Synthetic Surrealism

In 1949, seven years after fleeing a warring Europe for Mexico City, the artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) read a very curious book. Robert Graves’s White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, published a year earlier, was a mythographic account of the ways in which paganism underlies Christian belief. It posited the existence of a moon-affiliated “White Goddess of Birth, Love and Death,” whom patriarchal structures obscure. According to Graves, one