Ronald Hutton - Shibboleths and Moonshine?

There has been some discussion just recently in the blogsphere that appears to debunk some of Ronald Hutton’s core theories for the historical veracity of witchcraft and paganism. It all started when Peregrine, the owner of the blog “Magic of the Ordinary” wrote a response to a rather passionate anti Christian pagan article found in the Green Egg. While I would agree with some of Peregrine’s arguments about the tone and the perspective of the article, I also felt that the author had some justification for why he presented his arguments with such umbrage. David Griffin offered some pointed rebuttal to the comments in this article, which I felt were also quite valid and correct. Then the discussion tangentially went into discussing the merits of the writings of Ronald Hutton, and the real debate began.

The central premise to this debate is whether or not there is any connection between modern witchcraft and paganism, and the paganism of antiquity. This would include the possibility of the survival of witchcraft practices and family traditions from antiquity, through the middle ages to the present time. Hutton has forcefully denied that there is any connection whatsoever between the past and present beliefs and practices, and has said that other historians steadfastly agree with him. That heated discussion brought forth an article by David, who took on the Hutton premise, and in the process, revealed some interesting new perspectives in the disciplines of history and anthropology, some of which I was not fully aware of. You can find Peregrine’s original article here, and David Griffin’s article here. I’ll let you judge these two different perspectives on their own merits.

I was actually loath to get into this heated discussion since I had also bought into Hutton’s arguments and his basic premise. Yet after being shown a link to a well written and researched book that successfully takes on Ronald Hutton’s prize theories, I had a change of heart. (Many thanks to David for that link.) I carefully read that work, and I finally decided that I had to say something about this contentious issue. That wonderful book not only empowers misgivings and personal issues that I have had all along with Hutton’s declarations, but it was also quite illuminating. As a result, I am amending and modifying my opinions about the historical validity of pagan and witchcraft survivals. I will continue to be skeptical, of course, but I will not be dismissive of them either, and for some very good reasons, some of which I will discuss in this article.

Many have read Hutton’s book, “Triumph of the Moon,” as well as some of his other books, such as “Stations of the Sun” and “Pagan Religions of the British Isles.” Many are familiar with Hutton’s writings, but typically unfamiliar with others who have taken issue with Hutton’s over-reaching declarations. The book I mentioned above, entitled “Trials of the Moon,” was written by one of those very same authors who has brilliantly revealed the flaws in Hutton’s work. I have ordered the actual book from CreateSpace dot com because I wanted to honor the author, as well as look over his bibliography and have access to an index. You can find it here.

Needless to say, Ben Whitmore has done a fabulous job showing that the case for a historical witchcraft and paganism is anything but closed. Other areas that Whitmore has opened the door to consider involve the historical validity of the occurrence of a Mother Goddess in Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Greece, and whether any pagans or actual witches were killed during the witchcraft hysteria in Europe. Whitmore has also softened the harsh criticism of Margaret Murray, Leland and other earlier scholars and their theories - individuals that Hutton has ridiculed and thoroughly dismissed.

I have to admit that my opinions are in flux right now, so my readers will have to patiently wait for me to make a more thorough study of this work. Have no fear, this issue will most definitely get more consideration in the future. I also feel obligated now to read and examine the books written by the Italian historian, Carlo Ginzburg (“Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbat,” and “The Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries”) to see another quite different perspective by an accredited historian. Yet even now, I can at least make a few amendments on some of the previous statements that I have made in regards to the history of witchcraft.

You see, I freely admit that I was completely bamboozled by Ronald Hutton, taking many of his comments that I neither liked nor found palatable as a kind of academic gospel, when in fact they were poorly contrived and not supported by the actual evidence, or even by other researchers, writers and scholars. Despite his good humor and supposed regard for modern witches and pagans, Hutton must have secretly had an axe to grind, and instead of being considered an academic friend of neopagans and witches, he should actually be revealed to be quite inimical to those same people. He is, therefore, much more of a Christian apologist than a promoter of modern paganism. What Hutton did with a stroke of his academic pen was to eliminate any consideration of the historical roots of modern paganism and witchcraft. After his book became vogue and accepted as the new status quo, we who were pagans and witches found ourselves cut off from the various sources of our own beliefs and creeds, since anyone who wrote about vestigial rites, family traditions and cultural artifacts were ridiculed or vigorously dismissed. A veritable cloak of silence was placed over the writings and findings of many other historians and researchers, due mostly to the wide and uncritical acceptance of Hutton’s books.

Now I have come to discover that there are indeed many peculiar practices, beliefs and symbolism that have survived the onslaught of Christian persecution and continue to exist today, whose source was indeed antique paganism. This would seem so obvious to anyone, but was harshly and intensely contradicted by Hutton, who made the global pronouncement that there were no pagan survivals; that all cultural relics which seem to be pagan are in fact more recent creations. This has now been shown to be completely false, and not only by other practitioners of modern paganism and witchcraft, but by other scholars as well. Ronald Hutton represents a very ultra-conservative view point, which is not shared by other scholars who have researched the same or analogous evidential materials. The fact that they have come to completely opposite conclusions than what Hutton has written about is something of a profound eye opener, to say the very least.

What this means is that there are a lot of pagan practices, beliefs and symbolism embedded in our culture today. They are buried and integrated into a modern Christian post-modern culture, but they can be identified, extracted and placed in a new context, one that is exclusively pagan. In fact one could say that modern Christianity and its cultural beliefs and practices owes a tremendous debt to ancient pagan beliefs and practices. This, of course, takes the argument that Peregrine was making (that modern paganism and witchcraft owes a great debt to Christianity) and completely turns it on its head. What we have to consider now is that perhaps the founders of modern paganism and witchcraft weren’t just shamelessly appropriating Christian practices and beliefs, and then populating them in a new package, but maybe they were just extracting what they supposed were the pagan components from Christianity and properly restoring them into a modern pagan reconstruction.

 Still, Hutton was mostly correct about Gardnerian witchcraft and all of its various offshoots - they’re, without a doubt, all modern practices and traditions. The history of the Gardnerian tradition of witchcraft probably only goes back to the late 19th century, earlier than Hutton has allowed, but very much in line with what Phillip Heselton has discovered and written about in his books. Even so, modern witchcraft and paganism were not formed in a vacuum. These modern religions could easily have a lot of comparable beliefs and practices analogous to pre-Christian pagans. The times may have irreparably changed, the mind-sets and cultures are completely different, but the human condition is forever analogous. It is there, in that place of confluence, where we meet and join with what was practiced by our ancestors before Christianity became the dominant faith.

In regards to the ongoing discussion between Peregrine and David Griffin, I think that one very important concept that no one has addressed is that "religion" in antiquity had three very specific domains - the religion associated with the State, the family, and the individual. The outlier is, of course, the mysteries. Yet in all cases, the only really organized religion in antiquity was the State religion, and that was not nearly as organized as it became under the authority and influence of the Catholic Christian church.

For instance, in antique paganism there were no theologies, tightly regulated scriptures, single source liturgies, professional priests with exclusive liturgical prerogatives, an over-arching hierarchy or even ecumenical councils to establish a common creed. Religion in antiquity was highly informal and unstructured, with only State festivals, celebrations and the larger mystery schools acting as exceptions to this rule, and even then, traditions were subject to change for various reasons, and nothing was considered a hardened doctrine. Heads of households could perform community sacrifices and other liturgies, and throughout that time, there wasn't either a book of common liturgy or common belief.

All of this massive organization and uniformity in religion came about when Christianity was elevated to the state religion in Rome. The common folk were quite happy to attend to the state sponsored religious activities as they always had, and then continued with their pagan family and personal traditions without so much as an eye blink. While many people may have converted to Christianity and gave up their pagan beliefs, others were more or less co-opted into the faith, particularly those who lived in outlying and fringe areas, away from the major cities and towns. Because a religion in those times would have been a mixture of State, family and individual practices, one would surmise that a truly ancient survival of the pagan times would also incorporate a mixture of State (in this case Christianity), family and individual practices.

By the early middle ages, the Catholic church was fully engaged with converting pagans to the church in massive numbers (instead of persecuting them), but there no longer was the desire or the ability, or even the number of trained educators and clergy, to thoroughly change the way that many of these pagans actually believed. So it would not be surprising if some of these folk kept their pagan beliefs and practices quite active while still attending church (if there was a church to attend) and outwardly behaving as good Christians. It would not have been until the Reformation that the church and civil authorities would send out teams of interrogators to find and prosecute anyone who wasn't pure in their faith. Still, there were no witch trials in Italy and probably in other locations as well.

Even so, a secretive family tradition could have been kept alive all through the middle ages and even into the 20th century, yet it would have been a heterodoxy of Christianity mixed with pagan beliefs and practices. So I think that Peregrine and Hutton are dead wrong about their pronouncement that nothing survived the two thousand years of Christian persecution. Since religion in antiquity differentiated between State, family and the individual, adopting Christianity would have satisfied the need for conforming to the State religion, yet that conformity wouldn’t have completely purged all such practices and beliefs from the family and personal domains.

I believe, then, that one of the major problems with this discussion is that the definition of what a religion is may be too heavily influenced by Christianity. Hutton is looking for an organized religion analogous to Christianity surviving into the present times, when the religion of antiquity was never organized to such an extent. He also requires that individuals must exclusively belong to one group or the other, when this probably didn’t always happen. Using this criteria, Hutton has judged that such a religion never existed, and he's right, it didn't; but then again, it never did until Christianity came along. How ironic all of this appears to me, and I never would have known these perspectives had I not boned up on my studies of Greek and Roman religion, particularly through the writings of Walter Burkert.

The possibility for survival seems much more likely, but the big question that remains is what do we do about it and where do we go with that discovery? What is the future destiny of our faith? I, for one, would not be interested in engaging with an authentic historical tradition that mixed Catholic Christianity with pagan beliefs and practices. What I would be interested in is filtering out the Christian beliefs and engaging in a reconstruction effort to create a modern tradition of witchcraft with lots of ancient pagan lore. As a friend of mine has put it, the purpose of religious reconstruction is to create a system that would approximate what that original pagan tradition might have looked like if it had survived intact and were practiced today, as a modern synthesis and expression of an ancient tradition. I believe that modern paganism and witchcraft, allied with the various heathen research and reconstruction efforts, has managed, in its own flawed way, to do just that. There is a lot of room for improvement on the existing praxis, but that is very likely the task of a new generation of elders in the religious traditions of pagans and witches. 

Frater Barrabbas