The White Goddess (87 page)

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 mediaeval 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 is 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 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.

In Greece, when the Moon-woman first became subordinated to the Thunder-god as his wife, she delegated the charge of poetry to her so-called daughter, her former self as the Triple Muse, and no poem was considered auspicious that did not begin with an appeal to the Muse for inspiration. Thus the early ballad,
The
Wrath
of
Achilles,
which introduces the
Iliad
of Homer, begins: ‘Sing, Goddess, of the destructive anger of Achilles, son of Peleus.’ That Achilles is styled ‘son of Peleus’ rather than ‘son of Thetis’ proves that the patriarchal system was already in force, though totem society lingered on as a social convenience, Achilles being a sacred king of the Myrmidons of Thessaly, apparently an Ant clan subject to the Goddess as Wryneck; but the Goddess is clearly the Triple Muse, not merely one of the nine little Muses, mentioned in a less primitive part of the
Iliad,
whom Apollo later led down from Helicon, and up to Parnassus when, as recorded in the
Hymn
to
Pythian
Apollo,
he superseded the local Earth-goddess in the navel-shrine at Delphi. Apollo (‘Destroyer or Averter’) was at this time considered to be a male twin to the daughter-goddess Artemis; they were represented as children of the Thunder-god, born on Quail Island, off Delos, to the Goddess Latona the Hyperborean, daughter of Phoebe and Coieus (‘Moonlight and Initiation’).

The myths get confused here because Latona, being a newcomer to Delos, was not at first recognized by the local Triple Goddess; and because Artemis, the name of Apollo’s twin, had previously been a Greek title of the Triple Goddess herself. Artemis probably means ‘The Disposer of Water’ from
ard-
and
themis.
Apollo, one may say, was securing his position by persuading his twin to take over the emblems and titles of her predecessor: he himself adopted the titles and emblems of a Pelasgian ‘Averter’ or ‘Destroyer’, in one aspect (as his title Smintheus proves) a Cretan Mouse-demon. Apollo and Artemis then together took over the charge of poetry from the Triple Muse (in this context their mother Latona); but Artemis soon ceased to be an equal partner of Apollo’s, though she continued to be a Goddess of magical charms and eventually was credited with evil charms only. So Tatian records in his
Address
to
the
Greeks
:
‘Artemis is a poisoner, Apollo performs cures.’ In Ireland, similarly, the Goddess Brigit became overshadowed by the God Ogma. In Cormac’s
Glossary
it was necessary to explain her as: ‘Brigit, daughter of The Dagda, the poetess, that is, the goddess worshipped by the poets on account of the great and illustrious protection afforded them by her.’ It was in her honour that the ollave carried a golden branch with
tinkling bells when he went abroad.

About the eighth century
BC
the Muse triad became enlarged under Thraco-Macedonian influence to three triads, or an ennead. Here the nine orgiastic priestesses of the Island of Sein in West Brittany, and the nine damsels in the
Preiddeu
Annwm
whose breaths warmed Cerridwen’s cauldron, will be recalled. A ninefold Muse was more expressive of the universality of the Goddess’s rule than a threefold one; but the Apollo priesthood who ruled Greek Classical literature soon used the change as a means of weakening her power by a process of departmentalization. Hesiod writes of the Nine Daughters of Zeus, who under Apollo’s patronage were given the following functions and names: 

Calliope (‘beautiful face’) was a name of the original Muse, in her full-moon aspect; so were Erato ‘the beloved one’; and Urania ‘the heavenly one’. The first mention of Erato in Greek myth is as the Oak-queen to whom Areas was married; he gave his name to Arcadia and was the son of Callisto the She-bear and father of Atheneatis. The other names apparently refer to the several functions of the Muses. It will be observed that though the Muses of Helicon still had erotic tendencies, their chief function, that of healing and cursing by incantation, had been taken away from them under Olympianism. It had passed to Apollo himself and a surrogate, his physician son Aesculapius.

Apollo, though the God of Poetry and the leader of the Muses, did not yet, however, claim to
inspire
poems: the inspiration was still held to come to the poet from the Muse or Muses. He had originally been a mere Demon
1
whom his Muse mother had inspired with poetic frenzy; now he required that, as the Ninefold Muse, she should inspire individual poets in his honour – though not to the point of ecstasy. These poets, if they proved to be his faithful and industrious servants, he rewarded with a garland of laurel – in Greek,
daphne.
The connexion of poetry with laurel
is not merely that laurel is an evergreen and thus an emblem of immortality: it is also an intoxicant. The female celebrants of the Triple Goddess at Tempe had chewed laurel leaves to induce a poetic and erotic frenzy, as the Bacchanals chewed ivy –
daphne
may be a shortened form of
daphoine,
‘the bloody one’, a title of the Goddess – and when Apollo took over the Delphic oracle the Pythian priestess who continued in charge learned to chew laurel for oracular inspiration. The laurel had become sacred to Apollo – his legendary pursuit of the nymph Daphne records his capture of the Goddess’s shrine at Tempe near Mount Olympus – but he was now the God of Reason with the motto ‘nothing in excess’, and his male initiates wore the laurel without chewing at it; Empedocles, as Pythagoras’s semi-divine successor, held laurel-chewing in as great horror as bean-eating. Poetry as a magical practice was already in decline.

The Romans conquered Greece and brought Apollo with them to Italy. They were a military nation, ashamed of their own rude poetic tradition, but some of them began to take up Greek poetry seriously as part of their education in political rhetoric, an art which they found necessary for consolidating their military conquests. They studied under the Greek sophists and understood from them that major poetry was a more musical and more philosophical form of rhetoric than could be achieved by prose and that minor poetry was the most elegant of social accomplishments. True poets will agree that poetry is spiritual illumination delivered by a poet to his equals, not an ingenious technique of swaying a popular audience or of enlivening a sottish dinner-party, and will think of Catullus as one of the very few poets who transcended the Graeco-Roman poetic tradition. The reason perhaps was that he was of Celtic birth: at any rate, he had a fearlessness, originality and emotional sensitivity entirely lacking in the general run of Latin poets. He alone showed a sincere love of women; the others were content to celebrate either comrade-loyalty or playful homosexuality. His contemporary, Virgil, is to be read for qualities that are not poetic in the sense that they invoke the presence of the Muse. The musical and rhetorical skill, the fine-sounding periphrases, and the rolling periods, are admired by classicists, but the
Aeneid
is designed to dazzle and overpower, and true poets do not find it consistent with their integrity to follow Virgil’s example. They honour Catullus more, because he never seems to be calling upon them, as posterity, to applaud a demonstration of immortal genius; rather, he appeals to them as a contemporary: ‘Is this not so?’ For Horace as the elegant verse-writer they may feel affection, and admire his intention of avoiding extremes of feeling and the natural Roman temptation to be vulgar. But for all his wit, affability and skilful gleemanship they can hardly reckon him a poet, any more than they can reckon, say, Calverley or Austin Dobson.

To summarize the history of the Greek Muses:

The Triple Muse, or the Three Muses, or the Ninefold Muse, or
Cerridwen, or whatever else one may care to call her, is originally the Great Goddess in her poetic or incantatory character. She has a son who is also her lover and her victim, the Star-son, or Demon of the Waxing Year. He alternates in her favour with his tanist Python, the Serpent of Wisdom, the Demon of the Waning Year, his darker self.

Next, she is courted by the Thunder-god (a rebellious Star-son infected by Eastern patriarchalism) and has twins by him, a male and a female – in Welsh poetry called Merddin and Olwen. She remains the Goddess of Incantation, but forfeits part of her sovereignty to the Thunder-god, particularly law-making and the witnessing of oaths.

Next, she divides the power of poetic enchantment between her twins, whose symbols are the morning star and the evening star, the female twin being herself in decline, the male a revival of the Star-son.

Next, she becomes enlarged in number, though reduced in power, to a bevy of nine little departmental goddesses of inspiration, under the tutelage of the former male twin.

Finally, the male twin, Apollo, proclaims himself the Eternal Sun, and the Nine Muses become his ladies-in-waiting. He delegates their functions to male gods who are himself in multiplication.