Ronald Hutton Answers His Critics

I firmly believe that there is a big difference between Pagans of say 2,000 years ago & they way they worshiped then today. Like someone else stated you can pick any one religion & it to has went though some type of change.

Hutton. knows jolly well that he’s talking tosh. But! It does persuade idiots who are silly enough to seek to contend with his willfully controversial assertions, to pay for his dreary books. I mean! Seeking to warn pagan groups that they may attract ‘ridicule’ if they persist in claiming ancient antecedents? A chap dressed like an Edwardian fop for effect, tells others to fear ridicule?
Well I won’t be sucked in to purchasing any of his selectivist, so called history works. He won’t make a pennorth’ of royalty from me! It’s a long time since I read either, but I would certainly opt for a read of the Beano, before giving this Dandy, any further attention whatsoever.

I believe there are deep and meaningful connections between ancient and modern paganism, but I largely concur with Hutton's assertion that there is no evidence of unbroken, unaltered pre-Christian traditions surviving down to recent times. I also feel the need to insist otherwise is rooted in the cultural baggage we carry from Judeo-Christian backgrounds – ie the notion that legitimacy is conferred by "apostolic succession." I still run across people who maintain they have an unbroken ancient family tradition. They have no way to prove it, I have neither the time or interest to disprove it. If they're saying it because they believe it themselves, bully for them. If they're saying it because they hope to impress me, they aren't.

I think we should be talking more about the persistence of classical, pagan and mythic themes in art and literature. I don't think it is sufficient to call it "the persistent love affair of Christian culture with the art and literature of the ancient world." Certainly Christian culture has had such a love affair, but I think that's only a little part of what is going on, and I don't think it really explains what the artists and poets have been doing. By dumping all of the artists and the poets of the past 2,000ish years into the "Christian world" bucket, he suggests a very different cultural point of view and relationship between artist and subject than I think is the case.

I would also like to add that I am not challenging any claims of secretive, unbroken traditions, just speaking on my personal interpretations of Hutton's works.

Well done, Caroline! and thanks for sharing this here, Jason.

Valerie Herron: "In all of his work that I have read, Dr. Hutton basically says that there is no historical evidence for an unbroken Pagan tradition."

Ronald Hutton: "[E]ver since I first began to write about paganism, in my Pagan Religions book, I have emphasised that there is a direct line of transmission between the ancient and modern kinds, [of Paganism], though the medium of ritual magic. This was a clear counter-cultural tradition, in opposition to both pagan and Christian religious norms in Europe, but rooted firmly in the orthodox attitudes to religion and magic taken in ancient Egypt. Not only does it represent a demonstrable continuity, text to text and person to person, across the centuries, but Egyptian magical texts contain the clearest parallels to the beliefs and practices of modern Pagan witchcraft in the ancient world. In Witches, Druids and King Arthur, I went further, to show how astral magic in particular had opened a space for the continued veneration of pagan deities within a broadly Christian framework, which more or less spans the gap between the end of ancient paganism and the appearance of its modern counterpart. I am tempted to speculate that modern Pagans would have recognised the importance of this connection, and been able credibly to claim a direct and unbroken lineage of descent from antiquity, had they not been sidetracked by an error made by academic scholars in the nineteenth century and perpetuated by them into the early and mid twentieth, of identifying the people prosecuted for witchcraft in the early modern period as pagans."
[Emphases added]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this illustrates that it is not so much his critics that Hutton now finds himself needing to respond to, as his would-be supporters who wildly misrepresent what Hutton "basically says".

I suspect that Pagan leaders in the 1930s to the 1960s felt a need for antiquity as though that were necessary for authenticity. That's unnecessary; authenticity comes from within.

And yet there may be some connections between old and modern Paganism which are unique to Wicca. For instance, in Dutch, there used to be an expression De duivel slaat zijn wijf = The devil is beating his wife, said when there is a thunderstorm and the sun is shining at the same time. The same expression existed in French: Le diable bat sa femme. In German they used to say: Der Teufel schlägt seine Mutter = The devil is beating his mother. I have heard the Dutch expression in the fifties, my source for the French and German equivalents is an old book on Dutch folklore (Maarten Douwes Teenstra: Booze Kunsten, Kampen 1846, page 89).
Expressions like these tend to disappear in modern city life, but they point to a story about the devil or some pagan god beating or scourging a goddess, his wife or his mother. Once, this myth must have been known in a large part of Western Europe. Gardner’s Myth of the Descent of the Goddess seems to belong to the same tradition. My conclusion is that the ritual use of the scourge was not a quirk of Gardner’s (as some have suggested). Instead, it may point to a real survival of genuine pagan myth.

I don't think anyone makes the claim that no traditions were passed down in folklore from ancient paganism. The question becomes what level of folklore and folk practice rise to the level of religion. And as definitions of religion are notoriously slippery, there will always be difficulty settling this question.

He refers to an upcoming article of his in The Pomegranate which includes a section by section response to "Trials of the Moon."

Being counter-cultural doesn't mean many of those ritual magicians weren't also Christians.

in Dutch, there used to be an expression De duivel slaat zijn wijf = The devil is beating his wife, said when there is a thunderstorm and the sun is shining at the same time.

You know, my grandparents used to say that to me all the time, when I was growing up (60's and early 70's) – if the sun was shining while it rained, my Granny would say "The devil's whippin' his wife!"

I had never found another family where that was a common saying.

That should be http://ekologi.wordpress.com/

I never heard it either but I'll bet in a few days I'll find someone who thinks it is proof of antedeluvian bdsm.

I still say that, as my grandmother did, in Georgia (USA Georgia, that is)

My family originally hails from England and Germany, and I heard that frequently from my great grandmother and grandmother.

Actually, Vermillion was correct, the parantheses just screwed with the hyperlink. Your link, Fyreflye, was to an entirely different blog in a entirely different language.
http://eklogai.wordpress.com/

I think that that depends on whether the practice has become in any way Christianized. If it has then it can be said to be just as Christian as Pagan. If, on the other hand, the practice (or whatever else it may be) has retained its original Pagan nature and in no way reflects any aspect of Christianity I think that it is fair to characterize it as essentially Pagan, even if the people who do it see themselves as Christian. When Christianity spread across Europe it didn't replace Paganism it formed a new syncretic religion with all of the local forms of Paganism. Paganism did indeed survive to varying degrees in different parts of Europe, it just survived in a form that had merged into Christianity. I could reverse your statement and ask why should Christianity be privileged in examining the folk practices of people in regions where Christianity has spread? When Buddhism spread throughout East and South East Asia is became syncretized with local indigenous religions, does that mean that when talking about the folk practices of those people we can only attribute those practices to Buddhism or can we also recognize that the local, indigenous beliefs continued on in those practices, if in a new form?

In most cases this is indeed how religion is described in many East Asian countries, Buddhism flavored by indigenous folk practices/beliefs. However, Buddhism is more open to being syncretic, therefore it changes how they perceive and speak about religion/ belief. Buddhism proselytizes but it usually doesn't play the One and Only game.

It's true that Buddhism lacks the hostile dynamic with indigenous traditions that Christianity has, but I still feel like the comparison stands in that you can't neatly seperate the Pagan influence on the Christianities that resulted as is spread throughout Europe. We can even look to other non-European syncretic Christian/Pagan traditions, Voudoo or Santeria for example. No one at the Wild Hunt seems to have an issue with identifying these tradtions as some how Pagan even though both owe their existence to Pagan traditions hiding under the guise of Catholicism. No one here seems to question whether they respresent a continuation of earlier African-Pagan religions. But if one makes the same observation about various European traditions that clearly stand outside of the Christian religion it is rejected as not being a legitimate continuation of various pre-Christian European Paganisms.

Valerie, you stated that Hutton "basically says" that "there is no historical evidence for an unbroken Pagan tradition."

In the interview, though, Ronald Hutton states that in all of his writings comparing modern and ancient Paganism that he has "emphasised that there is a direct line of transmission between the ancient and modern kinds [of Paganism]."

What you say Hutton says is the exact opposite of what Hutton actually says. This is what I call "wildly misrepresenting."

For a while Hutton did try to insist on limiting the "pedigree" of modern Paganism to "magic", while denying that there was any continuity in terms of religion. However, as of 2003, with the publication of "Witches, Druids and King Arthur", Hutton acknowledged that "certain types of ancient religion" going back at least to late antiquity, have the same kind of magico-religious character as modern Paganism (of the Wiccan variety), thus accepting that modern Paganism has ancient roots as a religious tradition, not just as a magical tradition. In the present interview, Hutton goes even further and states that the tradition of "ritual magic" that provides the continuity between ancient and modern Paganism, is "rooted firmly in the orthodox attitudes to religion and magic taken in ancient Egypt."

You have an excellent point.
Most of this this about British originating traditions, and Britain has been mostly Christian for a long time, and where even being the wrong kind of Christian at the wrong time been a matter of bloodshed

I'm saying that if someone said they were a Christian, they were a Christian. I'm letting them define themselves. You may say they were worshiping pagan gods, but they would probably say they were just buying good will from the faeries, commanding demons, or invoking the planetary powers of Jupiter. They wouldn't say they were worshiping those beings.

We can know what they were thinking by what they've left us – art, literature, artifacts, etc. And those indicate to me that the Christian god was viewed as the supreme power. In diagrams of the heavenly spheres, he's sitting above all the planetary spheres named after the Roman gods. Ceremonial magicians would use the names of the Christian god to command elementals and other spirits. Faeries could be scared away by church bells. In Dante's Inferno various pagan entities (Charon, Geryon, the Harpies) are working in Hell, carrying out the Christian god's plans. If you can show me some text or artwork from Western Europe's Middle Ages or Renaissance that shows the Christian god doing the bidding of a pagan deity I would love to see it!

In short: I'd love to say that Shakespeare was a Pagan because he wrote about pagan gods, but I think he was a Christian who used pagan themes in his art.

We were from Tennessee. I'm kind of boggled that there are other families out there who shared that weird phrase.

Your use of the terms "institutional" and "folk", Baruch, is completely arbitrary. The main line of "transmission", in Hutton's view, is the "learned" tradition of ritual magic, which might not be exactly "institutional", but it is certainly not "folk".

Peter M. : "I'm saying that if someone said they were a Christian, they were a Christian."

It is a well established and uncontroversial fact that lying about one's true religious beliefs was a ubiquitous phenomenon throughout the history of Christendom from the fourth century through the Early Modern era.

In particular, Augustine of Hippo explicitly acknowledges that those who are forced to accept orthodox Christian teachings under threat of punishment will (obviously) do so insincerely. At first, Augustine used this as an argument against the use of coercive measures to combat heresy, but over time he developed the (truly and deeply evil) theory that eventually those who are forced to pretend to believe will come to sincerely believe.

Some dissenting Christian thinkers even developed a theological justification for lying about their true beliefs, called "Nicodemism".

I agree with your main point. But I don't believe "folk" and "learned" are mutually exclusive. If someone studies a folk instrument or midwifery from a local mistress or master, then that person is "learned" in that subject.

One of my main contentions with Hutton is that he restricts the word "learned" to academic or clerical environments.

Yeah, some folks lie that they are Christian, that doesn't mean that many ritual magicians didn't believe in Jesus. I'm more inclined to think those who profess such faiths wouldn't be lying for said reason when they already showed they didn't care all that much about what society thought when they decided to pursue ritual magic.
And if someone was raised in a primarily Christian country by a Christian family, it's very likely Christianity has some resonance in their life. Even if it occasionally manifests in strong hatred and rebellion against their milk faith.

I definitely get that Hutton's speciality and focus deals with Britain, Wicca/ religious witchcraft, my problem with the interview, though, was that he doesn't really specify that he might only be refering to those things. He throws the generic word 'pagan' around a lot without being more specific. So, when I read the interview it often felt like he was uncritically lumping all of Europe together and treating the questions of Pagan survivals like a question with a single answer, instead of being a complex question whose answer differs a lot depending on just where in Europe and which group of people he's talking about.

Oh, I've not claimed that anything has gone down through the centuries 'unbroken' or 'unchanged', everything changes. I'm just contending that the religious environment that emerged over the centuries it took Christianity to spread over Europe could arguable be called Christo-Pagan. I reject the notion that we should privilege the first half of that by claiming that only it survived and accounted for what it was people were doing religiously, when there were obvious Pagan components that continued on through the centuries in the religious/ spiritual lives of people throughout Europe. I've said before that Paganism in Europe didn't truly begin to truly disappear until all of the social/ political/ technological upheavals of that 19th-20th centuries. Were it not for the modern Pagan revival over the last decades I think that that Pagan heritage that had survived through the centuries would have disappeared under the force of the pressures of the modern world.

"But there was no church of magick."

There was no such "church" or "temple" for the vast majority of ancient pagan traditions, most of which were rural and based in the homestead or small community gathering spaces.

Also, Church is an obviously Christian word.

Being a witch of almost 40 years of practice and being instructed via a couple of lineaged initiatory trads, one fairly well known now and one more or less a family trad I was adopted into, I doubt there will be any historical evidence of the type that will satisfy historians. Mainly because we just don't care nor have a desire as to whether our historical descent is proven to the satisfaction of the public. Having been outside of cultural streams, being outside of history is no big deal. Nor is remaining outside of the "modern pagan movement".As a witch my religious beliefs are somewhat separate from my craft, though those beliefs do inform aspects of my craft.

The torture and lying issue is an interesting one, but it cuts both ways. If we assume that everyone whose statements contradict our beliefs were lying (for whatever reason) it makes it really hard to find any valid evidence at all. How do you prove that people were lying anyway? It's really hard. How can you know anything about the past?

During the assorted witch trials (which were really Christians persecuting other Christians they didn't like) the people who were tortured didn't confess that they were Christian. It was the opposite. They confessed that they were witches, because that's what the torturers wanted to hear. That was the real lie people told to make the pain stop. How can you trust someone's self-identification as a witch in that situation?

That's one of the problems with Margaret Murray's theory that the witches were pagans. She took the confessions (many extracted under torture) as fact, but ignored the parts that didn't fit her theory. Horned god, nudity, dancing in a circle at night? Murray says fact. Eating babies, flying across the countryside, turning in animals? Murray ignores. The whole idea of a witches' sabbat is suspect because of the torture.

Have you ever read Carlo Ginzburg's ECSTASIES? It's a great book, and he looks at how the alleged villains at the heart of Europe's imaginary evil conspiracy changed over time from lepers to Jews to finally witches. When ideas and images that survived from shamanism were added to the conspiracy idea – voila, the witches sabbat appeared in the European consciousness.

That is a very fruitful comparison. In fact, the exclusive focus on Wicca has blinded us to larger historical patterns, which are evident throughout Europe, in Latin American religion and in the African diaspora. Perhaps Hutton's "rigor" would be a bit more "rigorous" if he could get past his Anglocentricity and inherent class bias.

No matter where one places the accent, there is no clear bright line between "folk" and "learned" magic.

On this point, here are some excerpts from Ruth Martin's excellent study of the persecution of Witches by the Venetian Inquisition, Witchcraft and the Inquisition in Venice, 1550-1650:

"[I]t seems that witchcraft of one type or another held an interest for people from all levels of society …. Womens' social standing ranged from the gentildonne who would often consult witches or even try the experiments themselves, through wives of retailers and craftsmen, to washerwomen, arsenal workers (making sails or ropes), the wives of boatmen, prostitutes, to some with no visible means of income at all. Witchcraft had in fact become the main craft of many, hence their titles: la Pirotta, la Caballada, l'Astrologo and la medegha."
[p. 234]

"There was also a close degree of contact between the different classes of Venetian society. The rich and poor lived side by side and the flow of ideas and beliefs between them must have been considerable. As we have seen, the distinction between the 'learned' and the 'popular' elements of witchcraft beliefs in Venice was not always easy to define. This distinction has perhaps been overemphasized in the past in any case. Christine Larner's recent work on Scottish witchcraft, for instance, has revealed a considerable degree of interpenetration between the so-called learned and popular beliefs. In Venice this sharing of beliefs by popular and learned elements of society was even closer."
[p. 243]

"At a different level of society other forms of witchcraft also were all part of what was presumably a Europen-wide system of popular beliefs. Mary O'Neil describes the same experiments, with some local modifications, being practiced in Modena. The Udine records, and those in Trinity College, Dublin, covering the whole of Italy contain references to similar practices. Indeed, whenever the available records provide us with a glimpse into traditional beliefs and activities, for instance those of the so-called 'cunning folk' in England, we see time and time again what were basically the same types of witchcraft as those observed in Venice.

"England is indeed the one country outside Italy to display the most obvious similarities with Venice as far as witchcraft practices are concerned …. [T]he nature of the records in each area enables us to see beyond the large trails, the epidemics of witch-hunting, to the day-to-day beliefs and attitudes of the population as a whole …. The Venetian records provide us … with a detailed picture of a way of life … [W]hat Venice shows us was, broadly speaking, the picture throughout most of Europe."
[p. 241]

I did not in any way comment on the distance or lack thereof between folk magic and learned magic. In fact, I did not respond in in any way to Jonathan's first paragraph.

I simply pointed out, in response to his second paragraph, that Hutton "restricts the word "learned" to academic or clerical environments" because that's what the word means in English.

Please read what I actually wrote before you go off on it.