The White Goddess
by Robert Graves
Published by whoever
Description
A work first published in 1948 in which Graves argues that the language of poetic myth current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse - some dating from the Old Stone Age.
Reviews
Review One - An in-depth review
by Rachael Bulla
The White Goddess is understood by few, not merely because of its impressive
breadth and complexity. This book eludes many because it evokes what is
alien to modernity: a mystical awareness, and the source of that awareness,
which has been supressed for thousands of years. To approach The White
Goddess with merely Aristotelian logic is futile and ironic, because Graves
is resurrecting something which pre-existed Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates,
and which they all sought to suppress. Aristotelian logic is, according
to Graves’ ‘In Dedication’ poem, the God Apollo’s
‘golden mean’, ‘in scorn of which I sailed to find Her.’
Not to say that Graves’ insights are illogical. Graves certainly has lines of rationale, but he goes well above and beyond logic, weaving together lines of reasoning and insight, and connecting them into a kaleidescopic tapestry that is stunning in its complex beauty. The White Goddess is a poem, in its original sense, for it evokes what the poet is in love with: the Truth. The White Goddess is the unearthing of a mystery: poetry in its ancient, true form, and its eternal divine Inspirer:
‘Originally, the poet was the leader of a totem-society of religious
dancers. His verses...were danced around an alter or in a sacred enclosure
and each verse started as a new turn or movement in the dance...dances
were seasonal and fitted into an annual pattern from which gradually emerges
the single grand theme of poetry: the life, death, and resurrection of
the Spirit of the Year, the Goddess’s son and lover’ (413).
Graves focuses on two Welsh minstrel poems, the Câd Goddeu, or ‘Battle
of the Trees’, and the Hanes Taleisin. He argues that the Câd
Goddeu depicts an ancient religious struggle that took place in Britain
c. 400 BC in which the White Goddess and the god-king Bran were deposed
by Beli. Graves argues that the trees that took part in the poetic battle
were letters in the tree-calendar alphabet, the ‘BLN’ Ogham,
which came to Britain sometime between 2,000 and 3,000 BC from Greece
(from the Cretan Pelasgian alphabet which predates Greek). The BLN is
composed of twenty trees, with the first letter of each tree being a letter
in an alphabet of fifteen consonents and five vowels. The tree-alphabet
was also a lunar calendrical system, with each month linked with one of
the thirteen consonant-tree letters (birch, rowan, ash, alder, willow,
hawthorn, oak, holly, hazel, vine, ivy, reed, elder), and each of the
five seasons (The New Year, spring, summer, autumn, and winter) being
depicted by the vowel-tree-letters AOUEI (silver fir, gorse, heather,
white poplar, and yew). The result of the Câd Goddeu was a religious
change that was reflected in the reordering of the letters into the ‘BLF’
or ‘Boibel-Loth’. Graves feels the Hales Taliesin to be a
riddle which, when solved, reveals the letters in the BLF alphabet, and
it is the BLF ordering which people generally understand to be the Ogham
tree-alphabet.
Graves also discusses the Song of Amergin, said to have been chanted by the chief bard of the Milesian invaders, as he set his foot on the soil of Ireland in 1268 BC. Graves feels that the ‘I am/have been’ sequences are riddles that reveal the BLN tree-calendar, and that Amergin’s reference to a dolmen is the clue to a form of the BLN alphabet’s arrangement along a dolmen.
The BLN poetically reveals the story of the life of the Son-lover of the White Goddess, the sacrificial god-king in the Frazerian sense, who is sacrificed in mid-summer and is reborn at the winter solstice. But he actually rules the year in ‘twinhood’, with his ‘tanist’ twin/father/son taking over the kingship upon his death at midsummer, whom he in turn kills when he is reborn at the winter solstice. The waxing and waning of the king’s life is likened to the yearly path of the sun, poetically embodied by tree-months as being sacred symbols of divine attributes. For example, the Alder-month (March 18-April 14) is associated with Bran since in the Câd Goddeu Gwion vanquishes Bran by guessing his name from seeing his sprigs of alder. Alder also symbolizes a sacrificial god-king in that when its wood is cut it ‘bleeds’ red like a man.
The vowel-trees reveal the name of the White Goddess, who is the Mother, Lover, and Destroyer of the god-king. Upon death the king’s spirit dwells in Her Celestial abode, which in Celtic lore is depicted as Caer Arianrhod and as the constellation Corona Borealis, the silver-wheeled castle at the back of the north wind, near the pole-star or ‘Celestial hinge’. The most significant result of the Câd Goddeu was a change from the secret five/seven-vowel name of the White Goddess to an eight-lettered one of a supreme male father-god.
Graves’ Ogham tree-calendar is a well known portion of The White Goddess and is its central theme. However, there are other lesser-known themes that in my view are also highly significant. One such theme is a connection with the ancient Hebrews. Graves argues that the alphabet spread from Greece due to invasion c.1500 BC, and that these Aegean peoples took it with them not only to Britain, but also to other parts of Europe, and to Syria and Canaan. Graves argues that in Canaan it affected the Hebrew religion, and that vestiges of it can be found in Biblical and Jewish sources. For example, Graves argued that Soloman’s Wisdom was a Goddess, and that Jacob’s wrestle with an angel and resultant ‘sacred lameness’ and name change to ‘Israel’ was an initiation ritual. (According to Graves, sacral kings were often lame, which had profound symbolic significance). And indeed, when one reads about offering cakes to the Queen of Heaven in Jeremiah (44:17-19), and Isaiah’s musing ‘…for as the days of a tree are the days of my people…’ (Isaiah 65:22), Graves’ insights would seem to have some footing. Graves also feels that the religious changes resultant from the Câd Goddeu ultimately trace to a 6th cent. BC Jewish source. The new eight-lettered secret name of God was borrowed from Jewish Egyptians by Pythagoreans, whose priesthood in Gaul was in contact with Britain. Graves feels that the religious explanation behind this change is ultimately to be found in Ezekial’s vision of the chariot in Jewish mysticism.
Another lesser-discussed central theme in the White Goddess is his viewing Jesus Christ as having been a sacrificial god-king to the White Goddess, cognate with the Celtic Bran and the Greek Dionysis. Graves argues that the reference in the Talmud that Jesus was lamed while attempting to fly, and a remark in the Gospels by Jerome that Jesus was deformed probably refers to a secret Coronation ceremony on Mt. Tabor ‘where he became the new Israel after being ritually lamed in a wrestling match’ (325). This would seem to imply that primitive Christians were originally goddess-worshipping; a most staggering observation. And indeed, the Dead Sea Scrolls do reveal that the Gnostics worshipped a Mother in Heaven.
The White Goddess would also imply that most parts of the ancient world were once goddess-worshipping, and that modern religious fragmentation can ultimately be traced to: 1) the deposing of the goddess by a supreme father god and 2) the warring among various father-gods for supreme authority. Graves feels that the rule of a supreme father-god who is independent of any goddess to be unhealthy:
‘It will be objected that man has as valid a claim to divinity as woman. That is true only in a sense; he is divine not in his single person, but only in his twinhood. As Osiris, the Spirit of the Waxing Year he is always jealous of his weird, Set, the Spirit of the Waning Year, and vice-versa; he cannot be both of them at once except by an intellectual effort that destroys his humanity, and this is the fundamental defect of the Apollonian of Jehovistic cult. Man is a demi-god: he always has one foot or the other in the grave; woman is divine because she can keep both her feet always in the same place, whether in the sky, in the underworld, or on this earth. Man envies her and tells himself lies about his own completeness, and thereby makes himself miserable; because if he is divine she is not even a demi-goddess-she is a mere nymph and his love for her turns to scorn and hate’ (476).
In my view, Graves’ insight epitomizes the ultimate reason for the existence of a nightmare which all cultures and historical time periods seem to have in common: misogyny.
Graves’ reference to an ‘intellectual effort which destroys his humanity’ most chillingly decribes our time; a time when, Graves also relates, the scientist-organizer Apollo has grown weary, and ‘the Goddess smiles grimly at his predicament’ (474). Graves’ in sights most poetically predict post-modernist philosophy, which criticizes science for having set itself up as being a meta-language, omnisciently perched above any other perspective, and which ironically fragments rather than unifies in its attempts. The ancient story of the Tower of Babel would now seem like an oracular prediction. Post- modernist philosophy also calls for a theme to unify a fragmented world. In my view the answer to post-modernist fragmentation and angst would be the resurrection of what all the major world religions as well as science seem to be united in suppressing: the ancient White Goddess and her Son-lover. And this is what Graves poetically predicts at the end of The White Goddess:
Under your Milky Way
And slow-revolving Bear,
Frogs from the alder-thicket pray
In terror of the judgment day,
Loud with repentance there.
The log they crowned as king
Grew sodden, lurched and sank.
Dark waters bubble from the spring,
An owl floats by on silent wing,
They invoke you from each bank.
At dawn you shall appear,
A gaunt, red-wattled crane,
She whom they know too well to fear,
Lunging your beak down like a spear
To fetch them home again (477)
***
In The White Goddess Graves laments that paganism’s failing is a
never-ending cycle of death and rebirth. And this would seem to be the
flaw in The White Goddess; that kings die and are reborn in an endless
cycle, and that poet-lovers are always ultimately scorned by their Muse.
However, years later in a lecture at Oxford found in a book entitled Mammon
and the Black Goddess, Graves revealed his feeling that the White Goddess’s
cruel cycle of death and rebirth for sacral kings, and the cognate cycle
of rapture and heartbreak experienced by the poet, is an initiation process
which is preparitory for the Black Goddess of Wisdom. The ultimate end
in the cycle is the promise of eternal bliss in Her abode for the king,
and of eternal love for the poet. This lecture is not well known, but
in my view is crucial in understanding Grave’s perspective, and
is a key missing piece in The White Goddess.
***
It is also most interesting to note that Robert Graves’ argument
that goddess-worshipping peoples were driven out of Greece by Indo-European
invaders c.2000-1500 BC is compatible with and somewhat predicts the archaeologist
Marija Gimbutas'’ views. Marija Gimbutas contends that the Indo-European
invasions which swept across Europe c.5000-2000 BC conquered goddess-worshipping
peoples.
My Oxford University MPhil thesis entitled ‘Tibetan Cosmogonies and Ogham: a Critical Study in Comparative Mythology’ would go further in connecting Graves’ and Gimbutas’ perspectives. My thesis supports Gimbutas’s views by revealing common themes in modern folk traditions of areas which were geographically at the eastern and western perepheries of the Indo-European invasions in her model: Ireland and Britain, and Anatolia’s neighbor, Tibet. In my view, the fact that such striking thematic similarities in folk traditions of cultures who are otherwise very different and very geographically distant from one another can be explained by common Indo-European cultural roots, as the same themes are to be found in reconstructed models of Indo-European culture. My thesis also reveals a possible parallel between ancient Tibetan religious cosmology—the king Srong bstan Gampo’s 13 temple-scheme-- and Graves’ BLN Ogham cosmology. I also draw parallels between Tibetan, British and Irish queens, and reveals evidence for the reverence of ancient Tibetan queens as goddesses.
Review Two
In Defense Of Graves And Others.
I spent the morning in a tizzy, over an email posted to a Druid list
I moderate. A few snide comments were made about Ogham and Robert Graves.
Okay, here is why my response to offhanded quips denouncing Robert Graves
is so explosive. Back in the Days thirty years ago, a couple of us got
together and started a Druid Tradition. We never took ourselves that seriously
we simply started as a study group and went from there.
Who would ever know or even care. We were in Texas, fer' godsake. So,
we formed Hyperborea named so because one of our members Craft name is
Boreas and because we believed that Druids were solar Priests who live
in, you got it Hyperborea.
We've all grown up and disbanded in 2000. It was there, through my interest
in Druidry that I decided to leave my parents faith among the Jehovah's
Witnesses and seek my own uncertain truth along the Druid path. In 1970,
we never thought that the Druid Order would allow a nineteen year old
girl in to the fold, much less an American.
Ah, back to Graves, one of the members of our Grove/quasi druid grove went on to seek out Robert Graves the legend himself, and spend a few vacations in Majorca with him in his declining years. Nancy was even asked by his family to attend his funeral and sit among them during the ceremony as a family member. So to me he is not only a literary legend he's sort a like a Poetic Dutch Uncle. I never met the man but I have read enough of his work to understand that he didn't care what the 14th century thought about Ogham or Druids or Bards or anyone else for that matter. He sought the eternal Divine to be the archetypical Bard and bade us all with his works to follow.
If he published his personal notes and they are misunderstood by people who need solid answers about Druidry, ogham or anything else, then they will find none there. Only the notes from the inspired work that he originally bunged together over a week or so in a paper called the Roebuck in a Thicket, which would later be coupled with other such topics as research and musings for his works on King Jesus, and The Black Goddess, and from his translations of the Golden Ass. Another such anthology is the Crain Bag and other musings in which Gerald Gardner confides that Wicca is dying and after his passing it will fall to the hands of a few old house wives and people who don't really give it much thought and his life work will be for naught. Graves published over 130 books in his ninety year life. That is an incredible volume of work to even begin to critique it is as ludicrous as saying Picasso sucks, or Da Vinci was narrow-minded because he wrote backwards.
I guess the point I am trying to make is: Far too often authors' works are chewed up and spat out by intellectuals with grubby ham fisted hands. I see no difference in touching the bones of an ancestor or grave goods than I do reading a someone's words or viewing someone's artistic endeavors. They are divine attributes of that being and a tribute to their existence. The mistake too easy to make is the discounting of a theory by running down a list and checking off topics. That is not scholarship its intellectual bookkeeping. This to me far more repugnant that base ignorance.
It's not just Graves I'm waffling on about either. I watch a Druid author popular in the 1980s be drummed out of Druidry all together. Last I saw him he was a very unhappy Celtic Christian Priest, yet the idea of returning to Druidry tore his heart out. I mourn the loss of a Bard and a friend. Yeah, sometimes he was a jerk, but he didn't deserve the humiliation piled on him for his expression of his beliefs. I disagreed with some of his stuff. But Thom still deserved the right to his opinions; Even if he did get the odd well buttered baggett thrown at him during Beltane feasts.
I'm not saying don't form opinions, don't question. I am saying be as
mindful of a persons contribution to the greater aspects of this wonderful
journey we are on together. I find it ridiculous that some intellectuals
shout for the unknown bones of the ancestors to be eulogized and given
proper respect and burials; Then in the same breath discount fellow Druids
and thinkers when they are no longer in vogue their ideas tossed like
last winters cardigan in favor of new evidence on an issue. It's too easy
in this freeze dried world to lose touch with humanity by discarding the
bones of our ancestors, and discounting the works of the recently dead.
For me personally for me being a Druid is sacred, and like all sacred
things a divine gift and a divine madness.
If I have offended anyone with my divine madness well I don't know what
else to say.
Except live intentionally, so that others may live.
The Mad Pru/|\
Judith Prueitt
Dallas, Texas
Summer Solstice 2004