The White Goddess, by Robert Graves (1961)

The White Goddess has sat on my bookshelves for years. For many of those years I congratulated myself that I'd at least read more of it than most of the pagans and romantics who quoted it appeared to have done, but I must admit that still wasn't very much of its great five-hundred-page bulk. I have now done so, although even now I must confess a lot of that reading was fairly cursory. I wonder what it may have added to my life, rather than subtracted from the amount of time I have left to devote to more worthwhile topics. It's hard to exaggerate the influence The White Goddess had, even if it was an influence exercised by reputation rather than its actual content; together with Margaret Murray's The Witch Cult in Western Europe it generated the mid-twentieth century consensus that there had been a consistent, coherent cult of a goddess stretching across the ancient world and surviving in folklore and superstition and even, occasionally and covertly, practice, a belief which still lingers in certain quarters of the eco-pagan world. In a sense this doesn't do justice to what Graves was driving at: a thesis that related specifically to the writing of poetry and the mission of poets, built up painstakingly through the amassing of details from disparate ancient mythologies. It's massively learned and impressive, this collection of bits and pieces beaten and battered until they fit into a coherent argument, but at its heart it's a confidence trick: the usual insistence that you can draw fragments of evidence from utterly disparate languages, cultures and histories and make them mean something they do not naturally mean at all. And occasionally you catch Graves in a mistake so egregious you wonder about the reliability of the bits you have no direct knowledge of. If nobody really talks about The White Goddess much now, it's no great loss.