Här följer några utdrag ur R. Graves `The White Goddess` som omtalar just fenomenen poet och poesi... Graves tar upp det kvinnohat som Bibelns religioner alstrar och förnyar...

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 scottish dinner-party, and will think of Catullus as one of the very few poets who transcended the Graeco-Roman poetic tradition.


My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry – ’true’ in the nostalgic modern sense of ’the unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute’. The language was tampered with in the late Minoan times when invaders from Central Asia began to substitute patrilinear for matrilinear institutions and remodel or falsify the myths to justify the social changes. Then came the early Greek philosophers who were strongly opposed to magical poetry as threatening their new religion of logic, and under their influence a rational poetic language (now called the Classical) was elaborated in honour of their patron Apollo and imposed on the world as the last word in spiritual illumination: a view that has prevailed practically ever since in European schools and universities, where myths are now studied only as quaint relics of the nursery age of mankind.” One of the most uncompromising rejections of early Greek mythology was made by Socrates. Myths frightened him; he preferred to turn his back on them and disciple his mind to think scientifically: ’to investigate reason of the being of everything – of everything as it is, not as it appears, and to reject all opinions of which no account can be given.’

The Irish ollave’s chief interest was the refinement of complex poetic truth to exact statement. He knew the history and mythic value of every word used and can have cared nothing for the ordinary man’s appreciation of his work; he valued only the judgement of his colleagues, whom he seldom met without a lively exchange of poetic wit in extempore verse.”

The rediscovery of the lost rudiments of poetry may help to solve the question of theme: if they still own the validity they will confirm the intuition of the Welsh poet Alun Lewis who wrote just before his death in Burma, in March 1944, of ’single poetic theme of Life and Death… the question of what survives of the beloved.’ Granted that there are many themes of what journalists of verse, yet for the poet, as Alun Lewis understood the word, there is no choice. The elements of a single infinitely variable Theme are to be found in certain poetic myths which though manipulated to conform with each epoch of religious change – I use the word ’word’ myth in its strict sense of ’verbal iconograph’ without the derogatory sense of ’absurd fiction’ that it has acquired – yet remain constant in general outline. Perfect faithfullness to the Theme affects the reader of a poem with a strange feeling, between delight and horror, of which the purely physical effect is that the hair literally stands on end. A.E. Housman’s test of a true poem was simple and practical: does it make the hairs on one’s chin bristle if one repeats it silently while shaving? But he did not explain why the hairs should bristle.

The ancient Celts carefully disinguished the poet, who was originally a priest and judge and whose person was sacrosanct, from the mere gleeman. He was in Irish called fili, a seer; in Welsh derwydd, or oakseer, which is the probable derivation of ’Druid’.”

In ancient Ireland the ollave, or master-poet, sat next to the king at table and was priviledged, as none else but the queen was, to wear six diffrent colours in his clothes. The word ’bard’, which in mediæval Wales stood for master-poet, had a diffrent sense in Ireland, where it meant an inferior poet who had not passed through the ’seven degrees of wisdom’ which made him an ollave after a very difficult twelve-year course.”

The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God's losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride, and layer-out.... All true poetry - true by Houseman's practical test [does it make the hairs of one's chin bristle if one repeats it silently while shaving] celebrates some incident or scene in this very ancient story,...

The most memorable results of the Crusades was to introduce into Western Europe an idea of romantic love which, expressed in terms of the ancient Welsh minstrels tales, eventually transformed the loutish robber barons and their sluttish wives to a polished society of courtly lords and ladies.

To summarize the history of the Greek Muses:

The Triple Muse, or the Three Muses, or the Nine-fold Muse, or Cerridwen, or whatever else one may care to call her, is originally the Great Goddess in her poetic or incantatory character. She has a son who is also her lover and her victim, the Star-son, or Demon of the Waxing Year. He alternates in her favour with his tanist Python, the Serpent of wisdom, the Demon of the Waning year, his darker self.Next, she is courted by the Thunder-god (a rebellious Star-son infected by Eastern patriarchalism) and has twins by him, a male and a female – in Welsh poetry called Merddin and Olwen. She remains the Goddess of Incantation, but forfeits part of her sovereignty to the Thunder-god, particularly law-making and the witnessing of oaths.

Next, She divides the power of poetic enchantment between her twins, whose symbols are the morning star and the evening star, the female twin being herself in decline, the male a revival of the Star-son.

Next, she becomes enlarged in number, though reduced in power, to a bevy of nine little departmental goddesses of inspiration, under the tutelage of the former male twin.

Finally, the male twin, Apollo, proclaims himself the Eternal Sun, and the Nine Muses becomes his ladies-in-waiting. He delegates their functions to male gods who are himself in multiplication.

In mediaeval Irish poetry Mary was equally plainly identified with Brigid the Goddess of Poetry: /…/ In Gaelic Scotland her symbol was the White Swan, and she was known as the Bride of the Golden Hair, Bride of the White Hills, mother of the King of Glory.

The Goddess is a lovely, slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair; she will suddenly transform herself into sow, mare, bitch, vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid, or loathsome hag.... I cannot think of any true poet from Homer onwards who has not independently recorded his experience of her.

The test of a poet's vision, one might say, is the accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess and the island over which she rules. The reason why the hairs stand on end, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is the a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust - the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death.

... 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.

The third stage of cultural development - the purely patriarchal, in which there are no Goddesses at all - is that of later Judaism, Judaic Christianity, Mahomedanism and Protestant Christianity....

...The whiteness of the Goddess has always been an ambivalent concept. In one sense it is the pleasant whiteness of pearl-barley, or a woman's body, or milk, or unsmutched snow; in another it is the horrifying whiteness of a corpse, or a spectre, or leprosy...

_________

A poet cannot continue to be a poet if he feels that he has made a permanent conquest of the Muse, that she is always his for the asking.
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The Irish and Welsh distingueshed carefully between poets and satirists: the poet’s task was creative or curative, that of a satirist was destructive and noxious. An Irish poet could compose an aer, or satire, which would blight crops dry up milk, raise blotches on his victim’s face and ruin his character for ever.

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 Johnson 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: the fall inti sentimental homosexuality. Once poetic fashion begins to be set by 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.

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 a 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 Cagul cave-painting, or the nine women who warmed the cauldron of Cerridwen with their breaths in Gwion’s Preiddeu Annwm. Poetry it its archais setting, in fact, was either the moral and religious laws 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 /…/ or she should be the Muse in the complete sense: she should be in turn Aranrhod, Blodeuwedd and the Old Sow of Maenawr Penardd who eats her farrow, and should write in each of these capacities with antique authority.

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.’

...For [the poet] 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....

The main theme of poetry is, properly, the relation 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. /…/ For him there 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 reasoble 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 humilation – Catullus is the most familiar instance – he has been party to his own betrayal and has no just cause for complaint. /…/ The poet is in love with the White Goddess, with Truth: his heart breaks with longing and love for her. /…/ Determined to escape the dilemma, the Apollonian teaches himself to despise woman, and teaches woman to despise herself.

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!"

...Now the Jews are fast turning "liberal" and both they and the Christians are further away than they ever were from the ascetic holiness to which Ezekiel and his Essene successors hoped to draw the world, and after many theological ups and downs we have come to be governed by the unholy triumvirate of Pluto god of wealth, Apollo god of science and Mercury god of thieves....Unless the ascetic Michael can quickly reorganize his scattered legions of angels for a new puritannical campaign of sexless unworldliness, there can be no escape from the present more than usually miserable state of the world until a new Battle of the Trees is fought: "A renewal of conflict / Such as Gwydion made,..." and the supreme Godhead thereby redefined; until the repressed desire of the Western races, which is for some practical form of Goddess worship, with her love not limited to maternal benevolence and her afterworld not deprived of a Sea, finds satisfaction at last...

...The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.... This was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of the lady of the house; it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philosophy, science, and industry, and brought ruin on himself and his family. "Nowadays" is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonoured. In which serpent, lion, and eagle belong to the circus-tent; ox, salmon and boar to the cannery, racehorse and greyhound to the betting ring; and the sacred grove to the saw-mill. In which the Moon is despised as a burned-out satellite of the Earth and woman reckoned as "auxiliary State personnel." In which money will buy almost anything but truth, and almost anyone but the truth-possessed poet.

Most scientists, for social convenience, are God-worshippers; though I cannot make out why a belief in a Father-god’s autorship of the universe, and its laws, seems any less unscientific than a belief in a Mother-goddess’s inspiration of this artificial system. Granted the first metaphor, the second follows logically – if these are not better than metaphors…

But the real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet distinguishes between the Goddess as manifest in the supreme power, glory, wisdom and love of woman, and the individual woman whom the Goddess may make her instrument for a month, a year, seven years, or even more. The Goddess abides; and [p. 491] perhaps will he again have knowledge of her through his experience of another woman.

Being in love does not, and should not, blind the poet to the cruel side of woman’s nature – and many Muse-poems are written in helpless attestation of this by men whose love is no longer retuned:

Communism is a faith, not a religion: a pseudo-scientific theory adopted as a cause.

Frazer, an authorithy on Greek religion, must have known that the salvationist obsession of the Greek Orphics was Thraco-Libyan, not Oriental, and that long before the Jews of the Dispersal had introduced to the Greek world their Phariseic doctrine of oneness with God, city-state idealism had been destroyed from within.

... the early Gentile Christians borrowed from the Hebrew prophets the two religious concepts, hitherto unknown in the West, which has become the prime cause of our unrest: that of a patriarcal God, who refuses to have any truck with Goddesses and claims to be self-sufficient and all-wise; and that of a theocratic society, disdainful of the pomps and glories of the world, in which everyone who rightly performs his civic duties is a ’son of God’ and entitled to salvation, whatever his rank or fortune, by virtue of direct communion with the Father.

The new God claim to be dominant as Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, pour 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 thougt, pure good, whence came evil and error? Two separate creations had to be assumed: the true spiritual Creation and the false material Creation.

The religious concept of free choice between good and evil, which is common to Pythagorean philosophy and prophetic Judaism, developped 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, pleasureable and painful in turn, which she imposed on them as their destiny in the natural order of things.