Robert Graves and the Tree Alphabet

- Posted: 02.Oct.2006.


(Click for full size)

Re-reading Robert Graves's masterpiece of speculative poetic thoery, or as he called it, a historical grammar of poetic myth. I am talking of The White Goddess. It is a hodgepodge (but a sublime one!) of mythology, history, magic lore, poetic inspiration and a whisk of insanity. What fascinates me most is Graves' claim to be able to retrace a literary tradition going back to the stone age. There are many angles from which to read this book, the wicca-one is just a popular (and a stupid) one.

Here is some excerpts relating to his theories about the bardic/druidic alphabet and the trees.

Here is the Wikipedia_entry

Barbaric Knowledge

- Posted: 12.Feb.2008.




A book about the use of ancient oral traditions in William Butler Yeats, Robert Graves and Edwin Muir. It is about the search for "a priori" structures of experience. Celtic ethnopoetics? Anyone?

Robert Graves on Ezra Pound's Chinese

- Posted: 01.Mar.2007.

Pound's bravado paid in the long run. He knew little Latin, yet he translated Propertius; and less Greek, but he translated Alcaeus; and little Anglo-Saxon, yet he translated The Seafarer. I once asked Arthur Waley how much Chinese Pound knew; Waley shook his head despondently. And I don't claim to be an authority on Provencal, but Majorcan, which my children talk most of the time, and which I understand, is closely related to it. When my thirteen-year-old boy was asked to compare a Pronencal text with Pound's translation, he laughed and laughed and laughed.

Pound's admirers explain that his translations should not be read as such; that his free treatment of the original has supplied him with many interesting new ideas. Well I don't know.... It is true that Michelangelo advised young painters to seek inspiration (when at a loss) from the damp patches and cracks on their bedroom walls. But the corresponding source of poetic inspiration would, I suppose, be the litter left behind by foreign students in a Bloomsbury hostel; it seems unfair to Alcaeus and Li Po and Propertius to treat them so cavalierly.

...

It is an extraordinary paradox that Pound's sprawling, ignorant, indecent, unmelodious, seldom metrical Cantos, embellished with esoteric Chinese ideograms – for all I know, they may have been traced from the nearest tea-chest – and with illiterate Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Provencal snippets (the Italian and French read all right to me, but I may be mistaken) are now compulsory reading in many ancient centers of learning.

Robert Graves, in These be Our Gods, O Israel!, (The Crowing Privilege, pelican 1955)

Robert Graves and R. Gordon Wasson

- Posted: 15.Oct.2008.

Almost too good to be true: the author of the White Goddess and the banker who coined the term Magic Mushroom (and was the first to record Maria Sabina) were good friends. Though perhaps uninforming here all paragraphs about Graves meeting Wasson in Seymour-Smith's biography of Graves:

He began corresponding with R. Gordon Wasson in 1949, first met him - in Mallorca - in November 1953, and remained friendly with him until the mid-sixties. At first Wasson, vice-president of J.P. Morgan & Co., the bankers, was referred to as 'the mushroom man'. He was a student of rare hallucinogenic mushrooms, and published several books on the subject. His chef d'oeuvre was 'Mushrooms, Russia and History', which he wrote with his wife Valentina.

Wasson, as an amateur, felt insecure, but was wholly committed to his subject. His style of letter writing was curiously stilted and formal; he was awed by Graves's fame, but determined not to be over-influenced by him. Sometimes his letters sound a slightly petulant note, perhaps rising from a resentment that he was a rich business man rather than a scholar - and thus forced to turn to qualified professionals and poets.

Wasson's interest in the psychological effects of hallucinogenic mushrooms and allied substances synthesized in the laboratory was to have a considerable influence on Graves towards the end of the fifties. And Graves meanwhile helped build up Wasson's reputation.

He was also carefully following Wasson's progress, since he had suggested to him where he might find the mushroom oracle he was after:

My mushroom man is very elated since he actually found the mushroom oracle I send him after in Mexico, and ate the sacred mushrooms and has them analysed - and there's the next wonder drugs to watch out for. He thinks they were what the worshippers ate at the Eleusinian Mysteries to get such terrific visions... [to M.S-s, 24 December 1956]

Wasson's discovery became famous, though Graves's original part in it is not. later the Wasson's took Robert Heim - the real expert - to the same place; Heim cultivated thirty-two species of the Mexican mushrooms, and sent them to Dr. Albert Hofmann, at Basle, who discovered the potency of some of them.

The 'most exciting occasion' was an evening at the Wassons, when the sacred mushrooms were put on show and a tape-recording played of the curandera's (local priestess's) chanting at Oaxaca, where they had rediscovered the cult of psilocybe (teonacatl, 'God's flesh', the 'divine mushroom'), and had participated in what they rather gushingly called the 'soul-shattering' ceremony.


[On 31 January 1960] Graves took - in the company of Wasson and four others - psilocybin. On the occasion he took an extract of the real mushroom, not a synthesis. (In the following May, accompanied by Beryl [his wife] and others, he took pills synthesised in Basle. The result was disastrous, and everyone - including Graves - felt very ill.) He described his experience in his lecture to the Oxford Humane Society, 'The Poet's Paradise'. His account of the actual experience, a rather self-conscious one, is not among his best writing.

...

For a short time he was excited by the possibilities presented by the hallucinogens; but in May 1962 he wrote to wasson to tell him that he didn't want to take them any more.

Kill Your King! [From the Golden Bough]

- Posted: 09.Jun.2007.




You cannot possible -read- the James Frazer's The Golden Bough but it is great fun to pick up once in a while and read bits of it at random. I wanted to scan my own cheapo Wordsworth Reference edition to go with it but this old edition looks much better. The Following bit from the foreword that cannot but be read with great interest by Borges and Robert Graves:

[O]n the crucial question of the practice of putting kings to death either at the end of a fixed period or whenever their health and strength began to fail, the body of evidence which points to the wide prevalence of such a custom has been considerably augmented in the interval. A striking instance of a limited monarchy of this sort is furnished by the powerful mediaeval kingdom of the Khazars in Southern Russia, where the kings were liable to be put to death either on the expiry of a set term or whenever some public calamity, such as drought, dearth, or defeat in war, seemed to indicate a failure of their natural powers. The evidence for the systematic killing of the Khazar kings, drawn from the accounts of old Arab travellers, has been collected by me elsewhere. Africa, again, has supplied several fresh examples of a similar practice of regicide. Among them the most notable perhaps is the custom formerly observed in Bunyoro of choosing every year from a particular clan a mock king, who was supposed to incarnate the late king, cohabited with his widows at his temple-tomb, and after reigning for a week was strangled. The custom presents a close parallel to the ancient Babylonian festival of the Sacaea, at which a mock king was dressed in the royal robes, allowed to enjoy the real king’s concubines, and after reigning for five days was stripped, scourged, and put to death. That festival in its turn has lately received fresh light from certain Assyrian inscriptions, which seem to confirm the interpretation which I formerly gave of the festival as a New Year celebration and the parent of the Jewish festival of Purim. Other recently discovered parallels to the priestly kings of Arficia are African priests and kings who used to be put to death at the end of seven or of two years, after being liable in the interval to be attacked and killed by a strong man, who thereupon succeeded to the priesthood or the kingdom.