1943, was crossing Phoenix Park in Dublin, when the foreknowledge came to him of an order of mathematics, which he called ‘quaternions’, so far in advance of contemporary mathematic development that the gap has only recently been bridged by a long succession
of intervening mathematicians. All outstanding mathematicians have this power of making a prodigious mental leap into the dark and landing firmly on both feet. Clerk Maxwell is the best known case, and he gave away the secret of his unscientific methods of thought by being such a poor accountant: he could arrive at the correct formula but had to rely on his colleagues to justify the result by pedestrian calculation.

Most outstanding physicians diagnose the nature of a disease by the same means, though afterwards they may justify their diagnoses by a logical examination of the symptoms. In fact, it is not too much to say that all original discoveries and inventions and musical and poetical compositions are the result of proleptic thought – the anticipation, by means of a suspension of time, of a result that could not have been arrived at by inductive reasoning – and of what may be called analeptic thought, the recovery of lost events by the same suspension.

This need mean no more than that time, though a most useful convention of thought, has no greater intrinsic value than, say, money. To think in temporal terms is a very complicated and unnatural way of thinking, too; many children master foreign languages and mathematic theory long before they have developed any sense of time or accepted the easily disproved thesis that cause precedes effect.

I wrote about the Muse some years ago in a poem: 

Poets will be able to confirm this from their own experience. And because since I wrote this poem J. W. Dunne’s
Experiment
with
Time
has prosaicized the notion that time is not the stable moving-staircase that prose men have for centuries pretended it to be, but an unaccountable wibble-wobble, the prose men too will easily see what I am driving at. In the poetic act, time is suspended and details of future experience often become incorporated in the poem, as they do in dreams. This explains why the first Muse of the Greek triad was named Mnemosyne, ‘Memory’: one can have memory of the future as well as of the past. Memory of the future is usually called instinct in animals, intuition in human beings.

An obvious difference between poems and dreams is that in poems one is (or should be) in critical control of the situation; in dreams one is a paranoiac, a mere spectator of mythographic event. But in poems as in dreams there is a suspension of temporal criteria; and when the Irish poets wrote
of enchanted islands where three hundred years went by as if they were a day, and put these islands under the sovereignty of the Muse, they were defining this suspension. The sudden shock of a return to the familiar temporal mode of thought is typified in the myths by the breaking of the saddle girth when the young hero rides back home on a visit from the Island. His foot touches the ground and the charm is broken: ‘then the troubles of old age and sickness fell suddenly upon him.’

A sense of the equivocal nature of time is constantly with poets, rules out hope or anxiety about the future, concentrates interest detachedly in the present. I wrote about this with proleptic detail in 1934, in a poem ‘The Fallen Tower of Siloam’, which began: 

But an interesting feature of prolepsis and analepsis is that the coincidence of the concept and the reality is never quite exact: Gamma coincides with Zeta, but not so closely that either loses its identity. The coincidence is as close, you may say, as between the notes B natural and C flat which, for economy’s sake, are given only a single string on a pianoforte: they have slightly different vibration lengths, but only a remarkably true ear can distinguish one from the other. Or, as close as between the values 22/7 and
pi
: if you wish to calculate, say, how much binding you will need for the bottom of a bell-tent three yards in diameter, 22/7
will be an adequate formula.

In September 1943, when I could not stop my mind from running all day and all night in chase of the Roebuck, so rapidly that my pen could not keep up with it, I tried to preserve a critical detachment. I said to myself: ‘I am not particularly enjoying this jaunt. I am not greatly interested in the strange country through which my broom-stick mind is flying me, and not at all sure whether I should trouble to chart it.’ Then I addressed myself schizophrenically: ‘I’ll tell you what, Robert. I’ll propound a simple, well-known, hitherto unsolved riddle and if you can make sense of that, very well, I’ll pay attention to your other discoveries.’