The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth

by Robert Graves

Book Overview

The definitive edition of one of the more extraordinary and influential books of our time

This labyrinthine and extraordinary book, first published more than sixty years ago, was the outcome of Robert Graves's vast reading and curious research into strange territories of folklore, mythology, religion, and magic. Erudite and impassioned, it is a scholar-poet's quest for the meaning of European myths, a polemic about the relations between...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374289336
• ISBN13: 9780374289331
• Release Date: October 2013
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Magnificent

A magnificent highly educated spiritual ramble - playfully insightful - eminently readable and uplifting - recommended far above the dullest scriptures. Something to come back to often. It is a breath of freshness in a world of footloose foolishness. Something with which to sigh and say, "oh! that's why I went to college...and grad school....and...it was all worth it...I can sleep tonight...sigh...turn over and dream... a-ha...

Jaw-Dropping Amazement

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.

Like a dream

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!

Graves' Best! A Classic

Seeing this reprint in H/b - was a great pleasure. Grevel Lindop has done us all a favour - getting this organised. Always a controversial book, it's a great read - the sort of thing you can open and dip into for years - and still find something fresh iand stimulating. Even if deemed tendentious, at times, it is always a catalyst. Graves' poured great imagination and encyclopaediac stretches of information into this book - essentially his definition of what truly makes a poet - a poet, being a moon struck follower of the white goddess. While I personally subscribe to the view that there may be several different poetic functions - there is something compelling about Graves' basic argument - that poetry is a kind of service to the Goddess, that poetry is something 'magical' - poesis a kind of loss of self, even a kind of 'crucifixion' on the cross of time and space, altho' Graves' would probably have deemed that too Christian sounding. Still, he does suggest that an engagement with poetry - with the Goddess, involves a kind of 'dismemberment' - much like Nietzsche's feeling for the 'Dionsyian' experience - and, like Nietzsche, rather scornful of what 'Apollonians' get up to - in the name of poetry (or anything else). Graves elaborates this theme - with a kind of 'stream of consciousness' detour through several different cultural milieus - chiefly, focusing on the 'Celtic' tradition - and its Graeco-Roman equivalents, always returning to his starting point - the motif of the mother-son/lover-goddess object relationship. In the concluding chapters of the book, Graves concedes that this may become a kind of diffused presence, the 'great mother' in the cosmic sense, thus manifest in the entire creation. Graves' work had its problems, not least the notion that he could present his magnum opus - really a 'visionary' work - as a piece of serious scholarship. As such, the W.G. did not receive recognition from the scholarly fraternity. However, it did strike a chord with the artistic community, the avant garde, virtually achieving 'cult status' for a while - in the 60's. My only complaint about the new preface or introduction - by Grevel Lindop, is a certain ambivalence about who Graves' main audience was - when it mattered most? Graves' 'hippy' readership attracted rather pejorative comments in this respect, as if to suggest that Graves found his niche with the 'orthodox' - which was certainly not the case. Indeed, the same editorial comments go on to link Graves' name (and the W.G.) with 'magic mushrooms,' Hoffmann's discovery of LSD - and the counter-culture which gave the W.G. its greatest audience. That Graves eventually took the Chair in Poetry - at Oxford, was a rather belated tribute. As an editorial consideration, it would have been nice to see a little more attention devoted to the fact that Graves' later association with Idries Shah and the Eastern tradition led to a complete volte -face on Graves' part, vis-a-vis the negative comments accorde

visions and memory in myth

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.