The author and poet Robert Graves' study of the nature of poetic myth-making, ''The White Goddess'', first published in 1948, and revised, amended and enlarged in 1966, represents a tangential approach to the study of mythology from a decidedly idiosyncratic perspective. It proposed the existence of a European deity, the White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death, represented by the phases of the moon, who he argued lies behind the faces of the diverse goddesses of various European mythologies. In this work, Graves argued that "true poetry" or "pure poetry" has inextricable links with ancient cult-ritual of his proposed White Goddess and of her son. His conclusions were based upon his highly speculative conjectures about how religions formed, and there is no historical evidence that this White Goddess as he describes her was ever a feature of any actual belief system. Graves described ''The White Goddess'' as "a historical grammar of the language of poetry myth." He was not joking. The book draws from mythology and poetry from Wales and Ireland through most of Western Europe and the ancient Middle East. Relying heavily on arguments from etymology, Graves argues not only for the worship of a single goddess under many names; but also that the names of the letters in the Ogham alphabet used in parts of Goidelic Britain contained a calendar that contained the key to an ancient liturgy involving the human sacrifice of a sacred king; and also that these letter names concealed some lines of Greek language hexameter describing the goddess. ''The Golden Bough'' (1922) 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 touched upon. Graves wrote: :"Sir James Frazer was able to keep his beautiful rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, Cambridge University, 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 Christianity legend, dogma and ritual are the refinement of a great body of primitive and even barbarian beliefs, and that almost the only original element in Christianity is the personality of Jesus." Graves' ''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 only read by scholars, but as interest in goddess-based religions increased since 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. 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 nineteenth century Aryan Race myth of how Indo-European speaking super-warriors, armed with horses, wheeled vehicles, and other superior military technologies, had conquered and displaced earlier people in prehistoric Europe, likewise fell into disrepute at this time. Without these underpinnings, Graves's argument becomes hard to sustain. While Graves knew a great deal about Greek language and Rome mythology and literature, his knowledge of Celtic languages remained rather superficial, and his 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 "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 expresses anti-Semitism in his conclusion to the second and expanded edition, which blames the god of Judaism for much of the modern world's woes. Also, 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. Still, Graves's vision appeals sufficiently to some, that it has kept its power to convince and to overwhelm. 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 flaws as a work of information about ancient mythologies and cultures, ''The White Goddess'' has now 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. == External link == *[http://www.big.com.au/fallen/graves.html Robert Graves and ''The White Goddess''] 1948 books Books by title Goddesses
==NPOV tag== I added the NPOV tag to this article because it was painful to read. It doesn;t sound much like an encylcopidea article as it does a feel-good cheering session by someone in love with the book. The only mentions at all that this book was highly speculative and generally disregarded by the scholarly community are in the last sentence (which still manages to sound a rah-rah for the wonderfulness of the idea) and the mention that he used a controversial method for trying to come up with historical analysis. We need a strong rewrite here, one that approaches the book by how other scholars see it and points out that this goddess Graves talk about was a theoretical construct that isn't supported by the vast majority of other authors. In fact, the only scholars I know of who support it in any way are those with a very stong pro-feminist neopagan historical revisionism mindset, such as Barbara Walker, Merlin Stone (I'm not sure she would count as a scholar), Gimbutas and so forth. Even someone who believes in his theory should have to admit that this article is focusing way too much on the cultural validation followers get from the book and not on whether it was basically fictional. Ideally, I think the purposes of NPOV would be served best by someone nuetral on the topic going through and cleaning it up. I can and will add my thoughts to it, but at this point I feel like I would almost rather completely start from scratch if I were to do it, and then I just waste my time as people try to change it back. If this gets nudged to at least trying to be somewhat restrained in its love for the book instead of pure uncritical lovefest then I think I could go in and add politely worded parts about the lack of support it has among scholars. User:DreamGuy 17:16, Nov 23, 2004 (UTC) :Are we looking at the same thing here? The article says to me that: Graves deified his mistress; that nobody believes the turn of the century anthropology and comparative religion stuff that Graves founded his personal mythology on; that Graves's knowledge of Celtic languages and mythology were seriously inadequate; that his imaginative method guaranteed that he would find exactly what he was looking for; that Graves was anti-Semitic; and that the current fame of the book is the result of its being a shared fantasy rather than a historically accurate account. I added much of that stuff, and tried to state it as neutrally and as factually as I could. -- User:Ihcoyc 17:49, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC) *Those parts end up as very subtle in the other article, with some of that I'm not even sure how you can possibly read into the current article. The "nobody believes" part is nonexistent as far as I can tell (other than a "may not be real" thing at the end, which sounds more like a tentative slight possibility instead of the opinion of the majority of scholars), the Celtic part sounds like an aside while his Greek mythology revisionism completely passed by, the intro talks about his White Goddess as if she actually existed, and the strong outpouring of support for the great things he says comments still litter the piece. I suggest that your interpretation of how the article appears is more based upon what you meant to say and how you intended it and not on what we really have as an end result. Even still, the points you mention still would not make up for the glowing language of support persistent throughout the rest of the article. User:DreamGuy 18:23, Nov 23, 2004 (UTC) ==NPOV tag removal== I removed the NPOV tag that I put there a while ago. While I think the article still needs work, since I've been here a little longer I've decided the tag was a little severe for the things I was complaining about. When I get time to edit I shall try to do so, but in the meantime I couldn't see keeping the icon up top expecting someone else to just make the changes for me. User:DreamGuy 02:38, Dec 1, 2004 (UTC) ==Older discussion== As I said in my edit summary, this is a nice little article! Just a couple of things: #Could we have a source for it being called "unreadable"? #Could we have something in the intro that makes it get to the point a little quicker? The prose is nice, and the article feels complete and readable, but I don't know exactly what the book is about till the end of the article. Just an addition to the first paragraph should do it, though you might then need to edit the ending to avoid repitition. --User:Sam Francis 18:52 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC) :1. I don't think unreadable is that far off beam. I have read it and found it very heavy going. 2. Your point about the sense of abstraction in the article is correct and it probably needs a one-liner explaining what it's about as a prepend. If nobody has done it in the interim I'll have a stab tonight. user:sjc ::#I'm not suggesting it's not right, just that if we're quoting, it'd be nice to know ''who''; I like to attribute views. Even if it's truthful to say ''many reviewers have called it unreadable or near unreadable'' or something like that, it's a bit better than just putting ''"unreadable"''. ::#Cheers! I'd do it myself, but I've never read the book! -- User:Sam Francis 12:48 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC) :::Your point about attribution is apposite, however sometimes the facts tend to speak for themselves and do not necessarily always require attribution. As an example, it would not be unreasonable to suggest without attribution that Rush Limbaugh writes from a perspective which is markedly right of centre or that the Battle of Hastings represented a setback for the Anglo-Saxons. In this case I feel the comment is not unreasonable although I will try and find some established corroboration for this perspective, albeit that anyone essaying the book will come to very similar conclusions. user:sjc ::::I agree, though if anyone comes across an apt remark on this book, then it might help. I don't mind "unreadable" being there! Intro reads better now, too, nice one. -- User:Sam Francis :The text in question was ''"Others have described the 500-page book as "unreadable" (or nearly so),"'' I am always untrusting of these judgments made by unspecified "others." Often "scholars" are credited with such statements. So often the attribution turns out to be spurious. Does the entry for ''Middlemarch'' tell us that few college students actually finish the book? Out with this, which ''genuinely'' violates NeutralPOV. --User:Wetman 06:36, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC) Is User:Poitypoity's contribution valid/NPOV? -- User:Sam Francis ---- Anticipating that some might quarrel with my additions to the article, I'd call attention to the criticisms of Graves made here: * http://silver-gateway.com/grove/hutton/ The Ronald Hutton book ''The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles'' contains much valuable information about Graves and his shared fantasy; his later book ''The Triumph of the Moon'' has even more. -- User:Ihcoyc 03:23 18 Jul 2003 (UTC) :Shouldn't Hutton's book be mentioned and quoted in the entry, as central to the "de-bunking" of Robert Graves? --User:Wetman 08:30, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)
See other meanings of words starting from letter:
Words begining with The_White_Goddess:
The_White_Goddess
The_White_Goddess
The White Goddess
The author and poet Robert Graves' study of the nature of poetic myth-making, ''The White Goddess'', first published in 1948, and revised, amended and enlarged in 1966, represents a tangential approach to the study of mythology from a decidedly idiosyncratic perspective. It proposed the existence of a European deity, the White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death, represented by the phases of the moon, who he argued lies behind the faces of the diverse goddesses of various European mythologies. In this work, Graves argued that "true poetry" or "pure poetry" has inextricable links with ancient cult-ritual of his proposed White Goddess and of her son. His conclusions were based upon his highly speculative conjectures about how religions formed, and there is no historical evidence that this White Goddess as he describes her was ever a feature of any actual belief system. Graves described ''The White Goddess'' as "a historical grammar of the language of poetry myth." He was not joking. The book draws from mythology and poetry from Wales and Ireland through most of Western Europe and the ancient Middle East. Relying heavily on arguments from etymology, Graves argues not only for the worship of a single goddess under many names; but also that the names of the letters in the Ogham alphabet used in parts of Goidelic Britain contained a calendar that contained the key to an ancient liturgy involving the human sacrifice of a sacred king; and also that these letter names concealed some lines of Greek language hexameter describing the goddess. ''The Golden Bough'' (1922) 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 touched upon. Graves wrote: :"Sir James Frazer was able to keep his beautiful rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, Cambridge University, 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 Christianity legend, dogma and ritual are the refinement of a great body of primitive and even barbarian beliefs, and that almost the only original element in Christianity is the personality of Jesus." Graves' ''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 only read by scholars, but as interest in goddess-based religions increased since 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. 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 nineteenth century Aryan Race myth of how Indo-European speaking super-warriors, armed with horses, wheeled vehicles, and other superior military technologies, had conquered and displaced earlier people in prehistoric Europe, likewise fell into disrepute at this time. Without these underpinnings, Graves's argument becomes hard to sustain. While Graves knew a great deal about Greek language and Rome mythology and literature, his knowledge of Celtic languages remained rather superficial, and his 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 "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 expresses anti-Semitism in his conclusion to the second and expanded edition, which blames the god of Judaism for much of the modern world's woes. Also, 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. Still, Graves's vision appeals sufficiently to some, that it has kept its power to convince and to overwhelm. 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 flaws as a work of information about ancient mythologies and cultures, ''The White Goddess'' has now 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. == External link == *[http://www.big.com.au/fallen/graves.html Robert Graves and ''The White Goddess''] 1948 books Books by title Goddesses
The White Goddess
==NPOV tag== I added the NPOV tag to this article because it was painful to read. It doesn;t sound much like an encylcopidea article as it does a feel-good cheering session by someone in love with the book. The only mentions at all that this book was highly speculative and generally disregarded by the scholarly community are in the last sentence (which still manages to sound a rah-rah for the wonderfulness of the idea) and the mention that he used a controversial method for trying to come up with historical analysis. We need a strong rewrite here, one that approaches the book by how other scholars see it and points out that this goddess Graves talk about was a theoretical construct that isn't supported by the vast majority of other authors. In fact, the only scholars I know of who support it in any way are those with a very stong pro-feminist neopagan historical revisionism mindset, such as Barbara Walker, Merlin Stone (I'm not sure she would count as a scholar), Gimbutas and so forth. Even someone who believes in his theory should have to admit that this article is focusing way too much on the cultural validation followers get from the book and not on whether it was basically fictional. Ideally, I think the purposes of NPOV would be served best by someone nuetral on the topic going through and cleaning it up. I can and will add my thoughts to it, but at this point I feel like I would almost rather completely start from scratch if I were to do it, and then I just waste my time as people try to change it back. If this gets nudged to at least trying to be somewhat restrained in its love for the book instead of pure uncritical lovefest then I think I could go in and add politely worded parts about the lack of support it has among scholars. User:DreamGuy 17:16, Nov 23, 2004 (UTC) :Are we looking at the same thing here? The article says to me that: Graves deified his mistress; that nobody believes the turn of the century anthropology and comparative religion stuff that Graves founded his personal mythology on; that Graves's knowledge of Celtic languages and mythology were seriously inadequate; that his imaginative method guaranteed that he would find exactly what he was looking for; that Graves was anti-Semitic; and that the current fame of the book is the result of its being a shared fantasy rather than a historically accurate account. I added much of that stuff, and tried to state it as neutrally and as factually as I could. -- User:Ihcoyc 17:49, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC) *Those parts end up as very subtle in the other article, with some of that I'm not even sure how you can possibly read into the current article. The "nobody believes" part is nonexistent as far as I can tell (other than a "may not be real" thing at the end, which sounds more like a tentative slight possibility instead of the opinion of the majority of scholars), the Celtic part sounds like an aside while his Greek mythology revisionism completely passed by, the intro talks about his White Goddess as if she actually existed, and the strong outpouring of support for the great things he says comments still litter the piece. I suggest that your interpretation of how the article appears is more based upon what you meant to say and how you intended it and not on what we really have as an end result. Even still, the points you mention still would not make up for the glowing language of support persistent throughout the rest of the article. User:DreamGuy 18:23, Nov 23, 2004 (UTC) ==NPOV tag removal== I removed the NPOV tag that I put there a while ago. While I think the article still needs work, since I've been here a little longer I've decided the tag was a little severe for the things I was complaining about. When I get time to edit I shall try to do so, but in the meantime I couldn't see keeping the icon up top expecting someone else to just make the changes for me. User:DreamGuy 02:38, Dec 1, 2004 (UTC) ==Older discussion== As I said in my edit summary, this is a nice little article! Just a couple of things: #Could we have a source for it being called "unreadable"? #Could we have something in the intro that makes it get to the point a little quicker? The prose is nice, and the article feels complete and readable, but I don't know exactly what the book is about till the end of the article. Just an addition to the first paragraph should do it, though you might then need to edit the ending to avoid repitition. --User:Sam Francis 18:52 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC) :1. I don't think unreadable is that far off beam. I have read it and found it very heavy going. 2. Your point about the sense of abstraction in the article is correct and it probably needs a one-liner explaining what it's about as a prepend. If nobody has done it in the interim I'll have a stab tonight. user:sjc ::#I'm not suggesting it's not right, just that if we're quoting, it'd be nice to know ''who''; I like to attribute views. Even if it's truthful to say ''many reviewers have called it unreadable or near unreadable'' or something like that, it's a bit better than just putting ''"unreadable"''. ::#Cheers! I'd do it myself, but I've never read the book! -- User:Sam Francis 12:48 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC) :::Your point about attribution is apposite, however sometimes the facts tend to speak for themselves and do not necessarily always require attribution. As an example, it would not be unreasonable to suggest without attribution that Rush Limbaugh writes from a perspective which is markedly right of centre or that the Battle of Hastings represented a setback for the Anglo-Saxons. In this case I feel the comment is not unreasonable although I will try and find some established corroboration for this perspective, albeit that anyone essaying the book will come to very similar conclusions. user:sjc ::::I agree, though if anyone comes across an apt remark on this book, then it might help. I don't mind "unreadable" being there! Intro reads better now, too, nice one. -- User:Sam Francis :The text in question was ''"Others have described the 500-page book as "unreadable" (or nearly so),"'' I am always untrusting of these judgments made by unspecified "others." Often "scholars" are credited with such statements. So often the attribution turns out to be spurious. Does the entry for ''Middlemarch'' tell us that few college students actually finish the book? Out with this, which ''genuinely'' violates NeutralPOV. --User:Wetman 06:36, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC) Is User:Poitypoity's contribution valid/NPOV? -- User:Sam Francis ---- Anticipating that some might quarrel with my additions to the article, I'd call attention to the criticisms of Graves made here: * http://silver-gateway.com/grove/hutton/ The Ronald Hutton book ''The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles'' contains much valuable information about Graves and his shared fantasy; his later book ''The Triumph of the Moon'' has even more. -- User:Ihcoyc 03:23 18 Jul 2003 (UTC) :Shouldn't Hutton's book be mentioned and quoted in the entry, as central to the "de-bunking" of Robert Graves? --User:Wetman 08:30, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)
See other meanings of words starting from letter:
T
TA | TB | TC | TD | TE | TF | TG | TH | TI | TJ | TK | TL | TŁ | TM | TN | TO | TP | TR | TS | TU | TW | TX | TY | TZ |Words begining with The_White_Goddess:
The_White_Goddess
The_White_Goddess
These materials are based on Wikipedia and licensed under the GNU FDL
YouTube.com videos better site than Turbo Tax 2007
