Robert Graves och Ted Ringwood, - vad förenar dem???? Månen?

 

DEN MÅNEN, DEN MÅNEN!!!!

Ett av de mest omfattande och bästa lexikonen över världens myter skrevs kanske av Robert Graves. Denne hade även en bestämd aning om att myten hade använts i förtryckande syfte, men/och hans främsta poäng var att det var upp till poesin att återuppliva den äldsta delen av myten, kulten av månen.

     R. Graves:

     “My thesis is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in theMediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone A g e , and that this remains die language of true poetry—'true' in the nostalgic modern sense of 'the unimprovable original, not a synthetic substitute'. T h e language was tampered with in late Minoan times when invaders from Central Asia began to substitute patrilinear for matrilinear institutions and remodel or falsify the myths to justify the social changes. Then came the early Greek philosophers who were strongly opposed to magical poetry as threatening their new religion of logic, and under their influence a rational poetic language (now called the Classical) was elaborated in honour of their patron A p o l l o and imposed on the world as the last word in spiritual illumination: a v i e w that has prevailed practically ever since in European schools and universities, where myths are now studied only as quaint relics of the nursery age of mankind.”

                                    ( The White Goddess, p.12. )

 

         Matt Wilson:

“Graves was a lifelong lecturer, and this tendency culminated with the publication of The White Goddess. This massive survey first appeared in 1948, when Graves was in his early 50s, though you could say he never quite finished it: subsequent editions were revised, expanded, clarified, and appended.

 Graves believed he had composed a genuine Key to All Mythologies, and a few on the esoteric and occult fringes still agree with him. To make short work of a long book, The White Goddess argues that humanity once worshipped a three-aspected moon goddess, but that in time immemorial, patriarchal revolutions the world over suppressed her. In a speech given a few years post-publication, Graves, never humble, characterized the “inspiration” that descended upon him: “I seem to have stumbled on the central secret of neolithic and Bronze Age religious faith, which makes sense of many otherwise inexplicable myths and religious customs.” The innumerable “myths and customs” encountered in his investigations include medieval Welsh riddle poetry, forbidden druidic alphabets, the chthonic associations of the elder tree, “the Orphic tree-alphabet,” the cults of Apollo and Minerva, the isle of Avalon in Arthurian myth, and much more. Graves emphasizes the literary significance of his enlightenment, arguing that genuine poets are unknowing Goddess worshippers who reject Apollonian rationality (Apollo is a sort of anti-Goddess in Graves’s scheme) and give ecstatic, if uncomprehended, homage to the mother of poetry.

The White Goddess now seems like the last in a loose series of passionately argued, thoroughly researched, elegantly written, and generally dubious cultural-mythical exegeses. James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a loose, baggy, repetitive, and enthralling account of a dying and resurrecting god across cultures and civilizations, may be the first. Later iterations include Jessie Weston’s Grail study From Ritual to Romance, which influenced T. S. Eliot’s symbolism in The Waste Land, and Alfred Watkins’s The Old Straight Track, the first book to posit ley lines (the term originates with Watkins) across the English landscape. Joseph Campbell’s Jung-lite The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which appeared in 1949, is a disreputable cousin to these books; the anthropological histories of Claude Lévi-Strauss might be their academic heirs.

Graves saw this study as an apex of his career, and the importance he placed on the Goddess has ensured that no critic can read Graves’s poetry without looking for her three faces. Grevel Lindop, in his introduction to the Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition of The White Goddess, notes that Graves to some degree became a prisoner of the deity he invented or discovered. Can we read Graves without looking to the moon?”

 

Som kontrast till Graves´ poetiska syn på månen kan man ju erinra om den häpnadsväckande geologiska kunskapen om hur Jorden och Månen bildades, som under förra seklet presenterades så övertygande av A.E. Ringwood. Denne beskriver i en bok ( Origin of the Earth and the Moon, New York 1979 )  hur jorden, liksom många planeter, bildas genom aggregering ur stoftmoln på ett så intrikat – och våldsamt sätt – att det under processen vid nära nog alla planetbildningar bildas en atmosfär av skräp – material som inte just då passar in i själva planetbildandet - kring planeten själv, på ett sådant sätt att en enorm mängd skräp sedan – genom de olika attraktionskrafter som materia är utsatt för – mycket lätt sedan genom en liknande aggregation bildar just MÅNAR. Till yttermera visso fick just denne Ringwood ett metalliskt ämne uppkallat efter sig ( Eng.: ringwoodite ), sedan han på ett elegant vis – genom att studera små diamanter upphittade i lava, och i meteoriter – visat att det i jordens mantel – d-v-s- ungefär mitt emellan jordskorpan och jordens kärna – finns ett stort lager av ett blåaktigt ämne – ett aggregat av magnesium och kisel – vilket till sig slutit enorma mängder av vatten, så att denna mängd motsvarar drygt två hela jordytvattenmassor, eller något sådant. En hypotes är att det vatten som finns i närheten av jordytan, i form av alla dessa hav, har ”svettats ut” ur ringwooditen och blivit det stormiga hav, på vilket ångare, segelbåtar och skummande vågor forsa fram. Så innebär detta också att vi som lever här uppe i skorpområdet, vi har alltså under våra fötter enorma reserver av vatten - inneslutet i ett segt blått material - långt under våra fötter. Detta kan ju synas skönt att veta, i tider av torka under somrarna.