Ronald Hutton has a new book about witches coming out soon, In some countries it might even be available for order now. So in preparation for this, I decided to finally grab 'The Triumph of The Moon' out of the bookcase and read it.
While I was reading it, I decided that I might as well read the other two books by Hutton I also had, since they do marry into each other to a certain level of degree. Reading all of them will help you understand the individual books better, but they can be read individually as well.
On of the things that Hutton repeats over and over in these books (and it is worth repeating) is that our modern view of history is just that. We in the 20th century view history as it was presented in the 19th century. And many of the things that we think are thousands of years old turns out to be merely a couple of hundred years old, and many things we might think are pagan or traditional witchcraft or druid or anything like that, is in fact a 20th century invention.
We simply do not have an accurate view of history, and this can be dangerous when people try to create a religion from history.
I do have some criticism.
Hutton is very Anglocentric. He views the world from a British perspective and in books like 'stations of the sun' and 'Pagan Britain' he can be forgiven for this, but it becomes pretty obvious in 'triumph of the moon' that he is not getting the full picture.
It starts with 3 chapters on romantic poetry and literature. But what about the Germans?
I'm not saying that there isn't a lot of lovely British romantic poetry, but the Germans pretty much invented it. And this hurts me personally to say; But what about the Danish?
I don't think we can talk about the imagery of nature and witches without involving them. And I missed their presence in Pagan Britain as well.
The good parts
If you add asked me about witchcraft and neopaganism 3 weeks ago, I would have been a fucking expert on the subject.
Now: I have never been so uncertain about anything in my life. I'm confused, I'm ignorant and my ego is bruised. In a good way!
There is so much I don't know about this subject and so much I need to learn. There are 129 books quoted in these works that I haven't read. Yet.
And that should give you some idea of just how dense these works are. All of them are about 400 pages+ another 100 pages with notes, index and bibliography. Any chapter can have up to 70 notes and as I said, my reading list have gotten substantially longer.
It will probably take me 5 years to get all the material and I'm probably 10 years to early to even have an opinion about this subject.
Hutton has managed to cram a lifetime of study into each of his books, and he has another 4 titles on the market and then the new upcoming one. All of us can save a lot of time reading his books. And I do recommend reading them, even when I don't always agree with his view on things.
More criticism
Remember that this is coming from a highly ignorant reader and this is not a fact, but an opinion that I hold at the moment. I can very well be proven wrongly in the future.
Hutton criticizes Margret Alice Murray and other writers for not being 100% partial in their research. Well, neither is he. The entire last chapter of 'Triumph' is a very personally written piece about how he views Wicca and Neopaganism. And his personal commentary is inserted in many places in his books. You can really tell that he loves the stone age and doesn't love the danish. They occupied Britain for almost 300 year and yet there is almost no trace of them at all. Even the bloody Romans gets their own chapter. I don't even think they are mentioned in Stations of the sun other for a small side note in the origin of Christmas.
And the same goes for 'Triumph' I'm really missing Buckland, Cunningham and Silver Raven. Even Grimasi pops up towards the very end and Starhawk gets almost an entire chapter. Not to mention all the inspiration from the 90's new age movement with people like Paulo Coelho, Ted Andrews, Denning and Philips, Judy Hall and so on.
His research from 1930 to 1980 is incredible. There is so many myths and stories that I've heard over the years that he completely demolish. The amount of work he has done on the early Wiccan movement, going through all the diaries and letters and newspaper articles and personal contact with these people is amazing. But I'm missing some information when it comes to the 80's-90's and onward.