The White Goddess

A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth

EDITED BY
GREVEL LINDOP

 

The
White
Goddess
is one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary books. Subtitled ‘a historical grammar of poetic myth’, it is also (among other things) an adventure in historical detective-work, a headlong quest through the forests of half the world’s mythologies, a poet’s introduction to poetry, a critique of western civilisation, a polemic about the relationship between man and woman, and (in some respects at least) a disguised autobiography.

The last may seem an unlikely claim; but from its opening confession (‘Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion’) to the ringing declaration of its close (‘None greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess!’) the book is an intensely personal one. The attentive reader will catch many glimpses of Robert Graves – as a child picking blackberries in North Wales; as a student talking to his moral tutor at Oxford; as a Professor teaching English at Cairo; cutting mistletoe in Brittany; being bitten by a viper in the Pyrenees; exercising the time-travelling faculties that had helped him produce the
Claudius
novels; and even (at several points) writing the first draft of
The
White
Goddess.
The book’s composition was itself an extraordinary episode, even in the setting of Graves’s far-from-ordinary life – an irruption of inspired creativity generating a theory which not only deciphered much of European prehistory but also interpreted the most powerful experiences of his own past life and determined the course of his future. Certainly no one can understand Graves, or his poetry, without reading
The
White
Goddess.
It is tempting to go further and suggest that no one can fully understand the modern world who has not at least considered its arguments.

Graves’s own account of the book’s writing (reprinted here as Appendix B) is one of the great accounts of literary inspiration – a tale of power worthy to stand beside Coleridge’s note to ‘Kubla Khan’ and Mary Shelley’s account of the birth of
Frankenstein.
But it leaves many questions (not least those about dating) unanswered. A few points may be summarised here. In 1940 Robert and Beryl Graves had moved to the village of Galmpton in South Devon; their first child, William, would be born there later the same year. Before long, things started to happen which with hindsight appear relevant to the gestation of
The
White
Goddess.
In late 1941 Graves began to correspond with the Welsh poet Alun Lewis. They discussed the nature of poetry and poets; the name of the medieval Welsh poet Taliesin cropped up.
1
Then, in July 1942, as they completed their prose-writers’ manual
The
Reader
Over
Your
Shoulder
, Graves and his co-author Alan Hodge began to consider writing a ‘book about poetry’. Topics mooted by Graves for treatment included the psychology of poetic inspiration, and the reasons for the ‘aura or halo, or whatever, that clings to the name of “poet” in spite of the lamentable history of bad poetic behaviour’.
2
They agreed to ‘put [the] book on to simmer very, very slowly’, but by July 1943 Graves was writing to Hodge about the links between poetry and ‘primitive moon-worship’ and suggesting that ‘The history of English poetry has been the modifying of the original moon-poetry, which is stressed, with sun-poetry (intellectual, Apollo poetry) which is measured in regular beats and metres’.
3
Evidently the investigation of ‘moon-poetry’ soon took a Celtic turn, for in September Graves was telling the poet Lynette Roberts that ‘Gaelic and Brythonic influences’ would be important for the book, and she was offering to help with his research.

At this point the story acquires a second dimension. In November Graves (who frequently incubated, or even wrote, several books at once) began research for a historical novel,
King
Jesus,
based on his opinion that the documentary evidence showed Jesus to have been, in a strict view of both Jewish and Roman law, a claimant to the throne of Israel – a title which descended by the maternal line.
4
Thus Celtic, Roman and Hebrew matters were all much in Graves’s mind when, a month later in December 1943, Lynette Roberts sent him a copy of Edward Davies’
Celtic
Researches
(first published in 1804). The effect was dramatic: as Graves told Roberts,

The ingredients of the magic brew were now ready in the cauldron; but still something was needed to produce their synthesis. It came in March or early April 1944, when Graves’s projects, poetic and scholarly, were suddenly interrupted.
2
The publishers who were to bring out his recently completed historical novel,
The
Golden
Fleece
,
which dealt with the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts, asked him to redraw the Argo’s route on the maps which were to accompany the text. It was during this (significantly non-verbal) task that Graves’s mind began to work irresistibly on the mass of materials he had lately absorbed. To quote his own account,

By mid-May he had written a book-length work which was, essentially, the first draft of
The
White
Goddess.
Entitled
The
Roebuck
in
the
Thicket
, it was sent to Keidrych Rhys (Lynette Roberts’s husband), who serialised part of it in his magazine
Wales
whilst Graves’s literary agent, A.P. Watt, began approaching publishers. Graves continued his work on the book, consulting experts in many different fields. Margaret Murray (author of
The
Witch-Cult
in
Western
Europe
)
was asked about witch-names and the use of herbs; Christopher Hawkes advised on New Grange and Stonehenge; Max Mallowan (he lived near Galmpton with his wife, Agatha Christie) was on hand to discuss Middle Eastern Archaeology.

The book deepened and expanded up to its publication in 1948 as
The
White
Goddess
and, indeed, continued to develop until 1960: one purpose of the present edition is to give the text as Graves finally left it in that year. But what kind of book is it, and what was the ‘illumination’ that so gripped Graves during those weeks in 1943? To summarise in a rough-and-ready fashion, the book’s argument is that in late prehistoric times, throughout Europe and the Middle East, matriarchal cultures, worshipping a supreme Goddess and recognising male gods only as her son, consort or sacrificial victim, were subordinated by aggressive proponents of patriarchy who deposed women from their positions of authority, elevated the Goddess’s male consorts into positions of divine supremacy and reconstructed myths and rituals to conceal what had taken place. This patriarchal conquest happened at various times, beginning in the second millennium
BC
and reaching Britain around 400
BC
. True poetry (inspired by the Muse and her prime symbol, the moon) even today is a survival, or intuitive re-creation, of the ancient Goddess-worship. Moreover, her cult and the matriarchy that went with it represented a saner and happier mode of human existence than the patriarchy of the male God and his sun-inspired rationality, which have produced most of the ills of the modern world.

The illumination which struck Graves with such force was really a double realisation. One part of this was the perception that the mysterious ‘Battle of the Trees’ recalled in an early medieval Welsh poem was actually a battle between
alphabets
.
The Celtic Druids used tree-names for the letters of their alphabet, and the alphabet was structured so that it functioned also as a calendar and, in general, as a system of correspondences that could embody all kinds of knowledge. There was, indeed, evidence that one ancient Bardic alphabet had been replaced by a newer one of different structure. It was suddenly clear that the battle of two alphabets represented a conflict of the knowledge-systems held by the learned bards on the two sides at the time when Goddess-worship in ancient Britain was overthrown by patriarchy. Simultaneously, Graves realised that the puzzling
Song
of Taliesin,
always regarded by scholars as nonsense, was in fact a series of riddles; and that the answers to the riddles were the letters of one of the alphabets involved in the battle.

Even simplified as crudely as this, the argument is difficult – a set of interdependent hypotheses, each very strange in itself. Not surprisingly, some readers quickly find
The
White
Goddess
unreadable and give up. But to follow every ramification of Graves’s argument at a first reading is not necessary, nor even desirable. Better to wander through this fascinating labyrinth of poetry, myth and erudition enjoying the extraordinary delights and puzzles it has to offer, following the general drift and leaving the more recalcitrant knots to be untied at a future reading. And there are likely to be future readings: the book is one that can be enjoyed again and again, yielding new pleasures and surprises each time. For
The
White
Goddess
is the kind of work Northrop Frye has usefully called an ‘anatomy’: a book (like Burton’s
Anatomy
of
Melancholy
)
packed with learning and catalogues of strange facts, mixing verse, prose and dialogue to analyse its subject exhaustively and at the same time satirise contemporary society and academic scholarship. Such books are written with their authors’ lifeblood and take a lifetime to comprehend, though they may be read the first time with intense excitement.