Authors: Robert Graves
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Mythology, #Literature, #20th Century, #Britain, #Literary Studies, #Amazon.com, #Mysticism, #Retail
The White Goddess (91 page)
Cooch parwani
Good
time
coming!Queen
VictoriaVery
good
man!Rise
up
earlyIn
the
morning.Britons
never,
neverShall
be
slave….
But Victoria expected the women of England to reverence their husbands as she had reverenced hers and displayed none of the sexual coquetry or interest in love-poetry and scholarship that serve to make a queen into a Muse for poets. Queen Anne and Queen Victoria both gave their names to well-known periods of English poetry, but the name of Queen Anne connotes passionless decorum in writing, and that of Victoria didacticism and rococo ornament.
The British love of Queens does not seem to be based merely on the historical commonplace that ‘Britain is never so prosperous as when a Queen is on the Throne’: it reflects, rather, a stubborn conviction that this is a Mother Country not a Father Land – a peculiarity that the Classical Greeks also noted about Crete – and that the King’s prime function is to be the Queen’s consort. Such national apprehensions or convictions or obsessions are the ultimate source of all religion, myth and poetry, and cannot be eradicated either by conquest or education.
1
This magical tradition survived in the Northern witch-cult. In 1673 Anne Armstrong the Northumbrian witch confessed at her trial to having been temporarily transformed into a mare by her mistress Ann Forster of Stockfield, who threw a bridle over her head and rode her to a meeting of five witch-covens at Riding Mill Bridge End.
1
Insufficient notice has yet been taken of the shape of flint arrow-heads as having a magical rather than a utilitarian origin. The tanged arrow-head of fir-tree shape, for example, needs explanation. It must have been very difficult to knap without breaking off either one of the tangs or the projecting stem between them, and has no obvious advantage in hunting over the simple willow-leaf or elder-leaf types. For though a narrow bronze arrow-head with four tangs cannot be easily drawn out through a wound, because the flesh closes up behind, the broad two-tanged flint one would not be more difficult to draw out than an elder-leaf or willow-leaf one shot into a beast with equal force. The fir-tree shape seems therefore to be magically intended: an appeal to Artemis Elate – Diana the Huntress, Goddess of the Firtree – to direct the aim. The point was probably smeared with a paralysant poison – a ‘merciful shaft’ of the sort with which the Goddess was credited. An Irish fir-tree arrow-head in my possession, taken from an Iron Age burial, cannot have been seriously intended for archery. The chip of white flint from which it has been knapped is awkwardly curved, and it has so large a ‘bulb of percussion’ and so short a stem as to prevent it from being spliced to admit an arrow-shaft: it is clearly for funerary use only.
1
The ancients were well aware of Apollo’s frequent changes of divine function. Cicero in his essay
On
the
Nature
of
the
Gods
distinguishes four Apollos in descending order of antiquity: the son of Hephaestos; the son of the Cretan Corybantes; the Arcadian Apollo who gave Arcadia its laws; and lastly the son of Latona and Zeus. He might have enlarged his list to twenty or thirty.
1
The fourteenth-century Swedish St. Brigid, or Birgit, who founded the Order of St. Brigid was not, of course, the original saint, though some houses of the Order reverted merrily to paganism.
1
The earliest spelling of the Virgin’s name in English is Marian – not Mariam which is the Greek form used in the Gospels.
2
She was the mother of Adonis; hence the Alexandrian grammarian Lycophron calls Byblos ‘The City of Myrrha’.
1
Yorkshire
Archaeological
Journal,
No. 141, 1944
1
This same word ‘morris’, as the prefix to ‘pike’, is first written ‘maris’: so it is likely that the morris-men were Mary’s men, not
moriscoes
or Moorish men, as is usually supposed. The innocent word ‘merry’, though often spelt ‘mary’, has deceived the editors of the
Oxford
English
Dictionary.
They trace it back to an Indo-Germanic root
murgjo
meaning ‘brief’, arguing that when one is merry, time flies; but without much confidence, for they are obliged to admit that
murgjo
does not take this course in any other language.
1
Cunning and art he did not lack
But aye her whistle would fetch him back.
O,
I
shall
go
into
a
hareWith
sorrow
and
sighing
and
mickle
care,And l
shall
go
in
the
Devil’s
nameAye,
till
I
be
fetchèd
hame–
Hare,
take
heed
of
a
bitch
greyhound
Will
harry
thee
all
these
fells
around,
For
here
come
l
in
Our
Lady’
s
name
All
but
for
to
fetch
thee
hame.Cunning and art, etc.
Yet
I
shall
go
into
a
troutWith
sorrow
and
sighing
and
mickle
doubt,And
show
thee
many
a
merry
gameEre
that
I
be
fetchèd
hame.–
Trout,
take
heed
of
an
otter
lank
Will
harry
thee
close
from
bank
to
bank,
For
here
come
I
in
Our
Lady’s
name
All
but
for
to
fetch
thee
hame.Cunning and art, etc.
Yet
I
shall
go
into
a
beeWith
mickle
horror
and
dread
of
thee,And flit
to
hive
in
the
Devil’s
nameEre
that
I
be
fetchèd
hame.–
Bee,
take
heed
of
a
swallow
hen
Will
harry
thee
close,
both
butt
and
ben,
For
here
come
I
in
Our
Lady’s
name
All
but
for
to
fetch
thee
hame.Cunning and art, etc
Yet
I
shall
go
into
a
mouseAnd
haste
me
unto
the
miller’s
house,There
in
his
corn
to
have
good
gameEre
that
I
be
fetchèd
hame.–
Mouse,
take
heed
of
a
white
tib-cat
That
never
was
baulked
of
mouse
or
rat,
For
I’ll
crack
thy
bones
in
Our
Lady’s
name:
Thus
shalt
thou
be
fetchèd
hame.Cunning and art, etc.
1
In the corresponding ancient British mysteries there seems to have been a formula in which the Goddess teasingly promised the initiate who performed a sacred marriage with her that he would not die ‘either on foot or on horseback, on water or on land, on the ground or in the air, outside a house or inside, shod or unshod, clothed or unclothed,’ and then, as a demonstration of her power, manoeuvred him into a position where the promise was no longer valid – as in the legend of Llew Llaw and Blodeuwedd, where a goat figures in the murder scene. Part of the formula survives in the Masonic initiation ritual. The apprentice ‘neither naked nor clothed, barefoot nor shod, deprived of all metals, hood winked, with a cable-tow about his neck is led to the door of the lodge in a halting moving posture.’
1
It is a strange paradox that Milton, though he had been the first Parliamentary author to defend the execution of Charles I and was the Thunder-god’s own Laureate, fell later under the spell of ‘the Northern Muse’, Christina of Sweden, and in his
Second
Defense
of
the
English
People
his flattery of her is not only as extravagant as anything that the Elizabethans wrote about Elizabeth, but seems wholly sincere.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Indian mystics hold that to think with perfect clarity in a religious sense one must first eliminate all physical desire, even the desire to continue living; but this is not at all the case with poetic thinking, since poetry is rooted in love, and love in desire, and desire in hope of continued existence. However, to think with perfect clarity in a poetic sense one must first rid oneself of a great deal of intellectual encumbrance, including all dogmatic doctrinal prepossessions: membership of any political party or religious sect or literary school deforms the poetic sense – as it were, introduces something irrelevant and destructive into the magic circle, drawn with a rowan, hazel or willow rod, within which the poet insulates himself for the poetic act. He must achieve social and spiritual independence at whatever cost, learn to think mythically as well as rationally, and never be surprised at the weirdly azoölogical beasts which walk into the circle; they come to be questioned, not to alarm.