Hutton 1

[The Pomegranate 13.2 (2011) 225256] ISSN 1528-0268 (Print)doi: 10.1558/pome.v13i2.225 ISSN 1743-1735 (Online)

Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.Unit 3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield S3 8AF..

Review Article

Revisionism and Counter-Revisionismin Pagan History

Ronald Hutton

[email protected]

In the past few years, a heated argument has developed among modern Pagans concerning the nature of their history, which has attracted atten-tion from academic scholars. It has focused on the abandonment, by professional historians, of their traditional attitudes to the survival of Paganism during the Middle Ages and subsequently; attitudes on which the historical claims of late twentieth-century Paganism were based. The debate has been fuelled by a counter-attack mounted by Pagans who are unhappy with this development, and its implications for their religious views and identity. As yet it has produced only one actual book, by Ben Whitmore,1 being mostly represented on Pagan blogs such as The Wild Hunt, and Necropolis Now. It has in turn provoked some concern among academic scholars, and Pagans who have assimilated the changes in his-toriography (the two groups, of course, overlapping). Some have spoken of it as a backlash by Pagans against intellectualism or academic schol-arship, or as the Pagan manifestation of that fundamentalism which has been identified as a growing trend in religion in different parts of the world. This anxiety has in turn manifested little as yet in conventional publications,2 being once again conducted digitally, especially on social media websites, blogs and in analogue life, and at conventions and in personal conversation; but it is certainly present. I would characterize the two positions as revisionists and counter-revisionists, which has the merits of objectivity and concentration on the essential issue at stake in their formation.

1. Ben Whitmore, The Trials of the Moon: Reopening the Case for Historical Witchcraft (Auckland: Briar Books, 2010).

2. An exception being Caroline Jane Tully, Researching the Past is a Foreign Country, The Pomegranate, 13, no. 1 (2011): 98105.

226 The Pomegranate 13.2 (2011)

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What follows is a further contribution to the debate, intended prima-rily to clarify both some of the historical issues involved and also the geographical context of it. It will have no direct references to the Internet postings which have been at the heart of the controversy, for a number of reasons. One is that most have appeared in arenas which are often only dubiously public and where the exchanges are usually ephemeral, with participants and topics altering from week to week. Direct citation is made more difficult by the fact that some protagonists, especially on the counter-revisionist side, shelter behind anonymity or charismatic pseu-donyms; the latter effect, indeed, makes it difficult to know whether or not the same individual is behind more than one posting name. None the less, some clarification can be offered here of the following points: the nature of the changes that have sparked off the controversy; the dif-ficulties and opportunities that are presented to those engaged in it; the potential of counter-revisionism to make a contribution to historical knowledge; and the geographical and sociological pattern of the debate itself. These contributions together may help to move discussion on, and encourage further work on the issues that have inspired it.

The Nature of Revisionism

The revisionist process in the history of British Paganism was directed against a scholarly orthodoxy that had appeared during the nineteenth century and remained dominant for much of the twentieth. This held that Christianity had been no more than a veneer over medieval British society, found mostly among the social and political elite and barely penetrating the mass of the population, which continued to belong, at least in secret, to the old religion. This continued allegiance was mani-fested in many different ways, such as the placement of images of Pagan deities in Christian churches, the continued veneration paid to ancient holy waters, the maintenance of huge figures representing the old gods, carved in chalk hillsides, the use of magical rites and remedies rooted in ancient belief, and the annual enactment of seasonal ceremonies of fertil-ity and protection derived directly from prehistoric religion. Above all, according to this view, it was manifested in a flourishing witch religion, found all over western and central Europe, which represented a direct continuity of ancient Paganism and honoured ancient deities of nature. As such this religion also represented a self-conscious resistance move-ment to Christianity, and so was comprehensively and brutally crushed by Christian persecution between the fifteenth and seventeenth centu-ries. The claim made by the oldest attested of modern Pagan traditions, Wicca, was that it was in fact this same religion of witches, which had

Hutton Revisionism and Counter-Revisionism 227


survived in secret through the intervening centuries to resurface in the safer environment of the 1950s.

During the second half of the twentieth century, historians in general abandoned belief in this model of the past as a result of sustained anal-ysis of the relevant contemporary records. No evidence was found in Europe of a self-conscious Pagan religion surviving the formal conver-sion of a state to Christianity. A large number of meticulously researched local studies of the early modern witch trials found no solid evidence that its members had been practitioners of such a religion, or indeed of any other organised one consciously opposed to the established Chris-tian faith. In 1997 the leading expert on the literature of the early modern witch hunts, Stuart Clark, summed up a fully-formed new consensus by declaring that the entity witchcraft has turned out to be a nonentity, because for the most part it had no referents in the real world.3 These developments made the foundation story of modern Paganism unten-able and opened the way to the construction of a different sort of history for it, which could be based on demonstrable evidence. In this, it was certainly based on older images and ideas, gathered from the ancient, medieval and early modern worlds, but evolved in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to suit modern needs and ideals; which it did very well, thereby explaining most of its appeal and viability. As such, it was no less genuine than any other faith which had undergone a process of renewal and revival, such as Protestant Christianitys rejection of more than a millennium of developing Catholic theology and ritual to return to what its exponents regarded as ancient truths. Nor was the revision-ist model damaging to the perceived reality of the deities of modern Paganism, as they were certainly derived from pre-Christian figures and it would be entirely in accordance with religious experience for them to have manifested with particular force and in particular forms to a modern age which had most need and desire for them.

Revisionism also supplied a new view of the relationship between Paganism and Christianity after the latter became the dominant and offi-cially imposed system of faith. This embodied a different sense of how Pagan survival, or more properly, survivals, could be legitimately and successfully traced through the Middle Ages. This is done by focusing on the large number of Pagan rites, usages, ideas and festivals which were absorbed into various forms of Christianity, or into popular tradi-tion within a Christian culture (with an ill-defined line between the two). Some were combined with orthodox religious practices in a manner which represented a complete union, such as the elements of Pagan

3. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4.



practice which provided the physical trappings of Christian buildings and worship. Others, such as aspects of high ritual magic and folk magic, a belief in a terrestrial otherworld with inhabitants which were neither angels nor demons, seasonal rites, and the continuing affection for Pagan deities as figures of story, art and allegory, continued to exist in parallel with official Christian doctrine, sometimes condemned by religious and secular leaders, but more often tolerated. It was these various streams of tradition which provided the continuities that enabled a revival of actual Paganism to occur in modern times, as they were recombined in differ-ent forms, and an active worship of the old deities put back, to create a complete religious system.

The scholarly tradition of a large-scale, self-conscious survival of Paganism through the Middle Ages, which revisionism overturned, was vulnerable because it had not been based on a systematic study of medieval records themselves, but from other kinds of source; modern folk customs, early modern and modern texts, and the physical remains of medieval buildings. The revisionist portrait had the virtue of being based on a thorough use of evidence from the period being considered. It still allowed for a wide span of expert disagreement and controversy, over the exact extent to which a particular phenomenon in medieval and early modern Europe was a survival from Paganism. Even when it is clearly so, there is room for debate over how far something remains Pagan when it has been thoroughly appropriated by a different reli-gion. Few would doubt that a medieval or later image of the goddess Venus is a Pagan survival, or an Anglo-Saxon charm which invokes Woden; but what of a charm which calls on the powers of nature, when they could be seen as created or implanted by the Christian god? Is a Corinthian style of column Pagan, because it was originally devised for classical temples, or a halo, because it was appropriated from sun gods for Christian holy figures? Are the wheel, the brewing vat or money Pagan because all were invented in pre-Christian times?

In theory, it is quite possible for a Christian zealot to argue that all the phenomena dubbed Pagan survivals could be considered Christian because they were found in an officially Christian society. Likewise, an anti-Christian polemicist could declare that the sheer quantity of phys-ical, verbal, and literary forms taken into medieval Christianity from earlier tradition could cast doubt on whether the period could be called Christian at all. In practice, such a polarity has not appeared among specialists in the period and subject, because most have come to empha-sise the manner in which the two religious traditions were combined to form what was usually a seamless and harmonious whole, to create a hybrid culture (or series of different cultures) under the umbrella of



formal allegiance to the faith of Christ. It was only towards the end of the eighteenth century that the umbrella began to rupture and the compo-nent parts of the hybrid whole start to separate out, as progress towards a post-Christian society began. Such a process started first, and made most speed, not among the peasant societies in which the old scholarly model held that Paganism should have survived longest and most pro-foundly, but in the most urbanized and industrialized: in brief, the most modern. The revisionist perspective could explain why when modern Paganism appeared, it did so in the nation in the world which had more town-dwellers and more industry than any other at the time, the United Kingdom; and among sophisticated middle-class people, in touch with the latest ideas concerning history, archaeology and spirituality, living in the Bournemouth conurbation and North London.4

The alteration in the history of witchcraft was one subset of this broader shift. While there is no solid evidence that any people in early modern Europe actually gathered regularly to worship any non-Christian being, in preference to the Christian god, Paganism still has relevance to a study of the witch-figure. It is very clear that popular traditions concerning the nature of the supernatural, which had survived from pre-Christian times, played a part both in forming the medieval and early modern stereotype of the witch and in determining the nature and incidence of the resulting trials for witchcraft. When Stuart Clark said that for the most part witchcraft had no referents in the real world, he implied some exceptions, and it is in the survival of Pagan ideas and customs which contributed to the concept of witchcraft, and were sometimes con-fused with it, that those referents are found. Experts may sometimes argue over whether a particular aspect of a local belief or custom should be regarded as Pagan in origin, and differ in the amount of importance to be attached to the elements of surviving Paganism. On the whole, since 1970 Continental scholars have been much more ready to find ancient roots for aspects of witchcraft tradition than those from English-speak-ing nations, who have preferred to concentrate on beliefs and trials in their contemporary context, of gender and class relations and intellec-tual and political systems.5 Both approaches have their merits, and there needs to be a greater combination of them, but even in default of one

4. I have provided different parts of this story in a succession of publications between 1991 and 2009, and pulled it all together in the last chapter of Pagan Britain, forthcoming from Yale University Press.

5. Prominent in the Continental approach have been Carlo Ginzburg, Gustav Henningsen, va Pcs, and Wolfgang Behringer; in the AngloAmerican one, James Sharpe, Diane Purkiss, Stuart Clark, Brian Levack, Malcolm Gaskill, Lyndal Roper, Robin Briggs, and Julian Goodare and his Scottish team.



there has been no clash between the two different schools of scholarship, which have tended to proceed instead in parallel. In witchcraft studies, as in the history of Pagan survivals in medieval Europe in general, revi-sionism actually took place without any debate, as the former scholarly orthodoxy had no defenders among professional academics.

It is, indeed, more or less impossible to find any polarity in the process, between amateurs and professionals, or those who emphasised the element of survival from Pagan tradition in beliefs concerning witches and those who did not. The author who became most closely associ-ated with the theory that witchcraft had been a surviving Pagan religion was Margaret Murray, a high-ranking and deeply respected academic, though admittedly not a historian.6 By contrast, her contemporary C. LEstrange Ewen, who provided the valuable pioneering research into the archives of English witch trials, was an amateur. His actual interpre-tations were as mistaken as Murrays, being still stuck in the tradition of treating witchcraft as an actual religion, but he carried out the essential basic work of identifying the original records for English witch trials and listing them for the use of later scholars, which leaves history for ever in his debt.7 Nor has the gifted non-academic departed from the scene. Owen Davies, who has established himself as the leading expert in witchcraft and magic in England and Wales between 1740 and 1940, now holds a professorial chair but wrote the books which made his reputation while working on a farm in Somerset.8 Turning to the spec-trum of attitude among professionals, Carlo Ginzburg, who has been associated more than anybody else with the recovery of pre-Christian traditions from early modern trials for witchcraft, declared that it was justified to term Murrays work amateurish, absurd, bereft of any scientific merit. He emphasised that the accounts of witch practices in the trials simply document myths and not rituals.9 Norman Cohn, who was perhaps the British historian most commonly credited with an attack on the credibility of Murrays portrait of witchcraft, was also the one who stressed most enthusiastically the roots of medieval and early

6. Margaret Murray, The WitchCult in Western Europe, (Oxford: Oxford University Pres.s, 1921); The God of the Witches (London: Sampson Low, 1933).

7. C. LEstrange Ewen, WitchHunting and Witch Trials (London: Kegan Paul, 1929); Witchcraft and Demonianism, (London: Heath Cranton, 1933); Witchcraft in the Star Chamber, privately published, 1938; Witchcraft in the Norfolk Circuit, privately pub-lished, 1939.

8. Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 17361951 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); A People Bewitched (privately published, 1999)

9. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbath (London: Penguin, 1992), 89.



modern witchcraft beliefs in ancient culture.10 The Continental scholar who devoted most care to showing how the kind of evidence used by Murray to document an actual religion were the product of pure fantasy, Gustav Henningsen, was also among the most notable in uncovering old folk beliefs behind images of witchcraft.11 I myself, who am the historian most associated with revisionism by some Pagans (though in fact more of a publicist for it as my own work has been more concerned with its consequences), declared in my very first book on the subject that the vivid medieval realm of the imagination which produced images of witchcraft, drew on ancient modes of thought, and urgently requires further investigation.12

The two successive models of Pagan survival do have radically differ-ent implications for Pagans today. The old one, on which modern Pagan-ism was based, induced a set of counter-cultural attitudes, including a deep suspicion of mainstream society and a particularly adversarial attitude towards established Christianity, which could be blamed for the martyrdom of the tens of thousands (in the old historical mythol-ogy, the millions) of people who were put to death for the alleged crime of witchcraft in the early modern trials. It fostered an image of Pagan-ism as a beleaguered sect, maintained by the constancy and faith of a few true believers, and able in modern times to re-emerge and proclaim itself anew. It thereby also encouraged a heavy emphasis on initiatory lineage, as the mechanism which had maintained the religion in secret through the centuries, and therefore on the authority of received tradi-tion and of the leaders of the groups of which it was comprised, who carried and could dispense the line of initiation and the teachings that defined the tradition.

The revisionist history encourages a greater sense of integration into, and of a common inheritance with, the parent society. Instead of a line of martyrs and embattled tradition-bearers, the immediate ancestors of Paganism become a succession of cultural radicals, appearing from the eighteenth century onward, who carried out the work of distinguishing the Pagan elements preserved in Western culture and recombining them

10. Norman Cohn, Europes Inner Demons (London: Chatto and Heinemann, 1975).

11. Gustav Henningsen, The Witches Advocate (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1980); The Ladies from Outside, in Early Modern Witchcraft , ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 191218; The Witches Flying and the Spanish Inquisitors, Folklore 120 (2009), 5774.

12. Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (Oxford: Black-well, 1991), 3067. Such investigation is my current research project: trailersthat I have published for it are listed in my article Writing the History of Witchcraft, The Pomegranate 12, no. 2 (2010), 23862.



with images and ideas retrieved directly from the remains of the ancient past, to create a set of modern religions. They can be regarded with the more pride in that they included some of the most celebrated, and gener-ally admired, artists and authors in modern Western civilisation. In this model, Paganism is not something inherently different from mainstream society, and traditionally oppressed and persecuted by it, but represents an extreme, and courageous, distillation of some of its deepest and most important modern impulses. That is precisely why Pagans can regard themselves as peculiarly well positioned to serve some of the most pro-found instincts and needs of modernity. This model reduces the empha-sis on the authority of elders, group leaders and initiatory lineages and encourages a greater liberalism and eclecticism within the movement, as that movement itself arose from creativity, self-expression and individ-ual will within the relatively recent past (though still a longer past than many other modern religious movements have known). It also reduces the sense of bitterness and animosity towards other forms of faith, espe-cially Christianity, and encourages co-operation with them because of a shared cultural inheritance from the ancient world. Forms of it can cer-tainly claim an initiatory line, and an unbroken transmission from antiq-uity of texts and attitudes which had a strongly counter-cultural tinge and often endured official disapproval, but this is through the medium of ceremonial magic, which was not a separate religion in itself. Rather, it was a tradition of practical and operative workings, which often pre-served and sometimes enhanced Pagan elements, but combined these when they were present with some from other faiths, above all Judaism and Christianity.

It should be emphasised that there is no intention here of suggesting that one of these sets of attitudes is inherently more virtuous than the other; it simply seems to be the case that the actual historical evidence, and the consensus of current professional opinion, supports the second position and not the first. Adjusting from the one to the other has clearly been easier for some Pagans than others; and that is why counter-revi-sionism has appeared among those least disposed to make the adapta-tion. The problem that results for any meaningful debate over the issue is that the counter-revisionist tendency is reactionary in the straightforward and literal sense of the term. It has so far proved incapable of reinstating the old model of Pagan history itself, by producing any solid evidence for a survival of any fully-formed and self-conscious Pagan religion in a European society which had been converted to Christianity. What it has done instead is to react against revisionism, and attempt to discredit it, by confusing the old and new historical models. The classic counter-revi-sionist argument is to accuse revisionists of denying that there are any



continuities between ancient and modern Paganism, and then hold up examples of Pagan survivals within Christian society, of the sort actually embodied in the revisionist picture, as proof of such continuities and so of the falsehood of revisionism. This is, of course, to make a travesty of the revisionist case. A further tendency in counter-revisionist arguments is to highlight the genuine survival of Pagan figures, forms, formulae, concepts, procedures and trappings within medieval and later Christian society, and suggest or imply that they were somehow the property of a particular group of people. This group is equated, again usually by implication, with the witches of the old scholarly model or similar coun-ter-cultural figures, who are presumed to have preserved them down the centuries and handed them on to modern Pagans. In this manner, and in default of any actual evidence that would support such a move, the attitudes and self-image of a Paganism based on the old historical model can be accommodated to the new, by a misuse of the structures and components of the latter.

The most likely consequence of these tactics is to split international Paganism into opposed sects, some accepting and assimilating the revi-sionist model and others formally rejecting it in the name of beliefs which still correspond as closely as possible to the foundation story of modern Paganism. This is a shame, because the revisionist model is actu-ally broad and elastic enough to accommodate different attitudes and emphases, and form the basis for a complex of future Pagan identities which emphasise particular aspects of it but can co-exist harmoniously. The rest of this article will be devoted to exploring the potential for such a result.

The Problems of Research into Paganism and Witchcraft

If Pagans are to take control of their own history, rather than depend wholly on quoting professional historians who generally do not share their religious attitudes, then some realistic sense needs to be gained of what they can accomplish. This may be illustrated by a case study of the argument staged upon a few blogs during the course of 2011 and 2012 over the meaning of the word witch. A few of the participants had got hold of some Tudor and Stuart English texts, by a set of authors of whom Reginald Scot, George Gifford, William Perkins, and Thomas Ady were the most prominent.13 These applied the term witch both to those who

13. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584); George Gifford, A Dialogue concerning Witches and Witchcraft (London, 1593); William Perkins, A Dis-course of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (Cambridge, 1608); Thomas Ady, A Candle in the Dark (London, 1656).



were thought to use magic to harm others and those who were believed to use it to help people (though commonly for a fee). Some also asserted that such a usage was general among the English of the time. These texts were used by those who had read them to beat down other contributors to the discussions, and it is easy to see why. Here is contemporary testi-mony, of an unequivocal kind, from observers who ought to have been in an informed position. Why is it, then, that such evidence needs to be treated with caution?

The answer lies in context: in the ability to set these authors among other data from their time. When this is considered, a different picture shows up, for every time that a source reflects genuine popular belief, it displays a sharp dichotomy between the concept of the witch, as by definition somebody who was thought to inflict harm, and those who were believed to heal or aid with it, and who were known by a variety of other names, of which cunning folk and wise folk were the most common. One such sort of source is popular drama, produced for an audience consisting mostly of the urban working class, and here the dichotomy is apparently clear and maintained. Take for example, this piece of dialogue from the first English play to deal with witchcraft, the comedy Mother Bombie, written around 1590. Confronted by the charge They say you are a witch, the heroine of the title retorts, They lie, I am a cunning woman.14 Such an exchange would be unthinkable if what the writers named above had asserted were actually the case. Another major source of evidence for the question consists of the records of the church courts, which survive plentifully for the period in the archives of several English dioceses. One of the kinds of case that they heard was defamation, and a trickle of such hearings in each archive concerned accusations of witchcraft, which had resulted in the person accused suing the accuser for damage to reputation. What is clear from this evidence is that the word witch, when applied by one ordinary person to another, was consistently pejorative, in an intense and seri-ously injurious way. There is not a case yet found in which it had to be qualified to point out that the person concerned was not a good one of her kind; and the same is true of all the extant records of criminal trials for witchcraft, in which the term witch is only used, without any apparent need for glossing or qualification, for somebody who has alleg-edly afflicted injury by using magic.

When a closer look is taken at Scot and his successors, it is immedi-ately apparent that all were radical, evangelical Protestants, with a clear

14. John Lyly, Mother Bombie (London, c. 1590), II, iii, 989. Later in the play a char-acter who grows angry with her does insult her as a witch.



purpose to condemn all forms of magic-working by the laity, for osten-sibly good or bad purposes, as inherently demonic: in their terms, as witchcraft. That is why, given the import of the other forms of source material, why it is reasonable to doubt their assertions with regard to the usage of the word witch. Furthermore, they stood in a long Chris-tian tradition, which had obtained since Augustine of Hippo declared the essentially demonic nature of all magic. The Anglo-Saxon words that form the basis for witch, wicce and wicca (according to the sex of the person described), occur in law codes to indicate workers of deadly crimes against the person, such as murderers and perjurers.15 By con-trast, Anglo-Saxon churchmen regularly glossed wicce and wicce with Latin terms defining a range of workers of harmless magic such as divination.16 In this they were building on general Christian tradition by that date: the Theodosian Code prescribed for the late Roman Empire used the term maleficium, meaning evil-working and customarily describing destructive magic, for all magical acts including soothsay-ing, augury and astrology17. Early English clerics, furthermore, strove to identify magic-working as a Pagan practice, in which true Christians did not engage, and conflate it with witchcraft.18 This tradition was main-tained through the Middle Ages, so as churchmen increasingly pub-lished in English, they often described all acts of magic as witchcraft.19 The Protestant reformers of the Tudor and Stuart period were perpetu-ating this campaign. To speak of the term witch as being ambiguous, as a consequence, is entirely to miss the point: to the great bulk of the populace, it was utterly unambiguous, and centuries of attempts by cler-ical evangelists to persuade them otherwise seem to have been unavail-ing. We have here not a single word which was acknowledged to have different shades of meaning, but two different cultural groups, equally determined to cling to opposed senses of it.

Furthermore, that polarity persisted into modern times. When Owen Davies and I conducted the first sustained research into British popular magic in the Georgian and Victorian periods, in parallel and independ-

15. Cf. the series of codes in A. J. Robertson, ed., The Laws of the Kings of England from Edmund to Henry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925)

16. Browse, for example, Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An AngloSax-oDictionary, ed. Alistair Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907).

17. Theodosian Code, 9.16.4.18. For example, Aelfric: see W. Skeat (ed.), Aelfrics Lives of Saints, vol. 1, Early

English Texts Society, 76 (1881), 3724.19. As in the case of the church court records, the sources here are too voluminous

for a footnote to this article, and must be put into later work of mine: readers who want a quick summary of the tradition can turn to Catherine Rider, Magic and Religion in Medieval England (London: Reaktion, 2012), 15.



ently during the 1990s, we found plenty of evidence for people who called cunning folk witches. Some employed the term white witch, which was itself a coinage of the early modern reformers.20 They were, however, always individuals who did not themselves believe in magic; conversely, we could not seem to find any case of cunning folk refer-ring to themselves as witches or being described as such by people who resorted to them (unless they believed that the magician concerned had turned to the bad).21 Recently, we have been joined in the field by a third worker, Jason Semmens (incidentally, as a museum curator, another example of a fine scholar operating outside the university system), whose book on popular magic in the nineteenth-century south-west of England will shortly be published. At a conference in Glastonbury in April 2012 I asked him directly, before the full assembly of attendees, if he had encountered any exception to the rule that Owen and I had apparently identified. He replied, Never.

There is a reason why this matters, in practical and present terms, to those of us who live in Britain and are engaged, year by year, in explain-ing the essential benevolence of modern Pagan witchcraft to people who are in a position to damage its adherents, such as police, local govern-ment officials, school heads and governors and magistrates.22 This is that nobody can understand the instinctual prejudice that many of them have against members of this religion unless it is appreciated what visceral fear and hatred the word witch still inspires in many of the British, and the deep roots of this response: the more traditional the cultural background of the people concerned, the stronger the reaction tends to be.23 The word certainly has an ambiguity at the present time, or rather a multitude of fresh, overlapping or competing connotations, having been linked to Pagan religion, feminism and self-expression in the nineteenth century and to natural healing in the twentieth. The one that denotes malevo-

20. I think that it was first used by Thomas Hobbes, as part of his campaign against what he termed superstition, in the 1650s: but this is the subject of ongoing research.

21. Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture; A People Bewitched; CunningFolk (London: Hambledon and London, 2003); Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 84111.

22. At this very moment I am preparing once more to appear as an expert witness in the criminal trial of a Pagan witch, to explain to the jury the nature of that per-sons religion. Even now, the mere fact that somebody is known to belong to Pagan witchcraft can have the effect of prejudicing a case against them unless such scholarly testimony is provided: and it is so far in very short supply.

23. Today many elderly people still remember being told by their parents or grand-parents of how the latter resorted to cunning folk or were injured by bewitchment: most of my talks on the subject to village history societies in my local region yield a sheaf of such stories.



lence and destructive power is, however, the one that still has the widest purchase in Britainthe land which produced the wordand provokes the strongest responses. This situation, however, while very relevant to the consequences of historical tradition, is still a separate matter from the broader point being made by the example considered above: that it is possible for intelligent and well-intentioned people, concerned with the history of witchcraft, to take a particular category of primary source material, base reasoned conclusions on it which the evidence concerned unequivocally supports, and still get things wrong because they lack the necessary knowledge of context within which to set it.

This knowledge is, of course, the very thing that professional histori-ans are supposed to possess. It is, however, something that any historian must possess, and professionals still only account for some of the good historical writing that is published. That has already been illustrated in the case of Jason Semmens and the young Owen Davies, and Pagan-ism has produced its own first-rate historians such as Margot Adler, Chas Clifton, and Philip Heselton.24 Whole fields of British history and prehistory have been pioneered and defined by researchers working outside the academic system or on its fringe: in the fields of religion and magic alone, the study of prehistoric rock art, medieval holy wells, chalk figures on hillsides, the historical significance of yew trees and the physi-cal remains of medieval and early modern magic.25 Such work, however, still demands a lengthy immersion in all of the relevant source material. For some subjects, such as ancient religion, most of that material is pub-lished and so it is possible to gain a genuine expertise in it at a distance, given sufficient time and resources. This is, however, not true of the history of Paganism and magic in Britain (and probably anywhere else) since the Middle Ages. So, what do you do if you are a software engi-neer living in Auckland, New Zealand or an information systems direc-tor with science degrees, working in the Washington, D.C., area, who has been converted to Paganism and wants to make an impact on Pagan history? These are, as shall be considered more below, precisely the sort of people who seem to be most embittered by revisionism.

The answer would surely be to look under your own nose. Owen Davies has a book shortly to appear from Oxford University Press, pro-visionally entitled Witchcraft USA, Although the research for it has been limited to sources which can be obtained on the Internet, on loan or on vacation visits to America, it shows how wonderfully rich the local

24. The latest historical works of each are respectively Drawing Down the Moon 3rd edition, Penguin, 2006); Her Hidden Children (Lanham, Md: AltaMira, 2006); and Witchfather (Loughborough: Thoth, 2 vols., 2012).

25. All are documented in my forthcoming book, Pagan Britain.



archives of the United States are in evidence for witchcraft and magic between the eighteenth and early twentieth century. As Australia and New Zealand were settled by mainly British people in the nineteenth century, when a belief in magic was still abundant among many of those, things should be no different there; and indeed I recently examined an excellent Australian PhD thesis on the physical evidence for magical rites and beliefs in that nation since its first settlement by Europeans, which has shown how abundant this is.26 The problem here is that the individuals who are most prominent among the counter-revisionists have been converted to a British form of religion based originally on a claim of unbroken succession from antiquity and so look for their herit-age to Europe, and to periods more remote than those in which their own nations have existed. By doing this, they generally place themselves at a disadvantage if they decide to attack European natives and professional scholars, even while they ignore the resources on their own doorstep which could give them an enduring reputation as historians.

Achievements of Counter-Revisionism

At this point it may be helpful to look more closely at a set of counter-revisionist arguments with a view to discerning aspects of them which might be considered to make genuine contributions to historical knowl-edge. The case study which I am choosing is Ben Whitmores book, which is the longest and most sustained product of this school, the one most firmly based on referenced sources, and the only one to be published in a conventional, hard-copy form which makes analysis easy. Even so, as the author makes clear, it is not itself a history, but a series of attacks on my own work, which the author, as a Wiccan in New Zealand, pre-sumes to be the main statement of the revisionist position. By destroy-ing my credibility, at least among Pagans, he seems to believe that the problem of revisionism is removed. His general approach is an abso-lutely classic study of the misappropriation of the revisionist position, to appear to redeem the essence of the traditional one, which I outlined above. Though he says complimentary things about my character and initially accords some virtue to some of my work (though condescend-ingly, by suggesting that this was because I had help), his book comes increasingly to represent an indictment of that on Paganism and witch-craft in general. As more than one blogger has noted, if his allegations were generally believed to be true, then I would not be allowed to retain

26. Ian Evans, Touching Magic, (PhD thesis, University of Newcastle, Australia, 2011.)



a post at a university.27 I have provided a general reply to him before, and am dealing with his points of detail in my new publications as those proceed;28 here I want instead to discuss places in his book where he may have made a positive contribution to scholarship. I think that there are two such cases, one large and one small but significant, to which I would add a third study, of a point at which he might have deployed an argu-ment that reconciled our differing views. It is hoped that readers will find the issues under discussion of interest in themselves.

The large case study concerns the Wiccan goddess-form. In my own history of Wicca, The Triumph of the Moon, I pointed out that this concept of female divinity was not Wiccan in particular but derived from that which had manifested most powerfully in the modern British imagina-tion for one and a half centuries before. It was, specifically, of a goddess who represented the whole of the natural world, and especially the green earth and the moon. I pointed out that such deities were found in ancient times, and in one text in particular, the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, the goddess Isis is represented in a manner which matches the Wiccan one at every point, including the extra one of embodying in herself all of the other leading female divinities of her age. I also emphasised, however, that this sort of deity form was much rarer in the ancient world than indi-vidual goddesses who were patronesses of particular cities or regions, and of particular forms of human activity. This balance remained true until the opening of the nineteenth century, in Britain, when it swung the other way with dramatic speed, and the universal goddess of nature and the night sky suddenly became, and remained, a much more popular figure than the historical female deities who dominated classical myth. This was one of the points at which I gave Pagan witchcraft a cultural lineage that extended back far more than a century before its appear-ance and linked it into some of the main developments, and figures, in modern British history.29

Labouring under the delusion that my book was an attack on Wicca (or at least his concept of Wicca), Ben Whitmore tried to ruin my argu-ment by showing that the ancient world was replete with goddesses who were identified with others, and with triple goddesses, mother goddesses

27. A more serious danger is that an impression put about the Internet that both my ability and integrity as a scholar were in question might, unless strongly answered in a publicly accessible forum, undermine my ability to act as an expert witness to dispel prejudice against British Pagans.

28. The general reply was in Writing the History of Witchcraft, 25358, while the first substantial work of mine to deal with some of the detail is Pagan Britain. See also Peg Alois review of Whitmores book in The Pomegranate 12, no. 2 (2010): 26368.

29. Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 323.



and earth goddesses. He failed to realise that he was listing the compo-nent parts which had come together in the dominant goddess of the modern age, and failed to tackle my fundamental point that such forms of female divinity were not dominant in the ancient world, but outnum-bered by others. He declared that I thought that the image of a female deity as both virgin and mother was a modern projection of the Virgin Mary onto ancient evidence, whereas such deities had indeed existed in ancient times. What I had suggested insteadand only as a possibilitywas that the readiness of three specific modern writers (among a large number) to make their single and dominant great goddess take the form of a virgin mother owed much to their Christian upbringing. What he has to say of interest, however, concerns earth goddesses. Once again his basic premise is wrong (that I denied the existence of any earth mother deities in ancient pantheons, as opposed to denying their supremacy) , but his list of examples of such figuresCybele, Ninhursag, Nerthus, Gaia, Terra Mater, and the Mother Earth from the Anglo-Saxon Field Blessingis highly significant.30

None of them invalidate my own argument. Cybele was one of a set of Great Goddesses from Asia Minor who protected kingdoms and peoples, and sometimes gave fertility, but they were particular to specific regions and not interchangeable, because they had individual attributes.31 It was Sir James Frazer, in the early twentieth century, who popularised the idea that all these deities should be fused (with others) into a great Mother Goddess, the personification of all the reproductive energies of nature: an exemplar of the Edwardian belief in the former universal existence of such a figure.32 Ninhursag(a) was indeed an earth goddess who cared for the wombs of creatures and married the paramount sky god. She was, however, specifically the indwelling spirit of the deserts and mountains that ringed Mesopotamia, where the rain shed by her husband was cru-cially needed. The Mesopotamian landscape itself was in the hands of different deities, its great rivers belonging to the god Enki, the marshes in the south to the goddess Ningal, and so on.33 Nerthus is mentioned in only one source, the Roman historian Tacitus, as the main deity of a group of German tribes. The problem here has always been that linguis-tically what Tacitus says does not work, as Nerthus is not a female name, which of course casts doubt on the rest of his information. Some scholars have tried to get round the difficulty by turning this deity into

30. Whitmore, Trials of the Moon, 1724.31. Cybele in Phrygia, Artemis in Lydia, and Hecate in Lycia.32. In Adonis, Attis Osiris (London, 1907), 346.33. Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1976), passim.



an earth god, but the matter will probably never be resolved.34

Things get more interesting with Whitmores discussion of the other goddesses. The Greek Gaia was certainly a representative of the whole of the earth, and a mother figure in that she produced the principal family of deities who were objects of worship. Whitmore is aware of my diffi-culty with accepting her as the subject of an actual cult, which is most of the references to her come in literary sources, rather than from evidence of worship. He has taken this from an earlier book of mine, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, which is a softer target for him, because (and this is something with which he makes great play) not all of the statements in it are properly referenced.35 There is a technical reason for that: the publisher struck financial difficulties as the book was about to go into production and insisted that it be shortened to reduce unit costs. As few of the topics covered could be removed without destroy-ing its purpose as a comprehensive textbook, the problem was solved by removing much of the supporting material, qualifying remarks and references.36 I was persuaded that if I did not reference statements which were currently consensual positions among the relevant experts, none of the latter would take exception to them; and this, as the reviews subse-quently proved, was correct. Nobody expected that, twenty years later, somebody who had absolutely no expertise in any of the matters con-cerned would set himself up as an authority on my work: moreover, Whitmore used the lack of complete referencing in Pagan Religions to suggest that this was a characteristic of my books in general, which is not true. In this case, experts would have known that I was following an orthodoxy established as long ago as 1968, by Peter Ucko, who remarked on the lack of evidence for a popular cult of Gaia, as opposed to her appearance as a literary figure. He was, furthermore, making this point specifically in opposition to the earlier, and dominant, scholarly belief in a universal and all-important ancient Great Mother Goddess.37

The idea that Gaia was a major ancient Greek deity was propagated mainly by another Edwardian academic, Lewis Richard Farnell, as part of the preoccupation of scholars of his time with finding that Great Mother Goddess. He based his argument mainly on the literary texts and from conjectural reconstructions of inscriptions and attributes of

34. Richard North, Heathen Gods in Old English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4477, makes the most recent discussion of it.

35. The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991): the section on Gaia and Tellus Mater is on p. 316.

36. I made this problem and its solution clear on pp. viiiix of the introduction.37. Peter Ucko, Anthropomorphic Figurines of Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete

(London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 1968), 41011.



statues. He was driven to conjecture by the lack of hard evidence for cult, admitting that Gaias worship seemed to have scarcely a point of contact with the advanced life of the [Greek] race and she must dis-guise herself under other names. None the less, despite this lack of real data, he was still determined to conclude that she was a very important deity before the dawn of history.38 Recent classicists have abandoned this construct. In 1985 Walter Burkert, then the greatest of all experts in Greek religion, pointed out Gaias large place in the literature of speculation, while adding that in customary religion the role of Gaia is exceedingly modest, confined mainly to the pouring of libations.39 Since then (and since I wrote Pagan Religions) the evidence has increased a little. The latest word seems to be from Jennifer Larson, who concluded that her role in city states was widespread yet never prominent, meaning that most Greeks seemed to know about Gaia, but her worship consisted only of a statue or a place for offerings in a few temples of her son or grandson Zeus and an annual offering in two local religious calendars.40

So, the evidence for active worship is slightly greater than when I wrote in 1991, but there remains the discrepancy between Gaias promi-nence in literature, philosophy and myth, and the lack of a single shrine or temple actually dedicated to her. The Roman Terra Mater (literally, Mother Earth) is even less well attested in religious practice. The emperor Augustus included her near the end of a long list of deities to receive sacrifices at one cycle of games, which had a self-conscious philosophi-cal tinge to its composition: thus, Mother Earth was accompanied in this honour by the Fates, and the goddesses of childbirth, as an assem-blage of forces that guarded the lands fertility.41 Rome had a much more important goddess of earth, Tellus, who had the limited and specific role of quickening the fertility of cultivated soil, and to whom temples were raised. In actual worship, she was paired with the grain goddess Ceres (and the latters shadowy husband, Cerus) on equal terms, and both were accompanied by twelve lesser figures with special responsibilities for different aspects of the farming cycle.42 The reason for this pattern is fairly clear: that ancient religion tended to be localised, to particular regions, cities and people, and also practical, in that deities were invoked because of the specific aspects of life over which they had responsibility.

38. The Cults of the Greek States (Oxford, 1907), vol. III, 28.39. Greek Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1985), 175. 40. A Land Full of Gods, in A Companion to Greek Religion, ed. Daniel Ogden

(Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 67.41 Mary Beard, John North, and S. R. F. Price, Religions of Rome (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1998), vol. I, 203; vol. 2, 14242. H. J. Rose, Ancient Roman Religion (London, 1948), 25.



The Greeks and Romans could conceive of mighty figures who encom-passed the whole of the earth and the natural world, and put them into their literature as symbolic and allegorical figures; but they did not have a lot of use for them in worship.

Whitmore is completely unaware of this context to my brief remark in Pagan Religions. He attempts to refute the latter by quoting literary references to Gaia such as Hesiod and the Homeric and Orphic hymns, thereby missing the whole point, but also tries to assemble evidence for an actual popular cult of her. He does so by citing a dictionary which does not support his case and a handbook which does, but which is based on Farnells long-outdated text. He also, however, quotes Burkert, and this is more disturbing, because he parades what was said about Gaias large place in speculative sources, and ignores the subsequent remark about her lack of one in cult.43 It is when he goes on to look at later sources for earth goddesses, however, that his work acquires value, even if not in the sense in which he himself intended it. This effect concerns two texts from early medieval sources. One is the Latin poem Praecatio terrae matris, found in several Continental manuscripts dating from the sixth century onward, and an English one from the eleventh or twelfth century. The second is the Field Blessing Ceremony or Aecerbot, known from a single English manuscript of the late tenth or early eleventh century.

The former is almost certainly a Pagan work in origin, being a very polished literary work in praise of Earth, Divine Goddess, Mother Nature produced by a sophisticated writer towards the end of the Roman Empire.44 This fits the tradition of saluting such a deity in litera-ture. This poem, however, was incorporated into early medieval works of herbal medicine, as a charm, and was glossed in the earliest of those as the beginning of the prayer to earth employed by the Pagans of old when they wished to collect herbs. It was therefore assumed to have magical power to increase the potency of the herbs being collected, and was Christianised in the works concerned by the addition of a similar prayer directed to the Christian divine powers immediately after it.45 The Field Blessing Ceremony is by contrast a Christian composi-tion, quoting passages of church liturgy and invoking the powers of the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, and the Evangelists. It also, however, called on Erce, Erce, Erce, earths mother, as the indwelling spirit of the soil that

43. Whitmore, Trials of the Moon, 201.44. J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff, eds., Minor Latin Poets (Cambridge, Mass.,

1934), 33950.45. J. H. G. Grattan and Charles Singer, AngloSaxon Magic and Medicine (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1952), 456; A. D. Nock, Some Latin Spells, Folklore 36 (1925), 936.



is to be fertilised. The word Erce is not recorded in any other source and has no discernible meaning in Anglo-Saxon, so may be a genuine goddess name or a corruption of the Latin ecce, meaning behold. The text embodies a clear theology whereby the Christian god, who is the object of most of its devotion, grants fertility to the soil as part of his general remit as ruler of the universe and its creator. Though personified as a mother, the earth is shown as a passive entity, entirely in his power: what is less clear is whether this being was a specific former goddess or an abstraction imagined for the purposes of the rite.46

What Whitmore had done, by drawing fresh attention to these two texts in this context, is to supply the missing link in a chain of trans-mission. I had suggested such a chain in another book, published in 2003, entitled Witches, Druids and King Arthur. Pagan Religions had been written as a textbook to bring together the different forms of revisionism with respect to its subject, and Triumph to supply a new history of the development of modern Pagan witchcraft to replace that which revision-ism had rendered untenable. The new book was intended to show the continuities between ancient and modern Paganism by highlighting the aspects of late antique Paganism which had most in common with the modern kind and showing ways in which ideas and images had been transmitted to the latter through the Christian culture between. It gave Whitmore particular trouble, because in it I was demonstrating the very linkages which his mythology of me held that I denied. He got round the problem by ignoring the main thrust of my arguments and trying to find details of the information provided which he thought that he could fault. One of those arguments was that in the course of the impe-rial Roman period, writers began to conceive more readily of great god-desses who combined the identities and qualities of individual female divinities, such as Apuleiuss Isis and a triple moon goddess, and also of an abstracted figure called Nature, representing the entire natural world. This was one understandable consequence of the formation of a huge empire in which different peoples and cults could mingle freely as never before. I also highlighted the fact that some twelfth-century Christian intellectuals developed the concept of a goddess Nature to whom their god had entrusted charge of the physical world; a concept which lin-gered in different forms until the modern period.47

When Whitmore drew attention to the poem and the blessing cere-monythough with very different intentionshe filled the gap between

46. British Library, Cotton MS Caligula A7, fos. 176a178a. Translations are in most books that deal with early English magic.

47. Witches, Druids and King Arthur (London: Hambledon and London, 2003), 967; 16692.



the fourth and twelfth centuries by showing how such a goddess-fig-ure was taken into Christian cosmology. Early Christians had particu-lar problems with Pagan deities who had been the subjects of actual cults, and who could therefore be readily identified as demons. Gaia and Terra Mater, however, with their lack of temples and their low profile in worship, combined with their presence as symbolic beings in literature, were much less tainted, and these two texts show the process of assimi-lation to Christianity of the deity-form that they represented. The need of medieval Christians for a major female divinity to mediate between humanity and the supreme god, is well known, as is its most important solution, of the growth of the cult of the Virgin Mary. What has been much less discussed is the use that some thinkers made of a goddess-figure associated with the earth and the natural world (and later with the stars as well or instead) to provide such a mediator. What is more, this figure prepared the way for the emergence of the paramount goddess of the modern imagination, who became that of Paganism. A quite impor-tant additional component of transmission has been put into the revi-sionist model of Pagan survivals.

The lesser example of a contribution by Whitmore began with three specific case-studies which had been used in the traditional model of history to provide evidence of the existence of an active Paganism through the Middle Ages. In Pagan Religions I suggested that none of them stood up to scrutiny. Whitmore ignored two of them and picked on the one where he thought that he could fault me. This concerned a remarkable episode in the Scottish seaport town of Inverkeithing at Easter 1282, where the parish priest summoned the small girls of the surrounding countryside to his church and led them in a dance around a fertility image, carrying a phallus carved on a pole. On another occa-sion he ordered his parishioners to prick each other with goads, and he was then murdered. The conclusion that I suggested from these events was that he was demented.48 Whitmore found a Victorian book, which informed him that the murder took place a year after the dance, in a brawl (which he implies was not connected), and that in the interim the priest was summoned before his bishop to explain himself, and suc-cessfully defended himself on the grounds that he was following local custom. Whitmore thus restored the episode as evidence for a Paganism that was not only still flourishing in thirteenth-century Scotland, but involved some priests and was tolerated by their superiors.49

My own account of it was repeated, with full attribution, from a good

48. Pagan Religions, 299.49. Trials of the Moon, 678.



historian, Jeffrey Burton Russell, who had drawn the conclusion that I cited and used his account specifically to discredit the use made of it by Margaret Murray.50 Whitmore knew this perfectly well, as he includes the reference to Russell, and so also knew that his quarrel was with the latter and not me; but it is another of his consistent tactics that I must be made to appear a lone and malevolent eccentric with whom no other reputable historian agrees. He therefore implied that Russells account had been more friendly to the traditional use of the incident than mine, and also that I had known of the information in the Victorian work and failed to provide it. In fact I had not used that latter book because it had a reputation as a scurrilous and inaccurate work. After Whitmores attack, I read it and found that it did indeed contain the extra information that he had quoted.51 I also, however, read the original text, which is in a manuscript in the British Library, an edition of which was published in 1839, with an English translation in 1913.52 It lacks all of the extra details provided by Whitmore, which were invented by his Victorian source. Indeed, it contains others which bear out Russells judgement. It specifi-cally states that the priest was making a personal revival of the cult of the Roman god Liber Pater (Bacchus), not carrying on a local tradition. Some of his parishioners objected to his action, whereupon he replied with obscenities. His critics seem to have been cowed by his authority until the next Easter, when he tried the stunt of getting some parishion-ers to use goads to prick others while they were performing penance. At that point the burgesses of the town turned upon him in outrage, but he still refused to listen and somebody knifed him to death that night. The chronicler made clear that it was a shocking and unique event.

Whitmores action in drawing my attention directly to the source has highlighted for me the extent to which a well-educated thirteenth century Scottish priest could be familiar with Pagan classical literature, even one apparently needed to go mad to attempt to revive the cult of a god from it in this way. More important is Whitmores emphasis on the Victorian book, even if his use of it was wrong. I was mistaken to neglect it, because it shows how determined an English author could be, by the 1860s, to demonstrate that an active Paganism had survived through the Middle Ages, even to the extent of embellishing sources when they

50. Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972)51.Essay on the Worship of the Generative Powers during the Middle Ages of

Western Europe, appended to the 1865 London reprint of Richard Payne Knight, A Discourse of the Worship of Priapus, 13031.

52. British Library, Cotton MS Claudius DVII, fo. 192, the socalled Chronicle of Lanercost. The Latin edition was by Joseph Stevenson and the translation by Sir Herbert Maxwell.



did not support this case. Another part of the context for the develop-ment of modern Paganism, and of a post-Christian British society, is in place. The work was of course anonymous, but rumour credited it at the time to Thomas Wright, a notable antiquary.53 This attribution remains unproved, but Wright certainly made a different contribution to the development of Paganism, by asserting the idea that Robin Hood was originally a forest god rather than a human outlaw, which was taken up by Margaret Murray. Like the book which may or may not have been his, more notice needs to be taken of him in Pagan history.

The last study, of a point at which reconciliation might have been possible, concerns the figure of Ceridwen. She features, as Ceridfen, Ceritven, Kerritven, Kyrridven, or Kerritwen, in some of the mystical poems credited to the legendary bard Taliesin, as a muse who confers the gift of inspiration upon Welsh bards: these are twelfth- or thirteenth-century texts which may incorporate older material.54 Her role as giver of inspiration seems to derive from her part in the story of the birth (or rebirth) of Taliesin, who had accidentally drunk from a cauldron which she had brewed to confer great wisdom and magical and creative ability. As such, she is one of the great characters of world litera-ture. Although full versions of this story survive only in sixteenth-cen-tury texts, it was certainly known in the time of the poets who hailed her as a muse, or before. Some of the characters in it, with the relationships that they have there, are named in the Welsh Triads, devices to aid the memory of poets, which had been compiled by 1200. Moreover, Welsh bards referred to episodes from it for the rest of the Middle Ages.55

Nobody seems to have thought that Ceridwen had been a goddess until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when a clergyman called Edward Davies attempted to defend the literal truth of the Book of Genesis against questions that had begun to be raised about it by the developing sciences of geology and palaeontology. A favourite device of devout Christians who attempted this at the time was to find apparent references to Noahs Flood in the mythologies of different nations, and Davies applied it to a reconstruction of ancient British religion that he made from medieval Welsh literature. One of his most influential conclu-sions was that Ceridwen (being the version in which he now fixed her name), had been the Great Goddess of Britain, its divine mother figure

53. This attribution is written on the Bodleian Library copy of the work.54. The latest edition and analysis is Marged Haycock, Legendary Poems from the

Book of Taliesin (Aberystwyth: CMCS, 2007)55. Ibid., 31319; Rachel Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein, Cardiff: University of

Wales Press, 1978, 42, 103, 198, 308, 4635; Patrick Ford, Ystoria Taliesin, Cardiff: Uni-versity of Wales Press, 1992.



whose body had represented the earth. This was an early appearance of his centurys preoccupation with such a goddess, although Davies held her to be a degenerate memory of Noahs Ark. His new vision of her was reflected in his version of her name, which carried connota-tions of beauty and adoration.56 His work became extremely influen-tial, and his concept of Ceridwen as a goddess was repeated as fact in Lady Charlotte Guests translation of medieval Welsh tales, The Mabino-gion, in 1849.57 This carried it to a huge audience, well into the twentieth century. Among scholars of Welsh literature, however, it fared rather less well, as Daviess reputation as a scholar was (justly) destroyed in the mid-Victorian period.58 By the mid twentieth century, that ages leading expert in the Taliesin legend, Sir Ifor Williams, had no time for the idea that she had been a goddess. He derived her from the character in the story of Taliesins origins, and argued that her original name had meant crooked woman which would suit her apparent nature in it. These suggestions were accepted by other experts in medieval Welsh texts, such as Rachel Bromwich.59

On the other hand, archaeologists occasionally continued to represent the popular view. In 1967 Anne Ross suggested that Pagan goddesses seem to lurk behind all of the enchantresses of medieval Welsh fiction, including Ceridwen.60 The latter disappeared from books on Iron Age and Romano-British deities in the 1980s, such as those of Miranda Aldhouse-Green and Graham Webster.61 It was this disappearance, and knowledge that her modern reputation as a deity was owed to a nineteenth-century Christian zealot, that made me suggest in 1991 that she fairly clearly was not a pre-Christian divinity.62 I confess that I was also uncomfort-able with the way in which the Victorians seemed still to put the dead weight of their hands on the contemporary British popular imagination, to make us credit dubious Pagan goddesses, while so many undoubted and striking examples of such beings, now attested from my islands

56. I have told this story in full in Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 1729.

57 The reference is on p. 429 of my edition, the 1906 Dent one.58. Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, 25963.59. Ifor Williams, Chwedl Taliesin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1960), 34;

Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein, 3089; Ifor Williams, Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1944), 5965. Williams derivation of the name is now questioned, but without an agreed alternative:

Haycock, Legendary Poems, 31819.60. Anne Ross, Pagan Celtic Britain (London: Cardinal 1974), 290.61. Graham Webster, The British Celts and their Gods under Rome (London: Batsford,

1986); Miranda Aldhouse-Green, The Gods of the Celts (Gloucester: Sutton, 1986).62. Pagan Religions, 323.



archaeological record (and elsewhere) were apparently unknown. In 1995, however, Miranda Aldhouse-Green declared, without arguing the case, that Ceridwen had been almost certainly a goddess.63 At first sight this statement appears to be a polar opposite to mine, but they actu-ally occupy different points in the same category, of acknowledgement that the matter is doubtful. There is thus every potential for people who wish to see Ceridwen as a deity as a matter of personal choice, to con-tinue to do so. That identification is still a complete back-projection from medieval literature, resting on Edward Daviess otherwise discredited Christian polemic. It is however a possible one, and I have come to rec-ognise more of the ability of literary figures to move the creative imagi-nation, including the religious: the veneration now given by some to the figures from the novels of H. P. Lovecraft is a case in point.

Ben Whitmore knew absolutely nothing of any of this, but even on the information in my book alone, he had the option of suggesting that, if the status of Ceridwen as a former goddess could not be proved, nor could it be disproved; the position which I have myself embraced. I would happily have colluded in such a policy of live and let live, but it is sig-nificant that, neither here nor at any other of the many points in his book at which an equivalent course was open to him, did he show any incli-nation to take it. In every case, the opportunity for a mutual tolerance was rejected. What he wanted to do instead was to annihilate my repu-tation, because he held me to be an enemy to the religion of which he so fervently proclaims himself a member, for seeming to undermine it. In the case of Ceridwen, the paring down of Pagan Religions meant that I could tell little of the complex narrative of development provided above. The only source that I could cite was one by Ifor Williams, and that was the only one that Whitmore could therefore read. He noted, correctly, that the surviving full story of Ceridwen and Taliesin survives only in sixteenth-century texts, and assumed, wrongly, that there was no sign of it earlier. He quoted Williams as saying that certain themes and frag-ments of the story are old, and assumed that they represented deities, without realising that Williams entire argument (including Ceridwens very name) rests on the belief that the relationship between Ceridwen and Taliesin in the full story was an original component. He then ignores the other arguments I had made about medieval Welsh literature in the book and uses this single example to condemn my entire treatment of that literature as a misreading of previous scholarship.64

63. Celtic Goddesses (London: British Museum, 1995), 689.64. Whitmore, Trials of the Moon, 667. The year after he published this, I was

elected to a Fellowship of the Learned Society of Wales, the highest scholarly body of that nation.



The two examples provided above, of genuinely significant contribu-tions to Pagan history, are the total that I could find in Whitmores work. In all the rest of it the misuse of sources, and the defamation of me, are as serious, but no such positive effects are forthcoming; and in the two cases concerned those effects were not perceived by Whitmore himself. It must be clear from this that his problem is not a lack of intelligence, industry and (at times) access to source material, but his ideology itself. At each point so far, it blocks off both a true understanding of the nature of the issues and the data involved, and an opportunity for compromise, rapprochement and co-operation with people of a different viewpoint.

Prospects for the Future

The present fuss over revisionism in Pagan history is not a debate in the normal sense, because the counter-revisionists have not invited support-ers of revisionism to a discussion: rather, they have sought instead to persuade other Pagans to stop believing those supporters. It is not clear what they are supposed to believe instead, because no counter-revision-ist history has been developed: the implication of the attacks is that the traditional story is somehow correct after all, but it is never explained exactly how. Clearly human beings do not have the same tastes in litera-ture and ideas, any more than in other aspects of life. The equally plain truth that people are capable of reading utterly different meanings into the same text is also applicable here: entire sub-disciplines of recep-tion and audience studies have been developed in universities to take account of it. Counter-revisionism is, however, not a feature of con-temporary Paganism in general: rather, it is concentrated heavily among certain types of Pagan, in certain areas of the world. It is rare in Europe, including Britain, while its stronghold is the United States, and espe-cially the central and western parts of that nation; it is notably weaker in New York and New England. It also has vocal representatives in Canada, Australia, and (evidently) New Zealand. In all the areas which furnish representatives, on the other hand, it also faces strong and prominent advocates of the revisionist position. This argument, therefore, is really one internal to certain Pagan communities in the Western and South-ern Hemispheres, which the Internet has allowed to become evident to the rest of the world.65 Nor is it equally important to all kinds of Pagan,

65. Participants in Internet debates often identify their nationality, and I am per-sonally acquainted with many of the overseas Pagan communities from which they come. Others betray their homeland by distinctive spellings and turns of phrase, and in extreme cases there are sometimes technical ways of determining the source of transmissions.



but is concentrated mainly among those who identify to some measure with witchcraft and its history: for example, I spent much of the 2000s researching and writing a pair of books upon the history of Druidry, which have caused barely a ripple of concern on publication, in com-parison with that generated now by my writings on Pagan witchcraft.66 Finally, and remarkably for a complex of religions such as Pagan witch-craft, which have sought to empower the feminine, counter-revisionism is represented most prominently by men, who often employ a very tes-tosterone-rich language of swagger and taunt. They are never the people who have established themselves over decades as leading figures of the Pagan traditions of which they claim to be the defenders, by founding or dispersing the great lineages, orders, and networks, writing the books that have inspired people to become Pagans, and visibly defending and promoting Paganism to the wider public.

The geographical patterning of counter-revisionism has begun to attract attention from commentators, who have informally suggested possible reasons for it in the manner in which colonial societies often copy religious traditions in more extreme and zealous forms than those in the parent country. I forebear to comment on such explanations, save to recognise that they may well have validity, as I am not a member of one of those societies. I can however, propose instead three simple and functional explanations for the pattern: that Britain has had Paganism longer than the other nations; that the revisionist model developed there as a response to the collapse of the traditional model of Pagan history and did not arrive as a challenger to it; and that it is a small and well-inte-grated country. I can describe the consequences from my own point of view, as they formed the context for some of the key texts of the present disputation.

Towards the end of the 1980s, British Wicca faced three different chal-lenges. The first was increasing disbelief in its traditional story of origins, in the face of new academic scholarship, which had filtered through to most of its respected and influential figures by the end of the decade. The second was the panic over alleged satanic ritual abuse of children, which posed a threat to anybody in a religion related to witchcraft. The third was the appearance and rapid spread of new kinds of Paganism, such as Druidry and the Northern Tradition, on a scene which Wicca had hitherto dominated. It rose to all those challenges in the years around 1990, by founding a national organisation with its own magazine and annual convention, and regional branches and conferences; going into partnership with other kinds of Pagan when setting up these structures;

66. The Druids (London: Hambledon and London, 2007) and Blood and Mistletoe.



and looking for academic allies to help produce a new version of history. I unwittingly volunteered myself for the latter task by publishing Pagan Religions in 1991. It was not written for Pagans, but for students and general readers, and I had no expectation that Pagans would buy it, as they rarely seemed to have direct contact with academic publica-tions, and I did not see myself as being a missionary to them. They did, however, do so and viewed it as a helpful first step in the production of a new history. I was immediately plucked from the sidelines of the British Pagan movement to its limelight, and urged to produce a verifi-able history of it to replace that in which Pagan leaders had generally ceased to believe.

This was how Triumph got written, in the course of the mid to late 1990s, with the assistance and collusion of Pagans all over the nation. I would often return from the archives with fresh material and be able to discuss it with some of them that very evening. From the beginning the work was supported by the most respected of British Wiccans, and I was able to meet or correspond with all who were still active who had worked with Gerald Gardner in the 1950s, some of whom became dear friends. I attended all of the national conferences and many of the regional, and spoke regularly at them. A few British people initially reacted badly to Pagan Religions, tending to be either Pagan witches who were (self-con-sciously) not Wiccans and individuals who were not formally Pagan at all, but had ingested the traditional history and described themselves as artists or feminists (or both). By the later years of the decade they had all either disappeared or met me and talked things through to mutual satisfaction: it must be remembered that the whole of Britain is smaller than many of the individual states of the United States. On writing up the book, I not only tested its ideas on many audiences but got some leading Pagan witches to read every page of every draft. I naturally did not include anything in which I did not believe as a result, but it was not allowed to go to press until I was sure that they were all happy with it, which ensured a good reception in my homeland when it appeared and also across Continental Europe because of its strong links with Britain, embodied in meetings such as the Pan-European Wiccan Convention.

There was in fact one single British manifestation of hostility in the subsequent decade, and that was an exception which proved the rule: it was embodied in Jani Farrell-Roberts, who had come to England from Australia following an amazing triple conversion experience, from a Roman Catholic priest to a Paganism, a feminist and (by surgery) a woman.67 On arriving in the homeland of her new religion, she was infu-

67. Recorded in her autobiography, which she advertised in the debate below.



riated to find that the story that she had been told about it was no longer generally accepted, and chose me as the scapegoat.68 The only signif-icant support that she received as a result was on the Internet, from Americans; and after that, peace was restored. There are still Pagan witches in Britain who claim an unbroken descent of their lineage from the remote past, all propagating traditions which have appeared only in recent years; and since they do not attack historians, and do not present any historical evidence for their claims, we get on perfectly well when we meet. Last November I made my annual visit to WitchFest Interna-tional, the main gathering of Pagan witches in Britain (which has been at times the largest in the world). Listening to speakers, I was struck by the emphasis that they made on the contrast between the present time and the early 1990s, when the traditional history had disintegrated, Gerald Gardner was accused of being an old pervert who had invented Wicca from nothing, and experts in religious studies dismissed it as a shapeless nature religion with no intellectual or historical depth. It was felt that the revisionist history had secured it against all three difficulties.

British Paganism was not always so cohesive or tolerant. As readers of Triumph will know (let alone those in Britain who remember those times), the Gardnerian network was riven by personal feuds in the early 1960s; it was attacked viciously by Charles Cardell; the first attempt at a national organisation, in 1964, was wrecked by denunciations of Wicca from Robert Cochrane and a friend; and the hostility between Gardne-rians and Alex Sanders created a rift between the two great families of British Wiccans which lasted for decades. These rivalries, and clashing claims to legitimacy and supremacy, created a defensiveness about his-torical claims as well. It was only when they began to settle, in the later 1980s, that real progress could begin, both towards national co-opera-tion and to the building of a new history. Parts of North America and Australasia, where Pagan witchcraft has gained significant numbers of adherents more recently than in Britain, seem still to be engaged in that initial turmoil of identity formation and community-building: a kind of Wild West of current Paganism. They reproduce many of the tensions that their British cousins knew in earlier times, and with them, perhaps, a freshness, vigour, and excitement that British Paganism has lost as the price of settling down. Even more important, there seems to have been no gap there between the end of the traditional history and the arrival of the revisionist one: the latter ran directly into the former. If this analysis is correct, then those areas of the world will in turn follow the

68. The debate between us was published in The Cauldron in the May and August issues of 2003.



same course as Britain, slowly resolving their clashes and perhaps also accepting an elastic form of the revisionist model which leaves room for different readings and interpretations within an atmosphere of mutual tolerance. It might be added that for a British historian the sense of dj vu in the current arguments is even stronger, because so many of them rely on material long overtaken by further work. Old books like those of Margaret Murray and Sir James Frazer appear on some web sites almost as sacred texts, while Carlo Ginzburgs Ecstasies, a work of the 1980s, is treated as if it were a new discovery.69 Books of mine published more then ten or even twenty years ago are discussed as if they represented my latest thought, while my various relevant publications since are not noticed.70

I still receive regular letters from people who were either first attracted to Wicca as a result of reading Triumph or who were reassured by it after a collapse of confidence resulting from loss of faith in its traditional history. It therefore requires an effort of comprehension on my part when I read Internet postings from Pagans in other nations who accuse me of failing to understand the damage that I have done to their beliefs. The heart of the problem is that those beliefs were never actually theirs, in a double sense. The original history of Wicca was based firmly and explicitly on academic scholarship, and academics have changed their minds with further research; likewise, Wicca was taken from Britain to other nations, and the most prominent British Wiccans have altered their opinions. It is small wonder that some Pagans in those nations currently experience shock and a sense of dispossession. There was nobody in their social world as the new historical model was being developed to talk it through with them and involve them. None the less, that model does provide several links between ancient Paganism and modern Pagan-ism, with room for many different kinds of emphasis; and it also invites Pagans abroad who follow and develop British traditions to look more deeply into their own local history as well. The good news is surely that time is on their side.

Bibliography

Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon. 3rd edition. New York: Penguin, 2006 [1979].

69. It was translated into English in 1992, but unrevised.70. Those relating to witchcraft were listed in Writing the History of Witchcraft.

It may be noted that Ben Whitmore, in attempting to condemn most of my work, had not read about half of what I had published on subjects in which he was interested by the time at which he wrote.



Ady, Thomas. A Candle in the Dark. London, 1656.Alhouse-Green, Miranda. Celtic Goddesses. London: British Museum, 1995.. The Gods of the Celts. Gloucester: Sutton, 1986.Aloi, Peg. Review of The Trials of the Moon, by Ben Whitmore. The Pomegranate 12, no.

2 (2010): 26368.Beard, Mary, John North, and S. R. F. Price. Religions of Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1998Bromwich, Rachel. Trioedd Ynys Prydein. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1978Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985.Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.Clifton, Chas S. Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America.

Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2006.Cohn, Norman. Europes Inner Demons.

Hutton 1

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Transcript of Hutton 1