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which is spoken by Apollo, the God of poetry, who by Virgil’s time was also recognized as the Sun-god. The line means ‘On my return I shall lead the Muses down from the top of Mount Helicon’. Apollo is referring to the transplanting of the worship of the Muses from Ascra, a town on a ridge of Helicon, to Delphi, on Mount Parnassus, a place which had become sacred to himself. On Helicon rose the spring named Hippocrene, ‘The Horse Well’, which was horse-shoe shaped. The legend was that it had been struck by the hoof of the horse Pegasus, whose name means ‘of the springs of water’. Poets were said to drink of Hippocrene for inspiration. Hence John Skelton’s lines (Against Garnesche ):

But it may be supposed that Hippocrene and Aganippe were originally struck by the moon-shaped hoof of Leucippe (‘White Mare’), the Mare-headed Mother herself, and that the story of how Bellerophon son of Poseidon mastered Pegasus and then destroyed the triple-shaped Chimaera is really the story of an Achaean capture of the Goddess’s shrine: Pegasus, in fact, was originally called Aganippe. Aganos is a Homeric adjective applied to the shafts of Artemis and Apollo, meaning ‘giving a merciful death’; so Aganippe would mean: ‘The Mare who destroys mercifully.’ This supposition is strengthened by the Greek legend of the pursuit of Demeter, the Barley Mother, by the Achaean god Poseidon. Demeter, to escape his attentions, disguised herself as a mare and concealed herself among the horses of Oncios the Arcadian, but Poseidon became a stallion and covered her; her anger at this outrage was said to account for her statue at Onceum, called Demeter Erinnys – the Fury.

Demeter as a Mare-goddess was widely worshipped under the name of Epona, or ‘the Three Eponae’, among the Gallic Celts, and there is a strange account in Giraldus Cambrensis’s Topography of Ireland which shows that relics of the same cult survived in Ireland until the twelfth century. It concerns the crowning of an Irish petty-king at Tyrconnell, a preliminary to which was his symbolic rebirth from a white mare. He crawled naked towards her on all fours as if he were her foal; she was then slaughtered, and her pieces boiled in a cauldron. He himself entered the cauldron and began sucking up the broth and eating the flesh. Afterwards he stood on an inauguration stone, was presented with a straight white wand, and turned about three times from left to right, and then three times from right to left – ‘in honour of the Trinity’. Originally no doubt in honour of the Triple White Goddess.

The horse, or pony, has been a sacred animal in Britain from prehistoric times, not merely since the Bronze Age introduction of the stronger Asiatic breed. The only human figure represented in what survives of British Old Stone Age art is a man wearing a horse-mask, carved in bone, found in the Derbyshire Pin-hole Cave; a remote ancestor of the hobbyhorse mummers in the English ‘Christmas play’. The Saxons and Danes venerated the horse as much as did their Celtic predecessors, and the taboo on eating horse-flesh survives in Britain as a strong physical repugnance, despite attempts made during World War II to popularize hippophagism; but among the Bronze Age British the taboo must have been lifted at an annual October horse-feast, as among the Latins. In mediaeval Denmark the ecstatic three-day horse-feast, banned by the Church, survived among the heathenish serf-class; a circumstantial description is given by Johannes Jensen in his Fall of the King. He mentions that the priest first sprinkled bowls of the horse’s blood towards the South and East – which explains the horse as an incarnation of the Spirit of the solar year, son of the Mare-goddess.

In the Romance of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed the Goddess appears as Rhiannon mother of Pryderi. Rhiannon is a corruption of Rigantona (‘Great Queen’) and Dyfed consisted of most of Carmarthen and the whole of Pembrokeshire and included St. David’s; its central point was called ‘The Dark Gate’, an entrance to the Underworld. When Pwyll (‘Prudence’) first sees Rhiannon and falls in love with her, he pursues her on his fastest horse but cannot overtake her; evidently in the original story she took the form of a white mare. When at last she consents to be overtaken, and marries him twelve months later, she bears him a son afterwards called Pryderi (‘Anxiety’) who disappears at birth; and her maids falsely accuse her of having devoured him, smearing her face with the blood of puppies. As a penance she is ordered to stand at a horse-block outside Pwyll’s palace, like a mare, ready to carry guests on her back. 1 The life of her son Pryderi is closely connected with a magical foal which has been rescued from a harpy; all the previous foals of the same mare have been snatched off on May Eve and never seen again. Pryderi, a Divine Child of the sort that is taken away from its mother – like Llew Llaw, or Zeus, or Romulus – is later, as usual, given a name and arms by her, mounts the magical horse and eventually becomes a Lord of the Dead. Rhiannon is thus seen to be a Mare-goddess, but she is also a Muse-goddess, for the sirens that appear in the Triads, and also in the Romance of Branwen, singing with wonderful sweetness are called ‘The Birds of Rhiannon’. The story about the puppies recalls the Roman habit of sacrificing red puppies in the Spring to avert the baleful influence of the Dog-star on their grain; the sacrifice was really to the Barley-mother who had the Dog-star as her attendant. Rhiannon, in fact, is the Mare-Demeter, a successor of the Sow-Demeter Cerridwen. That the Mare-Demeter devoured children, like the Sow-Demeter, is proved by the myth of Leucippe (‘White Mare’) the Orchomenan, who with her two sisters ran wild and devoured her son Hippasus (‘foal’); and by the myth recorded by Pausanias, that when Rhea gave birth to Poseidon she offered her lover Cronos a foal to eat instead of the child, whom she gave secretly into the charge of the shepherds of Arcadian Arne.

Mount Helicon was not the earliest seat of the Muse Goddesses, as their title ‘The Pierians’ shows; the word Muse is now generally derived from the root mont, meaning a mountain. Their worship had been brought there in the Heroic Age during a migration of the Boeotian people from Mount Pieria in Northern Thessaly. But to make the transplanted Muses feel at home on Helicon, and so preserve the old magic, the Boeotians named the geographical features of the mountain – the springs, the peaks and grottoes – after the corresponding features of Pieria. The Muses were at this time three in number, an indivisible Trinity, as the mediaeval Catholics recognized when they built the church of their own Holy Trinity on the site of the deserted shrine of the Heliconian Muses. The appropriate names of the three Persons were Meditation, Memory and Song. The worship of the Muses on Helicon (and presumably also in Pieria) was concerned with incantatory cursing and incantatory blessing; Helicon was famous for the medicinal herbs which supplemented the incantations – especially for the nine-leaved black hellebore used by Melampus at Lusi as a cure for the Daughters of Proetus, which could either cause or cure insanity and which has a stimulative action on the heart like digitalis (fox-glove). It was famous also for the erotic fertility dances about a stone herm at Thespiae, a town at its foot, in which the women-votaries of the Muses took part. Spenser addresses the Muses as ‘Virgins of Helicon’; he might equally have called them ‘witches’, for the witches of his day worshipped the same White Goddess – in Macbeth called Hecate – performed the same fertility dances on their Sabbaths, and were similarly gifted in incantatory magic and knowledge of herbs.

As Goddess of the Underworld she was concerned with Birth, Procreation and Death. As Goddess of the Earth she was concerned with the three seasons of Spring, Summer and Winter: she animated trees and plants and ruled all living creatures. As Goddess of the Sky she was the Moon, in her three phases of New Moon, Full Moon, and Waning Moon. This explains why from a triad she was so often enlarged to an ennead. But it must never be forgotten that the Triple Goddess, as worshipped for example at Stymphalus, was a personification of primitive woman – woman the creatress and destructress. As the New Moon or Spring she was girl; as the Full Moon or Summer she was woman; as the Old Moon or Winter she was hag.

In a Gallo-Roman ‘allée couverte’ burial at Tressé near St. Malo in Brittany two pairs of girls’ breasts are sculptured on one megalithic upright, two maternal pairs of breasts on another; the top of a third upright has been broken off, but V. C. C. Collum who excavated the burial suggests that it pictured a third pair – probably the shrunken breasts of the Hag. A very interesting find in this same burial, which can be dated by a bronze coin of Domitian to the end of the first century AD , was a flint arrow-head of the usual willow-leaf shape with an incised decoration of half-moons. The willow, as we have seen, was sacred to the Moon, and in the Beth-Luis-Nion is Saille, the letter S. The most primitive character of the Greek letter S is C, which is borrowed from the Cretan linear script. Sir Arthur Evans in his Palace of Minos gives a table showing the gradual development of the Cretan characters from ideograms, and the sign C is there explained as a waning moon – the Moon-goddess as hag. The arrow-head, which in Roman Brittany was as completely out of date, except for ritual uses, as the Queen’s sword of state, or the Archbishop’s crozier is now, will have been an offering to the third person of the female Trinity. 2 V. C. C. Collum took the trouble to have an analysis made of the charcoal found under the uprights, apparently the remains of the funerary pyre on which the dead man had been cremated. It was willow, oak and hazel charcoal, expressive of the sequence: enchantment, royalty, wisdom.

In Europe there were at first no male gods contemporary with the Goddess to challenge her prestige or power, but she had a lover who was alternatively the beneficent Serpent of Wisdom, and the beneficent Star of Life, her son. The Son was incarnate in the male demons of the various totem societies ruled by her, who assisted in the erotic dances held in her honour. The Serpent, incarnate in the sacred serpents which were the ghosts of the dead, sent the winds. The Son, who was also called Lucifer or Phosphorus (‘bringer of light’) because as evening-star he led in the light of the Moon, was reborn every year, grew up as the year advanced, destroyed the Serpent, and won the Goddess’s love. Her love destroyed him, but from his ashes was born another Serpent which, at Easter, laid the glain or red egg which she ate; so that the Son was reborn to her as a child once more. Osiris was a Star-son, and though after his death he looped himself around the world like a serpent, yet when his fifty-yard long phallus was carried in procession it was topped with a golden star; this stood for himself renewed as the Child Horus, son of Isis, who had been both his bride and his layer-out and was now his mother once again. Her absolute power was proved by a yearly holocaust in her honour as ‘Lady of the Wild Things’, in which the totem bird or beast of each society was burned alive.

The most familiar icon of Aegean religion is therefore a Moon-woman, a Star-son and a wise spotted Serpent grouped under a fruit-tree – Artemis, Hercules and Erechtheus. Star-son and Serpent are at war; one succeeds the other in the Moon-woman’s favour, as summer succeeds winter, and winter succeeds summer; as death succeeds birth and birth succeeds death. The Sun grows weaker or stronger as the year takes its course, the branches of the tree are now loaded and now bare, but the light of the Moon is invariable. She is impartial: she destroys or creates with equal passion. The conflict between the twins is given an ingenious turn in the Romance of Kilhwych and Olwen: Gwyn (‘White’) and his rival Gwythur ap Greidawl (‘Victor, son of Scorcher’) waged perpetual war for Creiddylad (alias Cordelia), daughter of Lludd (alias Llyr, alias Lear, alias Nudd, alias Nuada, alias Nodens), each in turn stealing her from the other, until the matter was referred to King Arthur. He gave the ironical decision that Creiddylad should be returned to her father and that the twins should ‘fight for her every first of May, until the day of doom’, and that whichever of them should then be conqueror should keep her.

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 Arcas 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 3 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.

The Christian bards of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries repeatedly refer to the Virgin Mary herself as the cauldron or source of inspiration – to which they were led, as it seems, partly by a play on the word pair, a cauldron, and the secondary form of that word, on assuming the soft form of its initial mair, which also means Mary. Mary was Mair, the mother of Christ, the mystical receptacle of the Holy Spirit, and Pair was the cauldron or receptacle and fountain of Christian inspiration. Thus we have in a poem of Davydd Benfras in the thirteenth century:

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. 4

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, 5 Miriam, Mariamne (‘Sea Lamb’) Myrrhine, Myrtea, Myrrha, 6 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 gests. 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 7 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:

Since ‘Maid Marian’ had been acting as Lady of Misrule in the Yuletide revels and deserting Robin for his rival, it is easy to see how she earned a bad name for inconstancy. Thus ‘Maud Marian’ was often written for ‘Maid Marian’: ‘Maud’ is Mary Magdalene the penitent. In Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song she is Tom’s Muse – ‘Merry Mad Maud’.

Christmas was merry in the middle ages, but May Day was still merrier. It was the time of beribboned Maypoles, of Collyridian cakes and ale, of wreaths and posies, of lovers’ gifts, of archery contests, of merritotters (see-saws) and merribowks (great vats of milk-punch). But particularly of mad-merry marriages ‘under the greenwood tree’, when the dancers from the Green went off, hand in hand, into the greenwood and built themselves little love-bowers and listened hopefully for the merry nightingale. ‘Mad Merry’ is another popular spelling of ‘Maid Marian’, and as an adjective became attached to the magician Merlin (the original ‘Old Moore’ of the popular almanacks) whose prophetic almanacks were hawked at fairs and merrimakes. Merlin was really Merddin, as Spenser explains in the Faerie Queene, but Robin Hood had taken his place as the May Bride’s lover, and he had become an old bearded prophet. The ‘merritotter’ is perhaps called after the scales (representing the Autumn equinox) in the hand of the Virgin in the Zodiac, who figured in the Mad Merry Merlin almanack: devoted readers naturally identified her with St. Mary Gipsy, for true-lovers’ fates tottered in her balance, see-sawing up and down.

Many of these greenwood marriages, blessed by a renegade friar styled Friar Tuck, were afterwards formally confirmed in the church-porch. But very often ‘merrybegots’ were repudiated by their fathers. It is probably because each year, by old custom, the tallest and toughest village lad was chosen to be Little John (or ‘Jenkin’) Robin’s deputy in the Merry Men masque, that Johnson, Jackson and Jenkinson are now among the commonest English names – Little John’s merrybegots. But Robin did as merrily with Robson, Hobson, Dobson (all short for Robin), Robinson, Hodson, Hudson and Hood; Greenwood and Merriman were of doubtful paternity. The Christmas ‘merrimake’ (as Sir James Frazer mentions in The Golden Bough ) also produced its crop of children. Who knows how many of the Morrises and Morrisons derive their patronymics from the amorous ‘morrice-men’ 8 , Marian’s ‘merry-weathers’? Or how many ‘Princes’, ‘Lords’ and ‘Kings’ from the Christmas King, or Prince, or Lord, of Misrule?

The Christmas merry-night play was an important part of the English Yule-tide festivities: seven or eight versions survive. The principal incidents are the beheading and restoration to life of the Christmas King, or Christmas Fool. This is one of the clearest survivals of the pre-Christian religion, and ultimately derives from ancient Crete. Firmicus Maternus in his On the Error of Profane Religion tells how Cretan Dionysus (Zagreus) was killed at Zeus’s orders, boiled in a cauldron and eaten by the Titans. The Cretans, he says, celebrated an annual funeral feast, in which they played out the drama of the boy’s sufferings – and his shape-shifting – eating a live bull as his surrogate. Yet he did not die for, according to Epimenides, quoted by St. Paul, Minos made a panegyric over him:

At Athens, the same festival, called the Lenaea, (‘Festival of the Wild Women’) was held at the winter solstice, and the death and rebirth of the harvest infant Dionysus were similarly dramatized. In the original myth it was not the Titans but the wild women, the nine representatives of the Moon-goddess Hera, who tore the child in pieces and ate him. And at the Lenaea it was a yearling kid, not a bull, that was eaten; when Apollodorus says that Dionysus was transformed into a kid, Eriphos, to save him from the wrath of Hera, this means that Hera once ate him as a human child, but that when men (the Titans or tutors) were admitted to the feast a kid was substituted as victim.

The most ancient surviving record of European religious practice is an Aurignacian cave-painting at Cogul in North-Eastern Spain of the Old Stone Age Lenaea. A young Dionysus with huge genitals stands unarmed, alone and exhausted in the middle of a crescent of nine dancing women, who face him. He is naked, except for what appear to be a pair of close-fitting boots laced at the knee; they are fully clothed and wear small cone-shaped hats. These wild women, differentiated by their figures and details of their dress, grow progressively older as one looks clock-wise around the crescent. The row begins with three young girls, the first two in long skirts, on the right and ends with two thin dark elderly women on the left and an emaciated crone on the far side; the crone has a face like the old moon and is dancing widdershins. In between are three vigorous golden-haired women, one of them in a short, bright party-frock. They clearly represent the New Moon, Old Moon and Full Moon triads – the crone being Atropos, the senior member of the Old Moon triad.

In front of the senior member of the New Moon triad is an animal whose fore-quarters are concealed by her skirt – it seems to be a black pig. And in the foreground of the picture, bounding away behind the backs of the Full Moon triad, is the very creature that Oisin saw in his vision when being conveyed by Niamh of the Golden Hair to the Land of Youth: a hornless fawn. Balanced erect on the fawn’s neck, and facing backwards, is a boyish-looking imp or sprite, as clearly as anything the escaping soul of the doomed Dionysus. For the wild women are closing in on him and will presently tear him in bloody morsels and devour him. Though there is nothing in the painting to indicate the season, we can be sure that it was the winter solstice.

So we get back once more to the dramatic romance of Gwion – the boy who was eaten by the wild hag Cerridwen and reborn as the miraculous child Taliesin – and to the dispute between Phylip Brydydd and the ‘vulgar rhymesters’ (see Chapter Five) as to who should first present a song to their prince on Christmas Day. The Romance of Taliesin is a sort of Christmas play, in which the sufferings of the shape-shifting child are riddlingly presented. This is the elder version, reflecting the religious theory of early European society where woman was the master of man’s destiny: pursued, was not pursued; raped, was not raped – as may be read in the faded legends of Dryope and Hylas, Venus and Adonis, Diana and Endymion, Circe and Ulysses. The danger of the various islands of women was that the male who ventured there might be sexually assaulted in the same murderous way as, according to B. Malinowski in The Sexual Life of Savages, men of North-Western Melanesia are punished for trespass against female privilege. At least one coven of nine wild women seems to have been active in South Wales during early mediaeval times: old St. Samson of Dol, travelling with a young companion, was unlucky enough to trespass in their precinct. A frightful shriek rang out suddenly and from a thicket darted a grey-haired, red-garmented hag with a bloody trident in her hand. St. Samson stood his ground; his companion fled, but was soon overtaken and stabbed to death. The hag refused to come to an accommodation with St. Samson when he reproached her, and informed him that she was one of the nine sisters who lived in those woods with their mother – apparently the Goddess Hecate. Perhaps if the younger sisters had reached the scene first, the young man would have been the victim of a concerted sexual assault. Nine murderous black-garbed women occur in the Icelandic saga of Thidrandi, who one night opened his door to a knock, though warned against the consequences, and saw them riding against him from the north. He resisted their attack with his sword for awhile, but fell mortally wounded.

The transformations of Gwion run in strict seasonal order: hare in the autumn coursing season, fish in the rains of winter; bird in the spring when the migrants return, finally grain of corn in the summer harvest season. The Fury rushes after him in the form first of greyhound bitch, then of bitch-otter, then of falcon, finally overtakes him in the shape of a high-crested black hen – red comb and black feathers show her to be the Death Goddess. In this account the solar year ends in the winnowing season of early autumn, which points to an Eastern Mediterranean origin of the story. In Classical times the Cretan, Cyprian and Delphic years, and those of Asia Minor and Palestine, ended in September.

However, when the victory of the patriarchal Indo-Europeans revolutionized the social system of the Eastern Mediterranean, the myth of the sexual chase was reversed. Greek and Latin mythology contains numerous anecdotes of the pursuit and rape of elusive goddesses or nymphs by gods in beast disguise: especially by the two senior gods, Zeus and Poseidon. Similarly in European folk-lore there are scores of variants on the ‘Two Magicians’ theme, in which the male magician, after a hot chase, outmagics the female and gains her maidenhead. In the English ballad of The Coal Black Smith, a convenient example of this altered form of chase, the correct seasonal order of events is broken because the original context has been forgotten. She becomes a fish, he an otter; she a hare, he a greyhound; she becomes a fly, he a spider and pulls her to his lair; finally she becomes a quilt on his bed, he a coverlet and the game is won. In a still more debased French variant, she falls sick, he becomes her doctor; she turns nun, he becomes her priest and confesses her night and day; she becomes a star, he a cloud and muffles her.

In the British witch-cult the male sorcerer was dominant – though in parts of Scotland Hecate, alias the Queen of Elfin or Faerie, still ruled – and The Coal Black Smith is likely to have been the song sung at a dramatic performance of the chase at a witches’ Sabbath; the association of smiths and horned gods is as ancient as Tubal Cain, the Kenite Goat-god. The horned Devil of the Sabbath had sexual connexion with all his witch attendants, though he seems to have used an enormous artificial member, not his own. Anne Armstrong, the Northumbrian witch already mentioned, testified in 1673 that, at a well-attended Sabbath held at Allansford, one of her companions, Ann Baites of Morpeth, successively transformed herself into cat, hare, greyhound and bee, to let the Devil – ‘a long black man, their protector, whom they call their God’ – admire her facility in changes. At first I thought that he chased Ann Baites, who was apparently the Maiden, or female leader of the coven, around the ring of witches, and that she mimicked the gait and cry of these various creatures in turn while he pursued her, adapting his changes to hers. The formula in The Coal Black Smith is ‘he became a greyhound dog’, or ‘he became an otter brown’, ‘and fetched her home again’. ‘Home again’ is used here in the technical sense of ‘to her own shape’, for Isobel Gowdie of Auldearne at her trial in 1662, quoted the witch formula for turning oneself into a hare:

It is clear from her subsequent account that there was no change of outward shape, but only of behaviour, and the verse suggests a dramatic dance. I see now that Ann Baites gave a solo performance, alternately mimicking the pursued and the pursuer, and that the Devil was content merely to applaud her. Probably the sequence was seasonal – hare and greyhound, trout and otter, bee and swallow, mouse and cat – and inherited from the earlier form of chase, with the pursuer as the black Cat-Demeter finally destroying the Sminthean mouse on the threshing-floor in the winnowing season. The whole song is easy to restore in its original version. 9

An intermediate form of the ‘Two Magicians’ myth, quoted by Diodorus Siculus, Callimachus in his Hymn to Artemis and Antoninus Liberalis, the second-century AD mythographer, in his Transformations, who all refer it to different regions, is that the Goddess Artemis, alias Aphaea, Dictynna, Britomart or Atergatis, is unsuccessfully pursued and finally escapes in fish form. Callimachus makes Minos of Crete the erotic pursuer and Britomart the chaste pursued, and relates that the pursuit lasted for nine months from the early flood season to the winnowing season. The myth is intended to explain the fish-tail in the statues of the goddess at Ascalon, Phigalia, Crabos, Aegina, Cephallenia, Mount Dictynnaeum in Crete and elsewhere, and to justify her local devotees in retaining their pre-Hellenic rites and marital customs. Fishermen figure prominently in the story – Dictynna means a net – and fishermen are notoriously conservative in their beliefs. In the Philistine version from Ascalon, quoted by Athenaeus, the Goddess was Derketo and the pursuer was one Moxus or Mopsus: perhaps this should be Moschus the ancestor of King Midas’s tribe who defeated the Hittites. Cognate with this myth is the fruitless attempt by Apollo on the maidenhead of the nymph Daphne.

The love-chase is, unexpectedly, the basis of the Coventry legend of Lady Godiva. The clue is provided by a miserere-seat in Coventry Cathedral, paralleled elsewhere in Early English grotesque woodcarving, which shows what the guide-books call ‘a figure emblematic of lechery’: a long-haired woman wrapped in a net, riding sideways on a goat and preceded by a hare. Gaster in his stories from the Jewish Targum, collected all over Europe, tells of a woman who when given a love-test by her royal lover, namely to come to him ‘neither clothed nor unclothed, neither on foot nor on horseback, neither on water nor on dry land, neither with or without a gift’ arrived dressed in a net, mounted on a goat, with one foot trailing in the ditch, and releasing a hare. The same story with slight variations, was told by Saxo Grammaticus in his late twelfth-century History of Denmark. Aslog, the last of the Volsungs, Brynhild’s daughter by Sigurd, was living on a farm at Spangerejd in Norway, disguised as a sooty-faced kitchen-maid called Krake (raven). Even so, her beauty made such an impression on the followers of the hero Ragnar Lodbrog that he thought of marrying her, and as a test of her worthiness told her to come to him neither on foot nor riding, neither dressed nor naked, neither fasting nor feasting, neither attended nor alone. She arrived on goatback, one foot trailing on the ground, clothed only in her hair and a fishing-net, holding an onion to her lips, a hound by her side.

If the two stories are combined into a picture, the ‘figure emblematic of lechery’ has a black face, long hair, a raven flying overhead, a hare running ahead, a hound at her side, a fruit to her lips, a net over her and a goat under her. She will now be easily recognized as the May-eve aspect of the Love-and-Death goddess Freya, alias Frigg, Holda, Held, Hilde, Goda, or Ostara. In neolithic or early Bronze Age times she went North from the Mediterranean, where she was known as Dictynna (from her net), Aegea (from her goat), Coronis (from her raven), also Rhea, Britomart, Artemis and so on, and brought the Maze Dance with her.

The fruit at her lips is probably the apple of immortality and the raven denotes death and prophecy – Freya’s prophetic raven was borrowed from her by Odin, just as Bran borrowed Danu’s and Apollo Athene’s. The Goddess was established in Britain as Rhiannon, Arianrhod, Cerridwen, Blodeuwedd, Danu or Anna long before the Saxons, Angles and Danes brought very similar versions of her with them. Hilde was at home in the Milky Way, like Rhea in Crete and Blodeuwedd (Olwen) in Britain, both of whom were connected with goats; and in the Brocken May-eve ceremony a goat was sacrificed in her honour. As Holda she was mounted on a goat with a pack of twenty-four hounds, her daughters, running beside her – the twenty-four hours of May Eve – and was sometimes shown as piebald to represent her ambivalent character of black Earth-mother and corpse-like Death – Holda and Hel. As Ostara, the Saxon Goddess after whom Easter is named, she attended a May-eve Sabbath where a goat was sacrificed to her. The hare was her ritual animal: it still ‘lays’ Easter eggs. The goat spelt fertility of cattle; the hare, good hunting; the net, good fishing; the long hair, tall crops.

The May-eve goat, as is clear from the English witch ceremonies and from the Swedish May-play, ‘Bükkerwise’, was mated to the goddess, sacrificed and resurrected: that is to say, the Priestess had public connexion with the annual king dressed in goatskins, and either he was then killed and resurrected in the form of his successor, or else a goat was sacrificed in his stead and his reign prolonged. This fertility rite was the basis of the highly intellectualized ‘Lesser Mysteries’ of Eleusis, performed in February, representing the marriage of Goat-Dionysus to the Goddess Thyone, ‘the raving queen’, his death and resurrection. 10 At Coventry, she evidently went to the ceremony riding on his back, to denote her domination of him – as Europa rode on the Minos bull, or Hera on her lion.

The hare, as has been pointed out in Chapter Sixteen, was sacred both in Pelasgian Greece and Britain because it is swift, prolific and mates openly without embarrassment. I should have mentioned in this context that the early British tabu on hunting the hare, the penalty for a breach of which was to be struck with cowardice, was originally lifted on a single day in the year – May-eve – as the tabu on hunting the wren was lifted only on St. Stephen’s Day. (Boadicea let loose the hare during her battle with the Romans in the hope, presumably, that the Romans would strike at it with their swords and so lose courage.)

The story of Lady Godiva, as recorded by Roger of Wendover, a St. Albans chronicler, in the thirteenth century, is that shortly before the Norman Conquest the Saxon Lady Godiva (Godgifu) asked her husband Leofric Earl of Mercia to relieve the people of Coventry from oppressive tolls. He consented on condition that she rode naked through the crowded market on a fair-day; and she did so with a knight on either side, but preserved her modesty by covering herself with her hair, so that only her ‘very white legs’ showed underneath. The story, which is also told of the Countess of Hereford and ‘King John’ in connexion with the distribution of bread and cheese at St. Briavel’s in Gloucestershire, cannot be historically true, because Coventry in Lady Godiva’s day was a village without either tolls or fairs. But it is certain that in 1040 she persuaded Leofric to build and endow a Benedictine monastery at Coventry, and what seems to have happened is that after the Conquest the monks disguised a local May-eve procession of the Goddess Goda, during which all pious Christians were at first required to keep indoors, with an edifying anecdote about their benefactress Lady Godiva, modelling the story on Saxo’s. The fraud is given away by the ‘Lady Godiva’ procession of Southam (twelve miles south of Coventry and included in Leofric’s earldom), where two figures were carried, one white and one black – the Goddess as Holda and Hel, Love and Death. The story of Peeping Tom the Tailor is not mentioned by Roger of Wendover, but may be a genuine early tradition. The St. Briavel’s ceremony which took place, like the Southam and Coventry processions, on Corpus Christi, a date associated both at York and Coventry with mystery plays, is said to have commemorated the freeing of the people from a tax on the gathering of fire-wood in the neighbouring forest; Corpus Christi always falls on a Friday, the Goddess’s own day, and corresponds roughly with May Eve; thus, it seems that the mystery-play has its origin in the May Eve festivities, Bükkerwise, in honour of Goda, the Bona Dea. If there was a prohibition against men witnessing the procession, as there was at Rome in the Bona Dea ceremonies, and as there was in Celtic Germany according to Tacitus (Germania, chap. 40 ) against any man witnessing Hertha’s annual bath after her progress back to her sacred grove, and as there was in Greece in the days of Actaeon, when Diana took her woodland bath, Peeping Tom may record the memory of this.

The British are a mixed race, but the non-Teutonic goddess-worshipping strains are the strongest. This explains why the poets’ poetry written in English remains obstinately pagan. The Biblical conception of the necessary supremacy of man over woman is alien to the British mind: among all Britons of sensibility the rule is ‘ladies first’ on all social occasions. The chivalrous man dies far more readily in the service of a queen than of a king: self-destruction is indeed the recognized proof of grand passion:

There is an unconscious hankering in Britain after goddesses, if not for a goddess so dominant as the aboriginal Triple Goddess, at least for a female softening of the all-maleness of the Christian Trinity. The male Trinity corresponds increasingly less with the British social system, in which woman, now that she has become a property owner and a voter, has nearly regained the position of respect which she enjoyed before the Puritan revolution. True, the male Trinity antedated the Puritan revolution but it was a theological not an emotional concept: as has been shown, the Queen of Heaven with her retinue of female saints had a far greater hold in the popular imagination between the Crusades and the Civil War than either the Father or the Son. And one of the results of Henry VIII’s breach with Rome was that when his daughter Queen Elizabeth became head of the Anglican Church she was popularly regarded as a sort of deity: poets not only made her their Muse but gave her titles – Phoebe, Virginia, Gloriana – which identified her with the Moon-goddess, and the extraordinary hold that she gained on the affections of her subjects was largely due to this cult.

The temporary reinstatement of the Thunder-god in effective religious sovereignty during the Commonwealth is the most remarkable event in modern British history: the cause was a mental ferment induced by the King James Bible among the mercantile classes of the great towns and in parts of Scotland and England where Celtic blood ran thinnest. The first Civil War was fought largely between the chivalrous nobility with their retainers and the anti-chivalrous mercantile classes with their artisan supporters. The Anglo-Saxon-Danish south-east was solidly Parliamentarian and the Celtic north-west as solidly Royalist. It was therefore appropriate that at the Battle of Naseby, which decided the war, the rival battle cries were, for the Parliamentary army, ‘God our Strength’ and for the Royalist army ‘Queen Marie’. Queen Marie was a Catholic and her name evoked the Queen of Heaven and of Love. The Thunder-god won the day, and vented his spite not only on the Virgin and her retinue of saints, but on Maid Marian and her maypole retinue, and on the other Triple Goddess cult which still survived secretly in many parts of the British Isles – the witch cult. But his triumph was short-lived because after gaining the victory he had removed the King, 11 his chief representative. He was therefore temporarily ousted at the Restoration and when he returned in 1688 with a Protestant King as his representative, his thunderous fury had been curbed. He gained a second access of strength in the enthusiastic religious revival, fostered by the merchant class, which accompanied the Industrial Revolution; but lost ground again at the beginning of the present century.

The British love of Queens does not seem to be based merely on the historical commonplace that ‘Britain is never so prosperous as when a Queen is on the Throne’: it reflects, rather, a stubborn conviction that this is a Mother Country not a Father Land – a peculiarity that the Classical Greeks also noted about Crete – and that the King’s prime function is to be the Queen’s consort. Such national apprehensions or convictions or obsessions are the ultimate source of all religion, myth and poetry, and cannot be eradicated either by conquest or education.