Taylor Swift and the Triple Goddess
"I'm in my ____ era.”
Social media users have been fixated on this phraseology for some time. I don't know if this predated Taylor Swift’s Eras tour or if she popularized this notion, but regardless it seems to have struck a chord with women around the world. In Swift's case, it seems to refer to her long-running musical career, but particularly emphasizes the uniqueness of each episode in her musical journey. For Swift, each episode is an imitation. She did not invent country or pop or 80's pop or indie folk, but rather embodied each of these genres in her respective albums. One of the fundamental rules of marketing is that your brand must be focused and specialized on a single proposition or niche. Typically, for musicians, this means that they are successful when they work within a set genre or sound, especially if they have innovated within that genre. For most musicians, changing their genre spells career suicide. So how does Swift defy this convention? How does she change genres every five years yet multiply her audience and their enthusiasm? It is because femininity itself is her brand.
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In 1946 Robert Graves published his magnum opus, The White Goddess, a groundbreaking analysis of ancient poetics and mythology. T.S. Eliot called it "A prodigious, monstrous, stupefying, indescribable book." Indeed, the claims of the book are mountains made of mole-hills, or so the classicists insist, deriving outlandish theories from obscure sources. The central claim for which the book is titled is that pre-Christian European folk religion predominantly worshipped a central goddess character, whom Graves calls the White Goddess. I have not read the book, so I cannot summarize the content or respond to the argument, but I can say this about it: if the titular goddess was a fabrication in 1946, and not an object of serious worship in the ancient world, then Graves has certainly summoned her into this modern world, and on some level we moderns must contend with her.
Who is this proto-fictitious white goddess that Robert Graves describes?
As Goddess of the Underworld she was concerned with Birth, Procreation and Death. As Goddess of the Earth she was concerned with the three seasons of Spring, Summer and Winter: she animated trees and plants and ruled all living creatures. As Goddess of the Sky she was the Moon, in her three phases of New Moon, Full Moon, and Waning Moon...As the New Moon or Spring she was a girl; as the Full Moon or Summer she was woman; as the Old Moon or Winter she was hag. (The White Goddess, pg. 377)
He elsewhere summarizes this goddess's characteristic persons as Maiden, Mother, and Crone - the primary phases of a woman's life and the three uniquely feminine archetypes.
If this Triple Goddess is reminiscent of the Christian Triune God, and therefore strikes the spiritually sensitive reader as a blasphemy beyond mere paganism, then the reader would be correct. Dante Alighieri's Lucifer is a three-faced mockery of Yahweh, a languishing and wicked reminder that those things furthest from God usually attempt to explicitly imitate Him. Likewise, the priests of the most wicked religions on Earth construct their practices in continual response to Christianity. G.K. Chesterton observed that there would be no witches' black Sabbath without first an ordinary Sabbath, and although Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven may not have contained a Satanic message when played in reverse, the ensuing backlash ensured that Cradle of Filth's Dinner at Deviant's Palace eventually would. Occultists are not creative, but once they have erected an idol, they certainly get their mileage out of it. It was no different when Robert Graves erected the Triple Goddess, who was quickly absorbed, in turn, into neopagan worship after serious historians delegitimized her (1). She is in fact the foundational deity in Wicca along with The Horned God (2), who is just your good old neighborhood Satan (if I have overly drawn my sources from Wikipedia, let the reader appreciate that I hesitate to visit more official sources on these matters).
Graves himself believed in this goddess, in a manner of speaking. He believed that by writing poetry and absorbing poetic myth, one could commune with the goddess, who is also a muse. To him, all women are essential muses. Although he was bisexual in practice, he was oddly attracted to the worship of the feminine as superior to the masculine. The reader will correctly infer that the man had issues, but his sin is merely the original sin of the Garden, as characterized recently by my good friend Jack Waters: man worships woman and woman worships serpent. I will add here that although matriarchal religion as described by Graves was not ubiquitous in history, its few likely appearances often carried serpentine imagery (3).
Today, the Triple Goddess enjoys broad recognition as a religious and literary icon, but as a symbol of the universal feminine, she also reminds us of the strange relationship between femininity and modernity. She is a universal and supposedly ancient feminine ideal birthed (or synthesized) in the modern world by modern men and women, and she may teach us something about the conditions in which we live.
To go beyond the feminist musings and the occultist syncretisms, consider the poet and writer Sylvia Plath, who adopted some of the maiden/mother/crone thought into her own works. Plath struggled with the transition from girlhood into motherhood, finding tremendous support for the former role and complete isolation and despair in the latter:
I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand. (4)
Her society idolized maidenhood but still demanded procreation and yet hated motherhood. If the Bell Jar is to be taken as autobiographical, then these contradictions tortured her and contributed to her tragic suicidal depression. The contemporary world is not much different, worshipping maidenhood but disdaining virgins and idolizing sexuality but giving no room for children. There are many possible causes for the fertility crisis assaulting developed countries across the globe, but most of them directly result from the conditions we have created for ourselves - out of ignorance - ranging from cultural stigmas to infrastructural designs.
Womankind may be the mascot of modernist ideology - or the lab rat. If modernity is obsessed with equality, flatness, and predictability, then womankind may be its very antagonist. Where the 20th century Progress Enthusiast wants to see all people as equal in means, united in aspiration, and consistent in activity, femininity presents three stubborn faces, the maiden, the mother, and the crone, and these somewhat contradictory persons carry their own unique needs which a single socioeconomic system could never accommodate simultaneously, while each of these persons are also nonnegotiable for human survival. The maiden may be defined as a physically mature but virginal female, and to grossly oversimplify, her needs are education, encouragement, adornment, and protection. The modern system is not unable to meet these needs - as we said, modern man idolizes the maiden, who represents infinite possibility. Education, for the modern girl, is a system of encouragement, and also well-suited to female abilities as demonstrated by girls' superior academic achievements over boys. This was Plath's most comfortable era.
If death is the great equalizer, then birthing is the great discriminator. Supposing a mother could carry on a full-time job comfortably for the entirety of her nine-month gestational period - a doubtful proposition indeed - she then gives birth to her child and cannot place it in daycare for at least six weeks. A Family Medical Leave of Absence (FMLA) guarantees up to twelve weeks of time off for a birth, and although this is an important legal protection, it does not protect women from the collapse of goodwill that such an extended leave would inevitably invite in most workplaces. And is twelve weeks enough time for a mother to bond well with her child? Doubtlessly, many mothers would say yes, and for whom the six weeks is sufficient. It is also true that many more mothers will find twelve weeks far too short, and who suffer the separation as a loss, and who return to work out of necessity rather than preference. I cannot say how much time is enough time, but it is clear that these effects automatically put mothers far behind their childless coworkers in economic output. A civilization adapted to two-income households is not adapted to replacement-level fertility rates.
Finally, the crone. The crone is infertile but often sexually active, and her season is typically the longest of the feminine seasons. Her role is necessary for human thriving, since it is biologically adapted, but I find it more difficult to thoroughly characterize. Why does she typically remain sexually active despite her infertility? Does she function primarily to support active mothers? How is she meant to use her time? I ask these questions out of a naturalistic as well as economic and social perspective. One of the naive excesses of the trad movement that pushes wives to stay home with children and neglect their careers is that eventually their children go to school, or leave home, and these wives are always eventually left with nothing to do - perhaps conservatives are prone to ignore the third face of femininity. What is a woman to do when she has put everything she has into mothering and suddenly finds that occupation unnecessary? This may be the time to pick up a career, but that can be a great challenge if she has not tended to her marketable skills for many years. Whatever the case, the mother, like the maiden, is a mortal goddess, and a woman should anticipate new good work in her years as a crone.
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The recent “era” trend on social media is extremely female-skewed. I do my best to stay ignorant of trends, but they get through my firewalls often enough that I've also noticed that men practically never talk about eras, even when they have adopted female-skewed language elsewhere. Eras seem uniquely feminine; men tend to obsess over one or two things their whole lives, usually objectives of some kind, while women are more interested in becoming - becoming a doctor, being an engineer, entering into an archetype. And what could better encapsulate Taylor Swift's career except that it has had its phases and seasons? For Swift, changing her genre just means entering a new season and enjoying a new archetypical identity - and women everywhere seem to intuitively understand this and accept it readily. So when a man criticizes Taylor Swift for this or that, he is attacking more than just a Swiftie's casual interest: he is attacking femininity itself, because femininity is Swift’s genre. No wonder that her fans get defensive.
Taylor Swift promotes eras of being this artist or channeling that vibe, but ironically, she has been stuck for years with the crone's habits. She repeats the same irresponsible relationship patterns that you would expect of a modern maiden, but because she is not exactly chaste, and yet is childless, she is in fact a crone. The crone, lacking children and grandchildren to support, becomes a vicious wanderer, a Baba Yaga. The modern secular woman often follows this pattern, despairing when her maidenhood gives way not to glorious motherhood but rather to an infertile pointlessness. What will happen to all of us if these women continue idolizing the crone and scoffing at the mother? But we conservatives are also at fault: what will happen if we continue idolizing the mother and neglecting the crone?
The Triple Goddess reveals the poverty of our longstanding model of gender. She also reveals a world and a system that is intolerant of seasonality, and therefore is inhospitable to womankind.
Ogden, Daniel (2013). Drakon: Dragon Myth and Serpent Cult in the Greek and Roman Worlds.
Plath, Sylvia (1961). Morning Song.