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The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan
Witchcraft, by Ronald Hutton. Oxford University Press, 2000, 502
pages.
"Do Their Spells Really
Work?" by Stephen Cox
I want to start by talking about ghosts.
| | Stephen
Cox is a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego
and the author of "The Titanic Story." |
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Samuel Johnson, one of the Enlightenment's greatest intellectuals and, in his
way, one of its greatest skeptics, observed that people in every human society
have claimed to see ghosts. On that evidence, he was inclined to credit their
existence, though not to credit their existence in every case that he heard
about.
Recently I was talking with a friend, an intelligent young man in his
twenties. He is a person of conservative disposition — thoughtful, moderate,
self-controlled, immune to fanciful ideas. He comes from a conservative,
professional family, which educated him in traditions of order and
self-discipline. If there's any word you would trust, it's the word of someone
like him. And he happened to say to me, casually and as if it had no
philosophical implications whatever, that when he was growing up, he lived in a
house with ghosts.
It started when he was seven or eight years old. He was walking out of his
bedroom when something tapped him "very methodically" on the left shoulder, three
times. He didn't feel that there was anything "sinister" going on: "It was trying
to get my attention." After that, there were many times when he looked from the
kitchen into the bedroom hallway and saw a human-shaped shadow walking
"nonchalantly" from door to door. Sometimes he would hear his father calling him
from another room, but when he went to that room, no one was there. His father
— who, by the way, refused to believe that any of the other strange things
was happening — also heard him calling from rooms that turned out to be
empty. The same was true of his mother and sister.
"How long did these things go on?" I asked.
"Till we moved out of the house," he said, "when I was 15. I was afraid that
they were focused on me instead of the house. But it stopped as soon as we moved.
And I've never experienced anything like that since." |
| Witchcraft depends on
the notion that we can actually get acquainted with supernatural "forces," most
of which are hackneyed literary metaphors. |
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I didn't ask many questions. I was somewhat surprised that I didn't. It wasn't
because I found the story too strange to follow up on. To the contrary: it was so
simple and straightforward that no questions seemed necessary. He related what
happened, not as something that needed to be explained or justified, but as an
event of daily life — unusual, to be sure, and far from pleasant, but no
more demanding of hard questions than somebody's recollection of coming home to
find graffiti on the backyard fence.
At this point, since you're probably sneering at my credulity, I want to
assure you that I have read the philosophical literature on belief in
supernatural appearances, and that I do know the adolescent-psychology theory of
poltergeist phenomena. Well, what my friend encountered wasn't poltergeists, and
his experiences stopped, not when he got out of adolescence, but when he moved
out of a certain house in Sunnyvale. Also, I don't care what Hume said: if I ever
see a ghost, I'll believe in ghosts, and if a trusted friend says that he saw a
ghost, I'll be likely to believe that he did. (If you tell me that you saw one, I
don't think I'll grant the same degree of credence. I don't know you.) To
continue this string of disgraceful admissions: I confess that I don't see why
the use of objective reason should begin with a dogmatic exclusion of certain
kinds of evidence. And, speaking from a purely aesthetic point of view, I confess
that I believe our world would be a great deal poorer if the radical skeptics
actually convinced us all that there cannot ever be any truth in such stories as
my friend related. The story caused him considerable pain, and I sympathized with
him. All the same, it conjured up the kind of shadows that give life its relief
and roundedness.
Fortunately or unfortunately, however, there are people who have sought to
regularize human contacts with the mysterious and induce them to happen by
command. This used to be the province of spiritualism, which was mostly very
phony. The popular movement of the present hour is the neo-pagan religion of
"witchcraft." This is the movement that sometimes calls itself Wiccan, and it is
the subject of the book under review.
How popular is "popular"? From a website that discusses the appointment of
Wiccans as chaplains in state prisons in Wisconsin, I derive the following
statement: "Estimates of Wiccans in the U.S. vary greatly, from 200,000 to 5
million." Other sites give numbers of 10 million at the high end and 3 million at
the low end. But let's see. Five million would be about one in every 60
Americans. So the next time you're in a Wal-Mart in Kansas City, one out of 60 of
the people you see milling about the aisles will be a witch. Doesn't sound very
likely to me. But OK, I'll be fair. The next time you're in a coffee shop in San
Francisco, two out of three of the customers will be a Wiccan. That will make up
for the paucity of witches in the deep midwest.
Sorry. It's less ridiculous to believe in witchcraft than it is to believe
that there are five million witches in America. And believing in witchcraft is
much more ridiculous than believing in ghosts. After all, ghosts don't appear on
order. Either they appear or they don't, and no one knows why. Witchcraft, by
contrast, depends on the notion that we can actually get acquainted with
supernatural "forces," most of which are hackneyed literary metaphors, like the
moon goddess or the personified earth, and use them, perhaps command them, for
our benefit.
Evidence is lacking of anyone's ability to do that. And the history that
modern witches tell about their movement has equally strong evidentiary problems.
The usual story is that ancient Europe worshiped a goddess identified with the
moon and a variety of other things, that her worship went underground when
Christianity took over, but that it survived — very well, thank you —
by handing down its beliefs and practices from one generation of witches to
another, until it was rediscovered and popularized in the twentieth century.
This is where our author, Ronald Hutton, comes in. He shows, to any sane
person's satisfaction, that there was no pagan witch-religion that survived the
coming of Christianity. Modern paganism was originated by modern people, and very
modern people, at that. As Hutton demonstrates in meticulous detail, it's almost
all post-World War II. Also wrong is the picture that many people, especially
radical feminists, have been delighted to paint of the mass executions of witches
during the European past. I say "delighted" with ironic emphasis, because there
is something very repulsive about the desire to magnify human suffering in order
to create imaginary martyrs for one's cause. As Hutton indicates — to my
relief, if not to that of the radical feminists — there were far, far fewer
victims of witch-hunts than we've been led to suppose. "There was no long-lasting
or wide-ranging persecution of witches in early modern Europe . . . Only a tiny
percentage of people suspected by their neighbours of witchcraft were executed. .
. . [M]ass arrests . . . were concentrated in a few specific places and times
during the period 1560–1630, a short span in the whole extent of the
medieval and early modern epochs" (p. 379).
| When Hutton tells them
that he does research on practitioners of witchcraft, "far and away the most
frequent question which they ask is, again and again, 'Do their spells really
work?'" |
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Hutton's book is unsurpassed as a scholarly account of modern witchcraft, its
origins, motives, and fantasies about itself. It is one of the most penetrating
accounts of the invention of any modern religion. Its logic is strong, its array
of facts is enormous, its spirit is charitable but never naive; only its
proofreading is bad (in fact, damnable). Of special interest is the account it
provides of the role that scholars and intellectuals played in fostering false
stories about the so- called Old Religion that is supposed to have engendered the
modern world of Wicca. People like Robert Graves, Margaret Murray, Marija
Gimbutas, and other competent scholars are very largely responsible for the
wholly unsupported historical myths that surround neo-paganism. It takes a lot of
self-delusion, or something worse, to make a case for those myths. But scholars
made it, and readers bought it.
The market had been prepared by two centuries of literary romanticism, which
sometimes equated emotional longing with spiritual truth, and almost two
centuries of intellectual crusades against Christianity. Many people, and not
just intellectuals, either, turned out to be very willing to believe in any
religion except the dominant one, which as an identifiable force in society could
be blamed for virtually anything they carried a grudge about. Then, as Hutton
says, came the "powerful emotional currents" of the latter half of the 20th
century — "a yearning for a reunion with the natural world and one's own
imagination, for a spirituality of liberal self-expression and
self-actualization, and for a greater parity and partnership between the sexes,
especially in religion. . . . " (Women have so large a role in witchcraft that
Aleister Crowley, one of the movement's demigods, "declared that he would not
himself enter the witch religion because 'he refused to be bossed around by any
damn woman'" [218].) Hutton observes that "the 1960s, in particular, witnessed an
explosion of articulations of those needs and attempts to realize them." He makes
an especially interesting assessment of one type of emotional need: "As the
natural world became tamer and tamer, and the recesses of the globe more
familiar, so Westerners began, more than ever before, to treat their own minds
and souls as wild places, worthy of exploration. The new witchcraft, which united
religion and magic, provided for some a particularly exciting way of entering
those inner landscapes" (285–86).
I have to tell you that the religious behavior of the witches whom Hutton
studies doesn't look much like an invasion of the "wild." It looks more like an
invasion of Toys 'R' Us. His contemporary witches are nice, fairly normal people.
Their standards of what counts for evidence may be deplorably low, but so are
most people's. They don't have sex on the altar, they don't worship anything that
they regard as satanic, and their spells and chants are aimed at doing good, not
harm. They appear to spend most of their time celebrating "nature" and imagining
that they themselves are one with Her. They are a mildly creative addition to the
world's vast collection of spiritual self-expressions. But it's sad: they were in
quest of something "wild," and look where they ended up. It is always curious to
see how little is required to satisfy the soul.
Two other things are worth noting. One is the ironic fact that the followers
of a contemporary religion of nature should demand that it be rooted in the
practices of the distant past. Most of the originators of modern witchcraft
convinced themselves that it had been around since the dawn of time and that it
must therefore have a rich and literal history, even if they had to make one up.
Certain intellectual leaders of the movement now hesitate over such claims about
the beginnings of the Craft, while continuing to revel in the long and supposedly
illustrious career of the religious category that includes it, paganism. Yes,
it's true; some people did use to worship the moon. What that proves is another
issue.
And it's strange that certain exponents of witchcraft, especially feminists,
imagine that it is something revolutionary, while also imagining that it
originated in the prehistoric past — when, as we know, all the world was
lapped in peace, under the benevolent reign of the Great Goddess. Many founders
of modern witchcraft were political conservatives, sighing for the good old days
before industrial capitalism; nowadays, leaders and followers are pretty firmly
allied with the left, but the longing for a sanction from the past has never left
them — perhaps because they sense that the spiritual foundations which they
themselves have laid are too feeble to bear much weight.
This leads to the second of the things worth noting. Hutton says that the
"most disturbing recurrent experience" connected with his research has been the
response of the people he meets "in social situations . . . middle-class people
of high education and professional ability" who are, in "overwhelming majority,"
atheists, agnostics, or nominal Christians. These people operate on the premise
that there is no such thing as a supernatural phenomenon, not even a ghost. But
when Hutton tells them that he does research on practitioners of witchcraft, "far
and away the most frequent question which they ask . . . is, again and again, 'Do
their spells really work?'" (271).
Hutton finds this disturbing because he's afraid that if people entertain the
possibility that witchcraft works, they will begin to persecute witches for
working evil. This seems farfetched, until one recalls how much heat was
generated, a few years ago, by stories spread in this country by vicious or
demented people who suddenly happened to "remember" that they had been brought up
in witch covens that routinely conducted human sacrifice.
From another point of view, however, the question posed by Hutton's ostensibly
nonbelieving friends offers a wry confirmation of the saying of one of Robert
Browning's characters, who remarked that antireligious people may have as much
trouble fighting off doubts as religious people have:
"Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a
flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides —
And
that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature's
self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there,
a fantastic ring,
Round the ancient idol, on his base again —
The
grand Perhaps!"
And it must be said: compared with Hutton's friends, the Wiccans don't come
off badly in the intellectual department. There are a lot of silly things inside
their heads, but at least they know what's in there.
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