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").

 

Seven Days in New Crete

Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 23:00:15 +0000
Subject: Re: "Seven days in New Crete"

>I am an Italian university student. I am specializing in English
>literature at the University of Pescara, Italy and, for my thesis, I am
>preparing a study on Robert Graves' fiction... I have found this archive and I have
>thought to call for help. In a chapter of my thesis I have to tell about a Graves'
>novel, called "Seven days in New Crete", but in my country I was not able to
>find any news about it. It would be great to have some critical comments
>on this novel and any link it could have with another novel, called
>"1984" by George Orwell about the utopian thematic. I would be very happy
>if somebody paid attention to my help request. Thanks a lot, Alessandra.

Alessandra,

'Seven days in New Crete' is one of several works in which Graves explored his thesis that the original theological and social structures of the human race were matriarchal. In other words,that the principal divinity - in fact the only original divinity - was once 'The Goddess', and that, formerly, social organization had feminine characteristics, as contrasted with the 'masculine' social structures of the modern world.

The principal discussion of this thesis can be found in 'The White Goddess', first published in 1948. The idea first surfaced in 'The Golden Fleece'. It quickly dominated Graves thoughts, and 'The Golden Fleece' was put aside while Graves wrote the first draft of 'The White Goddess' (originally titled 'The Roebuck in the Thicket'). The matriarchial idea also plays a significant role in the novel 'King Jesus'. Graves translated Apuleius' 'Golden Ass' in the same decade, and Apuleius' work seems to have confirmed Graves in the belief that he was on the right track. The 'Goddess' is a key figure in Apuleius's novel, though in his work it is a specific goddess who is referred to (Isis), rather than 'The Goddess' of Graves' thesis.

The novel fits broadly into the category of science fiction, and explores a utopian future. Graves began planning a utopian novel in the summer of 1940 [see: Richard Perceval Graves' 'Robert Graves and the White Goddess': 'Work in Hand', p18] whose ideas of social and political organisation were founded chiefly upon former ideas of Laura Riding which he hoped would eventually inspire a 'practical organization of decent people'. He told his son David of his idea for the novel: David was however not impressed, and said that 'any practical organization of decent people would be suppressed at once by the government' and that he thought it 'time this Western industrial civilization was ended'. Possbily because of this criticism, the novel was laid aside for nearly seven years.

New Crete is divided into kingdoms, but powers of the kings are 'entrusted to them by their queens'. The governing principle is a custom based 'not on a code of laws, but for the most part on the inspired utterances of poets' who receive the guidance of the Muse (the Goddess). The system is run by women who 'act directly on behalf of the Goddess'. Thus women are 'naturally' treated by men as the superior sex. RPG comments that:

'This is a society living in harmony with the natural world; and each individual is allocated to one of the 'five estates' not by birth but by capacity. Money has been abolished; different villages have different social customs, so that one may live in a monogamous, polygamous, or even polyandrous society and yet be perfectly virtuous; there are even 'bagnios', brothels which it is no disgrace to visit, and 'where one goes when one isn't in love with anyone in particular but feels unhappily lecherous'; while war has become ritulalized into a kind of moderately violent rugger, so that the only deaths, apart from those by natural causes, occur as part of the ritual of goddess-worship.' [Richard Perceval Graves' 'Robert Graves and the White Goddess' p143-4].

'Seven Days in New Crete' is not in fact a serious utopia: its inhabitants are unhappy with its complacency and indifference: the New Cretans do not possess 'the quality that we prize as character: the look of indomitability which comes from dire experiences nobly faced and overcome'. Therefore the rulers have deliberately introduced 'a seed of trouble... since true love and wisdom spring only from calamity'. Graves novel is therefore anti-utopian.

On the face of it, there isn't much to connect Orwell's '1984' and Graves' utopian novel. They were both composed in the late 1940's, and both result from an anxiety about evident tendencies in the modern world. Orwell's literary sources included Wells, London, Huxley and Zamyatin (principally Zamyatin): I do not know whether or not Orwell read Graves' book. However both works are responses to the political and social dislocations of the early twentieth century. Both men wished for the creation of a new social order, but were rather pessimistic about the practicalities of this. Graves was particularly influenced by Laura Riding's ideas on politics and society during their time together, though afterwards he reacted against them: it is therefore interesting to speculate on the nature of 'Seven Days in New Crete' had Graves written it while still under the spell of Riding. It might have been whole-heartedly utopian in outlook.

Are there significant parallels between the novels? In both novels society is split up into different areas and levels, which have different rules of behaviour, as if they were autonomous societies: in Orwell's novel these are the 'zones of influence'; and in Graves' future society different areas of New Crete have different customs and mores. War has been ritualised in both societies: in '1984' it serves to underpin inequality and to soak up overproduction. Also, in both Orwell's and Graves' novels there is a social hierarchy: in '1984' membership of the oligarchy (the party) is presented as essentially non-hereditary - this is because the oligarchy's purpose is to preserve itself, rather than the families of its members; in 'Seven Days in New Crete' status is acquired on the basis of 'capacity'. Both societies continue because the ruling elite has the power to nominate its successors. Thus in both cases the society is totalitarian, in that all the reins of power are in the hands of a small oligarchic group, whatever the outward appearances of difference and diversity.

Both these novels owe a great deal to the circumstances of their creation, and looking at the context of their creation is probably the best way to make useful comparisons.

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.

Decoding Robert Graves

In a letter to T.S. Eliot concerning the publication of The White Goddess, Graves writes:

 "I have asked Creative Age to send you the cover design of The White Goddess, done by Kenneth Gay with me standing over him all the time. It shows the goddess Carmenta giving Palaimedes [sic] the eye which enables him to understand the flight of the cranes which originated the alphabet."

 ***

In the Introduction to The Greek Myths Graves outlines a basic procedure for his interpretation of Greek myth: this procedure is critically important for the understanding of the White Goddess sigil. He argues that: "True myth may be defined as the reduction to narrative shorthand of ritual mime performed on public festivals, and in many cases recorded pictorially on temple walls, vases, seals, bowls, mirrors, chests, shields, tapestries, and the like". 

 He then lists the characteristics of myth which are to be disbarred from serious consideration: I do not repeat the idiosyncratic list here - it is however important to know that Graves had a very precise notion of what he was doing, drawing inspiration and method from a school of anthropology whose high tide coincided with his time at Oxford. 

 Graves most fully discusses the source material for the sigil in Ch. 13, of The White Goddess, 'Palamedes and the Cranes'. Graves draws on Hyginus' Fables, where (Fable 277) disparate information is given about the 'origin' of the alphabet. Graves tells us that the fable relates : "that the Fates invented the seven letters: Alpha, [Omicron], Upsilon, Eta, Iota, Beta, and Tau. Or alternatively, that Mercury [i.e., Hermes] invented them after watching the flight of cranes 'which make letters as they fly'", and also: "that Palamedes, son of Nauplius, invented eleven others". 

 Two other individuals are credited with the creation of further letters in this fable, but they need not detain us here. Cadmus the Phoenician, surprisingly, is not mentioned at all. As Graves points out, he is "usually credited with the invention of the Greek alphabet," Wisely he also adds his recognition that these characters "are indisputably borrowed from the Phoenician alphabet', and thus makes it clear that his argument does not per se fly in the face of the archaeological record. 

 Graves goes on to fill out the mythical details: "Palamedes, son of Nauplius... is credited by Philostratus the Lemnian, and by the Scholiast on Euripides's Orestes, with the invention not only of the alphabet, but also of lighthouses, measures, scales, the disc, and the 'art of posting sentinels'. He took part in the Trojan War as an ally of the Greeks and at his death was granted a hero-shrine on the Mysian Coast of Asia Minor opposite Lesbos". [WG.p225]. The Fates he identifies as "a divided form of the Triple Goddess, and in Greek Legend [they] appear also as the Three Grey Ones and the Three Muses". [WG. p225]. 

 Graves argues that Palamedes "ruled over the Mysians, who were of Cretan stock..." His father was Greek, and  his "name means perhaps 'Mindful of the Ancient One', and he assisted the Three Fates (the Three Muses) in the composition of the Greek alphabet." Also that "it was well known to the ancients, as it is to us [referring here to the decipherment of Linear B by Chadwick and Ventris in the 1950's], that all the inventions credited to Palamedes originated in Crete." 

Hyginus tells that a version of the Greek alphabet was taken by Mercury into Egypt, and then brought back to Greece by Cadmus. After that the letters were taken by Evander the Arcadian into Italy where, Graves writes, "his mother Carmenta (the muse) adapted them to the Latin alphabet of fifteen letters." Graves mentions that Hyginus is supported by Pliny who writes in his "Natural History" that "the first Latin alphabet was a Pelasgian one". This is how Graves brings Palamedes and Carmenta, mythical figures belonging to different cultures, together in the same image. 

 Graves argues that the story of the invention of the pre-Cadmean alphabet is concealed in the "confusingly iconotropic myth of Perseus and the Gorgon Medusa" [p229]. He outlines the structure of the myth as follows: "Perseus was sent to cut off the head of the snaky-locked Gorgon Medusa, a rival of the Goddess Athene, whose baleful look turned men into stone; and that he could not accomplish the task until he had gone to the three Graeae, 'Grey Ones', the three old sisters of the Gorgons who had only one eye and one tooth between them, and by stealing eye and tooth had blackmailed them into telling him where the grove of the Three Nymphs was to be found. 

From the three Nymphs he then obtained winged sandals like those of Hermes, a bag to put the Gorgon's head into, and a helmet of invisibility. Hermes also kindly gave him a sickle; and Athene gave him a mirror and showed him a picture of Medusa so that he would recognise her. He threw the tooth of the three Grey Ones, and some say the eye also, into Lake Triton, to break their power, and flew on to Tartessus where the Gorgons lived in a grove on the borders of the ocean; there he cut off the sleeping Medusa's head with the sickle, first looking into the mirror so that the petrifying charm should be broken, thrust the head into his bag, and flew home pursued by other Gorgons." 

 Graves then explains that, for his purposes, "The Three Nymphs must be understood as the Three Graces, that is to say, the Triple Love-goddess. The Graeae were also known as the Phorcides, which means the daughters of Phorcus, or Orcus [the Medusa is also described as a daughter of Phorcus by Pausanias, a detail of which Graves was aware - GM 73.t.], and according to the Scholiast on Aeschylus had the form of swans - which is probably an error for cranes, due to a misreading of a sacred picture, since cranes and swans, equally sacred birds, are alike in flying in V-formation. They were in fact the Three Fates." 

 Graves then breaks up the myth into a sequence of images, in the manner he suggests in his introduction to The Greek Myths. The first of these images is the basis for the White Goddess sigil: 

"...a naked young man cautiously approaching three shrouded women of whom the central one presents him with an eye and a tooth; the other two point upwards to three cranes flying in a V-formation from right to left." [WG p230] In his analysis of the myth of the Lamia [GM 61.1], Graves suggests that her removable eyes "are perhaps deduced from a picture of the goddess about to bestow mystic sight on a hero by proffering him an eye." It is likely that the presence of the pentagram in the picture signifies the special kind of insight granted to the hero Palamedes. 

 There are however some details left over: the three spirals, and the serpent, for which we should try to account. The coils of thread on which Palamedes stands can be easily guessed by those familiar with Greek mythology: they represent the threads governed by the Moerae, or the Three Fates: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. The Fates are identified by Graves as the three aspects of the Goddess:: in GM 10 he writes: "Moerae means 'a share' or 'a phase', and the moon has three phases and three persons: the new, the Maiden-goddess of the spring, the first period of the year; the full moon, the Nymph-goddess of the summer, the second period; and the old moon, the Crone-goddess of autumn, the last period". [GM 10.1] 

 Which leaves the serpent unaccounted. Given the nature of the subject we should not expect there to be a single viable explanation. In The Greek Myths, in the section on Perseus [GM 73], Graves writes: "At sunset, Perseus alighted near the palace of the Titan Atlas to whom, as a punishment for his inhospitality, he showed the Gorgon's head and thus transformed him into a mountain; and on the following day turned eastward and flew across the Libyan desert, Hermes helping him to carry the weighty head. By the way he dropped the Graeae's eye and tooth into Lake Triton; and some drops of Gorgon blood fell on the desert sand, where they bred a swarm of venomous serpents, one of which later killed Mopsus the Argonaut". [GM 73i] 

 Hermes of course is credited elsewhere (and later) with many of the inventions of Palamedes [GM 17]. He is also the bearer of the 'kerykeion', or 'caduceus': the staff surmounted by opposed, interweaving snakes. But Graves, in line for once with the academy of the time, writes that "the heraldic white ribbons on Hermes's staff were later mistaken for serpents, because he was herald to Hades" [GM 17]. Cranes were sacred to Hermes also. 

 However, there is another and more plausible source for the appearance of a serpent in the sigil. Graves summarises the theme of The White Goddess in the first Chapter ('Poets and Gleemen') as the story of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year and of 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." The poet relates to this story by identifying himself "with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird... The weird, or rival.... takes countless malevolent or diabolic or serpent-like forms." The serpent can therefore be understood as Palamedes weird: especially since Palamedes is clearly the focus of its attention. 

 The provenance of the sigil is entirely a product of Graves method: as far as I am aware there is no antique exemplar of this image. Nor would I expect one to turn up. Graves has reconstructed a ritual image on the basis of an interesting, but highly idiosyncratic interpretative method and analysis. But, it should be remembered, The White Goddess is about the grammar of poetry and myth, not ancient history. Graves is exploring a pattern of thought, not describing the past. 

 ***

 On the Letter to T.S Eliot: Graves translated Apuleius' Golden Ass in 1947, and that work features a number of visitations of the Goddess to Lucius, the focus of the story. These occur often through the form of an intermediary, male or female, rather than the Goddess herself. It may not be fanciful to imagine that, when Graves wrote that Karl Gay produced the sigil while he stood over him, he saw himself as such an intermediary, as an ambassador of the Goddess. 

 Finally, the mispelling of 'Palamedes' in the letter to T.S. Eliot gives an additional insight into Graves' creative process. The reading of the name given earlier, 'Mindful of the Ancient One,' is not likely to be correct. However the mispelling tells us how Graves read it: 'palai' means 'long ago,' and Graves has chosen to see its contraction as a component in the name of Palamedes.