The White Goddess by Robert Graves

[darwinia]

I am just reading parts of The Wheel of Change Tarot book by Alexandra Genetti, and she makes extensive reference to this book, and lists it in the bibliography. I looked it up on amazon.com and it looks fascinating--they have a nice trade paperback edition available and the reviews are excellent.

It just sounds fascinating to me. I have a boxed set of Graves' I Claudius and Claudius the God, and he certainly manages to make history and myth come alive, and his writing and language are lovely to read.

So, does anyone here own this and have any comments?

Thanks.


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The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth
by Robert Graves

Paperback: 512 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.38 x 8.23 x 5.49
Publisher: Noonday Press; (July 1997)
ISBN: 0374504938

Amazon.com
Robert Graves, the late British poet and novelist, was also known for his studies of the mythological and psychological sources of poetry. With The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Graves was able to combine many of his passions into one work. While the book is so poetically written that many of the passages amount to prose poems, it is also frequently plot driven enough to feel like a novel, and it is rich with scholarly insight into the deep wells of poetry. Especially fascinating is the chapter in which Graves explores the ancient and ongoing practice of poets' invoking the muse. Graves details the practice in both the Eastern and Western literary traditions, and shows specific similarities and differences among Greek, British, and Irish tales and myths about the muse. Graves has much to offer students of history and myth, but poetry lovers will also be fascinated with The White Goddess.

 

[ihcoyc]

I was bemused by Graves's White Goddess as a college sophomore. The thing about that particular book is that it looks superficially profound and erudite. You practically need to have specialist degrees in Old Irish, Old Welsh, and Latin literature to begin to say where he goes wrong. The average layperson will take a look at Graves's impressive quotations, figure he knows what he's talking about, and lose sight of the fact that the whole book is essentially argued in Erich von Däniken style rhetorical questions. Your head will be spinning at the end.

One person who is helpful is Ronald Hutton, a British historian, whose The Triumph of the Moon, a history of the invention of neo-paganism, shows where Graves was coming from and gives you at least hints of a critique.

The basic problem with Graves is that he accepts and inverts the Aryan myth: a nomadic tribe of mounted, military, and "patriarchal" supermen conquered everything from Ireland to Bengal, and imposed their language and religion on the peace-loving natives. We know where this leads when you root for the Aryans. Graves and his followers just root for the losing side. Fortunately for us all, it never really happened that way; the Aryan conquest happened something like that way in India, although there's no reason to imagine the pre-Aryans in India or anywhere else were "matriarchal" or that peaceful; in Greece and Ireland it gets even more complicated, and it never happened at all anywhere else.

If you want to read something that is just as erudite and a lot more grounded in fact, read Calvert Watkins' How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. This will actually repay the effort you'll have to put into understanding it.

 

[jmd]

Again, I find myself so much in agreement with ihcoyc... (though his comments on 'rooting' from whatever side, given my antipodean location and its colloquialisms, makes for an interesting read!)

Graves (and the equally wonderful Golden Bough) has been taken by some far too much at face value... each writes from a particularly influenced view of what may be termed as an evolutionary approach to myths and sagas.

A book, nonetheless, well worth having and reading.

 

[Maan]

Hmmm and the book from Merlin Stowe? is that a like Graves book?

 

[darwinia]

Graves Stays in the Grave!

Graves (and the equally wonderful Golden Bough) has been taken by some far too much at face value... each writes from a particularly influenced view of what may be termed as an evolutionary approach to myths and sagas.

A book, nonetheless, well worth having and reading.

Hahaha. I noticed one of the reviews at amazon made much of hippies latching onto this book and rhapsodizing about it in the 60s. I was more interested in the poetic language rather than actually believing Graves' thesis.

I'm not terribly keen on believing any author's notions of ideas "grounded in fact," just interested in lyrical language and storytelling. In fact, I might be better off buying a book of poetry! Thanks all for posting.

I like that word "bemused." Kind of the feeling I get when people mention Carlos Castaneda.

 

[ihcoyc]

Graves, whatever his merits as a scholar, was indeed an excellent poet. His Collected Poems is quite worth your while.

Anthropologists generally don't put much stock in Frazer's theory about dying and reviving gods anymore. Frazer had a habit of ignoring what people said about their own customs and arguing that their "true" meaning was supplied by his theory. This was easy, especially since any annual ritual, especially if it has anything to do with fire or vegetation, is fairly easy to force into the system. Again, the Hutton book explains the fallacies in the Golden Bough in a fairly readable way.

The problem was, Frazer's influence was more literary than scientific. During the early twentieth century, Frazer was at the height of his academic reputation, and was borrowed from wholesale by giants like D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot. And after anthropology had moved on, the literary influence remained.

Now The Golden Bough and The White Goddess supply standard plot devices to hundreds of mediocre fantasy novels, long after the theories they were based on have been discarded.

 

[darwinia]

More Bemusement

I have always felt both D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce to be highly overrated. Joyce is much too much a slog, I consider it a point of pride that I managed largely to avoid him. Lawrence is just boring, even his John Thomas was boring!

As far as Eliot goes, I know nothing of him except excerpts from his poetry. I recently became interested in reading The Waste Land since I bought The Arthurian (Hallowquest) deck. However, I noticed when checking that out in my Oxford Companion to English Literature, that they describe: ..."Eliot's own 'Notes' which explain his many varied and multicultural allusions, quotations, and half-quotations (from Webster, Dante, Verlaine, Kyd, etc), and express a general indebtedness to the Grail legend and to the vegetation ceremonies in Frazer's ~The Golden Bough.~ (Eliot himself was later to describe these 'Notes' as 'a remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship', written to pad out the text of the poem when it first appeared as a little book; he admits that they were a temptation to critics, and had achieved 'almost greater popularity than the poem itself': 'The Frontiers of Criticism', 1956)
(Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th ed. 1985, pg. 1047.)

I think Eliot sounds bemused. Gotta love writers.

On fantasy authors I agree, they have forged little mazes of acceptable plot and seem determined to chunnel their way through life like mice forever in search of the magic button. If not Graves robbers, then Tolkienesque copycats. An interesting author is Tim Powers, who while using myth and non-fiction in his books, does what no one else seems to do, and with a marvelous sense of humour and creativity. But, he was afraid to touch the tarot deck he bought for research for Last Call! He is so inventive though when piled against the dreck of fantasy writers. And now unfortunately, the worst of them are publishing e-books and referring to themselves as "published authors."

Graves' poetry would be interesting and has perked me right up. Unfortunately, the used volumes on ABE cost too much. Time for an interlibrary loan.

 

[ihcoyc]

freesiaskye said:

I have always felt both D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce to be highly overrated. Joyce is much too much a slog, I consider it a point of pride that I managed largely to avoid him. Lawrence is just boring, even his John Thomas was boring!

Whatever you think of Finnegans Wake, it's the best book in the world for bibliomancy. Better than the Bible, better than the I Ching. Just open it at random, pick out a passage, and it's guaranteed to be murky and oracular! I admit I'm kind of fond of looking at Finnegans Wake, but I'm not about to try to sit down and read the whole thing straight through.

The White Goddess is sort of like a "non-fiction" version of Finnegans Wake, in fact. It covers a lot of the same themes, and blends erudition and fantasy in a way that makes it hard to tell where one leaves off and the other begins. And neither really has a payoff worth the effort you'll have to invest in reading them.

It's all like silly, pretentious puzzle-novels by Italo Calvino or Milorad Pavic, that seem so interesting at the beginning, until you finally realize your leg is getting pulled, and you put them down disgusted. When I invest time in fiction, I don't want to have the act of reading deconstructed: I want a story!

 

[baba-prague]

"I admit I'm kind of fond of looking at Finnegans Wake, but I'm not about to try to sit down and read the whole thing straight through."
_______________

Well, I love Joyce - but then I'm Irish . I heard Edna O'Brien (who, okay I am NOT keen on) talking at a writers' festival here last week. At the end, she half-apologised for referring to Joyce so much but said "Ah well, referring to Joyce a lot is just normal", which is maybe a very Irish view of the world, but certainly made me laugh.

To get on-thread, I did read the White Goddess years ago, and I think it had quite an influence on me, but I agree, it's important to take it as a metaphorical/poetic text, not as a factual or anthropological one. It does have some marvelous imagery which has stayed with me.

Kind of off-on-thread ;-) has anyone read "A Vision" by W.B Yeats? I also read that many years ago and now remember very little apart from some images that it describes. I wonder if I should read it again now from a Golden Dawn/Tarot perspective. Has anyone here found it useful or interesting?

Oh - great thread by the way (I'm beginning to think I'm like Edna - any excuse to talk about Joyce! LOL)

Karen

 

[Silverlotus]

Hmmm and the book from Merlin Stowe? is that a like Graves book?

I read Merlin Stone's book When God Was a Woman, and I wasn't very impressed. Since I read it quite a while ago, and do not actually own a copy, I can't provide specific examples of what I found wrong with it. All I can say is that the general feeling I got from the book was that Ms. Stone was taking small bits of fact and myth, and weaving them into a larger piece to suit her ideas. I admit that I could be wrong, but many of her "facts" didn't seem totally right to me. Subjective, yes, but sadly sometimes that's what history comes to. (Not that I'm saying that is right.) Anyway, it was an interesting book, but I'd take it with a large grain of salt.