A Look At Where Wicca (And Many Other Things) Started
Cambridge historians have been awarded a £1m grant to find out how much Victorian-era historians and scholars influenced, reinterpreted, and reinvented pre-Victorian history to fit their sensibilities. Some of the areas the project will be looking into will be writings on ancient Egypt, “the Merrie England of Good Queen Bess” (something that Ronald Hutton has studied quite extensively), and the influence of Greece and Rome.
The Victorian obsession with classical Greek culture is one of the many threads that eventually lead to the birth (or rebirth if you will) of modern Paganism and Wicca (again, Hutton’s writings on this subject are essential). Here is what the article has to say on the subject.
“Then there were debates about Greece and Rome. As early as the 1860s, some Victorian liberals were arguing that too much respect for Greece and Rome was positively anti-democratic, and that the compulsory teaching of Greek and Latin ought to be eliminated at grammar schools or even at Oxbridge. Modern languages such as French should be viewed as the proper foundation for a liberal education, some advocated. But others thought the Greeks were the fathers of democracy. Some thought the Greeks had prefigured Christianity, others that they were pagan and godless, others still (covertly) liked the paganism and godlessness and even (still more covertly!) celebrated the homoeroticism and naked emotionalism of certain aspects of classical Greek culture.”
The English fascination with the pre-Christian traditions and myths of ancient Greece would persist into our modern era. Influencing poetry, the arts, philosophy, religion and writing. These threads not only fed the first generation of modern Witches, but the writings of CS Lewis (where classical mythology loomed large in his Narnia books) and Tolkien (in Tolkien’s case he was inspired to write an “English” mythology that he felt was displaced by the English love of Greece). I look forward to the published results of this major grant, and hope it will shed more light on this dynamic and influential period of history.
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