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Robert Graves’ White Goddess
Robert Graves is another author whose two books Greek Myths and White Goddess are usually viewed with scrutiny. He’s a well known novelist and poet, but his attempts at being a scholar failed. In 1948 he published a book called The White Goddess and published a revised edition of it in ’66. In that book he proposed the existence of a European deity, the White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death, presented by the phases of the moon, who he argued lies behind the faces of the diverse goddesses of various European mythology. In it, 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 systemGraves described The White Goddess as "a historical grammar of the language of poetic myth." 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 Gaelic Britain contained a calendar that contained the key to an ancient liturgy involving the human sacrifice of a sacred king (see "Celtic Astrology") ; and also that these letter names concealed some lines of Ancient Greek hexameter describing the goddess. Graves's conclusions are universally considered untenable by Celtic scholars.
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.
While Graves knew a great deal about Greek and Roman mythology and literature, his knowledge of Celtic languages remained rather superficial, and his technique of 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 concludes, in the second and expanded edition, that the monotheistic god of Judaism and its successors are the cause of the White Goddess' downfall, and thus the sources of much of the modern world's woe. He also suggests 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.
Graves's vision still 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.
Robert graves’ Greek Myths
Graves is a very skilled novelist as he proved with a retelling of Jason and the Argonauts and I, Claudius, but his book Greek Myths received much skepticism as it did with The White Goddess. Being a worshipper of the Triple Goddess, Graves pursues in this book to prove the existence of this goddess and that goddesses like Persephone, Demeter and Hekate are aspects of the Triple Goddess as the Maiden (Persephone), Mother (Demeter) and Crone (Hekate). Many people nowadays still believe in this, that these three goddesses are aspects of the Triple Goddess. This book probably influence neopaganism more than Gimbutas ever did.
This book is full of falacies.
If you read Graves you will not encounter any understanding of the heavens, the basis of Greek myth, in which the planets and constellations were the detritus of times past, rendered immortal and writ large in the heavens. This absence is explained by Graves, when he extols his belief that even "the 13th century Excidium Troiae is, in parts mythically sounder than the Iliad." p. 13. What Graves claims is that an author who commented on the myths over 2000 years after Homer actually wrote down the myths, understood them better than the person who expounded them.
Instead of looking to the sky to understand these myths, Graves claims that the only way to properly understand them is when "archaeologists can provide a more exact tabulation of tribal movements in Greece and the dates." p.20; and that consequently "A large part of Greek myth is politico-religious history."(p.17). This is seriously misguided!
Graves as becomes evident has an agenda which he lays bare when he claims Greek & Jewish myth is a product of:
"The Jews as inheritors of the 'Pelasgian', or Canaanitish, creation myth.." p. 35; that is that the people of Greece, before the arrival of Greeks were the same people as those who peopled Canaan (Palestine, which is utterly unsupported by any archaeology). What Graves attempts with this ridiculous tome, is to provide a syncretist misinterpretation of Greek myth to reconcile it with the irreconcilable Biblical beliefs and he imagines he achieves this when he weaves into this his "matrilineal v patrilineal" theory as some sort of corroboration. This explains why Graves claimed that a later, Greek Christian from Byzantium, wrote a sounder mythology than Homer: the Byzantine, being Christian, had the same disposition to reinterpret Greek myths to make them more acceptable to a Christian viewpoint, as does Graves.
Greek myths are beautiful if they can be understood. Graves omits the ouranographic dimension of Greek belief because, as he makes clear, he is actually attempting to reconcile it with Jewish (hence Christian) belief. No such reconciliation can work if the author is honest. The Greeks studied the heavens; the Jews were forbidden to do so on pain of death, eg. Deuteronomy 17.2-5 & Jeremiah 10.2. Graves' book is embarrassingly silly.
If I look at the reviewers of this book at Amazon.com, I notice that too many people seem to fall for it and actually think it is a good guide to mythology and that is to be viewed as classical scholarship what the author has done. The only thing I can say is, read the book and make up your own mind.
http://www.big.com.au/fallen/graves.html
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