Letter of the Week

Every week, on this page, we will show a different letter from a selection of letters from Paul O'Prey's books on Robert Graves correspondence In Broken Images and Between Moon and Moon.

Date: 15 APR 1952

Recipient: Wasson, Gordon (1898-1986)

Location: Canellun

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Deyá.

15 April 1952

My dear Wasson:

I am delighted that you got my letter in time to take stock of that Etruscan mirror, and that you agree with me about the mushroom; as I also agree with you about punk and spunk — and would tentatively add sponge, English dialect word for 'leaven', J reported from Yorkshire and the Eastern counties. Spunk is Sponk ' in Scottish: even nearer to σπογγοϛ. About the male and female agarick: the point seems to me to be whether you regard the spunk as a) the female receptacle in which the male fire-stick is amatorily twirled, or as b) the spunk (which is used in English dialect and university—bawdy to mean semen virile —- the locus classicus is a dirty limerick written by Tennyson in his nasty old age beginning: 'There once was a Chinaman drunk') which procreates the desired flame. If a, then the agaric is female; if h then it is male. QED.

In reply to your letter of a few days ago: we shall be in Mallorca until July 14th when we are taking a flat (no. 8 Gardiner Mansions, Church Row, Hampstead, London, NW3) for three weeks. We pass through Paris, but will have our three jaded and boisterous children in tow, and so hope rather to see you in London — or, even better, here. It is about time we met.

Very busy settling the historical basis of early Greek mythology: a task shirked by all but a very few independent-minded scholars; and they all fall short at the real problem, which is the relation of the myths to the ritual theory of royal succession varyingly held in different parts of the Greek world at different times. How the sacred king dies: whether netted in a bath, pushed over a cliff, eaten in a stew, killed in a staged chariot crash, bitten in the heel by a viper κτλ κτλ.; when he dies, whether in June, October or New Year; and after what length of reign — these are the relevant details. The rest is mainly local anecdote or cathartic drama. The clue to a great deal of the corpus is found in Irish, Welsh and Latin myth; and occasionally in the Pentateuch — there are a great many points of contact between Corinthian and Palestinian mythology.

I am anxious to rescue myth from the ignorant Jungian psychologists . . . I learned today Theophilus the 11th century writer on the metallurgical crafts of his day explained the meaning of such alchemical fantasies (exploited by Jung in a nonsensical treatise) as 'marry two red cocks and set a toad to hatch their eggs', by pointing out that these are code words for chemical substances used for the sake of secrecy by Spanish alchemists. The 'precious jewel in the toad's head' which has always puzzled me and probably you) makes perfect sense as the by-product of a chemical process — the extraction of silver from lead ore by the addition of sulphur, I think it will have been.

But this piece of paper is coming to an end; and I must get back to Orestes and the tell-tale robe embroidered with wild beasts which he wore.

Kindest regards to your wife.

Yours v. sincerely

Robert Graves

What astonishes me is how you manage to think so clearly about these problems in the Banking district of New York.