An eclectic new religion

A new edition of this classic scholarly work updates the story of the history of Wicca, says

The Triumph of the Moon

A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (2nd edn)

Ronald Hutton

Oxford University Press 2021

Pb, 544pp, £14.99, ISBN 9780198870371

Twenty years after its first edition, Ronald Hutton’s history of Wicca has been thoroughly revised. He incorporates material produced in that interval and signposts readers to relevant scholarship.

I’ve heard Hutton say that Wicca is the only religion that Britain has given to the world. As evidence, he presents a particular set of influences which, taken together, seem bound to have made something happen.

Wicca is both the product and the antithesis of industrialisation. Its roots lie in the urbanisation of the British population in the 19th century from which developed a romantic view of rural life. German romanticism and the classical world influenced late 19thcentury thought; Pan appeared in poetry symbolising the wild in nature and in humans.

Writers including Jane Harrison, Robert Graves and Margaret Murray provided historical underpinnings. Witchcraft was ancient, practised in secret throughout the Christian era. Women and men were equal, each coven being governed by a priest and priestess. The god of the witches died and was reborn each year, bringing fertility to the land. Women were celebrated but categorised by their fertility as Maiden, Mother or Crone, classifications which today are problematic for witches who question why they are defined solely by their ability to reproduce. But witchcraft was a fertility religion, and this was how it had been for hundreds of years. Except it hadn’t.

Murray’s claim of evidence that a witch cult had existed, and that the Old Religion was still practised, was later discredited. Harrison and Graves relied more on romanticism and imagination than on hard evidence.

Wicca also incorporated the tradition of cunning men and women who provided herbal cures, found lost objects and removed curses. These people were Christians and frequently incorporated Christian terminology into their charms. Adding them to the foundation myth produced the story of people who did good, stayed under the radar, suffered persecution when discovered but kept true to their faith and endured.

Which brings us to the founder of modern witchcraft, Gerald Gardner, who took all these ingredients, added ritual elements from Freemasonry and some of Crowley’s writings and set up a coven in the New Forest. One of his high priestesses, Doreen Valiente, later rewrote these rituals in a beautifully poetic style including perhaps the bestknown piece, The Charge of the Goddess.

The repeal of the Witchcraft Act allowed Wicca to be open and to seek initiates. By the 1960s, the selfstyled King of the Witches Alex Sanders was presenting witchcraft rituals to a paying public in theatres, along with his pretty young priestess Maxine. The media were both horrified and intrigued. Witchcraft provided plenty of tabloid fodder.

By the late 1960s, Wicca had crossed the Atlantic. This brought about considerable change. The British variety of witchcraft was polarised – man/ woman, priest/priestess – and it was about fertility of the land and of its people. American witches such as Starhawk and Zusanna Budapest challenged this, creating a goddesscentred spirituality that became known as Dianic Wicca with womenonly covens. At the same time there was a shift to the political left. Wicca was a conservative religion, despite its ritual nudity and worship of the old god. Its rituals ensured that things stayed as they were. The American version introduced an environmental awareness that hadn’t existed before. The Earth is our mother. It’s not enough to appreciate what we have, we must do better. We must celebrate women and women’s values. Witchcraft became politicised and it became feminist.

Recent scholarship in the history of Wicca has produced revisions; many British witches don’t believe in an ancestral link to the European witch hunts, for example. The gods and goddesses may be psychological archetypes to work with rather than living entities. Where Wicca led, other neoPagan religions have followed. At any Pagan event one will encounter Druids, heathens and chaos magicians as well as witches.

Wicca offered the opportunity to record a religion that had emerged within living memory, to gather oral history from people who had attended Gardner’s coven and to track the ideas and circumstances that reached critical mass and produced something of great value to its adherents. It is to the credit of Wicca that it continues to thrive as it nears its first century. And it is to the credit of Ronald Hutton that he has documented its history so clearly and recognises its spiritual value to so many people. ★★★★★