The White Goddess (88 page)

(The legendary origin of Japanese poetry is in an encounter between the Moon-goddess and the Sun-god as they walked around the pillar of the world in opposite directions. The Moon-goddess spoke first, saying in verse:

The Sun-god was angry that she had spoken out of turn in this unseemly fashion; he told her to return and come to meet him again. On this occasion he spoke first:

This was the first verse ever composed. In other words, the Sun-god took over the control of poetry from the Muse, and pretended that he had originated it – a lie that did Japanese poets no good at all.)

With that, poetry becomes academic and decays until the Muse chooses to reassert her power in what are called Romantic Revivals.

 *

In mediaeval poetry the Virgin Mary was plainly identified with the Muse by being put in charge of the Cauldron of Cerridwen. D. W. Nash notes in his edition of the Taliesin poems:

In mediaeval Irish poetry Mary was equally plainly identified with Brigit the Goddess of Poetry: for St. Brigit, the Virgin as Muse, was popularly known as ‘Mary of the Gael’. Brigit as a Goddess had been a Triad: the Brigit of Poetry, the Brigit of Healing and the Brigit of Smithcraft. In Gaelic Scotland her symbol was the White Swan, and she was known as Bride of the Golden Hair, Bride of the White Hills, mother of the King of Glory. In the Hebrides she was the patroness of childbirth. Her Aegean prototype seems to have been Brizo of Delos, a moon-goddess to whom votive ships were offered, and whose name was derived by the Greeks from the word
brizein,
‘to enchant’. Brigit was much cultivated in Gaul and Britain in Roman times, as numerous dedications to her attest, and in parts of Britain Saint Brigit retained her character of Muse until the Puritan Revolution, her healing powers being exercised largely through poetic incantation at sacred wells. Bridewell, the female penitentiary in London, was originally a nunnery of hers.
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A Cornish invocation to the local Brigit Triad runs: 

It is a charm against a scald. One dips nine bramble leaves in spring water and then applies them to the scald; the charm must be said three times to each leaf to be effective. For the bramble is sacred both to the Pentad and Triad of seasonal Goddesses, the number of leaves on a single stalk varying between three and five – so that in Brittany and parts of Wales there is a strong taboo on the eating of blackberries. In this charm the Goddesses are clearly seasonal, the Goddess of Summer bringing fire, her sisters bringing frost. A fourth rhyming line is usually added, as a sop to the clergy:
In
the
name
of
the
Father,
Son
and
Holy
Ghost.

The mediaeval Brigit shared the Muse-ship with another Mary, ‘Mary Gipsy’ or St. Mary of Egypt, in whose honour the oath ‘Marry’ or ‘Marry Gyp!’ was sworn. This charming Virgin with the blue robe and pearl necklace was the ancient pagan Sea-goddess Marian in transparent disguise – Marian,
1
Miriam, Mariamne (‘Sea Lamb’) Myrrhine, Myrtea, Myrrha,
2
Maria or Marina, patroness of poets and lovers and proud mother of the Archer of Love. Robin Hood, in the ballads, always swore by her. She was swarthy-faced, and in a mediaeval
Book
of
the
Saints
she is recorded to have worked her passage to the Holy Land, where she was to live for years as a desert anchorite, by offering herself as a prostitute to the whole crew of the only vessel sailing there; so, once in Heaven, she showed particular indulgence to carnal sins.

A familiar disguise of this same Marian is the merry-maid, as ‘mermaid’ was once written. The conventional figure of the mermaid – a beautiful woman with a round mirror, a golden comb and a fish-tail – expresses ‘The Love-goddess rises from the Sea’. Every initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were of Pelasgian origin, went through a love rite with her representative after taking a cauldron bath in Llew Llaw fashion. The round mirror, to match the comb, may be some bygone artist’s mistaken substitute for the quince, which Marian always held in her hand as a love-gift; but the mirror did also form part of the sacred furniture of the Mysteries, and probably stood for ‘know thyself’. The comb was originally a plectrum for plucking lyre-strings. The Greeks called her Aphrodite (‘risen from sea-foam’) and used the tunny, sturgeon, scallop and periwinkle, all sacred to her, as aphrodisiacs. Her most famous temples were built by the sea-side, so it is easy to understand her symbolic fishtail. She can be identified with the Moon-goddess Eurynome whose statue at Phigalia in Arcadia was a mermaid carved in wood. The myrtle, murex and myrrh tree were also everywhere sacred to her; with the palm-tree (which thrives on salt), the love-faithful dove, and the colours white, green, blue and scarlet. Botticelli’s
Birth
of
Venus
is an exact icon of her cult. Tall, golden-haired, blue-eyed, pale-faced, the Love-goddess arrives in her scallop-shell at the myrtle-grove, and Earth, in a flowery robe, hastens to wrap her in a scarlet gold-fringed mantle. In English ballad-poetry the mermaid stands for the bitter-sweetness of love and for the danger run by susceptible mariners (once spelt ‘merriners’) in foreign ports: her mirror and comb stand for vanity and heartlessness.

Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, officially abolished Mary-worship, but much of the ancient ritual survived within the Church: for
example among the Collyridians, an Arabian sect who used to offer the same cake and liquor at her shrine as they had formerly offered to Ashtaroth. Myrrh, too, but this was more orthodox because St. Jerome had praised the Virgin as Stilla Maris, ‘Myrrh of the Sea’. St. Jerome was punning on the name ‘Mary’, connecting it with Hebrew words
marah
(brine) and
mor
(myrrh) and recalling the gifts of the Three Wise Men.

When the Crusaders invaded the Holy Land, built castles and settled down, they found a number of heretical Christian sects living there under Moslem protection, who soon seduced them from orthodoxy. This was how the cult of Mary Gipsy came to England, brought through Compostella in Spain by poor pilgrims with palm-branches in their hands, copies of the Apocryphal Gospels in their wallets and Aphrodite’s scallop-shells stitched in their caps – the palmers, celebrated in Ophelia’s song in
Hamlet.
The lyre-plucking, red-stockinged troubadours, of whom King Richard Lion-Heart is the best remembered in Britain, ecstatically adopted the Marian cult. From their French songs derive the lyrics by ‘Anon’ which are the chief glory of early English poetry; as the prettiest carols derive from the Apocryphal Gospels, thanks to the palmers. The most memorable result of the Crusades was to introduce into Western Europe an idea of romantic love which, expressed in terms of the ancient Welsh minstrel tales, eventually transformed the loutish robber barons and their sluttish wives to a polished society of courtly lords and ladies. From the castle and court good manners and courtesy spread to the country folk; and this explains ‘Merry England’ as the country most engrossed with Mary-worship.

In the English countryside Mary Gipsy was soon identified with the Love-goddess known to the Saxons as ‘The May Bride’ because of her ancient association with the may-tree cult brought to Britain by the Atrebates in the first century
BC
or
AD
. She paired off with Merddin, by this time Christianized as ‘Robin Hood’, apparently a variant of Merddin’s Saxon name,
Rof Breoht
Woden,
‘Bright Strength of Woden,’ also known euphemistically as ‘Robin Good-fellow’. In French the word
Robin,
which is regarded as a diminutive of Robert but is probably pre-Teutonic, means a ram and also a devil. A
robinet,
or water-faucet, is so called because in rustic fountains it was shaped like a ram’s head. The two senses of ram and devil are combined in the illustration to a pamphlet published in London in 1639:
Robin
Goodfellow,
his
mad
pranks
and
merry
gest
s
.
Robin is depicted as an ithyphallic god of the witches with young ram’s horns sprouting from his forehead, ram’s legs, a witches’ besom over his left shoulder, a lighted candle in his right hand. Behind him in a ring dance a coven of men and women witches in Puritan costume, a black dog adores him, a musician plays a trumpet, an owl flies overhead. It will be recalled that the Somersetshire witches called their god Robin, and ‘Robin son of Art’ was the Devil of Dame Alice Kyteler, the famous early
fourteenth-century witch of Kilkenny, and used sometimes to take the form of a black dog. For the Devil as ram the classical instance is the one whom, in 1303, the Bishop of Coventry honoured with a Black Mass and saluted with a posterior kiss. In Cornwall ‘Robin’ means phallus. ‘Robin Hood’ is a country name for red campion (‘campion’ means ‘champion’), perhaps because its cloven petal suggests a ram’s hoof, and because ‘Red Champion’ was a title of the Witch-god. It may be no more than a coincidence that ‘ram’ in Sanscrit is
huda.
‘Robin’, meaning ‘a ram’, has become mythologically equated with Robin (latin:
rubens
),
meaning the red-breast.

Here the story becomes complicated. The merry exploits of one Robin Hood, the famous outlaw of Sherwood Forest – whom J. W. Walker
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has now proved to have been a historical character, born at Wakefield in Yorkshire between the years 1285 and 1295, and in the service of King Edward II in the years 1323 and 1324 – became closely associated with the May Day revels. Presumably this was because the outlaw happened to have been christened Robert by his father Adam Hood the forester, and because during the twenty-two years that he spent as a bandit in the greenwood he improved on this identification of himself with Robin by renaming his wife Matilda ‘Maid Marian’. To judge from the early ballad,
The
Banished
Man,
Matilda must have cut her hair and put on male dress in order to belong to the outlaw fraternity, as in Albania to this day young women join male hunting parties, dress as men and are so treated – Atalanta of Calydon who took part in the hunt of the Calydonian Boar was the prototype. The outlaw band then formed a coven of thirteen with Marian acting as the
pucelle,
or maiden of the coven; presumably she wore her proper clothes in the May Day orgies as Robin’s bride. By his successful defiance of the ecclesiastics Robin became such a popular hero that he was later regarded as the founder of the Robin Hood religion, and its primitive forms are difficult to recover. However, ‘Hood’ (or Hod or Hud) meant ‘log’ – the log put at the back of the fire – and it was in this log, cut from the sacred oak, that Robin had once been believed to reside. Hence ‘Robin Hood’s steed’, the wood-louse which ran out when the Yule log was burned. In the popular superstition Robin himself escaped up the chimney in the form of a Robin and, when Yule ended, went out as Belin against his rival Bran, or Saturn – who had been ‘Lord of Misrule’ at the Yule-tide revels. Bran hid from pursuit in the ivy-bush disguised as a Gold Crest Wren; but Robin always caught and hanged him. Hence the song: