PREFACE AND

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Like a great many publications sent to press at the end of 2020, this was one, to use the old expression, ‘written in time of pestilence’. I was therefore fortunate to be working on this book during the period of Covid-related restrictions; it required relatively little additional research as I had amassed most of the material for it over the previous thirty years – although I now wished to ask new questions of it and put it to fresh uses. There was still some work to be done, however, and for this I had to await the reopening of libraries and negotiate the precautions taken by each to limit the spread of infection. In this context I would especially like to express my gratitude to Alan Brown of the Bodleian Library, for reserving a seat there for me when the online booking system broke down for the day. In the end, all the additional reading that I needed for the book was completed, save for one or two German works which could not be obtained in the circumstances of the epidemic other than by a very long wait and which were marginal to the work as a whole.

In more general terms, I remain grateful to all the staff of libraries and archives who assisted me beyond the normal call of duty in the long period of preceding decades in which I was accumulating the material. In the short term, I thank the two sets of readers employed by Yale University Press to scrutinize first the proposal and then the manuscript, and – as always now at this point – Heather McCallum, its managing director, who is responsible for my lengthy loyalty to her press. Mark Williams read my fifth chapter in draft and made invaluable suggestions. Synopses of the arguments in the book were presented and tested as an address to a conference at Leuven in 2018 and in my Stenton Lecture at Reading in 2019, and the former paper published in the proceedings of the event, edited by Joseph Verheyden and Daniela Müller and entitled Imaging Paganism in the Middle Ages, from Peeters in 2020.

The greatest point of difficulty in getting the book into publication was the question of the title, over which weeks were spent in a tug of war between the press’s natural desire for one as colourful and alluring as possible and my pedantic anxiety to settle on one that most accurately reflected the contents of the book. The result was the press’s suggestion that I liked best: it does not quite deal with the problem of whether the subjects of the book were either pagan or goddesses, strictly speaking, but it is certainly charismatic, and the clause ‘an investigation’ may suggest that the problem spoken of may exist.

CHAPTER 1

What is a Pagan Survival?

The Twentieth-Century Model

For most of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the expression ‘pagan survival’ would have had an obvious and uncontentious meaning for both most professional scholars and the general public interested in history. It was linked to a widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe, generally known by the umbrella term of ‘paganism’, had in some form and by some definition survived beyond the introduction of Christianity as the official faith. Moreover, it was as commonly believed that they did so for some considerable time, extending through the Middle Ages and far into the early modern period. This was thought to be true to some extent of the entire continent, but considerations of space and expertise mean that it will be examined in depth now with respect to Britain and publications in the English language.

The belief concerned was often asserted in general terms. In 1892 a leader of the newly formed British Folk-Lore Society informed his colleagues that English commoners had barely been Christianized even as late as the seventeenth century, and as such had preserved a pagan culture barely recognizable to the social elite.¹ Thirty years later, a leading expert on the institutions of the medieval English Church, in the few lines that he devoted to the beliefs of ordinary villagers, declared confidently that they had been ‘cheerful semi-pagans’. He continued, more lyrically, to assert that ‘the old idols remained under the old Christian veneer’ and that ‘in church, the women crowded around Mary; yet they paid homage to the old deities by their nightly fireside, or at the time-honoured haunts, grove or stone or spring’.² In 1952 an American historian of art, discussing medieval folk belief, suggested that paganism had not merely persisted into the Middle Ages but gained renewed strength at times. He spoke of ‘a new thrust of pagan forces instilling virulence into customs which otherwise would have been slowly neutralized’, though he added that the ‘history of this second pagan movement, which must have been naturalized in Western Europe by the . . . twelfth century, is known only fragmentarily and opinions of it amongst scholars vary widely’.³

All of these were highly respected authorities, although none of them knew much about medieval popular religion. They could make these statements with such confidence because they were based on a mass of apparent evidence of different kinds which had been interpreted in ways which tended towards the general conclusions just cited. One striking example of this in the British context was the Cerne Abbas Giant, the outline of a man 180 feet tall carved from the chalk rock on a hillside in Dorset, brandishing a 120-foot club. Two aspects of the figure are especially meaningful in this context. One is his virility, for he has pronounced genitals, including a 30-foot erect phallus. The other is that the valley below him had been occupied by one of England’s most important and long-lived medieval abbeys, which seemed to present the inescapable conclusion that if the giant were ancient – as his primeval appearance would seem to suggest – then the Christian monks had at least connived in his preservation for six centuries. A very popular and erudite guide to the ancient monuments of England and Wales published in the 1950s summed up the prevalent opinion concerning the figure. It stated that the giant was probably Romano-British, and that it must have been kept in being by the common people, overruling not only their parish priests but also the monks their neighbours in a ‘frank assertion’ of a symbol of ‘unabashed paganism’.⁴

Famous legends as well as famous monuments could inspire similar suggestions. Another of the early luminaries of the Folk-Lore Society opined that the story of Lady Godiva’s nude ride through the city of Coventry to save her people from heavy taxation actually testified to the late survival of pagan belief and worship in the city. He believed that the latter had been centred on the cult of a horse-riding goddess.⁵ British folklorists, however, found much more luxuriant evidence for a persisting paganism in the contemporary beliefs and customs which they collected in such abundance from rural people in particular in the decades around 1900. They followed the ideas of preceding German scholars in concluding that these ideas and activities represented living fossils of ancient religion, rites now kept up from tradition and for amusement which had once been sacred ceremonies intended to ensure the welfare of local communities and the fertility of their farms.⁶ Three popular nineteenth-century midwinter customs, the southern English mummers’ play, the North Country sword dance and the East Midland plough play, all featured a mock combat leading to the death and then the resurrection of one combatant. Between 1890 and 1935, folklorists achieved a consensus that they therefore all derived from the same prehistoric rite, concerned with the renewal of life at the winter solstice. In the words of one of the most influential, the climax of this came when ‘skin-clad worshippers, accompanied by a traditional Woman, capered about the slain figure of a man who had been King of the feast’.⁷ Over the same period they came to believe that the leaping folk dance called the morris, performed by teams of men at midwinter or in early summer, had been another ancient ritual, to ensure the fertility of the land.⁸ Customs carried on in the nineteenth century involving the disguising of a person as a horse, ram or bull, and the parading or dancing of that person house to house or through the streets – mostly at midwinter but also sometimes on May Day – were interpreted confidently as remnants of prehistoric animal cults.⁹

Unique and extraordinary customs, carried on in particular places, were subjected to the same treatment. The Haxey Hood Game is an annual contest held each Twelfth Day between two Lincolnshire villages in which each team tries to get a coil of rope inside a leather tube to a pub in their own settlement. The struggle is presided over by eleven red-garbed people called ‘boggins’, a Lord and a Fool, who is wreathed in smoke from a fire as he explains the rules beforehand. In 1896 another of the leading members of the Folk-Lore Society decided that it was a rite of ancient solar worship and human sacrifice, and this became the accepted reading.¹⁰ The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, now performed in September but formerly in midwinter, consists of six men carrying reindeer antlers, plus a hobby horse and a man dressed as a woman. Unsurprisingly, in 1933 another prominent folklorist declared that it was an archetypal relic of an ancient pagan custom involving ritual animal disguise, and that became the orthodoxy.¹¹ By that decade, such interpretations were being made at a feverish pace, so that, in a single presidential address to the Folk-Lore Society in 1937, it could be suggested that pancake tossing on Shrove Tuesday had been a magical rite to make crops grow, team sports on that day had begun as ritual struggles representing the forces of winter dark and spring light, and Mother’s Day was a remnant of the worship of the prehistoric Corn Mother.¹² By now, some theorists were intervening in seasonal local customs and attempting to ‘correct’ them if aspects of the current performance did not fit the particular interpretation which the experts concerned were making of them as survivals of prehistoric religion.¹³

During the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s these interpretations were continued, elaborated and reinforced, and – whereas until now they had been published mainly in specialist journals and monographs – embodied in popular survey books which carried them to a large general public.¹⁴ These often extended the earlier ideas in yet more vivid flights of imagination. One in 1962 declared that the sword dance had united a Neolithic ritual to awaken the earth from winter sleep with a Bronze Age one that conferred manhood.¹⁵ The same author, in a different work, showed a momentary uneasy consciousness that the historical record actually seemed remarkably bare after about the year 1000 of persistent pagan rites of this sort, until the seasonal customs which were supposed to embody them were recorded from the nineteenth century. She smothered it by declaring that ‘as the Church grew stronger it tried more and more to ignore what it did not care to remember’.¹⁶ Confident restatements of the belief that folk customs recorded as traditional between 1800 and 1914 were remnants of pagan religion continued into the 1970s in popular British works of folklore.¹⁷

If accessibly written books on folk customs reached a large audience, exciting works of pure fiction reached an even larger one, and it is not surprising, in view of these scholarly developments, that a particular genre of British fantasy novels and essays appeared in parallel during the same period. It featured an outsider – through whose eyes the storyline develops and whose Christian or rationalist viewpoint is presumed to reflect that of the reader – coming to live in a rural British community. This protagonist then slowly discovers that it is inhabited by natives secretly practising a surviving pagan religion; and this is always an unpleasant one, thoroughly transgressive of current social norms, with which the heroine or hero comes into conflict. The message is that paganism is essentially a malign force which makes the people who continue it do bad things. Clearly, this trope was one which spun off from an anxiety about the progressive loss of power by Christianity in the modern world, as more and more people embraced atheism, agnosticism or alternative forms of religion and spirituality. Its first notable appearance seems to have been in 1895, with a short story by the Anglican Christian Arthur Machen, entitled ‘The Novel of the Black Seal’.¹⁸ This featured the Little People, the degenerate descendants of pre-Celtic races, who dwell underground in remote countryside and creep forth in search of virgins to sacrifice in their pagan rituals.

Thereafter the storyline was more usually that of somebody who settles in a contemporary, outwardly normal, rural community, only to realize that the ancient paganism is still persisting there in secret. A trickle of such works over the succeeding eight decades produced two literary bestsellers and a cinematic one. The first of the two pieces of literature was Witch Wood, published in 1927 by the celebrated novelist and politician John Buchan, who remained a lifelong devout Scottish Presbyterian. It features a heroic young minister of that faith who comes to serve a parish in Scotland’s Southern Uplands in the 1640s, only to realize that most of its inhabitants still secretly adhere to a depraved and disgusting native religion centred on a Romano-British altar. He is unable to convince the authorities of its existence – which is a standard feature of the genre – or win over most of his parishioners, but does manage to destroy the high priest of the cult, aided by what could plausibly, in the context, be interpreted as a benevolent divine power accessed through his identity as a Christian. The second of the best-selling novels was Nora Lofts’ The Devil’s Own from 1960, set in a modern Essex village where the ‘old ways’ are secretly still carried on by most of the inhabitants. These turn out to centre on a religion celebrating ancient festivals with sexual orgies, naked dancing and gluttonous feasts, led by a high priestess; and it seems moreover to equip its devotees with genuine and malevolent magical powers. It is detected and opposed by a newcomer, an obsessive celibate spinster who, though once more given no support by official authority and no effectual help within the village, manages to wreck it and bring about the death of the priestess.¹⁹

Seven years after Lofts’ success, an author called David Pinner published a minor contribution to the genre, a novel entitled Ritual, concerning a London policeman sent to investigate the mysterious death of a teenage girl in a Cornish village, who (of course) uncovers a secret pagan sect surviving there. It is worthy of remembrance only because it accidentally gave birth to the hugely popular film The Wicker Man, released by the British company Lion Films in 1973. Its screenwriter, Anthony Shaffer, had intended to adapt Ritual for the screen, but decided instead to write a similar story of his own, with a pious Christian policeman sent to investigate the apparent disappearance of a schoolgirl on a secluded Scottish island. It made two major innovations to the genre, which contributed to the film’s eventual success. One was that for most of the story the usual sympathies are reversed, as the incomer is an unsympathetic character, graceless, repressed and bigoted, and the pagan fertility religion practised by the islanders is one of joyous celebration of nature, life and sex, of a kind matching the attitudes of the contemporary Flower Power generation. That is, until the final moments of the story, when the intruder is burned alive as a human sacrifice by the islanders, to restore the health of their blighted crops: suddenly the basic message of the genre is powerfully reasserted. The second innovation was that the island’s religion is not one that has survived from ancient times but one that has been crafted by the Victorian owner of the land, using ancient models, and successfully introduced to the people.²⁰ The film drew for its effect, however, on much the same contemporary belief system as that which nurtured the idea of a long survival of paganism, summed up in the case of The Wicker Man by one commentator as ‘the very argument of the film: that underneath a thin veneer of civility lie the still glowing embers of the “old ways”, which need only a small spark to start blazing again’.²¹

Other scholarly work served to reinforce the sense of a long persistence of paganism among the common people. Some concerned medieval carved figures in British churches, especially human heads gushing leaves from mouths and nostrils and figures of nude women with their legs spread facing the observer, which became known in the twentieth century by the Irish name of sheela-na-gigs. These were not much discussed before the early twentieth century. In the 1930s, the current enthusiasm for finding evidence for surviving paganism among medieval commoners caused writers connected to the Folk-Lore Society to suggest that they had been beloved pagan deities, respectively a god and goddess of fertility. These authors further proposed that the images had been included in medieval churches by popular demand, so that people attending services could look up and see their own ancient divinities represented there even while the official icons and services in the buildings were devoted to the new religion. This interpretation of the motifs remained dominant all through the middle decades of the twentieth century.²²

Similar trends were found in the study of Anglo-Saxon healing charms, words of power that were designed to be recited for the cure of specific ailments. A number of collections of these have survived from the tenth and eleventh centuries, apparently made originally by monks or cathedral clergy, and when they were edited in the nineteenth century it was observed that some of them contained clear references to pagan deities and spirits.²³ Most famous in this respect is the so-called Lay of the Nine Twigs of Woden, Woden being apparently the most important god in the pagan Anglo-Saxon pantheon, the equivalent of Odin in the Norse and Wotan in the German. In a set of verses which ascribe the creation of healing herbs in general to the Christian God, one couplet credits Woden with having destroyed an adder with nine ‘glory-twigs’. Two more herbs are said to be creations of ‘the wise Lord holy in heaven when He hung’, which may be a reference to the myth of Woden’s self-sacrifice on a sacred tree.²⁴ Then there is the ‘Aecerbot’, or Field Blessing, a charm for the fertility of the land, which seems piously Christian but at one point has the invocation ‘Erce, erce, erce, earth’s mother’, to address an entity to whom or which God is asked to grant abundance.²⁵ Finally in this celebrated list is ‘With Faerstice’, the charm ‘For a Sudden Stitch’, which at one point calls upon ‘the Lord’ (in Anglo-Saxon sources, conventionally meaning the Christian God) for help. It ascribes the pains which it is designed to cure, however, to a range of non-Christian entities: ‘mighty women’ who ride across the land and hurl magical spears; the ‘Aesir’ (pagan deities); elves; and a hag.²⁶ These verses could be taken to prove the existence of a dual system of religion, the old continuing alongside the new, of the sort which had been suggested as evidenced by the church carvings; and by the mid-twentieth century the ‘pagan’ aspects of the charms were strongly emphasized by scholars.²⁷

If such aspects were found in charms apparently copied and preserved by clerics, it was legitimate to wonder whether the folk healers who served the common people had an even greater component of paganism in their repertoire. That this could have been so was apparently suggested by the denunciations of reforming churchmen, above all Aelfric of Eynsham around the year 1000, who condemned healing magic as ‘heathen worship’. He furthermore accused those who practised it (and whom he termed wiccan, i.e. witches) of teaching people to make offerings to stones and trees to achieve their needs, in ‘heathen’ fashion.²⁸ Some ten centuries later, the kind of folk magicians whom Aelfric denounced were still around, under the name of wise or cunning folk, and in 1976 a historian published a much-admired study of religious attitudes in Victorian rural Lincolnshire. In this he described any spiritual aspect of popular culture which was not clearly Christian as ‘pagan’, and in particular identified the wise man as the most beneficent figure in ‘paganism’. He did stress that he was not using that term to signify ‘a counter-religion to Christianity’ or ‘a cosmos to be contemplated or worshipped’, but ‘a treasury of separate and specific resources to be used and applied in concrete situations’, by which he seemed to mean the repertoire of spells and charms used by popular magicians.²⁹

Most dramatically, between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, many scholars argued that a full-blown pagan cult had persisted all through the Middle Ages, across Western Europe, and been persecuted into extinction during the early modern period under the name of witchcraft. This idea had appeared in Germany, as one response to the challenge presented by the pan-European eighteenth-century movement known as the Enlightenment. One result of this movement was to make the ruling political and social elites all over Europe at least officially lose a belief in the literal efficacy of magic, and so in witchcraft. This now meant that every one of the forty to sixty thousand Europeans who had been executed as witches during the period between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, when witchcraft was viewed as a satanic religion, had been an innocent victim of religious delusion. This realization equipped liberals and reformers, from the time of the Enlightenment savants like Voltaire through to the early twentieth century, with a powerful ideological weapon with which to attack the traditional powers of Europe – nobilities, monarchies and above all churchmen – which they wanted to remove or reform. For most of the modern period, the dominant discourse used to describe the history of the early modern witch trials was one of a tragedy produced by ignorance, superstition, credulity and the machinations of unscrupulous clerics and politicians, brought to an end by the modernizing forces of reason and science.³⁰

A reply to it was developed in Germany between 1825 and 1840, by intellectuals who were committed to defending the old political and religious order in the period of reaction following the fall of Napoleon. These suggested that early modern witchcraft had been a degenerate remnant of former pagan religion which had been carried on in secret and engaged in all the disgusting practices of sexual transgression and bloodshed of which witches had been accused in the trials. The argument was a clever one, as it recognized the probable non-existence of all forms of magic while still justifying the authorities in wiping out the cult concerned.³¹ Its main weakness was that it was entirely speculative, resting on no actual evidence, which is why people who were expert in the witch trials records proceeded to disregard it, now and hereafter. It was also, however, given a different sort of response a generation later by a famous French historian, of precisely opposed – liberal and anticlerical – political attitudes,. This was Jules Michelet, who in 1862 published a passionate and colourful book entitled La Sorcière (The Witch). It was based on minimal research, padded out with a lot of imagination, and dealt with the challenge made by the Germans by accepting their premise that early modern witchcraft had been a surviving pagan religion but reversing the sympathies. His witch religion had kept the spirit of liberty alive through the Middle Ages and represented especially the needs of women and the working classes, being served by priestesses who venerated a fertility god. The book became a bestseller and has never been out of print.

By the 1890s its ideas had been taken up by two Americans who were both to find enthusiastic niche audiences, up to the present. One was Matilda Joslyn Gage, a feminist who adopted Michelet’s model and embellished it by declaring that his priestesses had preserved the traditions of a prehistoric golden age of matriarchy, and that their persecution had been intended to destroy female independence.³² The other was a journalist, Charles Godfrey Leland, who spent much of his life in Europe and shared Michelet’s political stance, and with it his loathing of the Middle Ages and the early modern ancien régime. Through local informants and assistants, he collected a lot of contemporary Italian folklore, especially from the Tuscan Romagna, which he interpreted in the fashionable manner of the decade as being almost all or entirely of pagan origin. He noted that some of his informants termed popular magic ‘the old religion’, though in two of his three books on the subject he acknowledged that it was not really a religion.³³

His third book, however, contained what he believed to be the ‘gospel’ of a full-blown pagan witch religion, of rebellion and liberation like that imagined by Michelet but dedicated to the goddess Diana, her consort Lucifer and her daughter Aradia (the Biblical Herodias). This had been delivered to him by the most regular and important of his local collectors, and he added that a secret society practising this religion still survived in ‘fragmentary’ form, and that certain villages in the Romagna remained entirely ‘heathen’.³⁴ Nobody in or since his time has turned up any evidence for the existence of such a religion in nineteenth-century Italy: the one revealed by Leland was, rather, a fantasy developed by northern Italian witch-hunters in the early sixteenth century, with the sympathies reversed to favour its practitioners. There is plenty of genuine Italian folklore in the spells and charms embedded in his ‘gospel’; it is the containing portrait of the religion which remains anomalous, outside the realm of the early modern imagination.

Only in Britain, however, was the idea taken up by scholars in the mainstream of the intellectual establishment that the people persecuted as witches had been pagan. This happened, unsurprisingly, in the 1890s, that decade when the concept of the British countryside as a refuge for enduring pagan beliefs and customs became widely influential. Its earliest articulation in British scholarship seems, indeed, to have been by a president of the Folk-Lore Society, and included the assertion that ‘the witch is the successor of the Druid priestess’.³⁵ Later in the decade, a mathematics professor at University College London suggested that the witch religion had venerated a great goddess and her male consort, the god of nature – and that Joan of Arc had been a priestess of it.³⁶ It was, however, another two decades before the idea began to be given both widespread public acceptance and scholarly respectability, and that was because of the work of another London academic and Folk-Lore Society luminary, the Egyptologist Margaret Murray. Hitherto the idea that alleged witches had been pagans, though now quite widespread in the Western world, had rested largely on speculation, without much basis of evidence. Murray now apparently provided this, from trial records (mostly published and mostly Scottish), pamphlets and demonologies, in a pair of books which appeared in 1921 and 1933.³⁷

Her witch religion was the cult of a horned god representing the generative powers of nature, organized in groups of thirteen run by women or men which met to transact business and celebrate festivals with feasting, dancing, animal and human sacrifice and ritualized sex. She came to refer to it simply as ‘the Old Religion’ (having picked up that phrase from Leland) and to characterize it as one of joy and affirmation of life, contrasted with the gloom of Christianity. As such, she suggested, it retained the allegiance of the bulk of the population until the end of the Middle Ages. Her work was immediately and consistently rejected by historians familiar with the evidence for early modern witchcraft beliefs and trials, who judged at once that she had misused it.³⁸ These were, however, very few in number, and it won rapid acceptance among respected historians expert in other subjects,³⁹ novelists (it was clearly an influence on Buchan’s Witch Wood), occultists and mystical Celticists,⁴⁰ and authors of popular books on witchcraft.⁴¹ Some folklorists also rapidly adopted it.⁴² Murray was invited to write the entry on witchcraft in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and used it to state her own theory as proven fact, so taking it to a much wider public.

Nonetheless, its popularity and celebrity really took off after the Second World War, and by the 1960s it was probably the dominant explanation for the early modern witch trials among the populace in general and scholars who – however distinguished – were not expert in the subject. In 1945 one of the most respected academic historians, Sir George Clark, brought out a second edition of a much-used textbook on the seventeenth century, and incorporated Murray’s explanation for the trials into it as the now most likely one.⁴³ The leading British historian of that century in the next generation, Christopher Hill, endorsed it repeatedly in the mid-1960s, above all in his own textbook on early modern England, which was especially popular among socialist teachers.⁴⁴ In 1962 – the year before Murray’s death – Oxford University Press reissued her most scholarly book on witchcraft as a paperback, with an approving preface by Sir Stephen Runciman, probably then the dominant British historian of the Middle Ages. In that year a Canadian historian commented that ‘the Murrayites seem to hold . . . an almost undisputed sway at the higher intellectual levels’.⁴⁵ Four years later, a young scholar who was to become probably the greatest living Italian historian, Carlo Ginzburg, launched his own first book with the declaration that the Murray thesis had ‘ended by prevailing’.⁴⁶ At the same time, a French historian who was to achieve a similar eminence in his nation to Ginzburg, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, built a religion of rebel witches into his portrait of early modern France.⁴⁷ Ten years later, the figure who towered over the field of comparative religion in the US academic system, Mircea Eliade, made medieval witchcraft a rebel faith descended from ancient paganism.⁴⁸

Where these giants led the way, lesser academic scholars followed, either in repeating Murray’s views unaltered or adapting them to produce slightly different portraits of medieval and early modern pagan witch cults, in a string of publications through the mid-twentieth century.⁴⁹ In the same period, that activity was even more characteristic of non-academic authors writing on the history of witchcraft whom she inspired prolifically to flights of fancy of varying wildness, united by the acceptance of the idea that the witch trials were directed against a pagan religion.⁵⁰ That idea was also embodied during the early 1970s in the work of the great collector of spoken history and tradition among rural English people George Ewart Evans.⁵¹ It was adopted by some local museums in the 1960s and used to explain and contextualize exhibits relating to witchcraft.⁵² In 1970 a documentary film, Legend of the Witches, was released, which combined the work of Leland and Murray and added some touches of its own. These included the confident statement that the famous scene of Harold Godwinson in the eleventh-century Bayeux tapestry, swearing support for William of Normandy on two boxes of Christian holy relics, actually showed him swearing on both Christian and pagan altar, because like most people of the time he would have recognized both faiths.⁵³

More people probably gain an impression of history from popular works and films than academic publications, and another great source of impressions of it is historical fiction. Here, too, Murray’s work was extremely influential, as its impact on novels, which commenced with John Buchan’s, continued steadily through the rest of the century.⁵⁴ Its most popular and talented convert was Rosemary Sutcliff, a much loved and admired author of historical fiction designed mainly for young adults. Her books, especially in the years around 1960, when she was at the peak of her productivity, accepted in its entirety the idea that medieval England had remained pagan under an outward show of Christianity, and that this paganism had been centred on Margaret Murray’s witches’ god. In The Lantern Bearers, from 1959, early medieval Britain was shown as a place in which the inhabitants ‘dance for the Horned One at Beltane’ (the pagan feast opening summer) but ‘listen to God’s word between whiles’.⁵⁵ The same pattern obtained in Knight’s Fee, published the next year and set six hundred years later in the Norman period, where villagers ‘come to Mass on Sundays and Saints’ Days, and turn at all other times to their Horned God’.⁵⁶ Those who read Sutcliff’s books in their teenage years during the 1960s and 1970s would go into the later twentieth century with a firm impression that this had been so.⁵⁷ Historical novels continued to embody the same idea into the 1980s and 1990s.⁵⁸

Margaret Murray herself continued to reinforce it with further books until the time of her death in the 1960s and by giving interviews to popular newspapers and magazines, who treated her by that period as the leading expert on the subject.⁵⁹ To a Birmingham paper in 1950 she made the assertion that not only had the pagan witch religion survived in secret into the modern period, but it continued to the present day, with murders committed as human sacrifices.⁶⁰ Four years later, however, she contributed an approving foreword to a book by a fellow member of the Folk-Lore Society and admirer of her work, Gerald Gardner. In this, he revealed what he claimed to be one of the few remaining covens of the old religion, into which he had been initiated, and the beliefs and rites of which he was now partially revealing; as she acknowledged, they consisted of a wholly benevolent worship of a goddess and god of nature, the former being the dominant partner.⁶¹ Gardner’s tradition, which became known as Wicca, grew rapidly thereafter into the senior, most important and most influential member of a family of religions grouped together under the umbrella term of modern Paganism. These naturally perpetuated Murray’s portrait of medieval and early modern belief into the 1970s and 1980s with especial vigour, as during that period many of those religions claimed, like Gardner’s Wicca, to have survived in secret from ancient times.⁶²

It may therefore be suggested that the majority of people in the English-speaking world who were interested in medieval and early modern history approached the last quarter of the twentieth century believing that, in some form and to some extent, the ancient pagan religion or religions of Britain had persisted actively long after the introduction of Christianity as the official faith – until the end of the Middle Ages, or the early modern period, or even the present. This belief could take significantly different forms. In one, Christianity was an upper-class veneer, accepted by the social and political elite while the common folk remained mostly pagan. In another, a dual-faith system obtained at all levels of society, with both the old and the new co-existing and to some extent blending (for example in church decoration) until the great Christian remaking of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation ended the co-existence. Both, however, rested on the same foundation of an assumption of surviving paganism. What needs to be emphasized is that this assumption was not a traditional one for the British: rather, it was a late Victorian creation which had been sustained and reinforced for most of the succeeding twentieth century. It flourished within one long lifetime, between 1890 and 1970. So what was going on in that particular period which made such a belief especially attractive?

It may be suggested that the answer lies in two major developments of the nineteenth century in Britain, one ideological, the other economic and social. The former was the shift to a pluralist religious culture, in which first the Church of England lost its monopoly of public office and higher education and was forced to recognize parity in both with other Christian denominations, and then Christianity came to recognize the legitimacy of other forms of religion, and of agnosticism and atheism, as personal faith positions. The latter was the transformation of the British population from predominantly rural to predominantly urbanized and industrialized. Both processes spanned the century, and both were substantially complete by its end. Both tended in various ways to foster a wish to believe that ancient paganism had lasted a lot longer as a potent force in Britain, and perhaps in Europe in general, than had previously been thought. The religious changes tended to this result in two utterly different ways.

The first was through a desire to attack the traditional power of Christian Churches, and especially established Churches, by convincing people that the Middle Ages, which hitherto had been much represented as a time of devout Christianity, uniting society in religious harmony, had been nothing of the kind. If the public could be persuaded that the faith of Christ had been throughout the period nothing more than a veneer concentrated in the elite, covering a general population which had never really accepted it, then its claim to represent the ancestral and universal faith of the nation could be seriously weakened. This was directly the inspiration of Michelet in writing La Sorcière. As the book went on sale, he noted in his diary: ‘I have assumed a new position which my best friends have not as yet clearly adopted, that of proclaiming the provisional death of Christianity’.⁶³ One scholar of his work has suggested that in his own mind, ‘Michelet killed, executed, [and] murdered [what he called] “that bizarre, monstrous, prodigiously artificial condition of life” . . . the Christian Middle Ages’.⁶⁴ The same mission possessed Leland, as he explicitly used his work on Italian folklore to protest against what he thought to be an unhealthy admiration for the period expressed by ‘all historians’ at the time: for him there could be no mitigation for a period dominated by the Roman Catholic Church and a feudal nobility, in which ‘on the whole, mankind was for a long time worse off than before’.⁶⁵ Such attitudes were also found in Britain. In 1865 a tract was appended to a new edition of an earlier book on pagan fertility religion, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, by Richard Payne Knight. It was entitled ‘Essay on the Worship of the Generative Powers during the Middle Ages in Western Europe’, and though anonymous was attributed to a political and religious radical and antiquary called Thomas Wright. Its argument was that a pagan veneration of fertility, and therefore of sexuality, had continued through the medieval period in various lands, including Britain: to underpin this argument it actually went as far as to print a falsified version of an entry in a major medieval British text, the Lanercost Chronicle.⁶⁶

The model of medieval religion which suggested that paganism had survived alongside Christianity as a dual faith system in which the dominant Christian churchmen and rulers tacitly accepted and condoned it also undermined the traditional belief in the total victory of the new faith. It could, however, do so more gently, and rather than operating as an attack on Christianity it could function as a plea for a tolerant multi-faith society in the future, based on mutual respect and accommodation, and even syncretism. The Anglo-Irish poet W.B. Yeats, writing of the contemporary Irish rural population in 1897, could assert:

Nothing shows how blind educated Ireland . . . is about peasant Ireland, than that it does not understand how the old religion, which made of the coming and going of the greenness of the woods and of the fruitfulness of the fields a part of its worship, lives side by side with the new religion which would trample nature as a serpent under its feet; nor is that old religion faded to a meaningless repetition of the old customs, for the ecstatic who has seen the red light and the white light of God smite themselves into the bread and wine at the Mass, has seen the exultant hidden multitudes among the winds of May: and if he were philosophical, would cry . . . I go inward to God, outward to the gods.⁶⁷

Yeats’s ‘hidden multitudes’ were the fairies, in which many Irish country folk did indeed believe in his time, and he defined that belief as paganism in itself. He himself was, or wished to be, such an ‘ecstatic’, and indeed he formed a blend of Christianity and paganism in his own personal belief system, as did many of the other members of the society of ritual magicians which he joined, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. So also, in the period between 1890 and 1940, did the novelists Rider Haggard, Kenneth Grahame, D.H. Lawrence and Dion Fortune, the theosophical philosopher George Russell, and members of a movement designed as a socialist equivalent to the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry.⁶⁸

The concept of harmony, syncretism and co-existence between medieval Christianity and paganism carried with it one of a profound and organic continuity of religion in British history. Instead of a battle for supremacy between rival faiths, with inevitable victory for the superior one, that history became a process whereby the new religion built slowly and surely upon the old, both in the physical and the ideological sense. To people experiencing the spiritual and technological disruption of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and reckoning with a need for co-existence and cooperation between religious traditions in the present, this vision could be deeply comforting. It was enunciated by another president of the Folk-Lore Society in 1896, who declared that, all across Europe, medieval churches had been built on or next to pagan shrines, and concluded that this supplied ‘unbroken evidences of the pagan foundation, which, itself resting on barbaric bedrock, upholds the structures of classical and Christian faiths’.⁶⁹

In the next decade this idea flowered in the work of amateur historians and archaeologists into the belief that most if not all medieval churches were built on pagan holy sites, that medieval pillar crosses were transformed prehistoric standing stones, that the old yews in churchyards had been pre-Christian holy trees, and that Christian festivals were simply those of the older religion in new dress.⁷⁰ This made an acceptance of a persistence of that older religion, alongside or combined with the new one, even easier. One of the most popular such amateur authors was Harold Massingham, a writer on the English countryside, who between 1930 and 1945 drove home the message that many Christian observances were inspired by pagan predecessors: to him, even the table tombs in churchyards were a development of prehistoric dolmens, and the traditional beating of the bounds of a Cotswold parish remained a rite of the ancient Earth Goddess. He made the Cerne Abbas Giant into the perfect symbol of an imagined reconciliation between the old and new religions, in which the medieval monks purged paganism of its grossness and cruelty but recognized its embodiment of the inherent powers of the earth.⁷¹

The belief that Christianity had been a religion of the medieval elite, spread thinly over the surface of a populace which itself largely remained pagan, fed off another major feature of the educated British psyche in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a sense of civilization as a fragile crust over a seething, menacing magma of primeval barbarism. In part, this was the product of the fears of the newly expanded and enriched middle and upper classes which industrial and commercial development had created, balanced on top of the huge, poor, exploited and restless new industrial and urban proletariat. The rapid contemporary expansion of the British Empire had created a similar anxiety among the new white colonial elites ruling over the mass of native peoples in the colonies. Another novelty of tremendous import, the theory of evolution by natural selection, had revealed humanity in general to be genetically connected to the beasts, and so with a presumed higher and lower nature either forever holding each other in check, or at war with each other. The old and new religions could be projected into the same relationship.

None of this, however, explains why the rural population, in particular, should be regarded as the natural, and enduring, repositories of surviving paganism.⁷² The reason for this lay in a simple pair of statistics: that in 1810, 80 per cent of the population of England lived in the countryside and engaged in occupations directly or ultimately based on farming, and in 1910, 80 per cent lived in towns and cities and engaged in occupations directly or ultimately based on commerce or industry. The balance had tipped by the 1850s.This sudden and unprecedented shift created an unfamiliar and rather frightening new world, in which it seemed that the countryside might soon disappear altogether. Moreover, it made country people into unusual and to some degree anomalous members of the new society – which mattered especially for views of the historic relationship between paganism and Christianity, as most of the authors who were to write about it came from and lived in towns. It did not, however, mean that they would necessarily take the same view of rural people. Instead, the views that were taken tended to cluster around two polarized opposites, drawing on very different emotions but nevertheless tending to the same conclusion, of a massive rural continuity of traditional ways.

At one pole was a millennia-old tendency of urban people to regard their environment as the one which produced virtually all progress and refinement in human affairs and was the seat of learning, invention and social polish: the very word ‘civilization’ was based on this understanding. As part of this, ordinary rural people were mocked and reviled as ignorant and rough: clods, boors and yokels.⁷³ It was quite easy, therefore, for those who held this attitude to credit them with mindlessly carrying on, year after year, customs and beliefs which perpetuated an ancient and primitive religion. It was also easy for those who had views of country folk which spanned the affectionate and the mocking to let the term ‘pagan’ creep into a characterization of their religious attitudes in general. In 1860, George Eliot, in her novel The Mill on the Floss, could say of her imagined English rustics ‘one sees little trace of religion, still less of a distinctively Christian creed. Their belief in the Unseen, so far as it manifests at all, seems to be rather of a pagan kind; their moral notions, though held with strong tenacity, seem to have no standard beyond hereditary custom’. In another place she wrote of them that ‘their religion was of a simple, semi-pagan kind’. However, she also made clear that Christianity was the only religion they knew, and that they were sure to get their children baptized and were anxious to be buried in the churchyard. What she meant by ‘pagan’ or ‘semi-pagan’ was only that they did not have any strenuous personal faith or knowledge of theology, and that some believed in elementary folk magic like carrying a mutton bone to ward off cramp.⁷⁴

When the trope of actual pagan survival emerged in British writing, it was easily assimilated to the traditional disparaging language of the urban directed against the rural. One of the most influential of the Edwardian writers who wrote of the persistence of ancient tradition in the English countryside declared that this was because ‘the peasant is, in some respects, a child as truly as he is physically a healthy animal’.⁷⁵ More vicious was the Cambridge academic who became the most influential and popular of all the scholarly authors who promoted the idea of the survival of paganism through folk custom, Sir James Frazer. He believed that ‘to this day the peasant remains a pagan and a savage at heart: his civilisation is merely a thin veneer which the hard knocks of his life soon abrade, exposing the solid core of paganism and savagery below. The danger created by a bottomless layer of ignorance and superstition beneath the crust of civilised society is lessened, not only by the natural torpidity and inertia of the rural mind, but also by the progressive decrease of the rural compared with the urban population in modern states.’⁷⁶ In other words, the good news was that the country people, like traditional peoples elsewhere in the world, were going to be exterminated by modernization.

There was, however, an opposite language used by city dwellers of the countryside, which was just as ancient as the disparaging one. It characterized rural places as more beautiful, healthy, peaceful and morally virtuous than towns.⁷⁷ This took on a new force in the nineteenth century in reaction to the increasing depopulation and disappearance of the English countryside, which made it seem like a precious and immemorial resource which could now be vanishing forever. Moreover, the new scale and industrialization of urban centres made the division between town and country much sharper and more dramatic than before: they were truly becoming entirely different worlds. The result, by the late nineteenth century and above all in England, was a new intensity to the idealization of the countryside, not just for all the traditional reasons but as a repository of unchanging ways and values, anchoring the English in a past from which the new cities and industries seemed to be tearing them.⁷⁸

The later Victorian writer of non-fiction who did more than any other to portray the countryside as an unchanging and redemptive refuge from modernity was Richard Jeffries, who in 1880 could declare that ‘these modern inventions, this steam, and electric telegraph, and even the printing press have but skimmed the surface of village life’. He invented the character of ‘Hodge’ to typify the quiet immemorial wisdom of the stereotypical ordinary countryman.⁷⁹ In the 1900s Rudyard Kipling took this persona into fiction, in the form of Hobden, the old Sussex smallholder who embodies the tradition of his valley over millennia and instinctually remembers and understands all that has happened there.⁸⁰ This view of the country both inspired and gave popularity to the work of folklore collectors over the same span of time: in the words of one of their recent descendants, they became ‘the high priests and priestesses of the rural myth’.⁸¹ Two of their leaders declared in a pamphlet designed for a popular readership that:

in every society there are people who do not progress either in religion or in polity with the foremost of the nation. They are left stranded amidst the progress. They live in out-of-the-way villages, or in places where the general culture does not penetrate easily; they keep to old ways, practices and ideas, following with religious awe all that their parents had held to be necessary in their lives. These people are living repositories of ancient history – a history that has not been written down, but which has come down by tradition.⁸²

In vain did one of their colleagues in the Folk-Lore Society protest in 1893 that this idealization of the rural population as a monolithic, inert, unthinking and unchanging mass was bad for scholarship, and declare that ‘the folk is a fraud, a delusion, a myth’ and ‘a name for our ignorance’.⁸³ The myth concerned was too beguiling, and it descended for most of the next century intact among enthusiasts for rural ways. As late as 1956, the collector of valuable spoken history George Ewart Evans could repeat that ‘old people in the countryside are survivors from another era. They belong essentially to a culture that has extended in unbroken line since at least the early Middle Ages.’⁸⁴ The potential in this view for a belief in surviving paganism is obvious, and was indeed hinted at in the reference to a lack of progress in religion recorded above. It had in fact already been suggested before the foundation of the Folk-Lore Society, in the work of the novelist who was the fiction-writing equivalent in fame to Richard Jeffries in promoting the idea of the English countryside as a place of timeless tradition: Thomas Hardy. In his bestseller of 1878, The Return of the Native, he could describe a rural maypole dance and add ‘the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, have in some way or other survived medieval doctrine’.⁸⁵ As was the case with other aspects of the theme of the persistence of the old religions, the idea of the timeless countryside had been proposed by fantasy writers or political propagandists before scholars made it their own.

Revisionism

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, this whole complex of ideas, and the evidence which had apparently underpinned it, was dismantled with astonishing speed. By the 1990s an apparently unanimous agreement had been reached among professional historians that there was no surviving paganism in any area of Europe for more than a short period after its official conversion to Christianity. In other words, no coherent and self-conscious pagan resistance movement, with an active and conscious retention of allegiance to the old deities in preference to Christianity, persisted anywhere on the continent once the rulers of an area had adopted the new religion.⁸⁶ A huge wave of new and detailed local research had proved all the data assembled to argue the case for persisting paganism to be either misunderstood or susceptible to different readings.

In the 1980s it was realized that there was no record of the Cerne Abbas Giant before the seventeenth century, in a valley with good previous records, and some testimony that he had been made at that period. Instead of being the figure of an ancient god, it now seemed possible, or even likely, that he was a bawdy early modern caricature. The problem of how such an apparently pagan image could have survived alongside a medieval abbey was removed if it had simply not been there in the time of the abbey.⁸⁷ During the 1970s and 1980s it became clear that there was no solid evidence of the mummers’ play before the mid-eighteenth century, and that it was spread from that time onward through printed texts and seemed to have influenced the sword dance and the plough play – which accounted for the common features of all.⁸⁸ In the same period it was established that the morris dance had appeared in the fifteenth century as a fashionable new entertainment in the royal and ducal courts of France and Burgundy, and spread from them to the English ones. In the early sixteenth century it had begun to move out among the English populace, and it became a widespread craze in the second half of that century, breaking into distinctive regional forms in the Stuart and Georgian periods.⁸⁹

The ritual animal disguises – horse, ram or bull – carried or danced around settlements at midwinter and May Day turned out to be recorded, with the single exception of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, only after 1800.⁹⁰ They may all be modern offshoots of the popular late medieval and early modern entertainment of the hobby horse dance, which did not have any particular season. The Horn Dance is certainly older, but is not recorded before the seventeenth century: an earlier reference to the same entertainment in the village only mentions the hobby horse. The antlers have now been dated, and are indeed about a thousand years old; but they came from domesticated reindeer, which were never kept in Britain, and so must have been imported, at some point between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries.⁹¹ The Haxey Hood Game turned out to have grown out of a widespread East Midlands custom in which plough boys toured their district to gather donations of food and money at the opening of the ploughing season. It was put together in its present, unique form in the decades around 1800.⁹² The customs collected by the folklorists between the 1870s and 1920s began to look less like a chart of prehistoric ritual and more like one of nineteenth-century popular festivity.

Some readers may be tempted to wonder whether the first recorded appearance of a custom need mark a date close to its actual development, and whether it might have been around unrecorded for centuries before then. If we were dealing with a period before 1400 then this concern would be entirely justified, because the survival of entries concerning popular festivity in this earlier time is so patchy and incidental that the initial citation of an activity usually gives no indication of its point of origin. The fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are very different, however, because the records for popular customs in them are so numerous and varied that it would be very difficult for one to enjoy any widespread or extended success while escaping all notice.⁹³

As part of this sequence of discoveries, a new generation of folklorists, following directly in the footsteps of those before and usually attached to the same organizations – above all the now slightly renamed Folklore Society – rejected the conceptual apparatus of their predecessors. Two foundations of that apparatus – the belief in an unchanging and immemorial culture of rural commoners and (therefore) in modern folk customs and beliefs as living fossils of ancient religion – were comprehensively disowned. It was accepted, once proper historical research had been carried out into a large number of those customs and beliefs for the first time, that country people could be as dynamic, creative and unfettered by tradition as any other commoners, and that their cultures were in a constant state of evolution. In 1982 one of the new folklorists could already declare that ‘the belief that traditional behaviour is a fading relic of former primeval cultures has long since disappeared from folklore study’, and excoriate the former application of it to dances such as the morris.⁹⁴ In the same year another poured scorn on the preceding preoccupation of folklorists with the ancient origins of customs as flawed and irrelevant.⁹⁵ Conversely, half a decade later a third could lament the fact that ‘the belief that all calendar customs have their origin in pagan fertility ritual is well established in public consciousness, and is still defying most academic attempts to shift it’. She went on herself to condemn the patronizing attitude which was implied in earlier scholars’ views of ‘the folk’ as unthinking and amorphous inheritors of tradition.⁹⁶ At the opening of the 1990s, a fourth of the new practitioners of the discipline could declare that ‘the way forward for British Folklore Studies must surely be . . . the study of the real country and the real town, outside the confines of a world of dreams and shadows’.⁹⁷

In the same period, the idea that certain carved figures in medieval churches represented pagan deities came into question. The sheela-na-gigs were shown to have a place in a fashion for church images preaching moral messages which originated in France as a package of designs associated with Romanesque architecture and spread outwards through Western Europe in the twelfth century. The foliate heads were a later fashion, mostly from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and found mostly in buildings constructed by fashion-conscious elites rather than by and for the common people. Their first appearance seems to lie in manuscripts produced by monks. All this makes a pagan origin and association seem very unlikely.⁹⁸

A parallel shift of attitude occurred towards the apparent references to pagan deities and spirits in Anglo-Saxon healing charms. It was pointed out that these were very few, within the whole corpus of such works, and were almost always interspersed with pious references to the Christian God, to Jesus and to saints. Moreover, the words with which they were associated were often garbled, as if the copyists no longer really understood their significance. There was no indication of how the gods and other supernatural entities concerned were viewed by the people using these recitations: whether still as actual deities, as lesser spirits subservient to the Christian Lord, as legendary human physicians or as demons. Early English medicine contained notable Greek, Roman and Arab elements as well as native tradition, so drew eclectically on all knowledge that seemed to be available. The scholar who has written most extensively on these texts since 1990 has concluded that they ‘indicate a strong Christian sense of God’s presence governing over the natural world: they have incorporated their folk sense of nature into the Christian cosmology quite neatly, in a holistic view of the world’.⁹⁹

Did the folk healers of Anglo-Saxon England preserve a more reverential attitude to the old deities, and a better understanding of them? We simply do not know, as no evidence survives to determine the matter; but it is now certain that we cannot take at face value the denunciations of them as heathens by the likes of Abbot Aelfric, who were a most unusual, puritanical and evangelical breed of reforming churchmen, inclined to condemn all magic – and indeed all elements of folk Christianity of which they personally disapproved – as non-Christian.¹⁰⁰ What is most significant in this context is that references to pagan Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian deities disappear completely from English magical recipes after the eleventh century. There was no enduring tradition of calling upon them – or on any other of the old deities – among folk healers and sellers of other magical remedies. There are good records for the activities and beliefs of these people – those commonly called wise or cunning folk – from the sixteenth century onward, increasing in volume to the nineteenth, and they display the cross-section of religious attitudes held by most people in their society at each stage of this span of time.¹⁰¹ In other words, they ranged from a fervent Christianity (in different denominations) to apparent religious indifference, but none showed any allegiance to pagan deities. The only religion which appears in their charms, spells and conjurations is the Christian, though it was often of an increasingly old-fashioned kind, embodying a medieval cult of the saints which had been officially abolished in the Protestant Reformation.¹⁰²

In the late twentieth century, also, the belief that the people prosecuted for the alleged crime of witchcraft in early modern Europe were practitioners of a surviving pagan religion collapsed completely among professional historians. From 1970 onwards a steady process of systematic and detailed research began into the trial records and associated documents and published literature, in one region after another, and it revealed absolutely no evidence for the belief. The pagan ancient world still played a part in the story of the witch trials. Everybody agreed that ideas and images originating in that world helped to formulate the novel concept of the satanic witch which propelled those trials. In many areas, also, popular beliefs which either definitely or possibly had ancient origins played a part in the accusations and confessions associated with the trials, and the demonological literature that justified and encouraged them. Those accused of witchcraft were, however, drawn from the same social and cultural groups as their accusers, and seemed to have shared the same religion, in each case the local variety of Christianity. There remains a slight chance that a few of them may to some extent have embraced the Satan-worship of which they were accused (though as an individual action and not as part of an organized counter-religion as was alleged of them), but this is nowhere firmly proved. The witch hunts between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries were generated by an unhappy combination of a general fear and anguish produced by uncanny misfortune, blamed on malicious magic, and a new elite belief in a satanic conspiracy to subvert Christianity. The worship of old deities played no part in it. This shift of scholarly perspective was the more final in that it was brought about not by a few iconoclasts but by studies produced by scores of academics, covering in the end every part of Europe.¹⁰³

What brought about this wholesale revisionism, at such speed and at this particular time? It was certainly not the product of a Christian backlash against the earlier propensity to see paganism as surviving far into the Christian centuries. The period concerned was, on the contrary, that in which Christian hegemony broke down across most of the Western world and a massive apparent secularization took place. More relevant was the great expansion and professionalization of the academic system in Western nations between the 1960s and 1980s, resulting in a much larger number of full-time scholars supported by public money and expected to engage in constant research and publication. This in itself would have shaken things up considerably, especially as many of the scholars recruited came from outside the upper-middle-class and gentry social groups which had produced most previous historians, and so were less inclined to defer to received opinion. Among folklorists in particular, however, most of those at the forefront of rejecting former approaches were not academics at all, and yet they were seized by the same fervour to re-examine prevailing orthodoxies. That fervour embraced all areas of history and prehistory, from the Neolithic to the recent past. Clearly something profound was going on.

It may be suggested here that the source of this wholesale jettisoning of received assertion and supposition was that the latter was, as has been noted, itself a creation of the period between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. As such, it was bound up with a particular set of social and cultural attitudes rooted in the physical, economic and intellectual environment of that period which ceased to obtain once that environment disintegrated. A heated questioning of received belief and custom, especially by younger generations, was a feature of the entire Western world from the 1960s onward. In the British context, it responded to the progressive disappearance of the national characteristics which had obtained since the late nineteenth century and remained stable until the period following the Second World War: an economic reliance on heavy industry and a male workforce mainly engaged in manual labour; great power status on the world stage linked to the possession of a large colonial empire; religious diversity within the bonding framework of an official and public Christian dominance which relegated other faith positions to the margins and especially discouraged newly appeared belief systems; and a restrictive and prescriptive set of attitudes towards race, gender and sexual preference which operated strong social and political prejudices against those who failed to conform. That package of phenomena had accompanied, and for many people had seemed to produce and sustain, a story of outstanding national success during the period concerned. By the 1960s, however, British industry was starting to collapse, and the empire, great power status and Christian hegemony almost gone; and there now seemed no further need for the restrictive cultural, moral and social prejudices which had accompanied them, especially as social and technological changes made those both less relevant and less practicable. The historian who proposed the term ‘revisionism’ for the resulting wholesale questioning of historical orthodoxies, Conrad Russell, suggested that those involved in it were the intellectual equivalent of contemporary urban planners, needing to renew the decaying late Victorian and Edwardian infrastructures of British cities.¹⁰⁴

In the case of pagan survival, this work of wholesale reappraisal was made easier by the evaporation of most of the emotional impetus which has been suggested above as being behind the popularity of the idea. With the end of Christian cultural hegemony, there was less need to undermine the credentials of Christianity as the national religion – it had effectively ceased to be one – and there was less need to acclimatize to genuine religious pluralism, because it was now a familiar fact. The slowing and at times cessation of urban expansion, the greater healthiness and familiarity of city life, the decline of heavy industry and the greater accessibility of rural areas because of the motor car – so that increasingly people were commuting from homes in villages – made the countryside seem less endangered, detached, remote and mysterious than it had done earlier. A wish to believe in pagan continuity and survival deep into the Christian period or through it just seemed less relevant than before, like organized religion in general.

Pagan Survival and Pagan Survivals

By 1990, as said, professional historians seem to have been unanimous that paganism – as a fully formed set of religions devoted to the old deities – did not persist long after the conversion of a given region to Christianity. They were, however, apparently equally unanimous that large numbers of ideas, figures, stories, magical techniques, customs and motifs were taken into medieval and early modern culture from ancient paganism, and that some proved remarkably enduring. They spanned the fields of architecture, art, literature, operative magic, medicine and folk tradition. Scholars were not unanimous regarding the extent of this importation, the spirit in which it was conducted or whether specific phenomena should be assigned to it or not. Nonetheless, the general principle was accepted. The Christian religion itself adopted extensively the trappings of pagan worship for the core elements of its own. All that its founder had prescribed was a code of ethics, a direction to hold a commemorative meal in his honour and (apparently) a cult of his own figure as a saviour and redeemer, set within the ritual and theological structure of the Judaism of his time. On making the transition from the Jewish to the Gentile world, the new religion borrowed from pagans the shape of its first churches, and the use of candles, incense, wreaths and garlands, altars, images, formal liturgies, hymns, vestments, choral music and sermons. Into these familiar structures it poured a radically different theology.

In 1991 the present author suggested a working distinction between ‘surviving paganism’, signifying a persisting pagan religion, and a ‘pagan survival’, meaning a custom, belief or object taken into Christian religion, culture or society from ancient paganism and redeployed in the new religious context.¹⁰⁵ It was very clear from the beginning that the boundaries of this latter category were always going to be blurred, that there would be contention over its contents and that there would be semantic problems in implementing it. For example, until the nineteenth century a church at Enna in Sicily housed statues of the Christian Madonna and Child which were actually once the cult images of the Roman agricultural goddesses Ceres and Proserpina from the ancient temple on the site of which the church was built.¹⁰⁶ So were they or were they not ‘pagan images’? The answer seems to be yes and no: yes, in origin, but not in the purpose to which they were subsequently put. The same ambivalence extends to the allied question of whether they could be called ‘pagan survivals’. They were certainly surviving relics of ancient paganism, and could physically be said to have survived in their original context, but theologically they had not done so. If, however, they had been preserved by nominally Christian peasants on a farm, where they were regarded as lucky objects which guarded the fertility of the land, then that would have been a less equivocal pagan survival.

The work published in 1991 which distinguished ‘surviving paganism’ from ‘pagan survivals’ also identified four direct lines of connection between ancient paganism and the present which acted as particularly effective conduits for the latter.¹⁰⁷ The first consisted of ceremonial magic, the summoning and control of supernatural forces by the use of invocations and specialized equipment, both solid (as in the case of swords, knives, vessels, censers and animal parts) and geometric (as in the use of circles, triangles and pentagrams). This was first apparently developed in ancient Egypt and has formed a continuous tradition ever since, permeating Judaism, Islam and Christianity even though all three religions (and especially the last) formally condemned and sometimes persecuted most forms of it. Although it could be entirely assimilated to all three, it also at times carried along with it some relics of paganism. Among the lists of spirits to be summoned in particular late medieval and early modern handbooks of magic appear the garbled names of Egyptian deities, and a charm ‘to see visions and cause dreams’ by calling on the goddess Isis and the god Bes is apparently found both in an Egyptian papyrus of the Roman period and a sixteenth-century English manuscript.¹⁰⁸ More importantly, in the twelfth century the Arabic system of astral magic, the harnessing of the arcane influences of the sun, moon and planets, reached Western Christianity and inspired the idea that the indwelling spirits of those heavenly bodies had been placed there by the Christian God to rule over aspects of the world. As they were identified with the Graeco-Roman deities associated with these bodies, this was effectively a way of bringing back most of the Olympian divinities into the Christian cosmos. For a time, this idea came close to being accepted as respectable theology, and though by the fourteenth century it was clearly rejected by orthodoxy, it persisted until the seventeenth century as a clandestine learned tradition.¹⁰⁹

At a more fundamental level, the pagan ancient world supplied the European tradition of learned ritual magic with a basic framework which was to sustain it until modern times, consisting of complex rites which unify actions, materials and words, conveyed in written texts; an emphasis on the power of special names and of invocations in unknown languages; a stress on the purification of the magician and the working space before the rite, and on measures to protect and strengthen the magician during it; the use of special equipment, often made particularly for the purpose, and the choice of an especially propitious time at which to work; the compulsion or attraction of spirits or deities to join and assist the rite; and an eclectic and multicultural range of source material. All these features first appear together in Egypt during late antiquity, and would supply ceremonial magicians with a list of actions and artefacts from which they could choose according to taste and need until the present day.¹¹⁰ They also provided the twentieth century with a structure within which, once the pagan deities were put back, a viable modern Paganism could easily be created.¹¹¹

The second significant line of connection between ancient paganism and the present consisted of popular service magic, of folk magicians serving clients in return for payment. These were the wise or cunning folk of English tradition, also known by many local names. Their charms and spells were, as said, far less successful than learned ceremonial and textual magic in preserving the names of pagan deities in the longer term (though the two types of magic merged at their boundaries). Nonetheless, they did preserve from ancient times some basic principles and practices. The underlying one was the belief that humans – or at least especially gifted humans – had the right to work rituals to manipulate the hidden powers of nature or to seem to transcend nature, and so to exceed the normal span of human ability, in order to remedy practical problems. There was also the recognition that this magic could be sympathetic, operating through similarities and attractions between different parts of the natural world, or contagious, directed at or employing substances generated by or associated with particular people and animals. Some of the specific techniques involved, such as the making of an image of a person to represent them, or the manipulation of a presumed link between particular plants, colours, times and planets, descended directly through the whole history of popular magic from ancient to modern times.¹¹²

The third line of connection between ancient paganism and modernity did indeed consist of folk customs, especially seasonal rituals, although to nothing like the same extent or in the same way that the early folklorists supposed. The genuine connections take two forms. One is that there are a few customs which when tested by proper historical research have turned out indeed to descend from pagan antiquity to recent times or the present. The lighting of sacred fires to bless and protect people and livestock at the opening of summer and at midsummer is one example of these, and the giving of gifts at midwinter (formerly at New Year, now at Christmas) another.¹¹³ These survived so long because they were not mere entertainments but served what seemed to be a vital purpose: to protect herds and their keepers at the opening of the summer pastures, and communities in general facing the threat of epidemics, storms and raids in late summer, and to bless and encourage people at the opening of a new yearly cycle. The other form of genuine connection is more general, and best explained by reversing the traditional metaphor of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. During the past fifty years, as described, a lot of babies have been removed from the bathwater of primeval seasonal festivity, in the shape of customs which proved to be a lot less old than had previously been supposed. It may now be suggested that, once all of them have been dried off and safely tucked up in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century, or early modern, cots, then it is the bathwater itself which becomes interesting: in other words, the background seasonal environment to particular pastimes.

Thus, the mummers’ play, sword dance and plough play may indeed be developments of the Georgian period, but there would always have been folk plays and dances at midwinter in Britain: the three named were just the favourite nineteenth-century forms. The morris may be a late medieval courtly entertainment popularized in England under the Tudors, but dances had always formed an important part of the festivities that celebrated the coming of summer, even if the form of them changed over time. In this manner there have always been rites of divination concerning death and the mocking of spirits of dark, cold and fear at the beginning of winter; rites centred on light, warmth, greenery and feasting, and blessing for the coming year, at midwinter; rites focused on driving back darkness and cold in early spring and on rebirth and reopening in late spring; rites of fire and flowers at midsummer; and rites which embodied thanksgiving, community, remeeting and closure in autumn. Their actual nature changed every few centuries, but the basic pattern of the wheel of the year endured, and was truly prehistoric.

The fourth, and perhaps the greatest, line of continuity consisted of the ongoing relationship of Christian cultures with the deities and spirits of the pagan ancient world, as embodied in art, literature and folklore. At the elite level, an admiration of and love for the mythology of pagan Greece and Rome remained a constant feature of European civilization. Botticelli, Titian, Velázquez and Lord Leighton were only the most famous of a succession of artists to paint pictures of the goddess Venus, as an embodiment of female beauty and allure. Her more austere counterpart Minerva was evoked as a patroness by intellectuals and civic leaders from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, just as Apollo remained emblematic of the arts and Mercury of communication. The Irish and Norse deities were remembered with the same affection, and indeed we depend entirely for our knowledge of them upon the tales recorded of them by medieval Christians. When a Highland Scottish chief, the earl of Argyll, marched off to join an invasion of England in 1513, his bard compared him to the former Gaelic god Lugh.¹¹⁴ At a popular level continuity with a pre-Christian supernatural world was maintained most obviously in the sense of an environment populated by non-human intelligent beings, some visible and some not, which could interact with humanity sometimes to its advantage and mostly not. These beings were encountered both in and out of the home, and known variously as fairies, elves, pixies, goblins, pucks, hobs and by many other names. Whereas the pagan goddesses and gods remained largely figures of mythology, allegory and entertainment to the cultured elite, to ordinary people these lesser beings often seemed very real, and were blamed for a range of physical ills and other misfortunes. Their persistence in Christianized societies is a global phenomenon.¹¹⁵

All these categories of belief and action could be thoroughly Christianized, and for around a thousand years, at least, the people who believed and enacted the contents of them were at least nominally Christians. Fervent and pious followers of Christ could be ceremonial magicians and have a love of Greek and Roman (or Norse or Irish) mythology, while cunning craft, seasonal rites and a belief in fairies were common components of folk Christian culture. To many scholars concerned with particular periods or aspects of medieval and early modern history, their pagan origins can hardly seem relevant at all. Once a longer perspective is taken, however, things look rather different. While all of these areas of belief and operation could be assimilated to Christianity, all of them were in both origin and essence unconnected with and different from it, and all of them caused Christian churchmen and magistrates grave misgivings at times: in the case of both kinds of magic, this normally took the form of sustained official hostility. Furthermore, looking across the span of two millennia, it is apparent that all four of these lines of connection were recombined in the twentieth century, with an active regard for the deities put back, to produce modern Paganism.

An early and celebrated application of the concept of pagan survivals was made in 1971 by a leading French historian, Jean Delumeau, in a manner which actually spanned the gap between it and the earlier one of surviving paganism. With special reference to France, he repeated the view that Catholic Europeans, at least, had only truly been made Christian in the seventeenth century, by that movement traditionally known as the Counter-Reformation. He did not claim, however, that they had been converted from paganism, or that any of the latter had survived anywhere near that time. Instead, he characterized medieval Christianity as a hybrid, in which many pagan elements survived in the forms of a great variety of folk magic and popular superstition, practised in and out of churches and often embodying a view of the natural world as animated by spirits. In his formula, ‘Christianity camouflaged rather than suppressed the beliefs and actions transmitted by millennia of obscure history’. The Counter-Reformation, he suggested, drove many of these customs and beliefs away from the Church and suppressed many more altogether, thereby providing a purer and more authentic kind of Christian religion.¹¹⁶

Between the 1970s and 1990s, the distinction between surviving paganism and pagan survivals was deployed with particular effect in the study of the early modern witch trials, where surviving paganism had been most commonly and thoroughly assumed to be a major element by earlier authors. Three scholars in particular made an international impact by operating that distinction and indeed it might be said in general that those authors who were most explicit in distancing themselves from a belief in surviving paganism – especially as expressed by Margaret Murray – were also the most active in acknowledging and working with the concept of pagan survivals. One was British, Norman Cohn, who in 1975 attacked and refuted Murray’s interpretation at length, but suggested instead that the stereotype of the satanic witch drew on two ancient sources of inspiration. The first was a construct of what evil religion should be, combining human sacrifice, cannibalism and sexual promiscuity, and the other was a complex of traditions concerning night-roving spirits.¹¹⁷

The second scholar was Carlo Ginzburg, publishing in 1989, by which time he was probably the most internationally renowned of Italian historians. He too was savage about Murray, describing it as ‘justified’ to call her work ‘amateurish, absurd, bereft of any scientific merit’ and terming her use of evidence ‘obviously absurd’. He was adamant that the descriptions of early modern witches’ activities were mythologies, not portraits of an actual cult. He insisted, however, that it had a ‘core of truth’, in that popular traditions ultimately based in ancient pagan beliefs had contributed to the stereotype of the witches’ sabbath, as Norman Cohn had argued. He went further, to argue that these traditions were remnants of an ancient pan-European shamanistic fertility religion.¹¹⁸ The third scholar was a Hungarian folklorist, Éva Pócs, who from the 1990s published a series of works in which she demonstrated the apparently archaic folk elements in the belief systems which underpinned the witch trials in her nation, and in the world of popular magic throughout south-eastern Europe. She praised Cohn for having drawn attention to the importance of such elements (though later Ginzburg became a greater influence), and carefully distanced herself from Murray and the other proponents of the idea that the alleged witches had been pagans. Nonetheless, she thought it likely that memories of genuine societies, or at least bonding traditions, of popular service magicians had partly lain behind the images of the witch religion, combined with tales about demons and concerning good and bad magicians who sent out their souls to fight each other at night.¹¹⁹

In 1991 a distinguished collection of essays by continental European scholars was published which appeared in English as The Pagan Middle Ages and exemplified the ‘pagan survivals’ approach to the period.¹²⁰ Its concern was with the way in which medieval societies assimilated, rejected or disputed the cultural heritage of pagan antiquity. The editor later wrote as his contribution to a subsequent, similar collection that the sheer otherworldliness of Christianity had forced medieval people to retain memories of ancient pagan beliefs in order to cope with the present world. This in turn provoked intermittent Christian movements of reform and purification in which a more literal reading of the Bible inspired attempts to remove these elements from the religion and the wider culture, but they generally survived or returned after these interventions. He concluded that ‘the result was syncretism in which very often the pagan origin got lost’.¹²¹

The apparent consensus which had formed by the 1990s around this model provided great potential for the historian. It was apparent that all over Europe the older religions had bequeathed a rich inheritance of beliefs, practices, remedies, symbols, images, ideas and forms to Christian culture. The result was indeed a constant process of adaptation, negotiation, disputation, utilization and condemnation, taking place at all social levels and within and without formal ecclesiastical structures, as different states, communities and individuals made their own relationships with this inheritance. Intellectual, religious, political and social elites attempted to define and police what could be adopted directly from paganism, what needed to be remodelled and redefined before absorption and what had to be rejected and forbidden outright. Having made these decisions – which often embodied some inconsistencies and involved subsequent changes of attitude – the elites concerned then had the often formidable job of ensuring that anybody else paid attention to them.

Post-Revisionism

The apparent consensus among historians and allied scholars over the model of ‘pagan survivals’ did not prove lasting, although many of them, as shown, found it a useful one, and continue to do so. From the 1990s, however, the current that had been carrying scholarship away from the idea of surviving paganism continued to move some authors further on to reject the term ‘pagan’ altogether for any aspects of medieval culture, including those inherited or borrowed from a pre-Christian antiquity.¹²² In 1996 an expert in Anglo-Saxon charms, cited earlier, defined as erroneous two previous assumptions about ‘With Faerstice’: that ‘the lack of Christian elements (and the presence of “magic” as we see it) means it was not Christian and, second, that if the origins of the material predate Christianity or represent an older tradition, the remedy was therefore pagan’. In the terms set by the present argument, that seems correct, but she went on to assert that ‘these so-called magic or pagan elements represent areligious folklore, transferable from one religious tradition to another’.¹²³ Those elements may have become a religious folklore, but that does not diminish the status of the references to pagan figures as pagan survivals, and significant and interesting as such.

In the new century the movement among professional historians to get rid of the term ‘pagan’ in any connection with the Middle Ages has strengthened. In 2009 an eminent British medievalist declared that ‘what the rigorists of the early medieval Church did have to face . . . was the fact that traditional rituals of varying origins survived everywhere routinized into local Christian practice’. He went on to note, equally correctly, that the surviving Anglo-Saxon healing charms were preserved in monastic or cathedral copying schools. He then went further to add the importance of stressing that ‘the village wise-woman, too, would in most cases have seen her powers as operating in an entirely Christian context, and so would her clientele’.¹²⁴ In an impressive study of the relationship between science and magic in medieval Europe, an American scholar agreed that ‘much that has been pointed to among the religious practices of the populace as evidence for a persistence of paganism or as a pagan residue should instead be regarded as not substantially different from the broad spirituality promoted by the official Church’.¹²⁵ A young Cambridge scholar, in his (generally very good) first book, went furthest, to attack Jean Delumeau, Norman Cohn, Carlo Ginzburg and the present author, together, for speaking of pagan survivals at all in the medieval context, calling the term completely unhelpful because it merely reflected the ruses of language employed by an unrepresentative minority of reforming churchmen to condemn forms of Christianity of which they disapproved. He thundered the conclusion that ‘the strongest evidence for residues of rival pagan belief and practice in the central Middle Ages does not survive close scrutiny’, thereby missing the point that the four colleagues whom he was denouncing had not argued for residues that were rival to Christianity, but against this idea.¹²⁶

At the same time a current in the different discipline of religious studies was carrying a few scholars in the opposite direction. This was to define paganism as comprising any cultic behaviour that involves a veneration of the natural and/or features ‘worship at an unreflective and spontaneous level’ and/or derives ultimately from an animist, polytheist, pantheist or shamanic world picture. It could involve subliminal and unconsciously automatic activities such as tossing a coin in a fountain, wishing somebody good morning or proposing a ‘toast’ in alcohol. This formulation views it as an intrinsic part of religious activity in itself, so that identifiable pagan practices variously infuse all faiths, though they can be developed into full religions in their own right (among which this definition would include not just the pre-Christian traditions of Europe and the Near East and Modern Paganism, but Chinese folk religion, Shinto, primal tribal religion, Amerindian spirituality and Afro-American Spiritism). This is essentially an ahistorical view, a timeless and global exercise in comparative religion. Whatever its merits as such, it has little relevance to a study of medieval and early modern European cultures, where the adoption, exclusion and contestation of the pre-Christian heritage went far beyond the embodiment of ‘an underlying subliminal, organic and natural apprehension’.¹²⁷

Revisionism, therefore, like most reformations, has shattered a former near-unity but not produced a new one, generating a number of competing positions instead. The present book is intended as a contribution to the resulting debate, with the intention not of directly refuting any of the voices in it but of recasting the basic terms of the discussion. It is designed to look at a set of figures in the medieval and early modern European imagination which do not seem to fit very well into the categories of pagan or Christian. One of them was found in learned and elite culture, and three in popular culture. Between them, they may be suggested to challenge the religious polarities and dualities around which discussion has been centred, perhaps, for too long.