Chapter One: What is a Pagan Survival?
1. G.L. Gomme, ‘Opening Address’, Folk-Lore, 3 (1892), 4–12. The name of the journal changed in the mid-twentieth century from Folk-Lore to Folklore, in conformity with general usage, and I have followed that change in the references.
2. G.C. Coulton, Five Centuries of Religion: Volume One, Cambridge, 1925, 179–83.
3. Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, MA, 1952, 78.
4. Jacquetta Hawkes, A Guide to the Prehistoric and Roman Monuments in England and Wales, London, 2nd edn, 1954, 125–7.
5. E. Sidney Hartland, ‘Peeping Tom and Lady Godiva’, Folk-Lore, 2 (1891), 5–11.
6. For general overviews of this ideology among British folklorists, see especially the work of Georgina Boyes, ‘Cultural Survivals Theory and Traditional Customs’, Folk Life, 26 (1987–8), 1–15; and Gillian Bennett, ‘Geologists and Folklorists: Cultural Evolution and the Science of Folklore’, Folklore, 105 (1994), 25–37.
7. T.F. Ordish, ‘Folk Drama’, Folk-Lore, 2 (1891), 253–71; R.J.E. Tiddy, The Mummers’ Play, Oxford, 1923; E.K. Chambers, The English Folk-Play, Oxford, 1933 (quotation from p. 225).
8. E.K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, Oxford, 1933, vol. 1, 195–201; Cecil Sharp and Herbert C. Macilwaine, The Morris Book: Parts One and Two, 2nd edn, London, 1912–19; Maud Karpeles, ‘English Folk Dances’, Folk-Lore, 43 (1932), 123–43.
9. This started with Sidney Addy, ‘Guising and Mumming in Derbyshire’, Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 29 (1907), 31–44, and was generalized by Violet Alford, ‘Some Hobby Horses of Great Britain’, Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, 3/4 (1939), 221–407.
10. Mabel Peacock, ‘The Hood Game at Haxey, Lincolnshire’, Folk-Lore, 7 (1896), 330–50.
11. Violet Alford, ‘The Abbots Bromley Horn Dance’, Antiquity, 7 (1933), 206–7.
12. S.H. Hooke, ‘Time and Custom’, Folk-Lore, 48 (1937), 17–24.
13. The most notorious case here was the upbraiding of one of the performers in the Padstow May Day hobby horse procession by Mary Macleod Banks in 1931 for ‘spoiling the rite’ by wearing an altered costume: see her note in Folk-Lore, 49 (1938), 392–4. Violet Alford had the mummers’ play at Marshfield, Gloucestershire, changed to make it seem more solemn and religious: Simon Lichman, ‘The Gardener’s Story and What Came Next: A Contextual Analysis of the Marshfield Paper Boys’ Mumming Play’ (Pennsylvania University PhD thesis, 1981), 1–2, 213–15. The distinguished anthropologist R.R. Marett informed the English Folk Dance and Song Society that such ‘relics of bygone rituals and sacraments’ should be restored to a more ‘mystic’ form and rescued from their current ‘boorish’ reduction to ‘merry-making pure and simple’: ‘Survival and Revival’, Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, 1/2 (1933), 74.
14. E.g. Christina Hole, English Custom and Usage, London, 1941; Violet Alford, An Introduction to English Folklore, London, 1952; and F. Marian McNeill, The Silver Bough, Glasgow, 3 vols, 1957–68. The journal articles restating the theory of pagan survivals also continued, throughout the whole period: cf. Theo Brown, ‘Tertullian and Horse-Cults in Britain’, Folk-Lore, 61 (1950), 31–4; and E.O. James, ‘Superstitions and Survivals’, Folklore, 72 (1961), 289–99.
15. Violet Alford, Sword Dance and Drama, London, 1962, 13–28, 201–16.
16. Alford, An Introduction to English Folklore, 7.
17. Such as Iorwerth C. Peate, Tradition and Folk Life: A Welsh View, London, 1972; and Ralph Whitlock, In Search of Lost Gods, London, 1979.
18. Published by John Lane in a collection called The Three Imposters.
19. Lofts published the book under the pseudonym of Peter Curtis, with Macdonald. It was then republished by Pan in 1966 as The Witches, and subsequently filmed under that title.
20. Although the theme of a revival of ancient paganism was already firmly established by then, classically in the form of somebody discovering an ancient pagan shrine or ritual and deciding to reactivate it, either because of romantic personal inclination or because it takes them over. This was as old a literary tradition by the 1970s as that of paganism surviving secretly within a rural community, both Machen and Buchan having also treated it (the latter no fewer than three times). The message remains the same as in the other theme: the revival almost always has catastrophic consequences.
21. Luc Ricaut, ‘Sacrifice, Society and Religion in The Wicker Man’, in Benjamin Franks et al., eds, The Quest for “The Wicker Man”: History, Folklore and Pagan Perspectives, Edinburgh, 2006, 57. The most famous actor in the film, Christopher Lee, had already starred in a more readily forgotten film of 1968, The Curse of the Crimson Altar, directed by Vernon Sewell, about a modern English village which hid an ancient cult with rites of human sacrifice.
22. The two key authors were Margaret Murray, ‘Female Fertility Figures’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 64 (1934), 93–100; and Lady Raglan, ‘The Green Man in Church Architecture’, Folk-Lore, 50 (1939), 45–57. The history of this idea will be explored in detail in the last chapter of this book.
23. The great nineteenth-century edition was by T.O. Cockayne: Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, Rolls Series, London, 3 vols, 1864–6. Famous further editions from the twentieth century were Godfrid Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic, Halle, 1948; and J.H.G. Grattan and Charles Singer, Anglo-Saxon Magic and Medicine, Oxford, 1952. The last of these seems the most authoritative.
24. It is entry LXXX in the compilation called Lacnunga, found in the editions cited above. It is sometimes elided with the preceding entry, the so-called Nine Herbs Charm or Lay of the Nine Herbs.
25. Again, found variously translated in the editions above. It will be examined in detail in the next chapter of this book.
26. This is Lacnunga CXXXIV–V, again variously translated in the different editions.
27. Above all Grattan and Singer, in the much-cited edition entered above. Two other charms mention pagan deities. In one, Woden himself speaks, to cure wrenched body parts, and there is also mention of Baldur, the name of another god known from the Norse pantheon: it is analyzed by Bill Griffiths, Aspects of Anglo-Saxon Magic, Hockwold-cum-Wilton, 2003, 174. The other calls on Thor, another Norse god (the Anglo-Saxon equivalent is Thunor, so this is a charm influenced by Viking settlers) to stop blood poisoning: see John Frankis, ‘Sidelights on Post-Conquest Canterbury’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 22 (2000), 1–27.
28. Aelfric, De Auguris, lines 75–182, passim, in Aelfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. Walter W. Skeat, Early English Text Society, 76, London, 1881, 364–83; and The Sermones Catholici, or Homilies, ed. Benjamin Thorpe, Aelfric Society, London, 1844, vol. 1, 476–7.
29. James Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey 1825–1875, Oxford, 1976: quotations on pp. 280–1, 287.
30. For a discussion of the sources for this, and its application to different national contexts, see Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Oxford, 2nd edn, 2019, 137–40.
31. Karl Ernst Jarcke, ‘Ein Hexenprozess’, Annalen der Deutschen und Auslandischen Criminal-Rechts-Pflege, 1 (1828), 450; Franz Josef Mone, ‘Uber das Hexenwesen’, Anzeiger für Kunde der Teutschen Vorzeit (1839), 271–5, 444–5.
32. Matilda Joslyn Gage, Women, Church and State, Chicago, 1893.
33. I have dealt with the complex issues concerning Leland’s work in The Triumph of the Moon, 147–54.
34. Charles Godfrey Leland, Aradia, Gospel of the Witches, London, 1899.
35. George Lawrence Gomme, Ethnology in Europe, London, 1892, 48–57.
36. Karl Pearson, The Chances of Death and Other Studies in Evolution, London, 1897, vol. 2, 1–50.
37. The Witch Cult in Western Europe, Oxford, 1921; and The God of the Witches, London, 1933.
38. See the review by R.W. Halliday in Folk-Lore, 33 (1922), 224–30; and the works of C.L. L’Estrange Ewen, especially Witch Hunting and Witch Trials, London, 1929; and Witchcraft and Demonianism, London, 1933.
39. Notably Coulton, cited above.
40. Such as Lewis Spence, The Witch Cult in Scotland’, Scots Magazine (January 1930), 17–20; and ‘Modern Theories about Witchcraft’, Occult Review, 69 (1942), 89–93; Dion Fortune, ‘The Brocken Tryst’, Occult Review, 56 (1932), 23; Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki, The Forgotten Mage, Wellingborough, 1985, 187–9; Ralph Shirley, ‘Notes of the Month’, Occult Review, 38 (1923), 193–205; and J.W. Brodie-Innes, ‘The Cult of the Witch’, Occult Review, 35 (1927), 150–63.
41. J.W. Wickwer, Witchcraft and the Black Art, London, 1925; Theda Kenyon, Witches Still Live, London, 1929.
42. C.N. Deedes, ‘The Double-Headed God’, and Violet Alford and Rodney Gallup, ‘Traces of a Dianic Cult from Catalonia to Portugal’, both in Folk-Lore, 46 (1935), 194–243 and 350–61.
43. G.N. Clark, The Seventeenth Century, Oxford, 1945, 245–8.
44. Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, London, 1964, 187 and 486 n. 4; Reformation to Industrial Revolution, London, 1967; review of Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost, in History and Theory, 6 (1967), 121.
45. Elliot Rose, A Razor for a Goat, Toronto, 1962, 14–15.
46. The Night Battles, London, 1983, is the English translation of that book, with the comment from the 1966 preface preserved on p. xix.
47. In Paysans de Languedoc, Paris, 1966, 407–14.
48. In Occultism, Witchcraft and Cultural Fashions, Chicago, 1976, 57–8, 69–92.
49. R. Trevor Davies, Four Centuries of Witch Beliefs, London, 1947; Arne Runeberg, Witches, Demons and Fertility Magic, Helsingfors, 1947; Rose, A Razor for a Goat.
50. Hugh Ross Williamson, The Arrow and the Sword, London, 1947; Pennethorne Hughes, Witchcraft, London, 1952; Arkon Daraul, Secret Societies, London, 1961, 163–78; and Witches and Sorcerers, London, 1962; T.C. Lethbridge, Witches, London, 1962; Gillian Tindall, A Handbook on Witches, London, 1965; Ronald Seth, Witches and their Craft, London, 1967; Peter Haining, Witchcraft and Black Magic, London, 1971; Raymond Lamont Brown, A Book of Witchcraft, Newton Abbot, 1971; Clifford Lindsay Alderman, A Cauldron of Witches, Folkestone, 1973; Frank Donovan, Never on a Broomstick, 1973; Michael Harrison, The Roots of Witchcraft, London, 1973.
51. George Ewart Evans and David Thomson, The Leaping Hare, London, 1972, 145. Evans, being also influenced by the ideas of the poet Robert Graves, was more inclined to think that the worship of the medieval pagans centred on an ancient Great Goddess than a god.
52. A classic example here is the one at Rydale in Yorkshire, which had some very good documents relating to nineteenth-century cunning folk, which were misinterpreted in harmony with Murray’s ideas. The exhibits have long been given new labels, and the old interpretative scheme remains lodged in the ‘Notes on Witchcraft in Ryedale’ made by the curator in the 1960s and preserved at the museum.
53. It was directed by Malcolm Leigh.
54. For an example from the period between Buchan and Sutcliff, see Hugh Ross Williamson, The Silver Bowl, London, 1948.
55. Pp. 204–5 in the original, Oxford University Press, edition. She supplied an extended picture of a Lammas (beginning of autumn) festival in the period, led by a local king in honour of the horned god, in Sword at Sunset, London, 1963.
56. In chapter 8 of the original, Oxford University Press, edition.
57. Similarly, most of the huge number of novels about a historical King Arthur published since the 1950s have made Arthur’s native Britain an ideological battlefield between Christianity and paganism, in contrast both with the medieval sources for the legend (where he is leader of a Christian people against heathen Saxon invaders) and the available historical evidence. These books are clearly exploring the anxieties and tensions of a multi-faith modern society: see Ronald Hutton, ‘The Post-Christian Arthur’, Arthurian Literature, 26 (2009), 149–70.
58. E.g. Philippa Wiat’s trilogy, The Mistletoe Bough, Bride in Darkness and Wychwood, published in London in 1982 (about a witch religion descended from the Druids and set in rural Oxfordshire in the 1560s); and Alan Massie, The Hanging Tree, London, 1990 (which is set up and down Britain across the mid-fifteenth century, with a witch religion linked to the fairies).
59. The books were The Divine King in England, London, 1954; The Genesis of Religion, London, 1963; and My First Hundred Years, London, 1963.
60. Birmingham Gazette (2 Sept. 1950), 1.
61. Witchcraft Today, London, 1954.
62. A sample of classic works by Pagan witches from this period, which embodied the idea of the surviving Old Religion, would include Doreen Valiente, An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present, London, 1975; and The Rebirth of Witchcraft, Phoenix AZ, 1989; Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, San Francisco, 1979; Charles Bowness, The Witches’ Gospel, London, 1979; Janet and Stewart Farrar, Eight Sabbats for Witches, London, 1981; and Rae Beth, Hedge Witch, London, 1990. The example of Wicca and its offshoots or cousins encouraged various spokespeople to come forward from the 1970s onward, identifying themselves as members of pagan traditions not related to witchcraft which had likewise survived the centuries in Britain. These were given much support and publicity by Ann Ross, who had pioneered the study of Romano-British and Romano-Gallic religious iconography in a marvellous book, Pagan Celtic Britain, London, 1967. Thereafter, however, she dropped out of the academic world and primary historical research to write popular books and help make television documentaries. As part of these, she accepted on face value the claims of such informants, without subjecting them to any critical scrutiny, and so did her utmost to perpetuate belief in the unbroken survival of ancient British paganism to the present, into the twenty-first century: see especially her documentary in the BBC Chronicle series, broadcast 31 Oct. 1977, and her book The Folklore of Wales, Stroud, 2001, 70–1, 103, 151–3.
63. Oscar A. Haac, Jules Michelet, Boston, 1982, 138.
64. Peter Burke (ed.), A New Kind of History, from the Writings of Febvre, London, 1973, 265.
65. Aradia, 103–6, and see his Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradition, London, 1892, 209–10.
66. Pp. 130–1 in the Bodleian Library edition, which has a note attributing the work firmly to Wright. In most of these works, even Leland’s, the design was more to undermine Christianity, or at least Catholicism, than to extol paganism itself, let alone recommend it for preservation or revival. Indeed, there was a genre of fiction which exploited the theme of surviving paganism to suggest that all religions could be equally abhorrent. One of the most famous writers to work in this was the American horror novelist H.P. Lovecraft, who in 1924 produced a short story, ‘The Rats in the Walls’, featuring a medieval English priory built on the site of a Neolithic stone circle. He adds of the prehistoric temple ‘that indescribable rites had been celebrated there, few doubted, and there were unpleasant tales of the transference of these rites into the Cybele worship which the Romans had introduced . . . Tales added that the fall of the old religion did not end the orgies at the temple, but that the priests lived on in the new faith without real change’ (pp. 22–3 in the H.P. Lovecraft Omnibus 3 published by Panther in London in 1985. There may have been a specific strain of anti-Catholicism in Lovecraft’s work here, as there certainly was in that of Michelet and Leland.
67. Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats, London, 1954, 52, where the passage is reproduced from an unidentified article.
68. Their stories are told in Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 81–6, 157–76.
69. E. Clodd, ‘Presidential Address’, Folk-Lore, 7 (1896), 47–8.
70. Especially influential here was Walter Johnson, a medical doctor whose fanciful books still got published by university presses: see his Folk Memory or the Continuity of British Archaeology, Oxford, 1908; and By-Ways in British Archaeology, Cambridge, 1912.
71. See his Wold Without End, London, 1932, 205; and Remembrance, London, 1944, 95–6.
72. Some readers may be tempted to point out that the very names ‘pagan’ and ‘heathen’ originally signified country-dwellers, but, although this is often asserted, it is not proven to be so. The adoption of it as an orthodoxy during the period under discussion was itself a result, and not a cause, of the identification of the rural and the pagan in that period. See Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 4.
73. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, London, 1973; and Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World, London, 1983, 243–4.
74. These passages are all in book 4, chapter 1.
75. Johnson, Folk-Memory, 19.
76. J.G. Frazer, Balder the Beautiful, London, 1913, vol. 1, viii–ix.
77. Williams, The Country and the City; and Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 244–61.
78. For this, see Williams, The Country and the City; W.J. Keith, The Rural Tradition, Toronto, 1975; Jan Marsh, Back to the Land, London, 1982; Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Robert Colls and Philip Dodds, eds, Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, London, 1986, 62–88; Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, Cambridge, 1987, 42–64;
79. In Hodge and His Masters, London, 1880: quotation on p. 7.
80. In Puck of Pook’s Hill, London, 1906, and Rewards and Fairies, London, 1910.
81. Gillian Bennett, ‘Folklore Studies and the English Rural Myth’, Rural History, 4 (1993), 89.
82. Sir Lawrence and Lady Gomme, British Folk-Lore, Folk-Songs and Singing Games, National Home-Reading Union Pamphlets Literature Studies 4, n.d., 10.
83. Joseph Jacobs, ‘The Folk’, Folk-Lore, 4 (1893), 234, 235–6.
84. In Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, London, 1956, 13–14.
85. P. 390 of the Oxford University Press edition of 1990.
86. Though this message took a while to get through even to members of other scholarly disciplines, let alone the public. At the very end of the century Aubrey Burl, an acclaimed expert in British archaeology, could write that ‘in spite of Christian teaching repugnant rites of sexuality and the worship of pagan deities continued at megalithic rings, chambered tombs and standing stones. The Church fulminated censoriously but impotently against the blasphemy . . . Paganism persisted and would persist even into modern times’: Great Stone Circles, New Haven, 1999, 11.
87. Timothy Darvill et al., The Cerne Giant, Oxford, 1999.
88. A.E. Green, review of Alan Brody, English Mummers, in English Dance and Song, 34/3 (1972), 118–19; E.C. Cawte, ‘“It’s an Ancient Custom” – But How Ancient’, in Theresa Buckland and Juliette Wood, eds, Aspects of English Calendar Customs, Sheffield, 1993, 41–4; Georgina Smith, ‘Chapbooks and Traditional Plays’, Folklore, 92 (1981), 208–17; Craig Fees, ‘Towards Establishing the Study of Folk Drama as a Science’, Roomer, 4/5 (1984), 41–51; Georgina Boyes, ‘Excellent Examples: The Influence of Exemplar Texts on Traditional Drama Scholarship’, Traditional Drama Studies, 1 (1985), 21–3.
89. R. Dommett, ‘How It All Began’, Morris Matters, 1/4 (Autumn 1978), 4–8; A.G. Barrand, ‘ABCD Morris’, English Dance and Song, 42/3 (1980), 11–13; Michael Heaney, ‘Kingston to Kenilworth: Early Plebeian Morris’, Folklore, 100 (1989), 88–104; John Forrest and Michael Heaney, ‘Charting Early Morris’, Folk Music Journal, 6/2 (1991), 169–86; John Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing 1458–1750, Cambridge, 1999.
90. E.C. Cawte, Ritual Animal Disguise, London, 1978.
91. Cawte, Ritual Animal Disguise, 79; Michael Heaney, ‘New Evidence for the Abbots Bromley Hobby Horse’, Folk Music Journal, 5/3 (1987), 359–60; Theresa Buckland, ‘The Reindeer Antlers of the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance’, Lore and Language, 3/2A (1980), 1–8.
92. Venetia Newall, ‘Throwing the Hood at Haxey’, Folk Life, 18 (1980), 7–24.
93. My book The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700, Oxford, 1994, covers this period and illustrates this point in detail.
94. Theresa Buckland, ‘English Dance Scholarship’, in Theresa Buckland, ed., Traditional Dance, Crewe, 1982, vol. 1, 3–18 (quotation on p. 4).
95. Georgina Smith, ‘Social Bases of Tradition’, in A.E. Green and J.D.A. Widdowson, eds, Language, Culture and Tradition, Sheffield, 1981, 77–87.
96. Boyes, ‘Cultural Survivals Theory’, 8. See also her full-length study of the ‘myth’ created by former folklorists, The Imagined Village, Manchester, 1993.
97. Bennett, ‘Folklore Studies and the English Rural Myth’, 89.
98. The full story of this with respect to foliate heads will be found in the last chapter of this book. The challenge to the straightforward pagan interpretation of sheela-na-gigs was mounted by Jôrgen Andersen, The Witch on the Wall, Copenhagen, 1977; and Anthony Weir and James Jerman, Images of Lust, London, 1986. The debate over them continues, but the point here is to register the challenge to the previous reading of the figures made in this period, and, furthermore, there seems now to be general agreement among scholars that whether or not pagan or folk ideas were embodied in them – and this really seems a possibility confined to the Irish cases – they were fashioned and installed in a purely Christian context. See the overview in my Pagan Britain, London, 2017, 148–51.
99. Karen Jolly, ‘Father God and Mother Earth’, in Joyce E. Salisbury, ed., The Medieval World of Nature, New York, 1993, 235. Jolly’s full-length study, Popular Religion in Late Anglo-Saxon England, is among other things a sustained polemic against the earlier emphasis on the pagan elements in the charms. Caution in handling the apparent references to pagan figures is also advised by Griffiths and Frankis, in n. 27 above.
100. This point was to be deployed by Carl Watkins as a polemical weapon in a debate to be considered below.
101. In the present book, following the practice established in a previous book of mine, The Witch, London, 2017, I have adopted the term ‘service magician’ for these people, to define a person who provides magical services to others at their request, usually for payment of some kind. It seems to sum up their role well, and can be applied worldwide, for English readers, avoiding the cultural and national specificity of traditional popular terms such as ‘cunning folk’ or ‘wise folk’.
102. Research into popular service magic in England only really began in the 1990s, but there are now independent studies by three different people which accord remarkably in their conclusions: Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture 1736–1951, Manchester, 1999; A People Bewitched, Bruton, 1999; and Cunning-Folk, London, 2003; Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, 87–115; and Jim Baker, The Cunning Man’s Handbook, London, 2014.
103. The first local studies of the new kind, which provided solid evidence, were Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England, London, 1970 (a study of Essex); Erik Midelfort, Witch-Hunting in South-Western Gerrmany, 1562–1684, Stanford, 1972; and William E. Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland, Ithaca, 1976. Norman Cohn’s work from 1975, which will be discussed below, represented the first attempt to construct an overall new model to replace that of a surviving pagan religion. The evolving general picture of the witch trials over the next forty years can be appreciated by comparing the three successive editions of Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, published in London and Harlow between 1987 and 2006; Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, London, 1996; Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History, London, 1996; Geoffrey Scarre and John Callow, Witchcraft and Magic in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, Basingstoke, 2001; Wolfgang Behringer, Witches and Witch-Hunts, Cambridge, 2004; Malcolm Gaskill, Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2010; Julian Goodare, The European Witch-Hunt, London, 2016; and Marion Gibson, Witchcraft: The Basics, London, 2018.
104. In his review of one of my own books, The Restoration, in the London Review of Books, 5 Sept. 1985, 22–3. Conrad once told me that in 1972 he had suddenly realized that in his own field, of early Stuart British history, he could believe that James I and Charles I had existed, with an accompanying cast of characters, but not anything else that he had been told about their reigns: it all had to be researched and rebuilt from scratch. That perfectly captures the mood of early revisionism and also that of a whole generation at that time: I think of the hippy slogan prevalent in it, ‘Trust nobody over the age of thirty’.
105. Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, Oxford, 1991, 284–341.
106. Leonard W. Moss and Stephen C. Cappannari, ‘In Quest of the Black Virgin’, in James J. Preston, ed., Mother Worship, Chapel Hill, 1982, 53–74.
107. Five years later these were expounded much more concisely and systematically in Ronald Hutton, ‘The Roots of Modern Paganism’, in Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman, eds, Paganism Today, London, 1995, 3–9.
108. Papyri Graecae Magicae VIII, 65–85; C.J.S. Thompson, The Mysteries and Secrets of Magic, London, 1927, 58; David Porreca, ‘Divine Names: A Cross-Cultural Comparison’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, 5 (2010), 17–29; Joannis Marathakis, ed., The Magical Treatise of Solomon, Singapore, 2011, 56, 60, 64, 85, 159.
109. Ronald Hutton, Witches, Druids and King Arthur, London, 2003, 153–66, 176–89.
110. Ronald Hutton, The Witch, London, 2017, 99–119.
111. Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, passim.
112. See sources at n. 102.
113. Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford, 1996, 22–5, 116–17, 218–25, 311–21.
114. Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, A Celtic Miscellany, London, 1951, 263–4.
115. They have been treated in that context by Michael Ostling, ed., Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits, London, 2018.
116. I have used the English translation, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, London, 1977: quotation on p. 165. The book initially made a great impact, but subsequently his apparent denial that medieval Catholicism actually was Christianity has found less favour, in the face of the view that it was just a different kind of Christianity from the Counter-Reformation sort.
117. Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, London, 1975.
118. His book was published in Italian, and translated into English as Ecstasies, London 1991. I use the 1992 Penguin edition, where the quotations are on pp. 8, 10, 112. It must be admitted that his theory has proved very controversial, and I differ from him in details, which I discussed at many different points of The Witch. Nonetheless, I would emphasize that I still think his approach fundamentally the right one, and endorse his brilliance (and personal charm) as a historian, which is why he was one of the three people to whom I dedicated that book (another being Norman Cohn).
119. Éva Pócs, ‘The Popular Foundations of the Witches’ Sabbath and the Devil’s Pact in Central and Southern Europe’, in Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs, eds, Witch Beliefs and Witch Hunting and Central and Southern Europe, Budapest, 1992, 305–70 (remarks on previous historians on 305, 335); Between the Living and the Dead, Budapest, 1999; and her contribution to the round table discussion in Gábor Klaniczay and Éva Pócs, eds, Witchcraft Mythologies and Persecutions, Budapest, 2008, 37–42.
120. Edited by Ludo Milis and brought out in English at Woodbridge in 1998.
121. Ludo Milis, ‘The Spooky Heritage of Ancient Paganism’, in Carlos Steel, ed., Paganism in the Middle Ages, Leuven, 2012, 1–18.
122. The beginning of this tendency is sometimes credited to Eamon Duffy’s justly celebrated and influential study of late medieval English religion, The Stripping of the Altars, New Haven, 1992, 293, where he proposed ‘lay Christianity’ as an alternative expression for ‘paganism’ with reference to popular practices. However, the practices concerned were healing and protective charms and incantations which employed phrases and concepts borrowed from the Christian liturgy, and objects – specifically ‘sacramentals’ such as consecrated candles, water and salt – also taken from orthodox worship. His aim was to rescue these from the earlier tendency, embodied above all for him by Jean Delumeau, to view such use of words and objects as pagan, and his argument is a plausible one: being taken directly from the regular usage of the established Church, those particular practices cannot be classed as ‘pagan survivals’ except in the most remote and attenuated sense, and their use should not be termed paganism.
123. Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England, 140.
124. Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400–1000, London, 2009, 176, 181.
125. Steven P. Marrone, A History of Science, Magic and Belief from Medieval to Early Modern Europe, London, 2015, 35.
126. C.S. Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England, Cambridge, 2007, 76–106: quotation on p. 103. I was, however, flattered to be placed in such company.
127. The central work here is Michael York, Pagan Theology, New York, 2003: quotations on pp. 66, 67, 74. I myself have never fared well in print at the hands of this author. On p. 6 of the book under discussion, he misattributes to me a view actually expressed by the Oxford classicist Robin Lane Fox, which I do not share, and then quotes against me one from the Frenchman Pierre Chuvin, which I have actually endorsed instead: compare p. 4 of Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, in the first, 1999, edition which is the one he will have read. That said, I have some sympathy for his overall thesis, because there are family resemblances between ancient European and Near Eastern paganism, and the other religious traditions that he associates with it, and with some aspects of world religions such as Hinduism. Whether this justifies the use of the term pagan to cover all, however, is a politically loaded question and has earned the book criticism by other specialists in religious studies: see the reviews by Melissa Raphael in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 43/4 (2004), 556; and Mary Jo Neitz in Sociology of Religion, 65/3 (2004), 314; Michael Strmiska, ‘Modern Paganism in World Cultures’, in Strmiska, ed., Modern Paganism in World Cultures, Santa Barbara, CA, 2006, 11–13; Kaarina Aitamurto and Scott Simpson, ‘Introduction’, in Aitamurto and Simpson, eds, Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, Durham, 2013, 2; and Ethan Doyle White, ‘Theoretical, Terminological, and Taxonomic Trouble in the Academic Study of Contemporary Paganism’, The Pomegranate, 18/1 (2016), 45–8.
Chapter Two: Mother Earth
1. Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness, New Haven, 1976, passim.
2. Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, Cambridge, MA, 1985, 175. The lack of evidence for a popular cult of Gaia was stressed before Burkert by Peter Ucko, Anthropomorphic Figurines of Predynastic Egypt and Neolithic Crete, London, 1968, 410–11. Even in the late twentieth century, however, popular survey works and encyclopaedias on Greek religion were still influenced by an Edwardian classicist, Lewis Richard Farnell, who argued that Gaia must have been a major deity before the beginning of history, as apparently evidenced by her prominence as a literary figure: The Cults of the Greek States, Oxford, 1907, vol. 3, 28. This reasoning, which has been abandoned by more recent experts (as has been seen) was driven by the belief of academics of Farnell’s time in a universal prehistoric Great Mother Goddess, which will be described below.
3. Jennifer Larson, ‘A Land Full of Gods’, in Daniel Ogden, ed., A Companion to Greek Religion, Chichester, 2010, 67.
4. Mary Beard et al., Religions of Rome, Cambridge, 1998, vol. 1, 203, and vol. 2, 142.
5. H.J. Rose, Ancient Roman Religion, London, 1948, 25.
6. Apuleius, Metamorphoses, XI.5. The idea that Isis was a mighty creatrix who could be identified with other goddesses was found quite widely before Apuleius, but it is his particular identification of her with both the moon and the natural world which was to be especially influential.
7. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1014B–15A.
8. Plato, Timaeus, 34C.
9. A process surveyed in George D. Economou, The Goddess Natura in Medieval Literature, Cambridge, MA, 1972, 4–40, which is the indispensable current starting point for the study of this figure in antiquity and the Middle Ages.
10. Ovid, Metamorphoses, I.23; Lucretius, De rerum natura, passim. Another poet of the early imperial era, Statius, called Natura both maker and ruler of the world: Thebaid, XI.465–7, XII.561–2, 642–8.
11. It is usually quoted in Thomas Taylor’s luxuriant translation, The Mystical Hymns of Orpheus, of which I have used the London, 1896, edition, 29–33. The latest edition, by Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow, Baltimore, 2013, dates the collection to the mid-third century. It is not apparent whether these hymns were purely literary productions or actually used in the cult practice of the mystery religion of Orpheus.
12. Claudian, De raptu Proserpinae, I.249, II.370–8, III.18–49; and De consulate Stilichonis, II.431–3.
13. Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 2, London, 1923, 5–6.
14. In particular, Lactantius, Prudentius and Ambrose of Milan are important here, and their theology is examined in Economou, The Goddess Natura, 54–8.
15. J. Wright Duff and Arnold M. Duff, eds, Minor Latin Poets, Cambridge, MA, 1934, 339–50.
16. Source references in nn. 23 and 25 of chapter 1.
17. Caroline M. Batten and Mark Williams, ‘Erce in the Old English Aecerbot Charm’, Notes and Queries (2020): https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjaa.005. I am grateful to Dr Williams for sending me this work in draft.
18. Bernard Sylvester or Bernardus Sylvestris, De mundi universitate sive megacosmos et microcosmos.
19. Alan of Lille or Alanus ab Insulis, De planctu naturae.
20. Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus.
21. Jean de Hauteville or Johannes de Altavilla, Architrenius.
22. Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, esp. IV.16005–19436 and V.20027–31.
23. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parlement of Briddes, or The Assembly of Foules, II.295 to end.
24. Guillaume de Deguileville or Diguileville, Le Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine, translated into English as The Pilgrimage of the Soul. I have used the latter, where Nature appears or is addressed in lines 3344–448.
25. Évrart de Conty, Les Échecs amoureux, translated into English by John Lydgate as Reson and Sensualltye. Nature manifests in lines 720–82 of the latter.
26. Edmund Spenser, the Faerie Queen, Mutabilitie, VI.35 and VII.13–15.
27. Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, Rome, 1652.
28. Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Historia, Oppenheim, 1617.
29. Simon Schama, Citizens, New York, 1989, 746–8.
30. What follows in the next two sections is an updated and extended version of data and suggestions first published in Ronald Hutton, ‘The Discovery of the Modern Goddess’, in Joanne Pearson et al., eds, Nature Religion Today, Edinburgh, 1998, 89–100; and ‘The Neolithic Great Goddess’, Antiquity, 71 (1997), 91–9.
31. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Song of Proserpine’ (1820).
32. ‘Sleep and Poetry’ (1816).
33. John Keats, ‘Endymion’ (1818), IV.141–88. For another address by the poet to the moon, see ‘I Stood Tip-Toe Upon A Little Hill’, lines 116–22.
34. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, first published London, 1847, chapters 27 and 28.
35. ‘Artemis Prologizes’, in John Pettigrew and Thomas J. Collins, eds, Robert Browning: The Poems, New Haven, 1981, 365.
36. Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘Hertha’ (1867), lines 1–15.
37. The citations are from ‘Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn’ (1862), ‘The Woods of Westermain’ (1883) and ‘Earth and Man’ (1883). The verse quoted is in the original draft of the first of those, for which see The Poetical Works of George Meredith, London, 1912, 585–6.
38. George Russell or A.E., ‘Dust’ (1890s).
39. ‘The Virgin Mother’ (1910s).
40. The extracts above, and these reflections as a whole, are based on the collected works in Selected Poems by A. E., London, 1935, especially at pp. 17, 18 and 85.
41. A.E., The Candle of Vision, London, 1918.
42. These are on pp. 365 and 516 of the Penguin edition.
43. P. 144 in the Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928).
44. Pp. 224, 276–80 and 348 of the Penguin edition.
45. From ‘Pan in America’, in Edward D. Macdonald, ed., The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, New York, 1936, 31.
46. Eduard Gerhard, Über Metroen und Götter-Mütter, Berlin, 1849.
47. Especially Francois Lenormant and M.J. Menant at Paris in the 1870s and 1880s and Ernst Kroker at Leipzig in the 1890s.
48. For this, see Ucko, Anthropomorphic Figurines, 409–12, and sources cited there.
49. A.J. Evans, Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Script, London, 1895; ‘The Neolithic Settlement at Knossos and its Place in the History of Early Aegean Culture’, Man, 1 (1901), 184–6.
50. A.J. Evans, ‘The Palace of Knossos’, Annual of the British School at Athens, 9 (1902–3), 74–94.
51. Sir Arthur Evans, The Earlier Religion of Greece in the Light of Cretan Discoveries, London, 1931, esp. 38–42. His ideas were then echoed at each stage by followers writing their own books on Minoan Crete, such as Charles Henry Hawkes and Harriet Boyd Hawkes, Crete: The Forerunner of Greece, London, 1909, 135–9; and J.D.S. Pendlebury, The Archaeology of Crete, London, 1939, 273.
52. His classic work was Das Mutterecht, Stuttgart, 1861.
53. Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Cambridge, 1903, 257–322. See also the further development of her ideas in Themis, Cambridge, 1912.
54. For this see especially Prudence Jones, ‘A Goddess Arrives’, Culture and Cosmos, 9.1 (2005), 45–71.
55. Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion, New York, 1912, 45–6; Arthur Bernard Cook, Zeus, Cambridge, 1914, vol. 1, 776–80; J.G. Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, London, 1914, vol. 1, 39–40; 161; Lewis Richard Farnell, Outline History of Greek Religion, London, 1920, 24.
56. E.K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, Oxford, 1903, vol. 1, 264.
57. Albrecht Dieterich, Mutter Erde, Berlin, 1905.
58. For this see Samuel D. Gill, Mother Earth: An American Story, Chicago, 1987; and Tony Swain, ‘The Mother Earth Conspiracy: An Australian Episode’, Numen, 38 (1991), 3–26.
59. Joseph Dechelette, Manual d’archaéologie préhistorique celtique et gallo-romaine, Paris, 1908, 594–6.
60. Angelo Mosso, La Prehistoria, 1910, immediately translated into English as The Dawn of Mediterranean Civilization, London, 1911: passages on 173 and 401–17 of that edition.
61. G.D. Hornblower, ‘Predynastic Figures of Women and Their Successors’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 15 (1929), 31.
62. John Arthur Goodchild, The Light of the West, London, 1898.
63. Harold Massingham, Wold Without End, London, 1932, passim: quotations on p. 171. The survey was that of O.G.S. Crawford, Long Barrows of the Cotswolds, Gloucester, 1925, with reflections on Neolithic religion on pp. 23–4.
64. Stuart Piggott, ‘Ancient British Craftsmen’, Antiquity, 60 (1986), 190; Gilliam Varndell, ‘The Ritual Objects’, in Ian Longworth et al., Excavations at Grimes Graves, Norfolk, 1972–1976: Fascicule 3, London, 1991, 103–6.
65. C.F.C. Hawkes, The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe, London, 1940, 84–9, 153, 180, 198; Jacquetta Hawkes, Early Britain, London, 1945, 16–18.
66. Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land, London, 1951, 158–61; A Guide to the Prehistoric and Roman Monuments of England and Wales, London, 1954, 20–1, 198, 243–4; Man on Earth, London, 1954, passim; Man and the Sun, London, 1962, 57–87; UNESCO History of Mankind: Volume 1.1, New York, 1963, 204–344; and Dawn of the Gods, London, 1968, passim.
67. V.G. Childe, What Happened in History, Harmondsworth, 1954, 64–5, 268; and The Prehistory of European Society, Harmondsworth, 1958, 21, 46, 58, 124–39; O.G.S. Crawford, Said and Done, London, 301–2; and The Eye Goddess, London, 1957; Stuart Piggott, The Neolithic Cultures of the British Isles, Cambridge, 1954, 46 and plate IV; Glyn Daniel, The Megalith Builders of Western Europe, London, 1958, 74. Another leading figure in British archaeology accepted the universality of the Neolithic goddess slightly earlier: Grahame Clark, From Savagery to Civilisation, London, 1946, 101.
68. Which were given great publicity by Frazer in Adonis, Attis, Osiris, vol. 1.
69. His original excavation reports were published in Anatolian Studies between 1962 and 1966. His textbooks were Earliest Civilizations of the Near East, London, 1965; Catal Huyuk, London, 1967; and The Neolithic of the Near East, London, 1975. In all of these, veneration of the Goddess is assumed to be normative of the whole period and region. His preoccupation with her was a feature of the 1960s, being absent from his earlier excavation reports of the 1950s, as visible in his series on the site at Hacilar, in Anatolian Studies between 1958 and 1961.
70. Mellaart, ‘Excavations at Catal Huyuk, 1962’, Anatolian Studies, 13 (1963), 49.
71. Robert Briffault, The Mothers, London, 1927. His contribution to the development of the triple goddess was especially noted by Jones, ‘A Goddess Arrives’.
72. For the development of the book and its place in Graves’s own life and work, see Martin Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves, London, 1982; Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, London, 1986; Robert Graves: The Years with Laura, London, 1995; and Robert Graves and the White Goddess, London, 1995; Ian Firla and Grevel Lindop, Graves and the Goddess, Selinsgrove, 2003; and S.J. Penicka-Smith, ‘Reinventing Robert’ (University of Sydney PhD thesis, 2010).
73. George Ewart Evans, The Pattern under the Plough, London, 1966, 62–3, 101, 192; and George Ewart Evans and David Thomson, The Leaping Hare, London, 1972, 107.
74. Mellaart, Earliest Civilizations of the Near East, 92–3.
75. See the midwinter invocation printed in Gerald Gardner, Witchcraft Today, London, 1954, 21.
76. W.J. Gruffydd, Rhiannon, Cardiff, 1953.
77. Gertrude Rachel Levy, The Gate of Horn, London, 1948; E.O. James, The Cult of the Mother-Goddess, London, 1959; Johannes Maringer, The Gods of Prehistoric Man, London, 1960.
78. Carl Jung, Collected Works: Volume Nine, Part One: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, London, 1959, 75–102.
79. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, Princeton, 1963; quotations on pp. 1–2, 336.
80. Jacquetta Hawkes, ‘The Proper Study of Mankind’, Antiquity, 42 (1968), 255–62.
81. This was especially true of Martin P. Nilsson, who was a, and perhaps the, dominant figure among German classicists between 1920 and 1950: his critique of Evans was first published in 1921 and translated into English as A History of Greek Religion, Oxford, 1925, 18–33.
82. J.D. Evans, Malta, London, 1959, 136–67.
83. Ucko, Anthropomorphic Figurines; Andrew Fleming, ‘The Myth of the Mother Goddess’, World Archaeology, 1 (1969), 247–61.
84. Hawkes, ‘The Proper Study of Mankind’.
85. In the second edition of A Land, published in London in 1978, p. ix.
86. Gill, Mother Earth; and Swain, ‘The Mother Earth Conspiracy’. I am not aware of any attempted refutations of these works by colleagues; but it is not my own field, which is the only reason why I characterize their arguments as assertions.
87. Shirley Ardener (ed.), Perceiving Women, London, 1975, xviii.
88. S.J. Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison, New Haven, 1988; T.W. Africa, ‘Aunt Glegg amongst the Dons’, in W.M. Calder (ed.), The Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered, Atlanta, 1991, 21–35.
89. Harold Massingham, Remembrance, London, 1944, 49.
90. Massingham, Wold Without End: The Tree of Life, London, 1943.
91. Sources at n. 71.
92. See especially A Land, 143, 198, 200–1; ‘The Proper Study of Mankind’, 260; Man and the Sun, 240–1; Man on Earth, chapter 8.
93. See especially the critique of his work in Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Woman, New Earth, New York, 1975, 154–7.
94. For these changes of thought with respect to Britain, see Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain, London, 2013, 126–34.
95. The Silbury Treasure, London, 1976; and The Avebury Cycle, London, 1977.
96. Marija Gimbutas, The Prehistory of Eastern Europe, Cambridge, MA, 1956; The Balts, London, 1963; The Slavs, London, 1971; ‘The Beginning of the Bronze Age in Europe and the Indo-Europeans’, Journal of Indo-European Studies, 1 (1973), 1–20, 163–218; The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, London, 1974.
97. Key texts in its development include Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, Boston, 1973; Merlin Stone, When God was a Woman, New York, 1976; and Zsuzsanna Budapest, The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries, Oakland, CA, 1980. A good overview of the movement is provided by Cynthia Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess, Boston, 1993.
98. The progress of her ideas can be tracked through ‘The First Wave of Eurasian Steppe Pastoralists into Copper Age Europe’, Journal of Indo-European Studies, 5 (1977), 271–338; ‘The Kurgan Wave No. 2’, Journal of Indo-European Studies, 8 (1980), 272–315; The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, London, 1982; The Language of the Goddess, London, 1989; ‘The Collision of Two Ideologies’, in T.L. Makey and A.C. Greppin, eds, When Worlds Collide, Ann Arbor, MI, 1990; The Civilization of the Goddess, San Francisco, 1991.
99. Her knowledge of Western Europe was shakier, and especially of the British Isles, where (for example) she identified the Linkardstown culture of fourth-millennium Ireland as belonging to the later, patriarchal takeover of prehistory, and the third-millennium British superhenges as belonging to the earlier, matriarchal phase. That was, however, in her final and most wide-ranging and populist book, when she was working against the timescale of a lethal and debilitating illness.
100. Gimbutas, Language of the Goddess, xiii–xxi; Civilization of the Goddess, vii.
101. Pioneers of this approach, with a critical eye on Gimbutas’s work, included Ruth Tringham, in her review of The Civilization of the Goddess in American Anthropologist, 95 (1993), 196–7; and her joint essay with Margaret Conkey, ‘Archaeologists and the Goddess’, in Donna C. Stanton and Abigail J. Stewart, eds, Feminisms in the Academy, Ann Arbor, MI, 1995, 199–247; and Lynn Meskell, ‘Goddesses, Gimbutas and the New Age’, Antiquity, 69 (1995), 74–86. I would not presume to state myself what a ‘true’ feminist archaeology should be, but (self-evidently from my work) I wholeheartedly support the concept of plural, and differing, interpretations of the same archaeological evidence which have equal status as speculations.
102. For a reinterpretation of the site by the team leader, see Ian Hodder, Catalhöyük, London, 2006. For a study of the feminist tourism to it, and the problem of interaction between the team and the visitors, see Kathryn Rountree, ‘Archaeologists and Goddess Feminists at Catalhoyuk’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 23/2 (2007), 7–26.
103. I supplied a selection of the main such publications, amounting to forty titles, on pp. 410–12 of my book Pagan Britain. It may be worth emphasizing here that to interpret that material as evidence for the worship of a single great goddess is still possible, as one reading of it among many.
104. I would say myself that it is a wholly justifiable and feasible one. Apart from the point made above about the legitimacy of the subjective and personal reading of the prehistoric evidence in this way, I would repeat a statement that I have made a number of times before (in ‘The Discovery of the Modern Goddess’, 99; and in both editions of The Triumph of the Moon, p. 51 in the 1999 one and p. 44 of the 2019 one): that such a deity may actually exist. It could well be that divine figures are all projections of the human heart and mind, but equally so that human belief gives them real life, or else that they have always existed but are perceived at particular times when humans have need of them. It may be necessary to state this a fourth time because some of the Goddess’s modern adherents have seemed capable of reading my work without apparently noticing it. Incidentally, a few readers may wonder why I have made no reference in the context of Mother Earth of the ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ of the biochemist James Lovelock, his theory that our planet in some respects exhibits the behaviour of a living creature: unveiled in a string of publications between ‘The Quest for Gaia’, New Scientist, 65 (1975), 304–6, and Gaia, London, 1979. This is because he ultimately denied firmly that he had identified the earth as a goddess, instead characterizing it as ‘a self-regulating system like the familiar thermostat of a domestic iron or oven’ (Gaia, London, 1991, 6–11). However, he had earlier commented that ‘the peaceful, artful, Goddess-orientated culture in Old Europe’ had venerated the earth and been the better for it, a clear echo of Marija Gimbutas (The Ages of Gaia, London, 1988, 203–23). So there is some slight connection.
Chapter Three: The Fairy Queen
1. The first half of this chapter draws partly on material which was used for my article ‘The Making of the Early Modern British Fairy Tradition’, Historical Journal, 57 (2014), 1157–75.
2. Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England, Woodbridge, 2007.
3. Gerald of Wales or Giraldus Cambrensis, Itinerarium Kambriae, 1.5–12; Ralph of Coggleshall, Chronicon Anglicarum, ff. 88–90; Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, III.45, 60; Walter Map, De nugis curialum, II.11; William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, 1.27–8; Edmund Craster, ed., ‘The Miracles of Farne’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 4th series, 29 (1951), 101–3.
4. Itinerarium Kambriae, 1.12.
5. For this, see especially C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, Cambridge, 1964, 122–38; Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, Oxford, 2000, 686–92; C.S. Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England, Cambridge, 2007, 62–5, 203–15; and Richard Firth Green, Elf Queens and Holy Friars, Philadelphia, 2016, 1–41.
6. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XV.23; Burchard, Corrector, section 152.
7. Leechbook III, ff. 123–5. Details of editions and translations of such texts are in chapter 1, n. 23.
8. Map, De nugis curialum, II.11.
9. British Library, MS Reg. 15C, vii, f. 74.
10. Itinerarium Cambriae, 1.5.
11. C. d’Evelyn and A.J. Mill, eds, The South English Legendary, Early English Texts Society, 1956–9, St Michael, Part 2, lines 238–58; W.A. Wright, ed., The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, Rolls Series, London, 1887, vol. 1, 196 (lines 2736–56).
12. For this see particularly Alfred Nutt, The Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare, London, 1900; Lucy Allen Paton, Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance, New York, 1903; Roger Sherman Loomis, Celtic Myth and Arthurian Romance, New York, 1927.
13. Figures especially like the fays of French and English romance are found in the texts Imram Brain maic Febail; Echtrae Chonnlai; Tochmarc Etaine, Eachtra Airt, Serglige Con Culainn, Eachtrae Laegari and Eachtrae Nerai. The obvious equivalent in the Welsh literature is Rhiannon in Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi.
14. For an excellent consideration of these beings in Irish literature, see Mark Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, Princeton, 2016. My own essay, ‘Medieval Welsh Literature and Pre-Christian Deities’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 61 (2011), 57–85, is an argument against the possibility of determining whether the characters of high medieval Welsh literature were once pagan goddesses and gods. Once again, this was an idea conceived in the late Victorian period which became dominant among scholars and was elaborated until the 1960s.
15. See Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England, 167–75; and James Wade, Fairies in Medieval Romance, Basingstoke, 2011, 147–9. In 2016 Richard Firth Green could declare that the ‘fashion associated in English scholarship particularly with Roger Sherman Loomis, for uncovering hidden Celtic motifs in medieval romance, has long passed’ (Elf Queens and Holy Friars, 66). Indeed C.S. Lewis already termed the quest for Celtic roots to romance irrelevant to an understanding of the latter in 1962: see his Selected Literary Essays, ed. by Walter Hooper, Cambridge, 1969, 301–11. Even so, Celtic texts were still credited with great influence over the figure of the fay in Carolyne Larrington, ‘The Fairy Mistress in Medieval Literary Fantasy’, in Ceri Sullivan and Barbara White, eds, Writing and Fantasy, London, 1999, 32–47; and Corinne Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance, Woodbridge, 2010, 179–206.
16. Especially memorable here are Larrington, ‘The Fairy Mistress in Medieval Literary Fantasy’; and King Arthur’s Enchantresses, London, 2006; Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England, 157–75; Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance; Wade, Fairies in Medieval Romance; and Piotr Spyra, The Liminality of Fairies, New York, 2019.
17. This was all worked out by Noel Williams, ‘The Semantics of the Word “Fairy”’, in Peter Narvaez, ed., The Good People, Lexington, 1987. See also Richard Firth Green, ‘Changing Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 25 (2003), 27–30.
18. This episode is in stanza 74.
19. I have used the edition of Lord Berners’ translation, with an accompanying history of the work, made by S.L. Lee for the Early English Text Society in 1882.
20. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini, lines 916–40.
21. See the discussion in Basil Clarke’s edition of the Vita, published at Cardiff in 1973, on pp. 203–7; and Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, 7–28.
22. Layamon, Brut, VII, lines 14277–82.
23. Claris et Laris also makes Morgana Arthur’s sister, a not really logical or explicable addition to her persona first effected by Etienne de Rouen in Draco Normannicus in the middle of the twelfth century and adopted by the great French romance-writer Chretien de Troyes near its end (in his Erec et Enide). There she is still benevolent. As Arthur’s sibling, however, she has to be a human woman who has learned magic deliberately, which was a step on which medieval Christian culture generally frowned. Claris et Laris drives home the point that she did so for purely selfish reasons and is entirely human; but she is still called a ‘fay’ in the story.
24. All three versions of the romance were helpfully edited by A.J. Bliss for Oxford University Press in 1966.
25. One manifestation of this had been the growth in reports of nocturnal processions or cavalcades of these unfortunates, doomed to wander the earth after death. For the context, see Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, Chicago, 1994; for the nocturnal processions, Ronald Hutton, ‘The Wild Hunt and the Witches’ Sabbath’, Folklore, 125/2 (2014), 161–78; and for the particular application to Sir Orfeo, Bruce Mitchell, ‘The Fairy World of Sir Orfeo’, Neophilologus, 48 (1964), 155–9; and Dorena Allen, ‘Orpheus and Orfeo’, Medium Aevum, 33 (1964), 103–11.
26. For this, see Williams, ‘The Semantics of the Word “Fairy”’, 470–8; and Jeremy Harte, Explore Fairy Traditions, Loughborough, 2004, 27.
27. I have used the English translation by Lord Berners, The History of the Valiant Knight Arthur of Little Britain, ed. by E.V. Utterson, London, 1814, lines 115–18, 297–300.
28. Siegfried Wenzel, ed., Fasciculus Morum, London, 1989, Part 5, lines 61–72.
29. In The Wife of Bath’s Tale, lines 857–81.
30. Sir Thopas, lines 784–803.
31. The Merchant’s Tale, lines 2225–318.
32. All three versions of the story were helpfully edited together by A.J. Bliss in London, 1960. The significance of the change of colour was noted by Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things, London, 2000, 81–2.
33. Ralph Flenley, ed., Six Town Chronicles, Oxford, 1961, 127.
34. F.R.H. du Boulay, ed., Documents Illustrative of Medieval Kentish Society, Kent Archaeological Society, 1964, 254–5.
35. The best-known edition is probably that by James Murray for the Early English Text Society.
36. Especially in ‘Y Dyllvan’ and ‘Y Niwl’.
37. Accessible versions are in Sabine Baring-Gould, Lives of the Saints, London, 1898, vol. 16, 223–4; and Elissa R. Henken, Traditions of the Welsh Saints, Cambridge, 1987, 221–6.
38. Richard Suggett, A History of Magic and Witchcraft in Wales, Stroud, 2008, passim; and Welsh Witches, n.loc., 2018, 123–33; Lisa Maria Tallis, ‘The Conjuror, the Fairy, the Devil and the Preacher’ (Swansea PhD thesis, 2007).
39. It is on pp. 132–53 of Denton Fox’s edition of The Poems of Robert Henryson, Oxford, 1981.
40. It is found in the Bannatyne Manuscript, and is published in editions of that, sometimes catalogued under the first line, ‘Sym of Lyntoun’. Other specimens of whimsy verse that feature the fairy king are ‘Lichton’s Dreme’, in which the dreamer is taken prisoner by him and bound with ropes of sand, and ‘The Gyre-Carling’, about an ogress who is driven out by him and his host. There is an overall consideration of this ‘eldrich’ verse in Lizanne Henderson and Edward Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, East Linton, 2001, 152–3.
41. Lines 1254–5, 1536–74, 4188–9; on pp. 422–3, 440 and 532 of the Early English Text Society edition of 1865.
42. Lines 1132–5. In quotation from Scots verse I have modernized and anglicized the spelling, save for the versions of ‘fairy’ itself.
43. In ‘Sir Thomas Norny’, lines 4–6.
44. ‘The Goldyn Targe’, lines 125–6.
45. ‘Ane Flytting or Invective be Capitaine Alexander Montgomerie against the Laird of Pollart’, Book 2, lines 14–26.
46. James VI, Daemonologie, Edinburgh, 1597, 73–4.
47. Philotus, eventually printed in Edinburgh in 1603, stanza 132.
48. Daemonologie, 73–4.
49. National Records of Scotland, JC26/1/67.
50. Robert Pitcairn, ed., Ancient Criminal Trials in Scotland, Edinburgh, 1833, vol. 1, part 2, 51–8.
51. Pitcairn, Ancient Criminal Trials, vol. 1, part 2, 161–5.
52. James Cranstoun, ed., Satirical Poems of the Time of the Reformation, Scottish Text Society, 1891, 365.
53. John Stuart, ed., The Miscellany of the Spalding Club, Aberdeen, 1841, 117–25.
54. P. Hume Brown, ed., The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, 2nd series, vol. 8, Edinburgh, 1908, 347.
55. David Masson, ed., The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland: Volume XI, Edinburgh, 1894, 366–7.
56. National Records of Scotland, CH2/467/1, pp. 76–83.
57. Pitcairn, Ancient Criminal Trials, vol. 3, part 2, 602–16.
58. This rethinking with respect to fairies in general is covered in my book The Witch, London, 2017, 237–42. See also, inter alia, Minor White Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, New York, 1930; K.M. Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck, London, 1959; Diane Purkiss, Troublesome Things, London, 2000, 124–85; Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Taken by the Fairies’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), 277–311; Marjorie Swann, ‘The Politics of Fairylore in Early Modern English Literature’, Renaissance Quarterly, 53 (2000), 449–73; Regina Buccola, Fairies, Fractious Women, and the Old Faith, Selinsgrove, 2006; and Peter Marshall, ‘Protestants and Fairies in Early Modern England’, in L. Scott Dixon, ed., Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe, Farnham, 2009, 139–61.
59. This is the work edited by S.L. Lee for the Early English Text Society in 1882.
60. Its Tudor publication history is considered by Cooper, The English Romance in Time, 176, 466.
61. This was Dead Man’s Fortune, recorded in Walter W. Greg, The Henslowe Papers, London, 1907, 135.
62. Robert Greene, The Scottish Historie of James IV, London, printed in 1598.
63. A point noted by Purkiss, Troublesome Things, 176–7.
64. Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 1, line 162; The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 4, Scene 4, lines 73–4 and Act 5, Scene 5, lines 43–108.
65. The anonymous Lust’s Dominion, the surviving edition of which is from 1657, lines 1583–605.
66. Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies, 143–4, runs down a list of such events, most notably at Hengrove Hall, Apethorpe, Quarrendon and Woodstock. To these can be added the Elvetham one, below, and that at the Lee family seat at Ditchley in 1592.
67. Jean Wilson, Entertainments for Elizabeth I, Woodbridge, 1980, 99–118.
68. Printed in 1607.
69. For context here see especially Matthew Woodcock, Fairy in “The Faerie Queene”, Aldershot, 2004.
70. Ben Jonson, The Entertainment at Althorp, printed 1616.
71. Ben Jonson, Oberon, the Fairy Prince, printed 1616.
72. Robin Goodfellow: His mad pranks and merry jests, London, 1628; The merry pranks of Robin Goodfellow, n.d.; The Pranks of Puck, n.d., all reprinted in James Orchard Halliwell, Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, London, 1845, 120–70, 237–9. In the last of these to appear, The Midnight’s Watch, London, 1643, Robin serves the queen instead.
73. Tom Thumb, His Life and Death, London, 1630.
74. A.H. Bullen, ed., The Works of Dr Thomas Campion, London, 1889, 21–2.
75. Such as Thomas Randolph’s The Jealous Lovers, acted before Queen Henrietta Maria at Cambridge in 1632, Act 3, Scene 7.
76. A Description of the King and Queene of Fayries, London, 1635.
77. For an overview here, see Hutton, The Witch, 217–27.
78. East Sussex Record Office, RYE 13/1–8, 12–13, 19, 21; G. Slade Butler, ‘Appearance of Spirits in Sussex’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, 14 (1862), 25–34. The case has been well studied by Annabel Gregory, ‘Witchcraft, Politics and “Good Neighbourhood” in Early Seventeenth-Century Rye’, Past and Present, 133 (1991), 31–66; and Rye Spirits, London, 2013.
79. Durant Hotham, The Life of Jacob Behmen, London, 1654, C3; John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, London, 1677, 301.
80. British Library, Sloane MS 3851, f. 115v; Norfolk Archaeology 1 (1847), 57–9; Bodleian Library, MS e. Mus 173, f. 72v; Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magical Books, Oxford, 2009, 60–1.
81. Bodleian Library, Ashmole MS 1491, f. 1362v.
82. British Library, Sloane MS 1727, p. 28; Folger Library, Washington DC, MS V626, 80, 156. Cf. Barbara A. Mowat, ‘Prospero’s Book’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 52 (2001), 12–19.
83. Peter Grund, ‘Albertus Magnus and the Queen of the Elves’, Anglia, 122 (2004), 640–62.
84. William Lilly, History of His Life and Times, London, 1715, 102–3.
85. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Hatfield House Manuscripts, vol. 5, 81–3.
86. The Brideling, Sadling and Ryding, of a Rich Churle in Hampshire . . ., London, 1595.
87. The severall notorious and lewd Cousonages of John West, and Alice West . . ., London, 1613.
88. C.J. Sisson, ‘A Topical Reference in The Alchemist’, in James G. McManaway et al., eds, Joseph Quincey Adams Memorial Studies, Washington, DC, 1948, 739–41.
89. Thomas Jackson, A Treatise Containing the Originall of Unbeliefe, Misbeliefe and Mispersuasion, London, 1625, 178–9.
90. Printed in 1616. These episodes are in Act 1, Scene 2, and Act 3, Scene 5.
91. It was eventually printed in 1663, the action concerned being in Act 2, Scene 5.
92. This is in British Library, Additional MSS 2006-7, and the whole affair has been fully and affectionately recounted by Frances Timbers, The Magical Adventures of Mary Parish, Kirksville, MO, 2016, who makes the most determined possible case that Mary was not a confidence trickster but a fantasist.
93. Act 1, Scene 3, lines 53–95.
94. The Maydes Metamorphosis, London, 1600, II.i.sigs C4, D1.
95. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperiala, book 3, c. 60.
96. Michael Drayton, ‘Nymphidia’, in The Battaile of Agincourt, London, 1627. Dryden went back to the same theme three years later, to dress up Mab in petals, feathers and lady bird wings to attend the wedding of a cricket who functions as one of her maids, in ‘A Fairy Wedding’, in The Muses Elizium: The Eight Nimphall, London, 1630. Both texts are in Halliwell, Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology, 195–225.
97. Thomas Randolph, Amyntas, London, 1638, in Halliwell, Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology, 237–52.
98. In Halliwell, Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology, 253–4, 258–62. See other poems of Herrick which deal with this conceit at pp. 254–8, 262–3. See also the songs about tiny fairies printed on pp. 268–71 and 269–71.
99. Inigo Jones, The Masque of the Twelve Months, in Peter Cunningham, Inigo Jones, London, 1848, 137; John Day, The Parliament of Bees, London, 1641; Sir Simon Steward, Musarum Deliciae, London, c. 1656.
100. For an overview of this and the associated scholarly literature, see Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, Oxford, 2019, 87–115.
101. See, inter alia, Jeremy Maas et al., Victorian Fairy Painting, London, 1997; Christopher Wood, Fairies in Victorian Art, Woodbridge, 2000; Jack Zipes, Victorian Fairy Tales, New York, 1987; Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness, Oxford, 1999.
102. I used these collections comprehensively for their material on seasonal customs in The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford, 1996. For a digest of the information on fairies from them, see Katharine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, London, 1967; and Harte, Explore Fairy Traditions.
103. That revival was launched symbolically by the superb picture book by Brian Froud and Alan Lee, Faeries, London, 1978. For contemporary experiences of it, see Sabina Magliocco, ‘“Reconnecting to Everything”: Fairies in Contemporary Paganism’, in Michael Ostling, ed., Fairies, Demons and Nature Spirits, London, 2018, 325–48.
104. See her in a work by an English practitioner, for example, which assumes actual contacts between readers and fairies: Teresa Moorey, The Fairy Bible, London, 2008. Her Queen Mab (on pp. 72–3) retains Shakespeare’s trait of giving dreams, but otherwise is described as ‘one of the many manifestations of The Goddess, in her autumnal guise of wise-woman and lady of magic, and she is linked with ancient ideas of sovereignty – for the king drew his power from the land, and Mab presided’. This is a clear connection with Maeve, whom some scholars have thought to be a sovereignty goddess. In the 1997 Anglo-American television series Merlin, about the famous Arthurian wizard and starring Sam Neill, Mab was turned into a (rather heartless and domineering) pagan goddess of the land: again, her personality there is reminiscent of Maeve.
Chapter Four: The Lady of the Night
1. The edition that I know is that of Hermann Wasserschleben, Regionis abbati Prumiensis libris duo, Leipzig, 1840, 355. There are translations in Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 2nd edn, London, 1993, 167; Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. by Raymond Rosenthal, London, 1992, 89–90; and Claude Lecouteux, Phantom Armies of the Night, trans. by John E. Graham, Rochester VT, 2011, 9.
2. This set of references was collected by Jacob Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, trans. by James Steven Stallybrass, 4th edn, London, 1882, vol. 1, 285–6, and repeated by Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 168. I have checked the sources and provided extra material from the Vita Caesarii Episcopi Arelatensis II.18–19, and Gregory of Tours, Historiae Francorum, VIII.14.
3. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 91–3, 104. Carlo was one of three great historians from the academic world of my youth to whom I dedicated my book The Witch in 2017. One of its reviewer delivered the opinion that that book was possibly unique in making so many criticisms of the ideas of people who were its dedicatees. Mercifully, no other appraisal of the book made this point, but it still struck me to the heart, and so requires some elucidation as I deal with Carlo’s theories again here. There are many points of detail on which we differ, and like several colleagues I cannot support his proposal that an ancient pan-European shamanic religious system ultimately underpinned the concept of the witches’ sabbath. Nonetheless, I consider his basic approach to the origins of the sabbath, of looking for roots in folkloric as well as learned tradition, to be perfectly correct, and believe that his application of it achieved more exciting and inspirational results than that of anybody else. To say this is of course to neglect his immense contribution to our profession and discipline in other areas, such as his paramount contribution to the genre of microhistory. He is also the perfect model of a gentleman, in scholarship as in all other respects.
4. Burchard of Worms, Decretum, X.29 and XIX.5.70,90,170–1. I have used the edition in Patrologia Latina vol. 140.
5. Carlo Ginzburg made a valiant attempt to discard this association and find a pagan goddess behind the Herodias of the nocturnal cavalcades in Ecstasies, 104 and 116. He proposed that such a deity had been called Hera Diana, which could be garbled into the Biblical name. There is no such goddess in the historical or archaeological record, although Carlo finds dedications to the Greek goddess Hera in Switzerland and North Italy. He also cites a roof tile from a late Roman grave in Dauphiné, south-eastern France, scratched with a human-like figure riding on an animal or ship, and the words ‘Fera Comhera’, which may mean ‘with Hera the savage’. The riding posture does link it to the lady of the medieval retinues, but the context of the find makes it look like a curse tablet, a common kind of artefact from this period. Hera would be a good fit with that, as a notoriously vengeful goddess and especially one who took a dim view of marital infidelity, and her steed in the carving could well be a peacock, her symbolic animal. More generally, it does seem unlikely that a hybrid would be produced by linking together a Roman goddess with a Greek one of very different character. Carlo also brings in a third tantalizing piece of evidence, a fifteenth-century reference to a belief by peasants in the Palatinate area of the central Rhineland that a being called Hera roamed around at the Christmas season, bringing abundance. This does relate – as will be seen – to seasonal Germanic traditions from that period of superhuman females doing exactly that, but it is hard to see how a Greek name for an ancient goddess could have lingered for a thousand years in what had been a Latin and Gaulish speaking area of the Roman Empire and then became a German-speaking one. It seems more likely to me that a classically educated author was mishearing the real name, such as Holle, and transforming it into that of a famous ancient deity. For these reasons, I find his suggestion inconclusive, though interesting.
6. Ratherius, Praeloquiorum libri, I.10. I have used the edition in Patrologia Latina, vol. 136, column 157.
7. Reinardus Vulpes, Book 1, lines 1143–64, translated into French as Le Roman de Renart and Le Roman de Ysengrin: there are various modern editions. The story varies in details between the Latin and French versions, and here I have followed the former.
8. These were teased out by Aron Gurevitch, Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, trans. by János M. Bak and Paul A. Hollingsworth, Cambridge, 1988, 84, 238.
9. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 267.
10. These and related figures are considered in my book The Witch, London, 2017, 67–72.
11. For successive discussions and employments of the different versions, see Hermann Wasserschleben, Die Bussordnungen der abenländischen Kirche nebst einer rechtsgeschichtlichen Einleitung, Halle, 1851, 624–82; Hermann Joseph Schmitz, Die Bussbücher und das Kanonische Bussverfahren, Düsseldorf, 1898, 402–67; Paul Fournier, ‘Études critiques sur le Décret de Burchard de Worms’, Nouvelle revue historique de droit francais et étranger, 34 (1910), 31–112, 213–21, 289–331, 564–84; John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer (eds), Medieval Handbooks of Penance, New York, 1938, 321–45; and Greta Austin, Shaping Church Law around the Year 1000: The ‘Decretum’ of Burchard of Worms, Farnham, 2004.
12. Strabo’s poem is in Patrologia Latina, vol. 114, column 1094. For Huldah, see 2 Kings 22:14–20 and 2 Chronicles 34:22–33.
13. Such a connection was suggested as long ago as by the great German reformer Martin Luther, as was noted by Jacob Grimm, only for him to dismiss it out of hand: Teutonic Mythology, vols. 1, 272, and 3, 1367.
14. It was given even wider currency in the mid-century by its inclusion in the very influential code, the Decretum, issued by the Italian jurist Gratian, and subsequently appeared in local penitentials such as that of Bartholomew Iscanus, bishop of Exeter between 1161 and 1182. For a summary of its propagation see C.S. Watkins, History and the Supernatural in Medieval England, Cambridge, 2007, 219.
15. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, II.17.
16. William of Auvergne, De Universo, II.2.94.
17. Quoted in Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 15. I have translated some of the original terms slightly differently.
18. A. Lecoy de la Marche, Anecdotes historiques, legends et prologues tires du recueil inédit d’Etienne de Boubon, Paris, 1877, no. 97.
19. Lines 18622–91.
20. Charles de Fresne, sieur du Cange, Glossarium, Paris, 1733, vol. 1, column 1127.
21. Bernard Gui, Interrogatoria ad sortilegos et divines et invocatories demonum, ed. by G. Mollat, Paris, 1927, c.2.
22. Jean Duvernoy, ed., La Registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier, Paris, 1965, vol. 1, 137–9.
23. Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, c. 102.
24. This is the completion of Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum morale, described in Wolfgang Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, translated by H.C. Erik Midelfort, Charlottesville, VA, 1998, 57–8.
25. In The Witch, I accepted them as facets of the same cultural construct, as scholars had mostly done before me, including those I have cited. I had already departed from them in insisting on distinguishing the tradition of the night-roaming lady from that of a different major one of night-roaming processions which appeared around 1100 and featured the human dead, the Hellequin or ‘wütende heer’: Ronald Hutton, ‘The Wild Hunt and the Witches’ Sabbath’, Folklore, 125.2 (2014), 161–78. This had been rolled in together with the female leader’s retinue by Jacob Grimm, in his Teutonic Mythology, along with other folk traditions of nocturnal hunters, to form one huge conglomeration allegedly derived from ancient paganism which he labelled ‘The Wild Hunt’, a construct which proved hugely influential until recent years.
26. Marianne Rumpf, Perchten, Würzburg, 1991, 61.
27. Gathered by Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 276–81, and one given more fully by Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 15–16.
28. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, NY, 1972, 175.
29. John B. Smith, ‘Perchta the Belly-Slitter and her Kin’, Folklore, 115 (2004), 167–86.
30. From Thomas Ebendorfer of Haselbach, Sermones de tempore, reprinted in Anston E. Schonbach, ‘Zeugnisse zur deutschen Volkskunde des Mittelalters’, Zeitschrift des vereins fur Volkskunde, 12 (1902), 5–6.
31. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 101, spots the change in the editions. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 3, 933, prints a fuller version of the 1474 one.
32. Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 16–17.
33. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 297.
34. These records were first published in 1899, and the original texts and a translation are in Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, 54–5, 173–4.
35. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 96, 108–9, 296–7, 302: Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, 58–64; Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles, London, 1982, 16, 33–6, 99.
36. Nicolai Cusae Cardinalis Opera, Paris, 1514, vol. 2, fos. 170v–172.
37. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 131–2.
38. This ignorance vitiates a convincing answer to questions such as whether such vivid details can help to prove continuities with ancient religion. Both ancient historical testimony such as that of Tacitus and archaeological evidence portray goddesses or goddess-like figures as riding in carts as Richella allegedly did, and Carlo Ginzburg has taken Richella’s hairy hands as evidence that she was a surviving memory of an ancient bear goddess, and her ear ornaments as echoing ancient female hairstyles (Ecstasies, 129–33). Without this sense of context, however, how can we ever know?
39. J.M. Clifton-Everest, The Tragedy of Knighthood: Origins of the Tannhäuser Legend, Oxford, 1979; C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, Oxford, 1936, 121.
40. Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 108–9.
41. I.V. Zingerle, ‘Frau Selde’, Germania, 2 (1857), 430–7.
42. Johann Geiler von Kaisersberg, De Emeis, reprinted in Joseph Hansen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter, Bonn, 1901, 284–6.
43. Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons, 171–2.
44. David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto, Manchester, 1992.
45. This is Giovanni Lorenzo Anania, quoted in Giuseppe Bonomo, Caccia alle Streghe, Palumbo, 1971, 30.
46. Gustav Henningsen, ‘“The Ladies from Outside”: An Archaic Pattern of the Witches’ Sabbath’, in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds, Early Modern Witchcraft, Oxford, 1990, 191–218.
47. It is provided in Pau Castell Granados, ‘“Wine Vat Witches Suffocate Children”: The Mythical Components of the Iberian Witch’, EHumanista, 26 (2014), 70–95. He does not, however, provide enough detail (and perhaps his source does not) to establish whether this was a genuine local tradition or a case of a Catalan churchman reporting something of which he had heard elsewhere in Europe.
48. Both reprinted in Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 269. I am very grateful to two great scholars of German literature, my own colleague Robert Vilain and Henrike Laehnemann, for sorting out a question of mine concerning a word in my first copy of Erasmus Alberus’s text, which turned out to be garbled by an OCR error.
49. The single exception that is known to me was in Hesse (in Central Germany) in 1632, where a serious local witch hunt was started by the claim of a service magician from Calbach that in the Ember Days he would go to the Venusberg on the ‘night journey’ (nachtfahr) and there ‘Lady Holt’ would show him the dead and the punishments inflicted on them for their sins: Walter Niess, Hexenprozesse in der Graftschaft Büdingen, Büdingen, 1982, 153–82. This is another classic example of the syncretization of different cultural elements.
50. They are especially well studied and discussed in Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf. A vivid description of those believed to operate around the Swiss city of Luzern, written in the early seventeenth century, is provided in Renward Cysat’s chronicle and printed in Karl Meisen, Die Sagen vom Wütemde Heer und Wilden Jäger, Münster, 1935, 111–20.
51. P. 185 in the 1989 Oxford University Press edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Thomas C. Faulkner et al.
52. Siegried Wenzel, ed., Fasciculus Morum, Philadelphia, 1989, Part 5, lines 61–72.
53. James VI, Daemonologie, Edinburgh, 1597, 73–4. Another now celebrated British writer of the period to quote the canon ‘Epscopi’ in his work on spirits was Reginald Scot, in his Discoverie of Witchcraft.
54. Priscilla Heath Barnum, ed., Dives and Pauper, Early English Text Society, 1976, vol. 1, 157–8.
55. See chapter 3, note 45. Andro Man’s fairy queen also went riding at times, as discussed in the same chapter.
56. As recounted also in chapter 3, with the source reference at note 51.
57. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies, 96–7, with typical perception and ability to range between regions, noted the similarity and proposed that both derived from the same ‘ancient stratum’ of beliefs. This is one of the points of detail on which we differ, but is another of the many areas to which, without Carlo’s suggestion, attention would not have been drawn.
58. This is equally true, among those cited above, of Grimm, Cohn, Ginzburg and Lecouteux, though none of them agreed with each other on the best candidate for such a goddess.
59. The main exception hitherto has been Carlo Ginzburg, as will be shown. In The Witch, 136–43, I made my own attempt and what follows here is a repetition of that with some updating.
60. She was Claude Lecouteux’s candidate, in Phantom Armies, 25 and 33.
61. Stephen Ronan, ed., The Goddess Hecate, Hastings, 1992; Sara Iles Johnston, Hekate Soteira, Atlanta, GA, 1990; and Restless Dead, Berkeley, 1999, 203–49.
62. In line 13.
63. Bruno Snell, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, Gottingen, 1986 vol. 1, 115.
64. Both were identified by Carlo Ginzburg in Ecstasies, where there are many references to them.
65. The main catalogue of material relating to her is René Magnen and Émile Thenevot, Épona, Bordeaux, 1956, updated by Jan de Vries, La Religion des Celtes, Paris, 1963, 132–5; Katheryn M. Linduff, ‘Epona’, Latomus, 38 (1979), 817–37; and Claude Sterckx, Élements de cosmogenie celtique, Brussels, 1986, 9–54.
66. The basic study of them remains F. Haverfield, ‘The Mother Goddesses’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 15 (1892), 314–36; but see Miranda Green, The Gods of the Celts, London, 1986, chapter 3; and her Celtic Goddesses, London, 1995, 106–11; and De Vries, La Religion des Celtes, 124–32; Graham Webster, The British Celts and their Gods under Rome, London, 1986, 63–70; and Sylvia Barnard, ‘The Matres of Roman Britain’, Archaeological Journal, 142 (1985), 237–45.
67. As commentators on the medieval night rides have done from Jacob Grimm, who established the tradition of using medieval Norse myth and legend as a guide to ancient Germanic paganism, to Claude Lecouteux.
68. For this see Hutton, The Witch, 92–5.
69. Havamal, st. 155.
70. Ketils saga haengs, c. 3.
71. Thorsteins thattr boejarmagns, c. 2.
72. Eyrbyggja saga, c. 16.
73. Volundarkvida, verse 1 (this text only names the winged women as Valkyries in the introduction, a probable later gloss as they do not resemble Valkyries in general); and Helgakvida Hundingsbana II, in the Poetic Edda, verse 4, prose opening fits 2 and 4. Lecouteux, Phantom Armies, 20–1, prints the passage on the Disir from Flateyarbók. The latter is from the end of the fourteenth century, and is a highly Christianized and schematic, and so atypical, account which identifies the women as fylgjur, female or animal ancestral spirits who often appear at a death. It therefore cannot be taken as normative.
74. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 267–72.
75. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 272–82; Smith, ‘Perchta the Belly-Slitter’; Rumpf, Perchten.
76. The evidence is summarized in Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf, 26–46.
77. Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, vol. 1, 282. The nineteenth-century folklore collected by Grimm also at times mixed thoroughly together the originally different medieval traditions of the roving nocturnal hosts led by the lady and the penitential processions of the human dead, so causing Grimm to believe that they had originally been one and derived from the same primeval religion focused on death and fertility: ibid., vol. 3, 934–41.
78. Gail Kligman, Calus, Bucharest, 1999.
79. Charles Godfrey Leland, Aradia: Gospel of the Witches, London, 1899.
80. My own consideration of it, and of Leland, is in Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon, Oxford, 2nd edn, 2019, 147–54.
Chapter Five: The Cailleach
1. Pronounced, according to region, ‘Cah-lehh’, ‘Cah-liahh’, ‘Coilleahh’ or ‘Cal-yuhh’.
2. All these are collected in Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach, Cork, 2013.
3. Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach, 113–4.
4. Donald A. Mackenzie, Scottish Folk-Lore and Folk Life, Glasgow, 1935, 162–3.
5. Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach, 104–7, 148.
6. ‘Loughcrew, County of Meath’, The Dublin Penny Journal, 4.192 (1836), 28; Eugene A. Conwell, ‘On Ancient Sepulchral Cairns on the Loughcrew Hills’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 9 (1864–66), 357–8.
7. Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach, 115–18; Mackenzie, Scottish Folk-Lore, 161, 164–6; Eleanor Hull, ‘Legends and Traditions of the Cailleach Bheara or Old Woman’, Folklore, 38 (1927), 244–9.
8. Mackenzie, Scottish Folk-Lore, 150–1.
9. Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach, 109, 120–3, 132–8, 146.
10. Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach, 132–8, 146, 150–2, 163–5.
11. Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach, 115–8;
12. Mackenzie, Scottish Folk-Lore, 151–4; John Francis Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, Edinburgh, 1860, vol. 2, 46.
13. Mackenzie, Scottish Folk-Lore 137–43; Katherine Whyte Grant, Myth, Tradition and Story from Western Argyll, Oban, 1925, 8; E.C. Watson, ‘Highland Mythology’, Celtic Review, 5/17 (1908), 65; Hull, ‘Legends and Traditions of the Cailleach Bheara’, 247–8.
14. W. Walter Gill, A Manx Scrapbook, London, 1929, 160; Cyril Ingram Paton, Manx Calendar Customs, London, 1942, 35–8.
15. Mackenzie, Scottish Folk-Lore, 156–61.
16. The second part of the name usually pronounced ‘vay-ruh’ or ‘vur’, depending on the spelling and place.
17. The most recent discussion seems to be in Mark Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, Princeton, 2016, 28 (n.92).
18. There are various editions and translations: for those interested in the later folklore, the most accessible and convenient is in Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach, 48–51. Another is appended to the classic study of the medieval text, Gerard Murphy, ‘The Lament of the Old Woman of Beare’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 55 (1952–3), 83–109. See also John Carey, ‘Transmutations and Immortality in the Lament of the Old Woman of Beare’, Celtica, 23 (1999), 30–7; and Katia Ritari, ‘Images of Ageing in the Early Irish Poem Caillech Bérri’, Studia Celtica Fennica, 3 (2006), 57–70. Ritari makes the point that there is no apparent supernatural character to the speaker in the poem, while Kim McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present in Early Irish Literature, Maynooth, 1990, 154, stresses the Biblical references in it.
19. All this is discussed, seemingly definitively, by Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, ‘Cailleach and Other Terms for Veiled Women in Medieval Irish Texts’, Éigse, 28 (1994), 71–96.
20. I use the standard edition and translation by Kuno Meyer, published in London in 1892: the reference is on p. 6.
21. Edward J. Gwynn, ed., The Metrical Dindshenchas, 5 vols., London, 1903–35; Whitley Stokes, ed., ‘The Prose Tales in the Rennes Dindshenchas’, Revue Celtique, 15 (1894), 272–336, 418–84; Whitley Stokes, ed., ‘The Bodleian Dinnshenchas’, Folklore, 3 (1892), 467–567.
22. The source is Sanas Cormaic, and the entry under ‘Coire Brecain’: I have the 1862 edition by Whitley Stokes, Three Irish Glossaries, and the entry appears there on pp. 13–14.
23. It is wonderfully analyzed in Mark Williams, Ireland’s Immortals, Princeton, 2016, 118–23.
24. The epic sequence now usually called the ‘Cycles of the Kings’ does contain a character called Mongfhind, daughter of Fidach and wife of the high king Muredach, of whom it is said that ‘women and common folk’ especially favoured her after her death and prayed to her at the feast of Samhain, which was when she died. This might argue for some social division in the veneration of deities, but it seems to be the only case, and Mongfhind’s followers were still drawn from elite women as well as commoners – if the text can be read like this – and her story still features in this literary text. I have used the standard translation of the cycle by Myles Dillon, Oxford, 1946, 30–1.
25. I have followed Mark Williams’s translation of this passage, put in a personal communication and resulting in a more nuanced version than the traditional one by J.H. Todd in the Rolls Series, London, 1867, 174–5. I am naturally very grateful to him for this assistance.
26. The Fenian tales, here and below, exist in good translations posted on the internet under their titles.
27. I have used the standard translation by R.I. Best in Ériu, 3 (1906), 149–73.
28. The Welsh terms translated here as ‘hags’ and ‘very dark hag’ are gwidondot in the first tale and Gwidon Ordu in the second. Similar ogresses are overcome by heroes in the poem ‘Pa gur yv y porthaur’ and the hagiographical Life of Samson.
29. For which see Richard Suggett, A History of Witchcraft and Magic in Wales, Stroud, 2008, 42–3.
30. The poem, commonly called ‘The Gyre Carling’ but usually listed in contents pages under its first line, ‘In Tiberus tyme the trew Imperiour’, is in the Bannatyne Manuscript, ff. 136v–7r. The manuscript is available in various editions, including the Scottish Text Society one (new series, vol. 23) and the facsimile one by D. Fox and W. Ringler published in London in 1980, and on the internet. The context is given in J.E.H. Williams, ‘James V, David Lyndsay, and the Bannatyne Manuscript Poem of the Gyre Carling’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 26/1 (1991), 164–75. Passing references to the gyre carling occur in Sir David Lyndsay’s Dreme, line 45; John Rolland, The Seuin Seages, available in the Scottish Text Society 3rd series, vol. 3, on p. 337; and the ‘Flytting’ between Montgomerie and Pollart, referenced in n. 45 to chapter 3 of this book.
31. She appears in lines 45–6 of ‘Ane littill Interlud of the droichis pairt of th[e play]’, on f. 118r of the Bannatyne Manuscript.
32. I am uneasily aware here of a gap in my own knowledge, represented by Ireland’s rich trove of literature, and the significant quantity of surviving Scottish Gaelic poetry, dating from between 1500 and 1800. Much less of this is available in translation than the texts in Old and Middle Irish, and I can only say that the amount which I have managed to locate does not seem to mention the Cailleach Bheara or an equivalent Cailleach figure, though it is replete with stately or tragic goddess-like figures representing Ireland as a whole.
33. There seems to be nothing relevant to her, for example, in William Grant Stewart, The Popular Superstitions and Festive Amusements of the Highlanders of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1823; Thomas Crofton Croker, Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, London, 3 vols, 1825–8; Hugh Miller, Scenes and Legends of the North of Scotland, London, 1851; Jane Francesca Wilde, Ancient Cures, Charms and Usages of Ireland, London, 1890; and Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland, London, 2nd edn, 1919; or John Gregorson Campbell, ed., Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, Glasgow, 1900. Nor does she seem to feature in the extensive collections of lore made by Thomas Westropp in County Clare and the coasts of Connacht and published in Folklore in 1910–1912 and 1918–1923.
34. John Francis Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, Edinburgh, 1860, vol. 2, 46.
35. For the early references to the Loughcrew origin myth, see the sources at n. 6.
36. Lord Archibald Campbell et al, eds, Waifs and Strays of Celtic Tradition: Argyllshire Series, London, 1891, vol. 5, 65–7.
37. I have used the 1994 Floris Books reprint where they occur on pp. 493–4.
38. William R. Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions, London, 1852, 55.
39. E.C. Watson, ‘Highland Mythology’, Celtic Review, 5/17 (July 1908), 65.
40. J. Gregorson Campbell, ‘The Sharp-Witted Wife’, Scottish Historical Review, 12 (1915), 413–17.
41. Eleanor Hull, ‘Legends and Traditions of the Cailleach Bheara or Old Woman (Hag) of Beare’, Folklore, 38 (1927), 225–54.
42. J.G. Mackay, ‘The Deer-Cult and the Deer-Goddess-Cult of the Ancient Caledonians’, Folklore, 43 (1932), 144–74.
43. Scottish Folklore and Folk Life, Glasgow, 1935; the sections on the Cailleach are on pp. 136–70.
44. Upon trawling the internet on 17 November 2020, I immediately found it repeated on Wikipedia, Mythopedia and the sites of FolkloreThursday, Owlcation, Puffins and Pies, Spooky Scotland and The Irish Place.
45. See Proinsias McCana, Celtic Mythology, London, 1968, 92–3; Tomás Ó Cathasaigh, ‘The Eponym Cnogba’, Éigse, 23 (1989), 26–7; and Katharine Simms, ‘The Poet as Chieftain’s Widow’, in Donnchadh ÓCorráin et al., eds, Sages, Saints and Storytellers, Maynooth, 1989, 400–11.
46. Referenced in n.2. He had been working towards this book since publishing ‘Continuity and Adaptation in the Legends of Cailleach Bhérra’, Béaloiddeas, 56 (1988), 153–78, as part of the flurry of interest among Irish scholars in the Cailleach as an ancient goddess during the late 1980s, evident in the note above. The book may therefore be read partly as an impressive late consequence of that interest.
Epilogue: The Green Man
1. ‘The “Green Man” in Church Architecture’, Folk-Lore, 50 (1939), 45–57.
2. This, and the connection between the two of them, was first noted by Roy Judge, The Jack-in-the-Green: on pp. 42–4 of the 2nd, London, 2000, edition.
3. ‘The Roof Bosses in Ely Cathedral’, Transactions of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 32 (1932), 36; ‘The Roof Bosses in Worcester Cathedral’, Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaeological Society (November 1934), 75–86.
4. Margaret Murray, ‘Female Fertility Figures’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 64 (1934), 93–100. Murray’s interpretation of the figures as pagan divinities remained standard until the 1970s and 1980s, when it ran into the tide of revisionism. The work of Jörgen Andersen, The Witch on the Wall, Copenhagen, 1977, and Anthony Weir and James Jerman, Images of Lust, London, 1986, demonstrated that they were part of a package of motifs developed in the Romanesque pilgrimage churches of France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and exported from there to Spain and Britain, and then to Ireland. As such, they appeared within an elite and pious Christian context, and the last two authors suggested plausibly that they were intended to warn of the evils of lust, rather than to provoke it. Despite this, they have been absorbed into the imagery of some parts of the recent Goddess movement, using the interpretation of them as female deities (or a female deity) spread by Murray. Accordingly, one of the readers of my proposal for this book to Yale University Press urged me to couple the sheelas with the Green Man in this present chapter or substitute them for him, as another example of a modern creation of a deity-form; the report suggested that this would also make a better fit with the female beings considered earlier in the book. It is an entirely understandable and intelligent recommendation, but I decided against it for the following reasons. First, the sheelas represent a single image and not a composite fusing of many figures and images as the Green Man does. Second, there may actually be some genuine ancient pagan input into the reception of the sheela motif in Ireland, where it appears at times on medieval secular buildings as well as churches, and in places where the human eye cannot reach. Nineteenth-century Irish folklore included the belief that the exposure of a woman’s genitalia could ward off evil and misfortune, and this may perhaps be linked to local employment of the sheelas. For different recent considerations of the image, see Eamonn Kelly, ‘Sheela-na-gigs in the National Museum of Ireland’, in Michael Ryan, ed., Irish Antiquities, Bray, 1992, 173–84; and ‘Irish Sheela-na-gigs and Related Figures’, in Nicola McDonald, ed., Medieval Obscenities, York, 2006, 124–37; Joanne McMahon and Jack Roberts, The Sheela-na-Gigs of Ireland and Britain, Dublin, 2000; Catherine Karkov, ‘Sheela-na-gigs and Other Unruly Women’, in Collum Hourihane, From Ireland Coming, Princeton, 2001, 313–31; Barbara A. Freitag, Sheela-na-Gigs, London, 2004; Rosemary Power, ‘Ionas’s Sheela-na-Gig and its Visual Context’, Folklore, 123 (2012), 330–54; Jack Roberts, Sheela-na-Gig, Port Townsend, 2019.
5. Margaret Murray, The God of the Witches, published 1933; the references in the 1970 Oxford reprint are on pp. 40–2, 48.
6. This contempt and loathing was associated with not just an evangelical rationalism but also an ingrained elitism. He believed that all advances in the human condition had been made by a few exceptional thinkers, with the masses playing no part in them at all. He regarded the great majority of humanity as stupid, weak, ignorant and superstitious, and so thought democracy an inferior form of government to dictatorship by a gifted ruler. Nor was he squeamish about the means that such a man might use to reach the top, declaring that those least scrupulous in acquiring power had often been best in using it. He despised non-European races, this feeling increasing with the darkening of their skin, but his contempt for, and fear of, the European working class, and especially that of the countryside, was almost as profound. He saw academics like himself as having the same role in regulating and indoctrinating the masses as justices of the peace had over domestic commoners and colonial officials over native peoples. Even for a person of his time, and especially among British intellectuals, these attitudes were unusually right-wing. They are examined, with much quotation, in Robert Ackerman’s biography J.G. Frazer, Cambridge, 1987, but some are also in plain view in the most popular version of The Golden Bough, the abridged single-volume one of 1922, on pp. 12–13, 46–7 and 55.
7. This is apparent, for example, in the field of witchcraft beliefs, for which development see my own book The Witch, London, 2017, 3–43.
8. Frazer’s relationship with the changing intellectual currents of his age is carefully explained in Ackerman’s biography, preceded by R. Angus Downie, Frazer and “The Golden Bough”, London, 1970, and followed by Robert Fraser, The Making of “The Golden Bough”, New York, 1990. For later notable appraisals of his work and reputation, across the decades, see Edmund R. Leach, ‘Golden Bough or Gilded Twig?’, Daedalus (Spring 1961), 371–89; Joseph Fontenrose, The Ritual Theory of Myth, Berkeley, 1971; and Mary Beard, ‘Frazer, Leach and Virgil’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34 (1992), 203–24. I had to reckon with Frazer’s work in three books of mine from the 1990s: The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, Oxford, 1991, 325–8; The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford, 1996, passim; and The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Oxford, 1999, 114–24.Overall, my own relationship with Frazer’s work falls into three different categories. The first consists of issues such as the interpretation of harvest customs, on which I have simply reported a debate, summarizing the theories of Frazer (and Mannhardt) and then the objections of their critics and concluding that at present the latter seem to be given more credit by specialists. I do not, however, state flatly that Frazer and Mannhardt were wrong, or indeed provide an opinion of my own. The second category consists of attitudes to the general methodology and arguments of The Golden Bough, where I concur with the dominant academic opinion that both are flawed, for reasons given here. However, as also stated here, I do not think that all of its ideas are wrong, or that it lacks any value. The third category consists of Frazer’s conclusions (based partly on the work of Sir John Rhys) that Halloween was the pagan Celtic New Year and feast of the dead. This is the one point at which I have ventured opinions of my own: that in neither case is the evidence sufficient to sustain those conclusions. I have not claimed that either is disproved, but I do not find the deductions of Rhys and Frazer convincing. Since I published that verdict a quarter of a century ago, no experts in medieval Irish or Welsh literature, or Iron Age religion, or folklore, have challenged my suggestions (somewhat to my surprise).
9. For this, see John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of “The Golden Bough”, Princeton, 1973; and Robert Fraser, ed., Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination, London, 1990. Unsurprisingly, one of the areas of culture on which the book made a significant impact was modern Paganism and witchcraft: as one example, the initiatory name of Alex Sanders, the ‘King of the Witches’ in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, was taken from it, and Frazer’s myth of the sacrificial king was an important one to him.
10. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, London, abridged edn, 1922, 128–34, 297–300.
11. The key text here is Jacob’s huge book, Deutsche Mythologie, first published in 1835.
12. Wilhelm Mannhardt, Roggenwolf und Roggenhund, Danzig, 1866; Die Korn dämonen, Berlin, 1868; Antike Wald- und Feldkulte, Berlin 1877; and Mythologische Forschungen, Strasburg, 1884.
13. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 129, 322–3.
14. W.R.S. Ralston, ‘Forests and Field Myths’, The Contemporary Review, 31 (Feb. 1878), 526. Ralston was a retired functionary at the British Museum, and an expert on Russia.
15. This had been done long before. In 1903 the civil servant and writer on medieval and early modern theatre, Sir Edmund Chambers, applied the name to Frazer’s vegetation god (in The Medieval Stage, published in London, vol. 1, 185–6). So did the classicist A.B. Cook in 1906, who was the first to give it capital letters, in ‘The European Sky-God’, Folk-Lore, 17, pp. 340–1). These early references were first hunted down by Roy Judge, for The Jack-in-the-Green, 2nd edn, 91. By the 1930s it was already circulating in popular culture in this context, and the occult novelist Dion Fortune employed it in this sense in The Goat Foot God, London, 1936, 165.
16. Mary Anderson, Design for a Journey, Cambridge, 1940, 112–15; Arthur Bernard Cook, Zeus: Volume Three, Cambridge, 1940, 1133.
17. Medieval Roof Bosses, Cambridge, 1948, 65–8 and plates 300–19.
18. By both Chambers and Cook, in the works listed in n. 15 above.
19. Medieval English Poetry, London, 1957, 219. Speirs had been proposing the same idea in articles since 1949.
20. In Seasonal Feasts and Festivals, London, 1961, 288–9.
21. Published in London in 1966.
22. Published in London in 1969.
23. Down by the Greenwood Side, first performed in 1969.
24. Ronald Sheridan and Anne Ross, Grotesques and Gargoyles, Newton Abbot, 1975: quotation on p. 8. Despite our different views on the evidence for surviving paganism, Anne and I became friendly towards the end of her life, an alliance commenced when I defended her spectacular interpretation of the bog body called Lindow Man on the grounds that, as the find could be interpreted in various different ways, her reading of it was a quite legitimate, if speculative, reconstruction.
25. Exeter University Archive, MS 416/PRO/4. I owe this reference to Sara Hannant.
26. Shown on 16 November 1990.
27. This observation is based on my own knowledge of British Pagans in the 1990s, when I was writing my works on them and their history. Symbolically, one of the main shops of Pagan art in Britain’s main New Age centre at Glastonbury took the name of ‘the Goddess and the Green Man’.
28. The examples of which I am aware are Mike Harding, A Little Book of the Green Man, London, 1998; Clive Hicks, The Green Man: A Field Guide, Faversham, 2000; Fran and Geoff Doel, The Green Man in Britain, Stroud, 2000; John Matthews, The Quest for the Green Man, London, 2001; Peter Hill, In Search of the Green Man, Chieveley, 2004; Paul Broadhurst, The Green Man and the Dragon, Launceston, 2006; Gary R. Varner, Mythic Forest, the Green Man and the Spirit of Nature, New York, 2006; Mark Olly, Revealing the Green Man, Winchester, 2016; and Nina Lyon, Uprooted: On the Trail of the Green Man, London, 2016. The last of these shows how far the genre can be stretched, as it is a sophisticated and witty examination of the uses to which the figure can be put at the present day, and keeps its tongue in its cheek for most of the time. It, moreover, recognizes that there is no hard evidence for the associations of different figures and motifs made by Lady Raglan, so that the present Green Man is an interconnected series of myths. Nevertheless, the author still sees him as a symbol of the superior force of nature, with which our species needs to remake a relationship as part of a questioning of the fallacy of human progress; and she records her own instinctual belief that the medieval carvings were honoured by ordinary people as a fertility deity.
29. Fran and Geoff Doel were lecturers in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent. Conversely, the reviewer who treated their book critically in the journal of the Folklore Society, for being based too much on Frazer’s methodology, was an independent scholar, a librarian: Elaine Bradtke, in Folklore, 114/1 (2003), 132–4.
30. Entitled simply The Jack-in-the-Green and first published in Cambridge by Brewer.
31. Like most of the key British revisionist writers, in history, archaeology and literary and folklore studies, Roy Judge was known to me personally. He contacted me in the 1990s, because he liked my books, and we became friendly.
32. The earliest records of it are drawings, published in London, which invariably show the Jack in an urban, and apparently metropolitan, backdrop.
33. This was my own in The Rise and Fall of Merry England, Oxford, 1994, where I considered the records for seasonal customs in the period between 1450 and 1700 and found them so rich that it seems hardly credible that one of them should have been carried on without a single mention. To declare that the first record for an activity is not the same as the actual time of appearance of it is only a tenable position if it can be shown that the evidence for the periods before that first record is patchy enough to allow a loss of information.
34. Roy emphasized that there is no solid evidence that the Jack evolved directly from the ‘garland’, though this had been suggested before and the two were sometimes confused at the time: on pp. 25–6. There seems to be no doubt, however – and this is much more important – that the custom of going round with the Jack developed out of that of going about with the ‘garland’, and that this originated with the milkmaids.
35. Judge, The Jack-in-the-Green, 76–7.
36. Roy Judge, ‘The Green Man Revisited’, in John Hutchings and Juliette Wood, eds., Colour and Appearance in Folklore, London, 1991, 51–5.
37. Judge, The Jack-in-the-Green, 2nd edn, London, 2000, 86–7.
38. As part of the general revival of traditional British folk customs in recent decades, the Jack-in-the-Green has reappeared as part of May festivities in different parts of England, especially at Deptford at the Kent end of Greater London and Hastings in Sussex. For an excellent guide to the latter celebration, which completely understands and accepts Roy Judge’s history while showing the power and historicity of the figure within Judge’s context, see Keith Leech, The Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green, Hastings, 2008. I am very grateful to the author for the gift of this book.
39. Georgina Boyes, ‘Dressing the Past’, in Theresa Buckland and Juliette Wood, eds., Aspects of British Calendar Customs, Sheffield, 1993, 105–18. This essay was delivered at a conference on the former date, the proceedings of which needed nine years to reach publication.
40. For the records of this custom in Britain, see Hutton, The Stations of the Sun, 226–43.
41. Barbara Lowe, ‘Robin Hood in the Light of History’, Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, 7/4 (1955), 228–39; Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval England, London, 1961; David Wiles, The Early Plays of Robin Hood, London, 1981; J.C. Holt, Robin Hood, London, 2nd edn, 1989; Colin Richmond, ‘An Outlaw and Some Peasants’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 37 (1993), 90–101; Stephen Knight, Robin Hood, Oxford, 1994.
42. There is a stray early reference to a play about him at Exeter in 1427, but this seems an isolated occurrence which did not establish or observe a tradition.
43. Bella Millett, ‘How Green is the Green Knight?’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 37 (1994), 137–51. In 2007 an American academic, Larissa Tracy, published ‘A Knight of God or of the Goddess?’, Arthuriana, 17.3, 31–55, in which she argued that the poem reflected a multi-faith society, part Christian and part pagan. I think that she makes some interesting points about the work itself but gets the cultural context wrong by misunderstanding Ludo Milis’s edited collection and so confusing surviving paganism with pagan survivals (for all of which, see chapter 1 of this book). Not even she, however, suggests that the Green Knight is a vegetation spirit.
44. Brandon C. Centerwall, ‘The Name of the Green Man’, Folklore, 108 (1997), 25–32.
45. Bryant Lillywhite, London Signs, London, 1972, 246–50; Jacob Larwood and John Camden Hotten, The History of Signboards, London, 1866, 367 and Plate XV.
46. In the epilogue to As You Like It.
47. I saw a bough of foliage still being used as a sign that wine was sold at a house outside which it was displayed in the mountains of Viterbo, Italy, in 1981.
48. The two classic surveys are Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages, Cambridge, MA, 1952; and Timothy Husband, The Wild Man, New York, 1980.
49. Jeremy Harte, The Green Man, Andover, 2001, 16, thought they were mermen.
50. I. Weber-Kellerman, ‘Laubkönig und Schässmeier Geschichte und Deutung pfingslichter Vegetationsgebräuche in Thuringen’, Deutches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde, 4 (1958), 366–85.
51. Published at Ipswich by Brewer.
52. It was also returned to a religious one in Scotland in the eighteenth century by becoming a popular motif on Scottish gravestones, as a symbol of fleshly decay and/or resurrection: Betty Wilsher, ‘Scottish Churchyard Memorials in the Eighteenth Century’, Local Historian, 23/2 (May 1993), 70–1; and ‘The Green Man as an Emblem on Scottish Tombstones’, Markers: The Proceedings of the Association for Gravestone Studies, 11 (1992), 58–77.
53. Kathleen Basford, The Green Man, Ipswich, 1978, 8, 19–20.
54. Kathleen Basford, ‘A New View of “Green Man” Sculptures’, Folklore, 102/2 (1991), 237–9.
55. Rita Wood, ‘Before the Green Man’, Medieval Life, 14 (Autumn 2000), 8–13. Another independent scholar, Tina Negus, put a piece into another magazine, serving a combined readership of sympathetic archaeologists and earth mysteries researchers, which suggested that the Knights Templar played a significant part in spreading the motif, but this has not been taken up as the image does not seem to feature especially often or early in their churches: ‘The Knights Templar and the Green Man’, 3rd Stone, 43 (2002), 45–8.
56. Later, Joana Filipa Fonseca Antunes, in ‘Metamorphoses of the Green Man and the Wild Man in Portuguese Medieval Art’, in Flocel Sabaté, ed., Ideology in the Middle Ages, Leeds, 2019, 333–58, noted that, in that nation, traces of colour survived on some of the heads and showed that they were painted gold as well as green, which makes a fit with Jeremy Harte’s observation.
57. Jeremy Harte, The Green Man, Andover, 2001; quotations on pp. 8, 10, 18 and 19. I was unable during the epidemic to gain access to a library which had a copy of Jeremy’s guide, and commented on the fact to him, whereupon, with typical generosity, he sent me a copy of his own.
58. This was also noted by Tina Negus, ‘Medieval Foliate Heads’, Folklore, 114/2 (2003), 247–61, who proposed the term ‘green beasts’ for the animal heads. Like Rita Wood, she found a range of Christian references which might have fitted the motif, whether human or animals.
59. Mercia MacDermott, Explore Green Men, Wymeswold, 2003: quotation from p. 163.
60. Richard Hayman, ‘Green Men and the Way of All Flesh’, British Archaeology, 100 (2008), 12–17; ‘The Ballad of the Green Man’, History Today, 60/4 (2010), 37–46; The Green Man, Oxford, 2010.
61. I do not want to give the impression that academic authors had neglected the subject completely: see, for example, Alex Woodcock, Liminal Images, Oxford, 2005, a study of medieval architectural sculpture in the south of England published in the British Archaeological Reports series, which deals with the foliate heads on pp. 47–63. I do feel, however, that they lagged behind the independent scholars in their treatment of it and that their conclusions tended simply to repeat those of the latter. Some have done valuable work by extending study of the topic geographically, such as Antunes’s work on Portugal referenced in n. 56.
62. See, for example, the admirably impartial and objective summary of the state of knowledge by Luke Martin in his ‘Enigma of the Green Man’ website, accessed 8 December 2020.
63. Noted by various commentators on the subject: the most accessible reference is probably MacDermott, Explore Green Men, 2.
Conclusion
1. Published by Pennsylvania University Press.
2. On these, see especially Michael Ostling, ed., Fairies, Demons and Nature Spirits: ‘Small Gods’ at the Margins of Christendom, London, 2018. The editor makes his own interesting contribution to the debate over the terminology of ‘pagan survivals’ by pointing out that, although fairies and nature spirits may have had pagan origins, they ‘are not just marginalized or diabolized pagan remnants, they are continually re-performed, recreated through Christian ritual and Christian discourse’: p. 42.
3. One of the anonymous readers who provided reports on the proposal for this book to the press urged me to discuss female saints and the Virgin Mary in it as well, in the context of the medieval divine feminine. They are definitely related to that, and the proposal is an entirely understandable and meritorious one; but they are also very different in kind, as suggested here, and represent a very large subject in which I have little expertise.