[The following is a guest post from Mark Carter.\u00a0Mark Carter lives, works, and writes in his home town of Bloomington, IL. His works have appeared in The Druid Missal-Any<\/a><\/em>, The Pagan Writer\u2019s Press Yule anthology<\/a>, and Examiner.com. \u201cStalking The Goddess\u201d<\/a> is his first book.]<\/p>\n A few weeks ago I mailed Jason Pitzl-Waters a review copy of my newly released book, \u201cStalking The Goddess\u201d<\/a>. I wasn\u2019t sure if it was the sort of thing he\u2019d cover at The Wild Hunt<\/em>. After all, my book is a study of\u00a0Robert Graves\u2019s \u201cThe White Goddess\u201d<\/a>, a book which is now 64 years old. This isn\u2019t exactly the sort of\u00a0current events TWH usually addresses, and I wondered if \u201cStalking The Goddess\u201d would find an audience\u00a0with tech-savy Pagans accustomed to gleaning their paganism online rather than from dusty books of\u00a0their parents\u2019 generation. Could the ghosts of Robert Graves, Gerald Gardner, Margaret Murray, and\u00a0Sir James Frazer be summoned up one more time, and if they could, did they have anything left to say?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n However, TWH was one of the few pagan blogs I visited regularly and, from his occasional references\u00a0to Graves\u2019s work, I suspected my book would interest him. Jason had once called The White Goddess\u00a0\u201cRobert Graves\u2019 most controversial book\u201d<\/em>, reported on suspicions that Graves had stole the book\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0thesis from his longtime lover and collaborator, Laura Riding<\/a>, and even caught Tori Amos\u2019s references<\/a>\u00a0to \u201cThe White Goddess\u201d on her Night of the Hunters album<\/a>. The White Goddess still appears in\u00a0recommended reading lists on various Pagan websites (including Patheos columnist Carl McColman\u2019s\u00a02009 article<\/a>) and its contributions to Paganism still inspire heated debate. The book has never gone out\u00a0of print since its initial publication in 1948 and the newest edition, edited by poet and Times Literary<\/a>\u00a0Supplement critic Grevel Lindop<\/a>, is highly recommended. I\u2019ve subscribed to Google Alerts for the\u00a0search terms \u201cwhite goddess\u201d, \u201cRobert Graves poet\u201d, and \u201cogham\u201d and I receive notifications of newly\u00a0posted material daily.<\/p>\n So, perhaps I had worried for nothing. Perhaps a study of The White Goddess from a pagan perspective\u00a0isn\u2019t just mildly interesting, but long overdue. As spiritual traditions go, modern paganism is a new\u00a0phenomenon, but it\u2019s already undergone several phases before developing a self-awareness of its\u00a0history. The usual reductive formula is Margaret Murray, Robert Graves, and Gerald Gardner;\u00a0followed by all of those who were directly or indirectly inspired by Gardner. (Doreen Valiente, Ray\u00a0Buckland, and Alex Sanders are the big players here.) Up to this point, two assumptions were almost\u00a0always taken for granted: that \u201cpaganism\u201d means primarily witchcraft or Wicca, and that Wicca derives\u00a0from Celtic sources. The 70s brought an explosion of both good and bad books which challenged the\u00a0assumptions but also muddied the waters of history. It\u2019s not until Adler\u2019s \u201cDrawing Down The Moon\u201d<\/a>\u00a0that paganism asks \u201cwhere did we come from\u201d<\/em> and \u201cwhere are we going\u201d<\/em>? Over the last three decades\u00a0the above assumptions have been refuted, disproved, and frequently ignored by the glut of Wicca 101\u00a0books of the 80s and 90s. The question of how this formula and its assumptions developed is seldom\u00a0asked. The answers are often found in Graves\u2019s works, and Stalking The Goddess is my attempt to\u00a0uncover them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Graves had two passions, literature and history, and he merged them in The White Goddess. The White\u00a0Goddess speculates upon how druid beliefs might have survived long enough to influence literature and\u00a0asked how we might recover them. Because of this, most of Graves\u2019s contributions to paganism derive\u00a0from literature rather than authentic folklore. By scouring old Celtic histories Graves revived a century\u00a0old debate between Celtic mystics and mainstream historians over the possibility of Druidism\u2019s survival.\u00a0The White Goddess was the last of the \u201cdruidic revival\u201d literature to flaunt conjectures without\u00a0evidence.<\/p>\n Robert Graves was the inheritor of a long line of forgotten (and dubious) Celtic revivalists like Iolo\u00a0Morganwg, Edward Davies, and Lewis Spence. He blew the dust off of obscure texts like the Four\u00a0Ancient Books of Wales<\/a> and the Myvyrian Archaiology<\/a>. I suspect the transformation of Ogham from an\u00a0obscure Irish alphabet to a full blown Celtic tree zodiac is entirely Graves\u2019s doing. If any of these\u00a0things sound familiar, it\u2019s because Graves rescued them from obscurity and linked them to the coming Pagan movement. Like magic itself, The White Goddess transcends time. It allows readers to apply\u00a0ancient pagan spirituality to their own future. By merging pagan poetry with pagan history Graves\u00a0reveals the lost glamor of druidism and medieval mysticism and inspires others to reclaim them for the\u00a0modern world.<\/p>\n The down side to all this is that paganism received these things almost exclusively through Graves\u2019s\u00a0personal interpretations rather than as objective history. The Pagan community has been reacting (often\u00a0times unconsciously) to his claims ever since, and it seems the difference between modern Witches and Druids is whether or not they embrace or reject The White Goddess. \u201cStalking The Goddess\u201d<\/a>\u00a0explores\u00a0how Graves did all this, who inspired him, who he later inspired, and alternative interpretations of the\u00a0sources he used. Rather than offering \u201cStalking The Goddess\u201d<\/a>\u00a0as the last word on the subject, I hope it\u00a0inspires a fresh debate.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [The following is a guest post from Mark Carter.\u00a0Mark Carter lives, works, and writes in his home town of Bloomington, IL. His works have appeared in The Druid Missal-Any, The Pagan Writer\u2019s Press Yule anthology, and Examiner.com. \u201cStalking The Goddess\u201d is his first book.] A few weeks ago I mailed Jason Pitzl-Waters a review copy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[285,660,661,3551,3640,2014,3552,2439],"class_list":["post-10153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paganism","category-religion","tag-books","tag-druidism","tag-druidry","tag-mark-carter","tag-paganism","tag-robert-graves","tag-stalking-the-goddess","tag-the-white-goddess"],"yoast_head":"\n