The Triumph of the Moon by Ronald Hutton (2019, OUP) offers a serious, useful history of UK pagan witchcraft from around 1800 to the present. It is scholarly, sober, and free of the taint of emotion and grandstanding.
Some things I learned:
*Rural customs are rarely if ever pre-Christian or prehistoric pagan "survivals." But that does not mean they may not be meaningful to practitioners.
*Fraser and Margaret Murray and Robert Graves were wrong.
*Magick and Wicca are retconned constructions, inventions of people like Crowley and Gardner that synthesized specific items of folklore research and material culled from personal insights, popularizing archaeology books, and fiction. Later programmatic insights were also culled from popular media portrayals in 20th century fiction and film.
Congratulations to Hutton. I look forward to reading more of his books.
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Hutton discusses many horror authors in the context of the shaping role popular fiction played in creating a seedbed from which a contemporary witch cadre developed from the late 1950s in the UK and the late 1960s in the U.S.
From: Chapter 13 The Wider Context: Hostility
Machen (p. 422-423):
....A different strand of the negative stereotyping of witches was fashioned out of that thoroughly a phenomenon, the nineteenth-century revival of interest in ceremonial magic. This presented its practitioners with an apparent difficulty which many of them never worked through; that if, on some level, the techniques characterized as 'magic' had some genuine efficacy, then would not malevolent or destructive magic be equally effective in reality, and should not then its operators be punished? To admit the existence of destructive spirits and the literal utility of curses was virtually incumbent upon any modern magician who was not sufficiently wary of the implications and equipped with an alternative definition of, and explanation for, evil. At the beginning of the revival in England, Madame Blavatsky herself warned theosophists to avoid ceremonial magic because 'geometrical designs and figures especially have a power in them of reacting on the awakening of…the half blind and brainless creatures of the elements'.
To those who ignored her advice and yet retained a commitment to Christianity, the temptation to place their work in the context of a supernatural battle between good and evil was often irresistible. One was Arthur Machen, an initiate of the Golden Dawn; in 1894 he broke with the contemporary eulogization of Pan by identifying the god as having the capacity to engender corruption, madness, and destruction. In another work he made out the ancient pagan peoples of Britain to be practitioners of human sacrifice whose descendants still dwell underground in remote rural areas and creep forth in search of victims. Subsequently J. W. Brodie-Innes, leader of one of the successor groups of the Golden Dawn, turned on witches. He wrote articles for The Occult Review taking note of the undoubted propensity of some cunning folk to accept money for laying curses, and declaring that 'this must be done in the Devil's name'. He anticipated Summers by suggesting that the witches accused in the early modern trials had been Satanists, and added a theory that they had accomplished their evil deeds by projecting their bodies onto the astral plane. To accompany and illustrate these ideas he produced two novels about witches in early modern Scotland, which articulated a theory that Druidry had been the ancient faith of the British Isles, a wise and benevolent religion anticipating that of Christ, and that witches had perverted its power to the service of the Evil One, to harm and dominate fellow humans. In both books they are defeated by the power of Jesus.
Further cautions were provided by the three most famous Christian initiates of the Golden Dawn's successor orders. Two came to the decision that magic was bad in itself. One was the poet and mystical writer Evelyn Underhill, whose novel A Column of Dust (1909) warned that those who raised elemental spirits could be possessed by such entities. In that case the only release was in death and ascent to Christ's mercy in heaven. The other was Charles Williams, who achieved national distinction between 1930 and 1945 as a writer of 'theological thrillers'. A common feature of these was the appearance of ceremonial magicians as figures of evil, and the last in the sequence, All Hallows' Eve, was also the most explicit in its condemnation of magic as a pursuit essentially selfish, wicked, and destructive. By then the publishing firm Faber had persuaded him to write a non-fictional work, Witchcraft (1941), which it hoped would cash in on the success of the novels. It proved to be a milder version of Summers, based upon minimal research and dedicated to providing 'a brief account of the history in Christian times of that perverted way of the soul which we call magic or (at a lower level) witchcraft'. The mildness lay in his insistence that by torturing and executing alleged witches instead of trying to redeem them, the early modern authorities had been almost as guilty of flouting Christ's teachings as their victims.
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Lovecraft (pages 418-419):
….the announcement of Wicca to the public was greeted in some newspapers by automatic condemnation, and that witchcraft was equated in some with Satanism. To a certain extent this reaction hardly requires explanation, for such a blatantly counter-cultural religion was hardly likely to meet with approval from all journalists. Furthermore, the old connotations of menace associated with the witch figure in folk tales were inevitably going to colour responses to those who now identified with it. Nonetheless, the specific form which condemnation took does demand comment, for it was articulated within a structure which was as much a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Wicca itself.
There were a number of different components to that structure. The most recognizably traditional consisted of the continuing struggle between eighteenth-century rationalism and the human love of marvels and mysteries which manifested in its most enduring modern form in the genre of Gothic fiction. Caught directly in the tension between the two were novelists such as the Victorian William Harrison Ainsworth. His best-regarded work, The Lancashire Witches (1849), wavered initially between a plea for tolerance of the sort presented by the Enlightenment philosophes and Sir Walter Scott, and a more traditional fear and hatred of witchcraft as a demonic anti-religion. In the end it came down on the latter side, depicting the suspected witches as being not only criminals but devil-worshippers in league with real demons and so possessed of real magical powers, who are justly burned at the stake—in a continental and not an English manner—at the conclusion of the book. The latter is bathed in an atmosphere of redemptive—and vengeful—Christianity. A later novelist of equal fame, John Buchan, followed Margaret Murray in Witch Wood (1927) by representing the witches of seventeenth-century Scotland as practitioners of a surviving pagan religion. Buchan, however, made its rites depraved and disgusting, and hinted that genuine superhuman powers of evil and good were involved in the contest between it and the Christian hero, in which the latter naturally triumphs. Likewise, the famous author of detective fiction, Ngaio Marsh, could publish a story in 1941, Surfeit of Lampreys, which features an anti-heroine who becomes interested, through books, in the practice of witchcraft, and loses her mind as a result.
....H. P. Lovecraft .... took to an extreme degree that theme so common in Victorian and Edwardian high culture; that civilization is a veneer over a morass of primeval horror and excitement. In Lovecraft's cosmology, the latter was represented by 'the Old Ones', monstrous extra-terrestrial entities which had ruled the world before and desired to do so again if they could attain entry points to it. Megalithic monuments and ancient pagan rites of human sacrifice were treated as aspects of the veneration of these beings, and witches were portrayed as their votaries, seeking to restore their rule. Lovecraft wove images of witches' sabbats, taken from Murray and from early modern demonologies, into his tales, to give an impression of a religion of utter evil. 1 What underpinned this vision was Lovecraft's own fear of racial pollution, revealed in letters in which he railed against the threat to the wholesome English values and genes of the United States represented by Jews, Mexicans, blacks, and every variety of Southern and Eastern European immigrant. 2 Beneath these attitudes in turn lay a more general sense of human existence as a dream encircled by a nightmare. All his works could be summed up by one sentence from "Arthur Jermyn" (1920): 'Life is a hideous business, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.'
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Hutton concludes his fourteenth chapter (pages 471-472):
....During the last three decades of the twentieth century, many individuals who adopted a self-consciously Pagan identity said that to do so felt like coming home. Perhaps this was due to memories of past lives, or acknowledgement of long-established contacts with the divine, or simply the discovery of a spirituality which perfectly corresponded to their own instincts and needs. It is also, however, possible that much of this feeling was due to the fact that such people had spent their youth reading books of the sort described above.
Such literary works, then, provided constant reinforcement of the body of ideas which had shaped Wicca. It must be plain enough that those works, in turn, fed off powerful emotional currents within modern British culture—a yearning for a reunion with the natural world and one's own imagination, for a spirituality of liberal self- expression and self-actualization, and for a greater parity and partnership between the sexes, especially in religion—which only strengthened as the twentieth century passed its meridian. The 1960s, in particular, witnessed an explosion of articulations of those needs and attempts to realize them. Out of hundreds of possible texts which might furnish illustration of that phenomenon, I choose one produced by a historian of cinema, Sean French, who describes how films of the decade turned an elitist artistic hedonism 'into a mass-market industry. It was the democratizing of Eden that the 1960s would promise: if we let our hair grow, lie in the sun and cast off our inhibitions imposed by clerics, old people and other tyrants, the result will be a Utopia of the senses'. French described this process as a revival of 'a pagan, classical tradition of sensual pleasure', 57 and indeed the whole passage, like many others from or concerning the time, is soaked in the 'fourth', libertarian, modern English language of paganism. In the definitive era of the counter-culture, counter-cultural religion came into its own.
Linked to these fairly obvious forces were others, perhaps more subtle but not the less profound. One was the continuing erosion of traditional communities by the atomizing effect of modern living. As the church and chapel lost their places as communal foci, so privatized spirituality came to seem more and more natural, and pagan witchcraft was a private spirituality par excellence. Furthermore, as the natural world became tamer and tamer, and the recesses of the globe more familiar, so Westerners began, more than ever before, to treat their own minds and souls as wild places, worthy of exploration. The new witchcraft, which united religion and magic, provided for some a particularly exciting way of entering those inner landscapes.
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Jay
15 January 2022
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