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The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth
The White Goddess is perhaps the finest of Robert Graves's works on the psychological and mythological sources of poetry. In this tapestry of poetic and religious scholarship, Graves explores the stories behind the earliest of European deities—the White Goddess of Birth, Love, and Death—who was worshipped under countless titles. He also uncovers the obscure and mysterious power of "pure poetry" and its peculiar and mythic language.
512 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1948
About the author
Robert Graves
481 books1,656 followersRobert von Ranke Graves (1895-1985), born in Wimbledon, received his early education at King's College School and Copthorne Prep School, Wimbledon & Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. While at Charterhouse in 1912, he fell in love with G.H. Johnstone, a boy of fourteen ("Dick" in Goodbye to All That) When challenged by the headmaster he defended himself by citing Plato, Greek poets, Michelangelo & Shakespeare, "who had felt as I did".
At the outbreak of WWI, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about his experience of front line conflict. In later years he omitted war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom". At the Battle of the Somme he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die, and indeed was officially reported as 'died of wounds'. He gradually recovered. Apart from a brief spell back in France, he spent the rest of the war in England.
One of Graves's closest friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also an officer in the RWF. In 1917 Sassoon tried to rebel against the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves, who feared Sassoon could face a court martial, intervened with the military authorities and persuaded them that he was suffering from shell shock, and to treat him accordingly. Graves also suffered from shell shock, or neurasthenia as it is sometimes called, although he was never hospitalised for it.
Biographers document the story well. It is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's collection Fairies & Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Through Sassoon, he also became friends with Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of 12 Apostle spoons".
Following his marriage and the end of the war, Graves belatedly took up his place at St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split with his wife under highly emotional circumstances before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal Epilogue, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928).
In 1927, he published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T.E. Lawrence. Good-bye to All That (1929, revised and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Sassoon. In 1934 he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complexly compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.
During the early 1970s Graves began to suffer from increasingly severe memory loss, and by his eightieth birthday in 1975 he had come to the end of his working life. By 1975 he had published more than 140 works. He survived for ten more years in an increasingly dependent condition until he died from heart failure.
At the outbreak of WWI, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about his experience of front line conflict. In later years he omitted war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom". At the Battle of the Somme he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die, and indeed was officially reported as 'died of wounds'. He gradually recovered. Apart from a brief spell back in France, he spent the rest of the war in England.
One of Graves's closest friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was also an officer in the RWF. In 1917 Sassoon tried to rebel against the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves, who feared Sassoon could face a court martial, intervened with the military authorities and persuaded them that he was suffering from shell shock, and to treat him accordingly. Graves also suffered from shell shock, or neurasthenia as it is sometimes called, although he was never hospitalised for it.
Biographers document the story well. It is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's collection Fairies & Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Through Sassoon, he also became friends with Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of 12 Apostle spoons".
Following his marriage and the end of the war, Graves belatedly took up his place at St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children and the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split with his wife under highly emotional circumstances before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal Epilogue, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928).
In 1927, he published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T.E. Lawrence. Good-bye to All That (1929, revised and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Sassoon. In 1934 he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complexly compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.
During the early 1970s Graves began to suffer from increasingly severe memory loss, and by his eightieth birthday in 1975 he had come to the end of his working life. By 1975 he had published more than 140 works. He survived for ten more years in an increasingly dependent condition until he died from heart failure.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 236 reviews
July 24, 2010
All right, let me honest and start by saying this was totally my favorite book in the entire universe when I was, like, 11. Hands down. It gave me my first sense of what scholarship might be - if it were actually fun.
Now I did end up becoming a professional scholar, and one who probably does have too much fun for his own good, so perhaps a word here is in order.
Those people who say the book provides zero evidence for its points - all I can say is, "yeah, that's right. It's kind of a joke. Or... well, Graves does insist that poetic truth is not a totally different truth, not to be judged by prose criteria of truth, but that it should always be at least true on the prose level and also something more (that something more being magical, profound, etc etc). But the question is always: is that very assertion part of the joke as well. Because what is magic? It's something that's both true, and a fraud, a trick, but it's true because you can carry it off. And what makes Graves so much fun is that he can always carry it off. When he says that he's solved some ancient mystery - why are fish used as a symbol for Christ - by time-traveling in a poetic trance and overhearing a conversation between two Roman literari c100 AD, he's obviously not asking to be judged by normal scholarly standards. He's having fun, and saying, "well, tell me it _isn't_ true!"
What I love about Graves is that he writes about religious devotion, of utter subordination to a terrifying entrancing but ultimately destructive goddess-muse, in such a way as to imply absolute subordination, but in fact, turns it into a license to do absolutely anything he pleases. His biographers always seem to miss this, presenting him as a sort of pathetic wimp in the sway of all these headstrong domineering women. In fact, you read books like this, or even more perhaps his essays on poetry, and you meet someone utterly different: someone who is having more fun than any professional scholar would ever be allowed to, sounding off on any topic in a way that's simultaneously outrageous, ground-breaking, profound, world-shattering, and probably, on some level, also, ridiculously untrue. What's the real game and what's his aim in playing it? That's half the fun. You can never be completely sure. But like any great theorist (and to be honest, I sometimes think Deleuze and Derrida, etc, are really doing exactly the same thing) the point is not to spend the rest of our lives deciding whether we adore him like a god or revile him, but to take it as a demonstration that it's possible to have just as much fun ourselves. That's what I did, without ever realizing that's what I was doing. And in retrospect, I'm not sure my career was better for it, but my writing was, and probably, arguably, the world is - if only slightly.
Now I did end up becoming a professional scholar, and one who probably does have too much fun for his own good, so perhaps a word here is in order.
Those people who say the book provides zero evidence for its points - all I can say is, "yeah, that's right. It's kind of a joke. Or... well, Graves does insist that poetic truth is not a totally different truth, not to be judged by prose criteria of truth, but that it should always be at least true on the prose level and also something more (that something more being magical, profound, etc etc). But the question is always: is that very assertion part of the joke as well. Because what is magic? It's something that's both true, and a fraud, a trick, but it's true because you can carry it off. And what makes Graves so much fun is that he can always carry it off. When he says that he's solved some ancient mystery - why are fish used as a symbol for Christ - by time-traveling in a poetic trance and overhearing a conversation between two Roman literari c100 AD, he's obviously not asking to be judged by normal scholarly standards. He's having fun, and saying, "well, tell me it _isn't_ true!"
What I love about Graves is that he writes about religious devotion, of utter subordination to a terrifying entrancing but ultimately destructive goddess-muse, in such a way as to imply absolute subordination, but in fact, turns it into a license to do absolutely anything he pleases. His biographers always seem to miss this, presenting him as a sort of pathetic wimp in the sway of all these headstrong domineering women. In fact, you read books like this, or even more perhaps his essays on poetry, and you meet someone utterly different: someone who is having more fun than any professional scholar would ever be allowed to, sounding off on any topic in a way that's simultaneously outrageous, ground-breaking, profound, world-shattering, and probably, on some level, also, ridiculously untrue. What's the real game and what's his aim in playing it? That's half the fun. You can never be completely sure. But like any great theorist (and to be honest, I sometimes think Deleuze and Derrida, etc, are really doing exactly the same thing) the point is not to spend the rest of our lives deciding whether we adore him like a god or revile him, but to take it as a demonstration that it's possible to have just as much fun ourselves. That's what I did, without ever realizing that's what I was doing. And in retrospect, I'm not sure my career was better for it, but my writing was, and probably, arguably, the world is - if only slightly.
December 4, 2013
O.K., so Graves was dead wrong about the Celts. Still, the "White Goddess" thesis--that patriarchal invaders suppressed the mother-goddess religions of the Aegean and Ancient Near East, traces of which managed to survive in Europe, especially in the minstrel lore of Ireland and Wales--is thanks to Graves now part and parcel of the modern. The real fun of the book isn't so much in its truth as the getting there: a waterslide ride of educated guessing, crossword logic, and speculative buccaneering that reads more like a postmodern novel than straight up scholarship. Graves's is the grandmammy of all conspiracy theories, setting the stage for Pynchon & Eco and us.
May 30, 2013
Rambling nonsense when he steps beyond what he knows.
Most of his ideas on the "tree alphabet" are his own and sourceless. Unfortunately a lot of the celtic magic industry owes too much to this as a gospel of sorts. Better and more scholarly book are out there if you can be bothered looking. But they are without the glamour of Graves which I suppose is part of the attraction to the sidhe huggers.
Edit:
This is a dreadful book...yet I’ve read it twice, the 1st time in the early ‘80s and again in ’13. It hasn’t gotten any better. On the re-read I read more critically and cross ref’d him. After the 1st read I had a bee in my bunnet about his made up tree alphabet nonsense (see above review), on the 2nd read I now realise he just made up pretty much everything else too.
Graves (and I am a fanboy for most of his other work) comes across as an arrogant arse.
He seems to use the No True Scotsman attitude when discussing poetry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_...). He discounts any poetry as not being real or true poetry if it doesn't conform to his standards. He seems to be saying you have to be of celtic stock (whatever that means) and a heterosexual male to be a poet...and only if you write on certain themes and have muse like inspiration at that...'cause that's all women are good for...well that and the orgies and temple prostitution obviously.
And he makes no mention of Burns or Yeats who pretty much fit his definition (sour grapes on his part?).
I like his fiction but I have the feeling he was a bit of a dick.
But this book isn’t really about poetry or history....yet it claims to be. The historical evidence is hammered and moulded to fit his hypothesis with contradictory ideas ignored or glossed over. Graves bases a chunk of his arguments on a re-ordering of the old Welsh poem Cad Goddeu, yet he has no Welsh and uses, in his own words, "D.W. Nash's mid-Victorian translation, said to be unreliable but the best at present available."
Then he goes ahead and juggles the order.
See what's going on here?
He's making it up based on a poor translation, hammering the facts to fit his hypothesis.
If someone had no understanding of any other text's original language and then used a poor translation prior to re-ordering the entire text to fit an idea would we be as tolerant?
I hope not.
And this technique isn’t limited to this one poem, it is his default method.
He says, amongst other things, "this must be a mistake" and "a stanza has been suppressed" when he isn't getting the confirmation of his hypothesis he wants. He has re-arranged entire poems.
There's a lot of "perhaps", "likely", "seemed", "suggests", "obviously", "evidently", in this book...they miraculously transform into what Graves sees as solid fact, at the end of ch.7 "conclusive proof".
Yet he has claimed "fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth."
Sniff, sniff...what's that smell?
Also, he seems to show little demarcation between deities (x appears to be y, who is actually z, but on closer inspection is really the same as a, who was worshipped as b etc etc etc). This syncretism is all well and good, but when the Venn diagram of deities ignores everything but the bits that fit his hypothesis and the focus is purely on the overlap I start to smell shite in the argument.
I'm with Francis Bacon when he says:
“The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.”
Rambling, havering keech...data ignored or manipulated, poems re-ordered, poets sneered at, women paradoxically praised and dismissed in equal measure...had he just been chucked by his wench/bird/muse prior to this or something?
I got the impression Graves was a bit xenophobic, homophobic and sexist (OK, I don't know if he actually was homophobic etc...but he occasionally makes comments that are a bit off). Now there may be a part of this due to him being a man of his time...but considering the hypothesis in TWG it jars a bit. But there's an irony here though isn't there? That a foundation text for modern wicca and neo-paganism, both fairly female friendly, is this way. How do folk square it in their heads? I think there's some cognitive dissonance going on...
As a foundation text for modern paganism it often appears in bibliographies and notes to bolster neo-pagan ideas...yet it has little substance itself. Many of them unquestioningly use TWG as a source and assume an authenticity and robustness to Graves’ arguments that just isn't there...like building in a bog without making sure the pilings are solid.
He has become an authority figure and this text is used again and again when discussing ideas around goddessy and sacred king type ideas, yet on examination many areas he explores in TWG are his own with little basis in ancient tradition. I wonder if many folk that have read this have actually paid attention, I mean critically read it? Or if most just assume Graves is correct and then use him as ref?
He seems as enthusiastic about ritual killings and orgies as he is about the whole tree/calendar/alphabet thing...yet I've never known anyone that has read this book wax as lyrically on those subjects.
And the drivel he spouts on lame kings is interesting but still drivel...
But I can get Graves’ text as a personal mythology and as something to give insight into his other work...and I get the fact that he had no intention of starting a pagan revival (see his disdain for wicca and neo-paganism in general in some of his work). But, for me, it is pretty much all supposition based on guesswork based on reworking of bad translations.
Now I shall put this away and never touch it again...after I have driven a stake through the text...the stake obviously of a wood that has suitably mythopoeic resonances for true poets.
Most of his ideas on the "tree alphabet" are his own and sourceless. Unfortunately a lot of the celtic magic industry owes too much to this as a gospel of sorts. Better and more scholarly book are out there if you can be bothered looking. But they are without the glamour of Graves which I suppose is part of the attraction to the sidhe huggers.
Edit:
This is a dreadful book...yet I’ve read it twice, the 1st time in the early ‘80s and again in ’13. It hasn’t gotten any better. On the re-read I read more critically and cross ref’d him. After the 1st read I had a bee in my bunnet about his made up tree alphabet nonsense (see above review), on the 2nd read I now realise he just made up pretty much everything else too.
Graves (and I am a fanboy for most of his other work) comes across as an arrogant arse.
He seems to use the No True Scotsman attitude when discussing poetry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_...). He discounts any poetry as not being real or true poetry if it doesn't conform to his standards. He seems to be saying you have to be of celtic stock (whatever that means) and a heterosexual male to be a poet...and only if you write on certain themes and have muse like inspiration at that...'cause that's all women are good for...well that and the orgies and temple prostitution obviously.
And he makes no mention of Burns or Yeats who pretty much fit his definition (sour grapes on his part?).
I like his fiction but I have the feeling he was a bit of a dick.
But this book isn’t really about poetry or history....yet it claims to be. The historical evidence is hammered and moulded to fit his hypothesis with contradictory ideas ignored or glossed over. Graves bases a chunk of his arguments on a re-ordering of the old Welsh poem Cad Goddeu, yet he has no Welsh and uses, in his own words, "D.W. Nash's mid-Victorian translation, said to be unreliable but the best at present available."
Then he goes ahead and juggles the order.
See what's going on here?
He's making it up based on a poor translation, hammering the facts to fit his hypothesis.
If someone had no understanding of any other text's original language and then used a poor translation prior to re-ordering the entire text to fit an idea would we be as tolerant?
I hope not.
And this technique isn’t limited to this one poem, it is his default method.
He says, amongst other things, "this must be a mistake" and "a stanza has been suppressed" when he isn't getting the confirmation of his hypothesis he wants. He has re-arranged entire poems.
There's a lot of "perhaps", "likely", "seemed", "suggests", "obviously", "evidently", in this book...they miraculously transform into what Graves sees as solid fact, at the end of ch.7 "conclusive proof".
Yet he has claimed "fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth."
Sniff, sniff...what's that smell?
Also, he seems to show little demarcation between deities (x appears to be y, who is actually z, but on closer inspection is really the same as a, who was worshipped as b etc etc etc). This syncretism is all well and good, but when the Venn diagram of deities ignores everything but the bits that fit his hypothesis and the focus is purely on the overlap I start to smell shite in the argument.
I'm with Francis Bacon when he says:
“The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.”
Rambling, havering keech...data ignored or manipulated, poems re-ordered, poets sneered at, women paradoxically praised and dismissed in equal measure...had he just been chucked by his wench/bird/muse prior to this or something?
I got the impression Graves was a bit xenophobic, homophobic and sexist (OK, I don't know if he actually was homophobic etc...but he occasionally makes comments that are a bit off). Now there may be a part of this due to him being a man of his time...but considering the hypothesis in TWG it jars a bit. But there's an irony here though isn't there? That a foundation text for modern wicca and neo-paganism, both fairly female friendly, is this way. How do folk square it in their heads? I think there's some cognitive dissonance going on...
As a foundation text for modern paganism it often appears in bibliographies and notes to bolster neo-pagan ideas...yet it has little substance itself. Many of them unquestioningly use TWG as a source and assume an authenticity and robustness to Graves’ arguments that just isn't there...like building in a bog without making sure the pilings are solid.
He has become an authority figure and this text is used again and again when discussing ideas around goddessy and sacred king type ideas, yet on examination many areas he explores in TWG are his own with little basis in ancient tradition. I wonder if many folk that have read this have actually paid attention, I mean critically read it? Or if most just assume Graves is correct and then use him as ref?
He seems as enthusiastic about ritual killings and orgies as he is about the whole tree/calendar/alphabet thing...yet I've never known anyone that has read this book wax as lyrically on those subjects.
And the drivel he spouts on lame kings is interesting but still drivel...
But I can get Graves’ text as a personal mythology and as something to give insight into his other work...and I get the fact that he had no intention of starting a pagan revival (see his disdain for wicca and neo-paganism in general in some of his work). But, for me, it is pretty much all supposition based on guesswork based on reworking of bad translations.
Now I shall put this away and never touch it again...after I have driven a stake through the text...the stake obviously of a wood that has suitably mythopoeic resonances for true poets.
September 10, 2008
Graves's phrase for what he does is "poetic scholarship," and I'm tempted to be generous and believe that what he means here really is thought that is associative and fleet, as opposed to simply lazy. The scholarship borders on parody: Graves's assertions are made on what is essentially zero evidence. But he follows his hind without faltering once, and by the time 500 pages is up, you do feel a sort of Palace of Wisdom effect has been achieved.
Where does that leave us? For me, reading this book is like walking through the preserved home of a reclusive genius: Look, there's his astrolabe, his roomful of scrolls, his private "exercise room" full of bright orange pogo sticks. You can distance yourself from his conclusions, but the actual motion of thought is undeniable. The book's a feat, a thing, but above all (I think Graves would probably agree with me here) a solution. Like many great solutions, it sounds as much like a riddle as the thing it solved.
Where does that leave us? For me, reading this book is like walking through the preserved home of a reclusive genius: Look, there's his astrolabe, his roomful of scrolls, his private "exercise room" full of bright orange pogo sticks. You can distance yourself from his conclusions, but the actual motion of thought is undeniable. The book's a feat, a thing, but above all (I think Graves would probably agree with me here) a solution. Like many great solutions, it sounds as much like a riddle as the thing it solved.
November 5, 2020
I came for the witchcraft, I stayed for the poetics . . .
While I was on my one-day book-procurement trip to the "booktown" of Hay-on-Wye, Wales, I stopped at Richard Booth’s bookshop (among many others) and picked up Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. I knew, vaguely, that the book was about the witch cults of Great Britain and something about druids, and that’s about it. I had read several works that referenced Grave’s book, so I thought I’d cut to the source and see what all the fuss was about.
I had expected an erudite study of witchcraft and its antecedents, replete with thorough bibliography and oodles of footnotes.
Not so.
In fact, the book hardly mentions witches (by name, at least) at all and there is no bibliography. There are some footnotes, but they are sometimes even more cryptic and self-referential than the text itself. But I was far from disappointed.
The White Goddess is one of those books like Gödel, Escher, Bach or Hamlet’s Mill: a rumination, of sorts, that only a genius will fully understand on the first read through, a work rife with speculation and some arguably false jumps in logic, but a brilliant work, nonetheless. It is, above all, Grave’s (very well-informed) opinion. I’ve read other reviews panning the work, and I had my problems with it, but I don’t think that it should be rejected wholesale.It is a deep, deep well to draw the waters of knowledge from.
Yes, Graves jumps from god to goddess, from tree-species to alphabetic characters, from stag cults to bull cults, then from the masculine bull-cult to the feminine partridge-cult, implicating everyone from Achilles to Christ in the process, and ends with a horribly trite last couple of chapters about politics and religion that could (and should) have just been abandoned. Graves isn’t apologetic about his promulgation of his own opinions and the fact that he is openly exploring the subject as he writes, either. I find it commendable, actually, that, at one point, he openly admits that some of the answers to the questions he was exploring came to him as he was meditating, as in doing a formal meditative practice. He’s not beholden to the sometimes-stultifying idea that ideas need to come in some sort of controlled laboratory environment. In fact, Graves shows a certain disdain toward formal academia, especially as it dulls the poetic senses:
. . . there are no poetic secrets now, except of course the sort which the common people are debarred by their lack of poetic perception from understanding, and by their anti-poetic education (unless perhaps in wild Wales) from respecting. Such secrets, even the Work of the Chariot, may be safely revealed in any crowded restaurant or café without fear of the avenging lightning-stroke: the noise of the orchestra, the clatter of plates and the buzz of a hundred unrelated conversations will effectively drown the words – and, in any case, nobody will be listening.
I wonder, somewhat, though, whether or not Graves was trying to inoculate himself against arguments from the outside that perhaps the rigor of his research was lacking? While I feel sympathy and agreement with Grave’s anti-University tirades (he has a couple in the book, both reflective of some of the feelings I had and have about graduate school), I also fear that populist anti-intellectuals might use his arguments as justification for their own (usually racist and/or misogynistic) goals. Though Graves only really argues against the problems of formal college education, his sentiments could easily be twisted into anti-intellectual arguments, the sort of which feed reactionary movements. But, since he takes a secularized view of Christianity (and, in fact, pushes for a further split between the views of the Historical Jesus and the Mystical Christ), such reactionary movements are likely to become very confused by Graves’ work. Besides, the gaps in Graves' arguments regarding early Christianity are big enough to drive a semi through. Still, I like his chutzpah and the fact that he's willing to play the provocateur, as he forces the reader to think about exactly why he's wrong. It's almost like he's taunting his audience into reacting.
As a result of all this deconstruction and reweaving of myth, it is very difficult to pin down Graves theses. One thesis is that of the poetic continuity of the worship of The White Goddess in ancient times through the Irish and Welsh poetic traditions (by way of the Greeks, mainly the Dannites, if I understood correctly) and even further through the cult of Mary and Jesus. Much of the last half of the book is dedicated to these arguments. I found them somewhat convincing, but I still have strong doubts about a few of his inferences regarding some sects of Christianity and the Jewish tradition from which they stemmed.
Another thesis that I find of great interest is that the true language of the goddess is traceable through the correlating of evidences in the Ogham alphabet relating to certain trees, which correspond, in turn, with positions on a dolmen, which correspond with calendrical events, which correspond with the fingers and palms of the hand, which correspond with certain animals, which . . . Yes, it gets exhausting, at times. My interest waned and was about to leave me altogether when the book posits that specific positions on the fingers and palms of the human hand correspond with specific letters in the Ogham alphabet. When I read this and the example given, it clicked! This was Thieves’ Cant, or a mystical, esoteric equivalent: Hidden coded messages couched in a poetic language of signs! Of course, this was 300 pages in, but well worth the wait.
Though there are many other sub-theses that I will not address, the third thesis that I found to be of most interest was probably more incidental than central. I also found it to be the most poignant. It has to do with methodology and echoes with some of the same laments as the earlier-quoted paragraph. Graves says:
What interests me most in conducting this argument is the difference that is constantly appearing between the poetic and prosaic methods of thought. The prosaic method was invented by the Greeks of the Classical age as an insurance against the swamping of reason by mythographic fancy. It has now become the only legitimate means of transmitting useful knowledge. And in England, as in most other mercantile countries, the current popular view is that ‘music’ and old-fashioned diction are the only characteristics of poetry which distinguish it from the prose; that ever poem has, or should have, a precise single-strand prose equivalent. As a result, the poetic faculty is atrophied in every educated person who does not privately struggle to cultivate it: very much as the faculty of understanding pictures is atrophied in the Bedouin Arab. (T.E. Lawrence once showed a coloured crayon sketch of an Arab Sheikh to the Sheikh’s own clansmen. They passed it from hand to hand, but the nearest guess as to what it represented came from a man who took the sheikh’s foot to be the horn of a buffalo.) And from the inability to think poetically – to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine them on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense – derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless the images resident in words must be securely related if the passage is to have any bite. This simple need is forgotten, what passes for simple prose nowadays is a mechanical stringing together of stereotyped word-groups, without regard for the images contained in the. The mechanical style, which began in the counting-house, has now infiltrated into the university, some of its most zombiesque instances occurring in the works of eminent scholars and divines.
I may not agree with the vociferousness of Grave’s obvious rancor, but I agree with the premise. We have lost the mindset of poetics, having surrendered to a stiff logic that doesn’t allow for the breadth of poetic expression and, in fact mocks it as an obfuscation of clarity. But this obfuscation was intentional, meant to keep the secrets of the mystical cults of the past, to hide the mysteries of life and the universe to all but the initiated. The initiated have been suppressed, in the modern age. As a result, the skill of poetic interpretation has died on the vine, and we may never be able to bring it back. However, I feel that there will always be a poetic underground that does the work necessary to carry on the essential esoteric tradition of the bards. I hold a hidden hope.
*****
Update 11/5/2020: I just learned that Graves grew up in Wales. I should have known that. I picked up this book in Wales when we visited Hay-on-Wye in 2019.
There is a fantastic interview of Graves here.
While I was on my one-day book-procurement trip to the "booktown" of Hay-on-Wye, Wales, I stopped at Richard Booth’s bookshop (among many others) and picked up Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. I knew, vaguely, that the book was about the witch cults of Great Britain and something about druids, and that’s about it. I had read several works that referenced Grave’s book, so I thought I’d cut to the source and see what all the fuss was about.
I had expected an erudite study of witchcraft and its antecedents, replete with thorough bibliography and oodles of footnotes.
Not so.
In fact, the book hardly mentions witches (by name, at least) at all and there is no bibliography. There are some footnotes, but they are sometimes even more cryptic and self-referential than the text itself. But I was far from disappointed.
The White Goddess is one of those books like Gödel, Escher, Bach or Hamlet’s Mill: a rumination, of sorts, that only a genius will fully understand on the first read through, a work rife with speculation and some arguably false jumps in logic, but a brilliant work, nonetheless. It is, above all, Grave’s (very well-informed) opinion. I’ve read other reviews panning the work, and I had my problems with it, but I don’t think that it should be rejected wholesale.It is a deep, deep well to draw the waters of knowledge from.
Yes, Graves jumps from god to goddess, from tree-species to alphabetic characters, from stag cults to bull cults, then from the masculine bull-cult to the feminine partridge-cult, implicating everyone from Achilles to Christ in the process, and ends with a horribly trite last couple of chapters about politics and religion that could (and should) have just been abandoned. Graves isn’t apologetic about his promulgation of his own opinions and the fact that he is openly exploring the subject as he writes, either. I find it commendable, actually, that, at one point, he openly admits that some of the answers to the questions he was exploring came to him as he was meditating, as in doing a formal meditative practice. He’s not beholden to the sometimes-stultifying idea that ideas need to come in some sort of controlled laboratory environment. In fact, Graves shows a certain disdain toward formal academia, especially as it dulls the poetic senses:
. . . there are no poetic secrets now, except of course the sort which the common people are debarred by their lack of poetic perception from understanding, and by their anti-poetic education (unless perhaps in wild Wales) from respecting. Such secrets, even the Work of the Chariot, may be safely revealed in any crowded restaurant or café without fear of the avenging lightning-stroke: the noise of the orchestra, the clatter of plates and the buzz of a hundred unrelated conversations will effectively drown the words – and, in any case, nobody will be listening.
I wonder, somewhat, though, whether or not Graves was trying to inoculate himself against arguments from the outside that perhaps the rigor of his research was lacking? While I feel sympathy and agreement with Grave’s anti-University tirades (he has a couple in the book, both reflective of some of the feelings I had and have about graduate school), I also fear that populist anti-intellectuals might use his arguments as justification for their own (usually racist and/or misogynistic) goals. Though Graves only really argues against the problems of formal college education, his sentiments could easily be twisted into anti-intellectual arguments, the sort of which feed reactionary movements. But, since he takes a secularized view of Christianity (and, in fact, pushes for a further split between the views of the Historical Jesus and the Mystical Christ), such reactionary movements are likely to become very confused by Graves’ work. Besides, the gaps in Graves' arguments regarding early Christianity are big enough to drive a semi through. Still, I like his chutzpah and the fact that he's willing to play the provocateur, as he forces the reader to think about exactly why he's wrong. It's almost like he's taunting his audience into reacting.
As a result of all this deconstruction and reweaving of myth, it is very difficult to pin down Graves theses. One thesis is that of the poetic continuity of the worship of The White Goddess in ancient times through the Irish and Welsh poetic traditions (by way of the Greeks, mainly the Dannites, if I understood correctly) and even further through the cult of Mary and Jesus. Much of the last half of the book is dedicated to these arguments. I found them somewhat convincing, but I still have strong doubts about a few of his inferences regarding some sects of Christianity and the Jewish tradition from which they stemmed.
Another thesis that I find of great interest is that the true language of the goddess is traceable through the correlating of evidences in the Ogham alphabet relating to certain trees, which correspond, in turn, with positions on a dolmen, which correspond with calendrical events, which correspond with the fingers and palms of the hand, which correspond with certain animals, which . . . Yes, it gets exhausting, at times. My interest waned and was about to leave me altogether when the book posits that specific positions on the fingers and palms of the human hand correspond with specific letters in the Ogham alphabet. When I read this and the example given, it clicked! This was Thieves’ Cant, or a mystical, esoteric equivalent: Hidden coded messages couched in a poetic language of signs! Of course, this was 300 pages in, but well worth the wait.
Though there are many other sub-theses that I will not address, the third thesis that I found to be of most interest was probably more incidental than central. I also found it to be the most poignant. It has to do with methodology and echoes with some of the same laments as the earlier-quoted paragraph. Graves says:
What interests me most in conducting this argument is the difference that is constantly appearing between the poetic and prosaic methods of thought. The prosaic method was invented by the Greeks of the Classical age as an insurance against the swamping of reason by mythographic fancy. It has now become the only legitimate means of transmitting useful knowledge. And in England, as in most other mercantile countries, the current popular view is that ‘music’ and old-fashioned diction are the only characteristics of poetry which distinguish it from the prose; that ever poem has, or should have, a precise single-strand prose equivalent. As a result, the poetic faculty is atrophied in every educated person who does not privately struggle to cultivate it: very much as the faculty of understanding pictures is atrophied in the Bedouin Arab. (T.E. Lawrence once showed a coloured crayon sketch of an Arab Sheikh to the Sheikh’s own clansmen. They passed it from hand to hand, but the nearest guess as to what it represented came from a man who took the sheikh’s foot to be the horn of a buffalo.) And from the inability to think poetically – to resolve speech into its original images and rhythms and re-combine them on several simultaneous levels of thought into a multiple sense – derives the failure to think clearly in prose. In prose one thinks on only one level at a time, and no combination of words needs to contain more than a single sense; nevertheless the images resident in words must be securely related if the passage is to have any bite. This simple need is forgotten, what passes for simple prose nowadays is a mechanical stringing together of stereotyped word-groups, without regard for the images contained in the. The mechanical style, which began in the counting-house, has now infiltrated into the university, some of its most zombiesque instances occurring in the works of eminent scholars and divines.
I may not agree with the vociferousness of Grave’s obvious rancor, but I agree with the premise. We have lost the mindset of poetics, having surrendered to a stiff logic that doesn’t allow for the breadth of poetic expression and, in fact mocks it as an obfuscation of clarity. But this obfuscation was intentional, meant to keep the secrets of the mystical cults of the past, to hide the mysteries of life and the universe to all but the initiated. The initiated have been suppressed, in the modern age. As a result, the skill of poetic interpretation has died on the vine, and we may never be able to bring it back. However, I feel that there will always be a poetic underground that does the work necessary to carry on the essential esoteric tradition of the bards. I hold a hidden hope.
*****
Update 11/5/2020: I just learned that Graves grew up in Wales. I should have known that. I picked up this book in Wales when we visited Hay-on-Wye in 2019.
There is a fantastic interview of Graves here.
April 22, 2021
This is quite the wild ride, dense in arguments that may not hold up at all. But it almost doesn't matter? I read it for the weaving of myths and ideas, and the search for a larger poetic responsibility in a search through poems and myths and puzzles. There's some brilliant history (again, probably totally wrong) about old poems and the modern shift to creation. Before, people learned poems and myths in exactitude because that perfect, exact language had and has real power to it. This is a real call for all of us to keep revising, to search for that place where words have real power again.
My favorite part came early, in a statement that whenever we read or hear something and it gives us shivers, that's a sign of recognition of the goddess, a moment of divine presence touching us.
My favorite part came early, in a statement that whenever we read or hear something and it gives us shivers, that's a sign of recognition of the goddess, a moment of divine presence touching us.
November 20, 2014
I would call this Joe Campell's Power of Myth for grownups. I've been thinking about this book recently, but I have to admit I never got more than halfway with it. Nobody else I know has either, but what I did take from it was worth the struggle. Hopelessly inadequate summary: Graves belives that literature and poetry are magic, real magic. These arts objectively conjure effects the same way a ritual is supposed to work, to make a deity present in the mundane world through a charm, a rhythm, even invoking a god's true name, as opposed to "Artemis" or "Hera." In short, a very unfashionable opinion even when it was written. And the hip, postmodern professors would laugh their heads off at this book if they had ever read it, that is.
Why do I think this is worth your time, especially given the absurd difficulty of the thing? Well, it may be that Graves has touched on a failure of modern literature avant la lettre, the language has lost its ancient ablity to conjure. Nobody believes in it and nobody knows how to do it anymore, and the art is, as Graves says a discipline, like biology or genetics. Graves was one of the last to see therigor in literature and poetry this way. The other important feature Graves brings out is how few and very precise are the archetypes that excite and thrill us, again through invokation, not clever-clever plot devices and intellectual tile patterns. I often wondered why that experience of being moved deeply through words is so rare in contemporary literature. Now I think I know why. I'm only giving it four stars because of the unnecessary difficulty.
Why do I think this is worth your time, especially given the absurd difficulty of the thing? Well, it may be that Graves has touched on a failure of modern literature avant la lettre, the language has lost its ancient ablity to conjure. Nobody believes in it and nobody knows how to do it anymore, and the art is, as Graves says a discipline, like biology or genetics. Graves was one of the last to see therigor in literature and poetry this way. The other important feature Graves brings out is how few and very precise are the archetypes that excite and thrill us, again through invokation, not clever-clever plot devices and intellectual tile patterns. I often wondered why that experience of being moved deeply through words is so rare in contemporary literature. Now I think I know why. I'm only giving it four stars because of the unnecessary difficulty.
February 7, 2020
Wow. I finished it! That may not mean much to you, but it really feels like an achievement to me, especially given that I have a long history of not reading this book. Let me explain: I received this copy from one of my favourite English teachers in the latter years of high school back in the mists of time. He was a wonderfully mad Celtic poet who I imagine shared a number of similarities with that whacky scholar-bard Robert Graves himself. Indeed he called this strange tome ‘his bible’ and I imagine he sent this my way since my major project for his class was a one act play about Merlin and the grail...though I can’t remember if he gifted it to me or lent it and I never returned it. Let’s go with the former (if not mea culpa Mr. Lafferty!) At the time my 16-17 year old self really couldn’t make heads or tails of it and it has since sat on my bookshelf as little more than a memento of a favourite teacher, not to mention standing in my mind as a representation of the world of crazy, oddball ideas.
The ostensible purpose of the book, at least in its early parts, is to decipher an enigmatic Celtic poem regarding a war between the trees which Graves believes holds the key to unlocking a secret poetic alphabet that itself contained the mysterious and secret name of the divine. It opens out into much more, however, since in order to do this Graves dives headlong into the mythic, historical, and political mysteries of the past in a truly heroic attempt to apparently syncretize all mythic (and therefore poetic) truth into two warring factions: the ‘true’ and ‘original’ feminine-centred worship of the titular White Goddess (in her many, many forms) characterized by the cyclical phases of the natural year, the predominance of inspriation and intuition, and the subserviant role of the male principal as both son and lover ultimately personified in both king and poet; and the Apollonion male-centred worship of the paternal Father (or thunder god) characterized by an adherence to logic, political necessity, and the following of clearly defined codes of law, both religious and social, (as opposed to the more loosely understood taboos of the earlier tradition) which subsumed into itself many of the original ruling characteristics of the ancient Mother after it had apparently won the war in the hearts and minds of humanity (thoughts of ‘Hemispheres’ by Rush are of course now running through my head…I wonder if Neil Peart read Graves? Probably not, or if he did his ‘solution’ vastly differs from the one proposed by Graves.)
Graves’ first, and perhaps most significant, hurdle involves uncovering the nuggets of poetic truth apparently buried under an accretion of ancient stories and traditions, both historical and mythic. He is, in essence, an archaeologist of myth and I must admit that I find myself fascinated by Graves’ brand of anthropological mythography (or is it mythographical anthropology?) which is one of his primary methods for uncovering the ‘truth’ behind the many myths and stories he uses as his sources. Stating the problem himself, Graves says:
Not surprisingly, given the poem he is starting from, Graves begins with the Celtic tradition, tracing his understanding of its sources and meanings, and can I just say that I find it intriguing that a man who apparently had no specific background in Celtic studies and, I believe, could not read or speak any Celtic tongue wrote so authoritatively on the hidden mysteries and ‘true meaning’ behind a seminal Celtic poem (and the supposed poetic alphabet that it concealed)? Perhaps more surprisingly is the fact that Graves soon calls on his real area of expertise, the Greek myths, drawing direct parallels between them and the Celtic mythic ideas he claims to see in the poem. Graves doesn’t stop here, however, and in addition to an apparently large Greek (and by extension Roman) influence, he also sees parallels in Biblical Hebrew myths and ideas, all of which he draws upon in his interpretation of the mysterious riddle poetry of the Celtic bard Gwion-Taliessin. A truly syncretic creation (or discovery) indeed! Perhaps it simply speaks to the breadth and depth of the education of earlier generations, or to Graves’ belief in a syncretic theory of universal mythology as tied to poetic truth. He has no issue with equating the mythological traditions of Greece and the Mediterranean with the Celtic and pre-Celtic mysteries of ancient Britain and Ireland. For Graves it appears that all ancient worshippers of the White Goddess (and the sun gods and solar heroes that at first served and then superseded her) are apparently ultimately part of the same cult and inheritors of the same traditions, however garbled and changed by time and distance due to the aforementioned “tendency of history to taint the purity of myth” (101)
I have to say that, to me at least, Graves comes across as equal parts confident scholar and raving madman with an idée fixe. Is he grasping at straws or uncovering actual mysteries of ancient poetic-religious traditions? I am obviously not educated enough to fully appreciate Graves fully or give any kind fo final judgement. He quotes Latin and Greek with no translations (and often no gloss) and habitually makes passing reference to some obscure or erudite ‘fact’ with which he assumes the reader is fully familiar (or perhaps which he presents as an assumption to silence those unwilling to admit their ‘ignorance’). Please allow me to quote an extended, though I would say representative, example:
The apparent ease with which Graves presents solutions like this, daring his reader to disagree and often supplying little to no actual citations, is a bit disturbing from a scholarly point of view. This is not to say that he never references a source or quotes an authority, but he is very free in making his own logical leaps and statements of ‘fact’ that come from sources often left mysterious to the reader. Graves leans heavily into Fraser’s _Golden Bough_, which in itself may raise warning signs as to the currency or accuracy of his conclusions. That being said I have to admit that I was often reminded of points, or at least ideas, made by David W. Anthony regarding the migrations and traditions of the Proto-Indo-European societies in the much more recent _The Horse, the Wheel, and Language_, in many parts of Graves’ argument, though I didn’t recall the specific details sufficiently to see if these similarities were more than superficial (or even imagined by me).
It generally seems to me as though one god (or hero) morphs into another with little to no exceptions. Hermes over here becomes Herne down there who also happens to be Anubis in this place…and of course Hercules is peeking from behind his eyes as well. One begins to wonder if there were any fundamental differences between any of them or if they are all simply one ur-god which begs the question (at least in the context of numerous gods from the same tradition): why differentiate them at all? It certainly seems to minimize the need for proof or evidence for many of his ‘findings’ when he can simply pull the characteristic from one ‘version’ of the figure and apply it to another. Ironically enough Graves will freely criticize another scholar for making a complicated argument (that of course does not gibe with his theory) without epigrammatic evidence.
Given the subtitle of the book, I think it is important to discover what exactly is Graves’ definition of a poet. I think this comes down to a twofold definition and a ‘true’ poet is one who is devoted to the Muse (the White Goddess in her guise as inspirational lover) and whose ultimate (or sole?) poetic theme is: the nature of this female goddess and her relationship with her son/lover, the seasonal year-god. In his own words: “The poet was originally the mystes, or ecstatic devotee of the Muse; the women who took part in her rites were her representatives...Poetry in its archaic setting, in fact, was either the moral or religious law laid down for man by the nine-fold Muse, or the ecstatic utterance of man in furtherance of this law and in glorification of the Muse.” (447) To Graves poetry must be heterosexual, of man’s love for woman, THE woman: the moon goddess, who will ultimately be his bane, and kill him as the price of her love and the wisdom and eloquence she bequeaths. It is lunar as opposed to solar, Dionysian (with it understood that this god is the inferior and victim of his Lady) as opposed to Apollonian. The poet cannot exist without the muse, nor can ‘true’ poetry exist unless it conforms to this theme.
In the final pages of the book Graves then makes a giant leap (to me at least) and opines that all of the problems of our modern society stem from our abandonment of the goddess. Graves sees the only solution to the ‘problem’ of modernity and our wrong-headed allegiance to Appollonian modes of thought, the deification of logic, and the mangling of mythic truth with political necessity to be a pastoral apocalypse that will reinstate the sovereignty of wild Nature and the divine Mother Goddess that presides over it.
Ultimately I find myself very ambivalent about this book: part of me can’t help but raise my eyebrow with scepticism and look for any inconsistency and confusion (not necessarily a difficult task, especially for the latter), and the other finds himself fascinated and drawn to the seemingly effortless manner in which Graves is able to pull together an (almost) elegant theory from the admittedly complex mare’s nest of ideas he works with. I’m glad I read it, but would warn prospective readers that they are likely in for an arduous journey.
The ostensible purpose of the book, at least in its early parts, is to decipher an enigmatic Celtic poem regarding a war between the trees which Graves believes holds the key to unlocking a secret poetic alphabet that itself contained the mysterious and secret name of the divine. It opens out into much more, however, since in order to do this Graves dives headlong into the mythic, historical, and political mysteries of the past in a truly heroic attempt to apparently syncretize all mythic (and therefore poetic) truth into two warring factions: the ‘true’ and ‘original’ feminine-centred worship of the titular White Goddess (in her many, many forms) characterized by the cyclical phases of the natural year, the predominance of inspriation and intuition, and the subserviant role of the male principal as both son and lover ultimately personified in both king and poet; and the Apollonion male-centred worship of the paternal Father (or thunder god) characterized by an adherence to logic, political necessity, and the following of clearly defined codes of law, both religious and social, (as opposed to the more loosely understood taboos of the earlier tradition) which subsumed into itself many of the original ruling characteristics of the ancient Mother after it had apparently won the war in the hearts and minds of humanity (thoughts of ‘Hemispheres’ by Rush are of course now running through my head…I wonder if Neil Peart read Graves? Probably not, or if he did his ‘solution’ vastly differs from the one proposed by Graves.)
Graves’ first, and perhaps most significant, hurdle involves uncovering the nuggets of poetic truth apparently buried under an accretion of ancient stories and traditions, both historical and mythic. He is, in essence, an archaeologist of myth and I must admit that I find myself fascinated by Graves’ brand of anthropological mythography (or is it mythographical anthropology?) which is one of his primary methods for uncovering the ‘truth’ behind the many myths and stories he uses as his sources. Stating the problem himself, Graves says:
The poetic language of myth and symbol used in ancient Europe was not, in principle, a difficult one, but became confused, with the passage of time, by frequent modifications due to religious, social and linguistic change, and by the tendency of history to taint the purity of myth – that is to say the accidental events in the life of a king who bore a divine name were often incorporated in the seasonal myth which gave him the title to royalty. (101)
Not surprisingly, given the poem he is starting from, Graves begins with the Celtic tradition, tracing his understanding of its sources and meanings, and can I just say that I find it intriguing that a man who apparently had no specific background in Celtic studies and, I believe, could not read or speak any Celtic tongue wrote so authoritatively on the hidden mysteries and ‘true meaning’ behind a seminal Celtic poem (and the supposed poetic alphabet that it concealed)? Perhaps more surprisingly is the fact that Graves soon calls on his real area of expertise, the Greek myths, drawing direct parallels between them and the Celtic mythic ideas he claims to see in the poem. Graves doesn’t stop here, however, and in addition to an apparently large Greek (and by extension Roman) influence, he also sees parallels in Biblical Hebrew myths and ideas, all of which he draws upon in his interpretation of the mysterious riddle poetry of the Celtic bard Gwion-Taliessin. A truly syncretic creation (or discovery) indeed! Perhaps it simply speaks to the breadth and depth of the education of earlier generations, or to Graves’ belief in a syncretic theory of universal mythology as tied to poetic truth. He has no issue with equating the mythological traditions of Greece and the Mediterranean with the Celtic and pre-Celtic mysteries of ancient Britain and Ireland. For Graves it appears that all ancient worshippers of the White Goddess (and the sun gods and solar heroes that at first served and then superseded her) are apparently ultimately part of the same cult and inheritors of the same traditions, however garbled and changed by time and distance due to the aforementioned “tendency of history to taint the purity of myth” (101)
I have to say that, to me at least, Graves comes across as equal parts confident scholar and raving madman with an idée fixe. Is he grasping at straws or uncovering actual mysteries of ancient poetic-religious traditions? I am obviously not educated enough to fully appreciate Graves fully or give any kind fo final judgement. He quotes Latin and Greek with no translations (and often no gloss) and habitually makes passing reference to some obscure or erudite ‘fact’ with which he assumes the reader is fully familiar (or perhaps which he presents as an assumption to silence those unwilling to admit their ‘ignorance’). Please allow me to quote an extended, though I would say representative, example:
No one familiar with the profuse variants of the same legend in every body of European myth can have doubts about her identity. She is the mother of the usual Divine Fish-Child Dylan who, after killing the usual Wren (as the New Year Robin does on St. Stephen’s day) becomes Llew Llaw Gyffes (‘the Lion with the Steady Hand’), the usual handsome and accomplished Sun-hero with the usual Heavenly Twin at his side. Arianrhod then adopts the form of Blodeuwedd, the usual Love Goddess, treacherously (as usual) destroys Llew Llaw – the story is at least as old as the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic – and is then transformed first into the usual Owl of Wisdom and then into the usual Old-Sow-who-eats-her-farrow; so feeds on Llew’s dead flesh. But Llew, whose soul has taken the form of the usual eagle, is then as usual, restored to life.Oh, of course Robert, that old chestnut…well why didn’t you just say so?! I don’t necessarily disagree with Graves, and certainly am not able to in any way assert that he is wrong, but his tone (to me at least) leaves something to be desired…I don’t like feeling that I am being shamed or bullied into agreeing with a theory.
The apparent ease with which Graves presents solutions like this, daring his reader to disagree and often supplying little to no actual citations, is a bit disturbing from a scholarly point of view. This is not to say that he never references a source or quotes an authority, but he is very free in making his own logical leaps and statements of ‘fact’ that come from sources often left mysterious to the reader. Graves leans heavily into Fraser’s _Golden Bough_, which in itself may raise warning signs as to the currency or accuracy of his conclusions. That being said I have to admit that I was often reminded of points, or at least ideas, made by David W. Anthony regarding the migrations and traditions of the Proto-Indo-European societies in the much more recent _The Horse, the Wheel, and Language_, in many parts of Graves’ argument, though I didn’t recall the specific details sufficiently to see if these similarities were more than superficial (or even imagined by me).
It generally seems to me as though one god (or hero) morphs into another with little to no exceptions. Hermes over here becomes Herne down there who also happens to be Anubis in this place…and of course Hercules is peeking from behind his eyes as well. One begins to wonder if there were any fundamental differences between any of them or if they are all simply one ur-god which begs the question (at least in the context of numerous gods from the same tradition): why differentiate them at all? It certainly seems to minimize the need for proof or evidence for many of his ‘findings’ when he can simply pull the characteristic from one ‘version’ of the figure and apply it to another. Ironically enough Graves will freely criticize another scholar for making a complicated argument (that of course does not gibe with his theory) without epigrammatic evidence.
Given the subtitle of the book, I think it is important to discover what exactly is Graves’ definition of a poet. I think this comes down to a twofold definition and a ‘true’ poet is one who is devoted to the Muse (the White Goddess in her guise as inspirational lover) and whose ultimate (or sole?) poetic theme is: the nature of this female goddess and her relationship with her son/lover, the seasonal year-god. In his own words: “The poet was originally the mystes, or ecstatic devotee of the Muse; the women who took part in her rites were her representatives...Poetry in its archaic setting, in fact, was either the moral or religious law laid down for man by the nine-fold Muse, or the ecstatic utterance of man in furtherance of this law and in glorification of the Muse.” (447) To Graves poetry must be heterosexual, of man’s love for woman, THE woman: the moon goddess, who will ultimately be his bane, and kill him as the price of her love and the wisdom and eloquence she bequeaths. It is lunar as opposed to solar, Dionysian (with it understood that this god is the inferior and victim of his Lady) as opposed to Apollonian. The poet cannot exist without the muse, nor can ‘true’ poetry exist unless it conforms to this theme.
In the final pages of the book Graves then makes a giant leap (to me at least) and opines that all of the problems of our modern society stem from our abandonment of the goddess. Graves sees the only solution to the ‘problem’ of modernity and our wrong-headed allegiance to Appollonian modes of thought, the deification of logic, and the mangling of mythic truth with political necessity to be a pastoral apocalypse that will reinstate the sovereignty of wild Nature and the divine Mother Goddess that presides over it.
Ultimately I find myself very ambivalent about this book: part of me can’t help but raise my eyebrow with scepticism and look for any inconsistency and confusion (not necessarily a difficult task, especially for the latter), and the other finds himself fascinated and drawn to the seemingly effortless manner in which Graves is able to pull together an (almost) elegant theory from the admittedly complex mare’s nest of ideas he works with. I’m glad I read it, but would warn prospective readers that they are likely in for an arduous journey.
Read
June 25, 2007this is a massive endeavor and will take an eternity to read. while i love cross-referencing the divine feminine through the mystical traditions, i can only take this book in small doses. imagine the densest, darkest fudge. this is not for the faint of heart, but a great resource. i don't want to have to give it back to ira unread, so wish me luck!
December 4, 2013
Whilst some have disputed Graves historical inaccuracies, im not reading this for its historical account, but rather for its mytho-poetical inventiveness and inspiration, of which I would say that it delivers handsomely.
The attempt to reconcile the Ancient Hebrew, Greek and Celtic civilizations with an Aegean/Tuath De Danaan Diaspora is fascinating and demands that the reader have a fairly wide background in cultural and mythological studies.
Speculating on the Cad Goddeu, The Battle of the Trees, a medieval Welsh poem from the Book of Taliesin, that the trees that fought in the battle in which each tree had a meaning and significance of its own. Graves argues that the original poet had concealed Druidic secrets about an older matriarchal Celtic religion for fear of censure from Christian authorities and that the 'battle' was probably not physical but rather a struggle of wits and scholarship. They did this he claims by employing the secret sign language called Ogham, in this case the Tree Ogham in which each tree holds a representative symbol, sound, meaning, set of mythologies and etc..
The particular poem and its meanings is he claims further concealed by the device of being 'pied' or mixed up with a further four poems, only those in the know would be able to correctly untangle and decipher their original order.
However and due to the excessive overloading of references and origins, at times it seems that Graves has almost become one of his ancient Cambrian Awenyddion' the magical minstrel poets who disguised their wisdom under the pretence of being possessed by spirits, as they did not deliver the answer to what is required in any connected manner..."but the person who skillfully observes them will find after many preambles...and incoherent though ornamented speeches, the desired explanation conveyed in some turn of word"
He could not have described his own method more perfectly, persist and you will find his meanings become clearer.
Nevertheless, despite the erratic, over-rich and often obscure prose, his reconciliation of the Tree Ogham Alphabet with the calender of the Year, the stations of both sun and moon, is an inspiring and potentially convincing demonstration of how the ancient mythographers (may have)created meaning and managed the seasonal and social rituals of their times.
Reaching further, his exposition and extrapolation of Biblical and earlier mythologies and their themes is remarkable.
I value and recommend this work to any more serious and patient reader (who is preferably well read, mytho-historically)for its hidden gems, its tremendous scope and its imaginative-inspirational qualities.
Bright Blessings By Stone and Star,
Celestial Elf ~
The attempt to reconcile the Ancient Hebrew, Greek and Celtic civilizations with an Aegean/Tuath De Danaan Diaspora is fascinating and demands that the reader have a fairly wide background in cultural and mythological studies.
Speculating on the Cad Goddeu, The Battle of the Trees, a medieval Welsh poem from the Book of Taliesin, that the trees that fought in the battle in which each tree had a meaning and significance of its own. Graves argues that the original poet had concealed Druidic secrets about an older matriarchal Celtic religion for fear of censure from Christian authorities and that the 'battle' was probably not physical but rather a struggle of wits and scholarship. They did this he claims by employing the secret sign language called Ogham, in this case the Tree Ogham in which each tree holds a representative symbol, sound, meaning, set of mythologies and etc..
The particular poem and its meanings is he claims further concealed by the device of being 'pied' or mixed up with a further four poems, only those in the know would be able to correctly untangle and decipher their original order.
However and due to the excessive overloading of references and origins, at times it seems that Graves has almost become one of his ancient Cambrian Awenyddion' the magical minstrel poets who disguised their wisdom under the pretence of being possessed by spirits, as they did not deliver the answer to what is required in any connected manner..."but the person who skillfully observes them will find after many preambles...and incoherent though ornamented speeches, the desired explanation conveyed in some turn of word"
He could not have described his own method more perfectly, persist and you will find his meanings become clearer.
Nevertheless, despite the erratic, over-rich and often obscure prose, his reconciliation of the Tree Ogham Alphabet with the calender of the Year, the stations of both sun and moon, is an inspiring and potentially convincing demonstration of how the ancient mythographers (may have)created meaning and managed the seasonal and social rituals of their times.
Reaching further, his exposition and extrapolation of Biblical and earlier mythologies and their themes is remarkable.
I value and recommend this work to any more serious and patient reader (who is preferably well read, mytho-historically)for its hidden gems, its tremendous scope and its imaginative-inspirational qualities.
Bright Blessings By Stone and Star,
Celestial Elf ~
August 5, 2008
It's almost impossible to read the Plath study without this book; apparently, it was a huge influence on Plath while she was at Cambridge (in the flat where she died, there was a poster of the White Goddess tacked to the pantry door). The book is more interesting for the mythological and folkloric tidbits than the unifying thesis, at this point.
I think the mythological connections are sound, but I have some trouble believing that each and every "true poet" since the advent of Christianity has been engaged in a covert effort to conceal the heretical evidence and practice of true poetry from the masses. If you don't attach any meaning to the words Dog, Roebuck, and Lapwing, thank me.
The accounts of superstitions, though, and the tracking of certain myths across cultures, are fascinating, and I can definitely see Graves' influence on Plath's sensibility and (especially) diction. Also, he has a number of theories referencing Shakespeare that could blow some texts wide open.
I think the mythological connections are sound, but I have some trouble believing that each and every "true poet" since the advent of Christianity has been engaged in a covert effort to conceal the heretical evidence and practice of true poetry from the masses. If you don't attach any meaning to the words Dog, Roebuck, and Lapwing, thank me.
The accounts of superstitions, though, and the tracking of certain myths across cultures, are fascinating, and I can definitely see Graves' influence on Plath's sensibility and (especially) diction. Also, he has a number of theories referencing Shakespeare that could blow some texts wide open.
February 21, 2012
If you drew a Venn diagram of unreadable books and unputdownable books, this would be in the small area of intersection. It reads like the death-evacuation of a brilliant and eccentric mind.
December 28, 2012
I first read The White Goddess during a road trip with my ex at the turn of the century. I can remember several days when we were staying at a bed-and-breakfast in pre-Katrina New Orleans. It was neither overly warm nor overly humid, and my erstwhile spouse was recovering from serving as a mosquito smorgasbord, so I had some down time to sit out on the patio and read. I have to say that the first time through this book left me confused and lost; the second time through I’m on firmer ground in understanding what Graves is trying to do with his “historical grammar of poetic myth” and I’m glad I have spent the last few months reading it again.
Truly, you can read only the Forward and Chapter XXVI, “The Return of the Goddess,” and get the gist of Graves’ argument. What comes between is the convoluted path of erudition and intuition (and a certain amount of wish fulfillment on Graves’ part) where he explains the original purpose of poetry (myth) and its perversion.
As Graves explains, poetic myth (the first poems) “are all grave records of ancient religious customs or events, and reliable enough as history once their language is understood and allowance has been made for errors in transcription, misunderstandings of obsolete ritual, and deliberate changes introduced for moral or political reasons.” (p. 13) Poetry originates as the invocation of the Triple Goddess (Aphrodite-Hera-Hekate are just one of her many iterations, she’s also the Muse who Homer calls upon in the Iliad) and the expression of the exaltation, horror and awe one feels in her presence. For millennia it was the religion of the Eastern Mediterranean and put out feelers throughout West Asia until it was perverted and eventually subsumed by invading patriarchal Sun worshippers (aka, Indo-Europeans and Semitic tribes) whose gods (Zeus, Apollo, Yahweh, etc.) usurped her attributes and – in the extreme case of Judaism and its descendants – denied the feminine principle entirely. This ur-religion persisted in a severely attenuated form in mystery cults (e.g., Eleusinian or Orphian), the bardic colleges of Ireland and Wales, and in witches’ covens before nearly vanishing utterly except in the intuitive inspirations of modern poets who don’t understand what it is they’re invoking.
Graves’ purpose in writing The White Goddess is nothing less than to restore the Goddess to her rightful position as the source of all acts of creation – physical, spiritual and intellectual – and depose the unholy trinity of Pluto, god of wealth; Apollo, god of science; and Mercury, god of thieves, who have ruled the world for the last three thousand+ years. (A sentiment shared by a growing number of people today, if not expressed quite so mystically.)
The book is a rather scathing indictment of Western civilization. Here’s the author’s description of the collapse of Western religion: “As a result, all but a very few have discarded their religious idealism, Roman Catholics as well as Protestants, and come to the private conclusion that money, though the root of all evil, is the sole practical means of expressing value or of determining social precedence; that science is the only accurate means of describing phenomena; and that a morality of common honesty is not relevant either to love, war, business or politics.” (p. 476) And he anticipates Stephen Prothero’s arguments in God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter: “[N]o good can come from publicizing either the contradictions between the main revealed religions and their mutually hostile sects, or the factual mis-statements contained in their doctrines, or the shameful actions which they have all…been used to cloak. What is really being urged is an improvement in national and international ethics, not everyone’s sudden return to the beliefs of his childhood – which, if undertaken with true religious enthusiasm, would obviously lead to a renewal of religious wars; only since belief weakened all around have the priests of rival religions consented to adopt a good-neighbourly policy.” (p. 477)
Graves’ solution to our woes is…idiosyncratic. It’s certainly utopian and it’s disturbingly nondemocratic:
And I think many people – while acknowledging many of the problems he points out – would balk at this answer.
I can’t recommend The White Goddess. If this brief review has sparked any interest or you’re a fan of Graves, then you may want to try this book. If you’re interested in authors such as Riane Eisler or Merlin Stone, there’s interesting information here. As I wrote, you can skip or skim Chapters I through XXV, without losing the author’s central message, which takes up all of 20 pages (in this edition).
Á propos recommendations, three related texts readers might be interested in are the Prothero book referenced above, Derrick Jensen’s Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization (and vol. 2) and Thomas Mann’s The Tables of the Law (which has a decidedly different take on the worth of the Law), and then there’s Graves’ own works: King Jesus: A Novel and The Greek Myths: Combined Edition.
Truly, you can read only the Forward and Chapter XXVI, “The Return of the Goddess,” and get the gist of Graves’ argument. What comes between is the convoluted path of erudition and intuition (and a certain amount of wish fulfillment on Graves’ part) where he explains the original purpose of poetry (myth) and its perversion.
As Graves explains, poetic myth (the first poems) “are all grave records of ancient religious customs or events, and reliable enough as history once their language is understood and allowance has been made for errors in transcription, misunderstandings of obsolete ritual, and deliberate changes introduced for moral or political reasons.” (p. 13) Poetry originates as the invocation of the Triple Goddess (Aphrodite-Hera-Hekate are just one of her many iterations, she’s also the Muse who Homer calls upon in the Iliad) and the expression of the exaltation, horror and awe one feels in her presence. For millennia it was the religion of the Eastern Mediterranean and put out feelers throughout West Asia until it was perverted and eventually subsumed by invading patriarchal Sun worshippers (aka, Indo-Europeans and Semitic tribes) whose gods (Zeus, Apollo, Yahweh, etc.) usurped her attributes and – in the extreme case of Judaism and its descendants – denied the feminine principle entirely. This ur-religion persisted in a severely attenuated form in mystery cults (e.g., Eleusinian or Orphian), the bardic colleges of Ireland and Wales, and in witches’ covens before nearly vanishing utterly except in the intuitive inspirations of modern poets who don’t understand what it is they’re invoking.
Graves’ purpose in writing The White Goddess is nothing less than to restore the Goddess to her rightful position as the source of all acts of creation – physical, spiritual and intellectual – and depose the unholy trinity of Pluto, god of wealth; Apollo, god of science; and Mercury, god of thieves, who have ruled the world for the last three thousand+ years. (A sentiment shared by a growing number of people today, if not expressed quite so mystically.)
The book is a rather scathing indictment of Western civilization. Here’s the author’s description of the collapse of Western religion: “As a result, all but a very few have discarded their religious idealism, Roman Catholics as well as Protestants, and come to the private conclusion that money, though the root of all evil, is the sole practical means of expressing value or of determining social precedence; that science is the only accurate means of describing phenomena; and that a morality of common honesty is not relevant either to love, war, business or politics.” (p. 476) And he anticipates Stephen Prothero’s arguments in God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter: “[N]o good can come from publicizing either the contradictions between the main revealed religions and their mutually hostile sects, or the factual mis-statements contained in their doctrines, or the shameful actions which they have all…been used to cloak. What is really being urged is an improvement in national and international ethics, not everyone’s sudden return to the beliefs of his childhood – which, if undertaken with true religious enthusiasm, would obviously lead to a renewal of religious wars; only since belief weakened all around have the priests of rival religions consented to adopt a good-neighbourly policy.” (p. 477)
Graves’ solution to our woes is…idiosyncratic. It’s certainly utopian and it’s disturbingly nondemocratic:
If…it is wished to avoid disharmony, dullness and oppression in all social…contexts, each problem must be regarded as unique, to be settled by right choice based on instinctive good principle, not by reference to a code or summary of precedents; and, granted that the only way out of our political troubles is a return to religion, this must somehow be freed of its theological accretions. Positive right choosing based on moral principles must supersede negative respect for the Law which, though backed by force, has grown so hopelessly inflated and complex that not even a trained lawyer can hope to be conversant with more than a single branch of it. Willingness to do right can be inculcated in most people if they are caught early enough, but so few have the capacity to make a proper moral choice between circumstances or actions which at first sight are equally valid, that the main religious problem of the Western world, is…how to exchange demagogracy, disguised as democracy, for a non-hereditary aristocracy whose leaders will be inspired to choose rightly on every occasion, instead of blindly following authoritarian procedure. (p. 479)
And I think many people – while acknowledging many of the problems he points out – would balk at this answer.
I can’t recommend The White Goddess. If this brief review has sparked any interest or you’re a fan of Graves, then you may want to try this book. If you’re interested in authors such as Riane Eisler or Merlin Stone, there’s interesting information here. As I wrote, you can skip or skim Chapters I through XXV, without losing the author’s central message, which takes up all of 20 pages (in this edition).
Á propos recommendations, three related texts readers might be interested in are the Prothero book referenced above, Derrick Jensen’s Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization (and vol. 2) and Thomas Mann’s The Tables of the Law (which has a decidedly different take on the worth of the Law), and then there’s Graves’ own works: King Jesus: A Novel and The Greek Myths: Combined Edition.
July 15, 2016
Faute de pouvoir donner cinq etrons, je luie donne une etoile.
The White Goddess is a book that belongs on the same shelf as the Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods or Thor Heyerdahl's Voyage of the Kontiki. It simply does not deserve to be read.
Robert Graves was acknowledged in this lifetime to have been one the greatest Latin scholars of his generation. His brilliant translations (e.g. The Golden Ass) and wonderful historical novesl (e.g. I Claudius) did a great service to the reading public by maintaining an interest in the remarkable literary heritage we all have received from the authors of classical Rome.
Having working so hard to develop his competence in Latin, Graves should have understand that rules of professionalism apply to all areas of scholarship. Graves, the master Latin scholar, decides in The White Goddess to enter the field of Celtic mythology an area in which he is utterly lacking in professional competence. This book contains numerous small conjectures that are all wierder than Daniken's contention that the extraterrestrials built the Pyramids into one huge theory of stunning absurdity.
Graves has no excuse. Unlike Daniken and Heyerdahl who did not possess a professional competence in any area, Graves was a great scholar in Latin culture. He owed it to his status in one area not to attempt this ludicrous foray into Celtic mythology.
At least Graves his honest. He notes in this introduction to the second edition, that in twenty years of trying he had failed to convince a single expert in the field of Celtic culture to review his book.
The White Goddess is a book that belongs on the same shelf as the Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods or Thor Heyerdahl's Voyage of the Kontiki. It simply does not deserve to be read.
Robert Graves was acknowledged in this lifetime to have been one the greatest Latin scholars of his generation. His brilliant translations (e.g. The Golden Ass) and wonderful historical novesl (e.g. I Claudius) did a great service to the reading public by maintaining an interest in the remarkable literary heritage we all have received from the authors of classical Rome.
Having working so hard to develop his competence in Latin, Graves should have understand that rules of professionalism apply to all areas of scholarship. Graves, the master Latin scholar, decides in The White Goddess to enter the field of Celtic mythology an area in which he is utterly lacking in professional competence. This book contains numerous small conjectures that are all wierder than Daniken's contention that the extraterrestrials built the Pyramids into one huge theory of stunning absurdity.
Graves has no excuse. Unlike Daniken and Heyerdahl who did not possess a professional competence in any area, Graves was a great scholar in Latin culture. He owed it to his status in one area not to attempt this ludicrous foray into Celtic mythology.
At least Graves his honest. He notes in this introduction to the second edition, that in twenty years of trying he had failed to convince a single expert in the field of Celtic culture to review his book.
August 6, 2007
I got kicked in the face by this book. For real, it walked up to me, said "i will kick you in the face." I ignored it's warning, and woke up 2 months later with a shattered jaw and lots and lots of information about poetry and bards. Wonderful read if you've ever had a sneaking suspicion all of your favorite "myths" had a certain aura to them.
January 5, 2022
Honestly a bizarre little number but quite fun all in all. My closest comparison to this is Manly P. Hall's Secret Teachings of All Ages - though Graves is more convincing and less masonic. It's an anthropological text originally published in the 40s so I wouldn't recommend this for its accuracy.
A large factor was the renown this book has among poets in English as soon as it was published. I first encountered this book while reading the letters of WSG. He's rapturously enthusiastic and I'd quote if I had them to hand. I can see the influence Graves has through this text on his poems but it's elsewhere too and that's delightful.
There's a lot of emphasis upon scrutinising alphabets. Graves' especial concern seems to be the druidic cults and mythologies of Wales and Ireland, as viewed in relation to contemporaneous Semitic and Hellenistic myths. There are some rather satisfying coincidences (are they coincidences?) between the Welsh and Persian beliefs. So we linger over Ogham and various riddles and hermetic decipherments, with some nice segues into the Book of Enoch and Ezekiel and so forth. I do like the way RG skates about the Bible. One doesn't leave especially convinced of the veracity of his assertions but his recommendation for his reader to approach the text with a poetic sensibility seems to suggest to me that The White Goddess is better read as a thought experiment than a pure study.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Graves as a writer. His digressions and anecdotes are disciplined, relevant, and brief, but all are warm, intimate and speak to a portrait of a man passionate about his subject matter. He has a remarkably ingratiating prose style. Makes me want to run back to his poetry.
A large factor was the renown this book has among poets in English as soon as it was published. I first encountered this book while reading the letters of WSG. He's rapturously enthusiastic and I'd quote if I had them to hand. I can see the influence Graves has through this text on his poems but it's elsewhere too and that's delightful.
There's a lot of emphasis upon scrutinising alphabets. Graves' especial concern seems to be the druidic cults and mythologies of Wales and Ireland, as viewed in relation to contemporaneous Semitic and Hellenistic myths. There are some rather satisfying coincidences (are they coincidences?) between the Welsh and Persian beliefs. So we linger over Ogham and various riddles and hermetic decipherments, with some nice segues into the Book of Enoch and Ezekiel and so forth. I do like the way RG skates about the Bible. One doesn't leave especially convinced of the veracity of his assertions but his recommendation for his reader to approach the text with a poetic sensibility seems to suggest to me that The White Goddess is better read as a thought experiment than a pure study.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Graves as a writer. His digressions and anecdotes are disciplined, relevant, and brief, but all are warm, intimate and speak to a portrait of a man passionate about his subject matter. He has a remarkably ingratiating prose style. Makes me want to run back to his poetry.
June 23, 2013
Illogical, unscientific, ahistorical, and weirdly entertaining.
November 19, 2018
At the long last, after many years of occasional remindings that I should read this book, I sort of did - skipping through a lot as I'm not good at digesting nonsense. Sweet nonsense it is, but still... Do not get confused by the title's claim. The book has very little to do with historical research in the modern sense. It is rather a continuation of the noble tradition of the medieval biblical exegesis as well as Jewish Kabbalah. It's interesting and amusing to observe that ancient methodology applied to Celtic myths and legends. Graves did not research the myths - he recycled and revived them, to the joy of some neo-pagan folk who now have their own holy script to study.
September 3, 2010
This is a great book. Graves is best known for his novels I Claudius or his poetry (which was his favorite form of writing), but this work about the grammar and connectedness of myth is a scholarly epic, profoundly interesting and peppered with references to support his "alphabet of the trees" and their use as at least an Iron Age "code" which Druids and perhaps others used to teach and remember their oral knowledge from generation to generation. There has been debate regarding the accuracy of Graves' leaps, but in some ways the book is so fluent and creative that one is simply swept along, and, in some cases, profoundly influenced by it, as in The Fionavar Tapestry and The Third Magic. It is not a book to imagine reading at one sitting, but more like a very rich dessert. One can digest only so much at once. I think of it as a fantasist's source book, if only one has the patience to swallow all the detail and the many references. Basically, it's difficult to read. But if I had to cull my bookshelves of all my books of myth but one, this would be the one I would keep.
January 28, 2008
This book is absolutely fascinating and an all-time favorite of mine. It ties together ancient history, poetry and myth, drawing from traditions around the world.
What this book isn't: traditional history or scholarship. As wikipedia puts it, "Graves openly considered poetic inspiration, or "Analepsis" as he termed it, a valid historical methodology." It is easy to see why New Age, Wikka and other modern syncretic traditions have seized on this book as a touchstone.
On the other hand, I think this book makes a wonderful example of how fascinating and worthy a book can be, despite being completely unreliable. You raise some fascinating questions when inebriated, don't you? This book is drunk on poetry.
For example, his concept of Iconotropy is a fascinating and convincing insight into art history, and the relationship between myths and visual art.
If you like this book, you should check out Grave's introduction to his translation of the Greek Myths. They illustrate the same duality of erudition and blather: the translations are both beautiful and scholarly, but the introductions and footnotes to the myths include all kinds of wild speculations.
What this book isn't: traditional history or scholarship. As wikipedia puts it, "Graves openly considered poetic inspiration, or "Analepsis" as he termed it, a valid historical methodology." It is easy to see why New Age, Wikka and other modern syncretic traditions have seized on this book as a touchstone.
On the other hand, I think this book makes a wonderful example of how fascinating and worthy a book can be, despite being completely unreliable. You raise some fascinating questions when inebriated, don't you? This book is drunk on poetry.
For example, his concept of Iconotropy is a fascinating and convincing insight into art history, and the relationship between myths and visual art.
If you like this book, you should check out Grave's introduction to his translation of the Greek Myths. They illustrate the same duality of erudition and blather: the translations are both beautiful and scholarly, but the introductions and footnotes to the myths include all kinds of wild speculations.
January 19, 2008
A controversial classic and certainly not for all tastes. Graves' erudition in ancient literature and mythopoetics is well known (e.g. his classic reference works on Greek mythology) but his thesis in this book has been contested in many quarters (and proved incorrect in some anthropological aspects) and struck me as largely speculative, although I really can't make a judgment since I'm not well read in this area. I can say that reading this book did spur me to read up on Irish and Welsh myth. If you do choose to give it a go, prepare for prose which is often discursive and occasionally dense. Content-wise, um, make sure you enjoy quasi-scholarly perambulations on poetics, etymology, psychology, and Western and Semitic mythological traditions, that er, sometimes don't seem to lead anywhere. :-)
February 1, 2008
I find this book particularly overrated. It is used as a basis to establish a geneaology for modern paganism. However, it is one supposition based upon another. Very faulty logic.
January 13, 2018
What absolute twaddle.
Sure, I went to this book with the intention of reading it as quickly as possible so I could shit-can the thing in context—but boy oh boy is this daft. Graves was an unorthodox scholar to such a frustrating degree that one should hardly call him a scholar. The man's historical novels and prose translations are fine reads (even if the premiss of 'Homer's Daughter' is dafter than beastiality), but his treatment of myth is the work of a nutter par excellence, with a gleeful disregard for fact. And that's fun, to a degree: one loves the thought of a matriarchal moon goddess. But Graves's uncanny ability to see 71 instances (in 170 Greek myths) of a lost white goddess (cf. 'The Greek Myths') is the work of a charlatan. Even worse, his pernicious twaddle is winning, self-replicating like swine flu for those who delight in seeing moon goddesses—abolished by the intrusive Achaean patriarchal myths and Apollonian falsehoods of Dorian ne'er-do-wellers...and whatever— where there is only blank papyrus. Graves is influenced by scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen, who put forth four phases of cultural evolution, whereby matriarchal societies are slowly replaced with patriarchal ones. Bachofen’s work influenced not only Graves, but also the scholars whom Graves used as sources for 'The Greek Myths'.
The result is bedlam. His work was influential on second-wave feminism, providing an unfortunate excuse for scholarly scorn, as horn-rimmed sexists could laughably cut out citations in Heide Göttner-Abendroth's 'scholarly' book, 'The Goddess and Her Heroes', leaving a moth-eaten brocade where there was once validity. And god save us from Jennifer Woolger and Dr Roger Woolger, whose 'scientific' psychology book, 'The Goddess Within' (don't bother skimming it—I'll never get that life back), shores up its bogus belief in a matriarchal Crete society by throwing Graves's name into footnotes so repeatedly that the authors bring to mind images of the Salt Bae meme. But it gets worse: Wiccans and New Age charlatans worldwide have found their Bible in Graves, because he wears the tweeds of academia and writes excellent prose. But oh, oh, what to do with the drivel in this paperback. Even Heaney and Hughes were duped into the SHAMANIC POWERS of the Celtic poet and his moon goddess after reading Graves. The man was in dementia's throes, perhaps.
The book is fun as a pseudo-science of myth, supposing that 'true myths' can be uncovered by applying the techniques of 19th-century philologists and German linguists; but don't let yourself get carried away with the Gravesy-train. If he truly believed in what he was doing, then he was off it. But I suspect that somewhere in his heart of hearts—maybe to win the favour of Laura Ridinghim—Graves knew he was being deceptive. 'The White Goddess' (like 'The Greek Myths') will be, for many, their entrée (perhaps even single foray) into ancient myth. And if that's the case, it's all sixes and sevens.
Sure, I went to this book with the intention of reading it as quickly as possible so I could shit-can the thing in context—but boy oh boy is this daft. Graves was an unorthodox scholar to such a frustrating degree that one should hardly call him a scholar. The man's historical novels and prose translations are fine reads (even if the premiss of 'Homer's Daughter' is dafter than beastiality), but his treatment of myth is the work of a nutter par excellence, with a gleeful disregard for fact. And that's fun, to a degree: one loves the thought of a matriarchal moon goddess. But Graves's uncanny ability to see 71 instances (in 170 Greek myths) of a lost white goddess (cf. 'The Greek Myths') is the work of a charlatan. Even worse, his pernicious twaddle is winning, self-replicating like swine flu for those who delight in seeing moon goddesses—abolished by the intrusive Achaean patriarchal myths and Apollonian falsehoods of Dorian ne'er-do-wellers...and whatever— where there is only blank papyrus. Graves is influenced by scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen, who put forth four phases of cultural evolution, whereby matriarchal societies are slowly replaced with patriarchal ones. Bachofen’s work influenced not only Graves, but also the scholars whom Graves used as sources for 'The Greek Myths'.
The result is bedlam. His work was influential on second-wave feminism, providing an unfortunate excuse for scholarly scorn, as horn-rimmed sexists could laughably cut out citations in Heide Göttner-Abendroth's 'scholarly' book, 'The Goddess and Her Heroes', leaving a moth-eaten brocade where there was once validity. And god save us from Jennifer Woolger and Dr Roger Woolger, whose 'scientific' psychology book, 'The Goddess Within' (don't bother skimming it—I'll never get that life back), shores up its bogus belief in a matriarchal Crete society by throwing Graves's name into footnotes so repeatedly that the authors bring to mind images of the Salt Bae meme. But it gets worse: Wiccans and New Age charlatans worldwide have found their Bible in Graves, because he wears the tweeds of academia and writes excellent prose. But oh, oh, what to do with the drivel in this paperback. Even Heaney and Hughes were duped into the SHAMANIC POWERS of the Celtic poet and his moon goddess after reading Graves. The man was in dementia's throes, perhaps.
The book is fun as a pseudo-science of myth, supposing that 'true myths' can be uncovered by applying the techniques of 19th-century philologists and German linguists; but don't let yourself get carried away with the Gravesy-train. If he truly believed in what he was doing, then he was off it. But I suspect that somewhere in his heart of hearts—maybe to win the favour of Laura Ridinghim—Graves knew he was being deceptive. 'The White Goddess' (like 'The Greek Myths') will be, for many, their entrée (perhaps even single foray) into ancient myth. And if that's the case, it's all sixes and sevens.
April 26, 2019
Sometimes it's hard to tell erudition from bullshit, and at times, The White Goddess seems to me to sort of walk that line. Certainly it is packed full of erudition about ancient history, religions, languages, trees, and customs/rituals, but the breezy way in which Graves strings these things together sometimes seems suspect. It's not so different from what I've read of Frazer's The Golden Bough (whom Graves cites here and there, at times with the modest assertion that old Frazer in his giant work simply hadn't carried things forward to their obvious conclusions), so perhaps there is tradition or prior art for this sort of work.
The book reads at times like the explication of a mythic conspiracy theory -- I can almost see Graves with scrolls and bits of papyrus pinned to his wall with lengths of yarn strung from piece to piece to demonstrate the thousands of connections he makes across myths and histories and languages. Often enough, it felt as if he had an idea in mind and that he interpreted his inputs (or often lack of inputs) to accord with his idea. At times it also reads like the ramblings of an old grandpa who starts in one place and then meanders sort of aimlessly before pausing to ask "now where was I?" and moving on to the next topic.
It is a pretty readable -- that's not to say an easy -- book in spite of its meandering. I'll confess that I didn't delve deep into the logic by which he made various numerological connections to build several variants of ancient alphabets based on tree taxonomy and linked to bardic cyphers and finger languages. I read the words and understood the general idea and trusted that I could come back to it later if ever I decided he was taking me for a ride and I wanted to try to verify for myself. Nor did I carefully cross-reference the thousands of name and story variants he breezily tossed out as if they're common knowledge (they were a veritable alphabet soup to me). Again, I trusted that he was an ok source and otherwise contented myself to be a willing victim to his knavery. I'll further confess that I skimmed some of the particularly name-heavy sections. These shortcuts are what made it readable and helped make the book a pleasure rather than a labor for me.
It's rare for a book to send my mind in so many directions with such enthusiasm. I've walked away from The White Goddess wanting to read The Mabinogion, learn more about Welsh and Irish history, research augury, and maybe get off my ass and learn Latin so that I can read the likes of Catullus in the original. I mean, I won't do most of these things, but a book that's sufficiently stimulating that it makes me want to is one that really struck a chord for me.
The book reads at times like the explication of a mythic conspiracy theory -- I can almost see Graves with scrolls and bits of papyrus pinned to his wall with lengths of yarn strung from piece to piece to demonstrate the thousands of connections he makes across myths and histories and languages. Often enough, it felt as if he had an idea in mind and that he interpreted his inputs (or often lack of inputs) to accord with his idea. At times it also reads like the ramblings of an old grandpa who starts in one place and then meanders sort of aimlessly before pausing to ask "now where was I?" and moving on to the next topic.
It is a pretty readable -- that's not to say an easy -- book in spite of its meandering. I'll confess that I didn't delve deep into the logic by which he made various numerological connections to build several variants of ancient alphabets based on tree taxonomy and linked to bardic cyphers and finger languages. I read the words and understood the general idea and trusted that I could come back to it later if ever I decided he was taking me for a ride and I wanted to try to verify for myself. Nor did I carefully cross-reference the thousands of name and story variants he breezily tossed out as if they're common knowledge (they were a veritable alphabet soup to me). Again, I trusted that he was an ok source and otherwise contented myself to be a willing victim to his knavery. I'll further confess that I skimmed some of the particularly name-heavy sections. These shortcuts are what made it readable and helped make the book a pleasure rather than a labor for me.
It's rare for a book to send my mind in so many directions with such enthusiasm. I've walked away from The White Goddess wanting to read The Mabinogion, learn more about Welsh and Irish history, research augury, and maybe get off my ass and learn Latin so that I can read the likes of Catullus in the original. I mean, I won't do most of these things, but a book that's sufficiently stimulating that it makes me want to is one that really struck a chord for me.
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September 21, 2010Astonishing. By Graves' claim, the measure of a poet is by his accuracy/faithfulness in depicting the (actual) White Goddess, thus proving the truth and source of his mystical inspiration. All the Welsh stuff goes far above my head but he cites some instances from pre-modern English poetry (pp. 426-36):
- Shakespeare's Venus & Adonis, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and more seriously in the Tempest
- Donne's "A Fever"
- Keats' "Belle Dame Sans Merci"
- Nimory (enchantress of Merlin) in Malory's Morte D'Arthur IV, i
- Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" (the woman dancing with death)
" 'What is the use or function of poetry nowadays?' is a question not the less poignant for being defiantly asked by so many stupid people or apologetically answered by so many silly people. The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites. But 'nowadays'? Function and use remain the same; only the application has changed. This was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family o living creatures among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of the lady of the house; it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the meaning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philosophy, science and industry, and brought ruin upon himself and his family. 'Nowadays' is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonoured." (14)
"Mount Helicon was not the earliest seat of the Muse Goddesses, as their title 'The Pierians' shows; the word Muse is now generally derived from the root mont, meaning a mountain. Their worship had been brought there in the Heroic Age during a migration of the Boeotian people from Mount Pieria in Northern Thessaly. But to make the transplanted Muses feel at home on Helicon, and so to preserve the old magic, the Boeotians named the geographical features of the mountain--the springs, the peaks and grottoes--after the corresponding features of Pieria. The Muses were at this time three in number, an indivisible Trinity, as the mediaeval Catholics recognized when they built the church of their own Holy Trinity on the site of the deserted shrine of the Heliconian Muses. The appropriate names of the three Persons were Meditation, Memory, and Song." (385-6)
- Shakespeare's Venus & Adonis, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and more seriously in the Tempest
- Donne's "A Fever"
- Keats' "Belle Dame Sans Merci"
- Nimory (enchantress of Merlin) in Malory's Morte D'Arthur IV, i
- Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" (the woman dancing with death)
" 'What is the use or function of poetry nowadays?' is a question not the less poignant for being defiantly asked by so many stupid people or apologetically answered by so many silly people. The function of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites. But 'nowadays'? Function and use remain the same; only the application has changed. This was once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family o living creatures among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of the lady of the house; it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the meaning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in philosophy, science and industry, and brought ruin upon himself and his family. 'Nowadays' is a civilization in which the prime emblems of poetry are dishonoured." (14)
"Mount Helicon was not the earliest seat of the Muse Goddesses, as their title 'The Pierians' shows; the word Muse is now generally derived from the root mont, meaning a mountain. Their worship had been brought there in the Heroic Age during a migration of the Boeotian people from Mount Pieria in Northern Thessaly. But to make the transplanted Muses feel at home on Helicon, and so to preserve the old magic, the Boeotians named the geographical features of the mountain--the springs, the peaks and grottoes--after the corresponding features of Pieria. The Muses were at this time three in number, an indivisible Trinity, as the mediaeval Catholics recognized when they built the church of their own Holy Trinity on the site of the deserted shrine of the Heliconian Muses. The appropriate names of the three Persons were Meditation, Memory, and Song." (385-6)
December 8, 2012
Graves' essay on the downfall of a matriarchal, goddess worship, societal structure in stone age Europe is the premise of this book long essay. Several themes in this book have been written about by anthropologists and other writers before and since Graves but The White Goddess is certainly the best known.
Graves own words:
"language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honor of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry..."
Graves posited that the downfall of the Goddess worship in old Europe was due to the rise of patriarchal religions stemming from the Judeo-Christian mythos.
It is a wonderfully structured essay which is why I gave it five stars. It does not match up with archaeological evidence. Matriarchies started declining in Europe at the end of the Neolithic. This coincided with the rise of agriculture in Europe and with it the rise in patrilineal kinship systems. That we live in a patriarchal society has a lot of do with how land was distributed after the rise in agriculture.
This evidence does not take away from the power of Graves book and it is certainly a classic.
Graves own words:
"language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honor of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry..."
Graves posited that the downfall of the Goddess worship in old Europe was due to the rise of patriarchal religions stemming from the Judeo-Christian mythos.
It is a wonderfully structured essay which is why I gave it five stars. It does not match up with archaeological evidence. Matriarchies started declining in Europe at the end of the Neolithic. This coincided with the rise of agriculture in Europe and with it the rise in patrilineal kinship systems. That we live in a patriarchal society has a lot of do with how land was distributed after the rise in agriculture.
This evidence does not take away from the power of Graves book and it is certainly a classic.
April 24, 2011
I reread this book perhaps every other year. Every year, being more widely read, I find more facts that are now outdated. But every year, the ideas, themes and conclusions I feel to be more true.
November 12, 2018
It's the unofficial Golden Bough sequel the world was clamoring for!
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January 1, 2014I'm not sure how to rate a book like this. On its own it is, as a friend said, historical/mythological fanfiction. The shoddy anthropology, etymology and linguistic study Graves marches out in support of the book's thesis - that All True Poetry praises The White Goddess and everything else, like things that aren't Scottish, are crap - is kind of awe inspiring. By the middle of the book, I couldn't take a damn thing he was saying seriously.
And yet, because I was reading it for research, and research as much into this kind of mindset as the actual information, it was exactly the kind of thing I needed. Graves drove me bats for most of the book, but he drove me bats in a way that was way useful. So while there is So. Much. Wrong with it, it gave me something I needed, and so I'm glad I read it.
I lost count of how many times I swore at the book, but I think my favorite was when he dismisses the whole of Japanese poetry out of hand in *maybe* a paragraph. So, so impressive.
And yet, because I was reading it for research, and research as much into this kind of mindset as the actual information, it was exactly the kind of thing I needed. Graves drove me bats for most of the book, but he drove me bats in a way that was way useful. So while there is So. Much. Wrong with it, it gave me something I needed, and so I'm glad I read it.
I lost count of how many times I swore at the book, but I think my favorite was when he dismisses the whole of Japanese poetry out of hand in *maybe* a paragraph. So, so impressive.
December 2, 2021
Reading deeper into Robert Graves' "The White Goddess" was severely didappointing. Sure, the fact that he posits the Tripple Goddess as an archetype has been a fruitful contribution. However, the book itself renounces accademic method but also fails to have narrative flow and poetic vision, therefore becomming painful to read.
Graves pretends to escape the patriarchal religion by focusing on the female goddess, but from the beginning he defines the goddess from the perspective of a cishet man (not by accident of his circumstance, but by design of considering this the source of universal truth). Thus it reverts to the "eternal feminine" conflating incest fantasies of Goethe and Freud, and keeping the woman in a supporting role to the male hero.
Graves pretends to escape the patriarchal religion by focusing on the female goddess, but from the beginning he defines the goddess from the perspective of a cishet man (not by accident of his circumstance, but by design of considering this the source of universal truth). Thus it reverts to the "eternal feminine" conflating incest fantasies of Goethe and Freud, and keeping the woman in a supporting role to the male hero.
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