Stalking the Goddess Quotes

“Murray and Graves redefined witchcraft into a religion with an actual theology, which offered something of value to the modern seeker standing outside of Jewish or Christian belief. Murray formed the goddess from the primordial myth, Graves breathed life into her, and Gardner became her first high priest.”
― Mark Carter, Stalking the Goddess

“Additionally, many supporters of matriarchal theories are not content with proving the existence of small, localized prehistoric matriarchies. Instead, they speculate on worldwide matriarchies, which unite far flung civilizations which never directly contacted each other. These theories quickly come to resemble the mythic golden age of peace and world unity under a single political and religious system. If the advancement of mankind as a whole in any way resembles the growth of the individual human, then this is the legend of mankind’s infancy in which all people were cared for and lived under the rule of a single Great Mother. In supporting this theory, Graves is guilty of iconotropy just as much as the patriarchal religions he attacks.”
― Mark Carter, Stalking the Goddess

“After introducing the term in King Jesus, Graves increasingly depends on iconotropy to explain why his own ideas deviate from popular opinion. Iconotropy plays a small part in King Jesus, a considerably larger part in The White Goddess, and finally, it dominates nearly every myth within The Greek Myths, until Graves is finally free to recreate ancient Greece based on his own model.”
― Mark Carter, Stalking the Goddess

“Yet, there may be another reason Graves detested Yeats: sheer jealously. Yeats had after all, beaten Graves to the punch by writing Celtic Twilight shortly before Graves was born.”
― Mark Carter, Stalking the Goddess

“Graves commits a non sequitur, which experts had already abandoned: the assumption that widespread goddess worship implied widespread matriarchies.”
― Mark Carter, Stalking the Goddess

“This process had begun even within Graves’s lifetime and had prompted him to claim, “There are some hopeful young people in California who have taken my book The White Goddess as their Bible” and that there were “various White Goddess religions started in New York State and California” (Kersnowski 95, 156).”
― Mark Carter, Stalking the Goddess

“Fred Adams, founder of Feraferia, was particularly influenced by Graves’s utopian novel Seven Days (Adler 239). Adams went so far as to meet Graves personally in 1959. Gerald Gardner also visited Graves at Majorca in January 1961 (M. Seymour 398). By this time however, Wicca’s popularity had spread and Gardner no longer monopolized its content.”
― Mark Carter, Stalking the Goddess