Why I Hate The White Goddess
A few years ago, I read The White Goddess by Robert Graves, and it recently came to my attention again. To say I resent Graves would be an understatement.
I am, frankly, dismayed that it has defined so much of modern paganism, and that so many pagans continue to swear by it even though so many of its claims can be debunked by a quick Google search. I feel something twist in my stomach everytime I see anything about the “Celtic Tree Calendar” or “Celtic Zodiac.” I sigh with bitter regret every time I see anything related to the Triple Goddess, even though that concept still resonates for me on some level. Something in me died when I learned that the D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, which introduced me to the gods that I now worship and was generally a big part of my childhood, involved him as a consultant.
Seriously, fuck Robert Graves.
Let me back up. I’ll put aside my ire and try to present this objectively: The White Goddess has very little to do with Catholicism, but it did “strengthen” paganism in that it had an enormous impact over neopaganism and its conception of the Goddess. The White Goddess helped to codify the idea of the God and Goddess in neopaganism, especially Wicca. In particular, it took the nineteenth century conception of the Great Goddess of Nature, which was retroactively projected onto ancient paganism but never truly existed, and connected it to the concept of the “dying-and-rising god” that had previously been codified by James Frazer. Graves tied these two ideas together into a monomyth concerning the interaction between these two entities — the Goddess is a great and eternal being of both destruction and creation, divided into three aspects (Maiden, Mother, Crone), and the God is both her lover and her son who must win her affection and die for her sake.
The best summary of Graves’s mythology is, perhaps ironically, from Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon:
In the ancient days, long before the wisdom and the religion of the Druids came here from the sunken temples in the western continent, the fairy people — of whom we are both born, you and I, my Morgaine — lived here on the shores of the inland sea, and before they learned how to plant the barley and reap it again, they lived by gathering the fruits of the land, and hunting the deer. And in those days there was no king among them, but only a queen who was their mother, though they had not learned to think of her as the Goddess. And since they lived by hunting, their queen and priestess learned to call the deer to her, and ask of their spirits that they sacrifice themselves and die for the life of the Tribe. But sacrifice must be given for sacrifice — the deer died for the Tribe, and one of the Tribe must in turn die for the life of the deer, or at least take the chance that the deer could, if they chose, take his life in exchange for their own. So the balance was kept.
[…]
So the Mother of the Tribe chose, every year, her consort. And since he had agreed to give his life for the Tribe, the Tribe gave him of their lives. Even if little children at the breast starved, he always had abundance, and all the women of the Tribe were his to lie with, so that he, the strongest and best, might sire their children. Besides, the Mother of the Tribe was often old past childbearing, and so he must have the choice of the young maidens, too, and no man of the Tribe would interfere with what he wanted. And then, when the year was past — every year in those times — he would put on the antlers of the deer, and wear a robe of untanned deerskin so that the deer would think him one of their own, and he would run with the herd as the Mother Huntress put the spell upon them to run. But by this time the herd had chosen their King Stag, and sometimes the King Stag would smell a stranger, and turn on him. And then the Horned One would die.
— Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon
Now, Bradley has all kinds of issues that go far beyond taking some inspiration from Graves (in short, she makes J.K. Rowling look like a saint). But what bothers me about this particular passage is, at the time… I bought it. The Mists of Avalon is fiction, but for a time I really believed that Britain was a Goddess-focused place until Christianity came along and ruined everything. And I also resonated with this story of the God who dresses in a stag’s skin and goes out into the woods to face down his rival and potentially die for the sake of the Goddess. It was only after I started doing research to learn more that I realized that there was never any such society as the one described here. Once the holes started showing, my faith in Wicca crumbled.
Wicca specifically owes a lot to this narrative. The Sabbats, the eight festivals that divide up the year, usually illustrate this myth in some way. Here’s the short version: The God is born at Yule, has sex with the goddess at Beltane, and is defeated by his “rival” (the god of the waning year) at Litha. Then the whole process repeats for the dark half of the year. I don’t know enough about the different traditions of Wicca to say definitively that they all follow a variation of this format, but it’s certainly common. Here’s an example concerning Beltane, from the Farrars’ A Witches’ Bible:
Back to Bealtaine itself. Oak is the tree of the God of the Waxing Year; hawthorn, at this season, is the tree of the White Goddess. The strong folklore taboo on breaking hawthorn branches or bringing them into the house is traditionally lifted on May Eve, when sprigs of it may be cut for the Goddess’s festival. (Irish farmers, and even earth-moving roadbuilders, are still reluctant to cut down lone hawthorns; a ‘fairy’ hawthorn stood by itself in the middle of a pasture of the farm we lived on at Fens, County Wexford, and similar respected examples can be seen all over the country.)
However, if you want blossoms for your ritual (for example, as chaplets worn in the witches’ hair), you cannot be certain of finding hawthorn flower as early as May Eve, and you will probably have to be content with the young leaves. Our own solution is to use black thorn, whose flowers appear in April, ahead of the leaves. Blackthorn (sloe) is also a Goddess tree at this season — but it belongs to the Goddess in her dark, devouring aspect, as the bitterness of its autumn fruit would suggest. It used to be regarded as ‘the witches’ tree’ — in the malevolent sense — and unlucky. But to fear the dark aspect of the Goddess is to miss the truth that she consumes only to give new birth. If the Mysteries could be summed up in one sentence, it might be this: “At the core of the Bright Mother is the Dark Mother, and at the core of the Dark Mother is the Bright Mother.” The sacrifice-and-rebirth theme of our Bealtaine ritual reflects this truth, so, to symbolize the two aspects in balance, our women wear hawthorn in leaf and blackthorn in blossom, intertwined.
[…]
(On the alluring and mysterious figure of the love-chase woman “neither clothed nor unclothed, neither on foot nor on horseback, neither on water nor on dry land, neither with nor without a gift”, who is “easily recognized as the May-Eve aspect of the Love-and-Death goddess,” see Graves, The White Goddess, p. 403 onwards.)
— Janet and Stewart Farrar, A Witches’ Bible
The Farrars frequently cite from The White Goddess (and The Golden Bough), using it as the basis of their personal spirituality and designing their rituals around the ideas contained in it. So, their idea of the Mystery is based on this interplay between the self-sacrificing God and the dual-natured Goddess. The problem is that most of what’s in the above passage is bullshit. I don’t know how much, if any, of the stuff about hawthorn and blackthorn is authentic Irish folklore, but I know for a fact that the association of them with the respective light and dark aspects of the Goddess comes directly from Graves. The idea that sprigs of hawthorn could be cut on May Eve for the Goddess’ festival? No chance that’s true, because the whole idea that Beltane even is a “goddess festival” is a modern one, but it’s presented as though it’s historical fact.
When my research was turning up zero primary sources, I realized that I couldn’t trust anything that the pagan writers like the Farrars said about ancient paganism. Ancient pagans didn’t even conceive of divinity as these generic archetypes, but rather as a multiplicity of distinct individuals. The more I dug into the Sabbat cycle, the Horned God, and the Triple Goddess, the less it made sense. It quickly became apparent to me that the entire concept wasn’t authentically ancient at all, let alone universal. So, where did it come from? Bradley’s take, at least, seemed to have its roots in The White Goddess.
I decided to read The White Goddess because of how influential it was, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. If it was just Graves sharing his own interpretations of various myths and so on, then that wouldn’t be so bad, even if his takes were a bit wild. But Graves did not distinguish between historical fact and his own wild interpretations. Most of The White Goddess was conjecture worthy of a conspiracy theorist, with no basis other than “these words sound similar, so they must be related!” Sometimes Graves pulled stuff out of his ass (like his tree calendar) and then tried to retroactively justify it by shoehorning primary sources into the roles he wanted them to play (like rearranging the Song of Amergin). He claims that Greeks somehow migrated to Ireland and that all Irish and Welsh mythology can be traced back to Greece, because Graves is a classicist who just really likes the Celts. The purpose of the book is to make a pretentious point about “true poetry,” which Graves says is meant to be in the service of The Goddess. Any poetry written about men is somehow false, anything homoerotic was “moral aberrancy,” and of course women couldn’t be poets — only passive, idealized “Muses” (ironic, because The White Goddess inspired Sylvia Plath). Unless you have the foreknowledge to be able to spot all of its (many, many) missteps, you may assume that Graves knows what he’s talking about and take its claims at face-value, especially if any aspect of it resonates for you. Therefore, a lot of other pagan writers accept his claims and insights without question, and repeat them as if they’re a fundamental truth.
I suffered through The White Goddess. It was painful enough to read on its own (if you want my thoughts on the book itself, I linked my two-part rant below), but to me it was like watching a building collapse in slow motion. My reading of The White Goddess by Robert Graves effectively destroyed paganism as I knew it. Ideas that I had once held sacred were entirely lacking of substance, and I couldn’t trust half of my books anymore. So much of what neopagans write about their gods and their traditions is based on nothing. Nothing but conjecture, and sometimes not even that. And now that I knew how to see it, I saw it everywhere.
Admittedly, it’s unfair of me to place the blame for the pseudohistorical bullshit endemic in neopaganism solely at Graves’s feet. The White Goddess is not the only book of its kind. It’s more of a culmination and a codifier of an entire ideology’s worth of baseless ideas about paganism, which developed in art and academia through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fairness to Graves, I think it’s important that I dive into some of that context, so that I’m not merely indulging in dragging Graves through the mud.
Let me turn to a source I can trust — Ronald Hutton (an actual scholar), who addresses where all these ideas come from in his book, The Triumph of the Moon. He traces the origin of the neopagan Goddess back to the Romantic movement, which personified Nature as a beautiful and terrifying female entity. Nineteenth-century classicists then interpreted all the goddesses of Ancient Greece through this lens, and extrapolated from there:
It is important also in this context that the ancient Greeks spoke of the Earth as being feminine in gender and the sky as being masculine (in sharp contrast, say, to the Egyptians). As most Western science is ultimately based upon Greek thought, this language became embedded in it. It was reinforced by the mindset of the patriarchal societies which occupied medieval and early modern Europe, in which intellectuals in general, and those who dealt with the sciences in particular, were overwhelmingly male. Carolyn Merchant has led a number of writers in emphasizing the development of a scholarly language which identified the author and reader as male adventurers occupied in exploring and exploiting a female natural world. None the less, when classical pagan goddesses [Diana, Venus, Demeter, etc.] were represented in art and literature, it was those with individual functions, usually expressing specific human needs and spheres of activity, who continued to dominate.
This was the pattern which prevailed, with remarkable consistency, until the decades around 1800, when it was dramatically altered by that complex of cultural changes known loosely and collectively as the Romantic Movement. One aspect of this was the exaltation of the natural and irrational, qualities that had conventionally been both feared and disparaged and characterized as feminine. Cultural historians have devoted many works to tracing the course of this revolution in taste, which for the first time gave emphasis to the beauty and sublimity of wild nature and of the night. None has hitherto made a study of its impact on the divine feminine.
[…]
In view of all the above, therefore, it makes sense that it was a German classicist, Eduard Gerhard, who in 1849 advanced the novel suggestion that behind the various goddesses of historic Greece stood a single great one, representing Mother Earth and venerated before history began. As the century wore on, other German, and French, classicists such as Ernst Kroker, Fr. Lenormant, and M. J. Menant began to adopt this idea, drawing support for it from the assumption that the cultures of Anatolia and Mesopotamia were older than, and in some measure ancestral to, those of Greece. Those cultures did contain some figures of powerful goddesses, identified with motherhood or with the earth (though never with both). The thoery meshed with another, which had emerged from a debate between lawyers over the origins of society and of the human family. One of the contesting theories in this exchange, articulated first in 1862 by the Swiss judge J. J. Bachofen, was that the earliest human societies had been woman-centered, altering to a patriarchal form before the beginning of history; what was true in the secular sphere should also, logically, have been so in the religious one.
— Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon
Put much more succinctly and snarkily by Tumblr user Jessica Price, in an essay called “You got your Known Minoans and your Unknown Minoans”:
So, the Romantics were very much enamored with the idea of Mother Earth/nature as female (go conquest that land in “virgin” America, yo). The concept wasn’t new–lots of cultures personify the earth as female–but this was very much a 19th-century European imagining.
Basically a lot of Victorian dudes liked the idea of their porn involving pretty landscapes.
So, along comes a German dude named Friedrich Wilhelm Eduard Gerhard, because everything you say is credible if you’re a white dude with four names, who’s like “hey maybe all those Greek goddesses were actually ONE goddess, and she was Mother Earth, that tempestuous temptress.”
And like as far as I can tell, that was it. That’s the Tweet. He had An Idea about how ancient religion might have worked, and everyone nodded sagely and suddenly it was a theory. The Greeks actually believed in one goddess, with a bunch of different faces.
And then, some of those other dudes nodding along sagely to this theory that didn’t arise organically from studying the actual writings and artifacts of the time, but from Mother Earth as a concept being trendy in the 1850s, were like, hey, so we know that the Anatolians and Mesopotamians influenced ancient Greek thought, so if the Greeks worshipped a single goddess, the Anatolians and Mesopotamians must have too!
And then they were like, hey, it was probably also true across Europe! Because there’s this <checks notes> Swiss judge named JJ who thinks all of human society was once matriarchal and only later evolved into patriarchy so it seems logical that everyone worshipped a goddess.
For those following along at home, no, this is not how logic works, but these dudes were probably drinking a LOT of absinthe.
The supposed ancient religion of the Goddess was cast as, to use Hutton’s words, “a female-centered religion of magic and unreason preceding that of classical Greece, at once repulsive and fascinating.” It was a retroactive assumption, based on the notion that society operates on a linear progression from “savage” neolithic paganism to “civilized” Greco-Roman polytheism to Christianity. This isn’t the case — we now know that some version of the Olympians were worshipped in Greece literally since the dawn of their recorded history. Also, magic, ecstatic ritual, and other “irrational” beliefs and practices always existed alongside the more “civilized” aspects of Greco-Roman religion, but were ignored by scholars in favor of this linear narrative. But because this “pre-Christian matriarchy” idea was propagated by academics in the twentieth century, it gained a veneer of legitimacy, and every archeological discovery of any kind of female figure was used to justify it. So, I can’t really blame Graves for having believed it, and I also can’t really blame American feminists for having resonated with it. Graves didn’t invent the Goddess, but he did popularize her.
It doesn’t surprise me that Graves’s conception of the Goddess has its ultimate origin in the Romantic movement. Graves himself points to these lines from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a famous Romantic poet, as the ultimate depiction of his Goddess:
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold,
Her skin was white as leprosy.
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.
There’s a lot that disturbs me about this specific image being that of the Goddess, but I’ll get back to that. For now, it’s worth asking why Graves, and a lot of other neopagans, were so invested in the idea of a pre-Christian matriarchy in the first place. It’s all well and good to personally conceive of the feminine divine as a Romantic personification of Nature in all of its beauty and terror, etc., but why try to claim that all goddesses were once one Goddess and that this is the origin of human religion?
Hutton explains that twentieth-century British scholars fetishized local rural folklore as a kind of pagan time capsule, with folk beliefs and customs somehow preserving an archaic and fundamental truth of humanity. These scholars simultaneously looked down upon poor rural Brits as being too stupid to understand where their folk customs come from or why they exist. The elitist scholars regarded the rural populace with detached and condescending interest, rather like zoologists studying the social dynamics of animals:
When collecting data upon popular beliefs and customs, none of [the classicists and folklorists] attempted more than the most rudimentary investigation of their earlier history, and none made any study of how they might have developed over a span of time; the presumption that rural life was essentially unchanging rendered such an exercise apparently superfluous. Furthermore, it was also assumed that the people who actually held the beliefs and practised the customs would long have forgotten their original, ‘real’ significance, which could only be reconstructed by scholars. The latter therefore paid very little attention to the social context in which the ideas and actions concerned had actually been carried on during their recent history, when they were best recorded. Many collectors and commentators managed to combine a powerful affectation for the countryside and rural life with a crushing condescension towards the ordinary people who carried on that life.
— Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon
It’s basically the “noble savage” trope, but applied to poor British people. By the way, this is what “cultural appropriation” really refers to — fetishizing someone else’s folk customs because you think they’re cool and mysterious or whatever, but simultaneously looking down upon the people whose practice it is and refusing to listen to them when they tell you what it is actually supposed to mean. Or worse, denying them the ability to practice the custom altogether, while saying that only you really understand its “true meaning.”
Speaking of appropriating ideas for one’s own purposes, combined with the above was the forerunner of edgy internet atheism, that looks down on religion in general as being “primitive” and “irrational.” In The Golden Bough, James Frazer wasn’t intending to uncover some archaic spiritual truth that underlies all human religion. He was intending to discredit Christianity, by demonstrating that it is not special and that all human religions are basically the same. It’s identical in spirit to the innumerable internet posts that claim that Jesus is actually Horus/Mithras/Dionysus/Krishna/Attis/insert-god-here, and about as accurate. (In fact, some of the “arguments” that those posts make can be traced back to Frazer.) In The Golden Bough, Frazer denigrates paganism as “savage” and “primitive” and so forth. He implicitly compares Christianity to paganism to make it seem foreign, barbaric, “Other.” If you’re wondering why so many internet posts profess the ancient pagan origins of [insert holiday], this is why. It’s why modern atheists will sometimes use paganism as a bludgeoning tool in their arguments against Christianity — “Ha! All that you hold sacred is actually pagan!” — without ever meaningfully engaging with paganism itself in good faith.
But then you’ve got pagans, like the Farrars, who took Frazer’s work and interpreted it as an actual spiritual truth. According to Hutton, this is because “savage” paganism and rural folklore became the Romantic antidote to twentieth-century industrialism:
The new mass urban and industrialized lifestyle was condemned not just because it was frighteningly novel and because its setting was perceived as being ugly, but because it was supposed to be physically and mentally unhealthy. The countryside became credited with all the virtues which were the obverse of those vices. It was not simply regarded as being more beautiful and healthy, but as being stable, dependable, rooted, and timeless. Its working people became credited with a superior wisdom, founded upon generations of living in close contact with nature and inheriting a cumulative hidden knowledge. This organic, immemorial lore, which by the twentieth century had accumulated the numinously vague label of ‘the Old Ways,’ was viewed as both a comforting force of resistance to the dramatic and unsettling changes of modernity, and as a potential force for redemption. […] Suddenly the urban centers had turned into monsters, destroying the world about them and spreading ill health, pollution, ugliness, and social instability. The shrinking and depopulating countryside — especially the soft arable and downland landscape of southern England — had become the epitome of continuity, community, and social harmony.
[…]
As said, by placing Christ in a context of dying and resurrecting pagan deities, Frazer had hoped to discredit the whole package of religious ideas. Instead, as some of the literary use of the Bough indicates, he actually gave solace to those disillusioned with traditional religion, by allowing them to conflate the figure of Jesus with the natural world, to produce a kinder, greener variety of Christianity. Frazer’s dying and returning vegetation spirit provided an easy means of accomplishing this.
— Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon
Neopaganism makes such a big deal of being “nature-based” (a concept that would have been foreign to ancient pagans) becuase neopaganism was a way of discovering the cycles of nature and learning to value them, in a world that was becoming increasingly divorced from nature. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but it did come with a huge helping of that “noble savage” stuff I mentioned earlier, as well as some pretty flagrant misconceptions about ancient pagans and how they related to their gods. There isn’t anything inherently more ancient or more authentic about “nature-based” neopaganism, and as Hutton points out, sometimes it looks awfully like Christianity with a green filter slapped on it.
That brings us back to Graves, who built off of Frazer’s dying-and-rising god concept and connected it to his particular conception of the Goddess. Graves added the piece that the God dies specifically for the Goddess’ sake. The cycles of agriculture that the god’s death and resurrection are supposed to represent, are inherently intertwined with the Goddess and her supremacy. In particular, Graves introduced the idea that the God has a “twin” or Shadow, who is simultaneously himself and his rival. The two Gods represent the waxing and waning halves of the year, respectively, and their annual battles for the Goddess’s hand result in the tradeoff between summer and winter. This is where the “Oak King and Holly King” come from. (I’ve heard that it has some basis in English folklore, but I haven’t been able to verify that, and it certainly isn’t an ancient pagan idea.) Graves identified the bright god with Horus and the dark god with Set, ignoring the fact that Horus and Set’s battles are not over Isis (or any other goddess) and that they don’t represent a seasonal tradeoff per se. (Osiris does represent the fertility of the land around the Nile in contrast to Set who represents the desert, but that’s not the same idea, and it’s disingenuous to pretend it is.) And it’s not just Horus and Set — Graves also forces Heracles and Llew Llaw Gyffes into this sacrificial king narrative, no matter how little sense that makes. Underscoring it all is the veneration of the Goddess, who demands that her king-consort must die:
…the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God’s losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird. All true poetry […] some incident or scene in this very ancient story, and the three main characters are so much a part of our racial inheritance that they not only assert themselves in poetry but recur on occasions of emotional stress in the form of dreams, paranoiac visions and delusions.
— Robert Graves, The White Goddess
There’s no real basis for this dynamic in ancient paganism. Oh sure, you can interpret any number of stories through this lens if you want to — like, say, Dionysus being dismembered at the behest of Hera — but it’s one thing to interpret a story in that way and quite another to claim that this is the actual hidden meaning of all stories, that only Graves is clever enough to understand.
It resonated, though. Not just for me, but for a lot of people, enough to become a major piece in a phenomenon known as the “Goddess Movement,” the religious arm of second-wave feminism:
Still more widespread [in American feminist culture], and potent, was that of the prehistoric Great Goddess, usually linked with that of ancient woman-centered cultures, which grew in strength through the decade and into the 1990s. It was linked, in some cases inseparably, with the larger phenomenon of the movement to develop or recover a specifically female spirituality. By the late 1980s this was commonly subsumed under the label of ‘Goddess spirituality,’ or simply ‘the Goddess.’ The terminology was loose enough to be both convenient and confusing. To some it simply represented a general female right to a separate spirituality, irrespective of whether this involved actual belief in deities; it could, indeed, signify simply the spiritual power within women. To others, it meant the putative prehistoric Great Mother Goddess, or the triple lunar deity of Graves, Maiden, Mother, and Crone, or the living and divine body of the planet. By yet others it was understood to mean a composite figure in whom were subsumed all the female deities revered in any part of the world and at any age, who retained something of their individual identity as her ‘aspects.’
— Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon
This is the Goddess that I was originally exposed to — a unified, feminist Great Goddess that had been forcibly dethroned by patriarchal men, and who was finally beginning to take her power back. I can’t pretend I don’t see the appeal in a Goddess-centered spirituality, but it’s always rubbed me the wrong way. Part of that has to do with my own gender identity; I don’t like being submerged in this utopian ideal of archetypal woman-ness. But another big piece of it is Graves. The Goddess of the “Goddess movement” always had a bit of a vindictive, violent punch to her, and that’s one that Graves intentionally gave her.
As Jessica Price goes on to say, the idea of the Great Goddess and her glorious matriarchy in which men are constantly dying for her isn’t actually all that feminist:
The Romantics might profess to revere Mother Nature, but at the end of the day, they revered her as an object: there to be conquered if they wanted to feel manly, there to challenge them if they wanted to feel manly in a different way, there to soothe and inspire them as Muse, and even there to kill them if they were into the idea of la petite mort being la grand mort.
I realized while reading The White Goddess that the notion of the Goddess that I had been introduced to through Wicca, and through other products of the Goddess Movement, was still invented by men. It was awash with gender essentialism. In fact, it was downright sexist, against both women and men. It was sexist against women because it denied women their agency. It put women up on a pedestal, transforming them into some archetypical ideal of Woman, like Galatea — idealized, glorified, and unchangeable. She’s defined by her genitals and her uterus, but she’s not really sexualized either. She could inspire art, but never create it. It was sexist against men by painting them as eternal victims of the Goddess, suggesting that they exist purely to adore women and die for them. Men aren’t expendable, and they don’t exist purely to adore women. Nor should they have to die (even metaphorically) for the sake of their sons. It sets up a kind of Freudian dynamic in which the Goddess’s son grows up to become her lover, and her previous lover (the father) is inevitably killed in the struggle between the old and the new king. Why should men have to be sacrificed to or for women? How is that a healthy dynamic?
Hutton said it best:
This theme — that a man can gain immortality by first being tortured and then killed in the service of the Goddess — is a recurrent one in Graves’s work. In Seven Days in New Crete a young boy is ritually butchered in a public performance as part of a twice-yearly sacrifice, by priestesses who then feast upon his flesh. The Goddess herself materializes to reassure the narrator, who is at first appalled, that he was a willing victim and that his family are greatly honoured. The last words of The Golden Fleece concern the death of Orpheus, the character with whom, as a poet and a personal devotee of the Goddess, Graves most clearly identifies. He is torn to pieces by priestesses, winning the author’s comment that “the Goddess has always rewarded with dismemberment those who love her best, scattering their bloody pieces over the earth to fructify it, but gently taking their astonished souls into her own keeping.” Why do such intensely masochistic images keep appearing in Graves’s work?
The short answer is that he was an intense masochist, who depended for his own creative inspiration upon being dedicated to the service of a specific woman, dominated by her, and made unhappy by her. […] The first was his mother, a powerful figure of profound Christian piety who used affection and punishment as instruments to encourage her offspring to succeed in the world. Under her influence, Robert spent his childhood and adolescence as a devout and somewhat priggish Christian. Her influence was broken in 1918 by his marraige to his first wife Nancy Nicholson, who immediately became the new dominant female in his life. She was a pronounced feminist and pushed him into a decisive loss of faith in Christianity by declaring that any religion with a male deity must be ‘rot.’ It can be no coincidence that he acquired his lasting belief in an ancient matriarchy during this period. The marraige became a time of acute unhappiness for him, from which he was rescued by falling under the spell of his third and greatest guiding figure, the writer Laura Riding, with whom he lived from 1926–1940. Riding proved to be more domineering than either of her predecessors, and actually believed herself to be something more than human, and to deserve the reverence accorded to a goddess. She inspired Graves to some ohis best work, and eventually to his greatest pitch of frustration and misery, before abandoning him. He was rescued by Beryl Hodge, who became his second wife and gave him a supportive love and understanding which he had never received before. He thus achieved a lasting domestic happiness, and yet lost that insecurity and emotional pain which he was gradually coming to recognize as essential to his ability to write poetry. His solution, from 1950 onward, was to fall in love with a series of young women whom he termed his Muses (more strictly, successive faces of the Muse, the lovely and cruel Goddess) and whom he pursued through doomed romances which afforded him the necessary excitement and torment. The main sequence of Goddess-centered writings, therefore, occured in the gap, when he was bereft of such a figure in his own life and coming to terms with his need for one. To somebody of Graves’s personality, what was true for him had to be true for everybody else; this absolute moral certainty was one of the enduring bequests made to him by his mother.
— Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon
So… yeah. To put it into less scholarly language: The reason why this all sounds like one guy’s masochistic sexual fantasy, is because that’s exactly what it is.
I don’t mean to shame Graves for his kinks — there’s nothing wrong with liking femdom (though I can’t say his approach to it is particularly healthy). I also can’t pretend that I haven’t incorporated any of my kinks into my interpretation of Dionysus. But the thing about sexual fantasies is that they’re intensely specific and personal, and what turns you on might be a complete turnoff for someone else. I mean, that’s true of any interest, but it’s especially pronounced in the case of sexual fantasies. Graves’s Goddess was at best an object to be either revered or feared, at worst, a fetishized nightmare. It scared me.
As Hutton put it, what was true for Graves had to be true for everyone else, so he universalized a conception of the Goddess that was intensely personal and specific. He decided that the Goddess must leave the God for a dark, shadowy twin or rival, because that’s what happened to him — Laura Riding left him for someone else. He assumed that all men’s experience of the Goddess must be as intensely masochistic as his own, and then had the gall to say that all true poetry is based in this toxic femdom dynamic! He never bothered to determine what women’s relationship to the Goddess is, beyond the assumption that women should embody her, leading to generations of women confusing domineering viciousness with empowerment. If The White Goddess were just about Graves and his personal relationship to the Divine, I’d have no problem with it, but Graves presents it as if it were inarguable fact. And people buy it. I bought it.
Here’s what it looks like when it’s been turned into an actual religion:
But what of the sacrificial mating theme as a single concept, instead of as two separate ones of sacrifice and sexuality? Has this vanished altogether in the Irish tradition?
Not quite. In the first place, that tradition as it has reached us is mainly a God-and-Hero one, though with the Goddess hovering powerfully in the background; and it has reached us largely through mediaeval Christian monks who write down a body of oral legend (albeit surprisingly sympathetically) — scribes whose conditioning perhaps made it difficult for them to recognize Goddess clues. But the clues are there — particularly in the recurrent theme of the rivalry of two heroes (gods) over a heroine (goddess). This theme is not confined to the Irish Celts; it appears, for example, in the legend of Jack the Tinkard, who can be regarded as a Cornish Lugh. And significantly — as with the Oak King and Holly King, these heroes are often alternately successful.
— Janet and Stewart Farrar, A Witches’ Bible
Everything that the Farrars say here comes directly from Graves! They suggest that the “sacrificial mating theme” is an actual thing that exists in real Irish folk tradition, and imply that the emphasis on the Goddess that “should” be there must have been smoothed over by the Christian monks who preserved Irish lore. Instead of… you know… not being there at all, because Graves made it up! And the whole Oak and Holly King thing, the God and his rival, is just Graves universalizing his own feelings at having lost his lover to another man. The rest is all what Hutton was describing when he mentioned local folk traditions being shoehorned into a particular mystical interpretation by scholars, without the people who actually believe in and practice those traditions being consulted. But if you didn’t know any better, why wouldn’t you take this as fact? Why would you have any reason to doubt what the Farrars say here?
That’s ultimately why I consider The White Goddess to be so insidious. It’s not just wrong (and it’s wrong about a lot of things), it pushes something personal to its author as The Old Religion, the most ancient and authentic of human spirituality that everyone would realize was the “obvious” ultimate truth if they just thought about it hard enough. And then well-meaning authors like the Farrars end up repeating it and interpreting evidence to support it instead of the other way around. If everybody does that, then “the Old Religion” becomes a self-sustaining meme that only ever references itself. It perpetuates plenty of misconceptions and problematic ideas that I’ve already discussed, but it also isolates anyone for whom it doesn’t resonate, or doesn’t fully resonate.
I don’t like Graves’s Goddess. I don’t like how she is a vague, generic archetype. I don’t like how she is a Muse but never a poet. I don’t like how she is as domineering as Laura Riding, how she subjugates men and has them sacrifice themselves to her in pursuit of “feminism.” But this is the version of the Goddess that “Goddess spirituality” is based around. This is the modern feminine divine. The other option is to look to ancient paganism, but ancient pagan sources were also written by men, and Greek goddesses in particular fall along pretty strict madonna/whore lines. And of course, it’s worth emphasizing that Graves’s goddess model leaves no room for LGBTQ+ people of any kind; hell, it also completely fails to take into account the number of gay/bi and nonbinary gods there are. The utter heteronormativity of his “proto-religion” is unbearable. And yet, even despite my frustration, certain aspects of it still do resonate for me… what am I supposed to do with that? Where do I go from here? It’s been four years since I read The White Goddess, and I’ve made such little progress in developing my own idea of the feminine divine.
Therefore, in my reading, The White Goddess doesn’t “strengthen” paganism — it does active damage to it. Whatever neopaganism might owe to The White Goddess, it has been outweighed by the amount of misinformation and the rigid, narrow specificity of its interpretation that is treated as inflexible and all-encompassing. It leaves room for nothing but itself. Whatever the real Mystery is, I’m sure I’ll find it, but in the meantime, Graves is standing in the way.
If you’re at all interested in seeing my blind reaction to The White Goddess, and my attempts at debunking Graves’ claims, here’s my two-part rant:
