Robert Graves's book "The White Goddess" expounds the theory that Europe had a single religion in prehistory, worship of the White Goddess. This formidable woman is immortal, has silver hair, white skin and blood-red lips. She is married to a new husband each year, while she continues unchanged. The Goddess is beautiful and deadly; she demands blood sacrifice. Yet she is good as well; she dances in the forest and causes the flowers to grow.

The myth of the Goddess was supplanted by the Greeks who introduced a new system of Gods and Godesses, with the accent heavily on the Gods, thereby transferring the power from the female to the male.

Graves's work is either a work of genius or madness (or possibly both). He claims that all true poetry is in tune with the cult of the Goddess and that the mark of a real poet in times gone by was the understanding of the cult. When the cult went underground, the poets hid the references to the Goddess in a secret language of flowers, trees etc.

However true this is, the signs of the Goddess are everywhere in the literature of Europe.

• The Queen of the Fairies - Titania, The Faerie Queene, Tam Lin, etc.

• The Morrigan (Mór Ríoghan or Great Queen)

• La Belle Dame Sans Merci

• The Wicked Stepmother in Snow White

• The Fairy Queen of the Tam Lin story, The Undying Laurel of Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, the lady of 'I Kavaleri di Ekebu' - all these demand a sacrifice of a man once a year to keep them immortal.

• Goldberry, the wife of Tom Bombadil, who is connected with the Welsh flower lady Blodeuwedd.

Theseus and the Minotaur - Theseus was in thrall to the high priestess of the Goddess cult before escaping and fleeing to Crete.

The White Goddess is also associated with the moon and her three aspects of maid, mother and crone correspond to the new, full and old moon.

Inanna, the priestess of Ishtar? Was she an invention of Robert Silverberg, or was she in the Gilgamesh story?

Here's the poem Tam Lin in a very good site with a discussion of what it means: http://tam-lin.org/front.html

The Cynical Point of View

With this in mind, it is very easy to take any reference to a powerful or magical woman in the literature of long ago and to identify her as the Goddess. But what proof is there that they really all represented the same person?

Take Snow White, for example. This story was collected by the Brothers Grimm, so it is a genuine folk tale. There are two women concerned. One is the beautiful young woman, who had hair as black as coal, skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood. The red lips and white skin are features of the Goddess, but the black hair isn't. The Goddess has silver hair. The other woman is the wicked step-mother. She is beautiful and middle-aged, but disguises herself as an ugly old woman. This change from mother to crone is very characteristic of the Goddess.

So is this a genuine story about the Goddess getting garbled over the ages, or is it just coincidence? Pale skin was always the sign of a lady, because ladies didn't work in the fields all day. Red lips have always been something that (almost) every woman wants, but this doesn't mean that every woman knows about the Goddess.