Mammon and the Black Goddess by Robert Graves
Yet to allow a complete break with history by the uni?versal extension of modern living would be most foolish.
I deplore the use made of institutional religion?once a bulwark against the advance of materialistic philosophy ?to buttress the materialistic system; but I should equally dislike seeing it suppressed in a rationalist cam?paign for Godlessness. I deplore, also, the engulfing of primitive, magic-making societies by the steel jaws of modernism. What I should like to see is cultural reserves, protected from all outside influence, even from anthro?pological study?the natives being left enough fertile land and animal life to give them a decent chance of sur?vival. If our own highly artificial culture blows up, only such reserves can preserve humanity. Yet, unless this scheme were sponsored by leading scientists of all nation?alities, no politician would agree to protect any society, however small and remote, against infiltration by tourists
st improbable that a world congress of scientists ?though alone of all professional men, except perhaps soldiers, they understand each other perfectly?could ever decide what limits to set on new experiment and on the exploitation of discoveries already made. And I am not singling out nuclear experiment and the missile craze which, to me, seem relatively unimportant compared with the upset of Nature's balance by irresponsible use of chemicals; the weakening, by labour-saving devices, of man's power to cope with moral or physical problems; the dulling of his imagination by commercialized art, literature, drama and music; the speed-up of communi?cations which makes privacy almost unattainable; and the standardizing of all objects in domestic and public service. No attempt to halt progress (or regress) has ever succeeded.
When it comes to communications, scientists are naturally far more interested in the means of conveying messages than in the messages themselves, even if spectacularly bounced off the moon or exchanged between astronauts; and it is here that the width of the gap separating science from the humanities shows most com?ically. ... As for the standardizing of industrial goods: I admit it has its advantages, such as a reduction of the working week by nearly a half, in an era when progress?ively fewer people take any pride in their work; but its disadvantages must not be forgotten. The human eye easily tires of machine-drawn straight lines and geo?metrical curves and of identical sets of objects, and can overcome fatigue reactions caused in this way only by ceasing to value singularity.
Goethe was right to emphasize the value of intuition and of contemplating, rather than categorizing, trees, flowers and natural objects. Unfortunately, he claimed to lie following the bright beam that joined him to God; I any 'unfortunately' because this God was a Brocken Spectre of his own male self. The German language does not allow for a female Wisdom, any more than it allows for a female Moon; and in my view the political and social confusion of these last 3,000 years has been en?tirely due to man's revolt against woman as a priestess of natural magic, and his defeat of her wisdom by the use of intellect. He has given her the choice of becoming either a housewife, a play-thing, or a careerist. If a careerist, she remains 'auxiliary male personnel' until she manages to get control at the office; whereupon she turns honorary patriarch, and thinks along male lines. There are even a lew women scientists.
I should not be speaking in this outrageous manner, unless I countered on finding among you some, at least, v^to have given thought to these matters. Not merely to I he case of institutional religion which many men here, though scientists, schizophrenetically accept for the sake of their families. Not merely to the problem of how to keep your discoveries from being exploited in a way that robs life of its natural savour?having, as it were, chartered your ship for a voyage not your own. Not merely to the problem of how to retain particular aware?ness of particular living things, though you must also deal in generalities and analytical abstraction. But to the problem of what sustains you here?what is your secret mystique?
Have your advanced technologists a mystique? So far I have found no evidence of finding any such, but only a sense of fate. 'We must go on and on and on.' Why? Curiosity drives us. Outwardly you conform to custom like solid, ethical citizens, as though unaware that the world now stands in far greater awe of you than of all living presidents, crowned heads, tycoons, scholars, and ecclesiasts. The world knows that you hold all lives in your hands; yet you insist on taking a purely objective view 01 the world's affairs. Moreover, you restrict your scientific ethics to the narrowest definition, that of factual accuracy in conducting and summarizing re?search. (The ethical rules used also, once, to stipulate the publication and exchange of all findings; but they have now been subordinated to so-called national interests.)
Your very modesty absolves you of reproach; you do not claim to be statesmen, executives, or spiritual advisers. And you exclude from your research all functions of the mind that may be directed towards its development not as a thinking machine?and here you have been taught its limits by computers of your own contrivance?but as a creative force capable of miraculous interventions in history.
I am grateful for your patient dedication, as Fate's agents, to the task of a reductio ad absurdum: the task of proving that intellect, when it tries to solve universal problems, can get only intellectual answers: to the effect that all hypotheses are of equal validity in this most anarchic of all possible universes. Never any answer com?mending itself to that other part of man's mind where is seated the emotional centre which (by some obscure ex?change of vibrations with responsive emotional centres) generates an element popularly called Love; which, in turn (by some obscure biological chemistry), stimulates the creative faculties, rejuvenates the entire organism, and sympathetically affects a number of similar organisms attuned to it.
As the midwife told a young wife who complained of morning sickness: 'It will be worse before it's better, my duck, and then you'll have a lot of work on your hands.' But I am not a pessimist, and will now explain why: quoting, by your permission, from the now dis?credited Judaeo-Christian Bible.
The Bible was edited, during or shortly after the Exile, by a monotheistic and misogynous Guild of Prophets; they set themselves to delete all favourable reference to women who controlled men by their intuitive wisdom. Only one such case somehow escaped the censors: that of Deborah. She judged the Israelites when they were tributary to Jabin, King of Hazor, and issued oracles under a palm-tree (sacred to the Goddess Anatha) rather than under Jehovah's holy terebinth. Deborah means 'bee', and 'bee' was the honorary title of all oracular priestesses in Greater Greece and Syria.
The name of Deborah's husband is mentioned; but he was a cypher. She summoned an Ephraimite named Barak, and gave him instructions for leading a revolt of Zebulon, Issachar and Naphtali?although Israel had long been totally disarmed by Sisera, Jabin's commander-in- chief, who could bring 900 iron chariots into the field. ii|rak replied: 'If you join us on Mount Tabor, I will obey.' She told him: 'If you need my presence there, I will come; but by bargaining, you have forfeited the glory of killing Sisera with your own hand. A woman shall now win it.' So the battle was won; and Jael, in defiance of her husband Heber, Jabin's ally, took a typical woman's revenge on Sisera, for which she was subsequently- praised by Deborah. As for the 900 iron chariots?Deb?orah and Barak afterwards sang together in triumph: 'The River Kishon swept them away; that ancient river, the River Kishon!'
No release from the present impasse can come, in my view, except from a Barak who has put himself under Deborah's orders. Barak means 'lightning', but is associ?ated with baraka, or 'blessedness' that comes from divine Wisdom. Potential Deborahs are not uncommon even to?day, but the Jabins and Siseras make every effort to limit their activities and sap their self-reliance. The Deborahs either resign themselves to marriage, or commit some spectacular form of suicide, or are confined to the psy?chotic wards of mental hospitals. It is the Baraks who are missing from the scene, or who fail to answer their summons.
Goethe prophesied the eventual rejuvenation of our wor
Now, the Irish Muse-goddess Brigid was threefold. She watched not only over poets?a term that included musi?cians, historians, story-tellers and astronomers?but over every kind of craftsman: from the illuminator to the architect; and over all physicians. Such natural sciences as astronomy, chemistry and navigation also came under her loving care, and were shared among her devotees. Their original discoveries?those inspired leaps in the dark? bocame craft mysteries. In ancient Greece, the Goddess Athene ruled every art and natural science, until ousted by the upstart God Apollo. Apollo was the first to patronize unnatural science?science as an intellectual perversion, science for the sake of science.
If Goethe's prophecy of the world's rejuvenation is to be fulfilled, and if my Deborah-Barak analogy holds, then the Barak chosen to deliver Israel from Sisera's 900 iron chariots must necessarily be an original scientist who, meditating among the woods of Mount Ephraim, lias suddenly been inspired by the Goddess's flash of lightning. He will see that the future of thought does not lie in the cosmical nonsense-region of electronic com?puters, but in the Paradisal region of what he will not bo ashamed to call 'magic'. He must obey Deborah's summons to the palm-tree, follow her irrational in?structions, trust her implicitly, and allow full weight to the scientifically imponderable. And the River Kishon will sweep away Sisera's 900 iron chariots. The more prodigally numerous those iron chariots, and the more select the tribesmen commanded by Barak?observe that I )eborah records 'out of Zebulon came they that handle the pen of a writer'?then the more certain his victory. That sudden destructive flood of the Kishon's very small stream, a cosmic coincidence that upset the logistics of Sisera's Pentagon, was naturally ordained by the poetic bond between Deborah and Barak. 'And the land had rest for forty years. . . .'
Forgive me!
Some Instances of Poetic Vulgarity
A French editor invited me the other day to join a sym?posium in praise of Robert Browning. At the risk of seem?ing a snob, I excused myself on the ground of his vulgarity, adding: 'This does not mean that Browning wrote in a non-academic style for the larger public, as one might call Victor Hugo vulgar, but that he was clearly no gontleman. The Muse has, of course, shown equal favour to poets of every rank and condition: to King Henry VIII5 to the Earl of Surrey 5 to Sir Walter Raleigh 5 to John (Jure, the Northamptonshire peasant; to William Davies, the South Welsh tramp; to John Keats, whose father was n groom; and to William Shakespeare, whose father was B wholesale provision dealer. Therefore to call Browning clearly no gentleman, and seemingly introduce class- barriers into a classless society, implies that he was clearly no poet either.'
What is vulgarity? Ruskin defined it as a 'deadness of heart and body resulting from prolonged and especially from inherited, conditions of degeneracy'. What he calls 'vulgar' I should call 'banal'. There is a livelier, likeable ?ort of vulgarity: the strident, active, healthy, unin?hibited, generous vulgarity of the Edwardian music-hall, or of New York vaudeville when Teddy Roosevelt was President. But vulgarity as a critical term means, as a rule, someone's swaggering attempt to be at ease in a class or group with different customs and taboos from his own.
Vulgaritas carried no social stigma in ancient Rome, once the power of the aristocratic families had been broken. Gaius Petronius's Trimalchio was rich, insensi-tive and uneducated; but as a priest of Augustus, he felt thoroughly at ease in bullying and looking down on his better bred and less successful fellow-townsmen. Indeed, I read him as Petronius's satire on the Emperor Nero who, though brought up anyhow under the care of a barber and a Circus dancer, stood high above all social criticism. 'Vulgarity', however, in English usage, is historically associated with vulgus mobile, 'the easily-moved crowd', from which comes the word mob. The mob, or 'mobility', were, for the three established 'Estates', rabble without patrons or clients, without representation, responsibility, or convictions: the objects of either scorn or pity.
Adult suffrage, two world wars, Labour Governments, compulsory education and crippling death-duties have gradually blurred social distinctions in Britain. Sports?manship /s now the one universally recognized moral virtue; all sportsmen rank as gentlemen. The servant class has disappeared; a skilled manual worker often earns more than a university graduate; and the dimin?ished importance given to all but technical accomplish?ments in education encourages the spread of what used ? *? to be called 'mob-taste' even among persons of royal blood. The Daily Sketch and Daily Mirror hail it as 'the popular touch'.
School anthologies harbour countless examples of vul?gar verse, still fed to children as worthy of admiration.
? Take Browning's Marching Along, his ballad of 'Kentish Sir Byng', a Cavalier who fought in the Civil War. iBrowning, the son of a Bank of England clerk, was by
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t birth and environment an enthusiastic crop-headed Iron?side. Yet here he casts himself for the part of a great?hearted, long-tressed Cavalier:
? Kentish Sir Byng stood for his King,
? Bidding the crop-headed Parliament swing:
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* And, pressing a troop unable to stoop And see the rogues flourish and honest folk droop,
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Marched them along, fifty-score strong, Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song.
God for King Charles! Pym and such carles
To the Devil that prompts 'em their treasonable paries!
Cavaliers up! Lips from the cup,
Hands from the pasty, nor bite take nor sup
Till you're?
chorus: Marching along, fifty-score strong,
Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song.
We read that Sir Byng pressed 'great-hearted gentle?men' for the King's service. Browning used pressed be?cause it had a more urgent sound than 'raised', yet 'press?ing' implies forcibly overcoming their reluctance to serve the King?a trait, however, of which he reports them incapable. Troop, stoop and droop all seem chosen to rhyme with each other, though troop probably occurred to Browning first. Being neither a soldier nor a historian, he did not know what strength a 'troop' would have had in King Charles's day; but to glorify Sir Byng (a fictitious character, perhaps short for 'Browning', and rhymed with King) he put it at 1,000 Cavaliers, or two cavalry regiments. Sir Byng finds them all together by some happy accident, armed and accoutred, at a gigantic wine- and-pasty picnic. Before grace can be said, Sir Byng's apt rhyme about King Charles, Pym's carles, and their treasonable paries, provokes them to rise up, still hungry and thirsty, and march off to battle with no better prepara- ? tion than a song. Talk of the Pied Piper of Hamelin4 As the Dictionary of National Biography notes: 'Brown?ing's poems everywhere attested unflinching optimism.' Marching Along is a day-dream of glory, doubtless pro-s voked (like the no less unhistorical How They Brought % the Good News from Aix to Ghent) by the sensuous rhythm of Browning's early-morning horseback consti-? tutional in the Park; and undeniably vulgar.
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Here is Browning at sea: a poem worked up from stray diary jottings:
home-thoughts, from the sea
Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away; Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay; Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay; In
'Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?' ?say,
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray, While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.
Nine readers out of ten will identify 'this evening' and 'the burning water' with the sunset at Cadiz; supposing that Trafalgar lay on the Spanish coast opposite Cadiz Bay, Gibraltar to the North-east where the dawn would presently break, and Cape St Vincent some miles to the North-west. ... A glance at the map will surprise them. Cape St Vincent lies 120 miles almost due west from Cadiz; Trafalgar thirty miles south of Cadiz; and Gib?raltar round the corner in the Mediterranean. Senti?mental allusions to Nelson's victories at St Vincent and Trafalgar, and to Lord Heathfield's earlier defence of Gibraltar would, Browning reckoned, make patriotic schoolboys ambitious of joining the Senior Service. The glorious blood-red sunset that reeked into Cadiz Bay is a daringly phrased reminder of Drake's surprise attack? against Royal orders?on the Spanish fleet in 1587. Needing a purple last line, Browning solemnly records that Jove's planet rose silent over Africay?to rhyme with pray. Did he expect it to sing Rule, Britannia?
Browning's vulgarity is a link between Thomas Camp?bell's and Rudyard Kipling's. Campbell, the youngest of an impoverished Scottish merchant's eleven children, won verse-prizes at Glasgow University, and was 'discovered' by the same Henry Mackenzie who had discovered Burns. The Battle of Copenhagen, Ye Mariners of England (not Scotland), and other patriotic songs, earned him a Govern?ment pension. Though his hope of political advancement was frustrated by the death of his patron Fox, he lived comfortably from his patriotic verse throughout the Napoleonic Wars; and found it hard to make ends meet only during the long period of peace that followed Water?loo. Then he addressed his trumpet-calls to other nations.
To the Greeks (1822):
Again to the battle, Achaians,
Our hearts bid the tyrants' defiance. . . . [?'c]
To the Spaniards (1823):
How rings each sparkling Spanish brand!