The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Back to the future – the rise of paganism
With Anglicanism down and environmental anxiety up, no wonder Mother Nature is seen as a deity again
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We are, arguably, poised on the edge of a pagan revival. With mainstream Christianity suffering a decline – Anglicanism’s bestknown priest, the Rev Richard Coles, warned over Easter that the rural parish system is at risk of collapsing – as anxiety about climate change and the state of the planet escalates, those who are spiritually engaged but denominationally disinclined are being pushed into personifying nature once more as something of a deity.
But perhaps revival is not the right word since, as historian Ronald Hutton chronicles, despite the best efforts of Christianity over 20 centuries, Europe’s pagan traditions never seem to have been stamped out. Instead, parts of them have been with us all along, as he demonstrates in his sprightly – and spritely – account of four female figures: Mother Earth; the Fairy Queen; the Lady of the Night; and the Cailleach of the Gaelic tradition.
In its first millennium, expanding Christianity operated a successful policy of subsuming many of the beliefs of the “old religion”. Shrines to water deities were rebranded as holy wells, and attributed to saints, while yew-lined sacred groves became the graveyards around churches. Yet through to medieval times and beyond, especially in rural areas, pagan beliefs continued to hold sway, even over those who turned up to church on Sundays.
Mother Earth, encapsulating the unpredictable power of nature, can be found even in leading Church theologians. Augustine of Hippo, in the early 5th century, certainly not renowned as an advocate of women’s empowerment, characterised her as Natura, appointed by God to teach humankind about earth’s bounty. (I’m struggling to imagine what the old grump would make of Natura now being repurposed in the branding of 21st-century planetfriendly health and beauty shops.)
This Mother Earth – not at odds with Christianity, but an adjunct to the creator God in his heaven – also made her way into medieval literature, such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s 14th-century poem “The Parliament of Fowls”, where she is enthroned in a palace of green boughs, presiding over birds each spring as they choose their mates.
By contrast, Lady of the Night became, especially in Germany, the focus of a rival belief system to Christianity. Around 900, the Archbishop of Trier publicly lamented her influence. “Certain wicked women, who have been perverted
by Satan, believe and profess that during the night they ride on certain beasts with the goddess Diana and an unaccountable host of women.” There are strong parallels here with the medieval obsession with the devil. The Lady of the Night was accused of seducing the God-fearing in the same manner as the succubus: a copulating female demon in the service of God’s arch enemy, preying on unwary males.
Some real-life self-styled fairy queens felt the wrath of both Church and state. In 1613 Alice West was ordered with her husband John to be flogged and put in a pillory on public display to punish them both for posing as the Queen and King of
Fairies in order, it was alleged, to swindle a wealthy couple of Hammersmith, west London. They are said to have staged shows where they were attended by elves and goblins, persuading the couple’s servant to sit naked in the garden with a pot of earth in her lap. By morning they had told her, it would turn to gold. It didn’t, and in the meantime they had made off with all her money and clothes.
Then there are the Cailleach of the Gaelic parts of the British Isles, older, lone female figures, often roaming the countryside with herds of sheep or cattle. They were found near water and rivers, a source of ancient wisdom, but potentially malign and so never to be crossed.
It is an intertwined folklorish and religious picture that Hutton carefully assembles, all rooted in nature. He might have profitably extended his cast by examining their relationship with other figures with a more secure foothold in the Christian tradition such as angels, equally popular, and often with a good deal of independence from Church rules and regulations. All, to some extent, were (and are) taken as outward signs of a transcendent dimension that many discern in the world around them that is beyond logic, reason, science and even the control of organised religion. And that, in today’s sacred-seeking, anti-institutional but imperilled world, is part of their persistent allure.