part0035

Sir, – Dr. Glyn E. Daniel, reviewing my White Goddess and misled by its unpedantic style into thinking that I have taken no trouble to check my facts, lists “among the fancies so extravagant and improbable as to cease to be amusing” the following: (1) “That the Danaans are middle Bronze Age Pelasgians.” I did not use the uncritical term “middle Bronze Age” which he ascribes to me, but adopted the perfectly orthodox view that Pelasgians means Sea-People, and the perfectly orthodox identification of the Danuna, who belonged to the sea-federation that invaded Syria about the year 1200 BC , with the Aegean Danaans. Since my book was in print Professor Garstang has published an account in The Times of a newly discovered Danuna city in Asia Minor, with inscriptions in what is thought to be the Canaanitish language, and connects the Danuna (as I do) with Danaus, the eponymous tribal hero of the Danaans who came from Africa by way of Palestine and Rhodes long before the Trojan War.

(2) “That the Belgae invaded Britain in 400 BC , and that their god was the [Celto-Teutonic] Gwydion [alias Woden, or Odin] and that the ash [Ygdrasill] was sacred to him.” The first of these “fancies” is to be found in almost every modern text-book of British prehistory, though so late a date as 180 BC is sometimes postulated; the second has the weighty authority of Professor Sir John Rhys; the third, Dr. Daniel should have learned in the nursery.

(3) “That Stonehenge is a sun-temple in cultured Apollonian style.” For this view The Druids, by Mr. T. D. Kendrick, the senior British Museum expert on British pre-history, may be cited.

(4) “That Stonehenge was the seat of the God Beli.” Beli, or Belinus, was an early British Sun-god, as Dr. Daniel will not have the temerity to deny.

(5) “That New Grange has Cretan ideograms on it.” I did not say this. I mentioned a single “symbol,” first recorded in Ledwich’s Antiquities of Ireland in 1803, and still visible, carved on one of the stones of the fence around this passage-grave burial, “which suggests a Cretan ideogram and apparently represents a ship with a high prow and stern and a single large sail.” For this information I thanked Mr. Christopher Hawkes, a learned colleague of Mr. Kendrick’s, who took some trouble to get it for me.

(6) “That Silbury Hill contains a passage-grave decorated with spirals, and is the oracular shrine of the God Bran.” I did not say this. I said that Silbury Hill was the largest artificial mound in Europe and suggested that since it dominated the great Salisbury Plain necropolis it was Britain’s original “Spiral Castle” – which I had elsewhere defined as the oracular grave of the principal cult hero – as New Grange was Ireland’s. I gave my reasons for giving Bran, who has sacral affinities with Cronos, as a title of this cult hero.

(7) “That Tomen y Mur covers the cist grave of Llew Llaw Gyffes.” Tomen y Mur in Merioneth is a typical kist-vaen burial mound and associated in the Mabinogion with the death of Llew Llaw Gyffes, a hero who was mourned annually at Lammas, the feast which is named after him. Since Celtic Kings often took the name of their tribal gods (e.g. Brennus [Bran] who sacked Rome and the later Brennus who seems to have sacked Delphi), my suggestion is reasonable enough.

(8) “That there are phallus and scrotum shaped barrows near Avebury.” Let Dr. Daniel look at any large-scale contour map for the two burials near Silbury Hill to which I refer.

(9) “That there are alphabet dolmens serving as calendars.” I suggested that the Beth-Luis-Nion, the earliest Irish alphabet, was also used as a calendar of the months, and showed that with its letters arranged in the form of a dolmen arch it was bound up with the cult mystery of the ever-reborn God of the Year and his pentad of tutelary goddesses. The argument is too long to be summarised here.

Sir, – The Listener of August 5 contained a somewhat misleading review of my White Goddess. The reviewer says that ‘this is a poet’s book, not a reviewer’s book’. He explains that I am ‘impatient of the careful accretion of facts’ by scholars and ‘oblivious to [sic] recent academic research’; that I make use of the ‘specious mode of argument adopted by those who read prophecies after the event in pyramids, or who find Bacon’s name concealed in Shakespeare’s sonnets’; and that I discover evidences of my ‘chimera’, the White Goddess, ‘in all the usual dangerous places: in the mists of antiquity, in the Apocalypse … and in the mazes of numerology’.

Unfair to Graves! It is not at all that sort of book. I have not here concerned myself with ancient prophecies except in so far as they have affected subsequent religious theory; and my argument is perfectly un-Baconian and above-board, though I do, of course, attempt to dispel some of the thicker mists of antiquity. My criticism of scholars is not that they carefully collect facts but that the liaison between different branches of scholarship, for example between mythology, archaeology and theology, is so weak that many of the conclusions separately reached are logically irreconcilable; and that the system of concentrating religious research in University Faculties discourages intellectual honesty and restricts imaginative thinking. My only reference to the Apocalypse is to the ‘Number of the Beast’: I suggest that the scholars’ commonly accepted solution of the 666 cypher, the Graeco-Hebraic Neron Kesar, breaks down on philological grounds (bad liaison again) and that with a little imaginative thought they might have realised that the cypher is not Greek or Hebrew, but Latin – DCLXVI, which should be read as the titulus or charge-sheet of the Anti-Christ, namely Domitianus Caesar Legatos Xti violenter interfecit. This is the only solution which makes historical sense and fits the context – or has your reviewer anything better to offer?

Nor do I exploit the bogus science of numerology, though I suggest that the mythical values given to numbers by the Pythagoreans derive from a Pelasgian calendar-cult of the White Goddess; Pythagoras is said to have been a Pelasgian.

It is not right to describe the White Goddess as a chimera; though the chimera is, I grant, a form of the White Goddess: ‘Lion before, snake behind, in the middle a goat’. In a chapter devoted to Fabulous Beasts I show that this composite monster, which occurs in Hittite sculpture as well as in popular Greek legend, is a pictorial formula derived from an early Carian calendar, in which the Goddess ruled over a three-season year, a beast for each season. Though I do not claim to have got her story right in every detail, I have everywhere respected historical facts.