Hutton quotes - page 3

Page 3 of other material from The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles; Their Nature and Legacy by Ronald Hutton, 1991.

p. 302-4: "[The Witch Cult in Western Europe by Margaret Alice Murray] deserves our respect in that it was the first attempt to study the Great Witch Hunt dispassionately, as an aspect of social history, and employing a fairly large quantity of material contemporary to the events described. But both her sources and her treatment of them were seriously defective. The former consisted of a few well-known works by Continental demonologists, a few tracts printed in England and quite a number of published records of Scottish witch trials. The much greater amount of unpublished evidence was absolutely ignored. She began with the premiss that the trials were of a genuine religion, and reconstructed it from the confessions of the accused and the writings of their persecutors. . . . She ignored or misquoted evidence which indicated that the actions attributed to the alleged witches were physically impossible. Or she rationalized it, by suggesting that an illusion of flying was created by drugs. . . .
"Furthermore, she pruned and rearranged her evidence ruthlessly to support her assertion that the 'religion' concerned was standard throughout Europe. Thus she mangled data continually to fit her assertion that all witches operated in covens of thirteen, though it is obvious even from the limited data which she scanned that most of the accused were solitary individuals. Her portrayal of the festival of the cult was of the same nature. It commenced with the bald assertion that the most important were May Eve and Hallowe'en, with two lesser ones at Candlemas and Lammas. These were, of course, simply the quarter days of the Gaelic year, and her scheme rests upon the confession of a single Scottish 'witch,' Isobel Smyth, at Forfar in 1661. She found a lot of evidence that persons accused in Scotland, and in one case Lancashire, had specified Hallowe'en as a time for their activities, doubtless drawing upon the arcane reputation of the old feast of Samhain. She also found a single Scottish trial at which Lammas was mentioned, though that just happened to be the major holiday during the time in which the people concerned were accused of having operated. And that was all her evidence; but it was sufficient for her to speak about the quarter days as the main celebrations of the witch cult of 'western Europe.' At Candlemas, she suggested, a wheel-like dance of torch-bearers had been performed. She did not provide a reference for this notion and it seems to have been her own invention. To the great festivals she gave the name 'Sabbaths,' a term used to describe meetings of witches by the early modern demonologists (because the same writers held the Jewish faith to be the antithesis of Christianity, an explanation which is patent in their work but which Dr. Murray brushed away with a simple denial.) She also spoke of gatherings for purposes of business instead of religion, which she termed 'esbats.' This expression actually occurs only in a single source, used by a French intellectual who did not himself give it this meani ng. Bur Dr. Murray was happy to declare it to be another general rule of her 'cult.' She did note that both in Britain and on the Continent alleged witches stated that they revelled upon a variety of Christian and traditional holidays. But, having set her system in place, she was able to dismiss these as aberrations.[28]
"This method of operation was buttressed by an apparently wilful ignorance of context and an obstinate refusal to ask any awkward questions -- even very obvious ones. Dr. Murray's ignorance of ancient paganism in Western Europe prevented her from realizing that the rituals imputed to early modern witches were not antique rites but parodies of contemporary Christian ceremonies and social mores. Her failure to study Continental sources obviated the need to wonder why the Great Witch Hunt was confined to certain places and certain times, and why the 'witch cult' failed to persist in areas in which it was never persecuted. . . . She had constructed her image of medieval paganism. It had ancient Gaelic festivals, and a congregational structure found in the pages of sixteenth-century demonologists. It worshipped the Horned God -- Dr. Murray's paganization of the Christian Satan who featured in the early modern accusations and confessions -- and also the Goddess -- whom she took from the high medieval records of magical practices. And she was convinced that she was correct."

p. 306: "The credibility of 'the Murray thesis' only really collapsed in academe during the 1970s, when it was at last systematically attacked by the authors of works which had a very large readership. Two in particular, Keith Thomas in 1971 and Norman Cohn in 1975 exposed her misrepresentation of evidence.[29] During the past two decades a score of detailed local studies of the Great Witch Hunt, spanning Europe, have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that its victims were not practitioners of an Old Religion.[30] Most were solitary individuals with a bad reputation among their neighbors. When local panics occurred and mass arrests were made, those who confessed to working in groups were provided stock replies designed to satisfy their interrogators. The Great Hunt was produced by a combination of four factors. . . . None of this had anything to do with paganism. Nor did it have much to do with traditional folk magic, for although local healers and workers of good spells were sometimes accused of satanic witchcraft, they seem to have represented only a minority of those arrested. Indeed, in some countries (such as France) they helped to detect destructive witches.[31] The vast majority of the 40,000 or so people who perished during the Great Witch Hunt[32] were distinguished only by the fact that they had made enemies."

pp. 307-308: Herodias was "the most wicked woman who features in" the New Testament. "Michelet took the name Herodias for the deity of his presumed witch religion, and so Leland's goddess, as described, became 'Aradia.'"

pp. 314-316: "[Green Men] often constitute the only decoration in medieval churches. The first systematic study of them was published in 1978 by Kathleen Basford, who demonstrated that these portraits are also found in French Romanesque churches, and that a prototype for them exists in masks sprouting vegetation which come from Roman sites in the Rhineland and at Rome itself. She added that the examples of these images in churches were from the beginning more demonic and menacing than those of the ancient Romans. In the thirteenth century the faces became more human, although still usually anguished or evil. But in the late Middle Ages, when (like Wild Men but unlike Sheelas) they were much more abundant than before, they reverted to being devilish again. She concluded that they were surly representations of lost souls or wicked spirits, rather than symbols of spring and of rebirth. It may be relevant that to some medieval Christian authors, leaves were associated with sins of the flesh.[33] Lady Raglan's original comparison with the foliage-covered figure who danced in May Day processions was shattered in 1979 by Roy Judge, who proved that this folk ritual had itself only appeared in the late eighteenth century.[34]
None of these images could have been a beloved pagan deity, placed in churches by popular demand. The context of this idea was destroyed with the collapse of the Murray thesis, but like that thesis it could hardly have been argued at all by anybody with a real knowledge of the Middle Ages. No churchman across the entire span of the period described them as such. St. Bernard, in a passage most accessibly printed by Sheridan and Ross,[35] did inveigh against the burgeoning fashion for Romanesque sculpture at the beginning of the twelfth century: but his invective does not in fact prove the point suggested by these authors, for he condemned the images as grotesque, silly and expensive, not as pagan. There is abundant evidence, mostly from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for the sort of people who paid the masons and commissioned the carvings. Occasionally the whole parish did so, but much more often those responsible were churchmen (above all bishops and abbots), landowners and wealthy merchants.[36] The central point of The Witch Cult in Western Europe was that the ordinary people remained adherents of the 'Old Religion' while the ruling class was Christian. And it was that class which determined how churches were decorated. The Wild Man, Sheela-na-Gig and Green Man were all products of that tremendous upswelling of medieval culture which has commonly been called the Twelfth-century Renaissance. And like the more famous later Renaissance it was a Christian movement, even though it drew upon ancient ideas and images."

pp. 318-320: "So we come to motifs and characters which appear in the medieval literature of these islands. Most of those drawn from pagan antiquity, as said above, may be considered part of the general cultural heritage of European civilization and have no relevance to the question of surviving religions. But there are a few which, for differing reasons, are of special interest. One is the Holy Grail, which features in high medieval romances as the cup which was used at the Last Supper, the chalice of the first Christian communion. In these stories, it is often accompanied by the land which pierced the side of Christ upon the cross. Both were held to exist within an enchanted Christian Otherworld, and to be made visible to mortals only under special circumstances, for example after the display of extraordinary merit. Until the late nineteenth century all this was presumed to be part, indeed the finest distillation, of the imagination of medieval Christendom. But between 1860 and 1920 a number of writers competed with each other to claim an origin for the concept in non-Christian sources. Alfred Nutt and A. C. L. Brown claimed that it descended from the Celtic religion, the Grail from the cauldron of the Daghda and the lance from the spear of Lugh. Jesse Weston, a pupil of Dr. Nutt, and W. A. Nitze preferred the belief that it was a memory of a pagan Roman mystery tradition, while Paul Hagen suggested that is embodied mystical philosophies brought from the Orient. All except the last of these proposals have relevance to the preoccupations of this chapter. The problem with the 'Celtic' explanation is that the objects do not match. Spear and lance may be good counterparts, but the Grail, usually a goblet or platter carried by a single maiden, does not correspond very well to the huge inexhaustible cauldron filled with food which was kept by the Daghda. The 'Roman' explanation has the greater problem that, like an Indian magician's rope, it floats upon empty air. There is absolutely no equivalent to the Holy Grail and lance in classical art or literature, and the proponents of the mystery religion thesis were arguing purely from what they felt to be likely, given an utter lack of evidence, employing abstracted themes of death and resurrection and of presumed mala and female symbolism.
"On the other hand, none of the authors who proposed a Christian origin for these motifs came any closer to substantiating their arguments. Writing in the same years as the proponents of the theories listed above, Richard Heinzel, Wolfgang Golther, W. W. Newell and Rose Peebles all tried to reassert the idea that the Grail legend was wholly part of the Christian tradition. They failed either to trace its evolution from earlier writings of that faith, or to explain why it suddenly became immensely popular in the short period from 1170 to 1200. The plain fact is that although the authors of the earliest known examples of the Grail legend did refer to previous authorities, none of the latter has survived. Given the medieval tendency to forgery, fabrication and citation of fictional predecessors, we cannot be sure that they ever existed. But scholarly interest in the matter was satisfied by the publication in 1917 of Lizette Andrews Fisher's splendid study. This did account for the timing of the legend by documenting the tremendous new emphasis upon the doctrine of transubstantiation in late twelfth-century Christendom. As the greatest of all communion chalices, the Grail was the literary embodiment of this preoccupation, and the accompanying stress upon the power of the Holy Blood also directed attention to the lance which had shed it. Thus the stories woven around both can most convincingly be seen as part of high medieval Christian culture, whether or not the Celtic theme of the nourishing and inspiring cauldron played any role in it. That idea remains a remote possibility, but the Fisher thesis stands up without it.[37] The concept of the Holy Grail has recently been the subject of reinterpretations by modern pagans which make beautiful and evocative reading but add nothing to our knowledge of its history.[38] It can safely be left out on any consideration of the ancient religions of these islands."

p. 320: "A quite different problem of possible pagan survivals in literature concerns certain high medieval Welsh poems which have been taken at times for evidence of pre-Christian Celtic beliefs. The most heavily used (or abused) of these are among the fifty-eight contained in a manuscript compiled around 1275 and known as Canu Taliesin, the Book (more properly the Song) of Taliesin. During the eighteenth-century revival of interest in Welsh culture, and passion for things 'Druidic,' these suffered especially badly from the 'pseudo-Celticists.' Between 1784 and 1838 Edward Williams, Owen Pughe, the Revd. Edward Davies and the Hon. Algernon Herbert all mistranslated them to suit their own theories of 'primitive religion.' Williams and Pughe went further by adding texts of their own composition. Those of the former did exceptional damage because they were innocently printed by Lady Charlotte Guest in 1849 as part of her edition of medieval Welsh tales translated into English, already mentioned: The Mabinogion. There they were read and believed by an enormous number of people, including Robert Graves who reinterpreted them in The White Goddess and so built a fantasy upon a forgery. . . . During the 1940's Sir Ifor Williams subjected the Canu to further analysis and demonstrated that the poems are of various different ages and traditions. Twelve out of the fifty-eight he considered to belong to the sixth century and the original Taliesin, while all the so-called mystical poems seemed to be considerably later. . . . All that subsequent scholarship has done . . . is to suggest that even the so-called original poems may be no earlier than the ninth century and the Taliesin himself may never have existed. Meanwhile, non-academic writers upon 'the Celtic mysteries' continue to interpret the 'mystical' poems of the volume as fragments of very ancient religious experience, with the same gusto as their spiritual predecessors two centuries before."

p. 322-3: "Modern textual analysis has revealed that the Welsh authors of the thirteenth century had already ceased fully to comprehend the language in which ninth-century texts were composed;[39] and those of the ninth century had only the haziest idea of the history and culture of their people a couple of hundred years before.[40]
". . .What is fascinating about the Gogynfeirdd ['fairly early poets,' about 1080 to about 1350] is that they seem actually to have created a new mythology, instead of merely working with characters from pagan legend. They did this by elevating human or semi-human characters to the status of deities. There are three examples of this process: Ceridwen, Gwyn ap Nudd and Arianrhod. Ceridwen, Kerritwen, Cyridwen or Cyrridwen first appears in the tale "Hanes Taliesin which . . . would appear from its language to have been composed in the ninth century. . . . The elements of this story . . . are found in others all over Europe and Asia: there is nothing especially Welsh about any of them. Ceridwen does not appear in any other early literature, and her name suggests that she was created for this tale alone: it means 'crooked woman,' which would suit well the personality of a witch or a sorceress. But her function as the creatrix of a cauldron which conferred inspiration very much appealed to the Gogynfeirdd, who prized this quality above all, and they turned her into a sort of Muse. . . . The modern 'pseudo-Celticists' further inflated her status to that of a pre-Christian deity, which she fairly clearly was not."

p. 326: [Regarding Sir James Frazer] "From the libraries and bookshops of that university [Trinity College, Cambridge] and of London, he obtained huge numbers of ancient, medieval and early modern texts, of contemporary collections of European folklore, and of reports upon tribal peoples in the non-European world which was being explored and conquered in his lifetime. All this information he pressed into the service of a passionate personal quest: to demonstrate that Christianity rested upon the same principles as other early and primitive religions, and that therefore it deserved to be treated with the same objectivity, and ultimately with the same contempt. The results were the three successive multi-volume editions of The Golden Bough, published between 1890 and 1915, followed by the single-volume digest of 1922.[41] The center-point of these was the theory that behind the myth of the Crucifixion and Resurrection lay a universal ancient tradition of a sacred king who reigned over his people for a set term and was then sacrificed for the good of the realm, to be replaced by another as part of a rite of renewal. But along with this he either produced or popularized several other concepts within the study of pre- or non-Christian beliefs, such as taboo, the scapegoat, the sequence of old European fire festival, and the impression that the whole concern of ancient paganism was with fertility. The book, in all its various forms, remains a marvelous compendium of human ritual activity. Some of the author's ideas, such as those regarding taboo and the scapegoat, still stand up relatively well today. Others were only a more sophisticated version of the orthodoxies of his own day, such as his Corn Mother who is an incarnation of the prehistoric Great Goddess. He cannot reasonably be blamed for working with them. Nor can he be held responsible for the further development of his ideas by later writers. It was Robert Graves, not Frazer, who turned the Corn Maiden and Mother into the Triple Goddess, and published Sir James's theory concerning the Crucifixion in a very crude form in his novel 'King Jesus.' It was some modern pagans who imposed upon his set of 'fire festivals' a schematization which ignored the facts in a way of which Frazer was never guilty.
"But it must be added that The Golden Bough itself had very serious flaws. At this distance in time, and in view of its fame, it is important to note that it was never accepted by most historians and theologians, the specialists in its field. As soon as the first edition appeared its weaknesses were demonstrated, effectively, by colleagues such as Andrew Lang. Frazer, as has already been stated, had piled together material from all over the world and all ages, ignoring contexts and discrepancies alike. It was also striking that he had not been able to produce a single actual example of a monarch being slain and replaced in the way in which he held to be universal. . . .
"So. if The Golden Bough did not convince fellow scholars in the author's field, how did it become a classic? The answer is that it appealed to two other groups. One consisted of the practitioners of the new science with which his name is now especially associated: anthropology, the study of those whom he termed 'savages.' But the anthropologists swiftly adopted three rules above all which Frazer always broke: meticulous personal fieldwork; due regard to the context of each observation; and the avoidance of a patronizing and omniscient attitude towards tribal peoples. No professional anthropologist now accepts most of Frazer's arguments, or his approach. But he made an enduring impact also upon another group, which consisted quite simply of the general public. To anybody not expert in the field concerned, The Golden Bough could appear convincing as well as entertaining. Margaret Murray and Robert Graves have been mentioned as devotees, and reflections of Frazer's portrait of ancient paganism can be found in a plethora of works of fiction and amateur folklore published up to the present day."

pp. 333-334: "[Gerald Broisseau Gardner's] view of early thirteenth-century England, laid out in High Magic's Aid, was apparently based upon a cross between The Witch Cult in Western Europe and Ivanhoe, and represents a vision of the past even more wildly inaccurate than either. It has Margaret Murray's view of the persecution of paganism as witchcraft, but shows it in full progress some 400 years too early, at a time when Dr. Murray herself recognized that there was no sign of witch-hunting. It has Sir Walter Scott's (erroneous) idea that England around 1200 was still bitterly divided between Norman and Saxon, and the language, descriptions and characterization also sound remarkably like Scott's. Gardner's exposition of the traditional rituals of the witch religion and of its history, revealed in this book and in this later works, seems to have drawn upon two very different sources. One, unsurprisingly, consisted of the magical practices of the Ordo Templi Orientis and of the Golden Dawn, from which this order was descended. Most of these were put together, in turn, by G. S. L. Mathers, who drew upon the teachings of 'Eliphas Levi' (mentioned earlier), upon medieval grimoires (handbooks of magic) which Mathers published and which Gardner also used directly (as he said in High Magic's Aid), upon Masonic practice and upon Mather's own imagination. For higher authority Mathers and his associates appealed to a mysterious and probably non-existent German branch of the original Rosicrucian Order (which was itself probably nothing more than a legend). . . . From these rituals came the bound and blindfolded initiation; the symbolic scourging; the ceremonial focus of a circle containing an altar; the use of pentagrams and triangles; the invocation and banishment of spirits; the appeal to the guardians of the four cardinal points of the compass; the use of incense and water; the notion that divine forces are drawn into one or more of the celebrants; and the impedimenta of a sword and two knives, one black- and one white-handled.[42]
"Gardner's second source, from which he drew the context of these rites, appears to have been the work of those modern authors who had proclaimed the continued existence of ancient paganism as a witch cult through the Middle Ages. From Margaret Murray he adopted the term the 'Old Religion,' the Horned God and the Goddess, the organization of covens, the idea that this religion had essentially been concerned with fertility, and the celebration of the four Gaelic quarter days as festivals. From Leland he took the idea that witches carried out their rituals naked, and arguably the idea that the cult had survived in secret. From English folk customs were drawn the term for marriage within this faith, 'handfasting,' and certain rites such as the leaping of fires. As the key text of the ceremonies, Gardner and his group(s) presented the 'Book of Shadows,' which remained unpublished in his lifetime but has appeared in various forms since.[43] This he is said to have claimed to be sixteenth-century, whereas in fact it is recognizably a mid-twentieth-century compilation drawing upon a remarkable range or sources including the grimoires, Leland, Crowley and a poem by Rudyard Kipling(!). The beings invoked include Hebrew demons from the medieval texts translated by Mathers, Egyptian deities from translated hieroglyphic inscriptions employed by the Golden Dawn, a few Greco-Roman goddesses and gods, figures from Celtic mythology and medieval romance, and Leland's Aradia. Some of the Gardnerian practices may well have been original. For example, there seems to be no previous appearance of the five fold kiss upon initiation, though it may have existed among the rituals of Crowley's Ordo. And to the quarter days identified as major witch festivals by Margaret Murray, Gerald Gardner and his companions added the solstices and the equinoxes. They deserve credit for launching what is probably the most eclectic religion in the history of the world."

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