The White Goddess, and Apollo's Golden Mean

 

Date: Sun, 25 Apr 1999 13:47:10 -0400 (EDT)
From: ......@westerncanon.com
Subject: Lecture Hall Message 18

Dated : April 25, 1999 at 13:47:09
Subject: Re: The White Goddess

>I am a junior at Malone College in Canton, OH and I am taking
>Modern British Writers. For our final project, the professor has
>asked us to analyze a poet and his works. My friend and I are going
>to do a type of interview situation, where he is Graves and I am
>the interviewer. We want to focus specifically on "The White Goddess"
>and "Succubus." If anybody has any information or comments on either
>of these poems, please share them with me. Also, share what types of
>questions you might ask Graves about these particular poems.

Nicole,

You have given yourselves a very tall order by focussing on two important poems by Graves, the first of which is of central importance to the second part of his life. I can however give you a number of pointers about "The White Goddess" which might help you to narrow down your target.

Another of Graves important poems, "To Juan at the Winter Solstice", begins with the lines:

There is one story and one story only/That will prove worth your telling

From the mid-forties onwards, much of Graves' prose and poetry was shaped by this belief. Interestingly there is a passage in "The Shout", a short story written in 1924, which prefigures this approach:

"My story is true", he said, "every word of it. Or, when I say that my story is 'true'", I mean at least that I am telling it in a new way. It is always the same story, but I sometimes vary the climax and even recast the characters. Variation keeps it fresh and therefore true".

Graves' stated opinions about the White Goddess, which resulted in the poem and the book of the same name, should be looked at the same way. Both Graves' prose and poetry attempt to retell his understanding of a truth by recasting detail and character. The specific reference is (according to Graves) always the same, but the incidentals change and the details blur and intertwine. The poem "The Clipped Stater" for example, can be read in terms of its references to Alexander, which are explicit, or to the phenomenon of the Incarnation of Christ, or even to the transformation of T. E. Lawrence into "Aircraftsman Shaw". In fact it should be read in terms of (at least) all three: if there is "one story and one story only", the real focus of Graves' interest is beyond the incidental details of the poem, and the blurring and braiding of detail allows us to look at the real subject, as it were, slantwise.

The first two lines of "The White Goddess" [the version in "Selected Poems", ed. Paul O'Prey, 1986] express Graves' view that his subject is one uncomfortable to the reasoning mind: and thus a subject which the dominant forces in European civilization over at least the past two and a half thousand years have tried to reject ("All Saints revile her"). Very quickly however (line 3) the poem is about a voyage in search of the Goddess: this is particularly interesting as Graves' views on ancient matriarchy surfaced first in "The Golden Fleece" [pub 1944] (US: "Hercules, My Shipmate" [pub 1945]), and Graves' was working on his translation of the story of the voyage of the Argo immediately before writing his monumental study: "The White Goddess" (to which a version of the poem is prefaced "in dedication"). The sailors sail to find her "in scorn" of those "ruled by the God Apollo's golden mean". This might be read as a re-interpretation of the real mission of the Argo, or a metaphor of Graves' own studies, or more broadly as a characterization of any attempt to escape from (as Graves believed) the rigid, plodding patterns of Cartesian thought sanctioned as "valid" by our civilization (the version prefaced to "The White Goddess" speaks in the first person).

The second stanza continues the speaker's identification with the crew of the ship:

It was a virtue not to stay/To go our headstrong and heroic way

The following three lines describe the extremes to which they are prepared to go to find the elusive Goddess. Paradoxically she is then given a precise physical description, clear enough to pick her out of a crowd. That it might not be wholly healthy to actually encounter her is suggested by the striking description of her brow as: "white as any leper's".

In the third stanza it is clear that there have been (and will be) good times for the Goddess, when all recognise her and the universality of her significance:

The green sap of spring in the young wood astir/Will celebrate the Mountain Mother

However the crew of the ship are gifted to recognise, "even in November", her "nakedly worn magnificence". Thus the ability to discern the Goddess in her elusiveness is given more importance by Graves than her mere celebration. Here Graves alludes to the different qualities required of devotees of the Goddess in secular (i.e., modern) times, to those qualities required in times when her reality is taken for granted.

The penultimate line reveals that the sailors have undertaken the voyage, not in ignorance, but in full knowledge of the dangers: since they have experienced "cruelty and past betrayal". They have met her before, in one form or another. They are also, like those in love:

Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.

"Bolts" are of course more commonly associated in Greek Mythology with Zeus, king of the gods. But Graves regarded Zeus as a usurper, and believed that real power belonged to the Goddess (See for example "The Greek Myths" 9.7: Zeus and Metis, where Graves quotes Jane Harrison who described the story of Athene's birth from Zeus's head as 'a desperate theological expedient to rid her of her matriarchal conditions').

Graves more and more came to regard the White Goddess as the real source of inspiration for poets, so that he began to view poetry written for any other reason as fakery. In his study "The White Goddess" he describes her in similar terms to those used in the poem:

...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. Her names and titles are innumerable. ... 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... The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living... [TWG: Ch. One, "Poets and Gleemen"]

Hence it is that Graves' concept of the White Goddess is entwined with the craft of poetry: poetry is an invocation of the Goddess, and to write "true poetry" the poet has to love someone in whom the Goddess temporarily manifests. Graves' book on the White Goddess has to be read therefore as a braid, made up of a historical reconstruction of poetic grammar, as well as his personal experience of the Goddess in his association with Laura Riding, and possibly also his mother, Amalie von Ranke Graves.

The Graves Interview:

You are going to have to do a lot of research to do this properly! You can find most of what you need in three books: Robert Graves "The White Goddess" for Graves own account of his ideas; Richard Perceval Graves: "Robert Graves and the White Goddess 1940-1985" [pub 1995]; and "Robert Graves: The Years with Laura Riding 1926-1940" [pub 1990]: these last two volumes give the relevant details about Graves' collaboration with Laura Riding, and his later muse poetry. Other information about Graves' picture of ancient matriarchy can be found in his novel "King Jesus" [pub 1946] and "Seven Days in New Crete" [pub 1949] (US "Watch the North Wind Rise"). Some useful critical remarks about the thesis of "The White Goddess" can be found in Martin Seymour-Smith's "Robert Graves: His Life and Work" [1982; expanded edition pub 1995]

It might be worth asking "Graves" to expand on the method of thinking he associates with the Goddess, which he opposes to "the God Apollo's golden mean": Graves says quite a bit about this (that poetic thought is not really viable in a scientific and rational civilization) in various parts of "The White Goddess". He also wrote an interesting preface in 1976 to John Biram's book "Teknosis", in which he seriously criticises modern industrial civilization (may be hard to find this book). And/or you might ask "Graves" to describe the background to the writing of the poem "The White Goddess", showing the different elements in both his writing and his personal life which he weaves together to make a successful artistic whole. You might also ask "Graves" to compare and contrast some related poetry (such as"Juan at the Winter Solstice"; "The White Goddess" and "The Succubus").

 

Wearable Fictions, Phenomenology, and the Grammar of Human Thought

'Fish Magic' (Paul Klee, 1925)

Some notes on The Shrine in the Sea, which eventually became The Sacred History of Being, written while waiting for a delayed flight to Bristol from Edinburgh, 3rd March 03 (four hour delay in total). Not everything which is scribbled during an airport delay is perfectly coherent by itself, so I've introduced some qualifications and expansions in square brackets, where necessary. There is more scope for writing about Robert Graves' White Goddess, but that is for another time.

I’m now approaching this [project] as something like a grammar of human intelligence. This is because I backed away (around two or three years ago) from starting from where I started – which was from a study of ancient philosophy. [It is hard to establish parallels using materials which appear to have no exemplars in other cultures. Which is one of the reasons this comparative and anthropological work has, so far at least, not been undertaken with any degree of seriousness].  Instead I decided to approach the question of how people used to think in antiquity on the basis of a phenomenological study. As if I didn’t know any of the things I already knew about the ancient world – both historical and prehistoric. [I.e., there are many obvious parallels between the culture phenomena of Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levantine civilizations, but these are, as yet, largely un-anchored in an underlying substrate of what might be sophisticated patterns of thought.] 

This way of tackling the problem has turned out to be very successful. Unfortunately I’ve written very little down about this, beyond a couple of lists of phenomena which repay closer study because they illustrate the characteristic grammar of the human intelligence [if the scholar looks hard enough]. Essentially these lists form the backbone of the study – it was and is my intention to use these lists as the basis of the books structure.[There was a series of lists entitled 'Topics', added to over time. One of these has been posted - Topics 5. The point was not to assume that all of the post-Enlightenment constructs which we use to interpret the ancient world, and which are less than three hundred years old, are correct. I know what I have been taught, and know what the assumptions are. But I chose to proceed as if these constructs were invisible, for the purposes of separating the actual evidence from what might be convenient presumptions,  including ideological and political judgements]. 

I backed away from the original approach for a number of reasons – partly because it was a very technical approach – but mainly because I didn’t think that attempting to infer common ways of thought on the basis of philosophical writings was a good idea, despite the fact that there are lots of clues in ancient texts to support such inferences. Better I thought to establish a good case on the basis of all available evidence for patterns of thought in antiquity outside philosophical texts, and then show how these texts build on these patterns, since, to some extent at least, this is likely to be what actually happened. The technical apparatus then becomes the principal corroboration of the thesis, rather than the point of entry into the argument.

In effect I’ve established [a process for dealing with] the case[s] twice, from different points of view, which represents some kind of check on the use of the evidence to support the hypothesis. This is as important to me in developing this case as it is in making the case to a more casually interested reader. I’m not interested in creating a weak and scarcely wearable fiction. I want a more coherent armature for the evidence that we currently have, which does less violence to that evidence.

In many ways the book is no longer about ancient history, though that remains the place where I started, and the home of the question I wished to solve.

It is now (as a book) a phenomenological study of human culture, and more particularly of its various levels of articulation. Essentially it is about establishing a coherence and continuity in human cultural production. Not by cutting down the evidence to fit, but by looking for the levels which make this cultural production hang together.

Of course this means that the book is a 21st century stab at the “key to all mysteries” [in that it proceeds on the basis that there is the possibility that there is a coherence in the body of ancient thought, expressed in art, literature, poetry, liturgy and ritual, which we have missed. With the intention of establishing whether or not a coherence of that sort exists, or once existed in some form.] On that account alone the thesis of the argument will be dismissed by those for whom synthetic arguments are not possible. Where they are found they are ipso facto false (itself a synthetic proposition, which doesn’t seem to be an objection to those who hold such an opinion). However I don’t see that a coherence in the cultural production of the human mind is a priori not to be found, and I do not find it to be very scientific (if that is to be valued) to presume that it cannot be found because it is [simply assumed that it is] not there to be found. 

If anything, the case which the book will make is that there is a coherent synthetic argument which binds all the inconsistencies of human cultural production. [As well as arguments which render consistency in interpretation. In other words, we need to understand why things are apparently inconsistent, as much as those which appear to be consistent to us. That throws back the problem of interpretation on to the sometimes problematic nature of the paradigms, constructs, and mental processes of scholars from the Enlightenment onwards]. 

The key to the mysteries is not an intellectually satisfying single core of human genius, but, that none of it adds up to that – the key is that human cultural production is deeply contingent and consistent with nothing save its own context [both intellectually and in terms of expression], except when the phenomenon is examined for the signs of an underlying grammar – which may or may not be part of a body of intellectual ideas.

Is this structuralism? Certainly it is a form of structuralist analysis, but it isn’t the structuralism of Levi-Strauss – it is not connected with the architecture of human narrative, but rather all human constructs, in space and in time. And it certainly isn’t an attempt to bind together cultural production on the basis of similar content; rather the opposite – to find out how quite dissimilar things participate in the same underlying grammar of human understanding [I was thinking of Plato's discussion of the' Same and the Different' at this point, since it follows from Plato's ontology, as well as the ontologies of other cultures around the Mediterranean, that, if the experienced world actually resides in a place which is neither located in space or in time, the ontological model which is being employed is that of reality as a plenum].

I would not wish to give this kind of philosophical analysis a name of that kind. The argument is both analytic and synthetic, in that way that good historians proceed. Questions are asked, and data is ordered. And questions are then asked of the ordered data. That isn’t structuralism (at least not to me). 

[Those familiar with  the work of Husserl may recognise the process of bracketing in my description of the attempt to analyse evidence and data outside the paradigms which we normally use to understand the past]. It is the act of creating wearable fiction, as the poet Alastair Reid suggested recently, at a public lecture in the Playfair Library, in the University of Edinburgh. Or at least, more wearable fiction than those we are currently forced to wear. [Alastair Reid was a friend and associate of Robert Graves. I was particularly interested in what he had to say, because I once worked as a research assistant for the Robert Graves Trust in Oxford, and spent much time before and after that trying to come to grips with Graves' White Goddess, which is not an easy text. I wrote an analysis of the White Goddess Sigil (in 1999) which appears on the cover of the book. The sigil can be understood in terms of various parts of the text, and in terms of information which can be found in his Greek Myths]. 

A principal way in which this study differs from a modern historical approach is that it does not build on the assumption that economic forces dictate cultural production. Or even that economic forces shape men’s thoughts. Rather economic forces are seen as a level of constraint, defining a space in which cultural production is possible. The difference is that whereas historians tend to see economics as a cultural driver, I see them as a brake, principally on the human imagination. Once, as a student studying the career of the Gracchi, I expressed the view that I could not work out what was in the mind of the surviving Gracchi brother. The eminent historian in charge of the tutorial suggested ‘does it matter?’ Well yes it does, unless you think that what is in someone’s mind is of no account, and that the inner life of the mind is no more than a reflection of the economic pressures bearing down on the owner of that mind.

Which is not to say that the economic landscape is of no little account – just that it acts as both a facilitator and a brake on human action. What causes human action is more interesting than that, as we shall see. Understanding the phenomenology of human history and culture without taking account of the mind, and perhaps more particularly the human will, seems to me to be a very strange approach. An approach so strange in fact, that it may be possible to explain it only by reference to the same grammar of human thought which some historians purport not to need to know anything about.

Running Folklore to the Death

This is an extract from the book J.G.Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being, published April 4, 2016. The extract is presented without its footnotes.




Section Thirteen

13.1. Frazer's work on the development of Plato's thought has made it more difficult to gain an understanding of the patterns of thought in antiquity - all his subsequent work is based on the presuppositions and arguments found in his early essay, and we still function within the vast paradigmatic frame established by these. And, once in place, the consequences of these presuppositions and arguments are difficult to move aside: particularly the view that the notion of magic before classical times exclusively depended upon the phenomenon of the association of ideas, and therefore can be understood as a simple species of error, a practice developed at the very beginning of man's attempt to understand the world around him.

13.2. Frazer worked within a milieu in which such arguments and assumptions would have been made even without the existence of Frazer himself, for they were on the tide. His later work never departed radically from the path set by his initial essay, and its presuppositions and arguments must be understood if his later monuments are to be assessed at their proper worth. Frazer erected his theory of Magic on the notion that magical patterns of thought, magical procedures, etc., can be explained according to the idea that ordered beliefs about the world are conditioned by the tendency of the mind to associate ideas, whether or not there is in fact such a relation between the objects which give rise to the subjective ideas of them. Thus habitual association gives false weight to notions of the world, and in the absence of adequate procedures of verification, these notions are not easily displaced. In his chapter on "Our Debt to the Savage"*[89] he says that:

When all is said and done our resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our differences from him; and what we have in common with him, and deliberately retain as true and useful, we owe to our savage forefathers who slowly acquired by experience and transmitted to us by inheritance those seemingly fundamental ideas which we are apt to regard as original and intuitive... their errors were not wilful extravagances or the ravings of insanity, but simply hypotheses, justifiable as such at the time when they were propounded, but which a fuller experience has proved to be inadequate. It is only by the successive testing of hypotheses and rejection of the false that truth is at last elicited.

13.3. And since "truth" in science is no more than the best working hypothesis, the one with the greatest degree of competitive plausibility,

...in reviewing the opinions and practices of ruder ages and races we shall do well to look with leniency upon their errors as inevitable slips made in the search for truth...*[90]

13.4. When Frazer speaks of these "inevitable slips", he means the ancient philosophers, including Plato, as well as our "savage" ancestors (that he understood this search for truth as an anabasis without limit is indicated by his provisional inclusion of his own work in this progression). The Platonic hypothesis as framed by Frazer in his essay of 1879 is one which a "fuller experience has proved to be inadequate". Before Plato, before Socrates, we are dealing with a much cruder set of beliefs and opinions concerning the world - the "quaint superstitions, the old-world maxims, the venerable saws which the ingenuity of savage philosophers elaborated long ago..." These customary beliefs and opinions centred around the king: those

men to whom the superstition of their fellows ascribes a controlling influence over the general course of nature... [his] life and health... are matters of anxious concern to the people whose welfare and even existence are bound up with his; naturally he is constrained by them to conform to such rules as the wit of early man has devised for averting the ills to which flesh is heir... The king was enmeshed in these "antique fancies", so that he "could hardly stir a limb for the threads of custom" and was "boundfast within a network of observances from which death or deposition alone could release him*[91].

13.5. And thus it is to ancient kingship and related institutions that we must turn (as Frazer did) if we are to understand the past, for

the life of the old kings and priests teems with instruction. In it was summed up all that passed for wisdom when the world was young. It was the perfect pattern after which every man strove to shape his life; a faultless model constructed with rigorous accuracy upon the lines laid down by a barbarous philosophy...

13.6. And while we can fault the premises of this philosophy, "it deduces for the practical guidance of life a system of rules which in general hangs well together and forms a fairly complete and harmonious whole"*[92].

13.7. Frazer argues*[93] that Magic precedes religion and religion precedes science, as a kind of natural order of progression, "and the order on which magic reckons is merely an extension by false analogy, of the order in which ideas present themselves to our minds", whereas in acuter minds

magic is gradually superseded by by religion, which explains the succession of natural phenomena as regulated by the will, the passion, or the caprice of spiritual beings like man in kind, though vastly superior to him in power... Keener minds, still pressing forward to a deeper solution of the mysteries of the universe, come to reject the religious theory of nature as inadequate, and to revert in measure to the older standpoint of magic by postulating explicitly, what in magic had only been implicitly assumed, to wit an inflexible regularity in the order of natural events, which if carefully observed, enables us to foresee their course with certainty and to act accordingly.

13.8. The passage emphasised by my italics is critically important. For Frazer, magic, conceived of as a phenomenon based on the association of ideas, may come to be operated in the absence of an explicit theory of Being, and have nothing to do with such a conception. Nowhere in the Golden Bough is there any intimation that notions of magic may arise from a notion of the nature of Being: it would seem that either the idea was considered by him and subsequently dismissed, or that it did not occur to him at all.

13.9. Before passing on to a discussion of the relationship between magic and theories of Being it is worth digressing a little, to consider a methodological problem of Frazer's, which bears on this difficulty in connecting magic and the concept of Being. Frazer does not stratify his evidence: the "beliefs" of "savages" of his own day are conflated with those of antiquity: the magical operations of kings and priests are hardly distinguished in quality from the events recorded in folklore ("the venerable saws... of savage philosophers... which old women at chimney corners still impart as treasures of great price to their descendants"*[94]). Frazer may thus have been in the thoughts of the scholar D'Arcy Thompson, when he complained of those who,

running folklore to the death, seek to read antiquity in the light of savagery; ...who arrive at what I unhesitatingly regard as misconception by the double blunder of unduly depreciating the complexity of initial or archaic Greek thought and unduly exalting the importance and too freely correlating the results of their own study of incipient or semibarbarous civilizations. We must see fallacy in any theory which treats as nascent and primitive the civilization of a period of exalted poetry, the offspring of ages of antecedent culture; which sees but a small advance on recent barbarism in ways of life simple in some respects but rich in developed art and stored with refined tradition; that looks only for the ways and habits and thoughts of primitive man in races supported by a background of philosophical and scientific culture of an unfathomed, and maybe unfathomable antiquity*[95]

13.10. It is a strange and unscientific way to deal with evidence, to assume that it is not necessary to evaluate the worth of each piece on its own merits, quite apart from the question of whether or not it fits into the large picture. But it follows quite naturally from the preconceptions of the time: if there is no ontological basis for the various beliefs of the ancients and savages, how are they to be graded and related to one another and to be given value of any sort? They are all mistakes, and do not form a sequence of a kind that might allow a progression to be determined. Thus Frazer grouped his study of patterns of belief thematically.

13.11. Frazer firmly locates magic as a phenomenon which precedes an explicit theory of Being, the result of quite startlingly false analogical thinking. The error in magic he defines as of two kinds: sympathetic and contagious. In the case of sympathetic magic, "the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it". Contagious magic involves the inference "that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact..."*[96].

13.12. Further, he argues that:

its fundamental conception is identical with that of modern science; underlying the whole system is a faith, implicit but real and firm, in the order and uniformity of nature...He [the magician] supplicates no higher power*[97]

.

13.13. Religion also, according to Frazer, is not a phenomenon whose origin can be traced to a theory of Being, despite the fact that it involves "a belief in powers higher than man and an attempt to propitiate or please them"*[98] . Why then does this change in patterns of belief take place? Frazer's attempt to explain this is perhaps the weakest part of his work. He suggests (with diffidence) that

a tardy recognition of the inherent falsehood and barrenness of magic set the more thoughtful part of mankind to cast about for a truer theory of nature and a more fruitful method of turning her resources to account... The discovery amounted to this, that men for the first time recognised their inability to manipulate at pleasure certain natural forces which hitherto they had believed to be completely within their control. It was a confession of human ignorance and weakness... If the great world went on its way without the help of him or his fellows, it must surely be because there were other beings, like himself, but far stronger, who, unseen themselves, directed its course and brought about all the varied series of events which he had hitherto believed to be dependent on his own magic... To these mighty beings, whose handiwork he traced in all the gorgeous and varied pageantry of nature, man now addressed himself, humbly confessing his dependence on their invisible power... In this, or some such way as this, the deeper minds may be conceived to have made the great transition from magic to religion. But even in them the change can hardly ever have been sudden; probably it proceeded very slowly, and required long ages for its more or less perfect accomplishment. For the recognition of man's powerlessness to influence the course of nature on a grand scale must have been gradual; he cannot have been shorn of the whole of his fancied dominion at a blow... religion, beginning as a slight and partial acknowledgement of powers superior to man, tends with the growth of knowledge to deepen into a confession of man's entire and absolute dependence on the divine*[99]

.

13.14. Thus Frazer detects in the divinities the personification of the great natural forces which man cannot control; and theories of Being, it would appear, have no part to play in this history of man's intellectual development; Being as a concept, it would seem, belongs only to a very narrow rung of the ladder of human intellectual progress, somewhere between the decay of religious explanation and the rise of empiricism and inductive method. The gods are merely inferential beings, without explanation beyond the fact that some such powers, on the basis of experience, must exist, if the nature of the world is to be understood.

13.15. That magic is conceived of as an operative phenomenon depends, as Frazer says, on there being sympathy and contact between things: relation of some sort must exist if magical results are to occur. Frazer argues that this is a species of intellectual error, essentially twofold, in that likeness is misread for identity, and contact for a moment is misread for contact at all times. No theory of Being among the ancients is however invoked by Frazer to explain this pattern of belief. But are we really to accept that at all times and at all levels, the practitioners of magic have been the victims of such stupid thoughts? That mere similarity was confused with identity, and that a brief contiguity likewise was taken, of itself, to establish a permanent relationship?

13.16. If we recall the passage in the Timaeus where similar forms are asserted to form a unity and thus to be interchangeable, it might be argued that Plato is attempting to supply an account of the relation of things on the basis of similarity, within the context of a theory of Being*[100]. Frazer perhaps understood the Platonic Philosophy as the culmination of a way of thinking, which, though it attempted to move forward, was boundfast by an inherited and inherent fallacy. But, though it is true that Plato's account of the theory of the Forms is unsatisfactory in the manner in which it is discussed, his theory of Being provides a paradigm of reality in which magical relationships ought to have been intelligible.

13.17. That it does not, on the face of it, provide a model for the understanding of magical relationships in antiquity is due essentially to the history of the interpretation of the fact that, clearly, the theory of Being breaks down in the course of Plato's work, and that the Intelligibles cannot, either exist unmoved, or exist unmoved and be known. The third alternative, which is voiced by the Eleatic Stranger at Soph. 249c-d, that Reality embraces both the unchangeable and the changing, similarly appears to have provided no model for the understanding of magical relationships, since it is a default position, agreed among the speakers in the dialogue because they have no other option. If, as in this case, the world of Forms is indistinguishable from the world of changing appearances, it has been understood that we are left with little more than the assertion of relation between similars (looking very like the Frazerian position on magic). Therefore the ultimate "disappearance" of the theory as an explanatory device of any worth is read as Plato's rejection of his own theory; lingering in his work for a time, just as the Ptolemaic account of the Cosmos lingered on (in Milton's Paradise Lost, for example) after the work of Copernicus and Galileo rendered it theoretically outmoded.

13.18. It would seem therefore that a theory of Being cannot support a pattern of belief, except for those who do not or cannot examine with precision the material which they are to believe. This however, is no reason to reject it as a possibility among the ancients, if we are to accept that they were starting out on the long road to rational thought. After all, the Frazerian picture of the development of Plato's thought implies that he did not spot the fallacies in his argument until late in his career. The fact that a pattern of thought may be held in error does not mean that it may not be held at all.

13.19. Yet the later nineteenth century had a peculiar aversion to allowing a venerable ancient history to the concept of Being, and abstract ideas in general; and this view is still broadly adhered to, though reasons for supporting this model of human intellectual history are increasingly hard to come by. The reasons for the unacceptability of abstract ideas among the ancients are difficult to unravel, but have much to do with the development of anthropological ideas, and the stratification of man, both socially and historically. I have already illustrated that Frazer runs antiquity and the savage close together. A passage from his chapter on "Magic and Religion", p73, suggests that for him the equation was both conscious and quite seriously maintained. He speaks of the diversity of religious views in the world "which affect mainly the intelligent and thoughtful part of the community", but suggests that

when we have penetrated through these differences... we shall find underlying them all a solid stratum of intellectual agreement among the dull, the weak, the ignorant, and the superstitious, who constitute, unfortunately, the vast majority of mankind.

13.20. Here Frazer tells us something of the strong sense possessed by the upper levels of society in late victorian England that they were supported by a large mass of people they neither knew or understood. This belief was strongly held:

One of the great achievements of the nineteenth century was to run shafts down into this low mental stratum in many parts of the world, and thus to discover its essential identity everywhere... This universal faith, this truly Catholic creed, is a belief in the efficacy of magic... Among the ignorant and superstitious classes of modern Europe it is very much what it was thousands of years ago in Egypt and India, and what it now is among the lowest savages surviving in the remotest corners of the world*[101]

13.21. The equation is clear. The repellent fascination with a barbarous antiquity is kin to the nineteenth century fascination with the horrors of what he later calls "a standing menace to civilization", the "solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society... unaffected by the superficial changes of religion and culture"*[102]. Naturally, given this equation as a premiss, it is impossible to ascribe to the ancients of remotest historical time, steeped in magic and ritual as they were, a capacity to deal in abstract ideas; far less that the details of their culture and beliefs might have been shaped by theories of Being.

13.22. This unfortunate association of ideas was understood, in the late nineteenth century, to make necessary a corollary between the biological nature of populations and their cultural production. There is not much evidence for this notion however: and no indication at all that there has been a change in the capacity of man to deal in abstractions over historical time. Changes in intellectual production ought to be approached - initially at least - as purely cultural phenomena. But the idea of the corollary between the "low mental stratum" and the "savage" was so strongly held that it occurred to few that they were dealing with a persuasive notion rather than an established fact.