Myths and Matriarchs
SIR,—In a review of Miss G. R. Levy's The Sword From the Rock, Mr. Peter Green writes intemperately of: a rank growth of symbolical exegesis, where fantasy borrowed a disreputable cloak of half-digested scholarship to prove any and every theory: a road strewn with primitive matriarchies and incredible etymologies, that culminated in Robert Graves' White Goddess.
and he accuses Miss Levy of being in the same cranky tradition. He instances as examples of " faulty scholarship " the suggestions that Scylla was a polypodal ogress of the type found carved on megalithic tombs; that Calypso was a goddess who received the dead and that Odysseus' seven-year stay on Ogygia was " ritually a repeated experience of death." I do not know Miss Levy by correspondence or otherwise, nor have I yet read her book; but having just finished writing an encyclopaedia of Greek Myths and Pseudo-myths for Penguin Classics, after some years' work on the original texts, I am glad to report that I have come to much the same conclusions as she has. Though Scylla's terrestial form was dog, her marine form was largely cuttle- fish, and it is as cuttlefish rather than dog that she seized Odysseus' sailors. The name Scylla means " she who rends." Her love-affairs with Minos, Glaucus and Poseidon, all Cretan royal titles, identify her with the sea-goddess Thetis whose final metamorphosis, when she married Peleus at the Cretan port of Iolcus, was a cuttle-fish. The cuttle-fish figures prominently on Minoan works of art, and the porphyry master-weight found in the Cnossian treasury, which set the standard for all transactions in the Mediterranean, was carved with a cuttle-fish. Professor Christopher Hawkes has, moreover, suggested Aegean influence in the Carnec cuttle-fish carving to which Miss Levy refers. Scylla represents Thetis in her angriest mood: the dangerous sea, the polypodal ogress. If Calypso was not a goddess who received the dead, why was she called Calypso—" she who hides "—or is this an " incredible etymology " ? Why, moreover was she an " awful goddess of mortal speech," and why did she live in an island of the ocean—Ogygia and Oceanus are the same word; an intermediate form Ogen is found— like other death-goddesses, and why was her cavern surrounded with groves of poplar sacred to Persephone, cypress sacred to Hades, and alder (clethra, " that which hides ") sacred to the death-hero Vron, Bran, or Cronus ? And why were the birds that roosted in the branches this hero's familiar, the sea-crow, and her own unlucky horned owl, and—because Calypso is also the death goddess Circe of the willow- tree cemetery—the falcon, her namesake? And why did parsley and iris, both funerary plants in Greek ritual, flourish in the meadow out- side? If Odysseus' seven-year stay with Calypso was, as Mr. Green suggests, merely a dramatic device to enable Telemachus to grow up, why, after his return to Ithaca, was he banished again, to spend another seven years with the Queen of Thesprotis ? (Classical references for all these questions supplied on request.) I know nothing of Mr. Green's scholastic qualifications, but a man who can offer a list of imaginative cranks beginning with Sir James Frazer and Jane Harrison, and dismiss primitive matriarchy as a fantasy, seems a very odd choice for a Spectator reviewer.—Yours
Deya, Mallorca, Spain.
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