The White Goddess

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The author and poet Robert Graves' book-length essay upon the nature of poetic myth-making, The White Goddess, first published in 1948, and revised, amended and enlarged in 1966, represents an approach to the study of mythology from a decidedly creative yet idiosyncratic perspective. It proposes the existence of a European deity, the "White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death," inspired and represented by the phases of the moon, and who, Graves argues, lies behind the faces of the diverse goddesses of various European mythologies. In this work, Graves argues that "true" or "pure" poetry is inextricably linked with the ancient cult-ritual of his proposed White Goddess and of her son. His conclusions come from his own highly speculative conjectures about how early religions developed, and there is no historical evidence that the "White Goddess" as he describes her ever figured in any actual belief system.

Graves described The White Goddess as "a historical grammar of the language of poetic myth." The book draws from the mythology and poetry of Wales and Ireland especially, as well as that of most of Western Europe and the ancient Middle East. Relying heavily on arguments from etymology alone, Graves argues not only for the previously unnoticed worship of a single goddess under many names, but also that the names of the Ogham letters in the alphabet used in parts of Gaelic Ireland and Britain contained a calendar that contained the key to an ancient liturgy involving the human sacrifice of a sacred king (see "Celtic Astrology") ; and, further, that these letter names concealed lines of Ancient Greek hexameter describing the goddess. Scholars of Celtic and other myths have universally rejected Graves's conclusions as unscientific and ill founded.

The Golden Bough (1922, but begun in 1890), an early anthropological study by Sir James George Frazer, is the starting point for much of Graves's argument, and Graves thought in part that his book made explicit what Frazer only hinted at. Graves wrote:

"Sir James Frazer was able to keep his beautiful rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, until his death by carefully and methodically sailing all around his dangerous subject, as if charting the coastline of a forbidden island without actually committing himself to a declaration that it existed. What he was saying-not-saying was that Christian legend, dogma and ritual are the refinement of a great body of primitive and even barbarous beliefs, and that almost the only original element in Christianity is the personality of Jesus."

Graves's The White Goddess deals with goddess worship as the prototypical religion, analyzing it largely from literary evidence, in myth and poetry. Instead of skirting the issue, as he accused Frazer of having done, Graves said what he meant, creating controversy that cost him some friends. The book was originally read chiefly by scholars, but as interest in goddess-based religions increased beginning in the 1960s, the public demand for books about the alleged roots of goddess worship has increased as well.

Joseph Campbell's books on mythology, and the ground-breaking television series he did with Bill Moyers, have created a whole new audience for books such as The White Goddess and When God Was a Woman (or, The Paradise Papers, 1976) by Merlin Stone, that explore the relationship between goddess-worship and Judaism and Christianity: how they began, what they have in common, and how they differ. More recently, J.F. del Giorgio is also following Graves' interpretations. He studies in The Oldest Europeans the evolution of Goddess cults since the Ice Age until nearly the present. He interpretes Greek mythology as the fruit of the clash between Indo-Europeans and pre-Indo-Europeans.

Graves openly considers poetic inspiration, or "Analepsis" as he terms it, a valid historical methodology. This explains, at least, why Graves's goddess bears such a strong resemblance to his longtime lover and personal muse, Laura Riding. Anthropology and comparative religion had mostly discarded the turn-of-the-century mythmaking of The Golden Bough by the 1960s. The speculative and sensational aspects of the nineteenth century Aryan racial myth that Indo-European speaking super-warriors, armed with horses, wheeled vehicles, and other superior military technologies, had conquered and violently displaced the earlier peoples of prehistoric Europe, likewise fell into disrepute at this time, not least because it was so strongly founded in Romanticism and etymological inference. Without such underpinnings, Graves's argument becomes hard to sustain. A similar framework was, however, presented in the guise of the Kurgan hypothesis by Marija Gimbutas, and while Gimbutas herself at times comes close to the cliched images of the past century, more moderately phrased versions of the Kurgan theory remain influential in mainstream scientific and linguistic thought about the origins of the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

While Graves had an extensive knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology and literature, his knowledge of Celtic languages remained rather superficial, and his technique of analepsis guaranteed that he would find what he wanted to find in that literature. He readily states that he is not a medieval historian, but a poet, and thus based his work on the premise that the "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 concludes, in the second and expanded edition, that the monotheistic god of Judaism and its successors is the cause of the White Goddess's downfall, and thus the source of much of the modern world's woe. He also suggests that women cannot function as poets and lack the capacity for true poetic creation, because woman's role in poetry remains exclusively to serve as a muse for a male poet who worships her as a goddess. He does, however, acknowledge Sappho as a possible exception.

Still, to some, the picturesqueness of Graves's vision appeals sufficiently to have kept its power to persuade. A simplified version of Graves's "goddess religion" has become the faith of dozens of fantasy novels, from the works of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mercedes Lackey to Graves's own Seven Days in New Crete. Whatever its inadequacies as an attempt to "reconstruct" ancient mythologies and cultures, The White Goddess has become the shared fantasy of hundreds of thousands of people; it may not reflect ancient mythologies accurately, but it remains a classic of contemporary myth-making.