Modern Pagan Festivals

Folklore
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Modern Pagan Festivals: A Study in the Nature of

Tradition
Ronald Hutton
To cite this article: Ronald Hutton (2008) Modern Pagan Festivals: A Study in the Nature of
Tradition, Folklore, 119:3, 251-273, DOI: 10.1080/00155870802352178
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Folklore 119 (December 2008): 251273
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Modern Pagan Festivals: A Study in the

Nature of Tradition
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Ronald Hutton
Abstract
The cluster of recently appeared religions known as Paganism have developed,
over the past sixty years, a distinctive cycle of annual festivals, most of which
draw on long historic roots but that are grouped together in a modern framework.
No study has yet been made of the manner in which this cycle developed, and
potentially rich rewards may be gained from doing so. Such a project is a rare
opportunity to study a religious festive tradition in the process of evolution, and
also to suggest features of the nature of tradition in modern societies, and the
manner in which it is perceived by scholars in different disciplines.
Introduction
During the past thirty years, scholars have gradually become aware of the
existence, across the western world, of a rapidly growing complex of modern
religions organised under the label of Paganism. [1] Although they differ from
each other in the nature of their deities, rites, and organisation, they have certain
definitive features in common: most obviously, a veneration of the feminine
principle of divinity as well as the masculine, a sense of an inherent sanctity in
the natural world, an ethic of responsible individual self-expression that rejects
concepts of sin and salvation, and an identification with the pre-Christian
religions of Europe and the Near East. They are also more or less united by the
observation of a common pattern of eight annual seasonal festivals. The study of
festivity is currently a focus of considerable interest among scholars of religion,
society, and culture, in several different disciplines: it is, indeed, a phenomenon
encountered in all, or virtually all, human cultures. The most comprehensive and
considered definition of a festival, by a social scientist, seems to have been that of
Alessandro Falassi: a periodically recurrent, social occasion in which, through a
multiplicity of forms and a series of co-ordinated events, participate directly or
indirectly and to various degrees, all members of a whole community, united by
ethnic, linguistic, religious, historical bonds and sharing a worldview (1987, 2).
This certainly fits the seasonal celebrations of modern Pagans, in all respects.
Most scholars of religious festivity have to reckon with the fact that the particular
rites they study have developed over relatively long periods of time, so that we
can observe their later and current forms, but have irrevocably lost much or all of
the process by which they came into existence. In the case of modern Paganism,
by contrast, it is possible to document virtually every detail of the way in which
an entire ritual calendar has developed. This provides a historian with an ideal
ISSN 0015-587X print; 1469-8315 online/08/030251-23; Routledge Journals; Taylor & Francis
q 2008 The Folklore Society
DOI: 10.1080/00155870802352178
252
Ronald Hutton
case study through which to understand how the processes by which sacred
and seasonal calendars, and festive traditions, can be produced within a
modern society.
Forms of modern Paganism have now been the subject of a valuable amount of
scholarly attention, on both sides of the Atlantic, even though this study still
remains at a comparatively early stage and much more work is needed.
The existing publications have tended to concentrate on pagan witchcraft, the
longest-established and best-known tradition, but even here they represent only a
first stage of the investigation that is needed for the international community of
scholarship fully to understand its nature and its context within the wider world
(Luhrmann 1989; Onion 1995; Harvey 1997; Berger 1999; Greenwood 2000;
Salomonsen 2002; Magliocco 2004; Bado-Fralick 2005; Johnston and Aloi 2007).
They have usually included a consideration of the place of festivity in the
traditions concerned, and of the celebration of the eight points of the Pagan cycle.
This consideration has, however, been focused upon the contemporary
significance of the cycle and the manner in which celebrants experience it. As
the authors have been sociologists, anthropologists, and experts in religious
studies, this preoccupation is natural enough, and valuable in itself. Some
valuable attention has now been also paid to the history of modern Paganism or
the manner in which that Paganism uses history. The quantity of work has,
however, been smaller, and much less of it has been produced by professional
scholars (Kelly 1991; Purkiss 1996; Hutton 1998; Heselton 2000, 2003; Clifton 2006;
Adler 2007; Gibson 2007; Pearson 2007). Of the publications in this category, only
my own has as yet taken any notice of the manner in which the festive cycle
developed, and then only briefly and in passing (Hutton 1998, 195, 233 4, 2456
and 248).
This neglect is undeserved, because a proper investigation of the development
of the cycle has relevance to some of the most prominent current preoccupations
of several different disciplines, and especially folklore. It is a classic study of
the invention of tradition, an area of critical interest to scholars ever since the
publication of Eric Hobsbawms and Terence Rangers pioneering work in 1983.
In his introductory essay to that collection, Hobsbawm declared that the most
interesting feature of this phenomenon was the use of ancient materials to
construct invented traditions of a novel type for quite novel purposes (1983, 6).
Modern Pagan festivals perfectly fit that description. Moreover, a study of them is
a consideration of the nature of tradition itself, especially in a modern society. This
is a project that goes to the very roots of folklore studies: in 1891 Edwin Sidney
Hartland could declare that folklore is the science of tradition (1891, 11). Two
years after that, and writing in this journal, Joseph Jacobs suggested that one of the
prime objectives of folklorists should be to understand how a particular tradition
originated, and how it developed and disseminated (1893, 237). Over a century
later, Simon Bronner has restated the same theme, suggesting that a particular
contribution of folklore studies to the philosophy of tradition could be to integrate
creativity and emergence into the idea of tradition (2000, 93). A study of modern
Pagan festivals permits exactly such an understanding, and integration, as Jacobs
and Bronner recommended. It also has implications for a broader appreciation of
the nature of modernity, and its relationship with older ideas and customs, and of
the changing place of religion in western culture.
Modern Pagan Festivals
253
The Intellectual Roots of the Cycle

Four of the eight festivals of the modern Pagan ritual calendar consist of the
cardinal points of the suns progress through the year: the solstices at midsummer
and midwinter, and the equinoxes of spring and autumn. The four others are
represented by the dates that commenced the seasons in traditional British and
Irish culture: the first days of November, February, May, and August, or their eves.
They are known, across the various traditions of modern Paganism, by various
different names, reflecting the particular ancient cultures with which the
traditions concerned identify: for example, the winter solstice is known to pagan
witches and to Pagans who follow Scandinavian models as Yule, to Druids as
Alban Arthan, to some Pagans who follow an Anglo-Saxon model as the Mother
Night, to those influenced by classical Greek and Roman religion as Saturnalia,
and so on. Nonetheless, they are generally observed as what Pagans collectively
usually call the Wheel of the Year, stressing the cyclical nature of the cosmos,
which is one of the themes of modern Pagan belief. It will be noticed that the
festivals concerned are not equally spaced throughout the year. They represent
two equal-armed crosses, imposed on each other in a slightly crooked pattern,
some five weeks apart and some seven weeks apart. This is because the two sets of
feasts do not just reflect two different natural systems, one solar and one lunar.
They actually have two completely different points of origin, each associated with
a different modern writer. The solar feasts are there because of Edward Williams,
the quarter days because of Margaret Murray; and the relationship of both with an
ancient and modern pagan calendar now needs setting in context.
The context for Williamss work was the general British rediscovery of the
ancient Druids in the mid-eighteenth century (Hutton 2007, 12 17 and 41 58). [2]
It was then that a mixture of excavation and fieldwork, mostly by William
Stukeley, established once and for all that the great megalithic monuments of
Britain had been built by the pre-Roman natives of the island. Until then they had
been credited, variously, to the Vikings, the Romans, and the post-Roman British,
the latter sometimes having the assistance of the wizard Merlin. Now all these
alternative candidates were swept away. What every educated European knew
about the ancient British was that their religious leaders had been called Druids.
Most of Britains prehistoric stone structurescircles, avenues and rows of great
stones, and chambered tombshad by then been recognised (correctly) as
ceremonial monuments. It followed therefore that the Druids must have been their
designers and the priests who officiated at them. This shot Druids to centre-stage
in the British imagination, having hitherto been marginal and hazy figures. A race
began to try to understand their beliefs and customs, and so recover a lost portion
of the British national heritage. As the Welsh were the modern people in the island
most obviously descended from the aboriginal Britons, there was a real hope that
their early literature might prove to contain traces of Druidical teaching that had
survived the conversion to Christianity.
The person who proceeded to look hardest for these was a stonemason from
Glamorgan, the aforementioned Edward Williams, who took the nickname [3] of
Iolo Morganwg, by which he is now better known (Morgan 1975; Jenkins 1997,
2005; Hutton 2007, 19 30, 57 61 and 1602). When he realised that the surviving
manuscripts contained nothing demonstrably Druidic, he proceeded to forge the
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Ronald Hutton
missing evidence and pass it off as a scholarly discovery. As part of this work of
deception, he had to devise a system of Druidic festivals, and did so by stages
between 1792 and 1826 (Owen 1792, xlvi; Williams 1848, 435). Iolo Morganwg has
recently been made the subject of a major and wonderfully productive research
project based at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, and led by
Geraint Jenkins (Jenkins 2005; Charnell-White 2007; Constantine 2007; Jenkins,
Jones and Jones 2007). Almost the only aspect of his life and work that has not
been covered by this is Iolos vision of ancient Druidry, and accordingly the
development of its festive cycle has not been investigated either. The basis of it
was the greatest of all Britains prehistoric monuments: Stonehenge. As had been
appreciated since the writings of William Stukeley in the 1740s, this is clearly
aligned on the midsummer sunrise, which, since it was now credited to the
Druids, meant that the cardinal points of the sun must have been sacred to them.
Iolo accordingly invented a pattern of four great Druidic festivals, the solstices and
equinoxes, to which he gave Welsh names relating to light: from midwinter
onward, Alban Arthan (21 December), Alban Eilir (21 March), Alban Hefin
(21 June), and Alban Elfed (23 September). It was only in the late nineteenth
century that British scholars in general concluded that the megalithic monuments
belong to the New Stone Age and the Druids to the Iron Age, almost three
thousand years later, severing the link. This news took another hundred years to
reach the general public. It was likewise only in the early twentieth century that
Welsh academics proved conclusively that Iolo had made up his Druidic system.
They did so, moreover, in books published in Welsh, so that there are members of
the English and American public, to this day, who still believe in it. Among those
who long retained such a belief were various orders of modern Druids inspired, at
least in part, by Iolos dream; and some of these celebrated rites inside Stonehenge
at midsummer from 1912 onward (Hutton 2007, 64 75 and 174 93). In this
manner, one-half of the modern Pagan cycle was put into place.
The other half arrived by quite a different route. During the eighteenth century,
most of the ruling elites of Europe came to lose a literal belief in magic and
witchcraft, as part of the process that came to be called the Enlightenment. As a
result, the death penalty for witchcraft was abolished in state after state. This gave
the liberal intellectuals of that century and the succeeding one a splendid stick with
which to beat the established churches and hereditary aristocracies. If witchcraft
had been an illusion, then all those who had perished in the witch trials of the
preceding epoch had been the victims of bigotry and superstition, embodied in the
traditional figures and institutions of authority. One possible answer to this was
provided in the period of reaction after the Napoleonic Wars by two German
scholars, Karl Jarcke and Franz Mone. They agreed that witchcraft did not exist, but
declared that the victims of the witch trials had been pagans, surviving practitioners
of the bloodthirsty and orgiastic religions of old Europe. As such, they had been
guilty of most of the atrocious behaviour that demonologists and witch-hunters had
associated with the festive assemblies of witches, and so richly deserved their
punishment and suppression (Jarcke 1828; Mone 1839). [4] This theory posed a real
challenge to the new generation of liberal reformers and revolutionaries, and the
one who accepted it with the most gusto was the Frenchman Jules Michelet. He had
neither the time nor the means to challenge the reactionary theory from original
evidence, and so he simply subverted it. He declared that the people persecuted
255
as witches had indeed been pagans. Rather than practitioners of a disgusting

religion, however, in his imagination this became one that loved the natural world,
and human liberty and self-expression. It was a rallying-point for ordinary people
opposed to the main oppressors of medieval society: the feudal aristocracy and the
Christian Church (Michelet 1862; see Hutton 1998, 13740). By the end of the
nineteenth century, this belief was well established on both sides of the Atlantic.
Scholars who were expert in the records of the witch trials recognised it as
untenable, but specialists in other areas of history, and in other disciplines, often
took it up (Hutton 1998, 14050). The one who tried hardest to match it to actual
evidence was the British archaeologist Margaret Murray, who, between the 1910s
and 1950s, did her best to build up a complete picture of the religion that had been
called witchcraft (Hutton 1998, 194201). Her working methods in doing so have
recently been given attention (Simpson 1994; Oates and Wood 1998; Hutton 1998,
194201); no sustained consideration, however, has been accorded to the way in
which she constructed its festivals.
She declared the most important to have been the four quarter days that opened
the seasons, which she felt to have been very appropriate for a surviving ancient
religion rooted in the cycle of the agricultural year. In addition, she concluded that
lesser assemblies were held at the solstices, which she asserted to have been feasts
brought in later by sun-worshipping invaders. This conformed to the view of
prehistory that predominated in Britain at the time, having been propagated by
scholars such as Max Muller, Sir William Boyd-Dawkins, and Sir John Rhys, and is
now more or less completely abandoned. It depended on the idea of an earthworshipping Neolithic religion that had been overthrown or absorbed by a new
cult of the sun brought in by bronze-using Aryan invaders from the East. She
explicitly stated that British witches had never celebrated the equinoxes, although
she might be read as implying by this that some on the Continent could have done
so (Murray 1921, 109). On examining the sources used by Murray herself, let alone
a larger body of original evidence, it is clear that most people accused of witchcraft
did not specify any calendar dates as being regularly used for their assemblies to
worship the Devil. Those that did specify named a wide range of them, including
one or two of the quarter days, either of the solstices but not both, and (just as
frequently) Christian feasts such as Easter or saints days. Only one, in fact, out of
the thousands whose detailed trial records have survived from across Europe
stated that she and her comrades had met on the four quarter days. This was Isobel
Smyth, tried at Forfar, Scotland, in 1661. Nobody else accused in the whole great
Scottish hunt of 1661, let alone at any other time and place, seems to have done so
(Murray 1921, 10911; cf. Maxwell-Stuart 2006). The fact that Margaret Murray
used this single case as the peg on which to hang a major aspect of an entire
assumed religion fits in with her usual methods when writing on witchcraft.
The Appearance of the Cycle
Margaret Murrays interpretation of the witch trials is now rejected by all
academic historians. Nonetheless, detailed studies of the early modern witch hunt
largely fell into abeyance during the time in which she was writing. As a result, by
the 1940s and 1950s her account of it was accepted as correct by a great
many people, both inside and outside the world of professional scholarship
256
Ronald Hutton
(Hutton 1998, 199 200, 272 8 and 377 80). In other words, her portrait of a native
system of ancient festivity, spanning Western Europe, was at its most influential
just as Iolo Morganwgs system was losing credibility. One of those who believed
it completely was a colleague of hers in The Folklore Society, a retired colonial civil
servant called Gerald Gardner. He is central to our story because it was he who
revealed to the world the existence of Wicca, or pagan witchcraft, the oldest
recorded and most enduring variety of modern Paganism and the template for
most of the rest. It has often been suggested that Gardner himself developed
Wicca, with an unknown amount of help from friends and collaborators. This is at
present impossible to verify and may always remain so. What is certain is that
there is no definite evidence for its existence before his involvement in it, and
that he was its first and greatest publicist (Hutton 1998, 20552 and 369 86;
Heselton 2000, 2003).
Gardner was also a high-ranking member of the most prominent of the modern
Druid orders that held public ceremonies at Stonehenge, the Universal Bond,
although latterly he was not very impressed by it. Apart from any other
consideration, he was sufficiently up to date with current scholarship to be aware
of the discrediting of Iolo Morganwg. On 6 November 1951, the year in which he
proclaimed the existence of Wicca, he summed up his own Druid orders rites to a
business partner as just what sentimental folk would invent in the eighteenth
century (Williamson Papers). On the other hand, he not only believed that
Margaret Murrays portrait of early modern witchcraft was absolutely accurate,
but declared Wicca to have been that very religion, which had survived the witch
hunts in secret until the present day. Murray wrote a supportive preface to the
book in which he did so (Gardner 1954). Her influence is amply borne out by
the earliest surviving Wiccan liturgy, a manuscript compiled by Gardner and
labelled Ye Bok of ye Art Magical, which dates from some point in the 1940s,
more probably from the second half of the decade. [5] In that period the main
Druidic seasonal ceremonies were all at midsummer. By contrast, the seasonal
witches sabbats in Ye Bok are based firmly on the descriptions given by Murray
(Ye Bok, 271 88; Murray 1921, 12431; 1933, 10919). They are scheduled for
her four quarter days, and the activities prescribed are essentially those
reconstructed in Murrays books from the descriptions of witches assemblies
given by demonologists and the confessions extracted from those accused of
witchcraft. The emphasis is, accordingly, on dancing, feasting, games, songs or
chants, and spell-casting, rather than on seasonal rites as such, in which the
witches of the early modern imagination had shown no interest. The ritual space is
approached in a processional dance, riding brooms and carrying a phallic wand,
as Murray portrayed her witches as having done. Among the dances prescribed
for Gardners witches is one from Italy to which she drew particular attentionla
voltawhich allowed couples to dance together (Ye Bok, 278; Murray 1921, 135).
Murray had provided no lyrics for the songs or chants allegedly used by witches at
their gatherings. Those prescribed for the festivals in Ye Bok are all taken from
existing published sources easily accessible to Gardner: a verse of Kipling,
quotations or paraphrases from published works of Aleister Crowley, and
an invocation from a thirteenth-century French miracle play, reproduced in two
well-known textbooks on magic published in 1931 and 1948 (Hutton 1998, 2312
and forthcoming [b]).
257
Margaret Murray had not given much prominence to the seasonal festivals in
her reconstruction of her imagined witch religion, and neither did Ye Bok; they
occupy just 15 pages, in large handwriting, out of 288 in the manuscript. The main
emphasis in the latter is firmly on operative magic. The fact that the verse of
Kipling is used in two successive festivals, and that a piece of Crowleys work that
appears in one is also employed in an invocation a few pages earlier in the
manuscript, indicates a considerable economy, or haste, of composition. The rites
that specifically recognise the season are all very brief and simple. Nonetheless,
they already embody characteristics that mark them out as part of a viable, and
highly distinctive, religion. The early modern demonologists had stated that the
central act of a witches festival was to adore the Devil as their god and master.
Murray had turned this into the adoration of a high priest, personifying a pagan
horned god who was the main deity of her reconstructed witch cult; she held that
the Christian Devil was simply a misrepresentation of this deity, once venerated
throughout the ancient pagan world. Gardners seasonal rites, from the beginning,
included such a god, but also gave equal emphasis to a high priestess,
personifying a goddess. They formed a divine couple who were intrinsically
linked to the annual cycle of winter and summer in temperate latitudes, the god
predominating during the cold-season festivals and being associated with death
and rebirth, and the goddess during the warm-season pair and being associated
with life and fertility. This concept of ancient paganism as being based on a
duotheism of a female and a male deity, who between them create and sustain the
world, had a long history by the 1940s. It had been found in the writings of
scholars of religionof whom the best known was the French revolutionary
ideologue Charles Dupuissince the eighteenth century (Dupuis 1795; Hugues
1785; Knight 1786). Gardners witches also had existing models for a witches
goddess, of which the most obvious is the one in the pagan gospel allegedly
used by Italian witches and published by the American, Charles Godfrey Leland,
in 1899. Most, if not all, scholars at the present time doubt very strongly that
Lelands text was the work of a genuine religion; it seems to have been another
product of the nineteenth-century desire to imagine a traditional folk religion
opposed to Christianity (Leland 1998; Hutton 1998, 141 8). The author or authors
of Ye Bok of ye Art Magical had certainly read Lelands book, because a passage
from the latter is paraphrased as a key part of the liturgy in Ye Bok (pp. 263 8).
A still more obvious source of the goddess who appears in Ye Bok, however, lies
in the sensual and ecstatic female divinities who feature prominently in the
writings of Aleister Crowley. Gardner had a personal relationship with Crowley,
treating him as a mentor, in the period during which Ye Bok was most probably
compiled. It can be no coincidence that the goddess in Ye Bok is most often
invoked, or speaks, in Crowleys own words. [6] Nonetheless, it was novel to find
both god and goddess together, as equals, at the centre of the religion of witchcraft.
This automatically gave Wicca a feminist appeal that was to serve it well in later
decades: mirrored in the leadership of each group, or coven, by a high priestess
supported by a high priest.
The other significant addition came in the November Eve, or Halloween, rite,
and dealt with the essential religious problem of the fate of the human soul.
The text that expressed this was, according to somebody who knew Gardner very
well and worked with him as his high priestess, written by Gardner himself. [7]
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Ronald Hutton
It promised that those who found favour with the god of Wicca would undergo
reincarnation into better bodies than before and at a time when those who had
been dearest to them in a previous life would be reborn again with them (Ye Bok,
272 5). To those who love the present world, it is a remarkably comforting vision
of the future. It is also a somewhat unusual one, and was, beyond any doubt,
Gerald Gardners own, because he had made it the central theme of his first novel,
written at the end of the 1930s before he claimed ever to have heard of Wicca
(Gardner 1939). Here we are provided with a rare, and important, insight into the
personal influence that Gardner exerted over the creation or development of
Wicca itself. More important, it may be seen that, although the first modern Pagan
seasonal rites were short, scrappy, and largely a plagiaristic pastiche, they already
contained a quite distinctive theology of divinity and of an afterlife. They had,
arguably, addressed the two most important needs of a religion: to provide
superhuman beings with whom humans may form respectful relationships and to
provide some reassurance of the survival of the human soul after death.
The Evolution and Diffusion of the Cycle
By the early 1950s, it is possible to observe the Wiccan festive calendar in the
process of further development. In 1953, Gardner initiated a woman with
remarkable powers of liturgical and poetic composition, Doreen Valiente. By this
date, his group had started to celebrate the solstices as well as the quarter days.
It may well be that Valientes appearance was itself the occasion for this, as she
concealed her membership of a witch religion from her family by claiming that she
had joined the more familiar and respectable modern Druids. They, of course,
observed the solar feasts (Valiente 1989, 40). It is a sign of how new the observation
of these seems to have been in Wicca that, at the very first midwinter that Valiente
celebrated as a Wiccan, there was no liturgy for the occasion. Gardner therefore
asked her to write one, a few hours before the celebration was due. Whereas
Gardner, or his initiators, generally took complete sections from existing sources,
with some paraphrasing, Valiente used existing texts only as starting points and
then wrote what were effectively new compositions, which only faintly echoed the
originals. Thus, as a starting point for her first such creation, she took two of
the prayers from Alexander Carmichaels famous collection of Hebridean folklore,
Carmina Gadelica. What she produced was a powerful invocation to the Wiccan
goddess, which immediately became the central component of the enduring
seasonal rite (Farrar and Farrar 1981, 148). Gardner was so pleased with it, indeed,
that he put it straight into the book he was writing on Wicca at that time, as an
example of the seasonal liturgy of his religion. It was the only extract from that
liturgy to feature in the book concerned, Witchcraft Today, which was published in
1954, and was the main work that revealed Wicca to the world at large (Gardner
1954, 21 2). This was surely because Valientes invocation was both a fine piece of
writing and almost the only one of the texts prescribed for festivals by that date
which an astute reader would not recognise as taken from an existing source.
Encouraged by this success, Valiente went on to compose matching invocations
for the summer solstice and the equinoxes, sometimes, again, drawing on phrases
in Carmina Gadelica for inspiration (Farrar and Farrar 1981, 72 9, 93 101 and
116 20). The equinoxes seem to have been adopted into the Wiccan calendar after
259
Witchcraft Today went to press in 1954, because that book only mentions the quarter
days and solstices as witch festivals (Gardner 1954, 130).
Gardner himself remained very resistant to the idea of giving the solar feasts the
full status of festivals, perhaps because he associated them with Druidry, or
perhaps because Margaret Murray had stated so firmly that the quarter days had
been the great feasts for witches. As a result, within the small but growing
network of Wiccan covens, the solar feasts still tended to be regarded as minor
events, celebrated at the nearest full moon to the dates concerned and treated as
of less importance than the quarter days. This situation ended in early 1958,
when Gardners main coven, based on the northern edge of London, objected
collectively to it. Its members felt that the solstices in particular had great
importance as calendar events, and that the equinoxes made a perfect symbolic
balance for them. They therefore asked for equal observation of both the cardinal
points of the sun and the quarter days, as close to the actual dates as was
conveniently possible. Gardner gave way, and in this manner the modern Pagan
calendar of eight festivals came into being. [8] Gardner himself still felt that only
the quarter days were grand witches feasts, and this tradition lingered long in
some branches of Wicca (compare Farrar 1971, 81 2). Nonetheless, the basic
pattern of the eight feasts was now the norm.
The history of modern Paganism in the decades since 1958 has been one of how
the Wiccan template of ritual has been diffused all over the western world, and
through many other varieties of Pagan religion that have appeared in the wake of
Wicca. It has travelled by word of mouth, by the copying of manuscript books of
ritual, and by the publication of an increasingly large body of handbooks about
Wicca and other kinds of Paganism. From the 1990s, the Internet has added a
major new means of transmission (Cowan 2004). To provide one important
example of the diffusion of the cycle: in 1964 a friend of Gardners, Ross Nichols,
seceded from the main modern Druid order to which Gardner belonged.
He established his own, the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, and promptly
instituted in it, as one of his innovations in Druid tradition, the new Wiccan
pattern of eight festivals. It is now the biggest Druid order in the world (Nichols
1990, esp. 299306; Carr-Gomm 2002, 159 61). In the late 1980s a large number of
new Druid orders appeared in Britain, some of which themselves founded
colonies overseas. What distinguished these from the older Druidry, which had
developed in the eighteenth century, was that they had a specifically Pagan
identity, instead of representing themselves as being, like Freemasonry, a system
of philosophy and ritual that could accommodate a variety of faiths. All of them
adopted the eight-fold festive pattern from Wicca, as the definitive one for modern
Paganism (Hutton 2003, 239 58).
By the opening of the 1980s, most Wiccans, let alone Pagans outside the Wiccan
tradition, had lost any realisation that the pattern concerned had been established
in the 1950s. It was, rather, accepted as an intrinsic feature of what was regarded
by many, following Gardners claims, as a surviving ancient faith. [9] By the end of
the 1980s, the broadening number and range of Pagan traditions influenced by
Wicca stretched its historic application still further. Rather than being associated
with one particular branch of ancient paganism, which had allegedly survived as
Margaret Murrays and Gerald Gardners pagan witchcraft, it was now commonly
regarded as having been the general festive cycle of north-western Europe
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in pre-Christian times. To one very influential British writer, Caitln Matthews,

who served especially the emerging constituencies of Pagan Druidry and a
non-denominational Paganism inspired mainly by Welsh and Irish literature, it
was, by 1989, simply the wheel of the Celtic year (Matthews 1989, passim).
An American Version of the Cycle

Since the 1970s, the world centre of modern Paganism has not been the United
Kingdom but the United States, and the eight-fold pattern has been imported and
adapted there in ways that provide further insights into the concerns of this article.
America produced its own, home-grown, modern Pagan revivals during the early
twentieth century. What distinguishes them from those based on Wicca is that, like
earlier British and Continental revivals, they failed to create lasting movements
(Clifton 2006, 115 48; Adler 2007, 243 60). Thus, the quarter days, which have
always been celebrated as important feasts in Gaelic areas of Britain and Ireland,
were brought to California as the key festivals of an Irish mystical society founded
in the early twentieth century. This was the Fellowship of Shasta, imported into
America by one member whose followers remained activealthough hardly
noticeduntil the 1960s. [10] It was the arrival of Wicca in America from Britain,
apparently in the early 1960s, which catalysed the establishment of enduring and
large-scale modern Pagan religions in the New World; and the cycle of eight
festivals came with it. A particularly good case study of the adoption and
naturalisation of that cycle is provided by a Californian Pagan tradition known as
the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn. [11]
It began in 1968, as a group of friends in the Bay Area of San Francisco, who
decided to create a body of ceremony that fused together relics of ancient
paganism with the festival atmosphere of the contemporary hippie counterculture. In doing so, its members were self-consciously trying to recreate a pagan
witch religion of the sort described by Margaret Murray and Gerald Gardner, but
with a new organisational structure and set of ceremonies. The liturgy that
resulted was largely the work of one man, Aidan Kelly, who acknowledges that his
sources were all literary. The most influential author among them was Gerald
Gardner, followed by the poet Robert Graves and then a list of lesser names
including Margaret Murray and Doreen Valiente. Unsurprisingly, the festival
pattern that Kelly adopted was the eightfold Wiccan one. The rites that he created,
however, were almost completely different: most of the liturgy was in verse, and it
was an original composition based on Kellys own reading of ancient mythologies
and medieval literature, often mediated through Victorian and Edwardian
commentaries. For example, those for Midsummer were based on the Arthurian
legend, in conformity with the nineteenth-century ideaapparently first floated
by Edward Davies in 1809 but subsequently very widespreadthat Arthur was a
transfigured sun god (NROOGD Book of Shadows, 30 4; Davies 1809). Midsummer
became Litha, the Anglo-Saxon word for that season, as found in the writings of
the early medieval monk Bede (Bede 1843, book IV, 178 9). It may have helped
that it had been appropriated, as Lithe, for the Midsummer festival in the
hobbits calendar in J. R. R. Tolkiens fantasy masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings
(Tolkien 1966, 384 7).
261
Kelly had more problems with the equinoxes. As noted, Margaret Murray had
said that British witches did not observe them, and he was self-consciously trying
to recreate a pagan witch religion inspired partly by the one portrayed in her
pages. All the six other festivals in the Wiccan system have ancient equivalents,
manifested both by specific mention in early texts and by a clustering of
subsequent folk customs (Hutton 1996). The equinoxes lack both these attributes.
The spring one has no recorded festival associations in northern Europe before the
arrival of the Christian Easter, which, of course, can occur almost a month later.
The autumn one is even less evident. The Roman calendar certainly had a scatter
of festivals around the time of the equinoxes, and annual offices were assumed at
the spring one, when the military campaigning season began. There were no
greater feasts at the equinoxes, however, than in the remainder of the surrounding
months, and the opening of the official year was not in itself a great religious
festival (Scullard 1981, 84 95 and 182 8). It is necessary to go as far as ancient
Greece to find any at an equinox. [12]
Kelly dealt with the spring equinox by applying the name Ostara, which is
simply the most euphonious of the early Germanic equivalents for Easter. It was,
moreover, one highlighted by the greatest of all pioneers of the study of German
folklore, Jacob Grimm, who had suggested that it had originally been the name
of a pagan goddess (Grimm 1882, vol. 1, 10 13). Kelly composed rites for it
associated with renewal and rebirth. He named his autumn equinox festival
Mabon, which to British scholars might seem preposterously inappropriate. It is
a proper name derived from the Welsh word mab/map son or boy, which
hardly suits an autumnal festival. He got there by a route that is typical, and
revealing, of American Pagan syncretism. His starting point was the greatest of
all European myths that can be associated with autumnthe return of the
goddess Kore, or Persephone, to the underworld for the darker half of the year.
Her story therefore became the core of the ceremony that he composed for the
festival. The name and the Welsh connection, however, seem to derive from the
work of a Welsh scholar, W. J. Gruffydd, published as an article (Gruffydd 1912)
and as a book (Gruffydd 1953). It emphasised the identity of Mabon, a character
known from medieval Welsh literature, as a former pagan deity; an attribution
that is possible, although arguably unproven. Gruffydd went further, to make
Mabon into a young god born of a great goddess: a male divine parallel for the
Greek Persephone. This was one of the last examples of the Victorian tradition,
now almost completely abandoned in Britain, of interpreting medieval romances
as echoes of lost pagan myth. Kellys creation of his Mabon festival marks one
of the main differences between the British and American constructions of
modern Paganism, in seasonal observance as in other respects. From Britain,
Greece and Wales seem a very long way apart. From California, however, they
can look quite close together, and America is, after all, a melting pot of peoples
and traditions from all over Europe and beyond. There is therefore commonly a
quality of syncretism, and a range of cultural catchment, in modern American
Paganism that is much less commonly found in that of Britain. Kellys new
coinage of names for festivals proved extremely influential in the United States,
getting into the mainstream of American Paganism as the latter developed in the
1970s, through his contributions to the most widely-read journal of the
movement, Green Egg. [13] They subsequently leaked back into British Pagan
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parlance during the 1980s, when the books of American Pagan authors found a
wide readership in the United Kingdom. [14]
Like Gerald Gardner or his informants, therefore, Aidan Kelly relied heavily in
his recreation of an imagined witch religion on ideas that were, or had been,
products of academic scholarship. This is a phenomenon that has already been
noted and treated, in a folkoristic context, by Sabina Magliocco (2004).
The relationship between these ideas and the creation of ritual may have been a
more complex one than the simple reception of scholarly arguments by members of
a reading public. To some extent, both parties in the process were united by similar
emotional or ideological needs. From Michelet onward, those who had propounded
a belief in the existence of an early modern religion of pagan witchcraft, rooted
in antiquity, were setting up a portrait of such a religion in opposition to the
established structures of religious and social authority that were more generally
associated with the Middle Ages. It acted in great measure as a radical spiritual
alternative to Christianity and to conventional mores, to be pitched against the
contemporary conservative admiration for more familiar aspects of medievalism.
Gardner, and those who joined him in Wicca, were likewise developing a modern
Pagan witch religion as a proportionate alternative to social and religious
conventions: they were giving physical expression to a libertarian dream. Likewise,
the academic fashion for finding pagan antecedents behind figures in medieval
romance and epic, and ancient religious traditions behind modern folk customs,
was propelled by much the same impulses that were expressed by creators of ritual
such as Aidan Kelly. Both were reaching back instinctually beyond the centuries of
Christian culture to a reconnection with older ideas and images that seemed to
express enduring and fundamental qualities of the natural world.
There was, however, an important difference between the two phases of
re-creation. Gerald Gardner claimed to be the publicist of a pagan religion that
had survived continuously since antiquity, while Aidan Kelly was openly
recreating one from modern literary sources, employing a large amount of
individual imagination and artistry in the process. Nonetheless, he also made
clear that he believed the result to represent a genuine reconnection with ancient
practices and spiritual entities. Just as Gardners seasonal rites were largely a
pastiche of existing literary texts, and yet contained a distinctive theology, so
Kellys were based on the crafting together of information taken from books, but
this was utilised to produce what participants felt to be a religious experience. He
and his companions were acting out the parts of figures that his informing texts
had held to be ancient archetypes representing powerful and enduring forces of
the natural world. By doing so, they felt themselves to be communing directly
with those forces. The repetition of the rites concerned, with growing assurance
and fervour, reached a point at which all involved in them felt that something
genuinely numinous had resulted: waves of unseen lightness, flooding our
circle, washing about our shoulders, breaking over our heads (Kelly n.d., 30 40;
see also Adler 2007, 165 7). In their parlance, the ritual had suddenly worked.
From that moment, they felt themselves to be members of a viable religious
tradition.
In a sense there was something characteristically modern in this process:
indeed, it embodied a central aspect of what was subsequently to be called
postmodernism. This was especially that aspect most clearly emphasised
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by Jean-Francois Lyotard: of postmodernity as a period in which culture recreates

itself by employing many different language games and a heterogeneity of
elements, legitimating itself by the quality and utility of what is produced, as
evaluated by those who produce and consume it (Lyotard 1984, esp. xxiv).
An application of this postmodern model to another form of recently appeared
spirituality, the New Age, has already been made by Adrian Ivakhiv (2001,
9 11). It can certainly be made to fit certain aspects of the development of Pagan
seasonal festivity. Aidan Kelly self-consciously and openly created a system of
ritual by selecting portions of published works, of different ages and contexts, and
mixing them together according to his own taste to provide a vehicle for actual
experience. In another sense, however, he was working within much older
European traditions. If he never concealed the fact that he was composing a
system himself, he also felt at times as if he were reconstructing one, from
fragments, hints, innuendos, a riddle, a puzzle dispersed through different texts
(Adler 2007, 163). This quest, of recovering ancient wisdom, and so a better
understanding of the cosmos, from clues and remnants scattered through many
sources, has been a theme of European culture from Renaissance humanism
onward, through the Enlightenment project, to Victorian Theosophy. Furthermore,
the experience of taking ideas from different texts, and mixing them together in a
new framework to form a basis for active religious experience, has always been
one of the keynotes of radical Protestantism. The only difference is that, in the
latter case, the texts concerned were taken from the Bible, sometimes leavened by
devotional writings. In that sense, Kellys approach departed significantly from
that of postmodernism, in holding to a source of inner spiritual wisdom and
authenticity, validated by reference to the past; something that Susan Greenwood
has noted as typical of modern alternative western spirituality as a whole
(Greenwood 2005, esp. 206 9).
The Significance of the Cycle
This, then, is what seems to be the basic outline of the history of modern Pagan
festivals. It remains to propose some thoughts concerning their significance as
religious festivity. They have already been subjected to good scholarly analysis as
events that convey a particular experience: in other words, as phenomena in the
realms of sociology and anthropology (see particularly Luhrmann 1989;
Greenwood 2000; Magliocco 2004). They have not, however, been treated as
performances of theology, or as activities that occupy a particular place in the
development of religious seasonal celebration. In both contexts, they do seem to
indicate a shift in emphasis between premodern and modern attitudes, which lies
in the relationship between the non-human and the human. Some timeless facets
of seasonal festivity have remained in place, including what is probably the
central one: that of connecting human beings to the rhythm of the seasons, and
thustraditionallyto the supernatural forces that may lie behind it. Modern
Pagan festivals certainly do that, but they have completely lost the sense of
relationship with both the natural and the divine that characterises most
traditional religion. There is virtually no sense of propitiation, nor of a concept
of the natural world as something much more powerful than humanity, and
at times deeply threatening to humans. In view of the hugely changed
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relationship between humanity and the natural environment over the past two
hundred years, this is hardly surprising. It is, however, one very striking hallmark
of modernity in the nature of pagan festivity. [15]
It is accompanied by a proportionate lack of fear of the divine; of a sense of
deities either as capricious and moody rulers or as stern creators, lawgivers, and
judges. Modern Pagan deities are viewed essentially as beings of a different order
to humanity, with whom humans should make relationships to mutual benefit. It is
very hard, a lot of the time, to make out whether these beings are supposed to have
a literal and objective existence, or whether they function more as motifs and
symbols. As a result, modern pagan festivity almost invariably lacks any
component of the central act of most ancient festivity: sacrifice. In many groups
the remnants of consecrated food and drink, consumed as part of the rite, are
scattered and libated as offerings to deities or land spirits. This is, however, more
of an act of sharing than one of tribute. [16] Likewise, the festive rites lack most
elements of what is traditionally regarded as worship. Transactions with deities
consist essentially of attempts to bring them closer to humans in a process
of understanding and negotiation. Very often these attempts are difficult to
distinguish from a process of making the humans concerned feel more divine.
These hallmarks have been present from the beginning, in Gardners
characterisation of a Wiccan as both priestess, or priest, and witch: the former
can be simply a passive servant of the divine, but the latter is presumed to be a
more active and productive agent. It is notable, in this context, that festivals
actually get just two pages out of the one hundred and sixty in his famous seminal
book, Witchcraft Today (Gardner 1954, 21 and 130). Most of that book is concerned
with the potential of pagan witchcraft to cultivate hidden powers in human
beings, for their own good and that of others. This remained the emphasis in all
books published on the subject by practitioners during the following twenty years
(Gardner 1959; Valiente 1962, 1973, 1978; Glass 1965; Johns 1969; Farrar 1971;
Sanders 1976).
At the end of the 1970s a movement arose to emphasise the religious aspects of
Pagan witchcraft, as a feminist and ecologically friendly alternative to mainstream
faiths. It was in origin an American phenomenon, reflecting both the greater
general religiosity of the USA and its native inheritance of nature-centred
transcendentalism. British witches also found it attractive, both as a logical
development of their existing beliefs and as a solution to a serious public image
problem. A nature-venerating religion was simply more acceptable to most people
in modern western societies than the traditional associations of the witch (Hutton
1998, 34068). On both sides of the Atlantic, however, humanity remained central
to Pagan festive rites even after this shift of emphasis. The most famous of all the
feminist American witches, Starhawk, created with her coven network in the late
1970s a series of seasonal rites that addressed human hopes and fears at each point
of the Wiccan eight-festival cycle (Starhawk 1979, 181 96). Those published in the
early 1980s by a pair of British witches, Janet and Stewart Farrar, were much more
closely centred on the deity figures of goddess and god, presenting them as
characters in a constantly repeated creation myth. Nonetheless, their avowed aim
was to reintroduce urban people to the archetypal rhythms of the natural world
(Farrar and Farrar 1981, esp. 1 27). At the end of the decade, another British
couple, Vivianne and Chris Crowley, produced their own book on Wicca, in which
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the seasonal rites featured as exemplifications of human maturation, as featured in

Jungian psychology (Crowley 1989, 188 206). This emphasis has been even more
marked since 1990, as pagan Druidry, ecopaganism, and non-denominational
forms of Paganism have taken their place alongside Pagan witchcraft. Festivals are
treated, according to the tradition, either as honouring human emotional needs or
as enabling humans to work more productively with the natural environment
(Harvey and Hardman 1995; Harvey 1997). They are essentially about the
empowerment of the human participants, in making them (at least to themselves)
more effective as inhabitants of the present world and assisting them to
understand it and themselves to a greater extent.
It has been suggested that much of this pattern may be attributed to the impact
of modernity, and the shift that this has produced in human attitudes to the
natural environment. It may also, however, be attributed in part to the true historic
roots of modern Paganism, which do not lie in the mainstream religions of the
ancient world so much as in the alternative, late antique, tradition of ritual magic.
The source of this is not in Athens or Rome, but Egypt, and by far the closest
reference point to modern Paganism in the ancient world is found in the Greek
Magical Papyri. From these, and other works of Graeco-Egyptian ritual power, can
be traced a literary tradition that descends continuously, through Greek, Arabic,
and then medieval Latin texts to the present. I have argued at length elsewhere for
the descent of this tradition (Hutton 1991, 337; 1998, 66 111; 2003, 87 192). Here it
is sufficient to note that, in many respects, modern Paganism consists of aspects
of religionthe formal honouring of deities and the natural forces that they are
held to representgrafted onto a tradition of ritual magic dedicated to the
empowerment of the humans who enact it. The human relationship with deity in
modern Paganismof attraction, negotiation and partnership, taking place on
specific ritualised occasions set up by the humans concernedis far closer to
that of ceremonial magicians with the entities they seek to invoke than that of
worshippers with deities in most religions. That is also the reason for the appeal of
Margaret Murrays vision of an ancient witch religion to people such as Gardner,
for that vision combined an apparently ancient system of nature worship with the
image of the witch, one of the most potent and challenging representations of the
magician in European culture.
There seems, therefore, to be a double paradox in the historical significance of
modern Pagan festivity. On the one hand, it seems to be a distinctively recent
creation, answering to specifically modern attitudes and needs. On the other, it has
both very old roots and a direct line of transmission from antiquity. On the one
hand, it has been characterised above as an assemblage of materials taken from
different sources, all or almost all literary, and put together at a recent date. On the
other, it has also been suggested that it represents an original, and inherently
viable, form of religion, however recently developed. A large part of the solution
to both apparent paradoxes lies in its relationship to ceremonial magic.
The position of Paganism in the contemporary western world, as primarily a
group of religions associated with a counter-culture, is inherent in its development
out of a tradition that has itself always been counter-cultural: the generally
clandestine and proscribed European practices of ritual magicians. The latter
were, as I have argued elsewhere, originally rooted in ancient religion, and have
always interacted with the religion of the day. It could be said that they have
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recently flowered into a religious system in their own right, as modern Paganism.
One of the key features of the latter, exemplified by a consideration of the history
of its festive cycle, is that it lacks that aspect of religion that both modernity, and
ritual magicians of all ages, have found most unpalatable: a sense of human
helplessness and subservience.
In conclusion, what does all this contribute to a discussion about the nature of
tradition? Here it should be noted that folklorists have, from the beginning,
adopted a definition of the term that departs from that in common parlance.
The latter tends to delineate a body of knowledge, customs or beliefs received
from the past, with an emphasis on continuity and authority in the reception of it.
In the article quoted near the beginning of the present one, published in the
present journal well over a hundred years ago, Joseph Jacobs declared that this
definition was misleading, and that instead tradition should be viewed as a
process, understood by following spatial and psychological patterns (Jacobs 1893).
Even he, however, was repeating a conclusion that had been drawn before him by
those interested in the nature of culture, such as William Morris, who emphasised
in 1878 that the natural state of any tradition is one of constant change (Morris
1878, 157 8). In terms of nineteenth-century British political attitudes, it should
be acknowledged that this was not a consensual way to characterise the term,
even among intellectuals, but a self-consciously radical one, pitted against the
conservatism latent in the commonly assumed one. Nonetheless, it did have some
practical advantages in acknowledging that received belief and practice are
inherently mutable, in a manner suited to both the discipline of history and that of
folklore studies.
In recent years a new emphasis has been laid on the formulation made by
Morris and Jacobs, by American folklorists. Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin
have defined tradition as a wholly symbolic construction with an assigned
meaning: an interpretative process that embodies both continuity and
discontinuity and a process of thoughtan ongoing interpretation of the
past. As all cultures change ceaselessly, they argue, traditional is only a
particular value given to something new (Handler and Linnekin 1984, 273 4).
To Henry Glassie, likewise, tradition was the creation of the future out of the
past by human beings going through life. He viewed it as cultures dynamic, the
process by which culture exists (Glassie 1995, 395 412). Simon Brenner noted
that his contemporaries were placing a new emphasis on the concept of tradition
as one of process or transmission rather than something essentially rooted in the
past (Bronner 2000, 90). The relevance of all this to the history of Pagan festivals
must be obvious, and Bronners is particularly apposite. He has emphasised that,
in post-industrial society, tradition appears exceptionally elastic, even protean,
and individualised. As a part of modernity, he believes it to be more
contemporaneous, more spread spatially, more strategically applied and
manipulated, rather than being a surrounding state of being. As such, he finds
it both invented and inherited, individual and social, stable and changing, oral
and written, of past and present, of time and space, about both authority and
freedom (Bronner 2000, 96). Every term on that checklist can be applied to the
modern Pagan festive cycle, and so can his further recommendation that a study of
tradition by folklorists could point to the ways that spiritual and social
connection can be subjectively invoked (Bronner 2000, 96).
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So much appears easy to point out, and the suggestion abovethat the present
study might contribute to a discussion of the nature of traditionmight almost
appear to be misplaced. There is not in fact much discussion to which to
contribute: rather, folklorists have recently been reaching a consensual
formulation of the nature of tradition that is itself based on ideas articulated
since the earliest days of their discipline. What might encourage a debate would be
to examine the way in which their definition differs from that of historians. Here it
is essential to return to the latters concept of invented tradition, as headlined in
1983 by Hobsbawm and Ranger, and subsequently accepted across much of the
discipline. At first sight this could operate comfortably as a subset of the list of
aspects of tradition listed by Bronner, and indeed Pagan festivals fit well within
most aspects of the Hobsbawm Ranger formulation. Eric Hobsbawm defined an
invented tradition as:
a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or
symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition,
which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally
attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historical past (Hobsbawm 1983, 1 2).
What makes them invented, in Hobsbawms view, is that they are responses to
novel situations, which take the form of reference to old situations, or which
establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition (Hobsbawm 1983, 1 2).
This can comfortably be accommodated within the folklorists model, while
placing a still heavier stress on the element of creativity and novelty as opposed
to that of inheritance and continuity. It certainly can be applied to the modern
Pagan festive cycle. Especially relevant here is Hobsbawms perception that the
invention of tradition, although probably a constant throughout history, is
especially frequent in times of rapid social change, when the cultural patterns for
which existing traditions had been designed are disrupted. Modern Pagan
festivals fall into the category of invention that Hobsbawm himself considered the
most interesting of all: the use of ancient materials to construct invented
traditions of a novel type for quite novel purposes (Hobsbawm 1983, 4). In
addition, they can match all three of the categories into which he divided modern
invented traditions: those establishing or symbolising social cohesion; those
establishing or legitimising relations of authority; and those inculcating beliefs,
value systems, and conventions (Hobsbawm 1983, 4 8).
The problem here is that Hobsbawm also uses the term tradition in a form
that is, potentially at least, opposed to that formulated by folklorists. He declares
that the object and characteristic of all traditions is invariance: to impose fixed
and formalised practices by repetition, with reference to a real or invented past.
This he contrasts with custom, which does not preclude innovation and change,
and serves to give any desired change the sanction of precedent, social continuity,
or natural law, as expressed in history (Hobsbawm 1983, 2). Such a distinction
strikes directly against the sense of tradition as a process of inherent adaptation
and mutation, as suggested by the folklorists quoted above. Clearly, the latter may
understate the amount of rigidity and orthodoxy present in some historical
examples of tradition, but it seems difficult in practice to find a generally
applicable boundary between tradition and custom as defined by
Hobsbawm. He seems, rather, to be discussing different forms of tradition,
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some more rigid than others, as encompassed within the folkloric model. Modern
Pagan festivals are clear examples of tradition as defined by the latter, but fit
comfortably within neither of Hobsbawms two terms.
On the other hand, there is a point at which the definition of tradition proposed
by the folklorists quoted above is likely to make many historians uncomfortable.
It was reached most obviously by Handler and Linnekin, who proclaimed that:
[T]raditions are neither genuine nor spurious, for if genuine tradition refers to the pristine
and immutable heritage of the past, then all genuine traditions are spurious. But if, as we
have argued, tradition is always defined in the present, then all spurious traditions are
genuine. Genuine and spuriousterms that have been used to distinguish objective reality
from hocus pocusare inappropriate when applied to social phenomena, which never exist
apart from our interpretation of them (1984, 288).
The context of this passage was that the authors were reacting against the
argument, made by some prominent twentieth-century predecessors, that it was
important to distinguish between folk beliefs and customs that had a genuinely
old provenance, and those that claimed one but had in fact been recently created.
Built into this was the presumption that the latter were in an important sense false,
and that it was only the former which were the true province of folklore studies.
Handler and Linnekin held that, on the contrary, if all tradition represented a
process of re-creation in every present, then all could fall within the remit of the
scholar of folklore. Both positions empowered folklorists, in different ways suited
to different periods. The first sought to establish them as the judges or arbitrators
to whom society turned for a definitive decision as to whether or not a piece of
apparent folk culture should be accepted as a true relic of the past, and so worthy
of respect as such. The second greatly enlarged the area of social and cultural
studies that could be claimed by folklorists as their own, and gave that area a new
dynamism, excitement, and flexibility that could sustain the discipline
indefinitely. Historians should not, as a discipline, have any problems with the
enterprise on which Handler and Linnekin were embarked.
Where the problems do occur for scholars of history is in applying the Handler
Linnekin formula to their own work, for the simple reason that they are not
primarily concerned with the present, and with the end product (to date) of the
processes under investigation. A large part of their work consists precisely of
the investigation and validation of historical claims. Few, if any, would now believe
that the whole truth of any portion of the past can be recovered by the present, but
all would agree that it is possible to refute some claims that are made about the past
absolutely, and to prove others, with as much certainty. Many more assertions about
historical events and phenomena can be pronounced to be more or less likely to be
accurate by scholarly investigation. Put like this, there is no doubt for a historian
that some statements about the history of traditions, which do to some extent
determine their nature, actually are spurious, and some genuine. In the context of
the present article, it matters a great deal to a historian that Gerald Gardners claims
for the historicity of his religious tradition were false, whether he himself made
them with perfect sincerity or not. A folklorist need not have the same concerns.
Where both disciplines can converge, within the definitions suggested by the
folklorists cited above, is in dealing with the practical consequences of historical
verification. It is perfectly in order for a historian to prove that the claims made
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by a current tradition for its history are wholly or partly false, while recognising
the validity of that tradition as a part of the contemporary world. It was
emphasised above that the seasonal rites revealed by Gardner were a pastiche of
pre-existing modern literary texts, dressed up as a surviving ancient religion.
Equal emphasis was given to the fact that, nonetheless, they embodied a
distinctive theology of divinity and the afterlife, which both provided a viable
religious system and was in many ways especially well suited to modern needs
and tastes. The latter comment could be made with equal force about the
subsequent elaborations and developments of the Gardnerian seasonal cycle of
festivals. What cannot be wholly tested by either historians or folklorists is the
belief voiced by some practitioners involved in this process that in creating the
new they were in some measure restoring the old, by entering into a spiritual
union with deities or with human ancestors. Members of both disciplines can unite
in studying such an example of the formation of a tradition as a cultural process.
Theologians have often employed a different word for it: revelation. The mere
admission of the possibility of that further element, introduced by another set
of disciplinary conventions, is a reminder of how deeply complex the issue of
knowledge can be. To return to the concerns of folklorists, it can be proposed in
conclusion that a consideration of the history of modern Pagan festivals can fulfil
the remit laid down by figures such as Hartland and Jacobs, long ago, while
engaging fully with that formulated by their most recent successors.
Acknowledgements
This essay is based upon a lecture commissioned by the Getty Institute, and
requested again by Harvard University. I am very grateful to Jan Bremmer and
Hannah Sanders for initiating the process by which I came to speak at those
respective institutions, and to my hosts at both. I have another great debt of
gratitude to Sabina Magliocco, for her many valuable suggestions regarding ways
in which the lecture could be converted into a journal article. I am also very
grateful to the owner, Graham King, of the Williamson Papers, held at the
Museum of Witchcraft, Boscastle, for allowing me to consult this collection, and to
Richard and Tamarra James, the owners of the unpublished manuscript of Ye
BoK of ye Art Magical in the keeping of the Wiccan Church of Canada, for
allowing me to read it and other documents in their possession.
Notes
[1] In conformity with practices now becoming established in the discipline of Religious Studies,
I refer to modern Pagan religions with a capital letter, but keep the lower case, pagan, when
referring to the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the Near East, and to subsequent
reflections on them. For a discussion of the rationale behind this distinction, see Hutton (2003,
xiii xv).
[2] A much more detailed coverage of the same ground is to be found in Ronald Hutton,
forthcoming (a).
[3] This is strictly speaking a Bardic name, for use among the leaders of Welsh cultural revivalism.
270
Ronald Hutton
[4] The importance of these authors was first noticed by Cohn (1975, 103 5), but he did not
note the significance of the ideological context within which they were working, as suggested
here.
[5] For a discussion of it, see Hutton (1998, 226 32). Extracts were published in Kelly (1991), the
seasonal rites being on pages 67 70, but fleshed out there, to use the authors term, in a way
that gives a very distorted sense of the originals.
[6] The works of Crowley concerned are the Gnostic Mass and the manifestation of Nuit in the
Book of the Law: see Hutton, forthcoming (b).
[7] This was Doreen Valiente, whose information is in Farrar and Farrar (1981, 148).
[8] Frederic Lamond, pers. comm., 28 March 1992, and Lamond (2004, 15 17). Mr Lamond was a
member of the coven at the time, and his account of events has been confirmed to me by two
other surviving members, Lois Bourne and Dayonis, and by a third, Zach, who joined soon
after the reform was made.
[9] See, for example, how they were treated by even an unusually historically conscious and
enquiring pair of Wiccans in Farrar and Farrar (1981).
[10] Information from Ella Young, relayed to me by Aidan Kelly, June 1993.
[11] What follows is based on Kelly (n.d.), and presented by him to me in 1993, together with the
book of rituals of NROOGD. I am naturally very grateful to him for these gifts. The details in
these works have been confirmed to me as accurate by Fritz Muntean, another founder
member, with further corroboration provided by Margot Adler.
[12] It is also, apparently, not very fruitful even there: Jan Bremmer tells me that the Eleusinian
Mysteries were indeed celebrated at the time of the autumn equinox, but that they did not
make any apparent reference to that event or incorporate it into their symbolism.
[13] Kelly (n.d., 41).
[14] Especially influential in spreading them in the United Kingdom was Starhawk (1979).
[15] For portrayals of this festivity, see the many works on modern Paganism cited in the text and
the bibliography.
[16] Some Pagans would also regard the creative composition, craft, and performance put into a
religious rite as an offering in itself. It is also possible that some of the recently appeared and so
far tiny American groups who self-consciously seek to reconstruct ancient religions do sacrifice
animals in the traditional manner (Sabina Magliocco, pers. comm., 19 February 2008). There
are, however, no equivalents to these in the United Kingdom.
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Biographical Note
Ronald Hutton is Professor of History at the University of Bristol.

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