The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft
It is the last Sunday of the Month so we’re looking at a religion, making this weeks book The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft by Ronald Hutton.
The Triumph of the Moon is broken down into two parts, Macrocosm and Microcosm.
Part one, Macrocosm, is about the overarching history of how Wicca came to be. The thought and history that led up to it’s creation. Hutton looks at the approximately two hundred years of Western European, primarily English, history that influenced the creation of this religion, and yes, he does determine in the end it’s a religion, which I’ll come back to.
Hutton looks first of all at literature that had an impact. And I’m not talking about James Frazer The Golden Bough or Robert Graves The White Goddess; he does discuss those, but later. I’m talking about works by Poets and authors, like Oscar Wilde, whose literary genius include a bit of the fantastical, and don’t necessarily reject the concept of God as a deity, but acknowledge there may be more gods out there. Life truly does imitate art, and once such imagery had entered the artistic sphere, it was not too far off before life started to follow in it’s footsteps.
From there he identifies which goddess (Artemis) made the biggest splash in the 19th century, and which god (Pan) would accompany her. All of this is based on, again, literature that was widely read and widely available in the late 18th and all through the 19th century. He points out that this revived love for classical ideas of godhood do not, in fact, make the authors who wrote about them Pagan. Merely well read.
The structure of various magical workings, up to and including the Order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley’s spin-off group, Ordo Templi Orientis are discussed, and apparently, a good chunk of the iniatory rituals and verbiage are directly cribbed from other mystery orders like, for example….the Freemasons. Wiccans are familiar with the phrase “So mote it be!” That comes directly from the Masons. How about “Merry meet, and merry part, and merry meet again!”? Also from the masons. “Hail to the guardians of the watchtowers!” Freemasons. And the Freemasons conclusively started in 1717 with the formation of the first Grand Lodge in London. Specifically June 24, 1717, according to wikipedia.
Other mystery or secret orders spun out of the freemasons, which ultimately culminated in the Order of the Golden Dawn, and it’s most infamous member Aleister Crowley. More on him in a bit.
As for the writings of James Frazer, Robert Graves, and Margaret Murray (The Witch Cult in Western Europe, and The God of the Witches in particular) Hutton dismantles these. Not in detail, but he points to other authors who have done so. Basically, these works were populist written, meant for easy consumption by non-academics, and not researched as serious academic works, meaning they include nothing that doesn’t support their central thesis.
And then Hutton goes into the Microcrosm, basically, how did Wicca develop and evolve as a stand alone religion?
Well….Aleister Crowley. Ok, not directly, but he was definitely an ancestor of the craft, as Gerald Gardner, the acknowledged founder of Wica (again, one C...mentioned that last week), did meet and was initiated into Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis shortly before Crowley died in 1947. We know this definitively, not because Gardner said as much, although he did, but because Crowley was a diligent diarist. He kept a daily journal of everything he did and who he spoke with, and noted in one such having met and initiated Gardner into OTO. Good news for Gardner. Bad news for a host of imitators who later all claimed to have been initiated by Crowley, probably for the air of legitimacy such initiatory contact would have given them. Because of the late comers to open witchcraft, the only one who can prove it is Gardner.
So Gerald Gardner was born June 13, 1884 in England, he largely grew up overseas and spent a significant portion of his life living and working abroad, before returning to England in the late 1930’s where he would dabble in Rosicrucianism, and OTO, before founding Wica. The one c in that is etymologically interesting, as Wica with one c means Wise. Adding the second c changes the definition to, literally, Witch. Hutton actually spends like a page and a half talking about the etymology of the two words and WICCE vs WICCA...basically it’s gendered language, wicce being the masculine version and wicca being the feminine version of witch. It should even be pronounced like witch, the double cc creating a ‘-tch’ sound, but for whatever reason, probably because American’s are, generally speaking, uncultured swine, it’s pronounced Wicca with a hard ‘c.’
And from there Hutton breaks down the drama and infighting and progression of Wicca as a religion and as a system of magical practice. He does address that by and large Wicca is driven these days, at least as of 1999 when this book was first published, is driven by American pagans. And he spends a lot of time in section two addressing some of the early and much loved myths regarding The Burning Times and the wishtory that all witches are descended from some long, unbroken line of women who survived The Burning Times.
But he doesn’t do it unkindly, and he addresses what cannot be proven or disproven, namely a VERY long tradition of folk remedies, which in England is generally referred to as hedge witchcraft, and in America you might be familiar with Appalachian magic or Pennsylvania Deutsche magic, or even, as Hutton references in the book, Ozark magic. Next year, I am absolutely reading Vance Randolph’s Ozark Magic and Folklore...because this book has now been mentioned in three of the books I read this month.
Basically, when he’s addressing the ‘lineage’ of witchcraft, there is absolutely NOT an unbroken religion going all the way back to ancient Greece. And you would be hard pressed to find anyone who practices Wicca who thinks there was. Most will acknowledge that on the stage of World Religion, they are well aware their faith is an infant, comparatively speaking. However, it is not impossible that the folk remedies you learned from your grandmother or great grandmother, comes from an older tradition that WAS handed down for a long period of time, that 500 years ago might have been considered witchcraft. You can’t disprove an oral tradition. But you also can’t prove it.
Hutton does come down on the side of this is definitely a religion. A small, infant religion, that is largely unstudied by academics. He addresses some of the myths around it, like that skyclad, i.e. naked, ceremonies devolve into orgies, and hypothesises that the reason for nudity is two fold: 1. to get your head space right for performing magic. If you’re naked, you’re aware this is not normal, and so you’re focused on the ceremony. 2. Group nudity is an open statement of trust in your fellow coven members. You HAVE to trust them to be that vulnerable around them.
Might explain why I’m not in a coven...I don’t think I trust anyone outside of my husband well enough to be naked in front of them.
Orgies are a no go, and any alcohol served is strictly for ceremonial purposes. Being drunk is contra indicated and can fuck up the power being drawn into the circle cast.
And while there are a steadily growing number of solo-practitioners, coven membership is harder to come by, mostly because this is a fully participatory religion. There are no passive observers. Which means of necessity, coven membership is limited to around 13. Last weeks book, the author didn’t know why, since Gardnerian tradition required male/female pairs and 13 is an odd number. I can’t swear to this, but my own immediate thought was 6 couples, and a high priestess, most likely post-menopausal, to lead the coven.
But, as Hutton points out in his final chapter where he addresses some of the demographics, post-menopausal is not the typical age range of practicing Wiccans, so now I have no more answers than Jason Mankey did on the number 13. I doubt it has anything to do with superstition, and now would guess it’s to keep the number of participants in an easily managed range.
This book was largely interesting. There were some parts I glossed over, mostly because I didn’t see the relevance. For example, he’d be talking about one persons books and then mention they were staunchly anti-communist or pro-socialist...and I could not see what the hell that had to do with the topic at hand. So I’d skim until he pulled the book back into focus with something that DID seem relevant.
It is, however, very much intended as a scholarly work, intended for academics, which is not to say it’s unreadable if you are not an academic, but it is densely written. It’s only 416 pages and I thought ‘No Problem’ when I saw that, but then I opened it up and saw the 8 point font, and thought “This is it...this is the book I go blind reading.”
Overall, it was not bad, although I do feel that he probably could have cut about 50 pages of exposition...then blown up the font to at least 10 point and still had it come out around 400 pages. Because I seriously don’t care what someone’s political beliefs are in context of what he/she said/wrote 90 years ago. Those lines have blurred and shifted significantly in the intervening century and no longer have relevance.
Except for Andrea Dworkin. No joke, she makes an appearance in the chapter on American contributions, which surprised me because I never think of her in context of possible witchiness. I think of her as the bat shit insane feminist who directly contributed to the mad cluster-fuckery of political discourse in the 1980s and 1990s. Fortunately, whatever feminist ramblings she contributed to the Witchcraft Conversation have largely been debunked. Dworkin was a large...pun not intended... proponent of it was men who burned women and it was a gynocide….
Not true, says Hutton, pointing out “The traditional paradigm of witch trials as a means by which people in power regulated and indoctrinated their inferiors, which flourished from the 18th century to the 1970s, has collapsed almost completely. It is now obvious that the main force in driving on persecution was pressure from common people, who genuinely feared and hated witches and wanted their rulers to act against them in times of social upheaval and economic crisis. The greatest single factor in keeping trials relatively infrequent was the disinclination of those rulers to oblige, so that hunts flourished not where states were larger and more powerful, but where they were smallest and most fragmented…”
One thing I do disagree with Hutton on, though, is that Wicca is the first religion to combine magic with the religion. I don’t disagree that Wicca does so, only that it’s the first. Because I think of votive candles in Catholic churches, and what else are they than magic, lighting a spark and praying that a divinity sees that spark, and chooses to act on it.
