Chapter 5 - Puritanism and the Goddess

Summary

Departing momentarily from the soteriological arc of fall-crucifixion-redemption, this chapter tackles a range of cultural topics centred around the Protestant Reformation, a historical development about which Hughes expresses repeated regret. Much of this chapter is concerned with bridging the symbolic worlds of Robert Graves’s White Goddess, which Hughes emphatically embraces, with the Christian metaphysical world discussed in this book. With reference to Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary and Hughes’s own great work of critical prose, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, our discussion teases out the complicated relationship between Graves’s Goddess and Christian figures such as Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Hughes’s particular disdain for Puritanism, which he read as a systematic rejection of the Goddess, is explored, leading to explorations of Marian symbolism in Gaudete and the provocatively religious language of Remains of Elmet, incorporating a history of the Primitive Methodist Church, the religion of Hughes’s earliest childhood in the Calder Valley.