Triple Goddess (Neopaganism) - Origins - Robert Graves

Robert Graves

According to Ronald Hutton, the concept of a Triple Goddess with Maiden, Mother and Crone aspects and lunar symbology was Robert Graves's contribution to modern paganism. Hutton says that Graves, in his The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948), took Harrison's idea of goddess-worshipping matriarchal early Europe and the imagery of three aspects, and related these to the Triple Goddess.

Graves wrote extensively on the subject of the Triple Goddess who he saw as the Muse of all true poetry in both ancient and modern literature. He thought that her ancient worship underlay much of classical Greek myth although reflected there in a more or less distorted or incomplete form. As an example of an unusually complete survival of the "ancient triad" he cites from the classical source Pausanias the worship of Hera in three persons as girl, wife, and widow. Other examples he gives include the goddess triad Moira Ilythia and Callone ("Death, Birth and Beauty") from Plato's Symposium; the triple goddess Hecate; the story of the rape of Kore, (the triad here Graves said to be Kore, Persephone and Hecate with Demeter the general name of the goddess); alongside a large number of other configurations. A figure he used from outside of Greek myth was of the Akan Triple Moon Goddess Ngame, who Graves said was still worshipped in 1960.

Graves cited for example Pausanias who recorded the ancient worship of Hera Pais (Girl Hera), Hera Teleia (Adult Hera), and Hera Khera (Widow Hera, though Khera can also mean separated or divorced) at a single sanctuary reputedly built by Temenus, son of Pelasgus, in Stymphalos. The Roman goddess Diana Nemorensis was a triple goddess, ruling the sky, the earth and the underworld, associated especially with the moon. Robert Graves cited a reference to her by the Tudor poet Skelton (following Ovid's Metamorphoses ) as an example of the triple goddess's continued relevance to poets (see below). James Frazer's seminal Golden Bough centres around the cult of Diana Nemorensis.

Graves states that his Triple Goddess is the Great Goddess "in her poetic or incantatory character", and that the goddess in her ancient form took the gods of the waxing and waning year successively as her lovers. Graves believed that the Triple Goddess was an aboriginal deity also of Britain, and that traces of her worship survived in early modern British witchcraft and in various modern British cultural attitudes such as what Graves believed to be a preference for a female sovereign.

Graves regarded "true poetry" as inspired by the Triple Goddess, as an example of her continuing influence in English poetry he instances the "Garland of Laurell" by the English poet, John Skelton (c.1460-1529) — Diana in the leavës green, Luna that so bright doth sheen, Persephone in Hell. — as evoking his Triple Goddess in her three realms of earth, sky and underworld.

In the anthology The Greek Myths (1955), Graves systematically applied his convictions enshrined in The White Goddess to Greek mythology, exposing a large number of readers to his various theories concerning goddess worship in ancient Greece. Graves posited that Greece had been settled by a matriarchal goddess-worshipping people before being invaded by successive waves of patriarchal Indo-European speakers from the north. Much of Greek myth in his view recorded the consequent religious political and social accommodations until the final triumph of patriarchy. Graves did not invent this picture but drew from nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship. This account has not been disproved, but alternative explanations have emerged, and it is not accepted as a consensus view. The twentieth century archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (see below) also argued for a triple goddess-worshipping European neolithic modified and eventually overwhelmed by waves of partiarchal invaders although she saw this neolithic civilization as egalitarian and "matristic" rather than "matriarchal" in the sense of gynocratic.

In the 1949 novel Seven Days in New Crete, Graves extrapolated this theory into an imagined future society where the worship of the Triple Goddess under the three aspects of the maiden archer Nimuë, the goddess of motherhood and sexuality Mari, and the hag-goddess of wisdom Ana is the main form of religion.