I read The White Goddess back in the day when I was first discovering neo-paganism, and went on to read everything by Graves I could get my mitts on. I still have a shelf-full in my library. I eventually learned not to take it seriously as history or anthropology, but the man sure could write! I have come to think of it as his own special brand of fanfiction. A lot of it has more to do with his personal relationship with poet Laura Riding than with anything else. Graves was traumatized by World War I, and Laura Riding went on to traumatize him further. All the femmes fatales in his novels and dangerous goddesses in his mythology are Laura Riding. No one would tell the truth about her to Graves’s biographers until after she was dead, because she was just that scary.

THANK YOU for talking about one of my favorite books by one of my favorite authors!! The entire reason I got interested in antiquity was because of Robert Graves ("I, Claudius"). And I LOVED his "The Greek Myths". But "The White Goddess" is DEFINITELY an incredible work. SUCH a pleasure to see someone talking about it. Thanks again!!

Thank you for posting this. it's odd the things that lead you down a rabbit hole. I purchased a painting done by an artist I knew nothing about (Leonora Carrington). In researching her influences at this time, I found out she was reading this book around the period she made the painting (1952). Thanks to your video I will get the book and further down the rabbit hole I go...

I'm happy that I found you four months ago by chance from KZfaq recommendation ,I do appreciate that, and I admire people who are like tower of knowledge I found my historical master. THANK YOU FOR YOUR FREE AND AVAILABLE KNOWLEDGE MASTER.🙏

I'm re-reading The White Goddess for the 3rd time since I first read in the early 1980s. I don't care if its factual. I am interested in poetry and nature and this book speaks to my soul.

I read The White Goddess (and the Claudius books) when I was a woolly-minded teenager in the early 70s. Goodness know what I've absorbed from it that must now inform how I think and feel about things! I'm not so woolly-minded now, since I do remember enjoying the book thoroughly at the time. Maybe it's just as well my local library didn't appear to have The Golden Bough, or I might have gobbled that up uncritically too (I certainly looked for it). About 3 decades ago I took a very entertaining course on prehistoric religion from which my takeaway was that it was and must be mostly speculation, employing a level of subjectivity all but banished from the majority of academic disciplines, but nonetheless I found it all nourishing and stimulating my imagination. Subsequent language studies, inter alia, have given me the perspective of how concepts and cultures change and change again and again to such a degree that it's very now hard for me now to believe that any but the crudest outlines of ideas are transmitted, and that historians ever more than ordinary people must become keenly aware that what does come down to us are symbols and rumours about the surfaces of things, and artefacts, from which we try to deduce. The concretes of sun and moon and blood seem to me austere echoes of Jung's archetypes, as we search for commonality with these ancients, peering through arcane multi-lensed telescopes at a past that might have been hard to comprehend even within the lifetimes of the people who lived northeast of the Black Sea in that mythical pre-literate era. We find as much looking within as through those lenses, and self-knowledge is subtle and hard=enough won too, even if we imagine its purpose to refine the clarity with which we might bring to bear on the folly and wisdom of those ancients. Anyway, I'm enjoying your critical, yet idiosyncratic take on these and other issues that colour or cloud our views of those who came before us.

I only knew of Robert Graves by two books - Book of Greek Myths I & II. I had no idea of other works by him, so I found this video very interesting.

Fascinating discussion, thank you! I just happened to stumble upon your channel and look forward to more of your videos. Cheers!

An interesting video. It is probably still a major inspiration for many poets in the UK, like some of Shelley's essays. The actual history is widely known to be dubious, but as a wild manifesto into poetic myth and what it should mean to be a poet, is influential. Ted Hughes book on Shakespeare is another controversial poetic myth book. A big controversy rumbled on for years. Hughes fought a decade long feud with various academics. Shakespeare as Shamen is an intriguing and fun idea. Hughes was an undergrad in anthropology. Personally I love the book, from the poetic aspect and a different perspective on Shakespeare. As for the academic aspects, they certainly don't stand up, but again, as a manifesto into poetic myth /poets, it is great.

Thank you very much for this. I vaguely remember running into The Golden Bough and the work of Graves in high school [1960's] but also the Higher Criticism. The Higher Criticism showed that both original belief and attempts to justify it are both deserving of critical examination. I was a skeptic and had become agnostic before graduating, and fully on board with scientific thinking and analysis. I was shocked when some of Margaret Mead's work was found suspect by later research. But, science progresses when earlier assumptions are challenged and found to need revision or scrapping. As pointed out here, dealing with beliefs of nonliterate ancient cultures is fraught. I had thought, from the thumbnail that the "Venus" figurines were going to be mentioned. They might be supposed to represent a single primordial female deity, but since childbirth is universal, as suggested, there is no reason to assume that it was discovered by one group which taught all others about it [Hancockian Hooey], and thus depictions need not be derivative either. Thanks again for a great video.

You talked me into it...subscribed. Thanks for a very interesting video!

Trivia: The Golden Bough is on Colonel Kurtz's desk in _Apocalypse Now._

Highly impressive scholarship there, in both breadth and depth!

The book cover puts me off: why has a characteristic fertility sculpture of the stone age had its head removed and replaced with a goat skull?

New and refreshing, thanks bro keep up the good work

Thank you, for explaining the book really well and it's context, i'm certainley considering reading it to touch the old reality that lies beneath this one..Cheers

HPL did not read The Golden Bough. He just tossed in references to it and Murray for artistic verisimilitude. He hated occultism, and was a Scientistic atheist. But his doing that got me to sit down one summer and read all 13 volumes! Okay, hot summer, library air-conditioned, home not. That helped. But there is nothing even vaguely Cthulhoid in it. I just twitch when someone refers to Corn Kings. That was like hiking the Transamerican Highway. Love Graves as much as HPL. His 2 volumes on Greek Myths are the best because he includes all the variants, not a single late redaction like it were Holy Writ.

Bob Dylan was seen carrying The White Goddess in the early 60's and even tracked down Graves. There are nuances in various songs but especially the Desire album. Just as The Golden Bough affected Eliot's Wasteland. Robin The sun, moon, birth, death, spring, fertility symbols, are constants in ancient cultures across the globe. Robin Witting England

Very interesting, thx-I’m slowly exploring Graves and watching some of his interviews . A lot of license has been taken with prehistory with tragic results. Very helpful synopsis.👍

Thank you for this video. I'm involved in the occult community, and I can't count how many times I've tried to persuade people to read TWG as a work of creative mythic narrative rather than as a textbook. Any useful ideas taken from it must be thought of as poetic inspirations rather than evidence-based facts. Of course, inspirations can be extremely valuable and useful, as can facts. However, in my experience, it's wise to keep these categories distinct in your mind. They have different roles to play in your own work.

Thank you for covering this. I started going through his collection of The Greek Myths earlier this year and was wondering how accepted his theory is/was.

Great breakdown, thanks.

That's a great understanding. The age of logic replacing the age of myth. An interesting perspective that really illuminates power structures.

I was trying to read Robert Greaves books on Ancient Greek mythology And a significant portion of his books on mythology were talking about matriarchal religion, where priestesses had sex with a man, becoming pregnant, before he was sacrificed at the end of the year All with basically 0 supporting evidence about this pre Greek matriarchal society I just wanted to read a book of ancient Greek myths..

Thank you for this, I have indeed noticed a revival of things like Zeus worship and wondered where on earth it might be coming from.

The question of whether cultures could develop the same gods of basic concepts independently is interesting, it sounds like a similiar question of whether early cultures all developed pyramids independently or not.

this is the first time I've heard mention of the golden bough since reading it nearly forty years ago. I even had a couple of thomes of it until moving back to france fourteen years ago. my entire library was lost.

My ex introduced me to TWG, and thence, to Neopaganism, in the early 70s. Even then, I realized that it was not so much “fact” as one man’s personal and passionately expressed myth. Keeping that in mind, it was and is one of the most influential works in the development of my spiritual path, even to this day.

I discovered the path to the hidden history while in a cheap Bangkok hotel. I was reading the Iliad and came to the conversation between Helen and Priam on the wall. His comment about having fought with Agamemnon as an ally against the Amazons. It made wonder exactly what they were.

11:50 My memory of reading the White Goddess from decades ago is the richness of what it passes under review. There’s an implicit holism to it in the speed at which it was written in relation to the denseness of the material - all the different elements had to be ‘speaking’ to each other within that cultivated mind and cohere for the composition to work out so well so fast. Errors no doubt abound but they can be adjusted later - there is something substantial behind all - an antique cultural consciousness. Today there would need to be adduced two different empires as vast into the mix to open out even more upon the ancient vista - the whole literature on palaeoastronomy developed in the last 50 years and its vast complementariness to vegetation myth but also the more recent developments discovered about metrology and Britain’s peculiar importance over influences moving east not west 3000 bc. as seen in the work of Knight Lomas and Butler. One more observation - Plato is sometimes thought to only to have written exoterically - but to have taught a mystery religion in the upper circle of the studio in the Athenian ward of Aka.

The White Goddess is so denselty packed with facts itr is difficult to read without taking notes. Graves knows so much that the constant bombardment facts for me made it difficult to keep up with his central tesis.

Great video I have great interest in the old faitha and myths. It also makes sense language originates in such a fashion so why would not our ancestors spiritualism? Very interesting information thank you

What's a good place to start studying ancient religions, myths and folklore?

Would you mind to name some references of the best critiques that were made against the thesis of this particular work? Thank you. Greetings from Brazil.

Ten minutes of my life lost forever.

I'm clicking on this in trepidation that it probably hasn't aged well, like a lot of stuff I was reading back then. I'm happy with the idea that it might not be objective scholarly truth, but still poetic truth, as it can't be denied Graves was an amazing writer. For many he brought the ancient world alive.

Inspiration of the muse of poets, brilliant!

Ranke-Graves... Was that the book I first came across the Diana Aricca's fighting Slave-priests, and the levantine Hera-fountain somewhere in today-Israel where she bathed to regain her virginity, for the hieros-gamos and where there also is an Adonis-shrine and he jumped to Adonai-Yahwe-Asherah-Astarte and from Astarte to the Tuscan Uni (and mentioned that close by - well however close by Byblos is to that fountain) there was an Horus-Isis&Osiris-shrine - or was that in the Golden Bough? And there was one chapter of them with the recovered pig-corpses for Demeter/Gemater/Persephone.

And Johnny and Suzie and I will always remember that wonderful warm sunny day

It’s a great work, and one is left with the feeling Graves was on to something, even if it wasn’t up to the standards of academia

The Golden Bough it´s AMAZING and got improving his work and lore-stuff within on each revision he got of the original text on 1890 when it were just two heavy volumes - very much alike the two volumes of the Secret Doctrine of Madame Blavatsky as her magnum-opus on Theosophy thought foundations and which happened to be published just a few years before the first version of The Golden Bough - then a second edition with a third volume and updating the former two got released on 1900, and a bit later between 1905 to 1915 that was when the third edition with 12 volumes - all those shorter than all the previous two and three volumes, while expanding material and getting short on other stuff which were on the second edition and didn´t came back later on (stuff relating Pagan origins and parallels about Christian rites and sacred mysteries specially regarding the Crucifixtion and Resurrection of Jesus which got awry controversial after the 1900 second edition and there were never updated on the third edition of 12 volumes from 1905-1915), Later on as Frazer got blind, and wanted to have a more handable and easy-reading version of his work, with help of her wife and some close friends, and his supervision, at 1922 there was released a SINGLE VOLUME edition of the 12 volumes third one, as an abridged synthesis of all the main themes of the former one and this has been the main source of latter editions of The Golden Bough including the one which Lovecraft might have had read and used as reference for his Cthulhu mythos lore. A 13th addenda volume done as appendix and update about both 12 volume version or/and the abridged version in one-volume versions of the Golden Bough was dictated by Frazer much later on on his final years at a time when even Lovecraft had passed away. However this thirteen volume is seldomly acknowledged and a lot of libraries have an index of the 12 volumes for themes research references, as the thirteenth volume which might be a furtherly confusion about it. Modern Golden Bough editions have done some amazing work doing a critical work merging both material of the third edition abridged in one volume but adding up the schemes and themes missing out from the second edition of 1900 - the one with three volumes - and it´s amazing the comparative and contrast between both.

I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on Marija Gimbutas work? ty

Wow! Have the 12 volume set of The Golden Bough. Plus, have the 13th volume. (1912). Have 1st edition of The White Goddess Have yet to read it. .

Ribert Graves one if most brilliant writers ever. This book will sttetch your mind big time!!! 😇

The Metal Band Atlantean Kodex made albums about The Golden Bough and The White Godess. I would put both in my Top 10 for the 2010s, so I am somewhat interested in their background but wouldn't read entire books or series.

Who did the painting in the thumbnail?

Would love to hear you talk about The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler. She basically takes The White Goddess and treats it as real history.

Sounds worth reading. great presentaion as always, thankyou. what you were saying about how greeks and romans assimalating barbarian gods to match their own reminded me of a weird bit of gaulish religious diplomacyi read about, its a bigass quote from Lucian (writing in second cent i think) but its so odd its worth reading: The Gauls call Hercules Ogmios in their native tongue, but they represent the god in a grotesque manner. With them he is a decrepit old man, balding with what hair remains extremely grey, his skin wrinkled and weathered like an old sailor. He looks like someone from the underworld, a Charon or Japetus, rather than anything like Hercules. But he is like Hercules in other respects: he carries a lion’s skin and holds a club in his right hand, a quiver hanging at his side, and he carries a great bow in his left, very much like Hercules. Now at first I thought that this was just a slight on the Greek gods, some sort of revenge on Hercules from the time he came into their country and carried off booty when he overran most of the western peoples in search of Geryon’s herds. Yet the oddest aspect of this image I have not yet described: this ancient Hercules draws after him a multitude of men, all tied by their ears. The cords by which he does this are small fine chains, worked with gold and amber like the most beautiful bracelets; and although the men are drawn by such slender bonds, none of them thinks of breaking loose, although they might easily do so. Nor do they struggle or tarry at all: instead of planting their heels in the ground and pulling back, they follow their captor willingly, singing his praises. Indeed from their eagerness to hurry after him, to prevent the chains from tightening, they appear to come, although it seems a sorry thing, of their own freewill. What seems to me the strangest of all, however, I will not hide: as the right hand of the god holds a club and the left a bow, the painter had nowhere to fix the end of the chain - so he made a hole in the god’s tongue and the people are led from there, the god smiling back at his companions. For a long time I stood staring at this, bemused - I didn’t know what to make of it and was beginning to feel a bit peeved. But then a Gaul standing next to me spoke to me (in admirable Greek), a man who apart from having some expertise in Gaulish mythology, was also acquainted with ours. ‘Sir’, he said, ‘I see this picture puzzles you. Do, please, let me explain. We Gauls associate eloquence not with Hermes as you Greeks do, but with the stronger Hercules. And it need not surprise you to see him represented as an old man: after all, eloquence is something that comes with age ...’"

In the pursuit of feminine archetypal patterns, I have the impression that none are as concrete as the Kabbalistic interpretation of the Merkabah (Ezekiel 1). Put differently, it is common to conjure four archetypes for men (lover, warrior, king, magician)...but the "best" I am aware of for women is Hecate (maiden, mother, crone). I'm haunted by the suspicion that somewhere there was an ancient religion/myth that gave further development to feminine archetypes. Put differently, I wonder if any ancient texts describe something akin to the Merkabah...but with instead an emphasis on the feminine or divine feminine. Any suggestions?

Would live to see a deep dive into the mythology of Saturn.

Great video, it’s been a while since I’ve read Graves so it’s nice YT suggest this video. Academically unsound and all that, Graves hypothesis still is provocative. Two arguments he gives are interesting : 1) the moon Goddess is three faced because of the lunar phases, the moon would have been the closer astral body with a slower, but steady, influence on earth and, arguably with the menstrual cycle) it represents a time when humankind lived under matriarchy because men didn’t understand the cause and effect of coitus with pregnancy, so women were on top (Graves theory, not mine). While academy may have good cause to call it “unsound” I refrain from calling it “rubbish”: the thinking, historical knowledge and the full poetical genius of Graves leaves to shame most actual “academics” , same goes for Frazier: at the very least they give you a basis, with a big scope, to build some thinking about mythology and human kind in general. I’ll always prefer any academically unsound Graves historical novel than LOTR - and that is considering Tolkien also as a great writer. Again, great video!

There is an interesting aspect of the matriarch period in the German language. The German language classifies any substantive in the female, male or factual character. So the words: majesty, power, force, sun, earth, world, love , science, art, music are all female.

This is all well and good, but none of Graves's suppositions can be proven, therefore not worth taking seriously until proven otherwise.

Nice video. It is interesting how some of these books live on in popular culture, long after being panned by academia. I would put Ignatius Donnelly's book "Atlantis" in the same category.

The most lasting influence of The White Goddess, is in its contributions to fantasy fiction.

"It was the Moon Goddess all along!" - Robert Graves, probably

If you read the book then he solves some poetic riddles now claimed to be of doubtful medieval Irish provenance. This doubt is used to disparage his work. However one of his conclusions was that the language of the Neolithic farmers (in the British isles) was a Semitic language. Recent DNA analysis now makes this seem very likely.

It's an interesting theory, which in itself if nothing else could be seen as an expression of a new myth of the human psyche on it's journey from hunter gatherer to rational city builder. Which is compelling in it's own way, & I can appreciate the romance of the neo-pagan movements in trying to revive the poetic feminine aspect of the psyche - even if there is no historical grounds for what Robert Graves writes here. I have only ever tried to start the book and didn't manage to get very far - I confess I am nearly incapable of making sense of the old poetry verse he quotes let alone see what he sees in it. Is it only his misuse or complete lack of proper methodology that makes people turn away from his claims? Or is it just known to be downright wrong otherwise?

Um , yah , thinking too much ends in books like this one . But to ponder the possibilities . ( again , thinking ) . Maybe it’s a good idea to not think about any of it too much .

Hello at The Historians Craft Thank you very much for this excellent White Goddess video content of Robert Graves. I too, as Robert Graves, am convinced of a very ancient and initial prehistoric mythical-religious GLOBAL worship of the White Goddess. I have not yet read his book, but I´ve had a direct out-of-body vision of this Mother Goddess. (If you like a description, I have your mail address). I even am familiar with his spiritual research method of asking into something, going to the natural well of knowledge and getting the most genuine and natural answers. - I easily can understand Robert Graves contemporary and later academic resistance and rejections against his works. If having no clues of the astronomical and cosmological contexts in ancient myths which describe even the Creation Story in full, ordinary scholars have no other options but referring to other scholars and authors who also have no further clues of celestial divinities but the Sun and Moon. The White Goddess is not a lunar deity. Nobody can imagine the Moon to have female attributes and having a connected gendered name. Our ancestors were not that superstitiously stupid to take a round celestial shape to depict a human formed being. To imagine human forms of divine character , thus doing myth-making, one have to observe a celestial imagery which fits a male or female form, and here we have Star Constellations and the whitish crescent contours of the Milky Way on each hemispheres to choose from.These crescent Milky Way shapes are scholarly confused for the typical Crescent Moon symbolism. The White Goddess resides on the Earth´s southern hemisphere where this hemispheric galactic contour very easily can and have been interpreted as a Great Sky Goddess all over the globe. So, the global cultural unity perception of this goddess derives from the physical Sky observation and spiritually visionary information, and initially not from migrational conditions, which logically happened later in historic times. The specific fertility and nurturing attributes of the White Goddess derive from the swirling creation process in the Milky Way center, in the Sagittarius Constellation. This formative center fits precisely with the womb location on the female imagined White Goddess, hence this center is mythically by ancestors dubbed “The Cosmic Womb”. Well, oh well. If you or others like more informations or a personal conversation, just let me know where to contact you. Best Wishes I. N. Comparative Mythologist & Natural Philosopher Denmark

Herodotus iirc says that the Egyptians gave the Greeks the names of the gods. Do you think there is any basis in that?

Imagine being called Rob Graves

I discovered Graves work through Colin Wilson

You wouldn't happen to be into the whole "A Song of Ice and Fire" theory crafting community, would you?

Graves, Frazer, Murray and Gimbutas became the Gurus of modern new age paganism... it is weird to see how much their ideas still prevail despite having been pretty much debunked for ever!

"Acceptance of my thesis will commit you to an historical confession that you will be loath to make." (Graves' Intro to WG). Graves was right more often than not, and the exemplary career of archaeologist/anthropologist Marija Gimbutas (her being mocked, dismissed, and then confessed as correct by no less than Colin Renfrew) demonstrates it, along with hundreds of other exiled scholars almost as well-educated as Graves who in recent decades have proven even more that humankind began more often than not with matricultural social structures, and the earliest human artistic finds support it too. The key word in such dismissals is "romantic." Mankind did once live in love with nature summed up as a Goddess and with respect for women, and nothing ignites more rage in those smelly old careerist men we call patriarchs. Ditch them all and recover your true freedom, humanity and joy.

I find the elevation of the feminine or the masculine at the expense of the other a uniquely modern idea, but it sounds like a good read.

Yeah, you are good at this and seem to know how to pronounce things. Thanks. Edit: I mention this because there are some ridiculous things on KZfaq that try to talk about stuff like this (like The Comte De St. Germain, or Jung with an AI voice or whatever) and it's terrible. Edit: Always been intrigued by the possible linguistic connection between the words Zeus and Deus. Maybe pure coincidence? Yeah the Celtic Revival also connects with the Theosophists and various Magical Cults of the turn of the century circa 1900. Don't know if you've come across the BBC interview with Malcolm Muggeridge and Graves, in which Graves explains that following Matriarchy there comes Patriarchy, then he invents a word... Mechearchy, the age of the machine or as we now call it, AI, then he says around 2036 the Age of Magic will ensue?

Graves' King Jesus is also intriguing.

Well I though that it was this book alongside Frazer´s Golden Bough and furtherlymore the God of the Witches from Margaret Murray which are heavily on the basis for neopaganism Wiccan lore stuff.

I read it twice this book.

Out of my head I can name also 2 more very influencial authors in the same vein: Joseph Campbell (of "the Hero of a Thousand faces" fame) and Marija Gimbutas. I would recommend Masks of God from Joseph Campbell, the Living Goddess from Marija Gimbutas, also King Jesus, from Robert Graves himself. The Golden Bough is pretty much meandering and long-winded, endless ""ancient customs" anecdotes from supposedly "savages, European or otherwise" (author's own words). Lots of these had been overthrown under new lights with deeper researches and more understanding of local conditions. Some are actually not ancient at all, but direct reaction from contact with outside civilization, particularly European, then thrown back into the past as if from time immemorial. When I read his records about the customs of Tonkin, Cochinchina or China proper, I rolled me eyes in agony and pure cringe. But then again, at least he was not -that- racist like his usual contemporary, while perhaps I'm commiting era-ism or something, judging the very flawed scholarship of the past :)). These lines of thoughts are mostly debunked now by modern academics and also recent archeological finds, but still, very interesting indeed from the philosophical point of view. I won't spoil anything here, but he postulate not 1, but 2 sources of ancient Mediterranean civilizations, and it's not Sumeria, ;). Hope you will get to discover for yourself.

I am reminded of "white painted woman" of the Apache.

Great book. A lot of bloody and violent human sacrificing going on back in the day though. Graves is an incredible author.

"...language was tampered with..." I fall down laughing! Just exactly what language did Graves use? That's a rhetorical question: he used English. Which language is a wonderful stew of Old German, French (dunno what flavor to call it), bits of Latin and Greek, etc., etc. Language grows, adopts, and adapts, or dies out in remote places.

Near the end of the book, Graves talks about his analeptic method of research which of course is rejected out of hand by Academia but it IS his method. A great movie with Chris Reeves explore this method: Back in Time. Acceptance of the method depends utterly whether you believe that going "within" can yield objective historical knowledge. Some historiography seems to support this view that you can.

👏👏👏👏⭐️❤️

I don't take Grave's work as literal history, but I do not dismiss it out of hand, either. Of course, I'm one of those weirdos who thinks Euhemerus had a point, too. ;)

Did anyone else notice the five books titled "HITLER" in the corner?

His writing is so compelling and interesting. But it was a bit disheartening to learn (after making it my final project for a college course) its better treated as a creative reinterpretation of some of the literature than accurate historic or anthropological writings. Marija Gimbutas is another great writer who is more grounded in anthropology and archeology while having some similar themes in their sort of metamythology.

thanks, your voice does not match your face? Did to overlay another voice?

The book is a wonderful explanation of the feminine and its pre history dominance and power

pretty cool stuff but how do you corrupt a language? it's a river of change.

Graves admitted later he didn't know why he wrote "that book", and confessed to regretting it. Still and all, other evidence suggests that the the Indo-European incursions did result in the displacement, destruction, or dilution of previous cultures. Modern genomic research provides evidence of large-scale population replacement: causes unknown. Causes may include zoonotic diseases as well as genocide, especially of male members of the sedentary societies the nomadic Indo-Europeans overran in a prehistoric first round of "Manifest destiny". Direct descendants of the Proto-European aboriginal hunter-gathers still exist. I am one of them. Those Proto-Europeans included the Gravettian culture that produced the famous Goddess figurines, and the first naturalistic depiction of a female head. Descendants of the First (or Anatolian) Farmers also exist among current populations although to a lesser extent. As regards any cultural continuity that may exist between those Paleolithic peoples and the Neolithic, in the absence of hard evidence we may wish (along with Graves) to tentatively flirt with possibilities. Graves's work has merit, though the work in question may have comparatively less of it. Graves certainly engaged in speculative flirtation. I like his thoughts and suppositions. Graves was a blown acidhead.

Cabbage Moth, between.EF/SF (all ways now).

Sumerians to all of these religions seems like a stretch, particularly because they were not PIE. However, the idea of diffusion of a very ancient mother goddess doesn't. For example, some linguists make the case that languages as far apart as Sino-Tibetan, Uralic, and Indo-European all share some cognates (mostly pronouns). (See: "Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across".) So there was contact (or at least a memetic root) between very far-flung cultures. This could have included a Mother Goddess. There is also, at the time, a huge bias for female figurines in the artwork that is produced. There could have been a mother goddess, even if Graves got the timing wrong.

I Claudius is awesome. Pity Graves died before the Electric Universe put together their study of mythology.

Graves served in the Royal Welsch regiment. So Celtic mythology came from there for him? IDK.

Real white godess is the narrator of the video😅

Rejected by people who basically entomb cultures rather than bring them to life. Equivalents and parallels in ancient cultures are well-documented.by these same people. These peoples are also well-known to have interacted. What's their problem? All cultures are derived from older cultures. Again, no real issues. Using language and styles of language as a way to join the dots makes perfect sense.

What Graves was postulating as a Poet himself was the magic of Love, that the poetry must be written when in the throes of Love and then you tap into the mysterious. Today poetry is written by angry people, sad people judging people, they do not tap into Love. The book the White goddess has many themes a few you mentioned but as the book was published 70 years before the DNA investigations, his research done then, talks about what the DNA studies show today and what the British myths and history point to, when Sumar collapsed the wise ones migrated some came to Britain and their colony eventually became Somerset while others went to the Nile and Egypt and other places. There is a consistent connection between ancient Egypt and ancient Britian from Welsh gold found in egyptian temples, stories of Egptian princess marying in Irish royality and the Kymru which Graves mentions who mingrated enmas from ancient Troy (before it was sacked) as well as one of the lost tribes. A broad stroke of history gleaned through a true poets understanding of the Muse's and their works from many nations and the master Priests kept all these ancient connections going from the planners and builders of the Stone circle networks to ....I digress, Welsh is postulated the last remments of the local spoken language of ancient Egypt as well as many of the colonys that were established, Etrusians, Phoenecians. The Druids were multi lingui speaking Greek for Trade with the traders of the mediterranean and shipyards have been found that are 7,000 years old on the British coast. But Graves hints at all this in his book

I'm like intersted in it, but I've found modern "retellings" like wicca and neopaganism and also lovecraft to be boring and uninspired so I'm pretty frustrated

🧲✴️♥️💥💖⚓🏁....................

Basically this video explains where the modern cosplay religion's come from.

Indo European is a very modern term for Arayan, correct?

white godess is the spider man

This reminds me of Gimbutas's theories of a pre Indo European mother goddess. Regardless of the other merits of these scholars, for instance Gimbutas's correct interpretation of how the Indo Europeans came into Europe , the Goddess Theory is rubbish. Thanks for the video!

In the Call of Cthulhu game system, The Golden Bough was one of the "books" that granted Mythos Knowledge but caused permanent sanity loss. So probably best you didn't finish it. 😄

Thank you! History is a maze, it seems, lol. But there may be a new theory that could help us fill in the gaps. "Symbols of an Alien Sky", a documentary by the Thunderbolts Project, on YT. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/qp11dM-FyMCqp40.html Its explanatory power for prehistoric myth & art, is absolutely mind-blowing, tying together threads of cultures in surprising ways, a way out of the maze of confusion we find ourselves! Myth becomes real, however it was expressed! However it was variously interpreted, and preserved in story & art. A primeval source, if you will.

Why all that nervous handwaving? The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, by the late Matija Gimbutas dwells on stone age cultures 6500- 3500 BC, this supplants Robert Graves fantasies.