ALSO BY ROBERT GRAVES
I, Claud,ius THE WHITE Cottnt Belisarius GODDESS King Jesus
Poems ry.78*x,14-S A HISTORICAL GRAMMAR Complate Short Stories (Edited by Lucia Graves) OF POETIC MYTH lmiluilil!rilillillulilllilfifiilililliilllilllllllrilllllllltllllllllltllllllllllllltllllllllllllllllllllillllll
GRAK
EDITED BY CREVEL LINDOP
FARRAR, STRAUS AND CIROUX I NEW YORK Farrar, Straus and Giroux CONTENTS 18 West 18th Street, Ncrv ytrrk l00ll
(irpr right !' l9+8, I9-i2 b,v llrrbcrt (jr.rrrcs (lopl,riuht tC) I 997 bi.'l'hc'l \.ustccs r ( j.rrsr ol' hc Ilobcrr i r.:rves'l Editorial lrrtrodr-rction vii Introrluction antl ctlitoriel rnalcr.ill copr,rig-ht r!.r I()97 b.l (ir.cvcl l,intloir A I I rights rescrr ccl The White Goddess I l)rirrtctl in the Llrrircd Strrrcs ot..,\nrcrit.ir 'ln Dedication' 3 Origin;rllv publishcrl irr l1)-lli bl l,'rrhcr ;rrrtl l,irber. l.irrrirr:tl. (ir.cirt llrirrin Foreword 5 Seconcl ctlition publishcrl in l9-lli br I,rrbcl.rurtl l,'rbcr l,irrritctl. (ircrrr li.irrin 'l'hird t. Poets and Gleemen t3 crlition, rrrtrcntlctl irntl cnlirrscrl, Publisht.tl in 1952 lrr il. The Battle of the Trees 23 lr;rllt:r.irnd l,irlrcr. l,inritcd, ( ireirt IJritrrin III, Dog, RoebLrck and Lapwing 44 l'irulth cclitiolr, ctlitctl [.r (ir.crcl Lirrrllp, ltufiisIctl i1 l(/(]7 lrr The White Coddess 55 (.lrc;rncl l)rcss. ( ircrrl llrir,rin Gwion's Riddle 70 l)ublishcti irr tht L,rritcti Slrrlt.s b1 liilr.rilt., Strilus rrrrtl (iirotrr 'l'his A Visit to Spiral Castle 93 prrlrcrlrrrt.L ctlitiolt, 201.1 VII. Cwiorr's Riddle Solved 108 vil t. Hercules on the LotLrs ll8 I -ibrary ol' (irngrcss ( iat irkrginr i n-[)ublicut ion I )irt rr IX. Cwion's Heresy 135 Gravcs, l{obctr, 189-5 l9lJ5. '['hc The Tree Alphabet flJ 160 r,vhitc goclclcss : ir historicirl gt.tlt.lrnill.ol tnvth (iravcs ltoctic / llol)(,rl ; xt. The Tree Alphabet r84 editcd bt (ircvel Lintkrp. [2) xil. The Song of Amergin 200 pages crrl X III. Pel;nredes ind the Crarres 217 Inclurlcs intlcx. X IV. The RoebLrck in the Thicket 238 ISIJN 97lJ-.0 .j7.1-2tt9.1:i-l (pbk ) xv, The Seven Pillars 25t l. Poclr\. 2. It.r tholog.-r,. .3. \\'clsh porrr.r Ilistor,r rrrrtl criricisnr. xv t. The Holy Unspeakable Name of Cod 264 I. I-intlop, (irocl, l()4ll 11. 'l'irlc. xv il. The Lion with the Steady Hand 293
PNl077 .Gi 2013 xvt I l. The Bull-iooted Cod 305 ll09.l--dc2i x tx. The Number of the Beast 333 201.1022013 xx. A Conversation at P.rphos - 43 ao 340 xxt. The Waters of Styx 355 li:trrrrr, Stlrrrrs (iiroLrr ;rntl lrooks rrrrrr bc prrrch:rsctl {irr etltrcrt iorrrrl. hrrsirrcss xxil. The Tr-iple Muse 374 or pronrolionrrl usr. lior xxilt. Fabulous Beasts irrlirrnrrrtiolr on lttrll, lrrrrcitrrst.s, ltlcirsc cortlrrt:l 400 thc Mitcr-nillrrn ( iorltorirtc lrrtl l)rcrrrirrrrr Srrlrs I)c;trl.trtrcnl rrl xxlv. The Single Poetic Theme +13 I l't00.221 79{5. crrcns on 5-[-]2, or u rirc ro XXV. War in Heaven 433
sPccirrimrr rkct s(rr nracnr i llir rr.conr. XXVI. Return of the Coddess +55 xx vt t. Postscript 1960 479 wtvw.fs!lbooks.com www.trvitter.com/fsgbooks . u,lvrv.firccbook.com/fsgbooks Appendix A: Two Letters to the Press 485 Appendix B: The White Goddess:A Talk 489 13579108(r4Z Index 505 .l r The Battlc ol t lrt' l t t't r 'l'hc White Goddess l' ' lrr" several sin-riltr tttt'tllers l)l l)rr( ( The Book of Taliesin contains llr rrl r.lt rrrtrr csl irtg sequence can be built up from lines 29-32, 3G37 butonc that rnust rltit rttrtrl rwaltlng resurrection: a most interesting task, arll,'ll,'ll translated' The work that I hale the texts are estatrlished and properll. final I nl{Jirent bards pretend, done here is not offered as in anY sense 'l'he! preteild a monsffous beast, l{ith a hundred heads, CAP GoPoEu A spotted crested snabe, 'The Battle of the Trees'
A toad haaing on his thighs The toPs ofthe beech tree A hund.red claps, Hai,e sprouted of late' With a golden jeoel set in gold ,4re changed and reneoed I am enriched: From thcir withered state' And indulged in pleosure Il/hen the beech ProsPers, By the oppressioe toil of the gold,smith. Though sPells and litanies Since Gwion identifies himself with these bards, they are, I think, The oak tol)s entangle, described as 'indifferent' by way of irony. The hundred-headed $erpent Therc is hoPe for trees' watching over the iewelled Garden of the Hesperides, and the hundred- hat'e the Jirn, clawed toad wearing a precious in his head (mentioned by I Plunderil iewel 'l'hrrtugh ull setrtts I sP.1'' Shakespeare's Duke Senior) both belonged to the ancient toadstool Muth aP,Mathonwl' mysteries, of which Gwion seems to have been an adept. The European )td Knerp no more thuil I' mysteries are less fully explored than their Mexican counterpart; but Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Wasson and Professor Roger Heim have shown that the I"or Plth nine sorts off'tcultY pre-Columbian Toadstool-god Tlal6c, represented as a toad with a Cod has g{ted ne' serpent head-dress, has for thousands ofyears presided at the communal I am fruit o.['frurts guthered eating of the hallucigenic toadstool psilocybe: a feast that gives visions of Front nint srlrls oJ'trrc ' transcendental beauty. European shares Tlal6c's counterpart, Dionysus, mulberr-Y' P lwn, quin c e, n h ttrt le, too many of his mythical attributes for coincidence: they must be versions Rasr,hff1t, of the same deity; though at what period the cultural contact took place Pear, Black cher4' and Phite between the Old World and the New is debatable. IVith the sorh in me share' In my foreword to a revised edition of The Creek Myths,I suggest that a secret Dionysiac mushroom cult was borrowed from the native From mY seat at FetYnedd' Pelasgians by the Achaeans of Argos. Dionysus's Centaurs, Satyrs and -4 ,:itt' that ,s strong' Maenads, it seems, ritually ate a spotted toadstool called 'fly-cap' (amanita I nutcied the trees and green things muscaria), which gave them enormous muscular strength, erotic power, Hastening along' delirious visions, and the gift of prophecl'. Partakers in the Eleusinian, ating haPPiness Orphic and other mysteries may also have known the panaeolus papil- Re tre from TheY Pould fain be set ionaceus, a small dung-mushroom still used by Portuguese witches, and Infoims of the chief letters similar in effect to mescalin. In lines 23+237, Gwion implies that a single Of thc alPhabet' gem can enlarge itself under the influence of'the toad' or 'the serpent' into a whole treasury of iewels. His claim to be as learned as Math and to Wavfarers wondered, know myriads of secrets may also belong to the toad-serpent sequence; at liorriors oere dismaY ed any rate, psilocybe gives a sense of universal illumination, as I can attest At renePal of con/licts from my own experience of it. 'The light whose name is Splendour' may Such as GoYdion made; refer to this brilliance ofvision, rather than to the Sun. I ,, tl I lrc White Goddess The White Goddess 59 I . rrnurr rn,lr r rlrr.rr s.rt.rctl king Cheiron welcomed Achaean aid against 1400, which ended Cretan sea-power. The reduction of Crete, by now tlr, rr r rrr rrrrr r tlrr. l.uprths, ,Cheir"oni of Northern Thessaly. The word is become largely Greek-speaking, resulted in a great expansion of .r;r1r1s1111f rorrrrt't.lcd .Centaurs, 1 with the Greek cheir, a hand, and with Mycenaean power: conquests in Asia Minor, Phoenicia, Libya and the ,,,tttttrt..r grral. lnmyessay L/hat FoodtheCentatrsAte,Isugglestthatthey Aegean islands. About the year 1250 sc a distinction arose between the ilrrrrrrr.:rtcd themselves .fly_cap' by eating (amanifa iiscaia), fhe Achaean Danaans and other less civilized Achaeans from North-western lrrrrrrlrcd,clawed toad, an example of which appears, carved on an Greece who invaded the Peloponnese, founded a new patriarchal dynasty, l.truscan mirror, at the feet of their ancestor Ixion. Were the repudiated the sovereignty of the Great Goddess, and instituted the l{ecatontocheiroi the Centaurs of mountainous Magnesia, *hose f.i"nd_ familiar Olympian pantheon, ruled over by Zeus, in which gods and ship was straregically necessary to the Achacan pastoralists of Thessaly goddesses were equally represented. Myths of Zeus's quarrels with his and Boeotia? The Centaurs, mother goddess was called, in Greek, wife Hera (a name of the Great Goddess), with his brother Poseidon, and Leucothea, 'the White Goddess,, but the Centaurs themselves called her with Apollo of Delphi, suggest that the religious revolution was at first Ino or-Plastene, and her rock-cut image is still shown near the.r,.i.r, strongly resisted by the Danaans and Pelasgians. But a united Greece pinnacle-town of T'antalus; .mother, she had" also become the of captured Troy, at the entrance to the Dardanelles, a city which had taken Melicertes, or Hercules Melkarth, the god o{. earlier semi_Semitic toll of their commerce with the Black Sea and the East. A generation after invaders. the fall of Troy, another Indo-European horde pressed down into Asia The Greeks claimed to remember rhe date of Zeus's victory in alliance Minor and Europe - among them the Dorians who invaded Greece, with the Hecatontocheiroi over the,I-itans of Thessaly: the r"eit_info.mea killing, sacking and burning and a Etreat tide of fugitives was let loose in Tatian quotes a calculation - by the Iirst_cenrury AD hisiorian f.f,rttrr,, itli all directions. it took place 322yearsbefori the ren_year siege of Troy. Since,t. i"ii Thus we may, without historical qualms, identify Danu of the Tuatha 1'roy was then confidently dated at I l"g3 rc, tte answer is 1505 sc. If this"f d6 Danaan, who were Bronze Age Pelasgians expelled from Greece in the date is more or less accurate, the legend profably refers to rn .*t.nrion of middle of the second millennium, with the pre-Achaean Goddess DanaC Achaean power in Thessaly pelasgian at the-expense of t.;U"., *ho *.i. of Argos. Her power extended to Thessaly, and she mothered the early driven off to rhe north. The story of ihe Gigantomachia, the fight of ihe Achaean dynasty called the House of Perseus (more correctly Pterseus, Olympian gods wirh rhe gianrs, piobably."drr,o a similar bur much later 'the destroyer'); but by Homer's time Danad was masculinized into occasion, when the Greeks found it ,,.".rrr.y to subdue the warlike 'Danaus, son of'Belus', who was said to have brought his'daughters'to Magnesians in their fasrnesses pelion _ of and Ossa apparenrly because of Greece from Libya by way of Egypt, Syria and Rhodes. The names of the trouble. caused by their exogamic practices which conflicted with thc three daughters, Linda, Cameira and Ialysa, are evidently titles of the Olympian patriarchal theory and gave them an undeservea ,.put.tioo., Goddess, who also figures as 'Lamia, daughter of Belus, a Libyan Qreen'. sexual maniacs; it also records -- Hercules's charm against tfr" In the well-known legend of the massacre of the sons of Aegyptus on their The Achaeans became "igl,i;".;. Cretanized between the seventleenth and wedding night the number of these daughters of Dandus, or Danaids, is fifteenth centuries in the Late Minoan Age, which in Greece is call;d th; enlarged from three to fifty, probably because that was the regular number M.v.:T:, ?fr:. the capitat Jity or the Atreus av"""r Cir. of priestesses in the Argive and Elian colleges of the Mother-goddess cult. Aeolran[[:T:r: Ureeks invaded Thessaly lrom the north and were further able to The original Danaans may well have come up to the Aegean from Lake occupy Boeotia and the peloponnese. ,.fhey Western settled down Tritonis in Libya (now a salt marsh), try the route given in the legend, amicably with the Achaean Danaans and became krro*n as ,fr. Uiry"rr. though it is unlikely that they were so called until they reached Syria. It is likely that both nations part took in tt e sack of Cnorror .b.ri ;t;;;;; That the Cottians, who came to Northern Greece from the Black Sea by way of Phrygia and Thrace, were also reckoned as Danaans, proves that I Theltus gives the earliest hisrorical record ofthe Crucifixion. they arrived there before the Aeolians, who were not so reckoned. A. B. 2 Burn in his .irlrzo aas, philktines l^^R and Gzals suggests that all traditional dates before Cook in his Zeus gives strong reasons for believing that the 500 sc should be reduced to five_sixths of tf,.i, airi""i.. f.o_ thar date, since the Greeks Graeco-Libyans and the Thraco-Phrygians were related, and that both reckoned three generations to a cenrury, when four would be nearer ,f," i".i. ifr*"".r, tribal groups had relatives among the early Cretans. Walter [,eafapproves of I 183 sc as rhe date oftn. f,.tt oif.oy, because the curse ofone thousand yeers We may further identify Danu with the Mother-goddess of the Aegean that hrd fallen on rhe ci-ry of Ajax in puni.i_"* f* f.,ir."p" oi,i" fro;"n priestcss Gssandra was lifted people year 1200 to contempo- about lgi ,a. tfr" a"r. r.* favoured Uy _*t 'Danuna', a who about the sc, according gists is 1230 uc. "r.f,".o,fo_ rary Egyptian inscriptions, invaded Northern Syria in company with the r78 The White Goddess The Tree Alphabcr ( I ) I lrl the berries are Christ's blood. In North Wales as a child I was warned countries to the Arctic Circle; but under a lir or pirrc sotrtlru,rr,l lrorrr rnerely- that they were poisonous. In Devonshire the taboo is only on Greece and Palestine to the Equator. In the North it is scarlct, irr rlrr. eating .the blackberries after the last day of September, when Devil enters South, fox-coloured. And does this explain the precedence glivcn ro rlrc into them'; which substantiates my theory that the blackberry was a silver-fir among the vowels as A, and the birch among the consonants as popular substitute for Muin in the West Country.) The vine was r"cred to B? Does it add a further note to 'Christ son of Alpha'? thc Thracian Dionysus, and to Osiris, and a golden vine was one of the (The rivalry mentioned in mediaeval English carols between holly and principal ornamenrs of the Temple of Jerusalem. It is the tree of joy, ivy is not, as one might expect, between the tree of murder and the tree of exhilaration and wrath. The monrh extends from September 2nj io resurrection, between Typhon-Set and Dionysus-Osiris; instead it repre- September 29th and includes the autumn equinox. sents the domestic war of the sexes. The explanation seems to be that in parts of England the last harvest sheaf to be carted in any parish was G FOR GORT bound around with Osirian ivy and called the Harvest Mav, the Harvesr Bride, or the Ivy Girl: whichever farmer was latest u'ith his harvesting was The eleventh tree is the ivy in its flowering season. October was the season given the Ivy Girl as his penalty, an omen of ill luck until the following of the Bacchanal revels of Thrace and Thessaly in which the intoxicated year. Thus the ivy came to mean a carline, or shrewish wife, a simile Bassarids rushed wildly about on the mountaini, waving the fir_branches confirmed by the strangling r:f trees bv iv1.Ilut ivy and holly were both of. Queen Artemis (or Ariadne) spirally wreathed with ivy _ the associated with the Saturnalia, holly being Saturn's club, ivy being the yellow-berried sort * in honour of Dionysus (the autumnal Dionysus, nest of the Gold Crcst Wren, his bird; on Yule nrorning, the last of his who musr be distinguished from the Dionysus of the Winter Solstice who merry reig;n, the first foot over the threshold had to be that of Saturn's is really a Hercules), and with a roebuck tattooed on their right arms above representative, a dark man, called the Holly Boy, and elaborate precau- thc elbow. They tore fawns, kids, children and even men ro pieces in their tions were taken to keep women out of the way. Thus Ivy Girl and Holly ecstasy. The ivy was sacred to Osiris as well as to Dionysus. Vine and ivv Boy became opposed; which gave rise to the Yule custom in which 'h =