The White Goddess (95 page)

In this lost
Gospel
According
to
the
Hebrews
occurs a passage which has been preserved by Origen:

Tabor, as has been shown, was an ancient centre of Golden Calf worship, the Golden Calf being Atabyrius, the Spirit of the Year, son of the Goddess Io, Hathor, Isis, Althaea, Deborah, or whatever one cares to call her. Thus the connexion between Graeco-Syrian Christianity and the single poetic theme was very close in the early second century; though later the
Gospel
of
the
Hebrews
was suppressed as heretical, apparently because it left the door open for a return to orgiastic religion.

Christianity is now the sole European faith of any consequence. Judaism is for the Jews alone, and Ludendorff s abortive revival of the primitive Teutonic religion was a matter merely of German domestic politics. Graeco-Roman paganism was dead before the end of the first millennium
AD
and the paganism of North-Western Europe, which was still vigorous in the early seventeenth century and had even taken root in New England, yielded to the Puritan revolution. The eventual triumph of Christianity had been assured as soon as the Emperor Constantine had made it the State religion of the Roman world. He did this grudgingly under pressure from his army, recruited among the servile masses that had responded to the Church’s welcome for sinners and outcasts, and from his Civil Service which admired the energy and discipline of Church organization. The ascetic doctrine which was the main element of primitive Christianity lost power only gradually, and it was not until the eleventh century that the old Virgin Goddess Rhea – mother of Zeus and now identified with the mother of Jesus – began to be honoured with all her old titles and attributes and restored to the queenship of Heaven; the restoration was not complete until the twentieth century, though it had been anticipated by the fifth-century Emperor Zeno who re-dedicated the Temple of Rhea at Byzantium to the Virgin Mary.

The Puritan Revolution was a reaction against Virgin-worship, which in many districts of Great Britain had taken on a mad-merry orgiastic character. Though committed to the mystical doctrine of the Virgin Birth, the Puritans regarded Mary as a wholly human character, whose religious importance ended at the birth-stool, and anathematized any Church ritual or doctrine that was borrowed from paganism rather than from Judaism. The iconoclastic wantonness, the sin-laden gloom and Sabbatarian misery that Puritanism brought with it shocked the Catholics beyond expression.
It was a warning to them to strengthen rather than weaken the festal side of their cult, to cling to the Blessed Virgin as the chief source of their religious happiness, and to emphasize as little as possible the orthodox Judaism of Jesus. Though the ‘divided household’ of Faith and Truth, that is to say the attempt to believe what one knows to be historically untrue, has been condemned by recent Popes, educated Catholics do in practice avert their eyes from the historical Jesus and Mary and fix them devoutly on the Christ and the Blessed Virgin: they are content to suppose that Jesus was speaking of himself, rather than prophesying in Jehovah’s name, when he said: ‘I am the Good Shepherd’, or ‘I am the Truth’, and prophesied eternal life to whoever believed in him. Nevertheless, they have long put their house in order; though many of the mediaeval clergy not only connived at popular paganism but actively embraced it, the Queen of Heaven and her Son are now decisively quit of the orgiastic rites once performed in their honour. And though the Son is still officially believed to have harrowed Hell like Hercules, Orpheus and Theseus, and though the mystic marriage of the Lamb to a White Princess identified with the Church remains orthodox doctrine in every Christian profession, the Samson and Delilah incident is not admitted into the myth, and the Goat-footed Devil, his mortal enemy, is no longer represented as his twin. The old religion was dualistic: in an ivory relief of the fourteenth century
BC
found at Ras Shamra the Goddess is shown in Minoan dress, with a sheaf of three heads of barley in either hand, dividing her favours between a man-faced ram on her left, god of the waxing year, and a goat on her right, god of the waning year. The goat is bleating in protest that the Goddess’s head is turned away and insists that it is now his turn to be cosseted. In Christianity the sheep are permanently favoured at the expense of the goats, and the Theme is mutilated: ecclesiastic discipline becomes anti-poetic. The cruel, capricious, incontinent White Goddess and the mild, steadfast, chaste Virgin are not to be reconciled except in the Nativity context.

The rift now separating Christianity and poetry is, indeed, the same that divided Judaism and Ashtaroth-worship after the post-Exilic religious reformation. Various attempts at bridging it by the Clementines, Collyridians, Manichees and other early Christian heretics and by the Virgin-worshipping palmers and troubadours of Crusading times have left their mark on Church ritual and doctrine, but have always been succeeded by a strong puritanical reaction. It has become impossible to combine the once identical functions of priest and poet without doing violence to one calling or the other, as may be seen in the works of Englishmen who have continued to write poetry after their ordination: John Skelton, John Donne, William Crashaw, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, Jonathan Swift, George Crabbe, Charles Kingsley, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poet survived in easy vigour only where the priest
was shown the door; as when Skelton, to signalize his independence of Church discipline, wore the Muse-name ‘Calliope’ embroidered on his cassock in silk and gold, or when Herrick proved his devotion to poetic myth by pouring libations of Devonshire barley-ale from a silver cup to a pampered white pig. With Donne, Crashaw and Hopkins the war between poet and priest was fought on a high mystical level; but can Donne’s
Divine
Poems
,
written after the death of Ann More, his only Muse, be preferred to his amorous
Songs
and
Sonnets
?
or can the self-tortured Hopkins be commended for humbly submitting his poetic ecstasies to the confession-box?

I remarked in the first chapter that poets can be well judged by the accuracy of their portrayal of the White Goddess. Shakespeare knew and feared her. One must not be misled by the playful silliness of the love-passages in his early
Venus
and
Adonis,
or the extraordinary mythographic jumble in his
Midsummer-Night’s
Dream
, where Theseus appears as a witty Elizabethan gallant; the Three Fates – from whose name the word ‘fay’ derives – as the whimsical fairies, Peaseblossom, Cobweb and Mustard-seed; Hercules as a mischievous Robin Goodfellow; the Lion with the Steady Hand as Snug the Joiner; and, most monstrous of all, the Wild Ass Set-Dionysus and the star-diademed Queen of Heaven as ass-eared Bottom and tinselled Titania. He shows her with greater sincerity in
Macbeth
as the Triple Hecate presiding over the witches’ cauldron, for it is her spirit that takes possession of Lady Macbeth and inspires her to murder King Duncan; and as the magnificent and wanton Cleopatra by love of whom Antony is destroyed. Her last appearance in the plays is as the ‘damned witch Sycorax’ in the
Tempest.
1
Shakespeare in the person of Prospero claims to have dominated her by his magic books, broken her power and enslaved her monstrous son Caliban – though not before extracting his secrets from him under colour of kindness. Yet he cannot disguise Caliban’s title to the island nor the original blueness of Sycorax’s eyes, though ‘blue-eyed’ in Elizabethan slang also meant ‘blue-rimmed with debauch’. Sycorax, whose connexion with Cerridwen has been pointed out early in Chapter Eight, came to the island with Caliban in a boat, as Danaë came to Seriphos from Argos with the infant Perseus; or as Latona came to Delos with the unborn Apollo. She was a
goddess with the power to control the visible Moon – ‘make ebbs and flows and deal in her command’. Shakespeare says that she was banished from Argiers (was this really Argos?) for her witchcrafts. But he is poetically just to Caliban, putting the truest poetry of the play into his mouth:

It will be noticed that the illogical sequence of tenses creates a perfect suspension of time.

Donne worshipped the White Goddess blindly in the person of the woman whom he made his Muse; so far unable to recall her outward appearance that all that he could record of her was the image of his own love-possessed eye seen reflected in hers. In
A
Fever
he calls her ‘the world’s soul’, for if she leaves him the world is but her carcase. And:

John Clare wrote of her: ‘These dreams of a beautiful presence, a woman deity, gave the sublimest conceptions of beauty to my imagination; and being last night with the same presence, the lady divinity left such a vivid picture of her visits in my sleep, dreaming of dreams, that I could no longer doubt her existence. So I wrote them down to prolong the happiness of my faith in believing her my guardian genius.’

Keats saw the White Goddess as the
Belle
Dame
Sans
Merci.
Her hair was long, her foot was light and her eyes were wild, but Keats characteristically transferred the lily on her brow to the brows of her victims, and made the knight set her on his steed rather than himself mount on hers, as Oisin had mounted on the steed of Niamh of the Golden Hair. So he also wrote pityingly of Lamia, the Serpent-goddess, as if she were a distressed Gretchen or Griselda.

The case of the
Belle
Dame
Sans
Merci
calls for detailed consideration in the light of the Theme. Here is the poem as it first appeared, with a few joking comments at the end, copied out in a journal letter to Keats’ brother George in America. Cancelled words are not italicized and shown in parentheses: