Newspapers and magazines, whether print or electronic, keep a store of “evergreen” content to republish at various intervals, usually seasonal. The thinking being, why rewrite on the same theme over and over again? That article about how you love flowers in the Springtime is never going to go out of style, so long as there are indeed flowers in the Springtime. But sometimes pieces even a few years old start to sound dated, or rely on arguments and “common wisdom” that is no longer valid today. Which brings me to Slate.com reprinting a 2005 article by Mark Oppenheimer about Wicca’s celebration of the Winter Solstice and how the religion is “undermined” by false historical claims.

“Wiccan teachings are for the most part a stew of demonstrably false historical claims. There’s no better time to examine this penchant for dissembling than at winter solstice on Dec. 21, which Wiccans say has been their holiday for thousands of years. For it’s just such unfounded claims to old age and continuous tradition that may keep Wicca from growing to be truly old.”

For the most part? Ouch! Now I’m the first to admit that certain strains of contemporary Paganism, including Wicca, have been, shall we say, “creative” with the past, but I’ve got a problem with this sort of article being re-published (and not just because it takes a jab at Wiccans). First off, even in 2005, this piece was years behind the curve of what was actually happening inside Pagan communities in America and around the world. Modern Paganism has been re-evaluating and questioning certain historical claims for decades now. Aidan Kelly was causing a stir nearly ten years before historian Ronald Hutton explored Wiccan historical claims in “Triumph of the Moon”, and Hutton’s book was published ten years ago! Oppenheimer even grudgingly admits in the article’s closing that changes have been going on.

“There’s evidence that many Wiccans may be wising up. Starhawk has backed off her boldest assertions and now concedes that some part of her original historical matrix may not be true. The debatable notion that Hanukkah is also based on solstice celebrations has been floated but has not caught on, even among diehard Goddess worshippers. Both Starhawk and Carol Christ, another prominent Goddess evangelizer, told me they had no reason to believe the Hanukkah theory. Chastened by the attacks on their bad historiography, Wiccans are growing more likely to say that their faith is based on a love of Wiccan practices, rather than on particular historical claims. It’s a heartening development when religious belief isn’t dependent on the latest archaeological findings. Wiccans might no longer have to sacrifice intellectual rigor to get their spiritual sustenance.”

That this historical re-evaluation has been going on for years should have been evident to Oppenheimer, since one of the sources he cites and praises, Charlotte Allen’s 2001 piece for The Atlantic, came to the same conclusion.

“…both Starhawk and Eisler, along with many of their adherents, seem to be moving toward a position that accommodates, without exactly accepting, the new Goddess scholarship, much as they have done with respect to the new research about their movement’s beginnings.”

So why even write about (and continue writing about) a problem that’s in the process of resolving itself? Perhaps because Oppenheimer has an ax to grind? Back in 2006, Oppenheimer published a book entitled “Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture” that claimed to look at how 60s counterculture shaped religion in America, but quickly drew some interesting boundaries for the sake of “clarity”.

“The alternative groups we identify with the late 1960s were far smaller than imagined, and some historians, easily infatuated with the new and the sexy, have been led badly astray…there has never been reliable evidence of widespread Satanism or paganism…One might argue that by excluding the preponderance of cults, sects, and communes from this study, we are denying them the status of “religion.” That is correct – but for the purpose of clarity not condescension…religion is commitment to a set of beliefs that requires meaningful sacrifice. A belief that you must tithe, or donate of a portion of your income to your church or faith community…religions require sacrifice and exclude other religions.”

You see, in Oppenheimer’s imaginary, arbitrary, definition of religion, Wicca, and other modern Pagan faiths aren’t “real” religions because we, in his imagination, don’t sacrifice or tithe (or own lots of real-estate). That his assertions about sacrifice within our communities are largely ignorant and untrue don’t seem to matter, just as he ignores the important and significant role modern Pagans did indeed play in shaping culture during the 1960s. But hey, anything to save a little work doing research for your book, right?

Ultimately, what gets me isn’t that Slate.com wants to re-publish a critical article about Wiccan history, but that it wants to re-publish a critical article from someone who has barely skimmed the surface of the topic (with his whopping two citations), who seems to have a chip on his shoulder regarding the subject, and who actively ignored our faiths when he actually did write a book on religion. Surely we can do better than this for evergreen material? Oh, and Mark? For the record there are several hundred thousand modern Pagans in America alone, not “thousands of adherents and many more occasional dabblers in the United States and Europe”. It looks like your article’s assertion is a bit out of date, you might want to contact Slate.com for an update lest you look hypocritical.

Historian Ronald Hutton’s “Blood and Mistletoe: The History of Druids in Britain”, the more academic-minded companion to his 2008 book “The Druids” (now out in paperback), is now out in the UK (and will soon be out in the US) and reviews are starting to trickle in. So far they have been extremely positive.

“This book is a tour de force: surely the definitive work on our perception of the Druids. The only thing missing from this exhaustive account is an overview, however brief, of today’s colourful Druid groups – an odd omission by the acknowledged historian of neo-Paganism. For that, you need his earlier book.” – David V Barrett, The Independent

“This is an ably researched and well-written book. It charts the history of an obsession, representing the strange creation of a wholly fabulous people who by dint of repetition become lodged in popular consciousness. They then become part of history. They become real. Hutton explains this alchemical process very well, in a study notable for its humour as well as its scholarship.” – Peter Ackroyd, The Times

“His real concern is with the constantly developing role the Druids have played in Britain’s various cultures since the 17th century, and their place in changing notions of nationality in these islands. From the first of the “antiquaries” through the foundation of the thoroughly modern Ancient Order to the Stonehenge solstice-celebrations of recent times. The result is an engrossing, endlessly thought-provoking read.” – Michael Kerrigan, The Scotsman

You can read an excerpt of the new book, here. It seems a shame that, as David Barrett reports in his review, there is little information on modern Druid groups in this book. Perhaps it was an issue of space? If so, maybe we’ll be graced with a third tome on Druids from Hutton, this one giving an extensive focus to modern Druidry. Still, despite a lack of focus on modern Druid groups, I can only imagine that anyone interested in the history and evolution of perceptions concerning Druids in Britain will find much to enrich themselves with in “Blood and Mistletoe”. I can’t wait to pick up my own copy.

Comic Book Resources features a short excerpt from a longer editorial by writer Alan Moore (writer of Promethea, V for Vendetta, and worshiper of a possible hand-puppet) concerning pornography for the magazine Arthur. In the article Moore details the history of imagery and stories meant to titillate, and their importance to civilization.

“In bygone Greece we see a culture plainly unperturbed by its erotic inclinations, largely saturated by both sexual imagery and sexual narratives. We also see a culture where these attitudes would seem to have worked out quite well, both for the ancient Greeks and for humanity at large. They may well have been hollow-eyed and hairy-palmed erotomaniacs, but on the plus side they invented science, literature, philosophy and, well, civilization, as it turns out.”

So where did it all go wrong? Well, in the opinion of Moore, Christianity and the shaming of sex influenced by such thinkers as the Apostle Paul.

“Sexual openness and cultural progress would seem pretty much to have walked hand in hand throughout the opening chapters of the human story in the West, and it wasn’t until the advent of Christianity, or more specifically of the apostle Paul, that anybody realized we should all be thoroughly ashamed of both our bodies and those processes relating to them. Not until the Emperor Constantine had cut and pasted modern Christianity together from loose scraps of Mithraism and the solar cult of Sol Invictus, adopting the resultant theological collage as the religion of the Roman Empire, did we get to witness the effect of its ideas and doctrines when enacted on a whole society.”

This massive social experiment, in Moore’s opinion, eventually brought about the fall of the Roman Empire.

“If we take a traditional (and predominantly Christian) view of the collapse of Rome, then conventional wisdom tells us that Rome was destroyed by decadence, sunken beneath the rising scum-line of its orgies, of its own sexual permissiveness. The merest skim through Gibbon, on the other hand, will demonstrate that Rome had been a heaving, decadent and orgiastic fleshpot more or less since its inception. It had fornicated its way quite successfully through several centuries without showing any serious signs of harm as a result. Once Constantine had introduced compulsory Christianity to the Empire, though, it barely lasted for another hundred years.”

In his view, this compulsory conversion experience destroyed the syncretic and (mostly) religiously tolerant (for its time) society of Rome. Specifically, it hurt the recruitment of foreign military who didn’t wish to toe the new religious line making Rome weak to invasions by barbarians. Moore’s conclusion?

“…sexually open and progressive cultures such as ancient Greece have given the West almost all of its civilizing aspects, whereas sexually repressive cultures like late Rome have given us the Dark Ages.”

It should be interesting it read the entire article to hear Moore’s views on the tension between libertine excesses and repressive shame in our modern era. It seems that no happy balance has yet to be struck. With one side often losing its own compass with issues regarding the degradation of women, and the other so worried about homosexual sex that it sees such impulses as demonic possession and pure evil.