The White Goddess (103 page)

These lines are memorable as a summary of the ideal poetic temperament. Since Jonson there have been no Chief Poets worthy of the name, either official or unofficial ones.

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,
1
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):

He lists the fashionable painters and sculptors and adds:

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.