The White Goddess

What it is

The White Goddess is Robert Graves's long essay on how poetic myth is made, issued with the subtitle A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. Graves, an English poet, argues that a single European goddess lies behind the many goddesses of European and pagan story. He calls her the White Goddess and gives her rule over birth, love and death. Moon phases stand for her, and he compares her to the Mother Goddess. Poetry that he counts as pure, he says, is tied to her old rites and to her son. The book is not a manual of spells. It is a poet's reading of myth, offered as a grammar of the language in which myths are written.

Where it comes from

Graves wrote a first version in January 1944, in three weeks, a month after completing The Golden Fleece. That draft was called The Roebuck in the Thicket. He set it aside to work on King Jesus, a novel about the life of Jesus. When he returned he renamed it The Three-Fold Muse, and later The White Goddess. The manuscript went to a publisher in January 1946. Faber & Faber brought it out in Britain in May 1948, and Creative Age Press in the United States the following month. The book rests in part on articles he had written for Wales magazine. Corrected and enlarged editions appeared in 1952 and 1961.

How it is done

Graves worked by etymology, by wide reading in myth and verse, and by two habits of mind that he named himself. One he called analeptic thought: throwing the mind back into the past to receive impressions. The other, iconotropy, was a way of reading pictures. The reader breaks speech down into its first images and rhythms, then holds those images together on several levels at once. Applying this, Graves read a woodcut of the Judgement of Paris as one triple goddess rather than as Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. He also held that the names of Ogham letters hid a calendar and lines of Greek hexameter about the goddess.

Tools and materials

The book's working materials are words and images rather than objects. Its central evidence is the Ogham alphabet used in Gaelic Ireland and Britain: Graves took the letter names as the bones of a calendar and a liturgy, and said they concealed Greek hexameter verse in praise of the goddess. For Ogham lore he leaned on Ogygia, written by Roderick O'Flaherty, a bard of the 17th century. He also built a hypothetical tree goddess, Druantia, whose name he traced to a Celtic root for oak. None of this is a set of instruments. It is close reading of texts and pictures.

What it is for

Graves wanted to show what poetry is for. He held that reading a poem could bring a person into the goddess's presence, though only verse by what he called a true poet of the wild would do it. Classical poetry and the Romantic poets fell short in his view, and he spoke harshly of 19th-century poets as unhealthy, drug-dependent and unbalanced. In the longer second edition he went further. He blamed the spread of a single male god, the God of Judaism and of the faiths that grew from it, for the goddess's fall, and for much of the trouble of the modern world.

Who does it

The author is the book's only practitioner. Graves called himself a poet rather than a medieval historian, and built his case on literary evidence. His biographer Richard Perceval Graves records that Laura Riding shaped his thinking while he wrote, even though the two had parted. She read the finished book with anger and called it a thing assembled out of her life and thoughts. Within the argument, women hold a rank above poet: Graves makes the Muse herself female. He also objected to women's verse that copied male conventions, wanting women's writing to sound in its own voice.

Peoples and places

Welsh and Irish myth and verse supply the core of the evidence, and Graves moves outward across the rest of western Europe and the old Middle East. Ogham belongs to Gaelic Ireland and Britain. Druantia, the tree goddess he proposed, he presented as Gallic. The book was published in London and New York, and its readership has been mixed: poets and novelists in English, Neopagans who took up Druantia and the triple goddess, and Celtic scholars who mostly kept their distance. Graves complained that those scholars ignored the book loudly rather than answering it.

What people believe

Behind the argument sits one claim: that a single goddess has been worshipped under many names, and that the moon, waxing and waning, is her sign. Graves treats goddess worship as the earliest form of religion and reads it out of poems and stories rather than from excavation. He supposed that a magical language once ran through the Mediterranean and northern Europe, bound to ceremonies for the Moon-goddess or Muse, some of them as old as the Stone Age, and that poetry still speaks it. The goddess has a son, and the old rite pairs them.

When it is done

One chapter turns on timekeeping. Graves argued that the Ogham letter names held a calendar, and that this calendar unlocked an old liturgy in which a sacred king was sacrificed. The letter names, he said, also carried Greek hexameters about the goddess. No Celtic calendar on record works the way his does. The book's other cycle is the moon's, whose phases he links to the goddess's three faces. No festival or season is fixed by the book itself.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Reviews from specialists were mostly hostile. Archaeologists, historians and folklorists pointed to weak philology, poor choice of texts and archaeology already out of date, and dismissed the thesis. T. S. Eliot's notice piled up adjectives and called the book monstrous and prodigious. Ronald Hutton says it still feeds mistaken ideas about the ancient Celts. Hilda Ellis Davidson wrote that it misled readers with eloquent claims about a vague goddess in early Celtic writing, and judged Graves no authority on the matter. Michael W. Pharand, while noting the criticisms, thought the conclusions came from careful observation, and Norman Davies cites the book with approval.

Compare and confuse

Graves started from The Golden Bough, James George Frazer's study of comparative religion, first issued in 1890 and revised in 1922; he felt he was stating plainly what Frazer had only implied. The book's one-goddess thesis was taken up in the 1970s by feminist theologians as matriarchal religion, and it sits close to the Triple Goddess of Neopaganism and the Mother Goddess of comparative myth.

Today

The book stays in print and in argument. A scholarly edition edited by Grevel Lindop appeared in 1997, after the amended versions of 1952 and 1961. Its images travelled into fiction: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath both drew on it, Alan Garner cites it for The Owl Service, Susan Cooper for the Dark Is Rising books, Lloyd Alexander for names in the Prydain novels, and Margaret St. Clair, Philip José Farmer and Joan D. Vinge for science fiction. Neopagans still use Druantia. Jacqueline Rose argued that its picture of woman as inspiration and drudge harmed Plath's writing and life.

Questions people ask about The White Goddess

Good reading and sources

• Encyclopaedia BritannicaArticle

• The White Goddess on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data