Customer Reviews

The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I am a great fan of Robert Graves. I find him to be an outstanding poet, an excellent novelist, and a compelling writer of non-fiction. Probably the best known, if not the best, example of the last mentioned genre is "The White Goddess."

When "Goddess" first appeared in the late 1940's it was a groundbreaking work; for lack of a better definition it is a book on cultural anthropolgy written by a poet, who felt that as a a poet and a man who understood the inner motivation of the poet he would give his views on the Muse and her invocation. The book covers a lot of territory, sprawling across civilization from the Greeks to the Celts, and from the three forms of the Muse to the Fisher King to the Ogham alphabet. It wanders so far that it's hard to keep up with Mr. Graves as he gallops across centuries and over distances. For those of us used to Mr. Graves' usual tight control of his material and its presentation, it's difficult to deal with how he jumps from subject to subject with little or no notice.

I'm almost tempted to say that this is Mr. Graves' version of "Finnegan's Wake", only in a non-fictional form. It certainly is his encomium to the White Goddess, whom he identifies as the original Muse of all poets, including himself. There's enough to think about for years in this book, and neo-pagan movements may be described as having largely started based on the thoughts provoked by this book.

But Graves was a poet, not a social scientist, and in the last fifty years many of his observations have been proven to be wrong. This in itself is not so surprising, nor is it really such a bad thing; the real problem is the amount of emotional residue that those ideas left in their wake. Graves makes some observations that some would find offensive now, such as his allegation that women can't be real poets - they have no Muse to appeal to, the White Goddess only wants the worship of males. He makes a possible exception of Sappho, for what it's worth.

In short, "Goddess" still deserves to be read - it's a good, albeit exhausting read, and Graves is always worth reading - but it would be a mistake to pick up his ideas and run with them.

I won't pretend I know exactly what this book is about. Graves presents his arguments with the reasoning of a poet, decidedly not the formal logic of a theologian or the empirical induction of a historian. I gave this book 5 stars because of its sheer ambition and audacity. Graves is attempting a synthesis of the entirety of mythology into a coherent grammatical code, a universal metaphysical language. That is a monumental undertaking, not only due to the breadth of knowledge of the Christian, Pagan and Classical canons it requires, but also because these traditions are commonly regarded as antithetical, their communities, such as they exist, hostile to each other. Graves proffers a common root under the ossified codices, if with an uneven case.

Poets, as a group, are known for their affinity to the mystical and mythological. The poetic temperament imbues and projects inner forms with aspects of corporeality, which the rest of us grasp only dimly as a spectre of consciousness, without significance or shape. The true poet is more likely to see them as a magical talisman, an object of necessary reality. Numbers, alphabets, calendars, zodiacs-- lunar and solar domains-- a primal order bubbles from the cauldron of Graves's conceptions. His spells are incarnate in trees, minerals, birds, planets-- metaphors of an underlying truth.

This analysis springs from two dense poems of spiritual mysticism, The Battle of the Trees (Welsh Druid) and Hanes Taliesen ( Early Christian). Presented as a vision, like Revelations, they pose a riddle and mix symbols. Graves's solution loosely ties his thesis together. Linguists have theorized about the existence of grammatical archetypes; mythic relics are visible in Christian sacraments; correspondence amongst various folklore is widely acknowledged. Graves is not proposing anything radically new. He has, though, developed a cryptic framework which is supernatural and aesthetic, an elixir of divination and contemplation. He sees the White Goddess, as muse, in every authentic poem since those of Homer. His construction puts history at the service of his grammatical architecture. The White Goddess is a work of introspection and selective interpretation, comparable to those of Jung or Spengler, not one of conventional scholarship. Many of its assertions are farfetched or arbitrary, some pure formulations. That is not to understate its value. This is the culmination of a life's reflections, investigations and musings. It represents the articulation of a powerful, syncretic imagination-- a concordance of speculation and intuition.

I think a lot of people have missed the point of this book. Robert Graves was a poet, not a historian or an expert on Celtic mythology. The subtitle for The White Goddess is "A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth." He was attempting to interpret the ancient poems. While I did not always agree with his interpretations, I found them to be quite intriguing.

Ancient poets were like the rock stars of today. They kept the history of the people, and may have been trying to hide secret information in their poetry that these ancient people did not want falling into the wrong hands. Mr. Graves was trying to break these secret codes.

I didn't pay too much attention to what Mr. Graves was saying about the Celtic Ogham, but more about the different faces of the Goddess, the lesser known parts of Greek mythology, and the different properties of trees as they related to the ancient people. Ancient people lived their lives shrouded in superstition, harboring a great respect for the earth, something we in this modern age of self-destruction, would do well to learn from.

At times, Mr. Graves jumped around too much for my taste, but I still found this to be a very interesting book. Whether you believe the Celts originated in Greece or not, this is still a book filled with important poetic insight.

Robert Graves never truly expected "White Goddess" to become the classic it has. However, along with "I, Claudius" & "Goodbye To All That" it may well be the only book the general public remembers him for. It is certainly unique in the field of poetry & caused much controversy that still rages on today in poetic, historic & religious circles. Graves called it "a historical grammar of poetic myth" & while that may sound a little vague there may be no better way to define it. "White Goddess" is based on the theory that true poetry isn't the free & interpretive verse that most people believe, but is instead spiritual in function & governed by ancient pagan religious ideas. It seeks to express, in a language of traditional mythic symbols, the five-fold stages of a never ending life & death cycle. Graves attempts to trace the origins of this mythic language back to ancient Europe & suggests that it may have even originated before the building of stonehenge. In the process of researching this mythic language he explains history in mythic terms & myth in historical terms, throwing new light on both by use of his "analeptic" method, which he argues is a valid form of research. Graves argues that true poetry, by it's very nature, is pagan & that the druids were it's undisputed masters. With the coming of Greek philosophers & later Christian missionaries, the true function of poetry & myth were lost. He uses countless references to support his claims & the reader should be familiar with Greek & Celtic history & mythology to get the most from this book. A familiarity with Frazer's "Golden Bough" is also recommended. Some of his history is flawed & his ideas of an early universal calendar-alphabet is highly suspect. However, he still succeeded in his goal. He created, or recreated, a valid & functional mythology for modern poets to apply to their work. In doing so he unknowingly also set the standard for the modern neo-pagan movement. The book has become accepted as one of the founding texts in the pagan community for it's insight into the meaning & function of mythology. Not to mention it's call for a more liberal & less dogmatic belief system.

Robert Graves believed that all "true" poetry was inspired by, and dedicated to, the White Goddess (or to a woman embodying her attributes)--a "Belle Dame sans Merci"--who brought ecstasy, madness, and death to her chosen lovers. In this vein, he wrote this book, which has become the basis of much neo-pagan philosophy. The Maiden/Mother/Crone triplicity can be traced to _The White Goddess_, as can the Oak and Holly Kings, and the meanings usually ascribed to the letters of the Gaelic Ogham alphabet. TWG cannot be underestimated as a source for pagan theology; it has been the inspiration for a lot of wonderful material. The most puzzling thing, though, is how anyone managed to make enough sense of TWG to glean meaning from it. This book confused the living daylights out of me, and I was glad, paradoxically, that I had read many of the later books that draw upon TWG before I actually read TWG. Otherwise, I might have been hopelessly lost in these pages. Now, there are those who will call me unintellectual for this admission. But for pete's sake, I can follow Carl Kerenyi's mythological meanderings, and he doesn't use smaller words than Graves. What he does do, though, is use segues when moving from one subject to another, and distinguish clearly between known fact, conjecture, and sheer flight of fancy. And includes, for crying out loud, a bibliography!

Graves's basic premise is that the "Tuatha De Danaan" of the British Isles were really displaced Greeks, who encoded within their mystical alphabet secret lore from Greek and Hebrew mythology. The code in its entirety supposedly adds up to a poem about the Goddess. But as interesting as I find Graves's ideas, his text is sometimes impossible to fathom. He has a bad case of literary ADD. He'll start examining something in Welsh myth, for example, and if he can't find the evidence he wants in Welsh material, he'll fire up his warp drive and zoom off to Greece or Phoenicia or Israel, often leaving the reader behind in a cloud of dust and wondering what on earth just happened. Or, if he can't find a source for his ideas _anywhere_, he'll look at an existing source and say it must be corrupted by the patriarchy and _should_ say something else entirely. And he tends to state wild guesses with the same certainty accorded to historical facts. Since he doesn't have a bibliography, I can't look and see which of his statements came from his source material and which from his imagination. I don't think I have a hope of truly grokking this book until, at some point in the nebulous and improbable future, I become as well-read as the author himself.

I am glad I read this book, especially since it showed me where many modern pagan authors got their ideas. (For example, now I know why neo-pagan writers talk of Badb's cauldron, though it never seems to be mentioned in primary sources...it's because Graves translates "Badb" as "boiling" and conjectures that the name refers to the cauldron of Cerridwen and/or Bran. I also know now how Cerridwen's cauldron first became conflated with Bran's.) But it still fried my brain. I don't see myself throwing this book out or anything--what is more likely is that it'll become the "annotated edition", and that I'll stuff notes between the pages every time I read something that makes more sense out of Graves's ramblings. Worth reading, but don't feel dumb if you have trouble following it.

More startling than the Golden Bough! More conjectural than Manly Hall! Who cares if the facts are correct? This book is amazing, and enough of it matches up with familiar mytho-historical fragments to keep you going along, nodding your head and saying "yeah, I'm with you." Graves admits quite clearly that much of his conclusions are pure conjecture. This book isn't about history, it's about poetry and mysticism - if you're moaning about the disservice done to Celtic scholarship, then perhaps you've missed the point. He was guessing. He was making stuff up. He was following his intuition, as long as it made some kind of sense. And it does...
Chapter 19 "The Number of the Beast" is a side-step completely out of the thread of the rest of the book. He devotes the entire chapter to document, step by step, his train of though as he winds his way backwards, forwards, and completely sideways to arrive at a FRIGHTENINGLY plausible solution for the famous "666" cryptogram from the Revelation of St. John. In fact, he arrives at the same traditional solution that theologians have known for centuries, but he arrives there by a completely different route. This book is a supreme example of what management-seminar speakers call "thinking outside of the box." Graves has gotten so far outside the box that he seems to have forgotten that there even WAS a box. The incredible thing is, that there's a lot of truly amazing stuff out there and a lot of it sounds completely plausible after you've followed the circuitous chain of mental connections that got you there..
Though I've read the Mabinogion, Chretiene de Troyes' Arthurian romances, and lots of Norse / Icelandic lore, I'll admit there was quite a bit here that went over my head, some material I was unfamiliar with. But just when I thought Graves had vanished over the hills and left me behind, he'd come back with something familiar and I'd go "oh, right ... so that's where this was headed. By all means, continue..."
Reading this book is worthwhile just for the delightful experience of being on the edge of your seat as some smooth-talking showman (possibly a charlatan, but who cares?) slowly draws back the veil .. you feel at each moment that a profound secret is about to be revealed, maybe on the next page, or the next one... It's been a long time since I read anything that THRILLED me like this book did.
Some other reviewers seem to have missed the distinction between mere fact and TRUTH. Graves' facts may be incorrect; you can pick at them and prove them wrong (can you? really? personally, I wanted to believe every word), but the White Goddess is not diminished by scholarly dissections. What Graves is talking about here is the profound, amazing, overwhelming, dark, unsettling, everlasting TRUTH. And if you care at all about that, this is a book you really should read.

Is this the book that launched a thousand neo-pagan cults? So I am told. It certainly got me interested in Celtic myth. When it was first published in the 1940s, this was THE book on Celtic myth. It hasn't quite stood the test of time in academic circles, and understandably so. The author, in order to arrive at his conclusions, takes leaps that defy academic credibility. What we see here is Graves the mythmaker, Graves the poet, Graves the dreamer, Graves the oracle of the white goddess but not Graves as an authority of prehistoric Europe. As I read on, I wanted to believe, but better sense told me not to. But I still say this is a great book (and I give it five stars) because of its dreamlike quality. At parts, I thought I was reading Tolkien. In its essence, this is a work of historical fantasy, about warriors from ages long past, about the decapitated priest-king, about orgiastic priestesses, about the key to ultimate wisdom. Does that sound like a good read? Yes, it is!

It bothered Graves significantly that the Irish and Welsh scholarly communities, of whom his father had been a member, did not treat _The White Goddess_ as a serious work of scholarlship. Their position was: how do you review a book about someone's personal mythos? That's like criticizing someone for what they believe. I find myself in the same position, now.

Graves has written something that will appeal to those who regard all mythology as essentially the same mythology, all religion as essentially the same religion. Those who love his poetry will appreciate this book as the core of his personal approach to poetry. However, in his lifetime, Graves claimed more for this book than an expression of his personal approach, if not in the book itself then in interviews after its publication. Often his claims were misleading: he expected others to *disprove* his claims but saw no reason to back up his "intuitions" with evidence. Yet despite this lack of evidence, he expected scholars of Celtica to accept his claims as fact. This insistence, and his claims of scholarship (not deserved in the area of Celtica), have misled many modern neopagans, especially those who have not taken the time to appreciate the subtleties and sometimes tricksterish aspects of his language. Graves also presented, as fact, ideas--such as the maiden-mother-crone type and the "Celtic Tree calendar"--that were not part of the cultures from which he claimed to take them. If you want to learn about and from Graves as poet, then you will love this book. Personally, I dislike the way Graves wanted it both ways: complaining because scholars wouldn't take his book as scholarship, but also insisting that his "poetic truth" negated any objective evidence. If you are looking for accurate information about Celtica, try Rees & Rees, _Celtic Heritage_.

You probably know the "White Goddess" thesis already--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. The real fun of the book for me though was in the getting there--a waterslide ride of vast learning, crossword logic and speculative buccaneering that takes you from A to some weird and half-forgotten form of Z in three chapters flat.

The book reads more like a postmodern novel than scholarship. The encyclopaedic frames of reference, baroque plotting and seemingly random coincidences that suddenly wink into information may remind you more than a little of Eco or Pynchon. This is the grandmammy of all conspiracy theories, revealing as much about our own peculiar forms of faith as Bronze Age Europe's. You'll enjoy Graves's dazzling hunt for the Goddess whether you find her or not.

If you're thinking about buying this book... DON'T waste your money!

Any entertainment value that could otherwise be garnered from this work of fiction is greatly overshadowed by Graves' false claims that the material presented was authentic, and that it came from ancient Celtic culture. This is NOT the case. In fact, nothing presented in this book is authentic, and as it is falsely presented as such, what could have at least been an interesting work of fiction, even fails to entertain.

Amazingly, Robert Graves' "White Goddess" has become a 'classic' upon which many modern "tree Ogham" books and articles have been written, however, in this text lies little, if any, decipherable truths. In fact, the book is so laden with errors and gross misinformation that it was dismissed as fiction by the foremost authorities on both Celtic studies, and the Ogham, at the time it was written (1946), authorities still heavily relied upon today for their foresight and accuracy. In fact, one of those most well respected authorities (and to this day, likely the most knowledgeable scholar on the subject, ever) was Robert Graves' own grandfather, Charles Graves. (More on this in a minute).

Several main components of this text are purely fictional, as is the majority of the supporting "evidence," i.e., heavily denounced, false documents that R. Graves relied heavily upon to make some very poor assumptions, and totally wild claims.

First, Graves' translations of Celtic legend and lore are linguistically shoddy at best, and many of his interpretations are highly obscure. Further, his efforts to paint Celtic legend and lore as stemming from displaced Greeks and Hebrews, and to interpret meaning into these Celtic legends from such a foreign perspective does the area of legitimate Celtic studies a serious disservice. Graves didn't do us any favors!

Further, his claims concerning the Ogham and the Celtic Tree Calendar are also blatantly false, and have lead to a great deal of misinformation on the ancient writing system of the Celts, and ancient Celtic culture, in general that persists even today.

Robert Graves relied very heavily upon the thoroughly discredited manuscript written by Roderic O'Flaherty in the early 17th century, that first claimed that Ogham markings were correlated with trees, which is linguistically inaccurate. At best, only seven of the Ogham characters can be interpreted as having any correlation with tree names.

Secondly, and more amazingly, is his "discovery" of what he labeled the "Celtic Tree Calendar." Graves makes a far leap out into space, purporting that the Ogham was made up of five vowels and 13 primary consonants, which he claims equate to 13 months in a "Celtic Tree Calendar," when it was already well known that there are not 13, but 15 primary consonants in the Ogham (in addition to the five vowels, and another five supplemental characters) . How he managed to string together an imaginary Calendar "system" based upon O'Flaherty's manuscript, and upon which he claims Celtic culture operated, is completely beyond me.

This text has been a continuous thorn in the side of Celtic scholars and academia since its writing. Robert Graves had access to the two foremost scholars on the Ogham of all time, and chose to completely dismiss them both. Although it also appears that the author wrote this book out of spite, due to very a strained relationship with both his father and grandfather, Robert Graves' further dismissal of R.A.S. Macalister (a well known and highly respected expert on the Ogham) is appalling. (Robert wrote Macalister seeking corroboration of his ideas and when they were challenged by the scholar, he blew him off!)

As for Charles Graves, Robert Graves' grandfather was not only a very credible scholar, and THE foremost authority on the Ogham at the time, but was also the President of the Royal Irish Academy. He was the first scholar to discover a cryptic element to the Ogham markings, and was well received for his many contributions on the subject. Both the elder Graves and Macalister (who himself cited the work of Charles Grave's in his own research) had heavily denounced the false works of O'Flaherty, and further scoffed at Robert Graves' text, discrediting it as pure fallacy.

For more useful texts on the Ogham, I highly suggest R.A.S. Macallister's Corpus Inscriptionum Insularum Celticarum and The Secret Languages of Ireland (both which include work by Charles Graves), and George Calder's "Auriacept Na n-Éces - The Scholar's Primer." Some of Charles Graves' exceptional work on the Ogham can be found on-line, for free. Just do a search for: "On the Ogam Inscriptions," Hermathena, Vol. 3, c.19 C. His work on the Ogham was purely outstanding.

For more on the fallacy known as "The White Goddess," be sure to read the excellent review written by the modern Celtic scholar and author, Peter Berresford Ellis, at: http://cura.free.fr/xv/13ellis2.html

Best of luck!