FOREWORD

I am grateful to Philip and Sally Graves, Christopher Hawkes, John Knittel, Valentin Iremonger, Max Mallowan, E. M. Parr, Joshua Podro, Lynette Roberts, Martin Seymour-Smith, John Heath-Stubbs and numerous correspondents, who have supplied me with source-material for this book: and to Kenneth Gay who has helped me to arrange it. Yet since the first edition appeared in 1946, no expert in ancient Irish or Welsh has offered me the least help in refining my argument, or pointed out any of the errors which are bound to have crept into the text, or even acknowledged my letters. I am disappointed, though not really surprised. The book does read very queerly: but then of course a historical grammar of the language of poetic myth has never previously been attempted, and to write it conscientiously I have had to face such ‘puzzling questions, though not beyond all conjecture’, as Sir Thomas Browne instances in his Hydriotaphia: ‘what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among the women.’ I found practical and unevasive answers to these and many other questions of the same sort, such as:

But it is only fair to warn readers that this remains a very difficult book, as well as a very queer one, to be avoided by anyone with a distracted, tired or rigidly scientific mind. I have not cared to leave out any step in the laborious argument, if only because readers of my recent historical novels have grown a little suspicious of unorthodox conclusions for which the authorities are not always quoted. Perhaps they will now be satisfied, for example, that the mystical Bull-calf formula and the two Tree-alphabets which I introduced into King Jesus are not ‘wanton figments’ of my imagination but logically deduced from reputable ancient documents.

My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry – ‘true’ in the nostalgic modern sense of ‘the unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute’. The language was tampered with in late Minoan times when invaders from Central Asia began to substitute patrilinear for matrilinear institutions and remodel or falsify the myths to justify the social changes. Then came the early Greek philosophers who were strongly opposed to magical poetry as threatening their new religion of logic, and under their influence a rational poetic language (now called the Classical) was elaborated in honour of their patron Apollo and imposed on the world as the last word in spiritual illumination: a view that has prevailed practically ever since in European schools and universities, where myths are now studied only as quaint relics of the nursery age of mankind.

One of the most uncompromising rejections of early Greek mythology was made by Socrates. Myths frightened or offended him; he preferred to turn his back on them and discipline his mind to think scientifically: ‘to investigate the reason of the being of everything – of everything as it is, not as it appears, and to reject all opinions of which no account can be given.’

Here is a typical passage from Plato’s Phaedrus, (Cary’s translation): 

The fact was, that by Socrates’ time the sense of most myths belonging to the previous epoch was either forgotten or kept a close religious secret, though they were still preserved pictorially in religious art and still current as fairy-tales from which the poets quoted. When invited to believe in the Chimaera, the horse-centaurs, or the winged horse Pegasus, all of them straightforward Pelasgian cult-symbols, a philosopher felt bound to reject them as a-zoölogical improbabilities; and because he had no notion of the true identity of ‘the nymph Orithya’ or of the history of the ancient Athenian cult of Boreas, he could give only an inept naturalistic explanation of her rape at Mount Ilissus: ‘doubtless she was blown off one of the cliffs hereabouts and met her death at the foot.’

All the problems that Socrates mentions have been faced in this book and solved to my own satisfaction at least; but though ‘a very curious and painstaking person’ I cannot agree that I am any less happy than Socrates was, or that I have more leisure than he had, or that an understanding of the language of myth is irrelevant to self-knowledge. I deduce from the petulant tone of his phrase ‘vulgar cleverness’ that he had spent a long time worrying about the Chimaera, the horse-centaurs and the rest, but that the ‘reasons of their being’ had eluded him because he was no poet and mistrusted poets, and because, as he admitted to Phaedrus, he was a confirmed townsman who seldom visited the countryside: ‘fields and trees will not teach me anything, but men do.’ The study of mythology, as I shall show, is based squarely on tree-lore and seasonal observation of life in the fields.

Socrates, in turning his back on poetic myths, was really turning his back on the Moon-goddess who inspired them and who demanded that man should pay woman spiritual and sexual homage: what is called Platonic love, the philosopher’s escape from the power of the Goddess into intellectual homosexuality, was really Socratic love. He could not plead ignorance: Diotima Mantinice, the Arcadian prophetess who magically arrested the plague at Athens, had reminded him once that man’s love was properly directed towards women and that Moira, Ilithyia and Callone – Death, Birth and Beauty – formed a triad of Goddesses who presided over all acts of generation whatsoever: physical, spiritual or intellectual. In the passage of the Symposium where Plato reports Socrates’ account of Diotima’s wise words, the banquet is interrupted by Alcibiades, who comes in very drunk in search of a beautiful boy called Agathon and finds him reclining next to Socrates. Presently he tells everyone that he himself once encouraged Socrates, who was in love with him, to an act of sodomy from which, however, he philosophically abstained, remaining perfectly satisfied with night-long chaste embraces of his beloved’s beautiful body. Had Diotima been present to hear this she would have made a wry face and spat three times into her bosom: for though the Goddess as Cybele and Ishtar tolerated sodomy even in her own temple-courts, ideal homosexuality was a far more serious moral aberrancy – it was the male intellect trying to make itself spiritually self-sufficient. Her revenge on Socrates – if I may put it this way – for trying to know himself in the Apollonian style instead of leaving the task to a wife or mistress, was characteristic: she found him a shrew for a wife and made him fix his idealistic affections on this same Alcibiades, who disgraced him by growing up vicious, godless, treacherous and selfish – the ruin of Athens. She ended his life with a draught of the white-flowered, mousey-smelling hemlock, a plant sacred to herself as Hecate,1 prescribed him by his fellow-citizens in punishment for his corruption of youth. After his death his disciples made a martyr of him and under their influence myths fell into still greater disrepute, becoming at last the subject of street-corner witticisms or being ‘explained away’ by Euhemerus of Messenia and his successors as corruptions of history. The Euhemerist account of the Actaeon myth, for instance, is that he was an Arcadian gentleman who was so addicted to hunting that the expense of keeping a pack of hounds ate him up.

But even after Alexander the Great had cut the Gordian Knot – an act of far greater moral significance than is generally realized – the ancient language survived purely enough in the secret Mystery-cults of Eleusis, Corinth, Samothrace and elsewhere; and when these were suppressed by the early Christian Emperors it was still taught in the poetic colleges of Ireland and Wales, and in the witch-covens of Western Europe. As a popular religious tradition it all but flickered out at the close of the seventeenth century: and though poetry of a magical quality is still occasionally written, even in industrialized Europe, this always results from an inspired, almost pathological, reversion to the original language – a wild Pentecostal ‘speaking with tongues’ – rather than from a conscientious study of its grammar and vocabulary.

English poetic education should, really, begin not with the Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with the Song of Amergin, an ancient Celtic calendar-alphabet, found in several purposely garbled Irish and Welsh variants, which briefly summarizes the prime poetic myth. I have tentatively restored the text as follows:

It is unfortunate that, despite the strong mythical element in Christianity, ‘mythical’ has come to mean ‘fanciful, absurd, unhistorical’; for fancy played a negligible part in the development of the Greek, Latin and Palestinian myths, or of the Celtic myths until the Norman-French trovères worked them up into irresponsible romances of chivalry. They are all grave records of ancient religious customs or events, and reliable enough as history once their language is understood and allowance has been made for errors in transcription, misunderstandings of obsolete ritual, and deliberate changes introduced for moral or political reasons. Some myths of course have survived in a far purer form than others; for example, the Fables of Hyginus, the Library of Apollodorus and the earlier tales of the Welsh Mabinogion make easy reading compared with the deceptively simple chronicles of Genesis, Exodus, Judges and Samuel. Perhaps the greatest difficulty in solving complex mythological problems is that:

and that to know the name of a deity at any given place or period, is far less important than to know the nature of the sacrifices that he or she was then offered. The powers of the gods were continuously being redefined. The Greek god Apollo, for instance, seems to have begun as the Demon of a Mouse-fraternity in pre-Aryan totemistic Europe: he gradually rose in divine rank by force of arms, blackmail and fraud until he became the patron of Music, Poetry and the Arts and finally, in some regions at least, ousted his ‘father’ Zeus from the Sovereignty of the Universe by identifying himself with Belinus the intellectual God of Light. Jehovah, the God of the Jews, has a still more complex history.

‘What is the use or function of poetry nowadays?’ is a question not the less poignant for being defiantly asked by so many stupid people or apologetically answered by so many silly people. The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites. But ‘nowadays’? Function and use remain the same: only the application has changed. This was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of the lady of the house; it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philosophy, science and industry, and brought ruin on himself and his family. ‘Nowadays’ is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonoured. In which serpent, lion and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery; racehorse and greyhound to the betting ring; and the sacred grove to the saw-mill. In which the Moon is despised as a burned-out satellite of the Earth and woman reckoned as ‘auxiliary State personnel’. In which money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth-possessed poet.

Call me, if you like, the fox who has lost his brush; I am nobody’s servant and have chosen to live on the outskirts of a Majorcan mountain-village, Catholic but anti-ecclesiastical, where life is still ruled by the old agricultural cycle. Without my brush, namely my contact with urban civilization, all that I write must read perversely and irrelevantly to such of you as are still geared to the industrial machine, whether directly as workers, managers, traders or advertisers or indirectly as civil servants, publishers, journalists, schoolmasters or employees of a radio corporation. If you are poets, you will realize that acceptance of my historical thesis commits you to a confession of disloyalty which you will be loth to make; you chose your jobs because they promised to provide you with a steady income and leisure to render the Goddess whom you adore valuable part-time service. Who am I, you will ask, to warn you that she demands either whole-time service or none at all? And do I suggest that you should resign your jobs and for want of sufficient capital to set up as small-holders, turn romantic shepherds – as Don Quixote did after his failure to come to terms with the modern world – in remote unmechanized farms? No, my brushlessness debars me from offering any practical suggestion. I dare attempt only a historical statement of the problem; how you come to terms with the Goddess is no concern of mine. I do not even know that you are serious in your poetic profession.

R. G.

Deyá,

Mallorca,

   Spain.