The White and Black Goddesses

The first half of our commentary on issue #38 focuses on WicDiv’s ties to The White Goddess, by Robert Graves (and, apparently, Anna White), as Alex hits the books.

Alex: Since Ananke first mentioned it, way back in issue #9, I’ve spent three years resisting the urge to read Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. Since Gillen mentioned he’d made sure to hide the book from all his Instagram photos up until that point, I’ve always thought of it as a sort of WicDiv Rosetta Stone… but, for all the insight it might contain, nah, I’d really rather not.

With Graves making an extended cameo in issue #38, I finally caved.

(Well, sort of. More accurately, I read around it. A few passages from the book; commentary from Graves, critics and scholars; some Pagan websites; a fair bit of Wikipedia.)

Once I began to probe, I couldn’t stop noticing connections. Coincidences, maybe. Except, as the woman herself once said, they don’t feel like coincidences. They feel like magic.

Let’s start with the story of how The White Goddess originally came to be, and how that fits with what we see in #38. The majority of the book was written in a three-week sprint in 1944 – the same year ‘Anna White’ visits Devon – after Graves was struck by a sudden bolt of inspiration. His account in the real world involves drawing maps for a book about Jason and the Argonauts, but WicDiv switches this out for the much more interesting idea that he was visited by a drunk Ananke.

(And while we’re in real-world history mode, it’s worth noting that the 1957 lecture from this issue did really happen, at New York’s YMHA Centre. Everything he says in the comic appears to be a direct quote from that lecture.)

As for the actual content of that bolt of inspiration: well, it was something about trees and Celtic druids. Ananke throws this out fairly casually, half a bottle deep into her rant. For Graves, it was the key to unlocking a bigger idea.

First, the solution to a riddle in a medieval poem, The Song of Teliesin, using a Druidic alphabet that used as its letters the names of trees – the consonants of which, according to Graves, doubled as names of months. It was a lunar calendar, with thirteen months instead of twelve. Those numbers might sound familiar.

(This calendar leaves one spare day each year: 23 December, which is so close to the all-important WicDiv date of 21 December that it actually hurts.)

Graves used this idea as a jumping-off point. Understanding the trees as an alphabet, he reinterpreted The Battle of the Trees, a medieval Welsh poem, as a metaphor for two warring languages and knowledge systems – a new patriarchal system overwriting the old goddess-worshipping matriarchy.

This didn’t just happen in Wales, according to Graves – it happened across prehistoric Europe and the Middle East. “The language was tampered with in late Minoan times,” he wrote, “when invaders from Central Asia began to substitute patrilinear for matrilinear institutions and remodel or falsify the myths to fit their social changes.” Back to WicDiv: we’ve actually visited Minoa roughly around this time in the comic.

(Very roughly, it’s worth noting. Crete in 3026BC is actually, as far as I can tell, early rather than late Minoan. Tim’s the historian in this duo – you can see what he had to say on the matter here.)

We saw it first in #36, where it stuck out in a fifteen-page sequence of murder as one of the few examples where Ananke’s role was filled by the one we know as Minerva. Then #37 filled in the blanks a little – it was the first time Ananke fucked up the ritual and experienced 90 years of darkness. “Never again,” she said then, which might explain the changeover. Maybe she decided to go underground.

Because the big idea that was lost with this cultural overhaul was worship of a “a divine female power, manifest under many names and forms in the goddesses of the ancient world”. Does that sound like anyone we know? Someone roaming early civilisation setting up franchises like Michael Keaton in The Founder, perhaps?

The other idea in The White Goddess with obvious applications to WicDiv is the triple goddess. It’s not an idea that started with Graves – it was likely borrowed from Jane Ellen Harrison, writing half a century earlier – but he applied it to this idea of a lost prehistoric goddess. She was a single deity, but generally worshipped in three different aspects: Maiden, Mother and Crone. Or, less catchily, Mother, Bride and Layer-out. That version describes her relationship to a lesser god-king, the last bit referring to her killing him as a sacrifice.

(This triple goddess idea, if we’re melding together the real and WicDiv histories, was one Graves wrote about before 1944, suggesting it didn’t originate from Ananke’s whiskey-fuelled diatribe. Perhaps it was these earlier writings that attracted her to seek him out.)

The obvious question becomes: which of the Pantheon does this apply to? WicDiv is weirdly full of triple goddesses. The obvious fit seems to be Minerva (Maiden), Persephone (Mother – soon to be literally) and Ananke (Crone, and Layer-out of a fair few gods along the way).

Persephone is a name that cropped up a lot in my reading, but an even more commonly cited example of the triple goddess is the Morai – the Greek Fates, known in the mythology of Northern Europe as Norns. Yup, our old pals Skuld, Verðandi, and Urðr.

The Maiden/Mother/Crone archetypes don’t map as neatly onto Cassandra and pals, although it’s generally accepted that each of the Norns represents past, present and future – which would, I guess, make Urðr our Crone. It’s also perhaps notable that the Norns manifested in issue #9, right after Ananke first mentioned The White Goddess.

And then there’s The Morrigan. Mythologically a shapeshifter with three (or more) forms, her WicDiv incarnation is probably closest to the original conception of the triple goddess – which is, after all, three aspects of a single person. The archetypes are a fairly neatly match, too, especially the less-common version. Annie is life-giving Mother. Macha, Bride to Baphomet. Badb, his Layer-out.

 It’s probably worth mentioning at this point another of Graves’ major influences: The Golden Bough, written by James George Frazer in 1890. Frazer identified his own pattern in mythologies and religions that seemed to suggest a single common source – primitive fertility cults which worshipped a divine king for a year before sacrificing him.

This is basically the story that Morrigan overlays onto her relationship with Baphomet, “my king for a year, twice over”. #37 basically shows how Graves’ triple goddess archetypes fits into this cycle, and – for me – understanding that helped contextualise the way the abuse storyline was handled. A new king is always (re)born, so the cycle can start all over again.

One interesting thing about The Morrigan is that we’ve seen two earlier incarnations, both of them male, neither of whom showed any signs of a triplicate personality. But there always seems to be at least one triple deity in each Recurrence: the 455 Lucifer referenced a Morai, the 1830s had its Brontë-analogue Lonely Sisters and – the only male incarnation we’ve seen – the 1920s had its own trio of Norns.

But, as ‘Anna White’ reminds us, the Mother/Maiden/Crone construction is “an effective sleight of hand”. So I’d like to consider a couple of other options.

The first was suggested by Tim: maybe Laura/Persephone is the Triplicate Goddess in and of herself.

Jane Ellen Harrison wrote that “the matriarchal goddess may well have reflected the three stages of a woman’s life.” Laura begins the series – which opens at the start of the year, remember – as a relative innocent. (“Well, she was just 17/And you know what I mean.”)

As a mythological figure, Persephone is most commonly associated with the Maiden archetype, but recent developments slot her firmly in the Mother role – possibly the reason she seems to have abandoned the Persephone identity. If it works, maybe she’ll get her full allotment of years and a chance to explore that third stage of life. (“Laura, you’re more than a superstar/You’ll be famous for longer than them.”)

Or maybe we’re asking the wrong question altogether. Let’s finish by quoting Grevel Lindop, editor of a 1997 edition of the book: “By 1963 [Graves’] vision of the Goddess was changing again. In his Oxford lecture of that December – published as ‘Intimations of the Black Goddess’ – he began to speak of the White Goddess’s ‘mysterious sister, the Goddess of Wisdom’.”

Hmm. Does that sound like anyone we know?

Like what we do, and want to help us make more of it? Visit patreon.com/timplusalex and pledge to gain access to exclusive blogs, ebooks, mixtapes and more.