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The last may seem an unlikely claim; but from its opening confession (‘Since the age of fifteen poetry has been my ruling passion’) to the ringing declaration of its close (‘None greater in the universe than the Triple Goddess!’) the book is an intensely personal one. The attentive reader will catch many glimpses of Robert Graves – as a child picking blackberries in North Wales; as a student talking to his moral tutor at Oxford; as a Professor teaching English at Cairo; cutting mistletoe in Brittany; being bitten by a viper in the Pyrenees; exercising the time-travelling faculties that had helped him produce the Claudius novels; and even (at several points) writing the first draft of The White Goddess. The book’s composition was itself an extraordinary episode, even in the setting of Graves’s far-from-ordinary life – an irruption of inspired creativity generating a theory which not only deciphered much of European prehistory but also interpreted the most powerful experiences of his own past life and determined the course of his future. Certainly no one can understand Graves, or his poetry, without reading The White Goddess. It is tempting to go further and suggest that no one can fully understand the modern world who has not at least considered its arguments.

Graves’s own account of the book’s writing (reprinted here as Appendix B) is one of the great accounts of literary inspiration – a tale of power worthy to stand beside Coleridge’s note to ‘Kubla Khan’ and Mary Shelley’s account of the birth of Frankenstein. But it leaves many questions (not least those about dating) unanswered. A few points may be summarised here. In 1940 Robert and Beryl Graves had moved to the village of Galmpton in South Devon; their first child, William, would be born there later the same year. Before long, things started to happen which with hindsight appear relevant to the gestation of The White Goddess. In late 1941 Graves began to correspond with the Welsh poet Alun Lewis. They discussed the nature of poetry and poets; the name of the medieval Welsh poet Taliesin cropped up. 1 Then, in July 1942, as they completed their prose-writers’ manual The Reader Over Your Shoulder, Graves and his co-author Alan Hodge began to consider writing a ‘book about poetry’. Topics mooted by Graves for treatment included the psychology of poetic inspiration, and the reasons for the ‘aura or halo, or whatever, that clings to the name of “poet” in spite of the lamentable history of bad poetic behaviour’. 2 They agreed to ‘put [the] book on to simmer very, very slowly’, but by July 1943 Graves was writing to Hodge about the links between poetry and ‘primitive moon-worship’ and suggesting that ‘The history of English poetry has been the modifying of the original moon-poetry, which is stressed, with sun-poetry (intellectual, Apollo poetry) which is measured in regular beats and metres’. 3 Evidently the investigation of ‘moon-poetry’ soon took a Celtic turn, for in September Graves was telling the poet Lynette Roberts that ‘Gaelic and Brythonic influences’ would be important for the book, and she was offering to help with his research.

At this point the story acquires a second dimension. In November Graves (who frequently incubated, or even wrote, several books at once) began research for a historical novel, King Jesus, based on his opinion that the documentary evidence showed Jesus to have been, in a strict view of both Jewish and Roman law, a claimant to the throne of Israel – a title which descended by the maternal line. 4 Thus Celtic, Roman and Hebrew matters were all much in Graves’s mind when, a month later in December 1943, Lynette Roberts sent him a copy of Edward Davies’ Celtic Researches (first published in 1804). The effect was dramatic: as Graves told Roberts,

The ingredients of the magic brew were now ready in the cauldron; but still something was needed to produce their synthesis. It came in March or early April 1944, when Graves’s projects, poetic and scholarly, were suddenly interrupted. 6 The publishers who were to bring out his recently completed historical novel, The Golden Fleece, which dealt with the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts, asked him to redraw the Argo’s route on the maps which were to accompany the text. It was during this (significantly non-verbal) task that Graves’s mind began to work irresistibly on the mass of materials he had lately absorbed. To quote his own account,

By mid-May he had written a book-length work which was, essentially, the first draft of The White Goddess. Entitled The Roebuck in the Thicket, it was sent to Keidrych Rhys (Lynette Roberts’s husband), who serialised part of it in his magazine Wales whilst Graves’s literary agent, A.P. Watt, began approaching publishers. Graves continued his work on the book, consulting experts in many different fields. Margaret Murray (author of The Witch-Cult in Western Europe ) was asked about witch-names and the use of herbs; Christopher Hawkes advised on New Grange and Stonehenge; Max Mallowan (he lived near Galmpton with his wife, Agatha Christie) was on hand to discuss Middle Eastern Archaeology.

The book deepened and expanded up to its publication in 1948 as The White Goddess and, indeed, continued to develop until 1960: one purpose of the present edition is to give the text as Graves finally left it in that year. But what kind of book is it, and what was the ‘illumination’ that so gripped Graves during those weeks in 1943? To summarise in a rough-and-ready fashion, the book’s argument is that in late prehistoric times, throughout Europe and the Middle East, matriarchal cultures, worshipping a supreme Goddess and recognising male gods only as her son, consort or sacrificial victim, were subordinated by aggressive proponents of patriarchy who deposed women from their positions of authority, elevated the Goddess’s male consorts into positions of divine supremacy and reconstructed myths and rituals to conceal what had taken place. This patriarchal conquest happened at various times, beginning in the second millennium BC and reaching Britain around 400 BC . True poetry (inspired by the Muse and her prime symbol, the moon) even today is a survival, or intuitive re-creation, of the ancient Goddess-worship. Moreover, her cult and the matriarchy that went with it represented a saner and happier mode of human existence than the patriarchy of the male God and his sun-inspired rationality, which have produced most of the ills of the modern world.

The illumination which struck Graves with such force was really a double realisation. One part of this was the perception that the mysterious ‘Battle of the Trees’ recalled in an early medieval Welsh poem was actually a battle between alphabets. The Celtic Druids used tree-names for the letters of their alphabet, and the alphabet was structured so that it functioned also as a calendar and, in general, as a system of correspondences that could embody all kinds of knowledge. There was, indeed, evidence that one ancient Bardic alphabet had been replaced by a newer one of different structure. It was suddenly clear that the battle of two alphabets represented a conflict of the knowledge-systems held by the learned bards on the two sides at the time when Goddess-worship in ancient Britain was overthrown by patriarchy. Simultaneously, Graves realised that the puzzling Song of Taliesin, always regarded by scholars as nonsense, was in fact a series of riddles; and that the answers to the riddles were the letters of one of the alphabets involved in the battle.

Even simplified as crudely as this, the argument is difficult – a set of interdependent hypotheses, each very strange in itself. Not surprisingly, some readers quickly find The White Goddess unreadable and give up. But to follow every ramification of Graves’s argument at a first reading is not necessary, nor even desirable. Better to wander through this fascinating labyrinth of poetry, myth and erudition enjoying the extraordinary delights and puzzles it has to offer, following the general drift and leaving the more recalcitrant knots to be untied at a future reading. And there are likely to be future readings: the book is one that can be enjoyed again and again, yielding new pleasures and surprises each time. For The White Goddess is the kind of work Northrop Frye has usefully called an ‘anatomy’: a book (like Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy ) packed with learning and catalogues of strange facts, mixing verse, prose and dialogue to analyse its subject exhaustively and at the same time satirise contemporary society and academic scholarship. Such books are written with their authors’ lifeblood and take a lifetime to comprehend, though they may be read the first time with intense excitement.

Certainly, for all its literary qualities, The White Goddess is a work of massive scholarship. Considered as a study in anthropology, it springs directly from Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (first published in 1890), and those who have read Frazer are likely to find The White Goddess most accessible. In a sense, Graves’s work rests on a brilliantly simple transformation of Frazer’s theory. The Golden Bough had demonstrated that a wide range of primitive religions centred on a divine king, a man who represented a dying god of vegetable fertility and who either killed his predecessor, reigning until killed in his turn, or else was sacrificed at the end of a year’s kingship. Graves’s contribution was to supply the missing female part in this drama: to suggest that originally the god-king was important not for his own sake, but because he married the goddess-queen; and that whilst kings might come and go, the queen or goddess endured.

Nonetheless, the broader notion that human society was originally matriarchal was one in which Graves had many predecessors, most notably the Swiss archaeologist J.J. Bachofen, whose Das Mutterrecht (‘Mother Right’, 1861) had argued that matriarchy was a remnant of a primitive era before the domestication of animals, when the part played by the male in procreation was not understood. The female was seen as the sole source of life; the dominance of goddesses and female rulers naturally followed. (Graves may well first have heard of such theories from W.H.R.Rivers, the psychiatrist and shell-shock specialist who had become a close friend after the First World War. Rivers, who had been an anthropologist with an active interest in ‘mother-right’ as a social phenomenon, must have known the work of Bachofen and his followers.) Such theories, though controversial, are still very much alive. A recent proponent has been the American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, whose books Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1982) and The Language of the Goddess (1989) are thoroughly in harmony with Graves’s ideas.

In the fields of poetry and aesthetics, precursors of The White Goddess ’s perspective are perhaps easier to find. It is evident that Graves’s idea of a divine female power, manifest under many names and forms in the goddesses of the ancient world, and appearing in historical times to possess the women who have inspired poets, has a great deal in common with the idea of the ‘eternal feminine’ which fascinated so many writers in the late nineteenth century. The ‘Gioconda’ of Walter Pater’s Renaissance (1873), who ‘has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave … and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes’; Swinburne’s ‘Proserpine’ (‘goddess and maiden and queen…’), Yeats’s ‘Rose of the World’, and even the threefold heroine of Hardy’s last novel, The Well-Beloved, all embody such a vision. Significantly, when Graves was preparing his Oxford lectures in 1964, he was a little perturbed to find that his concept of the poetic Muse as a particular woman possessed by an inspiring goddess was not attested by any quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘I would feel happier,’ he admitted, ‘to know that some other poet – Raleigh or Coleridge or Keats, for instance – … had anticipated me in this usage.’ 7 As this discovery suggests, whilst the poetic relationships Graves describes are certainly ancient, his particular view of them may be one that received expression only in the late nineteenth century.

This would not be surprising; for in many respects The White Goddess has its origins in the ‘Celtic’ literary movements of the fin de siècle. Graves’s grandfather, Charles Graves, Bishop of Limerick (1812-99), had been a prominent Irish antiquarian and a pioneer in the decipherment of Ogham inscriptions; and his father, the poet Alfred Percival Graves (1846-1931), had been an important figure in the Irish Literary Revival: Robert had spent his childhood in a household full of the literary bustle of a committed ‘pan-Celtic’ poet and educator. He had soon rejected most of his father’s ideals; but when in the 1940s Taliesin and the Battle of the Trees seized on his imagination, he was able to turn at once to ‘a shelf-ful of learned books on Celtic literature which I found in my father’s library (mainly inherited from my grandfather…)’. 8 He was resuming, however belatedly, a family tradition, and there is a sense in which The White Goddess might claim to be the last product of the Irish Literary Revival. Many of the books Graves used are still on the shelves in his study at Deyá: P.W. Joyce’s Social History of Ancient Ireland and Origin and History of Irish Names of Places; R.A.S. Macalister’s Secret Languages of Ireland; Lady Charlotte Guest’s Mabinogion; the many-volumed Transactions of the Irish Texts Society, of the Ossianic Society, of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion.

In these circumstances it may seem odd that The White Goddess contains no mention of W.B. Yeats, or of his collaborator in the collection of Irish myth and folklore, Lady Augusta Gregory. After all, Yeats’s youthful devotion to the charismatic Maud Gonne would seem to offer an outstanding example of the creative relationship between muse and poet; and literary historians have often coupled Yeats’s A Vision with The White Goddess as the modern period’s masterpieces of poetic myth-making in English. Moreover, Yeats had been a close friend of Alfred Percival Graves.

Robert Graves, however, cherished a lifelong distaste for Yeats and all his works, a product of his own early rejection of everything ‘Celtic’ intensified later by Laura Riding’s abhorrence of Yeats’s attitude to poetry (epitomised in his teasing suggestion, in a letter to her, that poets should be ‘good liars’). Although it might seem that to write The White Goddess without a single reference to Yeats must have required heroic determination, it is much more likely that the omission was unthinking and intuitive, an instinctive avoidance of a tainted source. Tellingly, Graves’s library contains just one volume by Lady Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902). Inside, in a hand of the 1960s, Graves has scrawled ‘Philip Graves from Robert Graves from Philip Graves’ – a riddling indication that the volume came from his half-brother Philip and is to be passed on to his grandson, another Philip. The inscription reads like a brusque dismissal, a laconic reminder that the book is just passing through and has no permanent place in his collection.

Comparison with Yeats’s A Vision is nonetheless instructive. Both books were written in a tempest of inspiration by poets in their fifty-second years; both present systems of myth which underlie their authors’ poems and will shape their future work; both owe much to women. But the contrasts are equally important. Yeats claimed a supernatural origin for his book – its materials were dictated by spirits – yet refused to commit himself as to its ultimate validity, quoting the spirits’ own confession: ‘We come to give you metaphors for poetry’. Graves’s book, on the other hand, shows a curious disjunction between passages of inspired fervour and an argument which proceeds ‘scientifically’, drawing its evidence from archaeology, linguistics, anthropology and even chemistry. It assumes a tone of the scientific and the factual never attempted by Yeats. This has helped to make Graves’s argument far more acceptable to a late-twentieth-century readership which remains uncomfortable with avowed occultism or myth-making. Yet Graves’s most explicit public word on the nature of the Goddess remained surprisingly close to the terms chosen by Yeats’s spirits. ‘Whether God is a metaphor or a fact cannot reasonably be argued,’ he told his New York audience in 1957; ‘let us likewise be discreet on the subject of the Goddess.’

The emphasis on metaphor is a useful reminder that The White Goddess is, among other things, a work of literary criticism, proposing a specific theory of English poetry. As such it shows Graves drawing not only on Celtic scholarship and anthropology but on major works of literary scholarship which had appeared during the 1920s and 1930s. John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu (1927) had set a precedent for conscripting the reader into a process of detection that led through realms of myth, dream and legend in pursuit of the poetic imagination; and a technique for disentangling the Hanes Taliesin may have been suggested by A Song for David (1939), W.F. Stead’s innovative book on Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno (a poem which has much in common with Taliesin’s song). By reordering the lines, Stead had been able to show that a long poem previously regarded as ‘mad’ or ‘nonsensical’ was in fact a coherent work whose religious riddles and puns followed a meaningful pattern. If Graves did not know these books before, it is possible that he read them in 1942 when gathering material for the book on poetic thinking which he had planned to write with Alan Hodge. There are fictional influences too. For example, Chapter I’s extraordinary vision of the Goddess’s nests as seen in dreams, with its accompanying quotation from Job – ‘Her young ones also suck up blood’ – derives from M.R. James’s ghost story ‘The Ash Tree’ (itself a fine portrayal of the Goddess in her ‘hag’ aspect).

Preoccupied though it is with the making of poetry, The White Goddess has much to say also about interpretation, most remarkably in Chapter XIX, ‘The Number of the Beast’. Here Graves turns aside from his pursuit of the magic roebuck to test his poetic intuition on ‘a simple, well-known, hitherto unsolved riddle’, namely the Number of the Beast mentioned in the biblical Book of Revelation. The logic of this exercise will reward careful attention. Graves first uses his ‘analeptic vision’ – a kind of historical clairvoyance – to read the riddle as an inscription referring to the Roman Emperor Domitian; he then ‘corrects’ it to refer to Nero; finally he argues that both versions are correct, although conceding that the second one could never actually have been written. Intuition, it seems, has read not only a text but the text’s hidden history, for which historical proof can be gathered after the reading is done. As for the original intentions of the biblical author, ‘Who can say whether the sense was put there by St John, as it were for my benefit, or by myself, as it were for St John’s benefit?’ The chapter shows how far Graves’s method differs from that of the scientist. Where the scientist must choose the most economical interpretation, Graves chooses the interpretation richest in meaning: if poetic intuition is in good working order, historical evidence to confirm the reading will turn up later.

For Graves himself, more than reading and writing was at stake. The White Goddess was a book which made sense of his personal as well as his literary past. Sydney Musgrove has shown 9 that many of the themes and preoccupations of The White Goddess had been present, in fragmentary or embryonic form, throughout his earlier work. More importantly, it is likely that The White Goddess arrived so insistently because its writing was a necessary process of therapy. Graves’s intense personal and poetic relationship with Laura Riding had ended in 1939, with her decision to remain in Florida with Schuyler Jackson. Graves had been stunned and, in a sense, disoriented: despite the increasing strains of their relationship, he had been accustomed for the past dozen years to accepting Riding’s (often ferocious) critical judgments on his work, and her (frequently megalomaniac) views on poetry and politics, as carrying a virtually divine sanction. By 1940 he had fallen in love with Beryl Hodge, the wife of his friend and co-author Alan Hodge. The new relationship caused no friction: as we have seen, Graves and Hodge continued to collaborate after Beryl and Robert had set up home together at Galmpton. But whilst Beryl’s love and support had probably saved Robert from a serious breakdown, the deeper trauma of the sudden and painful conclusion to his frighteningly intense relationship with Riding cannot have been quick or easy to deal with. It is clear that the myth of the terrible, beautiful, inspiring and destroying Goddess enabled Robert Graves to come to terms with the part Laura Riding had played in his life, to view it as part of a larger drama that transcended the personal; to see what had happened to him as what must happen to every poet, as the acting out of a myth. Even so, one senses the personal lurking near the surface of the book at many points. To read the story of Llew Llaw Gyffes in Chapter XVII, or of Suibne Geilt in Chapter XXVI, with Riding’s rejection of Graves in mind, is a very poignant experience. And yet little in the book is merely personal. In Graves’s discussion of that same Llew Llaw Gyffes story, for example, occurs his brilliant demonstration that sacred kings were ritually lamed by dislocation of the hip – a suggestion which resolves so many mythical and historical puzzles that the reader has a positively frightening sense of seeing for a moment directly back into a prehistoric world. Intellectually, we reflect that Graves may or may not be right; emotionally, we are convinced – and shaken.

Such was the book whose first draft Graves wrote during those few weeks of 1944. Not surprisingly, publishers were slow to take the bait. Cassell and Jonathan Cape in London, and Macmillan in New York, rejected it. (In his 1957 lecture Graves would suggest that the bizarre death of Macmillan’s vice-president, Alexander Blanton, was a kind of judgment for his rejection of the book.) For a time Graves had high hopes of Oxford University Press, where the poet Charles Williams was an editor. Williams admired Graves’s poetry and they had exchanged friendly letters about Graves’s novel Wife to Mr Milton; moreover, Williams was writing an ambitious sequence of poems about Taliesin. He was indeed enthusiastic about The White Goddess, finding it ‘thrilling … astonishing and moving’. Graves’s later claim that Williams ‘regretted that he could not recommend this unusual book to his partners because of the expense’, like his attribution of William’s untimely death to this dereliction of poetic duty, was unfair. Williams argued for the book’s acceptance, but the Director of the Press, Sir Humphrey Milford, refused to be persuaded. There was, he pointed out, a paper shortage; the Press had in hand such ambitious series as the Oxford History of English Literature. ‘The Press,’ Milford told Graves’s agent with perhaps a touch of contempt, ‘is already committed to these works of scholarship and not to his study of the poetic mind.’ So the typescript went to Dent, who also turned it down.

At length, the luck turned. The White Goddess was accepted by T.S. Eliot of Faber and Faber: a singular piece of generosity and intellectual courage on the part of a poet who had been roughly handled by Graves and Riding, and who knew the risks involved in committing his publishing house to a deeply controversial work. The much less well-known Creative Age Press of New York soon followed suit. For the jackets, Graves’s friend and secretary Karl Gay drew (‘with me standing over him all the time’, as Graves said) two little emblems. One shows the Roebuck in the Thicket (after the design on an antique cameo ring which Graves later lost) and the other, as Graves told Eliot, ‘the goddess Carmenta giving Palaimedes [sic ] the eye which enables him to understand the flight of cranes which originated the alphabet’ 10 – an icon described in Chapter XIII. It is clear from the letters that Graves regarded these devices as integral parts of the book and so, for the first time since 1948, the present edition includes both.

The White Goddess was greeted by mixed reviews. American critics were mostly enthusiastic but bewildered, a natural result of having to come to grips with such a book in just a few weeks. In Britain the book went to more knowledgeable reviewers, who tended to be firmly pro or contra. Perhaps the most perceptive review was by the poet John Heath-Stubbs, in The New English Weekly (8 July 1948). Heath-Stubbs saw the book as having ‘in reality, an importance quite independent of any unlikely-seeming theories about Irish or other alphabets’ and as ‘a plea for a return to imaginative, mythopoeic, or poetic forms of thought’. He linked Graves with Yeats and Williams as perhaps the only modern poets who had ‘made that intellectually conscious use of traditional mythological symbols which constitutes … “Bardic” poetry’. On the other hand the professional archaeologists were predictably scathing. Glyn Daniel, then the best-known archaeologist in Britain, dubbed Graves’s theories ‘fantasies’ and his book ‘outrageous’ (The Listener, 4 June 1948). Graves replied in print to this, and to one other hostile review in The Spectator. His replies are given in Appendix A.

More surprising was the reaction of readers. Evidently The White Goddess had touched a hidden spring in the public mind, and demand for this difficult, erudite book was strong and steady: the British edition sold out and was reprinted in less than five months, and a new edition followed in 1952. Readers’ letters about the book reached Graves in ever-increasing numbers, some confessing to Goddess-worship in unlikely places. The biologist and popular science-writer Lancelot Hogben (author of Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen ), for example, wrote of his admiration for the book, concluding ‘There cannot be many of us. So I will subscribe myself in the fellowship of She whom we venerate in her three phases or waxing, fullness and waning…’

By now, Graves had returned with his family to the village of Deyá, Mallorca, to live at Canelluñ, the house Graves and Laura Riding had built together in 1931 and had occupied until the Spanish Civil War drove them from the island in 1936. Graves had made the move back to Mallorca in 1946, whilst The White Goddess was awaiting publication, and had corrected the proofs at Deyá. It was there that the last acts of the remarkable drama of The White Goddess were to be played out. For, having drawn into the open the mythical pattern underlying his life and work, Graves now became more and more its prisoner as well as its beneficiary. Increasingly, a preoccupation with the idea of the Muse came to shape both Graves’s and his readers’ views of his poetry. In The White Goddess itself it is noticeable that the original myth of the Goddess and her ephemeral male consorts easily undergoes a subtle inversion, whereby a rather different pattern emerges – that of the male poet and the succession of women who (as Graves wrote of Wyatt’s mistresses) ‘were in turn illuminated for [him] by the lunar ray that commanded his love’. This view had consequences for Graves’s personal life, and led to the series of intense emotional relationships with young women – the so-called Muses – which stimulated Graves to the love poems of his later years but also subjected him at times to pain and humiliation. The stories of the four ‘Muses’ and their impact on the lives of the ageing poet and his family need not be retold here: they are available in Richard Perceval Graves’s Robert Graves and the White Goddess, 1940-85 and (an inside view from a member of the family) in William Graves’s Wild Olives: Life in Majorca with Robert Graves. But it is hard to believe that these relationships would have developed as they did had The White Goddess never been written. For better or worse, it was the book which fixed the popular image of Graves, and increasingly his own self-image.

A decisive stage in the process, and one which turned Graves into something of a cult-figure for the last decades of his life, was the appearance of the third British edition of The White Goddess in 1961. It was the first time the book had been available in Britain as a paperback, and the period was propitious. The 1960s, with all the radical cultural changes they brought, were getting under way; new religions, new psychotherapies, new sexual freedoms and new psychedelic drugs were all starting to spread across the western world. Occultism, paganism and a kind of feminism were in the air. The White Goddess was in tune with many of these developments, all the more so as Graves revised it in 1960. It had already been enlarged for the second British edition (1952), where Graves had added Chapter XXVI, ‘Return of the Goddess’. Now, between 24 March and June 17 1960, 11 Graves gave the text a thorough working-over, strengthening his arguments, cutting out some rather dated references to Russian Communism and the Second World War (his interest in politics had waned over the years), and adding extracts from his 1957 lecture to form the challenging ‘Postscript 1960’. Two changes in particular demand attention and show how skilfully he judged the mood of the time and the needs of his book. From the end of Chapter XV he deleted two paragraphs on the Tarot which, however they might appeal to the ‘hippy’ section of the audience which the book would soon be finding, were the passages most likely to alienate those others who wanted to take the book seriously as anthropology. One of the book’s strengths, as Graves must have known, is that it radiates magic, yet never allows itself to be reduced to occultism. At this point, for a single moment, Graves had lost his balance and begun to write like an ordinary magus. He was right to remove the passage; yet its intrinsic interest is such that it may be given here, safely outside the boundaries of the work itself:

While on the subject of ancient means of divination which, like the jewels of the month, have become corrupted by charlatans, I should like to mention the medieval Tarot pack. This consists of four suits of thirteen, and twenty-two trumps, and seems clearly derived from the tree-alphabet. The four suits are the thirteen weeks separating the vowel-stations, the trumps are the twenty-two letters of the full alphabet. The trumps could be used to spell out words and the ordinary cards to yield dates, and since each of the trumps had a symbolic picture on it, apparently derived from the lore of the letter it represented – e.g. Hanged Man for D, the Lightning-struck Tower for R, the Wheel of Fortune for AA – the seventy-eight-card pack was a very powerful instrument.

So much for the largest cut. But Graves also made additions, and amongst them a whole layer of material – each passage brief, but in aggregate subtly changing the flavour of the book – on the subject of hallucinogenic mushrooms. The reason was that since 1949 Graves had enjoyed a growing friendship with R. Gordon Wasson and his wife, Dr Valentina Wasson, who were expert mycologists. Gordon in particular was interested in hallucinogenic mushrooms. His interest was more than theoretical, and in late January 1960 he had initiated Graves and a group of other friends into the mysteries of the Mexican Psilocybe Heimsii, which they ate together in Wasson’s New York apartment. Graves described his extraordinary and beautiful visions in a 1961 lecture, ‘The Poet’s Paradise’. Four months later in May (in the midst of the period when Graves was revising The White Goddess ) they experimented again; this time, for lack of the genuine article, swallowing ‘synthetic psilocybin’ (perhaps the newly-discovered LSD). The results were disappointing, but Wasson, and the world of mushrooms, remained important matters in Graves’s thinking for a good many years afterwards. The Wassons (who deserve, and will doubtless someday have, a biography to themselves) are amongst the hidden inspirers of 1960s culture, for their work influenced not only Graves but also Carlos Castaneda, and Wasson was a friend of Dr Albert Hoffmann, discoverer of LSD. Among their less obvious monuments are the string of references to a Dionysiac mushroom-cult which gave added appeal to The White Goddess as it entered the age of the ‘psychedelic revolution’.

And there was now no doubt of that appeal. After 1961 the steady trickle of letters Graves received about the book swelled into a torrent. No longer need he complain of a lack of help in ‘refining’ his argument. Experts, real and self-styled, in archaeology and early Welsh, in runes and classical studies, in witchcraft and pharmacology, wrote to offer ‘corrections’ (often themselves of dubious correctness) and extensions to his theories. Less erudite readers wrote to tell him of their dreams, their drug experiences, their migraines, their writer’s block, their experiments in magic. When Graves claimed in his 1957 lecture that he ‘studiously avoid[ed] witchcraft, spiritualism, yoga, fortune-telling … and so on’, it may possibly have been true. Five years later it certainly was not. His writings had led to a friendship with the Sufi occultist Idries Shah; and in his wake came Gerald Gardner, a leading theorist of the modern witch-cult. Graves did not take to Gardner, but by the early 1960s magicians and witches of several kinds were writing to Graves, and the correspondence was not always one-sided: he seems to have been willing to give advice on matters of ritual as well as on the use of hallucinogens.

During Graves’s last decades, as his poetry came to its end and his mind failed, The White Goddess continued to extend its influence. Its ideas, simplified and sometimes garbled, became a part of general literary parlance, so that critics and reviewers could refer to ‘the White Goddess’ in passing without mentioning Graves, sure that readers would catch their drift. Artists in other media were tantalised by the possibilities. Already in 1960 there was interest in a film version, and Alistair Reid had collaborated with Graves in sketching a screenplay of this most unfilmable of books. In 1983 a ballet based on the book was performed at Covent Garden. In 1986 the painter Julian Cooper completed a large canvas, ‘Reading the “White Goddess”, Windermere’, which has become the best-known serious treatment of a ‘Lakeland’ subject in graphic art this century. Literary repercussions have been equally plentiful. To discount all but the most obvious debts, the book has had a fundamental influence on works of poetic theory as different as Peter Redgrove’s The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense (1987), Peter Russell’s The Image of Woman as a Figure of the Spirit (1991) and Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992). It would be hard to find a significant poet in Britain who has not read at least parts of the book and engaged in some way with its notions.

Yet Graves’s own thinking had never ceased to develop. By 1963 his vision of the Goddess was changing again. In his Oxford lecture of that December – published as ‘Intimations of the Black Goddess’ – he began to speak of the White Goddess’s ‘mysterious sister, the Goddess of Wisdom’. This new vision of a Black Goddess, to be reached by the poet who can pass uncomplaining through the ordeals imposed by her ‘White’ sister, was no doubt inspired by the many Black Virgins to be found in the churches of southern Europe, some near Deyá, as well as by discussions with Idries Shah about ‘the Sufic tradition of Wisdom as blackness’. 12 The Black Goddess offered the glimpse of a more harmonious and tranquil future. She is the poet’s ‘more-than-Muse’:

The final stage of Graves’s vision of the Goddess, this aspiration suggests that he was coming to see an incompleteness about The White Goddess. Always there have been readers (perhaps the earliest was John Heath-Stubbs in 1948) who have felt that the Muse presented in the book is too fond of ‘serpent-love and corpse-flesh’, too closely tied to the physical cycle of birth, copulation and death familiar to the materialistic modern world-views Graves rejected. The Black Goddess offered enchanting possibilities. But they were not to be developed. Although Graves continued to write poems for another decade, despite suffering increasingly from the memory-loss which heralded what was perhaps Altzheimer’s disease, in prose at least his exploration of the theme was over.

Graves’s copy of the paperback Vintage edition is a remarkable and evocative object. The first three-hundred-odd pages are speckled with thousands of blue pencil underlinings wherever Graves, the stylistic perfectionist, has caught himself in an ugly repetition. Thus, finding the words ‘he had no notion of the true identity of “the nymph Orithya” or of the history of the ancient Athenian cult of Boreas…’ Graves has underlined all five ‘of’s. These markings must have been merely a self-punishment for careless prose; they have evidently nothing to do with rewriting the text.

The actual revisions take several forms, in many combinations of colour and medium. Minor misprints are corrected in blue pencil, and one such correction (Vintage p. 152) has been further corrected in black ink. One correction (Vintage p. 144n) is in ordinary black pencil. More substantial corrections have been made in blue ink, and a few details marked in red ink. Several passages have been rewritten, or have had extensive new material added, in blue ink, with red pencil then used for further refinement, and blue ink again on top for final thoughts. No chronology can be deduced for all this, but as margins became full Graves took to gluing in slips of white paper with further material in blue or blue-black ink and/or red pencil. There are ten of these slips in all, and a patch of glue suggests that an eleventh has fallen out from between Chapters II and III. Most of the slips contain material about mushrooms.

It seems inconceivable that this confusing palimpsest of a book was sent to Faber, who were supposed to incorporate its revisions into their 1961 edition of The White Goddess. Surviving sheets of typescript, in the Poetry/Rare Books Collection at the State University of New York at Buffalo, suggest that Karl Gay typed out the corrections as a list, and that Faber were supposed to use this, alongside a clean copy of the Vintage edition, for typesetting. Only a few such sheets now exist, but they show that Graves made some further corrections on the typescript. At certain other points where the typed sheets are now lost we can also tell that Graves made such refinements, on the typescript or the proofs or both, because the changes in his Vintage copy turn up with subtle alterations (often, significantly, to avoid ugly repetitions) in the Faber 1961 edition. In these cases alone, the Faber text has been preferred to what Graves wrote in his Vintage copy.

In the event, not all of Graves’s revisions were incorporated into the 1961 edition. We do not know why, but many alterations – ranging from small local adjustments up to wholesale changes like Graves’s decisions to put AD after rather than before dates, and to spell ‘Juppiter’ with one ‘p’ rather than two – were overlooked. In some places either Karl Gay or Faber misread Graves’s handwriting; and, in addition to reproducing some minor errors missed by Graves in the Vintage edition, the 1961 text added hundreds more. To say this is to express no disrespect towards Faber and Faber: The White Goddess is, after all, a printer’s, editor’s, proofreader’s nightmare – complex and capricious in argument, peppered with strange names and quotations in dozens of languages, full of tables and diagrams. The 1961 edition has done good service through many reprints. But it has now been possible to remove these errors and to present the text, as nearly as possible, as Graves would have wished to see it.

Even this, however, has not been a simple matter. To correct obvious misspellings, to alter a mistaken chapter-number in a Biblical reference or to settle the inconsistency between, say, ‘wryneck’ and ‘wry-neck’ does not ask great ingenuity. But other ‘errors’ are less clear-cut. Three examples may serve to indicate a range of problems. Graves tells us that ‘The Son … was also called Lucifer or Phosphorus (‘bringer of light’) because as evening-star he led in the light of the Moon’. This is incorrect; Lucifer is the morning star (the planet Venus seen at first light) and never the evening star. But the error is woven into the logic of the sentence. It cannot be changed; and indeed, in its context the association between the Son, Lucifer, and the Moon is strongly evocative. It may be an error, but to correct it would damage the book.

A more intricate conundrum occurs here , where Graves quotes – not quite accurately – the poem ‘The Fallen Tower of Siloam’ which, he says, he wrote in 1934. His diary, however, shows that the poem was written on March 19 and 20, 1937. Clearly, one might think, the book is in error: why not correct the date to 1937? But look at the context. Graves is discussing the poet’s sense of ‘the equivocal nature of time’. ‘The coincidence of the concept and the reality,’ he tells us, ‘is never quite exact’. The poem, he says, was written ‘with proleptic detail’. Prolepsis, according to the dictionary, is ‘the representation or taking of something future as already done, or existing’. Graves has moved the date of his proleptic poem back by three years. A simple error? A private joke? A coded message? The quoted lines contain the words ‘We were there already…’ In the circumstances, I dare not alter the date.

One much larger alteration I have made. In both the Vintage and the 1961 editions, the two paragraphs beginning ‘It will be objected…’, now here , appeared on what is now here , after the words ‘Isle of Avalon’ and before ‘The joke is…’ They were clearly out of place in style, matter and logic. They jarringly interrupted Chapter VI’s account of Arthur’s grave at Glastonbury with a discussion of a quite different topic. Careful reading of the text shows that they are in reality a missing piece from the argument of Chapter XXVI. They were amongst new material added in 1952, when Graves was enlarging existing paragraphs to form the present Chapter XXVI. The printer evidently misunderstood Graves’s instructions and introduced these two paragraphs at the wrong place. Curiously, Graves overlooked the error in every subsequent proofreading: perhaps its subject (woman’s superior claims to divinity, as compared with man’s) was so central to his thinking that it seemed apposite at any point.

The diagrams in the present edition are taken from the 1961 Faber edition. The first American edition (Creative Age, 1948) gave its diagrams poorly-drawn, amateurish lettering. The second American edition (Viking, 1958) showed a great improvement, using strong calligraphic letters, apparently drawn by Karl Gay. But the British editions have always used a printed font for the lettering and this tradition (sanctioned, after all, by both Graves and Eliot) has been followed here.

The text of ‘The White Goddess: A Talk’ is reprinted from Steps: Stories, Talks, Essays, Poems, Studies in History, London (Cassell), 1958. This text contains here and there a few words omitted from the version in 5 Pens in Hand, New York (Doubleday), 1958, and differs slightly in punctuation. The two letters to the press are reprinted from their original periodicals.

And now, here on the verge of the enchanted forest, thanks must be given to all those who have helped. I am grateful first of all to Beryl Graves, for help and advice on countless matters, for generous hospitality at Canelluñ and for unrestricted access to her files and archives and to Robert Graves’s study, where much of the work was done under the tolerant eye of the little flute-player, who still sits on his brass box on the mantlepiece. To William and Elena Graves I am grateful for warm hospitality and tireless help of many kinds. I thank also Lucia Graves for valuable advice and information; Patrick Quinn and Dunstan Ward of the Robert Graves Programme for enthusiastic guidance and meticulous scholarship; Dr Robert J. Bertholf, Curator of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo for information and advice on Graves manuscripts; Frances Whistler and Peter Foden for searching the archives of Oxford University Press; Dr I.L. Finkel of the Department of Western Asiatic Antiquities at the British Museum for advice on Babylonian calendar beasts; Dr Edmund Baxter for help with locating texts; and Professor Charles Rzepka of Boston University for some detective work. For constant encouragement and inspiration I am grateful to my wife Amanda, to whom (for obvious reasons) the editor’s part in this volume is dedicated.