White goddess--the unspeakable name. An inquiry into Robert Graves' King Jesus.

Abstract

Robert Graves is a poet-mythographer, well-known in the U. K. and the U. S. A., but not in Japan despite his huge amount of poetic, mythographical, prose and critical works. Furthermore, even in the U. S. A. and the U. K., some people have been shunning him politely as a versatile iconoclast possessed of the White Goddess. In fact, it is not difficult to imagine that when King Jesus, a life story of Christ, was published, people were shocked at his extraordinary mythographical Christology derived from his enthusiasm towards the White Goddess Cult. In Christ he discovered the fragments of maternal doctrine as a new concept in opposition to the Apollonian theory of Judaism, but they seemed to be quite incomplete in the author's eyes lacking in something most essential in life, recognition of love and hatred discipline. This paper is an inquiry into how the author developed his own hermaneutics of Christ through his wide and thorough scholarship on mythology, history, the Bible and Celtic poetry.