The White Goddess
The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth is a book by Robert Graves, published in 1948, on the subject of poetic myth making. Built largely upon the works of James Frazer's seminal mytic-study work, The Golden Bough, The White Goddess attempts to demonstrate the power of myth within and upon society, by describing (or better, inventing) a "Myth of the Goddess," an image/myth which Graves suggests permeates all religions. This deity is "The White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death". He further claims that the worship of the "Goddess" in any general form, is the purest form of religion and interestingly, the source of all good poetry.
The "uncovered"[1] and rewritten myth itself is a reworking of predominately Irish and Welsh ("Celtic") myths, with some other western European and Middle Eastern mythic ideas and images tossed in here and there.
[edit] Graves and the Goddess Movement
Ultimately, the book suggests that there is one single Goddess and her son, and that every religion in the world that has any form of goddess, is a form of The Goddess. In making this claim, Grave's sets the ground work for what is called the "matriarchal religion", an off-shoot of feminist theology.
In the 1970s, Grave's work found an enthusiastic following in the Goddess Movement, who were promoters of the theory then in fashion in feminist circles. The Goddess Movement were very taken with his intrinsic linking of all of history, poetry, and life itself to this made-up "One Goddess," which dovetailed very nicely with their ideology as it posited an ancient Golden Age when times were simpler, there was no war, there was no violence, and women ruled the world and held men as slaves or rather made men equals just ignored men altogether.
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Graves argues in his work that he is not creating this myth, but simply uncovering all her layers and setting them out as a single, unified myth. There is little debate in the modern Religious Studies community that invention is a far better way to understand what he does