food of the dead
Blush as you stroke the curves?chin, lips and brow?
Of your scarred face, Prince Orpheus: for she has called it
Beautiful, nor would she stoop to flattery.
Yet are you patient still, when again she has eaten
Food of the dead, seven red pomegranate seeds,
And once more warmed the serpent at her thighs
For a new progress through new wards of hell?
Arabs, when down-trodden, robbed or cheated, often refrain from curses, since these are apt to boomerang back. They merely cry instead: lMoghreb, moghreb, moghrebf, which means 'I am oppressed, I am oppressed, I am oppressed!' and leaves the avenging of their in?jury, if undeserved, to God or Fate. So should the poet refrain from cursing Eurydice, however ill she has used him:
eurydice
'I am oppressed, I am oppressed, I am oppressed'? Once I utter the curse, how can she rest: No longer able, weeping, to placate me With renewed auguries of celestial beauty?
Speak, fly in her amber ring; speak, horse of gold! What gift did I ever grudge her, or help withhold? In a mirror I watch blood trickling down the wall? Is it mine? Yet still I stand here proud and tall.
Look where she shines with a borrowed blaze of light Among the cowardly, faceless, lost, unright, Clasping a naked imp to either breast? Am I not oppressed, oppressed, three times oppressed?
She has gnawn at corpse-flesh till her breath stank, Paired with a jackal, grown distraught and lank, Crept home, accepted solace, but then again Flown off to chain truth back with an iron chain.
My own dear heart, dare you so war on me As to strangle love in a mad perversity? Is ours a fate that can ever be forsworn Though my lopped head sing to the yet unborn?
Orpheus was torn in pieces: the fate of all Muse- worshipping poets. But his head continued to sing; and even the cynical Serpent (who asks: 'Why deceive your?self? She will always need corpse flesh and the charm of my subtle tongue') could not silence it. Neither could Apollo, God of Reason, make Orpheus hold his peace for ever. In the Palestinian myth of the rival twins, Aliyan and Mot, the Goddess Anatha lured first one, then the other, to her bed?murdering each in turn. Mot was the demi-god of drought, lack and evil. The Muse, in fact, alternates between the worlds of good and evil, plenty and lack; and her poet will have his head torn off and his limbs gnawn by greedy teeth if he attempts to change her. Yet still he believes that, one day, Eurydice must mount into the everlasting Garden of Paradise which she planted, and there make him her sole lover:
a last poem
A last poem, and a very last, and yet another? O, when can I give over?
Must I drive the pen until blood bursts from my nails
And my breath fails and I shake with fever,
Or sit well wrapped in a many-coloured cloak
Where the moon shines new through Castle Crystal?
Shall I never hear her whisper softly:
'But this is truth written by you only,
And for me only; therefore, love, have done'?
A poet who elects to worship Ishtar-Anatha-Eurydice, concentrates in himself the emotional struggle which has torn mankind apart: that futile war for dominance waged between men and women on battle-fields of the patri?archal marriage bed. He rejects the crude, self-sufficient male intelligence, yet finds the mild, complaisant Vesta insufficient for his spiritual needs. Renascent primitive woman, the White Goddess, to whom he swears allegiance, treats him no less contemptuously than she does anyone else in this man-ruled world; as in a race riot the colour of one's face is all that counts. . . . There can be no kindness between Ishtar and Enkidu, between Muse and poet, despite their perverse need for each other. Nor does a return to Vesta's gentle embraces?though he may never have denied her his affection?solve his problem. Marriage does not satisfy the physiological and emotional needs of more than one couple in ten.
Nevertheless Ishtar, though the most powerful deity of her day, did not rule alone. At Hierapolis, Jerusalem and Rome she acknowledged a mysterious sister, the Goddess of Wisdom, whose temple was small and unthronged. Call her the Black Goddess: Provengal and Sicilian 'Black Virgins' are so named because they derive from an ancient tradition of Wisdom as Blackness. This Black Goddess, who represents a miraculous certitude in love, ordained that the poet who seeks her must pass uncomplaining through all the passionate ordeals to which the White Goddess may subject him.
The Orphic Fragments tell how Night mothered a Love-god named Phanes, who set the Universe in motion. Night, for the Orphics, appeared in triad as Blackness (namely, Wisdom), Order and Justice. Before her cave sat the inescapable Rhea?the White Goddess?beating a brazen drum and compelling man's attention to Night's oracles. Throughout the Orient, Night was regarded as a positive power, not as a mere absence of daylight; and Black as a prime colour, not as absence of colour, was prized for capturing the Sun's virtue more than any other.
This myth surely needs no gloss? The Provencal and Sicilian Black Virgins are Sufic in origin?Perso-Arabic applications to Christian doctrine of the same ancient myth. The Virginal St Sophia?that is, Wisdom? mothers the creative Love-god:
that other world
Fatedly alone with you once more As before Time first creaked: Sole woman and sole man.
Others admire us as we walk this world: We show them kindliness and mercy, So be it none grow jealous Of the truth that echoes between us two, Or of that other world, in the world's cradle, Child of your love for me.
In the Jewish Wisdom-cult, also apparently of Orphic origin, seven pillars are set up to support Wisdom's shrine: namely, the seven planetary powers of the seven- branched Candlestick. And when the Shunemite bride, whom Solomon in his wisdom adored, says in the Can?ticles-. 'I am black, but comely,' her meaning is: 'Though comely, I am as wise as any crone.' She adds, half- humorously: 'The Sun has looked upon me.' And the Orphics, seekers after Wisdom like Hebrews and Sufis, chose the Sun as their metaphor of illumination.
Night had a dove's head, and Phanes, God of Love, was hatched from a silver egg that she laid. There is no more ancient emblem of love than the turtle-dove; or of spirit?ual re-birth than the phoenix. Shakespeare's strange prophetic line The Phoenix and the turtle fled in a mutual flame from hence, carries a world of meaning. The phoenix, according to the Egyptians, was born as a worm from the ashes of its self-consumed predecessor and, after four years, grew to a chick:
the hearth
Here it begins: the worm of love breeding Among red embers of a hearth-fire, Turns to a chick, is slowly fledged, And will hop from lap to lap in a ring Of eager children basking at the blaze.
But the luckless man who never sat there, Nor borrowed live coals from the sacred source To warm a hearth of his own making, Nor bedded lay under pearl-grey wings In dutiful content,
How shall he watch at the stroke of midnight
Dove become phoenix, plumed with green and gold?
Or be caught up by jewelled talons
And haled away to a fastness of the hills
Where an unveiled woman, black as Mother Night,
Teaches him a new degree of love
And the tongues and songs of birds?
Poetry, it may be said, passes through three distinct stages: first, the poet's introduction, by Vesta, to love in its old-fashioned forms of affection and companionship; next, his experience of death and recreation at the White Goddess's hand; and lastly a certitude in love, given him by the Black Goddess, his more-than-Muse.
The Black Goddess is so far hardly more than a word of hope whispered among the few who have served their apprenticeship to the White Goddess. She promises a new pacific bond between men and women, correspond?ing to a final reality of love, in which the patriarchal marriage bond will fade away. Unlike Vesta, the Black Goddess has experienced good and evil, love and hate, truth and falsehood in the person
of her sister; but chooses what is good: rejecting serpent-love and corpse flesh. Faithful as Vesta, gay and adventurous as the White Goddess, she will lead man back to that sure instinct of love which he long ago forfeited by intellectual pride.
It is idle to speculate what poets will then become, or whether the same woman can, in fact, by a sudden spectacular change in her nature, play two diverse parts in one lifetime. Everything is possible. The Black Goddess may even appear disembodied rather than incarnate. . . . Does it matter? Poets, at any rate, will no longer be bullied into false complacency by the submis?sive sweetness of Vesta, or be dependent on the un?predictable vagaries of Anatha-Ishtar-Eurydice.
Robert Graves, Mammon and the Black Goddess
(Series: # )
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