Triple Goddess

n his 1948 book The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Robert Graves posited that the language of poetic myth of the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was in fact magical language. This dialectic was “bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse.” Dating as far back as “the Old Stone Age,” it remains, he wrote, “the language of true poetry.” The early Greek philosophers, according to Graves’ argument, rejected and minimized this language in favor of the “rational” worship of logic. Socrates, in particular, writes Graves, shunned poetic myth, clinging instead to intellectual