Triumph of the Moon - 5 years on (review)

I’ve been rereading Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon, a masterful history of pagan witchcraft, published in 1999. It’s maybe inevitable that a book that covers such a huge spectrum of ideas is bound to suffer from the criticism of individual specialists. For example I would dispute the idea that after 1902, the poet Yeats’ ‘religious ideas reappear only in fragmentary form, embedded thereafter in his later poetry and plays’ (Hutton 1999: 157). I would say that Yeats’ greatest religious and magical revelation comes after his marriage to George Hyde Lees in 1918 with his vision for the phases of the moon. The influence of these ideas about the moon on the contemporary magical scene is something overlooked until quite recently.

But I refuse to fault-judge Professor Hutton’s book given that the overall thrust is so provocative in the best possible sense. There were several themes that particularly stuck in my mind.

Firstly the positive effect of the transference of pagan witchcraft to USA from whence it returned politically refreshed. It’s so easy for the little Englander view of witchcraft to overshadow the novel contributions of our American friends. Hutton shines the spotlight on the latent conservatism of the UK magical world (for an earlier expose see my own book Sexual Magick.) I too remember as a breath of fresh air the words coming from American witch poets such as Robin Morgan. In the 1980s I helped form a group inspired by Starhawk’s groundbreaking Spiral dance. It was then by no means taken for granted that other pagans would share our anti the bomb agenda. The conversion of modern pagans and magicians to these causes was something that had to be worked for – via organisations such as Pagans Against Nukes, the Greenham Women and the Stonehenge free festival, all causes strangely absent from the lips of Professor Hutton’s informants.

Many felt that Tanya Luhrmann’s infamous study of the uk magical scene was itself flawed by its restriction to a very narrow and conservative bunch of magicos, as well as her outright refusal to meet with any representatives of occultism’s new wave. Many linked this with ‘her apparent dismissal of their practices as founded on delusion. Perhaps that’s unfair but then as Ronald points out ‘The feeling of the latter were to some extent enhanced by Luhrmann’s own return to United States as soon as her project was complete, her entry into the academic profession assured and her subsequent lack of any obvious interest in Paganism or magic. (Hutton 1999: 376) It is a feature of the book that Hutton is as hard on fellow academics as he is sympathetic to the magical practitioner.

Professor Hutton levels some very telling criticism of the internecine strife that has been a feature pagan witchcraft since its very beginning. The often-termed ‘bitchcraft’ hardly waned, even when during the 1980s ‘satanic child abuse panic’ when the stakes were very high indeed. Whilst not a complete stranger to wiccan circles, I was at the time firmly within the magical fold. I remember feeling much got at by the intemperate outbursts from wiccans, ‘great and good’. They seemed to be fuelling the press views witch hunt against ‘black’ practitioners. Ronald’s book has at least helped me to get that in perspective. These attacks were not aimed at occultists but at other rival wiccan priests and priestesses! Whether the press saw it that way is another story. In Oxford a local Christian wannabee attempted to get our speaker meetings banned from council property and the ‘oh so liberal’ Bishop of Oxford (still in post), stopped our path working group using the local community centre.

Personally I wonder whether the abusive and bitchy nature of many covens is perhaps linked to the unhealthy influence of the fourth way philosophy of Gurdjieff or indeed the worst excesses of some of Aleister Crowley’s training regimes?

There is a common misconception that Professor Hutton has somehow undermined the basis of pagan witchcraft. I didn’t really get that impression, if anything he has cleared a space in which it can thrive. If anything his work reminds me of the kind of approach taken by the late Andrew Chumbley, whose credentials are anything but undermined by this book. I once asked Andrew about all these claims to a lineage older than the 1940s emergence of Wicca and he replied that although initiated by traditional witches with a long pedigree they didn’t actually know very much. It was still down to him and his colleagues to reinvent or flesh out the tradition.

Likewise on the topic of the goddess, the learned professor’s position is really a form of enlightened agnosticism –

‘The effect [of the ‘Murrayite’ fall from grace] upon professional pre-historians was to make most return, quietly and without controversy to that careful agnosticism as to the nature of the ancient religion which most has preserved since the 1940s. There had been no disproof of the veneration of a Great Goddess, only a demonstration that the evidence concerned admitted of alternative explanations.’ (Hutton: 1999: 282)

Which does not mean that goddesses were not worshipped in prehistoric times or that none of them achieved to greatness. For example Isis; who may not be a prehistoric goddess but is certainly the first to go global. Ronald Hutton’s book is a reminder that a god or goddess wants you to encounter them as they truly are and not as a mere cipher with which to work out your frustration or bitterness about the way your life is going just now.