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Ursus

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To be fair, Graves is not a historian, nor did he have any pretensions of being.

 

Perhaps not as such, but he advocated for a very strong poetic reimagining of ancient religion in his White Goddess and other works. He basically crafted an imaginary ancient world with imaginary religions.

 

The problem is that when people in your country got together after the repeal of its witchcraft laws to detemine exactly what pre-Christian religions were like, they used the works of Graves and others like him to craft a religion for ... for a new age, so to speak. This poetic retelling of ancient religion had little in common with history, though it was often presented as history by its adherents. Graves' forays into religious thought is damned by many scholars and cultural traditionalists for this reason.

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Even Graves' autobiography is inaccurate, but its a great read.

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To be fair, Graves is not a historian, nor did he have any pretensions of being.

 

Perhaps not as such, but he advocated for a very strong poetic reimagining of ancient religion in his White Goddess and other works. He basically crafted an imaginary ancient world with imaginary religions.

 

The problem is that when people in your country got together after the repeal of its witchcraft laws to detemine exactly what pre-Christian religions were like, they used the works of Graves and others like him to craft a religion for ... for a new age, so to speak. This poetic retelling of ancient religion had little in common with history, though it was often presented as history by its adherents. Graves' forays into religious thought is damned by many scholars and cultural traditionalists for this reason.

 

Ah - thank you Ursus, for clarifying. I confess to not having read his White Goddess. However, this is an interesting topic in itself - religion being founded on poetic re-tellings and such. But it's not the subject of the thread, so we'll save it for another time. Suffice it to say - all poets and novelists are romantics at heart, and can skewer the truth to create something else. But I agree - that is 'bad scholarship' when dealing with history.

 

And to Pertinax - yes, Goodbye to All That is a nice romp. Some very amusing little anecdotes.

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