Ronald Hutton

Hutton did an impeccable job, as always, laying out the historical elements at play with unshakable logic and an abundance of kindness and generosity. None but Hutton could point out how much of a sneaky liar someone was with such polite factual sass, while also giving them deeply human grace and the benefit of the doubt. Hutton has mastered the one-two-punch of delivering heartening humanist prose to refocus the reader from the mire of details and ideas. I would encourage anyone who is show more curious about modern magic and modern paganism to invest some time in this book; none will give you greater insight. Feels great to have finally finished this foundational book. It was only when I put it down that I noticed the moon will be completely full in just a few hours. A triumph indeed. show less

Hutton has out-done himself with this definitive, meticulous, and respectful look into the 2,000 year history of the Druids. There's so much that history has misinterpreted, misunderstood, assumed and forgotten about them.

Turns out, the earliest reference to Druids isn't in Britain, but in Gaul, and described by Julius Caesar. However his writings are based completely on hearsay! Since then, Druids went from being regarded as "savages and menaces to being romantic and admirable, once the show more civilization that was doing the viewing had absorbed them." In France, Germany, Ireland and Wales. The English, in fact, were the last to incorporate them into their ancient history due to their association with the Irish.

The word "Druid" being related to "oak" remained an unsupported fact until the mid-20th c., now largely abandoned. If one has to choose a Druidic tree per se, it's likely to be the rowan. The white robes and their worship of naturally forming henges is also unfounded. Even the famous Lindow Man, when discovered in 1984, was immediately assumed to have been ritualistically killed by Druids. The history of the Druids is full of these kinds of scenarios, bending the evidence to fit the conclusion. By the late 18th c. into the 19th c. once Britain has taken hold, the full romantic Druid is born. There are Druidic poetry clubs, societies with initiation ceremonies and regalia, much like the Freemasons. But where there are free thinkers, there is revolution. Hutton explores this trend through poet Iolo Morganwg. In 1853, Britain even saw its first Noble Order of Female Druids!

Throughout, Hutton isn't trying to slight modern Druids, but instead explores the evolution and creation of something new and our ever growing affection for this mystical and ancient group. show less

Queens of the Wild is a really engrossing exploration of popular modern misconceptions about medieval European religion and folklore. They frequently posit a binary contrast between a repressive, misogynist institutional church and a matriarchal, sex-positive paganism lurking just beneath the surface of every Christian-seeming peasant, together with century-spanning continuities of belief from ancient religions through to modern neo-paganism.

As Ronald Hutton lays out here, these show more misconceptions largely derive from 19th and early 20th assumptions and, to be honest, some plain shoddy scholarship. Hutton examines the medieval and early modern sources about four female figures—Mother Earth, the Fairy Queen, the Lady of the Night, and the Cailleach—and also the modern takes about them. He argues that rather than representing the remnants of a pre-Christian Mother Goddess religion, these figures are largely the creation of medieval Christian authors, and that many associated folk customs are largely 19th century in origin rather than from the Middle Ages.

A really great example of careful, meticulous scholarship. Absolutely recommended for anyone with an interest in these topics. show less

This may not be the definitive text on paganism in Britain before and during the Christian era but it is not going to be easily bettered in terms of grand narrative.

Hutton's approach, not at all unsympathetic to the way we all imaginatively reconstruct the world out of slender evidence, is highly sceptical of academic claims to know very much about paganism.

Until we reach the historical record, imperfectly represented for Roman evidence and only becoming clearer during the Middle Ages, what show more we have is material evidence that can be interpreted in many ways.

Over and over again, he takes a site or an artefact or a 'deposit' and shows us how little we can be certain of what it may have meant to the people of its time.

The book, for much of its length, runs along two parallel tracks: a precise description of the evidence to hand and an account of how earlier and current generations of academic have interpreted it.

We are all used to books of archaeology that give us inordinately dull descriptions of pots and post-holes and then, having flummoxed us with 'facts', try to persuade us of something we cannot argue with.

Although Hutton's book has its share of descriptions of burials and stone circles, just as we are about to stifle a yawn, up he pops with a bit of intellectual history that makes it interesting again.

His fundamental scepticism about claims is refreshing which is not to say that he is not describing significant progress in the archaeology of belief if only to show how evidence can strip away old theory.

As he suggests, the evidence has the virtue of not permitting certain beliefs to hold water (e.g. that the Egyptians built Stonehenge) but it has the vice of allowing a great deal else.

His response is to be tolerant - to let a thousand flowers bloom of academic suggestions and counter-cultural beliefs so long as none claims the mantle of evidenced truth.

From this perspective, the book is invaluable. He strips away the nonsense of the great goddess as truth but permits women to invent her (even if it clearly turns some of them into irrational harridans).

He does similar 'knife jobs' on the survival of the old religion as witch cults, the 'Celtic goddesses' allegedly to be found in Celtic literature, Heathen survivals and more.

Perhaps the best chapter is the last where some historical evidence can be added to the archaeological yet even here texts prove slippery and contingent with much later invention being misinterpreted.

His critical analysis of all the evidence, written or otherwise, tells us that we are unlikely ever to know what pagans actually believed and did before Christians arrived and started writing texts.

Hutton is also fair to the totalitarian religion that replaced paganism. He elucidates its power well and is persuasive that it did, indeed, almost entirely replace paganism without permitting survivals.

He reinstates Britain as a fundamentally Christian country between the integration of the last pagan Scandinavians and the recent arrival of secularism, atheism, pagan revivalism and imperial migration.

Indeed, from this perspective the last three hundred years or so of rationality looks a little exposed and vulnerable in the long run of 5,000 years - though perhaps palaeolithic man was rational too.

In that last chapter, he takes a surgical knife to almost every claim of pagan survival from the sacredness of yew trees to the existence of Herne the Hunter so that we are left with very little tangible.

What survives is a generalised set of cultural assumptions that do seem to have survived Christianity simply because they were not a challenge to it - and were largely expressed as folklore and 'cunning'.

He is persuasive that belief in fairies and elves is an ancient pre-Christian survival and there are a number of other customs and habits that may be but almost no identifiable folk rituals.

The final picture is one of a somewhat anxiety-driven middle class rediscovering paganism in response to modernisation and desperately seeking proofs that are not there of meaningful continuities.

Many appropriations are purely political - especially for feminism but also as reflections of the uncomfortable status of the middle class in relation to its own working class and the colonised.

Hutton is persuasive that what we might attribute to pagan sensibility was actually fully Christianised in the sense that no one believing in folk ideas or doing folk acts was not self-defined as Christian.

This book will be troublesome to true believers who want belief to be true. Hutton is more tolerant than me in that he wants us to have respect for belief rather than (my view) respect for the believer.

He leaves open the door to the right to accept an unproven belief (which is going to be no worse than believing Christian claims) so long as it is definitely not contradicted by the evidence.

And, of course, the nature of the evidence means that a lot of reconstructionist neo-paganism cannot be contradicted as a claim about past belief. Phew! Like Christianity, neo-paganism can be absurd.

A pagan Kierkegaard might now with justice throw himself or herself into the Mother Goddess or communion with Nature or Odin without having to worry about most claims by most archaeologists.

He is, consequently, as tough or gentle with his fellow academics as with believers and he maintains his scepticism about their claims being anything more than probabilities and possibilities.

Even more, he recognises that counter-cultural theories about survivals or the beliefs of the ancient may have been shown to be wrong-headed but they did stimulate important lines of research.

Although most cases result in investigation showing why the counter-cultural belief was false, this is far from the case in every respect - sometimes, the line of enquiry throws up new evidence.

Although ley lines now seem to have no basis in fact and archaeo-astronomy is highly problematic, serious investigation of both has thrown up new facts to consider.

He thus places counter-cultural believers in, say, earth mysteries much closer to most academic theorists as really not that different in their relationship to truth-telling.

Both sets of believer really can believe that they have the answer to the same evidence under conditions where neither can prove their claims, merely offer contingent probabilities and possibilities.

This is why the book is so useful. It offers us a senior academic's assessment of academic epistemology and it comes to a conclusion that is highly sceptical (possibly an edge too much so in the last chapter).

There are philosophers today who are also asking similar questions about their own discipline, beginning to question whether they are destined always to go round in circles on some central questions.

The value here lies in demarcating the so-called social sciences - the exploration of what is human that is not hard biology - much more from the 'hard' sciences which have laws and can create technologies.

This is important because the 'soft' sciences are making claims increasingly in political contexts that are merely probabilities and possibilities and have always done so, sometimes dangerously.

The point is that, as with half-baked genetics in the nineteenth century, soft scientists are in danger of claiming that they can provide technologies - of social control above all.

This book and other humanist contributions rightfully help us to be sceptical of theory based on evidence with multiple interpretations and sparse or selective in its nature. So much for 'nudge' ...

By repositioning archaeology as a hard science in terms of provision or critique of evidence but as a humanity in terms of its interpretation of evidence, he does a great service.

He runs both positions in parallel in this book to the benefit of the discipline. We thus feel more confident about the facts but decline to accept the fact-definers as more than guides to interpretation.

Not only can facts be overturned (after all Christ just could appear in all his glory on Tuesday morning) but interpretations are seen as highly contingent on social conditions and personal prejudices.

Hutton shows that the history of archaeology has included a Mulderian 'need to believe' and, if this is so, then the 'need to believe' is a human quality that neo-pagans have as much right to.

However, what he also does is reintroduce us to the concept of judgement, weighing up all the options and sceptically waiting until the balance of evidence holds little other than one interpretation.

Very few claims about the actual beliefs and behaviour of pre-historic Britons hold water in that context. We are faced with hypotheses that we should treat as more or less plausible stories.

Nor can we expect this situation to change. All early historical texts are unreliable. Stones do not speak. Our ancestors cannot be brought back from the dead. So much has been destroyed. show less