Free Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) by Robert Graves

third clan, to avoid incestuous unions. Servants’ children, once they’re weaned, aren’t left with their mothers, though the tie of affection remains fairly strong, and they don’t know their fathers: they’re communal property and begin their life of service at an early age. The most devoted, slow-pulsed, tractable and simple-minded of all are directed to the priesthood. In regions where the commons are unusually high-spirited and need a steadying influence we give them a celibate priest; they seem to have greater respect for a celibate priest than for a three-clan marriage one.’
    ‘Are there any women priests?’
    ‘No, only High Priestesses. All ordinary priests are men; but religious instruction, which consists in teaching children prayers and myths and other religious formulas, is given only by women, also of the servants’ estate. All children without exception have to learn these rudiments by heart, and the teachers explain them in the same set words, revised every three generations or so to conform with changes of language.
    ‘I should like to see a school of that sort in action.’
    ‘There’s one behind those houses over the stream. The children have only just gone in.’
    The school-room walls were white-washed and bare – no blackboard, no maps, no pictures – nothing to distract the children’s attention from their lessons, which were given orally. They sat in a semi-circle around the schoolmistress – the boys in black overalls, the girls in white and blue ones – and behind them a window opened on a hill crowned with a circle of trees. The schoolmistress was installed in a high-backed chair; on one side of her was the fire-place, filled with the flowers of midsummer; on the other a carved and painted statue of the Goddess Mari, in white robe and blue mantle. The Goddess nursed a fair-haired, blue-eyed child in the crook of the right arm, a dark-haired, brown-eyed child in the crook of the left; the head and hands of a wrinkled hag appeared over her shoulder; a girl about twelve years old nestled against her skirt. Her breasts were bare: she held a snake in the left hand and a cross-cut apple in the right, and on her yellow hair was a coronet of stars. The hag wore a high, black conical cap like the one used by Sally at my evocation; the girl was garlanded with flowers and carried a bow and arrows.
    The schoolmistress, a fat middle-aged woman with a deep emotionless voice, seemed not so much to be instructing as delegating for an unseen instructress – who, as I soon found out from her frequent sideway glances, was the Goddess Mari. The children, who were all between the ages of five and eight, addressed their replies to the statue rather than to her.
    ‘Chant, children, after me, the story of Dobeis and Nimuë!’ said the schoolmistress.
    She struck the lowest bell of a chime fastened beside her chair, which acted as a tuning-fork for the chant. The story was in verse, of which this is a rough rendering. It is not my fault that it reads, in part, like a passage from one of Blake’s
Prophetic Books
.
Dobeis was a young man, fat, bald and bad.
Dobeis did magic with wheels of gold,
Stamping them with pictures of creatures and men.
He lay on his bed at the open window,
He said to the gold wheels: ‘Out into the world,
Be the world’s ruin!’
     
    Everywhere they rolled, into every house and farm,
Bewitching the people, rousing them to hate,
Death was in those wheels, plague and misery.
They rolled against custom, they rolled over love,
All the five estates into confusion fell.
     
    The wheels assumed captainship,
The wheels recorded all,
The wheels clamped the commons in golden fetters,
The wheels forced the servants to serve without love,
The wheels annulled the magic of the magicians.
     
    Dobeis, lying there by the open window,
Laughed as he saw the ruin of the land
Cut up and wasted by the golden wheels,
Laughed as he saw the ruin of the town
Crushed into rubble by the golden