The Pagan Religion of the Ancient... Whomstve?
Critical Thinking Is For Nerds
Coming up on the first anniversary of The Preppy Witch Handbook, longtime members know about my frustration with the commodification of witchcraft. By this I mean the tee shirts with sassy slogans on them, the pyramid scheme “love and light” girlies, and mass-marketed evil eye bracelets being sold in shops that are also certified Lilly Pulitzer dealers. Another bugbear is the recycling of materials and information published each year, then picked apart on TikTok and eventually rendered inaccurate or useless. It’s even more frustrating when you learn that the sources from which many of these authors have gleaned their actual religion were adapted, compiled, and often just made up. Enter Ronald Hutton.
One of my most un-prep qualities is that I love a footnote. My preferred reading material is the driest, dustiest monograph on the shelf that probably hasn’t been checked out since the last decade or for longer. This is not the case with Hutton’s Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, yet it has been on shelves for the past three decades, making the current situation that much more inexcusable.
Yes yes, not everyone’s an academic. At 341 pages of block text paragraphs and few pen and ink illustrations, I understand why it’s not widely read. Even I struggled through the archaeological tract sections, but it was worth the mental toil to read almost every cliché about today’s “earth mysticism” be dismantled. Although much of the information was not new to me, reading it all in succession, in one book, was delicious.
Here are a few points addressed in the text:
At the time of this publication, historians knew next to nothing about how the Celts, the Picts, and the Druids practiced and worshipped; the left no written records, and contemporary accounts of them were written by Roman colonizers
Archaeological findings concerning burials, sacrifices, their social and spiritual meanings, are abundant but inconclusive; Hutton also addresses the lack of evidence about all churches being built a sacred spot super ley line highway
The majority of the deities worshipped by these peoples, as we know them today, are mostly assemblages of many different traditions as the British Isles hosted colonies from other neighboring territories even before the Romans arrived
Much of the “literature” that comes from the British Isles before this time is adapted from oral traditions recorded by monks, then rediscovered, compiled, and often embroidered by early modern writers– if not wholly fabricated
Tropes such as the “maiden, mother, crone” archetype stemmed from modern scholars that would make broad claims about “ancient” practices, then refuse to discuss them when disproved or even challenged
And yet, Hutton is one of the most respected living scholars of ancient and medieval magic, having written many books on the subject and even a few forewords in practical witchcraft guides. What distinguishes his work is that he disproves without disparaging, presenting at the evident but allowing the reader to make up their own minds. Learning more about the amalgamation of ancient British and Roman religious customs and deities was oddly comforting as a passing WASP with Mediterranean heritage. It’s also an example of how such practices were flexible, changing as needed to the practitioners’ circumstances.
The clearly defined physical proof also served to deepen the mystery of these known yet unknown peoples. Hutton’s emphasis on the nuance of religion, how it can be affected by a multitude of cultural, social, and political factors over time, made me think of the word itself. Nuance comes from the Latin nubes, meaning cloud, that then became the French verb nuer, to shade. I thought it may be related to the word numinous through the nu– as a root, which is not the case. However, numinous originated from the Latin numen or numin–, for “divine will.” It’s an interesting synchronicity– a term and phenomenon Hutton attributes to Carl Jung in the text.
Hutton’s ongoing studies on the nuance of the numinous continue to raise important questions about the scholarship and application of “ancient” magic, and I highly recommend checking out any book in his bibliography. If reading’s not your thing, frankly I’m surprised you’ve made it this far in my post, and there are recordings of his lectures on the Gresham College YouTube channel. Most of all, don’t just accept everything he says because I’ve endorsed him, or because he’s a tweed-wearing English professor. Ask questions, come to your own resolutions, in your practice of the craft as in everything else.
