Graves, "The Return of the Goddess"

[Dave Monroe]

... from Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of
Poetic Myth (rev. ed.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966
[1948]), Chapter Twenty-Six, "Return of the Goddess" ...

Sir James Frazer attributed the defects of European civilization to "the
selfish and immoral doctrine of Oriental religions which inculcated the
communion of the soul with God, and its eternal salvation, as the only
objects worth living for."  This, he argued, undermined the unselfish
ideal of Greek and Roman society which subordinated the individual to
the welfare of the State.  Adolf Hitler said later, more succinctly:
"The Jews are to blame for all our troubles."  Both statements, however,
were historically untrue. (474)

Yet neither Frazer nor Hitler were far from the truth, which was that
the early Gentile Christian borrowed from the Hebrew prophets the two
religious concepts, hitherto unknown in the West, which have become the
prime causes of our unrest: that of a patriarchal God, who refuses to
have any truck with Goddesses and claims to be self-sufficient and
all-wise; and that of a theocratic society, disdainful of the pomps and
glories of the world, in which everybody who rightly performs his civic
duties is a "son of God" and entitled to salvation, whatevr his rank or
fortune, by virtue of direct communion with teh Father.  (475)

Both these concepts have since been vigorously contested within the
Church itself. (475)

... not only has Hebrew monotheism een modified at Rome by the gradual
introduction of Virgin-worship, but the ordinary Catholic layman has
long been cut off from direct communication with God ... (475)

Protestantism was a vigorous reassertion of the two rejected concepts
....  The Civil wars in England were won by the fighting qualities of
the Virgin-hating Puritan Independents ... (475-6)

What ails Christianity today is that it is not a religion squarely based
on a single myth; it is a complex of jridicial decisions made under
political pressure in an ancient law-suit about religious rights between
adherents of the Mother-goddess who was once supreme in the West, and
those of the usurpinf Father-god.  (476)

Though the West is still nominally Christian, we have come to be
governed, in practice, by the unholy triumvirate of Pluto god of wealth,
Apollo god of science, and Mercury god of thieves.  To make matters
worse, dissension and jealousy rage openly between these three, with
Mercury and Pluto blackguarding each other, while Apollo wields the
atomic bomb as if it were a thunderbolt; for since the Age of Reason was
heralded by his eighteenth-century philosopher, he has seated himself on
the vacant throne of Zeus (temporarily indisposed) as Triumdival
Regent.  (476)


There are two distinct and complementary languages: the ancient,
intuitive language of poetry ... and the more modern, rational language
or prose, universally current.  Myth and religion are clothed in poetic
language; science, ethics, philosophy and statistics in prose.  A stage
in history has now been reached when it is generally conceded that the
two languages should not be combined into a single formula ....  (480)

The story of teh Ark is probably derived from an Asianic icon in which
the Spirit of the Solar Year is show in a moon-ship, going through his
habitual New Year changes--bull, lion, snake and so on; and teh story of
the Whale from a similar icon showing teh same Spirit being swallowed at
the end of the year by the Moon-and-Sea-goddess, represented as a
sea-monster, to be presently re-orn as a New Year fish, or finned
goat....  The icon ... survived in Orphic art, where it represneted a
ritual ceremony of initiation:  the initiate was swallowed by the
Universal Mother, teh sea-monster, and re-born as an incarnation of the
Sun-god.  (480)

A New Zealand scientist assured me the other day that Christianity had
received its heaviest blow in 1945: a fundamental tenet of teh church,
namely that Jesus' material body was immaterialized at the Ascension
had, he said, been spectacularly disproved at hiroshima and
Nagasaki--anyone with the least scientific perception must realize that
the break-down of matter would have caused an explosion large enough to
wreck the entire Middle East.  (481)

The Goddess is no townswoman: she is the Lady of the Wild Things,
haunting the wooded hill-tops--Venus Cluacina, "she who purifies with
myrtle," not Venus Cloacina, "Patroness of teh Sewage System."  (481)

There are frequent denials of her power, for example Allen Ramsey's
Goddess of the Slothful (from The Gentle Shepherd, 1725).... (485)

And we owe her a satire on the memory of the man who first tilted
European civilization off balance, by enthroning the restless and
arbitray male under the name of Zeus and dethroning the female sense of
orderliness, Themis.  (486)