The white goddess
The definitive edition of one of the more extraordinary and influential books of our time This labyrinthine and extraordinary book, first published more than sixty years ago, was the outcome of Robert Graves's vast reading and curious research into strange territories of folklore, mythology, religion, and magic. Erudite and impassioned, it is a scholar-poet's quest for the meaning of European myths, a polemic about the relations between man and woman, and also an intensely personal document in which Graves explores the sources of his own inspiration and, as he believed, all true poetry. Incorporating all of Graves's final revisions, his replies to two of the original reviewers, and an essay describing the months of illumination in which The White Goddess was written, this is the definitive edition of one of the most influential books of our time.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
3people
2015–2022years
33% recommend33% neutral33% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Consciousness-Breakdown-Bicamer...
I found it on this list:
http://spacecollective.org/wilfriedhoujebek/4076/Summery-Boo...
Where also the following books some of which I read to (Vehicles is really good) can be found:
The White Goddess - Robert Graves
Graves' grammar of poetic myth works at so many levels at the same time that I can't keep track of them all. This is not a book, this is a neurosis you can borrow. Druidic power to the nerds.
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - Julian Jaynes
Never mind the bulky title. The theory of Jaynes seems preposterous at first: before man was conscious he would not stop and think when making a decision, instead he would literally hear a voice telling him what to do. When life became too complicated this faculty broke down, but not in an instant. Religion is a by-product of this neuro-catastrophe. Jaynes however knows to make use of historic material in such a way that in the course of his argument he becomes plausible! If you don't trust me on this, trust Daniel Dennett.
The Ghost of Chance - William S. Burroughs
Burroughs was a great admirer of Jaynes and here he uses the bicameral image of two dividing brain spheres as a metaphor for the divide between peaceful lemur on Madagascar and the war-mongering chimpanzee on the African mainland as a reminder that human evolution could have taken a better turn.
Ancient Evenings - Norman Mailer
This book, the only lengthy novel in this list, I first looked up because Burroughs referenced it as his inspiration for 'The Western Lands'. When I noticed it starts with my favourite Yeats quote I knew I needed to read this. Even though Burroughs could never have written it like this, at times it is more Burroughs then Burroughs himself. It is the autobiography of a Ka, the lowliest soul of the seven souls of the ancient Egyptians, which makes for unusual reading. Especially because Mailer uses an uncensored version of Egyptian mythology which, to put it mildly, differs from the version you get of it from the National Geographic. The Egyptians practised sex magic with the stamina of a bonobo. Mailer makes Aleister Crowley look like a prudish schoolboy. This is the boldest attempt to recreate a radically different mind from ours that I know of, and does so successfully. The novel as the creation of an artificial consciousness. At the same time it doubles as an All American Novel (yuk).
The Mind in the Cave - David Lewis-Williams
Palaeolithic Psychedelia anyone? Close your eyes, place a finger on both of your eyelids and press gently. What you see is the origin of all art, you only need to look at rock-art with a guide like Lewis-Williams to see it.
The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry - Ernest Fennolosa
Edited by Ezra Pound, the most spectacular misunderstanding of language ever to be reprinted. It reads excellent and it gives us a language (Chinoiserie-Chinese) that does not exist in this world but should exist in a better world.
Vehicles - Valentino Braitenberg
I have read so much stuff relating to Cybernetics, AI, emergent systems and self-organization that I am totally saturated with it. The material itself is exciting but the professional obligation of science to be dull gets on my nerves. But this is an exception, wonderfully written and illustrated with funky little drawings. Vehicles is a tiny book but its size is deceptive. This introduction to synthetic psychology describes a number of simple responsive vehicles that with each new feature became aware of the world around them a good deal more. Each new vehicle is a new mind.
The Coleridge Notebooks.
Charles Lamb said he loved to lend his books to ‘Poet, Metaphysician, Bard’ Coleridge because he would return them with annotations more interesting then the book itself. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a mind that was free, discursive, unruly and truly original. His notebooks record the flow of his thoughts as if you are sitting next to him. Every now and then I dip into this and always come out with some gem I never saw before. Get the Seamus Perry edition of this. Get a copy of the Road to Xanadu by Livingstone-Lowes for extra enjoyment.
- I tried to read The White Goddess about a year or two ago, and I gave up midway through. As much as I like Robert Graves, that book exists better in its ideas than its execution: the prose itself read more like a brain-dump by a clearly brilliant individual than a focused work. I'm not a Classics expert by any stretch, but t consider myself reasonably well-versed in Greek mythology and history/archaeology of the ancient world. Nonetheless, Graves writing makes no distinction between fact and assertion, and so it's quite hard to tell at times which is which. If he says something like "Hercules was originally a cult-hero worshipped in Crete", is that a fact, or his assertion? Should I expect a footnote to substantiate it, or is that such a well-known fact among Classical scholars that it's my deficiency for not knowing it?
His book has about fifty of these on every page. It's bloody difficult to follow, as a result.
I think he did a much better job, to be honest, when he implemented his White Goddess theory into his retelling of Jason and the Argonauts, Hercules My Shipmate. At least there you understood the theory through the context of the narrative.
- How so? Please expand.
They sum up as follows: "Aside from a few devotees of the White Goddess, no one rates Graves as a prophet these days, but his books, some of them at least, are too good to be left “lying about.” The best of them should be picked up and read. We should be grateful that it’s easier than ever to rediscover Graves and grant his work the attention it deserves."
