Origins
The relationship between the neopagan Triple Goddess and ancient religion is disputed. Ronald Hutton, a scholar of neopaganism, argues that the concept of the triple moon goddess as Maiden, Mother, and Crone, each facet corresponding to a phase of the moon, is a modern creation of Robert Graves, drawing on the work of 19th and 20th century scholars such as especially Jane Harrison; and also Margaret Murray, James Frazer, the other members of the "myth and ritual" school or Cambridge Ritualists, and the occultist and writer Aleister Crowley. The Triple Goddess was here distinguished by Hutton from the prehistoric Great Mother Goddess, as described by Marija Gimbutas and others, whose worship in ancient times he regarded as neither proven nor disproven Nor did Hutton dispute that in ancient pagan worship "partnerships of three divine women" occurred; rather he proposes that Jane Harrison looked to such partnerships to help explain how ancient goddesses could be both virgin and mother (the third person of the triad being as yet unnamed). Here she was according to Hutton "extending" the ideas of the prominent archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans who in excavating Knossos in Crete had come to the view that prehistoric Cretans had worshipped a single mighty goddess at once virgin and mother. In Hutton's view Evans' opinion owed an "unmistakable debt" to the Christian belief in the Virgin Mary.
A poet and mythographer, Graves claimed a historical basis for the triple-goddess, and an ongoing tradition of her worship among poets. Although Graves's work is widely discounted by academics as pseudohistory (see The White Goddess#Criticism and The Greek Myths#Reception), it continues to have a lasting influence on many areas of Neopaganism.
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