Books don't get much more eccentric and idiosyncratic than Robert Graves' "Greek Myths" and his wider-ranging "The White Goddess." These were the books that really lit my love for this topic. The Greek myth collection pulls together all the versions of the stories, from many sources, and views each through Graves' Celtic prose-colored glasses. He lays out his world-view of myth and poetry, man and his muse, in "The White Goddess" which is either the nuttiest or the most brilliant book I've ever read, or possibly both. My reading it was something of a premonition, for I soon had my own Laura Riding. Graves was a poet and novelist by trade, but he brought his worshipful attitude toward womankind into the realm of classical mythology and found a strong connection to the lingering goddess-cult elements in the myths.

Of Welsh and Irish poetry:

"The (great) Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God's losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird. All true poetry ... celebrates some incident or scene in this very ancient story, and the three main characters are so much a part of our racial inheritance that they not only assert themselves in poetry but recur on occasions of emotional stress in the form of dreams, paranoic visions and delusions."

And, several chapters further on:

"It will be objected that man has as valid a claim to divinity as woman. That is true only in a sense; he is divine not in his singular person, but only in his twinhood. As Osiris, the Spirit of the Waxing Year he is always jealous of his weird, Set, the Spirit of the Waning Year, and vice-versa; he cannot be both of them at once except by an intellectual effort that destroys his humanity, and this is the fiundamental defect of the Apollonian or Jehovistic cult. Man is a demi-god: he always has either one foot or the other in the grave; woman is divine because she can keep both her feet always in the same place, whether in the sky, in the underworld, or on this earth. Man envies her and tells himself lies about his own completeness, and thereby makes himself miserable; because if he is divine she is not even a demi-goddess -- she is a mere nymph and his love for her turns to scorn and hate.

"Woman worships the male infant, not the grown man: it is evidence of her deity, of man's dependence on her for life. She is passionately interested in grown men, however, because the love-hate that Osiris and Set feel for each other on her account is a tribute to her divinity. She tries to satisfy both, but can only do so by alternate murder, and man tries to regard this as evidence of her fundamental falsity, not of his own irreconcilable demands on her."