Hutton 1

[The Pomegranate 13.
2 (2011) 225256] ISSN 1528-0268 (Print)

doi: 10.1558/pome.v13i2.225 ISSN 1743-1735 (Online)
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.Unit 3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffeld S3 8AF..
Review Article
Revisionism and Counter-Revisionism
in Pagan History
Ronald Hutton
R.Hutton@bristol.ac.uk
In the past few years, a heated argument has developed among modern
Pagans concerning the nature of their history, which has attracted atten-
tion from academic scholars. It has focused on the abandonment, by
professional historians, of their traditional attitudes to the survival of
Paganism during the Middle Ages and subsequently; attitudes on which
the historical claims of late twentieth-century Paganism were based. The
debate has been fuelled by a counter-attack mounted by Pagans who are
unhappy with this development, and its implications for their religious
views and identity. As yet it has produced only one actual book, by Ben
Whitmore,
1
being mostly represented on Pagan blogs such as The Wild
Hunt, and Necropolis Now. It has in turn provoked some concern among
academic scholars, and Pagans who have assimilated the changes in his-
toriography (the two groups, of course, overlapping). Some have spoken
of it as a backlash by Pagans against intellectualism or academic schol-
arship, or as the Pagan manifestation of that fundamentalism which has
been identifed as a growing trend in religion in different parts of the
world. This anxiety has in turn manifested little as yet in conventional
publications,
2
being once again conducted digitally, especially on social
media websites, blogs and in analogue life, and at conventions and in
personal conversation; but it is certainly present. I would characterize
the two positions as revisionists and counter-revisionists, which has
the merits of objectivity and concentration on the essential issue at stake
in their formation.
1. Ben Whitmore, The Trials of the Moon: Reopening the Case for Historical Witchcraft
(Auckland: Briar Books, 2010).
2. An exception being Caroline Jane Tully, Researching the Past is a Foreign
Country, The Pomegranate, 13, no. 1 (2011): 98105.
226 The Pomegranate 13.2 (2011)
Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011
What follows is a further contribution to the debate, intended prima-
rily to clarify both some of the historical issues involved and also the
geographical context of it. It will have no direct references to the Internet
postings which have been at the heart of the controversy, for a number of
reasons. One is that most have appeared in arenas which are often only
dubiously public and where the exchanges are usually ephemeral, with
participants and topics altering from week to week. Direct citation is
made more diffcult by the fact that some protagonists, especially on the
counter-revisionist side, shelter behind anonymity or charismatic pseu-
donyms; the latter effect, indeed, makes it diffcult to know whether or
not the same individual is behind more than one posting name. None
the less, some clarifcation can be offered here of the following points:
the nature of the changes that have sparked off the controversy; the dif-
fculties and opportunities that are presented to those engaged in it; the
potential of counter-revisionism to make a contribution to historical
knowledge; and the geographical and sociological pattern of the debate
itself. These contributions together may help to move discussion on, and
encourage further work on the issues that have inspired it.
The Nature of Revisionism
The revisionist process in the history of British Paganism was directed
against a scholarly orthodoxy that had appeared during the nineteenth
century and remained dominant for much of the twentieth. This held
that Christianity had been no more than a veneer over medieval British
society, found mostly among the social and political elite and barely
penetrating the mass of the population, which continued to belong, at
least in secret, to the old religion. This continued allegiance was mani-
fested in many different ways, such as the placement of images of Pagan
deities in Christian churches, the continued veneration paid to ancient
holy waters, the maintenance of huge fgures representing the old gods,
carved in chalk hillsides, the use of magical rites and remedies rooted in
ancient belief, and the annual enactment of seasonal ceremonies of fertil-
ity and protection derived directly from prehistoric religion. Above all,
according to this view, it was manifested in a fourishing witch religion,
found all over western and central Europe, which represented a direct
continuity of ancient Paganism and honoured ancient deities of nature.
As such this religion also represented a self-conscious resistance move-
ment to Christianity, and so was comprehensively and brutally crushed
by Christian persecution between the ffteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries. The claim made by the oldest attested of modern Pagan traditions,
Wicca, was that it was in fact this same religion of witches, which had
Hutton Revisionism and Counter-Revisionism 227
survived in secret through the intervening centuries to resurface in the
safer environment of the 1950s.
During the second half of the twentieth century, historians in general
abandoned belief in this model of the past as a result of sustained anal-
ysis of the relevant contemporary records. No evidence was found in
Europe of a self-conscious Pagan religion surviving the formal conver-
sion of a state to Christianity. A large number of meticulously researched
local studies of the early modern witch trials found no solid evidence
that its members had been practitioners of such a religion, or indeed of
any other organised one consciously opposed to the established Chris-
tian faith. In 1997 the leading expert on the literature of the early modern
witch hunts, Stuart Clark, summed up a fully-formed new consensus by
declaring that the entity witchcraft has turned out to be a nonentity,
because for the most part it had no referents in the real world.
3
These
developments made the foundation story of modern Paganism unten-
able and opened the way to the construction of a different sort of history
for it, which could be based on demonstrable evidence. In this, it was
certainly based on older images and ideas, gathered from the ancient,
medieval and early modern worlds, but evolved in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries to suit modern needs and ideals; which it did very
well, thereby explaining most of its appeal and viability. As such, it was
no less genuine than any other faith which had undergone a process of
renewal and revival, such as Protestant Christianitys rejection of more
than a millennium of developing Catholic theology and ritual to return
to what its exponents regarded as ancient truths. Nor was the revision-
ist model damaging to the perceived reality of the deities of modern
Paganism, as they were certainly derived from pre-Christian fgures and
it would be entirely in accordance with religious experience for them
to have manifested with particular force and in particular forms to a
modern age which had most need and desire for them.
Revisionism also supplied a new view of the relationship between
Paganism and Christianity after the latter became the dominant and off-
cially imposed system of faith. This embodied a different sense of how
Pagan survival, or more properly, survivals, could be legitimately and
successfully traced through the Middle Ages. This is done by focusing
on the large number of Pagan rites, usages, ideas and festivals which
were absorbed into various forms of Christianity, or into popular tradi-
tion within a Christian culture (with an ill-defned line between the two).
Some were combined with orthodox religious practices in a manner
which represented a complete union, such as the elements of Pagan
3. Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4.
practice which provided the physical trappings of Christian buildings
and worship. Others, such as aspects of high ritual magic and folk magic,
a belief in a terrestrial otherworld with inhabitants which were neither
angels nor demons, seasonal rites, and the continuing affection for Pagan
deities as fgures of story, art and allegory, continued to exist in parallel
with offcial Christian doctrine, sometimes condemned by religious and
secular leaders, but more often tolerated. It was these various streams of
tradition which provided the continuities that enabled a revival of actual
Paganism to occur in modern times, as they were recombined in differ-
ent forms, and an active worship of the old deities put back, to create a
complete religious system.
The scholarly tradition of a large-scale, self-conscious survival of
Paganism through the Middle Ages, which revisionism overturned,
was vulnerable because it had not been based on a systematic study of
medieval records themselves, but from other kinds of source; modern
folk customs, early modern and modern texts, and the physical remains
of medieval buildings. The revisionist portrait had the virtue of being
based on a thorough use of evidence from the period being considered.
It still allowed for a wide span of expert disagreement and controversy,
over the exact extent to which a particular phenomenon in medieval
and early modern Europe was a survival from Paganism. Even when it
is clearly so, there is room for debate over how far something remains
Pagan when it has been thoroughly appropriated by a different reli-
gion. Few would doubt that a medieval or later image of the goddess
Venus is a Pagan survival, or an Anglo-Saxon charm which invokes
Woden; but what of a charm which calls on the powers of nature, when
they could be seen as created or implanted by the Christian god? Is a
Corinthian style of column Pagan, because it was originally devised for
classical temples, or a halo, because it was appropriated from sun gods
for Christian holy fgures? Are the wheel, the brewing vat or money
Pagan because all were invented in pre-Christian times?
In theory, it is quite possible for a Christian zealot to argue that all
the phenomena dubbed Pagan survivals could be considered Christian
because they were found in an offcially Christian society. Likewise, an
anti-Christian polemicist could declare that the sheer quantity of phys-
ical, verbal, and literary forms taken into medieval Christianity from
earlier tradition could cast doubt on whether the period could be called
Christian at all. In practice, such a polarity has not appeared among
specialists in the period and subject, because most have come to empha-
sise the manner in which the two religious traditions were combined
to form what was usually a seamless and harmonious whole, to create
a hybrid culture (or series of different cultures) under the umbrella of
formal allegiance to the faith of Christ. It was only towards the end of the
eighteenth century that the umbrella began to rupture and the compo-
nent parts of the hybrid whole start to separate out, as progress towards
a post-Christian society began. Such a process started frst, and made
most speed, not among the peasant societies in which the old scholarly
model held that Paganism should have survived longest and most pro-
foundly, but in the most urbanized and industrialized: in brief, the most
modern. The revisionist perspective could explain why when modern
Paganism appeared, it did so in the nation in the world which had more
town-dwellers and more industry than any other at the time, the United
Kingdom; and among sophisticated middle-class people, in touch with
the latest ideas concerning history, archaeology and spirituality, living
in the Bournemouth conurbation and North London.
4

The alteration in the history of witchcraft was one subset of this broader
shift. While there is no solid evidence that any people in early modern
Europe actually gathered regularly to worship any non-Christian being,
in preference to the Christian god, Paganism still has relevance to a study
of the witch-fgure. It is very clear that popular traditions concerning
the nature of the supernatural, which had survived from pre-Christian
times, played a part both in forming the medieval and early modern
stereotype of the witch and in determining the nature and incidence of
the resulting trials for witchcraft. When Stuart Clark said that for the
most part witchcraft had no referents in the real world, he implied
some exceptions, and it is in the survival of Pagan ideas and customs
which contributed to the concept of witchcraft, and were sometimes con-
fused with it, that those referents are found. Experts may sometimes
argue over whether a particular aspect of a local belief or custom should
be regarded as Pagan in origin, and differ in the amount of importance to
be attached to the elements of surviving Paganism. On the whole, since
1970 Continental scholars have been much more ready to fnd ancient
roots for aspects of witchcraft tradition than those from English-speak-
ing nations, who have preferred to concentrate on beliefs and trials in
their contemporary context, of gender and class relations and intellec-
tual and political systems.
5
Both approaches have their merits, and there
needs to be a greater combination of them, but even in default of one
4. I have provided different parts of this story in a succession of publications
between 1991 and 2009, and pulled it all together in the last chapter of Pagan Britain,
forthcoming from Yale University Press.
5. Prominent in the Continental approach have been Carlo Ginzburg, Gustav
Henningsen, va Pcs, and Wolfgang Behringer; in the AngloAmerican one, James
Sharpe, Diane Purkiss, Stuart Clark, Brian Levack, Malcolm Gaskill, Lyndal Roper,
Robin Briggs, and Julian Goodare and his Scottish team.
there has been no clash between the two different schools of scholarship,
which have tended to proceed instead in parallel. In witchcraft studies,
as in the history of Pagan survivals in medieval Europe in general, revi-
sionism actually took place without any debate, as the former scholarly
orthodoxy had no defenders among professional academics.
It is, indeed, more or less impossible to fnd any polarity in the process,
between amateurs and professionals, or those who emphasised the
element of survival from Pagan tradition in beliefs concerning witches
and those who did not. The author who became most closely associ-
ated with the theory that witchcraft had been a surviving Pagan religion
was Margaret Murray, a high-ranking and deeply respected academic,
though admittedly not a historian.
6
By contrast, her contemporary C.
LEstrange Ewen, who provided the valuable pioneering research into
the archives of English witch trials, was an amateur. His actual interpre-
tations were as mistaken as Murrays, being still stuck in the tradition of
treating witchcraft as an actual religion, but he carried out the essential
basic work of identifying the original records for English witch trials
and listing them for the use of later scholars, which leaves history for
ever in his debt.
7
Nor has the gifted non-academic departed from the
scene. Owen Davies, who has established himself as the leading expert
in witchcraft and magic in England and Wales between 1740 and 1940,
now holds a professorial chair but wrote the books which made his
reputation while working on a farm in Somerset.
8
Turning to the spec-
trum of attitude among professionals, Carlo Ginzburg, who has been
associated more than anybody else with the recovery of pre-Christian
traditions from early modern trials for witchcraft, declared that it was
justifed to term Murrays work amateurish, absurd, bereft of any
scientifc merit. He emphasised that the accounts of witch practices
in the trials simply document myths and not rituals.
9
Norman Cohn,
who was perhaps the British historian most commonly credited with an
attack on the credibility of Murrays portrait of witchcraft, was also the
one who stressed most enthusiastically the roots of medieval and early
6. Margaret Murray, The WitchCult in Western Europe, (Oxford: Oxford University
Pres.s, 1921); The God of the Witches (London: Sampson Low, 1933).
7. C. LEstrange Ewen, WitchHunting and Witch Trials (London: Kegan Paul, 1929);
Witchcraft and Demonianism, (London: Heath Cranton, 1933); Witchcraft in the Star
Chamber, privately published, 1938; Witchcraft in the Norfolk Circuit, privately pub-
lished, 1939.
8. Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 17361951 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1999); A People Bewitched (privately published, 1999)
9. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbath (London: Penguin,
1992), 89.
modern witchcraft beliefs in ancient culture.
10
The Continental scholar
who devoted most care to showing how the kind of evidence used by
Murray to document an actual religion were the product of pure fantasy,
Gustav Henningsen, was also among the most notable in uncovering old
folk beliefs behind images of witchcraft.
11
I myself, who am the historian
most associated with revisionism by some Pagans (though in fact more
of a publicist for it as my own work has been more concerned with its
consequences), declared in my very frst book on the subject that the
vivid medieval realm of the imagination which produced images of
witchcraft, drew on ancient modes of thought, and urgently requires
further investigation.
12

The two successive models of Pagan survival do have radically differ-
ent implications for Pagans today. The old one, on which modern Pagan-
ism was based, induced a set of counter-cultural attitudes, including
a deep suspicion of mainstream society and a particularly adversarial
attitude towards established Christianity, which could be blamed for
the martyrdom of the tens of thousands (in the old historical mythol-
ogy, the millions) of people who were put to death for the alleged crime
of witchcraft in the early modern trials. It fostered an image of Pagan-
ism as a beleaguered sect, maintained by the constancy and faith of a
few true believers, and able in modern times to re-emerge and proclaim
itself anew. It thereby also encouraged a heavy emphasis on initiatory
lineage, as the mechanism which had maintained the religion in secret
through the centuries, and therefore on the authority of received tradi-
tion and of the leaders of the groups of which it was comprised, who
carried and could dispense the line of initiation and the teachings that
defned the tradition.
The revisionist history encourages a greater sense of integration into,
and of a common inheritance with, the parent society. Instead of a line
of martyrs and embattled tradition-bearers, the immediate ancestors of
Paganism become a succession of cultural radicals, appearing from the
eighteenth century onward, who carried out the work of distinguishing
the Pagan elements preserved in Western culture and recombining them
10. Norman Cohn, Europes Inner Demons (London: Chatto and Heinemann,
1975).
11. Gustav Henningsen, The Witches Advocate (Reno: University of Nevada Press,
1980); The Ladies from Outside, in Early Modern Witchcraft , ed. Bengt Ankarloo and
Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 191218; The Witches
Flying and the Spanish Inquisitors, Folklore 120 (2009), 5774.
12. Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (Oxford: Black-
well, 1991), 3067. Such investigation is my current research project: trailersthat I
have published for it are listed in my article Writing the History of Witchcraft, The
Pomegranate 12, no. 2 (2010), 23862.
with images and ideas retrieved directly from the remains of the ancient
past, to create a set of modern religions. They can be regarded with the
more pride in that they included some of the most celebrated, and gener-
ally admired, artists and authors in modern Western civilisation. In this
model, Paganism is not something inherently different from mainstream
society, and traditionally oppressed and persecuted by it, but represents
an extreme, and courageous, distillation of some of its deepest and most
important modern impulses. That is precisely why Pagans can regard
themselves as peculiarly well positioned to serve some of the most pro-
found instincts and needs of modernity. This model reduces the empha-
sis on the authority of elders, group leaders and initiatory lineages and
encourages a greater liberalism and eclecticism within the movement, as
that movement itself arose from creativity, self-expression and individ-
ual will within the relatively recent past (though still a longer past than
many other modern religious movements have known). It also reduces
the sense of bitterness and animosity towards other forms of faith, espe-
cially Christianity, and encourages co-operation with them because of a
shared cultural inheritance from the ancient world. Forms of it can cer-
tainly claim an initiatory line, and an unbroken transmission from antiq-
uity of texts and attitudes which had a strongly counter-cultural tinge
and often endured offcial disapproval, but this is through the medium
of ceremonial magic, which was not a separate religion in itself. Rather,
it was a tradition of practical and operative workings, which often pre-
served and sometimes enhanced Pagan elements, but combined these
when they were present with some from other faiths, above all Judaism
and Christianity.
It should be emphasised that there is no intention here of suggesting
that one of these sets of attitudes is inherently more virtuous than the
other; it simply seems to be the case that the actual historical evidence,
and the consensus of current professional opinion, supports the second
position and not the frst. Adjusting from the one to the other has clearly
been easier for some Pagans than others; and that is why counter-revi-
sionism has appeared among those least disposed to make the adapta-
tion. The problem that results for any meaningful debate over the issue is
that the counter-revisionist tendency is reactionary in the straightforward
and literal sense of the term. It has so far proved incapable of reinstating
the old model of Pagan history itself, by producing any solid evidence
for a survival of any fully-formed and self-conscious Pagan religion in a
European society which had been converted to Christianity. What it has
done instead is to react against revisionism, and attempt to discredit it,
by confusing the old and new historical models. The classic counter-revi-
sionist argument is to accuse revisionists of denying that there are any
continuities between ancient and modern Paganism, and then hold up
examples of Pagan survivals within Christian society, of the sort actually
embodied in the revisionist picture, as proof of such continuities and so
of the falsehood of revisionism. This is, of course, to make a travesty of
the revisionist case. A further tendency in counter-revisionist arguments
is to highlight the genuine survival of Pagan fgures, forms, formulae,
concepts, procedures and trappings within medieval and later Christian
society, and suggest or imply that they were somehow the property of
a particular group of people. This group is equated, again usually by
implication, with the witches of the old scholarly model or similar coun-
ter-cultural fgures, who are presumed to have preserved them down
the centuries and handed them on to modern Pagans. In this manner,
and in default of any actual evidence that would support such a move,
the attitudes and self-image of a Paganism based on the old historical
model can be accommodated to the new, by a misuse of the structures
and components of the latter.
The most likely consequence of these tactics is to split international
Paganism into opposed sects, some accepting and assimilating the revi-
sionist model and others formally rejecting it in the name of beliefs
which still correspond as closely as possible to the foundation story of
modern Paganism. This is a shame, because the revisionist model is actu-
ally broad and elastic enough to accommodate different attitudes and
emphases, and form the basis for a complex of future Pagan identities
which emphasise particular aspects of it but can co-exist harmoniously.
The rest of this article will be devoted to exploring the potential for such
a result.
The Problems of Research into Paganism and Witchcraft
If Pagans are to take control of their own history, rather than depend
wholly on quoting professional historians who generally do not share
their religious attitudes, then some realistic sense needs to be gained of
what they can accomplish. This may be illustrated by a case study of the
argument staged upon a few blogs during the course of 2011 and 2012
over the meaning of the word witch. A few of the participants had got
hold of some Tudor and Stuart English texts, by a set of authors of whom
Reginald Scot, George Gifford, William Perkins, and Thomas Ady were
the most prominent.
13
These applied the term witch both to those who
13. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584); George Gifford, A
Dialogue concerning Witches and Witchcraft (London, 1593); William Perkins, A Dis-
course of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (Cambridge, 1608); Thomas Ady, A Candle in the
Dark (London, 1656).
were thought to use magic to harm others and those who were believed
to use it to help people (though commonly for a fee). Some also asserted
that such a usage was general among the English of the time. These texts
were used by those who had read them to beat down other contributors
to the discussions, and it is easy to see why. Here is contemporary testi-
mony, of an unequivocal kind, from observers who ought to have been
in an informed position. Why is it, then, that such evidence needs to be
treated with caution?
The answer lies in context: in the ability to set these authors among
other data from their time. When this is considered, a different picture
shows up, for every time that a source refects genuine popular belief, it
displays a sharp dichotomy between the concept of the witch, as by
defnition somebody who was thought to infict harm, and those who
were believed to heal or aid with it, and who were known by a variety
of other names, of which cunning folk and wise folk were the most
common. One such sort of source is popular drama, produced for an
audience consisting mostly of the urban working class, and here the
dichotomy is apparently clear and maintained. Take for example, this
piece of dialogue from the frst English play to deal with witchcraft,
the comedy Mother Bombie, written around 1590. Confronted by the
charge They say you are a witch, the heroine of the title retorts, They
lie, I am a cunning woman.
14
Such an exchange would be unthinkable
if what the writers named above had asserted were actually the case.
Another major source of evidence for the question consists of the records
of the church courts, which survive plentifully for the period in the
archives of several English dioceses. One of the kinds of case that they
heard was defamation, and a trickle of such hearings in each archive
concerned accusations of witchcraft, which had resulted in the person
accused suing the accuser for damage to reputation. What is clear from
this evidence is that the word witch, when applied by one ordinary
person to another, was consistently pejorative, in an intense and seri-
ously injurious way. There is not a case yet found in which it had to be
qualifed to point out that the person concerned was not a good one
of her kind; and the same is true of all the extant records of criminal
trials for witchcraft, in which the term witch is only used, without any
apparent need for glossing or qualifcation, for somebody who has alleg-
edly afficted injury by using magic.
When a closer look is taken at Scot and his successors, it is immedi-
ately apparent that all were radical, evangelical Protestants, with a clear
14. John Lyly, Mother Bombie (London, c. 1590), II, iii, 989. Later in the play a char-
acter who grows angry with her does insult her as a witch.
purpose to condemn all forms of magic-working by the laity, for osten-
sibly good or bad purposes, as inherently demonic: in their terms, as
witchcraft. That is why, given the import of the other forms of source
material, why it is reasonable to doubt their assertions with regard to
the usage of the word witch. Furthermore, they stood in a long Chris-
tian tradition, which had obtained since Augustine of Hippo declared
the essentially demonic nature of all magic. The Anglo-Saxon words that
form the basis for witch, wicce and wicca (according to the sex of
the person described), occur in law codes to indicate workers of deadly
crimes against the person, such as murderers and perjurers.
15
By con-
trast, Anglo-Saxon churchmen regularly glossed wicce and wicce
with Latin terms defning a range of workers of harmless magic such
as divination.
16
In this they were building on general Christian tradition
by that date: the Theodosian Code prescribed for the late Roman Empire
used the term malefcium, meaning evil-working and customarily
describing destructive magic, for all magical acts including soothsay-
ing, augury and astrology
17
. Early English clerics, furthermore, strove to
identify magic-working as a Pagan practice, in which true Christians did
not engage, and confate it with witchcraft.
18
This tradition was main-
tained through the Middle Ages, so as churchmen increasingly pub-
lished in English, they often described all acts of magic as witchcraft.
19

The Protestant reformers of the Tudor and Stuart period were perpetu-
ating this campaign. To speak of the term witch as being ambiguous,
as a consequence, is entirely to miss the point: to the great bulk of the
populace, it was utterly unambiguous, and centuries of attempts by cler-
ical evangelists to persuade them otherwise seem to have been unavail-
ing. We have here not a single word which was acknowledged to have
different shades of meaning, but two different cultural groups, equally
determined to cling to opposed senses of it.
Furthermore, that polarity persisted into modern times. When Owen
Davies and I conducted the frst sustained research into British popular
magic in the Georgian and Victorian periods, in parallel and independ-
15. Cf. the series of codes in A. J. Robertson, ed., The Laws of the Kings of England
from Edmund to Henry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925)
16. Browse, for example, Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An AngloSax-
oDictionary, ed. Alistair Campbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907).
17. Theodosian Code, 9.16.4.
18. For example, Aelfric: see W. Skeat (ed.), Aelfrics Lives of Saints, vol. 1, Early
English Texts Society, 76 (1881), 3724.
19. As in the case of the church court records, the sources here are too voluminous
for a footnote to this article, and must be put into later work of mine: readers who
want a quick summary of the tradition can turn to Catherine Rider, Magic and Religion
in Medieval England (London: Reaktion, 2012), 15.
ently during the 1990s, we found plenty of evidence for people who
called cunning folk witches. Some employed the term white witch,
which was itself a coinage of the early modern reformers.
20
They were,
however, always individuals who did not themselves believe in magic;
conversely, we could not seem to fnd any case of cunning folk refer-
ring to themselves as witches or being described as such by people who
resorted to them (unless they believed that the magician concerned had
turned to the bad).
21
Recently, we have been joined in the feld by a third
worker, Jason Semmens (incidentally, as a museum curator, another
example of a fne scholar operating outside the university system),
whose book on popular magic in the nineteenth-century south-west of
England will shortly be published. At a conference in Glastonbury in
April 2012 I asked him directly, before the full assembly of attendees,
if he had encountered any exception to the rule that Owen and I had
apparently identifed. He replied, Never.
There is a reason why this matters, in practical and present terms, to
those of us who live in Britain and are engaged, year by year, in explain-
ing the essential benevolence of modern Pagan witchcraft to people who
are in a position to damage its adherents, such as police, local govern-
ment offcials, school heads and governors and magistrates.
22
This is that
nobody can understand the instinctual prejudice that many of them have
against members of this religion unless it is appreciated what visceral fear
and hatred the word witch still inspires in many of the British, and the
deep roots of this response: the more traditional the cultural background
of the people concerned, the stronger the reaction tends to be.
23
The word
certainly has an ambiguity at the present time, or rather a multitude of
fresh, overlapping or competing connotations, having been linked to
Pagan religion, feminism and self-expression in the nineteenth century
and to natural healing in the twentieth. The one that denotes malevo-
20. I think that it was frst used by Thomas Hobbes, as part of his campaign
against what he termed superstition, in the 1650s: but this is the subject of ongoing
research.
21. Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture; A People Bewitched; CunningFolk (London:
Hambledon and London, 2003); Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of
Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 84111.
22. At this very moment I am preparing once more to appear as an expert witness
in the criminal trial of a Pagan witch, to explain to the jury the nature of that per-
sons religion. Even now, the mere fact that somebody is known to belong to Pagan
witchcraft can have the effect of prejudicing a case against them unless such scholarly
testimony is provided: and it is so far in very short supply.
23. Today many elderly people still remember being told by their parents or grand-
parents of how the latter resorted to cunning folk or were injured by bewitchment:
most of my talks on the subject to village history societies in my local region yield a
sheaf of such stories.
lence and destructive power is, however, the one that still has the widest
purchase in Britainthe land which produced the wordand provokes
the strongest responses. This situation, however, while very relevant to
the consequences of historical tradition, is still a separate matter from
the broader point being made by the example considered above: that it
is possible for intelligent and well-intentioned people, concerned with
the history of witchcraft, to take a particular category of primary source
material, base reasoned conclusions on it which the evidence concerned
unequivocally supports, and still get things wrong because they lack the
necessary knowledge of context within which to set it.
This knowledge is, of course, the very thing that professional histori-
ans are supposed to possess. It is, however, something that any historian
must possess, and professionals still only account for some of the good
historical writing that is published. That has already been illustrated in
the case of Jason Semmens and the young Owen Davies, and Pagan-
ism has produced its own frst-rate historians such as Margot Adler,
Chas Clifton, and Philip Heselton.
24
Whole felds of British history and
prehistory have been pioneered and defned by researchers working
outside the academic system or on its fringe: in the felds of religion and
magic alone, the study of prehistoric rock art, medieval holy wells, chalk
fgures on hillsides, the historical signifcance of yew trees and the physi-
cal remains of medieval and early modern magic.
25
Such work, however,
still demands a lengthy immersion in all of the relevant source material.
For some subjects, such as ancient religion, most of that material is pub-
lished and so it is possible to gain a genuine expertise in it at a distance,
given suffcient time and resources. This is, however, not true of the
history of Paganism and magic in Britain (and probably anywhere else)
since the Middle Ages. So, what do you do if you are a software engi-
neer living in Auckland, New Zealand or an information systems direc-
tor with science degrees, working in the Washington, D.C., area, who
has been converted to Paganism and wants to make an impact on Pagan
history? These are, as shall be considered more below, precisely the sort
of people who seem to be most embittered by revisionism.
The answer would surely be to look under your own nose. Owen
Davies has a book shortly to appear from Oxford University Press, pro-
visionally entitled Witchcraft USA, Although the research for it has been
limited to sources which can be obtained on the Internet, on loan or
on vacation visits to America, it shows how wonderfully rich the local
24. The latest historical works of each are respectively Drawing Down the Moon
3
rd
edition, Penguin, 2006); Her Hidden Children (Lanham, Md: AltaMira, 2006); and
Witchfather (Loughborough: Thoth, 2 vols., 2012).
25. All are documented in my forthcoming book, Pagan Britain.
archives of the United States are in evidence for witchcraft and magic
between the eighteenth and early twentieth century. As Australia and
New Zealand were settled by mainly British people in the nineteenth
century, when a belief in magic was still abundant among many of those,
things should be no different there; and indeed I recently examined an
excellent Australian PhD thesis on the physical evidence for magical
rites and beliefs in that nation since its frst settlement by Europeans,
which has shown how abundant this is.
26
The problem here is that the
individuals who are most prominent among the counter-revisionists
have been converted to a British form of religion based originally on a
claim of unbroken succession from antiquity and so look for their herit-
age to Europe, and to periods more remote than those in which their own
nations have existed. By doing this, they generally place themselves at a
disadvantage if they decide to attack European natives and professional
scholars, even while they ignore the resources on their own doorstep
which could give them an enduring reputation as historians.
Achievements of Counter-Revisionism
At this point it may be helpful to look more closely at a set of counter-
revisionist arguments with a view to discerning aspects of them which
might be considered to make genuine contributions to historical knowl-
edge. The case study which I am choosing is Ben Whitmores book, which
is the longest and most sustained product of this school, the one most
frmly based on referenced sources, and the only one to be published
in a conventional, hard-copy form which makes analysis easy. Even so,
as the author makes clear, it is not itself a history, but a series of attacks
on my own work, which the author, as a Wiccan in New Zealand, pre-
sumes to be the main statement of the revisionist position. By destroy-
ing my credibility, at least among Pagans, he seems to believe that the
problem of revisionism is removed. His general approach is an abso-
lutely classic study of the misappropriation of the revisionist position,
to appear to redeem the essence of the traditional one, which I outlined
above. Though he says complimentary things about my character and
initially accords some virtue to some of my work (though condescend-
ingly, by suggesting that this was because I had help), his book comes
increasingly to represent an indictment of that on Paganism and witch-
craft in general. As more than one blogger has noted, if his allegations
were generally believed to be true, then I would not be allowed to retain
26. Ian Evans, Touching Magic, (PhD thesis, University of Newcastle, Australia,
2011.)
a post at a university.
27
I have provided a general reply to him before,
and am dealing with his points of detail in my new publications as those
proceed;
28
here I want instead to discuss places in his book where he may
have made a positive contribution to scholarship. I think that there are
two such cases, one large and one small but signifcant, to which I would
add a third study, of a point at which he might have deployed an argu-
ment that reconciled our differing views. It is hoped that readers will
fnd the issues under discussion of interest in themselves.
The large case study concerns the Wiccan goddess-form. In my own
history of Wicca, The Triumph of the Moon, I pointed out that this concept
of female divinity was not Wiccan in particular but derived from that
which had manifested most powerfully in the modern British imagina-
tion for one and a half centuries before. It was, specifcally, of a goddess
who represented the whole of the natural world, and especially the green
earth and the moon. I pointed out that such deities were found in ancient
times, and in one text in particular, the Metamorphoses of Apuleius, the
goddess Isis is represented in a manner which matches the Wiccan one
at every point, including the extra one of embodying in herself all of the
other leading female divinities of her age. I also emphasised, however,
that this sort of deity form was much rarer in the ancient world than indi-
vidual goddesses who were patronesses of particular cities or regions,
and of particular forms of human activity. This balance remained true
until the opening of the nineteenth century, in Britain, when it swung the
other way with dramatic speed, and the universal goddess of nature and
the night sky suddenly became, and remained, a much more popular
fgure than the historical female deities who dominated classical myth.
This was one of the points at which I gave Pagan witchcraft a cultural
lineage that extended back far more than a century before its appear-
ance and linked it into some of the main developments, and fgures, in
modern British history.
29

Labouring under the delusion that my book was an attack on Wicca
(or at least his concept of Wicca), Ben Whitmore tried to ruin my argu-
ment by showing that the ancient world was replete with goddesses who
were identifed with others, and with triple goddesses, mother goddesses
27. A more serious danger is that an impression put about the Internet that both my
ability and integrity as a scholar were in question might, unless strongly answered in
a publicly accessible forum, undermine my ability to act as an expert witness to dispel
prejudice against British Pagans.
28. The general reply was in Writing the History of Witchcraft, 25358, while the
frst substantial work of mine to deal with some of the detail is Pagan Britain. See also
Peg Alois review of Whitmores book in The Pomegranate 12, no. 2 (2010): 26368.
29. Hutton, Triumph of the Moon, 323.
and earth goddesses. He failed to realise that he was listing the compo-
nent parts which had come together in the dominant goddess of the
modern age, and failed to tackle my fundamental point that such forms
of female divinity were not dominant in the ancient world, but outnum-
bered by others. He declared that I thought that the image of a female
deity as both virgin and mother was a modern projection of the Virgin
Mary onto ancient evidence, whereas such deities had indeed existed in
ancient times. What I had suggested insteadand only as a possibility
was that the readiness of three specifc modern writers (among a large
number) to make their single and dominant great goddess take the form
of a virgin mother owed much to their Christian upbringing. What he
has to say of interest, however, concerns earth goddesses. Once again his
basic premise is wrong (that I denied the existence of any earth mother
deities in ancient pantheons, as opposed to denying their supremacy) ,
but his list of examples of such fguresCybele, Ninhursag, Nerthus,
Gaia, Terra Mater, and the Mother Earth from the Anglo-Saxon Field
Blessingis highly signifcant.
30

None of them invalidate my own argument. Cybele was one of a set of
Great Goddesses from Asia Minor who protected kingdoms and peoples,
and sometimes gave fertility, but they were particular to specifc regions
and not interchangeable, because they had individual attributes.
31
It was
Sir James Frazer, in the early twentieth century, who popularised the idea
that all these deities should be fused (with others) into a great Mother
Goddess, the personifcation of all the reproductive energies of nature:
an exemplar of the Edwardian belief in the former universal existence of
such a fgure.
32
Ninhursag(a) was indeed an earth goddess who cared for
the wombs of creatures and married the paramount sky god. She was,
however, specifcally the indwelling spirit of the deserts and mountains
that ringed Mesopotamia, where the rain shed by her husband was cru-
cially needed. The Mesopotamian landscape itself was in the hands of
different deities, its great rivers belonging to the god Enki, the marshes
in the south to the goddess Ningal, and so on.
33
Nerthus is mentioned
in only one source, the Roman historian Tacitus, as the main deity of a
group of German tribes. The problem here has always been that linguis-
tically what Tacitus says does not work, as Nerthus is not a female
name, which of course casts doubt on the rest of his information. Some
scholars have tried to get round the diffculty by turning this deity into
30. Whitmore, Trials of the Moon, 1724.
31. Cybele in Phrygia, Artemis in Lydia, and Hecate in Lycia.
32. In Adonis, Attis Osiris (London, 1907), 346.
33. Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1976), passim.
an earth god, but the matter will probably never be resolved.
34
Things get more interesting with Whitmores discussion of the other
goddesses. The Greek Gaia was certainly a representative of the whole of
the earth, and a mother fgure in that she produced the principal family
of deities who were objects of worship. Whitmore is aware of my diff-
culty with accepting her as the subject of an actual cult, which is most of
the references to her come in literary sources, rather than from evidence
of worship. He has taken this from an earlier book of mine, The Pagan
Religions of the Ancient British Isles, which is a softer target for him,
because (and this is something with which he makes great play) not all of
the statements in it are properly referenced.
35
There is a technical reason
for that: the publisher struck fnancial diffculties as the book was about
to go into production and insisted that it be shortened to reduce unit
costs. As few of the topics covered could be removed without destroy-
ing its purpose as a comprehensive textbook, the problem was solved
by removing much of the supporting material, qualifying remarks and
references.
36
I was persuaded that if I did not reference statements which
were currently consensual positions among the relevant experts, none of
the latter would take exception to them; and this, as the reviews subse-
quently proved, was correct. Nobody expected that, twenty years later,
somebody who had absolutely no expertise in any of the matters con-
cerned would set himself up as an authority on my work: moreover,
Whitmore used the lack of complete referencing in Pagan Religions to
suggest that this was a characteristic of my books in general, which is
not true. In this case, experts would have known that I was following an
orthodoxy established as long ago as 1968, by Peter Ucko, who remarked
on the lack of evidence for a popular cult of Gaia, as opposed to her
appearance as a literary fgure. He was, furthermore, making this point
specifcally in opposition to the earlier, and dominant, scholarly belief in
a universal and all-important ancient Great Mother Goddess.
37
The idea that Gaia was a major ancient Greek deity was propagated
mainly by another Edwardian academic, Lewis Richard Farnell, as part
of the preoccupation of scholars of his time with fnding that Great
Mother Goddess. He based his argument mainly on the literary texts
and from conjectural reconstructions of inscriptions and attributes of
34. Richard North, Heathen Gods in Old English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 4477, makes the most recent discussion of it.
35. The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991): the
section on Gaia and Tellus Mater is on p. 316.
36. I made this problem and its solution clear on pp. viiiix of the introduction.
37. Peter Ucko, Anthropomorphic Figurines of Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete
(London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 1968), 41011.
statues. He was driven to conjecture by the lack of hard evidence for
cult, admitting that Gaias worship seemed to have scarcely a point of
contact with the advanced life of the [Greek] race and she must dis-
guise herself under other names. None the less, despite this lack of real
data, he was still determined to conclude that she was a very important
deity before the dawn of history.
38
Recent classicists have abandoned this
construct. In 1985 Walter Burkert, then the greatest of all experts in Greek
religion, pointed out Gaias large place in the literature of speculation,
while adding that in customary religion the role of Gaia is exceedingly
modest, confned mainly to the pouring of libations.
39
Since then (and
since I wrote Pagan Religions) the evidence has increased a little. The
latest word seems to be from Jennifer Larson, who concluded that her
role in city states was widespread yet never prominent, meaning that
most Greeks seemed to know about Gaia, but her worship consisted only
of a statue or a place for offerings in a few temples of her son or grandson
Zeus and an annual offering in two local religious calendars.
40

So, the evidence for active worship is slightly greater than when I
wrote in 1991, but there remains the discrepancy between Gaias promi-
nence in literature, philosophy and myth, and the lack of a single shrine
or temple actually dedicated to her. The Roman Terra Mater (literally,
Mother Earth) is even less well attested in religious practice. The emperor
Augustus included her near the end of a long list of deities to receive
sacrifces at one cycle of games, which had a self-conscious philosophi-
cal tinge to its composition: thus, Mother Earth was accompanied in
this honour by the Fates, and the goddesses of childbirth, as an assem-
blage of forces that guarded the lands fertility.
41
Rome had a much more
important goddess of earth, Tellus, who had the limited and specifc role
of quickening the fertility of cultivated soil, and to whom temples were
raised. In actual worship, she was paired with the grain goddess Ceres
(and the latters shadowy husband, Cerus) on equal terms, and both
were accompanied by twelve lesser fgures with special responsibilities
for different aspects of the farming cycle.
42
The reason for this pattern
is fairly clear: that ancient religion tended to be localised, to particular
regions, cities and people, and also practical, in that deities were invoked
because of the specifc aspects of life over which they had responsibility.
38. The Cults of the Greek States (Oxford, 1907), vol. III, 28.
39. Greek Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1985), 175.
40. A Land Full of Gods, in A Companion to Greek Religion, ed. Daniel Ogden
(Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 67.
41 Mary Beard, John North, and S. R. F. Price, Religions of Rome (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1998), vol. I, 203; vol. 2, 142
42. H. J. Rose, Ancient Roman Religion (London, 1948), 25.
The Greeks and Romans could conceive of mighty fgures who encom-
passed the whole of the earth and the natural world, and put them into
their literature as symbolic and allegorical fgures; but they did not have
a lot of use for them in worship.
Whitmore is completely unaware of this context to my brief remark
in Pagan Religions. He attempts to refute the latter by quoting literary
references to Gaia such as Hesiod and the Homeric and Orphic hymns,
thereby missing the whole point, but also tries to assemble evidence for
an actual popular cult of her. He does so by citing a dictionary which does
not support his case and a handbook which does, but which is based on
Farnells long-outdated text. He also, however, quotes Burkert, and this
is more disturbing, because he parades what was said about Gaias large
place in speculative sources, and ignores the subsequent remark about
her lack of one in cult.
43
It is when he goes on to look at later sources for
earth goddesses, however, that his work acquires value, even if not in the
sense in which he himself intended it. This effect concerns two texts from
early medieval sources. One is the Latin poem Praecatio terrae matris,
found in several Continental manuscripts dating from the sixth century
onward, and an English one from the eleventh or twelfth century. The
second is the Field Blessing Ceremony or Aecerbot, known from a
single English manuscript of the late tenth or early eleventh century.
The former is almost certainly a Pagan work in origin, being a very
polished literary work in praise of Earth, Divine Goddess, Mother
Nature produced by a sophisticated writer towards the end of the
Roman Empire.
44
This fts the tradition of saluting such a deity in litera-
ture. This poem, however, was incorporated into early medieval works
of herbal medicine, as a charm, and was glossed in the earliest of those
as the beginning of the prayer to earth employed by the Pagans of old
when they wished to collect herbs. It was therefore assumed to have
magical power to increase the potency of the herbs being collected, and
was Christianised in the works concerned by the addition of a similar
prayer directed to the Christian divine powers immediately after it.
45

The Field Blessing Ceremony is by contrast a Christian composi-
tion, quoting passages of church liturgy and invoking the powers of the
Trinity, the Virgin Mary, and the Evangelists. It also, however, called on
Erce, Erce, Erce, earths mother, as the indwelling spirit of the soil that
43. Whitmore, Trials of the Moon, 201.
44. J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff, eds., Minor Latin Poets (Cambridge, Mass.,
1934), 33950.
45. J. H. G. Grattan and Charles Singer, AngloSaxon Magic and Medicine (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1952), 456; A. D. Nock, Some Latin Spells, Folklore 36
(1925), 936.
is to be fertilised. The word Erce is not recorded in any other source
and has no discernible meaning in Anglo-Saxon, so may be a genuine
goddess name or a corruption of the Latin ecce, meaning behold. The
text embodies a clear theology whereby the Christian god, who is the
object of most of its devotion, grants fertility to the soil as part of his
general remit as ruler of the universe and its creator. Though personifed
as a mother, the earth is shown as a passive entity, entirely in his power:
what is less clear is whether this being was a specifc former goddess or
an abstraction imagined for the purposes of the rite.
46
What Whitmore had done, by drawing fresh attention to these two
texts in this context, is to supply the missing link in a chain of trans-
mission. I had suggested such a chain in another book, published in
2003, entitled Witches, Druids and King Arthur. Pagan Religions had been
written as a textbook to bring together the different forms of revisionism
with respect to its subject, and Triumph to supply a new history of the
development of modern Pagan witchcraft to replace that which revision-
ism had rendered untenable. The new book was intended to show the
continuities between ancient and modern Paganism by highlighting the
aspects of late antique Paganism which had most in common with the
modern kind and showing ways in which ideas and images had been
transmitted to the latter through the Christian culture between. It gave
Whitmore particular trouble, because in it I was demonstrating the very
linkages which his mythology of me held that I denied. He got round
the problem by ignoring the main thrust of my arguments and trying
to fnd details of the information provided which he thought that he
could fault. One of those arguments was that in the course of the impe-
rial Roman period, writers began to conceive more readily of great god-
desses who combined the identities and qualities of individual female
divinities, such as Apuleiuss Isis and a triple moon goddess, and also of
an abstracted fgure called Nature, representing the entire natural world.
This was one understandable consequence of the formation of a huge
empire in which different peoples and cults could mingle freely as never
before. I also highlighted the fact that some twelfth-century Christian
intellectuals developed the concept of a goddess Nature to whom their
god had entrusted charge of the physical world; a concept which lin-
gered in different forms until the modern period.
47

When Whitmore drew attention to the poem and the blessing cere-
monythough with very different intentionshe flled the gap between
46. British Library, Cotton MS Caligula A7, fos. 176a178a. Translations are in most
books that deal with early English magic.
47. Witches, Druids and King Arthur (London: Hambledon and London, 2003), 967;
16692.
the fourth and twelfth centuries by showing how such a goddess-fg-
ure was taken into Christian cosmology. Early Christians had particu-
lar problems with Pagan deities who had been the subjects of actual
cults, and who could therefore be readily identifed as demons. Gaia and
Terra Mater, however, with their lack of temples and their low profle in
worship, combined with their presence as symbolic beings in literature,
were much less tainted, and these two texts show the process of assimi-
lation to Christianity of the deity-form that they represented. The need
of medieval Christians for a major female divinity to mediate between
humanity and the supreme god, is well known, as is its most important
solution, of the growth of the cult of the Virgin Mary. What has been
much less discussed is the use that some thinkers made of a goddess-
fgure associated with the earth and the natural world (and later with the
stars as well or instead) to provide such a mediator. What is more, this
fgure prepared the way for the emergence of the paramount goddess of
the modern imagination, who became that of Paganism. A quite impor-
tant additional component of transmission has been put into the revi-
sionist model of Pagan survivals.
The lesser example of a contribution by Whitmore began with three
specifc case-studies which had been used in the traditional model
of history to provide evidence of the existence of an active Paganism
through the Middle Ages. In Pagan Religions I suggested that none of
them stood up to scrutiny. Whitmore ignored two of them and picked
on the one where he thought that he could fault me. This concerned
a remarkable episode in the Scottish seaport town of Inverkeithing at
Easter 1282, where the parish priest summoned the small girls of the
surrounding countryside to his church and led them in a dance around
a fertility image, carrying a phallus carved on a pole. On another occa-
sion he ordered his parishioners to prick each other with goads, and he
was then murdered. The conclusion that I suggested from these events
was that he was demented.
48
Whitmore found a Victorian book, which
informed him that the murder took place a year after the dance, in a
brawl (which he implies was not connected), and that in the interim the
priest was summoned before his bishop to explain himself, and suc-
cessfully defended himself on the grounds that he was following local
custom. Whitmore thus restored the episode as evidence for a Paganism
that was not only still fourishing in thirteenth-century Scotland, but
involved some priests and was tolerated by their superiors.
49
My own account of it was repeated, with full attribution, from a good
48. Pagan Religions, 299.
49. Trials of the Moon, 678.
historian, Jeffrey Burton Russell, who had drawn the conclusion that I
cited and used his account specifcally to discredit the use made of it by
Margaret Murray.
50
Whitmore knew this perfectly well, as he includes
the reference to Russell, and so also knew that his quarrel was with the
latter and not me; but it is another of his consistent tactics that I must
be made to appear a lone and malevolent eccentric with whom no other
reputable historian agrees. He therefore implied that Russells account
had been more friendly to the traditional use of the incident than mine,
and also that I had known of the information in the Victorian work and
failed to provide it. In fact I had not used that latter book because it had a
reputation as a scurrilous and inaccurate work. After Whitmores attack,
I read it and found that it did indeed contain the extra information that
he had quoted.
51
I also, however, read the original text, which is in a
manuscript in the British Library, an edition of which was published in
1839, with an English translation in 1913.
52
It lacks all of the extra details
provided by Whitmore, which were invented by his Victorian source.
Indeed, it contains others which bear out Russells judgement. It specif-
cally states that the priest was making a personal revival of the cult of
the Roman god Liber Pater (Bacchus), not carrying on a local tradition.
Some of his parishioners objected to his action, whereupon he replied
with obscenities. His critics seem to have been cowed by his authority
until the next Easter, when he tried the stunt of getting some parishion-
ers to use goads to prick others while they were performing penance. At
that point the burgesses of the town turned upon him in outrage, but he
still refused to listen and somebody knifed him to death that night. The
chronicler made clear that it was a shocking and unique event.
Whitmores action in drawing my attention directly to the source
has highlighted for me the extent to which a well-educated thirteenth
century Scottish priest could be familiar with Pagan classical literature,
even one apparently needed to go mad to attempt to revive the cult of a
god from it in this way. More important is Whitmores emphasis on the
Victorian book, even if his use of it was wrong. I was mistaken to neglect
it, because it shows how determined an English author could be, by the
1860s, to demonstrate that an active Paganism had survived through
the Middle Ages, even to the extent of embellishing sources when they
50. Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972)
51.Essay on the Worship of the Generative Powers during the Middle Ages of
Western Europe, appended to the 1865 London reprint of Richard Payne Knight, A
Discourse of the Worship of Priapus, 13031.
52. British Library, Cotton MS Claudius DVII, fo. 192, the socalled Chronicle
of Lanercost. The Latin edition was by Joseph Stevenson and the translation by Sir
Herbert Maxwell.
did not support this case. Another part of the context for the develop-
ment of modern Paganism, and of a post-Christian British society, is in
place. The work was of course anonymous, but rumour credited it at the
time to Thomas Wright, a notable antiquary.
53
This attribution remains
unproved, but Wright certainly made a different contribution to the
development of Paganism, by asserting the idea that Robin Hood was
originally a forest god rather than a human outlaw, which was taken up
by Margaret Murray. Like the book which may or may not have been his,
more notice needs to be taken of him in Pagan history.
The last study, of a point at which reconciliation might have been
possible, concerns the fgure of Ceridwen. She features, as Ceridfen,
Ceritven, Kerritven, Kyrridven, or Kerritwen, in some of the
mystical poems credited to the legendary bard Taliesin, as a muse
who confers the gift of inspiration upon Welsh bards: these are twelfth-
or thirteenth-century texts which may incorporate older material.
54
Her
role as giver of inspiration seems to derive from her part in the story
of the birth (or rebirth) of Taliesin, who had accidentally drunk from a
cauldron which she had brewed to confer great wisdom and magical and
creative ability. As such, she is one of the great characters of world litera-
ture. Although full versions of this story survive only in sixteenth-cen-
tury texts, it was certainly known in the time of the poets who hailed her
as a muse, or before. Some of the characters in it, with the relationships
that they have there, are named in the Welsh Triads, devices to aid the
memory of poets, which had been compiled by 1200. Moreover, Welsh
bards referred to episodes from it for the rest of the Middle Ages.
55
Nobody seems to have thought that Ceridwen had been a goddess
until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when a clergyman called
Edward Davies attempted to defend the literal truth of the Book of
Genesis against questions that had begun to be raised about it by the
developing sciences of geology and palaeontology. A favourite device of
devout Christians who attempted this at the time was to fnd apparent
references to Noahs Flood in the mythologies of different nations, and
Davies applied it to a reconstruction of ancient British religion that he
made from medieval Welsh literature. One of his most infuential conclu-
sions was that Ceridwen (being the version in which he now fxed her
name), had been the Great Goddess of Britain, its divine mother fgure
53. This attribution is written on the Bodleian Library copy of the work.
54. The latest edition and analysis is Marged Haycock, Legendary Poems from the
Book of Taliesin (Aberystwyth: CMCS, 2007)
55. Ibid., 31319; Rachel Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein, Cardiff: University of
Wales Press, 1978, 42, 103, 198, 308, 4635; Patrick Ford, Ystoria Taliesin, Cardiff: Uni-
versity of Wales Press, 1992.
whose body had represented the earth. This was an early appearance
of his centurys preoccupation with such a goddess, although Davies
held her to be a degenerate memory of Noahs Ark. His new vision of
her was refected in his version of her name, which carried connota-
tions of beauty and adoration.
56
His work became extremely infuen-
tial, and his concept of Ceridwen as a goddess was repeated as fact in
Lady Charlotte Guests translation of medieval Welsh tales, The Mabino-
gion, in 1849.
57
This carried it to a huge audience, well into the twentieth
century. Among scholars of Welsh literature, however, it fared rather less
well, as Daviess reputation as a scholar was (justly) destroyed in the
mid-Victorian period.
58
By the mid twentieth century, that ages leading
expert in the Taliesin legend, Sir Ifor Williams, had no time for the idea
that she had been a goddess. He derived her from the character in the
story of Taliesins origins, and argued that her original name had meant
crooked woman which would suit her apparent nature in it. These
suggestions were accepted by other experts in medieval Welsh texts,
such as Rachel Bromwich.
59

On the other hand, archaeologists occasionally continued to represent
the popular view. In 1967 Anne Ross suggested that Pagan goddesses
seem to lurk behind all of the enchantresses of medieval Welsh fction,
including Ceridwen.
60
The latter disappeared from books on Iron Age and
Romano-British deities in the 1980s, such as those of Miranda Aldhouse-
Green and Graham Webster.
61
It was this disappearance, and knowledge
that her modern reputation as a deity was owed to a nineteenth-century
Christian zealot, that made me suggest in 1991 that she fairly clearly
was not a pre-Christian divinity.
62
I confess that I was also uncomfort-
able with the way in which the Victorians seemed still to put the dead
weight of their hands on the contemporary British popular imagination,
to make us credit dubious Pagan goddesses, while so many undoubted
and striking examples of such beings, now attested from my islands
56. I have told this story in full in Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in
Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 1729.
57 The reference is on p. 429 of my edition, the 1906 Dent one.
58. Hutton, Blood and Mistletoe, 25963.
59. Ifor Williams, Chwedl Taliesin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1960), 34;
Bromwich, Trioedd Ynys Prydein, 3089; Ifor Williams, Lectures on Early Welsh Poetry
(Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1944), 5965. Williams derivation of
the name is now questioned, but without an agreed alternative:
Haycock, Legendary Poems, 31819.
60. Anne Ross, Pagan Celtic Britain (London: Cardinal 1974), 290.
61. Graham Webster, The British Celts and their Gods under Rome (London: Batsford,
1986); Miranda Aldhouse-Green, The Gods of the Celts (Gloucester: Sutton, 1986).
62. Pagan Religions, 323.
archaeological record (and elsewhere) were apparently unknown. In
1995, however, Miranda Aldhouse-Green declared, without arguing the
case, that Ceridwen had been almost certainly a goddess.
63
At frst
sight this statement appears to be a polar opposite to mine, but they actu-
ally occupy different points in the same category, of acknowledgement
that the matter is doubtful. There is thus every potential for people who
wish to see Ceridwen as a deity as a matter of personal choice, to con-
tinue to do so. That identifcation is still a complete back-projection from
medieval literature, resting on Edward Daviess otherwise discredited
Christian polemic. It is however a possible one, and I have come to rec-
ognise more of the ability of literary fgures to move the creative imagi-
nation, including the religious: the veneration now given by some to the
fgures from the novels of H. P. Lovecraft is a case in point.
Ben Whitmore knew absolutely nothing of any of this, but even on the
information in my book alone, he had the option of suggesting that, if the
status of Ceridwen as a former goddess could not be proved, nor could
it be disproved; the position which I have myself embraced. I would
happily have colluded in such a policy of live and let live, but it is sig-
nifcant that, neither here nor at any other of the many points in his book
at which an equivalent course was open to him, did he show any incli-
nation to take it. In every case, the opportunity for a mutual tolerance
was rejected. What he wanted to do instead was to annihilate my repu-
tation, because he held me to be an enemy to the religion of which he so
fervently proclaims himself a member, for seeming to undermine it. In
the case of Ceridwen, the paring down of Pagan Religions meant that I
could tell little of the complex narrative of development provided above.
The only source that I could cite was one by Ifor Williams, and that was
the only one that Whitmore could therefore read. He noted, correctly,
that the surviving full story of Ceridwen and Taliesin survives only in
sixteenth-century texts, and assumed, wrongly, that there was no sign
of it earlier. He quoted Williams as saying that certain themes and frag-
ments of the story are old, and assumed that they represented deities,
without realising that Williams entire argument (including Ceridwens
very name) rests on the belief that the relationship between Ceridwen
and Taliesin in the full story was an original component. He then ignores
the other arguments I had made about medieval Welsh literature in the
book and uses this single example to condemn my entire treatment of
that literature as a misreading of previous scholarship.
64
63. Celtic Goddesses (London: British Museum, 1995), 689.
64. Whitmore, Trials of the Moon, 667. The year after he published this, I was
elected to a Fellowship of the Learned Society of Wales, the highest scholarly body
of that nation.
The two examples provided above, of genuinely signifcant contribu-
tions to Pagan history, are the total that I could fnd in Whitmores work.
In all the rest of it the misuse of sources, and the defamation of me, are
as serious, but no such positive effects are forthcoming; and in the two
cases concerned those effects were not perceived by Whitmore himself.
It must be clear from this that his problem is not a lack of intelligence,
industry and (at times) access to source material, but his ideology itself.
At each point so far, it blocks off both a true understanding of the nature
of the issues and the data involved, and an opportunity for compromise,
rapprochement and co-operation with people of a different viewpoint.
Prospects for the Future
The present fuss over revisionism in Pagan history is not a debate in the
normal sense, because the counter-revisionists have not invited support-
ers of revisionism to a discussion: rather, they have sought instead to
persuade other Pagans to stop believing those supporters. It is not clear
what they are supposed to believe instead, because no counter-revision-
ist history has been developed: the implication of the attacks is that the
traditional story is somehow correct after all, but it is never explained
exactly how. Clearly human beings do not have the same tastes in litera-
ture and ideas, any more than in other aspects of life. The equally plain
truth that people are capable of reading utterly different meanings into
the same text is also applicable here: entire sub-disciplines of recep-
tion and audience studies have been developed in universities to
take account of it. Counter-revisionism is, however, not a feature of con-
temporary Paganism in general: rather, it is concentrated heavily among
certain types of Pagan, in certain areas of the world. It is rare in Europe,
including Britain, while its stronghold is the United States, and espe-
cially the central and western parts of that nation; it is notably weaker in
New York and New England. It also has vocal representatives in Canada,
Australia, and (evidently) New Zealand. In all the areas which furnish
representatives, on the other hand, it also faces strong and prominent
advocates of the revisionist position. This argument, therefore, is really
one internal to certain Pagan communities in the Western and South-
ern Hemispheres, which the Internet has allowed to become evident to
the rest of the world.
65
Nor is it equally important to all kinds of Pagan,
65. Participants in Internet debates often identify their nationality, and I am per-
sonally acquainted with many of the overseas Pagan communities from which they
come. Others betray their homeland by distinctive spellings and turns of phrase, and
in extreme cases there are sometimes technical ways of determining the source of
transmissions.
but is concentrated mainly among those who identify to some measure
with witchcraft and its history: for example, I spent much of the 2000s
researching and writing a pair of books upon the history of Druidry,
which have caused barely a ripple of concern on publication, in com-
parison with that generated now by my writings on Pagan witchcraft.
66

Finally, and remarkably for a complex of religions such as Pagan witch-
craft, which have sought to empower the feminine, counter-revisionism
is represented most prominently by men, who often employ a very tes-
tosterone-rich language of swagger and taunt. They are never the people
who have established themselves over decades as leading fgures of the
Pagan traditions of which they claim to be the defenders, by founding
or dispersing the great lineages, orders, and networks, writing the books
that have inspired people to become Pagans, and visibly defending and
promoting Paganism to the wider public.
The geographical patterning of counter-revisionism has begun to
attract attention from commentators, who have informally suggested
possible reasons for it in the manner in which colonial societies often
copy religious traditions in more extreme and zealous forms than those
in the parent country. I forebear to comment on such explanations, save
to recognise that they may well have validity, as I am not a member of
one of those societies. I can however, propose instead three simple and
functional explanations for the pattern: that Britain has had Paganism
longer than the other nations; that the revisionist model developed there
as a response to the collapse of the traditional model of Pagan history
and did not arrive as a challenger to it; and that it is a small and well-inte-
grated country. I can describe the consequences from my own point of
view, as they formed the context for some of the key texts of the present
disputation.
Towards the end of the 1980s, British Wicca faced three different chal-
lenges. The frst was increasing disbelief in its traditional story of origins,
in the face of new academic scholarship, which had fltered through to
most of its respected and infuential fgures by the end of the decade.
The second was the panic over alleged satanic ritual abuse of children,
which posed a threat to anybody in a religion related to witchcraft. The
third was the appearance and rapid spread of new kinds of Paganism,
such as Druidry and the Northern Tradition, on a scene which Wicca had
hitherto dominated. It rose to all those challenges in the years around
1990, by founding a national organisation with its own magazine and
annual convention, and regional branches and conferences; going into
partnership with other kinds of Pagan when setting up these structures;
66. The Druids (London: Hambledon and London, 2007) and Blood and Mistletoe.
and looking for academic allies to help produce a new version of history.
I unwittingly volunteered myself for the latter task by publishing Pagan
Religions in 1991. It was not written for Pagans, but for students and
general readers, and I had no expectation that Pagans would buy it,
as they rarely seemed to have direct contact with academic publica-
tions, and I did not see myself as being a missionary to them. They did,
however, do so and viewed it as a helpful frst step in the production
of a new history. I was immediately plucked from the sidelines of the
British Pagan movement to its limelight, and urged to produce a verif-
able history of it to replace that in which Pagan leaders had generally
ceased to believe.
This was how Triumph got written, in the course of the mid to late
1990s, with the assistance and collusion of Pagans all over the nation. I
would often return from the archives with fresh material and be able to
discuss it with some of them that very evening. From the beginning the
work was supported by the most respected of British Wiccans, and I was
able to meet or correspond with all who were still active who had worked
with Gerald Gardner in the 1950s, some of whom became dear friends.
I attended all of the national conferences and many of the regional, and
spoke regularly at them. A few British people initially reacted badly to
Pagan Religions, tending to be either Pagan witches who were (self-con-
sciously) not Wiccans and individuals who were not formally Pagan at
all, but had ingested the traditional history and described themselves as
artists or feminists (or both). By the later years of the decade they had
all either disappeared or met me and talked things through to mutual
satisfaction: it must be remembered that the whole of Britain is smaller
than many of the individual states of the United States. On writing up
the book, I not only tested its ideas on many audiences but got some
leading Pagan witches to read every page of every draft. I naturally did
not include anything in which I did not believe as a result, but it was not
allowed to go to press until I was sure that they were all happy with it,
which ensured a good reception in my homeland when it appeared and
also across Continental Europe because of its strong links with Britain,
embodied in meetings such as the Pan-European Wiccan Convention.
There was in fact one single British manifestation of hostility in the
subsequent decade, and that was an exception which proved the rule: it
was embodied in Jani Farrell-Roberts, who had come to England from
Australia following an amazing triple conversion experience, from
a Roman Catholic priest to a Paganism, a feminist and (by surgery) a
woman.
67
On arriving in the homeland of her new religion, she was infu-
67. Recorded in her autobiography, which she advertised in the debate below.
riated to fnd that the story that she had been told about it was no longer
generally accepted, and chose me as the scapegoat.
68
The only signif-
icant support that she received as a result was on the Internet, from
Americans; and after that, peace was restored. There are still Pagan
witches in Britain who claim an unbroken descent of their lineage from
the remote past, all propagating traditions which have appeared only in
recent years; and since they do not attack historians, and do not present
any historical evidence for their claims, we get on perfectly well when
we meet. Last November I made my annual visit to WitchFest Interna-
tional, the main gathering of Pagan witches in Britain (which has been at
times the largest in the world). Listening to speakers, I was struck by the
emphasis that they made on the contrast between the present time and
the early 1990s, when the traditional history had disintegrated, Gerald
Gardner was accused of being an old pervert who had invented Wicca
from nothing, and experts in religious studies dismissed it as a shapeless
nature religion with no intellectual or historical depth. It was felt that the
revisionist history had secured it against all three diffculties.
British Paganism was not always so cohesive or tolerant. As readers
of Triumph will know (let alone those in Britain who remember those
times), the Gardnerian network was riven by personal feuds in the early
1960s; it was attacked viciously by Charles Cardell; the frst attempt at a
national organisation, in 1964, was wrecked by denunciations of Wicca
from Robert Cochrane and a friend; and the hostility between Gardne-
rians and Alex Sanders created a rift between the two great families of
British Wiccans which lasted for decades. These rivalries, and clashing
claims to legitimacy and supremacy, created a defensiveness about his-
torical claims as well. It was only when they began to settle, in the later
1980s, that real progress could begin, both towards national co-opera-
tion and to the building of a new history. Parts of North America and
Australasia, where Pagan witchcraft has gained signifcant numbers of
adherents more recently than in Britain, seem still to be engaged in that
initial turmoil of identity formation and community-building: a kind of
Wild West of current Paganism. They reproduce many of the tensions
that their British cousins knew in earlier times, and with them, perhaps,
a freshness, vigour, and excitement that British Paganism has lost as
the price of settling down. Even more important, there seems to have
been no gap there between the end of the traditional history and the
arrival of the revisionist one: the latter ran directly into the former. If this
analysis is correct, then those areas of the world will in turn follow the
68. The debate between us was published in The Cauldron in the May and August
issues of 2003.
same course as Britain, slowly resolving their clashes and perhaps also
accepting an elastic form of the revisionist model which leaves room for
different readings and interpretations within an atmosphere of mutual
tolerance. It might be added that for a British historian the sense of dj
vu in the current arguments is even stronger, because so many of them
rely on material long overtaken by further work. Old books like those of
Margaret Murray and Sir James Frazer appear on some web sites almost
as sacred texts, while Carlo Ginzburgs Ecstasies, a work of the 1980s, is
treated as if it were a new discovery.
69
Books of mine published more
then ten or even twenty years ago are discussed as if they represented
my latest thought, while my various relevant publications since are not
noticed.
70
I still receive regular letters from people who were either frst attracted
to Wicca as a result of reading Triumph or who were reassured by it
after a collapse of confdence resulting from loss of faith in its traditional
history. It therefore requires an effort of comprehension on my part when
I read Internet postings from Pagans in other nations who accuse me of
failing to understand the damage that I have done to their beliefs. The
heart of the problem is that those beliefs were never actually theirs,
in a double sense. The original history of Wicca was based frmly and
explicitly on academic scholarship, and academics have changed their
minds with further research; likewise, Wicca was taken from Britain to
other nations, and the most prominent British Wiccans have altered their
opinions. It is small wonder that some Pagans in those nations currently
experience shock and a sense of dispossession. There was nobody in their
social world as the new historical model was being developed to talk it
through with them and involve them. None the less, that model does
provide several links between ancient Paganism and modern Pagan-
ism, with room for many different kinds of emphasis; and it also invites
Pagans abroad who follow and develop British traditions to look more
deeply into their own local history as well. The good news is surely that
time is on their side.
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