SOURCE: “Poe's Reading of Myth: The White Vision of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in Poe's Pym: Critical Explorations, edited by Richard Kopley, Duke University Press, 1992, pp. 57-74.

[In the following essay, Peirce and Rose explore Poe's use of Celtic mythology in Pym, finding that it transforms the voyage narrative into a “revelation of symbolic vision.”]

Toward its close, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym seems to suffer a sea change. In its early chapters, the work appears a straight, factually oriented account. However, as the novel progresses toward the South Pole and the conclusion, Pym seems to many readers to take on redemptive or apocalyptic imagery. Indeed, it has a strange mythic quality all its own—changing from a gripping sea yarn to a revelation of symbolic vision.

Myth in literature is characterized as either having unconsciously survived or being consciously revived.¹ This essay is not concerned, however, with unconscious mythic usage, the province of mythic criticism, but rather with conscious revival—Poe's reading of myth and his possible use of that reading in Pym. Poe himself challenges us to find the inner meaning of his works; an attention to his awareness of myth and his borrowings from myth may help to reveal more clearly the ways his imagination is realized through structure and symbolism. Indeed, this approach may show how a straightforward novel about a voyage is, on another level, both profoundly and resonantly about a romantic quest, even the Arthurian Grail quest. This method, involving a concern with a work's mythical nuances, has been said to arise out of “nineteenth-century symbolism with its serious attention to arcane subjects, irrational states, and hermetic meanings.”² Richard Wilbur speaks of Poe's “symbolic or allegorical method” and concludes that Poe “is the most secretive and difficult of our great symbolic writers. How much of him will permanently elude us, how much we can figure out, we can only learn by trying.”³

Poe and other writers of the early nineteenth century were both knowledgeable about myth and involved in using it. Not only did they read mythology itself, but they also read about it in the work of recent mythographers and commentators. Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson point out that many English and American writers, including Poe, were actively interested and well versed in current developments in the study of myth: “The meaning of mythology, the origins of mythology, the connections suggested by comparative mythology, and above all, the romantic urge to create new myths and whole new mythologies were subjects of central concern to these writers; they were powerfully aware of the importance of myth to their work, and their experiments with myth in literature were conscious, deliberate, and sophisticated.”⁴

Early nineteenth-century writers read about myth in the works of such philosophers and mythographers as Augustus and Friedrich Schlegel, Augustus arguing that one might either “work in the spirit of myth, creating new stories,” or recast the old myths within one's poems or tales.⁵ Accordingly, many American writers “began to look to myth to provide the vital force for a new heroic literature.”⁶ And Noah Webster, drawing together his own “Origin of Mythology” in 1810, refers to two mythologists, Jacob Bryant and George Stanley Faber, as the outstanding authorities in the field.⁷

We know that Poe read both the Schlegels and Bryant, and he seems in Pym to have drawn on the work of Faber, as well. He makes two references in his works to Friedrich Schlegel, eleven to Augustus, and five to Jacob Bryant, but their influences may have been considerably larger.⁸ The last he refers to as “Bryant, whose authority we regard as superior to any” ([The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 1902, hereafter H] 14:113). Kent Ljungquist bases his analysis of the ending of Pym firmly upon Bryant's mythology, stating that “Poe's exposure to Bryant has long been known.”⁹ Poe does not directly refer to Faber, but Bryant and Faber are often associated. In 1832, Isaac Cory refers to “the very curious dissertations by Bryant and Mr. Faber,”¹⁰ and Charles Anthon, the classical scholar and author of the Classical Dictionary, uses both throughout, incorporating their exciting new theories.

Poe apparently became acquainted with Bryant's New System¹¹ through Anthon.¹² Although the Dictionary did not appear until 1841, Poe met Anthon in 1836 when he consulted him concerning a book review. A correspondence ensued, and, according at least to Ana Hernández del Castillo, “This was the beginning of a friendship that was destined to play an important role in the genesis of Pym.”¹³ She feels sure that Anthon also introduced Poe to Faber's Origin of Pagan Idolatry.¹⁴ Both mythographers see the story of Noah and the Ark as central to much “pagan” mythology. Every god or hero is Noah, especially if he undertakes a voyage. The Ark is personified in the goddess he loves, and she is the same “Great” or “White,” three-fold Goddess, whatever her nationality or period. Faber especially stresses the relation to the Arthurian story and sees the god-hero as Arthur and the White Goddess as represented in her three phases by Guinevere, the Lady of the Lake, and Morgan le Fay, all together merging in “Gwenhwyvar” (F 3:318, 323).

Poe turned to the current language of myth for both interior meaning and symbolic method. Calling his method “mystic,” he particularized it as “suggestion” and wrote about it in a number of places.¹⁵ That Poe's understanding of “mystic” is closely related to “mythic” and “symbolic” and to the concepts of the Schlegels is clear upon reading Anthon's comment in his Dictionary: “In the treatment of these [articles on mythology], it has been the chief aim of the author to lay before the student the most important speculations of the two great schools (the Mystic and anti-Mystic) which now divide the learned of Europe.” And he believes that “the former will appear to the student by far the more attractive one of the two.”¹⁶ Rees' Cyclopaedia explains the meaning of “mystic” using Scripture as example: “The Bible, they [commentators] contend, is a book written both withinside and withoutside: withinside, in respect to the mystical, internal, sublime and hidden sense; and withoutside, in respect to the literal and grammatical sense immediately expressed by the words.”¹⁷

Poe picks up this very sense of “mystic” in his review of Alciphron, a Poem by Thomas Moore: “The term mystic is here employed in the sense of Augustus William Schlegel, and of most other German critics. It is applied by them to that class of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current of meaning an under or suggestive one” (H 10:65).¹⁸ He then turns to “imaginative” works and sees them as “remarkable for the suggestive character” manifested. “They are strongly mystic,” he adds and continues: “With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always a distinct, but an august and soul-exalting echo. In every glimpse of beauty presented, we catch, through long and wild vistas, dim bewildering visions of a far more ethereal beauty beyond” (H 10:65-66).

Poe's “mystic” suggestiveness beneath the surface of Pym seems possibly, or even probably, to come from ideas that he has gleaned from his reading of mythologists and Arthurian “matter.” He seems throughout to follow some of the lines of that legend, drawing on its many-layered turnings in his own creative process. The connection is worth consideration, for there are many intriguing relationships.

The cluster of legends concerning Arthur and the Grail, with its sources in Celtic mythology and fairy lore, its reminder of the primordial White Goddess, its central concern with the shadowy history of Arthur, and its branchings into a multitude of high medieval quests certainly fascinated thinkers of the early nineteenth-century. Emerson, for instance, in his first lecture on English literature, introduces early Welsh poetry, including a poem of Taliesin, and concludes that much of it is devoted to the adventures of Arthur. He goes on to discuss the Arthurian legend more thoroughly in the next lecture, “The Age of Fable,” comparing Arthur's exploits to those of the Greek gods. He speaks of the “vast collections of tales” that have been printed and retold and of their popularity “in the abridgments of Morte d’Arthur, Lancelot du Lac” and others.¹⁹

That Poe was very much aware of Arthurian myth seems evident not just from the wide availability of retellings and reissuings but from a variety of other sources. The Encyclopaedia Britannica and Rees' Cyclopaedia of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, both of which he used, treat of Arthur and related subjects. An admirer of Ossian, Poe surely knew Percy's famous and popular Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, which devotes a whole section to ballads concerning Arthur.²⁰ Poe himself writes of “a sense of dreamy, wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, indefinable delight” that he finds in the “old bards” (H 12:139). Poe also speaks often of his love of Tennyson's early Arthurian poetry, writing that the “Morte D’Arthur” and “The Lady of Shalott” (among others) “are not surpassed” (H 11:176). He is familiar with Scott, and he quotes from Spenser's Faerie Queen.²¹

In his own work, Poe creates the author Sir Lancelot Canning in “The Fall of the House of Usher” ([Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott, 1969-78, hereafter M] 2:413-15), and he often sets his stories or poems in “saintly days of yore” (M 1:366). Burton R. Pollin identifies Poe himself as the questing knight in “Eldorado” and shows how this poem parallels “The Lady of Shalott.”²² Finally, in two specific references, Poe reveals his delight at the thought of the ancient legend and, further, his reading knowledge of its historical connections and background. In a review of Howitt's Visits to Remarkable Places, Poe writes about “A Day-dream at Tintagel”: “The old castle of King Arthur seems once more to lift its massy battlements above the thundering surf below, and from its portals go forth the heroes of the Round Table, with hound and hawk, and many a fair demoiselle” (H 10:113). In a second piece, “Some Account of Stonehenge, the Giant's Dance,” in giving a description of the place then connected closely to Druidism, Celtic myth, and Arthurian legend, he says: “The earliest account of them [the Stonehenge monuments] occurs in Nennius, who lived in the eighth century. He says they were erected by the Britons to commemorate a massacre which took place at the spot. The Historical Triads of the Welsh refer their origin to the same cause … Modern authors have been profuse in speculation, but no more. The general opinion seems to be in favor of a Druidical Temple” (H 14:112).²³

Poe's interest is revealed clearly in a quotation from Bryant in Pinakidia: “Mr. Bryant in his learned ‘Mythology’ says that although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves continually and make inferences from them as existing realities” ([Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Burton R. Pollin, 1985, hereafter P] 2:50). Among all the possible sources, however, for Poe's use of Arthur, Faber's study offers the closest analogues. Faber sees much myth and romance as related to initiation rites and a “remembrance of the diluvian Mysteries.” For him, Arthur exemplifies the pattern that repeats itself through many recastings of myth: “The entrance of the great father into the Ship” (F 3:315).

In fact, to all the mythographers, Arthur was composed of two beings: a historical man and a sort of Celtic god. The Cambrian Biography begins (and Rees approximates it): “Arthur, the most remarkable name among the Britons; as a hero and a consummate warrior, he appears illustrious in our history; but as a being of romance his splendor has dazzled the world.”²⁴ Of these two, it is the “being of romance” on whom Faber concentrates (F 3:314-23).

Faber further juxtaposes to Arthur the “gigantic White goddess” (F 3:328), of whom he declares: “All the Goddesses of Paganism will be found ultimately to melt together into a single person who is at once acknowledged to be the great mother and the earth” (F 1:21), whether she is “Anna-Purna” or “Isi” or “the White Goddess.” Both Bryant and Faber see the Goddess as born from the seas, having as Faber puts it, “assumed the form of a ship when the mighty waters of the deep universally prevailed” (F 1:21). Bryant concludes “that the Ark, by the mythologists, was spoken of as the mother of mankind. The stay in the ark was esteemed a state of death, and of regeneration” (B 3:168).²⁵ She became eventually “venerated by the old Britons under the names of Ceridwen, Ked, Sidee, Devi, Andrastè, and Esaye or Isi,” as she is “the Ceres of the classical writers.” Her “mystic circle is declared to be the circle of the World” (F 3:3-5).

The very beginnings of the Arthurian legend exist in Celtic tales of voyages by water to an Otherworld to find a magic cauldron. In an early Arthur story, “The Spoils of Annwfn,” Arthur sails to find the cauldron of rebirth.²⁶ In time, this first cauldron becomes related to two others, one of these containing creative inspiration and wisdom, the other an endless supply of food. In Celtic mythology, these cauldrons belong to three goddesses, each a version of the White Goddess, and one of them, Ceridwen, is identified by Faber as identical with Morgan le Fay (F 3:318). In later Grail literature, the cauldrons are merged with the cup and plate or “stone” of the Last Supper and with the vessel which caught Christ's blood; thus the Grail, the stone, and the cauldron become connected. Though the Grail comes and goes mysteriously, it is always associated with a miraculous and dreamed-of quantity of food and drink. The knights, physically and spiritually hungry and dry, seek its magical fulfillment. Pym, too, and all his fellows, thirst and starve and dream of food throughout.

In the later Grail myth, the knightly hero undertakes a journey across water to a wasteland ruled by a Fisher King, who is deficient physically or spiritually. On the way, the hero also faces physical and spiritual trials and finally must pass through the Chapel Perilous, an initiation site. If proven worthy in courage and character, he may attain the Grail vision. But for each seeker, the way is marked by blood, terror, mystery, and marvel: “Here is the Book of thy Descent / Here begins the Book of the Sangreal, / Here begin the terrors, / Here begin the miracles.”²⁷ So reads the thirteenth-century Perlesvaus, in words redolent of Arthurian romance. And, in the “Preface” to Pym, Poe begins to describe “the extraordinary series of adventure in the South Seas and elsewhere” which “were of a nature so positively marvellous” that Pym feared they would be disbelieved (P 1:55). This, he says, in a possible first suggestion, is due to their “air of fable” (P 1:56)—or of “myth,” as the words are used almost interchangeably in Rees' Cyclopaedia under “Mythology” and elsewhere. Pym's very first adventure on the Ariel arouses terror, an “intense agony of terror” (P 1:60), followed by a rescue by the Penguin—a rescue Pym sees as “miraculous” (P 1:65). He continues throughout to use the words “terror,” “miracle,” and “marvel.”

There are a number of suggestive connections of names early in the narrative. The hero's first name is Arthur. On the Grampus he meets Dirk Peters, who later becomes his close companion. Peter's name, as Harry Levin points out, “bespeaks his nature, a sturdy combination of knife and rock.”²⁸ It is not far from “knife and rock” to “sword and stone” or to the sword Arthur draws from the stone. Another companion is Pym's dog, Tiger. In early Welsh stories, Arthur is connected especially to his sword Excalibur, his dog Cabal or Horse,²⁹ and his ship Prydwen. Provocatively, each dog bears the name of another animal. Arthur's ship name Prydwen, meaning in Welsh “Fair face,” is not unlike Penguin, which Johnson's Dictionary derives from the Welsh as “white head”³⁰ and which is seen by Richard Kopley especially as foreshadowing the white vision at the end.³¹ The name Pym itself may well come from “pilgrim,” as used in quest stories and in Shelley's phrase for Byron, “the Pilgrim of Eternity.”³²

In another, perhaps significant, hint, Poe mentions in regard to the Penguin's “small jolly” that it “was fitted, as I have since had reason to believe, with air-boxes, in the manner of some life-boats used on the coast of Wales” (P 1:63). Pollin comments that “Poe had no reason to attribute such boats to the ‘whaling service’ or ‘the coast of Wales’” (P 1:223). But, if Poe were thinking of Arthurian legend and the fabled Prydwen, this is just such a connection as he might make.

Another tantalizing relationship is implied by datings in Pym. In Arthurian myth, many of the stories, such as the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,³³ move in time according to Celtic or Christian festivals; seasonal symbolism is unmistakable. Pym's whole journey is carefully dated (as were the nineteenth-century sea chronicles), but the dating of Pym's voyage carries an undercurrent of seasonal suggestion as well. Arthur and Augustus sail from Nantucket on the Grampus on 20 June, Midsummer's Eve, at the summer solstice (P 1:69-70). Midsummer's Eve is one of the high fêtes of Celtic Faërie, and Midsummer's Day one of two main feasts of the White Goddess. On this day, her “complementary moods of creation and destruction” join, as her yearly oak-king is sacrificed and translated to the Corona Borealis, the symbol of her northern throne, while she takes a new young lover.³⁴ Her high seasons are spring, summer, and winter, and her power is strong on their turning days. In the development of Pym, Captain Guy decides to “push on towards the pole”; on 21 December, the winter solstice, he sets sail on that determined course (P 1:158). But the spring equinox marks the beginning of the Goddess's highest power, and on 21 March, Pym approaches the cataract “having all the wild variations of the Aurora Borealis” (P 1:203, 205). On 22 March, he sees his white vision (P 1:205-6). Critics have noted the date; thus Sidney Kaplan asks, “Is it worthy of note that it is on the opening day of spring that Pym is taken by the white god?”³⁵

Developing the theme of the White Goddess, Faber explains that Arthur had three wives, each named Gwenhwyvar or “the Lady on the summit of the water” (F 3:318). This name, from the Welsh, can be translated as “white phantom” and is undoubtedly an allusion to the “Three Great Queens” of the Welsh Triads.³⁶ (Curiously, the name may be suggested in Pym by the etymologically related name, Penguin.) In connecting two other women to Arthur—The Lady of the Lake and Morgana, the darkest of the three—Faber identifies them as sisters. But he really seems to see them, along with the real Guinevere, as the springtime, summer, and winter manifestations of the White Goddess—like Isis, Maiden, Woman, and Crone. Together they appear to represent the triune goddess whom Arthur loves, and who loves, betrays, and saves him, carrying him in the end to the magical White Island (F 3:318-21).

In Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance, Roger S. Loomis writes about Guinevere as one of the representations of the Celtic Goddess and sees her in her varied abductions as another version of Kore or Persephone.³⁷ For him, the Arthurian Grail story represents a seasonal myth of the young god going through a “series of initiations” involving the gaining of talismans and the marrying with the springtime Goddess.³⁸ This myth is tied both to Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter and Persephone and to the celebration in Samothrace, where the Goddess is seen as Demeter, Persephone, Hecate, and Cybele together. He quotes Strabo: “There is an island near Britain where they offer sacrifices to Demeter and Kore like those in Samothrace.”³⁹

Among the main characteristics of the White Goddess in both the Greek mysteries and Arthurian romance is her ability to change shape. Demeter as Hecate (her darker self) was capable—as are both the Grail Messenger, who is either hideous or radiantly beautiful, and Morgana especially, according to Faber—of taking on a mixed form such as that of a woman with a dog's head or “a gigantic old woman, with serpents in her hair, her legs ending in a dragon's tail.”⁴⁰ Taking her form from “the Irish lamia, the Morrigan” and coming from the sea, Morgana could play strange roles and assume the most diverse aspects.⁴¹ But, whatever her particular manifestation, the Celtic Goddess or Fairy Queen, “untouched by time,” is, ultimately, immortally beautiful. A combination of hostility and love characterizes her nature, as in Morgana's relation to Arthur, and, should the lover escape her power, she will pursue and bear him back to the Otherworld: “In the fairy mythology of romance the law is invariable, that for the mortal who once has experienced the fairy control there is no true release.”⁴²

Faber says that very early as a child or youth the hero is borne in a boat, cast into the ocean, but brought safe to land. But “occasionally the idea of infancy is dropped; and the hero of romance, at an adult age, performs some extraordinary voyage” (F 3:317). In fact, we see both voyages in Pym, youth and adult, first in the Ariel and then in the Grampus and Jane Guy. So Arthur sailed on “a wonderful voyage over the ocean” on his ship “called Prydwen, which signifies the lady of the World” and is thus the Goddess herself (F 3:318). Though Pym, feeling a sense of impending doom, has visions “of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears,” he cannot resist the journey. He regards the visions “only as prophetic glimpses of a destiny which I felt myself in a measure bound to fulfil” (P 1:65).

In another of the Welsh Triads, Arthur is held “three nights in prison in Caer Oeth and Anoeth, and three nights imprisoned by Gwen Pendragon, and three nights in an enchanted prison under the Stone of Echymeint.”⁴³ Faber refers to these as three nights “in the inclosure of wrath and the remission of wrath; three nights, with the lady of Pendragon; and three nights, in the prison of Kud or Ceridwen under the flat stone of Echemeint.” He sees this story as borrowed from the enclosure of an initiate “within the mystic stone cell of Ceridwen which typified the womb of the ship-goddess.” This enclosure under the stone is “his [Arthur's] allegorical bed or sepulchre” (F 3:318). So, too, Arthur Pym as a stowaway, hidden in the hold of the Grampus by his friend Augustus, is imprisoned in his “iron-bound box,” “nearly four feet high, and full six long, but very narrow,” where he remains “three days and nights” (P 1:69).⁴⁴ Afterwards he goes through horrible dreams and fever and winds his way through a maze of passages among the stowage by means of a whipcord left by Augustus. These “dismal and disgusting labyrinths” (P 1:74-75), as Pym calls them, have much in common with the maze that was part of the journey to be made in ancient initiation rites in both Greece and Britain.⁴⁵ Pollin writes, “Poe's source has often been assumed to be the thread given Theseus by Ariadne as a guide through the Cretan labyrinth” (P 1:230). Ariadne was one of the brilliant personifications of the Goddess, “the daughter, or younger self, of the ancient Cretan Moon-Goddess”; Geoffrey of Monmouth refers to her among “Merlin's Prophecies.”⁴⁶

Pym's dreams of demons, of deserts limitless, of tall trees screaming in agony, may well reflect the enchanted medieval wasteland. And those “immense serpents” that “held me in their embrace, and looked earnestly in my face with their fearfully shining eyes” (P 1:72) may be symbols of the Goddess; Faber says that Merlin called Morgana “the white serpent” (F 3:321). And Bryant writes: “In most of the antient rites there is some allusion to the serpent” (B 2:198).⁴⁷ Thus it seems that Pym spends some time in the womb of the Grampus in a proleptic dream of her. He tells us that “a dull humming sound, which reached my ears as if from an immense distance, convinced me that no ordinary gale was blowing” (P 1:71). The Goddess often manifests herself first by “some mysterious agency” that may “benumb the senses” and is “a sign that the mortal is feeling the bewildering fairy influence.”⁴⁸ And Pym's watch stops; time seems to stand still, as it often does in Celtic Faërie. Pym says, “I began to suppose that I must have slept for an inordinately long period of time” (P 1:71). When he hears Augustus call, he feels “redeemed from the jaws of the tomb” (P 1:83).

Later, after coming out of the hold, in defeating the mutineers with Augustus and Peters, Pym disguises himself, splotching his face with blood like that of a dead crewman with erysipelas, whose eye looked as if streaked “with a band of red velvet” (P 1:107, 109). Now Arthur in “Triad 20” is described as one of the “Red Ravagers of Britain.”⁴⁹ Owen, in the Cambrian Biography, says, “He was joined to form the triad of blood-stained sovereigns.”⁵⁰ Graves translates the phrase as “one of the Three Crimson-stained Ones of Britain” and adds, “To be ‘crimson-stained’ is to be a sacred king.” Such kings had face and hands stained red as a sign of royalty.⁵¹

In the tempest that follows, Pym dreams again, this time pleasing dreams of “green trees, waving meadows of ripe grain, processions of dancing girls, troops of cavalry, and other phantasies.” He remembers afterwards that “motion was a predominant idea” (P 1:118)—as it is an attribute of the Goddess, “white raiser, red reaper, and dark winnower of grain,” Queen of the whirling elements and of the “Circling Universe.”⁵² Apuleius describes Isis rising from the sea, bearing her sistrum, a mirror or moon in the center of her forehead, supported “on either side by serpents that seemed to rise from the furrows of the earth, and above it were blades of corn set out.” Freed from enchantment, Lucius joins her procession, which is led by floral-crowned women, scattering flowers. Temple pipers announce the Goddess; “And then came the great company … which were initiate.”⁵³ One face of Isis—and of Gwenhwyvar—is that of Persephone, goddess of the green spring; another is that of Demeter, goddess of corn and earth, Persephone's mother.

However, in her next appearance, it is her third face—of Hecate or Morgana, of darkness and death—that she shows, coming with deadly motion. For then occurs the meeting with that “hermaphrodite brig … painted black, with a tawdry gilt figurehead”—the death ship (P 1:123). But the strange boat passes them by; or perhaps Pym passes another challenge of the mysteries. Faber writes that “the redoubtable knights of the round table are sometimes fabled to man the infernal ship and to ferry the souls of the dead over the lake of Hades” (F 3:318).

The passing of the ship leads straight to the bloody cannibal feast, almost a parody of the Eucharist, the sacred ritual of the Grail mysteries. Pym shrinks in horror but presides over the lots and ultimately participates, as Graves says the new king partakes of the body of the old in the primitive mystery of the White Goddess.⁵⁴

Augustus dies on 1 August, the day of Lugnasadh, the main summer festival of the Celtic Cycle.⁵⁵ The “Lugnasad” in Ireland celebrated the marriage of the sun-god Lug to the earth-goddess.⁵⁶ In Greek and Celtic myth, the new king eats some “royal” part of the dead king's body; through “this alternate eucharistic sacrifice,” he makes “royalty continuous, each king being in turn the Sun-god beloved of the reigning Moon-goddess.”⁵⁷ The day thus celebrates the beginning of the second half of an even more ancient year, the year after the death of the White Goddess's king, “as soon as the power of the sun” begins “to decline in the summer.”⁵⁸ Another young man, “his twin, or supposed twin,” then becomes the queen's lover: “His tanist or other self … succeeds him for the second half of the year.”⁵⁹ Sometimes a substitute is made for the hero-king, a “mock-king” who dies in his place, allowing him to reign a whole year—or longer. This may throw some light on Poe's comment on the relation of Arthur and Augustus, so close in “state of mind”: “It is probable, indeed, that our intimate communion had resulted in a partial interchange of character” (P 1:65).

The character of Dirk Peters too receives illumination from Arthurian material, where an ugly and terrifying dwarf as guide may become in the end a selfless savior and friend.⁶⁰ Celtic dwarfs sometimes are “grotesquely ugly” and frightening, and they command unusually great strength. Their moods are various, ranging from hostile and surly to helpful, jocular, and even noble. And their characteristic roles include “gracious host, combative opponent, truculent servant, supernatural helper.”⁶¹ In more than one romance, the dwarf conducts the hero to a supernatural realm. Also, a close relationship exists between Morgan le Fay and a number of dwarfs, often portrayed as her servants or messengers.⁶² Dirk Peters is described as a half-breed Indian, notable for “the natural ferocity of his countenance” and his warped stature, “four feet eight inches high,” but with limbs “of the most Herculean mould” and the merriment “of a demon” (P 1:87). He has “prodigious strength” (P 1:87); when he stabs Parker from behind, the condemned man falls dead immediately (P 1:135). But Peters befriends Pym and Augustus, and toward the end he saves Pym's life in a near superhuman effort.⁶³ In a real change for that time, Pym refers to them together as “white men” (P 1:185).

Faber, as he relates the myth, turns from Arthur's own story to consider his knights riding “enchanted boats” that convey them on “some desperate adventure.” The knight, he says, “steps into the vessel: and, in an instant … is wafted … full three thousand leagues to the precise scene of action” (F 3:320). Such seems to be the case with the rescuing vessel, the Jane Guy, as she wafts Pym and Peters southward toward the pole. Surviving another terrible gale, Captain Guy, using a central word of the story, calls the escape of his vessel “little less than miraculous” (P 1:148-50). Pym himself seems marvelously to have grown in authority; at every chance he urges the captain on: “(For in some way, hardly known to myself, I had acquired much influence over him)” (P 1:170). Soon they will be making decisions together (P 1:172).

On and on to real islands with suggestive names they sail, and they seek the vanishing islands of the Auroras (P 1:156-58). In discussing their visit to Tristan d’Acunha, Pym refers to an Englishman by the name of Glass (mentioned in Morrell's original account), a corporal in the British artillery who claimed to be the governor (P 1:156), and he later mentions “the search for Glass's Islands” (P 1:162). It is intriguing to think that Poe again may be hinting with his use of “British” and the name “Glass.” The Otherworld island of Celtic myth, later called Avalon, the modern Glastonbury, to which Arthur once sailed and returned at the end, was the Isle of Glass or the hidden Glass Island—the White Island of the White Goddess. A second intriguing point is Poe's introduction of the Auroras, for one of the Goddess's signs was the aurora or veil, and at the end of Pym's voyage we do find the aurora, and Pym speaks of white birds flying from “beyond the veil” (P 1:206).

Near this point, indeed, the Jane Guy seems to sail out of reality into the realm of pure myth—and on to Tsalal Island. On the way, the seamen have a series of suggestively symbolic encounters with what Burton Pollin terms a “melange of animal life” (P 1:317). First flies by “a large bird of a brilliant blue plumage” (P 1:164), reminiscent of Isis in Egyptian art, shifting her shape to a bird with outstretched wings, sometimes of a wonderful blue color. Then the men meet “a gigantic creature of the race of the Arctic bear” (P 1:164-65), reminding us that both the Cambrian Biography and Rees’ Cyclopaedia say that, “Arthur is the Great Bear, as the epithet literally implies,” and both works continue by stating that the Bear is a constellation “so near” the North pole.⁶⁴ The Britannica repeats the story told by Giraldis Cambrensis of the finding of Arthur's “grave” in 1189 “encased in a hollow oak.” Cambrensis reports that his bones “were so huge … And the skull was so large and capacious as to be a portent or prodigy.”⁶⁵ The oak-tree burial may have either suggested or been suggested by the legend of Arthur carried to the island of Avalon in a barge. Further along, Pym and his fellows come on a “low rocky islet” where they find “a piece of wood, which seemed to have formed the prow of a canoe” (P 1:165).

Next they pick up “a bush, full of red berries, like those of the hawthorn, and the carcass of a singular-looking land-animal” (P 1:167). In Celtic legend the white hawthorn is a sacred bush. The red berries, however, suggest the magical rowan, beloved of the White Goddess and guarded by a dragon. Its berries were, along with the apple and the “red nut” of the hazel, “the food of the gods,” “the food of dead heroes,” planted near “oracular places” and “in the neighborhood of ancient stone circles” such as Stonehenge.⁶⁶ The strange “land-animal” with cat's head, dog's ears, silky white hair, the tail of a rat, and scarlet claws and teeth, recalling Demeter-Hecate's and Morgana's transformations and tree guardianship, suggests that what Arthur Pym encounters may involve not only symbolism, but also shape shifting.⁶⁷ Here possibly is another manifestation of the White Goddess's magic, soon to call forth through this beast such fascination and hatred by the islanders of Tsalal (P 1:190).

On Tsalal Island, the seamen find that the black inhabitants have some strange symbols of their own. Their canoe bottoms are full of egg-sized black stones, and a small rock guards each hovel in their village. Bryant says that the Egyptians “shewed a reverential regard to fragments of rock, which were particularly uncouth and horrid: and this practice seems to have prevailed in many other countries.” He goes on to refer to the Celts and Stonehenge (B 5:200-201). The stone, in fact, is one of the four talismans of their Otherworld.⁶⁸ Later a stone is seen as the Grail itself; Percival is told that it is called “lapsit exillis,” “a stone falling from heaven” with marvelous powers of regeneration.⁶⁹ It is related to sacred rocks like the Black Stone of Mecca.⁷⁰ And, when the Romans began to worship Cybele, they brought from Phrygia “the small black stone which embodied the mighty divinity.”⁷¹ So Tsalal may be the once-fertile wasteland itself, degenerating with a degenerating king, no longer aware of the meaning of its stones or of their connection to the White Goddess and to the Grail.

Related to all this is the islanders' seeing the Jane Guy as “a living creature” (P 1:169).⁷² Later, after murdering her seamen, the natives drag the ship ashore and set it afire in a sort of pyre. When the vessel explodes, throwing the strange white beast among them, they swarm about it pointing and crying “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” (P 1:190), words seemingly associated with their abhorrence of whiteness. Perhaps they recognize the ship as the personification not just of all things white, which they abominate, but of the White Enchantress herself.

On the island, one or two formidable serpents, reminders of the Goddess, cross Pym's path, and fish and wild fowl crowd the streams, an echo of the Fisher King (P 1:173-74). The water is veined in purple like “changeable silk,” the life blood of the Goddess, or the wine of the Grail cup (P 1:172).⁷³ Bryant tells of a temple and statue of Isis “situated near some hot springs.” And he adds, “One reason for holding waters so sacred arose from a notion, that they were gifted with supernatural powers” (B 1:255-56). Pym, in one of the most striking passages of the whole book, states: “The phenomena of this water formed the first definite link in that vast chain of apparent miracles with which I was destined to be at length encircled” (P 1:172).

There are other suggestions that the islanders see the boat as the Goddess. Among the puzzling clues offered by Poe is the language of the islanders; specifically intriguing are the words called out at the approach of the ship, “Anamoo-moo! and Lama-Lama!” as well as later, “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” (P 1:168, 190). These have been attributed to languages from Maori-Polynesian to Hebrew (P 1:318). Hernández del Castillo, however, sees “Anamoo-moo!” and “Tekeli-li!” as compounded from basic “radicals,” which Bryant draws up and from which he says most names in mythology have been compounded (B 1:1). “Ana” recurs in ancient mythologies as the Mother Goddess, and Hernández del Castillo sees the “moo-moo” as suggesting the moon.⁷⁴ Anthon says that in Rome Ana became Anna Perenna, whose festival was on 15 March. She “reposes for ever in the river Numicius, and runs on for ever with it. She is the course of the moons, of the years, of time.” Graves says she is a sister of Belus, or Bel, who was a masculinization of the Sumerian Goddess Belili.⁷⁵ “Tekeli-li,” as Hernández del Castillo points out, resembles her name closely, as it does that of Ishtar Kilili, “a twofold goddess, the creator and the destroyer.”⁷⁶ Interestingly, tek- is an aorist stem of the Greek word tikto, meaning “to bring forth, to bear,” and the verbal noun tekousa means “mother.”⁷⁷ Anthon, though not mentioning Ishtar, does discuss Astarte of Syria. Anthon sees Astarte as a form of the Great Goddess, “precisely the same as the Cybele … by some called Juno, by others Venus, and by others held up to be nature.”⁷⁸ Poe was very aware of Astarte, we know, using her name to identify the evening star, Venus, in “Ulalume” (M 1:416-17). And in Pinakidia he refers to the temple of Belus (P 2:87).

Cybele, one of the strongest of these goddesses, achieved her greatest fame through her love of Attis. Her spring festival, beginning on 15 March, reached its height with the coming of her lover on the 22nd and continued through his castration, death, and resurrection on the 25th. In the frenzied celebration, her followers slashed and even castrated themselves to appease the Goddess. Regarding the amputated penises, Frazer suggests, “These broken instruments of fertility were afterwards reverently wrapt up and buried in the earth or in subterranean chambers sacred to Cybele,” probably to regenerate the land.⁷⁹

Finally, there is a distinct possibility that the phrase “Lama-Lama!” too relates to the White Goddess and may be a contraction of lamia. Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon identifies the word lamia in Greek as “a fabulous monster” from lamos, meaning “yawning, profound, voracious, coquettish.”⁸⁰ Morgana herself is connected with “the lamia, Morrigan.” Closer even to Poe and Pym are the recreations of the creature, part woman, part serpent, in Coleridge's “Christabel” and Keats’ Lamia. All her characteristics—the sea habitat, the serpents, the shape shifting, and her beauty versus her deadly whiteness—seem to suggest that she is a third version of the Goddess in the language of Tsalal.

At length, as the natives ambush the seamen, Pym and Peters turn aside into a “fissure in the … rock” (P 1:181).⁸¹ This cavern gives evidence of being at once the Chapel Perilous and the White Goddess's grotto from which only a hero need try to escape.⁸² Bryant speaks at length of caverns and hollows which were thought to be the residences of gods, saying “that the Deity had always a rock or cavern for his temple” (B 1:269, 277). He adds that these caverns served as sites of mysteries and initiations (B 1:286).

The mazelike passages in which Pym and Peters find themselves entombed contain certain images suggestive of the mysteries. There is the strangely marked wall (“To be shady,” “To be white,”) with the figure seeming to point toward “the south”—a figure with extended phallus, related to Cybele's strange rites (P 1:192-96, 207-8). Most important, there is “a vast heap of sharp flints somewhat resembling arrowheads in shape,” again described as “white arrowhead flints” (P 1:194). Graves points out that the arrowhead in Roman Brittany was used only for funerary or for magical purposes. In magical rites, the flints were sacred to the Goddess in her third, darker persona—“the Moon-goddess as hag.” In the story of Attis, a sharp flintstone is the instrument of castration.⁸³

Fallen from the wall “among the powder” are “several large flakes of the marl” (P 1:195). As Pollin says, “The mysterious powder will become a theme in the rest of the work” (P 1:342). Graves tells us that the White Goddess's most widespread emblem is the omphalos, or round white rock at Delphi, originally, perhaps, a “raised white mound of tightly-packed ash,” later identified with a “mound of sea-shells, or quartz, or white marble, underneath which dead kings were buried.”⁸⁴ This then could be her white powder, these her white bolts on the cavern floor. Perhaps both the black rocks and this black granite passage represent her opposites, but perhaps, as the dark Morgana, she still rules within these caves.

Outside, beneath the cliff, the ground is strewn with “huge tumuli, apparently the wreck of some gigantic structures of art”—like ancient Stonehenge (P 1:198). Rees' Cyclopaedia connects Stonehenge through the Welsh Triads to Merlin, speculating that it was a center of Celtic mystery rites and sacrifices.⁸⁵ Close to the cavern grow hazel bushes with their deep red filberts, as they are said to grow near the magical circles of the Celts. Nearby are two deep holes—wells, Poe suggests (P 1:196). The passageways of the White Goddess to and from her underground labyrinths are streams and wells; at both Delphi and Mycenae, deep wells still mark her ancient presence. Her loveliest white mansions, though, those “splendid illusive palaces,” Faber says, “float upon the surface of the sea” (F 3:321).⁸⁶

Fulfillment comes as Pym and Peters flee the island, descending by the steep cliff. Pym's whole soul is “pervaded with a longing to fall,” but “a shrill-sounding and phantom voice screamed within my ears; a dusky, fiendish, and filmy figure stood immediately beneath me; and, sighing, I sunk down with a bursting heart, and plunged within its arms.” His loathsome guide has become the saving spirit. Reborn, like Perceval, through journey and sacrifice, Pym says simply, “I felt a new being” (P 1:198). He too is finally ready in the rites of romance to glimpse the Grail, to meet the Goddess.

Near the end of his quest, Sir Galahad attains the Grail and partakes of its marvels. He then leaves the sinning wasteland for the Grail castle, setting sail with Perceval and Bors in the magical small “Ship of Solomon,” which once belonged to that king and which now bears the body of Perceval's sister.⁸⁷ So, in a variant form—or in coincidence—Pym sets sail with Peters and the dying Nu-Nu, a native who tells them that the islanders “were governed by a common king, named Tsalemon or Psalemoun” (P 1:203). Now, “a fine white powder, resembling ashes—but certainly not such” falls over the canoe, and the aurora streaks the sky (P 1:204-5).

Twenty-two March fast approaches. Emma Jung says that the Arthurian Grail legends belong to the “springtide of the spirit” because they are identified with spiritual awakening. In the legends, there often occurs “a numinous experience of this inner psychic wholeness … usually accompanied by profound emotion.”⁸⁸ So in Pym the vast aurora—“a limitless cataract,” a “gigantic curtain,” like the ventum textilem, “woven air,” “woven snow,” of Isis that Poe mentions in other works—looms ahead and a chasm opens “to receive us” (P 1:205-6).⁸⁹ Then the vision comes—perhaps only a mirage like those that came to the wasteland wanderers, or perhaps the real saving prowhead of a vessel like the Penguin. It is an ambiguous figure. And in the Grail vision, “In looking at the idea behind the symbol, we seem to catch a glimpse of a dual natured Grail figure … contained within a single image of wholeness, the Grail.”⁹⁰

But there is one other face, one other myth that rises even beyond the ideal of the Grail in Pym's white figure. At the end of Arthur's life, Malory tells us, there comes “a queen,” with many fair ladies. He writes, “‘Now put mee into the barge,’ said the king … and there received him three queenes with great mourning, and so these three queenes set them downe, and in one of their laps king Arthur laide his head.”⁹¹ Other accounts tell us that they included the Lady of the Lake and Morgan le Fay. They do not tell us the name of the third, but our own voyage of exploration has given us that name also—Guinevere. The three are but varying manifestations of Gwenhwyvar, the lady of the waters—the White Goddess, who has come to carry Arthur to the White Island at the end of the world.

And so perhaps Arthur Pym glimpses, too, that ancient, eternal figure embodied anew in Arthur's Gwenhwyvar. Here is her southern throne, attended by her symbols of white ashy powder, white birds, and luminous aurora. As in Celtic Faërie, drawn by the Enchantress, Pym feels “a numbness of body and mind—a dreaminess of sensation—but this was all” (P 1:204). One of the strange beasts drifts by, and many “pallidly white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil” (P 1:205-6). The spring equinox has come. And so Gwenhwyvar rises again for a new young Arthur. She is—in myth, legend, and fable—fresh and youthful, yet older than time, the queen of both life and death—her skin “of the perfect whiteness of the snow” (P 1:206).

Thus it seems possible that Poe drew deeply from past literature and myth in creating Pym. It seems, indeed, very possible that somewhere in his reading about the journey into light of “this wild and beautiful fiction” of the Arthurian Grail quest (F 3:319), Poe caught the glimmer of his own white vision. “Here begin the terrors. / Here begin the miracles,” writes the Grail poet. The mystery at the heart of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym may in the end be most nearly understood in its most enigmatic statement, that one by one links were being forged “in that vast chain of apparent miracles with which I was destined to be at length encircled” (P 1:172).

Notes

1. Harry Levin, “Some Meanings of Myth,” in Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Henry A. Murray (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), p. 112.

2. John B. Vickery, ed., Myth and Literature: Contemporary Theory and Practice (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. xi.

3. Richard Wilbur, “Poe and the Art of Suggestion,” in Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Eric W. Carlson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), pp. 160, 171. Poe explains his own principles in a review of Twice-Told Tales: “Where the suggested meaning runs through the obvious one in a very profound under-current so as never to interfere with the upper one without our own volition, so as never to show itself unless called to the surface, there only, for the proper uses of fictitious narrative, is it available at all” (H [The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 1902] 13:148).

   Other “suggestive,” symbolic, and mythic criticism has been turned toward Pym in this century, beginning with Marie Bonaparte's Freudian study in Edgar Poe: sa vie, son oeuvre—Étude psychanalytique (Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1933), translated by John Rodker as The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation (London: Imago, 1949) (see pp. 290-352). Complementing Bonaparte's work is Gaston Bachelard's introduction to Les Aventures d’Arthur Gordon Pym, trans. Charles Baudelaire (Paris, 1944), pp. 7-23. Early attempts to plumb its inner meaning include Harry Levin's portrayal of Pym as the archetypal American boy “initiated into manhood” (The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville [New York: Knopf, 1958], pp. 108-25) and Wilbur's introduction to his 1973 edition of Pym (Boston: Godine), pp. vii-xxv, in which he sees Pym's as a spiritual and gnostic quest.

   In more clearly mythic criticism in the 1970s, Grace Farrell Lee explores the story as mythic quest in “The Quest of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Southern Literary Journal, 4, no. 2 (1972), 22-33. Kathleen Sands sees the journey as exploring rites of passage in “The Mythic Initiation of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Poe Studies, 7 (1974), 14-16. Barton Levi St. Armand considers its relation to alchemy in “The Dragon and the Uroboros: Themes of Metamorphosis in Arthur Gordon Pym,” American Transcendental Quarterly, 37 (1978), 57-71.

   In the 1980s, studies have been undertaken connecting Pym with specific mythic heritages. In American Hieroglyphics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 43-235, John Irwin relates Pym to the mythic origin and nature of language. Richard Kopley pursues in depth the biblical connection in “The ‘Very Profound Under-current’ of Arthur Gordon Pym,” in Studies in the American Renaissance 1987, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987), pp. 143-75. Both Kent Ljungquist, in “Descent of the Titans: The Sublime Riddle of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Southern Literary Journal, 10, no. 2 (1978), 75-92 (a revised version of which appears in The Grand and the Fair: Poe's Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques [Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1984], pp. 56-72), and Ana Hernández del Castillo, in Keats, Poe, and the Shaping of Cortázar's Mythopoesis, Purdue University Monograph in Romance Languages (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B. V., 1981), investigate the novel's relation to the ideas of speculative mythographers whose works Poe was reading.

4. Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson, The Rise of Modern Mythology: 1680-1860 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), pp. 511-12.

5. Ibid., p. 298.

6. Ibid., p. 513.

7. Ibid., p. 512.

8. Burton R. Pollin, Dictionary of Names and Titles in Poe's Collected Works (New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), pp. 14, 82.

9. Ljungquist, The Grand and the Fair, p. 61n.

10. Isaac Preston Cory, Ancient Fragments of the Phoenician, Chaldaean, Egyptian, Tyrian, Carthaginian, Indian, Persian, and Other Writers (London, 1832), p. x.

11. Jacob Bryant, A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology, 6 vols. (London, 1807). All further references to Bryant will be cited as B, volume, and page number.

12. Charles Anthon, A Classical Dictionary Containing an Account of the Principal Proper Names Mentioned in Ancient Authors (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1841; reprinted 1860). Harper also, interestingly, published Pym.

13. Hernández del Castillo, Cortázar's Mythopoesis, pp. 56-57, 121. See, also, for later correspondence, O 1:266-72 and H 17:193.

14. George Stanley Faber, Origin of Pagan Idolatry: Ascertained from Historical Testimony and Circumstantial Evidence, 3 vols. (London, 1816). All further references to Faber will be cited in the text as F, volume, and page number.

15. See, for instance, “The Philosophy of Composition” (H 14:193-208) and “The Poetic Principle” (H 14:266-92). See also Krishna Rayan, “Edgar Allan Poe and Suggestiveness,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 9 (1969), 73-79.

16. Anthon, Classical Dictionary, p. vii.

17. Abraham Rees, The Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, 1st American ed. 41 vols. (Philadelphia, n.d.), vol. 25, s.v. “mystical.”

18. See also The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 25. Emerson, discussing the influence of “The Age of Fable,” writes: “He who constructs a beautiful fable only with the design of making it symmetrical and pleasing, will find that unconsciously he has been writing an allegory. He finds at the end of his task that he has only been holding a pen for a higher hand which has overseen and guided him.”

19. Emerson, Early Lectures, pp. 239, 241, 257.

20. Thomas Percy, ed., Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (London, 1765; reprinted 1767), 3:xvii, 26, 37.

21. Killis Campbell, “Poe's Reading,” University of Texas Studies in English, no. 5 (1925), 180, 176.

22. Burton R. Pollin, Discoveries in Poe (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), p. 291.

23. This information may have come from Rees' Cyclopaedia (25), which devotes five pages to Stonehenge, but works concerning Stonehenge were among the favorites of the mythographers and were well-known references for Arthurian materials. For instance, it is from William Owen's Cambrian Biography: or Historical Notices of Celebrated Men among the Ancient Britons (London, 1803) that Rees derives his abridged discussion of Arthur. Owen's work mentions Nennius and the Welsh Triads; and, in fact, Faber refers to Cambrian Biography along with Edward Davies' The Mythology and Rites of the British Druids (London, 1809) and the “Morte Arthur” a number of times. Davies' other major work, Celtic Researches on the Origin, Traditions and Language of the Ancient Britons (London, 1804), is listed in Anthon's Classical Dictionary. All the writers mentioned seem well acquainted with early Welsh material such as the Triads and the songs and stories to be gathered shortly in The Mabinogion (partially trans. by Edward Williams in The Cambridge Quarterly, 1833; trans Lady Charlotte Guest, 1838-49).

24. Owen, Cambrian Biography, p. 13.

25. Bryant tells us that Isis, also, “is mentioned as the mother of all Beings” (B 3:320-21). Quoting Plutarch's Isis and Osiris copiously, he sees Osiris and Isis almost as archetypes. And speaking of the Celts, he concludes: “Tacitus takes notice, that this people worshipped Isis: and he mentions that the chief object at their rites, was an Ark or ship.”

26. Davies (Celtic Researches, p. 555) refers to Taliesin and the cauldron. See also Adam McLean, “Alchemical Transmutation in History and Symbol,” in At the Table of the Grail: Magic and the Use of Imaginations, ed. John Matthews (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 60. The Cauldron of Annwfn can be achieved only by a progress through seven “caers” or inner castles. They seem to be related to a series of mazes through which mystery initiates had to find their way. In coincidence or connection, Pym contains a series of seven boats that affect Pym's passage.

27. From Perlesvaus, quoted in John Matthews, The Grail: Quest for the Eternal (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), p. 4.

28. Harry Levin, Power of Blackness, p. 113.

29. Nennius, Historia Brittonum, in Arthur, King of Britain, ed. Richard L. Brengle (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1964), p. 6.

30. Samuel Johnson, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: A Modern Selection, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr., and George Milne (New York: Pantheon, 1964), p. 287.

31. Kopley, “‘Very Profound Under-current,’” pp. 155-56.

32. Phrase derived from Byron's life and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage.

33. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight had become so well known in Poe's time as to be reissued in a collection of its various versions: Sir Gawayne: A Collection of Ancient Romance-Poems, ed. Sir Frederic Madden (London, 1839).

34. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1960), pp. 184-85.

35. Sidney Kaplan, “An Introduction to Pym,” in Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robert Regan (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967), p. 161.

36. Rachel Bromwych, ed. and trans., Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Welsh Triads (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1961), pp. 154-56, 380-85.

37. Roger Sherman Loomis, Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927), pp. 11, 286.

38. Ibid., p. 260.

39. Ibid., p. 285; also B 3:356.

40. Loomis, Celtic Myth, p. 288.

41. Roger Sherman Loomis, Arthurian Romance and Chrétien de Troyes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), p. 470.

42. Lucy Allen Paton, Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance (New York: Burt Franklin, 1960), p. 5.

43. Bromwych, Trioedd, p. 140.

44. One can speculate that three days might equal three seasons for the Goddess and so nine months. Pym journeys from June 21 to March 22 and thus possibly toward a seeing of the “Mother” after a natal journey through her belly and waters. Leslie Fiedler thinks that it “was … his mother whom Poe was pursuing in his disguise as Pym,” the journey symbolizing Poe's return to the womb (Love and Death in the American Novel [1960; rev. ed. New York: Stein and Day, 1966], p. 400).

45. Among the most famous of the prehistoric British mazes is that of the Tor at Glastonbury, regarded as one of the entrances to Annwfn, just as Glastonbury itself is known to have been Avalon. Avalon (including this maze) was presided over by Morgan le Fay and was known as the Isle of Glass. See Geoffrey Ashe, “The Grail of the Golden Age” in At the Table of the Grail, ed. John Matthews, pp. 15-16; also Richard Cavendish, King Arthur and the Grail: The Arthurian Legends and their Meaning (New York: Taplinger, 1978), p. 35.

46. Galfredi Monumetensis, Historia Britonum, ed. J. A. Giles (London: 1844), p. 130; Graves (Goddess, pp. 93, 184) says, translating Geoffrey, that the future is closed to the Goddess's new king: “After this Janus shall never have priests again. His door will be shut and remain concealed in Ariadne's crannies.”

47. Serpents were among the Goddess's main symbols, along with the Ark, white doves, and the rainbow or aurora. In Apuleius' Golden Ass, she holds a boat-shaped golden cup on the handle of which “an asp lifted up his head with a wide-swelling throat” (trans. William Adlington [London, 1566]; revised by Stephen Gaselee [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958], p. 545).

48. Paton, Arthurian Romance, p. 5.

49. Bromwych, Trioedd, pp. 35-36.

50. Owen, Cambrian Biography, p. 14.

51. Graves, Goddess, p. 354.

52. Ibid., pp. 62, 185.

53. Apuleius, Golden Ass, pp. 543-45, 553-55.

54. Graves, Goddess, p. 125.

55. John Starkey, Celtic Mysteries: The Ancient Religion (New York: Avon, 1975), p. 18.

56. Loomis, Celtic Myth, p. 267.

57. Graves, Goddess, p. 125.

58. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Penguin, 1955), 1:14.

59. Graves, Goddess, p. 125.

60. Numerous in Celtic lore, dwarfs moved on into Arthurian romance. The first Arthurian poem in Percy's Reliques (3:26) begins on Pentecost Day when “a doughty dwarfe” to Arthur's dais “right pertlye gan pricke.”

61. Vernon J. Harward, Jr., The Dwarfs of Arthurian Romance and Celtic Tradition (Leiden: J. Brill, 1958), pp. 9, 19, 120.

62. Ibid., pp. 74-81.

63. Ibid., pp. 121-22: “Guivret, Auberon, and the dwarf in the Dutch Lancelot are at first hostile toward the hero, then become his fast friend.”

64. Owen, Cambrian Biography, p. 13; Rees, Cyclopaedia, s.v. “Arthur.”

65. Encyclopaedia, or a Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Miscellaneous Literature, 18 vols. (Philadelphia: 1798), 2:371, s.v. “Arthur”; Giraldis Cambrensis, “De Principis Instructione,” in Arthur, ed. Richard Brengle, pp. 9-10.

66. Graves, Goddess, pp. 170-71.

67. This description is almost a parody of the picture of the Goddess with animal's head or with dragon's tail guarding the tree.

68. Loomis, Celtic Myth, p. 268.

69. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, trans. Helen M. Mustard and Charles E. Passage (New York: Vintage, 1961), pp. 251-52; John Matthews, The Grail: Quest for the Eternal, pp. 19-20.

70. John Matthews, The Grail: Quest for the Eternal, p. 90.

71. Sir James George Frazer, The “New” Golden Bough, ed. Theodor H. Gaster (New York: S. G. Phillips, 1959), p. 310.

72. They are careful at first not to hurt the ship and soothe it when it is accidentally struck. They are also astonished to see two large mirrors in the cabin. While an explanation for the mirrors has been offered (Kopley, “‘Very Profound Under-current,’” pp. 31-32), it is interesting that Isis wears “a circlet in the fashion of a mirror” on her forehead (Apuleius, Golden Ass, p. 543).

73. Sidney Kaplan says that Tsalal is Hell, its water the Styx (“Introduction to Pym,” in Poe, ed. Robert Regan, p. 157). Hernández del Castillo, who also identifies the natives' personification of the Jane Guy with the White Goddess, sees the island as the body of the “Mother” and its waters as her blood (Cortázar's Mythopoesis, p. 58). But the water also can be seen, in paradox, as water/wine in the process of transmutation into the blood of Christ, as happens in communion, but especially in drinking from the Grail.

74. Hernández del Castillo, Cortázar's Mythopoesis, p. 59.

75. Anthon, Classical Dictionary, pp. 137-38. See also Hernández del Castillo, Cortázar's Mythopoesis, pp. 60, 122. Maureen Gallery Kovacs (The Epic of Gilgamesh [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985], p. 111) speaks of the goddess Aruru as creating mankind in the “‘Myth of Abrahasis,’ where she was called Beletili, ‘Lady of the Gods.’” Graves adds, “And indeed if one needs a single, simple, inclusive name for the Great Goddess, Anna is the best choice” (Goddess, p. 411).

76. Hernández del Castillo, Cortázar's Mythopoesis, p. 60. On Ishtar, see N. K. Sanders, trans., The Epic of Gilgamesh (Baltimore: Penguin, 1960), pp. 25-26.

77. James M. Whiton, ed., A Lexicon Abridged from Liddell and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon (New York, 1871), p. 705.

78. Anthon, Classical Dictionary, p. 218; see also Hernández del Castillo, Cortázar's Mythopoesis, pp. 122-23.

79. Frazer, Golden Bough, p. 311; Anthon, Classical Dictionary, pp. 395-96. Sanders (Epic of Gilgamesh, p. 46) reiterates that the old Babylonian gods went underground to appear in later religions and that behind Celtic legend and Arthurian romance lie the stories of the Middle East.

80. Whiton, Liddell and Scott's Lexicon, p. 406. See also Greek and English Lexicon (London, 1831), where lamia is seen as “a fabulous monster, a kind of large sea fish” from lamos, meaning “a gulf, a large cavity.”

81. They enter a grotto like that described under “Magic” (Encyclopaedia Britannica [3rd American ed., 1797], 10:417) as the temple of Apollo at Cumae: “This rock was probably of the same kind with that which the temple at Delphi was built, full of fissures.” The Delphi grotto belonged to the White Goddess before Apollo wrested it from her; and the Chapel Perilous probably derived from a combination of her ancient cave temple, the underground grottos of mystery rites, and the Christian cell. Bryant writes: “I have shown that Gaia in its original sense signifies a sacred cavern … looked upon as an image of the Ark. Hence Gaia, like Hesta, Rhoia, Cybele, is often represented as the mother of mankind” (B 5:45). He adds in regard to Cumae, the cave of the Latin sybil, “It was a cave in the rock, abounding with variety of subterranes, cut out into various apartments” (B 1:145).

82. Faber describes Lancelot, who also loves Gwenhwyvar, as entering the White Goddess's grotto, the Chapel Perilous. Inside he meets phantom warriors and dead knights, but he miraculously escapes (F 3:323). In the high romance of Sir Thomas Malory's La Mort d’Arthure: The History of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (2nd ed., ed. Thomas Wright, 3 vols. [London, 1866], 3:112-13), however, he cannot attain the Grail because he has sinfully loved Guinevere. He dreams of a tournament in which he supports the wrong: “The earthly knights were they the which were clothed all in blacke, and the covering betokneth the sinnes whereof they bee not confessed; and they with the covering of white betokneth virginitie, and they that choose chastitie, and thus was the quest begun in them.” Lancelot, however, because of his valor and nobility, attains a vision of the Grail.

83. Graves, Goddess, p. 429; Hernández del Castillo, Cortázar's Mythopoesis, p. 123. See also, Catullus 63, 1.5.

84. Graves, Greek Myths, 1:12.

85. Rees, Cyclopaedia, vol. 25, s.v. “Stonehenge.”

86. Davies (Celtic Researches, pp. 558-61) tells the story of a prince overtaken by a tempest near the seashore. He enters a cavern, “which proves to be inhabited by the Goddess of Nature.” She lifts him into the air, where he meets souls of the dead, and she then carries him into the vortex of the moon, where he sees millions of souls crossing vast fields of ice. At the end Davies asserts: “This is neither Gothic nor Roman;—it is Druidical.”

87. Malory, La Mort d’Arthure, 3:147; John Matthews, The Grail: Quest for the Eternal, p. 86. Perceval, unlike Galahad, is very human and attains the Grail through growing into understanding. Pym resembles him, next to Arthur, the most of any Arthurian character.

88. Emma Jung and Marie-Louise Franz, The Grail Legend, trans. Andrea Dykes (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1970), pp. 95, 98.

89. Barton Levi St. Armand (p. 68) suggests that “the ‘gigantic curtain’ he [Pym] encounters can be nothing less than ‘the veil of Isis’” and the figure “none other than the Great Mother herself.” Robert Graves states, “The most … inspired account of the Goddess in all ancient literature is contained in Apuleius's Golden Ass” (Goddess, p. 62). It concludes with a wonderful saving vision of her, a vision Poe may have known. Although Poe mentions Apuleius four times, it is always in regard to the same phrase, ventum textilem (M 2:917). He translates it as “woven air” or “woven snow,” saying Apuleius refers thus to “fine drapery” (H 8:304). In Alciphron, Moore, he says, “has stolen his ‘woven snow’ from the ventum textilem of Apuleius” (H 10:70). Although the phrase comes from Petronius, Poe credited it to Apuleius, and he may well have tied it to Isis as he constructed his “curtain” and “veil” here. A veil is always associated with Isis, a central reference being that of Plutarch, “I am all that has been or that shall be; and no mortal has hitherto taken off my veil” (Anthon, Classical Dictionary, p. 688).

90. John Matthews, The Grail: Quest for the Eternal, p. 17.

91. Malory, La Mort d’Arthure, 3:337.