THE WHITE GODDESS

Peter Kane

  One of the most influential books in the 1960s on the witchcraft revival, the emergence of neo-paganism and the so-called  ‘Goddess spirituality’ feminist movement of the 1970s was Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, first published by Faber & Faber in 1948. In his foreword to the book, Graves says the content of the book was based on the premise that the secret language of poetic myth in the Mediterranean area and Northern Europe was a magical one linked to religious ceremonies in honour of ancient moon goddesses. Graves believed that this cultus, enshrined in the pagan Mysteries, was suppressed by the Roman Emperors when they accepted Christianity. He believed it only survived in the bardic colleges of Ireland and Wales and the medieval witch cult in Western Europe. Graves was one of the foremost poets of his generation and in his idiosyncratic concept of the triple lunar goddess, the ‘White Goddess’ of the title of the book, he saw the poetic muse, the ‘Night Mare’ who lined her nest with the bones of human poets. For Graves this muse manifested physically in his life as his wife and the young women he took as mistresses and lovers who inspired his work.
  The Theme (with a capital letter) of The White Goddess was based on the birth, life, death and resurrection or rebirth of the God of the waxing year and the Cain and Abel type struggle between him and his twin brother or ‘dark twin’, the God of the waning year. This was over the love of the Triple Goddess, who was their mother, bride and layer-out. The dark twin or rival Graves says was represented in mythical terms as the ‘Prince of the Air’. He appears as a tall, thin, dark faced, shapeshifting spectre that materialises in bedrooms and attempts to abduct the sleeper. This dark twin, although Graves never specifically said so, is a vampiric entity resembling the modern fictional characters of Count Dracula and Nostrefaru.
  According to Graves, the White Goddess herself is physically represented as a lovely slender woman with a hooked nose, deadly pale face, lips as red as rowanberries, startling icy blue eyes, and long fair hair or alternatively hair as ‘black as a raven’s wing’. In ghost stories and folklore she is the mysterious ‘White Lady’ and a thinly disguised form of Sovereignty, the goddess of the land who demands the blood of the sacrificed divine priest-king every seven years. Although she mostly appears as a female human, the White Lady or White Goddess can also take the form of one of her sacred totem animals – a bitch dog, a mare, a sow, a vixen, a she-wolf, a serpent, an owl or a mermaid.  In her human form she can appear as either a beautiful and enchanting young woman or the ‘loathly hag’ of fairy tales, both aspects of the archetypal folkloric witch or sorceress. These dual forms represent her aspects as both the Dark and Bright Goddess or the White Goddess and the Black Goddess as Graves portrayed her.
  The genesis of the writing of The White Goddess was in 1944 when Graves was living in Devon and had began work on a historical novel about Jason and the Argonauts called The Golden Fleece. This involved a detailed study of the Greek myths (about which Graves wrote a seminal two volume work) and was to be based in Majorca where Graves lived for many years before his death. From his studies Graves believed that the legend of the Golden Fleece concealed a struggle between matriarchy and patriarchy in the Bronze Age that was represented historically by the suppression of the ancient worship of a triple moon goddess. The central character in the novel was the chief priestess of a nemeton or sacred grove in a matriarchal society on Majorca. There the Goddess (with a capital letter) was worshipped in the archetypal forms of a Maiden, Nymph and Mother symbolising the full, new and ‘old’ moon. By the time he had written The White Goddess four years later this triple female deity had become the now well known Maiden, Mother and Crone or Hag representing the new, full and waning moon. In the manuscript of The Golden Fleece Graves describes the Triple Goddess as representing life and she is ‘the mistress of all elements, the Original Being, the Sovereign of Light and Darkness, the Queen of the Dead…’ Graves identified her with a rather wide range of ancient goddesses, some of whom are more appropriate than others. They include Isis, Cybele, Ashtaroth, Prosperina, Rhea, Pallas-Athena, Anu, Diana, Hera, Juno, and Hecate.
  In a lecture given in New York in February 1957, Graves said that he was working on a map showing the voyage of Jason and his Argonauts when he got side-tracked into speculation about the meaning of the ‘Battle of the Trees’ in Celtic lore and became obsessed with it. After reading Lady Charlotte Guest’s 19th century translation of the medieval Welsh legends called The Mabinogion, Graves came to the conclusion that the ‘Battle of the Trees’ represented a struggle between two rival priesthoods in Iron Age Britain. This was centred on the passing on of the knowledge of a magical and mystical alphabet based on the esoteric symbolism of trees. In a few weeks he had written a 70,000 word manuscript, provisionally entitled The Roebuck in the Thicket, which in 1946 was expanded into The White Goddess. The original title was based on one of the leading emblems or sacred totems of the ancient Goddess – a white roebuck - and its accompanying myth.
 Robert Graves’ interest in Celtic mythology already dated back to 1941 when he began corresponding with a Welsh poet called Alun Lewis and the two men discussed the ancient bard Taliesin. Then in late August 1942 Graves began a correspondence with another young Welsh poet, Lynette Roberts (Rhys). Their exchange of letters concerned a proposed book Graves wanted to write on the origins of poetry. Graves told Roberts that he had come to the conclusion that there were links between Gaelic (Irish) and Brythonic (Welsh) poetry and Greek poetic sources. He gave as an example the similarities between the Welsh and Irish exemplar gods Llew and Lugh and the Greek sun god Apollo. In response Roberts offered to look up some sources in the British Museum and send Graves some relevant books. One of these was a copy of Edward Davies’ Celtic Researches (1804), which Graves later said provided him with the keys to unlock the symbolism of Celtic, Roman and Greek religion and the Christian myths of the Nativity and the Crucifixion.
    Through his contacts with Alun Lewis and Lynette Roberts, Graves immersed himself in ‘the ancients secrets of her [the White Goddess] cult in Wales, Ireland and elsewhere’.  He read the 13th century Red Book of Hergest, which contains the legends later collected together in The Mabinogion, The Book of Taliesin and The Romance of Taliesin. The latter contains a long poem called ‘Cad Goddeau’ or ‘Battle of the Trees’, which recounts how a white roebuck and a dog came from Annwn (the Welsh underworld) and were stolen by a chieftain called Amatheon ap Don. He fought with Arawn, the king of Annwn, for ownership over these two faery animals and Graves saw this as a battle between the powers of the Otherworld and a human army made up of a confederacy of tribes with a matrilineal kingship. Graves speculated that this tribal fellowship was in fact the ancient Irish tribe of the Tuatha de Danaan or ‘People of [the goddess] Danu’. Graves was to later to include this myth in a chapter in the original version of The Roebuck in the Thicket.
    The research that Graves was doing into Greek mythology in connection with the writing of his novel The Golden Fleece led his friends to believe that he had become ‘moon obsessed’. In July 1942 Graves wrote to a friend saying that he was now firmly convinced that the origins of poetry were concerned with ‘primitive moon worship’. Graves admitted that he himself thought the idea was ‘crazy’ and was beginning to doubt his own sanity.  However he had noted that in English folk songs the magical number three kept recurring and he associated this with the three phases of the moon and his concept of a triple lunar goddess. Noting that one of the animals sacred to the moon goddesses was a white mouse, Graves claimed that the muse who inspired poets took that form.
  Graves also went off in another writing direction, but one that was still linked with his emerging and developing ideas about matriarchy and ancient goddess worship. He decided to write a novel about Jesus, provisionally entitled The Angry Shepherd and later published under the more snappy title of King Jesus. This, however, was not a conventional account of the Jewish messiah for Graves believed that Yahweh, the god of the Old Testament, had once been regarded as the son of the Great Goddess. He also believed that originally the descent of the kings of Israel had been matrilineal i.e. the tribal chieftain or king only held his position by woman-right and through his marriage to the hereditary (female) owner of the land he ruled over. In the novel Jesus is the secret and illegitimate son of the puppet king Herod Antipater and a virgin temple priestess called Miriam (Anglicised as Mary). Jesus, as a dedicated follower of Yahweh, denounces the feminine principle but ironically as the divine priest-king suffers a ritual death overseen by the ‘three Marys’, who Graves believed were symbolic of the Triple Goddess.
 When Graves sent a sample chapter of The Roebuck in the Thicket to his agent to forward to his then publisher Jonathan Cape their response was lukewarm. Cape obviously did not understand the subject matter and regarded the content as ‘obscure and limited.’ Graves’ agent suggested an academic publisher might be more sympathetic and the manuscript was submitted to the prestigious Oxford University Press who also rejected it, as did J.M. Dent, the publishers of the popular Everyman Library. Nothing further seems to have happened with the manuscript until January 1945 when Graves submitted it with a personal accompanying letter to a director of Faber & Faber hoping they would appreciate its content. He replied positively and agreed to publish the work and Graves then began the task of finishing it off. When he submitted the final draft to Faber & Faber in January 1946 Graves had decided to change the title of the book to The White Goddess, as that was now its central focus.
  The book itself received mixed criticism and it is not an easy read or particularly reader-friendly. It is one of those works that you browse or flick through picking up the many nuggets of information and wisdom embedded in its pages. As an example, my own well-thumbed copy of the 1948 edition has numerous passages underlined and highlighted. It has been claimed that Graves himself was not happy with the book after it was published and even disowned it. This claim seems to be contradicted by the fact that in 1963, inspired by a conversation with his friend the Sufi master Idris Shah, Graves had started to talk about the White Goddess’ alter ego, the Black Goddess of wisdom, and he planned to devote one of his famous Oxford lectures to her. One of Graves’ biographers, Grevel Lindop, has claimed that no one can understand Robert Graves’ poetry without first reading The White Goddess.
  In 1973 the feminist writer Elizabeth Gould-Davis author of The First Sex, wrote to Robert Graves praising him as the ‘god’ of the new women’s movement. She said that it consisted of small groups from California to New York who, inspired by reading The White Goddess, were defying the Church and rejecting Christianity to ‘worship the female principle and bring back the Great Goddess.’ In Britain The White Goddess certainly influenced Gerald Gardner, who was introduced to Graves by their mutual friend Idries Shah, and his emerging Wicca movement. It also had a great influence on modern traditional witchcraft with both Robert Cochrane of the Clan of Tubal Cain and Ruth Wynn-Owen of the Plant y Bran being fans of the book. In fact Cochrane actually wrote to Graves and it is hoped this correspondence may be published in the near future. In recent years numerous books have also been written about the concept of the ‘Celtic tree alphabet’ that Graves wrote about in The White Goddess.
It cannot be coincidental that over sixty years since its first publication The White Goddess has gone through four editions, in 1948, 1952, 1960 and 1997, and is still in print. This reflects the power of the writing and the continuing interest in its subject matter. It is ‘interesting’ though that a book that was first conceived as a history of the origins and development of poetry should have ended up having such an important influence on one of the most intriguing forms of alternative spirituality to have emerged in the 20th century. Or perhaps it is not that surprising as Robert Graves always insisted that the historical witch cult was a survival of the ancient Goddess worship, or at least contained elements of it.