ROBERT COCHRANE’S LETTERS TO ROBERT GRAVES
Grevel Lindop
When Robert Graves’s The White Goddess first appeared in 1948, published responses were generally marked by puzzlement. Graves’s argument that all true poetry, up to and including his own, was inspired by a Muse-Goddess, and that this same Goddess had been worshipped throughout Europe until her cult was suppressed in late prehistoric times by waves of patriarchal invaders, was so learned, complex and challenging that few reviewers felt able either to endorse or dismiss it. Informed comment came mainly in the form of a few reviews by specialists. The poet John Heath-Stubbs wrote a perceptive appraisal [1] hailing the book as ‘a plea for a return to imaginative, mythopoeic, or poetic forms of thought, as distinct from the abstract “Apollonian” thinking which has become dominant in the West.’ Less sympathetically, professional archaeologists such as Glyn Daniel attacked Graves’s use of archaeological evidence, calling his views “extravagant and improbable”. [2]
The general public, however, reacted with enthusiasm. The British edition of The White Goddess sold out and was reprinted within five months. Graves was able to publish a second, slightly revised edition in 1952, and a more fully revised paperback appeared in 1961. Not only did the book sell well, it elicited a mass of correspondence. Letters flowed to Graves at his house in Deya, Mallorca, from an increasing number of readers keen to discuss not only poetry and archaeology but magic, witchcraft, folklore and psychic experiences. Robert Graves’s exploration of Goddess-worship had touched a deep psychic spring: without knowing it, people had evidently been waiting for such a book and it liberated a pent-up flood of responses ranging from the learned and thoughtful to the egoistic and eccentric.
Among those who wrote to Graves was a certain R.L Bowers of Slough. Roy Bowers (1931-1966) is better known by his pseudonym of ‘Robert Cochrane’, under which he established the Clan of Tubal Cain, a witchcraft organisation claiming deep traditional roots and entirely distinct from the ‘Wicca’ which had been propagated from the late 1940s on by Gerald Gardner. Little is known about Cochrane’s early life, and the available facts are conveniently summarised in two books which also collect his writings with additional material by Evan John Jones and Michael Howard. [3] A working-class Londoner, born in poverty but claiming hereditary connections with witchcraft, Cochrane seems to have turned his hand to many things before becoming known as an authority on witchcraft. He claimed to have worked as a smith in a foundry, and also as a bargee on the narrow-boats which as late as the 1950s were still used in some areas to transport coal.
‘By the 1960s’, as Michael Howard has written, ‘Cochrane and his family were living on a modern housing estate at Slough in Berkshire. At that time he was working in an office as a typeface designer.’ [4] He came to a certain prominence in November 1963 with a letter in Psychic News, which was followed by several articles in Pentagram, journal of the short-lived Witchcraft Research Association. It is not clear when Cochrane first formed, or took over the leadership, of a coven, but certainly a fully-fledged working group was in existence by 1964. Late in 1965 he was contacted by Joseph B. Wilson of Kansas, an enquirer into witchcraft, and the two men exchanged letters intensively for the next few months. Wilson drew on material from Cochrane’s letters for the basis for his ‘1734’ witchcraft tradition. But by then Cochrane’s life, and his brief career as a known occultist, were drawing to a close. As is well known, he died at midsummer 1966 from an overdose of belladonna.
Given the shortness and obscurity of his life, Cochrane’s heritage is a remarkable one. At least two lines of practice descended directly from his work – the Clan of Tubal Cain and the 1734 Tradition – continue at the present day. Apart from these, however, his work is represented only by the relatively small number of his articles and letters to have survived. The discovery of two previously unknown letters from Cochrane to Robert Graves is therefore particularly exciting.
The White Goddess is known to have had a great influence on Cochrane’s thinking. His letters to Joe Wilson are peppered with references to the book. In the first of the letters he describes himself as ‘an admirer, and a critic, of Robert Graves’ [5] and in the fifth he writes of how the Goddess ‘rends her poets/lovers apart before finally making them all wise. Graves follows this theme in The White Goddess’. [6] In his tenth letter to William Gray he states that ‘Robert Graves writes a great deal of nonsense about many things, (Mainly because he tried to explain everything), but he was absolutely accurate when he wrote that the protean Goddess was the true inspirer of the poet, and that all real poetry must deal with the themes that She is Mistress of.’ [7] But these explicit references to Graves are merely the tip of the iceberg. Anyone who knows The White Goddess can see, time and again, that Cochrane’s ideas were deeply nourished by the book. It is fascinating to know that Cochrane actually approached his inspirer, and debated with him, by letter.
Robert Graves (who died in 1985) was in the habit of answering, and keeping, all his incoming correspondence. The incoming letters, formerly in Graves’s house in Deya, Mallorca, are now held by the St John’s College Robert Graves Trust. (Sadly Graves did not keep copies of the letters he wrote.) I first noticed the Cochrane letters in 1996 when I was preparing a new edition of The White Goddess but at that time I did not know the identity of ‘R.L. Bowers’. Even then, however, I was struck by the powerful intensity and poetic style of the letters, which clearly came from no ordinary reader. More recently, knowing the identity of their author, I have returned to the letters, and am delighted to be able to publish them here with the kind permission of Val Jones, whom I thank most warmly, and William Graves, and the St John’s College Robert Graves Trust.
Frustratingly, the letters are undated, and the envelopes were not kept (Graves habitually threw these away as he opened his letters). Disappointingly also, Graves’s replies have not survived, and were probably destroyed with the rest of Cochrane’s papers soon after his death. All that we can say about the dating of the letters is that they were probably not written before 1963, though the signature ‘R.L. Bowers’ may indicate a period before ‘Cochrane’ had firmly adopted his alias. The second letter mentions the Black Goddess, the more domesticated and less capricious and less terrifying counterpart to the White Goddess whom Graves had announced in his 1963 lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry. It is unlikely (though just conceivable) that Cochrane attended any of the lectures. But the Black Goddess was described, in material derived from the lectures, in Graves’s 1965 book Mammon and the Black Goddess, which Cochrane could easily have read.
Cochrane’s second letter indicates that Graves had raised the question of Islamic influence. At this period Graves was much under the influence of Idris Shah, whom he had met when Shah was acting as secretary and companion to the elderly Gerald Gardner. Shah and Gardner had visited Graves in Palma in 1961, and although Graves did not take to Gardner, Shah had maintained contact and had written to Graves
extensively about the influence of Islamic thought (and Sufism in particular) on European witchcraft and magic. Presumably Graves had brought this up in his reply to Cochrane’s first letter. It was under Shah’s influence also that the Black Goddess had been envisioned by Graves, on the basis of Shah’s claim that for Sufis, black was the colour of wisdom.
In his first letter, Cochrane mentions ‘a carved dolmen in Brittany’ which depicts both Christ and ‘eight circles with the bell Goddess above them’. This is the same dolmen which he described in his sixth letter to Joseph Wilson: in the same letter he enclosed an illustration showing the dolmen, removed from a book – possibly from Witchcraft, the Sixth Sense – and Us, by ‘Justine Glass’ (Enid Corrall), published in 1965. Cochrane had brought the monument to her attention when she was working on the book, and she had included a photograph of it.
Though the material in the letters is bound to deepen our understanding of Cochrane and his ideas, much of it is broadly self-explanatory. A puzzle, though, is his reference near the beginning of the first letter, to ‘the “Guiden Corn”’. The phrase does not occur in The White Goddess and I have been unable to find any explanation of it elsewhere. The best I can do is to point out that guiden is Cornish for ‘tree’, and appears in certain glossaries of Celtic languages as ‘Guiden (Corn.)’ with ‘Corn.’ being, of course, an abbreviation for ‘Cornish’. It seems just possible that Cochrane found the phrase in some such book and misunderstood it as a pagan religious or magical term.
What is clear, however, is the breadth of Cochrane’s reading, the depth of his thought, and the passionate eloquence of his letters. The poetic force of certain passages is unforgettable, above all at the moment of personal revelation in which he confesses: ‘I sometimes feel when I am wandering around in the marshes of the old knowledge, that the dam upstream is going to burst and the whole of humanity is going to be submerged by fifty thousand years of pre-history, swamping the neat subtopian conventions of the last thousand years.’ Many readers will know exactly what he means.
The letters are typed, with a very few handwritten insertions which I have not specially indicated because they fit perfectly into the flow of the sentences. Because of the importance of these letters, I give them here exactly as written - repetitions, misspellings, typing errors and all. The dots at the end of the second letter are in the original, and do not indicate omissions. Incidentally, until 1974 Slough was in Buckinghamshire, so that the address was correct for the time.
26 Tomlin Road,
Britwell,
Slough, Bucks.
Dear Robert Graves,
I have read and re-read your book, ‘The White Goddess,’ with admiration, utter amazement and a taint of horror. I can see your point when you write of inspirational work, and realise that it must have resulted from quite an internal ‘pressure,’ since from my own experience, that is the way she works. However, I am just pointing out some other factors that might interest you in the manifestation of the ‘Guiden Corn’. There is some evidence to support the theory that the British and French pagans believed in stages of spiritual development and maturity and had incorporated this into thier religious beliefs. There is still in existence a carved dolmen in Brittany that has all the witch symbols and mysteries arrayed upon it, surmounted by a carving in the round of Christ, which archeologists describe as a depiction of the passion of Christ. It dates from 1674 and to the best of my knowledge, (I come from an old witch family and although the family’s beliefs were moribund at my fathers birth, I know enough to get along) the carving is anything but Christian. In this carving there is the eight circles with death supporting the bell Goddess above them. These, so I was told, represent the eight states or worlds of manifestation, and since they appear to correspond with Jungian psychology which is a rehash of much of the Mystery systems, the rest is quite interesting. Also there are other factors connected with this ninefold unfolding of the spirit. There is amongst many, an old m.s in which an epic hero by the name of Libius Disconis undertakes nine adventures accompanied by Ellen and one dwarf. In these adventures all the enemies defeated are of the true mythological flavour, and Libius evidentally ends by releasing the Goddess in one of her most dangerous forms and marrying her. However it is the progress of Taunhasser in it’s original form. The damned thing eludes me, since I am unable to make up my mind whether it is seasonal or psychological. I would be interested to hear of what you can make of it. It has the advantage of the various tribal animals and heroes of the Druidical system in corporated in it, and it may possibly be an opening to the mystery that still surrounds much of the iconography of the old religion.
Incidentally, the battle of the trees may also be a system equivalent to the tree system of twelth century magic. There are many points in common between the Hermatic and Kabbalists meditational system and the trees of Talisien. A friend of mine has claimed that he has worked it out, but until it fits to the endocrine glands of the body, I personally cannot see how this can be so. The kabbalistic tree of life along with the book of Thothh seems to belong more to Appollo than the Goddess. I think that you are absolutely right when you say that she is the prime source of inspiration.
Yours sincerely,
R.L. Bowers.
P.S. My apologies for writing, but I have found so much of interest in your books that I almost feel that you are an old friend.
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26 Tomlin Road,
Britwell,
Slough, Bucks.
Dear Robert Graves,
Thank you for your unexpected and very welcome letter. I find your point about the influx of the Islamic societies interesting, but apart from Gerald Gardner’s covens and Idris Shah, I have not heard of it before. I have been told that my grandfather’s grandfather dressed in skins and horned head-dress for ritual practice Since he was an ‘Old Man’, (high priest, devil, what you will,) I fail to see that Islamic practice or belief had reached so far, since, as you will know, the Sufi and kindred societies did not enact the part of God; Thier aim was to achieve a mystical state vide various practices. To the best of my knowledge, that was not the aim of the Staffordshire and Warwickshire witches. Flags, flax, fodder and Frig was their total aim, good crops, healthy children and some power to strike back at the oppressor was the aim, and in my opinion they succeeded. There was poetry, there was mysticism, but these were either side effects or something that belonged to the individual rather than the group. However, there may be a very distinct difference between the witches of the west and of the midlands. They still used the triple stave or ‘stang’, and used deer antlers, not bull horns for certian purposes (Incidentally the stag of seven tines may have a meaning to each of the tines), and to the best of my knowledge they did not use the ritual star, or the binding thereof as part of thier ritual, instead they used the deathshead and bones. I agree that there has been an influx of Eastern magic and mysticism, but the question is upon the distance that it spread. In my personal opinion there are two distinct kinds of witches (and taking into account the events over the last fifteen years, three kinds) and it may be that they lived in mutual toleration of each other. However, according to some research I have done upon this particular branch, it mayhap that this division was originally social, and there is quite a difference between the peasant and the squires mysteries. I leave it to your superior knowledge to see whether there is any truth in this statement. But as a sort of interesting side line, there is pretty good evidence that the gypsies infiltrated into the English clans, and for that matter else where. They may have carried various Indian practices with them. The whole ruddy subject gets so confusing that I usually end up with fresh knowlegde about something that I had no intention of examining. Still it is something that once picked up, you can’t put it down again. I sometimes feel when I am wandering around in the marshes of the old knowledge, that the dam upstream is going to burst and the whole of humanity is going to be submerged by fifty thousand years of pre-history, swamping the neat subtopian conventions of the last thousand years. King Log has already sunk, but they still worship the memory.
I was interested in your description (one of the difficulties of communication – ‘interested’!) of the physical appearance of the Goddess symptons (Gawd, my spelling). I am not biased towards the poetical aspect but more towards the Black Goddess, so my knees do not shake or eys run, but I do get a sudden feeling of intense pressure, something like an approaching storm. It is as you say a physical thing, almost a desire to run and find shelter. I have also ‘seen’ the Goddess, although She was riding a white horse, maybe it was artistic vision, I do not know, but I was genuinely terrified for the following week. At the present moment I have the best of both worlds with the Black and the White.. Of course I will pay for it later, hire purchase is no new thing...
Yours sincerely,
R.L. Bowers.
References: [1] New English Weekly, 8 June 1948, pp. 130-1. [2] See Graves’s responses to these hostile criticisms in Robert Graves: The White Goddess, ed. Grevel Lindop, Faber and Faber (London), 1997, Appendix B. [3] See The Roebuck in the Thicket: An Anthology of the Robert Cochrane Witchcraft Tradition by Evan John Jones and Robert Cochrane, ed. Michael Howard, 2001 and The Robert Cochrane Letters: An Insight into Modern Traditional Witchcraft, by Robert Cochrane, ed. Evan John Jones and Michael Howard, 2002; both from Capall Bann (Milverton). [4] Roebuck in the Thicket, p. 7. [5] Robert Cochrane Letters, p. 17. [6] Robert Cochrane Letters, p. 43. [7] Robert Cochrane Letters, p. 124.
Biographical note; Professor Grevel Lindop is an author, lecturer, and editor who writes for The Times Literary Supplement and also contributes essays and reviews to several other magazines. His book Travels on the Dance Floor about salsa was BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week in August 2008. In 1997 he edited a new edition of Robert Graves The White Goddess for Temenos Press. His other works include a biography of the poet Thomas de Quincey and a guide to the Lake District. He is currently working on a biography of Charles Williams for Oxford University Press.