Feminism, Poetic Myth, and Alternative Culture:
An Homage to The White Goddess
by Nowick Gray
Since the seventies I have always perceived feminism as
a necessary political medicine, to correct certain male
predominances that were cultural and historical; administered
by strident women justly frustrated by such oppression,
and abetted by sympathetic if outnumbered males in the name
of good democratic values like liberty, equality, and, if
you'll pardon the expression, fraternity. My understanding
of the breadth of myth was once defined by Joseph Campbell's
Hero with a Thousand Faces; my appreciation of poetry
slowly gleaned over academic years and subsequent candlelit
visions in the wilderness; my knowledge of history spottily
gained through a patchwork of courses, random readings,
and dimly-configured folk wisdom. Now, after fifty years
in a "modern" age on a rapidly denatured planet,
I have run across a once-famous and now probably neglected
book that has completely rewritten my understanding of feminism,
history, mythology, poetics, religion, and human culture.
Robert Graves wrote The White Goddess: A Historical
Grammar of Poetic Myth in 1948. In its Foreword
he sums up its central thesis and offers a challenge to
the anti-poetic society which was sure to offer it a less-than
complete embrace. He warns readers
that this remains a very difficult book, as well as
a very queer one, to be avoided by anyone with a distracted,
tired, or rigidly scientific mind....My thesis is that
the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean
and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with
popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess,
or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age [before
10,000 B.C], and that this remains the language of true
poetry--"true" in the nostalgic modern sense
of 'the unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute.'
The language was tampered with in late Minoan times [1500-1000
B.C] when invaders from Central Asia began to substitute
patrilinear for matrilinear institutions and remodel or
falsify the myths to justify the social changes. Then
came the early Greek philosophers who were strongly opposed
to magical poetry as threatening their new religion of
logic, and under their influence a rational poetic language
(now called the Classical) was elaborated in honour of
their patron Apollo and imposed on the world as the last
word in spiritual illumination: a view that has prevailed
practically ever since in European schools and universities,
where myths are now studied only as quaint relics of the
nursery age of mankind.
More on this later. Graves turns his attention to the area
of this vast subject that is closest to his heart: the function
of poetry.
The function of poetry is religious invocation of the
Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and
horror that her presence excites....This was once a warning
to man [Might it be said that truly man and not woman
has always been most in need of the warning?] 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.
Strong words, earned by incredibly rich research and personal
mastery of and devotion to the craft. Is there any need
to delineate the various strands Graves holds to view in
the light of what we might today call "Alternative
Culture"? To mention a few in passing: the ecological,
environmental battles fought for the sacred beauty and
power of the old growth forests; a continued redevelopment
of natural
economies such as organic farming and permaculture;
a revival of natural healing
methods that earned former practitioners death at the stake;
a new respect for tribal and
aboriginal peoples and cultures, languages and mythological
traditions; an appreciation of a multiplicity of musical
roots rich in resonance with timeless
rhythms that are primal-cosmic in their universality;
a new spiritual liberty
that values the core principles of conventional religions
above their superimposed trappings, and brings insights
from ancient, mystical and oracular wisdom teachings into
play in the fabric of our everyday lives.
Graves is by no means a conventional thinker in any of
the fields he overturns: he reverts with unflagging persistence
to the original wisdom humanity discovered in its birth
from unconscious nature. This alternative world-view is
not simply obsolete, archaic, primitive, or irrelevant.
It has merely been buried, suppressed, burned, conquered,
displaced, censored, transfigured, co-opted, and consigned
to the depths where yet it refuses to die: in the unconscious
images of dreams, in folk traditions the world over, in
the sacred mythopoetic craft, in natural subsistence economies,
in our instinctive connection to the natural cycles from
which we cannot divorce ourselves, however much certain
forces of civilization might like us to try, so that instead
we should be forced to pay our homage and material bounty
to them.
To elaborate on the story of how this current state of
affairs came about (Graves, 387 ff) while summarizing the
evolution of the central poetic myth...
In Europe there were at first no male gods contemporary
with the Goddess to challenge her prestige or power, but
she had a lover who was alternatively the beneficent Serpent
of Wisdom, and the beneficent Star of Life, her son. The
Son was incarnate in the male demons of the various totem
societies ruled by her, who assisted in the erotic dances
held in her honour. The Serpent, incarnate in the sacred
serpents which were the ghosts of the dead, sent the winds.
The Son, who was also called the Lucifer or Phosphorus
("bringer of light") because as evening-star
he led in the light of the Moon, was reborn every year,
grew up as the year advanced, destroyed the Serpent, and
won the Goddess's love. Her love destroyed him, but from
his ashes was born another Serpent which, at Easter, laid
the glain or red egg which she ate; so that the
Son was reborn to her as a child once more. Osiris was
a Star-son, and though after his death he looped himself
around the world like a serpent, yet when his fifty-yard
long phallus was carried in procession it was topped with
a golden star; this stood for himself renewed as the Child
Horus, son of Isis, who had been both his bride and his
layer-out and was now his mother once again. Her absolute
power was proved by a yearly holocaust in her honour as
"Lady of the Wild Things," in which the totem
bird or beast of each society was burned alive.
The most familiar icon of Aegean religion is therefore
a Moon-woman, a Star-son and a wise spotted Serpent grouped
under a fruit-tree--Artemis, Hercules and Erechtheus.
Star-son and Serpent are at war; one succeeds the other
in the Moon-woman's favour, as summer succeeds winter,
and winter succeeds summer; as death succeeds birth and
birth succeeds death. The Sun grows weaker or stronger
as the year takes its course, the branches of the tree
are now loaded and now bare, but the light of the Moon
is invariable. She is impartial: she destroys or creates
with equal passion....
There are as yet no fathers, for the Serpent is no more
the father of the Star-son than the Star-son is of the
Serpent. They are twins, and here we are returned to the
single poetic Theme. The poet identifies himself with
the Star-son, his hated rival is the Serpent; only if
he is writing as a satirist, does he play the Serpent.
The Triple Muse is woman in her divine character: the
poet's enchantress, the only theme of his songs. It must
not be forgotten that Apollo himself was once a yearly
victim of the Serpent: for Pythagoras carved an inscription
on his tomb at Delphi, recording his death in a fight
with the local python--the python which he was usually
supposed to have killed outright. The Star-son and the
Serpent are still mere demons, and in Crete the Goddess
is not even pictured with a divine child in her arms.
She is the mother of all things; her sons and lovers partake
of the sacred essence only by her grace.
The revolutionary institution of fatherhood, imported
into Europe from the East, brought with it the institution
of individual marriage. Hitherto there had been only group
marriages of all female members of a particular totem
society with all members of another; every child's maternity
was certain, but its paternity debatable and irrelevant.
Once this revolution had occurred, the social status of
woman altered: man took over many of the sacred practices
from which his sex had debarred him, and finally declared
himself head of the household, though much property still
passed from mother to daughter. This second stage, the
Olympian stage, necessitated a change in mythology. It
was not enough to introduce the concept of fatherhood
into the ordinary myth, as in the Orphic formula quoted
by Clement of Alexandria, "The Bull that is the Serpent's
father, the Serpent that is the Bull's." A new child
was needed who should supersede both the Star-son and
the Serpent. He was celebrated by poets as the Thunder-child,
or the Axe-child, or the Hammer-child. There are different
legends as to how he removed his enemies. Either he borrowed
the golden sickle of the Moon-woman, his mother, and castrated
the Star-son; or he flung him down from a mountain top;
or he stunned him with his axe so that he fell into perpetual
sleep. The Serpent he usually killed outright. Then he
became the Father-god, or Thunder-god, married his mother
and begot his divine sons and daughters on her. The daughters
were really limited versions of herself--herself in various
young-moon and full-moon aspects. In her old-moon aspect
she became her own mother, or grandmother, or sister,
and the sons were limited revivals of the destroyed Star-son
and Serpent. Among these sons was a God of poetry, music,
the arts and the sciences: he was eventually recognized
as the Sun-god and acted in many countries as active regent
for his senescent father, the Thunder-god. In some cases
he even displaced him. The Greeks and the Romans had reached
this religious stage by the time that Christianity began.
The third stage of cultural development--the purely patriarchal,
in which there are no Goddesses at all--is that of later
Judaism, Judaic Christianity, Mohammedanism and Protestant
Christianity. This stage was not reached in England until
the Commonwealth, since in medieval Catholicism the Virgin
and Son--who took over the rites and honours of the Moon-woman
and her Star-son--were of greater religious importance
than God the Father. (The Serpent had become the Devil;
which was appropriate because Jesus had opposed fish to
serpent in Matthew, VII, 10, and was himself symbolized
as a fish by his followers.) The Welsh worshipped virgin
and Son for fifty years longer than the English; the Irish
of Eire still do so. This [patriarchal] stage is unfavourable
to poetry. Hymns addressed to the Thunder-God, however
lavishly they may gild him in Sun-god style--even Skelton's
magnificent Hymn to God the Father--fail as poems,
because to credit him with illimitable and unrestrained
power denies the poet's inalienable allegiance to the
Muse; and because though the Thunder-god has been a jurist,
logician, declamator and prose-stylist, he has never been
a poet or had the least understanding of true poems since
he escaped from his Mother's tutelage.
Graves's erudite analysis leaves until too late the pregnant
question in this reader's mind--What is the role of the
woman poet, if the man's is but to sing her praises?
Hazarding a guess somewhere around page 400, it seems to
me likely that, like the Goddess Natura herself, a woman
as "true poet" would dispense graces and favors,
rich samplings and tastes from her bounteous sources and
stores, laughing innocently and mockingly by turns like
a brook now warmly lambent, now icy--singing to herself
or her creation (which amount to the same) in her own inimitably
beautiful and haunting voice.
Graves comes to the pithy point himself on page 446, pronouncing
emphatically that "woman is not a poet: she is either
a Muse or she is nothing." Leaving aside the fury that
this categorical presumption is sure to invoke in women
listeners, we can make room for expansion on the point:
"This is not to say that a woman should refrain from
writing poems; only, that she should write as a woman, not
as if she were an honorary man...she should be the Muse
in a complete sense: she should be in turn Arianrhod, Bodeuwedd
and the Old Sow of Maenawr Penardd who eats her farrow,
and should write in each of these capacities with antique
authority. She should be the visible moon: impartial, loving,
severe, wise." Graves can be forgiven these prescriptive
"shoulds" in the light of his observation of poetry
by the women of his day, that it had the false ring of imitation
of male poets.
Graves bases his sense of poetic rightness and obligation
not on personal or simply male authority, but on an impression
of the weak and tawdry spirit of our civilization, of the
loss of our connection with a sustaining Nature, and the
knowledge of an earlier culture which honored the organic
bonds between society, nature and spirit, and between man
and woman. In such times, he writes, "The poet was
originally the mystes, or ecstatic devotee of the
Muse; the women who took part in her rites were her representatives,
like the nine dancers in the Cogul cave-painting, or the
nine women who warmed the cauldron of Cerridwen with their
breaths in Gwion's Preiddeu Annwm. Poetry in its
archaic setting, in fact, was either the moral and religious
law laid down for man by the nine-fold Muse, or the ecstatic
utterance of man in furtherance of this law and in glorification
of the Muse."
Where does this leave us in our ever-contemporary search
for harmonious relationship between the sexes? Again, the
mythic dimensions of archaic poetry remind us of the age-old
organic bonds, rooted in natural forces and cycles. Graves
puts it succinctly: "The main theme of poetry, is,
properly, the relations of man and woman." The poet,
as an emblematic man, is blessed and afflicted with one
certain destiny in service to the Muse. "For him there
is no other woman but Cerridwen and he desires one thing
above all else in the world: her love. As Blodeuwedd, she
will gladly give him her love, but at only one price: his
life."
In a modern relationship we can supply our own symbolism
in the fleshing out of this truth; in primitive times the
rite is most extreme, as is Graves's uncompromising edict
(448): "No poet can hope to understand the nature of
poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified
to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from
the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the
measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly forward,
with a monotonous chant of: 'Kill! kill! kill!' and 'Blood!
blood! blood!"
To avoid such a fate the man today will denounce or turn
away from poetry (as from the Nature that demands, in one
way or another, such annual sacrifice) and settle for a
mutually compromising domestic truce. Similarly, "the
woman whom he took to be a Muse, or who was a Muse, turns
into a domestic woman"--and like her agreeable mate,
succumbs to the urbanizing temptation "to commit suicide
in simple domesticity" instead of in orgiastic frenzy.
This bleak judgment, however, is only the shadow side of
a sensible and forgivable human fate: "If she makes
him a good wife, why should he cherish the poetic obsession
to his own ruin? Again, if a woman-poet can get a healthy
child in exchange for the gift of poetry, why not?"
A sense of humor, adds Graves, may yet save the day and
put us in harmony with Truth and with each other.
But a grimmer fate remains for an entire civilization bent
on a one-way divorce from the Goddess and her ravaged Creation.
A radical religious change is necessary to restore the balance,
but is ever more unlikely as it bucks the trend of public
preference (481-82):
The Mother-and-Son myth is so closely linked with the
natural year and its cycle of ever-recurring observed
events in the vegetable and animal queendoms that it makes
little emotional appeal to the confirmed townsman, who
is informed of the passage of the seasons only by the
fluctuations of his gas and electricity bills or by the
weight of his underclothes. He is chivalrous to women
but thinks only in prose; the one variety of religion
acceptable to him is a logical, ethical, highly abstract
sort which appeals to his intellectual pride and sense
of detachment from wild nature. The Goddess is no townswoman:
she is the Lady of the Wild Things, haunting the wooded
hill-tops--Venus Cluacina, "she who purifies with
myrtle," not Venus Cloacina, "Patroness of the
Sewage System," as she first became at Rome; and
though the townsman has now begun to insist that built-up
areas should have a limit, and to discuss decentralization
(the decanting of the big towns into small, independent
communities, well spaced out), his intention is only to
urbanize the country, not to ruralize the town....No:
there seems no escape from our difficulties until the
industrial system breaks down for some reason or other
[Y3K, anyone?], as it nearly did in Europe during the
Second World War, and nature reasserts herself with grass
and trees among the ruins.
Neither Jehovah nor samadhi will save us, Graves asserts,
in the forced absence of the Goddess. The ascetic and intellectual
religious philosophies deny us the Goddess's blessings but
not her ultimate vengeance at being scorned and forgotten
too long. "The longer her hour is postponed, and therefore
the more exhausted by man's irreligious improvidence the
natural resources of the soil and sea become, the less merciful
will her five-fold mask be, and the narrower the scope of
action that she grants to whichever demi-god she chooses
to take as her temporary consort in godhead. Let us placate
her in advance by assuming the cannibalistic worst"
(486).
Thus the poet, of the fate of men like wayward frogs, sings:
At dawn you shall appear,
A gaunt,
red-wattled crane,
She whom they know too well for fear,
Lunging your beak down like a spear
To fetch
them home again.
© 2000 Nowick Gray
Order The
White Goddess from Amazon.com
Further
Reading...
Maya Cosmogenesis
2012 is in many ways a New World companion to The
White Goddess. This is another impressive scholarly feat
of research that makes sense of a wealth of archeological,
linguistic, historical, astronomical, linguistic and mythological
evidence. Its central theory concerns the Mayan calendar,
explaining its prophetic power in the light of the whole
history of peoples in the Americas, against the cosmic
backdrop of the precession of the equinoxes.
The History of the World
- an exploratory essay examining the current of history
with an outlook to the future, in the light of the trend
toward liberal democracy as shown in Fukuyama's The
End of History and the Last Man.
Ishmael
- the best selling novel by Daniel Quinn which contrasts
the world view of the Old Stone Age (the "Leavers")
with the destructive changes instituted by the "Takers"
who have taken over the planet.
Untold Genesis - poetry by
Paul Gagnon -
"the girl picks up a stone the size of her
fist and hurls it at the sky where it
splits the horizon in half.
...
the girl decides to name herself god.
