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Critical Studies
Graves, Ghosts, Madness, Magic & Religion
Graves, Ghosts, Madness, Magic & Religion
Abstract: This essay looks at several loosely related topics. Most prominent among these are the appearance of ghosts in Robert Graves’s poetry, both as metaphors and their association with madness, and actual apparitions, and Graves’s ideas about death and the paranormal, along with his association with psychics. It concludes with some observations on the poet’s alterity and how it expresses itself and anticipates the dilemmas confronting civilization today.
Keywords: ghosts, madness, death, magic, parapsychology, nuclear accidents
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Ghosts
It is hardly surprising that Robert Graves had a fascination with death, having inherited such a surname from his father. Death also became a personal possibility when he joined the wartime army soon after leaving school, which he considers in 1915 in ‘The Shadow of Death’:
Here’s an end to my art
I must die and I know it
With battle-murder at my heart
Sad end for a poet!
But death already appeared in poems written at Charterhouse, which were published in his first book, Over the Brazier, in 1916.
Ghosts also make their first appearance in Over the Brazier in ‘Ghost Music’, in which he considers an old organ loft in a church, where: ‘the ghosts of long-dead melodies’ hang like bats from the rafters, though these are friendly ghosts, ‘drowsy-sweet, they huddle here in harmony’ (p. 8). Death is present in most of the poems in the second half of the book, and its successor, Goliath and David.
The moon, often paired metaphorically with ghosts, can also assume a ghostly appearance. It first appears in Graves’s canon in a rather silly schoolboy lyric, ‘The Jolly Yellow Moon’ (p. 7), but later in a more sinister guise in ‘The Cruel Moon’, where the moon’s ‘face is stupid, but her eye is small and sharp and very sly’; though the prospect of her inducing madness is introduced by ‘the nurse’, the poet dismisses the possibility, since ‘moons hang much too far away’ (p. 34): an attitude which he would later reject comprehensively! Another ghost appears in ‘Corporal Stare’ at Bethune, where his former comrades are enjoying a seven-course dinner,
Then through the window suddenly,
Badge, stripes and medals all complete,
We saw him swagger up the street,
Just like a live man
[…]
He paused, saluted smartly, grinned,
Then passed away like a puff of wind. (p. 53)
These hauntings by dead soldiers continued for some years after the War, contributing to Graves’s neurasthenia and aversion to crowds and cities. He refers again to these ghosts in ‘Haunted’, ‘I’m ashamed to greet | Dead men down the morning street’, asking them to confine their activities to night-time (Collected Poems, p. 92). From the same collection (Country Sentiment)
Madness figured in Graves’s awareness since the War, most famously, when he got Siegfried Sassoon into Craiglockhart Hospital to save him from being court martialled.
But if we let our tongues lose self-possession
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death
[...]
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way. (p. 283)
This plight was still hypothetical; but, in 1936, he felt madness approaching, and wrote about it in ‘The Halls of Bedlam’: ‘Father in his shirtsleeves flourishing a hatchet’ (p. 372). That year saw the start of a long period of instability for Graves, as the British consul advised immediate departure in early August from Mallorca, following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
This may also have triggered fearful memories of his own war service. Back in England, he was also in contact with his abandoned children; and although no longer in love with Laura Riding, he still supported her campaign to prevent another war, so all these agitations could have resulted in chronic instability of mind.
Ghosts, either real or imaginary continued to make frequent appearances in his poems until 1938, when he began to fall in love with Beryl Hodge, while they were living in the French Chateau near Rennes.
No new ghost can appear. Their poor cause
Was that time freezes, and time thaws;
But here only such loves can last
As do not ride upon the weathers of the past’. (Complete Poems, p. 385)
A certain kind of ghost (a ‘new ghost’) may be banished, but other imaginary creatures, present in Graves’s poetry from the very beginning, haunt the poems, and madness is still a prospect. In ‘The Shot’, ‘honest human nature knows its own miracle: not to go mad’ (p. 392). Imaginary imps, called ‘Lollocks’ are produced by sloth or sorrow, or ‘when the imbecile aged are overlong in dying’ (p. 393). With the exception of the poet, ‘men cannot see them’, do not believe in them, but are inflicted with ‘boils on the neck’, or stomach aches. From the siege of Troy, a departing spirit arises from the body of Penthesilea (p. 461), after Achilles commits necrophilia on her corpse, and then kills Thersites, who sniggered at the spectacle. The phantoms of ‘The Sea Horse’ are rather imaginary doubles, ‘who assume your walk and face’, when the love-sick poet worries if his love is returned (p. 452).
Apart from the figurative language of poetry, Graves dismissed the possibility of reincarnation. In 1956, a book was published in the USA, called The Search for Bridey Murphy by Morey Bernstein, a hypnotist, who recorded the story of a young woman, Ruth Simmons, relating in hypnotic trance how she had lived a previous life in Ireland 150 years earlier. Many of the details of her life in Belfast proved to be true. In his review, Graves rejects the possibility of reincarnation, supposing that she had overheard the story of Bridey Murphy while dozing as a child and subconsciously recorded the conversation.
It is probable that this same book aroused the curiosity of Dr Ian Stevenson, who, in 1957, became the head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical School, and started his research into reports of children who remembered their previous lives. His research involves no hypnotism but relies on interviews with young children who recall their former names, where they lived, and their relatives in that life. He follows this up by travelling to the place and talking to the people who remember the person named, often taking the child there, who recognises and identifies his former relatives. Stevenson investigated over 2000 such cases, and a review of his work in the journal of the American Medical Association states that ‘he […] collected cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds except reincarnation’.
I already knew of Stevenson’s work when I began my correspondence with Robert in 1967, while studying music in Birmingham. During the interval before his last letter in November 1972, I was working in a Steiner school for handicapped children, and wrote to him about reincarnation, which was central to Rudolph Steiner’s philosophy. He replied:
My view of birth is that it is decided in the moment of death, and that there is no past existence or pre-existence, there being no such thing as time, except as a matter of convenient reckoning. This is not an enigmatic remark, it simply refers to the proper use of the 5th dimension.
I knew something about the fifth dimension, having read a book of the same title by Vera Alder,
To bring the dead to life
Is no great magic.
Few are wholly dead:
Blow on a dead man’s embers
And a live flame will start.
Some years later, Kathleen Raine replied to my question about Graves’s views, by saying that he was a Euhemerist,
He was to keep the same humanistic approach in The Greek Myths, and embody the philosophy in his poem, ‘To Juan at the Winter Solstice’, in which he asserts that: ‘Her sea-grey eyes were wild | But nothing promised that is not performed’ (Complete Poems, pp. 405-06). This assertion was a sly dig at conventional Christianity, according to which ‘heaven’ can be reached only after death, following a virtuous life, rather than in a loving human relationship. Despite his ecclesiastical forebears, Graves had a horror of priests in their black robes, in common with William Blake.
In June 1943, came the news that Graves’s eldest son David had been killed in action, in Burma. Graves was then writing his retelling of the story of Jason and the Argonauts,
The Paranormal
When he was approached by Eileen Garrett in 1942, who had just set up her Creative Age Press in the USA, asking if she might publish any of his new writing, he was set fair for his next six books.
I have in my way been preoccupied for years with thoughts and studies concerning the origins of religions, and I spent ten years of my life studying in the College of Psychic Science in London, searching for objective meanings to the great pattern of subjective language.
Graves was aware of Garrett’s gift as a psychic and told Martin Seymour-Smith he found her great fun, and that the two of them got on like two oysters on a plate. Although American, she was brought up in Ireland, which gave them more in common. She wrote about her contact with Graves in her autobiography:
I was fortunate enough to publish several of his books, and to have him tell me about his method of going deeply into the collective unconscious, where he derived great knowledge in abstract terms. He told me he was careful to check with eminent scholars everything that he learned from the deep unconscious.
His creed as a Euhemerist prevented him from accepting that we have more than one life or may spontaneously contact the dead. Nevertheless, healers, such as Betty Shine, have claimed success in this undertaking. Perhaps the most amazing incident she recounts is her telephone conversation with her mother,
If I lose anything which I must have back, I simply invoke St Antony of Padua who never fails me. But be careful to address him, and not St Antony the Abbott, or you will lose something else. A fortnight ago I lost my ticket and passport in an Oslo hotel 5 minutes before I was due for my return plane. St Antony produced it within 3 minutes from an impossible quarter […] What all this means really is I suppose a ‘magical’ means of focussing one’s attention on circumstances, which in one’s ordinary way of thinking, one cannot possibly envisage. In scientific terms it is 5th dimensional thinking. Since the name of St Antony has so long been an instrument of Christendom inducing this way of thought, it has acquired power that nothing else that I know of (except certain Sufic divinatory measures) possesses.
Psychic energies of the kind which Graves used habitually are denied in the prevailing orthodoxy of modern materialistic science, as it will not fit into their mathematical formulae; but plenty of scientific work has been done in this area, as may be seen in the archives of the Society for Psychical Research, founded in Britain in the late nineteenth century. A good example of such is the faculty of ‘remote viewing’, in which distant objects can be seen clearly by those with the gift, such as Ingo Swann and Pat Price, who are able to see and describe things hundreds of miles away if given the map co-ordinates. Examples of this are given in Lynne McTaggart’s book, The Field, which gives a comprehensive guide to much contemporary research, including the work of British biologist, Dr Rupert Sheldrake, who, she says:
in a rush of fevered inspiration at an ashram in India, worked out his hypothesis of formative causation, which states that the forms of living things […] are shaped by morphic fields, […] which have a cumulative memory of similar systems through cultures and time.
Sheldrake explains his theories in more detail in his book, A New Science of Life, for example in the field of parapsychology.
Even within modern Western society, there are persistent reports of apparently inexplicable phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, memories of past lives, hauntings, poltergeists, psychokinesis, and so on. In so far as these phenomena cannot be explained in terms of the known laws of physics and chemistry, from the mechanistic point of view they ought not to occur.
Sheldake’s ideas and intuitions about the world strike a note of defiance against the prevailing Western philosophy but harmonize in their alterity with Graves’s views. In the nineteen-sixties, prodded by Omar Ali-Shah,
Khayyam was a middle-aged University professor at the College of Nishapur, who broke away from his academic colleagues to return to a Sufi way of thought of the eleventh century AD. ‘His university colleagues felt only scorn for Sufis, whom they regarded at best as heretical enthusiasts’ (p. 3). Graves’s encounter with the goddess during his frenzied writing of The White Goddess utterly changed his previous aversion to religion, to which a primary female aspect was added. He was later to co-author a book about Genesis, showing how the female attributes of God had been suppressed by the patriarchal priests.
One sees another comparable mythic principle in Graves’s post- Goddess writing. The Indian Goddess, Kali, appears several times in The White Goddess in her dual aspect of benefactress and universal mother, and the opposite as fury and ogress. Graves also prescribes: ‘Only after a period of complete political and religious disorganisation can the suppressed desire of the Western races, which is for some practical form of Goddess-worship, with her love not limited to maternal benevolence, and her after-world not deprived of a sea, find satisfaction at last;’
Epilogue
The signs that we are living in the Iron Age become more obvious each year, with the world being increasingly taken over by money and mechanisation; its most sinister aspect being the Nuclear Power Industry – described by Albert Einstein as ‘a hell of a way to boil water’.
The story sounded so cloak-and-dagger, that I was very glad in 1965 to meet that man in Mexico City who worked under Cliff and told me that there were powerful and conscienceless elements who might well be working against you [... .] It is like the Dallas Shooting: one knows that it wasn’t just poor Oswald who shot Kennedy but a hired and well-protected marksman, and the finger points (I am told) at [....] Ordinary people can’t believe it; it’s too much like I, Claudius (but Die Nasty was a joke at my prep school).
His printed letter omits the name of the assassin, presumably after legal advice, but it would have been known to Catherine. William Blake’s ‘mind-forged manacles’
The ‘mad scientists’ (of Seven Days in New Crete) are regrettably not yet running down corridors in terror, pursued by visions of the Goddess as a Fury! These hubristic apprentices, all descended from Perseus, are incompetent in the absence of the ‘Sorcerer’ (viz. Henri Dukas), and this Iron Age is ending with bangs after all, though with much whimpering to follow. Whether the human race is doomed to become a mere unlamented ghost or whether magic will save us is a question one wishes Robert Graves were here to answer.
Richard Carder is a clarinettist, conductor, and composer. He chaired the English Poetry and Song Society from 1985 to 2015, and edited Ivor Gurney, Seven Sappho Songs (London: Thames, 2000). As a keen environmentalist, he campaigns for Friends of the Earth.
NOTES