Talk:The White Goddess

NPOV tag

I added the NPOV tag to this article because it was painful to read. It doesn;t sound much like an encylcopidea article as it does a feel-good cheering session by someone in love with the book. The only mentions at all that this book was highly speculative and generally disregarded by the scholarly community are in the last sentence (which still manages to sound a rah-rah for the wonderfulness of the idea) and the mention that he used a controversial method for trying to come up with historical analysis.

We need a strong rewrite here, one that approaches the book by how other scholars see it and points out that this goddess Graves talk about was a theoretical construct that isn't supported by the vast majority of other authors. In fact, the only scholars I know of who support it in any way are those with a very stong pro-feminist neopagan historical revisionism mindset, such as Barbara Walker, Merlin Stone (I'm not sure she would count as a scholar), Gimbutas and so forth.

Even someone who believes in his theory should have to admit that this article is focusing way too much on the cultural validation followers get from the book and not on whether it was basically fictional. Ideally, I think the purposes of NPOV would be served best by someone nuetral on the topic going through and cleaning it up. I can and will add my thoughts to it, but at this point I feel like I would almost rather completely start from scratch if I were to do it, and then I just waste my time as people try to change it back. If this gets nudged to at least trying to be somewhat restrained in its love for the book instead of pure uncritical lovefest then I think I could go in and add politely worded parts about the lack of support it has among scholars.

DreamGuy 17:16, Nov 23, 2004 (UTC)

Are we looking at the same thing here? The article says to me that: Graves deified his mistress; that nobody believes the turn of the century anthropology and comparative religion stuff that Graves founded his personal mythology on; that Graves's knowledge of Celtic languages and mythology were seriously inadequate; that his imaginative method guaranteed that he would find exactly what he was looking for; that Graves was anti-Semitic; and that the current fame of the book is the result of its being a shared fantasy rather than a historically accurate account. I added much of that stuff, and tried to state it as neutrally and as factually as I could. -- Smerdis of Tlön 17:49, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The mistress in question (Laura Riding) was Jewish. Evidence of anti-semitism? I believe Graves specifically stated that he disagreed with Hitler's belief that "The Jews are to blame for all our problems". He describes the Jews as "an intelligent people" responsible for European economic development. Disagreeing with Jewish religious beliefs (and protestantism) does not make someone anti-semitic, it makes them non-Jewish (and non-protestant)121.155.16.188 08:48, 19 August 2007 (UTC)pignut

• Those parts end up as very subtle in the other article, with some of that I'm not even sure how you can possibly read into the current article. The "nobody believes" part is nonexistent as far as I can tell (other than a "may not be real" thing at the end, which sounds more like a tentative slight possibility instead of the opinion of the majority of scholars), the Celtic part sounds like an aside while his Greek mythology revisionism completely passed by, the intro talks about his White Goddess as if she actually existed, and the strong outpouring of support for the great things he says comments still litter the piece. I suggest that your interpretation of how the article appears is more based upon what you meant to say and how you intended it and not on what we really have as an end result. Even still, the points you mention still would not make up for the glowing language of support persistent throughout the rest of the article. DreamGuy 18:23, Nov 23, 2004 (UTC)

I feel the article now focusses too much on criticism of the content and way too little on Graves' actual work and the story behind it. The book remains a potent inspiration to many. This article neither does it justice nor is it encyclopaedic in tone. Tim flatus (talk) 00:13, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

NPOV tag removal

I removed the NPOV tag that I put there a while ago. While I think the article still needs work, since I've been here a little longer I've decided the tag was a little severe for the things I was complaining about. When I get time to edit I shall try to do so, but in the meantime I couldn't see keeping the icon up top expecting someone else to just make the changes for me. DreamGuy 02:38, Dec 1, 2004 (UTC)

Older discussion

As I said in my edit summary, this is a nice little article! Just a couple of things:

1. Could we have a source for it being called "unreadable"?
2. Could we have something in the intro that makes it get to the point a little quicker? The prose is nice, and the article feels complete and readable, but I don't know exactly what the book is about till the end of the article. Just an addition to the first paragraph should do it, though you might then need to edit the ending to avoid repitition.

--Sam 18:52 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)

1. I don't think unreadable is that far off beam. I have read it and found it very heavy going. 2. Your point about the sense of abstraction in the article is correct and it probably needs a one-liner explaining what it's about as a prepend. If nobody has done it in the interim I'll have a stab tonight. user:sjc

1. I'm not suggesting it's not right, just that if we're quoting, it'd be nice to know who; I like to attribute views. Even if it's truthful to say many reviewers have called it unreadable or near unreadable or something like that, it's a bit better than just putting "unreadable".
2. Cheers! I'd do it myself, but I've never read the book! -- Sam 12:48 Jan 22, 2003 (UTC)

Your point about attribution is apposite, however sometimes the facts tend to speak for themselves and do not necessarily always require attribution. As an example, it would not be unreasonable to suggest without attribution that Rush Limbaugh writes from a perspective which is markedly right of centre or that the Battle of Hastings represented a setback for the Anglo-Saxons. In this case I feel the comment is not unreasonable although I will try and find some established corroboration for this perspective, albeit that anyone essaying the book will come to very similar conclusions. user:sjc

I agree, though if anyone comes across an apt remark on this book, then it might help. I don't mind "unreadable" being there! Intro reads better now, too, nice one. -- Sam

The text in question was "Others have described the 500-page book as "unreadable" (or nearly so)," I am always untrusting of these judgments made by unspecified "others." Often "scholars" are credited with such statements. So often the attribution turns out to be spurious. Does the entry for Middlemarch tell us that few college students actually finish the book? Out with this, which genuinely violates NeutralPOV. --Wetman 06:36, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Hell, I'll come out and call it "unreadable;" I've tried about five times. Someone should come out with an annotated version that translates all the Greek, Latin, and other languages that Graves sprinkled through the book.

Septegram 17:42, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, praise the gods, there is (was) an edition that has the translations! Published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux in 1986. Library of Congress catalog card number 48-8257, for what it's worth. Found it in a used book store while in Canada for a friend's wedding.

*Septegram*Talk*Contributions* 04:35, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

Is User:Poitypoity's contribution valid/NPOV? -- Sam

---

Anticipating that some might quarrel with my additions to the article, I'd call attention to the criticisms of Graves made here:

• http://silver-gateway.com/grove/hutton/

The Ronald Hutton book The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles contains much valuable information about Graves and his shared fantasy; his later book The Triumph of the Moon has even more. -- IHCOYC 03:23 18 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Shouldn't Hutton's book be mentioned and quoted in the entry, as central to the "de-bunking" of Robert Graves? --Wetman 08:30, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I would not be hasty about "debunking". Hutton's criticisms of Graves, judging from the link above, smack of a Christian position defending the dogma. Among other things, Hutton appears to dismiss not only Graves, but Frazer as well, as "ungrounded". Hutton's position is probably biased. We need an unbiased rewrite of the article which actually gives information about the book and its criticisms, and does not read like a broad editorial review.

Hutton is seen by many as a champion of modern neo-paganism. I find this view baffling, but the point is that Hutton is not coming from a Christian perspectivePignut 08:55, 19 August 2007 (UTC)pignut

---

I agree that a rewrite is necessary, but not because it's "feel-good cheering session". The passing comment that Frazer's work has been discredited is simply dropped in as though it's self-explanatory. Scholarship which has attempted to debunk him has made little headway apart from nitpicking minutae, and anthropologists are returning to him increasingly (though the dying/reviving god is clearly an exception). The comment that Grave's argument becomes hard to sustain likewise is hardly unbiased. He never aligned himself with an "Aryan racial myth", and this seems an attempt to align him - anachronistically and counter-intuitively - to some form of reactionary conservatism/fascism. Quite aside from the loaded use of "Aryan", the notion of European ascendancy via technology etc. finds more contemporary support from Jared Diamond's books (another writer who's ideas many find hard to stomach for whatever reasons, and whose thesis has yet to have a strong counter argument). Additionally, the Moon-Goddess/Sun-God idea is found in the works of writers and thinkers as varied as Nietzsche, Jung, Camille Paglia, Colin Wilson, Joseph Campbell (who is mentioned in the article, though not in any productive way). The final comment of the work being mere contemporary mythmaking is glib and dismissive in the extreme. His methodology is as structured as the evidence and subject matter allows, indeed anyone who is involved with anything similar (and I will here include the attempt to retro-actively arrive at a formation of Indo-European through etymology and - forgive me - leaps of linguistic intuition) can appreciate the difficulty involved. In short, this page is an opinion piece (and a poorly argued one at that), but it isn't an unbiased article. -- Fugazilazarus 01:33, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Agree about the criticisms of Frazer and Graves being mostly nit-picking. I have heard it said about Graves that all the relevant academics disagreed with Graves' views but few if any had the breadth of knowledge of myth to argue with him.Pignut 08:55, 19 August 2007 (UTC)pignut

Edit request

I believe that this article now goes a long way towards pointing out that The White Goddess is not respected as accurate. However, I think that it would be justified to expand on this opinion.

Graves' book is separable into scientifically verifiable ideas (mostly linguistically and archeologically) along with his poetic nonsense (which, I believe, he would feel is the main subject of the book). The scientific ideas are discredited because of the analepsis technique, among others. I have read the book through several times. Unlike some authors that propose new ideas, he does not look at contrary evidence and discount it because it does not fit with the theory. Most of his scientific discourse is difficult to refute, even as more archeologically evidence has become available since it's original and revised publications. In fact, what he conjectured at, based on linguistic evidence, has since received supporting evidence from archaeological discoveries.

I would like to see a short (two or three sentence?) representation of this idea of the two themes that run through his book. --Timatthelab 13:27, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Edit request

Actually, I find this article fairly insulting, and would agree with "Timatthelab" that the points he is making (about Grecian myths influencing Irish and Welsh religious culture) as well as other archaeological evidence of syncretism between "opposed" religions. I am not going to call bias on the current state of this article, but it is obviously written by someone who does not approve of matriarchal religion. 64.122.204.27 02:12, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Analepsis

Could someone explain what analepsis is? I followed the link but it redirects to flashback and that doesn't make any sense in the article. If Graves was using it in a non-standard way that should be mentioned. Tocharianne 21:38, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

I believe that Graves uses it to mean a kind of "unforgetting". This is related to the "flashback" term, but the analeptic is flashing back to a memory outside of physical experience. I believe that this sort of mystical revelation (technically, a recollection) of something from before one's own birth exists in many religions, sometimes experienced with the aid of sacramental substances or physical travail.

This is, I believe, the root of the controversy in Graves' historical presentation - He claims to have knowledge of some historical occurrences based on analepsis, and it does not sit well with readers. My earlier point was that his conclusions should not be discounted based solely on this one blatantly non-scientific claim. For example, if somebody claimed that she believed that massive objects attract each other with a force proportional to the product of the masses, and that she reached the conclusion after an apple hit her on the head, it might not be justifiable to discount the conclusion by discounting the method of discovery. Some of Graves' stories are suppositions, and may or may not be plausible, but are completely untestable; others are hypotheses, for which some evidence exists and can be tested, at least to a point. If these hypotheses are taken seriously, the treatise is valuable, even as a piece of historical exposition. Timatthelab24.41.20.139 (talk) 05:16, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

I've been looking for the reference to this for years. I wonder whether it got edited out in one of the revisions. I think he used the phrase 'analeptic memory'. To equate this with poetic inspiration I believe is inaccurate and the comment that he believed it to be a valid historical methodology may also be misleading. His chief method was an analysis of the language of poetic myth, that is not the same thing as 'poetic inspiration'. I have always understood 'analeptic memory' to be a form of 'channelling'. I don't think it's relevant to judge whether that was a valid methodology or not, it is simply how he described what he thought he was doing. ″all that I write must read perversely and irrelevantly to such of you as are still geared to the industrial machine″ - Foreword to the 1961 edition. Tim flatus (talk) 01:16, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Rearrange

I've wikified the lengthy quotes, and moved the image to the top of the page - no problems there.

I also rearranged the paragraphs and added section titles - it's a well written article, but I thought some parts appeared out of sequence. So I cut and pasted, without editing the writing, although some present tense was switched to past. Revert if you like, but keep the wikifying edits.

Unreadable? I've read it several times. You don't plough through it - it's more like a puzzle devised by a man with a brain big enough to match his ego.--Shtove 17:02, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Balance

I have removed comments that were openly perjorative or unverifiable, and added fact tags where other unattributed assertions were made. I have also removed the undue emphasis that was given to Analepsis, for the following reasons. Firstly because the weight given to it was such as to suggest that poetic inspiration was all that Graves used as a technique. It was not, the article itself states that etymological techniques were used, and I have added text alluding to Graves view that the existing myths that we have inherited are contaminated by a process he calls iconotropy. These contaminations are able to be identified through their inconsistency. Graves adopts a forensic analysis to resolve such inconsistency, and while analepsis inspires that approach, it does not define the arguments that he is eventually led to. The second reason why I have deleted it is because the negative overtones are simply not justified. Analepsis is part of every methodology of scientific enquiry or creative process. Every advance in human science has begun with an inspiration based on nothing other than intuition, which then leads to the development of a dialectic that underpins it. A famous example is Issac Newton and his considerations on the action of an apple falling from a tree, which led him eventually to the universal law of gravitation.Tashkop 08:02, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Sources

This article is only mildly useful to me because it cites only one source. I would like to track down some of the criticisms of Graves and evaluate them myself; I know his scholarship is much maligned, but I would like to read detailed factual critiques rather than mere rumours. Does anyone know of good critiques that could be listed at the bottom of the article? Fuzzypeg☻ 22:29, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for making a start, Bloodofox. If you know of any sources that actually provide an evidence based argument of facts, that would be the ultimate! Anyone else? Thanks,  Fuzzypeg  ^talk  20:31, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

No problem. They are certainly out there as I have seen them myself. Unfortunately, I can't recall exactly where.. :bloodofox: (talk) 04:04, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

I have added a bibliography to this article. A good place for you to start might be the introduction, commentary, etc, by Grevel Lindop for the 1995 Carcanet Press ed of The WG. And there is also the collection of essays edited by Firla & Lindop (2003).:L107:L107 (talk) 21:01, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

The quotes from Hilda Ellis Davidson both come from a single brief sentence in her book, which is the only sentence on the subject of Graves and his work. It is purely a summary of Juliette Wood's comments in her article, and Davidson clearly cites it as such. So... it seems odd that we would take even one quotation, let alone break it into two (making it seem to have come from a more extended discussion), from a passing and purely derivative mention. I don't know what the WP guidelines say on this, but it seems to me we should be simply citing Wood, not citing citations of Wood, if you get what I mean. Maybe whoever added these quotes liked Davidson's blunt wording, and that's why they chose to quote her, but I don't think we'd lose much by giving our own summary wording. In fact, we might manage a more accurate summary than Davidson does: she reports that Graves "has no authority" on early Celtic literature, whereas Wood emphasises his comparatively sophisticated knowledge of sources, and says "His command of the scholarship is impressive, and still he gets it wrong." The emphasis is quite different to saying he "has no authority". Fuzzypeg★ 09:49, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

This isn't a summary of the reference, but Davidson's opinion plainly stated ("Robert Graves's book, The White Goddess (1961), has misled many innocent readers with eloquent but deceptive statement about a nebulous goddess in early Celtic literature, on which he was no authority (Wood 1996:10ff)"). She does point to the Wood reference, but it is also clearly a verdict she shares. Therefore I see no issue with the Davidson quote, which I added, and I note that Davidson was one of the foremost experts in the field (and her work far more respected than that of, say, the error-ridden work of Hutton), making her straightforward dismissal of Graves particularly notable. :bloodofox: (talk) 15:29, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Celtic Astrology

This section is such rubbish that I feel obliged to edit it almost immediately. The Celtic Astrology popularised by new age authors is not part of the White Goddess, so this comment should be moved to Criticism or indeed removed. His theory is merely that of a calendar, which may be justifiably criticised. He does not equate any of the Oghams to Zodiac signs directly and does not attribute ″two letters each to winter solstice (A/I), Sagittarius (B/R), spring equinox (O/E) and Gemini (D/T)″! I shall correct this with an accurate précis of the list in chapter 16.Tim flatus (talk) 02:07, 6 January 2013 (UTC)