Graves, "The Return of the Goddess"

[Paul Mackin]

Where things really went wrong however was when nature decided asexual
reproduction wasn't good enough and started the world on its long
disasterous downward spiral. The latest manifestation of the "if only
women were in charge" school of history is Susan Estrich's new book.

Just funning around.

		P.


On Mon, 23 Oct 2000, Dave Monroe wrote:

> ... 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)
> 
> 
>