www.robertgraves.org

[tim owen]

hello,

I'm new here, just read The White Goddess, and am fascinated. Having said that, it's quite heavy going and I'm sure my eyes were reading without actually taking some things in ... when I'd finished it, I thought of the soap brand Dove, which is a brand that people seem to have real, instinctive attachment to. I've worked on it a few times, and it's really quite unique in it's power - a new shampoo launch took 11% of the Uk shampoo market last year. In it's symbolism it uses the dove, obviously, but more importantly, a visual motif of milk. It's curvy, maternal, simple, etc. Am I right in thinking there could be a connection with the Goddess? And is there anything to support the idea that Graves poetic system went beyond the written word, into the world of pictures, shapes, colours etc.

Ideas, thoughts would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Tim

ps. sorry if I've trodden in branding and walked over the website!

[Mark Carter]

Hello Tim,

Your post brings up an interesting point. I'm sure there was no intentional link between products like Dove soap and TWG, but there is clearly a connection between colors, shapes and forms that we enjoy and the marketing of things like soap. Certianly, a soap (or any product) that produces pleasant mental images is going to sell better than one that doesn't. As an example, consider this...would Dove sell better if instead of being white, curved, and well scented it was instead steel grey, shaped like a grenade, and smelled like burning tires? Of course, nobody would buy a soap with those traits. Graves's white goddess is a 3X goddess but we tend to think of her mainly as the mother or maiden and link her to images of the loving female. We think of pale white skin, perfect white teeth, a curved figure and scented hair.....and then the people in the research and development department of all the major soap and shampoo companies strive to package their products in a way that reminds us of those happy images. Developing any product, no matter how mundane, requires a little artistic vision and an understanding of our reactions to certain visual images. Nor did Graves create these images or our reactions to them. These sort of tricks have been going on since the dawn of time and companies have been using comforting images to sell their products long before TWG was published.

[David_Hannaford]

Graves gives the colours white, red, and black as the colours symbolic of the moon goddess. These are moon colours because the full moon is white; the moon appears red in certain atmospheric conditions and solar eclipses, and black just before the new moon. In occult tradition, white symbolises the goddess as Spring; red is Aphrodite, and black the death aspect of the goddess, say Atropos (the third of the Fates). In celtic lore, white symbolises all three as in Graves'