The White Goddess (107 page)

It must be explained that the word
lex
, ‘law’, began with the sense of a ‘chosen word’, or magical pronouncement, and that, like
lictor,
it was later given a false derivation from
ligar
e.
Law in Rome grew out of religion: occasional pronouncements developed proverbial force and became legal principles. But as soon as religion in its primitive sense is interpreted as social obligation and defined by tabulated laws – as soon as Apollo the Organizer, God of Science, usurps the power of his Mother the Goddess of inspired truth, wisdom and poetry, and tries to bind her devotees by laws – inspired magic goes, and what remains is theology, ecclesiastical ritual, and negatively ethical behaviour.

If, therefore, it is wished to avoid disharmony, dullness and oppression in all social (and all literary) contexts, each problem must be regarded as unique, to be settled by right choice based on instinctive good principle, not by reference to a code or summary of precedents; and, granted that the only way out of our political troubles is a return to religion, this must somehow be freed of its theological accretions. Positive right choosing based on moral principle must supersede negative respect for the Law which, though backed by force, has grown so hopelessly inflated and complex that not even a trained lawyer can hope to be conversant with more than a single branch of it. Willingness to do right can be inculcated in most people if they are caught early enough, but so few have the capacity to make a proper moral choice between circumstances or actions which at first sight are equally valid, that the main religious problem of the Western world, is briefly, how to exchange demagogracy, disguised as democracy, for a non-hereditary aristocracy whose leaders will be inspired to choose rightly on every occasion, instead of blindly following authoritarian procedure. The Russian Communist Party has confused the issue by presenting itself as such an aristocracy and claiming to be inspired in its choice of policy.

* * *

There are two distinct and complementary languages: the ancient, intuitive language of poetry, and the more modern, rational language or prose, universally current. Myth and religion are clothed in poetic language; science, ethics, philosophy and statistics in prose. A stage in history has now been reached when it is generally conceded that the two languages should not be combined into a single formula, though Dr.
Barnes, the liberal Bishop of Birmingham, complains
1
that a majority of reactionary bishops would like to insist on a literal belief even in the stories of Noah’s Ark and Jonah’s Whale. The Bishop is right to deplore the way in which these venerable religious symbols have been misinterpreted for didactic reasons; and to deplore still more the Church’s perpetuation of fables as literal truth. The story of the Ark is probably derived from an Asianic icon in which the Spirit of the Solar Year is shown in a moon-ship, going through his habitual New Year changes – bull, lion, snake and so on; and the story of the Whale from a similar icon showing the same Spirit being swallowed at the end of the year by the Moon-and-Sea-goddess, represented as a sea-monster, to be presently re-born as a New Year fish, or finned goat. The she-monster Tiamat who, in early Babylonian mythology, swallowed the Sun-god Marduk (but whom he later claimed to have killed with his sword) was used by the author of the
Book
of
Jonah
to symbolize the power of the wicked city, mother of harlots, that swallowed and then spewed up the Jews. The icon, a familiar one on the Eastern Mediterranean, survived in Orphic art, where it represented a ritual ceremony of initiation: the initiate was swallowed by the Universal Mother, the sea-monster, and re-born as an incarnation of the Sun-god. (On one Greek vase the Jonah-like figure is named Jason, because the history of his voyage in the Argo had by that time been attached to the signs of the Zodiac around which the Sun makes its annual voyage.) The Hebrew prophets knew Tiamat as the Moon-and-Sea-goddess Rahab, but rejected her as the mistress of all fleshly corruptions; which is why in the ascetic
Apocalypse
the faithful are promised ‘No more sea’.

Dr. Barnes was quoting the stories of the Whale and Ark as obvious absurdities, but at the same time warning his fellow-bishops that few educated persons believe literally even in Jesus’s miracles. The merely agnostic attitude, ‘He may have risen to Heaven; we have no evidence for or against this claim’, has now given place in the back-rooms to the positively hostile: ‘Scientifically, it does not add up.’ A New Zealand atomic scientist assured me the other day that Christianity had received its heaviest blow in 1945: a fundamental tenet of the Church, namely that Jesus’s material body was immaterialized at the Ascension had, he said, been spectacularly disproved at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – anyone with the least scientific perception must realize that any such break-down of matter would have caused an explosion large enough to wreck the entire Middle East.

Now that scientists are talking in this strain, Christianity has little chance of maintaining its hold on the governing classes unless the historical part of ecclesiastical doctrine can be separated from the mythical: that is to say, unless a distinction can be drawn between the historical concept
‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’, and the equally valid mythical concepts ‘Christ’ and ‘Son of Man’ in terms of which alone the Virgin Birth, the Ascension and the miracles make unchallengeable sense. If this were to happen, Christianity would develop into a pure mystery-cult, with a Christ, divorced from his temporal history, paying the Virgin-Queen of Heaven a filial obedience that Jesus of Nazareth reserved for his Incomprehensible Father. Scientists would perhaps welcome the change as meeting the psychological needs of the masses, involving no anti-scientific absurdities, and having a settling effect on civilization; one of the reasons for the restlessness of Christendom has always been that the Gospel postulates an immediate end of time and therefore denies mankind a sense of spiritual security. Confusing the languages of prose and myth, its authors claimed that a final revelation had at last been delivered: everyone must repent, despise the world, and humble himself before God in expectation of the imminent Universal Judgement. A mystical Virgin-born Christ, detached from Jewish eschatology and unlocalized in first-century Palestine, might restore religion to contemporary self-respect.

However, such a religious change is impossible under present conditions: any neo-Arian attempt to degrade Jesus from God to man would be opposed as lessening the authority of his ethical message of love and peace. Also, 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 towns woman: 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. Agricultural life is rapidly becoming industrialized and in England, the world’s soberest social laboratory, the last vestiges of the ancient pagan celebrations of the Mother and Son are being obliterated, despite a loving insistence on Green Belts and parks and private gardens. It is only in backward parts of Southern and Western Europe that a lively sense still survives in the countryside of their continued worship.

No: there seems no escape from our difficulties until the industrial system breaks down for some reason or other, as it nearly did in Europe
during the Second World War, and nature reasserts herself with grass and trees among the ruins.

The Protestant Churches are divided between liberal theology and fundamentalism, but the Vatican authorities have made up their minds how to face the problems of the day. They encourage two antinomous trends of thought to co-exist within the Church: the authoritarian, or paternal, or logical, as a means of securing the priest’s hold on his congregation and keeping them from free-thinking; the mythical, or maternal, or supralogical, as a concession to the Goddess, without whom the Protestant religion has lost its romantic glow. They recognize her as a lively, various, immemorial obsession, deeply fixed in the racial memory of the European countryman and impossible to exorcize; but are equally aware that this is an essentially urban civilization, therefore authoritarian, and therefore patriarchal. It is true that woman has of late become virtual head of the household in most parts of the Western world, and holds the purse-strings, and can take up almost any career or position she pleases; but she is unlikely to repudiate the present system, despite its patriarchal framework. With all its disadvantages, she enjoys greater liberty of action under it than man has retained for himself; and though she may know, intuitively, that the system is due for a revolutionary change, she does not care to hasten or anticipate this. It is easier for her to play man’s game a little while longer, until the situation grows too absurd and uncomfortable for complaisance. The Vatican waits watchfully.

Meanwhile, Science itself is in difficulties. Scientific research has become so complicated and demands such enormous apparatus that only the State or immensely rich patrons can pay for it, which in practice means that a disinterested search for knowledge is cramped by the demand for results that will justify the expense: the scientist must turn showman. Also, a huge body of technical administrators is needed to implement his ideas, and these too rank as scientists; yet, as Professor Lancelot Hogben points out,
1
(and he is exceptional in being an F.R.S. with sufficient knowledge of history and the humanities to be able to view science objectively) they are no more than ‘fellow-travellers’ – careerists, opportunists, and civil-service-minded authoritarians. A non-commercial benevolent institution like the Nuffield Foundation, he says, is as high-handed in its treatment of scientists as a Treasury-controlled Government department. In consequence, pure mathematics is almost the only free field of science left. Moreover, the corpus of scientific knowledge, like that of law, has grown so unwieldy that not only are most scientists ignorant of even the rudiments of more than one specialized study, but they cannot keep up with the publications in their own field, and are forced to take on trust findings which they should properly test by
personal experiment. Apollo the Organizer, in fact, seated on Zeus’s throne, is beginning to find his ministers obstructive, his courtiers boring, his regalia tawdry, his quasi-royal responsibilities irksome, and the system of government breaking down from over-organization: he regrets having enlarged the realm to such absurd proportions and given his uncle Pluto and his half-brother Mercury a share in the Regency, yet dares not quarrel with these unreliable wretches for fear of worse to come, or even attempt to re-write the constitution with their help. The Goddess smiles grimly at his predicament.

This is the ‘brave new world’ satirized by Aldous Huxley, an ex-poet turned philosopher. What has he to offer in its place? In his
Perennial
Philosophy
he recommends a saintly mysticism of not-being in which woman figures only as an emblem of the soul’s surrender to the creative lust of God. The West, he says in effect, has failed because its religious feelings have been too long linked with political idealism or the pursuit of pleasure; it must now look to India for guidance in the rigorous discipline of asceticism. Little or nothing is, of course, known to the Indian mystics that was unknown to Honi the Circle-drawer and the other Essene therapeutics with whom Jesus had so close an affinity, or to the Mohammedan mystics; but talk of political reconciliation between Far East and Far West is in fashion and Mr. Huxley therefore prefers to style himself a devotee of Ramakrishna, the most famous Indian mystic of modern times.

Ramakrishna’s case is an interesting one. He lived all his life in the grounds of the White Goddess Kali’s temple at Dakshineswar on the Ganges, and in 1842, at the age of six, had fallen in a faint at the beauty of a flock of cranes, her birds, flying across a background of storm clouds. At first he devoted himself to Kali-worship with true poetic ecstacy like his predecessor Ramprasad Sen (1718–1775); but, when he grew to manhood, allowed himself to be seduced: he was unexpectedly acclaimed by Hindu pundits as a re-incarnation of Krishna and Buddha, and persuaded by them into orthodox techniques of devotion. He became an ascetic saint of the familiar type with devoted disciples and a Gospel of ethics posthumously published, and was fortunate enough to marry a woman of the same mystic capacities as himself who, by agreeing to forgo physical consummation, helped him to illustrate the possibility of a purely spiritual union of the sexes. Though he did not need to declare war on the Female, as Jesus had done, he set himself painfully to ‘dissolve his vision of the Goddess’ in order to achieve the ultimate bliss of
samadhi,
or communion with the Absolute; holding that the Goddess, who was both the entangler and the liberator of physical man, has no place in that remote esoteric Heaven. In later life he claimed to have proved by experiment that Christians and Mohammedans could also achieve the same bliss as himself; first, by turning Christian and devoting himself to the Catholic liturgy until he achieved a vision of Jesus Christ, and then Moslem until he
achieved a vision of Mohammed – after each experience resuming
samadhi.