Hutton quotes - page 2

Page 2 of other material from The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles; Their Nature and Legacy by Ronald Hutton, 1991.

p. 176-178: "So now to festivals. The four great points of the ancient Irish year are neatly set out in the Ulster tale of the wooing of Emer by Cú Chulainn. Among various tasks which she set him before he could wed her, was to go sleepless from 'Samhain, when the summer goes to its rest, until Imbolc, when the ewes are milked at spring's beginning; from Imbolc until Beltine at the summer's beginning and from Beltine to Bron Trogain, earth's sorrowing in autumn.'[8] This means, from 1 November to 1 February, from 1 February to 1 May, and from 1 May to 1 August. There are signs that the names of the festivals varied between localities just as deities did, though not as greatly. In the Yellow Book of Lecan, a high medieval text preserving some early medieval tales, it is said that the common people called Samhain 'the feast of Mongfind' instead.[9] Legend made Mongfind a witch-queen married to an early king of Tara, but the fact that the same source states that the people still prayed to her on 31 October indicates that we are dealing here with another goddess: queens and heroines were not prayed to, nor given commemorative feasts. The August festival is called 'the first day of the Trogan-month' in the fourteenth-century Colloquy of the Old Men, echoing the word for it given by Emer. But the same line in the Colloquy refers to is as having a new title, Lughnasadh. It is by this name, meaning 'the feast of the god Lugh,' that it is generally known to scholars. Lugh has been described above, but who or what Trogan or Trogain was is anybody's guess. The two names for the festival seem both to be ancient, as 'Lughnasadh' appears in the texts of the ninth and tenth centuries.[10] The spelling of all of them varies, Beltine being also written Beltain, Beltane, Beal-tine, Beltan, Bel-tein or Baltein. Sir James Frazer arbitrarily settled on one of the Scottish versions, Beltane, and made this standard among British scholars and modern pagans alike. But whatever the names, the pattern of the four quarter days was standard in early medieval Ireland. There is no sign of any celebration of the solstices or equinoxes.
"Of the four festivals, there is no doubt whatsoever from the literature that Samhain, which began the year in November, was the most important. Tribal assemblies were held then, rulers and warriors conferred and laws were made. It was also the time at which humans were most susceptible to divine and supernatural interference. At Samhain heroic and royal figures met fated deaths or enchantments. Spirits, monsters or fairies attacked royal capitals, with physical destruction or with evil spells. Divine women allowed themselves to be wooed by human males. Supernatural beings fought or mated with each other, while warriors, gathered in royal halls, made important boasts or challenges. Magical gifts were presented to kings, or things stolen magically from them.[11] It is worth stressing that most of these occurrences took place in daylight, so the whole day of 1 November was regarded as exciting and perilous, and not just (as in modern times) the night before. After this feast, it was Beltine which features most prominently in the stories. Upon 1 May, according to the Leabhar Gabhála, the Tuatha de Danaan landed in Ireland. Other key events also occur at that date, but it is of minor importance in the tales compared to the great haunted festival which opened winter. Imbolc and Lughnasadh appear as feasts, but without much arcane significance attached to either.
"The Irish pattern of festivals if so often taken as typical of 'the Celts,' from Ireland to the Alps, that it must be pointed out that the available evidence on the matter is inconclusive. The early Welsh literature ascribes no importance to 1 November, 1 February or 1 August, and all the emotional investment made by the writers in Samhain is attached instead to May Day (Calan Mai) and the night before it. Upon May Eve, according to the tale of Pwyll, a demon stole new-born children and animals in the land of Dyfed. During that night, in the tale of Lludd and Llevelys, dragons fought each other and terrified the people with their screeching. At Llyn Cwm Llwch, in the Brecon Beacons, a doorway into fairyland was said to have opened each May Day.[12] That festival features as the favorite one in the work of medieval poets such as Dafydd ap Gwilym, and indeed the first literary reference to a maypole in the British Isles is probably in a fourteenth-century poem by Gryffydd ap Adda ap Dafydd.
"For the Celts of Scotland there is absolutely no literary evidence upon the matter, and that for Gaul is not very helpful. No Greco-Roman author says anything about festivals. Caesar records that daily units were reckoned from sunset to sunset, so that each night was counted within the date of the following day. But he does not say which nights and days were important. His statement about the reckoning of dates is proved by the Coligny calendar, an object engraved in bronze in the first century AD and dug up in France in 1897. Even this is only in some senses 'Celtic,' for it was written in Roman characters, under Roman rule, and apparently kept in a temple of Apollo. It is certainly not the calendar of Rome, though, differing in the calculation of the months (from the full moon), their names, and the specifications of lucky and unlucky days. But nor is it the same as the Irish calendar, it may not even have been generally used in Gaul, and it does not specify feasts.[13] Nor do the Greco-Roman sources describe any seasonal ritual. Pliny's famous description of the gathering of the mistletoe by the priests of Gaul was not a regular custom. According to him it occurred only in the rare event of the plant being found on a oak tree, and then took place upon the sixth day of the moon. He did add that the same day began the months (which, again, is different from the Coligny calendar), and that these priests hailed the moon as a healer of all things.[14] It is not clear from Pliny whether these statements were intended to apply to more than some of the Gallic tribes, and none of them is corroborated by the British and Irish texts."
". . . Much more important is the assertion by Cormac, writing around 900, that in every district at Beltine the fires were extinguished and the Druids lit two in honor of Bel. They canted 'numerous spells' over them and then cattle were driven between them, being thereafter divinely protected from disease.[15] The name of the deity sounds suspicious: was the Christian Cormac remembering a real god, inventing one from the name of the feast or drafting in the Biblical one Baal? But the driving of cattle is a rite which survived into relatively modern times, not just in Ireland but in other parts of the British Isles and at other festivals. The 'new fire' was still made on 1 May in Gaelic Scotland in the last century. Here we do seem to have evidence of a genuine and important ancient calendar custom, even if it is not absolutely certain that it occurred everywhere in Ireland and always as Beltine. We are also considerably less certain how far it extended into Britain."

p. 199: "A few other scraps of information about pagan Celtic belief can be gained by sifting through the early texts. It is obvious, for example, that like many ancient peoples the British and Irish believed that it was lucky to make a circle sunwise, in modern terms clockwise (or in Old Irish 'deisiol'), and very malicious or foolish to proceed in the opposite direction or, as the English were to say, 'widdershins.' Also, colors played a great symbolic role. Red was associated with death, destruction and the more primitive deities. Green was the hue of the more sophisticated divine being, such as the Tuatha de Danaan, and of enchantment. White animals often feature in the stories as supernatural, especially if they had red ears. The presence of ash twigs in the ritual shafts is significant, for all over northern Europe it was regarded as the most arcane of trees, and there are more superstitions recorded about it in folklore collections from the British Isles than any other species."

(*) p. 227: "The Druids vanished at the conquest, but whether into oblivion or by transformation into Romano-British priests, nobody can say. The latter seems the more likely fate. The Romans wiped them out only where they encouraged resistance to Imperial rule, and there seems to have been to general proscription of their order. A fourth-century scholar proudly proclaimed descent from one of them, as did some local worthies in Gaul. Yet vanish they certainly did. Women called 'druidesses' occasionally advised emperors as late as the third century, but these seem to have been Celtic soothsayers, not priestesses.[16]"

p. 271-272: "A greater contrast appears to be evident between the festivals of the two groups of peoples [i.e. the Celtic and Germanic]. Those of the pagan English are known almost entirely from the book written by the eighth-century scholar Bede, about the workings of the calendar. His references to pre-Christian practices, though incalculable, are slight and probably incomplete. He states unequivocally that the greatest sacred occasion was the winter solstice, which marked the beginning of the year and was known as the Modranicht, the 'Mother Night.' He also records that in February the people offered cakes to their deities, that September was Halegmonath, 'Holy Month,' and so presumably had ceremonies, and that November was Blod-Monath, 'Blood Month,' when cattle were slaughtered before the winter set in, and some used in sacrifices. He adds that the feast of the goddess Eostre, after whom the month later called April was named, was the greatest spring festival.[17] All this suggests a calendar very different from the neat Irish system of quarter days, which began the year on 1 November and was apparently indifferent to the solstices. It may be that the cakes offered in February might have been at a time close to the Irish feast of Imbolc, and that the cattle slaughter took place near the Irish Samhain. But overall, the contrasts are striking. We are still left to wonder about two major points. One is that not all the Celtic peoples may have used all or some of the Irish calendar, and the feasts of Britain and Gaul may have borne a greater similarity to those of the Anglo-Saxons. The other is that according to Bede the early English attached no importance to Midsummer, the feast counterpoised to their great Modranicht which in historical times was celebrated by all peoples of northern Europe including the Germans, Slavs and Celts. The feast of Eostre was probably their equivalent of the tremendous rejoicing at the return of greenery, known across the whole Continent and British Isles and held variously on May Day or St. George's Day since records begin. But in addition, the Gallic tribes, as shown earlier, and the Goths at the far end of Europe[18] had certain rituals to correspond to phases of the moon, as the Anglo-Saxons may also have done.

pp. 285-287: (Imbolc & festivals) "It is also well known that many Christian festivals were fixed, by Church Councils, upon dates already associated with major pagan celebrations. The Scriptures themselves specify no calendar of ritual and so this, like much else, was developed in part from the models of the older religions. The Nativity of Christ was fixed to replace the Imperial feast of the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, thereby linking its celebration to all the different pre-Christian commemorations of the mystery of the winter solstice. The decision to do so was taken in the fourth century, but two centuries elapsed before it was accepted by all the various churches. The approximate timing of Easter was indicated in the New Testament by the fact that the arrest, execution and resurrection of Christ followed the Hebrew spring festival of the Passover. But when a formal decision was taken to determine its date, in the fourth century, it was set according to the solar and lunar calendars: the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Nearly 400 more years were to pass before the whole Christian world was reckoning the equinox at the same date and the feast at the same phase of the moon. Over the same period, several major ancient festivals were Christianized by being awarded to particular patrons: thus, Samhain's importance was recognized by its transformation into All Saints' Day and Midsummer Day became the feast of Saint John the Baptist.
"Having said all this, it is important not to take too far the process of identification of the old religions with the new one. There is a powerful tendency, which began with Protestant reformers, was continued by nineteenth-century anti-clericalists and is preserved by many modern writers, to assume that medieval Christianity was simply paganism given a thin layer of Scripture. Two swift case-studies may give some idea of its dangers. One concerns the cult of Michael the Archangel, the glamorous, bewinged, spear-bearing, dragon-slaying, shining saint especially associated with the tops of hills and crags. He is regularly taken as a Christianization of a solar deity, and his symbol of the spear has caused him to be identified in particular with the Celtic god Lugh. But a careful study of the development of his cult[19] shows that it arose in fifth-century Italy and spread to France and England during the seventh century. There was nothing particularly 'Celtic' about it, and it came latest to Ireland where the memory of Lugh ought to have been strongest. His earliest churches tended not to be built over the remains of solar shrines: rather, he was a saint of high and wild places which, with the growth of the habit of pilgrimages during the Middle Ages, made splendid goals for the faithful. He was a product of the development of Christianity itself rather than an importation into it. Then there is the question of the genuine ancient Gaelic feast of Imbolc, which according to many modern writers was transformed into the Christian one of Candlemas, the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Some recent authors have linked Candlemas in addition with the Roman Lupercalia, or suggested that Imbolc was a 'fire feast,' and that its flames were perpetuated in those of the Christian candles. A few contemporary 'witches' have asserted that behind the festival of the purification lay a pre-Christian celebration of the recovery of 'the Goddess' from giving birth to the 'new year's Sun God.'[20] There is absolutely no evidence for this last idea, which is purely and simply a paganization of Christianity, but the relationship between Imbolc and Candlemas is more subtle and deserves extended discussion. The Purification had to be celebrated by Christians because it commemorated one of the most important episodes in the early life of Jesus, his presentation at the Temple and his recognition as the Messiah by Simeon and Anna. Once Christmas was fixed upon 25 December, the Purification had to occur upon 2 February, being the time appointed for this ceremony, according to Hebrew law, after a birth. Its especial association with candles, evident during the course of the early Middle Ages, was suggested by Simeon's words, read out at the service, that the child would be 'a light to lighten the Gentiles.' All this was determined by churchmen sitting in councils around the Mediterranean and representing lands very far from the Gaelic area in which Imbolc was known. Nor is there any evidence that ceremonies involving fire were employed in the Gaelic feast, which was Christianized in its own right, very appropriately, as the holy day of that great saint of the Gaels, Brighid. So Imbolc and Candlemas were separate in their origins and observation. BUT in some Gaelic or semi-Gaelic districts, notably southern Scotland, the great Christian feast came to replace that of St. Brighid in the popular imagination as the quarter day which marked the beginning of spring.[21]"

(*) p. 287-88: "...the former existence of a 'Celtic Christianity,' which combined the best features of both old and new religions and tolerated both, until it was wiped out and replaced by metropolitan, 'Catholic' Christianity during the Middle Ages. According to this view, the Culdees, a monastic movement within the Gaelic world during the eight and ninth centuries, were the inheritors of the former wisdom of the Druids . . . . No careful scholar has ever propounded it [i.e., 'pseudo-Celtism' and 'Celtic Christianity'] and nor do the more responsible modern 'popular' writers on the ancient Celts like Caitlìn Matthews. During the sixth and seventh centuries the churches of the British Isles differed from the others in western Europe in the way which they calculated the date of Easter and administered the tonsure, and in other relatively trivial ways. They also permitted priests to marry, in common with many other early medieval Christian groups (and those of the Greek world never abandoned this practice). But in no way did they preserve more pagan observations than other followers of Christ. During the seventh and eighth centuries they brought their ritual practices into conformity with those of Rome, and after 750 the Céli Dé or Culdees arose. These were the exact opposite of recipients of pre-Christian wisdom, being an ascetic movement of monks, 'the vassals of God,' who condemned the laxity of many existing religious houses and demanded a stricter and yet more puritanical devotion.[22] As for the Irish priests who were assisted by women, they were not in the least representative of their homeland, but were a pair of itinerant eccentrics loose in Brittany, and their practices were unorthodox in a number of ways.[23] In recent years Kathleen Hughes has led religious historians in questioning any concept of 'Celtic Christianity,' arguing convincingly that the differences between churches of Wales and Ireland in particular were at least as important as their similarities."

p. 288: "We saw in the previous chapter that the overwhelming majority of temples and shrines seem not to have been re-used, and that virtually all images of former deities were destroyed if they fell into the hands of Christians. . . . Most early medieval religious buildings in the British Isles, as asserted before, seem to stand or have stood upon formerly unused ground. It is better to say, not that the Christian Church took the older religions into itself, but that it provided a parallel service to them."

p. 289: "The new religious calendar was fundamentally Hebrew, not that of the classical pagans, with a service every seven days instead of a succession of seasonal feasts. But the latter soon appeared. . . . As already noted, it incorporated several older festivals, but it was not dependent upon them. Lughnasadh was given only the feast of St. Peter in chains, while the allocation if SS Philip and James, to Beltine, or May Day, hardly did justice to its non-Christian importance: in the new calendar it was overshadowed upon either side by Easter and by Ascension Day and Pentecost, which had no direct pre-Christian ancestors. Great saints like the Apostles Peter, James, Andrew and Paul were given feast days which had formerly no religious significance in the northern European world. A large part of the reason for Christianity's victory in places such as Ireland, where it depended solely upon its own merits, is surely that it offered everything already given by the old cults, and added a confident promise of eternal bliss. When looking for 'pagan survivals' in the medieval Church, it is not enough for historians to detect parallels, relics or imitations of paganism. It is necessary to demonstrate that certain things, although now existing within a Christian structure, kept alive a memory of, and reverence for, the old deities. Otherwise they were part of Christianity."

pp. 289-292: "The second besetting problem of the subject consists of the relationship between religion and magic. Historians, theologians and anthropologists seem to be in general agreement upon the distinction between the two. Religion consists of an offering up of prayers, gifts and honor to divine beings who operate quite independently of the human race and are infinitely more powerful than it. Those actions may be aimed at obtaining favor or merely at maintaining the existing order, but whatever the inspiration of the worshiper, the decision as to whether or not any response will be made lies entirely with the deity or deities concerned. Magic, by contrast, consists of a control worked by humans over nature by use of spiritual forces, so that the end result is expected to lie within the will of the person or persons working the spell or the ritual. In theory anybody ought to be able to carry out either, but in practice most societies have produced specialist practitioners in both. The folklore collections made within Europe during the past two centuries have revealed the two phenomena operating at different levels. For many a nineteenth-century villager, church-going was an activity designed to ensure that the worshipper secured a better life after death and that the whole community, whether conceived of as the village, the district or the state, was protected from harm. The same person would often employ a magical remedy for matters apparently too trivial for the concern of Almighty God: to heal illness in a human or in animals, to trace stolen or lost property, to increase the yield of a particular plot of land, to gain a compatible marital partner or to ward off malice. In other words, magic did a lot of the work later taken over by pharmaceutical medicine, fertilizers, insurance schemes and advertisement columns. Those practicing it were generally devout Christians and saw charms and rituals in the same functional sense as these modern commodities and services. Such magic had, in the eyes of its practitioners or purchasers, nothing to do with the great contest between God and Satan: it was concerned with the morally neutral forces of nature, which could be turned to good or bad effect just like the physical natural world.[24]
"The two spheres, of course, generally overlapped and sometimes combined. Strictly speaking, religion can do all the work of magic, and the fact that humans have sought the latter in addition has been the result of modesty (not wishing to trouble the deities), frustration (the deity has not responded), double insurance, pride and curiosity (the desire to work spiritual power directly) and considerations of convenience and expense. In many tribal societies the priest and the sorcerer have been the same individual, and the distinction between the two roles, if one can be drawn, lies in whether the benefit is being sought for many or for a single person. But in historic European societies the difference had been fairly clear, and they have shared with most of humanity, up to the last 200 years, a chronic fear of the user of magic by private individuals for destructive purposes. . . . All the literary sources for European paganism also make plain that magic of any kind was not connected with the worship of deities. Whether courtly or rural, learned or traditional, benign or malignant, it was an art or science, not part of a religion. The distinction in pre-Christian society between a priestess or priest and a sorcerer or witch was usually plain.[25] The former were essential to the well-being of a community, the latter potentially useful but also menacing. . . .
"Christian teaching attempted, as was also noted earlier, to blur the difference between paganism and magic by declaring that the latter could only be worked by employing demons whom the older religions had revered. . . .
"Thus, magic of any kind cannot, strictly speaking, be described as 'paganism.' It was separate from the worship of the old deities, could flourish within a Christian culture and was a constant factor before and after the Christian conversion."

p. 295-6: "It is obvious that when a modern writer compares somebody to Mars or Jove or Hercules, this is not a declaration of pagan Roman beliefs, and that when a modern plutocrat decorates a garden with statues of deities or nymphs, these are not objects of worship. Likewise, we know that Botticelli, Titian, Velazquez and Lord Leighton were all Christians even though they painted images of Venus. The faith of Michelangelo and Bernini is not in doubt, although one sculpted Bacchus and the other Apollo. It is considerably less widely appreciated that medieval Celtic writers drew upon their past in precisely the same way. When the Earl of Argyll marched off to war in 1513, his bard could still compose a poem comparing him to Lugh.[26] The most Christian of Anglo-Saxon literature is peppered with pagan references and comparisons. . . . That such references vanish from English works during the eleventh century is not due to greater Christianization but to the Norman Conquest, which wrenched the country away from the northern cultural world."

p. 301: "The name of the goddess worshipped by the witches is . . . Herodias (the significance of which will be discussed later), rendered in Leland's Vangelo (the name which he gave to his 'gospel' [of the medieval witch cult]) into Italian as Aradia."Leland's text also has the ... picture of the 'religion' as one conducted principally by priestesses. Now, since its publication, no historian of folklorist or (indeed) modern witch has uncovered any trace of the sort of hereditary cult in Tuscany which Leland claimed to exits. . . . It has never been taken seriously by any conscientious scholar of the Middle Ages.[27]"

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