Hutton quotes - page 4

Page 4 of other material from The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles; Their Nature and Legacy by Ronald Hutton, 1991.

pp. 335-337: "How did the 'Wicca'[44] which was developed in these years actually compare with the paganism of antiquity? One fundamental difference is that it deliberately blurs the distinction between religion and magic, and that most of its practices are drawn from the latter. The vital significance of the consecrated circle, in the modern cult as in the medieval sorcery from which it is derived, is that spirits or forces are raised and gathered within it and the humans concerned work with them. It would have been inconceivable to any ancient European pagan of whose thought we have evidence, that the purpose of religious ritual was to 'raise' a deity and 'work' with him or her. No ancient goddess or god worth the name could be summoned by worshippers, to a particular place, and there employed. The modern emphasis is upon a series of techniques which confer benefit upon the celebrants or their objectives, the ancient one upon a set of ceremonies intended to give pleasure to, and therefore to earn reward from, divine beings. That is why the rites of the present day witches or pagans are apparently totally lacking in the universal ancient principle of sacrifice. By assuming that witchcraft and paganism were formerly the same phenomenon, they are mixing two utterly different archaic concepts and placing themselves in a certain amount of difficulty. The advantage of the label 'witch' is that it has all the exciting connotations of a figure who flouts the conventions of normal society and is possessed of powers unavailable to it, at once feared and persecuted. It is a marvelous rallying-point for a counter-culture, and also one of the few images of independent female power in early modern European civilization. The disadvantage is that by identifying themselves with a very old stereotype of menace, derived from the pre-Christian world itself, modern pagans have drawn upon themselves a great deal of unnecessary suspicion, vituperation and victimization which they are perpetually struggling to assuage.
"Another notable distinction between the 'Old Religion' and the old religions lies in the two presiding divine figures of the former, goddess and god. From the beginning Wiccans recognized that the ancient world worshipped and enormous number of deities of both genders. They incorporated a selection within their rituals, but made it plain that these were not individual beings but different names, and aspects, of the great couple. This is a vision very remote from the genuine polytheism of antiquity. Initiates of the 'mystery religions' regarded their presiding deities as the mightiest of all, and sometimes identified them with others of mighty reputation: but they did not thereby declare that these major figures were the only gods or goddesses. A few Neo-Platonist philosophers taught that all deities were manifestations of a single divine spirit, but this is a rather different concept from the 'duotheism' of today's pagans. That is part of a more general characteristic of their faith, summed up by two of their most prolific authors as 'the creative polarity of complementary opposites,' such as 'male/female, light/dark, fertilizing/formative, intelligence/intuition,' or 'cyclical and linear, synthesizing and analytical, monolithic and mobile.'[45] This sort of dualism in not rooted in European antiquity: if it derives from any old tradition it is from that strain of Near Eastern thought found in Zoroastrianism, Manichaeanism and Christianity. In view of this it ironically appropriate that another characteristic of the writings of contemporary British pagans consists of an intense and consistent hostility to the Christian Church. the follies and deficiencies of this institution are regularly held up to ridicule and abuse. Such bitterness may be therapeutic for those who have recently rejected Christianity, and is natural in view of the conviction of modern pagans that the Church was directly responsible for the Great Witch Hunt with whose victims they identify. But anyone who is indifferent to the faith of Christ is likely to find the barrage of vilification tedious.It may also be wondered whether such a sustained attack upon what is still the most powerful religion in Britain does not provoke a proportionate dislike, and increase the tendency of people to mistake modern paganism or witchcraft for satanism and to harass its adherents. . . .
"There are other differences between old and new. No known cult in the ancient world was carried on by devotees who all worshipped regularly in the nude like the witches portrayed by Leland and inspired by Gardner (although many present-day pagans prefer to have robed ceremonies). The enormous difference in the societies concerned has produced proportional changes of preoccupation: the concern of the archaic religions with glorifying rulership and war is understandably missing from the modern one. The anxiety to produce food and wealth has been replaced with an equally powerful one to preserve the natural environment which that process of production has now largely destroyed. And no known pre-Christian people celebrated all the eight festival of the calendar adopted by Wicca. Around the four genuine Gaelic quarter days are now arranged the Midwinter and September feasts of the Anglo-Saxons, the Midsummer celebrations so prominent in folklore and (for symmetry) the vernal equinox, which does not seem to have been commemorated by any ancient northern Europeans. Nor do most members of the present day cults have permanent temples or other sacred spaces, as the all-important circles can be created and removed at will, a concept familiar in magic but alien to the old religions. All told, the paganism of today has virtually nothing in common with that of the past except the name, which is itself of Christian coinage.[46] But if Wicca and its successors are viewed as a form of ritual magic, then they have a distinguished and very long pedigree, stretching back through the Ordo Templi Orientis and the Golden Dawn to Levi, the New Templars, the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons, and so beyond these to the early modern and medieval texts which derived by many stages from those of Hellenistic Egypt.
"During the 1970s and 1980s, modern paganism became yet more eclectic. It did not expand and enrich its repertoire by a closer study of the past, but spread sideways to combine with other modern traditions.[47] . . .From Native American traditions appeared totemic animals, spirit-quests, medicine wheels, sweat lodges and shamanistic visions. From the religions of the east (mostly strains of modern Hinduism) came meditative techniques, mandalas, chakras and the Third Eye. The writings of the psychologist Carl Jung proved immensely influential, frequently being treated as a discovery of objective truth about the past rather than accurately as unproven hypotheses, His concept of synchronisity, archetypes, the shadow and the collective unconscious were especially useful in imposing modern concepts upon old sources. People persuaded by them no longer had to accept the actual context and apparent message of the latter: they could claim that, like a psychologist treating a patient, they were probing through to realities of which the people leaving the evidence had themselves been unaware."

p. 339-340: "It may be observed that the 'earth-mysteries,' the 'Celtic mysteries' and Wicca have during the past twenty years all become movements which build, like medieval scholasticism, upon closed systems of belief. Up to about the 1970's the bibliographies appended to their books contained works by 'establishment' scholars as well as by people of their own persuasion. After then, all have tended to read only one another and to write only for one another. All have almost totally ignored the tremendous outpouring of new academic publications relevant to their interests. In the case of Wicca, its initiates have paid no attention to the important recent work upon either ancient paganism or the Great Witch Hunt. Two of them took some fleeting notice of Norman Cohn's attack upon the Murray thesis, but only to dismiss it with a few general and quite inadequate remarks, ignoring the vast bulk of a detailed, meticulous and formidable book.[48] By the 1980's, 'craft lore,' sometimes called 'oral tradition,' was deemed by some Wiccan writers as important as historical sources.[49] This did not appear to be a conscious process of censorship so much as a genuine loss of contact with thought worlds other than their own. But at the same time, more in America than in its homeland, modern Paganism was developing a parallel tendency which a historian can only applaud. By trial and error some groups were discovering that brand new rituals worked as well as those prescribed in supposedly (if dubiously) old Books of Shadows. Others were conscientious enough to examine the ancient sources which were claimed to support key works such as [Graves'] The White Goddess and found that they did not in fact do so. The result was a growing admission that modern paganism might well be a recent creation which draws upon ancient images but employs them in a new way and for modern needs. One might add here that this view does fit very well into one genuine Greco-Roman tradition, that anybody could make up their own religion provided it did not harm others."

p. 340: "Still more delightful is the candor of Margaret Adler: 'The most authentic and hallowed Wiccan tradition -- stealing from any source that didn't run away too fast.'[50]

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