Biography
When discussing pagan witchcraft, Ronald Hutton is a name that often seems to come up. Among my own inner pagan circle, he seems to garner some deep respect, so I decided it was time to look more deeply into him. I should stress that he doesn’t define himself as a witch, magic practitioner, shaman, or any kind of the usual pagan stereotypes. Foremost, he is a British historian and academic. He started his career as a historian of early modern Britain (Civil War era), but has since branched out to devote more of his academic research to esoteric subjects, such as pagan witchcraft, and folklore.
Ronald Hutton is the Professor of History at the University of Bristol and was awarded the CBE. He has given talks on subjects as diverse as dragon goddesses, druids, and witchcraft at Gresham College, and these are available for viewing on YouTube. I urge you to check them out. Also, on YouTube is his 45-minute Channel 4 documentary on modern British witchcraft from 2013. That’s definitely worth a gander.
Born in India in 1953, Hutton is of mixed British and Russian parentage and took degrees at Cambridge and Oxford, so there’s no doubting his academic prowess. He’s also the author of around twenty books; the pagancentric ones appearing during the 1990s, though his latest is a biography of Oliver Cromwell.
While he has never given up his interest as a historian in the Charles I era, I find his sudden switch to British folklore and paganism intriguing. It doesn’t mean to say he’s a pagan himself. Rather, he prefers to keep his religious beliefs as a private matter, though he was brought up in a pagan household and became acquainted with Wiccans during his formative years.
The Triumph of the Moon – A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft
So, let’s delve a little into his bibliography. I have two of his books, one of which I’ve read: The Triumph of the Moon. The second, The Witch, I’m yet to start at time of writing.
In The Triumph of the Moon Hutton delves deep into the history of pagan witchcraft. I certainly learned more from this book about the history of witchcraft than any other I’ve read on the subject. That said, the chapter headings aren’t to my taste. The book is divided into two parts, Macrocosm and Microcosm. The chapter headings listed under Part 2 make a bit more sense, eg, Uncle Sam and the Goddess is clearly about the growth of witchcraft in the USA. Otherwise, I would need to dive back into the individual chapters to remind myself what they were about. It’s a small personal quibble, admittedly.
Title: The Triumph of the Moon
Author: Ronald Hutton
Publisher: Yale University Press
I also find Hutton’s writing style a little dense. I expected an academic style, but even allowing for this, I found reading it a bit of a slog. There were an above average number of proofreading errors, too. None of this though put me off reading The Witch.
If you want to truly go back to the roots of pagan witchcraft, including defining the language and the influence of ancient tribes, druids, not least the romantic poets of the 19th century, then this is the book for you.
Part 1 – Macrocosm
In Part 1, Hutton covers the establishment of ancient goddesses such as the Moon Goddess, as well as the male gods Apollo and Pan, and their place in literary fiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Keats, Shelley and Byron were all incorporating the hoofed, pipe-playing Pan in their works, and he became quite an icon of the time.
Part 2 – Microcosm
Personally, I found the second part of the book the most interesting. I loved the chapter on Freemasonry and the workers’ guilds, and their similarity to pagan covens and witchcraft. For example, the initiation ceremony for joining the Millers’ Guild involved reading the Bible backwards three times over three years. There was a Society of Horsemen where carrying the bone of a toad gave the user power over the big draught horses, then superseding oxen as plough pullers. These early horse whisperers were known as the Toadmen. Workers’ guilds, Hutton reckons, gave birth to modern pagan witchcraft.
Guilds and covens share one commonality. They’re both secret societies, which can produce problems for the members of each – particularly the latter – who risk social exile. Those folk who lived by themselves away from the hub of mainstream society were often marked out as witches, especially if they never attended church or parish meetings.
One of the 19th century’s most famous liberal historians, Jules Michelet, who was fired from his teaching post because of his outspoken views, once declared, “Don’t speak to me of the equality of the sexes; woman is superior.” Although he meant this in the sense of women making the best domestics, he believed the witch represented spiritual freedom and could be a force for good in protecting women’s rights and the working classes. To him, Woman was inherently ‘a creature of Enchantment. In virtue of regularly recurring periods of exaltation, she is a Sibyl; in virtue of love, a Magician.’*
Modern Pagan Witchcraft
The Microcosm, or Part 2 of the book, dwells more on the nitty-gritty and brings us more up to date with the history of witchcraft. Here, Hutton reveals many of the modern characters of the 20th century who branded themselves as pioneers. A few of them I’ve already discussed elsewhere on this website.
He provides an interesting snippet about nudity in rituals. I’d always believed that the main reason the witches of yore performed naked (or skyclad) was so that if they were suddenly discovered by the witchfinding authorities, they could escape quickly without having to gather up their clothing. In fact, many witches believed that performing nude more readily released the body’s innate magical power. Dion Fortune was more conservative about the matter. She insisted that long robes provide some modesty, but that the nakedness beneath enhanced the creative sexual tension between male and female coveners. Gerald Gardner, an enthusiastic nudist, forbade even fig leaves to be worn for his rituals.
Gardner & Crowley
Gardner was assisted by Aleister Crowley in his ambition to form a coven and write magic rituals. They fell out, and Gardner would later describe Crowley as ‘a charming charlatan.’ This caused a bit of a backlash against Gardner from the Crowley camp.
Crowley’s most famous dictum is his Law of Thelema – ‘Do what you will shall be the whole of the law’ – thought to be largely based on the Wiccan Rede: ‘Do what ye will and ye harm none.’
Small wonder then that by both magicians’ deaths, the Wiccan community existed in a state of civil war, largely fought over by the Gardner and Crowley camps. Aleister Crowley had been dead twenty years when his legacy received a major pop revival with the placing of his image on the Beatles’ 1967 hit album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band.
U.S. Pagan Witchcraft and Feminism
During the 1960s and early 1970s, the main branches of Wicca migrated across to the USA. There, it was seen more as a driver for feminism and for continuing the fight against the ruling patriarchy. The burning of European witches offered proof to women that feminism should be seen as a matter of life and death.
The USA produced its own share of famous self-styled witches, including Miriam Simos, who penned under the name Starhawk. In 1979, her book, The Spiral Dance, expressing her views on what path witchcraft should take, became a bestseller.
Starhawk believed in the Goddess as the primary deity over the male horned god. The Goddess, according to her, was both real and a creation of the imagination. So, she was kind of hedging her bets here. Starhawk wrote that magic ‘opens the gates between the conscious and the unconscious minds.’ Also: ‘Magical systems are highly elaborated metaphors, not truths.’ She argues that we connect with higher, cosmic forces through these metaphors, and that the primary purpose of magic is this connection, regardless of whether the elements themselves are real. We have the power to connect with the cosmos, either way. I might elaborate further on the intriguing Starhawk in a separate blog. I have a copy of Spiral Dance, and it’s sat firmly on my TBR list.
The Triumph of the Moon offers a compelling history of pagan witchcraft in Europe and the USA, and I’d recommend giving it a read.