Robert Graves You Dickhead

[icymist]

Robert Graves invented the Maiden-Mother-Crone goddess as well as the Holly King & Oak King gods in his 1948 essay The White Goddess. There is no historical evidence that the "White Goddess" as he describes her ever figured in any actual belief system.


Robert Graves' The White Goddess has been the subject of severe criticism for lack of academic stringency as well as for its emphasis on the "male gaze" in relation to the goddess, and its Eurocentric character. Flaws in his scholarship such as poor philology, misdating texts (for example, the Hanes Taliesin from the 16th-18th centuries which he believed a more ancient document), and use of out-dated archeology have been criticised. Archeologists, historians and folklorists have not received the work favourably.


Hilda Ellis Davidson, a distinguished scholar of many years standing, writes (Davidson 1998:11): "If scholars have been somewhat reluctant to explore the symbol of the Goddess there has been plenty of enthusiasm at a more popular level. Robert Graves' book The White Goddess has misled many innocent readers with his eloquent but deceptive statements about a nebulous Celtic goddess in early Celtic literature on which he was no authority".


Carol Christ, (Carol Christ 1997), sees The White Goddess as "deeply flawed"; Graves's vision of the Goddess as inspiration of poetry is distorted by his understanding of the poet as the "masculine ego fertilised by the mysterious feminine" and she questions his depiction of the Goddess religion "inevitably involving the sacrifice of the Son to the Mother."

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