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Terreson Profile
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Registered: 06-2006
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Re: from my library


I had thought to tell a bit of a story concerning the life-changing book mentioned immediately upthread. Thinking on it for the last week or so I realize the story is too personal, and still too closely felt, too turn to reportage.

In the spring of '82 I spent five weeks in Spain, mostly in the south of Spain, Andalusia. It was less an adventure than it was a retreat. There I met with Romany people and did a whole lot of walking. Maybe ya'll know how it is. When you travel you always take a book or two. I had owned one book for a long time but still not read. Robert Graves' study of what he called "the true poetic grammar," "The White Goddess." At the time I knew scant about Goddess worship lore, less about Wicca, even less about the many neo-pagan movements. My approach to the book was simply that of a poet looking to follow a line of inquiry.

Graves' study actually amounted to big doings among poets in the fifties. Written during WW2 it was one of those studies poets measured themselves against. I've given up trying to discuss the work with PhD types in lit. Usually they run away down the hall at its mention. Drawing on Classical, Hebraic, and Celtic poetry, and the mythologies involved, it makes for some thick reading. Having some grounding in the several studies I was able to follow his arguments. Being a poet, I was also able to follow his method, which is thought by association. What I wasn't prepared for was his thesis.

"The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death, and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God's losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride, and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird. All true poetry...celebrates some incident or scene in this very ancient story, and the three main characters are so much a part of our racial inheritance that they not only assert themselves in poetry but recur on occassions of emotional stress in the form of dreams, paranoic visions, and delusions."

Or at the end of his study there is this:

"Originally, the poet was the leader of a totem-society of religious dancers...All the totem-societies in ancient Europe were under the dominion of the White Goddess, the Lady of the Wild Things; dances were seasonal and fitted into an annual pattern from which gradually emerges the single grand theme of poetry: the life, death and resurrection of the Spirit of the Year, the Goddess's son and lover."

This is pretty much Graves' argument. Between the two declarations are a good 400 pages fleshing out, in the evidenciary way, his thesis. Speaking as a poet, increasingly the stranger in a strange land (as are all artists), that spring was the first time in my career I had the home-feeling. When I came back to America I looked up an acquaintance who said he was a witch.

Coda to my story might be this. All you homesteaders looking to find an alternative to civilization, and mass-society, and feed lots, and agri-business might get a kick out of Graves. But for the WW2 years he lived on the island of Mallorca from 1931 until he died in the mid eighties. Agriculturally and traditionally based, it was where he could find an out to what he called the industrial machine.

Tere
2/23/2009, 4:34 am Link to this post Send Email to Terreson   Send PM to Terreson
 
de Corbin Profile
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Re: from my library


Scholars don't like Graves' book because he makes a lot of "leaps of faith" - making connections where there is no real evidence.

It is, however, and facinating book, and was very influential in the beginnings of the Pagan revival. Graves himself was a pagan, and that, at the time, didn't do much to help his reputation, either... He was seen as somewhat cracked.

When you read his poetry, you can almost always find his major theme of the returning cycles of nature in there, somewhere, often hidden under the poem's surface meaning.

He even wrote about Jesus (King Jesus)fitting that story into the theme he identified as "True Poetry" (which wassn't that hard of a task, really emoticon ).

---

3/5/2009, 1:29 pm Link to this post Send Email to de Corbin   Send PM to de Corbin
 
Terreson Profile
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Re: from my library


All true stuff, Corbin. Thanks for commenting. Graves is probably best known for his I Claudius creation(s), at least through the old Masterpiece Theater series. And you bet. Scholars have always had trouble with him, so have many poets. But I think it is true to say that his two volumes interpreting Greek Myths for Penguin books is still something of a standard. Especially with how he dug under the official Olymian-centric layer. Thanks again.

Tere
3/7/2009, 9:13 pm Link to this post Send Email to Terreson   Send PM to Terreson
 
DebbrahF Profile
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Re: from my library


Tere,

Given that you enjoy Leek and history... do you like subtle-ishly snarky history?

Doreen Valiente's Rebirth of Witchcraft is wonderfully fun. I love her ability to create a painfully pointed comment.

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For good or ill, luck and opportunity are 90%+ preparation...
3/13/2009, 6:37 am Link to this post Send Email to DebbrahF   Send PM to DebbrahF
 


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