I recently listened to an interesting podcast with J.J. Storm which situated /The Golden Bough/ in its historical context. ( https://shwep.net/oddcast/jason-ananda-josephson-storm-on-james-george-frazer-the-golden-bough-and-western-esotericism/ ) One thing I wanted to highlight to add to this excellent review is that Frazer was not some lone wolf stochastic terrorist rising up against Christianity. The idea of "pagan survivals" was deeply exciting to hundreds of 19th century European intellectuals who are completely forgotten today; you can read a long list of them in Joscelyn Godwin's /The Theosophical Enlightenment/. Frazer was actually behind his times theoretically, and most folklorists and anthropologists were already discarding his thesis by the 1930s. What made him unique, though, was his impressive industry. He was not afraid to sit in the British Library and slowly translate old articles from Dutch or Spanish language journals just to find a citation or two to stick into the third edition of his work. Even today, some anthropologists find /The Golden Bough/ useful simply because of its massive number of citations in a diverse number of languages. It's like an encyclopedia written entirely to prove a point. It's unsurprising that the creators of Wicca looked to Frazer instead of the hundreds who came before him, most of whom were just playing wishful thinking with a handful of texts.
Another amusing point raised by the podcast is that well before the creation of Wicca, both Frazer and Margaret Murray were cited by Lovecraft when he first described the Cthulhu cult.
Thanks. A colleague recommended SHWEP to me a couple years ago.
FWIW, Hutton talks a fair amount about Frazer's precursors.
And on HPL, Frazer/Murray may be bad history/folklore but it makes great fiction. For instance the Dolmenwood RPG setting (think fantasy medieval England) includes people called "the Druze" who are straight out of Frazer/Murray and it would be a less awesome game setting to cut them out for the sake of historical accuracy.
An amusing sidelight on Margaret Murray's moonshine is that a number of British Golden Age mystery writers wrote mysteries in the 1930s in which folk cult survivals, or ostensible ones, were at play--usually (a bit like in The Wicker Man) created by a charismatic local, often as a cover for nefarious but entirely non-supernatural doings. One of my favorite blogs has an entertaining post about one of these: https://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2017/05/it-takes-village-case-of-unfortunate.html
Also interesting, for anyone interested in the reception of Murray's moonshine, is this article: Jacqueline Simpson (1994) Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?, Folklore, 105:1-2, 89-96, DOI: 10.1080/0015587X.1994.9715877 The first paragraph is worth sharing, I think:
No British folklorist can remember Dr Margaret Murray without embarrassment and a sense of paradox. She is one of the few folklorists whose name became widely known to the public, but among scholars her reputation is deservedly low; her theory that witches were members of a huge secret society preserving a prehistoric fertility cult through the centuries is now seen to be based on deeply flawed methods and illogical arguments. The fact that, in her old age and after three increasingly eccentric books, she was made President of the Folklore Society, must certainly have harmed the reputation of the Society and possibly the status of folkloristics in this country; it helps to explain the mistrust some historians still feel towards our discipline. It is disturbing to see one speaking of "the folklorist or Murrayite" interpretation of witchcraft, as if the two words were synonymous, and all folklorists espoused her views (Russell 1980,41)—whereas, as I hope to show, she wrote only one substantial article on witches for Folklore (in 1917), the reviews of her books that appeared there were far from enthusiastic, and as far as can now be seen the only member of the Folklore Society to adopt her theory wholeheartedly was the very untypical Gerald Gardner, founder of the Wicca movement.
"British Golden Age mystery writers wrote mysteries in the 1930s in which folk cult survivals, or ostensible ones, were at play--usually (a bit like in The Wicker Man) created by a charismatic local, often as a cover for nefarious but entirely non-supernatural doings"
"One thing that we can be confident that Wicca does not draw upon, however, is a goddess religion that survived the introduction of first the Indo-European *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr in the Bronze Age, and then the Semitic Jesus Christ in late antiquity, before being mostly suppressed in the “burning times” of the early modern era.1 Neo-pagans are not the (great-great-great …) granddaughters of the witches you didn’t burn in the 16th and 17th centuries; rather, they are the granddaughters of upper class romantics whose religious innovations in the early to mid-20th century are best characterized as “creative synthesis.”"
Bastet knows that teeing off on Wiccans is easy and fun, and yes, it's a religion by and for overeducated WEIRD romanticists, BUT one can see a similar dynamic in a certain strain of converts to Orthodox Christianity trying to reinvent a folk tradition from the other side of the pond based on the stuff they read on the internet.
This was exactly my thought as I was reading this! The revival of interest in 'high' Christianity (Latin mass, orthodox ritual, etc) from people with no real continuous connection to it rings very similarly.
This is not quite the same as performativity, but I remember reading a critical anthropologist who related the following anecdote.
An anthropologist wished to study the lifestyle of an isolated tribe in some out-of-the-way place. He made the difficult journey to get there, found a local informant and began asking questions about tribal life and beliefs. When the informant was stumped for an answer, he retreated to a hut, and presently returned with a definitive reply.
The anthropologist was intrigued – was there some elder of the tribe in the hut, deeply versed in their traditions, who was being consulted? Eventually the informant allowed him into the hut, where he found an old book written by an anthropologist of a previous generation who had once studied the tribe.
His informant had been consulting this old anthropologist’s book to answer the new anthropologist’s questions!
There’s also a humorous passage in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies novel, where a London gossip columnist invents a story about a Scottish laird, which eventually gets printed in an anthology of Highland Legends. Waugh dryly remarks, ‘This shows the difference between what is called a “living” as opposed to a “dead” folk tradition'.
Re: the Nazi belief that Semitic religion has replaced the original, Norse religion of the Germanic peoples.
This excerpt from a review by Jane Psmith:
Proto-Germanic has all kinds of ocean-related borrowings that don’t appear to be cognate with words in other Indo-European languages…
So obviously it was the Phoenicians.
And “Baldur,” a god who shows up in Germanic mythology, is etymologically Phoenician Baal.
At least, this is the case of Theo Vennemann of the University of Munich, who argues that the Phoenicians could have ended up in the northern shore of Europe, somewhere around what’s now the border of Germany and Denmark, around 500 BC, and that the influence of Phoenician could account for all the oddness of Proto-Germanic. (McWhorter adds only that maybe they came from Carthage, because why not.)
I'm a pagan myself. However, I'm not a Wiccan and am not personally very familiar with Wicca.
The one thing I'd like to emphasize is that paganism is a big tent and includes countless traditions, not just Wicca.
I don't significantly disagree with anything in this review. It is very focused on Wicca and England. Maybe that's the focus of the book being reviewed. Some other countries had longer (or shorter) durations of paganism before Christianization. I find it plausible, for example, that pagan traditions in Baltic countries, Japan, etc. have been more continuous or more well-documented.
Historicity - in religion or otherwise - has an obvious appeal. It's nice to understand a historical state of equilibrium that apparently people found meaningful until the system changed and it was lost. What if they understood and appreciated aspects of humanity or reality that mainstream culture doesn't? It would be nice to glean the best from every age.
Chesterton: “Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”
Making something new up wholesale just doesn't have the same precedent of success. Still, New Age metaphysics is arguably part of the big tent of paganism, and many people are unbothered by its newness.
It's unfortunate that most human traditions that aren't directly coded into our biological instincts have been lost without record. This includes most pagan traditions, as well as even comparatively well-documented religions like Christianity.
What was a Christian church service in 100 AD like? Well, a few things were recorded - we know they shared a meal - but there are hardly service leaflets or prayer books around. Modern liturgies incorporate a mix of elements from various times and places around historic Christendom, plus new inspiration.
What was a pagan celebration in 3000 BC in Ireland like? Well, for that we have to rely on archaeology. We know that their stone monuments at e.g. Newgrange were sometimes oriented to catch the sun at eight specific times of year: the solstices, equinoxes, and the halfway points between them. Later paganism and Wicca don't have the same names for those eight holidays, but the eight-armed Wheel of the Year that features in Wicca and some other branches of paganism is a very old tradition indeed. It's still not a service leaflet; for that, many turn to Starhawk et al. or make up their own.
I'll leave you with a return to my line about human traditions that have been directly coded into our biological instincts. I think these are what a lot of paganism is about, which explains the sex, violence, reverence for nature, etc. that are more or less explicitly addressed in various traditions.
Go back - waaaay back, before the Iron Age paganisms that Christianity displaced, back before the patriarchal Bronze Age invasions - back to the innovative Neolithic era and everything preceding it, back even to the Gravettians of the upper Paleolithic in 31,000 BC. What you see prevalent in the archaeological record, more than any other likeness, are goddess figurines. Okay, what you technically see are figurines of human females, typically with large breasts, often pregnant, occasionally giving birth. Figurines with rope-holes so they can be worn as pendants. Figurines transported hundreds of miles from where the stone they're carved from came from. Cave drawings of these women. Sculptures of these women, on thrones, in obvious temples. Call them goddesses or not, these artifacts seem to revere the female capacity for gestating, birthing, and breastfeeding.
That's my paganism. When I did those things for the first time, wow, talk about biological instincts.
The mother-baby bond is generally the strongest bond in mammalian experience. And human babies are much more dependent than other species’, so human mothers need to activate even more nurturing instincts and motivation.
Matrescence is as big of a neurological transformation as adolescence, crammed into a much shorter time frame. That's what natural birth and breastfeeding do. They rewire your brain as well as your body. That process is indescribably intense. It's awe-inspiring, for our distant ancestors as well as for the few of us who get to do it nowadays. Worthy of religious valuation, even.
The mother-baby bond is how human infants learn love at their most formative stages. And early societies that rallied to support mothers (possibly involving these goddess figures) as they instinctively invested in nurturing their babies probably outperformed societies that didn't.
I would love to see and maybe participate in some of the various ways that humans throughout the ages have honored and celebrated the feat of birth, the transformation of matrescence, the nurturing instinct of breastfeeding, the relationship of motherhood. It would be enriching. But the underlying reality isn't lost along with the historical traditions that honor it. The underlying reality isn't many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, or the Venus of Willendorf, or even the archetypical Great Mother Goddess, at least not as some sort of deity one could have a personal relationship with. The underlying reality is biology, it's nature, it's my body and my experience, which I appreciate knowing I'm not alone in. That's what I choose to express gratitude for and lean into. That's what I do with my one wild and precious life.
Hutton very deliberately frames Triumph of the Moon as being about English Wicca and includes US Wicca in his history only because it influenced English Wicca in the 1980s and 1990s. His later book, The Witch, is a global comparative study, but it is also specifically about witches rather than paganism or neo-paganism. I suspect that a study of, say, Germany or Spain, would look broadly similar to England, but I totally agree that things would look different in places with little or no history of dominant monotheism. For instance, I don't particularly see any reason to doubt the conventional story that Japanese religion is a syncretic combination of Shinto animist tradition and Buddhism (which itself incorporated Chinese gods). The Baltics are a harder case, my tentative hunch is that pagan survivalism is pretty minimal. 500 years of official Christianity is not 1600 years like in Western Europe, but it ain't nothing either. For instance, Latin America has been Christianized for almost as long as the Baltics and it has a mix of practices that understand themselves as Christian but may be pagan survival (eg, is Our Lady of the Amazon derived from Pachamama?) and practices that claim to be pagan survivalism but are actually secularized Christianity (eg, Dio de Muertos).
We actually know a fair amount about Christian liturgy circa 100 AD from such sources as the pastoral epistles and the Didache. There are some differences (eg, the agape feast gets pared down to the eucharist and confession and clerical celibacy date to the early middle ages) but a recognizable basic structure of the mass and the episcopacy date to the 2d century.
I wouldn't go full Jungian, but totally agree that some cultural practices will resonate more with human nature or nature itself than will others. As such, it's not surprising that multiple cultures have goddesses associated with fertility since human women give birth, have solstice festivals since a solstice is a conspicuous feature of nature, etc.
As I noted in a footnote, interpreting neolithic venus figurines as goddesses is plausible but unprovable. I would add though that 30kya is a very long time and so it's less plausible that there would be continuity in this tradition, especially given that, as you noted, there's something resonant in human nature about this archetype.
> "Go back - waaaay back, before the Iron Age paganisms that Christianity displaced, back before the patriarchal Bronze Age invasions - back to the innovative Neolithic era and everything preceding it, back even to the Gravettians of the upper Paleolithic in 31,000 BC. What you see prevalent in the archaeological record, more than any other likeness, are goddess figurines."
I know this isn't really the main thrust of your argument and I don't disagree with it, but given the levels of fortress-building associated with the Linear Beaker Culture and it's successors and the apparent introgression of hunter-gatherer Y-DNA during the later neolithic I think the claims of neolithic matriarchy were likely exaggerated.
You're correct, what OP is saying sounds like it comes straight from Marija Gimbutas, who is a lot like Murray. Gimbutas was a very well-respected archeologist and one of the pillars of locating Proto-Indo European to Pontic Steppe. However, her work on "Old Europe" was very controversial at the time and has been battered to death in the past 50 years as new evidence undercuts many of its assumptions.
One example is the Venus figures which were assumed to be of such ritual importance because we didn't find any other similar objects. However that is no longer true as archeological techniques advanced which allow much more delicate animal statuary to survive the unearthing process so it now looks like the Venus figures only survived at abnormal rates because they're essentially a bowling ball with tits.
This is completely incorrect. New research has *vindicated* Gimbutas, not "battered [her] to death" (interesting choice of phraseology, but not surprising in a comment enthusiastic about Hutton's regressive, misogynistic work)
If you don't believe me, take it from Sir Colin Renfrew:
I think you're misunderstanding me. I was not disputing the Krugan hypothesis but her "Old Europe" Theory. Your video link from what I've seen is entirely concerned with the migration of PIE not her Old Europe theory.
As for the evidence battering her Old Europe theory as a matriarchal, peaceful and egalitarian there's the Talheim and Asparn-Schletz mass graves which predate the arrival of PIE and in which males massively outnumber females and have signs of sudden traumatic death.
We also have the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck which shows between 10,000-7,000 years ago a massive number of male lineages disappeared but not female lineages which we can only explain via warfare or extreme social stratification.
Finally the rate of non female figures being found compared to female figures has changed significantly since Gimbutas's time (see link 1) and the interpretation of those figures has also changed a lot in the last 50 years (see link 2)
The Neolithic Y chromosome evidence *confirms* Gimbutas, it's consistent with everything she said throughout her career.
A tremendous amount of ink has been spilled over the years trying to prove Gimbutas wrong and the interpretation of the sex of figurines is almost inevitably done in a "don't say it's female unless you haaaave to" intellectual context. so if your "50 years" is 1975-2025, throughout the 80s and the 90s and into the early 2000s archaeological work savagely trashing any type of Gimbutas-adjacent interpretation was a lively cottage industry. That's why someone who really knew the field -- Renfrew -- felt it was important to explicitly say "oh fuck me she was right all along" after the 2015 Y chromosome study was published.
Gimbutas never, ever proposed an "Old Europe" in which everyone sat around all day holding hands and singing about the glory of mommy's boobies. What she said is that the shift to Indo-European culture was violent and dramatic. That's what the aDNA says too.
As to "everyone sat around all day holding hands and singing about the glory of mommy's boobies" she did say which is directly against the archeological evidence we have of mass graves and fortifications
"Europe enjoyed a long period of uninterrupted peaceful living which produced artistic expressions of graceful beauty and refinement … demonstrating a higher quality of life than many androcratic, classed societies"
and
"It is a gross misunderstanding to imagine warfare as endemic to the human condition. Widespread fighting and fortification building have indeed been the way of life for most of our direct ancestors from the Bronze Age up until now. However, this was not the case in the Paleolithic and Neolithic"
both from The Civilization of the Goddess. The World of Old Europe
Can you explain to me how the Y bottleneck supports the Old Europe theory? Everything I've read says it was either warfare or extreme social stratification. I didn't see your Renfeld video address this at all. This would match with the archeological evidence of mass graves and proliferation of fortications in places like Provadia-Solnitsata, berry au bac and Sesklobetter than the Old Europe.
I don't know if Hutton already covers this in Queens of the Wild, but there seems to be decent evidence that elements of Gaelic paganism were syncretised with the cult of St. Brigid, and the story of King Bresal Bó-Díbad (in connection with the newgrange complex and royal incest) seems to have been vindicated by recent archaeogenetic findings, which would- amazingly- imply that knowledge of neolithic religious practices managed to echo in Irish folklore for around 4000 years. Most of modern paganism is recently fabricated, sure, but clearly something of the pre-Christian world survived in places.
Best I can tell, this is the only mention of Brigid / Bridget in Queens of the Wild.
"British writers who were not experts on prehistory, by contrast, had no such inhibitions, being carried away by the attraction of a nature-goddess figure which had been sweeping the West for a century. In 1898 a medical doctor with a mystical attachment to the Celtic past declared that ancient Ireland had been ruled by a high queen representing the land’s Great Mother Goddess, whom ‘the Celtic Church’ turned into the Christian saint Bridget."
I recall hearing him express somewhere that goddess -> saint or vice versa was indeterminable. Perhaps it was in Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles.
It looks like Hutton will be lecturing on Bridget on March 10 so we will find out his opinion in a few months.
Britain isn't all of Europe, and the late 19th / early 20th c. isn't all of history. There was quite a bit of magic going on from the 13th c. on in Europe, just not Wicca or paganism (though the cultures were virtually made from superstitions, some very old).
I think there was a little pagan survival in rural areas, but it was a lot more marginal (and weirder) than people think. See Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles (1966) and Ecstacies (1989), and if your dated academic German is really good, “Der Werwolf in Livland,” Hermann von Bruiningk (1924). Some fun, weird stuff, but absolutely nothing close to a “religion” (which really isn’t compatible with historic “paganism” as I understand it—it was mostly not actually an “ism” at all, more a pantheistic perspective on the world).
Hutton discusses Ginzburg and the benandanti and concedes they're the best evidence for possible pagan survivalism though he is obviously annoyed that Ginzburg weighed in on the Murray thesis overall. I know there were early modern werewolf court cases in northern Europe that seemed to be tied to the puffery of service magicians (an etic term for what we used to call "witch doctors" and who in the British context were sometimes called "cunning folk").
I recently listened to an interesting podcast with J.J. Storm which situated /The Golden Bough/ in its historical context. ( https://shwep.net/oddcast/jason-ananda-josephson-storm-on-james-george-frazer-the-golden-bough-and-western-esotericism/ ) One thing I wanted to highlight to add to this excellent review is that Frazer was not some lone wolf stochastic terrorist rising up against Christianity. The idea of "pagan survivals" was deeply exciting to hundreds of 19th century European intellectuals who are completely forgotten today; you can read a long list of them in Joscelyn Godwin's /The Theosophical Enlightenment/. Frazer was actually behind his times theoretically, and most folklorists and anthropologists were already discarding his thesis by the 1930s. What made him unique, though, was his impressive industry. He was not afraid to sit in the British Library and slowly translate old articles from Dutch or Spanish language journals just to find a citation or two to stick into the third edition of his work. Even today, some anthropologists find /The Golden Bough/ useful simply because of its massive number of citations in a diverse number of languages. It's like an encyclopedia written entirely to prove a point. It's unsurprising that the creators of Wicca looked to Frazer instead of the hundreds who came before him, most of whom were just playing wishful thinking with a handful of texts.
Another amusing point raised by the podcast is that well before the creation of Wicca, both Frazer and Margaret Murray were cited by Lovecraft when he first described the Cthulhu cult.
Lovecraft was a big believer in the Murray thesis! (For rather Frazerian reasons, of course.)
Thanks. A colleague recommended SHWEP to me a couple years ago.
FWIW, Hutton talks a fair amount about Frazer's precursors.
And on HPL, Frazer/Murray may be bad history/folklore but it makes great fiction. For instance the Dolmenwood RPG setting (think fantasy medieval England) includes people called "the Druze" who are straight out of Frazer/Murray and it would be a less awesome game setting to cut them out for the sake of historical accuracy.
An amusing sidelight on Margaret Murray's moonshine is that a number of British Golden Age mystery writers wrote mysteries in the 1930s in which folk cult survivals, or ostensible ones, were at play--usually (a bit like in The Wicker Man) created by a charismatic local, often as a cover for nefarious but entirely non-supernatural doings. One of my favorite blogs has an entertaining post about one of these: https://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2017/05/it-takes-village-case-of-unfortunate.html
Also interesting, for anyone interested in the reception of Murray's moonshine, is this article: Jacqueline Simpson (1994) Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?, Folklore, 105:1-2, 89-96, DOI: 10.1080/0015587X.1994.9715877 The first paragraph is worth sharing, I think:
No British folklorist can remember Dr Margaret Murray without embarrassment and a sense of paradox. She is one of the few folklorists whose name became widely known to the public, but among scholars her reputation is deservedly low; her theory that witches were members of a huge secret society preserving a prehistoric fertility cult through the centuries is now seen to be based on deeply flawed methods and illogical arguments. The fact that, in her old age and after three increasingly eccentric books, she was made President of the Folklore Society, must certainly have harmed the reputation of the Society and possibly the status of folkloristics in this country; it helps to explain the mistrust some historians still feel towards our discipline. It is disturbing to see one speaking of "the folklorist or Murrayite" interpretation of witchcraft, as if the two words were synonymous, and all folklorists espoused her views (Russell 1980,41)—whereas, as I hope to show, she wrote only one substantial article on witches for Folklore (in 1917), the reviews of her books that appeared there were far from enthusiastic, and as far as can now be seen the only member of the Folklore Society to adopt her theory wholeheartedly was the very untypical Gerald Gardner, founder of the Wicca movement.
"British Golden Age mystery writers wrote mysteries in the 1930s in which folk cult survivals, or ostensible ones, were at play--usually (a bit like in The Wicker Man) created by a charismatic local, often as a cover for nefarious but entirely non-supernatural doings"
So British Scooby Doo
"One thing that we can be confident that Wicca does not draw upon, however, is a goddess religion that survived the introduction of first the Indo-European *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr in the Bronze Age, and then the Semitic Jesus Christ in late antiquity, before being mostly suppressed in the “burning times” of the early modern era.1 Neo-pagans are not the (great-great-great …) granddaughters of the witches you didn’t burn in the 16th and 17th centuries; rather, they are the granddaughters of upper class romantics whose religious innovations in the early to mid-20th century are best characterized as “creative synthesis.”"
Bastet knows that teeing off on Wiccans is easy and fun, and yes, it's a religion by and for overeducated WEIRD romanticists, BUT one can see a similar dynamic in a certain strain of converts to Orthodox Christianity trying to reinvent a folk tradition from the other side of the pond based on the stuff they read on the internet.
This was exactly my thought as I was reading this! The revival of interest in 'high' Christianity (Latin mass, orthodox ritual, etc) from people with no real continuous connection to it rings very similarly.
People are being grafted, contrary to continuity, into a cultivated religious tradition, sharing in its nourishing roots? 🧐 Is outrage!
Excellent work, Gabe. This reminded me of Caligula's reported obsession with the moon and desire to capture and seduce it (her).
Brilliant review.
This is not quite the same as performativity, but I remember reading a critical anthropologist who related the following anecdote.
An anthropologist wished to study the lifestyle of an isolated tribe in some out-of-the-way place. He made the difficult journey to get there, found a local informant and began asking questions about tribal life and beliefs. When the informant was stumped for an answer, he retreated to a hut, and presently returned with a definitive reply.
The anthropologist was intrigued – was there some elder of the tribe in the hut, deeply versed in their traditions, who was being consulted? Eventually the informant allowed him into the hut, where he found an old book written by an anthropologist of a previous generation who had once studied the tribe.
His informant had been consulting this old anthropologist’s book to answer the new anthropologist’s questions!
There’s also a humorous passage in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies novel, where a London gossip columnist invents a story about a Scottish laird, which eventually gets printed in an anthology of Highland Legends. Waugh dryly remarks, ‘This shows the difference between what is called a “living” as opposed to a “dead” folk tradition'.
"Fortunately cranks writing the encyclopedia is an issue safely in the past."
I lol'd. Well done.
Used to date a Wiccan and she’d get super mad because I would take her magic stick or whatever and point it at things and go “pew pew”
Everybody wants a goth gf but seems like some people don't want to do the bare minimum to keep one.
Overrated experience
Re: the Nazi belief that Semitic religion has replaced the original, Norse religion of the Germanic peoples.
This excerpt from a review by Jane Psmith:
Proto-Germanic has all kinds of ocean-related borrowings that don’t appear to be cognate with words in other Indo-European languages…
So obviously it was the Phoenicians.
And “Baldur,” a god who shows up in Germanic mythology, is etymologically Phoenician Baal.
At least, this is the case of Theo Vennemann of the University of Munich, who argues that the Phoenicians could have ended up in the northern shore of Europe, somewhere around what’s now the border of Germany and Denmark, around 500 BC, and that the influence of Phoenician could account for all the oddness of Proto-Germanic. (McWhorter adds only that maybe they came from Carthage, because why not.)
It’s a fun, if totally conjectural, theory...
https://substack.com/home/post/p-136621386?selection=5d1df9c1-54b1-420a-bf25-569a121060d5#:~:text=Did%20you%20know%20English%20is%20one%20of%20the%20very%20few%20languages%20that%20can%20say%20things%20like%20%E2%80%9Cdid%20you%20know%E2%80%9D%3F%20We%E2%80%99re%20forever%20sticking%20the%20verb%20%E2%80%9Cto%20do%E2%80%9D%20into%20questions%20and%20negative%20statements%3A%20%E2%80%9CDo%20you%20have%20a%20giraffe%20in%20your%20back%20yard%3F%E2%80%9D%20%E2%80%9CNo%2C%20I%20do%20not%20have%20a%20giraffe%2C%20because%20giraffes%20do%20not%20live%20in%20this%20climate
I'm a pagan myself. However, I'm not a Wiccan and am not personally very familiar with Wicca.
The one thing I'd like to emphasize is that paganism is a big tent and includes countless traditions, not just Wicca.
I don't significantly disagree with anything in this review. It is very focused on Wicca and England. Maybe that's the focus of the book being reviewed. Some other countries had longer (or shorter) durations of paganism before Christianization. I find it plausible, for example, that pagan traditions in Baltic countries, Japan, etc. have been more continuous or more well-documented.
Historicity - in religion or otherwise - has an obvious appeal. It's nice to understand a historical state of equilibrium that apparently people found meaningful until the system changed and it was lost. What if they understood and appreciated aspects of humanity or reality that mainstream culture doesn't? It would be nice to glean the best from every age.
Chesterton: “Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.”
Making something new up wholesale just doesn't have the same precedent of success. Still, New Age metaphysics is arguably part of the big tent of paganism, and many people are unbothered by its newness.
It's unfortunate that most human traditions that aren't directly coded into our biological instincts have been lost without record. This includes most pagan traditions, as well as even comparatively well-documented religions like Christianity.
What was a Christian church service in 100 AD like? Well, a few things were recorded - we know they shared a meal - but there are hardly service leaflets or prayer books around. Modern liturgies incorporate a mix of elements from various times and places around historic Christendom, plus new inspiration.
What was a pagan celebration in 3000 BC in Ireland like? Well, for that we have to rely on archaeology. We know that their stone monuments at e.g. Newgrange were sometimes oriented to catch the sun at eight specific times of year: the solstices, equinoxes, and the halfway points between them. Later paganism and Wicca don't have the same names for those eight holidays, but the eight-armed Wheel of the Year that features in Wicca and some other branches of paganism is a very old tradition indeed. It's still not a service leaflet; for that, many turn to Starhawk et al. or make up their own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrange
I'll leave you with a return to my line about human traditions that have been directly coded into our biological instincts. I think these are what a lot of paganism is about, which explains the sex, violence, reverence for nature, etc. that are more or less explicitly addressed in various traditions.
Go back - waaaay back, before the Iron Age paganisms that Christianity displaced, back before the patriarchal Bronze Age invasions - back to the innovative Neolithic era and everything preceding it, back even to the Gravettians of the upper Paleolithic in 31,000 BC. What you see prevalent in the archaeological record, more than any other likeness, are goddess figurines. Okay, what you technically see are figurines of human females, typically with large breasts, often pregnant, occasionally giving birth. Figurines with rope-holes so they can be worn as pendants. Figurines transported hundreds of miles from where the stone they're carved from came from. Cave drawings of these women. Sculptures of these women, on thrones, in obvious temples. Call them goddesses or not, these artifacts seem to revere the female capacity for gestating, birthing, and breastfeeding.
That's my paganism. When I did those things for the first time, wow, talk about biological instincts.
The mother-baby bond is generally the strongest bond in mammalian experience. And human babies are much more dependent than other species’, so human mothers need to activate even more nurturing instincts and motivation.
Matrescence is as big of a neurological transformation as adolescence, crammed into a much shorter time frame. That's what natural birth and breastfeeding do. They rewire your brain as well as your body. That process is indescribably intense. It's awe-inspiring, for our distant ancestors as well as for the few of us who get to do it nowadays. Worthy of religious valuation, even.
The mother-baby bond is how human infants learn love at their most formative stages. And early societies that rallied to support mothers (possibly involving these goddess figures) as they instinctively invested in nurturing their babies probably outperformed societies that didn't.
I would love to see and maybe participate in some of the various ways that humans throughout the ages have honored and celebrated the feat of birth, the transformation of matrescence, the nurturing instinct of breastfeeding, the relationship of motherhood. It would be enriching. But the underlying reality isn't lost along with the historical traditions that honor it. The underlying reality isn't many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, or the Venus of Willendorf, or even the archetypical Great Mother Goddess, at least not as some sort of deity one could have a personal relationship with. The underlying reality is biology, it's nature, it's my body and my experience, which I appreciate knowing I'm not alone in. That's what I choose to express gratitude for and lean into. That's what I do with my one wild and precious life.
Hutton very deliberately frames Triumph of the Moon as being about English Wicca and includes US Wicca in his history only because it influenced English Wicca in the 1980s and 1990s. His later book, The Witch, is a global comparative study, but it is also specifically about witches rather than paganism or neo-paganism. I suspect that a study of, say, Germany or Spain, would look broadly similar to England, but I totally agree that things would look different in places with little or no history of dominant monotheism. For instance, I don't particularly see any reason to doubt the conventional story that Japanese religion is a syncretic combination of Shinto animist tradition and Buddhism (which itself incorporated Chinese gods). The Baltics are a harder case, my tentative hunch is that pagan survivalism is pretty minimal. 500 years of official Christianity is not 1600 years like in Western Europe, but it ain't nothing either. For instance, Latin America has been Christianized for almost as long as the Baltics and it has a mix of practices that understand themselves as Christian but may be pagan survival (eg, is Our Lady of the Amazon derived from Pachamama?) and practices that claim to be pagan survivalism but are actually secularized Christianity (eg, Dio de Muertos).
We actually know a fair amount about Christian liturgy circa 100 AD from such sources as the pastoral epistles and the Didache. There are some differences (eg, the agape feast gets pared down to the eucharist and confession and clerical celibacy date to the early middle ages) but a recognizable basic structure of the mass and the episcopacy date to the 2d century.
I wouldn't go full Jungian, but totally agree that some cultural practices will resonate more with human nature or nature itself than will others. As such, it's not surprising that multiple cultures have goddesses associated with fertility since human women give birth, have solstice festivals since a solstice is a conspicuous feature of nature, etc.
As I noted in a footnote, interpreting neolithic venus figurines as goddesses is plausible but unprovable. I would add though that 30kya is a very long time and so it's less plausible that there would be continuity in this tradition, especially given that, as you noted, there's something resonant in human nature about this archetype.
> "Go back - waaaay back, before the Iron Age paganisms that Christianity displaced, back before the patriarchal Bronze Age invasions - back to the innovative Neolithic era and everything preceding it, back even to the Gravettians of the upper Paleolithic in 31,000 BC. What you see prevalent in the archaeological record, more than any other likeness, are goddess figurines."
I know this isn't really the main thrust of your argument and I don't disagree with it, but given the levels of fortress-building associated with the Linear Beaker Culture and it's successors and the apparent introgression of hunter-gatherer Y-DNA during the later neolithic I think the claims of neolithic matriarchy were likely exaggerated.
You're correct, what OP is saying sounds like it comes straight from Marija Gimbutas, who is a lot like Murray. Gimbutas was a very well-respected archeologist and one of the pillars of locating Proto-Indo European to Pontic Steppe. However, her work on "Old Europe" was very controversial at the time and has been battered to death in the past 50 years as new evidence undercuts many of its assumptions.
One example is the Venus figures which were assumed to be of such ritual importance because we didn't find any other similar objects. However that is no longer true as archeological techniques advanced which allow much more delicate animal statuary to survive the unearthing process so it now looks like the Venus figures only survived at abnormal rates because they're essentially a bowling ball with tits.
This is completely incorrect. New research has *vindicated* Gimbutas, not "battered [her] to death" (interesting choice of phraseology, but not surprising in a comment enthusiastic about Hutton's regressive, misogynistic work)
If you don't believe me, take it from Sir Colin Renfrew:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmv3J55bdZc
I think you're misunderstanding me. I was not disputing the Krugan hypothesis but her "Old Europe" Theory. Your video link from what I've seen is entirely concerned with the migration of PIE not her Old Europe theory.
As for the evidence battering her Old Europe theory as a matriarchal, peaceful and egalitarian there's the Talheim and Asparn-Schletz mass graves which predate the arrival of PIE and in which males massively outnumber females and have signs of sudden traumatic death.
We also have the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck which shows between 10,000-7,000 years ago a massive number of male lineages disappeared but not female lineages which we can only explain via warfare or extreme social stratification.
Finally the rate of non female figures being found compared to female figures has changed significantly since Gimbutas's time (see link 1) and the interpretation of those figures has also changed a lot in the last 50 years (see link 2)
https://www.academia.edu/23184133/The_Interpretation_of_Prehistoric_Anthropomorphic_Figurines?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/archaeological-dialogues/article/matriarchy-gimbutas-and-figurines-entanglements-with-the-goddess/07D1A3C4647CC496F4410F70E54075D5?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://www.academia.edu/23184133/The_Interpretation_of_Prehistoric_Anthropomorphic_Figurines?utm_source=chatgpt.com
The Neolithic Y chromosome evidence *confirms* Gimbutas, it's consistent with everything she said throughout her career.
A tremendous amount of ink has been spilled over the years trying to prove Gimbutas wrong and the interpretation of the sex of figurines is almost inevitably done in a "don't say it's female unless you haaaave to" intellectual context. so if your "50 years" is 1975-2025, throughout the 80s and the 90s and into the early 2000s archaeological work savagely trashing any type of Gimbutas-adjacent interpretation was a lively cottage industry. That's why someone who really knew the field -- Renfrew -- felt it was important to explicitly say "oh fuck me she was right all along" after the 2015 Y chromosome study was published.
Gimbutas never, ever proposed an "Old Europe" in which everyone sat around all day holding hands and singing about the glory of mommy's boobies. What she said is that the shift to Indo-European culture was violent and dramatic. That's what the aDNA says too.
As to "everyone sat around all day holding hands and singing about the glory of mommy's boobies" she did say which is directly against the archeological evidence we have of mass graves and fortifications
"Europe enjoyed a long period of uninterrupted peaceful living which produced artistic expressions of graceful beauty and refinement … demonstrating a higher quality of life than many androcratic, classed societies"
and
"It is a gross misunderstanding to imagine warfare as endemic to the human condition. Widespread fighting and fortification building have indeed been the way of life for most of our direct ancestors from the Bronze Age up until now. However, this was not the case in the Paleolithic and Neolithic"
both from The Civilization of the Goddess. The World of Old Europe
https://www.scribd.com/document/819449018/Civilization-of-the-Goddess?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Can you explain to me how the Y bottleneck supports the Old Europe theory? Everything I've read says it was either warfare or extreme social stratification. I didn't see your Renfeld video address this at all. This would match with the archeological evidence of mass graves and proliferation of fortications in places like Provadia-Solnitsata, berry au bac and Sesklobetter than the Old Europe.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/ancient-clan-war-explains-genetic-diversity-drop/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1168112
I don't know if Hutton already covers this in Queens of the Wild, but there seems to be decent evidence that elements of Gaelic paganism were syncretised with the cult of St. Brigid, and the story of King Bresal Bó-Díbad (in connection with the newgrange complex and royal incest) seems to have been vindicated by recent archaeogenetic findings, which would- amazingly- imply that knowledge of neolithic religious practices managed to echo in Irish folklore for around 4000 years. Most of modern paganism is recently fabricated, sure, but clearly something of the pre-Christian world survived in places.
Great article, in any case.
Best I can tell, this is the only mention of Brigid / Bridget in Queens of the Wild.
"British writers who were not experts on prehistory, by contrast, had no such inhibitions, being carried away by the attraction of a nature-goddess figure which had been sweeping the West for a century. In 1898 a medical doctor with a mystical attachment to the Celtic past declared that ancient Ireland had been ruled by a high queen representing the land’s Great Mother Goddess, whom ‘the Celtic Church’ turned into the Christian saint Bridget."
I recall hearing him express somewhere that goddess -> saint or vice versa was indeterminable. Perhaps it was in Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles.
It looks like Hutton will be lecturing on Bridget on March 10 so we will find out his opinion in a few months.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiC5wqRoLPg
Britain isn't all of Europe, and the late 19th / early 20th c. isn't all of history. There was quite a bit of magic going on from the 13th c. on in Europe, just not Wicca or paganism (though the cultures were virtually made from superstitions, some very old).
Enjoy browsing the Ritman Library of old magical books online: https://embassyofthefreemind.com/en/library/online-catalogue/
I think there was a little pagan survival in rural areas, but it was a lot more marginal (and weirder) than people think. See Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles (1966) and Ecstacies (1989), and if your dated academic German is really good, “Der Werwolf in Livland,” Hermann von Bruiningk (1924). Some fun, weird stuff, but absolutely nothing close to a “religion” (which really isn’t compatible with historic “paganism” as I understand it—it was mostly not actually an “ism” at all, more a pantheistic perspective on the world).
Hutton discusses Ginzburg and the benandanti and concedes they're the best evidence for possible pagan survivalism though he is obviously annoyed that Ginzburg weighed in on the Murray thesis overall. I know there were early modern werewolf court cases in northern Europe that seemed to be tied to the puffery of service magicians (an etic term for what we used to call "witch doctors" and who in the British context were sometimes called "cunning folk").
He is "annoyed" because Ginzburg's work flies right in the face of Hutton's work and cannot be easily dismissed. It is annoying when that happens.
Anyone genuinely interested in this topic should read Whitmore's critique of Hutton:
http://ben-whitmore.com/reply-to-ronald-hutton/