THE SINGLE POETIC THEME

Poetry – meaning the aggregate of instances from which the idea of poetry is deduced by every new poet – has been increasingly enlarged for many centuries. The instances are as numerous, varied and contradictory as instances of love; but just as ‘love’ is a word of powerful enough magic to make the true lover forget all its baser and falser usages, so is ‘poetry’ for the true poet.

Originally, the poet was the leader of a totem-society of religious dancers. His verses – versus is a Latin word corresponding to the Greek strophe and means ‘a turning’ – were danced around an altar or in a sacred enclosure and each verse started a new turn or movement in the dance. The word ‘ballad’ has the same origin: it is a dance poem, from the Latin ballare, to dance. All the totem-societies in ancient Europe were under the dominion of the Great Goddess, the Lady of the Wild Things; dances were seasonal and fitted into an annual pattern from which gradually emerges the single grand theme of poetry: the life, death and resurrection of the Spirit of the Year, the Goddess’s son and lover.

At this point it will be asked: ‘Then is Christianity a suitable religion for the poet? And if not, is there any alternative?’

Europe has been officially Christian for the past sixteen hundred years, and though the three main branches of the Catholic Church are disunited all claim to derive their divine mandate from Jesus as God. This seems, on the face of it, most unfair to Jesus who made clear disavowals of deity: ‘Why callest thou me good? None is good except the Father’, and ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ They have also renounced obedience to the Mosaic Law, as refined by Hillel and his fellow-Pharisees, which Jesus considered essential for salvation and, while retaining the Pharisaic ethical code, have incorporated into Christianity all the old pagan festivals commemorative of the Theme and worship Jesus as the ‘Incarnate Word of God’ in the pre-Christian Gnostic sense, and as the Sun of Righteousness – the crucified Man-god of prehistoric paganism.

Yet though Jesus denied the Theme by his unswerving loyalty to the only contemporary God who had cast off all association with goddesses, and by declaring war on the Female and all her works, the Christian cult can in great part be historically justified. Jesus came of royal stock, was secretly crowned King of Israel with the antique formula, preserved in the Second Psalm, that made him a titular Son of the Sun-god, and concluded that he was the destined Messiah. At the Last Supper, in the attempt to fulfil a paradoxical prophecy of Zechariah, he offered himself as a eucharistic sacrifice for his people, and ordered Judas to hasten the preparations for his death. In the event he was crucified like a harvest Tammuz, not transfixed with a sword as the Messiah was fated to be; and since Jehovah’s curse on a crucified man debarred him from participation in the Hebrew after-world, there is no reason why he should not now be worshipped as a Gentile god; and indeed many poets and saints, unaware of his uncompromising Judaism, have worshipped him as if he were another Tammuz, Dionysus, Zagreus, Orpheus, Hercules or Osiris.

ACHAIFA, OSSA, OURANIA, HESUCHIA and IACHEMA – the five seasonal stations through which the Spirit of the Year passed in the cult of Canopic Hercules – could be expressed in the formula:

This saying, quoted by Clement of Alexandria from the Gospel According to the Hebrews, seems to be an adaptation of this formula to the needs of the Christian mystic:

Since the mystic, by being made one with the solar Jesus at the Sacrament, shared his triumph over death, the fifth station was excused him; Jesus was equated with HESUCHIA (repose), the fourth station when trees cast their leaves and rest until the first stirrings of Spring. It is likely that a formula conveyed by the mystagogues to pre-Christian initiates of Hercules went something like this:

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:

The context of the poem is discussed at length in Sir Sidney Colvin’s Life of Keats. Keats had been reading a translation, then ascribed to Chaucer, of Alain Chartier’s La Belle Dame sans Mercy, in which a ‘gentleman finding no mercy at the hand of a gentlewoman dyeth for sorrow’. In the translation these lines occur:

Other literary sources of the ballad have been found. In Spenser’s Faerie Queene (II, 6), the enchantress Phaedria is seen in a rowing-boat by the Knight Cymochiles as he wanders on the river-bank. He accepts her invitation to embark with her, and they have a pleasant time together. She sings, jests, decks her head with garlands, and puts fresh flowers about her neck, to the knight’s wondrous great content. They land on an island in the ‘Idle Lake’, where she takes the ‘wretched thrall’ to a shady dale, lulls him fast asleep with his head on her lap, and there maroons him. Similarly in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, (IV, 1) the prophetic poet Merlin ‘was assotted and doated upon’ Nimue, the enchantress. She decoyed him into a grotto and there left him immured.

Amy Lowell has traced another source of the poem in the romance Palmyrin of England which Keats is known to have read with avidity. Palmyrin is madly in love with one Polinarda whom he fears he has offended, and ponders his grief under trees by the water-side….‘And the passion therefore became so strong upon him that his strong heart failed, and such was the power of these fantastic thoughts over him that with the semblance of one dead he lay at the foot of the willow trees.’ In another episode Palmyrin ‘espied a damsel on a white palfrey come riding toward him, her hair spread over her shoulders and her garments seeming to be greatly misused; all the way as she rode she used many shrieks and grievous lamentations, filling the air with her cries.’ She was an emissary of the sorceress Eutropa, sent to decoy him. And towards the close of the romance occurs a description of kings and princes embalmed in a mortuary temple on Perilous Isle, which seems to account for the ‘pale Kings and Princes too’.

There are also reminiscences in the Belle Dame Sans Merci of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan with its singing maiden and poetic honey-dew (‘honey wild and manna dew’ is Keats’ version), of a line by Wordsworth, ‘Her eyes are wild’, and of another in William Browne’s Pastorals ‘Let no bird sing…’; but the most important source of all is the Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, one version of which had recently been published by Sir Walter Scott in his Border Minstrelsy and another by Robert Jamieson in his Popular Ballads. Thomas of Erceldoune was taken up by the Queen of Elfland on her milk-white steed and carried to a garden where she fed him on bread and wine, lulled him to sleep in her lap, and gave him the gift of poetic insight; but warned him that he might be destined as a Sabbatical sacrifice to hell, going by the road that ‘lies out owr yon frosty fell’ (or ‘cold hillside’).

Keats was now twenty-four years old and at a crisis of his affairs. He had abandoned medicine for literature but was growing doubtful whether he could support himself by it; lately a ‘loitering indolence’ had overtaken his work. He had conceived a jealously possessive passion for the ‘beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange…MINX’ Fanny Brawne. She was evidently flattered by his addresses and willing to let him be her beau, but her frivolous ways caused him increasing pain; the more so, because he was not in any position to offer her marriage or insist on her remaining faithful to him. The ‘kisses four’ in the poem are likely to be autobiographical, rather than a modification, to suit the rhyme, of the ballad convention ‘kisses three’. But often Fanny seems to have treated him mercilessly in resentment of his masterful ways and even, as he complains in a letter, to have made his ‘heart a football by flirting with Brown’, his friend. Thus the Belle Dame was, in one aspect, the elfish Fanny Brawne, whom he figuratively placed before him on the saddle of his Pegasus; and it is true that she admired his poems sufficiently to copy one or two of them out in a manuscript book of her own.

Keats, writing to his brother George who was in low water and far from home, took pains to conceal both the strength of his passion for Fanny and the serious condition of his health which complicated his other distresses. He was now in the early stages of a consumption induced, six months previously, by an exhausting walking tour in Scotland from which he had returned to find his elder brother Tom dying of the same disease. As an ex-medical student he knew that no cure had yet been found for it. He had seen the lily on Tom’s brow, the hectic rose on his cheek, his starved lips a-gape in horrid warning, and had closed his wild wild eyes with coins, not kisses.

In the letter which contains the Belle Dame Sans Merci Keats mentions having just met Coleridge walking by Highgate Ponds with Green, a former medical instructor of his own. Coleridge’s account of the meeting has been preserved. Keats asked leave to press his hand, wishing to carry away the memory of meeting him, and when he had gone Coleridge told Green: ‘There is death in that hand.’ He characterized it as ‘a heat and a dampness’, but ‘fever dew’ is Keats’ own description. Thus the Belle Dame Sans Merci was, in another aspect, Consumption: whose victims warned him that he was now of their number. Although it was not for nearly another year that he received his ‘death-warrant’ in the form of violent arterial bleeding in the lungs, Keats must have already realized that even if it were financially possible to support Fanny he could not now honourably ask her to marry him; especially since the consumption was aggravated by venereal disease which he had caught two years before this at Oxford while visiting his friend Bailey the Divinity student. Thus the features of the Belle Dame were beautiful in a strange pale, thin way as Fanny’s were, but sinister and mocking: they represented both the life he loved – in his letters to Fanny he identified her with both Life and Love – and the death he feared.

There is a third constituent of this nightmare figure: the spirit of Poetry. Keats’ chief comfort in his troubles, his ruling passion, and the main weapon with which he hoped to clear his way to Fanny’s love was poetic ambition. Now Poetry was proving an unkind mistress. In the disturbed state of his heart and mind he could not settle down to writing the romantic epics on which, in emulation of Milton, he hoped to build his fame. Recently he had stopped work on Hyperion after writing two and a half books, and confided to his friend Woodhouse that he was so greatly dissatisfied with it that he could not continue.

That the Belle Dame represented Love, Death by Consumption (the modem leprosy) and Poetry all at once can be confirmed by a study of the romances from which Keats developed the poem. He seems to have felt intuitively, rather than known historically, that they were all based on the same antique myth. The Queen of Elfland in Thomas the Rhymer was the mediaeval successor of the pre-Celtic White Goddess who carried off the sacred King at the end of his seven years’ reign to her island Elysium, where he became an oracular hero. The story of the prophet Merlin and the enchantress Nimue has the same origin; so has that of Palmyrin and the enchantress on the white horse; and that of Cymochiles and the enchantress Phaedria. She was Death, but she granted poetic immortality to the victims whom she had seduced by her love-charms.

The case of Thomas the Rhymer, alias Thomas of Erceldoune, is a remarkable one. He was an early thirteenth-century poet who claimed to have been given poetic insight by the Queen of Elfland, or Elphame, who appeared suddenly to him as he lay on Huntlie Bank and chose him as her lover; and it was for this reason that his vaticinations were so highly prized by the Scots. (They were said by Thomas Chambers, in 1870, to be ‘still widely current among the peasantry’.) Although it looks at first sight as though Thomas had merely borrowed the Gaelic myth of Oisin and Niamh of the Golden Hair, of which the Arthurian variant is the romance of Ogier the Dane1 and Morgan le Faye, and applied it fancifully to himself, this is unlikely to be the case. What seems to have happened is that he was accosted on Huntlie Bank not by a phantom but by a living woman, the titular ‘Queen of Elphame’, the contemporary incarnation of Hecate, goddess of witches. She made him renounce Christianity and initiated him into the witch cult under the new baptismal name of ‘True Thomas’.

As we know from the Scottish witch trials, the same adventure happened to other likely young Scotsmen, three or four centuries later. At Aberdeen in 1597, for instance, Andro Man confessed to carnal dealings with the then Queen of Elphame, who had ‘a grip of all the craft’ and who had attended that year’s Harvest meeting at the Binhill and Binlocht riding on a white hackney. ‘She is very pleasant and will be old and young when she pleases. She makes any King whom she pleases and lies with any she pleases.’ (Old and young, naturally, because she represented the Moon-Goddess in her successive phases.) William Barton of Kirkliston similarly became the beloved of a later Queen, as he confessed at his trial in 1655, renounced Christianity, was renamed John Baptist and received the Devil’s mark. But already by the thirteenth century the sacrifice of the king in the seventh, or Sabbatical, year seems to have been no longer insisted on, or only symbolically performed: for in the garden to which the Queen took Thomas of Erceldoune he was warned on pain of death not to pluck the apples growing there, the traditional food of the oracular dead. If Thomas had eaten them he would not have lived to tell his tale and keep his ‘green velvet shoes and coat of even cloth’ that had been his livery as the Queen’s gudeman. The account of his mystical experiences corresponds with what is known of the initiation ceremonies of the witch cult. Like Ogier the Dane, he had first mistaken her for the Virgin, a pardonable mistake since (according to the confession of the witch Marion Grant of Aberdeen, an associate of Andro Man) she was addressed as ‘Our Lady’ by the witches and appeared like a fine lady clad in a ‘white walicot’.

Keats in his letters to Fanny makes it clear that to become her lover in as complete a sense as Thomas of Erceldoune became the Queen of Elphame’s, he would gladly have received the Mark and signed the blood compact which thereafter delivered his soul to hell. He was not a Christian. ‘My religion is Love and you are its only tenet,’ he wrote to her. But Fanny was not well cast for the part he forced upon her. Though at first, like the Queen whom William Barton met on the way to the Queen’s Ferry, she pretended to be ‘angry and very nyce’ when he offered her gallantries, and later took pity on his distresses and humoured him to some degree, it is clear that she never ‘suffered him to do that which Christian ears ought not to hear of’.

Coleridge, at his best, had a stricter poetic conscience than Keats. Though the second part of Christabel belies the moon-magic of the first, his description in the Ancient Mariner of the woman dicing with Death in the phantom ship is as faithful a record of the White Goddess as exists:

Anonymous English balladists constantly celebrate the Goddess’s beauty and terrible power. Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song is directly inspired by her:

So is the Holy Land of Walsinghame:

The Holy Land of Walsinghame recalls the tender description of the Goddess in the ancient Irish Sickbed of Cuchulain, spoken by Laegh after visiting the rath of the Sidhe:

For though she loves only to destroy, the Goddess destroys only to quicken.

Coleridge’s mention of leprosy is strangely exact. The whiteness of the Goddess has always been an ambivalent concept. In one sense it is the pleasant whiteness of pearl-barley, or a woman’s body, or milk, or unsmutched snow; in another it is the horrifying whiteness of a corpse, or a spectre, or leprosy. Thus in Leviticus XIV, 10, the leper’s thank-offering after his cure, originally paid to the Goddess Mother, was a measure of barley flour. Alphito, it has been shown, combined these senses: for alphos is white leprosy, the vitiliginous sort which attacks the face, and alphiton is barley, and Alphito lived on the cliff tops of Nonacris in perpetual snow. Pausanias connects leprosy, the meaning of which is ‘scaliness’, a characteristic of true leprosy, with the town of Lepreus, which lay close to the river Alpheus in the district of Triphylia (‘trefoil’), which was a leper-colony founded by a goddess called Leprea: it afterwards came under the protection of ‘Zeus of the White Poplar’, for another name for leprosy is leuce, which also means ‘the white poplar’. This ties together several loose ends of argument. The white trefoils which spring up wherever the Love-goddess Olwen treads can be described as ‘white as leprosy’. And we may assume that the leaves of the white poplar (the autumn tree of the Beth-Luis-Nion), which still grows in the Styx valley, were prophylactic against ail forms of leprosy: for albus and albulus in Latin have all the connotations of the Greek alphos. When Evander came to Italy from Arcadia he brought the name of the River Alpheus with him: Albula was the old name for the Tiber, though its yellow waters would have earned it the name ‘Xanthos’, or ‘Flavus’, if the White Goddess had not sponsored the migration.

The priestesses of the White Goddess in ancient times are likely to have chalked their faces in imitation of the Moon’s white disc. It is possible that the island of Samothrace, famous for its Mysteries of the White Goddess, takes its name from scaly leprosy; for it is known that Samo means white and that the Old Goidelic word for this sort of leprosy was Samothrusc. Strabo gives a warrant for this suggestion in his Georgics: he quotes Artemidorus as writing that ‘there is an island near Britain where the same rites are performed in honour of Ceres and Persephone as in Samothrace.’

In the Ancient Mariner, when the Nightmare Life-in-Death has won her game of dice:

She whistles for the magical breeze that is presently to save the Mariner’s life. Here again Coleridge is beautifully exact. The White Goddess Cardea, as has been mentioned, was in charge of the four cardinal winds; mythologically the most important was the North Wind at the back of which she had her starry castle, close to the polar hinge of the Universe. This was the same wind that blew in answer to Gwion’s final riddle in the Romance and helped to liberate Elphin, and the wind which, according to Hecataeus, gave its name to the Hyperborean priesthood of Apollo. Whistling three times in honour of the White Goddess is the traditional witch way of raising the wind; hence the proverbial unluckiness of ‘a crowing hen and a whistling maid’. ‘I’ll give thee a wind.’ ‘And I another.’ – as the witches say in Macbeth….‘All the quarters that they know, I’ the Shipman’s card.’ The close connexion of winds with the Goddess is also shown in the widespread popular belief that only pigs and goats (both anciently sacred to her) can see the wind, and in the belief that mares can conceive merely by turning their hindquarters to the wind.

The earliest Classical reference to this belief about mares is found in the Iliad, where Boreas grows amorous of the three thousand mares of Erichthonius the Dardanian; he finds them grazing on the plains about Troy, and impregnates twelve of them. Classical scholars have been content to read this merely as an allegory of the swiftness of the twelve sacred horses born to Boreas; but the myth is far more complex than that. Boreas lived with his three brothers, the other cardinal winds, in a sacred cave on Mount Haemus in Thrace, which lies due north of Troy, but was also worshipped at Athens. The Athenians gave him the honourable title of ‘brother-in-law’ and their ancient respect for him was heightened by his sudden descent from Haemus during the Persian invasion of Greece, when he sank most of Xerxes’s fleet off Cape Sepias. Boreas was represented on the famous carved Chest of Cypselus as half man, half serpent – a reminder that winds were under the charge of the Death-goddess and came out of oracular caves or holes in the ground. He was shown in the act of carrying off the nymph Oreithuia, daughter of another Erichthonius,1 the first King of Athens (who introduced four-horse chariots there) to his mountain home in Thrace.

This gives a clue to the provenience of the North Wind cult. The mares of Erichthonius were really the mares of Boreas himself, for Erichthonius was also half man, half serpent. Erichthonius, styled an autochthon, that is to say ‘one who springs from the earth’, was first said to be the son of Athene by Hephaestus the demiurge, but later, when Athene’s unblemished maidenhood was insisted upon by the Athenians as a matter of civic pride, he was made the son of Hephaestus and Ge, the Earth-goddess. The name of Oreithuia, the nymph whom he carried off, means ‘She who rages upon the mountain’ – evidently the Love-goddess of the divine triad in which Athene was the Death-goddess; which explains Boreas as her brother-in-law, and so the brother-in-law of all Athenians: whose ancient friendship with the Boreas priesthood of the Hyperboreans is mentioned by Hecataeus. But since North Winds cannot blow backwards, the story of Boreas’s rape of Oreithuia to Thrace must refer to the spread to Thrace of the Athenian orgiastic cult of the Triple Goat-goddess and her lover Erichthonius, alias Ophion, and its adaptation there, as at nearby Troy, to an orgiastic cult of the Triple Mare-goddess; the twelve sacred horses of Boreas provided her with three four-horse chariots. Since Erichthonius shortly after birth took refuge from his persecutors in the aegis of Athene – the bag made from the hide of the goat Amalthaea – he must have come from Libya with her. In Libya he would have been more beloved than in Greece; northerly breezes freshen the early morning along the whole Libyan coast throughout the summer – thus Hesiod calls Boreas the son of Astraeus (‘the starry one’) and Eos (‘dawn’). That Portuguese mares were fertilized by the zephyr – according to Varro, Pliny and Columella – is an obvious error derived from the extreme westerly position of Portugal. The philosopher Ptolemy rightly attributes only to the planet Zeus (Jupiter), which ruled the north, ‘winds that fertilize’, and Boraeus was one of Zeus’s titles.1 Lactantius, the late third-century Christian Father, makes this fertilization of the mares an analogy of the mysterious impregnation of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Spirit (literally ‘breath’): a comment which was not at the time regarded as in bad taste.

According to the Odyssey, the home of the winds, that is to say the centre of the cult of Boreas and his brothers, was not on Mount Haemus but in an Aeolian island; perhaps this was the Aegean island of Tenos which lies immediately north of Delos, where a megalithic logan-stone was shown as the memorial raised by Hercules to Calaïs and Zetes, the heroic sons of Boreas and Oreithuia. But the cult of Boreas spread west as well as north from Athens – the Thurians of Italy are known to have worshipped him – and is likely to have reached Spain with other Greek colonists. In late Classical times Homer’s ‘Aeolian Isle’ was believed to be Lipari which had been colonized by Aeolians; Lipari bears due north from Sicily where the belief probably originated.

A slightly Christianized pagan Irish poem, printed in Vol. II of the Ossianic Society’s Publications, 1855, gives the natal characteristics of the four cardinal winds. It not only shows the connexion of winds with Fate but presents the child who is born when the north wind blows as a type of Hercules.

At this point we can clear up one or two outstanding puzzles. If the Athenians worshipped the North Wind in very primitive times and had brought the cult with them from Libya, then the original Hyperboreans, the ‘back-of-the-North-wind people’, a priesthood concerned with a Northern other-world, were Libyans. This would explain Pindar’s mistaken notion that Hercules fetched the wild olive from the distant north: he really fetched it from the south, perhaps from as far south as Egyptian Thebes where it still grew with oaks and persea-trees in the time of Pliny – just as the ‘Gorgon’ whom Perseus killed during his visit to the ass-sacrificing Hyperboreans was the southern Goddess Neith of Libya. This was not Hercules the oak-hero, but the other Hercules, the phallic thumb, leader of the five Dactyls, who according to the tradition that Pausanias found at Elis brought such an abundance of wild-olive from Hyperboraea that, after he had crowned the victor of the foot-race run by his brothers, they all slept on heaps of its fresh leaves. Pausanias, though he names the competitors, does not say who won; but it was obviously Paeonius the forefinger, which always comes in first when you run your fingers on the table and make them race, for the paean or paeon was the song of victory. Moreover, Pausanias says that Zeus wrestled with Cronos on this occasion, and beat him; Zeus is the god of the forefinger, and Cronos the god of the middle, or fool’s finger. The Dactyl who came in second in the race was evidently Epimedes, ‘he who thinks too late’, the fool; for Pausanias gives the names in this order: Hercules, Paeonius, Epimedes, Jasius and Idas.

The wild olive, then, was the crown of Paeonius the forefinger: which means that the vowel of the forefinger, namely O, which is expressed by the gorse Onn in the Beth-Luis-Nion, was expressed by the wild olive in the Greek tree alphabet. This explains the use of olive at the Spring festival in the ancient world, which continues in Spain at the ‘Ramos’ (boughs) festival; and Hercules’s olive-wood club – the Sun first arms himself at the Spring equinox; and the olive-leaf in the bill of Noah’s dove which symbolizes the drying up of the winter floods by the Spring Sun. It also explains Paeonius as a title of Apollo Helios the god of the young Sun, which however he seems to have derived from the Goddess Athene Paeonia who first brought the olive to Athens; and the name of the peony, paeonia, a Mediterranean wild flower which blooms only at the Spring solstice and quickly sheds its petals.

Spenser’s White Goddess is the Arthurian ‘Lady of the Lake’, also called ‘the White Serpent’, ‘Nimue’, and ‘Vivien’, whom Professor Rhys in his Arthurian Legend identifies with Rhiannon. She is mistress of Merlin (Merddin) and treacherously entombs him in his magic cave when, as Llew Llaw to Blodeuwedd, or Samson to Delilah, or Curoi to Blathnat, he has revealed some of his secrets to her. However, in the earliest Welsh account, the Dialogue of Gwenddydd and Merddin, she tells him to arise from his prison and ‘open the Books of Inspiration without fear’. In this dialogue she calls him ‘twin-brother’ which reveals her as Olwen, and she is also styled Gwenddydd wen adlam Cerddeu, ‘White Lady of Day, refuge of poems’, which proves her to be the Muse, Cardea-Cerridwen, who inspires cerddeu, ‘poems’, in Greek, cerdeia.

‘What is inspiration?’ is a question that is continually asked. The derivation of the word supplies two related answers. ‘Inspiration’ may be the breathing-in by the poet of fumes from an intoxicating cauldron, the Awen of the cauldron of Cerridwen, containing probably a mash of barley, acorns, honey, bull’s blood and such sacred herbs as ivy, hellebore1 and laurel, or mephitic fumes from an underground vent as at Delphi, or the fumes that rise to the nostrils when toadstools are chewed. These fumes induce the paranoiac trance in which time is suspended, though the mind remains active and can relate its proleptic or analeptic apprehensions in verse. But ‘inspiration’ may also refer to the inducement of the same poetic condition by the act of listening to the wind, the messenger of the Goddess Cardea, in a sacred grove. At Dodona poetic oracles were listened for in the oak-grove, and the prophetic trance was perhaps induced in the black-dove priestesses who first controlled the oracle by the chewing of acorns; at any rate, a scholiast on Lucan notes that this method was used among the Gallic Druids. In Canaan the prime oracular tree was the acacia – the ‘burning bush’ discussed in Chapter Fifteen – and there is a reference to this sort of inspiration in 1 Chronicles, XIV, 15:

Here, ‘mulberry trees’ should be ‘acacias’. Jehovah himself was in the wind, and the context – David’s assault on the Philistines from Gibeon to Gaza-shows that it blew from the North. This story dates from a time when Jehovah was not yet a transcendental God but lived, like Boreas, in a mountain to the far north; he was, in fact, the white bull-god Baal Zephon (‘Lord of the North’) who had borrowed his title from his Goddess Mother Baaltis Zapuna, a name attested in an inscription from Goshen where the tribe of Joseph was once settled. The Canaanites worshipped him as King of the Northern Otherworld and the Philistines of Ekron had taken over the cult; he was a god of prophecy and fertility. Another of his titles was Baal-Zebul, ‘the Lord of the Mansion [of the North]’ which named the tribe of Zebulon: they worshipped him on Mount Tabor. When King Ahaziah of Israel consulted his oracle at Ekron (2 Kings, I, 1-4) he earned Elijah’s reproach for not consulting the native Israelite oracle, presumably on Tabor. I suspect that Baal Zabul was an autumnal Dionysus, whose devotees intoxicated themselves on amanita muscaria, which still grows there; the Biblical name for these toadstools being either ‘ermrods’ or ‘little foxes’.

By the time of Jesus, who was accused of traffic with Beelzebub, the Kingdoms of Israel and Philistia had long been suppressed and the shrines of Ekron and Tabor destroyed; and Baal-Zebul’s functions having been taken over by the archangel Gabriel, he had declined to a mere devil mockingly called Baal-Zebub, ‘Lord of Flies’. Yet the Levite butchers continued the old ritual of turning the victim’s head to the north when they sacrificed.

The acacia is still a sacred tree in Arabia Deserta and anyone who even breaks off a twig is expected to die within the year. The common Classical icon of the Muse whispering in a poet’s ear refers to tree-top inspiration: the Muse is the dryad (oak-fairy), or mĕlia (ash-fairy), or mēlia (quince-fairy), or caryatid (nut-fairy), or hamadryad (wood-fairy in general), or heliconian (fairy of Mount Helicon, which took its name as much from helicë, the willow-tree sacred to poets, as from the stream which spiralled round it).

Nowadays poets seldom use these artificial aids to inspiration, though the sound of wind in the willows or in a plantation of forest-trees still exercises a strangely potent influence on their minds; and ‘inspiration’ is therefore applied to any means whatsoever by which the poetic trance is induced. But a good many of the charlatans or weaklings resort to automatic writing and spiritism. The ancient Hebrew distinction between legitimate and illegitimate prophecy – ‘prophecy’ meaning inspired poetry, in which future events are not necessarily, but usually, foretold – has much to recommend it. If a prophet went into a trance and was afterwards unconscious of what he had been babbling, that was illegitimate; but if he remained in possession of his critical faculties throughout the trance and afterwards, that was legitimate. His powers were heightened by the ‘spirit of prophecy’, so that his words crystallized immense experience into a single poetic jewel; but he was, by the grace of God, the sturdy author and regulator of this achievement. The spiritistic medium, on the other hand, whose soul momentarily absented itself so that demonic principalities and powers might occupy his body and speak pipingly through his mouth was no prophet and was ‘cut off from the congregation’ if it was found that he had deliberately induced the trance. The ban was presumably extended to automatic writing.