AN OVERLOOKED CLASSIC FOR PRIDE MONTH AND FOR THOSE IN THE CRAFT WHO ARE TIRED OF OVER THE COUNTER WICCA
By the mid-20th century, Robert Graves was a revered poet. His early work explored the First World War. In 1948 Graves published the long essay, The White Goddess: A historical grammar of poetic myth, a creative interpretation of myth and poetry.
THE WHITE GODDESS IN PDF
With hair curled honey-coloured to white hips. Green sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir. Will celebrate the Mountain Mother,. And every song-bird shout ...
THE WHITE GODDESS IN PDF
With hair curled honey-coloured to white hips. Green sap of Spring in the young wood a-stir. Will celebrate the Mountain Mother,. And every song-bird shout ...
The White Goddess, in full The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, scholarly work by Robert Graves, published in 1948 and revised in 1952 ...
ANCIENT ORIGINS OF THE FIRST IRON JOHN MEN'S ONLY RITUAL BUT NOT FLUFFY FLANNELIST LIKE THE MEN'S MOVEMENT OF THE EIGHTIES THIS IS MORE EISLER; MAN INTO WOLF
Robert Graves, The White Goddess--a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: 1961, first publ. 1948) There are many folkloristic echoes in Liz Lochhead’s poems, and we know that in particular she was strongly influenced by the famous English poet and novelist Robert Graves’s (1895-1985) book The White Goddess, whose argument was that much of the imagery of Western poetry descends from a lost pre-Christian matriarchal cult of the moon goddess. The book went through several editions, becoming one of the key texts in the feminist revival of the 1970s. What concerns us here, is the idea of the sacrificial male, centering on the Hercules legend in its numerous forms. See if you can find echoes of this in any of the poems in Liz Lochhead’s “Grimm Sisters”:
“Hercules first appears in legend as a pastoral sacred king […] male leader of all orgiastic rites and has twelve archer companions, including his spear-armed twin who is his tanist or deputy. Her performs an annual green-wood marriage with the queen of the woods […] The manner of his death can be reconstructed from a variety of legends, folk customs and other religious survivals. At mid-summer, at the end of a half-year reign, he is made drunk with mead and led into the middle of a circle of twelve stones arranged around an oak, in front of which stands an altar-stone; the oak has been lopped until it is T-shaped. He is bound to it with willow thongs in the ‘five-fold bond’ which joins wrists, neck, and ankles together, beaten by his comrades until he faints, then flayed, blinded, castrated, impaled with a mistletoe stake, and finally hacked into joints on the altar stone. His blood is caught in a basin and used for sprinkling on the whole tribe to make them vigorous and fruitful. The joints are roasted at twin fires of oak-loppings, kindled with sacred fire preserved from a lightning-blasted oak […] The twelve merrymen rush in a wild figure-of-eight dance around the fires, singing ecstatically and tearing at the flesh with their teeth. The bloody remains are burnt in the fire, all except the genitals and the head. These are put into an alder-wood boat and floated down a river to an islet. His tanist succeeds him and reigns for the remainder of the year, when he is sacrificially killed by a new Hercules.” pp.125-6 Graves, Robert.
. Faber and Faber, 1961. © Faber and Faber. All rights reserved. This content is excluded from our Creative Commons license. For more information, see http://ocw.mit.edu/help/faq-fair-use/. MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu 21L.430 / CMS.920 Popular Culture and Narrative: Use and Abuse of the Fairy Tale
a review of Robert Graves' "The White Goddess"
Much of the current information about Ogham on the web and in the neo-pagan community is based on the book "The White Goddess" by Robert Graves.
Robert Graves and The White Goddess | Request PDF - ResearchGate
https://www.researchgate.net/.../296856067_Robert_Graves_and_The_White_Goddess
This lecture discusses The White Goddess, a novel written by Robert Graves that was first published in May 1948. It is an intellectual and difficult book that has a ...
The Rebirth of Robert Graves Part Three: Enter the White Goddess ...
https://www.charlesmarlow.com/blog/2016/07/15/1933/
Jul 15, 2016 - Robert Graves's 'The White Goddess' both justified his approach to poetry and romantic life and helped shape alternative society profoundly.
ANCIENT ORIGINS OF THE FIRST IRON JOHN MEN'S ONLY RITUAL BUT NOT FLUFFY FLANNELIST LIKE THE MEN'S MOVEMENT OF THE EIGHTIES THIS IS MORE EISLER; MAN INTO WOLF
Robert Graves, The White Goddess--a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: 1961, first publ. 1948) There are many folkloristic echoes in Liz Lochhead’s poems, and we know that in particular she was strongly influenced by the famous English poet and novelist Robert Graves’s (1895-1985) book The White Goddess, whose argument was that much of the imagery of Western poetry descends from a lost pre-Christian matriarchal cult of the moon goddess. The book went through several editions, becoming one of the key texts in the feminist revival of the 1970s. What concerns us here, is the idea of the sacrificial male, centering on the Hercules legend in its numerous forms. See if you can find echoes of this in any of the poems in Liz Lochhead’s “Grimm Sisters”:
“Hercules first appears in legend as a pastoral sacred king […] male leader of all orgiastic rites and has twelve archer companions, including his spear-armed twin who is his tanist or deputy. Her performs an annual green-wood marriage with the queen of the woods […] The manner of his death can be reconstructed from a variety of legends, folk customs and other religious survivals. At mid-summer, at the end of a half-year reign, he is made drunk with mead and led into the middle of a circle of twelve stones arranged around an oak, in front of which stands an altar-stone; the oak has been lopped until it is T-shaped. He is bound to it with willow thongs in the ‘five-fold bond’ which joins wrists, neck, and ankles together, beaten by his comrades until he faints, then flayed, blinded, castrated, impaled with a mistletoe stake, and finally hacked into joints on the altar stone. His blood is caught in a basin and used for sprinkling on the whole tribe to make them vigorous and fruitful. The joints are roasted at twin fires of oak-loppings, kindled with sacred fire preserved from a lightning-blasted oak […] The twelve merrymen rush in a wild figure-of-eight dance around the fires, singing ecstatically and tearing at the flesh with their teeth. The bloody remains are burnt in the fire, all except the genitals and the head. These are put into an alder-wood boat and floated down a river to an islet. His tanist succeeds him and reigns for the remainder of the year, when he is sacrificially killed by a new Hercules.” pp.125-6 Graves, Robert.
. Faber and Faber, 1961. © Faber and Faber. All rights reserved. This content is excluded from our Creative Commons license. For more information, see http://ocw.mit.edu/help/faq-fair-use/. MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu 21L.430 / CMS.920 Popular Culture and Narrative: Use and Abuse of the Fairy Tale
a review of Robert Graves' "The White Goddess"
Much of the current information about Ogham on the web and in the neo-pagan community is based on the book "The White Goddess" by Robert Graves.
Graves' book is a very interesting read. In it he attempts to "uncover" the earliest religions, especially those dealing with the "mother-goddess" and nature worship, primarily through ancient poetic stories. Graves analyzes what stories have been written down and saved from the times when all tales were memorized and orally transmitted, and claims to reveal their "secrets". He seems to summarize this approach in writing "(I have no knowledge even of modern Welsh; and) I am not a mediaeval historian. But my profession is poetry, and I agree with the Welsh minstrels that the poet's first enrichment is a knowledge and understanding of myths." (from Chapter 2; emphasis mine.) In the forward he explains "My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honor of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry..." It is important to note that Graves was first and foremost a story-teller and only incidentally a "historian": he wrote primarily "historical novels" in which he based events and characters on the research he had done and the hypothesis he drew from that research. All historians are guilty, to one degree or another, of finding only what they want to find in the past; gathering only those pieces of information which confirm their suspicions and leaving the others. But Graves may be more guilty of this than many, being of a self-proclaimed "unscientific" mind and having a well-developed imagination. He approaches his subjects with a certain amount of "faith", or at least a desire to believe, and claims to unravel riddles based almost entirely on intuition and conjecture. |
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