Hutton quotes - page 1

Some other material from The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles; Their Nature and Legacy by Ronald Hutton, 1991. Quotes marked (*) seemed particularly relevant to lesson three of Keltria's correspondence course.

p. 14: "[Humans about 8000 BC] used fire to remove woodland on a larger scale than before. Where the natural ecosystem was fragile, the trees never grew back as the people moved on, and heaths and bogs came into being."

(*) p. 16: "One of the major developments in British archeology during the past twenty years has been the loss of confidence by its practitioners in their ability to recognize the movement of peoples. The problem is that an exiting population can adopt foreign artifacts and fashions so completely as to appear to have been replaced by foreigners. Thus, according to traditional archeological practice, had modern Britain been an illiterate society then it would have been natural to have spoken of the invasion of the 'Washing Machine People' in the 1950s and large-scale Japanese immigration in the 1970s."

pp. 37-38 regarding "Venus" figures: Egypt considered the earth to be male, earliest unequivocal evidence of mother Goddess in late Sumerian texts, no clear evidence in Crete before c. 2000 BC. In Egypt holding breasts was a female sign of grief, so can not be considered as "obviously" significant of maternity or fertility. Female figures could have been dolls (mostly female because they were made mostly for girl children) or for sympathetic magic (especially obstetrical).[1]
"The second attack (on the Neolithic Mother Goddess concept) was made by Andrew Fleming, in an article in the periodical World Archeology uncompromisingly entitled The Myth of the Mother Goddess (1969, pp. 247-61?). He pointed out the simple fact that there was absolutely no proof that spirals, circles and dots were symbols for eyes, that eyes, faces and genderless figures were symbols of a female or that female figures were symbols of a goddess. This blew to pieces the accepted chain of goddess-related imagery from Anatolia round the coasts to Scandinavia. He was helped by the revolution in the carbon-dating process, which disproved the associated belief that megalithic architecture had travelled from the Levant with the cult of the Great Mother."
(in a footnote to p. 40, Hutton refers to Gimbutas's The Language of the Goddess: "It makes a wholly arbitrary and selective interpretation of the prehistoric symbols which it reproduces, and tacks on to this an interpretation of the historic Great Witch Hunt which is based not even upon dubious scholarship but upon assertions of modern pagans made without research. Overall, the book is an extended and very beautiful radical feminist tract.")

p. 40: "If the revised ideas of academe concerning the Goddess were made available to her modern worshipers, the latter would probably reject them. There is, of course, a chance that such a being may have been venerated in the Neolithic, but it is beyond doubt that she would not now possess so many followers had not scholars like Professor [Glyn] Daniel [in The Megalith Builders of Western Europe, 1958] proclaimed her existence with such certainty."

pp. 40-42 speak of Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, "the largest Neolithic settlement yet known," which "yielded a large quantity of apparently religious art." "Ian Hodder[2] concluded, convincingly, that all [the evidence] argues for a considerable tension between the sexes, the female being viewed alternately as comforting, producing and nurturing, and (more often) as predatory and threatening. We cannot tell from this whether the women of Çatal Hüyük were powerful, feared and honored, or suspected, feared, constrained and subordinated. Despite this wealth of information, we have no entry into the system of thought and worship which is represented. And if we cannot find one at Çatal Hüyük, where the images are so abundant, what hope do we have elsewhere in the Neolithic?"

p. 44: "Studies of primitive agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers in the present century have not brought a solution to the problem [of the divine beings of British Neolithic ritual] any nearer. They have demonstrated that such peoples can believe in a large number of spirits inhabiting the natural world, in a varying number of goddesses and gods, in a universal deity, or in differing combinations of all three. So it may have been with the New Stone Age peoples."

(*) p. 88-89: "But until the 1980s scholars who were abandoning the classic divisions [for prehistoric ages] still believed in the vital significance of an invasion which was said to have happened towards the end of the Neolithic, that of the Beaker People. These newcomers were given most of the credit for the major developments of that time. . . . They were supposed to have been a new race, crossing over from the Netherlands. . . .
"Around 1980 it became obvious that at least some of this had to be wrong. The improvement in dating methods revealed that the appearance of the new types of monument was a gradual process, which took place centuries before the new goods were adopted. The latter could thus be accounted for in terms of an importation of continental fashions by an existing population. . . . By 1988 some prehistorians were declaring roundly that the Beaker People had never existed. Some scholars even felt that the assertion that a colleague still believed in them was a condemnation in itself, not needing further elucidation. Others cautiously allowed of the possibility of a little immigration."

p. 103: (re: the so-called Celtic Cross) "In its origins there was nothing Irish, or British, or 'Celtic', about it. It developed in the western Carpathian region around 3000 BC, upon pottery. During the next millennium it spread slowly across Europe, being especially popular upon metalwork of the so-called beaker culture. Traditionally it has always been regarded as a sun symbol. . . ."

p. 107: (re: mazes) "The most famous to its devotees is also the least convincing: the putative maze upon the slopes of Glastonbury Tor. To archaeologists, the terraces upon the hill look like perfectly normal medieval or Iron Age hillside field systems, and their name, upon estate maps, indicates that the identification is correct. They are called the 'lynchets', meaning fields. . . . Even the assumption that Glastonbury itself was a major Celtic or pre-Celtic holy place is dubious. In 1964-5 Philip Rahtz excavated the crest of the Tor and found ample evidence of occupation in the sixth century AD but none of any prehistoric structures. But then, the terraces themselves remain uninvestigated. Perhaps it would be a simple and worthwhile matter to put a few sections through them and enquire after their date and purpose, treating the putative maze as a Somerset Shroud of Turin.[3]"

p. 125: "Part of the new rigor towards evidence consis ts of a strong sense of the very different ways in which superficially similar monuments and rituals can operate, given different societies. It is the separate and distinct nature of peoples, places and periods which has been emphasized by mainstream scholarship of late, thereby striking both at a fundamental principle of the earth mysteries and at an important part of the methodology of 'alternative' archaeologists. This may be compared to a solution to the problem of what to do with a jigsaw puzzle from which most of the pieces are missing. The modern academic scholar has simply to accept the fact that most of the pattern has probably gone. The 'alternative' researcher will very often take pieces from many other jigsaws, usually snipping them into shape and daubing them into shade if they do not make an immediate fit with what is being 'reconstructed.'"

p. 125-126: "The English word dragon is a translation of a Latin term, used in the Middle Ages to describe the fire-breathing, flying reptilian monster of Scandinavian and Germanic myth. In that myth, these creatures feature as threats to humankind, to be slain by heroes, and they entered the pan-European medieval imagination in that guise. They did not exist in ancient Celtic, or Roman or Greek mythology, although human-eating serpent-like monsters (often dwelling in water) did. Nor were they found in ancient Egypt, where the closest equivalent, the crocodile, had positive sacred associations. But in the Babylonian creation myth, the earth goddess Tiamat assumed the form of a mighty lizard (usually translated as 'dragon' by English writers) and in that guise was killed by the hero Marduk. The Chinese, by contrast, have always believed in great lizard-like winged beasts very similar in form to the north European dragon and therefore described as 'dragons' by English-speakers. Their legendary function, however, is quite different, for they are viewed as vessels of great spiritual power, very often beneficial to humanity. When John Michell (The View Over Atlantis, 1969) transplanted the tradition of lung mei, 'dragon-paths,' to the English landscape, he had to reckon with the fact that in English tradition dragons were regarded as destructive monsters. He did so by superimposing Chinese upon English myth so that the English dragon-slaying heros were turned into villains, striking symbolically at the sacred forces represented by the lung mei or leys. Feminist writers and artists among the earth mystics brought in the myth of Tiamat and Marduk to suggest that both Babylonian and Germanic dragon-slaying stories were folk-memories of the destruction of matriarchal religions and societies by militaristic patriarchal brutes. By the mid-1970's it was a widespread creed among 'alternative' archaeologists that wherever dragons were mentioned, across the world, they were the symbol of the Earth Mother and her energies. Thus, when contemplating statues, paintings or stories of medieval heroes who rid a countryside of a dragon, the sympathies of the onlooker had to be reversed. This well-rounded picture draws upon Scandinavian, Germanic, Chinese and Babylonian myth. But it would not have been recognizable to the Vikings, or the Germans, or the Chinese, or the Babylonians, let alone to other ancient peoples. It is a modern mythology, constructed by a process which may be compared to the looting of stonework from ruined buildings of several different kinds and ages in order to put up a brand new cathedral."

p. 131: "But the most precious gift the earth mystics have to offer others may be that very capacity for fantasy which can be such a liability in the eyes of academic scholars. If prehistory is a time of which we do, in fact, know very little, then the more imaginative reconstructions which we possess of how things might have been, the better. To be of real value, such reconstructions need to be based upon the latest archeological data and to make clear precisely where the data end and speculation begins. It is a difficult but not impossible set of rules for 'alternative' archaeologists to follow."

(*) pp. 140-142: Edward Williams (1747 - 1826), who assumed the name Iolo Morgannwg, "went on to 'revive' the medieval Order of the Bards to teach the prehistoric system of mystical belief which he had proclaimed."
"Williams was just one of a number of writers between 1760 and 1840 who also set out to 'reconstruct' the principles of a noble and natural religion worthy to be associated with prehistoric philosopher-priests. The others included Rowland Jones, John Cleland, William Cooke, D. James, Edward Davies and the famous William Blake. What distinguished Williams was partly the direct appeal which he made to the contemporary Welsh patriotic revival, and partly the fact that he provided a ritual as well as texts. The Welsh living in London revived the medieval institution of the eisteddfod, or national competition of the arts, in the early 1790s. When an eisteddfod was held in Glamorgan (or Morgannwg) in 1819, Williams included his Gorsedd ceremony in it, and this later became an integral part of the gathering. This self-conscious association of his ideas with Welsh nationalism rescued his Order of Bards from the fate of the Ancient Order of Druids, which was 'revived' by the London carpenter and builder Henry Hurle in 1781. That too survives to the present day, with ceremonies as confidently enacted, and as impeccably eighteenth-century, as Williams's."
". . . At the national eisteddfod at Llangollen in 1858, the promoters appealed for further evidence of the 'Bardo-Druidic' faith, offering a prize. What they got, sent in by an anonymous donor, was the unpublished portion of Edward Williams's work. This was handed over to the perfect editor, the Revd. J. William ap Ithel, whose carelessness and credulity in handling real Welsh manuscripts has aroused the irritation of modern scholars. He duly issued it as part of the Welsh Manuscripts Society series, under the title Barddas, thereby providing the new Bards with their 'definitive' account of ancient Celtic mystical belief.
"During the twentieth century most came to accept that Barddaswas not the authentic voice of their remote ancestors, and to perform the Gorsedd ritual with tongues firmly in cheeks."

p. 143: (re: Caitlín Matthews) "She is clearly highly intelligent, her style is fluent and lively, she reads both Welsh and Irish and she uses a full range of published primary resources. She has no time for the fantasies of Edward Williams and his successors. A lovely personality shines through her work. Yet she still falls below the standards required of a professional historian. She makes no attempt to distinguish between the relative value of sources, so those from the seventh century and from the seventeenth are put together with no sense of context. She assumes that the 'Celtic world' formed a whole, from Ireland to the Alps, and consequently mixes data from all over this vast area without raising the possibility of local variation. Thus she plucks her material from all over space and time and arranges it to suit her taste and that of her audience, on the assumption that Celts were always and everywhere much the same. A swift example of this process at work may be seen in her consideration of 'the Celtic year.' She states that the quarter days 1 February, 1 May, 1 August and 1 November were important festivals. This is perfectly true for Ireland and Scotland, but it is a Gaelic system which may not have operated further afield. She also refers to them as 'fire feasts,' upon the grounds that they were formerly associated with fire. There is no source-reference for this, and in fact the term is a common one among modern pagans, appearing first in the work of the very popular Victorian folklorist, or anthropologist, Sir James Frazer. But Frazer did not apply it to all these quarter days, only, quite correctly, to two of them which were associated with customs involving fire; and he included these two with a number of others which make no appearance in the scheme presented by Caitlín Matthews. On to these four Gaelic feasts she superimposes the solstices and equinoxes, which do not feature as feasts in any of the early Celtic literatures. But they are celebrated by many modern pagans, and these eight festivals together, which make up her 'Wheel of the Celtic Year,' turn out to be simply those of the modern witch cult. To these she adds a lunar calendar from the first century AD which was dug up on the far side of France. It was made under Roman rule and in Roman characters, and kept in a temple to the Roman god Apollo. There is no sign in the Welsh and Irish texts that anything like it was used in the British Isles. But she includes it with her 'Wheel' as part of the system used to reckon 'the Celtic year.'"

(*) p. 144: "Caitlín Matthews and her colleagues are not really concerned with the past, so much as the present and the future. They are creating a mystical tradition out of old materials but suited to modern needs. One aspect of this is her imposition upon Celtic lore of a lot of native American religion, such as the totem, the spirit-quest and the shamanic vision. There are actually no precise parallels for any of these in ancient Celtic culture. . . . The result is a perfectly sound theology, and gives immense pleasure and is of great practical utility to many people. Like the earth mysteries, it 'works.'[4] Only from the narrow point of view of one interested solely in the ancient Celts can there be said to be something wrong with it. But from this point of view it is a pity that writers as able as Caitlín Matthews have not given themselves over more to a quest for objective truth, whether the result has utility or not."

p. 145: "Another major, and separate contribution to the confusion surrounding the Celts was begun in 1944 by one of the greatest modern English poets and historical novelists, Robert Graves. In three weeks during that year he completed the first draft of a book which was to become The White Goddess, drawing upon images culled from Celtic and Greco-Roman literatures and fusing them within his own tremendous creative inspiration to provide a personal religion to accompany his poetry. The result is a sustained metaphor, a vision of the sort of past the writer thought ought to have existed. His friends have maintained that in private he himself did not believe that his vision had existed in reality: he was expressing a state of creative longing which made what he wrote poetically, not literally, true. But nowhere in the book did he warn his readers that they were to take it as metaphor or myth. As a result, it was taken as history by a large number of unscholarly readers. . . . His bluntest retrospective comment on the work, written to a stranger, was: 'It's a crazy book and I didn't mean to write it.'[5] But it still has great influence in shaping the view of Celtic paganism held by unscholarly readers."

(*) pp. 170-172: "The Greco-Roman writers agreed that the Celtic intellectual elite was divided into Bards, Druids and Vates, the last two categories being religious officials. The distinction between them was obviously difficult to make. The Druids were more prestigious and more concerned with philosophy and theology, while the Vates were more concerned with divination and sacrifice. But the Druids also undertook the same tasks as the Vates. Caesar states that the Druids had an assembly and a chief, met in the tribal territory of the Vates in Gaul and sent their pupils to learn from the source of their religion in Britain. But he had a vested interest in exaggerating the sophistication of the Gallic peoples to the Roman Senate, to support his assertions that they were a good prize if conquered and a threat if not. He saw Gaul at the height of its pre-Roman development. And, unfortunately, he was the only writer whose work survives to have had first-hand experience of the Gallic peoples before they became Romanized. He also recorded that the Druids were teachers, healers and judges and kept the calendar. Some of this is confirmed by the other Roman texts. Strabo and Diodorus Siculus agrees upon the judicial role of the Druids. Pliny confirms that they operated as healers. Lucan and Strabo state that they also cared for shrines. Much of this is neatly paralleled in early Irish literature. Vates do not appear there, but Druids are shown as ranking before kings in assemblies. They sacrifice, prophesy, heal, teach, make magic and give council. There is also a glimpse of the same people at work in northern Britain, in Adomnán's Life of Columba. He writes of 'magi,' who advised Pictish kings and 'magnified' their deities. The Tripartite Life of St. Patrick contains further evidence concerning both the appearance of Druids, crediting them with the tonsure and white tunics, and their ceremonies, speaking of their baptizing children in water. Other early Irish texts also contain this last assertion, and the Roman Pliny portrayed Gallic Druids as donning white robes for the mistletoe-cutting rite.[6] But the Tripartite Life is a relatively late (eighth- to tenth-century) and wildly imaginative document. and in all these details it may be projecting Christian ways back on to the old religions. The same may be true of the other sources which mention baptism, and the description in Pliny may be coincidental.
"All the various authors agree that these priests were male, and that the formal religion of the Celtic peoples was mediated through men. This did not mean, according to the same writers, that religious affairs were wholly the preserve of a priesthood. Other sorts of men, such as bards or physicians, and all sorts of women, feature in the Irish literature as gifted with prophesy, skilled in magic and capable of communing with deities. These people were essentially interlopers to the formal system of religion, but they were treated with great respect and their words were heeded. . . . But the absence of priestesses is remarkable, especially as many other ancient peoples, including the Romans, had them. Tacitus records that when a Roman army prepared to attack the island which was later called Anglesey, the natives were encouraged by Druids and by black-robed women carrying torches. But whether the latter were religious dignitaries, prophetesses or just cheerleaders, we cannot tell. Strabo and Pomponius Mela repeat a story, old by their time, of an island off the west coast of Gaul which was a sanctuary staffed entirely by women.[7] The trouble with this report, which comes from Poseidonios, is that is was related when so little was known about western Gaul among Greco-Roman authors that it was more or less over the edge of the world. It existed in the same sort of realm as India, which Roman geographers portrayed as having people with dogs' heads. . . .Strabo himself thought [the stories] dubious. By the time Roman rule, and Roman knowledge, reached the region concerned, no more was heard of them.
"But then, the Irish Druids were properly speaking only regulators of the relationship between deities and people, there to conduct rites and interpret signs. In the last resort they seem to have been expendable. The indispensable figure, representing the true mediator between human and divine, was the local or tribal king."

p. 174-175: ". . . What was peculiarly Irish, or Celtic, about the system of kingship portrayed in Ireland's literature. A few features swiftly emerge. . . . Most important, the period of 'probation' for a ruler followed by his marriage to the tutelary goddess seems to have been unknown to Celts outside of Ireland. The Greco-Roman authors never mention it."

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