![\"cae679cd6424f9167aad52f69699e7e4\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/363\/2014\/11\/cae679cd6424f9167aad52f69699e7e4.jpg\")
<\/a>1. Gerald Gardner did not worship the Triple Goddess.<\/strong> Gerald Gardner, the father of Wicca, did not mention a Triple Goddess in his \u201cBook of Shadows\u201d<\/a>. \u00a0Nor does Gardner mention a Triple Goddess in\u00a0Witchcraft Today<\/em>, which was published in 1954. \u00a0He does mention a Triple Goddess in his book, The Meaning of Witchcraft<\/em>, published in 1959, but only briefly.\u00a0 Similarly, Raymond Buckland, who is credited with bringing Gardnerian witchcraft to America does not mention the Triple Goddess in Witchcraft from the Inside<\/em> (1971) or his book,\u00a0Tree: The Complete Book of Saxon Witchcraft<\/em> (1974). The Triple Goddess is mentioned only briefly in his best-selling Buckland\u2019s Complete Book of Witchcraft<\/em> (1986), published twelve years later, and with no exposition.<\/p>\n2.\u00a0 Gerald Gardner visited Robert Graves.<\/strong> \u00a0In 1961, Idries Shah brought Gardner to visit Graves at his home on the island of Majorca. \u00a0(Fred Adams, the founder of Feraferia, also visited Graves in 1959.) \u00a0Gardner did write an essay about the Triple Goddess entitled \u201cThe Triad of the Goddess\u201d. \u00a0(I am grateful to Morgan Davis of geraldgardner.com for drawing my attention to this essay. \u00a0I\u2019ll be glad to email a .pdf of the document to anyone who requests or you can download it here<\/a>.) \u00a0The essay was found among Gardner\u2019s papers which were purchased by Ripley\u2019s from Gardner\u2019s Witchcraft Museum.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the essay is undated.<\/em>\u00a0 (I have seen someone else give it a date of 1958, but in any case, it appears to have been written after<\/em> Gardner read Graves.) \u00a0In the essay, Gardner describes the \u201ctriad of the Goddess\u201d as \u201cLOVE:DEATH:REBIRTH\u201d and\u00a0compares it\u00a0to the Christian Trinity and to the triad of \u201cVrahmin, Vishnu and Siva\u201d. \u00a0Gardner argues\u00a0that the death aspect is misinterpreted as a \u201cHag aspect\u201d (here he\u00a0seems to be responding to Graves), and that the true death aspect is not frightening, but comforting. \u00a0This is consistent with Gardner\u2019s conception of the Goddess as \u201clight\u201d and the God as \u201cdark\u201d.<\/p>\n 3.\u00a0 Robert Graves wrote about the Triple Goddess before he wrote The White Goddess<\/em>.<\/strong>\u00a0 Many Pagans will know that Robert Graves described the Triple Goddess in his book\u00a0The White Goddess<\/em>, published in 1948.\u00a0 But four years earlier, in Hercules, My Shipmate, or The Golden Fleece<\/em>, which describes the ascendancy of the Olympian gods over the Triple Goddess, he described the Goddess as Maiden, Nymph and Mother, corresponding to the New Moon, Full Moon, and Old Moon.\u00a0 Then, in 1946, Graves published King Jesus<\/em>, where he described a Great Triple Moon Goddess of birth, love, and death. \u00a0In the narrative, the Triple Goddess\u00a0takes the form of Miriam (Jesus\u2019 mother), Mary of Cleopas (Jesus\u2019 potential wife), and Mary Magdalene (a witch who is a disciple of the old goddess religion).<\/p>\n 4.\u00a0 The Triple Goddess was not always Maiden-Mother-Crone.\u00a0<\/strong> Many Pagans know that Robert Graves more or less invented the Triple Goddess as Maiden-Mother-Crone.\u00a0 What you may not know is that Graves described the Triple Goddess in other ways, including Mother-Bride-Layer-out and Maiden-Nymph-Hag.\u00a0 Graves was primarily concerned with the Mother-Bride-Layer-out trinity, which describes the experience of the Triple Goddess from the male perspective<\/em> of her son-lover-victim.\u00a0 The adoption of Maiden-Mother-Crone as the Triple Goddess\u2019 principal formulation can probably be credited to Starhawk\u2019s Spiral Dance<\/em> and Margot Adler\u2019s Drawning Down the Moon<\/em>, both published in 1979.<\/p>\n 5.\u00a0 The Triple Goddess herself was not the focus of Robert Graves\u2019 book,\u00a0The White Goddess.<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0 The White Goddess<\/em>\u00a0is about a lot of other things, like the Celtic Tree Alphabet, but even when he was writing about the Triple Goddess, Graves was less concerned with the Goddess, per se, than with the relationship<\/em> between the Goddess and her male counterpart. For each aspect of the Goddess, there is a corresponding aspect of the man or the god who is her son (Mother), lover\/consort (Nymph\/Bride), victim (Crone\/Layer-out), as well as poet (Maiden-Muse).\u00a0 As Mother, the Goddess gives birth to the god of the year. As Bride, the goddess takes the god as her lover, and in her womb he sows the seeds of his own rebirth. As Layer-out, the goddess inspires the god\u2019s twin-rival to slay him, his death becoming a sacrifice to the goddess, a sacrifice which fertilizes the earth and makes possible his subsequent rebirth.<\/p>\n 6.\u00a0 Robert Graves was focused on two aspects of the Triple Goddess (and neither of them were Maiden, Mother, or Crone).<\/strong>\u00a0 The focus of Robert Graves\u2019 treatment of the Triple Goddess in The White Goddess<\/em> is on her role as the lover and slayer of her consort.\u00a0 The tragic relationship to the Goddess as Lover-Slayer can be traced to James Frazer\u2019s treatment of the goddess Ishtar and queen Semiramis in the second and third editions of The Golden Bough<\/em> (but not in the 1922 popular abridged version).\u00a0 There are also precedents to be found in the Celtic legend of the Goddess of Sovereignty, the Hindu goddess Kali, and the Romantic motif of La Belle Dame Sans Merci in Keats and the pre-Raphaelite painters.\u00a0 Dion Fortune also wrote about this tragic relationship in The Sea Priestess<\/em>.\u00a0 Although it was (self-)published six years before Graves\u2019 The White Goddess<\/em>, Graves may have been unaware of it.<\/p>\n 7.\u00a0 Robert Graves described a Quintuple Goddess, too. \u00a0<\/strong>Robert Graves\u2019\u00a0conception of the Triple Goddess was constantly evolving.\u00a0 Never one to be held back by logical consistency, Graves combined the various aspects of the Triple Goddess into a Quintuple Goddess<\/em>.\u00a0 He describes the five stations of her year: Birth, Initiation, Consummation, Repose and Death, and states that she must be worshiped \u201cin her ancient quintuple person\u201d.\u00a0 The five aspects of the Quintuple Goddess are, according to Graves: Mother-Maiden-Bride-Crone-Slayer. Starhawk picked this idea up in The Spiral Dance<\/em>, where she describes the Goddess as a \u201cpentad, the fivefold star of birth, initiation, ripening, reflection, and death.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 8.\u00a0 Robert Graves prophesied the revival of worship of the Triple\/Quintuple Goddess.\u00a0<\/strong> In the last chapter of The White Goddess<\/em>, Graves prophesied that the worship of the Goddess would return.\u00a0 In a 1969 interview, he\u00a0observed that a \u201ccurious result\u201d of the publication of The White Goddess<\/em> was that \u201cvarious White Goddess religions started in New York State and California. I\u2019m today\u2019s hero of the love-and-flowers cult out in the Screwy State, so they tell me\u201d \u2014 apparently\u00a0alluding to the West Coast Neo-Pagan Revival.\u00a0 This may not have been self-aggrandizement, as Elizabeth Gould-Davis, the feminist author of The First Sex<\/em>, wrote to Graves in 1973 and told him: \u201cI suppose you know that you are the God of the new Movement here, the newest of the new women\u2019s movements, and you are the only male creature who is admitted to godhead in the movement. It has all sorts of names because it is not yet co-ordinated. Small groups from California to New York have formed to defy Christianity and all organized religion, to worship the female principle, and to bring back the Great Goddess.\u201d<\/p>\n 9.\u00a0 Aleister Crowley wrote about the Triple Moon Goddess.\u00a0<\/strong> In his 1929 book, Moonchild<\/em>, Crowley identified the Triple Goddess as Artemis-Diana-Isis (Maiden), Persephone (Lover), and Hecate (Crone).\u00a0 He associated her with the full moon and heaven (Diana), the new moon and hell (Hecate), and the half moon, a state between heaven and hell (Persephone).<\/p>\n 10.\u00a0 Jane Ellen Harrison inspired Robert Graves\u2019 Triple Goddess.<\/strong>\u00a0 Robert Graves was undoubtedly influenced by the \u201cCambridge Ritualist\u201d, Jane Ellen Harrison, who had also written about pre-Olympian matriarchial religion.\u00a0 Harrison also described the Goddess as Maid and Mother (Kore and Demeter), and united them in one being, comparing them to the Father and Son of the Christian Trinity, but she not identify a \u201cdark\u201d aspect of the Goddess or otherwise take the next step in the analogy with the Christian Trinity.<\/p>\n 11.\u00a0 Freud wrote about the Triple Goddess.\u00a0<\/strong> Before Robert Graves, Sigmund Freud<\/em>\u00a0wrote about a Triple Goddess of birth, love, and death, whom he related to the Fates, the Seasons, the tri-form Artemis-Hecate, and Mother Earth who receives the dead. You can read his 1913 essay, \u201cThe Theme of the Three Caskets\u201d here.<\/a>\u00a0 (The Triple Goddess comes up near the end the essay.)<\/p>\n![\"crane19\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/363\/2014\/11\/crane19.jpg\")
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