The Significance of The White Goddess for Musical Thought

Geoffrey Álvarez

Part One: The Five Seasons: Graves' Goddess Sings

Drinking deep from the cauldron of erudite, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary researches that is Robert Graves' formidable 'historical grammar of poetic myth', I wish, in this article, to develop his analysis to generate a grammar of musical myth.

In my book The Song of the Earth: Music and the Great Mother in Twentieth Century Europe, I extend Graves' system of correspondences between the five vowels of the Ogham tree alphabet,a Five-fold Goddess and a Venusian Five Season Year (Graves, 266-273) to include musical notes and processes . I show how Graves' pentad may be represented by a five-note scale issuing from the wellsprings of the startlingly similar musico-cosmological systems of Babylonia, as noted by Plutarch in Timaeus 31, and China in the Chou Li (c.400 BC). Both systems are compared and contrasted by Curt Sachs(1943:77, 109-110).

The responsibility of other Gravesian concerns for the formal articulation of much of the music by Muse-musicians Debussy and Maxwell-Davies such as the Venusian number 72 and the lunar number 9, will be noted in the second part of this paper. Locating such symbolism in music may be termed Gravesian analysis, as the searching for archetypes is Jungian.

The White Goddess as pentad, Venus as Apple Goddess, hangs on the oldest boughs of Western Music, the dog, roebuck and lapwing concealing her deep within the thicket of Gregorian plainchant: Guido D'Arezzo's ascending stepwise series of six notes, a hexachord, for teaching and learning plainsong melodies, was sung to the syllables ut re mi fah sol la (Sachs, 1943: 300). This hexachord, the medieval equivalent of doh re mi etc. contained five different vowels, beginning with Graves' summer vowel, U. The vowels then proceed in the order 'phonetically expressive' of the retreat and subsequent progress of the year, the highest vowel reiterating the New Year Vowel, (Graves, 287).

Guido D'Arezzo, the prior of Avellano, as he explained in correspondence, circa 1030, to his 'beloved Brother Michael' (Strunk, 121), derived his hexachord from the initial notes and syllables of these consecutive phrases from an eighth century hymn sung on Midsummer's Day, the Feast of the Birth of St. John the Baptist – Ut quéant laxis re sonare fibris mi Ara gestorum famuli tuorum, Sol Ave polluti la bri reatum Sancte Joannes. Whilst the whole hymn is unambiguously in the sober Hypodorian mode ending on D, approved by the church, Guido's hexachord outlines what is known today as the innocuous C major scale known as the Ionian Mode.

To the medieval ecclesiastic it’s use was taboo, the Ionian Mode being associated in some secular music with the rhythmic modus lascivus, a raunchy two beat rhythm contravening the accepted conventions of the sacred three beat Trinitarian bar. (The eight sanctioned melodic modes, allegedly prescribed by Pope Gregory the Great (reigned 590-604), (Reese, 121) were collections of seven distinct pitch names, whose range and concluding notes was specified; paradigms under which most canonical liturgical chants could be classified.)

C major was particularly associated with the modus lascivus  in songs of an erotic and/or pagan nature by goliards (contemporary poets writing in Latin) such as the 10th century O admirabile Veneris ydolum may have contributed to its excommunication. Whilist this song was not set to a canonical chant, since the Caroligian renaisssance, even Classical pagan authors had been sung to authorised plainsong; Horace's Ode, iv, 11, for instance, depicting youthful desire inflamed by Alban wine, was sung to the Hymn for St. John the Baptist (New Grove, ii, 799).

As both the beheading of St.John, according to some traditions  (Graves, 175) and Hercules took place on Midsummer's Day (Graves, 120), it is tempting to associate the hymn with the licentious rites that may have accompanied this celebration of the ritual slaughter of the consort of the White Goddess/Salome.  Graves himself (130) identifies Hercules with St. John the Baptist.

Feigning ignorance of St. John's distiguished pedigree, Guido and most of his commentators were at pains to emphasise the purely didactic nature of his hexachord. However, that each of the 20 notes of the complete medieval scale or gamut were assigned to parts of the hand as were the letters of the Druidic Ogham alphabet is convincing evidence, prompted by Graves (109) for the existence of an unwritten, heretical corpus of hymns and chants to the White Goddess disseminated with this secret digital cypher.

The White Goddess shines with ever increasing luminosity throughout most of the last movement of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. Composed in 1908 when he found he was suffering from a serious heart condition, (New Grove, xi, 511) this setting of Bethge's 19th century German translations of two Chinese poems: Mong-Kao-Jen's In Erwartung des Freundes and Wang Wei's Chinese poem, Der Abschied, (Mitchell, 334-335) is not only a farewell to life, but a valediction to the revulsion and fear the Occident has long associated with death, inculcated by the prevalent patriarchal ideologies, and a 'rematriation' of the Oriental acceptance of death.

As in Chinese tradition (New Grove vi, 523), Mahler's death is announced with two sets of three strokes on the tam-tam, (a large flat gong). The final tam-tam stroke at bar nine is the only bar with five beats in the whole Abschied, a disruption of the prevalent four beat metre. In order to attempt a 'Gravesian' interpretation of these purely musical phenomena, Graves'   analytical method applied to some of his concerns in The White Goddess, notably poetry and architecture, should be understood.

Graves' often attributed widely diverse constellations of mythico-poetic meanings to significant features of a poem or a building. He asserts, for instance, that the 'twelve beats' in each half of his religious charm to the White Goddess suggests,'a dance by twelve persons around a circle of twelve standing stones (Graves, 368) and believes that Stonehenge's 'plan of the five dolmens corresponds exactly with the disc alphabet' (Graves, 283) both the alphabet and the stones expressing a hypothetical five season calander, described below.

As the poetic metre of Graves' invocation and the number of dolmens at Stonehenge seemed sufficiently significant to Graves to warrant a 'Gravesian' interpretation, so a piece of music must contain a musical event of similar import to a justify the continued application of 'Gravesian' analysis.

Having judged the musical event worthy of attention, the analyst must dive into the perilous waters of the collective unconscious, clinging to Ariadne's thread. This thread may be spun from observations such as (1) the immediate context of the event within the work and (2) the possible intentions of the composer (in this instance Mahler), guided by knowledge of his current preoccupations and contemporary thought. Mahler was aware of the philosophy of the orientalists Wagner (who read Schopenhauer) and Fechner (Mitchell 460, 128), and listened to cylinders of Chinese music in 1908 (Mitchell 126).

It is therefore possible that an association of the number five with the five-petalled lotus in Eastern philosophy was not inconceivable to him. Five was sacred to Graves; he also associated it with the lotus, 'the gold cup of the sun' bearing Hercules the Sun God's homeward journey at sunset (128). That this five-beat 'lotus-bar' is also a lotus-Goddess will not become evident until a harmonic phenomenon is observed later in the movement (described below).

A harmonic inflection will shortly be noted that supports the association of this ninth bar with a moon Goddess, but Mahler may have also emphasised this bar because its number alone signified the moon both for the Chinese (if the top line of the ninth hexagram of the Chinese I Ching signifies nine, 'the moon is nearly full' (Wilhelm, 43)) and for many European cultures The White Goddess (382). If these conjectures are accepted, the interpretation of the ninth, lengthened bar as the Nine-fold Lunar Goddess expanding her ninth bar by a beat to accommodate the Five-fold Lotus Goddess is a feasible 'Gravesian' analysis, just as Graves finds nine bramble leaves sacred to both the 'Pentad and Triad of seasonal Goddesses’ (Graves, 385). 

As Mahler/the sun bids 'farewell' in bars 19-26 of 'Der Abschied’ floating westward on his lotus, some pitches are lowered; the tonality darkens and the pulse of the music is temporarily suspended - Apollo has begun his annual winter break in the land of the Hyperboreans. One bar later the moon 'floats through the blue lake of heaven like a silver bark'. The moon-boat is silver, Mahler choosing to paint her with the notes of C major (consisting of only the white keys of the piano, ruled by the principal note, C), which contrasts with the dying golden sun, tinted with the 'darker' key of C minor.(C minor shares the same principal note as C major, but three other notes of the scale are lowered or darkened; E becoming E flat for instance.) Silver and gold are also the two colours of the Yin and Yang, the feminine and masculine principles of the I Ching (Campbell, vol. II: 1990).

Through the interaction of the Yin and Yang, all things (lit., the ten thousand things) come into being (Fung Yu-lan, 445). One aspect of this multiplicity within the unity of the Yin/Yang concept is the annual cyclic procession of the twelve months, represented by the derivation of the twelve notes or liü of the Chinese musical system from a fundamental pitch produced by a nine inch pipe, the ratios between adjacent notes alternatively 3:2 and 3:4, a system investigated by Pythagorus, introduced into China in the 3rd century B.C. either as a result of the Asiatic conquests of Alexander the Great (Fu Yung-Lan, 11) or by the peace loving Tochars who had lived on the southeastern border of the Gobi desert since the 13th century B.C.(Sachs, 1943: 114).

As will be noted shortly, a version of the complete cycle of 12 liü was not completely expressed in the west until the 17th century, most eloquently by Bach in his Das Wohltemperirte Klavier of 1722. However, Pythagorean tuning was applied to the individual seven-note modal architecture of specific pieces, remaining in vogue throughout the Middle Ages despite the fragmentation of the Greece of Pythagoras. This 'Pre-Socratic Greece', writes Wilfrid Mellers (8) 'was still mainly an oral, nonliterate culture, intuitive, irrational, built on the all-embracing love of the earth goddess, Demeter...at war with, and too powerful to be absorbed by the new empirical rationalistic patriarchy. This potestas - this patriarchal authority - was taken over by Roman civilisation; in Greece, the unity of Pythagorean science split into Platonism and Aristotelianism, and the Dark Ages split 'spirit from the physical world' and the Goddess went underground, appearing as the unattainable Dark Goddess - the Sophia of the Troubadours often masquerading as the Virgin Mary, with her 'death aspect' emphasized (Mellers, 11). The Goddess' cult of the Virgin continued to flourish in the late Middle Ages.

However, the complete Pythagorean tonal cycle, the 12 Chinese liü was not yet availble as an aural analogy for her cyclic nature. This cyclic aspect,the Goddess of the cycle of life, death and rebirth did emerge as the canonic devices structuring such works as 'Summer is y-commin in'  (c.1280) and Machaut's 14th century 'Mon fin est ma commencement' ('My end is my beginning'). The canon,a musical Ouroborous is a serpentine melody biting its own tale: often the repetition of a melody in a second voice before its original version has finished, the repeated version in turn dovetailed with a further statement of the original melody and so on. The origins of the cyclic aspect of the Goddess was located in 1923 by Frobenius (Campbell, Prehistoric Mythology, 127 and 313) in an area south of the tropic of Cancer from West Africa, through India and the Malay Archipelago and Melanesia, his prehistoric 'tropical planting culture' (Campbell, Vol II: 153).

After Western musical theorists such as Penna tabulated a version of the complete 12 note cycle in the 17th century, 18th century composers like Haydn and Mozart (with the aid of an 'equally tempered' 12 note cycle which modified the pure Pythagorean ratio of 3:2 to eradicate an anomaly of the system), imposed the dialectic (currently propounded by the contemporary Prussian philosopher Fichte) between the fundamental pitch expressed as the principal key, and the eleven subordinate pitches denoted by subsidiary keys: the ego - the subject pitted against the non-ego - the object (Balantine, 20).

Although a pupil of Hadyn, Beethoven rejected his teacher's espousal of dialectic in many works, prefering the variation of single themes in pieces such as the Piano Sonata Op.111 and the Diabelli Variations. In such works, Beethoven relinquishes the desire to change key and the need for subsidiary, contrasting themes, dissolving the object back into the subject, destroying the barrier between 'inner' and ‘outer’ life. This Beethoven (who also copied out texts of Persian mysticism, who framed some ancient Egyptian inscriptions on the same theme, and kept both these texts on his writing desk) was thus, with Balzac and Chopin, a distinguished 'advance guard' for the musical Oriental Renaissance - a term first used by the poet and critic Friedrich Schlegel in 1803 (Batchelor, 252).

A century of Oriental revivalism in Europe thus prepared Mahler for his farewell to the heroic posturing of the patriarchal, Indo-European equestrian warrior culture and his return to the White Goddess, to the unity of being. This notion is symbolised, from bar 454, by his gradual release from the world of tonal dialectic, the twelve notes or months of the Chinese cycle expressed as keys set in dramatic opposition, emblematic of the illusory passing of time created by the Indian Goddess of delusion, Maya - and the his passage to the timeless world of the five'correct notes', cheng-sheng, of traditional Confucian Chinese musical theory (New Grove, iv: 252): kung (C), shang (D), chiao  (E), chih (G), yü (A) finally reached in bar 532, attained by relinquishing seven of the twelve available notes, and remaining in one key (esuing tonal dialectic). Thus, at any one time, until bar 454, each of the twelve notes of the Chinese scale is mistress of six subordinate pitches forming an occidental seven-note scale, the dominating note C is the key. In tonal dialectic, such a collection based on one principal pitch is juxtaposed with another set of seven notes, theoretically containing as many as five different notes (as at bar 345 when D minor usurps D flat major).

Although beginning in earnest in bar 454, the interpenetration of these different Weltanshauungen begins with the introduction of E in bar nine, previously identified as the principal lunar bar dedicated to the Five-fold Goddess. E, a note foreign to the predominant key of C minor is the third of the five 'correct notes' - chiao, the final note of the piece, eminently suitable for a work about death and subsequent resurrection, being correlated since the Han dynasty, with the East, with green, with goodness, and with Spring. The other four 'correct notes' are also linked to a similar array of corresponding objects/ideas  (Campbell, 432).

Similar quintuple groupings are found in the Sankhya system of the Indian sage Kapila (c.600 B.C.) the five elements are associated with the five senses for instance: space to hearing; wind to touch; fire to sight; water to taste and earth to smell (Campbell, 431). The earliest surviving system of such correspondances is found in the Greek fragments of Anaximander - 611-547 B.C. Joseph Campbell (431) suggests that 'based on the distribution pattern...evidence... must appear in the tablets of Sumer and Akkad.

'The number of melodic archetypes or 'Great Ragas' of the music of India is also five, springing from Ôiva Mah~deva's five heads.  (Sachs, 1943:178). Indeed, Mahler's principal melodic line may be likened to a raga which is subject to a series of variations of increasing complexity over a recurring rhythmic cycle or avarta, a ritual reinactment of the cyclic nature of existence and the cycle of the seasons. In the first 54 bars of Der Abschied, the avarta is presented five times. Assuming 'Gravesian' symbolism, the opening may be consecrated to both the Five-fold and the Nine-fold Goddess.

The voice enters five quavers before the second statement of the ~varta given to the flute coloured, in bar 23, with a characteristic note, the sharpened fourth, from the Indian raga Lalit creating tonal ambiguity. (Lalit meaning fickle, restless or beautiful, an epithet of the Lotus/Love Goddess, Ôri LakÕmi). This raga should only to be played at dawn (Daniélou, 101-3), an ambiguous, transitional period appropriate for the death and transfiguration of Mahler's soul.

In contrast to the first lines of this phrase in which 'scheidet' is set as two single beat notes within the predominant four beat metre, the accented syllables of the following lines are given two beats, distending the regular four beat rhythm, supplanting the qualitative accentuation of German poetry with the quantitive accentuation of Oriental poetry: Mahler has assumed a 'Pre-Raphaelite' persona, returning to the ecstatic, mystical worship of Sophia or Mary, unfettered by the constricting rhythms concomittent with the Renaissance ideology of the dualism of life and death welcomed by Pietro Aron in 'De institutione harmonica' of 1516 (Sachs 1953:93), the metre of 'sun-poetry' inflected  with the rhythms of 'moon-poetry' (Graves vii).

At the end of the first stanza, the flute plays a transcription of crane song. This bird, Graves guesses (227), is sacred to the Triple Goddess, taking nine steps before she flies, displaying white, red and black, the Goddess's three colours, her flight in chevron formation suggesting the arrow-heads of 'all early alphabets’ (Graves, 221). In both Western and Oriental mythologies, the crane guides the hero through a rite of passage. In Delos, a Crane Dance   introduced by Theseus' represented a journey through the Labyrinth (Graves, 221).

In China, the Crane Goddess, Hsi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the West, stands on K'un-Lun mountain under pine trees, the dark pine trees mentioned in bars 47-49 distributing peaches of Immortality to the souls of the blessed dead, escorting them to their resting place (Larousse, 382). The evergreen property of these dark trees (dunklen ficten) led to their apprehension as the metamorphosed form of Attis, bought back to life by the Goddess of Ressurection, Cybele (Fraser, 267-276).

In the Boibel-Loth variant of the Irish tree Ogham, notched on wooden billets by Druids, Cybele's tree of ressurection, the silver fir, the 'prime birth-tree of Northern Europe' (Graves 185) is considered the first season of the year represented by the letter A, the first letter of 'Ailm', the Gaelic for silver fir. This vowel is the first in the pentad of vowels from this alphabet, each also a tree in a calendar of five 'seasons' (Graves 272). Realising that the Oriental year also consists of five 'seasons', and noting the similarities between the notches of the Ogham alphabet and the hexagrams of the I-Ching, it is conceivable that the Goidels who bought the tree alphabet into Ireland and the Yamato clans who bought a similar liguistic-cosmological system into Japan were both descendants of a shamanistic, mountain-worshipping, hunting people, originally from North-east and North-central Asia, also bringing the Iron Age with them to both countries (Campbell, Oriental Mythology, 246-5).

Certainly, the note names of the Japanese five-note scale (Harich-Schneider, 134) can be alligned with the vowels of the Ogham alphabet.

Table 1 Correspondence of the Ogham vowels and the names of the Japanese five-note scale

Unfortunately, the five vowels of the note names of the Japanese five-note scale do not correspond to their Celtic, Goidelic sister series of seasonal vowels.

Fortunately, the names of the fifth century Chinese ancestors of these notes, the five'correct notes', when incorporated in the Huang Fan system of cosmological correlations, (Campbell 431-2) (itself a development of the fourth century Chou li system mentioned above), can each be coupled with an Ogham vowel with greater phonetic similarity than their Japanese descendants.  Although under this paradigm the Irish and Chinese seasons are generally assigned to different vowels, the Queen of the Irish pentad, the U vowel of the Summer Goddess is associated with Kung, the ruling Season of the Chinese pentad.

Table 2 The Expression of the Five-fold Goddess

These five pitches are the musical archetype of 'the most potent of Deities' representing the 'five' seasons: In India, she is Kali, her five aspects - Kali, Surya, Shiva, Vishnu and Ganesha (Graves, 401). She is Isis in Egypt - Horus, Set, Osiris, Isis, Nephtys her five-fold persona (Graves, 267) Originally the Paleolithic Great Mother, this five-fold epiphany of the White Goddess may have been invoked by the incantation of the five vowels with these five notes.

Whilst matching the numerical value assigned to each vowel in medieval Irish literature with an aspect of the Goddess, Graves (287) also notes that the realignment of vowels in ascending numerical order results in the familiar ordering of the Latin alphabet.

Table 3 The Realignment of Vowels

Although the original seasonal cycle is disguised, if the notes retain their allegiance to the same vowel, they outline the Dorian mode, sharing the same principal note with St.John's Hypodorian hymn. This seven note mode is formed by adding F and B to the five notes of the musico-alphabetical system. The conjunction of these two additional notes was banned by the medieval church as the diabolus in musica, its proscription usually ascribed to its uniquely astringent quality (Mellers, 35). However, as will be demonstrated in the second part of this paper, there is another rationale for ecclesiastical disquiet: if each of the pitches of the seven note mode is paired with a vowel and the deity assigned to that vowel, a musical icon of Graves' 'Trascendental God of the Hyperboreans' (Graves, 277) is unveiled and the coupling of these two additional notes becomes the sacred marriage of two powerful pagan deities. 

Works cited

Robert Graves: The White Goddess Carcanet 1997

Curt Sachs: The Rise of Music in the Ancient World Norton 1943

Gustav Reese: Music in the Middle Ages 1940

Stanley Sadie ed.: The New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians 1980

Oliver Strunk: Source Readings in Music History Faber & Faber 1952

Gustav Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde Universal Edition 1962

Donald Mitchell: Gustav Mahler Volume III

                            Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death Faber & Faber 1985

Richard Wilhelm: I Ching or Book of Changes 1950

Joseph Campbell: The Masks of God Vol.II: Oriental Mythology, Arkana 1990

Fung Yu-lan: A History of Chinese Philosophy, Volume II, Princeton University Press, 1953

Wilfrid Mellers: Caliban Reborn Victor Gollancz 1968

Joseph Campbell: The Masks of God Vol.I: Prehistoric Mythology, Arkana 1990 Christopher Balantine: Twentieth Century Symphony, Dobson, 1983

Stephen Batchelor: The Awakening of the West, Thorsons, 1995

Alain Daniélou: The Ragas of North Indian Music, Barrie & Rockliff, 1968

Curt Sachs: Rhythm and Tempo, Norton, 1953

FŒlix Guirand ed.: New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, Hamlyn, 1959

James Frazer: The Golden Bough, Volume VI,Adonis Attis Osiris, MacMillan, 1936

Eta Harich-Schneider: A History of Japanese Music, Oxford, 1973

The Significance of The White Goddess for Musical Thought

Geoffrey Álvarez

Part Two: The Sound of Her Sacred Marriage and Seven-Day Love Song.

In The White Goddess, Graves' demonstrated the enormous cultural resonance of the five vowels of the 'Arcadian' alphabet and the seven vowels of the succeeding 'Classical Grecian' alphabet: Egyptian, Phoenician, Creten, and Irish writing systems are shown to be invested with shared, albeit modified, mythological/calendrical preoccupations. In the first part of this paper, I showed that each note of a specific five-note scale  may corespond to both to a vowel of the Irish Ogham tree alphabet, an aspect of the Five-fold Goddess and the  Chinese and Indian musico-cosmological systems: This scale was employed by Gustav Mahler in  the radiant conclusion of the last movement of a song cycle he wrote when confronted with death, Der Abschied, representing his mystical reabsortion into the womb of the White Goddess in her oriental aspect as the Lotus Goddess: an acceptance of death as 'a natural phase of life, comparable to the moment of the planting of the seed', the mystical vision of Frobenius' tropical planting cultures, rejecting the hunter's view of death as a 'consequence of violence, generally ascribed to magic'.

Prompted by Graves' understanding of Hygenius, that Simonides' addition of four letters to the Arcadian/Cadmean Greek alphabet enabled each of the seven strings of the 'zither' to be allocated a letter, described in page 221 of The White Goddess, I now wish to suggest that the letters associated with the strings of the lyre might be, alternatively restricted to the seven vowels of Classsical Greece. Such combinations of vowels and notes can be found in a Gnostic invocation in the papyrus W of Leyden: 'Thy name...is composed of seven letters according to the harmony of the seven tones, which have their sound according to the twenty-eight lights of the Moon' (Wellesz, 65).

table 4 The Twenty-eight vowel name of God

Similar constellations of vowels at the end of antiphons for the Divine Office have also troubled scholars of plainchant.

F.M.B`hme mistook Euouoe for a familiar Greek word and was greatly excised at the admission of a 'Bacchanalian shout' into the office-books of the Church; write William S. Rockstro and Mary Berry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (New Grove, vi 321).   For them, the vowel sequence was 'a technical pseudo-word formed from the vowels of the last six syllables of the doxology - 'seculorum. Amen' used in medieval office books as an abbreviation when, at the close of an antiphon, it is necessary to indicate the psalm tone with its appropriate ending to be used in the following psalm or canticle.

Egon Wellesz, in his study of Byzantine Hymnography quoted above, whilst acknowledging that similar 'meaningless syllables' such as nana and Hagia may have served the same purpose in Byzantine chant, his recognition of their similarity with the inserted vowels in Manichean cantillation (Wellesz, 121) suggests an alternative function; the evocation of a gilded, Byzantine White Goddess, supported by Graves' observation that the Manichees were Christians who committed the heresy of reconciling Judaism with Astaroth worship (Graves 416).

In the same volume (Wellesz, 66) Wellesz documents the Gnostic concordance between Classical Greek vowels, five planets and the five principal notes of the Greek Dorian mode - whilst the association of each planet with a day of the week is demonstrated by Graves in the fifteenth chapter of the White Goddess (Graves, 252).

Table 5 Greek/Gnostic Correspondences

The other two planets, Jupiter and Venus were given the two vowels, upsilon (L) and eta (0): the complete vowel sequence, the seven-vowel system of Simonides achieved by making a 'distinction between' Omicron and Omega, and Eta and Epsilon in the Arcadian alphabet in the sixth century B.C. Some four hundred years later, Dio Cassius, describing the cosmological system of ancient Egypt, couples Jupiter with F and Venus with B, the simulteneous sounding of these two notes an interval of unique quality and potency within the seven note collection, appropriate for the marriage of Venus to Juppiter, her father.

The celebration of such sacred sexual congress was a sacrament abhored by the church, the uniquely piquant conjunction of notes celebrating this union was consequently taboo - demonised as the diabolus in musica. It should be noted that the B ascribed to Venus may be lowered (to B flat) in Egon Wellesz' tabulation of the correspondances - most commentators derive this B flat from the Greek 'lesser perfect system'. My hypothesis rests on considering the B from the 'perfect system'. However, if Wellesz' lowered B is accepted, the diabolus in musica, a sacred union is forged between B flat and E, Venus conjoined with her grandfather, Saturn

(Incidentally, it is in the former avatar that the diabolus, the Goddess, exiled from both music and the alphabet was welcomed back from the Far East by Chopin in bar 124 of his Ballad Op.23 of 1835, the whole piece evoking a poem about a moonlit lake by the Polish/Lithuanian poet Micklewicz, and exalted by Wagner in 'Tristan' as the dual Goddess of love and death, part of the chord associated with the love/death potion, the 'Tristan' chord.)

Simonides addition of eta (0) and omega (T) to the five original Greek vowels follows the addition of three strings to the four string Greek lyre, the kithera, in the seventh century B.C. by Terpander. (Incidentally, Graves' translation of cithaera as zither is a mistranslation: no reproduction as sculptures or paintings of semikon and epigoneion, Greek words in texts by Aristotle, Pollux and Jubal (d.24 A.D.) which do suggest zithers, have been found in Greece (Sachs, 1940 137)). If each new string of the enlarged seven-string lyre is assigned a distinct vowel, considering Graves' argument in The White Goddess (Graves 277), each vowel/string can have his or her own deity: the God of the lyre becomes the transcendental God of the Hyperboreans, the Lord of the God of each day -        

Table 6 The seven vowels of the transcendental God

The twelfth century writer Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra observed that the Hebrew 7-string kithera, the kinnor, was shaped like the Hebrew candelabrum, the menorah - each of its seven braches Graves notes (255), also dedicated to a day of the week: If the central note of the kinnor can be associated with the central branch of the menorah, both may signify Wednesday and the almond Goddess of healing and inspiration, the White Goddess Artemis Carytis, also known as as Carmenta who allegedly adapted the Cretan 13 consonant alphabet to conform to a 15 consonant system, encouraging the adoption of a Venusian Year of Five 72 day Seasons (Graves 266).

Venus shines at bar 71 of Der Abschied as Queen Satyavasti's river: to attain enlightenment, the ego must cross it, in Chinese Taoist thought, the river which must be crossed to reach the world mountain, the K'un-lun mountain, to attain immortality. The river flows beneath a snaking yin-yang motif, Isolda singing from the stream the first four notes of her Liebestod from Wagner's opera Tristan fused into three - Isolda, Gottfried's thirteenth century epiphany of the Serpent Goddess who, like her countless avatars, sheds her skin and then arises as if reborn, linked to birth and death and ressurection, worshipped as Dea Syria with ecstatic dancing and ritual prostitution. In the Tantric practice of Kundalini Yoga, the dormant Goddess Kundalini - meaning literally 'coiled up' symbolizes the female energy in the universe conceived or understood as a serpent:

The divine power

Kundalini, shines

like the stem of a young lotus;

like the snake, coiled up round herself (Mookerjee, passim.)

The serpent is, consequently, linked to the lotus - at bar 77 of Der Abschied described obliquely as an anonymous female flower growing pale in the moonlight.

The lotus, the goal of Mahler's spiritual journey appears as a three-note figure at bar 309: This phrase occurs conspicously in Schumann's Die Lotosblume (Op.25) 1840: Thematically, the three-note motif celebrating Schumann's love of Ernestine though the name of her birthplace has become extended to a figure of five distinct pitches. Eric Sams has already discovered the cypher which converts the letter-names of these pitches into CLARA, the friend of Ernestine, whom Schumann was to marry on September 12, 1840, the physical epiphany of Ôri LakÕmi, his own private lotus Goddess.Throughout Mahler's funeral march beginning fourteen bars later, Brahms and Schumann are among the attendants of the cortPge. Brahms, the bourgeois Protestant fears for Mahler as he stands trial before his Thunder God, the first seven notes of his Second Clarinet Sonata heard throughout the march having been divested of all sense of composure whereas Schumann, the devotee of Oriental mysticism is happy for Mahler as he believes his deity has a less distressing fate in store for her acolyte, as further references to the peace and radiance of Die Lotosblume bare witness.

Fortunately, Isolda's Liebestod, the Great Mother blesses Mahler's last breath, not Brahms' Clarinet Sonata, the Heavenly Father.Mahler's soul, not yet transformed into its desired form, a Holy Mountain man, the Chinese immortal bird, continues to search for the Mountain Queen in the music following the Funeral march, bars 430-459, the Queen who will effect this transformation with her miraculous peaches served at one of her banquets on her mountain.

The concentration at this point on material from bars 42 and 72 is encouraged by the mystical significance of these numbers: 42 was the number of days from the beginning of the Hawthorn month, which is the preparation for the midsummer marriage and death orgy on Misummer Day' - the mythical day of Mahler's death as Oak-King. Seventy-two was the size of Moses' party that ascended the sacred hill to consult the oracular hero. On Cyllene, Demeter's mountain, such a hero was known as Elatos, or 'fir-man'. As the pun 'Der Bach singt' and the numerous quotes from other composers suggests, Mahler consulted his dead heroes Bach, Schumann, Brahms and Wagner throughout the movement.

The Oriental isorhythmic techniques that structure the last 83 bars of Der Abschied suggest the atemporal world of such a sacred hill: isorhythm is partly the imposition on a plainsong melody of a repeated rhythmic cell or talea, (the term borrowed originally from the Indian tala). The speed of this cell is sufficiently slow to prevent the apprehension of a rhythmic pulse, corporeal rhythm replaced by an 'ecstacy induced by Spiritual rhythm' from the Arabian and Moorish music flooding into Europe during the Crusades.In the aesthetic of the Middle Ages, both gargoyles and creatures of beauty are distractions that may be sublimated into the architectural Whole: the material and the spiritual are allowed to co-exist, as in Tantric thinking.

The isorhythmic motet, like the Gothic cathedral, is constructed under such Tantric paradigms, differenttexts set simulteneously, often in different languages, one voice singing a sacred trope (enlargement) of a plainsong text to the Virgin, another singing of the joys of carnal love. Mahler's isorhythmic structure is overlaid by the repetition of the word 'ewig', 'forever' from this sentence after it has been heard complete: 'Everywhere and forever, the distance shines bright and blue,' the blue sky, the stella epiphany of the White Goddess, the Catholic Virgin's Cloak, receiving the souls of the dead into her womb, for ever.

The lotus from bar 77 floats amidst the isorhythmic cycle, unfolding to greet the moon in the evening. This lotus is a symbol of the Lotus Goddess known in Tantric thought as Chinnamastra, the sixth Goddess transformation, or mahavidya of  Black Kali, Lalita familiar to Occidental readers through Vladimir Nabokov's eponymous anti-heroine of his novel Lolita.The S~dhaka (one who performs acts of ritual, worship and meditation) will find her in himself at the level of his navel, inside a full blown lotus. The lotus rises from a pair of figures representing pure cosmic fertility, a blue male and a female (MahalakÕmi and Ôri LakÕmi) analogous to KriÕna and Rahda, Tristan and Isolda, in sexual intercourse.

This is the vision of Sahajiya Buddhism which flourished in Bengal in the Pale dynasty (c.730-1200 A.D.) wherein it was held that the only true experience of the pure rapture of the void was the rapture of sexual union: There is no duality in sahaja. It is perfect, like the sky... (Campbell, 351); the eternal blue sky of the last section of Mahler's Der Abschied. Having experienced the cyclic nature of the lunar psyche in the first 28 ~vartas, each representative of a day of the lunar month, the last nine ~vartas view the lunar psyche outside of time, in her a-temporal totality as the nine-fold muse, who thrusts her vision upon the artist the sahaja reality: He himself is the universe - the Buddha, perfect purity, non-cognition, the annihilator of the cycle of existence.

Mahler's jewel (mani) or (lingam) pentrating the lotus (padme), the yoni of the Goddess and his subsequent absorbtion into her womb in the last five bars of Der Abschied is the surrounding of the pitch E by three others from the Chinese five-note scale - G, A, C. Mahler has returned to the lotus - the womb of the Five-Fold White Goddess.

The White Goddess visited Eastbourne in August 1905, engendering 'Reflets dans l'eau' the first piece in the 'premiere series' of piano 'Images' by Claude Debussy. As a Wagnerite and a Symbolist with an interest in many occult movements then in vogue such as the Rosicrucians and the esoteric Egyptology of Maurice Denis' school, Debussy naturally drew on the resources of Wagnerian harmony and rhythmic schemata derived from sacred geometry as metaphors for mystical concepts throughout the work.

The principal motif returns in bars 35 and the Venusian bar 72, each time, as the 'pebble dropping into water', unchanged. After the only silence in the entire work at bar nine, the Goddess as Nine-Fold Muse descends into the work silently during the only rest, engendering a reflection, a harmonic inflection, which will dominate the entire piece.

However, the primarily numerical building block is 5, Minerva - also responsible for the major formal division of the piece, beginning with the literal repetition of the principal theme at bar 36 which divides the piece into two unequal sections of 35 and 60 bars. Through Minerva's eyes the shorter section may be considered to consist of seven five-bar units, the longer, twelve five-bar units; The only section that doesn't acknowledge the sovereignity of Minerva is a four-bar unit, bars 16-19, the epiphany of the White Goddess from behind her unhewn dolmen, Wagner's 'Tristan' chord.

In The Song of the Earth, Music and the Great Mother in Twentieth Century Europe, I also investigate the presence of Graves Goddess in other Twentieth Century works: The number 72, which Graves associates with Venus, is found to be a fundamental structural pivot in both Berio's Ofanim, and Maxwell-Davies' Ave Maris Stella. Maxwell-Davies' medievalism prompted research into the presence of Graves' numerological speculation in the music of this period: It was interesting to find numbers like 3 and 19 controlling the structure of Dunstable’s fifteenth century motet Gaude Virgo saluta, three, the ubiquitous 'Triple Goddess' a.k.a the Trinity, and nineteen, the number of revolutions of the sun between each ...approximate concurrance of solar and lunar time (Graves, 277). Lutheranism did little to stifle the Goddess: Bach celebrates her lunar epiphany in the fifteenth variation of the Goldberg Variations (the first variation in a minor key) and the fifteenth lunar section of the B Minor Mass: et incarnatus est de Maria Virgine.

Whilst some may find nothing new under the sun, there is plenty to be discovered under the moon. The result of my work on music and The White Goddess is currently a song cycle for Bass and chamber orchestra: My Last Muse setting my own poems based on Graves imagery inspired by Julie Simonne, his ‘last muse’ and my Second Symphony, whose structure is based on a simulteneous presentation of Graves's Five Season Year, the Five-Fold Goddess of the year as Birth, Initiation, Marriage, Rest and Death and his Fifteen Consonant Year, Hercules' 15 chapter biography.

Works Cited.

Gustav Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde Universal Edition 1962

Joseph Campbell: The Masks of God Vol.II: Oriental Mythology Viking Penguin 1962

Curt Sachs: The Rise of Music in the Ancient World Norton 1943

Egon Wellesz: A History of Byzantine Music and Hymnography Oxford University                          Press 1949

Stanley Sadie: The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians Vol. VI: Macmillan 1980

Curt Sachs: The History of Musical Instruments Dent, 1940

Ajit Mookerjee: Kundalini: The Arousal of the Inner Energy Destiny Books, 1972

Debussy: Reflets dans l'eau Peters Edition, London 1970

Robert Graves: The White Goddess Carcanet, 1997   

Geoffrey Alvarez: The Song of the Earth, Music and the Great Mother in Twentieth Century Europe 1996

The paper was originally addressed to the Robert Graves and the White Goddess Conference held by the Robert Graves Society in Manchester University, September 5, 1998. The first part was subsequently published in Gravesiana: the Journal of the Robert Graves Society, vol. II no. II, Oxford1999.