part0031

Must poetry necessarily be original? According to the Apollonian, or Classical, theory it need not be, since the test of a good poet is his ability to express time-proved sentiments in time-honoured forms with greater fluency, charm, sonorousness and learning than his rivals; these, at least, are the qualities that win a man a bardic Chair. Apollonian poetry is essentially court-poetry, written to uphold the authority delegated to poets by the King (regarded as a Roi Soleil, Apollo’s vice-regent) on the understanding that they celebrate and perpetuate his magnificence and terror. They therefore use old-fashioned diction, formal ornament, and regular, sober, well-polished metre, as a means of upholding the dignity of their office; and make frequent eulogistic references to ancestral events and institutions. There is an extraordinary sameness in their eulogies: the Aztecs flattered their patriarchal Inca as ‘a well-fed hawk, always ready for war’ which was a phrase worked to death by the early mediaeval Welsh bards.

A Classical technique such as was perfected by these bards, or by the French poets of the Louis XIV period, or by the English poets of the early eighteenth-century Augustan Age is a sure sign of political stability based on force of arms; and to be original in such an age is to be either a disloyal subject or a vagrant.

The Augustan Age was so called because the poets were celebrating the same renewal of firm central government after the troubles leading to the execution of one king and the banishment of another, as the Latin poets (under orders from Maecenas, Minister of Propaganda and the Arts) had celebrated after Augustus’s triumph at the close of the Roman Civil Wars. The new poetic technique was based partly on contemporary French practice – the ‘Golden Age’ of French literature had just begun – partly on that of the ‘Golden Age’ of Latin. The fashionable ten-or-twelve-syllabled iambic couplet, well-balanced and heavily packed with antithetical wit, was French. The use of ‘poetical periphrasis’ as a formal ornament was Latin: the poet was expected to refer, for instance, to the sea as the ‘ briny deep’ or ‘the fishy kingdom’ and to fire as the ‘devouring element’. The original reason for this convention was forgotten; it had grown out of the old religious taboo against direct mention of dangerous, powerful or unlucky things. (This taboo survived until recently in the Cornish tin-mines, where fear of the pixies made the miner refrain from speaking of ‘owls, foxes, hares, cats or rats save in Tinner’s language,’ and in Scotland and North-Eastern England among fishermen who had a similar fear of annoying the pixies by un-periphrastic mention of pigs, cats or priests.) Because the Latin poets also had a poetic diction, with vocabulary and syntax forbidden to prose-writers, which they found useful in helping them to accommodate Latin to the Greek convention of hexameter and elegiac couplet, the English Augustans gradually developed a similar diction which they found useful in resolving awkward metrical problems.

and if ‘wind’ was used it had to rhyme with ‘mind’ not with ‘sinned’. But Victorian Classicism was tainted with the ideal of progress. The dull, secure Augustan ‘rocking-horse’ alexandrine and heroic couplet had been abandoned since Keats’s attack on them and a poet was encouraged to experiment in a variety of metres and to take his themes from anywhere he pleased. The change marked the instability of the social system: Chartism threatened, the monarchy was unpopular, and the preserves of the old landed nobility were being daily encroached upon by the captains of industry and the East India Company Nabobs. Originality came to be prized as a virtue: to be original in the mid-Victorian sense implied the ‘mental squint’ which enlarged the field of poetry by weaving poetic spells over such useful but vulgar things as steam-boats, mutton-pies, trade exhibitions and gas lamps. It also implied borrowing themes from Persian, Arabic or Indian literature, and acclimatizing the sapphic, alcaic, rondel and triolet as English metrical forms.

The true poet must always be original, but in a simpler sense: he must address only the Muse – not the King or Chief Bard or the people in general – and tell her the truth about himself and her in his own passionate and peculiar words. The Muse is a deity, but she is also a woman, and if her celebrant makes love to her with the second-hand phrases and ingenious verbal tricks that he uses to flatter her son Apollo she rejects him more decisively even than she rejects the tongue-tied or cowardly bungler. Not that the Muse is ever completely satisfied. Laura Riding has spoken on her behalf in three memorable lines:

In Greece the metres allotted to the satirist were the poetic metres in reverse. Satire can be called left-handed poetry. The Moon travels from left to right, the same way as the Sun, but as she grows older and weaker rises every night a little farther to the left; then, since the rate of plant growth under a waxing moon is greater than under a waning moon, the right hand has always been associated with growth and strength but the left with weakness and decay. Thus the word ‘left’ itself means, in Old Germanic, ‘weak, old, palsied’. Lucky dances by devotees of the Moon were therefore made right-handed or clockwise, to induce prosperity; unlucky ones to cause damage or death were made left-handed, or ‘widdershins’. Similarly, the right-handed fire-wheel, or swastika, was lucky; the left-handed (adopted by the Nazis) unlucky. There are two sides to the worship of the Indian Goddess Kali: her right side as benefactress and universal mother, her left side as fury and ogress. The word ‘sinister’ has come to mean more than left-handed because in Classical augury birds seen on the left hand portended ill-luck.

The word ‘curse’ derives from the Latin cursus, ‘a running’ – especially circular running as in a chariot race – and is short for cursus contra solem. Thus Margaret Balfour, accused as a witch in sixteenth-century Scotland, was charged with dancing widdershins nine times around men’s houses, stark naked; and my friend A. K. Smith (late of the I.C.S.) once accidentally saw a naked Indian witch do the very same thing in Southern India as a ceremony of cursing. The Muse-priestesses of Helicon and Pieria, in a sinister mood, must have danced nine times about the object of their curse, or an emblem of it.

Most English poets have occasionally indulged in left-handed satire, Skelton, Donne, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Blake among them; those who have built up their reputation principally on satire, or parody – such as Samuel Butler, Pope, Swift, Calverley – are only grudgingly allowed the title of poet. But there is nothing in the language to match the Irish poets in vindictiveness, except what has been written by the Anglo-Irish. The technique of parody is the same as that employed by Russian witches: they walk quietly behind their victim, exactly mimicking his gait; then when in perfect sympathy with him suddenly stumble and fall, taking care to fall soft while he falls hard. Skilful parody of a poem upsets its dignity, sometimes permanently as in the case of the school-anthology poems parodied by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland.

The purpose of satire is to destroy whatever is overblown, faded and dull, and clear the soil for a new sowing. So the Cypriots understood the mystery of the God of the Year by describing him as amphidexios, which includes the sense of ‘ambidextrous’, ‘ambiguous’, and ‘ambivalent’, and putting a weapon in each of his hands. He is himself and his other self at the same time, king and supplanter, victim and murderer, poet and satirist – and his right hand does not know what his left hand does. In Mesopotamia, as Nergal, he was both the Sower who brought wealth to the fields and the Reaper, the God of the Dead; but elsewhere, in order to simplify the myth, he was represented as twins. This simplification has led, through dualistic theology, to the theory that death, evil, decay and destruction are erroneous concepts which God, the Good, the Right Hand, will one day disprove. Ascetic theologians try to paralyze or lop off the left hand in honour of the right; but poets are aware that each twin must conquer in turn, in an agelong and chivalrous war fought for the favours of the White Goddess, as the heroes Gwyn and Greidawl fought for the favours of Creiddylad, or the heroes Mot and Aleyn for those of Anatha of Ugarit. The war between Good and Evil has been waged in indecent and painful way during the past two millennia because the theologians, not being poets, have forbidden the Goddess to umpire it, and made God impose on the Devil impossible terms of unconditional surrender.

That woman must not be excluded from the company of poets was one of the wise rules at the Devil Tavern in Fleet Street, just before the Puritan Revolution, when Ben Jonson laid down the laws of poetry for his young contemporaries. He knew the risk run by Apollonians who try to be wholly independent of women: they fall into sentimental homosexuality. Once poetic fashions begin to be set by the homosexual, and ‘Platonic love’ – homosexual idealism – is introduced, the Goddess takes vengeance. Socrates, remember, would have banished poets from his dreary Republic. The alternative evasion of woman-love is monastic asceticism, the results of which are tragic rather than comic. However, woman is not a poet: she is either a Muse or she is nothing. 1 This is not to say that a woman should refrain from writing poems; only, that she should write as a woman, not as if she were an honorary man. The poet was originally the mystes, or ecstatic devotee of the Muse; the women who took part in her rites were her representatives, like the nine dancers in the Cogul cave-painting, or the nine women who warmed the cauldron of Cerridwen with their breaths in Gwion’s Preiddeu Annwm. Poetry in its archaic setting, in fact, was either the moral and religious law laid down for man by the nine-fold Muse, or the ecstatic utterance of man in furtherance of this law and in glorification of the Muse. It is the imitation of male poetry that causes the false ring in the work of almost all women poets. A woman who concerns herself with poetry should, I believe, either be a silent Muse and inspire the poets by her womanly presence, as Queen Elizabeth and the Countess of Derby did, or she should be the Muse in a complete sense: she should be in turn Arianrhod, Blodeuwedd and the Old Sow of Maenawr Penardd who eats her farrow, and should write in each of these capacities with antique authority. She should be the visible moon: impartial, loving, severe, wise.

Sappho undertook this responsibility: one should not believe the malevolent lies of the Attic comedians who caricature her as an insatiable Lesbian. The quality of her poems proves her to have been a true Cerridwen. I once asked my so-called Moral Tutor at Oxford, a Classical scholar and Apollonian: ‘Tell me, sir, do you think that Sappho was a good poet?’ He looked up and down the street, as if to see whether anyone was listening and then confided to me: ‘Yes, Graves, that’s the trouble, she was very, very good!’ I gathered that he considered it fortunate that so little of her work had survived. The sixteenth-century Welsh woman-poet, Gwerfyl Mechain, also seems to have played the part of Cerridwen: ‘I am the hostess of the irreproachable Ferry Tavern, a white-gowned moon welcoming any man who comes to me with silver.’

The main theme of poetry is, properly, the relations of man and woman, rather than those of man and man, as the Apollonian Classicists would have it. The true poet who goes to the tavern and pays the silver tribute to Blodeuwedd goes over the river to his death. As in the story of Llew Llaw: ‘All their discourse that night was concerning the affection and love that they felt one for the other and which in no longer space than one evening had arisen.’ This paradise lasts only from May Day to St. John’s Eve. Then the plot is hatched and the poisoned dart flies; and the poet knows that it must be so. For him there is no other woman but Cerridwen and he desires one thing above all else in the world: her love. As Blodeuwedd, she will gladly give him her love, but at only one price: his life. She will exact payment punctually and bloodily. Other women, other goddesses, are kinder-seeming. They sell their love at a reasonable rate – sometimes a man may even have it for the asking. But not Cerridwen: for with her love goes wisdom. And however bitterly and grossly the poet may rail against her in the hour of his humiliation – Catullus is the most familiar instance – he has been party to his own betrayal and has no just cause for complaint.

Cerridwen abides. Poetry began in the matriarchal age, and derives its magic from the moon, not from the sun. No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of: ‘Kill! kill! kill!’ and ‘Blood! blood! blood!’

Constant illiterate use of the phrase ‘to woo the Muse’ has obscured its poetic sense: the poet’s inner communion with the White Goddess, regarded as the source of truth. Truth has been represented by poets as a naked woman: a woman divested of all garments or ornaments that will commit her to any particular position in time and space. The Syrian Moon-goddess was also represented so, with a snake head-dress to remind the devotee that she was Death in disguise, and a lion crouched watchfully at her feet. The poet is in love with the White Goddess, with Truth: his heart breaks with longing and love for her. She is the Flower-goddess Olwen or Blodeuwedd; but she is also Blodeuwedd the Owl, lamp-eyed, hooting dismally, with her foul nest in the hollow of a dead tree, or Circe the pitiless falcon, or Lamia with her flickering tongue, or the snarling-chopped Sow-goddess, or the mare-headed Rhiannon who feeds on raw flesh. Odi atqae amo: ‘to be in love with’ is also to hate. Determined to escape from the dilemma, the Apollonian teaches himself to despise woman, and teaches woman to despise herself.

Solomon’s wit is bitterly succinct: ‘The horse-leech’s two daughters: Give and Give. ’ The horse-leech is a small fresh-water animal akin to the medicinal leech, with thirty teeth in its jaws. When a beast goes down to a stream to drink, the leech swims into its mouth and fastens on the soft flesh at the back of its throat. It then sucks blood until completely distended, driving the beast frantic, and as a type of relentless greed gives its name to the Alukah, who is the Canaanite Lamia, or Succuba, or Vampire. The two daughters of Alukah are insatiable, like Alukah herself: and their names are Sheol and the Womb, or Death and Life. Solomon says, in other words: ‘Women are greedy of children; they suck the vigour of their menfolk, like the Vampire; they are sexually insatiable; they resemble the horse-leech of the pond which plagues horses. And to what purpose are men born of women? Only in the end to die. The grave and woman are equally insatiable.’ But Solomon of the Proverbs was a sour philosopher, not a romantic poet like the Galilean ‘Solomon’ of the Canticles who is really Salmaah, the Kenite Dionysus, making love in Hellenistic style to his twin-sister, the May bride of Shulem.

The reason why so remarkably few young poets continue nowadays to publish poetry after their early twenties is not necessarily – as I used to think – the decay of patronage and the impossibility of earning a decent living by the profession of poetry. There are several ways of supporting life which are consonant with the writing of poems; and publication of poems is not difficult. The reason is that something dies in the poet. Perhaps he has compromised his poetic integrity by valuing some range of experience or other – literary, religious, philosophical, dramatic, political or social – above the poetic. But perhaps also he has lost his sense of the White Goddess: the woman whom he took to be a Muse, or who was a Muse, turns into a domestic woman and would have him turn similarly into a domesticated man. Loyalty prevents him from parting company with her, especially if she is the mother of his children and is proud to be reckoned a good housewife; and as the Muse fades out, so does the poet. The English poets of the early nineteenth century, when the poetry-reading public was very large, were uncomfortably aware of this problem and many of them, such as Southey and Patmore, tried to lyricize domesticity, though none of them with poetic success. The White Goddess is anti-domestic; she is the perpetual ‘other woman’, and her part is difficult indeed for a woman of sensibility to play for more than a few years, because the temptation to commit suicide in simple domesticity lurks in every maenad’s and muse’s heart.

An unhappy solution to this difficult problem was attempted in Connaught in the seventh century AD by Liadan of Corkaguiney, a noblewoman and also an ollave-poet. She went with her train of twenty-four poet-pupils, as the immemorial custom was, on a poetic cuairt, or circuit of visits where, among others, the poet Curithir made an ale-feast for her and she fell in love with him. He felt an answering love and asked her: ‘Why should we not marry? A son born to us would be famous.’ She answered: ‘Not now, it would spoil my round of poetic visits. Come to me later at Corkaguiney and I will go with you.’ Then she began to brood on his words, and the more she brooded the less she liked them: he had spoken not of their love but only of their fame and of a famous son who might one day be born to them. Why a son? Why not a daughter? Was he rating his gifts above hers? And why irrelevantly contemplate the birth of future poets? Why was Curithir not content to be a poet himself and live in her poetic company? To bear children to such a man would be a sin against herself; yet she loved him with all her heart and had solemnly promised to go with him.

So when Liadan had finished her circuit of visits to the kings’ and chieftains’ houses of Connaught, exchanging poetic lore with the poets she found there, and receiving gifts from her hosts, she took a religious vow of chastity which it would be death to break; and did this not for any religious motive, but because she was a poet and realized that to marry Curithir would destroy the poetic bond between them. He came to fetch her presently and, true to her promise, she went with him; but, true to her vow, she would not sleep with him. Overwhelmed with grief he took a similar vow. The two then placed themselves under the direction of the severe and suspicious St. Cummine, who gave Curithir the choice of seeing Liadan without speaking to her, or speaking to her without seeing her. As a poet he chose speech. Alternately each would wander around the other’s wattled cell in Cummine’s monastic settlement, never being allowed to meet. When Curithir finally persuaded Cummine to relax the severity of this rule, he at once accused them of unchastity and banished Curithir from the settlement. Curithir renounced love, became a pilgrim, and Liadan died of remorse for the barren victory that she had won over him.

The Irish have been aware of the poet’s love-problem since pre-Christian times. In the Sickbed of Cuchulain, Cuchulain, who is a poet as well as a hero, has deserted his wife Emer and fallen under the spell of Fand, a Queen of the Sidhe. Emer herself was originally his Muse and at their first meeting they had exchanged poetic conversation so abstruse that nobody present understood a word; but marriage had estranged them. Emer comes angrily to Fand’s rath to reclaim Cuchulain, and Fand renounces her possession of him, admitting that he does not really love her and that he had better return to Emer:

Let us consider Suibne Geilt, the poet-King of Dal Araidhe, about whom an anonymous ninth-century Irishman composed a prose tale, The Madness of Suibne, incorporating a sequence of dramatic poems based on certain seventh-century originals which were attributed to Suibne himself. In the tale, as it has come down to us, Suibne was driven mad because he had twice insulted St. Ronan: first, by interrupting the Saint as he marked out the site of a new church without royal permission, and tossing his psalter into a stream; and next, by flinging a spear at him as he tried to make peace between the High King of Ireland and Suibne’s overlord, just before the Battle of Magh Rath. The spear hit St. Ronan’s massbell, but glanced off harmlessly. St. Ronan thereupon cursed Suibne with the flying madness. Evidence found in three early chronicles, however, suggests that Suibne’s second insult was directed not at St. Ronan but at an ollave, or sacrosanct poet, who was trying to make peace on the eve of Magh Rath between the rival army-commanders, namely King Domnal the Scot, and Domnal High King of Ireland. In the seventh century, such peacemaking was an ollave’s function, not a priest’s. Perhaps Suibne’s spear struck the branch of golden bells which were the ollave’s emblem of office; and the ollave vengefully threw in his face a so-called ‘madman’s wisp’ (a magical handful of straw), which sent him fleeing crazily from the battlefield. At any rate, Suibne’s wife Éorann had tried to restrain him from this act of folly, and was therefore spared the curse. The flying madness is described as making his body so light that he could perch in the tops of trees, and leap desperate leaps of a hundred feet or more without injury. (Mediaeval Latin philosophers described the condition as spiritualizatio, agilitas and subtilitas, and applied it to cases of levitation by ecstatic saints.) Feathers then sprouted on Suibne’s body, and he lived like the wild things: feeding on sloes, hollyberries, watercress, brooklime, acorns; sleeping in yew-trees and rocky clefts of ivy-clad cliffs, and even in hawthorn and bramble bushes. The slightest noise would startle him into flight, and he was cursed with a perpetual distrust of all men.

This impossible tale conceals a true one: that of the poet obsessed by the Hag of the Mill, another name for the White Goddess. He calls her ‘the woman white with flour’ just as the Greeks called her Alphito, ‘Goddess of the Barley Flour’. This poet quarrels with both the Church and the bards of the Academic Establishment, and is outlawed by them. He loses touch with his more practical wife, once his Muse; and though, pitying such misery, she admits to a still unextinguished love for him, he can no longer reach her. He trusts nobody, not even his best friend, and enjoys no companionship but that of the blackbirds, the stags, the larks, the badgers, the little foxes, and the wild trees. Towards the end of his tale Suibne has lost even the Hag of the Mill, who snaps her neck-bone in leaping along with him; which means, I suppose, that he breaks down as a poet under the strain of loneliness. In his extremity Suibne returns to Éorann; but her heart has gone dead by now, and she sends him coldly away.

The tale seems to be devised as an illustration of the Triad that it is ‘death to mock a poet, death to love a poet, death to be a poet’. Suibne found it death to mock a poet; and death to be a poet; Éorann found it death to love a poet. Only after he had died in misery did Suibne’s fame flourish again.

This must be the most ruthless and bitter description in all European literature of an obsessed poet’s predicament. The woman-poet’s predicament is described in an almost equally poignant tale: The Loves of Liadan and Curithir, discussed above, is as sorrowful as Suibne’s.

In the result, he either loses the girl altogether, as he rightly feared; or else he marries her and loses her in part. Well, why not? If she makes him a good wife, why should he cherish the poetic obsession to his own ruin? Again, if a woman-poet can get a healthy child in exchange for the gift of poetry, why not? The sovereign White Goddess dismisses both deserters with a faintly scornful smile, and inflicts no punishment, so far as I know; but then neither did she praise and cosset and confer Orders on them while they served her. There is no disgrace in being an ex-poet; if only one makes a clean break with poetry, like Rimbaud, or (more recently) Laura Riding.

Yet, is the alternative between service to the White Goddess, on the one hand, and respectable citizenship, on the other, quite so sharp as the Irish poets presented it? Suibne in his tale has an over-riding obsession about poetry; so has Liadan in hers. But was either of them gifted with a sense of humour? Doubtless not, or they would never have punished themselves so cruelly. Humour is the one gift that helps men and women to survive the stress of city life. If he keeps his sense of humour, too, a poet can go mad gracefully, swallow his disappointments in love gracefully, reject the Establishment gracefully, die gracefully, and cause no upheaval in society. Nor need he indulge in self-pity, or cause distress to those who love him; and that goes for a woman-poet also.

Humour is surely reconcilable with devotion to the White Goddess; as it is, for example, with perfect sanctity in a Catholic priest, whose goings and comings are far more strictly circumscribed than a poet’s, and whose Bible contains not one smile from Genesis to the Apocalypse. Andro Man said of the Queen of Elphame in 1597: ‘She can be young or old, as it pleases her’; and indeed, the Goddess reserves a delightfully girlish giggle for those who are not daunted by her customary adult marble glare. She may even allow her poet an eventual happy marriage, if he has taken his early tumbles in good part. For though she is, by definition, non-human, neither is she altogether inhuman. Suibne complains about a snowstorm that caught him without clothes in the fork of a tree:

Yet his sufferings were by no means the whole story. He enjoyed life to the full in better weather: his meals of wild strawberries or blueberries, the swift flight that enabled him to overtake the wood-pigeon, his rides on the antlers of a stag or on the back of a slender-shinned fawn. He could even say: ‘I take no pleasure in the amorous talk of man with woman; far more lovely, to my ear, is the song of the blackbird.’ Nobody can blame Éorann for asking Suibne politely to begone, when he had reached that stage. What preserved her, and what he lacked, was surely a sense of humour? Éorann’s earlier wish for a feathered body which would let her fly around with him, suggests that she too began as a poet, but sensibly resigned when the time for poetry had gone by.

like the Three Jovial Huntsmen. But is it enough to have described something of the peculiar way in which poets have always thought, and to have recorded at the same time the survival of various antique themes and concepts, or even to have suggested a new intellectual approach to myths and sacred literature? What comes next? Should a practical poetic creed be drafted, which poets might debate, point by point, until it satisfied them as relevant to their immediate writing needs and in proper form for unanimous subscription? But who would presume to summon these poets to a synod or preside over their sessions? Who can make any claim to be a chief poet and wear the embroidered mantle of office which the ancient Irish called the tugen? Who can even claim to be an ollave? The ollave in ancient Ireland had to be master of one hundred and fifty Oghams, or verbal ciphers, which allowed him to converse with his fellow-poets over the heads of unlearned bystanders; to be able to repeat at a moment’s notice any one of three hundred and fifty long traditional histories and romances, together with the incidental poems they contained, with appropriate harp accompaniment; to have memorized an immense number of other poems of different sorts; to be learned in philosophy; to be a doctor of civil law; to understand the history of modern, middle and ancient Irish with the derivations and changes of meaning of every word; to be skilled in music, augury, divination, medicine, mathematics, geography, universal history, astronomy, rhetoric and foreign languages; and to be able to extemporize poetry in fifty or more complicated metres. That anyone at all should have been able to qualify as an ollave is surprising; yet families of ollaves tended to intermarry; and among the Maoris of New Zealand where a curiously similar system prevailed, the capacity of the ollave to memorize, comprehend, elucidate and extemporize staggered Governor Grey and other early British observers.

Again, if this hypothetic synod were reserved for poets whose mother tongue is English, how many poets with the necessary patience and integrity to produce any authoritative document would respond to a summons? And even if the synod could be summoned, would not a cleavage be immediately apparent between the devotees of Apollo and those of the White Goddess? This is an Apollonian civilization. It is true that in English-speaking countries the social position of women has improved enormously in the last fifty years and is likely to improve still more now that so large a part of the national wealth is in the control of women – in the United States more than a half; but the age of religious revelation seems to be over, and social security is so intricately bound up with marriage and the family – even where registry marriages predominate – that the White Goddess in her orgiastic character seems to have no chance of staging a come-back, until women themselves grow weary of decadent patriarchalism, and turn Bassarids again. This is unlikely as yet, though the archives of morbid pathology are full of Bassarid case-histories. An English or American woman in a nervous breakdown of sexual origin will often instinctively reproduce in faithful and disgusting detail much of the ancient Dionysiac ritual. I have witnessed it myself in helpless terror .

The ascetic Thunder-god who inspired the Protestant Revolution has again yielded pride of place to Celestial Hercules, the original patron of the English monarchy. All the popular feasts in the Christian calendar are concerned either with the Son or the Mother, not with the Father, though prayers for rain, victory and the King’s or President’s health are still half-heartedly addressed to him. It is only the pure allegiance of Jesus, recorded in the Gospels, that has kept the Father from going ‘the way of all flesh’ – the way of his predecessors Saturn, The Dagda and Kai 2 – to end as chief cook and buffoon in the mid-winter masquerade. That may yet be the Father’s end in Britain, if popular religious forces continue to work in their traditional fashion. An ominous sign is the conversion of St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors and children whose feast properly falls on the sixth of December, into white-bearded Father Christmas, the buffoonish patron of the holiday. For in the early morning of Christmas Day, clad in an old red cotton dressing-gown, Father Christmas fills the children’s stockings with nuts, raisins, sugar biscuits and oranges; and while the family are at church singing hymns in honour of the new-born king, presides in the kitchen over the turkey, roast beef, plum pudding, brandy butter and mince pies; and finally when the lighted candles of the Christmas tree have guttered down, goes out into the snow – or rain – with an empty sack and senile groans of farewell.

This is a cockney civilization and the commonest references to natural phenomena in traditional poetry, which was written by countrymen for countrymen, are becoming unintelligible. Not one English poet in fifty could identify the common trees of the Beth-Luis-Nion, and distinguish roebuck from fallow deer, aconite from corn-cockle, or wryneck from woodpecker. Bow and spear are antiquated weapons; ships have ceased to be the playthings of wind and wave; fear of ghosts and bogeys is confined to children and a few old peasants; and the cranes no longer ‘make letters as they fly’ – the last crane to breed in this country was shot in Anglesey in the year 1908.

The myths too are wearing thin. When the English language was first formed, all educated people were thinking within the framework of the Christian myth cycle, which was Judaeo-Greek with numerous paganistic accretions disguised as lives of the Saints. The Protestant revolution expelled all but a few saints, and the growth of rationalism since the Darwinian controversy has so weakened the Churches that Biblical myths no longer serve as a secure base of poetic reference; how many people today could identify the quotations of a mid-Victorian sermon? Moreover, the Greek and Latin myths which have always been as important to the poets (professionally at least) as the Christian, are also losing their validity. Only a severe Classical education can impress them on a child’s mind strongly enough to give them emotional relevance, and the Classics no longer dominate the school curriculum either in Britain or the United States. There is not even an official canon of two or three hundred books which every educated person may be assumed to have read with care, and the unofficial canon contains many famous books which very few people indeed have really read – for example, Langland’s Piers Plowman, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Lyly’s Euphues. The only two English poets who had the necessary learning, poetic talent, humanity, dignity and independence of mind to be Chief Poets were John Skelton and Ben Jonson; both worthy of the laurel that they wore. Skelton, on terms of easy familiarity with Henry VIII, his former pupil, reckoned himself the spiritual superior, both as scholar and poet, of his ecclesiastical superior Cardinal Wolsey, a half-educated upstart, against whom at the risk of death he published the sharpest satires; and consequently spent the last years of his life in sanctuary at Westminster Abbey, refusing to recant. Jonson went on poetic circuits like an Irish ollave, sometimes with pupils ‘sealed of the tribe of Ben’, and spoke with acknowledged authority on all professional questions. As one of his hosts, the second Lord Falkland, wrote of him:

The only poet, as far as I know, who ever seriously tried to institute bardism in England was William Blake: he intended his Prophetic Books as a complete corpus of poetic reference, but for want of intelligent colleagues was obliged to become a whole Bardic college in himself, without even an initiate to carry on the tradition after his death. Not wishing to cramp himself by using blank verse or the heroic couplet, he modelled his style on James Macpherson’s free-verse renderings of the Gaelic legends of Oisin, and on the Hebrew prophets as sonorously translated in the Authorised Version of the Bible. Some of his mythological characters, such as the Giant Albion, Job, Erin and the Angel Uriel, are stock figures of mediaeval bardism; others are anagrams of key words found in a polyglot Bible – for example, Los for Sol, the Sun-god. He kept strictly to his system and it is only occasionally that figures occur in his prophecies that seem to belong to his private story rather than to the world of literature. Yet as a leading English literary columnist says of Blake’s readers who admire the gleemanship of Songs of Innocence: ‘Few will ever do more than dive into the prophetic poems and swim a stroke or two through the seas of shifting symbols and fables.’ He quotes these lines from Jerusalem:

He comments: ‘Blake’s feelings and habits were those of the artisan, the handicraft worker. His point of view was that of the class whose peace and welfare were disastrously undermined by the introduction of machinery, and who were enslaved by the capitalization of industry. Recall how the imagery of wheels, forges, furnaces, smoke, “Satanic mills”, is associated in the Prophetic Books with misery and torment. Remember that the years of Blake’s life were also wears of incessant wars. It is obvious that the imagery of this passage, as of many others, is an upsurging from Blake’s subliminal consciousness of political passions. Albion as a mythical figure may typify Heaven knows what else besides, but that is neither here nor there. Note the imagery of war and mechanism…’

It is the function of English popular critics to judge all poetry by gleeman standards. So the clear traditional imagery used by Blake is characteristically dismissed as ‘neither here nor there’ and he is charged with not knowing what he is writing about. The White Goddess’s Starry Wheel here multiplied into the twelve wheeling signs of the Zodiac, and the intellectual Furnaces of Los (Apollo), and the Tomb of Albion – alias Llew Llaw Gyffes, who also appears as the famished Eagle with his boney wings – are misread as dark, mechanistic images of capitalistic oppression. And the perfectly clear distinction between archaic Albion and modern England is disregarded. Blake had read contemporary treatises on Druidism.

The bond that united the poets of the British Isles in pre-Christian days was the oath of secrecy, sworn by all members of the endowed poetic colleges, to hele, conceal and never reveal the college secrets. But once the Dog, Roebuck and Lapwing began to relax their vigilance and in the name of universal enlightenment permitted the secrets of the alphabet, the calendar and the abacus to be freely published, a learned age ended. Presently a sword like Alexander’s severed the Gordian master-knot, 3 the colleges were dissolved, ecclesiasts claimed the sole right to declare and interpret religious myth, gleeman literature began to supersede the literature of learning, and poets who thereafter refused to become Court lackeys or Church lackeys or lackeys of the mob were forced out into the wilderness. There, with rare intermissions, they have resided ever since and though sometimes when they die pilgrimages are made to their oracular tombs, there they are likely to remain for as long as who cares?

In the wilderness the temptation to monomaniac raving, paranoia and eccentric behaviour has been too much for many of the exiles. They have no Chief Poet or visiting ollave now to warn them sternly that the good name of poetry is dishonoured by their mopping and mowing. They rave on like Elizabethan Abraham-men, until raving becomes a professional affectation; until the bulk of modern poetry ceases to make poetic, prosaic or even pathological sense. A strange reversal of function: in ancient times the painters were supplied with their themes by the poets, though at liberty to indulge in as much decorative play as was decent within the limits of a given theme; later, the failure of the poets to keep their position at the head of affairs forced painters to paint whatever their patrons commissioned, or whatever came to hand, and finally to experiment in pure decoration; now affectations of madness in poets are condoned by false analogy with pictorial experiments in unrepresentational form and colour. So Sacheverell Sitwell wrote in Vogue (August, 1945):

It is not as though most so-called surrealists, impressionists, expressionists and neo-romantics were concealing a grand secret by pretended folly, in the style of Gwion; they are concealing their unhappy lack of a secret. For there are no poetic secrets now, except of course the sort which the common people are debarred by their lack of poetic perception from understanding, and by their anti-poetic education (unless perhaps in wild Wales) from respecting. Such secrets, even the Work of the Chariot, may be safely revealed in any crowded restaurant or café without fear of the avenging lightning-stroke: the noise of the orchestra, the clatter of plates and the buzz of a hundred unrelated conversations will effectively drown the words – and, in any case, nobody will be listening.

If this were an ordinary book it would end here on a dying close, and having no wish to be tedious I tried at first to end it here; but the Devil was in it and would not give me peace until I had given him his due, as he put it. Among the poetic questions I had not answered was Donne’s ‘Who cleft the Devil’s foot?’ And the Devil, who knows his Scriptures well, taunted me with having skated too lightly over some of the elements in Ezekiel’s vision of the Chariot, and with having avoided any discussion of the only Mystery that is still regarded in the Western World with a certain awe. So back I had to go again, weary as I was, to the Chariot and its historical bearing on the Battle of the Trees and the poetic problems stated at the beginning of this book. It is a matter of poetic principle never to fob the Devil off with a half-answer or a lie.

Ezekiel’s vision was of an Enthroned Man surrounded by a rainbow, its seven colours corresponding with the seven heavenly bodies that ruled the week. Four of these bodies were symbolized by the four spokes of the chariot-wheels: Ninib (Saturn) by the mid-winter spoke, Marduk (Jupiter) by the Spring equinox spoke, Nergal (Mars) by the mid-summer spoke, Nabu (Mercury) by the Autumn equinox spoke. But what of the three other heavenly bodies the Sun, the Moon and the planet Ishtar (Venus) – corresponding with the Capitoline Trinity and with the Trinity worshipped at Elephantine and at Hierapolis? It will be recalled that the metaphysical explanation of this type of Trinity, brought to Rome by the Orphics, was that Juno was physical nature (Ishtar), Jupiter was the impregnating or animating principle (the Sun) and Minerva was the directing wisdom behind the Universe (the Moon). This concept did not appeal to Ezekiel, because it limited Jehovah’s function to blind paternity; so though the Sun figures in his vision as the Eagle’s wings, neither the Moon nor Ishtar is present.

The Devil was right. The vision cannot be fully explained without revealing the mystery of the Holy Trinity. It must be remembered that in ancient religions every ‘mystery’ implied a mystagogue who orally explained its logic to initiates: he may often have given a false or iconotropic explanation but it was at least a full one. As I read Origen’s second-century In Celsum, the early Church had certain mysteries explained only to a small circle of elders – Origen says in effect ‘Why should we not keep our mysteries to ourselves? You heathen do’ – and the logical explanation of the Trinity, whose seeming illogic ordinary members of the Church had to swallow by an act of faith, must have been the mystagogue’s most responsible task. The mystery itself is no secret – it is stated very precisely in the Athanasian Creed; nor is the mystery which derives from it, the redemption of the world by the incarnation of the Word as Jesus Christ. But unless the College of Cardinals has been remarkably discreet throughout all the intervening centuries, the original explanation of the mysteries has long been lost. Yet, I believe, not irrecoverably lost, since we may be sure that the doctrine developed from Judaeo-Greek mythology which is ultimately based on the single poetic Theme.

The religious concept of free choice between good and evil, which is common to Pythagorean philosophy and prophetic Judaism, developed from a manipulation of the tree-alphabet. In the primitive cult of the Universal Goddess, to which the tree-alphabet is the guide, there was no room for choice: her devotees accepted the events, pleasurable and painful in turn, which she imposed on them as their destiny in the natural order of things. The change resulted from the Goddess’s displacement by the Universal God, and is historically related to the forcible removal of the consonants H and F from the Greek alphabet and their incorporation in the secret eight-letter name of this God: it seems clear that the Pythagorean mystics who instigated the change had adopted the Jewish Creation myth and regarded these two letters as peculiarly holy since uncontaminated with the errors of the material universe. For, though in the old mythology H and F had figured as the months sacred respectively to the harsh Hawthorn-goddess Cranaea and her doomed partner Cronos, in the new they represented the first and the last trees of the Sacred Grove, the first and the last days of Creation. On the first day nothing had been created except disembodied Light, and on the last nothing at all had been created. Thus the three consonants of the Logos, or ‘eightfold city of light’, were J, the letter of new life and sovereignty; H, the letter of the first Day of Creation, ‘Let there be Light’; and F, the letter of the last day of Creation, ‘Let there be Rest’, which appears as W in the JHWH Tetragrammaton. It is remarkable that these are the month-letters allotted to the three tribes of the Southern kingdom, Benjamin, Judah and Levi; and that the three jewels respectively assigned to them in the jewel-sequence – Amber, Fire-Garnet (‘the terrible crystal’), and Sapphire – are the three connected by Ezekiel with the radiance of God, and with his throne. The Enthroned Man is not God, as might be supposed: God lets nobody see his face and live. It is God’s likeness reflected in spiritual man. Thus, though Ezekiel retains the traditional imagery of the unchanging Sun-God who rules from the apex of a cone of light over the four regions of the round universe – the eagle poised above the four beasts – and of the ever-changing bull-calf, Celestial Hercules, he has withdrawn Jehovah from the old Trinity of Q’re (Sun), Ashima (Moon) and Anatha (Ishtar) and redefined him as the God who demands national perfection, whose similitude is a holy Being, half Judah, half Benjamin, seated on Levi’s throne. This explains Israel as a ‘peculiar people’ – the Deuteronomy text is of about the same date as Ezekiel’s vision – dedicated to a peculiarly holy god with a new name, derived from a new poetic formula which spells out Life, Light and Peace.

I am suggesting, in fact, that the religious revolution which brought about the alphabetic changes in Greece and Britain was a Jewish one, initiated by Ezekiel (622–570 BC ) which was taken up by the Greek-speaking Jews of Egypt and borrowed from them by the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras, who first came into prominence at Crotona in 529 BC , is credited by his biographers with having studied among the Jews as well as the Egyptians, and may have been the Greek who first internationalized the eight-letter Name. The Name must have come to Britain by way of Southern Gaul where the Pythagoreans were established early.

The result of envisaging this god of pure meditation, the Universal Mind still premised by the most reputable modern philosophers, and enthroning him above Nature as essential Truth and Goodness was not an altogether happy one. Many of the Pythagoreans suffered, like the Jews, from a constant sense of guilt; and the ancient poetic Theme reasserted itself perversely. The new God claimed to be dominant as Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, pure Holiness, pure Good, pure Logic, able to exist without the aid of woman; but it was natural to identify him with one of the original rivals of the Theme and to ally the woman and the other rival permanently against him. The outcome was philosophical dualism with all the tragi-comic woes attendant on spiritual dichotomy. If the True God, the God of the Logos, was pure thought, pure good, whence came evil and error? Two separate creations had to be assumed: the true spiritual Creation and the false material Creation. In terms of the heavenly bodies, Sun and Saturn were now jointly opposed to Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus. The five heavenly bodies in opposition made a strong partnership, with a woman at the beginning and a woman at the end. Jupiter and the Moon Goddess paired together as the rulers of the material World, the lovers Mars and Venus paired together as the lustful Flesh, and between the pairs stood Mercury who was the Devil, the Cosmocrator or author of the false creation. It was these five who composed the Pythagorean hyle, or grove, of the five material senses; and spiritually minded men, coming to regard them as sources of error, tried to rise superior to them by pure meditation. This policy was carried to extreme lengths by the God-fearing Essenes, who formed their monkish communities, within compounds topped by acacia hedges, from which all women were excluded; lived ascetically, cultivated a morbid disgust for their own natural functions and turned their eyes away from World, Flesh and Devil. Though they retained the Bull-calf myth, handed down from Solomon’s days, as emblematic of the spiritual life of mortal man and linked it to the seven-letter name of immortal God, it is clear that initiates of the highest Order cultivated the eight-letter name, or the enlarged name of seventy-two letters, and devoted themselves wholly to the meditative life: ruled by acacia and pomegranate, Sunday and Saturday, Illumination and Repose.

War had now been declared in Heaven, Michael and the archangels fighting against the Devil, namely the Cosmocrator. For in the new dispensation, God could not afford to surrender the whole working week to the Devil, so he appointed archangels as his deputies, with a day for each, which were the archangels cultivated by the Essenes. Michael was given charge over Wednesday; so it fell to him not only to collect the dust for the true creation of Adam but to offer battle to the Devil who disputed that day with him. The Devil was Nabu, pictured as a winged Goat of Midsummer; so that the answer to Donne’s poetic question about the Devil’s foot is: ‘The prophet Ezekiel’. Michael’s victory must be read as a prophecy rather than as a record: a prophecy which Jesus tried to implement by preaching perfect obedience to God and continuous resistance to the World, Flesh and Devil. He reproached the Samaritan woman at Sychar, in a riddling talk which she may or may not have understood, for having had five husbands, the five material senses, and for having as present husband one who was not really her husband, namely the Cosmocrator, or Devil. He told her that salvation came, not from the Calf-god whom her fathers had idolatrously worshipped on near-by Ebal and Gerizim, but from the all-holy God of the Jews – the God, that is to say, of Judah, Benjamin and Levi. His faith was that if the whole nation repented of their erroneous devotion to the material universe, and refrained from all sexual and quasi-sexual acts, they would conquer death and live for a thousand years, at the end of which they would become one with the true God.

The Jews were not yet ready to take this step, though many of them approved of it in theory; and a conservative minority, the Ophites, continued to reject the new faith, holding that the true God was the God of Wednesday, whom they pictured as a benign Serpent, not a goat, and that the God of the Logos was an impostor. Their case rested on the Menorah, a pre-Exilic instrument of worship, the seven branches of which issued from the central almond stem, typifying Wednesday; and indeed the revised view recorded in the Talmud, that the stem represented the Sabbath, made neither poetic nor historical sense. This Serpent had originally been Ophion with whom, according to the Orphic creation myth, the White Goddess had coupled in the form of a female serpent, and Mercury the Cosmocrator therefore used a wand of coupling serpents as his badge of office. It is now clear why Ezekiel disguised two of the four planetary beasts of his vision: recording eagle instead of eagle-winged goat and man instead of man-faced serpent. He was intent on keeping the Cosmocrator out of the picture, whether he came as Goat or Serpent. It may well have been Ezekiel who appended the iconotropic anecdote of the Serpent’s seduction of Adam and Eve to the Genesis Creation myth, and once it was approved as canonical, in the fourth century BC , the Ophite view became a heresy. It must be emphasized that the Genesis Seven Days of Creation narrative is based on the symbolism of the Menorah, a relic of the Egyptian sun-cult, not derived from the Babylonian Creation Epic, in which the Creator is the Thunder-god Marduk who defeats Tiamat the Sea-Monster and cuts her in half. Marduk – Bel in the earlier version of the story – was the God of Thursday, not Nabu the God of Wednesday nor Samas the God of Sunday. The resemblances between the two myths are superficial, though the Deluge incident in Genesis has been taken directly from the Epic, and Ezekiel may have edited it. 4

In Rabbinical tradition the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, whose fruit the Serpent in the Genesis allegory gave Adam and Eve to eat, was a composite one. This means that though they were originally innocent and holy he introduced them to the pleasures of the material senses. Monday’s willow and Tuesday’s kerm-oak (or holly) do not supply human food, but they must have eaten Wednesday’s almonds (or hazelnuts), Thursday’s pistachios (or edible acorns), and Friday’s quinces (or wild apples). So God expelled them from the tree-paradise for fear that they might meddle with the Tree of Life – presumably Sunday’s acacia grafted with Saturday’s pomegranate – and thus immortalize their follies. This reading of the myth is supported by the ancient Irish legend, first published in Eriu IV, Part 2, of Trefuilngid Tre-eochair (‘the triple bearer of the triple key’ – apparently an Irish form of Hermes Trismegistos) a giant who appeared in Ireland early in the first century AD with immense splendour at a meeting of the great manor-council of Tara. He bore in his right hand a branch of wood from the Lebanon with three fruits on it – hazel-nuts, apples and edible acorns – which perpetually sustained him in food and drink. He told them that on enquiring what ailed the Sun that day in the East, he had found that it had not shone there because a man of great importance (Jesus) had been crucified. As the giant went off, some of the fruit dropped in Eastern Ireland and up sprang five trees – the five trees of the senses – which would fall only when Christianity triumphed. These trees have already been mentioned in the discussion of the tree-alphabet. The Great Tree of Mugna bred true to its parent branch with successive crops of apples, nuts and edible acorns. The others seem to be allegorical glosses, by some later poet. The Tree of Tortu and the Branching Tree of Dathi were ashes, presumably representing the false magic of the Brythonic and Danish ash-cults. The Tree of Ross was a Yew, representing death and destruction. I cannot find what the Ancient Tree of Usnech was: it is likely to have been a blackthorn, representing strife.

The Holy Trinity doctrine was pre-Christian, founded on Ezekiel’s vision, the Trinity consisting of the three main elements of the Tetragrammaton. The First person was the true Creator, the All-Father, ‘ Let there be Light’, represented by the letter H, the acacia, the tree of Sunday, the tree of Levi, the lapis lazuli symbolizing the blue sky as yet untenanted by the heavenly bodies; he was identified by the Jewish apocalyptics with the ‘Ancient of Days’ in the Vision of Daniel, a later and inferior prophecy which dates from the Seleucid epoch. The Second Person was comprised in Ezekiel’s Enthroned Man – spiritual man as God’s image, man who abstained in perfect peace from the dangerous pleasures of the false creation and was destined to reign on earth everlastingly; he was represented by F, the fire-garnet, the pomegranate, the tree of the Sabbath and of Judah. The apocalyptics identified him with the Son of Man in Daniel’s vision. But only the lower half of the Man’s body was fire-garnet: the male part. The upper half was amber: the royal part, linking him with the Third Person. For the Third Person comprised the remaining six letters of the name, six being the Number of Life in the Pythagorean philosophy. These letters were the original White-goddess vowels, A O U E I, representing the spirit that moved on the face of the waters in the Genesis narrative: but with the death vowel I replaced by the royal consonant J, amber, Benjamin’s letter, the letter of the Divine Child born on the Day of Liberation; and with the ‘birth of birth’ vowel omega supplementing the birth vowel alpha. The Third Person was thus androgynous: ‘virgin with child’, a concept which apparently accounts for the reduplication of the letter H in the J H W H Tetragrammaton. The second H is the Shekinah, the Brightness of God, the mystic female emanation of H, the male First Person; with no existence apart from him, but identified with Wisdom, the brightness of his meditation, who has ‘hewn out her Seven Pillars’ of the true Creation and from which the ‘Peace that passeth understanding’ derives when Light is linked with Life. The sense of this mystery is conveyed in the Blessing of Aaron (Numbers, VI, 22–27 ), which only priests were authorized to utter:

The first two blessings are really one, together representing the Third Person, Life and the Brightness, J H; the third blessing represents the First person, Light, H; the fourth blessing represents the Second Person, Peace, W. This Trinity is one indivisible God, because if a single letter is omitted the Name loses its power, and because the three concepts are interdependent. The Second Person is ‘begotten by the Father before all the world’ in the sense that ‘the World’ is a false Creation which he preceded. This interpretation of J H W H as ‘Light and the Glory, Life and Peace’ further explains why the priests sometimes enlarged it to 42 letters. In the Pythagorean system, 7, written as H aspirate, was the numeral of Light and 6, written as Digamma F (W in Hebrew), was that of Life. But 6 also stood for the Glory, and 7 for Peace as the seventh day of the week; so six times seven, namely 42, expressed Light, the Glory and Peace multiplied by Life. Though the Jews used the Phoenician notation of numeral letters for public purposes, it is likely that they used the early Greek in their mysteries, just as they used the Greek ‘Boibalos’ calendar-alphabet.

The Menorah symbolized the fullness of Jehovah’s Creation, yet it did not contain the first of the four letters of the Tetragrammaton; and its lights recalled his seven-letter Name, but not the eight-letter one. However, at the Feast of Illumination, or ‘The Feast of Lights’, (mentioned in John, X, 22 and Josephus’s Antiquities, XII, 7.7 ), the ancient Hebrew Winter Solstice Feast, an eight-branched candlestick was used, as it still is in Jewish synagogues, known as the Chanukah candlestick. The rabbinical account is that this eight-day festival which begins on the twenty-fifth day of the month Kislev, was instituted by Judas Maccabeus and that it celebrates a miracle: at the Maccabean consecration of the Temple a small cruse of sacred oil was found, hidden by a former High Priest, which lasted for eight days. By this legend the authors of the Talmud hoped to conceal the antiquity of the feast, which was originally Jehovah’s birthday as the Sun-god and had been celebrated at least as early as the time of Nehemiah (II Maccabees, I, 18 ). Antiochus Epiphanes had sacrificed to Olympian Zeus, three years before Judas’s re-institution of the festival, at the same place and on the same day: Zeus’s birthday fell at the winter solstice too – as did that of Mithras the Persian Sun-god whose cult had greatly impressed the Jews in the time of their protector Cyrus. According to rabbinical custom one light of the candlestick was kindled each day of the festival until all eight were alight; the earlier tradition had been to begin with eight lights and extinguish one each day until all were out.

In the Chanukah candlestick which, among the Moroccan Jews (whose tradition is the oldest and purest) is surmounted by a small pomegranate, the eight lights are set in a row, each on a separate branch, as in the Menorah; and an arm projects from the pedestal with a separate light in its socket from which all the rest are kindled. The eighth light in the row must stand for the extra day of the year, the day of the letter J, which is intercalated at the winter solstice: for the pomegranate, the emblem not only of the seventh day of the week but of the planet Ninib, ruler of the winter solstice, shows that this candlestick is a Menorah enlarged to contain all the letters of the Tetragrammaton, that it is, in fact, the ‘Eightfold City of Light’ in which the Word dwelt. The number Eight, the Sungod’s number of increase, recalled Jehovah’s creative order to increase and multiply; and the eight lights could further be understood (it will be shown) as symbolizing the eight essential Commandments.

The Chanukah candlestick was the only one ritually used in the synagogues of the Dispersion, because of the Sanhedrin law forbidding the reproduction of the Menorah or of any other object housed in the Holy of Holies. This law was designed to prevent the foundation of a rival Temple to that of Jerusalem, but aimed also, it seems, at the Ophites, who justified their heretical religious views by the centrality of the fourth light (that of the Wise Serpent Nabu) in the seven-branched candlestick; they would find no central light in this one. The separate light probably stood for the oneness of Jehovah as contrasted with the diversity of his works and brought the total number of lights up to nine, symbolizing the thrice-holy Trinity. The meaning of the pomegranate at the top has been forgotten by the Moroccan Jews, who regard it as a mere decoration though agreeing that it is of high antiquity; Central European Jews have substituted for it a knob surmounted by a Star of David. Among the Moroccan Jews a pomegranate is also placed on the sticks around which the sacred scroll of the Torah is wound, the sticks being called Es Chajim, ‘the tree of life’; Central European Jews have reduced this pomegranate to the crown formed by its withered calyx. The common-sense Rabbinical explanation of the sanctity of the pomegranate is that it is the only fruit which worms do not corrupt.

The Ten Commandments, which are among the latest additions to the Pentateuch, are designed as glosses on the same mystery. The oddness of their choice seems to have struck Jesus when he quoted the ‘Love thy God’ and ‘Love thy neighbour’ commandments, from elsewhere in the Pentateuch, as transcending them in spiritual value. But it is a more carefully considered choice than appears at first sight. The Commandments, which are really eight, not ten, to match the numbers of letters in the Name, fall into two groups: one of three ‘Thou shalts’ concerned with the True Creation, and the other of five ‘Thou shalt nots’ concerned with the False Creation: each group is prefaced by a warning. The order is purposely ‘pied’, as one would expect.

This mystical god differed not only from the Babylonian Bel or Marduk but from Ormazd, the Supreme God of the Persian Zoroastrians, with whom some Jewish syncretists identified him, in having separated himself from the erroneous material universe to live securely cloistered in his abstract city of light. Ormazd was a sort of three-bodied Geryon, the usual Aryan male trinity that first married the Triple Goddess, then dispossessed her and went about clothed in her three colours – white, red and dark blue, like the heifer calf in Suidas’s riddle, performing her ancient functions. Thus Ormazd appeared in priestly white to create (or recreate) the world; in warrior red to combat evil; in husbandman’s dark blue to ‘bring forth fecundity’.

The pre-Christian Jewish apocalyptics, probably influenced by religious theory brought from India, along with the ethrog, by Jewish merchants, expected the birth of a divine child: the Child, prophesied by the Sibyl, who would free the world from sin. This implied that Michael and the archangels to whom the new Idealistic God had delegated the immediate care of mankind had proved no match for the World, Flesh and Devil – the grosser powers which he had repudiated. The only solution was for the Prince of Peace, namely the Second Person, the Son of Man, who had hitherto had no independent existence, 5 to become incarnate as perfect man – the human Messiah born of Judah, Benjamin and Levi. By exposing the vanity of the material Creation he would bring all Israel to repentance and thus initiate the deathless millennary kingdom of God on earth, to which the Gentile nations would ultimately be admitted. This was the faith of Jesus, who was of Judah, Benjamin and Levi and had been ritually rebegotten by God at his Coronation: he expected the actual historical appearance of the Son of Man on the Mount of Olives to follow his own prophesied death by the sword, and assured his disciples that many then living would never die but enter directly into the kingdom of God. The prophecy was not fulfilled because it was founded on a confusion between poetic myth and historical event, and everyone’s hopes of the millennium were dashed.

The Grecians then claimed that those hopes had not after all been premature, that Jesus had indeed been the Second Person of the Trinity, and that the Kingdom of God was at hand, the dreadful signs which would portend its coming, the so-called Pangs of the Messiah, being apparent to everyone. But when the Gentile Church had wholly separated itself from the Judaistic Church and Jesus as King of Israel was an embarrassing concept to Christians who wished to escape all suspicion of being Jewish nationalists, it was decided that he had been born as the Second Person not at his coronation but at his physical birth; though spiritually begotten before all the world. This made Mary the Mother of Jesus into the immaculate human receptacle of the Life and Brightness of God, the Third Person of the Trinity; so that it had to be presumed that she was herself immaculately conceived by her mother St. Ann. Here was a fine breeding-ground for all sorts of heresy, and soon we return in our argument to the point where the Theme reasserted itself popularly with the Virgin as the White Goddess, Jesus as the Waxing Sun, the Devil as the Waning Sun. There was no room here for the Father God, except as a mystical adjunct of Jesus (‘I and the Father are One’).

SUIBNE		‘At ease you are, bright Éorann, Bound bedward to your lover; It is not so with Suibne here – Long has he wandered footloose. ‘Lightly once, great Éorann, You whispered words that pleased me. “I could not live,” you said, “were I Parted one day from Suibne.” ‘Now it is clear and daylight clear, How small your care for Suibne; You lie warm on a good down bed, He starves for cold till sunrise.’
ÉORANN		‘Welcome, my guileless madman, Dearest of humankind ! Though soft I lie, my body wastes Since the day of your downfall.’
SUIBNE		‘More welcome than I, that prince Who escorts you to the banquet. He is your chosen gallant; Your old love you neglect.’
ÉORANN		Though a prince may now escort me To the carefree banquet-hall, I had liefer sleep in a tree’s cramped bole With you, Suibne, my husband. ‘Could I choose from all the warriors Of Ireland and of Scotland, I had liefer live, blameless, with you On watercress and water.’
SUIBNE		‘No path for his belovéd Is Suibne’s track of care; Cold he lies at Ard Abhla, His lodgings cold are many. ‘Far better to feel affection For the prince whose bride you are, Than for this madman all uncouth, Famished and stark-naked.’
ÉORANN		‘I grieve for you, toiling madman, So filthy and downcast; I grieve that your skin is weather worn, Torn by spines and brambles…’ ‘O that we were together, And my body feathered too; In light and darkness would I wander With you, for evermore!’
SUIBNE		‘One night I spent in cheerful Mourne, One night in Bann’s sweet estuary. I have roved this land from end to end.…’