The White Goddess (109 page)

People often ask me how I came to write
The
White
Goddess.
Here is the story.

Though a poet by calling, I make my livelihood by prose – biographies, novels, translations from various languages, and so forth. My home has been in Majorca since 1929. Temporarily exiled because of the Spanish Civil War, I wandered around Europe and the United States; and the Second World War caught me in England, where I stayed until it ended and I could return to Majorca. In 1944, at the Devonshire village of Galmpton, I was working against time on a historical novel about the Argonauts, when a sudden overwhelming obsession interrupted me. It took the form of an unsolicited enlightenment on a subject which had meant little enough to me. I stopped marking across my big Admiralty chart of the Black Sea the course taken (the mythographers said) by the Argo from the Bosphorus to Baku and back. Instead, I began speculating on a mysterious ‘Battle of the Trees’, fought in pre-historic Britain, and my mind ran at such a furious rate all night, as well as all the next day, that it was difficult for my pen to keep pace with it. Three weeks later, I had written a seventy-thousand-word book, called
The
Roebuck
in
the
Thicket.

I am no mystic: I avoid participation in witchcraft, spiritualism, yoga, fortune-telling, automatic writing, and the like. I live a simple, normal, rustic life with my family and a wide circle of sane and intelligent friends. I belong to no religious cult, no secret society, no philosophical sect; nor do I trust my historical intuition any further than it can be factually checked.

While engaged on my Argonaut book, I found the White Goddess of Pelion growing daily more important to the narrative. Now, I had in my work-room several small West African brass objects – bought from a London dealer – gold-dust weights, mostly in the shape of animals, among them a humpback playing a flute. I also had a small brass-box, with a lid, intended (so the dealer told me) to contain gold dust. I kept the humpback seated on the box. In fact, he is still seated there; but I knew
nothing about him, or about the design on the box-lid, until ten years had gone by. Then I learned that the humpback was a herald in the service of the Queen-mother of some Akan State; and that every Akan Queen-mother (there are a few reigning even today) claims to be an incarnation of the Triple Moon-goddess Ngame. The design on the box-lid, a spiral, connected by a single stroke to the rectangular frame enclosing it – the frame having nine teeth on either side – means: ‘None greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess Ngame!’ These gold weights and the box were made before the British seizure of the Gold Coast, by craftsmen subservient to the Goddess, and regarded as highly magical.

Very well: put it down to coincidence. Deny any connexion between the hump-backed herald on the box (proclaiming the sovereignty of the Akan Triple Moon-goddess, and set in a ring of brass animals representing Akan clan totems) and myself, who suddenly became obsessed by the European White Goddess, wrote about her clan totems in the Argonaut context, and now had thrust upon me ancient secrets of her cult in Wales, Ireland and elsewhere. I was altogether unaware that the box celebrated the Goddess Ngame, that the Helladic Greeks, including the primitive Athenians, were racially linked with Ngame’s people – Libyan Berbers, known as the Garamantians, who moved south from the Sahara to the Niger in the eleventh century
AD
, and there intermarried with negroes. Or that Ngame herself was a Moon-goddess, and that the White Goddess of Greece and Western Europe shared her attributes. I knew only that Herodotus recognized the Libyan Neith as Athene.

On returning to Majorca soon after the War, I worked again at
The
Roebuck
in
the
Thicket,
now called
The
White
Goddess,
and wrote more particularly about the Sacred King as the Moon-goddess’s divine victim; holding that every Muse-poet must, in a sense, die for the Goddess whom he adores, just as the King died. Old Georg Schwarz, a German-Jewish collector, had bequeathed me five or six more Akan gold-weights, among them a mummy-like figurine with one large eye. It has since been identified by experts on West African art as the Akan King’s
okrafo
priest. I had suggested in my book that, in early Mediterranean society, the King fell a sacrifice at the end of his term. But later (to judge from Greek and Latin myths) he won executive power as the Queen’s chief minister and the privilege of sacrificing a surrogate. The same governmental change, I have since learned, took place after the matriarchal Akan arrived at the Gold Coast. In Bono, Asante, and other near-by states, the King’s surrogate victim was called the
‘okrafo
priest’. Kjersmeier, the famous Danish expert on African art, who has handled ten thousand of these gold-weights, tells me that he never saw another like mine. Dismiss it as a coincidence, if you please, that the
okrafo
figurine lay beside the herald on the gold box, while I wrote about the Goddess’s victims.

After
The
White
Goddess
had been published, a Barcelona antiquary
read my
Claudius
novels and invited me to choose myself a stone for a seal-ring from a collection of Roman gems recently bought. Among them was a stranger, a banded carnelian seal of the Argonaut period, engraved with a royal stag galloping towards a thicket, and a crescent moon on its flank! Dismiss that as a coincidence, too, if you please.

Chains of more-than-coincidence occur so often in my life that, if I am forbidden to call them supernatural hauntings, let me call them a habit. Not that I like the word ‘supernatural’; I find these happenings natural enough, though superlatively unscientific.

In scientific terms, no god at all can be proved to exist, but only beliefs in gods, and the effects of such beliefs on worshippers. The concept of a creative goddess was banned by Christian theologians almost two thousand years ago, and by Jewish theologians long before that. Most scientists, for social convenience, are God-worshippers; though I cannot make out why a belief in a Father-god’s authorship of the universe, and its laws, seems any less unscientific than a belief in a Mother-goddess’s inspiration of this artificial system. Granted the first metaphor, the second follows logically – if these
are
no better than metaphors….

True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than-coincidences, into a living entity – a poem that goes about on its own (for centuries after the author’s death, perhaps) affecting readers with its stored magic. Since the source of poetry’s creative power is not scientific intelligence, but inspiration – however this may be explained by scientists – one may surely attribute inspiration to the Lunar Muse, the oldest and most convenient European term for this source? By ancient tradition, the White Goddess becomes one with her human representative – a priestess, a prophetess, a queen-mother. No Muse-poet grows conscious of the Muse except by experience of a woman in whom the Goddess is to some degree resident; just as no Apollonian poet can perform his proper function unless he lives under a monarchy or a quasi-monarchy. A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse. As a rule, the power of absolutely falling in love soon vanishes; and, as a rule, because the woman feels embarrassed by the spell she exercises over her poet-lover and repudiates it; he, in disillusion, turns to Apollo who, at least, can provide him with a livelihood and intelligent entertainment, and reneges before his middle ’twenties. But the real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet distinguishes between the Goddess as manifest in the supreme power, glory, wisdom and love of woman, and the individual woman whom the Goddess may make her instrument for a month, a year, seven years, or even more. The Goddess abides; and perhaps he will again have knowledge of her through his experience of another woman.

Being in love does not, and should not, blind the poet to the cruel side
of woman’s nature – and many Muse-poems are written in helpless attestation of this by men whose love is no longer returned: